The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  "You won't need a lawyer," one said. "We just need to ask you a few questions."

  "I don't think we've been introduced," Evan said to him, "formally."

  They took out their wallets and badges again and said, "NYPD"—only the letters this time—and Evan, in his lavender shorts and Boston Red Sox T-shirt, underwent a split-second transformation. "Why don't you gentlemen come in?" He extended his arm and led them through the foyer and into the big room. "Will you be comfortable here?" Upturned palm to the armchairs that overlooked the deck, the pond, the sky still bluer than robins' eggs.

  "This is fine," one of them said.

  "Yeah, fine," said the other, trying to pretend nonchalance.

  "Flossie, lie down. Right there." Master to dog, another minor power play, keeping her from their big feet, their highly polished black shoes.

  I looked around for Henderson and saw him through the open door in Evan's study, head down, talking on the phone with the island phone directory in front of him. He must have known to make himself scarce. As Evan knew to make himself into the maitre d', even though he had no idea why these men were here.

  "Can I get you a cup of coffee?" he said.

  "We don't want to take up much of your time. Why don't we just get started?"

  Evan held out his arm to me and pointed gracefully toward a third chair. I sat down and understood his ballet as a series of gestures to disarm the police, and understood that when confronted with loyalty to lawyering versus loyalty to his wife's desire that I leave—I had my eye on the clock, expecting to see an angry Mavis any minute—there was no contest as to which would prevail. Evan stood back with his arms crossed, affecting the most casual demeanor, as if he were waiting for a tennis court to free up. Every so often he'd scratch the side of his chin or use the fleshy part of his thumb to brush an imaginary crumb from his lower lip, something left over from breakfast. One of the cops—they were detectives, hence the suits—ran through the facts of Vicki's disappearance, and Evan pretended it was not the first time he had heard them.

  "Mr. Jacobs called us late last night and said he'd just learned the girl had visited you the day before in your apartment. Is that correct?"

  "Yes."

  "Had she ever done that before?"

  "No."

  "What was the reason for her visit?"

  "I don't think it's fair to ask Ms. Chase to interpret the motives of a child," Evan said. "Or anyone else's, for that matter."

  "Why did she say she was there?"

  It took me a moment to know how to answer, and in that silence the police must have imagined I was inventing or choosing among inventions or trying to conceal a truth that implicated me in her disappearance. "She invited me—" I started over: "She presented me with a card she had made expressing her desire that I live with her and her family."

  "What was your answer?"

  Again, I paused. I had no choice: the disparity between what I had felt and what was permissible for me to say to her was so vast, it made me nearly dizzy, then and now. "I said that her father's life and my life were too complicated for that right now."

  "Then what happened?"

  "I talked to her for a little while and took her back to her house in a cab."

  "We understand you saw her father later that day?"

  "Yes."

  "But you didn't tell him she'd come to your apartment."

  "I intended to."

  "But?"

  "The police called—the police here—and told me my husband was dead. We're separated. I came almost immediately, so I never had the chance to—"

  "Mr. Jacobs said that you didn't tell him because she'd asked you not to. Suggesting that you didn't intend to tell him."

  "She did ask me not to, because she was embarrassed."

  "About what?"

  "She was telling me—through this card she'd made—how much she cared about me, and I guess she was embarrassed that—"

  "I'm uncomfortable discussing what any of us guesses this child's feelings were at the time," Evan said with more delicacy than I'd have imagined.

  "All we want to do is find the child. Did you make any plans with her?"

  "No."

  "Did you promise her anything?"

  "No."

  "Did she tell you anything that would suggest where she might have run away to?"

  "She came to my apartment to see me. It occurred to me that after she found out I was here, she might also try to come to Swansea. But I imagine people's inner lives all the time—something of an occupational hazard—and I don't always get them right."

  "You are Mr. Jacobs's girlfriend?"

  Was I required to tell them that I was and that I wasn't, that I wanted to be and that I knew well enough not to want to be, but that I would marry him in a minute to have the children in my life? Was I required to tell the NYPD that I had never told Vicki that I loved her and now I wished I had? "I guess you'd say I'm his girlfriend."

