Page 62 of I Need You to Read This
“Quite the drama up at the beach house, I hear. Something about a girl from the mailroom murdering her own brother?” she says distastefully. Alex’s head throbs as she tries to remember what happened. Francis’s house. Brian. Her stomach turns. What happened to Raymond? She looks around for a sign of him. Did he visit her? She can’t remember.
“Raymond?” she croaks out. “Do you know where he is?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know who you’re talking about.” Regina looks momentarily flustered, annoyed by the off-script questioning.
She continues: “As you know, we can’t have our staff going around behaving badly. I spoke to Daddy, and he wasn’t so sure, but you’ll be happy that I’ve convinced him to keep you on.” She smooths her platinum-blond hair, swept into a chignon the size of a giant cinnamon roll on the top of her head. “I told him you were trying to prove that Howard killed Francis. You did us a service at theHerald. I came to thank you, actually.”
“Thank me?”
“Without all your nosing around, there is no way Howard would have gotten caught. I never would have known.”
Alex’s vision blurs as she tries to focus on what Regina is saying. Did she prove Howard’s guilt? In her half-loopy medicated state, Alex is having trouble remembering. There was a letter, something on the computer at Francis Keen’s house. Did Howard say that he loved her?
“What are you mumbling?” Regina snaps.
“Nothing.” Alex coughs.
“Anyway, I should be going. I just came to pay my respects and to let you know that you still have a job. I thought it might inspire you to get back at it more quickly. Nothing like a goal, am I right?”
Her job. Alex remembers the rush of adrenaline she felt putting the words together, unfolding the puzzle of someone’s deepest dilemmas and arranging them on the page. There are the letters of people she thought of even here from her hospital bed. Images of their lives that play out against the backs of her heavy-lidded eyes during half-waking moments. Sometimes she has even thought of something she wants to say to them, to write down, but found herself asleep again before she could try to reach for a pen.
“Thank you,” Alex says. Her throat feels dry and scratchy.
“Oh, I brought you a card,” Regina says as she stands, leaning forward to place an envelope on the flesh-colored hospital tray next to Alex’s bed.
Regina gathers herself, straightening the cream-colored sweater. So pressed and perfect. Alex wonders how she must appear to Regina. Terrible, she assumes. She can see only her own scarred wrists on the bed and the wild curls of hair in her peripheral vision. She must look like a nightmare to someone like Regina, whose entire existence is so perfectly curated it may as well be put in a gallery to admire like some sort of incredible performance art. Alex watches her lift her Chanel bag off the top of a contraption with a digitized screen. Despite being dressed down, Regina looks every bit as perfect and glamorous as inthe first photo Alex saw of her and Howard at the Met Gala, in that miraculous shimmering fish scale dress. Incredible, really, for a woman whose husband just went to jail and is awaiting trial for murder.
As Regina goes to the door, Alex picks up the card and slides it open.Get well soon, written on thick cardstock in perfect tilted script. But that isn’t what makes Alex cry out. The notecard accidentally falls from her fingers, fluttering to the floor. It lands face up, a green background with a thin gold line embossed around the edge.
“I know,” Alex whispers. “I know about Howard and Francis,” she says gently to Regina’s back as her hand freezes on the door.
Regina rotates slowly on her heels, turning back toward her. Coming back to the end of the bed, she looks down at Alex and her eyes narrow. “What did you say?”
“You knew about the two of them, didn’t you? You told her you did.”
“No, I had no idea about her and Howard, only that Howard was having an affair,” Regina says in her clipped way.
Alex’s voice remains calm. “I found the note, Regina.I know.Wasn’t that what it said? I’m a little bit addled at the moment, but something like that is hard to forget. So short and to the point.” She registers a flutter of anxiety in Regina’s eyes and continues. “It would be tempting to want to punish someone your husband cheated with so brazenly and for so long.”
“I didn’t.” Her mouth opens and closes.
“It was your handwriting though. You have incredible penmanship. I’m quite envious of it, really.”
“You can’t prove anything with a note, darling,” Regina says, though her knees seem to have gone weak and she’s sunk back into the blue plastic hospital chair beside Alex’s bed. “Any woman would be angry at the woman who ruined her marriage.”
“It’s true. She did ruin it, didn’t she?” Alex says with pity in her voice.
“For years and years, I had to deal with it. The way he always gave her the benefit of the doubt, raved about her talent, while with me, well.” She snorts, a surprisingly unrefined noise. “You know, the emotional part is always so much harder than the physical anyway. I wasn’tever in love with my husband in a passionate way. But I did love him. I respected him. I expected some level of devotion at least. A token of appreciation for what I did for him. What I sacrificed.”
“What was that?” Alex winces as she shifts in her bed. She is suddenly dying of thirst. There is a cup just to the side on the table. She reaches her fingers out to it.
“I could have run the whole place. Been editor in chief. Do you think I wanted to be a fucking socialite? To spend my life holding charity functions?” she demands, standing and crossing the room. “My father would never have allowed it though. He always wanted someone like him to take over. But Howard was nothing like him. He was always full of principles”—she makes air quotes with her fingers—“and ideas.” She leans in, confiding in Alex. “Marrying Howard was a perfect way to punish my father while also keeping my hands in the business. I always thought one day I might come back in.”
“Until he hired Francis,” Alex says, feeling a tiny seed of sympathy. To love someone who would never love you back, to be married to them, is a brutal form of punishment.
“She ruined everything. That’s what I thought anyway. My husband was in love with a woman who made everything I’ve worked for, everything I am, disappear. But it’s not true. Of course, I realized it too late. Isn’t that the way these things often go? You said it yourself, didn’t you, Alex?”
Alex almost has it now. Her finger rests on the edge of the cup. Finally Regina sharpens her eyes on her. She crosses over to the little table.
