Puppet

by Joy Fielding

  “A lot’s changed in the last few days.”

  “What’s changed, Amanda?”

  I don’t think I’ve ever told you how beautiful you are.

  “I don’t know.”

  You look lovely. That’s a wonderful color on you.

  “It’s just that nothing makes any sense.”

  I’m sorry I was such a bad mother to you, Amanda.

  “I can’t go back to Florida, Ben. I just bought all these clothes. Where am I going to wear them in Florida?”

  “What?!”

  Amanda begins spinning around in helpless circles. “There’s something wrong with my mother, Ben. She’s different, and you know it.”

  “She shot a man, Amanda. That can do strange things to your head.”

  “Or maybe there’s already something strange in her head. Maybe she has a brain tumor. We didn’t think of that. Can we arrange for an MRI?”

  Ben sighs, looking longingly toward the exit. Why did I ever get involved in this mess? the sigh asks. “I can petition the court, but I doubt your mother would agree, and without her permission—”

  “Which you know she won’t give.”

  “—our hands are tied.”

  “Shit.” The epithet, louder than she’d intended, ricochets off the walls, races down the corridors.

  Ben looks nervously around. “Okay, look. Why don’t we grab a cup of coffee.” He doesn’t wait for her response, his hand already on her elbow as he leads her out the side exit and across the street to the coffee shop where they had lunch the previous day.

  “We have to find out who this guy Turk is,” Amanda is saying moments later, ripping into a cranberry muffin and blowing the steam from her coffee. “He’s the key to this whole thing.”

  “How do you propose we do that?”

  “I have no idea.” Amanda stares across the table at her former husband, feels a slow grin tugging at her lips.

  “What are you smiling about?”

  “Just that I’m not used to seeing you in a suit.”

  “And what’s the verdict?”

  “That suits suit you,” Amanda says, her grin widening, stretching across her face.

  Ben shakes his head. “Who’d have thought,” he says, a now-familiar refrain.

  “Who’d have thought,” she echoes. “What made you decide to become a lawyer anyway?”

  “Truthfully?”

  “If you think I can handle it.”

  “I always wanted to be a lawyer.”

  “What? You never told me that.”

  He shrugs. “Too embarrassed. I mean, here I was, the classic angry young man with that whole ‘rebel without a cause’ thing going, no way I’m going to be a lawyer like my father. Perish the thought. And what do I really want to be, deep down?”

  “A lawyer like your father,” Amanda answers.

  “Exactly.”

  “How is your father?”

  “Great. He’s in Paris right now. On his honeymoon, actually.”

  “His honeymoon?”

  “My mother died five years ago,” Ben explains. “Cancer.”

  “I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

  “How would you? We haven’t exactly stayed in touch over the years.”

  Amanda takes a sip of her coffee, feels it burn the roof of her mouth, and wishes the numbness in her palate would spread to the rest of her body. “Were you close to your mother?”

  He nods. “We got closer as time went on.”

  “You mean, you got closer after I left town?”

  “Something like that,” he acknowledges.

  “She didn’t exactly approve of me, as I recall.”

  “She just thought we were too young.”

  “Mother knows best,” Amanda says, shaking her head in wonderment. “I can’t believe I said that.”

  “Maybe she does know best,” Ben says, effortlessly shifting the focus from his mother to Amanda’s. “Maybe the best thing is to leave bad enough alone.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “It could get worse, Amanda.”

  Amanda laughs, a painful sound that hacks at the air like a machete. “So, who’d your dad marry? Anyone I know?”

  “Believe it or not, yes.” Ben finishes the coffee in his cup and signals the waitress for a refill. “Remember Mrs. MacMahon? Grade eleven history?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Her husband passed away around the same time as my mother. Some mutual friends fixed them up about a year ago, and what can I say? The rest is—”

  “Don’t say it.”

  They laugh, this time easily.

  “Can I stay at your place?” The question is out of Amanda’s mouth before she has time to consider either its ramifications or repercussions.

  “What?”

