The Happiness Thief Read online

  In the warm vestibule, she typed: Of course. Have fun at Sophie’s. Call me when you want to be picked up.

  On the second floor, Natalie turned the key and blinked in the dull light of her hallway. An empty nest—and she was still three years away from that—was a bittersweet swerve compared to the tragedy of her mother’s death. She just needed to remind herself that not all loss was catastrophic. But loss was right in front of her: a year ago her place had been punctuated with wires, the connective tissue between one gadget and another. The abundance of cables, earphones, extenders, switches, and adapters, some coiled up with snake-like heads and mean little teeth, were Marc’s only mess. They could be found on the coffee table, the kitchen counter, her bedroom dresser. All these were gone now.

  Still in coat and boots, she headed for her office to listen to the messages on her landline. She would arrange her work schedule for the upcoming week and do her laundry. By the time her vacation clothes were dry, the night would be over.

  The first was a robocall about her electrical bill from that morning, which she erased. The second was from the day before, a woman’s scratchy voice. “Hello? Natalie? This is Ellen Arden, Garrick, uh, Professor Walker’s assistant from the university. We didn’t get a chance to speak at the funeral. I didn’t feel up to attending the reception.”

  Ellen at the service: oyster-gray hair and an oxblood scarf wrapped around her neck. The older woman’s eyes had glinted like silvery fish, and her mouth was a knot of grief.

  “Poor thing. She has no life outside of her job and my dad. I won’t be surprised if she dies of a broken heart,” Isabel whispered to Natalie when they’d first taken their places in the front pew of the eighteenth-century church, with its Ionic pillars and ballooning chandeliers.

  The reverend stood beside the coffin, in his white robe and black stole tucked under a roped belt. “Enlighten our Hopes, O God.”

  Isabel’s eyes were on the King James Bible open in her lap.

  The closed book was heavy in Natalie’s hands. She envisioned her stepfather—his slender frame, his thicket of straw-colored hair, his long, thin face—laid out in the chestnut box. There had not been a viewing, but Natalie knew that Isabel had chosen Garrick’s blue blazer with gold buttons and his Oxford shoes that she’d polished until they shone like sugary caramel.

  Ellen’s voice gained volume. “Garrick asked me a favor, that last night, when I visited him at the hospital. To pick up a manila envelope for you at the office, in case something happened to him.” Her voice caught. “To FedEx it to you. There was some uncertainty, well, I wasn’t certain. Never mind that. I’m sending it in the morning. You should get it in a few days. Please accept my apology for the delay.”

  There was a pause, so that Natalie thought the message was over. But then, “The package, it’s private. Let’s keep this between ourselves.”

  Natalie laughed at this suggestion, the stoking of melodrama.

  Once, a few months after her mother had died, the live-in housekeeper asked Natalie to summon Garrick to the dinner table. She moved gingerly, the carpet cool under her feet. Her stepfather was ensconced in his leather chair, behind the desk with the gleaming veneer, head bowed over the pad and pen on which he wrote his papers to be published in renowned legal journals. Garrick squinted and asked, “Yes? What is it?” as if he were trying to place how he knew her. That look of bewilderment captured their relationship, Garrick’s and hers, housemates with only the people they loved in common.

  What mysterious parcel would he send to her, a stepdaughter he barely recognized?

  ISABEL WAS PERCHED atop her walnut desk, legs crossed under a pencil skirt. Her eyes were focused, her hair obedient in its ponytail, her nails manicured in a shimmery white. Natalie noticed how her face looked tighter than usual, like a garment short on material. “Welcome to the first session of ‘Changing our Brains for Happiness.’”

  Natalie sat on a cushioned chair among the fifteen arranged in a semi-circle in Isabel’s loft, her new office. Thirteen women and two men. It was a luxurious space, painted in a stark white: high ceilings from which hung three modern light fixtures, nearly floor-length windows, and several columns a richer almond shade.

  “To begin today’s session, I’m introducing a tool to help facilitate that change: my new iPhone app, Wired Happy. I developed these techniques with my husband, a Harvard-trained neurologist. He’s more accomplished than I am.” She swung one leg over the other. “But you’re stuck with me, I’m afraid.”

