Rose thought back over the past few months, the long sessions in her office, their countless phone conversations, the endless cups of coffee they’d downed. And through it all, Rachel, with her two-fisted energy, her anger, fueling them both. Rose had come, reluctantly, to admire this woman she had considered her enemy. She had started wanting to help Rachel only as a way of getting to Brian. [459] But now, surprising herself, she wanted to help Rachel for her own sake.
She sat down opposite Rachel, calmer now. She would make Rachel talk to her, tell her everything about this creep Sloane and anything else she might have been concealing ... for both their sakes.
Rose took a deep breath.
“All right. Let’s assume he is lying. Why? What’s in it for him?”
“I don’t know.” Rachel’s voice, flat, dead, might have been a recorded message over the telephone.
But something in her face, a flicker of her eyelids, a muscle leaping in her clenched jaw, gave her away. She’s lying, Rose thought.
Rose leaned forward, palms flat against the table.
“Okay. Let’s try it another way. Why don’t you give me your version. Did you ever discuss Alma Saucedo with Dr. Sloane?”
“Yes.”
“Did he make a recommendation?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“He advised me to wait. He said there was probably more risk in inducing her labor prematurely.” She stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray with a jerky, impatient gesture. “I didn’t bring it up because there didn’t seem to be any point.”
“Do you think he’s protecting himself?” Rose asked. “Is that why he lied ... to cover his own ass?”
But Rose didn’t think so. Sloane was too smooth. Too deliberate.
“Maybe. How should I know? Look, is this really necessary? You know now. There isn’t anything else to tell.”
“I think there is.”
Rachel turned, ever so slowly, swiveling her head toward Rose with the small careful movements of an invalid. Her blue eyes squinted against the smoke that rose and spread in a hazy stratus.
I can see now why Brian fell in love with her, Rose thought. She’s as stubborn as he is. I’ll bet she fought like hell to save his life back in Vietnam.
“David Sloane would like to see me drawn and quartered,” Rachel said. “That’s why.”
“Any particular reason?”
[460] Rachel was silent.
Rose felt hot frustration welling up in her, spilling over.
“Dammit! Just what the hell kind of game are you playing here? How do you think it’s going to look when we go back in there and I make a fool of myself during cross-examination?”
“That’s the thing you really care about, isn’t it?” Rachel said, her voice rising. “Your reputation, how you’re going to look. What does it matter what happens to me?” Her eyes glittered with anger. “Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. I knew what I was getting into. Maybe that’s why I agreed to hire you. Tired of secrets. Tired of bumping around in the dark. I guess maybe what this really is about is—Brian.”
“I guess maybe it is,” Rose acknowledged softly, feeling strangely elated. Maybe now it would all come out. Was that what they’d both been after from the beginning? “I’ve always needed to know. Why he married you instead of me. Why he stopped loving me.”
“Are you so sure of that?” One side of Rachel’s mouth twisted down in a bitter smile.
“I’ve done my best on this case,” Rose said. “I want you to know that. Whatever I felt about you, I’ve done my best.”
“I know that. But now, tell me one thing. Are you still in love with Brian?”
Okay. She had asked it, finally. And with those words Rose felt some of the bitterness that had been acting on her like a slow poison all these years drain away.
“Yes,” she said.
Rachel blinked hard.
“I guess I knew that, too,” Rachel said quietly, her face frozen. “All right then. You’ve been honest with me. I’ll tell you about David Sloane. You might as well know. There’s a kind of justice in it, I can see that now. Because if I hadn’t lied to Brian in the first place, he might very well have married you instead.”
“I don’t understand.”
Rose felt as if the room had suddenly been tilted off balance. Dear God in heaven, what is she saying?
Rachel appeared calm, only her eyes glowed with a light so intense, so naked, it hurt to look into them. Rose felt slightly sick, shivery, as if she were coming down with a fever.
[461] “You will,” Rachel said softly. “When I explain. When I tell you how David Sloane and I murdered our child.”