  “It would only be for a few days. Till we know what’s happening. I don’t know, Ben. It just seems to make sense.”

  “It makes no sense at all.”

  “I’m not suggesting we sleep together,” Amanda continues quickly. “Obviously, I’d sleep on the couch. And I’d try to stay out of your way if Jennifer—”

  “You can’t stay with me, Amanda.”

  Amanda nods her head in silent acquiescence. He’s right. Of course he’s right.

  “I can have one of the secretaries at my office call around, see if they can find you a hotel room. There might even be something here,” Ben adds, looking past the coffee shop doors toward the lobby of the adjoining hotel.

  “No, that’s all right. I’m a big girl. I’m sure I’ll be able to find something on my own.”

  “I just don’t think it would be wise for you to stay with me.”

  “Of course. I understand. You’re absolutely right. It was a lousy idea.”

  “An interesting one though,” he admits after a pause.

  “I thought so.”

  “Maybe we—”

  “Ben!” a woman’s voice exclaims.

  Amanda feels a swoosh of fabric beside her, smells the overpowering scent of lemon-based perfume, and turns to see an attractive woman in a dark green overcoat bending over to kiss Ben’s cheek, her chin-length brown hair falling across cheekbones that are high and well-defined.

  “You finished in court already?” the woman asks, her voice husky and low.

  “I’m finished all right.”

  “The judge denied bail?”

  “The judge never had a chance.”

  The woman smiles as if she understands and turns her penetrating gaze on Amanda. Her eyes are the same color as my coffee, Amanda thinks, knowing this is Jennifer even before Ben introduces her.

  “Jennifer Grimes, I’d like you to meet Amanda Travis,” she hears him say as she casually absorbs the details of the woman’s face—the dark eyes, the long, aquiline nose, the coral-colored lips. “Gwen Price’s daughter.”

  “And Ben’s ex-wife.” Amanda extends her hand. “In case he forgot to mention it.”

  Disappointingly, Jennifer takes her hand, gives it a vigorous shake. “He didn’t forget. I’m so sorry we had to meet under these circumstances.”

  “It’s a difficult time,” Amanda says. “Would you like to join us?”

  Jennifer Grimes waves to two colleagues waiting by the door. “I’ll see you over there in a few minutes,” she tells them, pulling up a chair from a nearby table and squeezing it up against the table for two. “Actually it’s good I ran into you. I was able to find out some of the things you asked me about last night.” She casts a sidelong glance at Amanda. “We were at the most boring party. Did he tell you?”

  “Said it was too boring to talk about,” Amanda says with a smile.

  Jennifer’s dark eyes widen. She turns her attention back to Ben. “Seems they got back the initial autopsy reports on John Mallins.”

  “And?” Ben and Amanda ask together.

  “And there are a number of interesting results.”

  “How so?” Ben asks.

  “What do you mean
, ‘interesting’?” Amanda asks at the same time.

  “Well, they’re inconclusive, and so, of course, they have to do further testing.”

  “What do you mean, ‘interesting’?” Amanda asks again.

  “Well, for one thing, it seems our Mr. Mallins is older than first thought.”

  “How much older?”

  “Ten, maybe even fifteen years, if his internal organs are to be believed.”

  Ben looks at Amanda. “Which would make him about—”

  “—the same age as my mother,” Amanda says, finishing the thought.

  “Is that significant?” Jennifer asks.

  They shrug.

  “There’s more.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, it seems our Mr. Mallins has had some plastic surgery.”

  “What kind of plastic surgery?”

  “A nose job. And a face-lift. Apparently both done some time ago.”

  Amanda puts her elbows on the table, balances her head in her hands. What does all this mean? That John Mallins was a desperate man, or merely a vain one? That he was trying to keep up appearances or disguise his appearance altogether? “He was trying to look the age on his passport,” Amanda realizes out loud. A passport he stole from the real John Mallins, after he killed him and assumed his identity. Dear God, who was this man?

  “That’s the other thing,” Jennifer says.

