She shook her head, musing, thinking back.
“But Scott—stubborn, difficult. He leapt away if I as much as touched his arm. It was really quite amusing. So then I thought, well, perhaps with the right circumstances he and Glenda might . . . But then you came to me for help. A solution! Simple one, too.”
Kat took a slow breath.
“So the adoption—that was just a game you were playing?”
“What do you think?”
“We would never have been approved, would we?”
“Not by that agency. Not by any agency, probably.”
“So you lied about it to me, said something different to Scott, simply to create a rift between us?”
Sarah shrugged.
“It worked rather well, didn’t it?”
“And the Stanford student? All fabrication?”
“No. Not entirely. I have access to the applications. I read them occasionally, out of curiosity. She’s real. And she was perfect. She even looked a bit like you. Did you notice that? But no, not possible for you.”
Kat recalled her growing hope when Sarah told her that adoption was possible, the elation she felt when she saw the picture of the Stanford girl on her computer screen.
“Don’t you understand how cruel that was?” Kat asked quietly. “To mislead me like that?”
“Cruel?” Sarah repeated. “For God’s sake. No crueler then you were to me. You deserved it, Caitlin.”
Kat, mouth dry, turned away. She needed to get out. Get out fast. To the station, to a hotel, anywhere. Quickly, she began to pack the suitcase as Sarah watched like a cat from the doorway. Aware of Sarah’s eyes on her, Kat felt gauche and clumsy as she folded underwear, reached into the closet for pants and sweaters.
She had gathered together the toiletries on the dresser and then, remembering that a cab could take a long time this late in the evening, picked up the phone and asked the operator for the number of a cab company, when Sarah leaped forward and snatched the phone from her hand, unplugging it from the wall.
“No, Caitlin,” Sarah said.
Kat took a small step backward. Sarah’s whole body was poised, tense like a spring. Her eyes were focused on Kat’s face with a frightening intensity.
“I don’t think so,” Sarah said. “No telephone calls. No taxicabs. You stay here. Alone. Unhappy. Isolated, just as I was. You have all you need. The pills in your case. The clifftop just a stroll away.”
“You can’t stop me leaving.”
“Really?”
Sarah stepped forward, gripped Kat’s wrist tightly in a wrenching motion. She stood so close that Kat could smell the gardenia shampoo in her hair.
“You have nowhere to go,” Sarah said. “There’s nothing left for you in Los Angeles. No good friend. Your little pal is happy in my company in France. You have no husband. Your marriage is over. Poor Scott. Finished. Disgraced. How will he like that, do you think? The embarrassment. The awful shame of it. Such a successful career. Over.”
“Scott?” Kat asked, fear for her husband swamping her. “What have you done to Scott?”
As she said his name in the electric tension of that room, Kat had a clear picture of her husband entering the kitchen after work each day: the way he loosened his tie, the way his hair would spike upward. His smile.
Kat pulled herself free. A bracelet of red remained on her skin where Sarah’s fingers had circled her wrist. As she reached for the last item to pack, her makeup bag, Sarah took the small floral bag out of her hand and dropped it to the floor.
“You won’t need that, Caitlin.”
Heart pounding, Kat watched as Sarah moved to the suitcase.
“You will need these.”
Sarah reached inside the suitcase for the two bottles of pills, placed them, with a sweeping flourish, on the dresser. That done, she tossed items out of the suitcase, scattering them around the room. As she lifted the picture frame, tangled in clothing, she looked hard at Kat. Then, she hurled it to the floor. The sound of glass breaking, splintering, echoed through the small cottage.
Kat gasped, bent to lift the shattered photograph. She pulled out the picture of her son, pushed it into her purse before she began to pick up the broken glass from the floor near her bare feet.
“Handsome lad, wasn’t he?” Sarah said.
Kat looked up. Sarah regarded her with a small smile, the green eyes cold as stone.
Kat felt as if a twig snapped in her head; her ears felt full of rushing sounds. The anger she had battened down—at the driver of the truck, the woman in the SUV, at Scott for burying his own grief in work—now focused on one target: Sarah. She felt a soaring, spiraling loss of control and stood, a long shard of glass in her hand.
“What the fuck do you want, Sarah?” she whispered. “What?”
Sarah took a step backward.
“You should be careful with—”
“Tell me. You just want to hurt people. Is that it? Is that your plan?”
“Don’t—”
Kat moved closer, holding tight to the curving glass.
“You didn’t need to destroy Scott, Sarah. Or me. We were already destroyed. Can’t you understand that?”
“I—”
“You want blood? Is that it? Is that what you want?”
She saw Sarah flinch. Kat, trembling visibly, stepped forward.
“You want another bloody suicide? Is that it? You want to watch?”
Kat gripped the shard of glass, turned her other arm to expose the soft inside flesh, then looked directly at Sarah.
“Watch!”
In one fast movement, she slashed downward.