Brian, she saw, was waiting. Rose spotted him in a banquette near the back, where the coats were hung. The bar was crowded, smoky. From a back room drifted the low, velvet lament of a saxophone. She waved to him, but he didn’t see her. He was staring into space, a nearly empty glass of beer on the table in front of him.
She inched past the noisy hedge of people crammed along the bar. The dense sour odor of beer hovered like a mist, and the faces reflected in the long mirror above the bar shimmered in the smoky air.
She felt guilty, almost like a criminal, as if everyone here knew, and they were staring at her, accusing her. And what if, in the end, Brian didn’t really want her after all? Each step sent a hot glassy sheet of terror through her. Her heart was thundering, drowning out the bar sounds.
Rose tossed her head back, clenching her jaw, reminding herself, I’m only taking what’s mine, what was always mine. Brian belongs to me.
So close now. After waiting so long.
Almost within reach.
It was the moment she’d been waiting for, praying for, dreaming of, for seven long years. And now it was here.
We’ll be together, she thought, just like we planned all those years ago. We’ll buy a house in some quiet neighborhood, maybe on Long Island or in Westchester. I know what he needs, a wife who will put him first, him ahead of everything and everyone. Then, in a year or two, a baby. Brian’s baby. Something I could give him.
The hazy bar, the raincoat she was wearing, and now the ripple of piano keys joining the crooning saxophone reminded her of her favorite old movie, Casablanca. Except for the ending—she had always hated the ending, the part where Bogie walks off into the mist, leaving Ingrid behind. No matter how many times she saw it, she always yearned for Bogie to take Bergman in his arms and tell her that nothing mattered more than their being together.
Well, now she would rewrite that ending, have it her way.
Rose took her coat off, and slid in across from him. Her throat [462] was so thick with emotion, she was afraid for a moment she wouldn’t be able to speak.
Then Brian looked up from his beer, his deep-gray eyes expectant.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t be here,” she said.
He looked surprised. “I told you I would.” He smiled. “Would you like something to drink? A beer? I’m afraid that’s about all this place has to offer. Their idea of a mixed drink is a boilermaker. I only chose it because it’s right around the corner.”
“It really doesn’t matter.” She felt a tiny stab of impatience. Did he think she cared where they were? “I don’t want anything to drink.”
He shrugged, finishing his beer in one swallow. She saw the long stubbled slide of his throat as he threw his head back. She wanted to touch him, hold him, kiss every part of him. How sad he seemed, older somehow than the last time she’d sat across from him at a table like this one, lines fanning out from the corners of his eyes.
“Brian ...” She reached out, felt his long fingers curl about hers, warm and slightly moist.
What will you say when I tell you? That your wife has been lying to you all these years? That she’ll never have your child? Will you come to me then?
“... I’m glad you’re here,” she finished. “I wanted to talk to you ... about something. About Rachel.”
Brian’s
shoulders sagged, and the light seemed to go out in his eyes.
“You know then.”
“What?”
He was silent a moment. Then, “She’s left me.”
Rose felt a wild joy filling her, expanding her. Brian was free, free. It was all so easy. Rachel had done it all for them.
“She left you? Did she say why?”
“She didn’t have to. It’s been coming a long time now. We ...” His throat worked, and tears stood in his eyes. “Look, I don’t want to dump all this on you. It’s got nothing to do with the trial. It started a while back ... I don’t know when or how. God, I wish I did.”
[463] Seeing the hopeless despair on Brian’s face, Rose felt her elation drain away.
She felt as if she were sinking. He’s upset because of the shock, she reassured herself. He’ll get over it. Someday, he’ll look back on this and see it as good fortune in disguise.
Especially once she told him the truth about Rachel.
“Brian, there’s something you should know ...” Rose broke off, suddenly unsure.
