Before and Again

by Barbara Delinsky

  A large manila envelope hung from one hand, but it stayed at his side. His voice was surprisingly quiet. Also surprising, I saw no arrogance. There was something sad about him, which might have made me think about his personal feelings for Grace, if I hadn’t been caught up in his words.

  “Thirteen years ago, a woman named Greta Brandt disappeared from Santa Fe with her two-year-old son. Someone called me to say you’re that woman. I researched the facts of the case. Height, weight, smile—all the same. You look different in other ways”—he raised the envelope, suggesting there were photos inside—“but those ways could easily be cosmetic.”

  Edward and I exchanged a worried glance. Cosmetic? Easily.

  Grace said nothing. Her hands curled into fists, knuckles white against the inside of her elbows as Ben went on.

  “Greta Brandt had gone through an ugly divorce. Her husband was wealthy and well connected. He successfully made a case that she was an unfit mother, so he got full custody of the boy. When she took off with him, she was charged with kidnapping.”

  I felt a sinking sensation. But I had guessed it, hadn’t I? The pieces fit. Totally aside from makeup, hair color, and contact lenses, it explained multiple rounds of plastic surgery.

  Edward’s eyes found mine again. They were uneasy, like he, too, knew where this was heading. I had driven Grace to the plastic surgeon. I had done her makeup and given her woodsy brown hair, which I had cut in layers to veil side views of her face. Before that I had given her auburn curls, and before that an ashy bob. I was totally complicit in helping her hide.

  Grace raised her chin. “That woman couldn’t be me. I am not an unfit mother. I love my son. I have done things for him that most mothers would never do. I’ve turned over my life for him.”

  “She was never found,” Ben said. “Both of them gone without a trace.” He dropped the envelope on Edward’s desk, then rubbed his palms on his jeans. It was a nervous gesture, coming from a man who had surely been in far more threatening situations. “Here’s the thing, Grace. The woman who called me was the Brandts’ cook, so she saw what went on in that house. She says you’re Greta Brandt; you say you’re not. She has photos from papers back then and ones from papers now. She wants to sell me her story, and if I don’t buy it, she’ll show those pictures to someone else, so whether it’s true or not, it’ll come out.”

  “Libel,” warned Jay.

  “Not if corroborated,” argued Ben. “For what it’s worth, she said the boy’s father was scum.”

  “Batshit scum,” Grace cried in a burst of venom before realizing the admission. Her panicked gaze scanned the others before returning to Ben. Her eyes welled, and a tremor hit her voice. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because despite what you think,” he said, sounding more sincere than I wanted him to, “despite what others think, I’m not the enemy. I don’t make up stories. I do my research and report on it. Right now, I can only find one side of this story. There has to be another one.”

  In the silence that followed, I pictured the other side, which would be filled with a slew of details I didn’t want to know. I looked at Edward again. His mouth moved just enough to share his silent, Fuck. Oh yeah, we were on the same page, right there in my probation agreement.

  “Only one side of the story,” Ben repeated, “and, trust me, I tried for the other. Can’t see the court proceedings, because they’re sealed. Can’t ask the boy, because the boy was two when it happened. Won’t get anything from neighbors and friends, because our man is that intimidating and that powerful.” He screwed up his face at Grace. “Did you mount any kind of case in your defense?”

  Jay neared Grace with surprising speed. “Don’t answer,” he told her. “Don’t confirm or deny. He’s media. He can’t be trusted.”

  He was speaking as a lawyer, I knew. But I also knew he had slept with Grace, so his distrust of Ben might have been personal.

  I stepped in. Hell, I was already in it up to my ears, so what was a little more? Besides, I was the one who had set up this meeting. “If anyone distrusts the press, it’s me,” I said, “but he claimed he wanted to help, and that all he wanted to do here was talk. He said he wouldn’t even write anything down.”

  “Oh, he will,” Grace argued, “if not here, then when he leaves. He smells a book, and what could be better than two opposing stories, lots of conflict, lots of drama, lots of injustice?”

