Dune Road

by Jane Green

  “I saw in the paper that Robert’s giving a talk tonight,” Edie says, opening Kit’s car door for her, as the children shout their hellos and run into the house to switch on the television set. “I have Pilates but I thought perhaps I could miss it for once.”

  “No! You’d miss Pilates? I thought you never missed Pilates.”

  “Well, I don’t,” Edie grumbles. “But this is special. It’s not often that Robert gives talks any more and I’d like to hear what he has to say.”

  “It’s such a shame, isn’t it, that he rarely does this these days? ”

  “I agree,” Edie says with a sigh. “I think the press gave him such a hard time after his wife died, he just decided to keep to himself. Can’t blame the poor man, really. Terrible thing to happen to him, and there he was, trying to recover from the tragedy, and then all those rumors started. I would have probably gone to live in South America.” She follows Kit into the house.

  Kit laughs. “And then everyone would have assumed you were guilty.”

  “True, but you’d be living in a lovely hot climate, sunning yourself on a tropical beach. Who cares what people might think? ”

  “Only you would think like that. Well, I’m going, and I’d love you to come with me. Adam, miraculously, said he’d come home early and take the kids, so he should be here at around quarter to seven, and then we could head over there.”

  “Lovely! ” Edie’s face lights up. “I’ll just go and get ready.”

  When Kit and Adam were first divorced, most of the time when Adam showed up to get the kids, or Kit drove over to his house to drop them off, it was like being with a stranger. There was something so familiar about him, and yet they were so stiff with one another, so awkward, she sometimes got out the wedding album and flicked through, just to check that she actually did marry him, that it wasn’t just a figment of her imagination.

  For a long time, Adam appeared to be furious with her, and during the divorce negotiations it was fair to say they pretty much hated one another, but as soon as the divorce was finalized it seemed they both started to heal.

  And now, a year on, there are times when Kit realizes they can be friends. Times too when she wonders whether things could have turned out differently, whether there was an opportunity they didn’t take, therapy perhaps, couples’ counseling, something that could have brought them back to one another before it was too late.

  She still remembers, so clearly, how she met him, on the Fourth of July in 1991, at a party in Concord.

  She noticed him as soon as he walked in, nudged her girlfriends and pointed out the cute stranger who had entered with a guy they’d all been at school with.

  “Hey,” Samantha, one of her bolder friends called over. “Who’s the new cutie? ”

  “This is my cousin Adam,” he said. “He’s from Connecticut.”

  “Hey, Adam from Connecticut,” Samantha said, all big eyes and flirtatious smiles. “I’m Samantha from Concord.”

  “Hey,” he said, then turned his gaze to Kit. “Who are you?”

  “Kit from Concord,” she said, and she blushed, looking away quickly so he wouldn’t see. He saw.

  The rest of the night passed in a blur of drinking, laughing and dancing. As did the rest of that summer. At twenty-three, Kit was mostly interested in having fun, and Adam made her laugh more than anyone she’d ever met.

  At the end of the summer he invited her to Connecticut to stay with him, and during her trip she rang her mother and told her where she was, and Ginny demanded they both come into the city and have lunch with her.

  She sent a car for them, and positively swooned when she met Adam. Kit tried to tell herself it didn’t matter, but now, all these years older and with the hindsight that comes with age, she realizes she phoned her mother because she wanted her approval, and Ginny quite clearly approved of this good-looking graduate of Harvard Business School who was evidently going to be a success.

  Could it have been that simple, Kit sometimes wonders. I married him to please my mother? She tries not to dwell on the answer.

  Almost immediately, once the partying and drinking stopped and they settled into being newlyweds, Kit had a horrible feeling that she had done the wrong thing. Sure, he still made her laugh, and sure, they still had fun, but now that the excitement of planning a wedding had passed, now that they were just getting on with life, they really didn’t have much to talk about at all, didn’t, in fact, seem to have anything in common.

