“Rebekah insisted we put her up in a little place in Sag, to get away from those people. Louisa could check up on her, too, since the rental was close to the ferry. She became their little project. The baby was born early, small, but she was healthy.
“But then Dani’s mother delayed the adoption. She’d do it after she was weaned, she said, after winter. Meanwhile, Rebekah fell hard for the baby, slept at the hospital, shopped for organic groceries. God, she was such an easy mark. I saw it happening. I knew it. I warned her. I said you’ve gotten way too close to that girl, Rebekah. She’s going to hit us up hard, you watch. She’s manipulating you. And sure enough, a few weeks later she tells Rebekah, if you want to see the baby again, you have to pay me, otherwise I have to leave Long Island because I can’t afford to live here once you cut me off.
“So Rebekah paid to see the child, a few hundred here, a few thousand there. Then one day, she goes to the apartment and the girl says, Guess what? I got an offer. For a job? No, she said, for the baby. And it’s a lot of money. I’m going to take it. I need to take it. Now. Rebekah begged her not to. She said whatever they’re paying, we’ll double it. So that’s how we came to buy a baby.”
“Why didn’t Rebekah just go to the police? Or child services? Surely there’d be a way for you to keep her legally.”
“Because she’d already broken the law when she gave Dani’s mother all that money even before handing her a hundred thousand dollars. Behind my back, I might add. What could I do? She controlled our money.” He gave a snort. “I mean her money. I was enraged. This was beyond my comprehension. But Rebekah lived above the law. It was Rebekah’s money that bought the place in the Caymans, the boats, the trips to Paris. She set Louisa up nicely, too. She had already convinced me to run for office, but I postponed my political plans. No way I could make our lives more public at that point.
“And then, big surprise, a couple years later, Dani’s mother came back, broke, face hollowed out, teeth gray, hair the color of something you might find washed up on a beach. It was meth, painkillers. Both. I don’t know. She walked across the causeway and around the gate through the forest. She was soaking wet. Rebekah gave her more money. But this time I got her to sign something that said she would never bother us again, but really it was adoption papers Jonah drew up and backdated. Totally illegal. He could lose his license to practice law, go to jail. But we couldn’t mess around anymore. I really thought, I hoped, that this last windfall meant Dani’s mother could indulge all of her addictions, surround herself with the dregs of the earth, and maybe, with any luck, overdose somewhere quickly and quietly to leave us in peace with our child. This was my wish for a troubled young woman. For her to die. And that’s the story I’ve told you about her, and Jonah and Louisa, a story born of the darkest kind of wishful thinking. That’s why all of this is happening now. My horrible thoughts brought a curse upon Asherley, on us.”
“People do desperate things when they’re afraid, Max,” I said. “Dani was better off with you, regardless of the circumstances of her adoption. Can you imagine the life she’d have had with her mother?”
“We told ourselves that. And I wish I could say she had an idyllic childhood. As the years passed, Dani went from being a colicky baby to an enraged toddler to a difficult child. She did not play well with others. She couldn’t keep a friend, sit through a class, behave with nannies. But damn it if Rebekah wasn’t determined to fix what was wrong with her. She took her everywhere, to every expert, tried every cocktail of medication, acupuncture, horse therapy, a dozen different camps. She’d last two days, wet the bed, pick a fight, and come home. She absolutely clung to Rebekah.”
“She sounds like a devoted mother,” I said. “No wonder Dani misses her so much.”
“Ha. That’s what you think? That’s your takeaway? No. Despite how badly she wanted a baby, Rebekah didn’t know what to do with a child, especially a needy, angry one. You’ve been a far better mother to that kid in four months than Rebekah was in thirteen years. Oh, don’t get me wrong. She wanted to be a good mother. She said to me before Dani came, I’ll be the best mother ever, Max. I’ll make every mother in the Hamptons jealous. What she meant was she wanted to be seen as a good mother. That’s all she knew how to do. The pictures she took, the magazine profiles, that cursed social media, every picture told the story of the perfect mother, Rebekah Winter.”
