Ben is always complaining about the monthly get-togethers at the hospital, when he and his nurses answer questions from pregnant women who are considering bringing their future newborns to his practice.
“Yeah. I get sick of answering the same questions over and over,” Ben says, tucking his beeper into his pocket.
“Really? You should try spending a day with your daughter,” Rachel says with a grin. “By the way, I won’t be home till late tonight either.”
“No? What’s up?”
“I’m having dinner with Allen,” she tells him easily.
She can’t use Tasha or Karen as the excuse—too easy for Ben to run into one of them. Allen is one of her gay friends who lives in the city. He’s a leftover from her pre-Ben days as a fashion stylist for Saks—and he happens to be in Tuscany for a few weeks on a shoot.
Ben raises an eyebrow. “What about Mrs. Tuccelli?”
“What about her?”
“I thought you fired her last night. Who’s going to watch the kids?”
“That boy from down the street,” Rachel tells him.
“What boy from down the street?”
“The one who’s staying with the Gallaghers. Their nephew.”
“Oh. You know him?”
“He’s a nice kid,” she says with a shrug. “And if he needs anything, his aunt and uncle are right down the street.” Well, his aunt will be.
“Have you seen my keys?” Ben asks, distracted, patting the pocket of his trench coat
“Nope.”
“Must be in my other coat.” He opens the closet again and reaches for his black trenchcoat.
Rachel tiptoes up and gives him a kiss on the cheek. “Have a good day, Ben. I’m going to go have some coffee and read the paper.”
“Did they find that Kendall woman yet?”
She shakes her head. “Not according to the headline. What do you think happened to her?”
“Nothing good. Here they are.” Waving his keys, he closes the closet door and picks up his bag. “I’ll call you later. Give the kids a kiss for me.”
“Aren’t you going to do it yourself?”
“I did. They didn’t notice. They’re all wrapped up in Sesame Street. I think they’re watching too much TV, Rach.”
She shrugs. “There are worse things that could happen to them, Ben. See you tonight.”
“You’ll probably beat me home. I’ve got some HMO paperwork to catch up on after the meeting. Have fun.”
“I will,” she tells him, smiling to herself as he walks out the door.
Mitch stands at the bottom of a tree with a big gun aimed at Robbie Sussman, who is whimpering and clinging to a branch overhead. Mitch is just centering Robbie’s dumb, tear-stained face in the sight when a shrill siren shatters everything.
Run! It’s the police, he thinks in the split second before he realizes that it’s not a siren after all, but the bleating of the alarm clock, and that the whole thing with Robbie was just a dream.
Oh.
Mitch fumbles for it on the end table beside the couch, his fingers finally making contact with the snooze button.
There. Silence.
After a moment, he realizes that the place is too silent.
Where’s Mom?
He opens his eyes. The first thing he sees is a folded note on the coffee table, which has been pushed away to make room for the pullout bed.
He knows what it says before he sits up and reads it. Sure enough . . .
Mitch, I had to leave early again to cover this story. Eat breakfast. Don’t be late for school! Love, Mom
Good. When she’s here in the morning, she nags him to hurry. Today he can have a few extra minutes to lie in bed. He sinks back against the pillow and thinks about his father. If he lived with Dad, he would never have the house to himself. Shawna would always be hovering around, trying to take care of him.
Sometimes he likes the way she tries to act like a mother. She makes him cookies from one of those Pillsbury mixes—not from scratch the way Blake’s mother does, but they’re still pretty good. She buys him little presents—mostly stuff to wear, though.
And she tries to hug him. That, he doesn’t like. Maybe because the person he wishes would hug him is his dad. And his dad never has.
Plus, he knows how much it would upset his mom if she thought Shawna was going around hugging him, acting like she’s his mother. She’s not supposed to hug him, or tell him to eat his vegetables, or make sure he washes behind his ears. That’s the kind of stuff only a mom is allowed to do.
