Private Lives

by Karen Young

  “I’ll say it again, Gina. Please reconsider. For Jesse’s sake.”

  Gina slipped a diamond-studded watch on her wrist and brightened her smile. “We’ll be in a public place. What could happen?” Then, as if shaking off her qualms, she grabbed a cashmere shawl draped over the back of the vanity chair, scooped up a tiny, but pricey shoulder bag—another peace offering from Austin after another brutal incident—and blew out the candle. “Okay, I’m ready.”

  “Don’t forget your cell phone. And keep it on.”

  “Got it.” She patted the small bag. “Where’s Jesse?”

  “Hopefully waiting on the patio. I helped her get dressed and made her promise not to get too grimy while you finished dressing.”

  “I hope it wasn’t over ten minutes ago,” Gina said dryly.

  “Barely.” Elizabeth followed her out of the bedroom. “I didn’t tell her anything about your plans tonight.” Hoping against hope they wouldn’t pan out. But that was a futile wish.

  “Great.” Gina breathed in a deep sigh.

  “If you won’t reconsider, just let me call Ryan and find out if he’s had a chance to talk with Austin yet.”

  “Give it a rest, Liz.”

  “You’re flirting with disaster, Gina! I think I have a right to—to—”

  “To nag me?” Gina laughed shortly, humorlessly. “Yeah, I guess if anybody deserves to lecture me, you do. Haven’t you always done the right thing? Always resisted the devil’s whispers in your ear?”

  Elizabeth threw her hands out in exasperation. “What are you talking about? This isn’t about me. You have a chance to start a new life and flirting with Austin is the best way to screw that up. That’s what I’m trying to make you see. If Ryan has spoken with him, maybe—”

  Suddenly Gina was angry. “Didn’t you hear me, Liz? I’m going. I’ve already set it up. Even if Ryan has talked to him, Austin will just think of something else another day. The best thing I can do is try to play him the way he’s playing me. Obstructing him is sure to piss him off. Tonight, of all nights, I don’t want him pissed off.” Tired of talking, she jerked open the French doors to the patio. “Jesse! Where are you?”

  “Here, Mommy.” Jesse appeared with Archie, both breathing hard. Miraculously, Jesse’s shoes had remained tied. Her shirt was reasonably neat, but her jeans were smudged at the knees. Otherwise, she was still fairly presentable.

  “Ready to go, muffin?” Gina picked a bit of leaf from her daughter’s bangs.

  “Where are we going, Mommy?”

  “It’s a surprise, sweetie. Daddy’s coming and we’re going to follow in our car. Won’t that be fun?”

  “No.” Looking alarmed, Jesse ran to Elizabeth and locked her arms around one leg. “I’m staying with Aunt Lizzie.”

  “Don’t you want to see your daddy?” Gina asked.

  “No.”

  Elizabeth met Gina’s eyes over the child’s head. “I’d be happy to—”

  “No, Liz.” Taking a firm grip on Jesse’s arm, Gina pulled her away from Elizabeth and hustled her into the house. “Daddy’s due any minute now and we don’t want to keep him waiting.”

  “I don’t want to go anywhere with him, Mommy!” Jesse tugged at Gina’s grip, trying to free herself. “You can’t make me. I hate him!”

  Elizabeth took a step to intervene just as a car wheeled into the drive with a loud blast of the horn. She’d always deplored Austin’s rudeness in honking to announce his arrival rather than coming to the door. It was just one more indication of his lack of respect for Gina. For Jesse.

  “He’s here,” Gina said, scooping Jesse up as the child struggled in earnest. Her arms flailed wildly while her legs churned, kicking and thrashing.

  Distressed and helpless, Elizabeth followed them to the door. Jesse was now hysterical. She watched as Gina wrestled the red-faced, screaming child down the sidewalk to the street where Austin was parked. Apparently, the plan was for Jesse to ride with him, but it was going to be a trick to get her in the car and buckled up. Austin, of course, sat waiting for Gina to manage the feat on her own. But Jesse was having none of it. Gina couldn’t even get the door open. Elizabeth now ventured forward, determined to try again to persuade Gina not to force the child to go.