He was right, that was the undisputed narrative. I’d seen the images, visited them over and over for clues on how to be a good mother myself. There she was cuddling the baby in soft focus, the two of them holding hands on the seashore, Rebekah spinning Dani around, throwing her in the air, hosting extravagant birthday parties with ponies and clowns, cheering her from the sidelines with the other perfect mothers. Max continued shattering these images, one by one, his hammer hitting the glass surfaces, the shards piling up around my feet. Their marriage was a financial arrangement. Rebekah was craven and imperious. She broke the law. Her beauty was fake. She was a terrible mother.
“Rebekah became increasingly depressed, frustrated, full of regrets. She would have these anxiety attacks. She wasn’t consumed with guilt so much as buyer’s remorse. Motherhood was harder than she thought it would be. Draining, unfulfilling, one-sided, boring, constant. I wish I could say I made up for it, that I was a good father. My own father was an asshole, distant, distracted, and I carried on that proud family tradition. I became like him, always away somewhere, always busy. Rebekah started drinking more. She snuck cigarettes. Went on lavish vacations, often leaving Dani behind to be cared for by a succession of nannies, none sticking around once she returned. Turns out Dani wasn’t what was missing in our marriage. She was the bomb that destroyed it. And I will never forgive myself for not filling in the gaps Rebekah’s disinterest created, for not being a better father, for letting Rebekah ruin that child. For not trying to be the father she deserved, until it was too late.”
I reached for his hand, but he recoiled.
“Louisa tried. She’s been a good aunt. She took her to New York, to Paris. She’s invested in Dani’s success, at least for Asherley’s sake. But Louisa wasn’t her mother. Dani wanted her mother. She wanted Rebekah. And the more Rebekah pulled away from her, the more clingy and desperate Dani became. She can be like that with me now. You’ve seen it.”
“But Dani doesn’t remember Rebekah this way at all. She idolizes her. Still. To this day.”
“I know. It’s a crazy thing. Kids are remarkably selective in what they want to believe. But a neglected baby monkey will love a fork covered in duct tape if that’s all they’re given to hold. And as Dani got older, she committed the ultimate sin by resembling Rebekah less and less. She was darker, swarthier, bonier, taking after the father, maybe. She tried desperately to win Rebekah’s approval, to gain her attention, even demanded, at eleven, that we let her dye her hair the exact same color as Rebekah’s. I’m ashamed that I ever said yes. But I couldn’t say no to anything that pacified Dani, no one could, least of all Rebekah.
“When she turned twelve, she shot up, got those legs, her real mother’s looks before the drugs ravaged her. And suddenly Rebekah had competition. She resented the attention Dani received, from anyone, especially me. So I pulled away even more, just to keep the peace.
“Then she came back again. Dani’s mother. She showed up at the door that hot summer night almost two years ago. You know a part of the story. The air-conditioning was broken. The house was an oven. We sent Dani to bed. There was a knock at the door. But I left out the part about how Dani’s mother . . . she looked different. She said she hitchhiked to East Hampton from Florida, where she’d been living after getting out of prison for some minor drug charge. That’s where she got clean. I mean, I don’t know if she was clean, but she looked healthy, almost pretty again. I asked if anyone saw her come out here or knew she was coming back to Long Island. She said no. She had no home, no friends, no family would talk to her
anymore. This time, she said, she came for Dani. She wanted to get to know her daughter, and for Dani to know her. She’d changed, she said. She’d seen her on the local news campaigning with me and was so proud of her. We were months away from the election and I was doing well in the polls. Now I was the one offering her money to go away. But she said she didn’t want money. Rebekah said, You promised this would stop, that this was over. I offered two hundred thousand, three, five, name your price, I said. I couldn’t imagine this woman in our lives. She was clean now maybe, but for how long? I slapped car keys into her hand and said, Take the Jaguar. She threw the keys on the floor. I want to see Dani, she said. She’s all I have left.
“That’s when I said, Let’s go into the greenhouse, so we don’t wake Dani. I thought we’d reason with her. I thought we’d tell her about Dani’s troubles, convince her how disruptive it would be to introduce them now, in the middle of the campaign. If we could just wait until later, we could introduce them the right way. I think I meant that. I really do.
