As for her office, well, that was even more nondescript, even more impersonal. To avoid questions that might betray her own anxiety about exposure, she had no photographs at all on her desk, not even one of Rain. Her assistant, Mary, had brought her a potted plant once, but it had died within a week. Becca had neglected to water it.
And what did that say about me? Becca wondered now. Nothing good, it seemed.
Becca walked over to the only item she hadn’t yet explored. There was a large corkboard on the far wall, and tacked to it were a jumble of images—some were obviously torn from magazines; some were postcards; some were photographs; a few were rough sketches in charcoal—and quotations, the latter printed in a strong, vertical hand that Becca assumed was Alex’s hand.
“What’s all this?” Becca asked, gesturing to the display.
Alex glanced over his shoulder to where she stood. “Food for thought. Words and pictures to keep the mind alive and well. Inspiration, if I’m lucky. A way to kill time if I’m not.”
Becca walked closer to the wall. Her eye was immediately caught by a phrase printed on a three-by-five index card. She proceeded to read aloud.
“ ‘We are by nature our own enemies . . . we seek events that unconsciously befit us, which consciously we fear. Richard Ellmann, OSCAR WILDE.’ ”
Alex seemed to have completed the immediate task that had required most of his attention. Now he put down his gouge and perched on a paint-spattered stool. “It’s a wonderful biography,” he said. “Have you read it?”
Becca shook her head. “No. So what he’s saying, this Ellmann, is that a person’s greatest strength is his greatest weakness.”
Alex considered. “I’m not sure that’s quite what he’s saying, but yes, I think your observation is probably true for most people. Maybe all people. People who are super-organized might be missing out on the creative aspects of chaos. Someone who’s always nurturing others might be emotionally starving inside.”
The thought scared Becca because she suspected its truth. She liked things to be obvious and clear; she liked things to mean what they were supposed to mean and nothing else. The fact that one trait—generosity, for example—could mean something both positive and negative within the one person who owned the trait, well, that was disconcerting.
“I’m uncomfortable with paradox and uncertainty,” she said abruptly.
Alex looked at her, as if wondering what had been going on in her head in the last few seconds. “As an artist,” he said finally, “I dwell almost exclusively with paradox and uncertainty.”
“Do you think there’s any way to avoid yourself?” she said, not in response to Alex’s statement, but struck by the quote tacked to the wall. “What I mean is, do you think it’s inevitable that everyone betrays himself in the end? Is it inevitable that, for example, my generosity is going to be my downfall?” That if I’m always and exclusively concerned with another person—my daughter—I’m going to live and die unfulfilled? This last question Becca posed to herself.
“I think,” Alex said with a smile, “that I’m going to have to give that question some consideration. It’s a complex question with, no doubt, a complex answer.”
Becca turned back to the board and read aloud another quote, this one also by this Richard Ellmann person. “ ‘To replace a morality of severity with one of sympathy.’ ”
“What are your thoughts about that?” Alex asked.
“I doubt that sympathy is always appropriate,” Becca said quickly, turning to face him. “I mean, some people make their own unhappiness and I can’t feel much sympathy for that.” Like my older sister, Becca thought. And like me?
“That’s where we’re different,” Alex replied. “I’m not claiming to be a saint, but I do urge sympathy at all times. Sometimes, I’m wrong, but I’d rather start from a place of kindness than one of judgment. Maybe that unhappy person isn’t able to be otherwise. Maybe he simply can’t be other than who and what he is. And for that, I can feel sympathy.”
Becca looked closely at this man working on his pay-the-bills project. She found herself admiring his dedication, and his competency. And more than that, she found herself admiring his kindness. “I think,” she said, after some time, “that you’re a much better person than I am.”
“Don’t say that,” he replied quickly. “You don’t know me very well. Besides, I also don’t believe in putting oneself down, even in a roundabout way. Which is not to say that a person shouldn’t hold himself accountable to good behavior. But that’s another topic.”
Yes, she thought. One should hold oneself accountable to good behavior. Otherwise, there would be chaos all the time. No relationship would ever be safe. “Alex,” she said, “do you ever regret something you did? Or something you didn’t do?”
“No,” he said firmly. “To both questions. I believe that regret is useless. More than that, I believe that it’s poisonous. I just can’t see anything constructive about it. Which is not to say that I don’t try to learn from my mistakes. I do try to learn. I just try not to regret.”
“Oh.” Could regret really be avoided? Becca wondered.
Alex shifted on the stool, which was not the most comfortable perch he’d ever sat on. “Why did you ask?” he said. “Are you suffering regrets about something?”
“Maybe,” she said. “But not about something I did or didn’t do. I think I might be regretting something I plan to do. Rather, something I’d planned to do.”
Alex raised an eyebrow at her. “You know that makes no sense. You can’t regret the future.”
“Intentions,” Becca argued. “You can regret or feel bad about intentions. You can feel bad about having announced your intentions and maybe having hurt people by announcing them. You can feel bad about revealing thoughts and feelings you should have kept to yourself or conquered or . . . or maybe never had in the first place.”
Alex folded his arms—damn, it was cold in that barn—and looked at Becca with concern.
“Becca? What are you trying to say?”