  “What other thing?” Ben and Amanda ask, their words overlapping.

  Jennifer looks a bit taken aback. “You asked about his date of birth.”

  “Yes?” comes their joint response.

  “Well, you were right. According to his passport, it’s July fourteenth.”

  “Shit,” says Amanda, her hands dropping into her lap.

  “Shit,” echoes Ben, leaning back in his chair.

  “How’d you know that anyway?”

  Neither Ben nor Amanda says a word.

  “What’s going on here?”

  Again, only silence.

  “Well, I’d love to sit and chat …,” Jennifer says, dark eyes flitting between the two. After a lengthy pause, she pushes back her chair, stands up.

  Immediately Ben is on his feet. “Thanks,” he says simply.

  “For what exactly?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Jennifer touches his cheek with a tenderness that makes Amanda wince. Then she extends that same hand toward Amanda. “Nice meeting you, Amanda. I hope everything works out.”

  “Me too.”

  Amanda watches Jennifer stretch onto her tiptoes to brush her lips against Ben’s. “Call me later?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Then she walks to the door, leaving only the scent of lemons behind.

  TWENTY-ONE

  “RIGHT here. This is fine,” Amanda says as the taxi pulls to a stop at the corner of Bloor and Palmerston. She hands the driver a crisp, purple $10 bill, tells him to keep the almost $4 in change. What the hell, she thinks, climbing out of the cab into about three inches of freshly fallen snow. It all looks like play money anyway. Blue five-dollar bills, purple tens, green twenties, rose-colored fifties, brown hundreds. Not to mention the one- and two-dollar coins, referred to respectively as loonies and toonies. It’s Looney Tunes, all right, she thinks, deciding the coins provide an apt metaphor for her life.

  Throwing her purse over one shoulder and her overnight bag over the other, she proceeds down the wide street, lined with giant oak trees and dotted with wonderful, old-fashioned gas lamplights. Snow coats the branches of the trees like a heavy syrup, causing them to droop like the branches of a weeping willow. She pictures those same branches in spring, crowded with new buds just waiting to burst, and feels her face relax into a smile.

  Spring was always her favorite time of year: the gradual transition from frigid to more temperate climes as winter grudgingly relinquished its hold on the land; that first tantalizing tease of warm air that appeared in late March only to be pummeled into oblivion by an early-April snowstorm; the snow ultimately washed away by rain, the rain falling on bright yellow daffodils and brilliant red tulips that push their thin, yet surprisingly sturdy, stalks out of the wet ground, demanding their time in the sun.

  This changing of the seasons is probably the only thing Amanda misses, living in Florida, where the threat of hurricanes is the only thing that differentiates one season from the next. The palm trees are always full of fronds; the sun shines with monotonous regularity. It might be a little more humid in July, a little chillier in January, but by and large, Florida is a land of constant summer.

  Which is why she moved there in the first place, Amanda reminds herself, deliberately hammering her boot heel into a patch of thin ice, watching it crack like glass, then shatter. What is she doing? Who gives a shit about the change in seasons? Yes, at one time she might have enjoyed that first invigorating rush of cool air blowing away the stifling August heat, and, yes, at one time she might have marveled at a sudden November storm that carpeted the city in soft white snow, but experience had taught her that cool breezes had a nasty habit of turning into biting winds, and pure virgin snow too quickly degenerated into slush. The seasons had a way of getting old quickly.

  No, Florida is her home now, and she wouldn’t have it any other way. It has everything, Amanda tells herself, slipping her overnight bag off her shoulder and stretching the muscles in her neck before repositioning the bag and continuing down the street. It has sun, even though she avoids it with almost religious fervor; the ocean, although she rarely goes to the beach and certainly never swims in the dangerous water—think of the sharks and the sea lice and the invisible undertow, not to mention the occasional oil spills that pollute the sand and tar the bottoms of your feet; shopping malls, even though they’re filled with the same stores you can find anywhere, one shop looking pretty much the same as the next—hell, the Eaton Center is as impressive as any of them; culture—just think of the Kravis Center and the Royal Poincianna Playhouse—all right, so Toronto’s theater district is second only to New York’s, so what?; art—yes, there’s the wonderful Norton gallery, and some truly fabulous art shows and lots of charming little galleries, but if she sees one more ceramic frog, she just might scream, I mean, really, how can they call that art? “What am I doing?” Amanda demands, the words sliding out of her mouth into the cold air, like children on a sled, so that she can almost see them written on her breath. “I love ceramic frogs.”

