The Mansion Read online

  “It’s embarrassing for a boy of his age to be wetting himself,” Mrs. Hedridge said.

  Mrs. Hedridge, Percy’s mom, was in her early forties. A lot of the women bringing kids to the day care were in their early forties. Career women who’d put off having kids as late as they could. That was one group of moms. The second group of moms were women who’d maybe never wanted kids until they realized that having them was a sort of trophy, proof that you could have it all, that you could have a husband and be a success at work and still, at the same time, be a mom. Mrs. Hedridge, Emily suspected, fell into the latter camp. Most of the women who had waited for career reasons or because they hadn’t met the right guy were hoverers. They were the moms who came all the way into the classroom with their kids, who stuck around for five or ten or fifteen minutes, who hugged and kissed their kids multiple times before leaving, and who always asked Emily why oh why it was that Bright Apple Preschool didn’t have webcams in the classrooms so they could check in on little Jimmy or Jeffrey or Jenny or, often enough, Dakota or Silica or Raven or Tesla or other names designed to prove that this child was like no other child ever born. The hoverers were the parents who would have been speaking in whispered tones with Emily to make sure that their precious darlings wouldn’t be embarrassed, asking Emily for suggestions for websites and books and articles that could make their kids feel empowered in the way they pissed their pants. But Mrs. Hedridge was most definitely not a hoverer. In fact, in the mornings, she often didn’t bother getting out of her car. She was one of the few parents who pulled up in front of the building and had their kids hop out and walk in alone. That was maybe the first thing that Emily had loved about Percy. The way he slid down from his seat to the pavement—he was too small to just step down—shouldered his Winnie the Pooh backpack, and walked into Bright Apple Preschool without a backward glance at the automatic door sliding closed on his mother’s car. A brave little trooper. Though, if Emily were being honest about loving Percy just a little bit more than any of the other boys and girls, she would also have to admit that it didn’t take very much bravery for a child to come into Bright Apple Preschool, with or without a parent.

  Most of the big technology companies had years ago moved to on-site childcare, but there was still a huge market for places like Bright Apple that had a certain kind of focus that you couldn’t necessarily find on your company’s campus. Emily’s job before she landed at Bright Apple had been at a preschool whose selling point was that it was on a houseboat and featured a nautical theme. Weird, but also weirdly compelling for certain fathers who, Emily suspected, might be somewhere further along the Asperger’s continuum. At Bright Apple, the focus was on the environment and organics. The carrots on the snack table were organically grown, provided by a local farmer who supplied most of the in-season greens and vegetables to the preschool kitchen, and the detergent that Emily had put into the washing machine with Percy’s pee-soaked clothing and blanket was certified to be hypoallergenic and kind to the earth.

  “It’s really not a big deal, Mrs. Hedridge,” Emily said. “Percy’s four. It’s normal for a kid his age to have accidents occasionally. A lot of the kids in the class still wear pull-ups during nap time.”

  “Disposable diapers?” Mrs. Hedridge said.

  That was rich, thought Emily. She bet Mrs. Hedridge’s carbon footprint would put Bigfoot’s to shame. “Biodegradable,” Emily said. “We use cloth diapers for the younger kids, but the older kids are too resistant, so we’ve got biodegradable pull-ups made out of organic materials. To tell you the truth, I’m not actually sure they work as well as the other kind, but they usually work well enough, and we can add them to the compost pile.”

  “Well,” Mrs. Hedridge said, sniffing at the thought, “Percy isn’t going back into diapers. He’s not a baby.”

  “I’m not suggesting Percy go back into diapers. He didn’t have an accident for the first six months he was in my classroom, and it’s only been in the last month or so that he’s been wetting himself during nap time,” Emily said. “Did he have any issues with this at his previous day-care provider, or is there something else going on that we should be aware of?”

