A Clean Slate
Authors: Laura Caldwell
graduated from University of Iowa, before getting her law degree from Loyola University Chicago School of Law. Laura was a trial lawyer for many years, specializing in medical negligence defense and entertainment law. She is widely published in the legal field, as well as in numerous mainstream publications.
Burning the Map,
her first novel, was published by Red Dress Ink and chosen by Barnes & Noble.com as one of “The Best of 2002.”
Laura is currently a writer and contributing editor at
Lake Magazine,
as well as an Adjunct Professor of legal writing at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. Please visit her online at www.lauracaldwell.com.
Laura Caldwell
All my admiration and appreciation to the following people: my stellar editor, Margaret Marbury, Maureen Walters at Curtis Brown, Ltd., everyone at Red Dress Ink (especially Laura Morris, Tania Charzewski, Craig Swinwood, Margie Miller, Maureen Stead and Don Lucey), Beth Kaveny, Suzanne Burchill, Kelly Harden, Ginger Heyman, Trisha Woodson, Ted McNabola, Joan Posch, Rochelle Wasserberger, Hilarie Pozesky, Alisa Speigel, Katie Caldwell Kuhn, Margaret Caldwell, William Caldwell, Karen Billups, Stacey Billups, Kelly Caldwell, Dr. Stuart Rice, Kim Wilkins, Joe Ford, Joel Odish, Anthony Parmalee (photographer extraordinaire) and Greg Brown and Roberto Puig of BMG Model Management.
Lastly, and once again most importantly, thanks, love and overwhelming gratitude to Jason Billups.
“Life isn't about finding yourself; life is about creating yourself.”
âGeorge Bernard Shaw
H
ave you ever had a moment when you've knownâI mean, logically known in your headâthat you're a fantastically lucky person, that you're truly fortunate to have an education, to live in a nice place in a great city, to have friends who care about you and all that, but you just can't get yourself to actually feel it?
Well, I was having one of those moments on the day it all started. I stood in the dry cleaners, where the temperature was about a hundred eighty degrees from the pressing and steaming machines.
“Sorry, sorry. No clothes for you,” the tiny Asian woman said as she came back to the cracked linoleum counter for the third time.
I clicked my nails on the counter and expelled a massive breath of hot air, trying to maintain rational thought. “Can you please look one more time? I brought in a whole bag of
clothes last week.” I tried not to think of my favorite black pantsâmy skinny pantsâwhich had been in that bag.
“You have ticket?” The lady waved a pile of pink slips.
“No,” I told her. I never saved those pesky things. Never had to before.
She shrugged. “I look again.” Wiping sweat from her eyebrows, she turned away. As she disappeared into a sea of hanging, plastic-covered clothes, I tried to guess her size. Was it possible that she had stolen my black pants and was wearing them on the weekends?
I felt one of my temper tantrums coming on, but I forced it down. I am lucky to be alive, I told myself as I leaned on the counter, fanning my face. I am lucky because I am now losing weight at an average of a pound a minute. I am lucky because I have a great town house and a nice boyfriend who is soon to be my fiancé, and a decent job and lovely friends. I've really got the world by the tail.
The problem was thisâI wasn't buying a word of it. My nice boyfriend soon-to-be-fiancé, Ben, was at my great town house, true, but he wouldn't be so nice when he learned that his favorite French-blue shirt had been destroyed by the dry cleaners from hell. And the decent job I hadâas a research analyst at an investment bank called Bartley Brothersâwas starting to look like a ticket straight to nowhere-ville. I'd been toiling for years, digging up information on retail stocks so that my boss could pass on my recommendations and then take all the credit when we made money, or blame me when we lost it. After almost eight years of promises that I would soon be considered for partnership, it still hadn't happened. Finally, my best friend, Laney, my sanity advisor, was off at some marketing conference (read: company boondoggle) in Palm Beach.
“Sorry,” the dry cleaner said, emerging from the plastic sea, looking even more red-faced and sweaty. “We have nothing for you.” She gave another helpless shrug.
“Can you
please
keep looking, and I'll stop back later in the day?”
“Okay, okay.”
