Like this time. Before she disappeared.
Emily works in public relations for a famous fashion designer in Manhattan whose name I’ve also been careful not to mention. In fact she’s the director of public relations for a very famous designer. I try to be conscious about brand names on the blog because of trust issues involved and also because name-dropping is so unattractive. That’s also why I’ve resisted accepting advertising.
Even when she’s late, or at meetings, Emily texts me every few hours. She calls when she gets a minute free. She’s that kind of mom. Not helicopter, not hands-on, not any of those negative expressions society uses to judge and punish us for loving our kids.
When Emily gets home from the city, she always makes a beeline from the station to pick Nicky up. I have to remind her to stay under the speed limit. When her train is going to be late, she texts me. Constantly! What station they’re at, her ETA, until I text her back: no worries. boys fine. get here when u get here. safe travels.
It’s been two days since she hasn’t shown up or gotten in touch with me or returned my texts or calls. Something terrible has happened. She’s vanished. I have no idea where she is.
Moms, does Emily sound like the kind of mother who would leave her child and disappear for two days and not text or call or answer my texts or calls? If nothing was wrong? Seriously?
Okay, got to run now. I smell chocolate-chip cookies burning in the oven. More soon.
Love,
Stephanie
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Stephanie's Blog
Where We Live Now
Hi, moms!
Until now I’ve tried not to mention the name of our town. Privacy is so precious—and there’s so little of it these days. I don’t mean to sound paranoid, but even in a town like ours, hidden cameras might be watching to see what brand of canned tomatoes you buy. Especially in our town. People assume it’s a rich town because it’s in that part of Connecticut, but it’s not all that rich. Emily and Sean have money. I have enough to live on from what my husband, Davis, left me, another reason I can afford to blog without running it as a business.
But because Emily’s disappearance changes everything, and because someone who lives near us may have seen her, and because I’m frantic, I feel I need to out Warfield. Warfield, Connecticut. It’s about two hours from Manhattan on Metro-North.
People call this the suburbs, but I grew up in the suburbs and lived in the city, so it’s always felt like country to me. I’ve blogged about how Davis had to drag me kicking and screaming up here from the city. I’d spent years getting out of the suburbs. I’ve blogged about how I fell in love with country life, how fantastic it feels to wake up with the sun streaming into the eyebrow colonial that Davis restored without sacrificing any of its period details, and how I love drinking tea while the rainbow machine (a kind of prism you put in the window) my brother Chris gave us for a wedding present scatters brightness all over the kitchen.
Miles and I adore it here. Or anyway, I used to.
Until today, when I was feeling so anxious about Emily that everyone—the moms at school, nice Maureen in the post office, the kid who bags groceries—they all seemed sinister, like in those horror movies where everyone in town is a cult member or a zombie. I asked a couple of my neighbors, fake-casually, if they’d seen Emily around, and they shook their heads no. Was it my imagination that they gave me funny looks? Now you moms can really see how crazy-making this is.
Moms, forgive me. I got distracted and just blabbed on, as always.
i should have put this earlier!!!
Emily is around five foot seven. She has blond hair with dark streaks (I never asked if they were real) and dark brown eyes. She probably weighs around a hundred and twenty pounds. But that’s a guess. You don’t ask your friends, How tall are you? How much do you weigh? Though I know some men think that women never talk about anything else. She’s forty-one, but she looks thirty-five, at the most.
She has a dark birthmark underneath her right eye. I only noticed it when she asked me if she should get it removed. I said no, it looked fine and that women in the French court (so I’d read) painted those “beauty spots” on.
Emily always wore a perfume that I guess you could call her signature scent. She said it was made from lilacs and lilies, by Italian nuns. She orders it from Florence. I love that about Emily, all the elegant, sophisticated things she knows about that would never have crossed my mind.
I’ve never worn perfume. I always think it’s a little off-putting when women smell like flowers or spices. What are they hiding? What’s the message they’re sending? But I like Emily’s perfume. I like it that I can always tell from the scent when she’s nearby, or when she’s been in a room. I can smell her perfume in Nicky’s hair, after she’s held him tight and hugged him. She’s offered to let me try some, but it seemed too weird, too intimate, the two of us smelling like creepy smell-twins.
She always wears the diamond and sapphire ring that Sean gave her when they got engaged. And because she moves her hands a lot when she talks, I think of the ring as a sparkling creature with a life of its own, like Tinker Bell flying out in front of Peter Pan and the Lost Boys.
Emily has a tattoo: one of those delicate crown-of-thorn bracelets around her right wrist. That surprised me. She didn’t seem like someone who would get a tattoo—especially one that couldn’t be covered up unless she wore long sleeves. At first I thought it was some fashion-industry thing, but when I felt I knew her well enough and asked, Emily said, “Oh, that. I got it when I was young and wild.”
I said, “We were all young and wild. Once upon a time.”
It felt good to say something I could never say to my husband. If he’d asked what I meant by wild and I told him, life as we knew it would have ended. Of course, that life ended anyway. The truth has a way of coming out.
Wait. The phone’s ringing! Maybe it’s Emily. More soon.
Love,
Stephanie
3
Stephanie's Blog
Simple Favors
Hi, moms!
It wasn’t Emily on the phone. It was a robocall telling me I’d won a free trip to the Caribbean.
Where was I? Oh, right:
Last summer, sunning at the community pool while the boys splashed in the baby pool, Emily said, “I’m always asking you for favors, Stephanie. And I’m so grateful. But can I ask for just one more? Could you take care of Nicky so Sean and I can get away, for Sean’s birthday weekend, to my family’s cabin?” Emily always calls it “the cabin,” but I imagine that her family vacation home on the shore of a lake in northern Michigan is a bit fancier than that. “I was amazed Sean agreed, and I want to nail this down before he changes his mind.”
Of course I said yes. I knew what a problem it was for her to lure Sean away from his office.
“On one condition,” I said.
“Anything,” she said. “You name it.”
“Can you put suntan oil on this hard-to-reach spot on my back?”
“Gladly.” Emily laughed. As I felt her small, strong hand rubbing the oil into my skin, I remembered the fun of going to the beach with my friends in high school!
The weekend that Emily and Sean went away, Miles, Nicky, and I had a great time. The pool, the park, a movie, and burgers and veggies on the grill.
Emily and I have been friends for a year, since our boys met in pre-K. Here’s a picture of her I took at Six Flags, though you can’t see her all that well. It’s a selfie of the four of us, boys and moms. I scanned the kids out. You know I have strong opinions about posting images of one’s kids.