by A. R. Taylor
“He seduced everyone.”
“Honestly, Tasha was beautiful, persuasive. I idolized her. And Mrs. Hull. Now she was the most exotic woman I’d ever seen. Mr. Hull, well Vincent—”
Jorge raised his hand. “Stop. You’re worth fifty of those three.”
“I keep thinking that the story they told me didn’t make any sense, why I had to be there, not Tasha. Because she’s black? Or that she was an employee, the supposed friend of Mrs. Hull? The cover-up was totally botched, yet the press didn’t get into it at all. They just bought that I was the one, even given the screwed-up timeline.”
“Triangulating was a specialty of theirs, an art form that they took to a very high level. Also, they have great control over the press. It’s subtle and complete. Look at Tasha now, fat and happy in Chicago, well, maybe not fat.” At this point, the two of them had eaten almost nothing, so now when the waiter appeared with two huge plates of bandeja paisa, steak, fried pork rinds atop red beans and rice, with a slice of avocado and sweet banana chips on top of all that, even a side of chorizo sausages, they dug into the food. “Speaking of fat, behold the national dish of Columbia.”
“Listen, though, can you help me? I don’t have much time, and I want to talk to Tasha.”
Jorge took a big sip of wine. “You’ll have to go to Chicago. She’ll never come here.”
“Right. I need to find out what was really going on. I’ve done everything the lawyers wanted, and, on the bright side, I’m rich, I’m living the life of someone else, or maybe I’ve become that person, I don’t know. I have to get her to talk to me.”
“Trust me, you can’t figure them out, but also you have to watch yourself. They take no prisoners.”
“You’re not trying to say they’d kill me or something?”
“I don’t know what I’m trying to say.” He scribbled a number on the flip side of a business card he pulled from his pocket and handed it to her. “My cell. Let me know how it goes, or call for backup if need be.” When she leaned in to kiss him good-bye, something she had never done before, he held on to her for a moment, whispering, “Seriously, be careful.”
Despite the lateness of the hour, Jenna went back to the hospital, not quite sure why. Without a plan, she realized she wanted to see Amon again and went off in search of him. Of an age where she might have wanted children, she had prevented herself from even thinking along those lines, but now, despite the pileup of personal disasters in her life, she began to think of her future. She had always been comfortable around children, despite her personal only-child status. She liked their friendliness, their curiosity, their fearless laughter. Perhaps because of this little boy, the idea of having a child had taken up residence in her mind.
Eleven at night, late for such a place. She grabbed her lab coat out of her “office” and as quietly as she could, walked the length of the hallway, peeking briefly into each hospital room. In one a small baby slept while the mother sat nearby knitting. The woman looked up and smiled. Further down, she encountered a girl, maybe thirteen, pacing inside her room with her IV bag attached, talking on her cell phone. Several nurses glanced up at Jenna momentarily, not finding her presence odd, so she kept on in her search.
Around another corner she saw an open door and peeked in, ready to impersonate an official if the need arose, but this time she heard muffled cries, the sound of a wailing baby, and then a child really screaming, “You’re not going to put that into me, you’re not.” More screaming was followed by soothing sounds coming from what must have been nurses. Jenna hurried along, peeking into the small glass windows of each room, until finally she spotted Amon. In the darkness she could just make him out; his stomach badly distended, he was curled around in a ball in his mother’s arms. He cried and cowered into her, wailing, “Mom, Mom” in muffled tones. Right away Jenna drew back, ashamed of having seen him in such distress, fearing that he might have seen her.
His mother spotted her and waved her into the room. “I’m so sorry,” Jenna murmured. “I just wondered where he was.”
“He’s been really sick. He’s waiting for a kidney transplant, and you know, they just let the kids go downhill until they’re truly in trouble. He can’t eat any food he likes and keeps getting his goddamned picc line fixed over and over again. It gets infected. So that’s why he hasn’t been to see you. The nurse doesn’t like him to visit you either,” the woman whispered.
