Tessa was still holding Luke steady in the chair and imploring him to speak to her, when two paramedics burst into the room. She stood back only when they laid him down on the floor. One of the paramedics checked Luke’s pupils and took his blood pressure while the other checked his pulse and quickly reached for the defibrillator paddles. “We’re going to shock his chest,” he explained to Tessa rapidly.
“He’s never had a heart problem,” she cried, incredulously watching the bizarre activity that had suddenly erupted in the fortress of her home. “His heart is perfect, what’s wrong, what’s wrong with him?”
“I don’t know, ma’am,” one of them answered. He had no intention of telling her that the paddles showed only a flat, straight line that indicated no electrical heart activity. That duty was for the doctors, thank God.
“How could you not know?” she shouted. “Do something, for the love of God, do something.”
“Yes, ma’am, we’re doing everything possible,” he told her, reassuringly.
The paramedics exchanged a look. The man’s pupils were fixed and dilated, there was no pulse, no blood pressure, he was asystolic, but they were trained to go on the basis that there was always hope. They shocked his chest, put an airway down his throat, and put an I.V. into his arm to try and push medication into him.
“Call the hospital,” one of the paramedics told the other. Suddenly three firemen entered the room, responding to the initial call Tessa had made that indicated that a healthy man was down. One of them was bringing an oxygen tank, the others helping to strap Luke onto a stretcher. The paramedic on the phone said quietly, making sure that Tessa didn’t hear him, “We’re coming in, yes, asystole, fast as we can.”
The paramedics, the firemen carrying the stretcher, and Tessa, grabbing her purse, all ran down the stairs to the ambulance that waited in front of the door, ignoring the servants who had finally materialized by the front door.
Tessa climbed into the ambulance and tried to gather Luke in her arms even though he was strapped to the stretcher. Neither of the paramedics tried to stop her.
“We’re getting him to the hospital as quickly as possible,” one of them said. He would not tell this poor woman, whose contorted features were so familiar and yet unplaceable, that her husband was dead. Stone cold dead. He’d known it the minute he’d looked in his eyes. It had been pointless to try the techniques they used for heart-attack victims. It must have been an aneurysm, he thought. Nothing else could kill as quickly. Nothing else ended a healthy life like a bolt of lightning unless you put a loaded gun in your mouth and pulled the trigger.
Maggie and all the Websters, even Candice and her husband, flew out to Los Angeles as soon as possible after Fiona had called to tell them that Luke was dead.
Madison, Tyler, and Maggie dropped the others at the Beverly Hills Hotel and went directly to Tessa’s. There they found Fiona, Aaron Zucker, and Roddy Fensterwald already gathered.
“Where’s Tessa?” Maggie asked as soon as she saw the little group huddled around a coffee table in the living room.
“In her bedroom. She won’t come out,” Fiona said, “and she won’t let anybody in.”
“Do you mean nobody’s seen her since it happened?”
“Just me,” Fiona answered. “She gave the hospital my name last night and I went to pick her up and bring her home right away—there was nothing she could do at the hospital—but when we got here, she ran upstairs to the bedroom and locked the door. She won’t answer the house intercom and she hasn’t rung for anything to eat. I listened at her door but I couldn’t hear a thing, not a sound, and no matter what I said, she wouldn’t answer, not even to tell me to go away.”
“I think we should break the door down,” Roddy said. “This can’t go on.”
“Fiona,” Maggie asked, “what was she like when you went to the hospital?”
“In shock. Total. She wouldn’t talk to me, she wasn’t crying, she was barely breathing. I don’t know if she even realized who was driving the car home. I must have been the only person she could think of to call because she knew I was at Le Dôme.”
“What did the doctors tell you, exactly, Fiona?” Maggie said, still trying to comprehend what had happened.
