by Joy Fielding
“How long were you married?” Vic asked.
“Going on twenty-five years. This trip was supposed to be a second honeymoon to celebrate our anniversary. Didn’t quite work out that way.”
“So you came by yourself. That’s very …”
“Stupid?”
“I was going to say brave.”
“I don’t think that’s a word too many people would use to describe me.”
“Then it’s amazing how wrong people can be.”
“Yes.” Marcy agreed. It was amazing how wrong people could be.
“Do you have any children?” he asked.
“Yes. Two.”
“Boys? Girls?”
“One of each. Darren’s nineteen, very tall and handsome, thinking of going into dentistry, like his dad. He’s working as a camp counselor for the summer.”
“Sounds like fun. And your daughter? What’s she up to?”
“Devon is twenty-one, or no, actually, she’d be almost twenty-three now,” Marcy said, correcting herself immediately.
Vic cocked his head to one side, smiling to mask his obvious confusion. “Devon is the girl you thought you saw this afternoon?”
“I did see her.”
“Your daughter is here in Ireland?” This time there was no attempt to hide his confusion.
“She’s traveling through Europe for the summer,” Marcy said. “I didn’t realize we’d both be here at the same time, not until I saw her this afternoon. I guess she must have changed her plans at the last minute. That’s a lie,” she added in the next breath.
“I kind of figured.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right. You don’t owe me any explanations.”
“My daughter supposedly drowned in a canoeing accident about two years ago,” Marcy said, watching Vic’s brow furrow and his eyes narrow. “Twenty-one months ago, to be precise. Except they never found her body. And I know, I know, she’s still alive, that for whatever reason, she faked her death.”
“Why would she do that?” Vic asked, as Peter had asked earlier.
“To get away. To start a new life. Start over.”
“Why would she want to start over?”
“Because she was so unhappy. Because she’d gotten herself into some trouble … I’m sorry. Can we not talk about this anymore?”
“We can not talk about whatever you’d like.”
Marcy continued, unable to stop herself. “Everybody else is so positive she’s dead. But I know what I saw. I saw my daughter. You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”
“I think a mother knows her own child.”
Relief washed across Marcy’s face like a cool breeze. “God, you’re a nice man,” she said.
“And you’ve had a very eventful day. Come on. Finish up. I’ll take you back to your hotel.”
Marcy reached across the table, took Vic’s hand in hers. “I have a better idea,” she said.
FIVE
HER SISTER WAS RIGHT about one thing, Marcy thought, sitting up in bed and gazing through the darkness at the man snoring softly beside her: Sex was like riding a bicycle. Once you knew how to do it, you never really forgot the mechanics, no matter how long it had been since the last time you did it. And it didn’t matter what kind of bike it was or how many speeds it had or how many embellishments had been added, the basic operating premise remained the same: You mounted; you worked the pedals; you got off.
And her sister would know. As Judith herself admitted, she’d ridden a lot of bicycles.
Marcy climbed out of bed and walked to the window overlooking Fleet Street. It was quiet, although surprisingly, even at almost two in the morning, there were still people out walking. The trendy area of Temple Bar never really shut down, according to Vic, who’d pointed out several scantily dressed fashion models draped like fur stoles around the shoulders of some music industry bigwigs at the boutique hotel’s crowded bar.
They’d gone to his room at her suggestion.
“Are you sure?” he’d asked when they first entered the elegantly underfurnished lobby of his hotel.
“I’m sure.”
They’d undressed each other quickly and expertly, made love easily and effortlessly. And repeatedly, she thought now, feeling the pleasant soreness between her legs. When was the last time she and Peter had made love more than once in a single night? Not in at least a decade, she thought, then immediately amended that to two decades.