“Why doesn’t she like it?”
“It’s something different, unexpected. Not what the other kids do. I don’t know.”
“So . . . he’s been in a lot of hospitals?”
“He was in Columbus Children’s in Ohio for weeks last year. He still does have one sort of good kidney, and they’ve tried to keep it working. His mother smoked crack. That’s what got us here. I adopted him when he was ten months old.” Amon curled even more against his mother’s belly, not acknowledging Jenna at all.
“I’m from Ohio too,” Jenna said, and without quite knowing how it happened, she took the woman in her arms, the child as well, and held them both for a long time. More cries sounded about them, the nighttime anguish of children alone or in pain. No one deserved this place, an absolute rebuke to God.
In the wee hours, ensconced once more in her posh hotel suite, she arranged a flight to Chicago for the day after tomorrow. She had already created a whole scenario about giving money to the charity through Tasha’s assistant, under her current phony name, mentioning a sum so large that any time she wanted to come, according to the young woman, would be fine. She barely slept, and right at ten the next morning, she raced to the Metropolitan Museum of Art just as it opened its doors. Headed for the museum store, she quickly found a mini artist’s studio in a box, thirty colored pencils, twenty-four pastels, fourteen tubes each of oil, tempera, and acrylic paints, six brushes, a palette knife, sketch pencils, and a wooden palette. It even came with one stretched canvas and a small, foldable easel.
She had the present wrapped up in heavy paper and slung it into a cab on that drizzly gray day, determined to get it to Amon before she left town. Already his room was full of games and toys, so what would one more item matter? Because it looked like all the other gear she sometimes carried, security didn’t stop her at the front door, and she lugged it up to her studio, fully prepared to surprise him somehow, even if she had to bulldoze through his hospital door. But he was waiting for her already in the library, again hiding behind an oversized book. He smiled solemnly, saying nothing, and pattered off with her to her workroom, the pain that had caused him to cry in the night apparently gone.
“This is for you.”
The little boy didn’t react at first, but then he balanced the large package on his knees, watching it with wide, dark eyes, waiting. At last, oh so carefully he peeled back several layers of paper. When he opened the easel and saw all the paints, he said nothing for a moment. Finally, “For me?”
She nodded. And then, without asking her, he set the easel on the table next to the Bélange, pulling out the drawers on either side, running his finger slowly along each of the pencils. At last he picked one up, poked himself slightly in the finger, smiling, and began to draw an entirely recognizable horse.
The door to their little sanctuary opened abruptly. “Now this is too much. Amon cannot be up here all the time working with you, instead of down in his room getting treatments and doing what the other children are doing.” The Cavanaugh woman wrung her hands and folded them across her middle.
“And that would be nothing, right?” Jenna wasn’t in the mood. The curator glared at her, and then took the boy’s hand, pulling him up off his stool.
“No, I want to stay,” he wailed.
But now she had hold of his arm and wouldn’t let him go, though he tried to wriggle away. “Pack this stuff up again, and I’ll get it put in his room.”
Jenna removed the boy from the woman’s grasp, gently though. “No need. I’ll walk down with you.” She placed the colored pencils back in their slots and fol
ded up the box. As they walked single file down the hallway, Jenna watched Amon turn his head and stare back at her. Those eyes seemed to say, that’s how things are. People get taken away from each other, their dreams crushed, and they are forbidden, inexplicably, to do what they want, even when in danger of losing their lives. Like every other injustice, this one had no explanation and no possible reaction except stoic silence, the same such charged acceptance Amon showed now, as the unhappy group opened the door to his chamber.
Miserable, she ran back to her improvised studio, grabbing her tote, intent on getting to her waiting livery car. In the dark back seat, she crumpled into sobs because she feared she was going to lose even this little boy. She refused to lose anyone ever again, never never again. The only solution, to care for nothing, for nobody, only for inanimate objects. Yes, that would be best. She deserved to be alone because she had been bad and wrong and exile held out the only hope. So, she couldn’t approach anyone, certainly not a man; she never would have a child of her own and would always be alone.