“But once we were in the greenhouse she turned into her old threatening self again, saying, wouldn’t everyone want to know that the future senator’s wife was a shady criminal, that his Russian princess bought a baby from a desperate teenage drug addict? Isn’t that illegal? Isn’t that thirty years in prison? And guess what? I’d get custody of Dani, she said, your heir. Isn’t that funny. I’d get the money and the baby. Maybe I’d even live here. I’d win in the end, she said, because the courts always side with the mother. The real mother.
“Then Rebekah laid into her, screaming at her, threatening her, telling her that our lawyers would annihilate her, unearth every rotten crime she’d ever committed these past thirteen years. I told her to keep it down. I ducked out quickly to check on Dani, in case she woke up. I couldn’t have been gone more than two minutes, but when I returned . . . There’d been a struggle. I don’t know who started it, but Dani’s mother had . . . sunk gardening shears into Rebekah’s neck. I’d never seen so much blood. I tried to stanch the flow with an old blanket, telling Dani’s mother to call an ambulance, but she just stood there mumbling, I didn’t mean to do that, I was defending myself, she came at me first.
“Rebekah just . . . bled out onto the dirt floor. She was dead in less than a minute.”
Max clasped his hands in his lap, as if in surrender. A cold dread crept over me. The ghosts I’d felt were real. They’d been here all along.
“It finally dawned on Dani’s mother what she’d done. She looked at me and . . . she ran. And all I could think was, I can’t let her get away. What if she disappeared again? She was homeless, indigent. What if they think I killed Rebekah? Everything would come out. Buying a baby, faking an adoption, the payoffs. I threw a tarp across Rebekah’s body and tipped a table in front of her, propping it up like a shield in case Dani came down looking for us. I shut off the lights. I locked the door behind me. Dani’s mother had found the keys she’d thrown and taken off in the Jaguar. I ran to the garage to get my car. I remember Rebekah’s blood on my hands.
“She was driving fast, reckless like Rebekah. I could see her taillights ahead of me, swerving to stay on the road. I knew the curves well. She didn’t. I worried what I’d do if I caught up to her. What then? Would I kill her? I was afraid I would kill her. But sadly, she did me the favor.”
He told me he heard the impact before he drove up to the scene of the crash, the front of the car accordioned into an old oak, Dani’s mother slumped over the steering wheel, her hair a tangled curtain covering bone and blood where a pretty face used to be.
“She was almost dead,” he said, “her body just crumpled. I couldn’t get her out if I’d tried. And . . . I didn’t try. I just . . . left her there. I left her there, knowing she was almost dead, knowing the gates were closed and that no one would find her for hours.”
His face was impassive.
“It all fell together, a plan. I had to create a scenario where there was just one dead body, just Rebekah’s. And if Dani had to grieve the only mother she ever knew, she could not know her real mother had killed her. She’d never recover. There are things you do when you’re desperate, things that would shock you. I raced back to the house. I had to make sure Dani stayed asleep. I had a lot to do. I washed my hands, put on a clean shirt, then I woke her, or so I thought. You see now what a terrifying thought it is, that she was awake that night after all. Anyway, I gave her some water with a crushed sleeping pill and rubbed her back until it knocked her out. Then I went downstairs, unlocked the greenhouse. I knelt by Rebekah’s body. I said a prayer. I asked for her and for God’s forgiveness for what I was about to do, but that it was the only way to put this all in the past for good. I removed her wedding rings. I wrapped her body in a large linen tablecloth, tied it with belts. Then I got out that portable backhoe and dug a hole. The whole time I comforted myself with the idea that were this legal, it’s where she’d have wanted to be buried. I lowered her body down. I covered the hole with compost, clean dirt, and then a table.”
I thought of how I had frolicked with Maggie in there, planted an imaginary garden, hosted a wedding of all things.
“It was two thirty in the morning by then. I drove back to the crash site with several cans of gasoline from the boathouse. She was dead. I checked to make sure. I placed Rebekah’s rings on her finger and I doused the car and the perimeter, and I watched it burn for a while. I didn’t mean to light up six acres, but it was a small sacrifice, I suppose, to the gods, in exchange for a fire that rendered her body completely unidentifiable, except for three diamonds melted in a pool of gold.”