  Adam was climbing the corporate ladder, and Kit was happy to just stay at home, more so when she found she was pregnant with Tory. She wasn’t interested in any kind of social climbing, had had quite enough of that with her mother, thank you very much, and much of the time when Kit said she couldn’t attend a function in the city—pregnancy was an extraordinarily useful excuse, particularly when she invented a morning sickness she didn’t actually have—Ginny turned out to be a wonderful and gracious partner for Adam.

  Everyone was happy.

  Except perhaps Kit. But she tried not to think about it. Tried to focus on all that was good, and who, after all, wouldn’t want what she had? A charming husband who all her friends adored, an impressive house, a beautiful daughter. How could she possibly expect more? What right did she have to feel there was something missing? How selfish to even dwell on that for a second.

  So she tried not to. Until it became too hard to ignore.

  Yet, post-divorce, and now that Adam is back out there in the dating scene, he has been friendlier, chattier, and there are even times when she looks at him and wonders what was wrong with her, that she couldn’t be happy when she was with him.

  She hears his car from the bedroom as she’s slipping on her shoes, and comes down the stairs yelling toward the kids, both holed up in Tory’s bedroom, watching something on the computer.

  “Tory! Buckley! Computer off. Get your stuff. Dad’s here.”

  “Hi.” Adam grins and raises an eyebrow as he looks her up and down, making her feel instantly self-conscious. “You look great. Got a hot date?”

  Despite herself, Kit laughs. She has made an effort tonight, it is true. Her light brown hair, now streaked with gold from the sun and a few strands of her natural gray, is silky on her shoulders, straight and shiny instead of her usual natural wave.

  A touch of eyeshadow brings out her blue eyes, and she is wearing a wrap dress that shows off her figure perfectly. At five foot eight, she has always been tall and rarely wears heels, far happier in her clogs and Merrell slides, but tonight she stands tall, feeling feminine and flirty, pretty in her dress-up clothes.

  “I’m off to a book reading.”

  “That’s it? You dressed like that for a book reading?”

  He has a point.

  “Oh God.” Kit groans. “Is it too much?”

  “Are you kidding? You look amazing. Nice dress.”

  “Thanks.” She twirls awkwardly, wondering if it is as strange for Adam to see her in unfamiliar clothes in her new environment, as it is for her to see him in his.

  When she drops the kids off, she can see into the house, all the furniture that used to be theirs, paintings they bought together, books she remembers from their bookshelf.

  She had always bought everything in the house, decorated herself, chosen the furnishings, Adam trusting her taste and style, leaving her in charge; so although she didn’t miss the things she saw in Adam’s house, they were familiar, they had her imprint on them.

  Then she started seeing new things. A rug, some cushions. Paintings. Things she not only didn’t buy, but things she would never have bought. Not her taste. And then his clothes. Unfamiliar shoes, jackets she hadn’t seen before—and that was perhaps the moment she realized he had moved on.

  This dress she is wearing tonight, a navy and white printed wrap dress, is new. One of the first things she did, after her divorce, was sort through her wardrobe and get rid of all the clothes she thought of as belonging to her previous incarnation as a rich house
wife.

  The little bouclé suits, the matching heels. The silk shirts and cashmere capes. It was a look that was far more her mother than her, and when she dropped them off at the consignment store, she felt the weight of trying to be someone she was not finally lift off her for good.

  Her mother was horrified. “Darling!” she said. “Who gets rid of Chanel?”

  “I do,” she said simply, knowing that her mother would never understand her daily uniform of Gap capris and Old Navy vests, although she has to admit, she has made an effort tonight, and not because of the possibility of meeting a man, but for her friends.

  Kit thinks of the few times that she, as a new singleton, Charlie and Tracy, plus a number of other girls from the yoga studio, have had nights out, and how she determined, at the first one, that she would never again be the frumpy friend.

  She had shown up, straight from work, at the Mexican restaurant on Main Street, expecting to have a quiet dinner with the girls.