I stomped out of the sweltering store, a crisp Chicago breeze hitting me blessedly in the face. As an El train clamored to a halt on the tracks over my head, I trudged up Armitage Avenue, muttering obscenities about my missing clothes and the incompetence of the dry cleaners. The street was full of couples doing Saturday morning errands hand-in-hand, along with the post-college baseball-hat crowd searching for hangover grub.
I took a couple of deep breaths, but they brought no relief from my cranky mood. Ben rarely, if ever, held my hand and did errands with me on the weekends. Saturday mornings were his time to run with his marathon group or train for one of the other races he was constantly entering. It didn't bother meâ¦not really. Because Ben worshipped at the Church of Holy Workouts he had an amazing body, something that benefited me as well as him. Yes, sex was fine. More than fine, actually. But if I were forced to lodge one complaint about Ben, it would be thisâwe no longer had any of those couple-y, sappy-eyed rendezvous, such as candlelit dinners or surprise weekends at a log cabin. Romantic interludes just weren't his thing these days, or at least that's what he told me, what I told myself to make myself feel better when I saw other couples having picnics in Lincoln Park and horse-drawn carriage rides down Michigan Avenue.
Ben was sweet and funny and wonderful in his own way, though. He would cheer me up by singing show tunes in a falsetto voice, and when it was time to carbo-load for his next race, he'd cook huge pasta dinners for the two of us. And last January when my sister, Dee, died, Ben was amazingâan absolute rock. I couldn't have gotten through it without him.
At Bissell Street, I took a left and walked along the sidewalk, crunching over a golden bed of fallen leaves, moving past the rusty autumn trees and stone three-flats until I hit the stretch of brick town houses, one of which was mine (something I was inordinately proud of). I'd saved all my paychecks from Bartley Brothers, and this place was the first home I'd ever owned, the place Dee used to love to stay when she came to visit, the place where Ben and I would live when we were married. The sun was peeking through the red curtain of trees, making an X-like pattern on the town homes. Normally, I would have loved to take photos of thatâI liked the way the rays made crosshairs on the brickâbut I was too annoyed by the dry cleaning debacle to think about getting my Nikon.
Before I went inside, I stopped at the bank of oblong silver mailboxes in the little courtyard located right behind the town houses. I stuck the key in the third one, my box, and tried to turn it to the right as I always did, but it wouldn't budge.
I screwed my face up tight and tried again. Maybe the eager-bunny mailman had stuffed a stack of magazines in there, jamming the lock. I tried over and over, but the key wouldn't turn.
I took it out and jiggled it in my hand, as if that would help. I was looking back at the box, lifting the key to try again, when I noticed what was wrong. The tiny black plate with white letters affixed to the box, the plate that should have said my name, KELLY M
C
GRAW, instead read BETH & BOB MANINSKY.
What the hell?
I moved down the row of boxes, peering closely, reading each one: LILY CHANG, SIMON TURNER, MILLER/SAMSON, and on and on, but no KELLY M
C
GRAW.
I repeated the process two more times, then stood still, swiveling my head, looking at the trim bushes that were be
ginning to turn red at the edges and the brick walls of the surrounding town houses. Was there another bank of mailboxes somewhere? No, that couldn't be right. This was the only set, the same place I'd been getting my mail for almost a year.
And then I figured out what it was. The damned management company. The company to whom I paid two hundred dollars a month so that they could refuse to repaint the garage door or fish a spoon out of my clogged sink. They'd screwed up once more.
Muttering again, I strode around the side of the town houses and up the front stairs to my place. The door was tall and painted green to match the trim on the bay windows. I tried the doorknob, but it was locked. Ben must have headed out for a run already. Just as well. I could prolong telling him that he'd probably never see his French-blue shirt again.
I put the key in the lock, or at least I tried, but it didn't insert smoothly. Finally, I got it in and attempted to turn it. Déjà fucking vu. This lock wasn't working, either. I wrestled with the key, grasping it with both hands and trying to force it to the left, as the wind whipped my hair in front of my face so I couldn't see.
Deep cleansing breaths,
I told myself in a low soothing tone, just like the woman in my meditation tapes would say it.
Inhale in, exhale out.
I did this a few times, batting my hair out of my eyes, then tried the key again. No luck.
My deep-cleansing-breaths mantra turned to thoughts of violence. I would have to physically harm everyone in the management company now. This was ridiculous.
On the off chance that Ben was still home, I rang the doorbell.