She grabbed her blouse off a nearby chair and wrapped it around her, the soft cotton teasing her nipple, mimicking Vic’s earlier touch. At first she thought it would be strange to have another man’s hands exploring her so intimately. After almost a quarter of a century of being with the same man, she was used to a certain way of doing things, a clearly defined order of what went where and when and for how long. She and Peter had long ago fallen into a familiar rhythm—satisfying and pleasant, if no longer terribly exciting. But good nonetheless, she’d always thought. Dependable. Reliable.
She’d had no desire to change things.
And then Devon had paddled her canoe into the middle of Georgian Bay one brilliant October morning—the air cold, the dying leaves a miraculous succession of red, orange, and gold—and nothing was ever the same again.
Marcy shook thoughts of Devon from her head and looked around the room, which was sparsely decorated in various neutral shades: cream-colored walls, crisp white bedspreads, light beechwood furniture. The only real color came from several exuberant paintings by Irish artists, one on the far wall, another over the bed. The effect was at once understated and luxurious, a heady mix of old-school restraint and modern decadence.
Rather like the man lying on his back in the middle of the queen-size bed, a white sheet wrapped lazily around his still-slender torso, Marcy thought, watching the steady rise and fall of Vic’s chest as he slept. She’d always liked a man with hair on his chest, had never really understood what today’s women found attractive about someone who’d been shaved and waxed to within an inch of his life. Hairy chests were like English gardens, unruly and vaguely chaotic, yet strong and stubbornly resilient. There was just something so reassuringly grown-up about a hairy chest, she thought, returning to the bed and perching on its edge.
But then there were all sorts of areas where she and other women parted company on what constituted sex appeal. For one thing, she wasn’t overly fond of muscles. A well-defined pair of biceps tended to make her more anxious than aroused. As did men in uniforms of any kind, including the mailman. You’re worse than my poodle, Judith had once said, chastising her. And how many women could say they actually enjoyed the sound of a man snoring? How many found such a sound not only comforting but life affirming? When she was a child, there were nights when she would tiptoe into her parents’ bedroom during one of her mother’s unexplained and extended absences, and she would lie down on the floor at the foot of their bed, soaking up her father’s prodigious snores, which filled the room like a lullaby, assuring her of his continuing presence as she reluctantly gave herself over to sleep.
Peter never snored, although he claimed she did. “Why do you have to sleep on your back?” he’d say accusingly, as if her snoring was something she was doing deliberately to provoke him. And then increasingly, as the years passed and more grievances surfaced: “Do you have to move around so much?” “Do you know you talk in your sleep?” “Can’t you ever just lie still?” Until one morning about a year after Devon’s accident she woke up to find Peter’s side of the bed empty, and when she’d gone to look for him, she’d found him asleep in the guest bedroom.
He never came back.
Five months later, he moved out altogether.
All he’d taken were his clothes and his golf clubs.
Marcy sighed, reaching her hand out to touch Vic’s cheek, then withdrawing it before she made contact, returning it to her lap. What on earth had possessed her to sleep with a man she barely knew, a man she’d met on a bus, for God’s sake, a ma
n who was still grieving the death of his first wife even after divorcing his second? Grief makes us do funny things, he’d said.
Was it grief that had brought her to his bed?
Or was it gratitude?
I think a mother knows her own child, he’d said, and she’d actually had to hold herself back from leaping across the table, crawling into his lap, and smothering his face with kisses. Yes, thank you, you believe me!
At last, somebody believes me.
Was that all it took?
Or maybe it was hope that had brought her here. Hope that had let a virtual stranger undress and caress her, hope that had allowed her to respond so eagerly to his touch, hope that because Devon was alive, so too was she, that two people hadn’t drowned on that horrible, cold October day, and that she could finally spit out the water that had been trapped in her lungs for far too long, inhale and exhale without feeling a knife plunging into her chest.
Devon was alive, which meant Marcy had been given a second chance, a chance to make things right, a chance for both of them to be happy again.
Had they ever truly been happy?
“What’s the matter, sweetheart?” she remembered asking one July night almost exactly five years ago. The night when everything changed. The night she had to stop pretending they were a normal family, that everything would be okay.