  "You are having a sexual relationship with him, aren't you?"

  "I don't believe the details of Ms. Chase's private life are relevant to this matter," Evan said.

  "I am," I said. I wasn't sure the details were relevant either, but it was a relief, finally, to give a straightforward answer, one that was more true than any of the others. And answering it seemed a good-faith gesture, to let them know I was not evasive out of a desire to conceal; that all I wanted to hide was my vulnerability. "It is most definitely a sexual relationship."

  None of us said anything for ten or fifteen seconds. Then one of the detectives said, "So we have to assume the girl has some understanding of this surrogate-mother-type situation."

  Henderson suddenly appeared at the study door. "Excuse me, Sophy, you have a phone call. It's your mother."

  "Is it all right if I take this?" I asked as I raised myself from the chair. "I've been trying to reach her since I learned my husband was dead."

  "Of course," the men said in unison, "of course." I could hear the deference in their voices, even though my widow's weeds had a decidedly off-the-shoulder look. I closed the study door behind me and picked up the phone.

  "Sweetheart, there must be something wrong if you're back on Swansea in someone else's house and calling me this way," my mother said. "It's Will, isn't it?"

  She knew little of the life that the police knew all about, and had forgotten a lot of what I'd told her about the end of my marriage, so when I said, "Yes, he's dead," she felt my pain and her own without interference, without qualification or hesitation. She did not think of me as the widow manque, as I thought of myself, and she did not ask if that was good news or bad news, and did not try to entertain and distract me, as Henderson had done. She cried.

  I wish I could say that the purity of her response buoyed me or comforted me or touched me, but she was my mother, and those tears, echoing other tears I had heard her shed, flung me back to a time when there was no distance between us, just a porous membrane, and her pain flowed everywhere, coated me as if it were paint, body paint, although there was nothing light or playful about it. It had been house paint in my pores, and it had taken me years to remove.

  "It's difficult to get to Swansea," she said now, collecting herself, "and I'm just not sure I can—"

  "Mom, don't even think about it. It is too much of an ordeal."

  "But I don't want you to be alone at a time like this."

  "There are lots of people around. And Ginny and Susanna are here."

  "Who?"

  "Will's daughters. We're planning the funeral together."

  "Good. What was he?"

  "Catholic."

  "I thought so."

  "But lapsed."

  "It's coming back to me. I assume he was generous to you in his will. Was he, honey?"

  "We were in the middle of a divorce, so things are—a bit up in the air."

  "But you'll get the house, won't you?"

  "No, Mom. I told you before, I won't. His children have—"

&nbs
p; "What kind of divorce lawyer did you have? I don't think it's too much to expect that, after how many years of marriage?"

  "Someone here needs to use the phone. I'm at my friend Evan's."

  "Which one is Evan?"

  "He's on TV a lot. Defending the German girl who killed the baby in Boston."

  "A friend of yours is defending her? How did he get hooked up with her? Can't he choose the people he—"

  "Mom, I really need to go. I'll call you later today."

  As I set down this conversation, I see that it wasn't my mother directly who caused me to make the next connection, but my mother indirectly. The connection between what she did with my father when I was a child and what I was doing now with Will: chasing a phantom, someone who wasn't there; someone, in the case of my father, who had chosen to leave; someone, maybe, in the case of my husband, who had chosen to leave. It was the first time since all of this began that I understood I did not have to be doing what I was doing—sleuthing. And that sleuthing might be a substitute for what I should have been doing, and the same might have been true for my mother, when my father disappeared. Sleuthing instead of mourning.

  When I returned to the living room, the landscape had changed. Evan was gone, and Henderson was in my seat, but leaning forward, talking animatedly to the detectives, who had loosened up enough to look as if they were enjoying the sunshine, the island breeze, the good life of a defense lawyer whose work it is to unravel their own. '"They're all over New York,'" Henderson was repeating to the cops. '"Especially the universities. Especially Columbia.' But I don't think there's much support for that on the island, even among the summer people. Would you say there is, Sophy?"

  "Is what?"

  "A lot of anti-Semitism on the island?"