  “I hate the press,” I told her, upping the ante. “I’ve seen them exaggerate and fabricate and lie. But I don’t think he’s lying now.” To Ben, I said, “You promised you wouldn’t have a recording device. Do you?”

  He patted his pockets and shirtfront, held out his arms. “Nothing. I just wanted to warn you about what may be happening, and hey,” he was addressing Jay now, “there’s a risk for me, too. They find out I’m talking to you while Chris’s court case is ongoing, and I’m in trouble.”

  “Damn right,” said Jay, his second warning in as many minutes.

  Ben came a step closer. He seemed oddly hurt. To Grace, he said, “You would never talk about your past. I told you I would never write about anything you said. I told you it was personal between us, but you never let me get close. I knew you were hiding—”

  “You dreamed,” Grace broke in, but meekly, like she had been badgered for hours, not minutes, and had simply run out of steam.

  “Then tell me. Nothing you say leaves this room unless you say it does.”

  She was silent so long that I looked at her. Her face wore yearning, though I didn’t know whether it was for Ben the man, or simply for unburdening herself of secrets that had chafed in her veins for too long—and, omigod, did I know how unburdening felt. Discussing the accident and Lily and loss with Edward these past few weeks, breaking down with him the other night, even broaching the forbidden with my mother—tears came to my eyes just thinking about it.

  And here was Edward now, reassuring Grace. “We’ll hold him to it. But he’s right about containing this. We can’t do that if we don’t know what we’re dealing with.”

  We. I loved him a little more each time he said that word, but my fear also grew. In hosting this meeting, he would be implicated if things went wrong. My shit would become his, again. I had never wanted that.

  Seeing my tears, he shot me a silvery stare. Daring me to question his loyalty? Punishing me for the mess?

  Unable to decide which, I refocused on Grace, who was going from face to face, bewildered, outnumbered, overpowered. My eyes cleared; I slid an arm through hers. I knew what it was like to be alone in a crowd of people with your life upended and no one at your back. In that instant, I didn’t care about Shanahan. Being a friend in time of need was what I wanted the new me to be.

  “I can’t go back,” she whispered, begging me to understand. “He’ll kill me. As soon as he became a somebody, he wanted me gone, so my leaving with Chris meant nothing to him. He already had a new family. That started while we were still married. Smearing me was to justify his own infidelity. And the custody battle? It was just a power thing. That’s what it’s all about with him—power and ego.”

  “The problem,” I whispered back, although the three men were close enough to hear, “is that you can’t keep denying it, Grace. You’ve been found.”

  Her eyes darkened with momentary resolve. “I’ll disappear again.”

  I remembered our discussion of places to go if not Devon, and understood now why she preferred to stay east of the Mississippi. She had most liked the idea of New York, where she might easily get lost. But starting over now wasn’t so easy. Totally aside from his legal issues, her son was no longer two.

  “Is that what you want for Chris?” I asked, and for an instant, she seemed to stop breathing.

  “Low blow,” she finally said. She looked crushed.

  “I know. I’m sorry.” But I wasn’t. I can’t go back, she had just said. But if she didn’t go back, if she didn’t finally tell someone the truth of the past, she could never be w
hole.

  She?

  Me.

  I was barely grasping that—when her eyes flew back to mine. Her face was the color of chalk. She clamped a hand over her mouth, and her upper body convulsed.

  “Bathroom,” I murmured for the sake of the others, but when I put an arm around her shoulder and started to steer her there, firm hands eased me aside and took over.

  * * *

  I’m not sure what Ben said to Grace after she was done being sick. When they came out, her skin was newly washed, makeup nearly gone, and the soft brown hair around her face was damp. She remained pale but seemed marginally composed.

  Composure was an act, of course. Grace was good at acting. You had to be, when you were in your thirties and restarting life with a new identity. By the time thirteen years, or four, had passed, you were a pro. You looked poised; you looked calm. You looked like you knew exactly where you were and what you were doing, like you had reached this point in a perfectly natural progression, even though inside you were terrified.