It was after midnight. Devon had been out partying with friends. Marcy was lying in bed, Peter asleep beside her. She’d been drifting in and out of consciousness, having never been fully able to give in to sleep until she knew Devon was home safe, and now she waited for Devon to tiptoe by her room, possibly stick her head in the door to see if she was still up so she could kiss her good night. Instead Marcy heard her moving around in the kitchen, restlessly opening and closing the cupboard doors. Open, close, open, close. First one, then another. Open, close, open, close.
Then a crash. The sound of glass breaking.
Marcy had jumped out of bed, grabbed a bathrobe, and run from the bedroom, telling herself she was overreacting, that there was no need to be alarmed. Devon was hungry; she’d been searching for something to snack on and had knocked something over in the dark. It was an accident. She was probably down on her hands and knees at this very moment trying to clean up the mess.
Except that when Marcy entered the kitchen, she discovered Devon standing ramrod straight beside the granite counter, her mouth open, her jaw slack, her eyes blank and filled with tears.
“What’s the matter, sweetheart?” Marcy asked, drawing closer.
“Don’t,” Devon warned.
Marcy noted the pieces of glass that were scattered around Devon’s feet and the tulips that were lying half in, half out of what remained of their crystal vase. Water was splashed across the top of Devon’s open-toed sandals, the red polish of her toenails wet and shiny in the moonlight. Her hands were curled into tight fists at her sides, white granules squeezing out from between her clenched fingers and falling toward the floor like snow.
“What is that, sweetheart?” Marcy asked, flipping on the overhead light, seeing a familiar cardboard box lying on its side on the counter. “What are you doing with the salt?”
In response, Devon raised her fists to her face, began shoveling the salt into her mouth.
Marcy was instantly at her side, tearing Devon’s hands away from her face. “Devon, for God’s sake, what are you doing? Stop that. You’ll make yourself sick.”
Devon’s eyes suddenly snapped into focus, as if she were seeing her mother for the first time. “Mom?” she said, opening her palms and letting the remaining salt spill free.
Marcy felt the avalanche of tiny, hard crystals as they landed on the tops of her bare feet. “Are you all right?” She began frantically brushing her daughter’s hair away from her face, trying to wipe away the salt still stubbornly clinging to her lips and chin.
Devon looked from her mother to the floor. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry.”
“What is it, sweetheart? What happened?”
“I don’t know. I was reaching for a bag of potato chips and I stopped to admire the flowers. You know how they say you have to stop and smell the roses? Even though these are tulips and they don’t smell. Only I knocked over the vase and I couldn’t find the potato chips. Do you remember Vicki? Vicki Enquist? She’s really tall, almost six feet, her nose is a little crooked? She was like my best friend in the seventh grade, do you remember her?” she said, all in the same breath.
Marcy was about to answer that no, she had no memory of anyone named Vicki Enquist and could Devon please slow down, that she wasn’t making any sense, but her daughter had already moved on.
“Her mother was like this famous gardener or something. She had, like, her own TV show or something in Vancouver. Anyway, she was there tonight. Vicki, I mean, not her mother. At the party over at Ashleigh’s. And she looked so pretty,” Devon said, suddenly bursting into tears. “Her nose didn’t look too crooked at all. And I felt really bad about all the times we teased her. I was really mean to her, Mom.”
“Sweetheart, please. You’re scaring me. Why don’t we sit down?”
“I don’t want to sit down. I want to go dancing.” Devon pushed herself onto her toes and did a clumsy pirouette. “But everybody else just wants to sit around and get high,” she said, losing her balance and tumbling into her mother’s arms.
“Is that it?” Marcy asked, holding her daughter at arm’s length, forcing Devon’s eyes to hers. “Are you high, Devon? Have you been doing drugs?”
“I’m so thirsty,” Devon said, ignoring the question and extricating herself from Marcy’s grip.
