The Nanny
EMMA CLINE
There isn’t much in the house,” Mary said. “I’m sorry.”
Kayla looked around, shrugged. “I’m not even that hungry.”
Mary set the table, bright Fiestaware on place mats alongside fringed cloth napkins. They ate microwave pizzas.
“Gotta have something a little fresh,” Mary’s boyfriend, Dennis, said cheerily, heaping spinach leaves from a plastic bin onto his pizza. He seemed pleased by his ingenuity. Kayla ate the spinach, took a few bites of crust. Mary poured her more water.
When Kayla asked for a beer, she saw Mary and Dennis glance at each other.
“Sure, sweetie,” Mary said. “Dennis, do we have any beer? Maybe check the garage refrigerator?”
Kayla drank two over dinner, then a third out on the porch, her legs tucked up into the oversize hoodie she had taken from Mary’s son’s room. The wildness of the backyard made everything beyond it look fake: the city skyline, the stars. Reception was awful this high in the canyon. She could try to walk closer to the road again, out by the neighbor’s fence, but Mary would notice and say something. Kayla could feel Dennis and Mary watching her from inside the kitchen, tracking the glow of her screen. What would they do, take her phone away? She searched Rafe’s name, searched her own. The numbers had grown. Such nightmarish math, the frenzied tripling of results, and how strange to see her name like this, stuffing page after page, appearing in the midst of even foreign languages, hovering above photos of Rafe’s familiar face.
BEFORE TUESDAY THERE HAD BEEN hardly any record of Kayla: an old fund-raising page from Students for a Free Tibet; a blog run by a second cousin with photos from a long-ago family reunion, teenage Kayla, mouth full of braces, holding a paper plate bent with barbecue. Her mother had called the cousin and asked her to take the photo down, but by then it had passed into the amber of the internet.
Were there any new ones? She looked through the image results again, in case. They had dug up photos of Kayla lagging behind Rafe and Jessica, holding Henry’s hand. Rafe in his button-down and jeans, surrounded by women and children. Kayla had no photos of her and Rafe together. That was strange, wasn’t it? She came across a new photo—she looked only okay. A certain pair of jeans she loved was not, she saw, as flattering as she’d imagined it to be. She saved the photo to her phone so she could zoom in on it later.
Kayla made herself close the search results, then let her text messages refresh. A split-second reprieve where she could believe that perhaps the forces in the universe were aligning and aiming something from Rafe in her direction. She knew before they finished loading that there would be nothing.
“You need anything, sweetie?”
Mary stood in the porch doorway, just a black shadow.
“I’d turn the light on for you,” Mary said, “but there’s no bulb out here, actually.”
Mary had been her mother’s college roommate, now a drug and alcohol counselor. Kayla’s mother had wanted her to fly home—I’ll buy the ticket, she said, please—but then the photographers had descended on her ranch house in Colorado Springs. Waiting for Kayla. So her mother called Mary, the witness at her small courthouse wedding, though the wedding had been followed quickly by divorce. It was easy to imagine what Mary thought of Kayla. A
