“What about your husband? Did he come to New York too?”
Geneva seemed to flinch at the word husband. “What makes you think I was married?”
“The wedding photograph—the one in the country club newsletter.”
“It was a brief marriage.”
“You still use his name.” Miranda didn’t know where she was going with this, but it was one of the facts Evan had presented her with, and it seemed, if not exactly relevant, then not without meaning either.
“Preston and I were very young. Too young, really. I was still in college. But we had to get married.”
“Because you were pregnant?”
Geneva nodded. “And even though I could have had an abortion, my mother and Preston pressured me. It was—a mistake.”
“What about the baby?”
“She was stillborn.” Miranda bounced Celeste a little; she was getting fussy.
“I’m sorry.” Miranda looked at Geneva’s pale, drawn face and felt the first stirrings of pity for this puzzling woman.
“Preston and I—well, things kind of fell apart after that. I knew he blamed me somehow, like I was being punished for even considering an abortion. For wanting one—because I really and truly did.”
“New York was a new start for you.”
“Exactly.” Geneva’s color came back, and she looked more animated now. “A clean slate. But I kept my married name. I’m not even sure why; maybe I believed that if I did, Preston might come back to me.”
“What happened when Caroline got here? Did you let her live with you?” Miranda felt restored too; the water had helped. Celeste wouldn’t become like her mother; Miranda would not let it happen. If she saw the signs—any signs—she wouldn’t be ashamed, wouldn’t hide behind the scrim of denial. She’d go to the ends of the earth to help her daughter. To save her, as poor Caroline had not been saved.
“She showed up in New York when our mother died. She knew where I lived and she sweet-talked the super into letting her into my apartment. I nearly fainted when I came home and found her taking a nap on my bed. But I let her stay—at least for a little while.” Geneva was quiet, remembering. “It wasn’t so bad at first. She could be fun; she could be charming. She had a wicked sense of humor. We used to laugh a lot. . . .”
“But then it changed.” Miranda pushed one of the offending pillows out of the way so she could lean back. It slid to the floor, but Geneva did not seem to notice.
“No.” Geneva shook her head. “It just went back to the way it was before. The way it had always been. If I asked her to do the dishes, she screamed at me and accused me of being a scold, just like our mother. She stayed out until all hours and then woke me up when she came in. She let the tub overflow, left the stove on, and nearly set the place on fire with her smoldering cigarettes. A couple of times she even did light fires—intentionally. ‘I just wanted to see something burn,’ she said. She tossed garbage out the window, swore at the neighbors. Then there were the men. I once got up in the middle of the night and found her having sex with someone on the living room rug. And she could barely keep a job—”
“You supported her?”
“Yes. Almost the whole time she was here. She only worked sporadically.”
“Doing what?”
“Well, she didn’t have a lot of options. She wasn’t cut out for waitressing or being a salesgirl—her moods were too unpredictable. And forget about office work. But I knew someone who owned a small modeling agency—”
“Caroline was a model?”
“Not a fashion model; she modeled parts—eyes sometimes. She had gorgeous blue eyes. Lips too. And feet! She had the most elegant feet: small, with high, fine-boned arches and very even toes. Not everyone has those, you know. They’re very highly prized.”
At another moment, Miranda would have burst out laughing. But this was not that moment.
“Anyway. Finally, I told her she had to go. But even then I was still involved; she’d have a fight with her landlord and I’d have to intervene. Or she’d run out of money for the fourth time in six months. So I’d go in and patch up whatever it was. It was only later that I cut her off completely. I had to. She had keys to my apartment, and one weekend when I was away, she came in and practically cleared the place out. Clothes, dishes, even furniture—gone. I didn’t even try to find out what she had done with everything. Or why. I moved and left no forwarding address. When she called my office, I instructed people not to put the calls through. She was crazy, pure and simple. Crazy and hell-bent on staying that way.”
“She was your sister. She had no one else,” said Miranda. Couldn’t Geneva have had her committed? Put her somewhere that she would have been safe?
Geneva was silent for a moment. “I don’t expect you, or anyone who hasn’t lived with someone like her, to understand. She was my sister, but my sense of revulsion—and it really was that, revulsion—began to overshadow any love I might have had.”
“You were angry,” Miranda said, beginning to understand. “You still are.”
“Yes, I was angry. I’m not proud of that,” she said finally. “But I had reached the end—of my patience, my tolerance, of my everything. She used me up.”
There was a silence in which Miranda tried to imagine herself in Geneva’s position. “How did you put it together? About Celeste, I mean,” she finally said. “Because you did put it together, didn’t you? You suspected she might be your niece when you sought me out, flattering me and getting me to agree to the profile. It wasn’t just that you saw the story and thought we would make good subjects. You had a plan all along.”
“Yes,” Geneva said softly. “I did.” She looked down at her hands; they seemed to offer nothing in return.
“You still haven’t told me how you were sure,” Miranda said.
“Wait here,” Geneva said. She went into another room and returned with a photo album.
As Geneva flipped through the pages, Miranda caught glimpses of a fair-haired woman with a French twist, a big brick house, a backyard teeming with roses. Here, in these snapshots, was Celeste’s heritage, her legacy, and her birthright.