  In jeans and an L.L.Bean shirt, she realized her mistake as soon as she walked in. This was a Girls’ Night Out, and these Girls were definitely making the most of it. Tracy, who has the best body of anyone she knows, was in a skin-tight aqua dress, high heels, her blonde hair tumbling in rollered curls down her back. Charlie was in a green and white print dress with flat jew eled sandals, and the other girls were in an assortment of cute dresses and tight jeans, with lots of makeup and jewelry.

  Frozen margaritas were being downed by the dozen, and when the lights were dimmed and the music was turned up, the girls were the first to grab the waiters and dance raucously on the tables, while the rest of the restaurant cheered and clapped, before joining in.

  Kit was self-conscious, at best. She had never been a big girls’ night out person, but she had to admit she had fun, once the margaritas had loosened her up a bit; and the next time they arranged a night, she went all out with a flippy pink mini-dress and sparkly eyeshadow.

  “That’s more like it!” Tracy had hugged her approvingly. “Now you look like one of the girls.”

  “As opposed to what?” Kit said, bemused. “One of the boys?”

  “I just meant you look gorgeous,” Tracy said, and Kit, who hadn’t ever managed to quit her search for approval from other women—thank you, Mother—had beamed.

  Kit shouts up the stairs to hurry the children as their father is waiting, giving Adam an apologetic shrug. He smiles in return, and they both stand there, awkward suddenly, waiting for the children to thunder down the stairs.

  “See you, Mom!” The kids whirl past her, not even stopping to give her a kiss good-bye.

  “Hey!” Adam roars. “Go back and give your mother a kiss.”

  “Sorry, Mom,” they say sheepishly, and she catches Adam’s eye as she straightens up from kissing Buckley and thanks him with her eyes. He nods, and for a minute she feels a pang of loss.

  Then his phone buzzes, and he quickly reads through a text, a small smile playing on his lips as he does so.

  She has heard through the grapevine that he is dating many women and she realizes this is from one of them.

  Oh screw him, she thinks. Saying good-bye, she goes to clean up the kitchen while she waits for Edie.

  Chapter Four

  Tracy is the first to arrive at the bookstore, and seeing no one there she knows, she heads over to the coffee bar and orders a mint tea while she waits.

  She has dressed carefully today. Not one of her usual skin-tight colorful dresses that show off her yoga-toned body to perfection, but something far more subdued. A white shirt tucked into jeans, and a big silver-buckled turquoise-studded western belt, suede ballet flats on her feet, her hair drawn back in a low, elegant ponytail, and glasses.

  She wasn’t sure about the glasses, put them on, took them off, put them on again. Was it too contrived, perhaps? Too Why, Miss Jones, I never realized you were so beautiful?

  She has worn contacts for years, was thinking about now investing in Lasik, except the thought of it terrified her, and she was so used to the contacts they never really bothered her. Wearing glasses has always made her feel like the nerdy schoolgirl she once was, long before she discovered the transformative effects of yoga, when her hair was dark and frizzy, and her thighs rubbed together when she walked.

  At the ripe old age of forty-one, Tracy has mastered the art of transformation, morphing into a serene, peaceful yogini now she is in Highfield, and finally away from the storm of her early life in California.

  Occasionally, Tracy will pull her pictures down from the attic of her house. She keeps them under lock and key, doesn’t want anyone to see who she was in any of her former lives, and even now she is stunned when she flicks through, studies the unhappy, chubby girl, the sullen teenager, the promiscuous twenty-something party girl and the wealthy, polished thirty-something housewife.

  She had never been frightened of forty, had always felt that forty would give her the greatest transformation yet, lead her into the best years of her life, and so far this has been partly true, although there are pieces of her past she is not able to shake, no matter how hard she tries.

  To look at her, you would never recognize her from the old photographs. True, there is something in the eyes that remains, a sadness perhaps, but almost everything else has changed. The dark untamed locks were finally tamed into a mass of tumbling curls in her twenties, when she also joined Weight Watchers, lost thirty pounds and discovered, for the first time, her power over men.