“See!”
The flesh paled, then reddened. The severed skin opened and began to bleed. Blood ran down her arm, and Kat took a sharp inward breath at the throbbing pain. Sarah cried out, pressed back against the wall, her face chalk white.
Kat moved fast then. Grabbing only her purse, she pushed past Sarah and out of the bedroom. She heard Sarah’s scream.
As she pulled at the front door, a cold wind blew into her face, whistled through the cottage. The trees were bowed in the wind, the sea a black, turbulent mass on the horizon. She could hear the sucking sound, loud and ugly, of the stones in the surf.
She ran down the path, her bare feet slipping and sliding on the stones. As she reached the country lane, she heard Sarah’s angry voice behind her. It sounded close. Kat, struggling to ignore the insistent pain, pressing her arm against her body in an effort to stop the bleeding, tried to run faster. She did not dare cross to the cliff path with Sarah so close behind, and she felt the fear rising, choking her. Kat heard then, over the sound of the wind, over the sound of Sarah’s voice, a car engine, and saw, at the edge of her vision, headlights. A car coming down from the big house.
If she could just dart across. Move fast. Sarah would be distracted by the car, would have to pause, wait for it to pass. Kat took a jagged breath, counted one, two—She ran. On the other side of the road, she whipped around to see if Sarah had stopped. At the same moment, she heard the screech of brakes, the snapping of breaking branches in the roadside shrubs. Kat caught one glimpse of Sarah’s face before the vehicle hit. So focused on Kat, so intent on catching up with her, Sarah had not realized how close the black compact car was. Her face showed no fear, no caution. Only a cold, determined rage.
As the car screamed to a halt across the lane, its lights illuminated the figure now crumpled on the ground. Sarah lay perfectly still. Blood pooled behind her head, almost black in the slanted beam of the headlights. Her body had landed at an odd angle, one knee bent outward in an impossible position. The peach towel was still draped around her neck.
Shouts and footsteps were immediately audible from the main house. A heavyset man with a smooth shaved head ran down the hill, pulling a cell phone from his pocket. Kat heard him calling for police, for an ambulance.
Kat, shivering violently, moved forward, pausing as a woman climbed out of the black car. An olde
r woman with a wide, pale face, gray hair pulled back into a knot on her neck, walked stiffly toward Sarah. Kat heard her low moan as she knelt on the road. She looked up and saw Kat. The two women stared at each other. Then, the sharp shock of recognition. Mrs. Evans, eyes narrowing, mouth a thin, hard line, waved her hand in a contemptuous gesture—Get back, move away—before she turned again, keening softly, to Sarah. Kat stood frozen, felt time stretch and stall, as they waited for endless minutes for the ambulance they all knew would be too late.
TWENTY-FIVE
On the morning of the anniversary of Chris’s accident, as a warm breeze carries the scent of juniper and litters the sky with pink paper-thin clouds, Kat stands at the open bedroom window, aware of the air on her damp skin. She has just bathed and still has the towel wrapped around her.
“Going to be a hot one,” Scott says, coming up behind her. She leans back against him, murmuring a good morning. He, too, is fresh from the shower and smells of shampoo and pine-scented soap. His kiss, soft on her neck, triggers a memory of last night’s lovemaking. Since her return from England, shaken, close to collapse, wanting only to find Scott, Kat has rediscovered the soothing quality of physical closeness. She would like to stay like this, his arms around her, the breeze lifting the curtains. Scott kisses the top of her head, releases her, and reaches for his shirt.
“Better get going,” he says. “Before the traffic builds up.”
“You’ve got the whole day off?”
“Yep. Took a vacation day.”
It is his first vacation day since he accepted a position with the large public-interest law office on the other side of the city.
“Civil liberties focus, so it’s interesting work,” Scott said when he described the job offer to Kat. “But it’s a huge drop in income.”
“If you’ll like the work, then take it. We’ll manage.”
When Kat first learned the details of the loss of his partnership, she had wanted Scott to fight the board decision. It was too late, he told her, shock and disbelief still in his voice. Sarah had removed all her files on the day she left for England and cited his incompetence as the reason. She had taken Bianchi with her. The decision had been effective immediately. It was all in place.
“I had to resign,” he said. “It was such an enormous loss to the firm.”
The shock of Sarah’s death has now faded in the Los Angeles legal community. Scott has discovered, through tentative inquiries to former colleagues, that all her old matters are now being handled in Europe. Kat wonders if anyone mourns her, besides Mrs. Evans, the housekeeper, so wretched at the accident site.
“Next time we go to England, we should take some flowers to that lane by the cottage. Gardenias maybe. Some remembrance,” Kat said to Scott one evening.
“Remembrance? For that woman? After all she did?”
“For the girl she was, not the woman she became.”
He shook his head, touched her cheek with the back of his hand.
“You’re nuts,” he said.