  But before Elizabeth reached them, Austin suddenly decided to intervene. He got out of his car, stopping Elizabeth in her tracks with a murderous glare. Then, looking fed up, he stalked around the back of the car and instead of forcing Jesse inside, he said a few quick, scathing words to the little girl that cowed her into abrupt silence. He then took her by her small arm, ignoring the fear on her face, and marched her to Gina’s car that sat parked and waiting in Elizabeth’s driveway. Jerking open the door, he buckled her in and closed the door with a force that rocked it on its wheels. Next, he gave Gina a wordless order with just a curt dip of his head before stalking around to climb back behind the wheel of his car. His face now a thundercloud, he watched while Gina meekly climbed into her car and started it. Elizabeth stood in the middle of her driveway transfixed. It was only when Austin turned to check traffic behind him that Gina gave a quick, furtive flutter of her fingers to Elizabeth. He roared away. Gina looked tearful and pale as she backed out to follow. Then they were both gone.

  “Check.”

  Elizabeth pulled her gaze from the window and stared blankly at the chessboard. Louie’s last move, she noted, had rendered her queen helpless. With a sigh, she shoved her chair back and stood up. She had no heart to finish. Chess was not a game to be played while distracted. Archie, sensing her distress, rose instantly and followed her over to the window. “I’m sorry, Louie. I just can’t concentrate tonight.”

  “So it seems,” he said and began carefully placing the chess pieces in a velvet-lined case. He prized the elaborate set and the game, and had been delighted when he discovered that Elizabeth liked to play.

  “I thought I heard a car.” For the umpteenth time in the past hour, she parted the plantation shutters at the window and peered, frowning, at the dark and empty street.

  “Worried, are you?”

  “They should have been back by now.” She stroked Archie’s silky head absently. “Something terrible has happened, Louie. I know it.”

  He paused with a knight in his hand. “You don’t know any such thing, Lizzie. Don’t let your imagination run away with you. It’s fine for writing your books, but at a time like this, you want to keep it under wraps, hon.”

  “I had a feeling like this once before,” she said, focusing on nothing special in the shadowy stillness outside.

  “Oh?”

  “It was the night of the fire.”

  Louie was silent a beat or two. “Fire?”

  She turned then and gave him a tight smile. “The fire that burned the house down where I lived with my father and sisters.”

  He took a moment to reply. “We’ve never talked about that, Lizzie.” There was an odd note in his voice, but she was focused on the past.

  “No, because contrary to what all those counselors said during my childhood, I never could see the point in discussing what couldn’t be changed. My life was changed from that night. I had to accept it and go on. Actually, I’ve been pretty good at stuffing it—that’s another psychological term, you know—until that article in the Chronicle when I won the Newbery. I don’t quite know how, but that reporter seems to have opened the door to my past.” Her mouth twisted in a bitter smile. “An uninteresting past but mine alone, and I wish it had stayed that way.”

  Louie still held the knight. “I don’t believe there was any intent on the reporter’s part to expose facts about your life that would hurt you. You’re an author, a famous one now. People are interested in who you are.”

  Again, a tight smile. “Well, I learned my lesson. No more interviews.”

  His beard sometimes hid Louie’s smile. As now. “Until the next award.”

  “That article flushed my sisters out. I was really stupid not to guess what would happen
when I agreed to talk to him.”

  “I think we’ve had this conversation,” Louie said dryly, then added more soberly, “And it’s troubling to hear you refer to your sisters as being ‘flushed out.”’

  She sighed. From the start, Louie had encouraged her to renew her relationship with Megan and Lindsay, insisting that family was important. He’d dismissed her argument that it was too late, that there was no relationship as she had no memories of them. Sisters were meant to be together, he’d argued, however late it was or whatever the past.

  She watched him tuck the knight into its niche, then take off his glasses and begin polishing them. “Are you going to lecture me again about the importance of family?”

  “Not tonight, Lizzie.” He put the glasses on and brought her back into focus. “Besides, it’s only Lindsay you’ve heard from, isn’t that right?”