  The other participants laughed. One called out, “It’s you we want!”

  Isabel touched her chest lightly with her fingers. “Thank you. So, without getting too technical, I’m going to talk this evening about how our minds have a negativity bias. This may sound like New Age nonsense, but it makes sense that human beings are more sensitive to negative events. Primitive men and women needed to be attuned to threats in order to survive. We’ve evolved to respond more powerfully to adversity than to comfort and pleasure. While this was a helpful adaptation for our hunter-gatherer ancestors—and is still a necessary tool in times of crisis—it’s not particularly useful to us when we are living our day-to-day lives.”

  Natalie had heard her stepsister speak on this subject at her lecture on Grand Cayman. Hunter-gatherers sounded like wolves, which were related to dogs. Once, when she was a kid, Natalie had seen a dead dog on the highway, its tongue lolling out of its mouth. “Oh, poor thing,” her mom had cried, behind the wheel. “Don’t look, girls.”

  Did I kill that dog? Did the animal drag his wounded body into the bushes to die alone?

  Isabel said, “What scientists have discovered is that our brains have plasticity, which means they are capable of transformation. My app, Wired Happy, combines cognitive, behavioral, spiritual, and physical techniques. Along with what we learn here, my app will help you to alter your habits, or as I like to put it, to grow your own happiness.”

  A murmur of excitement rippled through the group. Natalie thought of the Chia Pet from her childhood, its slogan: “the pottery that grows.” She’d soaked the terracotta turtle in a bowl of water, and an ugly green bush sprouted instead of the fur she’d expected. Thinking about it now, Natalie realized how she was like that figurine: a distortion, a disappointment—or something even worse.

  “Our brains are stubborn organs that stick to their set patterns,” Isabel continued. “It’s like your body when it’s out of shape. You need to train it to be active and fit, to heal itself.”

  “I try to heal myself through self-compassion,” Prama, the yoga teacher on Natalie’s left, whispered to her. She was a willowy thing with auburn hair down to her tailbone and a painfully earnest voice.

  She’d explained to Natalie right before the meeting that her real name was Heather. She’d chosen her Sanskrit one for its meaning, “true knowledge free from error and above doubt.” Natalie wondered why Prama was here if she were the repository of wisdom.

  The yoga teacher closed her eyes and said, “I find as winter approaches, it’s a natural time to turn inward. Don’t you? That’s why I signed up to do the workshop this cycle.”

  Natalie smiled and observed her more closely, her maroon tights, Uggs, and silky ankle-length wrap-around dress, some cross-pollination of a sari and a kimono. The dress looked light as butterfly wings. She must have frozen outside, unless self-compassion kept her warm. What would that feel like, being able to so readily forgive herself?

  Isabel reached behind her and grabbed bound manuals with turquoise covers. “Let’s start with my written program, your handbook. This package will reinforce the concepts we discuss here. There’s additional information online at the web address listed on the first page. Some of the exercises might feel self-indulgent at first—all this taking one’s own emotional temperature.” She smiled at her audience. “But they work.”

  Natalie noticed the girl across from her gawking at Isabel, the way Hadley would at Beyoncé in concert. Her hand was raised, ea
gerly; she looked young enough to be in college. She was pixie-faced with a pert nose and short, spiky brown hair and multiple silver earrings in both lobes.

  “How long till I stop obsessing about the bad shit all the time?” she asked when Isabel pointed in her direction. “I’m meditating. I cut out sugar—okay, except for a few Reese’s Pieces a day. I’m eating organic, you know, other than the Reese’s. I volunteer at Planned Parenthood. Okay, only once.” She raised her first three fingers and slapped her thumb over her pinky. “Just trying to keep myself together after rehab. We have no twelve-steps here, right?”

  Isabel looked at the girl and nodded. “Nope.”

  “Should I, like, work for the homeless or Planned Parenthood or immigration? With all the crap going on now in this country, you know, I’m wondering if helping people would make me feel better.”

  “Volunteering is wonderful and important,” Isabel said. “But there are no rules or requirements here, Ms. Anshaw.”