  A series of rich boyfriends, then Jed, the long and painful love of her life. He rang her doorbell one day, selling wholesale gourmet food out of the back of a van, and she was taken in by his good looks and the twinkle in his eye. Soon he had managed to charm his way into her kitchen, then into her life.

  He had been exactly her type. Tall, tanned, black hair and green eyes, and irresistibly confident, with a confidence that Tracy had always lacked, even though you would never know it, to look at her.

  He piled boxes of food into her freezer, then threw in more because, he said, she was so pretty. She guessed he said that to all the girls, but the next day he rang her doorbell again, and this time, instead of holding a box of crab claws, he held a bouquet of flowers.

  For a while, it was everything Tracy had ever dreamed about. He was loving, attentive, lavishing her with attention and presents. He adored her so much, he couldn’t bear for her to even talk to another man, and, in the beginning, she found it endearing to be loved so much.

  Until the night they had run into an old friend whom she had hugged—and Jed changed. He said nothing, gave her the silent treatment until they got home, and as soon as the front door closed, he screamed at her.

  She had humiliated him, he said, flirting with another man. How dare she, he spat, as she tried, in disbelief, to defend herself. He pushed her against the wall, hard, and she was so shocked, she told him to get out.

  He left, coming back two hours later, weeping and telling her he didn’t know what came over him and he would never lay a finger on her again.

  She should have left that night. Now, looking back, she thinks so often of how her life would have been different if she had left that night, but how did she know? How did she know what was to come as she sat on the sofa with this wreck of a man, who she knew she loved, weeping in her arms?

  The pushing happened again. And again. And more. So much more. Each time he swore it would never happen again, and as time went by she became too scared to leave, tried to keep her head down. He told her he was insecure because they weren’t married, so they got married, and things got worse. She was now his. His property. His to abuse as he pleased.

  Eventually, Jed started having affairs, and he left her, as she always hoped he would, for she knew she didn’t have the strength to leave him.

  She moved house, changed her name, got a new job working as a secretary for Richard Stonehill, who had a penchant for redheads, and a penchant for her.

  She became a sleek, glossy redhead, deeply
tanned (aided by an excellent self-tanning spray), with huge diamond studs in her ears and an even larger ring on her finger.

  It was easy to be a rich housewife, easier still to be married to one of the biggest movie executives in Hollywood. And it was fun, to go to all those parties, to have all those stars over for dinner, to call them friends, even though she knew the rules, knew that the friendship was entirely due to Richard’s power. As soon as they divorced she wasn’t surprised the friends all disappeared.

  The divorce was easy. Setting it up wasn’t quite so easy. Under California law, spouses are automatically entitled to fifty percent, but not when they have signed a watertight prenup.

  Luckily for Tracy, she knew about Richard’s secret before she married him. Hell, it was part of the reason he married her, for he believed she accepted him, loved him; she was able to dominate him like no one else, not even the mistresses he had paid over the years.

  She often felt like giggling, in her costume of black latex, as she and several others tied Richard up and smacked him until he was sore and red; and soon she began to find Richard rather ridiculous.

  She no longer needed saving from Jed, and she no longer needed Richard. The prenup she had signed was indeed watertight, but his reputation was not, and when Tracy decided the time had come for them to move on with their lives, all she had to do was produce some photographs she had taken over the course of some of their more . . . elaborate parties, and Richard was offering her whatever she wanted.

  His manager stepped in. Tried to tell Tracy he would ruin her, but Tracy had laughed and said she was only a housewife, what did she have to lose.

  In the end she got a settlement she was reasonably happy with, and a chance to reinvent herself. She grew her hair long and highlighted it blonde, let her skin tan in the sun, carried on learning more and more complicated yoga, Hatha, then Vinyasa, then finally Ashtanga, the yoga she had started all those years ago when she first moved to California.