Page 10 of The Identicals
She is so pretty, her teeth white and straight, her hair long and shiny, tucked behind one ear. But it’s her skin that Tabitha really envies. If she could go back in time and change one thing it would be this: she would have worn sunscreen. Lots of it.
“Yeah,” Ramsay says. “Who’s the beer for?”
His voice is so familiar, his wicked smirk so easy to interpret, that it’s as though Caylee unwittingly inserted herself between a long-married couple. Ramsay is the ideal life partner for Tabitha in nearly every way. But there are deal breakers. It’s not only that he wants a child. It’s also that he has never lost anyone, and he’s incapable of understanding the depth and intensity of Tabitha’s emotions. There are things that activate her Julian anxiety: Julian’s birthday, obviously, and the day of his death, but also babies and boys who are now the age that Julian would have been. Fourteen. Ramsay was impatient with Tabitha’s emotional lows as they related to Julian; the more she tried to talk it through and make him understand, the more he urged her to “get over it” and “move on.”
That Tabitha is now so unhappy without Ramsay has come as a surprise. That she is fiendishly jealous of Caylee—honestly, Tabitha would like to cut her—is a shock.
“That’s my date’s,” she says. “Captain Peter.” She wants the title to make him sound like a figure of authority, but it comes across as goofy. She might as well have saidCaptain CrunchorCaptain Kangaroo.
“Guy wearing a white uniform like Merrill Stubing’s?” Ramsay says. “I just saw him out front. He left.”
“Heleft?” Tabitha says.Have you ever lost anyone?she thinks. She has now lost Captain Peter, but she feels only a wave of relief. Thank God he’s gone! If only this news hadn’t been reported by her ex-boyfriend, she would be a very happy woman indeed.
She picks up Captain Peter’s beer and drinks the entire thing in one pull. She has, officially, turned into her twin sister. Caylee looks impressed, Ramsay surprised. Tabitha hides her burp behind a cupped hand.
“I’m out,” she says, grabbing her clutch and blowing a kiss to young Zack. “You two have fun.”
“Tabitha,” Ramsay says.
Tabitha looks at him. He loves her; she can see it written all over his face. But love isn’t enough.
“Good night,” she says, and she heads for the door.
Tabitha can hear the music, feel the music—hell, she can practically taste the music—from two houses away. It’s rap or whatever kids call rap these days, but there are fewer tricky lyrics and a heavier bass line. When Tabitha pulls into the driveway, the music is so loud that the walls of the house seem to expand and contract. It looks like the house is breathing.
Or maybe that’s the effect of the Nauti Dog.
Then Tabitha sees the cars. One is the black Range Rover that overindulged, unparented Emma drives, and the other is a white pickup that Teddy—Ainsley’s boyfriend—drives.
Tabitha gets out of her car and steadies herself with a hand on the hood. How has Eleanor not heard the music? She really is going deaf. It’s so loud Tabitha can’t believe the neighbors haven’t called the police.
She opens the door into a miasma of pot smoke.
This is just not possible,she thinks.
But of course itispossible; Ainsley is sixteen. She is grounded, and what she will no doubt say is that she hasn’t left the house. She didn’t ask if she could have friends over, because if she had asked, Tabitha would have said absolutely not. But because Ainsleydidn’task and Tabitha didn’t say no, Ainsley will argue that she is not technically breaking any rules.
Tabitha kicks off her kitten heels. The layout of the carriage house is upside down; the bedrooms are on the ground floor, the living space upstairs. Oh, how Tabitha would love to slip into her room, take an Ambien, and go to bed. She doesn’t have the energy to deal with this.
You’re a piss-poor parent,she hears Ramsay say.
Then she hears something else. A hollow thocking noise. Thock thock thock. Thock thock thock.
No,Tabitha thinks.
She ascends the stairs stealthily, thinking she would like to appraise the situation before anyone realizes she’s home. She grips the handrail as thethocking continues, then stops, then starts again. The song ends. There are a few seconds of silence during which Tabitha freezes. Then Meghan Trainor starts singing that song from the previous summer: “My name is no…” Tabitha congratulates herself for recognizing her daughter’s music, then she thinks:Myname is no.No no no no no no no.
She peers between the spindles of the banister at the top of the stairs to see at least a dozen kids smoking cigarettes, smoking weed, drinking cans of PBR, and, yes—the source of that sickening sound—kids playingbeer pongon her Stephen Swift table.
“No,” Tabitha says. She steps into the room and wonders which transgression to address first. She wants to turn off the music, but she is drawn over to the beautiful table, her prize piece of furniture. She grabs the paddle out of the young man’s hand on his backswing, and he is so stunned that he accidentally knocks over one of the cups of beer on the table. An amber lake spreads across the sumptuous polished cherry.
“Whoa,” he says. It’s Ainsley’s friend BC. He’s cute, dark-haired, wearing a T-shirt from Young’s Bicycle Shop. Tabitha has the urge to beat him with the paddle.
She races to the kitchen for a towel, and she finds Ainsley’s phone hooked up to the iPod dock. Tabitha yanks it off, and the music stops. Tabitha is so angry that she dumps Ainsley’s phone into one of the cups of beer on the kitchen counter.
Someone from the living room calls out, “Music!”
Another voice says, “Her mom is home.”
