Last Day

by Luanne Rice

  “Besides, we don’t have a choice,” she said. He had removed his hand, but now she placed it back on her belly, as if he needed reminding. Every time he touched her he felt emotional.

  “I want this so much,” he said.

  “Tell me.”

  “A life with you.”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice beautifully warm and sweet. “We will be so good together. I’ll make you so happy, Pete.”

  “You already do.”

  “I want to wake up next to you every day. Live as a family. I know I shouldn’t ask you for that, and I won’t. Not now. When you’re ready, you’ll tell me, won’t you?”

  Instead of answering, he had made love to her, right there on the workbench in the gallery basement.

  But as time went on, he felt how tense she had gotten, how worried about their future. At the very beginning, when they’d first found out she was pregnant, she had said she didn’t expect him to leave his wife, that she understood Beth and Sam were his family, and that she and their baby would be fine. She was an independent woman, a grown-up. She had gotten into this with her eyes wide open.

  And she had been amazing, self-sufficient, and accomplished, a winner of academic prizes, the author of an important and widely circulated monograph on Benjamin Morrison. Someone Pete would have been proud to be with.

  But midway through the pregnancy, everything changed. She had become needy, even nagging. Whispering “I want to wake up next to you every day” had given way to constant tears and whining, “When, when, when?”

  By the time she gave birth, he had watched her confidence drain away, witnessed this gorgeous, brilliant woman transform into someone who couldn’t completely lose the baby weight, who smelled like Tyler’s spit-up, who would rather read parenting magazines than keep up with trends in curation and advances in her work as a conservator.

  The seduction had been lovely, but the pressures were ruining his life. All he had ever wanted was to do justice to the sacrifices his mom had made for him to get ahead. He wanted to make people, especially her, proud of him. Beth had given him so much. She represented stability, prestige, the life he had worked for. They had a wonderful daughter together. They were known and respected in the art world.

  But once he fell in love with Nicola, she was all he could think about. Before her, he’d had a hard time really understanding love—it had felt more like an ambition, a responsibility, than an all-consuming feeling. He was all set to leave Beth for her until his lovely, crafty wife outsmarted him: right after Tyler was born, Beth gave him the news.

  That she was going to have a baby too.

  To Pete, the pregnancies were a one-two punch.

  The sick irony was, Beth no longer wanted him; even though she was pregnant, she had asked for the separation. He had never seen her like this, the way she had been in the months before her death. She had become almost brash, standing up for herself, even when it was at his expense—like when she’d called his mother and told her everything.

  Back when they’d first met, he had sensed her vulnerability—she was only twenty-two, a recent college graduate, running the family gallery, dealing with the horrible way she had lost her mother. She needed a man who would be everything to her—to heal her pain, to be her family, to make up for what her father had done. Pete’s instincts about Beth, about women, had been dead on.

  He thanked his mother for that.

  His mom was a saint—there was no other way to look at it. Pete remembered how the kitchen light would be on past midnight, his mother studying at the Formica table. Pete had to find a way to make her life easier.

  She had not been able to afford a new computer on her own, but even though Pete was only in eighth grade, he had saved from his after-school job cleaning up at a downtown gym, given her money to help buy it. His brothers and sisters could not be bothered, and his mother had rewarded him for it. “Here comes my jewel,” she’d say when he’d go into the kitchen for his nightly glass of milk. Nothing had made him feel better than the sound of her fingers clicking on the keyboard, doing her schoolwork.

  And now, thanks to Beth, his mother knew about Nicola and Tyler. He had never wanted to disappoint his mother, a devout Catholic who despised anyone who committed adultery, never mind getting divorced. This woman who had given the best years of her life so Pete could succeed.

  It was a struggle. Nicola had wanted a future for them. Beth had tired of him. She had not been able to hide it, and he hadn’t been able to keep pretending that their lives had been great—that what had gone on between them privately matched up to how they had looked from the outside: the perfect Black Hall couple with the elegant art gallery and big house and lovely, brilliant daughter.