“He had something called a cerebral aneurysm,” Fiona answered wearily. She’d already explained this to Roddy and Aaron. “Some people are born with the possibility of it happening. You can die from it at any time, or live to a ripe old age, it just depends. It’s like a bubble or a bunch of berries on a vine in a blood vessel that comes out of the neck and goes around it, something called the Circle of Willis. If it pouches out, you have an aneurysm, and you die instantly. The pathologists at the hospital did the autopsy and called me this morning. There’s no way to know if you have it or if you don’t, and no point in knowing either.”
“Oh,” Maggie said in a small voice. “So Tessa still doesn’t know why Luke died.”
“I agree with Roddy,” Aaron said. “We’ve got to do something, we just can’t sit around here while she’s going through this all by herself. Can’t we take the door off its hinges?”
“Let me try to get her to open it first,” Maggie said. “I’m the only one here who’s family.”
“You’re right,” Fiona agreed. “Do you want me to come with you?”
“Oh, yes, please, Fiona. I need someone to show me the way, this is the first time I’ve been here.”
As they walked up the staircase Fiona, who hadn’t seen Maggie in several years, was amazed by the steadiness of her step and her all-but-visible resolution. She’s not a kid anymore, Fiona thought, but how old can she be? Surely no more than seventeen?
“I don’t know how she’ll live without him.”
“No,” Maggie said, “neither do I.”
At Tessa’s door, Maggie knocked. When she received no answer she spoke through the door, raising her voice so that it was impossible that it wouldn’t be heard.
“Tessa, it’s Maggie. I’m here, Tessa, I’m here for you. Please let me in. You can’t stay in there all by yourself, you need to be with somebody. I’m your sister, Tessa, I love Luke too. I’ve loved him almost since I can remember. He held my hand at our parents’ funeral, remember that day, Tessa? You on one side and him on the other? I still think of that. He never let me be by myself, he never let me be frightened. I knew he’d take care of me, even though I was only five. Luke wouldn’t want you to be alone now. You know he’d want you to be with your sister. Please let me in.”
“Maggie? Are you alone?”
“Fiona’s here with me, but she’ll go away if you want.”
The door opened and Tessa stood there, still wearing the white suit she’d had on the night before, tearless, composed, with blank eyes as dead as fossils in her white face.
“Maggie,” she said, without any inflection, without any sign of surprise at Maggie’s presence. “Maggie, have you heard about Luke.”
“Yes, Tessa, that’s why I’m here. May we come in?”
“Something happened to Luke, Maggie, something I don’t understand.”
“I know, Tessa. Please let us come in. We both really need a cup of tea and something to eat.” Maggie and Fiona both entered the room, stepping carefully over the dozens of ruby necklaces and bracelets and earrings that lay scattered all over the floor where Tessa had dropped the trays.
“A cup of tea,” she echoed.
“Yes. And something to eat.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot. What time is it. I’ll call down. Where did you come from, Maggie,” Tessa said in her mechanical voice from which all emotion, even curiosity, had bled away.
“From home, Tessa. Tyler and Madison are downstairs, and Aaron and Roddy.”
“So many people,” Tessa remarked, slowly. “And Fiona, you too. Do they all know that something’s happened to Luke.”
“Yes, Tessa, they know. They came to be with you.”
“What can they do for me?” For the first time there was a
question in her voice.
“Just be with you. We love you, Tessa,” Fiona said.
“Be with me? Do you think that will help?” Tessa asked blankly.
“A little, Tessa. It’s better than being alone.”
“Oh no, Fiona, it’s the same thing, it’s the same thing as being alone.”
Only after the Requiem Mass was Tessa finally able to begin to accept the fact of Luke’s death. For five days, despite Maggie and Fiona’s entreaties, she shut herself up in her room once more, went to ground like a small animal whose legs had been gnawed off, and mourned for Luke, unable to stop weeping, sleeping only hours at a time, waking hideously to a nightmare that never ceased, eating only when her body insisted. Luke, her one and only love, was gone, her safety was gone, there was nothing left to live for, but no way to die. She was condemned to life and condemned to danger. Eventually Tessa’s mind began to work again, as the useless jets of wrenching sobs, in which she’d forget everything but Luke, slowly turned to a dull perception of reality.