  "Only among the Jews. Where's Evan?"

  "On the phone in the kitchen. How did your mother take the news?"

  I didn't want to say any more than I had to in front of the police, but I did want to counteract the impression of myself as a not entirely sympathetic character. "She was devastated," I said quietly, turning to the two men, uncertain whether I should go on without Evan. They were not exactly Laurel and Hardy, though one was appreciably thinner than the other, one was dark and one was fair, and the dark one had coarse, wiry hair and the fair one was nearly bald. Both wore gold wedding bands and sports watches with a lot of buttons and options. "If there's anything I can do to find Vicki, I'll do it. I'll leave the island if there's somewhere you think I—"

  "You've got plenty to do right here, with your husband's—"

  "He has grown daughters who can handle everything." Of course what I had told my mother was a lie, that I was planning the funeral with them.

  "Excuse me," Evan said, coming to stand beside me. "I had to take that call. Is there anything more you need to go over with Ms. Chase?" For some reason, he was holding a purple plastic beach pail and shovel. Because Evan never did anything casually where legal matters were involved, I knew they were props.

  Dutifully, exactly as scripted, the detectives stood up. The dark-haired one said to me, "I think we're done. If we need to get a-hold of you—"

  Henderson interrupted. "She'll be at the Lighthouse Motel in Cummington for the next few days. Let me get you the number." He went back to Evan's study.

  "And if you need to reach us," the taller one said, handing me a card, "there's always someone at these numbers. Obviously, if you hear from her or if you have any ideas—"

  "Just out of curiosity," Evan said, "if she disappeared only—when was it, twenty-four hours ago?—how did you get involved so quickly? Isn't there a forty-eight-hour rule before you'll—"

  "The girl's mother has some connection to the mayor. And naturally, the girl's father ... We were asked to expedite it. Unusual set of circumstances."

  "Of course," Evan said knowingly, nodding, the purple pail pressed against his hip and no idea who the parents were.

  When they left, I headed to the kitchen for more caffeine before going upstairs to pack. Evan followed me. "Who the hell are you dating, Donald Trump?"

  "Daniel Jacobs." I found a jar of instant coffee in the cabinet, next to a prescription bottle of Mavis's Klonopin. Take one as needed for anxiety. One way to start the day: coffee and a tranquilizer.

  "Refresh my memory."

  "He's an art dealer."

  "Divorced, I trust?"

  "She's hospitalized."

  "I hope for more than a day or two."

  "She's in a nursing home, in a coma. Before that, she ran a literacy program for poor kids. I guess that's her connection to the mayor." Forty-eight hours ago, before the bottom dropped out of the great mad joy market, Blair was a comedy routine in my exotic new life. Now her story was leached of whatever ghoulish hilarity I had invested in it; now it was as sad to me as it must always, always have been to Daniel.

  I turned on the gas under the kettle and looked at Evan across the counter, Evan on his summer vacation, getting sunburned on his extremities, wheeling and dealing in his living room with his sons purple pail. "Thank you for helping me out with the cops. With everything. I'm not usually the man who came to dinner. And thanks for the offer of the chicken coop, but we've made other plans." I tapped a teaspoonful of coffee into a beautiful glazed mug, a palette of rich, complicated blues that bled into and out of each other like pieces of the Swansea sky. "There are already enough secrets to go around. More than enough."

  "If you had nowhere else to go, that's all."

  "Thanks."

  The kettle whistled. Things inside me thumped and rattled and hurt. I was still hung over, and people and animals were dead, missing, unaccounted for. I seemed to have had the effect of a tornado, a twister, strewing wreckage everywhere in my path, in all the places I had visited and lived and left. Or was I simply choosing to organize events this way, placing myself at the center of them, conferring on myself a power I did not have?

  When the phone on the kitchen wall rang, Evan answered and was engrossed in seconds. Had the twenty-five-year-old changed her mind again? But wouldn't she have used the phone number for the study? How many lines did they have and which belonged to whom? I didn't need to wonder anymore. I needed to make my exit. I went upstairs with the instant coffee in the beautiful mug and began to pack. Henderson stuck his head in and said he had called a cab; it should be here any minute. Then he was gone.