  He’d made a fucking mess of everything. And now he couldn’t go back and fix it, not at all. It was too late.

  He couldn’t stop thinking of his and Beth’s last minutes together. He had hugged and kissed her, told her how much he loved her. He had told her he was worried about her health, wondering if he should leave on the sailing trip at all. He had begged her to rest, to stay cool and out of the sun, not worry about the garden, keep her feet elevated, stay in bed as much as she could while he was gone. He ran through these thoughts over and over, until he could feel them happening again. Hugged, kissed, I love you, worried, you need to rest, Beth, keep your feet up, stay in bed . . .

  “Oh, Beth,” he said out loud now. Almost as if she could still hear him.

  And he felt pierced by guilt because her death had made everything so much easier. Even though his love for Nicola was draining away, at least he didn’t have to deal with two demanding women.

  One was really enough.

  Sometimes he wondered, though, whether the wrong woman had died.

  Finally, the phone rang—“Green, Green, and Wolcott Attorneys-at-Law” popped up on the screen.

  “Mac!” he said in his most jovial way. “Finally, we speak.”

  “Sorry, Pete, I was in court all morning. What’s up?”

  “I really need to know when you’re scheduling my polygraph.”

  Silence on the line, then Mac’s low voice. “We discussed that. I strongly advise against it.”

  “Right, you don’t like your clients taking them. But guess what, Mac? I don’t know about your other clients, but I’m innocent. I need to prove that as soon as possible so Reid and the rest of them start looking for the actual murderer.”

  “Pete,” Mac began.

  “I have to insist on this,” Pete said. “If you don’t want to represent me anymore, fine. I’ll do it on my own.”

  After they hung up, Pete felt pleased by the way he had stood up to the big, fancy WASP-y lawyer. Mac relented and was going to accompany Pete to the examiner’s office. As Pete had known he would. No lawyer would want to lose a client like Pete. And Pete would nail the exam, just as he had every test he had ever taken. He was a member of Mensa; he doubted very much that Mac could say the same.

  Closing his eyes, he ran through the last moments again:

  Hugged, kissed, I love you, worried, you need to rest, Beth, keep your feet up, stay in bed . . .

  19

  “Should we go school shopping?” Kate asked.

  Sam lay on the sofa, texting. Morning light streamed through the loft’s tall windows, bouncing off the red brick wall, casting a blush on Sam’s face. She didn’t look up. “I need to get my phone fixed,” she said.

  “That one seems to be working fine,” Kate said. “Considering you’re always on it.”

  “I dropped it, and the screen cracked,” Sam said. She stopped, raised her thumb, and showed Kate the beads of blood.

  “Why are you typing on broken glass?” Kate asked, nudging Sam’s legs over and sitting at the other end of the sofa.

  “I don’t know,” Sam said.

  “We’ll get you a new one,” Kate said.

  Sam shook her head. “I just need a new screen. I’m keeping the phone. Mom gave it to me.”


  It was a warm day, but Sam had wrapped a blanket around herself. Kate tucked it more tightly around her legs, not looking into her eyes. She understood. There was a plastic water bottle in the back of her car that Beth had left there one day in July. They had gone to the arboretum at Connecticut College, to walk through the trees and sit in the shade, and Beth had drunk from the bottle. Kate kept hearing it rattle around, hollow and dull, under the driver’s seat, but she wouldn’t throw it out.

  “Let me see the screen,” Kate said. Sam handed her the phone. It had a rose-gold case. Beth had thought it pretty and that Sam would like it. She’d driven to the Apple Store at Providence Place and bought it the first day the new iPhone had come out. It had a good camera with telephoto enhancements, and Beth had hoped Sam would start taking pictures. She had never stopped encouraging Sam’s interest in art—any form would do, from photography to watercolors to the dry and more scholarly pursuit of studying other artists’ work.