  Grace had to be beyond terrified. I could see it in the way she went straight to the large leather sofa and sank into its corner as her legs gave out. Oh, I knew the corner gambit, too. A corner meant you were shielded on two sides—three, if you sat with your back to the seam, as Grace did, so that the only exposed side was your front.

  Edward produced bottles of water from a low cabinet. He gave her one and put the rest on the long, low table.

  Jay crouched beside the sofa, his fingers curled on its leather arm. “You don’t have to do this,” he told her quietly.

  She nodded, but when she looked back at me, her eyes said she did. That look also held an apology, regret for what she had to say, fear that it would change everything, and it might. She might lose her son, her name, her job, her home. But not our friendship. Shanahan or not, that wasn’t in play. Needing her to know it, I joined her on the sofa, sitting close with a leg folded under me so that I faced her.

  “Tell us,” I urged, and for a minute, seeing a last flash of panic in those copper eyes, I feared she might throw up again. But she stayed where she was, swallowed, and began.

  She had met Carter Brandt eighteen years before. She was his massage therapist at a spa in Sedona, and the attraction was immediate. Later, when his dark side proved so dark that she wondered how she could have missed it, she blamed Sedona’s heady vibe of red rocks, pine forests, and spirituality. Carter snowed her. She thought they had a special connection. He was good-looking and charismatic, turning heads wherever he went. What woman wouldn’t be flattered that he chose her? she asked the men before returning helpless eyes to me.

  “They wouldn’t understand,” I said softly and jiggled her wrist. “Go on.”

  She took a quick drink, tucked the bottle between her hip and the sofa, and folded her hands in her lap. He liked her spark, she said. He liked her independence. Within the year, she had moved from Arizona to New Mexico to marry him, and, soon after, was pregnant. She hadn’t thought it would happen so soon, but his parents had been after him to have kids. Their business was a family one, and they needed promise of a next generation.

  The Brandt family owned the largest car dealership consortium in the southwest. Despite being intimately involved with that, Carter built a separate source of power in politics. When he and Grace met, he was already a city councilor, although he kept a scrupulous finger in the automotive till. The dealerships he personally ran were the most productive; he used that fact to build connections beyond those of his family. This meant nights out, lots of nights out. Sometimes Grace was with him. Increasingly, she was not.

  Soon after Chris was born, Carter was elected to the New Mexico House of Representatives. He had run as a successful businessman dedicated to honesty and transparency, buzzwords he knew resonated with voters, and he won by a healthy margin. Grace was at his side when he needed her, though she was starting to chafe at being “the little woman.” She wanted to go back to work. The spa ambiance offered a warmth and serenity she didn’t have at home. And Santa Fe was known for its spas.

  Carter refused. He argued that she was the wife of a state representative, not to mention now belonging to one of the state’s most prominent families. Touching men’s bodies all day wouldn’t look good.

  Little by little, other things about Grace started not looking good to him. She wasn’t good at political talk. She wasn’t good at hosting dinner parties. She wasn’t good at elegance. Her flair had become a liability, drawing attention away from him. And then there were her roots, about which his constituents often asked. She came from nothing. Her parents were working class, which hadn’t bothered him when they first met, but suddenly did.

  “He told you this?” Ben asked.

  “Well, I sure didn’t imagine it,” she shot at the window to which he’d returned. “Do I look that insecure?”

  She actually did, tucked in her protective corner, though I’m not sure the men sensed it the way I did. Confidence could be applied like makeup. I knew this for fact.

  Jay had been pacing but now stopped before her. “Verbal abuse?” he asked.

  “Not at first,” she said and picked at a nail. “It started innocent, like, ‘Can you do something with your hair,’ or ‘Maybe not that sweater.’ Then it got worse, and it wasn’t only Carter. His sister got in the act”—she made air quotes—“to help me out. She’s a bitch in the best of times, which shopping with me was not. She kept choosing things that were totally not me then rolling her eyes at what I did want, like I was hopeless. Add that to all the nights he was out, and, well, yeah, I guess I did start feeling insecure.”

  “All those nights out?” Ben asked, leading her without quite saying the words.

  “Of course. I mean, a guy with an ego way bigger than his dick? Of course, he cheated.”

