Red Dress, No Strings

CHAPTER 001 The fan hummed above my head. I like that sound. It covers everything. I sat on the edge of the marble tub with my knees pulled up and my headphones pressed deep into my ears. The tiles were cold under my bare feet. Gray ones, small and square. I had counted them so many times I knew there were two hundred and eighteen on the floor. A calm woman's voice spoke in my ear. "Repeat after me. Je voudrais." "Je voudrais," I whispered. "Je peux." "Je peux." "Je pars." I stopped. My mouth stayed open a little. I pars. I leave. Three small words. I said them again, softer, like I was stealing bread from a shop. Nobody in this big, quiet apartment would ever guess it. The wife on the third floor, the one who smiles and says okay, was planning a jailbreak with a phone app. I'm twenty-nine years old. Once I could jump across a stage and land without a sound. Now I count bathroom tiles and call it a hobby. I looked at the clock on my phone. 11:42. I had been in there almost an hour. Then I heard it. Footsteps in the hall. Slow and heavy. The kind of steps a man takes when he is tired and not in a hurry to get anywhere. They stopped outside the door. My heart jumped so hard it hurt. I yanked the earbuds out and shoved my phone into a folded towel on the shelf. My hands were shaking. I reached over and flushed the toilet, which was the dumbest thing I could think of, and I did it anyway. The handle jiggled. "Nat?" His voice came through the wood, flat and low. "Yeah," I said. My own voice sounded too high. "I'm here." "I'm going to bed." "Okay." That was it. I waited for the next part. I waited for him to say, are you alright, or, you've been in there a long time, or even, what are you doing? Nothing came. Just the soft creak of the floor as he walked away. Then a door closed down the hall. I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding. I should have felt relieved. Instead I felt something heavy sit down in my chest. He didn't ask. He never asks. If he had knocked and said, Natalie, talk to me, I think I would have told him everything. The French. The studio in Queens. All of it. I'd have cried right there on the cold tiles and said, please see me. That was the part that scared me. I wanted him to ask so badly. And he never did. I pulled my phone out of the towel. The screen lit up my face in the big mirror. I looked tired. My hair was messy and my eyes were red around the edges. I looked like someone's quiet ghost. I whispered it again. "Je pars." It sounded braver in the dark. I tiptoed out of the bathroom. The hall was long and dim, with expensive paintings on the walls that I never picked. The floor was cold wood. At the end I could see a thin line of light under the bedroom door. I stood there for a second. Five years. Five years of this door. In the first month of our marriage, I used to wait up. I wore a silk nightgown Sam bought me as a joke. I sat on the bed with my hands in my lap like a kid at a doctor's office. Andrew came in at one in the morning. He looked at the gown. Then he looked at me, and something sad crossed his face. "You should sleep, Natalie," he said. He took a pillow and went to the couch. That was it. That was the whole beginning of my marriage. After a while I stopped wearing the gown. After a longer while I stopped waiting up. Now it was easier to hide in the bathroom with a language app than to stand outside that door and feel stupid. I went to the kitchen instead. It was the biggest kitchen I had ever seen in my life, and I never felt like it belonged to me. White counters, a silver fridge, a window that looked out at the dark shape of the park. I poured a glass of water and sat at the counter. My laptop was already there. I had left it open under a stack of magazines. I slid it out and woke up the screen. A page glowed back at me. Dark blue letters. A small crest of a university in Paris. Graduate Program in Dance and Literature. Applications Close in Eleven Weeks. My mouth went dry. I had been looking at this page for two months. Every night I told myself I'd just peek. Just read the words. Just pretend. Below the title was a big green button. Start Application. I put my finger on the trackpad. It hovered over the button. My hand was trembling so much that the little arrow on the screen shook, too. Who was I kidding? I was a twenty-nine year old woman with no degree, no money of my own, and a husband whose family owned half of Manhattan. I wasn't some brave girl in a movie. I was the girl who said okay. But I could hear Sam's voice in my head, from last Thursday. "Nat, you used to dance like the floor owed you money. What happened to her?" I didn't have an answer for her. I still didn't. I breathed in. I breathed out. My finger pressed down a little. Then, down the hall, a click. The bedroom light went off. The thin line of gold under the door vanished, and the whole apartment went black except for my screen. I froze. My heart was pounding in my ears. He's asleep, I told myself. He doesn't know. He can't know. But my hand moved on its own. I slammed the laptop shut so fast the sound cracked through the kitchen like a gunshot. I sat there in the dark with my fingers pressed on the lid. I felt like a thief. That's the funny part, isn't it? I was hiding a dream in my own house, like it was something shameful. Like wanting a life was a crime. I thought of my dad then. He used to put old records on in our tiny kitchen in Queens and spin me around until I screamed with laughter. I was seven. I thought love meant you never ran out of songs. What would he say if he saw me now? My eyes burned. I wiped them with the back of my hand. "Stop it," I whispered. "Not tonight." I stood up, rinsed my glass, and set it in the rack. I tried to do it quietly. I tried to do everything quietly. It's a habit now. Even my crying makes no sound. I was heading for the guest room when my phone buzzed on the counter. One short buzz. Then the screen lit up the dark kitchen like a tiny blue flame. I froze again. Nobody texted me at midnight. Sam would never. Andrew was twenty feet away, asleep. Jessica was somewhere in California, or at least that's where I thought she was. I picked it up. Unknown number. No name. No picture. Just a message, sitting there, waiting. I opened it. My hands were ice cold. "Congratulations on almost five years. Don't trust the flowers." I read it once. Then twice. My blood went quiet in my ears. The flowers? I turned slowly and looked across the kitchen. On the dining table, under the pale light from the window, sat a tall glass vase. Twelve red roses. They had arrived on Monday, like they always did. With a little white card in neat black letters. You are my everything. I had put them there myself. I had smiled at them. I had told myself they meant something. My whole body went cold. Who knew about the roses? Who was watching me? And why did the message sound like a warning, not a joke? I took a step toward the vase, and the phone buzzed again in my hand. Another message. "Look under the card. Quickly!"