“I’ll get you a glass of water.”
“There’s water on the floor,” Devon said, as if noticing it for the first time.
“I’ll clean it up in a minute.”
Devon suddenly sank to her knees, began moving the water and salt around the large sand-colored squares of the ceramic tile floor with the palms of her hands, as if she were a child who’d just discovered the joys of finger-painting.
“Devon, please, sweetheart, be careful of the glass. No, don’t put that in your mouth. Please let me help you up.”
“I don’t want to get up.”
“You need to let me help you.” Marcy succeeded in dragging her daughter to her feet and sitting her down in one of the four kitchen chairs clustered around the large oval-shaped pine table. “I’ll get you some water. Please, baby. Tell me what you’ve taken.”
“I’m just so thirsty,” Devon said again. “Why am I so thirsty? Did I tell you that Bobby Saunders was at the party tonight? He’s like this big-shot hockey player or something. I think he plays with the Maple Leafs. All the girls are crazy about him, although personally I don’t think he’s all that hot. I think he looks kind of stupid. He has this big, goofy grin, and he’s missing a couple of teeth. Anyway, he was coming on to all the girls, saying things like, Are we going to have sex tonight?’ even though he supposedly has this gorgeous fiancée who’s some kind of supermodel. It was disgusting. Do you even know who I’m talking about? You don’t know anything about hockey. I bet Dad would know. Dad’s very into sports.” She started crying again.
Marcy’s hands were shaking as she went to the sink and poured a glass of water for Devon, letting the sound of the water gushing from the tap temporarily drown out Devon’s insane chatter.
“Devon,” she said, turning off the tap and swiveling toward her. Except that Devon was no longer sitting on the chair. She was curled up on the floor in a semi-fetal position, her knees pressed tight against her blue T-shirt, her face half-submerged in a mound of soggy salt, a large shard of glass pressed against her cheek, mere inches from her eye. “Devon?” Marcy said again, her voice lost between a cry and a whisper.
She collapsed to her knees beside her daughter. Immediately a piece of crystal pierced her skin and she cried out. It was then that she heard a faint sigh escape Devon’s parted lips and realized that her daughter had fallen as
leep. Sound asleep, Marcy realized when she tried to rouse her.
She thought of waking Peter but decided against it. There was no reason for both of them to be up. It took her almost fifteen minutes to get Devon out of the kitchen, down the hall, and into her bedroom, another twenty to get her undressed and cleaned up, five more to maneuver her into bed, and then another fifteen to go back and clean up the mess in the kitchen. By the time Marcy returned to her room, she was bathed in sweat, and blood was dripping in a series of straggly lines from her knee to her ankle. She took a shower, applied a Band-Aid to her knee, and climbed back into bed.
“Can’t you stay still?” Peter muttered, flipping over onto his side.
“What are you doing sitting there?” Vic asked now, his eyes finding hers in the dark hotel room. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you crying?”
Marcy immediately swiped at the tears in the corners of her eyes. “No. Of course not. Well … maybe a little.”
Vic pushed himself onto his elbows, reached for her hand. “Are you sorry that we …?”
“What? Oh, no. No. Honestly. I promise that’s not it.”
“You were thinking about Devon,” he said, the name sounding comfortable, even familiar, on his tongue, almost as if he knew her.
“Yes.”
“Have you decided what you’re going to do?”
“No.”
“Would you like me to go with you?” he asked with a smile. The smile said, Don’t even try to lie to me. “I’m serious. I’d be happy to go back with you to Cork.”
It was certainly tempting, Marcy thought. It would be nice to have company. “No,” she said after a moment’s pause. It would only complicate things. “I think this is something I need to do alone.”
He nodded, as if he weren’t surprised. “Promise you’ll keep me posted.”
“I have your card,” she said.
“You’ll call the minute you find Devon?” Again the easy use of her daughter’s name. Had Marcy ever felt such ease where her daughter was concerned?