  “To answer your question,” Sam said, “I don’t need school things.”

  “I thought all kids did.”

  Sam shook her head again. “I don’t want anything new.”

  “No?”

  “I don’t want anything that Mom hasn’t seen. Hasn’t touched. If I got new shoes, she’d never know about them. Or a new jacket. She’d never be able to tell me she liked it, or didn’t like it, or button it up for me the first time I wore it. She still did that, you know. It was so funny; I’m old now, but when I got my winter coat last year, she did all the buttons for me before I walked out the door to get the bus.”

  “You’re not old now. You’re just sixteen. You were always hers, and you still are. Her little one.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Kate’s chest tightened. She wanted to do and say the right thing. She had always been an on-the-sidelines aunt. She’d loved this girl from the minute she first met her as a tiny, red-faced infant in the hospital, the third to hold her after Beth and Pete. But Kate lived the life of a pilot, more at home in the sky than on earth. She had avoided relationships and commitment since she was sixteen. So how could she, right now, be everything Sam needed?

  “What should we do today?” Kate asked. “Besides get your phone fixed?”

  “I was thinking,” Sam said slowly, “that I should go home.”

  That stopped Kate in her tracks. She pressed her lips together, gathering her thoughts. She wondered if Sam knew that Pete was basically living at Mathilda’s. Kate planned to kick him and Nicola out, but she’d been too absorbed in Sam and racking her brain to figure out where the funny little key she’d found in Beth’s drawer fit.

  “I want you here,” Kate said. “Does it seem I don’t?”

  “You’ve been great,” Sam said, giving her a crooked smile. “Even though I know you’d probably rather be flying places with Lulu, whatever.”

  “There’s time for that, but right now I’m concentrating on you,” Kate said.

  “You’re a lesbian like Mathilda was, right? In love with Lulu—it’s obvious. Why won’t you come out?”

  “I’m not,” Kate said, not completely surprised by Sam’s assessment but knowing the truth would be too hard to explain.

  “In this day and age, is it seriously so hard for you to be honest about yourself?” Sam asked. “You’re allowed to be who you are! Do I have to be the one to tell you that? Didn’t your grandmother and Ruth show you?”

  “Sam,” Kate said, wanting to shut the questions down.

  “Okay, whatever,” Sam said, grabbing her phone back, frowning with little lines of hurt furrowing her brow. Despite the splintered screen, she gave it all her attention and resumed her swift double-thumb typing.

  Kate knew that Sam would have liked her to confide in her. To have an adult moment, a grown-up aunt-and-niece moment in which Kate told her what she never told anyone. And Kate was pretty sure her niece expected to hear Kate say that, yes, she was a lesbian. She might have been surprised to hear that Kate wasn’t anything. She felt wild, bottomless love for Lulu. And for Beth and Sam, too, for Scotty. But since that day in the basement, she had never felt romantic love, not even slightly. Parts of her heart and body had shut down during the hours of imprisonment.

  Before that, her mother had called her boy crazy. She knew only one way to fall in love—madly—and it had started in first grade. Every school year she would be entranced, fascinated, in love with one particular boy. Billy in first grade, Dennis in second, Palmer in third, Patrick in eighth, all the way up to Michael when she was a sophomore.

  She would dream about them when she was really young, turn bright red if they spoke to her. She couldn’t wait for her first kiss, and it happened when she was fourteen and went with Patrick Reilly to a beach movie. Whatever was playing, they didn’t bother to watch. They walked to the end of the beach and skipped stones into the dark water. She found the flattest, most perfect scaler. When she handed it to him, he pulled her close. The kiss was fire, and she melted through the soles of her feet right into the sand.

  Patrick was her boyfriend until sophomore year when his family moved to New Hampshire. Kate had cried for a month. Then Michael asked her to frostbite with him. Frostbiting was sailing in winter regattas when the water was cold, sometimes crackling with ice. They would bundle up in dry suits, sail even if it was snowing, both of them so competitive they’d put the rail under and sometimes capsize.

