Nanny dearest, p.20
Nanny Dearest, page 20
She asks Mr. Keller, while he’s making his morning coffee, “What inspired Ariadne Maplethorpe?” A splash of milk ends up on the countertop instead of in his mug. “She’s just so...different from Mrs. Keller.”
“I didn’t know you’d read any of my books, Annie.” She gives him a rag to wipe up the milk.
“I’m starting to. It’s strange to live in the house with such an esteemed author and not know the full extent of his work.” He moves the spilled milk around with the cloth, the cotton barely absorbing it.
“Well, to answer your question, she was a character I came up with in college. I’m a little embarrassed by her now.” He leaves the wet rag on the countertop, sips his coffee. “She’s kind of a teenage boy’s fantasy of a woman, you know? Of course, that helped the series sell. Actually, by book four, I wanted to kill her off, but my publisher wouldn’t let me. I’d just gotten so tired of writing like that. Belle helped, of course. She told me on our third date that Ari was a trash character, that Ari should be more like her, brash and bold.” He takes a paper towel and sops up the rest of the milk and leaves the kitchen, seemingly back in his own head, without letting Annie respond.
She would have said, Poor Mrs. Keller. What a shame that her days of being brash and bold have come to an end. For who would describe her now, this slip of a woman, as a commanding presence? She has become a shadow of herself, and soon even the shadow will be diminished, the sun and its angles aligning against her.
29
When I wake up, the light in the apartment has dimmed, gray washing in through the windows. I don’t feel well-rested. My throat’s dry and my lips are chapped, my legs cramped from bending them to fit on the sofa. I could sleep for another five hours, ten. Somehow the nap has made me more tired, but I know I should leave before Anneliese comes back. After our conversation, I don’t feel comfortable inviting myself to dinner.
I go down on the carpet and do some yoga poses. I haven’t stretched my body like this since my old life. I haven’t taken any kind of exercise class since I began looking after the kids, and my back cracks as I descend into cow.
I need to call Beth, explain to her calmly and rationally that we were wrong. She’ll be so angry with me, but I can handle that, I think. She’ll come around. She has to. And there’ll be enough room for everyone. There has to be.
I breathe out as I go into downward-facing dog, spotting the kitchen, the hanging pots and pans suddenly inverted. I go over the conversation with Anneliese in my head, channeling the anger I felt and trying to expel it out of my system as I breathe in and out. That hot ball of fury was so large, and I want it to deliquesce into mellow light.
As I sometimes do, I hear my father’s voice, the way he used to speak to me as I was falling asleep as a seven-year-old, reading from books like Bunnicula, Alice in Wonderland, A Series of Unfortunate Events, his tone softening as I became sleepier. Even when I was thirteen and refused to be tucked in, preferring to go into my room and put on headphones before bed, doing my homework to Arctic Monkeys or Animal Collective, I’d sometimes let him come sit beside me with a book as I was getting sleepier, his voice rising and falling with the dramas of the stories unfolding.
He didn’t really have the kind of wisdom to offer that fathers on TV or in movies tend to dole out. But as much as I hated it at the time, he was always quietly there. Ready to listen, to tell me with his steady gaze whether I was in the right during a high school fight with my friends, or when Gavin and I argued and I didn’t hear from him for a night.
I miss that calmness, that stable, mindful masculinity. And as I breathe out again, I see his face the way it looked the last time I saw him, in the den of the apartment, balancing a container of pad thai on his knees because the table was out for repairs, his glasses askew, thinning hair combed back. Instead of making me wince, it’s a reassuring, hopeful vision.
I fold my body into child’s pose, my muscles stretching and relaxing. I have an itch that I’m missing something, like the feeling of being watched, turning around and seeing nothing but your own shadow.
It’s just my own paranoia, isn’t it? That hot fury still trying to burn up any traces of forgiveness, of hope. I close my eyes, force myself to exhale it all out, visualize myself pushing that flaming ball out through my chest, my ears, my mouth.