  The man on Natalie’s right side mumbled. “Wouldn’t be the worst thing.”

  Natalie turned around to face one of the men in the group. His eye roll made her smile. He was attractive in a slapdash way: curly brown hair, the sides of which jutted out like twigs, tortoise shell glasses that magnified dark eyes with slight pouches under them, the five o’clock shadow of a man not yet committed to a beard. She guessed he was in his early forties; no wedding ring, she quickly noted.

  “Why is it so hard not to be self-destructive?” the college girl asked.

  Prama, collarbones sharp as ivory tusks under the skin, said, “In yogi, we call that ‘misdirected prana.’ Coming to this workshop is the first step towards readjustment.”

  “Yogi’s a Jill Stein voter,” Natalie’s neighbor said quietly. “Trust fund baby who reads Goop religiously.”

  Natalie stared at the ceramic bowl of stones on Isabel’s glass coffee table in order not to laugh.

  “Changing habitual behavior is a tough challenge,” Isabel said. “But I promise if you come every week and follow the program, you’ll start seeing results before the twelve weeks are over.”

  Natalie flipped through her manual. Could someone like her, someone with damage so deep it might be encoded on her DNA, “cultivate mindfulness” and “find meaning in failure”?

  When the two hours had passed, Isabel said, “Next meeting is a couple of days before Thanksgiving, so I anticipate a smaller turnout. For those who are traveling, have a safe and wonderful holiday.”

  An animated rumbling ensued as the other workshop members gathered their things and dispersed. A few flocked around their instructor. A peach pulp haired woman droned on about “staying present.” As soon as she stopped talking, Prama/Heather cited “the heart Chakra.”

  “Excuse me,” Natalie interjected. “Can I have a second?”

  The others turned and peered at her like a cluster of cats, their eyes shining in the dark.

  “Let’s catch up next time. I’ll address everyone’s questions and concerns,” Isabel reassured. She took Natalie’s elbow and led her to the opposite side of the loft, behind a pillar. She waved to her students and waited for them to all clear out.

  “I’m so glad you came,” Isabel said. “Sorry about the constant interruptions from that girl with all the questions.”

  “Do you know her?”

  Isabel shrugged. “She’s been to my lectures, hung around to talk. She’ll settle in.”

  “One of your super-fans.” Natalie’s thumb spun her bracelet around, over and over. “Listen, something kind of weird happened.”

  Isabel popped open her eyes the way she used to do when they were kids and Natalie was frightened of sleeping alone in the dark. “What?”

  “I got a phone call. From Ellen.”

  “Ugh, sorry. She’s insufferable. What did she want?”

  Let’s keep this between ourselves.

  Natalie’s allegiance was to her stepsister, not Garrick’s assistant. Why should she abide by Ellen’s instructions? “Seems Garrick left an envelope of something for me. She said she was FedEx-ing it right away. I should have it in a few days.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “She didn’t say. I figured it’s a copy of his will. If he left me part of his estate, it’s yours.” Having paid for her college, and put money into an investment fund for Hadley, Garrick had fulfilled his fiscal obligation to her. “Do you think that’s what it is?”

  Natalie noted her stepsister’s stricken expression, the gleam lining her lids when she averted her eyes. “If not his will, what?”

  Slowly, Isabel sat down next to Natalie, her breath a light breeze between them. “I have no idea.”

  “Yes, you do. What is it?”

  “You’ll see when you get the package.”

  “What do you know?” Natalie asked, desperate to tear the truth out of Isabel, whatever secrets or doubts she’d harbored all these years. “I’m not a kid anymore, I can handle it.”

  Isabel shook her head. “I would have called you to come, but I thought he was recovering. You hate hospitals, why make you come?”

  “I would have if you’d called me.”

  “Cardiac arrest,” Isabel had blurted out the first time. Her step-sister phoned while Natalie was reading her notes for her History final, sophomore year of college, and as soon as Isabel blurted, “My dad’s at Mass General,” the dates of the French Revolution sloshed across Natalie’s mind like melting snowdrifts. She was seized with the black terror of transport, of waking up as she was being lifted into the ambulance and rushed down Washington Street.

