She hadn’t known, way back then, that her mom and Carson were neighbors growing up, and went to the same schools. She remembered learning it a few years after they’d moved back to Ocala—maybe when she was twelve? It was something her Grandma Anna said when Savannah and her mom were visiting the farm, about how the McKays next door were adding on to their house with money from Carson’s career. “You mean Carson McKay, the rock star?” she asked her grandma, who confirmed this and then said, “Sorry, Meggie—I assumed she knew.” Savannah didn’t know why her grandma apologized, and didn’t much care; she was excited about the possibility of meeting the famous Carson McKay someday. She said, “Next time he has a concert here, we have to go! Maybe he’ll let us backstage!” Even at that age she’d admired his music, the way he could play piano like another of her mom’s favorites, Freddie Mercury.
She felt her cell phone buzzing in her shorts pocket. Quickly she dug it out, pulled off her earbuds, and flipped open the phone before it stopped.
She glanced at the caller’s number but didn’t recognize it. “Hello?”
“Hey, babe.” Kyle.
“Hey! Where are you calling from?”
“Dude who’s a good buddy of mine, ’cause my phone is, like, dead—and I just had to call my favorite girl.”
His favorite girl! Then he wasn’t pissed off by her changing plans. Or…he hadn’t heard her message. “Well, I’m really glad you called!”
“I’m really glad you’re glad. Do you think you’d be, like, glad to meet up this weekend, like Friday night?”
“What, this weekend, seriously?”
“I don’t want to wait till Monday to see your sweet face in person. So I thought, I’ll take a little road trip, go see my favorite girl—my car’s crap, but we can drive down to Miami in yours, save your ticket for another time.”
Shit, he definitely hadn’t heard the message.
She heard laughter in the background. “Sounds like a party there.”
“Oh, yeah—just a few friends hanging out, indulging a little. You know.”
“Are you drunk?”
“Me? No. No, no, I’m not drunk. Booze is not my thing.” More laughter.
With the weekend only two days away, she’d have to do some quick planning. “I’m supposed to go home again this weekend. Let me see how I can work this out, okay? And I’ll call you back at this same number.”
“Hey, yeah, I’ll be waiting.”
She hung up and sat scanning her room, pulse pounding. How to work this? How was she going to meet him without anyone knowing? And where would he stay? Could she scam her parents into thinking she was at Rachel’s…and maybe stay in a hotel with him? She could tell him her car was in the shop—
“Get a grip, girl,” she said aloud, though she was almost bouncing with joy. She took a deep breath, made herself think of a sensible plan, and then she pressed her speed-dial for Rachel.
Eighteen
AFTER RETURNING FROM DINNER WITH HER FATHER, MEG FELL INTO UNEASY sleep in the den, dreaming of Bride, the mare they’d had when she was young…shutting the hugely pregnant Bride into her special pen, night falling, the stable so dark she couldn’t see her own feet…. Then somehow, the curry comb was in her hand and she was standing on a wooden box to reach Bride’s forelock, murmuring soothing words. Bride jerked and stumbled sideways, knocking Meg backward, pinning her to the wall, then lurched down to the straw, pulling Meg with her. Meg’s legs folded, her back scraping as she went down. There was no pain in the dream; her unconscious mind spared her that part of what she’d experienced as a ten-year-old. But the darkness, the panic of being trapped there, the futility of yelling until she was hoarse—all of that was here in the dream.
Bride groaned and panted, the noises harsh and threatening in the blackness. They would both die there, Meg was sure of it as minutes passed like desperate, heaving hours. She couldn’t budge the 1,200-pound mare, couldn’t help pull the foal—which would later emerge stillborn. She knew this in the dream, but there was no comfort in recognizing that if she knew it, she must have survived this horror; in the dream, she couldn’t breathe. Bride pressed her down until she was flattened, invisible. Doomed.