  “She wants to pick my brain for details of the night my father died.”

  He halted in the act of reaching for the queen. “What makes you say that?”

  “She claims she’s been researching his death. I’m sure she wants to know what, if anything, I remember about that night. Or about anything out of the ordinary I might recall during the time leading up to that night. She’s hinted at having uncovered some interesting facts—I’m quoting her—which she’ll share with me. All I have to do is let her into my life and my head.” With a bitter sound, she turned back and parted the blinds to check the street again. It was dark and still. “I don’t know what it’ll take to convince her that I know nothing. Or even if I did, I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to remember that time. It beats me that she doesn’t understand why it’s so much more painful to me than it is to her. Or Megan.”

  “Because they were adopted and you weren’t?”

  She released the blind and turned to face him. “Is that so odd?”

  She didn’t wait for his reply. Moving to a small table, she picked up a framed black-and-white photograph of her parents taken at their wedding. Badly damaged, it was dark from smoke and water stains, beyond restoring, although Elizabeth had given it to an expert to try to salvage it. “To tell the truth, Louie, I work at not thinking about that time in my life, but you can’t always keep things buried. I’ve never quite believed in repressed memory. By that, I mean the kind of memory that a person claims they’ve never let out of the dark box inside them until an event or an experience or someone triggers it. Then suddenly, they recall a murder or a molestation or something so personally traumatic that it just must be exorcised. I simply don’t accept that.”

  “Some people aren’t strong enough to face harsh realities, Lizzie.”

  She shrugged and carefully set the photo back in its place. “If you say so.”

  “So you do have some memories of that night?”

  She gave a short laugh and made a knot of both hands locked together. “Right here in my own personal dark box.” But then with a sigh, she dropped back into her chair across the game table from him. “Unfortunately, my demons come swirling up out of that box at the most distressing times.”

  Louie’s hand wasn’t quite steady as he stored the chessmen back in their velvet niches. “And this is one of those times?”

  “I can almost smell the smoke.”

  Louie reached for a rook. “You weren’t even six years old, Lizzie. You’re probably recalling what you were told and your imagination is doing the rest.”

  “Maybe, but the feeling’s there all the same.” Too restless to sit, she got up again and went to the window. Still no sign of Gina. “I remember my dad reading me a story that night. He didn’t always do that. He was very busy and I think he spent a lot of time in a room that I now know was his study. I took the book down there to ask him to read to me. I missed my mother dreadfully. She had already taught me to read, but I wanted the time with him, you understand?” Frowning, she rubbed her forehead, thinking. “I remember that he was at his desk. Just sitting there. He took me up in his lap and he read the book to me. I don’t remember what it was. I wish I did, but it must have been destroyed in the fire.”

  “It’s a good thing you didn’t stay in his office.”

  “Don’t you think I’ve thought of that a million times?” she asked, turning from the window. “If I’d stayed, maybe he wouldn’t have lit up that cigar. That’s what they said caused the fire, you know. He was smoking at his desk and he must have fallen asleep and the ashes ignited the papers he was working on.”

  Louie replaced the final chess piece. “You aren’t thinking to take responsibility for your daddy’s accident, are you, Lizzie?”

  “No, of course not. But as a child, I often replayed the events of that night. If I’d curled up in one of the leather chairs in that room, would it have happened? Maybe I would have noticed him nodding off and rescued the burning cigar.”

  “Counseling should have helped you with those feelings.” Louie snapped the lock on the chess case. He bent down to stow the case beneath his chair. Archie, sensing tension in the room, whined and looked from one to the other.

  “I guess they tried. Maybe I was just locked into my own private little hell. Maybe in the state’s underfunded bureaucracy, nobody was particularly noticing a kid who didn’t make much noise. Maybe all the counseling in the universe wouldn’t have helped.” She stroked Archie, soothing him. “Actually, Iris Graham, my caseworker, was more helpful than the overworked psychologists. She seemed to develop a personal interest in both my case and Gina’s. It was Iris who suggested I write to my father.”