He straightened up, relieved of some of the weight of the story. “I’ve done many awful, selfish things in my life,” he continued. “But bringing you here, marrying you, lying to you, and now dumping all of this on you are among the worst. Sometimes I think I fell in love with you knowing that everything would come to light, that Dani’s mother would win, that I’d go to jail and Dani would need looking after by someone good. Someone like you. Would you do that? Take care of Dani for me? I do love her, you know. She drives me crazy, but I do.”
Throughout his confession, I passed through every emotion: fear, confusion, anger, resentment. But one rose above the rubble, a dissolute kind of joy. Max had said I was a better mother to Dani than Rebekah ever was. I could be a better wife, too, because now there were no secrets between us and I could help him. I could fix this. Max wasn’t going to lose Dani or Asherley. Nor, for that matter, was I.
“Don’t talk like that, Max,” I said, standing up. “No one is going to jail. Dani’s mother didn’t win anything. You made a horrible mistake, but you didn’t kill Rebekah. Everything you did was to protect Dani. You can’t save Rebekah, but you can save Dani. She needs you here, not in jail. Let me help you. Who else knows about that night? Who else have you told?”
“Nobody. I mean, Jonah drew up the fake adoption papers, but I told them Dani’s mother died of an overdose. Dani has pieces of the truth, as you know. She thinks that woman was my girlfriend, something we can’t disabuse her of. But last night she said she saw something in the greenhouse. And she knew to dig right there.”
I shut my eyes. Rebekah was dead, her body a few feet from where we were sitting. This was a fact. But I was no longer afraid of her, or of his past with Rebekah, or of my future with Dani. Nothing could hurt us. I felt a rush of manic purpose. I took his hands in mine, tugging on them for emphasis.
“Listen to me very carefully. Surrendering to the police won’t undo what happened, what Rebekah did, what Dani’s mother did, what you did. These things are in the past. Right now, today, is what matters. We have each other, we love each other, Dani will get well. I’ll do everything in my power to make sure she can put all of this behind her. But we have to do something about the . . . body. Today. Before the police do come back with a warrant and start poking around. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
&n
bsp; “Yes, I do. I thought the same, but I was afraid to say it. Out loud. It’s why I wanted you to go to Louisa’s. I thought perhaps I could take her out past the barn—”
“No. She can’t stay on the island.” I had never felt more right. A plan was falling into place, my plan, one that would save Dani, Max, and Asherley. “No. I say we . . . we take her out on a boat, on the Aquarama. It’s fast, small. It has that shallow aft.”
“Yes,” he said.
“It’s still cold,” I continued. “There won’t be many boats out on the water. We’ll head out past the bay—”
“No!” he said, throwing my hands off his. “Not ‘we.’ I’ve already implicated you with my confession. You will not be accomplice to anything worse.”
“Max, you can’t do it alone. You know that. You need my help. I’m strong. I’m not squeamish. I can drive. It’s a fussy boat and I know how—”
“No. I can handle it. This is something I have to do alone. I can’t involve you. I’d never forgive myself. I won’t budge on this.”
“I want to help.”
“You want to help? Where’s your phone?”
“Upstairs.”
“Fine.” He tapped in his password and gave me his. “Here’s what you can do. Call the rental company. Tell them to come get the chairs and tables tomorrow afternoon, not today. Then call Louisa. Tell her we’re coming to their house for dinner. This will stop her from checking in on us, plus if we take the boat to their house, it’ll explain why I was spotted out on the water today. Then call Eli. Find out if there are any updates about the warrant or if they’re just letting this go. Then call the rehab. See if Dani’s okay. Find out when she’s out of detox. Tell her doctor we’re not mad at her for calling the police. Find out when we can visit. But before you do any of that, bring me a warm sweater and something to . . . transfer the body into. A thick blanket or something. And some belts. Nothing monogrammed. These are the things you can do for me.”
The Winters Page 25