Mad River Road

by Joy Fielding

  “So you think I should call Jeff Dawson, tell him I’ve changed my mind?”

  “Have you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t have a sitter,” Lily said in the next breath. “And it’s a Saturday night.”

  “So bring Michael over to my place,” Emma heard herself offer.

  Lily glanced toward Michael’s bedroom. “I couldn’t do that.”

  “Why not? I’m home anyway. The boys can have a sleepover. I’m sure Dylan would be thrilled.” Would he? Emma wondered. Would her son be thrilled about such a disruption to his nighttime routine? “They can sleep in my bed. They’ll have a blast.” Would they? Would they have a blast? Or would it be an unmitigated disaster?

  “Can I think about it?” Lily asked, borrowing Emma’s earlier question. “I mean, Michael was an angel tonight, but he can be a bit of a handful.”

  “Not to mention Detective Dawson.”

  The sound of dogs barking cut through the ensuing silence. Both Emma and Lily looked toward the sound, saw Anne and Carole leaving their house, their two overweight schnauzers straining on their leashes, pulling them down the street.

  “Who’s taking who for a walk?” Lily called after them as the dogs pulled them past her house, only to stop abruptly at the next lamppost. First one dog lifted his leg to mark his territory, then the other, then the first again.

  “Men,” Anne said with a laugh as the two women linked arms and continued on down the street.

  “You ever been hit on by a woman?” Emma asked.

  “What?” Lily’s eyes widened.

  “I was,” Emma continued. “Long time ago. One of the teachers at this private school I went to.”

  “My God. What happened?”

  “I was thirteen, maybe fourteen. Just starting to fill out. More than a little self-conscious about it. And there was this gym teacher, Mrs. Gallagher, who everybody loved. She had long, shiny, blond hair that she used to let all the girls brush. I mean, can you imagine? We actually thought it was some kind of honor to brush this woman’s greasy hair. And one day, that honor fell to me. And so I’m standing behind her, brushing away. My arm feels like it’s about to fall off, but I keep brushing, and she tells me I do it better than any of the other girls, that I have a real feel for it, which of course makes me brush even harder, and she asks me to come back at the end of the day. So I did. Only instead of me brushing her hair, she starts to brush mine. And I have to admit, it feels great. And she’s telling me I have this fabulous hair, so soft and pretty. And then suddenly I feel something brush against my neck, only I know it’s not the brush.”

  “She kissed you?”

  Emma nodded, raised one eyebrow, folded one lip inside the other.

  “What’d you do?”

  “Nothing. I was terrified. I just sat there. And she’s saying stuff like, ‘Does that feel good? Do you like that?’ And then suddenly, I just bolted off that chair and ran. Didn’t stop running until I got home.”

  “Did you tell anyone?”

  “I told my mother. She was the school principal.”

  “And? Did she fire her?”

  “She didn’t believe me, said I was making the whole thing up to get attention.”

  Lily looked horrified. “How awful for you.”

  Emma shrugged.

  “You’ve had a very interesting life,” Lily remarked after a pause of several seconds.

  “A little too interesting at times.” Emma finished the last of her coffee, pushed herself to her feet. She handed the Scully’s mug to Lily. “I guess I should be getting home.”

  “I’m really glad you came tonight.”

  “Me too. Let me know what you decide about tomorrow.” Emma walked down the steps, waved good-bye from the sidewalk. “I had a wonderful time,” she called back, forcing one reluctant foot in front of the other. When she reached her house, she turned back, but Lily was no longer standing on her front steps. She probably shouldn’t have told Lily her mother was a school principal, she thought, unlocking the front door and tiptoeing inside. Was she afraid that Lily wouldn’t like her if she knew the truth? That was silly. Lily wasn’t like the girls she’d grown up with. She wouldn’t think any less of her if she found out her mother had been part of the custodial staff.

  And did one more lie really matter all that much, when she’d told so many lies already?

  Emma checked Dylan’s room and saw he was sleeping soundly. If only I could sleep like that, she thought enviously as she undressed and climbed into bed.