At odd moments, Kat experiences flashes of memory, fragmented images of those hours in Sussex. She recalls Sarah’s visible fury just before the car hit and the blood pooling on the asphalt; she remembers the roiling sea and clifftop, the sucking sound of stones in the surf and the crash of shattering glass. At these times, she reminds herself that Sarah, in trying to destroy her life, had actually saved it. There is an appealing irony in that, one that Sarah would certainly have recognized.
In the kitchen, dressed and ready to leave for Forest Lawn, she makes coffee.
“One quick cup,” she says, handing a mug of coffee to Scott.
He takes it, regards her steadily.
“You’re okay now, Kat?”
“As okay as I can be. Considering the date.”
Soon after they were reconciled, she had apologized to Scott for her obsession with the adoption plan and the conflict it caused between them.
“I was impossible,” Kat said to him. “Crazy. I’m so sorry.”
“Not impossible. No. Just grieving. And manipulated by Sarah.”
“Oh, it was more than that. I believed what I wanted to believe. I thought I could just rewind and begin again. Start over with a new baby—and change the ending. Change the ending! As if I could. As if I could replace Chris. As if he could be replaceable.” She stopped, sighing. The words she needed to explain her mixed emotions eluded her.
“I should have been more understanding,” Scott said. “I was just so busy. I was overwhelmed.”
Now, Kat turns away, makes a small adjustment to the bowl of roses she has picked from the garden. The rich red and gold colors glow in the thin morning light. She reaches for the card she will attach to them and writes a few lines from a Carver poem she loves. When she is almost at the end, she hands the pen to Scott.
“Write the last two lines,” she says. “This is from both of us.”
He hesitates. This is the kind of sentimentality that, just a year ago, Scott would have mocked, but on this, the anniversary of their son’s death, he is not the same man. He takes the pen and reads the first four lines from “Late Fragment.”
“I hope he felt that,” he says.
Kat looks at her husband quizzically.
“Chris? Or Carver?”
“Chris. I hope he felt what Carver describes. I hope he felt beloved on the earth.”
“Of course he did,” Kat says, hugging her husband. “He was loved. He knew that.”
The grave site, when they arrive just before noon, is already piled with flowers. Kat places her roses by the others and bends down to read the cards. Ben and Matt have left a balloon displaying a picture of a rock band. Chris’s former English teacher has placed a bowl of white camellias by the side of the grave and written out, in her graceful script, the entire Frost poem, “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” There is a bunch of mixed flowers from Brooke, now back in the neighborhood, her new job having ended as abruptly as it began, and another one from Maggie and Paul. Kat smiles when she sees, right in the center, a vase of purple-and-white tulips from Chloe. Attached to it, and clearly visible, is a picture of Chris with all his friends around him.
We love you, Chloe has written. Don’t you forget it.
“Look at all this,” Scott says. “It’s amazing.”
“We have to remember that he wasn’t just ours,” Kat says. “A lot of people loved him.”
She turns back to her husband, holds his hand briefly before kneeling down on the grass and bowing her head.
“Find peace, sweet son,” she whispers.
Kat feels Scott’s arm around her shoulders as he crouches beside her at the graveside.
“We miss you, Chris,” he says aloud. “We miss you, son.”
A soft breeze carries a dampness from the ocean a few miles away. Kat thinks she can taste salt in it. Scott stands, reaches for her hand to help her to her feet.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to Julia Kenny, my agent, and to Carmen Johnson, my editor at Little A, for excellent support and guidance.
I’m grateful to the talented writers at Zoetrope Writers’ Studio for their encouragement and friendship over the past fifteen years. Too many wonderful people to list here. You know who you are. Special thanks to a few pals, both inside and outside the studio: Steve Augarde, Jo Barris, Brian Burch, Jai Clare, John Cottle, Terry DeHart, Lucinda Nelson Dhavan, Pia Z. Ehrhardt, Marko Fong, Avital Gad-Cykman, Alicia Gifford, Debbie Ann Ice, Webb Johnson, Lucinda Kempe, Roy Kesey, Andy Morton, Jean Saunders, Tom Saunders, Kay Sexton, Maryanne Stahl, Wendy Vaizey, and Bonnie ZoBell.
My thanks to three superb writers, Pamela Erens, Charles Lambert, and Ellen Meister, for taking time out from their busy lives to read and endorse the manuscript.
To my son, Nick, brother Jim, and in-laws, Linda and Chris—thank you for cheerleading with such enthusiasm and style.
Finally, I owe so much to my sister, Helen Chappell, and to my good friend Bev Jackson. My love and heartfelt t
hanks to you both.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mary McCluskey’s prizewinning short stories and essays have been published on Salon.com and in the Atlantic, the London Magazine, StoryQuarterly, London’s Litro, and other literary journals in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Hong Kong. She divides her time between Stratford-upon-Avon and Los Angeles.
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