The garage door rumbled closed, waking her. Damp with sweat, she checked the time: two-fifteen. Her pulse slowed as she waited for Brian to come inside, to stop in and explain himself. But he weaved his way past, shoes off and shirttails out, never even looking into the room. She sat up, relieved to have escaped Bride once again, and reoriented herself with the life she was living now, tonight. With the issue of Brian having left Horizon and gone drinking, apparently, rather than coming home and discussing the subject raised at dinner.
She heard a thump and a crash and Brian saying, “Shit!”
A more dedicated wife, she thought, would get up and check if he was hurt. A more dedicated wife would confront him with a demand that he explain where he’d been for the past six hours. A bar? A friend’s? A woman’s? A more dedicated wife would not now be reaching for the phone to wake her father-in-law in the middle of the night in order to get the answer to another question, the one Brian wouldn’t answer earlier and obviously decided he wasn’t going to answer now, either.
Bruce and Shelly’s phone rang five times before Bruce answered. “Hello?”
“It’s Meg. I apologize for the hour.”
“Is Brian okay?” He sounded panicked. “What’s the matter?”
Of course he’d be panicked about his precious oldest child, his heir. As Shelly herself would admit, they’d sheltered Brian—maybe too much, she’d say, smiling indulgently—from the day of his first allergy emergency. Peanut-butter toast, when he was two. He’d nearly died because the housekeeper of the time, Esmeralda, thought he was choking and kept trying to help by smacking him on the back. Fortunately, Shelly returned from her oil painting lesson in time to call for an ambulance; a hefty dose of epinephrine saved his life. Since then, his parents lived in perpetual dread of his accidental ingestion of peanuts, peanut dust, peanut oil; the stuff was everywhere. Shelly devoted a whole week to educating Meg, when she first began seeing Brian, including trips to the market and a three-night “allergy-free” cooking class.
Meg said, “Brian is fine—well, I think he’s fine. He just stumbled in, drunk.”
“Have you been drinking?” Bruce asked, his voice shifting from fearful to cautious.
“No, actually I’ve been sleeping. But never mind that. I’ll be brief: did my father give you money recently?”
Bruce coughed. “That’s between Spencer and me.” She could hear Shelly asking who was on the phone and Bruce telling her, “Meg—everything’s fine.”
“Bruce, look, I’m not twenty-one years old anymore. It’s late, I’m cranky, and my father mentioned something that I want to confirm. Did he pay you back?”
“I told him not to. Damn stubborn man wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
So it was true. “The whole amount?” she asked.
“That’s right.”
“And you took it.”
“He insisted. Look, I’m putting it into a trust for our girl, all right? And if Spencer gets into any more hot water—not that he should, if you’re watching his spending—but if he does, well, I’m sure we can help him out.”
“I appreciate that, but I’ll handle it if need be. Brian knew about the payment?”
“I think that’s for the two of you to discuss.”
Which meant yes. “I’m sure we will,” she said.
Bruce sounded weary when he asked, “Now is Brian around?”
“No, I imagine he’s passed out on the bed. Call him in the morning, okay? I’m sorry I woke you.”
Now the pieces fit. Her father’s words at dinner—I didn’t give Bruce all that money for nothing. You don’t have to take that crap from Mr. Big Shot here anymore—made sense.
Brian’s behavior tonight did not. Why hadn’t he told her?
She padded down the hallway into the kitchen,
which was quiet and empty again. Standing at the French doors, she looked out at the shifting and folding light thrown off by the pool’s illuminated water. At this time of night the lights were supposed to be off, controlled by an automated system that also told the sprinklers when to run and kept the back boundary of their yard electrified by a mild current meant to repel alligators and deer. The light was ethereal and lovely, an unexpected late-night gift. But obviously there was a glitch in the control—perhaps a glitch like the one she feared was in her brain.
For sure, there was a glitch in her life, she thought, watching the light dance on the portico ceiling and the wide terrazzo floor tiles, imported from Spain. She wanted that glitch fixed ASAP. The person Cameron Lowenstein recommended, the acupuncturist psychic, might be a life-fixer. Could a set of long, ultra-sharp needles and some prescient knowledge be the tools needed to get hers back on track?