FOUR
The next morning Jenna opened a bottle of fizzy water, gulping at it, and then splashed her face with a wet palm. She held in her hand today’s New York Times, a publication she had banished from her life because she feared what it said about anyone from her past. Worse yet, she might have had to read something by Inti, but now she hunted for his byline. Just as soon as she got back from this little adventure of hers with Tasha, she planned to set up a date with him. As she paged through the whole newspaper, she could not help noticing the tone, so different from European papers, talk in and around and about money on page after page, as if a colossal money fest had erupted. It seemed that every story was about money. Wealth had broken out for her too, but here all talk spun in a carousel around it. She herself had so much, and if only she could take pleasure in her money instead of hiding away her bank statements and investment papers in a pile under her bed, she could become once more like her American compatriots, enthusiastically rich. At last, she found what she’d been looking for: “By Inti Weill” attached to “Gas Stove Linked to Explosion in the Bronx.” She would leave a message for him when she got back from Chicago.
In a daze, Jenna rested her head on the seat as they crawled up the FDR toward the Triborough Bridge on the way to LaGuardia. She really had no plan as to what she would say to Tasha, so to cheer herself up she conjured up past visions of herself and Inti making love, wonderful images really, so different from Vince, less fraught, just fun and enjoyable. With Vince every caress brought her to the fire. She should dive back into it, she thought. Little Slutbag, that’s what Granny would have called her, but in point of fact, she had other, more serious concerns. She had already broken her word not to contact people from the past and was shortly to talk to the very person the lawyers must fear most, next to herself. At this point, though, they could come after her anyway, so she might do as she wanted, no? In a moment of bravado, she vowed to see Inti as soon as she got back from this strictly forbidden visit to the other “other” woman.
Chicago in February was a city in frozen lockdown. Anything that hadn’t been shuttered properly was buried in snow or blown into the distance by the wind. Jenna had very bad memories of snow in Ohio, mainly of cars sliding off the interstate into the median, almost comically side by side. Now she faced those memories head on. In her cab on the way to the restaurant Tasha’s assistant had specified, she clutched her heavy coat around her, but when she got out, the wind howled down the sidewalk, hard enough practically to blow her into the side of a building. She was so nervous she pushed her hat down on her head so it wouldn’t fly off, wrapping her scarf tightly around her neck. Would Tasha recognize her? Of course, Jenna remembered well the beautiful girl with high cheekbones, long caramel-colored hair, and a face so distinctive that it was difficult to look away from her, but maybe she too had changed her appearance. At least from her own research, that hadn’t happened; Tasha lived a public life, CEO of a foundation to help children, quite visible. Perhaps too Jenna’s own memories might have grown fuzzy and more romantic over time, but she would never forget the look on Tasha’s face as she stood over her dead lover.
The restaurant was a noisy sports bar, and she couldn’t quite figure out why Tasha had wanted to meet there. It would be too loud to talk. When first Jenna entered she was so nervous she just swiveled her head around wildly, wondering where among the beer drinkers and blaring television sets, she might see her former friend. At last, she spotted a bobbling head of that extraordinary hair still in the same style her Tasha had worn it in New York. Jenna waved, but the woman just stared at her. And so she hurried over, almost too nervous to look her in the eye because she saw only incomprehension. The woman didn’t recognize her. “It’s me, Tasha.”
“You’re Cate Myatt now?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t believe it. Where did that girl Jenna go?”
Jenna pulled out a chair and sat down, shaking out her hair, and pulling off her coat. “She’s still here, but buried beneath her own lies and money.”
“Good god, you look completely European.”
“In most respects I am.”
Jenna could smell that same floral perfume and admire the woman’s strong figure and demeanor just as she had when they worked together in the Hull empire. Tasha ordered burgers and fries for them, along with two beers. “Very American,” she said, and then the two sat there for some time in the lunchtime noise and hilarity.