  She closed her eyes and waited for the demons.

  ELEVEN

  In the few minutes of twilight between sleeping and waking, Jamie relived the almost two years of hell that had been her life with Mark Dennison. It began, fittingly enough, on their wedding night, when a series of frantic phone calls from the groom’s mother repeatedly interrupted their attempts to consummate their marriage.

  “How could you do this?” Jamie heard her new mother-in-law wail through the phone wires. “How could you marry a girl you just met, a girl you know absolutely nothing about?”

  Jamie waited to hear her new husband say “I know everything I need to know. I know I love her.” But instead what she heard were a string of abject apologies—for the rashness of his decision, the unnecessary speed of his elopement, the stunning disregard for his mother’s feelings—and his assurances that he and his new wife had no intention of settling in Palm Beach, that they’d abandon their plans for a honeymoon in the Bahamas and fly to Atlanta first thing in the morning in order to reassure her. Jamie even heard herself trying to console her new mother-in-law by offering to let her tag along when they went apartment hunting, telling the clearly distraught woman that she welcomed her input and was looking forward to being part of such a close-knit, loving family. What she heard in return was the stony silence of a phone going dead in her ear.

  Needless to say, their lovemaking that night had been a disaster, her husband unable to sustain an erection, no matter what she tried. “Where’d you learn that little trick?” he’d demanded, angrily pushing her away. “Your college boyfriends teach you that?”

  That was the first time she thought of leaving. Pack your bag and walk out the door, she remembered thinking as she huddled on the other side of the bed. Swallow your pride and go back home to Mama. It’s been less than twenty-four hours. You can get an annulment, go back to law school, reenroll for the spring term. Just get out of this mess you’ve gotten yourself into, and get out now.

  Except how could she leave him when he was so vulnerable, when he was literally crying for her to stay, apologizing to her over and over again for the awful things he’d said? He was upset, confused. He hadn’t meant any of it. Surely she knew that. Please understand, he’d begged. If she would only be patient, give him another chance. His mother had had a hard life, he explained. She’d been widowed when she was only thirty-six, and he’d become her sole source of comfort, the one she turned to and relied on, the only thing that kept her going, allowed her to get out of bed in the morning. At the tender age of eight, he’d become her little man. For the last two decades, it had been just the two of them. Naturally it was going to be hard for her to accept a virtual stranger into their lives. If Jamie could just be patient …

  Jamie agreed to try. He was right after all. His mother was just upset because of the suddenness of their union. It had nothing to do with her. She shouldn’t take it personally. Hadn’t her own mother been almost apoplectic when Jamie announced her intention to marry a man she’d known barely two weeks?

  “Mom, this is Jamie. Jamie, this is my mother, Laura Dennison,” her new husband said, proudly introducing the two women in his life to each other.

  Jamie was surprised at how small her mother-in-law actually was. Despite her towering voice on the telephone, in person she measured a scant five feet two inches tall and couldn’t have weighed more than 100 pounds. At almost five feet seven and 120 pounds, Jamie loomed over her like a large building. What
was I so afraid of? she wondered, extending her arms magnanimously toward the woman with the short auburn hair and cold blue eyes.

  “You don’t look anything like I pictured,” her mother-in-law said, stiffening inside Jamie’s embrace.

  “It’s great to finally meet you,” Jamie ventured, pulling back. “Can I call you Laura?”

  “I’d prefer Mrs. Dennison,” came the chilling reply.

  “You just went a little too fast,” her husband advised as they were settling into his old bedroom. “My mother has never been overly demonstrative.”

  “She hates me.”

  “She doesn’t hate you.”

  “ ‘I’d prefer Mrs. Dennison,’ ” Jamie repeated in her mother-in-law’s steely voice.

  “Give her time,” her husband urged. “She’s still a little shell-shocked. Just take it nice and slow. Have a little patience.”

  “I’m going as slow as I can,” Jamie said with a mischievous smile, her arms reaching out to encircle her husband’s waist, her hands dropping to his buttocks, pulling him closer.