UNWILLING TO JOIN BRIAN IN BED, MEG SAT DOWN AT THE KITCHEN counter with the last of her mother’s notebooks, to read an entry she’d only skimmed before:
August 10, 2005
Low: 71º high: 87º. good storm this afternoon.
I spent most of tonight on the phone with Julianne, calming her down. Allan broke his wrist and needs surgery. She’s just no good in a crisis, never has been, probably because she had so many sisters to buffer her all those years growing up.
Speaking of a crisis, Spencer’s had kidney pain all day, but won’t do anything about it. Men are stubborn like that. I tried to get Meggie earlier, to ask her about it, but she’s in the middle of handling somebody’s premature labor. I hope that won’t result in another one of those fragile, one-pound babies stuck with all those needles and tubes and everything—I saw a feature about it just last week. Small enough to hold in one hand, nothing but transparent skin stretched over bones as fragile as a bird’s. Poor things! I’ve always believed in letting nature say which ones live. A baby born before it can even breathe is a baby called back to the Blessed Mother, and us keeping it here is cruelty. That’s my view. And I can talk, losing my tiny boy the year after Meggie came; I know how it feels.
My, how grim I am tonight. Enough of that. I’ve never been one to look backward too much, which probably accounts for how I’ve managed to survive Spencer all these years! Oh sure, I wish I could’ve kept Julianne home longer and I wish Beth would stick to one man for more than three weeks—she was just saying, though, that she’s got no good examples of marriage to make her want to. I said, “Look at Kara and Jules and Meggie. Look at Daddy and me!” And she laid it out like a row of ducks: Kara and Julie are nothing but baby factories (!!), Meg’s depressed and lonely, and their dad’s been nothing but a financial wildfire his whole life—she’d never live with any man like that. Then she said, “I don’t mean to insult you, Mom,” which of course I know. Spencer is an acquired taste to be sure, but I love him. How can you explain the force of true love? I told her, true love doesn’t go around looking at a situation from every angle, it strikes at its whimsy, and we are all helpless to defend ourselves. I said, “It just hasn’t happened to you yet. But it will.”
Beth is right about Meggie, though, and I said to Spencer just a few minutes ago how I wish we had never let her take up with Brian. “She was an adult,” he said. “Not like we could’ve stopped her.” “Oh, we could’ve,” I said, and I told him, if I could go to the flea market and find some magical lamp with a genie inside, the only thing I’d wish right now is to have the money to pay Bruce back. What a yoke that debt must be to her. How could we have failed to see?
But I know that answer.
Meg closed the notebook and slid her hand over its cover, a caress.
Her father thought he’d already told her about the money, but there was no way he could have. Was there? In the commotion of her getting his house packed and cleaned, of coordinating all his appointments with the real estate agents and the inspectors and the lawyer, the disconnections of power and gas and phone, the notifications to post office, relatives, friends, doctors—in all of that, might he have told her he was writing a check to Bruce, satisfying what turned out to be one of her mother’s last wishes, and she’d forgotten? It sounded possible, but she was certain she would remember something so significant. She would have reacted as she was reacting now: with growing indignation.
Because for all that returning Bruce’s cash was a respectable thing to do, her father had not, in almost seventeen years, even obliquely referred to the favor she’d done him, except to say, at her wedding reception—a lavish, four-tent affair he knew he was supposed to have paid for—that her marriage would be a terrific thing for all of them. If he had only thanked her, even, she might not feel so angry now.
She poured some milk, grabbed a stack of Oreos, and went out into the muggy night to sit beside the pool. The sharp croak of a tree frog greeted her as she passed the portico columns. She sat and put her feet into the water, shivering a little and then relaxing as she grew accustomed to the temperature, a constant eighty degrees. Then she dunked one cookie halfway, waited for it to be saturated, and quickly bit off the soggy half, the same way she’d done each of the rare times they’d had Oreos in their house when she was a kid.