  As I packed, I remembered a ride in a car with Will years ago—remembered it in the present tense, as I would a dream a few moments after dreaming it, pieces drifting back out of sequence, rearranging themselves, like a skein of geese flying into formation. It is the fifth or sixth month of our romance, and we're driving from his apartment in Georgetown to mine in Manhattan. As we cross the Delaware Memorial Bridge, he says he has something to tell me: he doesn't work for the State Department. Just ahead is a station wagon, a German shepherd in the back looking out at us; something both comic and menacing about this sudden surveillance. I even think that word, "surveillance," about the dog, because as soon as Will says this, I know what he'll say next. The State Department is his cover. He works for the CIA. He isn't supposed to tell me and he doesn't want me to tell anyone else, but he thinks I should know, given the intensity of the feeling between us. In any case, he's leaving the Agency soon, early retirement, the instant he can, next month, and it will all be behind him, though it must still be kept secret.

  "I have to lie too?" I ask. "I have to tell people you worked one place, though the truth is something else?"

  "That's what people do. That's the way it works. It's only for another month. After that—"

  I hear him stop in the middle of the sentence and see him, although my eyes are still on the dog, swivel his head toward me for a few seconds. "I don't have to tell you any of this," he says. "And maybe I'm making a mistake doing it. But I think it's fair, because I love you, to tell you the truth."

  He can feel my dismay, the amplification in my silence. It has a lot of bass and treble and pr
ompts him to say, "Do you mean your love is contingent on where I work? You fell in love with me because of my job?"

  I shake my head and say, "Of course not," but that's not what I'm thinking. I'm thinking: I fell in love with you because of your grief. Because it is so thick and complicated, it makes me forget my own.

  Now, at Evan's, I zipped the canvas bag that I'd packed two days earlier in New York, that distant evening as Daniel dressed and Vicki and her siblings waited for us in the house on Waverly Street that had since become a police stake-out. Where do you look for a missing child? Who do you call? Where do you begin to begin? At the bottom of the stairs, I stepped over sleeping Flossie, whose shiny black coat brought to mind a seal prostrate on a rock. She emitted a brief, high-pitched squeal, and her front paws clenched, then fluttered—dreams of chasing squirrels. Sweet dreams.

  "Sophy—" It was Evan at the kitchen door, at the other end of the great sunny room; I felt as if I were looking down a lane in a bowling alley. "Your stepdaughter's on the phone. Why don't you take it in here?"

  10. Later the Same Day

  I HAD NO IDEA how much Ginny knew about my behavior the night before. News on the island traveled at lightning speed, but there were different laws of physics and etiquette at work in that family. My uncertainty made my hello a bit wobbly, as if this were a call from a collection agency, and that made her hesitate. "Soph, is that you?"

  "Yeah, how are you this morning?"

  "Oh, God, I went to our house, it was awful, I was so—"

  "Are you there now?"

  "No, I couldn't stand it. I came over to talk to Ben and Emily—that's where I am now—and Ginny said I should call you about—"

  "Isn't this Ginny?"

  "It's Susanna."

  "Oh, Boo-kins," I said without thinking, using one of Will's childhood names for her, before I remembered that she didn't like it, "it's you."

  Have I mentioned that Susanna was my favorite? Of course not. I've always worked to push it out of my thoughts, my vocabulary, such an uncharitable formulation, even for a stepmother who arrived late in their lives. Instead, I've stuck to the facts. Susanna's looks and voice, identical with her sister's, though not her temperament. When Ginny was hurt or angry, she snarled and sometimes pounced. Susanna grew silent; she withdrew, did not return phone calls, moved to the side of a mountain beyond the grid, outside the reach of Pacific Bell. But now, no doubt at my "Boo-kins," and its reminder of her father, Susanna came undone, as Ginny had a day ago at the airport. I winced and said what I could in the way of comfort. I, too, felt the blow of Will's death again, but through the filter of Vicki's disappearance, it felt less urgent. So when Susanna said what she said next—"Will you come over now?"—I did not feel, as I would have earlier, that I had to go right away.