She must learn to live without Luke, she understood, since she was still alive. If she could only act as if she had strength, perhaps she would eventually find some measure of true strength, Tessa told herself, with all the courage she could fake. Searching in the only direction she knew, she took the first step to stitch up the tattered rags into which her heart had been ripped. She phoned her agent and asked him to come to the house.
“I need a job, Aaron. Within a week.”
“Tessa, Tessa, what kind of crazy idea is that?”
“I have to have it, Aaron, a location shoot, as far away as possible, as difficult as possible, something that will keep me from thinking or feeling for as many hours of the day as possible.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to—”
“What?” she interrupted him, “sit here and mourn? I could spend the rest of my life doing that, Aaron, and never have the slightest reason to stop. I’m afraid of that … oh, it would be so easy, Aaron, you have no idea, so horribly easy … tempting … oh, so tempting. It terrifies me when I think how almost right that would feel to me.” Tessa rose with determination. “The alternative is to go back to work. I know that’s what Luke would have wanted me to do. And if I don’t, how can I keep on living? Work is the only thing I know how to do now.”
“But what about Maggie? She wants to come and live with you. She can do her senior year here. She truly yearns to do that Tessa, she hopes so much that you’re going to let her, she’ll be such a comfort to you.”
“Oh, Aaron, Aaron, Maggie is such a darling, but she has no idea how bad an idea that would be for her. She may be ready to sacrifice an all-important year of school, but I’m not ready to let her do that. It’s a year in which she’ll become everything she’s been working toward, in a place where she’s finally conquered and triumphed and become a leader. How could I let her do that? How, Aaron? Only the most selfish woman in the world could allow it. She deserves her senior year at school, she needs it, you know it and I know it.”
“I’m not as convinced as you are.”
“All I can hope to be, Aaron, for a long, long time, is a woman who is using her work to survive. No one can ‘be a comfort’ to me. The only sort of comfort I can imagine is in making movies back to back, using the one part of me that I know still exists, still functions. I’m going to be on the move, and your job is to make sure of that. Maggie’s place is in school. Do you seriously imagine I could drag a seventeen-year-old girl around from one location shoot to another, for companionship? You know how unfair that would be to her. Aaron, I’m ashamed of you for not understanding that! She’s helped me beyond measure, she was there when I needed her, but now it’s time for her to go back to her own life.”
“No reason her life can’t be with you,” Aaron persisted. “No reason why she can’t take a year off. Tessa, she’s the only family you have.”
“Aaron, no, no, and no,” Tessa said, cutting short the conversation. Now that the first numbness had worn off, she saw clearly what was right for Maggie. She was free now to tell Maggie the truth, to claim her daughter, to claim the only child she’d ever have, but that revelation would bind Maggie more strongly to what she imagined, so wrongly, so sweetly, was her mission of comfort. She felt a strong urge, Tessa admitted to herself, to allow herself to take Maggie’s youth and courage and lean on it, to possess, at last, a child of her own, to hold her close, to let Maggie be strong for her. To cling. But it was wrong, clearly wrong. She must wait to tell Maggie until she felt less needy, less vulnerable. She must wait until she had done the long work of mourning that remained to her, until she stopped being this stranger, this wounded, grieving, empty shadow of herself, with only a craft left to keep her going.
“I’m sending Maggie back home tomorrow,” Tessa said, summoning up all the resolution at her command. “I’ll call Madison and arrange it. She’s been away too long as it is.”
“I’ll tell her,” Aaron said sadly. “She’s going to feel she’s abandoning you.”
Tessa continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “Now you, Aaron, you have no more than a week to get me that job, and if nobody has what you consider to be a decent location script ready to cast, don’t worry, take anything, anything at all. I don’t care about quality. One week, Aaron, and I’ll be packed and ready to go up the Amazon or anywhere else that’s far enough away. You know you can do it. Don’t bother to argue with me again, because I don’t care what anyone thinks, not even you, Aaron. If I don’t get going, soon, I’ll never work again. Luke … Luke wouldn’t have wanted me to let go of life, no matter what happened to him. Remember Aaron, remember how proud he was of me …?”
