Five(14)

“Thank you,” she says, grasping the package like a life raft. She shuts the door. This is exactly what she needs. She has spent the past few hours taking every frame, every piece of art off the walls, after Gideon proved he could tear them down in last night’s rage before bed. She removed the nails. She dismantled the line of shoes he had constructed and tossed them in a laundry basket to deal with later. She washed his sheets. She tried to quiet her unease about what he might be doing at Anne’s right now.

Anne was so confident when she sent Emma home and offered to keep Gideon for a few hours.

“But the baby?” Emma protested, afraid to leave.

“Don’t be ridiculous. Gideon loves Louise, I’ll be with them the entire time,” Anne assured her.

“You should have been his mother,” Emma said.

“I know,” Anne said to herself, as she watched Emma drive away.

Alone at home with her new clothes, Emma fills a champagne glass with sparkling water. She rarely drinks alcohol. She usually can’t afford not to be alert at all times. She takes her pretend champagne and strips down in front of the full-length mirror. She tears into the package and shimmies into a shimmering black evening gown. The silk satin skims her delicate curves, drapes around her like a living thing, caressing her, holding her. She checks that the cut of it covers all the places she meant to cover, and it does, but she needs one more thing.

“Where are they,” she says, as she opens the drawer of her bureau. “Perfect,” she says, pulling on the antique full-length black evening gloves, her grandmother’s. She looks at herself. She is a vision. She breathes deeply for the first time in days. She smooths the fabric of her dress with her gloved hands.

“Okay, well, just this one, if you insist,” she says to an imaginary man at an imaginary party, a slow mischievous smile creeping across her lips.

She runs into the hallway to the linen cupboard and finds the red wine, a gift from a client long, long ago, on the highest shelf in the back. “What? Really?” she giggles at the man who isn’t there. “I mean, you can, but I’m pretty sure your wife won’t like it.” For a moment she can feel an arm around her waist. A brush of lips against hers.

She fills her champagne flute with red wine. She takes a sip and winces. She has not tasted alcohol for many months. And then she downs one, then another, then holds on to the third glass.

Emma swans around the house from room to room, pretending her suitor is chasing her, but she moves carefully because even in her inebriated state she remembers that silk satin will crease immediately and this dress has to go back. And it will, but not before she gets up on the table, not before she plays Now That’s What I Call the 90s, and not before she belts a song at the top of her voice and the people of the world spice up her life and she slips inside the eye of your mind, and not before, definitely not before, she must confess that her loneliness is killing her but that she still believes—still believes!

And above Britney, above her own voice, she can hear the doorbell. Already? The things she ordered last night?

She climbs off the table, hurries down the hallway, trips over the bloody scatter cushion she screamed into yesterday, somehow she missed it when she was cleaning up, it gets caught up in her silk satin train, it comes with her to the door.

It is not the delivery man, it is not the Net-A-Porter man with her silver dress and her white disco boots. It is a different man altogether.

Hit me baby, one more time.

“Didn’t we say two o’clock today,” Liam says in the doorway, not hiding his surprise at what he sees. “Is this a bad time,” he says. They are statements, not questions.

She cannot catch her breath. She cannot swallow. She nearly asks, “What day is it?” but stops herself. The query will only make this worse than it already is. At least she knows not to admit aloud that she is lost in time.

She looks down, appalled to see the bloody scatter cushion at her feet, and kicks it away. She knows the red wave has begun under her skin, creeping up her neckline, crawling up to her clavicle. She never flushed like this before she had Gideon. She sees herself as he must see her, unhinged, unmoored.

He is a stark contrast to her: calm, self-possessed, in a crisp blue suit with a waistcoat, no tie, the tailored hems of his cuffs and trousers as sharp as razor edges. His shaven head, smooth as a stone—she imagines for a second resting her cheek on his forehead, how cool he would feel against her blazing flesh. His cologne—he’s wearing too much of it, which is the perfect amount—is so strong, it becomes the air of her personal atmosphere. She starts to raise her hand to his face then stops herself.

Shit. She tightens her grip on the doorknob, thinking as fast as she can.

“Are we going in or doing this out here?” he says, looking up at her bandaged brow, noticing the laundry basket full of shoes in the corridor behind her.

“Oh, look at the time, I’m so sorry, do come in,” she says cheerily, holding on to the door to steady the tremble in her hands. Shit.

He steps past her into the foyer and looks at the dark rectangular shadows on the walls, each marked with a hole where a nail used to be.

She closes the door and lingers as she pushes it shut to buy some time. She wills herself to sober up. Fatboy Slim is praising you like he should over and over again in the kitchen. It’s so loud she can’t think. She looks at her hands and sees that she is still wearing the long black gloves. She wonders if she has red wine teeth. Shit.