When I stand back up, I do feel more centered, with my spine better aligned. The apartment is almost gloomy in this light, and I straighten up the sofa, putting the pillows back in their place, making sure to leave no residue of myself on the carpet.
I don’t think I’ve ever been here completely alone, and the fact that she trusts me to be here now only makes my accusations against Anneliese even more treacherous. She opened her home to me, and how have I repaid her? Closing my eyes again, I visualize the hot ball, trying to get my bearings before I leave.
It’s not until I’ve opened my eyes that I realize I’ve been gnawing on my lip, that I taste a salty dribble of blood running down the side of my mouth. I wait for a moment, almost as if I want it to trickle down my mouth and stain my shirt. But I wipe it away at the last second, just as it hits my chin.
I go into the kids’ bathroom to dab the lip, to find some Neosporin to put on the cut. There are toys abandoned in the bathtub, a plastic truck and a naked doll, but otherwise it’s clean like the rest of the apartment, the toilet water blue, the pink bubblegum-flavored toothpaste standing like a sentry next to the toothbrushes, all aligned with the sink’s edges. Even the toilet paper is folded into a triangle at the tip.
I open the medicine cabinet, scanning for the Neosporin among the various crammed, but orderly, items—Q-tips, extra toothpastes, a first aid kit, bottles of goopy kids’ cold and stomach medicines. The shelves are all neat, organized by use, so I find the Neosporin near the Band-Aids, but my wayward hand flings the kids’ Flintstones vitamins off the shelf, too, dislodging the childproof lid that must not have been screwed on, and spilling the pastel tablets into the sink.
I start grabbing at the chalky pieces before they fall down the drain. They really haven’t changed kids’ multivitamins much, I think, as I collect them in my hand, ready to dump them back into the container.
But I pause. Because there’s an aberration among the tiny Freds and Barneys. I’d recognize what I see at the bottom of the bottle anywhere after years of making sure my dad took his medications.
I grip the sink, my stomach tumbling, and place the bottle down on the ledge, sinking to my knees, all sense of ease extinguished. I pick up the bottle again, shake everything remaining in it onto my palm, bring it up to my eyes to inspect even closer.
I’m not deceiving myself. There they are, their blue hue camouflaged well among the Flintstone candy-colored vitamins. And I think of Anneliese, crushing them up a few mornings a week to put in the kids’ breakfast smoothies, chattering away about how they couldn’t stand the taste but that these were the best vitamins for kids on the market right now, unfortunately, so she just had to use them.
She’d never let me do it myself, the grinding into powder, the smoothie-making. She said she was the champ, knew how to mix it in just right so the taste was completely dissolved by the fruit and peanut butter.
The kids, so obedient and low-energy most days. Always ready to nap, to sleep when they were supposed to. Caleb asking Anneliese what was wrong with them, noticing a difference when they first arrived at his apartment for the weekend, almost pleading with her for an answer.
There’s a lurch at the back of my throat, and I’m vomiting into the toilet, yellow gunk from God knows what, since I haven’t eaten today.
I need to get out of here.
I slip one tablet of what I found into my pocket and haphazardly put the rest of the vitamins and the Neosporin back into the cabinet, my lip still bloody, my mouth reeking of bile.
As I leave, the door locking behind me, I don’t look back, that ball of fire growing larger, igniting, into an expanding cannonball of fury. I won’t be back here, I think as the front door of the building slams with a thud, and I’m running down the street, away from it all, away from her.
PART THREE
30
February 1997
Ironically, it’s Suzy’s fault when the call finally comes. Annie doesn’t blame Suzy. She’s too young to know what she’s done.
It comes on a Thursday afternoon, around three. Usually, Annie gets to the phone first, tells the Kellers who it is, and then they pick up the line. Mrs. Keller’s breathing has become more labored, so she hasn’t been taking calls as much. But today, she’s expecting a call from her trusts and estates lawyer, so she’s poised by the phone, forcing herself to stay awake while Christine knits solemnly in a chair beside her.
Annie only knows these details afterward, though.
She picks up the phone at the same time as Mrs. Keller, saying, “Keller residence,” at the same moment that Mrs. Keller picks up, without looking at the caller ID, and says, “Hello, Greg?”
