Chapter Twenty-Four
Kimber’s phone vibrates as she walks Gabriel to his car, and she takes it from her pocket to see if it’s Shaun calling. But Leeza Meyers’s name and number scroll across the screen. She touches IGNORE and puts the phone away. “I don’t know what’s going on with her.”
“You haven’t talked to her?” Mr. Tuttle is cuddled in Gabriel’s arms, and Kimber reaches out to stroke the silky fur on top of the dog’s delicate head.
“I have more important things to deal with.” Mr. Tuttle licks her hand. “You think he misses Jenny?”
“Sure. I think she was probably his whole world. She hasn’t been gone even twenty-four hours if the medical examiner is right.” He transfers the dog carefully to Kimber.
Michelle was allergic to dogs, and Kimber never imagined she would have one.
“Hadley really likes him. Once Kyle gets used to him, everything will be fine. I won’t be here that long, and Jenny’s daughter might want to take him right away. Did you know Kyle had a Yorkie named Raisin when he and Diana got married? Isn’t that weird?”
When Gabriel doesn’t respond, she mentally kicks herself for mentioning Kyle. Her brain isn’t functioning well. She wants to sleep for about a week.
“I’ve told you you’re welcome to stay with me. If you’re worried that I can’t handle it, don’t be. I’m offering as a friend.”
It’s as frank as he’s ever been with her about his illness. About their breakup. She wants to be careful. With Lance Wilson (or whatever his real name is) in the front of her mind all the time, it’s hard for her to see beyond him. The fucker. Kyle’s behavior at dinner tempts her to accept. When Kyle feels threatened, he turns cruel. She’s seen it too many times. How Diana puts up with it, she has no idea. Thank goodness Kyle didn’t divorce Diana to marry her. He would’ve expected her to be as docile as Diana, and they wouldn’t have lasted six months. Killer sex can’t make up for everything. She’d much rather be Hadley’s pretend aunt than her despised stepmother.
But to stay in Gabriel’s apartment? “Let me think about it, okay?”
His face clears.
Dammit, don’t look so happy, she wants to say. It doesn’t mean anything. It can’t mean anything.
Then: God, he’s a beautiful man. When he’s relaxed, he reminds her of when he’d first contacted her about her father’s bequest. After meeting with him a few times, she was so smitten that she’d slept with him on their first date. Even though being with him made her feel kind of old because he was three years younger. Even though she wasn’t yet completely over Kyle. Even though she was still in shock after learning her father was dead and had left her a house. Or maybe she’d done it for precisely those reasons.
How good would it feel to go home with Gabriel, to forget everything that’s happening? It’s the wine, it’s only the wine, she tells herself.
What if he kisses me? Damn it, I’m like some dumb teenager. Uncomfortable, she glances down at the dog in her arms and holds him a little tighter.
“Kimber.”
She looks up.
“Please don’t go back to your house. Just stay away. You’re tough, and I know you’re used to taking care of everything yourself, but this isn’t something you can do alone. Okay?”
The tender moment is gone, and her defensiveness kicks in. “It’s my home. He just took it away from me, and it makes me sick to think of him using my things, standing in my shower, touching everything. Maybe even breaking stuff. If I let myself think about it, it makes me physically ill. I feel absolutely freaking powerless.” I will not cry, I will not cry. It’s just the wine. But the tears spill anyway, stunning her with their sudden ferocity. Mr. Tuttle, alarmed, struggles in her arms, and she lets him down. Walking a few feet away, he sits and stares up at them.
When Gabriel puts his good arm around her and rests the weaker one lightly on her hip, she lets herself lean into him. The way he strokes her hair feels so right to her that she doesn’t want him to stop. Gabriel, who always cared too much.
I can’t care enough. Not for anybody. What’s wrong with me?
“It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay. I promise.”
With those words, she remembers a chilly fall night on Gabriel’s bed, The English Patient on the television across the room. Ralph Fiennes promising Kristin Scott Thomas that he will come back for her, as she lies dying in a desert cave.