If Mitch lived with Dad and Shawna right now, Shawna would probably be standing over him, telling him to hurry up and get out of bed so he won’t be late for school.
Yeah, so . . .
Thank God he doesn’t live with Dad and Shawna.
Mitch rolls over and closes his eyes again.
Fletch steps from the steamy master bathroom back to the bedroom, a towel wrapped low around his lean waist. He catches sight of his reflection in a cheval mirror across the room and admires his bulging biceps and washboard stomach. Later he’ll hit the gym. He was hoping to play golf this morning, but it’s too late now. He slept past his usual tee time at the country club.
Yawning, he crosses the room to the built-in bureau, glancing at the rumpled bed as he passes. Sharon is there, asleep, her mouth slightly open. She’s been sleeping in that position since he came home last night, and he wasn’t thrilled to find her already in their bed. He likes to have it all to himself these days, and often does.
He stares at his wife, noting the weighty tousle of blond hair on the pillowcase, the unnaturally tanned skin against the white bed linen, the skinny black strap of her silk teddy that has slipped down over her exposed shoulder. She has drawers full of lingerie like that, he knows. He used to be impressed by her sexy sleepwear. But that wore off years ago.
She’s so motionless. . . .
She looks like she’s dead, he notes without the humor that accompanied that particular observation in the past.
When they first met, she informed him that nothing could rouse her from a deep sleep, and Fletch soon discovered she was right. He could talk to her, turn on lights, raise the volume on the television, even shake her, and still she slept as soundly as a corpse. Always had. Still does, unless she’s faking.
But why would she do that?
To avoid talking to me?
Maybe. After all, he’s done his share of playing dead in bed for that same reason.
Well, he couldn’t care less whether she’s actually asleep at the moment or is faking it. He rubs his tense shoulders and reaches for a pair of sweats, anxious to get to the gym and pound out some of this aching tension in a kick-boxing class.
Margaret emerges from the third-floor guest room dressed in gray slacks, a white silk blouse, and a navy blazer. Her hair is pulled back neatly and tied at her neck. She’s wearing the perfect string of pearls her father bought her for her fifteenth birthday.
“You’re my beautiful girl,” he said that morning, fastening them around her neck.
Beautiful. In her whole life, only Daddy ever called her that. Only Daddy ever complimented her and seemed to mean it.
She never heard him call Jane beautiful. He probably did; she has no doubt that her father adored her sister. Who didn’t? But he was the only person who was ever sensitive to Margaret’s plight as Jane’s sister. He didn’t compare them; didn’t make Margaret feel inferior—something that had been second nature to Mother.
Mother.
Having descended the stairway to the second floor, Margaret passes the closed door of the other guest room, the bigger one with the adjoining bathroom. Naturally, her mother is staying there, having requested, after her arrival last night, that Margaret move her things to the third floor. She blamed it on her arthritis, saying i
t’s too difficult to climb all those stairs, but Margaret knows that’s merely an excuse. Her mother simply isn’t willing to settle for second-best. She wants the better guest room.
The better daughter.
Mother wants Jane. She hasn’t come right out and admitted it, but Margaret knows what she’s thinking. That the wrong daughter has disappeared. That Margaret should have been the one to go missing.
Not Jane.
Margaret clenches her hands into fists at her sides as she walks down the second-floor corridor, heading for the next flight of steps.
Not perfect Jane with her perfect house and perfect daughter and perfect husband.
The thought of Owen calms Margaret enough so that she relaxes her hands, realizing that her fingernails have been digging painfully into her palms.
She passes the nursery and pauses in the open doorway, looking in at Schuyler’s cheerful yellow-and-white room. The curtains are still drawn, but the crib is vacant. Margaret thought that if she stayed in the second-floor guest room, she would be able to hear Schuyler when she woke.
Way upstairs, she hasn’t been in earshot of the baby’s cries. Did Mother tend to Jane’s daughter, or was it Owen? Or perhaps Minerva, who said she would be back early this morning?
