Under My Skin

Is it fatigue that makes his voice sound that way, flat, distant? Or the crush of it all—work and family, marriage, pretty from the outside, exhausting from the inside.

Slade, still undeterred, launches in about how by the time he can prove he’ll get his grades up, it will be too late. They go back and forth for a few minutes.

“FaceTime parenting,” whispers Layla. I don’t like her flat tone, either, or the kind of sad distance I see on her face; it’s new. “It’s all the rage.”

“You okay?”

She puts on a smile, but looks down at her plate. “Yeah,” she says, false bright. “Yeah, of course. Just—tired.”

I catch Izzy watching us with a worried frown.

“Dad says what if I sign up for robotics and quit if my grades don’t come up?” Slade cuts in.

Layla looks to the screen, annoyed. But the iPad is dark; Mac is gone.

“Your father and I will discuss it later and give you a decision tomorrow.”

“Robotics is the future, Mom.”

Layla puts down her fork and locks Slade in a stare. “Ask me again and the answer is no.”

Everyone knows that tone; Slade falls silent and looks at his plate. The mom tone—which means you’ve reached the limit of her patience and you’re about to lose big. I take a bite of meatloaf. Wherever she got the recipe, it’s great. I’ve cleared my whole plate. I didn’t realize how hungry I was. Layla’s barely touched hers. Which I guess is why she’s a size zero.

“Okay,” he says, drawing out the word into sad defeat.

Izzy gets up, scraping the chair loudly, clearing her plate. “I promised to call Abbey.”

Somehow the mood has changed, the happy chatter died down, a stillness settling.

* * *

Layla and I settle into the white expanse of her living room—everything low and soft, the gas fireplace lit, photography books laid out on the reclaimed wood coffee table, a bottle of pinot opened between us. I want to tell her about the hooded man, but I don’t. She’ll panic, launch into fix-it mode, and I don’t need that right now.

We’ve been friends since eighth grade. But friend is such a tepid word, isn’t it? A throwaway word that can mean any level of acquaintance. What do you call someone who’s shared your whole life, who seems to know you better than you know yourself, accepts all your many flaws and weaknesses as just flubs in the fabric of who you are? The person you can call at any hour. The one who could show up at your house in the middle of the night with a body in the trunk of her car, and you’d help her bury it. Or vice versa. That’s Layla.

“Mac’s working late,” I say, tossing it out there.

She lifts her eyebrows. “That’s Mac. It’s what he does. He works.”

She seems to wear the opulence around us, slipping into it easily like a silk robe. The expensive fabrics on her body drape; her pedicured toes are pretty, white-pink squares. Her skin practically glows from regular treatments. It would be easy to think she came from wealth, that this was all she knew. But I remember how she grew up. The fingerprint bruises on the inside of her arm from one of her father’s “bad nights.” How my mother used to pack extra food in my lunch box in case Layla came to school without and with no money to buy anything. We don’t talk about it much anymore, the abuse, the neglect. Ancient history, Layla says.

“It’s easier I think,” she says, looking down into her glass. “For him. To be at work than here with us. It’s messy at home, you know. Lots of noise, emotions, ups and downs—family, life. Numbers sit in tidy columns. You add them up and it all makes sense.”

When Jack and I first started the agency, Mac helped figure out the finances.

One night, he came to our apartment after work, and sat at our kitchen table covered with a swath of spreadsheets and documents. Layla and I grew bored, drifted away from the table. But the boys stayed up late talking about pension plans and salaries, quarterly taxes, insurance costs.

Layla and I opened a bottle of wine, lay on the couch listening to their voices, low and serious.

“Are you sure this is what you guys want?” she asked that night.

“The agency?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Won’t you miss it? The assignments, the travel, you know—the excitement of it?”

There was something odd in her tone. “Do you miss it?” I asked.

She shrugged. “The kids keep me busy,” she says. “But, yeah, sometimes.”

I was surprised by this; it never occurred to me that Layla was less than happy.

Her Facebook posts and Instagram feeds were a cheerful tumble of beautiful pictures of the kids, family trips, idyllic Sunday breakfasts, strolls in the park. Layla and Mac in love, wealthy, with two gorgeous, gifted children. Fakebook, Jack liked to call it. A bulletin board of our pretty moments, all the rest of it hidden.

“I guess we all make our choices,” she said, flat and final. “I mean, we’re blessed. I’m—grateful.”

“Mac loves the kids,” she says now. “He’s always there for them. He’s never missed a performance or a party—they call, he answers.”

“He loves you.”

That much I know. Though Mac can be stiff and isn’t exactly a sparkling conversationalist, sometimes even a little blank, his face lights up when Layla talks. He watches her with love in his eyes. Personally, I think he’s on the spectrum, a genius with numbers but maybe struggling elsewhere. Not an unusual combination. But since Jack’s death, Mac has spent many an evening at the office with me, educating me on everything Jack used to handle. He’s patient, gentle, explaining and re-explaining as often as necessary without a trace of annoyance. He’s been there for me, just like Layla. These people—they’re my family.

Layla rubs at the back of her shoulder, seems about to say something but then it dies on her lips, replaced by a wan smile.

“I know,” she says. “Of course he does. Seventeen years.”

She takes a sip from her wineglass, the lights behind her twinkling in a sea of dark. In daylight, the room looks out onto Central Park—an expanse of green, or autumn colors, or white. “It’s okay. We can’t change each other. Most of us who stay married know that.”

Jack and I had just passed our eighth-year wedding anniversary before he died, so I don’t comment. But I don’t remember ever wanting to change him.

“I’m sorry,” she says, sitting forward and looking stricken. “The stupid things I say sometimes.”

I lift a hand. “Don’t walk on eggshells. Don’t do that.”

“So what’s going on with you, then?” she asks. “Something—so don’t lie.”

“Nothing,” I lie. She doesn’t buy it, doesn’t push, but keeps her gaze on me.

“I saw Dr. Nash today,” I say, just to put something out there. “She wants me to get off the sleeping pills.”

“Why?” says Layla, pouring us each another glass of wine. I don’t stop her, though I’ve had enough, and the pills earlier. This is our second bottle. “Fuck that. Take what you need to sleep. This year’s been hard enough. You tell her—”

I tune her out. She’s always had a mouth on her, always the fighter, the one standing up, speaking out. For some reason I flash on her arguing with one of her high school boyfriends. We were in the parking lot after a football game. She hit him on the head with her purse. You fucker! she’d screamed, as we all watched. I dragged her off; she kept yelling. The look on his face, like he’d never experienced anger before. Maybe he hadn’t. Layla wept in my car afterward. What had she been so mad about that night? I don’t even remember—or who the boy was, or who else was there. Just the bright spotlights from the field, some girls giggling, the smell of cut grass and Layla’s voice slicing the night.

“Poppy,” she says.

“What?”

I’m getting the mom look, the one she gives her kids when they’re not listening.