“Look,” Geneva said, stopping. There was a close-up of the French-twist woman holding a baby; on the baby’s wrist was a tiny string of beads. The photo was black-and-white, but Miranda knew that the beads were pink and white glass, with black lettering. She had seen it before, the first time she’d seen Celeste. “That bracelet? My great-grandmother got it as a gift when my mother was born. It came with a layette—everything pink, white, and smothered in lace. The letters spelled out ‘baby girl.’ My grandmother kept it and gave it to my mother, who was saving it for when she had a granddaughter. I didn’t even remember it until I saw that photo of Celeste on the news. She was wearing it.”
“You suspected Celeste might be Caroline’s—”
“Caroline had told me about Jared.” Geneva went on as if Miranda had not spoken. “She was mad for that man. Head over heels. And the bracelet? She must have taken it earlier, before my mother died; I didn’t find it with her things.” Geneva’s voice cracked then. “I wish she had told me about the baby. But I probably wouldn’t have believed her.”
“Jared didn’t,” Miranda said.
“She told him?” Geneva looked surprised. “He didn’t mention that.”
Miranda nodded. “On the last night he saw her. They had met for drinks at the Cosmo. He thought she was making it up. He was furious; he stormed out and never saw her again.”
“She drove everyone away!” Geneva burst out. “She couldn’t help herself, but that’s what she did.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Miranda said. “But to her, it must have felt like you were the ones pushing her away. Abandoning her.”
“I know,” Geneva said. “And even though I’m not sure I could have done it differently, it will haunt me.”
>
“Why did you come looking for us, then? That’s the really twisted part,” Miranda said. “That’s what I still don’t get.”
“Isn’t it obvious?” said Geneva. “Guilt. Pure and simple.”
“All right. So you were guilty. But what did you think you would accomplish by writing those articles? What was it that you wanted?” There, she finally had asked the thing that had been plaguing her most.
“When I first suspected that Celeste was Caroline’s baby, I felt sick. Sick. It was almost like Caroline had come back from the dead to taunt me. Of course that wasn’t true. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the baby: what would happen to her? Where would she end up? I didn’t want her; I didn’t think I could handle having her. Still, I wanted her to be safe. Protected.” She paused. “Loved.”
Miranda was quiet.
“Then I found out you were trying to adopt her. I thought if I interviewed you and wrote the piece, I would be doing two important things. Learning more about you. And helping Celeste. Because the piece did help, didn’t it? You got offers of diapers, food—things like that, right?”
“Yes,” said Miranda. “I did.”
“But when I found out about Jared, I changed my mind. Not about you—it was clear to me that you were a wonderful mother. But I knew that Caroline had loved him—at least as much as she was capable of loving anyone. And that she would have wanted him to raise their child. So I switched allegiances. In the end it didn’t matter, though. You didn’t fight to keep her.”
“I wouldn’t have won. But, more important, I didn’t think I should. She was his child, after all. Who was I to take her from him? I loved her so much I was willing to let her go.”
“You put her first. Not too many people would have done that. Caroline wouldn’t have.”
“Caroline couldn’t have.”
“No. That’s right.” Geneva stood and walked over to the portrait. Miranda got up and joined her. There was nothing in that enchanting child’s face that forecast the sorry story of her life. Whatever she had read into Geneva’s gesture was only because she knew its tragic end.
While Miranda was still looking at the portrait, she felt Geneva’s touch on her arm. “Could I hold her? Just for a minute?”
Miranda hesitated. But as Geneva stood there, a supplicant in white and black, something in Miranda softened and she handed the baby over.
“She’s so heavy!” Geneva exclaimed. She looked ill at ease—even burdened.
“She’s big for her age,” Miranda said. “Which is actually a good thing, considering her start in life.”
Celeste began to squirm and reached out for Miranda. Geneva seemed relieved to give her back. “Do you think you could find your way to letting me see her sometimes?” she said. “Not often, not alone. But just once in a while.”
Again, Miranda was silent. She let her eyes roam around the meticulously appointed room. Although she had not seen the rest of the apartment, she knew it would be governed by the same sense of order, the same loving attention to detail. And she also knew what it had cost Geneva to make this request.
“I’m not sure,” she said finally. “I’ll need to think it over.” Geneva was on the outside of Celeste’s life; she wanted to step a little closer to it, and Miranda was the one who could bestow or deny permission. It was, she realized, a terrible position to be in. She was ready to go; she had gotten what she had come for. Or as much as she was going to get. She strapped Celeste into the car seat and took her bag from its spot near the love seat. Then she moved toward the door.
“I won’t call you.” Geneva followed her and stood with her hand on the polished brass knob. “But I’ll be hoping that you’ll call me.”
Miranda did not reply. She had come to judge, to excoriate and to blame. But what she felt now was less anger and more compassion. Geneva was damaged too—by her past, by the choices she had made, and by the burden of guilt she would always carry with her. She still had not said anything, but she reached for the other woman’s hand and gave it one short, strong squeeze before she left.