  “This probably isn’t a good idea.” He pointed with his chin toward the closed bedroom door.

  “It’s okay. I locked it.”

  “You locked it? Why?”

  “Thought we could use some privacy.” She brought her hands around to the front of his pants.

  He smiled, began nibbling the side of her neck. “Oh, you did, did you?”

  And then he kissed her, and she remembered what it was about him she’d found so appealing. She’d always been a sucker for a good kisser.

  They were halfway out of their clothes when a knock on the door interrupted them. It was followed immediately by a second knock, then the frantic turning of the doorknob. “Mark.” Mrs. Dennison’s voice cut through the solid wood. “Mark, are you in there?”

  “Just a minute, Mom,” he said as he began struggling back into his clothes.

  Jamie wrapped her arms around his slender hips, tried pulling him back toward the bed. “Tell her you’re busy,” she whispered.

  “Get dressed,” was his response.

  “Is something wrong?” his mother asked, still twisting the doorknob back and forth.

  Mark broke free and walked to the door, stealing a last look back at Jamie. “Your buttons,” he scolded, pointing to her half-open blouse.

  “Why was the door locked?” Mrs. Dennison stared accusingly at Jamie.

  “Force of habit,” Jamie said, forcing a smile onto her lips.

  “We don’t lock the doors around here,” Mrs. Dennison said.

  “Is something wrong?” Jamie wondered what was so urgent.

  Mrs. Dennison looked both confused and conflicted, as if she were debating with herself over what she was about to do. “I thought you should have these,” she said after a long pause. She held out her hand. Inside it were the most exquisite gold-and-pearl earrings Jamie had ever seen. “They belonged to my great-grandmother, and I always promised my son they’d go to the woman he married.” She pulled back her shoulders, cleared her throat, spit out the last few words. “So now, I suppose, they’re yours.”

  “Mother, that’s so thoughtful.”

  “They’re beautiful,” Jamie agreed, feeling suddenly light-headed and grateful. Her husband was right. His mother was a wonderful woman who just needed a little time to adjust to her son’s surprise wedding. She just had to be patient. “I’m so touched.”

  “You understand, of course, that if this doesn’t work out,” Mrs. Dennison said matter-of-factly, “it’s your duty to return them.”

  That was the second time in two days of marriage that Jamie considered leaving. Instead she again allowed herself to be cajoled into giving her new mother-in-law the necessary time to adjust; she told herself that it was her fault for expecting too much too soon, that she was the one who’d rushed into this marriage, and now it was up to her to slow things down. She’d had unrealistic expectations. You don’t marry a man you barely know and move with him to another city and expect everything to just fall into place.

  Except that’s exactly what she’d been expecting.

  That the tall young man with the shy dimples and long, aquiline nose whom she’d met at an automobile show—he was there for a convention of car salesmen; she was there to view the display of antique cars—wasn’t the sexy, knight-in-shining-armor he’d first appeared to be, but was rather a timid and insecure mama’s boy still living at home, was a thought too painful to dwell on.

  Everything will be all right as soon as we get our own apartment, she assured herself. Things will be different. He’ll change back into the man I married—the man I thought I was marrying—as soon as I get him away from his mother.

  But Mark Dennison had proved remarkably resistant to severing the apron strings. “I don’t understand why you’re in such a hurry to leave,” he told her. “She cooks for us, she does the housework, the laundry. She knocks herself out, for God’s sake. Why can’t you just appreciate it? What’s wrong with you?”

  “I just think it would be nice to have a place of our own. You know, where we could have a little more privacy. A little more sex,” Jamie whispered, stroking his thigh. A lot more sex, she was thinking, aware that their love life had dwindled to almost nothing in recent weeks.

  “Is that all you ever think about?” he asked accusingly. “Why don’t you get a job?” he suggested in the next breath, as if one were a viable substitute for the other.

  She did. It was as an administrative assistant for a property management company, and it bored her to tears. She quit after less than a month, took another job as a receptionist to a busy developer, lasted barely six weeks. She talked about going back to college, getting her MSW.