  “Of course. But how could I know he’d have another heart attack? Maybe Dad sensed he was dying and was trying to make things right. He asked me to give this letter to you, but I refused, and we argued. I’m only guessing … Ellen would do whatever he wanted.”

  “What was in the letter?”

  “I never read it, but he was agitated, pumped up on drugs, Nat.”

  Natalie pressed her palm to her chest, felt the quick, insistent beat within. “Why did you refuse to give it to me, what was in it?”

  “The accident.” Isabel sighed. “You think Dad didn’t know how it destroyed you? How you went from doctor to doctor?”

  “Garrick never paid attention to me.”

  “He felt guilty, that’s the reason he turned away.” Isabel placed her hand on Natalie’s knee. “You’re shaking.”

  “Dr. Davidson called it survivor’s guilt. But mine was more than that. I always sensed that.”

  “He wanted you to know that he blamed himself for that night, for everything that happened.”

  Her leg was bobbing, a buoy in choppy waters. “I still can’t remember where we were going, what my mom and I were talking about. Everything, even the months before, are spotty.”

  “I know, Nat. I’ve tried to help fill in the blanks. But Dad and I weren’t in the car with you.”

  Natalie stared at the wood panels on the floor through a blur. She needed to focus, to sharpen her vision. “So, what did Garrick want to tell me?”

  When Isabel inhaled deeply, Natalie saw the strain in the hollows under her eyes. “It was Dad’s Come to Jesus Moment. I can’t be sure what he wrote in his morphine state.”

  Natalie’s throat felt grainy and tight. “Did Garrick confess to you where we were going that night? Or did you know it all along?”

  “Leave it alone. That’s what I advised Dad, too. It’s like picking at a wound, infecting it over and over, instead of letting it heal.”

  “But it never does.”

  There was a slight shift in the loft’s ambience, as if the molecules in the air had quickened. The words came before Natalie’s mind processed the question. “Did I talk to you about going away, being sent away? Was that why I shone the light in Mom’s eyes, because she was sending me somewhere that night?”

  Isabel reached for Natalie, smoothed the hair behind her ear. “You were just going to a therapist, that’s all it was. Th
at’s not as scary as you’re making it.”

  Natalie let that sink in. It felt true. “Why, Belle? What was wrong with me?”

  “You were having issues with the stress in the house. Laura thought Dad was having an affair with Ellen. You were terrified they’d separate.”

  “Lake Grove. What is that?”

  “The name of a boarding school.”

  She thought of the ones Hadley mentioned where the rich kids went to ensure they’d get into Ivy League schools. “I’m betting it wasn’t like Andover, this place they were going to ship me off to. What kind of school was it?”

  “It was for kids … who were struggling with emotional issues. But, Nat, it was normal what you felt. You’d lost one family, and now you were going to lose another.”

  Tears ran down Natalie’s cheeks, a silent cry. “You and me. We didn’t have blood binding us to each other.”

  “I used to say that, those words exactly. Nat …”

  She squinted as if through a peephole into a dark room, “I remember it now. What I was. What I’ve done.”

  four

  —

  NATALIE’S CAR WAS PARKED ON THE NEXT BLOCK, AND SHE RACED through the damp cold to get there. She heard her cell phone ping. Engine on, heat turned up, she checked the message. It was a text from Hadley: Mom, u almost here? Waiting.

  It was after nine, the time she’d told Hadley she’d be in Belmont. Leaving in five minutes, she texted back. She could picture Marc’s scowl, the lines deepening between his brows. She would have to drive more quickly than she liked.

  She was on I-90 W, raindrops landing on her windshield, when the highway seemed to wave and shimmer as if from tectonic shifts in the landscape. She reminded herself: the world was fine. She was offkilter. Her mother had wanted to put her into a special school. What if her problems hadn’t begun with the crash and her lost memories? What if she’d been born with something missing?

  Her phone beeped again. Eyes on the road, Natalie scooped her cell out of the cup holder and pressed the Home button without reading the name on the screen. “Hi, Hads. I’m on my way.”