Margaret simmers with frustration. She had planned to be the one who came to calm the little girl in the night. She had intended to be the one who picked her up when she cried out this morning, to cuddle her and dress her and feed her.
She turns away from the nursery and continues along the silent hallway.
The door to the master bedroom is ajar. She wonders, did Owen even make it to bed last night?
When he returned from the press conference, he went straight to his study and closed the door. Mother had already been in bed by then, exhausted from her trip. But Margaret waited up, wanting to be there for Owen if he needed her. He didn’t even see her sitting in the living room when he passed, nor did he hear her calling to him as he went to his study.
Now, back on the ground floor, Margaret walks slowly to the study and finds the door closed, just as it was last night.
She does what she hadn’t found the courage to do then, knocking softly.
No reply.
Tapping a bit harder, she calls, “Owen? Are you in here?”
Still no reply.
After a moment’s hesitation, she reaches out and gingerly turns the knob, half-expecting to find the door locked. It isn’t.
She opens it halfway and pokes her head inside.
The desk lamp is on.
Owen is seated there, his head buried in his arms. For an instant Margaret thinks he’s asleep.
Then she sees his shoulders heave and hears a slight sound: his muffled sobbing.
She urgently wants to go to him, to gather him into her arms and cradle his head against her breast. She longs to comfort him; to be the one who takes his pain away.
Poised in the doorway, she watches him. Then, gathering her courage, she puts one sensible navy blue flat over the threshold.
There’s a sound behind her, a footstep, and then a soft gasp.
“Owen! You poor thing! Are you crying?”
Bess swoops past Margaret into the room. She hurries over to the desk and puts her arms around her son-in-law. “I know just how you feel, Owen,” she sobs. “Oh, God, I know, I know. . . .”
Owen lifts his head, his face a mask of anguish. “This is a nightmare, Bess,” he chokes out, his voice raw. “What am I going to do?”
For a moment, Margaret watches, incredulous, as her brother-in-law cries in her mother’s arms.
Then she spins on her heel and storms away, fury churning with the pain in her gut.
Tasha raises the shade on the bedroom window facing the street just in time to see Ben Leiberman pulling out of the driveway in his black BMW. That reminds her—she should call his office today and schedule Max for his first-year checkup next month.
As if he’s aware she’s thinking of him, Max babbles loudly on the floor behind her. She turns, sees that he’s chewing on one of Joel’s loafers, and scoops him up.
“Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba? Is that what you said, Maxie? What does that mean? Oh, wait, I know. It means, how about some real breakfast instead of this yucky leather?” She pries the shoe out of his hands. He screams in protest when she tosses it in the general direction of the closet. “No, Max, that’s disgusting.”
She struggles to hang on to his squirming little body as she raises the shades on the other windows. Then she eyes the rumpled bed. If she puts Max down now so that she can make it, he’ll get into something else. She sighs. She’ll leave the bed for later.
Right now she has to go down and find the washing machine booklet so that she can check out the troubleshooting chart. She can’t go another day without doing the laundry.
“Bye, guys,” Joel’s voice calls up from the front hall downstairs, over the distant strains of the closing music to Sesame Street, which Hunter is watching down in the family room.
Tasha hasn’t spoken to Joel all morning. After a restless night, she got up and took a shower before the alarm. When she came out, Max was crying in his crib. She was changing him while Joel showered and feeding him downstairs while Joel got dressed. By the time he was heading downstairs to make coffee, Tasha was trying to drag a sleepy Hunter out of bed. Meanwhile, of course, Victoria had bounded awake and instantly into action, causing one disruption after another as Tasha tried to help Hunter get dressed and find something to bring for show-and-tell.
Tasha decides to ignore his casual “Bye, guys,” irritated that he’s apparently going to act as though nothing happened between them last night. How typical of Joel. Anything to avoid an argument.