  “Why would you want to be a social worker?” her mother-in-law asked.

  Her husband became even more withholding until she dropped the idea of college altogether, found another job as an administrative assistant, this time for a small insurance company.

  Her husband finally agreed to at least look at some apartments in the neighborhood, but then his mother got sick, some vague problem the doctors couldn’t quite pin down, probably stress-related, they said, so how could they leave her until she was well again?

  She’ll live to be a hundred, Jamie thought, realizing she would never have any chance of a normal life until she took matters into her own hands. So she found an apartment, signed a lease, and told her husband she was moving out at the end of the month, with or without him. Reluctantly, he agreed to the move. They’d been married one year.

  Year two was more of the same.

  She was working at a job she hated, married to a man she barely knew and rarely saw—he’d taken to stopping by his mother’s every evening after he finished work, sometimes having dinner there without even bothering to call her—and cut off from her family and old friends. She tried making new ones, found a circle of girlfriends in whom she could confide and commiserate. They told her to cut her losses and run. “All you’ve done is exchange one overbearing mother for another,” they told her.

  They were right. After fortifying herself with several glasses of wine, she’d called him at his mother’s to tell him she was moving back to Palm Beach. An hour later, he showed up on their doorstep with flowers, apologies, and tears. “Please don’t leave,” he begged. “This is all my fault. I’ve been a complete idiot. I promise you that things will be different. I’ll change. Please, give me another chance. Things will get better. I promise.”

  He was right. Things did get better. For a few weeks anyway.

  Then they got worse.

  That’s enough of that, Jamie thought now, turning over onto her side in bed and coming fully awake. Once was more than enough, she was thinking, refusing to relive those last agonizing months. It was over. She never had to see Mark Dennison again. She had a new life now, and after several false starts, a new man. She reached over to stroke Brad’s back.

  He wasn’t there.

  “Brad?�
�� Jamie climbed out of bed, her eyes searching the obviously empty room, her ears straining above the air-conditioning unit for sounds of a shower running, a shaver humming, a toilet flushing. There was nothing. She ran to the window and pulled back the drapes. The sun exploded in her face, like a camera’s sudden flash, temporarily blinding her. But even through the ensuing blur of white light and purple dots, she could see the parking space outside her motel room window was empty and her car was gone. Had last night’s unsavory trio somehow discovered their whereabouts and returned, lying in wait to ambush Brad?

  And then she saw it, a large piece of white paper hanging over the blank TV screen and held in place by the Holy Bible. The note read:

  Took the car to the auto body shop. Back soon. Grab some breakfast in the lobby. It’s included.

  Jamie smiled, held the note against her chest, like a shield of armor, using it to still the wild beating of her heart. You see, she assured herself. I told you you have nothing to worry about. He’s safe and sound and thinking of your welfare. As always.

  Jamie quickly showered and washed her hair, then got dressed, choosing a white shirt and a pair of pink capris. Then she packed her overnight bag so that she would be ready when Brad returned, and, after taking a cautionary look around, proceeded to the hotel lobby. “Are you still serving breakfast?” she asked the prematurely balding young man behind the reception desk. The clock on the wall above his shiny head said it was already 9:36.

  “Around the corner.” He pointed with the index finger of his right hand. Jamie noted he was missing the tip of that finger and wondered what had happened to it. She walked around the corner to the designated breakfast area. The green-carpeted space consisted of several small tables and chairs as well as an old beige canvas sofa and a large-screen TV. A narrow food table ran along one wall, filled with an unappetizing display of cold bagels and slices of dry, white bread for toast. There were a couple of danishes, one whose center was filled with cheese, the other with strawberry jam. Jamie selected the one with cheese, then filled a Styrofoam cup with lukewarm coffee and carried both to the nearest table, realizing she was the only one there. Well, it’s late, she thought, taking a sip of her coffee and turning her attention to the TV screen, where a man in a big-brimmed cowboy hat and blue-and-white-checkered shirt was lovingly embracing an assault rifle and passionately defending his right under the Constitution to bear arms. Did that include a knife? she wondered.