Ding, ding, dingâ
I could hear it going off inside. If he was home, doing his prerun stretches, he would be annoyed, but I didn't care.
Ding, ding, ding, dingâ
I tried one more time, and then, thank God, I heard footsteps inside pounding down the stairs.
As the door swung open, I was already in midrant. “The dry cleaners lost our stuff, can you believe it? They say they'll look some more, but it's as good as gone. Your blue shirt was in that load, and my favorite black pantsâand then the mailbox was messed up and⦔
My body froze, along with my tirade, as I realized that Ben hadn't opened the door. It was someone else. Someone I'd never seen, some
woman.
She had short blond hair cropped close to her head. In fact, she looked a little like the pictures of Ben's high school girlfriend, Toni, the woman he said he'd always love. And then the truth of the situation hit me. Ben was cheating on me, right here in my own house, getting his groove on with some girl who looked like Toni, when I'd only been gone an hour or so. Unbelievable. This wasn't happening. Now I would have to kill Ben along with the management people. A thousand thoughts flew through my brain like birds let out of a cage. I couldn't hold on to just one.
“Hi, can I help you?” the Toni look-alike said, a sweet smile grazing her face.
“Can I help
you?
” I crossed my arms over my chest, then, thinking better of it, dropped them and pushed past her inside. “Hey!”
The first thing I noticed was that my high mosaic table, the one made of tiny pieces of broken glass, the one I'd bought at an art fair, wasn't there. Instead, in its place, there was a heavy wooden coat tree, its arms jutting out, holding a woman's pink trench coat and a tiny kid's sweatshirt.
“What's going on here?” The woman's voice was low and cautious, the kind of voice cops use with loose criminals on TV.
I wanted to make a smart comment, ask her the same thing, but a flock of doubts flew around in my head along with the other birds. “This is my house,” I said, but I heard my voice waver.
I spun around to check something, and sure enough, there it was, next to the coat tree. The dent in the drywall where Ben's skis had fallen against it last year. This was my place, so what was the Toni look-alike doing here? And what was with that coat tree?
“No,” she said. “This is my house. My husband and I bought it a few months ago.”
I bit my lip and looked at her, confused. “Is Ben here?”
“There's no Ben who lives here. What's your name?” She took a step closer to me, as if she was afraid I'd move farther into the house.
I peeked my head around the corner and into the study, expecting to see the big, scarred desk that my mom had given me when she moved to L.A., but in its place was a playpen with yellow mesh sides and a jumble of brightly colored toys.
“Kelly McGraw,” I said, yet even that came out a little unsure.
The woman gave me the sweet smile again. “Oh,
you're
Kelly McGraw! I'm Beth Maninsky. We never did meet you at the closing.” She held out her hand.
“Closing?”
“Sure. We bought this house from you, but you gave your lawyer power of attorney, so we never officially got to meet you when we closed on the house. We love it, though. Did you stop by for old times' sake?” She tried the smile again, but when I didn't shake her hand, the grin faltered, and now she was looking as perplexed as I felt.
“Closing?” I said again. “I sold this house?”
She nodded, gazing at me warily.
From somewhere above, I heard the cry of a baby, short at first, then a full-on wail. Beth Maninsky's eyes shot to the ceiling as if she could see through it.
“A baby?” I couldn't seem to form a full sentence.
“Scottie. I should get him. Now can I help you with anything?”
I just stood there. What was happening?
“Kelly? Are you all right?”
Beth Maninsky looked almost scared now, so I just nodded and moved to the door, then out to the stoop. I stood there looking at the house,
my
house.
Beth Maninsky stood in the doorway, fairly blocking it with her body. “Can I call someone for you?” There was warmth in her voice.
It took me a second to answer. “No. I'll go to my boyfriend's place.”
“Okay.” The wail of the baby got louder behind her. She glanced in the house, then back at me. “You sure you're okay?”
“When you⦔ I paused, barely able to say the words that didn't seem true “â¦bought this house. Did you learn why Iâ¦sold it?”
“Our Realtor told us that you thought it was too big for one person.”
“Right.” I nodded as if I could convince myself that this was really happening, that someone named Beth Maninsky, who looked like Toni, owned my house.
“Nice to meet you,” Beth Maninsky said.
My front door closed, and I heard the lock click inside.