Someone—on a talk show, maybe, or perhaps she’d read it—said that American adults were obsessed with addressing their unresolved childhood issues. Meg supposed that explained why her shopping list always included Oreos. It also included whatever peanut-free sugary cereal Savannah was in the mood for when the list got made, and ice cream and real cheese and orange soda. Everything Meg coveted as a child filled her refrigerator and cupboards now. Everything she didn’t have back then, she gave her daughter now. Things like a big, cheerful bedroom suite—a suite, whereas she and Kara had shared a room so narrow that they could hold hands while lying in their beds. When Carson slept over, they would wedge an old army surplus cot up against the ends of the beds, leaving maybe six inches between the cot and their dresser. Jules and Beth shared a bed in their tiny room. The house had a single bathroom for the six of them.
Savannah had her own, with a clawfoot tub and dual sinks so that her sleepover guests didn’t have to share with her. She had guitar and music theory lessons, summer camp stays that rivaled most people’s best vacations. All the stuffed animals, dolls, clothes, shoes, jewelry she wanted…. More recently Savannah’d gotten the cell phone and computer and iPod, and soon, she’d have a brand-new car. When Meg listed all these things in her mind, and then pictured their lifestyle—this pool, the million-dollar French-inspired villa that was their house, the trips they’d taken, their membership in an exclusive country club, to name the obvious—the picture of what she’d provided for Savannah by marrying Brian, by becoming an obstetrician, by choosing the material path as if the wrongs it righted were the important ones, brightened to a blurry glare of excess.
“I suck,” Meg said as she dunked the rest of the cookie. Her fingers held it in the cold milk with no trouble, suggesting there was nothing wrong with her at all, nothing more than what she’d assumed in the first place: a strain, perhaps a pinched nerve, which had worked itself out in the week that had passed since the first problem. The relief contained in this thought pleased her as much as the cold, wet chocolate in her mouth; she took a second cookie from her lap and dunked it as easily as she’d done the first.
If only a week and a handful of cookies could improve everything else.
The water beckoned, its shimmer a visual siren’s call she didn’t even try to resist. After shedding her blouse and slacks, she stood poised at the pool’s edge in her panties and bra, then dove in. As she’d done as a child swimming in the McKays’ clear, largest lake, she let herself drift down to the bottom, eyes open, studying the soft swirls of light that covered her now, too. She was a water nymph, weightless, ageless; she was as one with the molecules of hydrogen and oxygen, no more than they and no less.
When her lungs began to ache, proving the folly of her fantasy, she put her feet against the bo
ttom of the pool and pushed off. Breaking the surface, she filled her lungs and broke into freestyle, pulling herself across the water’s surface with the same sure motion that had won her so many races so long ago. For a few sweet strokes she was fifteen again, racing Carson and Kara across the lake. But then her rhythm faltered, the weak arm struggling to match the other, and she paddled to the steps and climbed out. She simply needed to get back into the routine, that was all. “Use it or lose it,” she sighed, taking an oversize towel from a teak storage bin and wrapping it around her shoulders. Lowenstein was way off base.
After picking up her clothes, she walked back into the house, her feet leaving damp prints behind her. Inside, she locked up and turned off the interior lights, then went to the bedroom she and Brian had been sharing for eight years now, since they’d built the house. He was asleep on top of the covers, shirt half unbuttoned, pants off but light tan dress socks still on. In the low light of the bedside lamp, the socks looked skin-colored and made it seem that the dark hair of his legs ended abruptly three inches above his ankles. He looked ridiculous, and worse, he was snoring with his mouth hanging open, the way he always did when he slept on his back. Mr. Big Shot, her father had called him. Right.
As she stood in the bathroom drying off, she thought, what was it that her father had said when she was leaving his apartment last week? Something like, why didn’t she just get on with her life? Ah, another reference to repaying Bruce…he’d been trying that day and again tonight to show her that her debt was cleared. And the diaries—might they, like the repayment, be his gift to her, a gesture toward an apology he couldn’t quite make with words? He wanted her to see that he’d freed her of the shackles she had incurred on his behalf. That must be it.
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