“Oh, hi, Mrs. Keller? This is Louisa Sandowski, principal of Windsong.” The older woman’s voice sounds softer than Annie has ever heard it, almost silky.
“I can take it,” Annie hears herself say, making her presence known on the line.
A pause, the voice growing hard, icy, something you could pierce someone’s eye with. “I’d rather take this call alone with Mrs. Keller.” Annie doesn’t argue. She puts the phone back in the cradle, puts her head in her hands.
She goes upstairs to the door, presses her ear against it. But Mrs. Keller’s breathing is too shallow, her voice too low, for Annie to make out anything.
Annie feels discombobulated, disjointed, like she is composed of separate moving parts floating in space. She goes to her room, shuts the door, lies back on her bed, and puts her hand down her pants, feeling herself down there, reminding herself she’s intact. Suzy is down for a nap.
They won’t fire you, whispers one of her childhood companions. There’s too much going on right now. They won’t want Suzy’s life to be disrupted any more than it already has been. The voice is even-toned, soothing, rich hot chocolate right before spring. Besides, she’s yours. Even if they were to banish you from the house, you have all the strength in the world to get your own child back. You know what you’re doing.
Annie nods. She does. She has her plan in place.
Later, she will learn that Suzy had said something distressing to one of her teachers, to Mrs. Keenan who had come to the house months ago. While playing with a baby doll, feeding it a bottle, putting it in a little stroller during playtime and zooming around the carpet, she’d said, “Mama’s leaving. But I won’t leave.”
Mrs. Keenan had leaned away from trying to stop a boy intent on crashing his dump truck into a pile of blocks a little girl had built, and asked Suzy what she meant by that. Suzy had looked at her, stuck her thumb in her mouth. “Mama is going away.”
“Where is she going?” Mrs. Keenan asked.
“She’s going into the jungle like Tiger. Away, away, away,” and she’d tossed the baby doll facedown on the ground and closed its eyes. “Like that.” She’d pointed.
Mrs. Keenan, that inquisitive woman, had wanted to let it slide. Kids say strange things all the time, especially three-year-olds. But for some reason, the image had stuck with her, of this baby doll lying prone on the floor.
Which is maybe why Mrs. Keenan’s ears were cocked, why she was a bit more alert at pickup that afternoon. She usually herded the kids out of class and then stayed back to clean up and look after the ones who had to stay until three. She never ventured much into the hallway. But that day she had. And she kept hearing how the Kellers were away again, that they were always leaving the poor, overworked nanny alone with the kid.
Well, that explains that, Mrs. Keenan had thought. But she needed to tell Mrs. Sandowski, the principal, because with children so young, the parents had to notify the school if they were going on an extended vacation and leaving someone else in charge. And clearly the Kellers hadn’t.
So Mrs. Sandowski had merely planned to call the Kellers to tell them it was school policy to let her know the next time they went out of town. And she waited a week for them to get back. But within that week, Mrs. Keenan was keeping her ears pricked, had been spending more time in the halls. And what she’d heard was sickening, astounding coming from what she assumed to be such upright, established, if a bit entitled, parents.
She approached Mrs. Sandowski with what she’d heard. Neglect. Horrific fighting. Nanny abuse. She had never dealt with something like this in their sleepy little school. But Mrs. Sandowski had worked in New York, in Boston, with parents and families who were far more conniving and dysfunctional than the less sophisticated upper-middle-class types that inhabited this small town. She would know how to handle it. And besides, Mrs. Sandowski was supposed to call them anyway.
Annie would hear the details from Mrs. Keller herself. How she had stayed silent on the phone as these accusations were flung at her, her parenting was questioned, the very foundation of her marriage ripped to pieces by this woman she’d only met once. “Suzy doesn’t seem to be suffering from any physical harm. In fact, except for this baby doll incident, she seems relatively well-adjusted. So of course I have no reason to call CPS. But please, for the sake of Windsong, take your child and your personal dramas elsewhere.”