  She knew the truth. Percy had told Emily. Confided in her, really, though she wasn’t sure if Percy really knew that he was telling Emily a secret. Because she was sure it was a secret. She was sure that Mrs. Hedridge would be furious if she knew that Percy had told Emily about Mr. Hedridge sleeping on the couch because Mommy had called him a lying son of a bitch. Of course Percy was having a period of regression with that going on at home. Emily saw it all the time with the kids in her charge: a new baby in the house, a new job where suddenly Mommy was traveling a lot, an impending divorce, a divorced parent’s impending marriage. Even, sometimes, when it was good news at home, the kids reacted to it. They didn’t always show their stress by wetting themselves during nap time, but the kids showed their stress somehow to Emily. They couldn’t hide it. She was their secret keeper. Her loyalty was always to the children. No matter how much she liked the parents, she was on the side of the kids.

  In this case, however, she did not particularly like the parent, and there was a part of her that wanted to ask Mrs. Hedridge why it was that her husband was sleeping on the couch. Was her husband cheating on her, Emily wanted to ask, because Mrs. Hedridge was such a cold, callous bitch? If so, Emily wanted to say, it made her secretly happy, because even though Emily would never actually call another woman this, Mrs. Hedridge was, really and truly, the kind of woman who deserved to be called a rhymes with punt.

  “No,” Mrs. Hedridge said coldly, “there were never any issues, as you say, with Percy pissing his pants at his previous day-care provider. He was in diapers until I potty trained him, and he has been dry ever since, so whatever you’ve been doing, you need to take a look at it. You could start, for instance, by not letting him have juice at lunch.”

  Emily didn’t bother telling Mrs. Hedridge that Bright Apple Preschool never served juice, with lunch or breakfast or snack or any time at all. In fact, one of the selling points of Bright Apple was that they had their own on-site organic kitchen, that the meals featured whole grains and fresh fruits and vegetables, that there was such a strict ban on processed sugars that the kitchen provided all the treats for birthday parties and holiday parties: oatmeal cookies sweetened with coconut and honey, homemade fig bars, frozen yogurt fruit pops, poppy-seed pomegranate drops. Instead, she did what she did best, which was to placate and please, deciding all the while that the next day she’d make sure to spend some extra time with Percy.

  The other parents all swung through the classroom over the next thirty minutes, chatting briefly with Andy and Emily before helping their kids carry popsicle-stick creations and clay flowerpots and other crafts out to the waiting electric cars and, in some cases, bicycles with attached trailers. It fascinated her how some of the parents wore thrift-store clothes and rode bikes and acted like all they cared about was Mother Earth and that capitalism was some big sham, even though they could afford to pay the outrageous tuition for Bright Apple Preschool without even blinking. Not that much of the tuition made it Emily’s way. She was paid okay, she guessed, more than she could have earned working in a coffee shop or something, that was for sure, and she did love the kids, but with the debt she and Billy had racked up . . . No. She wasn’t going to do that anymore. Wasn’t going to cover for him. The debt that Billy had racked up. Billy alone. Not her. But she’d made her choice. She’d made her choice, and she could help bail out the ship or she could drown.

  “That woman is bitch-tastic,” Andy said as soon as the last of the kids was gone and the door to the classroom was closed. “If she were a dinosaur, she’d be a bitchosaurus.”

  Emily laughed but she also covered her ears. She was not a fan of the word bitch—it was too often the refuge of weak men angry at strong women—but coming from Andy, it was funny. And she didn’t have to ask to know that Andy was talking about Percy’s mom. Mrs. Hedridge had
actually had the temerity to go to the owner of the preschool and complain that she thought Percy had been acting “swishy” since he’d been in Andy’s class. Emily liked to think that even if the owner of the preschool, Monica, hadn’t been Andy’s sister, she still would have told Mrs. Hedridge to find a different school for Percy if it was a problem. Andy was unquestionably swishy, which was one of the reasons all the kids adored him. He was fat and bald and somehow looked like a teddy bear. When Andy read stories for the kids, he did all the voices, and as much as Emily loved the boys and girls in her classroom, it was always Andy they went to when they were looking to be comforted. Until he joined his sister’s preschool, Andy had been some sort of manager at Google, and had more than made his fortune before moving home to Seattle. Even though Monica was the titular owner of the day care, Emily knew that it was Andy who had lent her the money to buy the building and start the business in the first place. He was, unquestionably, next to the children themselves, the best thing about the job, even if he did have a foul mouth that he liked to exercise after hours.