She was remembering the bravery of Rachel’s confession. If she’d cried, moaned in self-pity, telling Brian now would be easier. But all Rachel had asked was that she listen, not judge. With those naked blazing eyes of hers, she’d asked for understanding, not forgiveness.
Rose grew annoyed with herself.
Tell him now. This is your chance. Their marriage is over anyway. You didn’t have anything to do with that. You’re only taking what was yours in the first place.
But Brian wasn’t even paying attention, she realized. He was staring into space again, far away from anything she had to say. She wanted to snatch him by the collar, shake him, make him see her, be with her.
Then she sat back, a little shocked at herself. She had imagined drumrolls and violins, lightning bolts, glorious fireworks. And here they were ... in a crummy bar on Third Avenue ... drinking beer ... lost in their separate thoughts. Brian wanting consolation. She wanting promises of love.
We’re like—oh God, it hurt her just to think a thing like that might be possible—strangers. Can it be? Is it possible I’ve changed so much, that we’ve become such different people from those we were before the war?
Suddenly, as the music changed, she found herself thinking about Max. How empty the apartment seemed since he had moved out. How only last night she had reached out across the cold expanse of bed and he wasn’t there. How she missed the stupidest things, his razor and toothbrush on the bathroom sink, his papers scattered across the coffee table.
Oh God, what was wrong with her? Brian was all she wanted, all she had ever needed. And now was her chance.
[464] But something stopped her. Was it recognizing the loneliness in his face? Yes, she’d felt it too, that emptiness, like a deserted city street at four in the morning with the cold wind whipping. Oh, yes ...
I felt that way after Max left.
Then the words were spilling out of her. But not the things she had come here to say.
“I don’t want to play five-cent psychiatrist here or anything,” she began gently. “But I’ve seen this before ... whatever problems you might have been having ... a thing like this, a trial, your life laid open to a courtroom full of strangers ... it has a funny effect on people. On marriages. Don’t come to any conclusions right away, that’s all I’m saying. Give it time.”
“When will it be over, this damn trial?”
“A day or two more at the most, I’m hoping. I’ve asked Judge Weintraub for a recess until Monday. There are a few loose ends I need to check into.” Dr. Sloane, for instance. I have a feeling he’s not exactly kosher, over and above what Rachel has told me.
Brian hung his head for a moment, and when he lifted it, his eyes were rimmed with red. He smiled then, a gentle, sad smile.
Rose felt her heart break a little, and she remembered a time when he had grieved for her. Yes, that awful day when she was thirteen, playing the part of Mary Magdalene in the school’s Easter play. All those hateful boys throwing their papier-mâché stones straight at her breasts—her big cow breasts—smirking so only she, not the audience, could see. Oh, how humiliated she’d been! But she couldn’t let them know. And then, afterwards, there was Brian, finding her backstage, all the suffering she had felt written there in his face. His arms wrapping about her, folding her stiff, proud body into his embrace.
Looking at him now, Rose saw how little he had changed, really, that same compassion was undimmed. She stared at his hand on the table, his long fingers curled around his glass, a faint ink stain on his thumb, and she imagined him reaching for her, stroking her face.
“It’s like Vietnam,” Brian was saying. “You know why we lost the war? I’ll tell you. It had nothing to do with Tricky Dick. Or Kent State. Or the C.I.A. It was because we couldn’t see what we [465] were fighting. Not just Charlie. Not just the guys in black pajamas planting pongee sticks and claymores—what I’m talking about is not knowing what the hell we were supposed to be fighting for. The enemy wasn’t the Viet Cong after all, it was us. That’s what killed us. We didn’t know what we were fighting for, and it kept us running around in circles instead.
“And that’s what’s killing Rachel. Not knowing who the enemy is. The Saucedos? Di Fazio? I don’t think so. I think it’s her ... us. There’s something wrong with the two of us, something missing. I used to think it was the child we didn’t have, but now I know it’s more than that. We both need something we can hang on to. Something solid. But, Christ, it’s just not there anymore. It used to be. Maybe it still is ... somewhere ... and we’re just not looking hard enough.”