  “And you let him?” Jay asked.

  “What in the hell could I do, Jay?” she cried, but at least bits of color had returned to her face. “I asked him about it, but that only unleashed a long list of everything I was doing wrong. It was little nothing me against big powerful him.” She considered that summation and let out a breath. Quietly, she said, “It went downhill from there.”

  “The abuse?” Again, from Jay.

  “Yes. I kept thinking he wouldn’t do anything major, because I was the mother of his son. But the words got more vicious, and he hit me where no one would see. I mean, women go through that all the time, right? I was not a great wife for him. I hated those political dinners, hated trying to look good and coming up short, hated the way he would find fault when we were out and blame it on my upbringing—I mean, right in front of other people.” She looked up at her audience when she said the last. Every face held concern. “He said I broke my own arm tripping over one of the baby’s toys, I was such a klutz.” She looked at me. “Am I a klutz?”

  I pictured her skiing those Black Diamond slopes. “Absolutely not.”

  “Thank you.” She took another sip of water and tucked the bottle back in. Eyes downcast, she said, “I came to hate him—I mean, really hate him. I dreamed of leaving him, fantasized about it all the time, but I was worried he would take it out on the baby. Then he started losing patience with Chris, too—you know, complained that he wasn’t walking early enough, wasn’t talking early enough, made too much noise, didn’t make enough noise. One spanking was all I could take. I said if he ever again lifted a hand to the baby, ever again, I would go public with it.” She grunted. “Not one of my wisest moves.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  Her eyes met mine. “Because Carter Brandt loves a challenge. He needed dirt on me in case I went public with dirt on him, so he started having me followed.”

  “Followed,” Jay said.

  “He hired someone to go where I went and take pictures of anything that was remotely suggestive.”

  “Like what?” I asked, covering her hand to stop the picking.

  “I had defied him and gone back to work, just a few after
noons a week while Chris napped, because I needed someone to say I wasn’t a worthless piece of shit. So his guy planted a camera where it would capture my hands on men’s bodies. Add those shots to ones of my talking with a guy at Starbucks or smiling at the pizza delivery guy or hugging my hairdresser—my hairdresser, for Christ’s sake—well, you get the idea. But infidelity wasn’t enough. He wanted to totally destroy me, which meant showing I was an unfit mother.”

  “How were you unfit?” I asked, indignant this time. Not seeing what your teenage son was doing on a computer wasn’t being unfit. It was being distracted.

  A tiny bell rang in my head. I hadn’t been unfit, either. I’d simply been distracted.

  But Grace hadn’t heard the bell. “For starters,” she said, “he claimed I drank. There were dozens of photos of me with a glass in my hand.” She looked at me again. “Do I drink?”

  “No.”

  “Thank you—but oh, I forgot to mention that most of the shots were taken at campaign events, which were a nightmare for me. I wouldn’t have dared take more than a sip or two of whatever was put in my hand, because even with a clear head, I had trouble remembering who was married to who and which donor’s son just got into U-N-M or U-A or U-S-C, because as far as I was concerned, that brownnosing is total C-R-A-P.”

  Throaty sounds came from Edward and Ben in varying degrees of appreciation, but Jay was brooding. “Carter Brandt? Isn’t there a Carter Brandt in Congress?”

  “That would be the US Congress,” Grace confirmed in a voice laced with sarcasm. “But you’re jumping ahead, Jay. Don’t you want to hear about the videos?”

  “Absolutely,” Jay said and stepped back.

  “There were videos?” Ben asked.

  “Oh, you’d love to see those, Ben.” She was running on anger now, reliving all she must have suppressed for so long. “His guy shot videos of me lounging at the pool while the soundtrack had Chris screaming inside. Forget the fact that the drink I held was an iced espresso because I needed the caffeine because we’d been at one of those godawful boring events the night before and Chris had woken up when we came in and hadn’t wanted to go back to sleep, so he was overtired, too, and was screaming because I’d just put him in for a nap. There were videos of me laughing on the phone while, behind me, Chris was in a little floaty thing drifting toward the deep end of the pool.”