Finally Jenna looked up and into the eyes of her one-time friend, a woman she hadn’t seen in five years. Neither spoke until at last Jenna said in a low voice, as Tasha leaned forward to hear, “Why? Why all of it? I still don’t understand, and I go over and over in my mind what happened. Why me and not you? Was it your race? Was that it? They didn’t want people to think he was sleeping with someone black?” Such being the world of NewsLink, she had never directly mentioned her race to Tasha, as if it were too much a statement of the obvious and offensive in ways she couldn’t quite figure out but could feel.
“Race played a role, I think, looking back,” Tasha spoke carefully. “But that wasn’t all that was in play. My life was complicated then.”
“And it’s not now?” Jenna felt a sort of heat go up through her.
“It’s always complicated, though I try hard to simplify.”
“Anything around that family would have been horrendous.”
“Horrific and fascinating. Worth every moment, ultimately. I was in love and trying to deal with that. I had never been in love before.”
“Ah, there’s that. He was an extraordinary man, at least to me, but then I was basically a kid. I think I loved him myself.” Unsure how much further to go, she refused to say that she herself was also sleeping with the man. “You were friends with Mrs. Hull, at least it seemed that way. Do you ever talk to her?”
“I don’t see her anymore, I don’t know her. She hates me, anyway.”
“Wait, why? She didn’t know you were sleeping with him, did she?”
Almost as if afraid to listen, Tasha bowed her head down into her hands. Jenna reached out and held those hands for a moment. “With people like that,” Tasha finally said, “there’s no way to get around their will. They’ll grind you. I watched him do it time and again. He always got what he wanted. Weirdly enough, she’s just like him.”
“I’m amazed you understood as much about them as you did.” But Jenna still felt mystified, yet wary of finding out even more.
They talked on into the afternoon as the restaurant emptied out, and when Jenna could listen with attention, she tried to understand something of the swirl of events she’d unwittingly been part of. According to Tasha, the family wanted urgently to protect Hull’s children, and had it been a black woman, the press would have become even more salacious and insinuating and have asked all kinds of questions that would have dug up further, deeper family secrets. Nevertheless, Jenna still found her account questionable. “This is t
he modern age, Tasha. Race really doesn’t mean what it once did.”
“For you, not for them.”
Jenna didn’t buy it, she felt let down, but she couldn’t get any more information from the woman, who seemed her senior by approximately one hundred years. Was race alone the mighty engine of her downfall? The only person she could ever ask, Sabine Hull, was strictly forbidden to her, but what an amazing hospital-unveiling-personal-life story meeting that would make, and she shuddered at the thought. The Frenchwoman so proud, and the recently minted Cate Myatt, Jenna who once was, the thoroughly bad young woman who had taken unimaginable amounts of money from the family, talking together over the past.
They emerged into a night of cold and wind and grasped each other arm in arm. These shared secrets involved them in a cloud of mystery and suspicion. “Do you think you would be helping people now, so much, if this hadn’t happened?” Jenna asked.
“Not at all. I’d be back in publicity. Thank god it did happen. It got me away from a world that was killing me. I hate how I behaved in that city.”
As a result of this meeting, once more on a plane that bucked mightily through wind and snow, Jenna leaned back, holding a glass of Champagne, and contemplated her own life. For one thing, she no longer had such mortal fear of flying, other fears having nudged that particular phobia out. But more important, where during the last few years she had thought her new profession too decadent and rarified to mean anything other than that wealthy people got their paintings fixed, she now saw it as a gift. Some of these works would find their way into museums where everybody could see them. That these objets should look right, perfect, just as they had hundreds of years before, was her job. Some of the paintings she had loved, others she had thought flawed, and others awful or even fake, but still she could invest her own small self into the painter’s work on the canvas. It was a privileged role, allowing her to go into the distant mind and soul of an artist out there in the ether.