Sharing Nightmares

Zoe Aarsen || The Nanny

The Nanny by zaarsenist

She reaches for the doorbell and hesitates, not entirely certain that she’s in the right place. She checks the address for the third time against the email on her cell phone. This must be the right house. The Uber driver brought her here, after all. There couldn’t be two identically named streets in this posh Long Island town.

Her interview for this position had been in the city. When she had met Mrs. Addario for tea at the
Gramercy Hotel, Chloe had assumed that the woman was very, very rich.

But this kind of rich? She tries to match her memory of the wrinkle-free petite blonde woman with this monstrosity of architecture in front of her. They don’t correlate. The house’s style is too modern; too… everything. Not right for the wife of a Park Avenue doctor, which Chloe had assumed Mrs. Addario to be.

Chloe rethinks her arrival at this place and what she’s committed to do for the summer. Maybe she’s been hasty about this whole thing. She knows in her heart that she should spend the summer earning the last few hours of field credits that she needs to finalize her master’s degree. Escaping the heat of the city to nanny at someone’s luxurious private summer home initially seemed like a great idea, but now it seems irresponsible. She’s running away, she knows, from the mess she’s made with Josh as well as the career path that’s started to bore her before it’s even begun. Both of those problems will wait patiently for her all summer back in Manhattan.

But she hears joyous shrieks of children from within the house. Then footsteps. She hasn’t rung the bell but somehow they know she’s here, anyway. Security cameras, she figures. She is under surveillance. Impulsively, she rings the bell, primarily out of self-consciousness because who knows how long someone has been watching her stand there out on the front steps having second thoughts?

“Oh, glorious! You found us!” Mrs. Addario looks exactly as Chloe remembers from their meeting two weeks earlier.

“Yes,” Chloe says. “It was easy.”

“Please, come in. Sergio! Come and help with the bags!” Mrs. Addario calls over her shoulder into the house.

Chloe steps inside the home’s interior and is relieved to feel the temperature inside drop to twenty degrees below the early summer swelter outdoors. She’s already feeling better about her decision to work for the Addario’s until August. Last summer the city was a steaming pit of stink, but this summer she’ll obviously be luxuriating in air conditioned splendor.

The foyer is overwhelming. A scent fills the air throughout the house which smells like cold, there’s simply nothing else to which Chloe can liken it. The heels of her dirty sandals make clack-clack against Italian marble flooring. A staircase flows upward against the cathedral ceiling to the second floor, and Chloe gets her first glimpse of the Addario’s eldest son, Sergio, as he stomps down the stairs. At ten, he’s tall for his age, and lanky. His knobby elbows and kneecaps pop through his skin like those of a horse, an
indication of just how much taller he’ll one day be.

“Sergio, this is Chloe. She’ll be spending the summer here to keep an eye on you,” Mrs. Addario informs her son.

A smirk hints at the ends of the boy’s lips. “Right,” he says. His tone implies that he thinks he’s too old to need an eye on him. Chloe can tell from the boy’s dark eyes and upturned nose that that his father must be devastatingly handsome.

The daughters are upstairs in their rooms, packing. Alanna looks like her mother, fair and prim. At seven, it seems as if she’s already been taught that as a girl in her parents’ social circle she must always elevate herself from others who are beneath her. After cordially greeting Chloe, she looks over her new nanny’s outfit and comments, “That Louis Vuitton doesn’t look authentic. You can tell by the shape of the handles.”

“Yes,” Chloe says, feeling herself blushing. The bag had been bought for twenty dollars in Chinatown
from a street vendor. She’s humiliated because Mrs. Addario is standing right beside her, and the woman makes no attempt to reprimand her daughter about rudeness. “It’s a knock-off. I’m in grad school and I can’t afford the real thing just yet.”

In an odd display of maturity for such a young girl, Alanna places her hand gently on Chloe’s forearm and apologetically tells her, “I just wanted to make sure you didn’t pay too much for it, that’s all. It’s very convincing.”

The girl has been folding clothing and sets it into neat stacks in the open suitcase on her bed. “What are we packing for this morning?” Chloe asks innocently, noticing that Ruby, the round-cheeked baby of the family at age four, is also stuffing clothes into a suitcase. Ruby is dark, like her older brother, with silky hair split into pigtails.

“The trip,” Alanna says matter-of-factly. “You brought your bathing suit, didn’t you?”

Mrs. Addario slaps her own forehead and says, “Oh my goodness. I did tell you that we booked travel,
didn’t I? It all happened so quickly that I’ve forgotten who I’ve told and who I haven’t.”

Chloe smiles politely but has no idea what Mrs. Addario is talking about. When they’d met for the initial interview in the city, Mrs. Addario had mentioned that in the past, the family has traveled overseas over the summer break. She had suggested that Chloe obtain a passport just in case they decided to venture to Paris for a long weekend before August. Travel had seemed like an improbable possibility, the way that Mrs. Addario had described it that day. “No,” Chloe replies.

“The Balearic Sea,” Mrs. Addario says with an enthusiastic smile. “My husband has old childhood friends there who own a villa. We try to squeeze in the trip every summer but it’s always very last minute. You did bring your passport, didn’t you? I mean, we can certainly send someone back into the city to pick it up, if necessary.”

Chloe pats her fake Louis Vuitton tote bag. “Of course.” She doesn’t know where the Balearic Sea is and she’s hopeful that her ignorance will not be exposed in front of the girls.

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THIS IS ONLY A PREVIEW, FULL STORY AVAILABLE ON THE AUTHOR'S PERSONAL PAGE, zaarsenist