  “If she were a ship, she’d be the Bitchtanic,” he continued. “If she flew on a broom, she’d be a buh-witch. And if she were a cowboy, she’d tie her horse up to the bitching post. Bitchy bitch bitch,” he said.

  “Ugh, please stop,” she said, but she couldn’t stop herself from laughing, and after a minute, she couldn’t stop herself from egging Andy on: “So, just to be clear, you think Mrs. Hedridge is . . .”

  “A biiiiii-tter lady,” he said, and the two of them laughed together as they finished straightening the room.

  He walked with her out to the staff parking lot, and leaned over the hood of his vintage Porsche. He claimed that he was embarrassed by the car, but he also claimed it made him irresistible to the type of younger, smooth, muscular men that he liked to date, so how could he possibly get rid of it? “Let’s face it,” he’d said. “I’ve got my charm and I’ve got my money, but I don’t have looks. I could buy myself a nice, new luxury car, but unless I leave the sticker price on the window it won’t do me any good. If I don’t advertise that I’m rich by driving this ridiculous antique beast, I have to rely on my charm, and that’s not going to get Andy the kind of boy toy he deserves.” Or, at least that’s what he’d said the previous year, when she’d asked him about the car. In the meantime, he’d started dating Harry, who was also fat, also bald, and, as far as Emily could tell, nearing middle age, and the two men seemed like they were in love.

  Love. What a mysterious thing. She was almost certain that Billy was still in love with her. And she loved Billy, too. Still. She was sure that she did. She’d come back to him for a reason. But there were times when she thought, what if he has a car accident on the way home from work, what if he just magically disappears? How much easier would her life become if he was just suddenly gone? If she could erase her past mistakes? The thought always gave her a sick thrill.

  “Is he coming back?” Andy asked, and for a moment Emily thought he’d read her mind, but she quickly realized that of course Andy knew about Billy’s trip out east to see Shawn Eagle.

  “Tomorrow. He texted. Shawn had some sort of meeting he had to go to, and there’s more to talk about between the two of them over whatever this thing is. Billy’s being mysterious about all of it, and it’s not like I understand the engineering stuff, but he’s being put up in some sort of fabulously swanky hotel in Baltimore, evidently. He has the Eagle Technology box at tonight’s Orioles game completely to himself. A bit different from our usual weeknight. I’m afraid he’s going to be pretty spoiled when he comes back.”

  Andy cocked his head, and she could tell he was thinking about saying something, maybe even suggesting that it would be better for all involved if Billy did not, in fact, come back. She could tell he was on the verge of, once again, gently probing the idea that maybe Emily didn’t have to be married to Billy anymore, that maybe instead of helping to bail out a sinking ship, she should just swim away. It was hard for him not to say anything, she knew. It wasn’t his way to be quiet and it wasn’t his way to be delicate in conversations, but they’d gone over this ground plenty of times, and Emily finally had to tell Andy to leave it alone. Some doors should stay shut, and she could see him, finally, come to that same conclusion.

  “You sure you don’t want to go out for dinner?” he said instead.

  She shook her head.

  “You’re a sweetheart, but honestly, a night in by myself sounds like heaven. I’ll read a book—”

  “One of your dirty little novels?”

  “Oh, please. Romance novels barely qualify as dirty anymore,” she said, though she didn’t say that the book she was reading fell firmly into the erotica camp. “Besides, who are you to call anyone dirty?”

  “Dirty Andy,” he said. “Dirty Andy used to be a lot dirtier back before he became domesticated. Well, just don’t wear out the batteries on your vibrator, kiddo.”