“He shouldn’t promise that he’ll come back to save her,” Gabriel said. “It’s an unkeepable promise. He has no idea what’s going to happen. There’s a war going on, and she’s in the middle of a desert.”
“Watch, he’ll come back in time.” She didn’t really believe it, but she wanted it to be true. Gabriel wasn’t even smug when he turned out to be right.
“Maybe. I don’t know that everything’s going to be okay.” She gently pulls away from him. “It feels like he’s ruined everything.” And wants to hurt me even more than you know.
Taking her by the shoulders, Gabriel looks into her eyes. “Let’s take it one day at a time. I can be your friend, no matter what.” He pulls a neatly folded handkerchief out of his pocket and presses it into her hand. He’s the only man under seventy she knows who carries an actual handkerchief, and the sight of it both charms and comforts her. “Here. Dry your eyes. There’s no need to let Hadley see you upset.”
“Thank you.”
“You bet.”
She feels ten years old and knows she’s in danger of crying again. Instead, she smiles as best she can and picks up the patient Mr. Tuttle.
As Kimber washes the stockpot in which Diana cooked the white bean turkey chili, she lets her hands drift in the warm, soapy water. She can hear Hadley laughing in another room. Is this why she agreed to come here? Is this what she wanted all along? A laughing child. A big house. Dinnertime and bath time and story time and bedtime? Lance Wilson has plunged her into this nightmare, but now she sees outside of it. When he’s gone—after she has the house fumigated—maybe she’ll fill it with something besides furniture and artwork. Her father had lived there. There’s already something of him inside it. What about a child? It’s never seemed fair to her to have a child because Michelle never had the chance to have them. But if this nightmare ends in a way that lets her continue her life as it was, then maybe…
“You’re getting bubbles on the floor!” Hadley breaks into exaggerated laughter watching the water and soap bubbles slide down the cabinet and pool at Kimber’s feet. Mr. Tuttle barks and runs around in circles.
“Shit!” Remembering Hadley is right there, Kimber mutters, “Sorry,” and shuts off the water.
“It’s okay. Mommy says the s word all the time.” Hadley grabs a dishtowel and begins to sop up the water. There’s not much, but Kimber is still embarrassed. “But you still have to put money in the jar.”
“What a mess!”
“Mommy says we’re going to get mani-pedis on Saturday. All three of us.” She hands Kimber the sopping wet towel, which drips on Kimber’s feet.
“I can’t wait.” Kimber finds she is looking forward to it, despite earlier thinking she didn’t want to go. “Hey, I thought you were in bed already.”
“I wanted to say good night to Mr. Tuttle. Now I can help you too.”
When they finish mopping up the mess, she makes Hadley promise not to tell her mother about the water, and they pinkie-swear after Hadley gets a promise of being read to for an extra ten minutes.
Before going upstairs, Kimber finds the website of the fundraiser and posts it to her social media accounts with the words “Mani-pedis with BFF and mini-BFF on Saturday for a great cause. You should be there too!” It’s her first post since the retreat. Maybe life doesn’t have to completely suck, she thinks. Smiling to herself, she puts her phone in her pocket, picks up Mr. Tuttle, and goes upstairs, not thinking about the fact that anyone can see where she’ll be on Saturday.
Chapter Twenty-Five
September 199_
Michelle came outside to find Kimber already sitting beside their father in the ancient Jeep Wagoneer. She hated the Wagoneer. Like so many older Jeeps, it had serious rust issues, and she was embarrassed to be seen in it. It was a kind of tweedy icon among some of her friends, but she thought it belonged out in the country, where it had come from. When her grandparents had moved full-time into their house in Webster, they’d given the Wagoneer to her family as a “gadabout.” This morning, Kimber was grinning like an insane monkey, obviously excited to be riding with their dad.
Opening the back passenger-side door, Michelle climbed in. Often she sat up front, beside Kimber, but now she wasn’t in the mood. “I need to study,” she mumbled.
“Test today, Mitch?”
“Sure.”
“Seriously. Teenagers are the worst.” Kimber meant it to be funny, and her father laughed.
“Hey, junior year is tough,” he said, putting the Wagoneer in gear and pulling out onto the road. “It’s the year when you figure out you don’t really know everything.”