  The crash boat would rescue them, and one of Kate’s favorite parts of the race would be warming up with Michael in front of the fire at the yacht club. They would sit close to each other on the sofa, arms touching, drinking hot chocolate and plotting how they would annihilate the competition the following Sunday. One time he reached for her hand. The next week she scooted across the sofa and put her head on his shoulder. From then on, they began losing regattas because they’d rather be kissing than racing.

  Frostbite season ended, then came the spring series, and by summer they had figured out how to balance making out with high-performance sailing. They were sixteen, and Kate had started fantasizing about the next step. She and Michael were in love. Every time they were together, they went a little further. They would lie together, holding each other, and she would imagine what it would be like with their clothes off, and the thoughts would start to take over and keep her from being able to think of anything else.

  Then she didn’t have to imagine anymore. She lost her virginity in Michael’s bedroom while his parents were at work. His body was hot and gave her a fever. She literally got delirious, her head spinning so hard when he touched her breasts and between her legs, when he entered her, that she couldn’t breathe and wasn’t sure whether she was awake or dreaming. She hadn’t known bodies could do that.

  Lulu had been jealous. She had never told Kate how she felt about her, but Kate knew. The way Lulu would always sit really close, the back of her hand accidentally-on-purpose brushing Kate’s, gazing at her as if she was hers—as if she could see into Kate’s soul like no one else.

  The thing was, Kate knew it was true, and she felt the same way. The feeling was so intense it sometimes made Kate uncomfortable, especially when it stirred up her dreams. The day after such dreams, Kate would flaunt Michael to Lulu. She’d tell her about the things they did and those they wanted to do. Lulu would never smile during those talks.

  Michael and Kate were each other’s first. They climbed into his bed whenever they could. He used condoms, and then she got her doctor to give her the pill. Supposedly she had to wait a full cycle before the birth control would kick in, and it was so hard to wait to feel what it would be like without anything, even that thin layer, between them.

  She kept her eye on the calendar, ready for the day, but then the basement happened.

  It was as if her virginity returned, clamped down on every single bit of her. She couldn’t let herself remember how being with Michael had felt. She began to doubt they had ever even had sex. It was easier to pretend they hadn’t than to miss him, mi
ss the feeling of his hands on her skin. Her heart and body had never come back to life after that. There was no more longing, no more wishing. There was nothing to wish for.

  Michael kept telling her he loved her, trying to hold her and kiss her, begging her to tell him what he’d done wrong. It was only August, months away from frostbite season, but she was frozen solid. Instead of telling him it wasn’t his fault, that she had changed because of what she had been through, she stopped speaking to him. She refused to go to the phone when he called her at Mathilda’s.

  She didn’t start school that September. Whenever possible, she slept all day. Eventually Mathilda eased her out of bed and drove her to a hospital in Massachusetts, south of Boston. There were other depressed girls and lots of psychiatrists, psychologists, art therapists, music therapists, psychiatric nurses dispensing meds, taking the girls on long walks in the fresh air along trails through a forest of birches and sugar maples and the falling leaves of October, but nothing made Kate come back to life.

  By the time she was well enough to return to Black Hall High School, Michael had started going out with someone else. He tried to talk to Kate once, but she pretended not to see him. The truth was, she saw the hurt on his face and hated herself for putting it there. When boys asked her out, she said she had a boyfriend in New Hampshire. Lulu and Scotty embraced her and Beth, nurtured them through that school year.

  Beth had survived and somehow started to heal.

  Kate had died, but she had kept it to herself.

  Staring at Sam, she wondered whether she would recoil from or be intrigued by the way her aunt felt or didn’t feel. Kate knew she was an oddity among the passionate Harkness-Woodward women.

  “I really do want to go home,” Sam said, typing even faster.