THIRTY
When Evan walked onto the set of the Soigné fashion shoot, he couldn’t help but compare it to the last shoot he’d been on: yapping dogs, hissing cats, a rogue parrot, and yards and yards of pee-stained no-seam. Here, in this elegant Brooklyn Heights town house, the mood couldn’t have been more different. Not only was the place itself posh by any standards—velvet drapes, massive crystal chandelier, enormous mantel in black, veined marble—but the mood was so subdued and even elegant. The smooth, creamy sound of Nat King Cole was issuing forth from a pair of speakers and, at the far end of the room, a long table had been set up with lavish platters of sliced fruit, a sink-sized bowl of yogurt, and a matching bowl of granola, croissants, and muffins; there was also coffee and hot water for tea.
Mario, who had asked for his help on this shoot, came up behind him. “Fashion people like to live well.” He paused to take a bite of a blueberry muffin. “And if you’re in their orbit, that means you get to live well too.” Evan had been friends with Mario since their days at Pratt, and when Mario’s assistant bailed at the last minute, he didn’t mind stepping in to lend a hand. The work wasn’t too hard, and Mario had offered him a great day rate.
Evan began unpacking the lights, keeping an eye on the terry-cloth-clad girls—and they really were girls—who were having their faces painted by the makeup person. Not one of them was especially pretty, but as the makeup was applied, they became transformed, their features suddenly springing into vivid and compelling life. There was a red-haired, freckled one who truly did look like a kid, but when the makeup person got through with her, she was turned into someone at least a decade older—and decades more sophisticated. Those freckles reminded him a little of Thea, though Thea never attempted to cover them.
“We’re going to start in the parlor,” Mario said. “So you can set up in there.”
The parlor had a long, lace-covered table, and the models were asked to sit and pose around it. They wore wispy, light dresses that looked like silk or, in one case, gauze; although it was now October, the magazine was already shooting for a spring issue.
After Evan had positioned the camera, a medium-format Rolleiflex, on the tripod, Mario began with several shots of the entire table—the girls holding crystal goblets, the pyramid of fruit in the crystal bowl, the platters of petits fours, the enormous sprays of white lilacs, flown in from who knew where—before he began to focus on the individual girls. “Come on. Throw your head back and smile, smile, smile.” He kept up a steady patter, cajoling them with his words, his compliments. “You’re at a party; you’re having fun, the time of your life. Let it show, sweetheart. Let it shine.”
When it was the redhead’s turn, Mario had her stand against the dark green velvet drape; her hair stood out like a blaze. In addition to her sliplike dress, she wore dangling earrings, a wristful of bangles, and a long scarf she wound in different ways around neck, shoulders, and arms. A stylist hovered nearby to make adjustments to her clothes and hair, adroitly stepping out of the way before the shutter clicked. “That’s right. That’s the way to do it!” The girl arched her throat and giggled; click, click, click.
Evan wondered if Thea had ever considered modeling when she was younger. She was very pretty, and she certainly had the body for it. They were lovers now, and he’d learned to appreciate that body, despite its not being the kind that naturally excited him. But she was fun in so many other ways. Since they’d started dating, they had gone rock climbing and Rollerblading. They were planning a white-water rafting trip, and Evan was looking forward to it. She was even taking trapeze lessons at Chelsea Piers, and although he declined her offer to treat him to a class, he did stay and watch. The sight of her long limbs stretched and flying through the air was exhilarating, and yeah, sexy. He didn’t feel like he loved her, but he liked her a lot, and for now, liking was mor
e than okay. “And this time, you picked one who’s really into you,” Audrey pointed out. He knew she was right.
Around noon, they broke for lunch. Evan went back into the first room and saw that the breakfast stuff had been cleared and consolidated to make space for the sandwiches, wraps, bowl of salad, and cookie plate that had been added. He reached for a sandwich—turkey with arugula and cranberry mayo on a ciabatta roll, just the kind of thing Miranda would have prepared. He also helped himself to a bag of sweet potato chips and a pickle. He still thought of her, often, though he tried to banish her image from the bedroom, especially when he was with Thea. He thought about Lily too. Were Miranda and her father, Jared Masters, a couple now? One happy little family? The thought still could make his stomach churn, so he tried not to think about it.
He was just about through with the sandwich when he was approached by a tall, blond woman in caramel-colored leather pants and a soft sweater of the same shade. At first he thought she was a model but quickly realized she was at least twice the age of the rest of the girls in the room.
“Evan Zuckerbrot?” she said, putting out her hand.
“I’m Evan.” He shook her hand and swallowed; it was hard to talk with a mouthful of turkey.
“Courtney Barrett. I’m the accessories editor at Soigné. I don’t usually show up at these shoots, but when I saw your name listed as the assistant on the shoot, I wanted to stop by.”
“Nice to meet you.” What possible interest could the accessories editor of this big-time magazine have in him? He was just pinch-hitting here.
“I’m not here about the shoot,” she said as if she’d been able to divine his thoughts. “But I did want to talk to you. Can we go upstairs?”
“Isn’t that off-limits?” he asked.
“Not to me.”
You Were Meant For Me Page 26