  She blushed, which made him laugh, as it always did, and then she kissed him on the cheek and got into her car. The door squealed on its hinges when she opened it. She had to lift and pull to get it to close. She would have liked to go out to dinner with Andy, but it was too awkward to keep glomming on to him. If they went somewhere cheap and shitty that she could afford, he’d be unhappy. He didn’t mind slumming it occasionally, as he put it, but he’d grown used to a certain lifestyle, and that was a lifestyle that didn’t exist for Emily. He’d be happy to pay for her, of course, and he’d done so on more than one occasion and constantly kept offering, but she hated the way it made her feel. Hated it. Hated being poor and worrying about every dollar, but hated worse the way it made her feel to take charity from somebody else. She’d had enough of that as a girl, that sense of unearned shame. Shame forced upon her. The shame of being poor had been a feeling she thought she’d be able to leave behind when she left home, but it had traveled with her from Kansas City to college. She shouldn’t have been surprised, she realized, that she still felt poor at Cortaca University. She’d known it the minute she got off the bus in downtown Cortaca, but as she made her way up the hill to campus, a ratty camping pack on her back and a wheeled duffel bag towed behind her, she kept trying to tell herself that the feeling of shame would go away.

  And it had gone away. For a while. But not at first.

  She hadn’t even bothered applying to Kansas University or Kansas State. Most of the girls at her high school didn’t go to anything more exciting than community college, if they made it through high school at all without getting pregnant. If they did aspire higher, KU or K-State was as high as they could think. They were decent schools, but they weren’t far enough away for her. She needed to get away from Kansas City. Needed to get away from the whole damned middle of the country. She needed distance. Needed to get as far as she could from her dad and his drinking and . . . Maybe if her mom hadn’t died in “the incident,” when Emily was still too young to remember, it would have been different. But her mom had died in “the incident,” and it was the way that it was. Her sister, Beth, older by five full years, old enough to remember their mother as something more than an idea, had gotten out when Emily was still in eighth grade, going to Northwestern University on a full ride and then staying in Chicago. Chicago was far enough for Beth; she never let her shadow fall on Kansas City again, even for their father’s funeral. Beth was a presence in Emily’s high school life only through occasional phone calls and postcards and Emily’s visits to Chicago. But seeing Beth go off to Northwestern had been like a promise that it was possible to get out of there, to get away from Kansas City and their dad and all of it. Emily decided early on that she wasn’t going to be left behind. Straight As her entire life. She killed the SATs and the ACTs. Student body president, captain of the cross-country and track and field teams, volunteer candy striper at the hospital on weekends, babysitter, movie theater popcorn slinger, debate team, AV crew for the winter musical.

  So determined to get herself out of Kansas City
that she wouldn’t date any of the boys who asked her out in high school. No sirree. She wasn’t going to fall for that one, not like her mother had. She’d seen that trap coming a mile away. A handsome boy with a handsome smile and then, zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay, all of a sudden you’ve got two kids and a husband who drinks. No boys for her. Just class and work and extracurricular activities that she thought would help sell her to her college of choice. She was the classic overachiever, compensating for something, compensating for everything. Maybe if she’d been out in the suburbs, she would have been just another normal kid, but at her school she was a comet. The guidance counselor didn’t know what to do with her, had never seen anyone like Emily Wiggins.

  It had come as such a shock, then, that she’d gotten straight-up rejected by Dartmouth and Princeton. Both on the same day. So sure of herself that she hadn’t even registered the thinness of the envelopes. Dear Ms. Wiggins, thank you for your application . . . The single, creamy piece of paper that she thought had been her ticket to freedom was, instead, a thousand tiny cuts rolled into one. The blow had been so hard and so unexpected that she hadn’t even cried. She’d just stood there, on their sagging, rotting porch, holding the letters from Dartmouth and Princeton and staring at their seals embossed in full color on the letterhead and wondering why they bothered using such expensive paper. Were they hoping to seem so impressive that the students they rejected would send checks in return, like some sort of defensive posture, a puppy rolling on its back to be kicked again, or a girl thinking she deserved what her father did to her?