“I don’t think she’s figured that out yet,” Kimber whispered.
Annoyed, Michelle kicked the back of the seat.
Kimber giggled. Their father didn’t react. He almost never did.
They were all quiet for a couple of minutes, and a Rod Stewart song came on the radio after the weather forecast. Kimber heaved a dramatic sigh. Michelle was glad her father always picked the radio station. Kimber would be turning the dial, looking for some angsty Nirvana song, which was the last thing Michelle wanted to hear.
“No time for doughnuts today. Sorry.” Her father caught Michelle’s eye in the rearview mirror, and he grinned. She looked quickly back down at her book.
“Will you be home for dinner tonight?” Kimber asked.
“Nope. I’ll be back next Monday. I’ve got to pick up a few things this morning, then go home to pack.”
A thought occurred to Michelle. It was kind of a mean thought. “Maybe someday we could go out of town with you.” She leaned forward, resting an arm on the top of the front seat.
Their father pursed his lips and seemed to think for a moment.
Will he lie? Make up some excuse?
“There’s a conference in Atlanta in the spring, maybe during your Easter break. Would you two like to drive down with me?”
“Mom too?” Kimber was excited.
Michelle saw a muscle in his jaw twitch.
They never took family vacations. Mimi and Granddad had all kinds of slides and pictures from the trips they’d taken when Claudia was little. Trips to the Grand Canyon, Hawaii, Nova Scotia, Florida, Mount Rushmore. Their mother’s voice got soft and sentimental when she talked about the places they’d visited. It sounded like such fun.
Even though Michelle was pretty close to their mother, much of their mother’s life was still a mystery to her and Kimber. She often spoke in hushed tones to unseen friends on the phone in her bedroom, the door cracked just enough that she could hear the girls if they needed her. Resting against the drop of the Laura Ashley bedspread, she would stretch out her legs in a surprisingly sensuous way on the plush, rose-colored carpet and tilt her head back as she listened to the woman on the other end. (Kimber often quietly picked up the extension to eavesdrop and had told Michelle it was always a woman.) Sometimes she would smoke, blowing lazy rings at the ceiling, her eyes focused on some invisible point. Michelle fancied she could see the gray outlines of old smoke in the paint above where her mother would sit.
The effect of the matching wallpaper and curtains and bedspread and upholstered headboard and pillow shams in her parents’ bedroom was dizzying. Standing in the middle of the room, Michelle felt oppressed by all the flowers. The delicate pattern of yellow and pink and red blossoms joined by curls of blue and mauve ribbons would quickly become overwhelming. It was less like a cozy garden scene than a violent sea of stems and petals.
But the flowers weren’t confined to the bedroom. In those days her mother wore her garden everywhere, dressing in florals (never matching her bedroom, to her daughters’ relief) of cotton and linen, or occasionally loose jumpers in navy blue or pale pink, as though they lived in a land of perpetual spring and not in changeable St. Louis. Though she did wear sweaters when it got very cold: long wool cardigans over slim pants embroidered with ivy or seashells or little anchors. The sweaters might have looked sloppy on another woman who didn’t have her mother’s slender hips and elegantly tapered legs. She was petite, and her unchanging pixie haircut suited her fine-boned face. The bold makeup and shoulder pads of the previous decade had nothing to do with her mother.
She was a precious thing that seemed most vibrant when her husband was with her. When he was away, she wilted, appearing drab beside all those precise and colorful flowers. Michelle wouldn’t have been surprised to see her heart begin to glow through one of her pastel blouses when he walked in the door after being gone for several days.
Finally her father’s laughter filled the Wagoneer. “You don’t think your mother would let us go on a trip without her, do you? She’d be in the car, the first one packed.”
Michelle scoffed. “I bet we never go. I’d bet a thousand dollars that we’ll never go. We’re the only family I know that’s never been on a real vacation.”
“You don’t even have a thousand dollars,” Kimber shot back.