Yes, Mrs. Keller had stayed silent, her rage simmering until, once Mrs. Sandowski had taken a breath, she croaked out, “I’m dying of cancer, you fucking bitch.” And she cleared her name from there.
Christine taps on Annie’s door not a half hour later, a sharp knock that wakes Annie out of her reverie instantly. “She wants to talk to you. Alone.” Annie rubs her eyes, straightens her shirt, smooths back her hair and walks over, her spine straight.
As always, Mrs. Keller looks like a shrunken corncob doll, her tiny body dwarfed by the hospital bed, one bruised arm attached to an IV drip.
“Come, sit,” she rasps, and Annie imagines Mrs. Keller’s skin melting off, pooling on the sheets like egg yolk, drip-drip-dripping onto the hardwood floor. Christine has forgotten her knitting on her chair, and Annie places it next to the water cup.
“I have a task for you. But we’ll get to that,” is all Mrs. Keller says, her upper body barely lifted, her sunken eyes having trouble focusing on Annie.
Annie sucks her lip. Perhaps nothing happened on the call at all.
“I don’t know why you hate me so much. I know I can be cold, dismissive. Maybe cruel at times. But If anything, it should be the other way around. You could get ten more years with my daughter, and I barely have ten days. You’ll live for another sixty years.” She pauses. “You know how much trouble I went to to have children? You’ll probably have a family of your own someday, a whole full life, you lucky thing.” She tries to prop herself up but fails, too weak to even press the Up button of the mechanical bed, resigning herself to the supine position she’s been forced into. “So, why waste your energy on me?”
The question sounds almost rhetorical, and Annie’s eyes widen as the silence between them broadens. Mrs. Keller wants an answer, and she is so close to saying a plaintive, treacly, “I don’t hate you,” but instead, something much closer to the truth slips out.
“You have what I want. You got Suzy and I guess... I guess I deserve her more than you. You could say I’m jealous.” She raises her fingers to her lips in an almost cartoonish gesture, trying to shove the words back in. But then lets them drop, folds her hands in her lap, exhilarated and exhausted by that confession. She knows what will come next, that her own mouth has betrayed her, and she has sealed her demise.
But once again, those whispers latch to her ear, reassure her that nothing is going to happen, that her job is secure. That not even Mrs. Keller will want to disrupt Suzy’s life any more.
Mrs. Keller is staring at her, one drawn-on eyebrow arched, the ropy veins by her temple made translucent by the light pouring through the window beside the bed. “But why the lies? Wasn’t it enough to have my child while I was dying?” She takes a shaking hand and sips water from her plastic cup, almost knocking it over with her tremors.
Annie looks down at her fingers, picks at her cuticles. In some ways, this is worse than angry, abusive words flung at her, this quiet, deadly rasp of a sound coiling its way around their corner of the room. “The first time, it happened by accident. Another nanny saw the bruises from that one time you grabbed me, and she looked at me—really looked at me. No one has ever looked at me with that kind of concern before. It was addictive, I guess, being seen.” She can’t meet Mrs. Keller’s eyes then, but she can feel them. And the quiet stretches so long and loud that she forces herself to look up, and Mrs. Keller’s eyes are almost dewy, sympathy softening her face.
“That’s quite a story. You know, that was never my problem, being seen. Oh, I had plenty of problems when I was your age, but being seen was never one of them.” She tries to laugh but lets out a choking sound instead. “But I get it. Or at least, I can be sympathetic to it.” She wipes some spittle from her lip. “I’m not going to tell my husband what you’ve said about us. He’d fire you in an instant. He’s very worked up about this death thing and so nostalgic about the past. If he hears you’ve been bad-mouthing me, it’ll be the end of everything for you. I’ve told the school not to interfere with you either. They are going to let Suzy stay. You may get some glances, some gossip, but that’s nothing compared to what you’ve said about me.” Annie looks down at her gnawed nails again. The floorboards are so clean in this room, immaculate. The outside light bounces off of them.
That must be Christine’s doing, or even Serena’s. Annie and Claudette, the housekeeper, were never instructed to clean this room.