Or maybe you chose the wrong woman in the first place, Rose thought.
But the bitterness was less strong than it used to be. She felt something else mixed in with it now, something that rinsed through her, sweet and clear as a mountain spring.
Forgiveness.
I loved you, Brian. I loved you enough to die for you. But I couldn’t have saved you, not as Rachel did. And now I understand. How the winds of change can blow. How events can be bigger, stronger than we are. And even how you can love more than one person, each love with its own subtle shadings, one maybe stronger but not necessarily canceling out the other.
She had been chasing the proverbial rainbow. A part of Brian had loved her, and always would love her. Just as a grown person loves his happy memories of childhood. Barefoot summers and Orange Ne-Hi and a ten-cent ride on the subway to Coney Island. A love so poignant because, she sensed, there was no going back to it.
“I wonder how it would have turned out for us. If you’d married me instead,” Rose said. There was a time when she couldn’t have said those words, it would have hurt too much.
Brian smiled, some of the sadness lifting from his face. “We’d be making mistakes, just like everybody else. We’d be squabbling over who left the toothpaste uncapped, and which movie to go see. And, yeah, there’d probably be times when we’d wish we’d married other people.”
“But we’d have been happy.”
[466] “Yeah. Probably.” His hand tightened about hers, and his gaze met hers, clear and untroubled, for a brief moment. “But, Rose, we didn’t have a monopoly on happiness. You loved me partly because you felt so alone. And you were so damn proud. If you’d let others in ...”
“I didn’t want anyone else.”
“It’s tough, Rose, being the only one responsible for another person’s happiness. No one should ever be the only one.”
Tears stung her eyes, but she forced a smile. “You didn’t do so badly.”
He shook his head, looking pleased. “I never thought I’d hear you say that.”
“For a long time, I couldn’t have. It hurt too much, remembering those days. But I guess I’ve changed. We both have. I guess I’d rather remember the good things than throw them all out with the bad.” She cocked her head, remembering. “Do you still have that Saint Christopher’s medal I gave you?”
; “No, but it saved my life. In Nam.” Haltingly, he told her his version of the rescue Rose had read about in the newspapers.
“I’m glad you told me.” She withdrew her hand to brush the wetness from her eyes. “All those months, I felt so frustrated, not being able to reach you. In a way, this sort of evens the score.”
“What score?”
“Rachel and you. For years, I’ve been jealous as hell over the fact that she saved your life. It was something I would have done for you a hundred times over ... only I never got the chance.”
But you have the chance now, she told herself.
“Rose ... if it makes any difference,” he told her, haltingly, “I did love you. I ... I still do, in a way.”
“I know,” she said.
They exchanged a long, tender look. She understood exactly what he meant ... because she felt the same way. They loved who they’d each been, and who they might have been ... not who they were now.
“Do you love Rachel?” Rose asked, breaking the long silence.
“Yes. I’m not sure I knew how much until these past few days.”
He looked at her, and she saw nothing but honesty in those fine gray eyes that seemed to open straight off his heart. There had never been anything but honesty in Brian.
[467] I could tell him how she lied, I could bring him to his knees, but that isn’t what I want, is it? No, not anymore.
Rose sat back, marveling at how little pain she felt. She had come to the end with Brian, and there was only bittersweet nostalgia.
“Go after her,” she told him with sudden urgency. “If you really mean that, then go after her, tell her you love her no matter what she’s done, or will ever do.”
“As simple as that?”
“No. It’s never simple. I’m not saying that.” An image of Max filled her mind, free at last of Brian’s shadow. An image keen as a beautiful keepsake she had given away, not realizing its value.
Oh, Max, why didn’t I see?
“You have to try,” she finished lamely, unable to convey all that she was feeling.
“Rose, there’s something else ... I’ve hated myself for a long time for what happened with us.”
Garden of Lies Page 52