“You don’t know that.” Michelle had a little over eleven hundred dollars saved between a summer babysitting job and the steakhouse. The money was in the bank, where Kimber couldn’t get her hands on it. Not that she really thought Kimber would steal it. Her sister had never taken money from her dresser or her purse unless she had told Kimber that she could. Kimber wasn’t a thief.
The Wagoneer pulled up in the school’s drop-off lane.
“I can’t take that thousand-dollar bet, but I’d be willing to go ten bucks,” her father told her. “How’s that? If spring break matches up, we’ll spend four nights in Atlanta. All of us.”
Michelle tugged at the door handle without answering. She glanced at Kimber, who was kissing their father’s cheek. “Love you, Daddy!” Kimber said as she bounced out the door.
A few weeks ago, I might have done that.
“Bye, Sunshine! So long, Mitch.” He touched Michelle’s hand, which rested temporarily on the front seat. “It’s a deal, okay? Ten bucks. Let’s make sure you get off work.”
“Whatever, Dad.”
As he pulled away, Michelle thought she saw the smile drop quickly from his face, but it may have been a reflection in the Wagoneer’s window.
“Are you on the rag or something?” Kimber stood waiting for her. “What’s up with you?”
“There’s not going to be any trip to Atlanta, and you know it, Kimmy. You’ve got to stop being such a baby or you’re going to end up like Mom.” She started up the stairs, easing into the throng of students going the same direction.
“Like Mom? What does that mean?” Kimber hurried after her.
Michelle stopped on the top stair. With her eyes so wide and questioning, Kimber looked like the vulnerable and innocent little sister she remembered. She suddenly felt very, very old. “Just don’t believe everything he says.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
In her sleep, Kimber waves away whatever is tickling her, dreaming that Michelle is bent over her, her long hair brushing her cheek. Michelle smells of her favorite shampoo: strawberry Herbal Essence. One night Michelle even talked their mother into letting her take the Audi to Walgreens just before it closed because she’d run out of it. Now Kimber feels Michelle’s breath on her face. Is that their mother humming down in the kitchen? She makes them breakfast every morning, whether the girls want it or not. Sometimes, if they’re running late for the bus, Kimber will grab an apple or a handful of potato chips, shrugging as she hurries past her mother, standing beside the kitchen table, where two plates are piled with pancakes and bacon. Michelle is always the one to stop, carefully wrapping a pancake and piece of bacon
in a napkin to take with her and tenderly kissing their mother on the cheek. “Thanks, Mom. You’re the best.” Their mother smiles, Kimber’s slight forgotten.
When the tickle comes again, Kimber wants it to stop, wants Michelle to get away from her, and she hits out, connecting with skin and bone. A small, startled cry wakes her to the fact that she has been dreaming. But the cry is real. She opens her eyes. Hadley, her curls framing her face and wide eyes, crouches beside the bedside table, a lush blue plume clutched in her hand. A spot of pink the size of a plum blooms on her right forearm.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for you to get mad.” Tears cluster in the fringe of Hadley’s lower lashes.
Kimber and Michelle had their share of fights, and when things got heated, they often shoved or slapped at each other. They were irritated slaps. Never brutal, never injurious. But Kimber can’t explain this to Hadley, a child who has no siblings and has surely never been struck in her life.
“Oh, sweetie! I’m so sorry.” She sits up and holds open her arms.
Hadley hesitates a moment but then jumps up onto the bed, snuggling against Kimber. Her delicate body is warm even in the air-conditioned cool of the bedroom. She wears pink-and-yellow striped pajama shorts with a yellow shirt. Her breath smells of orange juice and her hair of the strawberry shampoo Diana no doubt used on her the night before.
Kimber hugs her tightly. “You scared me. I dreamed a spider was crawling on me, and I wanted to get it away. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I promise.” The spider is the first thing that came to mind. Hadley is young, so Kimber sticks with a simple explanation. It’s adults who like things to be complicated.
Hadley shrieks. “A spider? We had a spider named Isabelle in a terrarium at school, and I wanted to smash it with a book! The teacher let it crawl on her arm, and Justin let it crawl on him too, but I think that’s crazy. Don’t you think that’s crazy?”
“Hadley?” Diana’s voice comes from the hallway.
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