21
She wouldn’t have to stand it much longer, Madison Webster told herself, sitting at the desk in her bedroom, as she listened to Maggie clatter down the stairs, off to one of the countless events that marked the end of her last year in high school. That—that peasant—would be out of the house soon, although it could never be soon enough as far as she was concerned. She didn’t need to provide a home for Maggie any longer, not for another second, yet for the sake of appearances she obviously couldn’t throw her out until her graduation, Madison thought, as she bent over her accounts.
Her own private investments in the past thirteen years, solid and substantial as they had become in the amazing market of the 80s, remained intact. She’d had the instinct to sell everything and cash in several months before the stock market crash of 1987. However, her own impressive funds, built up through thousands of domestic economies, seemed minor compared to the twenty million dollars Luke had left Tyler in his will. Although the settlement of Luke’s complicated estate was not yet final, there was no question that they were far richer than she had ever dreamed they’d be, yet she still hadn’t changed any of her frugal ways.
Aside from what Luke had left them, he’d arranged the affairs of his company in exceptionally good order, leaving ten million dollars each to his six top men, dependent on their pledging to remain in the employ of the company for the next ten years, and he’d passed on his position as chief to Len Jones, who had been his second-in-command for so long. He’d left seventy million dollars to various charities, and everything else, the bulk of his estate, had been left to Tessa, except for another twenty million he’d left Maggie, to be kept in a trust until she was thirty-five, with Tessa named as one trustee and his tax attorney the other.
If Luke had enough to leave a hundred seventy million dollars to others, Madison wondered, biting the inside of her lips, what must Tessa be worth? She couldn’t begin to imagine. Certainly, if she were Tessa, she’d never be able to bring herself to spend it, she told herself comfortingly and honestly. How odd and yes, how pleasant, how deeply reassuring it was to know that she’d become so accustomed to a certain way of life that she’d never want to make drastic changes no matter how much money she might have.
In fact, for some reason she didn’t explore, Madison felt more devout about protect
ing her secret funds than ever. That was real money. It made her feel richer than the twenty-million-dollar bequest, which, after all, had been left to her husband, not to her.
Well, she thought, old money had always been conservative. Her family hadn’t had true old money for two generations, although they’d had the wit to make it look as if they had it but were too secure to spend it. A great deal of well-polished, ugly old silver, heavy in the hand; unfashionable, darkly varnished mahogany; her great-grandmother’s worn oriental rugs; lots of dogs—she’d grown up surrounded by all that, and as long as her horse was decent and her riding gear well cared for, the money had been assumed to be there, by her friends, the only people who mattered.
Ah, but there was one thing she promised herself to spend money on openhandedly, her private celebration when Luke’s estate was settled. She was going to redecorate Maggie’s rooms, erase every trace of her. Once that big, gaudy girl with her vulgarly large breasts was out of the house, once she’d been shipped off to college, the guest suite would become her own office from which she’d manage the estate, since Tyler had neither the ability for nor the interest in such practical matters. He could be trusted to buy a few promising stallions if their manager approved the prices, but Madison had her own ideas about making the stud farm profitable, plans she’d never been able to put into action in the past.
As for Maggie, clearly it was Luke’s intention that she now be in Tessa’s charge. Obviously he’d intended that Maggie make her home with Tessa, once she was of an age to go to college and no longer needed the steadiness of living in a family. Let Tessa cope with her sister for a change! Let Tessa try to get her to wear a bra!
Anyway, chances were Maggie would spend most of her holidays with classmates just as she’d encouraged Barney to do. That boy hadn’t been home for almost a year, what with a summer at a friend’s ranch in Nevada and Christmas and Thanksgiving in Boston and Philadelphia. He was such a popular boy that his disappointing marks didn’t matter. The main thing was that he was making exactly the kind of friends she’d hoped he’d make when they’d decided to send him to Andover, when he was twelve, more than five years earlier.
The Jewels of Tessa Kent Page 22