“Wait, Daddy!”
Uh-oh. Tasha hears running footsteps in the hall. It’s Victoria, who has been ordered to play with her Kelly Doll in her room while Tasha combs her still-damp hair and throws on the same pair of jeans she wore yesterday.
“Daddy! Wait! Don’t go! I want a kiss!”
“Careful on the stairs, Victoria!” Tasha rushes out of the bedroom just in time to see Victoria almost pitch forward on the top step. Her chubby little hand grabs the banister just in time and she steadies herself.
Tasha’s eyes meet Joel’s. He’s at the bottom of the steps, looking up.
For a split second, they exchange a glance of mutual parental relief that Victoria wasn’t hurt. Then Joel’s gaze flits away.
“Come on down, Tori,” he says, arms outstretched.
“Joel, come up and get her. She’s not supposed to go down the steps herself.”
“She’s fine. Come on, Tori, Daddy’s going to miss his train.”
“No, Victoria, don’t rush,” Tasha says, juggling the baby to her other hip and catching up with her daughter midway down the flight. She reaches down to take Victoria’s hand. “Hold on to Mommy, sweetheart. Careful. Slow down.”
Joel looks at his watch.
The gesture says it all.
Renewed anger sparks in Tasha.
“Just go, Joel,” she snaps.
He looks up in surprise.
“I know you’re in a hurry, so go.”
“Mommy, no! I want to kiss Daddy!” Victoria protests, wrenching her hand out of Tasha’s grasp. She launches herself forward and her foot misses a step.
Joel reaches out and catches her.
For a minute, there is silence.
“Don’t ever do that again, Tori,” Joel says, holding her close in his arms. “Mommy’s right. You can get hurt on the stairs.”
“I wanted to hug you, Daddy. I never get to see you anymore.”
Tasha waits to see a flicker of guilt in his face. It’s there, but not for long.
“I know, Tori,” Joel says. “But Daddy’s very busy at work lately. I’d be here if I c
ould. You know that.”
Would you? Tasha wonders, watching him plant a kiss on his daughter’s cheek.
“Bye, Max,” he says, reaching up to pat the baby’s head.
Again his gaze meets Tasha’s. She thinks fleetingly of the old days, when he used to kiss her every time he walked out of—or into—the house.
“I already told Hunter good-bye. He’s watching Sesame Street.”
She nods.
“I’ll see you tonight.”
“Okay.”
He turns to go.
“Joel,” Tasha says, remembering something.
“Yeah?” He doesn’t turn to face her again.
“Your mother called yesterday. Your parents are coming over on Saturday,” she tells his back.
“Okay,” is all he says before he walks out the front door, closing it firmly behind him.
Tasha glares after him.
“Mommy!” Hunter’s voice calls from the next room. Hearing him, Victoria takes off in that direction.
Tasha follows, with Max balanced on her hip. “What’s wrong, Hunter?”
“This stupid lady has been talking for hours!”
He gestures at the television set, where a smiling PBS woman is soliciting pledges for their fund-raising drive. Tasha hates when they do this. Instead of a minute or two in between programs, there’s a big break—long enough for the kids to lose interest and drift away.
What kind of mother are you? she asks herself, realizing what she’s thinking. She never wanted to be one of those people who rely on their TV to keep their kids occupied. But today she just doesn’t have the patience to deal with them. All she wants is for them to be distracted so she can sort through her thoughts.
“Mommy! I don’t want to watch this lady,” Victoria says shrilly. “I want to watch The Big Comfy Couch! Put it on!”
“I can’t put it on, Victoria. It’s not a video. I can’t just make it appear. You’ll have to wait.”
“I want The Big Comfy Couch to be on now!”
“Believe me, so do I,” Tasha tells her.
The phone rings.
Ignoring Victoria’s whining, Tasha plunks Max into his Exersaucer and grabs the receiver.
“What are you doing?” Rachel asks.
The Last to Know Page 14