listen.
Rachel had been tall and long-limbed, but not in a graceful way. In a not-quite-in-control of her hands and feet way, and her hands and feet were prominent, because she always wore pants and long-sleeved shirts – never dresses or skirts or tank tops or T-shirts – and they were always too short for those long, gangly limbs.
But still, she was nice enough, and it would be interesting to see what she was up to. That was one of the great things about Facebook. You could keep in touch with lots and lots of people in a non-committal way. Ben thought it was a waste of time – he’d deleted his account a few months back – but Sarah liked it. She liked people, and she was interested in their lives.
She paused at the door to Examining Room Three – inside was her last patient of the day, a hypochondriac man in his early forties who enjoyed splendid good health but was convinced he was dying – and opened the friend request.
Hi Sarah! It’s me, Rachel! Recently got on Facebook (a bit late but you know me – not exactly with it!) and thought I’d look you up. Hope you’re well. I’m in the process of moving back to Barrow so maybe we’ll catch up. One question – is this the right account for you or is it the other one (with your name and photo on)?
Sarah frowned and typed a response.
Rachel! Would love to catch up. At work or I’d write more. And I only have one account – this one!
She sent the reply, walked into Examining Room Three, and forgot all about it.
Ben, it turned out, was able to pick up Miles. His message – OK re: Miles – was typical of him. He treated email and text messages as vehicles to pass on the maximum of information with the minimum of words. He claimed it was because he was British and didn’t believe in idle chat, but Sarah thought it was really because he harbored some vague idea that the more words you wrote, the more the message could cost. Either way, Miles was taken care of, so she stopped at the gym on her way home and joined, a few minutes late, a spinning class. Afterwards, she walked outside with Abby, a marketing graduate in her mid-twenties who had played lacrosse in college and who took, it seemed to Sarah, a too obvious pleasure in out-spinning the late-thirties moms and retirees who made up much of the gym-going population of Barrow.
‘Ugh,’ Abby said. ‘So hard. My thighs were burning. She’s the best instructor.’
She was Tanya, a woman who was a few years older than Sarah but who had a body that, as a doctor, Sarah considered to be a marvel of medical science. She did the class with her charges but, when they were dissolving into puddles of their own sweat, she was untroubled. And, as she spun, she would shout out what to do next. The fact she was capable of rational thought was impressive; that she could speak was amazing; that she could shout was beyond belief. Although it was ridiculous – she was a thirty-eight-year-old mother of three with a husband with whom she still had an active (and not unadventurous) sex life – Sarah had, she realized, a bit of a crush on Tanya. Not – she didn’t think – in a sexual way, but in a I-want-to-be-this-person way. She was awestruck by Tanya, and found herself wanting to impress her with her spinning skills, a mission which was likely to result only in Tanya wondering why Sarah was so easily reduced to a red-faced and panting wreck.
‘She is phenomenal,’ Sarah said. ‘I don’t know how she does it.’
‘Lots of hard work,’ Abby said, with the literal-mindedness of the young. ‘There’s no secret sauce that gets you in shape.’
‘I guess so,’ Sarah replied, wishing there was a secret sauce that got you in shape. She took her phone and car keys from her bag. ‘See you next time, hopefully.’
‘I’ll be here for Thursday’s class,’ Abby said. ‘See you then.’
Sarah nodded and opened her car door. She put the keys in and started the engine. As she waited for the air-conditioning to kick in she looked at her phone.
There was a new message from Rachel.
Great! I’ll let you know when I’m back in Barrow. And here’s the other account in your name! It’s definitely you!
There was a link. Sarah tapped it with her forefinger and it brought up a Facebook account.
She frowned. It was her name. Sarah Havenant.
She scanned the page. Married to Ben. Mother of three kids.
And the profile photo was of her. She was smiling and looking straight at the camera, standing by an ice rink they had skated at a lot last winter. She remembered that particular day: she was wearing the coat she’d bought at one of the outlet stores in Freeport. It was made from some new material – super lightweight but super warm – and she’d been struck by how much she wished they’d had things like this when they grew up; most of her childhood winters had been spent wrapped in so many layers it made movement practically impossible.
But it was all irrelevant. The question was, why the hell was there a Facebook account purporting to be her? And, more to the point, who had set it up?
She scrolled down.
And froze.
The most recent post was from that morning. It was a photo of Miles, Faye and Kim sitting on a beach towel eating peanut butter sandwiches, and it had a caption:
Turns out Kim likes sand sandwiches. Thanks to her older siblings for putting the sand in her sandwich and helping her discover this!
Sarah stared at the screen. This was not some random photo of her at an ice rink six months ago. This had happened yesterday.
They had been at the beach, and, at lunchtime Miles and Faye – it was more Faye, in truth – had told their youngest sibling the reason they were called sandwiches was because they had sand in them, and, desperate for attention, Kim had nodded agreement. Smiling, they had spread mayonnaise on bread, sprinkled it with a liberal dose of fresh, warm sand and handed it to her.
Mmm, Kim said, as they encouraged her to eat it. I love sandwiches.
But no one else knew about it. They had come home late in the afternoon, and, once the kids were in bed, Sarah had spent the rest of the evening getting ready for work.
Slowly, she began to scroll through the rest of the post.
She could not believe what she saw.
The next post was a photo of her and Ben on a date a few weeks earlier at a Japanese restaurant. They were sharing a sushi boat and a bottle of white wine; the photo had been taken from behind Ben and she was listening to him, her right hand resting on her glass. The caption read:
Date night with my wonderful husband. We need to do this more often!
It was, she realized, exactly the sort of banal post she would have written.
Except she hadn’t. Someone else had. And they had done more, many more.
A photo of her in a Greek wine bar in Portland with Toni and Anne, her two best college friends, on a night out in early spring. Caption: Girls night! Yay! A photo of her and Jean, a teaching