  “Why, if your father had died in the fire?” Louie had again removed his glasses and was rubbing his eyes.

  “I don’t know, really.” She was looking thoughtful. “Maybe she knew how devastating it was to lose both my parents within a year of each other and was trying to ease the loss. Or maybe she thought it would be good therapy, who knows? Anyway, I did what she suggested. I wrote letters to my dad….” She paused in stroking Archie, remembering the care and thought she’d taken in telling the judge every little happening in her life. The laugh she gave was soft and bitter. “It wasn’t good therapy. It kept me hoping and hoping, you know? That was cruel. I must have written a hundred of those letters and Iris would take each and every one with a promise to put it in the mail. Of course, I knew long before I stopped writing them that it was dumb to write letters to a dead man, but I still did it. I was ten or eleven—definitely old enough to know better—before I finally just quit doing it.”

  “I’m sure she meant well,” Louie said.

  “Probably.” Archie licked her hand and she bent down to hug him. “But at thirteen, I was pretty angry. And not only with Iris, but with my father, if you can understand that. I would lie in bed at night and scream at him. You can imagine how that went over with some of my foster families. I felt a lot of anger. I hated my sisters. I hated my father for dying. I hated him for setting up a situation where my sisters were given new parents and I was a ward of the state. I hated him for abandoning me to that fate.”

  She looked up to find Louie watching her through a blur of tears. She managed a laugh, a brief, deprecating dismissal of the pain of that time. “Does that sound sick? I know it was unreasonable, but I really did hate him. Not my mother, because dying in childbirth seemed something beyond a person’s control. But to die by carelessly falling asleep with a cigar in your mouth!” She made a disgusted sound. “I still find it hard to forgive him for something so stupid.”

  “He’s probably in hell thinking the same thing.”

  Now her laugh was soft, more natural-sounding. “I hope not. I’ve learned to…well, put it in that dark box. But sometimes it just seems to burst open, like a jack-in-the-box. Like tonight.”

  Louie shoved his chair back. “I believe I need to visit the little boy’s room, Lizzie.”

  “Oh, okay.” She watched him rise, his movements stiff and careful. She’d upset him and hadn’t meant to. “I shouldn’t have gotten carried away like that, Lou
ie.”

  “I’ll just be a minute. Why don’t you check your own cell phone? Maybe Gina left a message there, although I can’t imagine why she’d do that instead of calling….” His voice trailed off as he disappeared down the hall. Elizabeth heard the sound of the door of the powder room closing. She sat down abruptly. She’d broken a rule, talking about her father and the fire, dredging up old ghosts. What had gotten into her? She never did that.

  As Louie suggested, she picked up her cell phone and turned it on. Gina would have no reason to call it, knowing Elizabeth wouldn’t be away from the house. Still…she watched it go through a series of electronic tricks before indicating its readiness. As she expected, no messages.

  She looked up as Louie returned. His face was drawn with fatigue and his color was off. “You should go home, Louie. It’s so late. I’ll call you when Gina returns, if you like.”

  “I’m staying, Lizzie.”

  She knew that tone and didn’t bother arguing. “I think I’ll try her cell phone again.”

  “You’re sure she has it with her?”

  “I saw her put it in her bag.” She replaced her cell phone and picked up the cordless which had stayed within reach on the game table while they played. Gina’s number was programmed and she punched the button. Voice mail kicked in instantly. Disconnecting without bothering to add another message to the numerous ones she’d already left, she looked at Louie. “Do you think I should call Ryan Paxton?”

  Louie stepped carefully over Archie, who lay sprawled on the floor now, and settled back in his chair. “Why would you do that?”

  “He would probably have Austin’s cell phone number.” But would he give it to her, even if he had it? She felt a rising sense of panic. Gina knew Elizabeth would be concerned by the lateness of the hour and she wouldn’t have turned off her cell phone. Besides, it was a school night for Jesse, another point Gina wouldn’t ignore. It was difficult for the little girl to get up if she didn’t get to bed by nine at the latest. It was now long past that time.

  “It’s worth a try.”