  Besides:

  What Florida doesn’t have: her mother.

  What Florida also doesn’t have: Ben.

  Isn’t that why she went there in the first place?

  Amanda continues south along Palmerston toward Harbord, wondering why she didn’t tell the cabbie to let her off directly in front of her mother’s house. “Because some things you have to lead up to gradually,” she says into the collar of her coat. “Some things you have to take nice and slow. Fools rush in,” she whispers, smiling at an elderly man gingerly making his way along the icy sidewalk.

  “Damn winter,” the man grouses audibly as he passes.

  “Damn right,” Amanda agrees, soldiering on. And while we’re at it—damn Ben, damn her mother, and damn Jennifer. Where did that woman get off, anyway? With her sleek, modern hairdo and flawless complexion. Planting a preemptory kiss hello on Ben’s cheek. Not to mention that totally unnecessary kiss on the lips as she was leaving, as if to say, He’s mine now. Call me later? Whose benefit was that for? Certainly not Ben’s. And Ben’s response? Absolutely. Was he really so easily fooled? Couldn’t he see that behind Jennifer’s calm, competent exterior was … what? A calm, competent interior? So what? Who needs calm and competent when you can have competent and chaotic? What’s more fun anyway? Damn it. Ben couldn’t be in love with this woman.

  Unless he was.

  Amanda kicks at a mound of snow, watching it disperse like baby powder. And so what if he’s in love with Jennifer? What possible difference does that make to her? The fact that they were on
ce husband and wife—briefly, when they were way too young, when they had no idea what they wanted to do with their lives, let alone whom they wanted to spend them with—doesn’t give her any residual claim to his affections. Nor is she interested in staking any such claim. She’s only feeling this way—what way exactly is she feeling?—because of circumstance. As soon as she gets back to Florida, these feelings for her former husband—what feelings exactly?—will disappear. She’s only feeling this way—what way?—because she’s confused and vulnerable and not used to men who say no. You can’t stay with me, Amanda, he’d told her. Although it was possible he’d been about to change his mind. Maybe, he was saying, just as calm, competent Jennifer appeared on the scene.

  Maybe what?

  “Guess we’ll never know.” Amanda stops in front of the brown brick house with the bright yellow door. We may never know a lot of things, she thinks, walking toward the front steps that are all but buried beneath a small mountain of snow. She treads carefully, feeling for the concrete with the toes of her boots. We may never know who John Mallins really is, or why he had plastic surgery, or who this guy Turk is, even if it’s obvious that her mother knows.

  I’m sorry I was such a bad mother to you, Amanda.

  What the hell does that mean?

  Amanda shuffles through the snow on the landing, stopping at the front door, as if waiting to be admitted. It’s not too late, she is thinking. She can still turn around, hail another taxi, hightail it back to the downtown core, find a hotel, any hotel, even the Metro Convention Center, maybe call Jerrod Sugar again, ask him if he’d like the pleasure of her company for a night or two.

  Sure, she thinks, shrugging off the memory of their last encounter, although in truth, she remembers little of that night except for the way it ended. She was too drunk; he was too eager; the whole thing was over too fast. Or maybe not fast enough, she amends, smiling at the memory of Ben’s unscheduled visit, the way he came knocking on her door in the middle of the night, pushing himself into her hotel room over her objections, then flipping on the lights. And then—the startled look on his face when he realized she wasn’t alone, the surprise in his eyes giving way to … what? Anger? Disappointment? Regret?