She laughed a bit and waved her hand dismissively. “Nothing. I’m—I’m just thinking out loud.”
He eyed her carefully, not at all sure he believed her but sensing it would be stupid—at least, pointless—to push the issue. “Okay,” he said.
Becca looked back to Alex’s wall of inspiration.
“ ‘My life,’” she read, “ ‘cannot have been other than what it was, and what it is, and what it is becoming. Such is Fate.’ Where did that one come from?” she asked. “I don’t see an attribution.”
Alex shrugged. “I guess I was lazy when I copied it out.”
“A belief in Fate lets you off the hook for having screwed up.” Becca believed that, or she thought she did. “You can’t be responsible for an action because you were fated to take that action. You had no choice. It was all in the cards. It seems to me that believing in Fate is the coward’s way of living.”
“But that’s if you’re positing Fate as a force outside your self,” Alex said. “If your self—your mind and heart and soul—is your ‘fate,’ then you are, indeed, responsible for your actions and choices. Right?”
Becca nodded. “Yes, I suppose that is right. But at the same time, if you are your own Fate, then you still wouldn’t be exhibiting free will because you’re not making choices. You’re acting as you have to act because you’re you.”
Alex grimaced. “It’s not easy stuff to wrap your head around, that’s for sure. But it does make for good thinking.”
Alex suddenly turned back to the worktable and began to sketch something with a stub of a pencil on a piece of torn brown paper. Inspiration, Becca wondered? Or maybe it was something as mundane as a shopping list. Left to her own devices for the moment, Becca continued to think about their conversation.
Whatever it was—Fate, her own nature—that had directed or caused her to have unprotected sex at sixteen, she had done it. And she wondered now why had she—why did anyone—run to her ruin? B
ecca, for example, had known the risks of having sex without birth control. She hadn’t been stupid when it came to accumulating facts. But when it came to judgment, to putting that store of facts to good use in daily life, well, there she had been lacking.
Since then, since the birth of her daughter, she had been perfecting her judgment. She had become proud of her rational self . . . and yet, only now, during this bitter cold week in December, was she coming to see that in wanting to tell Rain the truth in the way she had, she had been executing very poor judgment.
Why the slip in rationality, she wondered, and why such a massive one at that?
Becca looked hard at her parents’ neighbor. “You’ve insinuated yourself into our lives, haven’t you?” she said abruptly.
Alex put down his pencil and turned to her. “Have I?” he asked, with a grin. “I assure you I had no intention of insinuating. I find the word and the action it describes a bit too snakelike for me. A bit too reminiscent of Uriah Heep.”
So he read Dickens, did he? “So,” she asked, “what word would you prefer to use?”
“Let me think.” Alex looked to the beamed ceiling as if inspiration was to be found there. “How about ‘barge’?” he said finally. “I barged into their lives. It’s so much more direct and honest. When someone barges in, you can easily see him coming.”
“And you can run away. Or hide. Or both.”
Alex looked at her closely. “But you didn’t do either, did you? Run away or hide.”
“No, I didn’t,” she admitted. “Which is not to say that I didn’t try.”
“How hard did you try?”
Becca gave this question some thought. “I guess not very,” she finally said. “When I set my mind to a task, I usually succeed.” She paused as a stray thought pushed its way to her tongue. “By the way,” she said, “and I don’t know why I just remembered this now, but Rain told me that you like her long nails.”
Alex blushed; Becca could see it through the scruff of his unshaved cheeks. “Oh,” he said. Did his voice sound a bit squeaky? “It’s just that I think it’s kind of, I don’t know, exotic. Different. I spend a lot of time with artists, and long nails just get in the way of clay and paint and wires and tools.”
“You should hear them on a keyboard!” Becca laughed. “Anyway, I think Rain might like to wear her nails long because of me. I’m her—I’m her favorite aunt.”
“She’s a good kid. And it’s pretty clear she adores you.” Alex came to join Becca by the inspiration board. “Really, Becca,” he said, “your hands are—well, they’re beautiful. Even covered in heavy winter gloves.”
Becca had the ridiculous urge to hide her hands behind her back. Instead, she just said, “Thanks.” And then Alex took one of her gloved hands in his.
It felt like an important moment. It felt like a moment in which she might just be kissed.
And oh, how she wanted him to kiss her! It had been so very long since a man had touched her, and even then she hadn’t responded with equal passion. But this was different. Becca knew that she would respond to Alex’s heat easily and immediately.
But it wasn’t so simple.
She was bothered by the fact of the secret she was keeping from Alex—by the secret she had vowed to keep from the world. And if you thought you were falling in love with someone, didn’t you owe that person total honesty? Didn’t you have a responsibility to be who you really were and not the character you pretended to be in the larger world?
She liked Alex. She respected him. She might even be coming to love him. What would he think of her if he knew the truth about what she had done sixteen years earlier? Would he willingly join the family conspiracy or would he reject Becca—and the Rowans—with disgust? Besides, how could she ask it of anyone, that he become part of a lie? It was the same old problem that she’d had since a boy in her freshman year of college had asked her out. But now . . .
Maybe, she thought, it would be better for her to remain alone and aloof. Better—and safer—for everyone. All this rushed through her head in the matter of a moment.
“I’ve got to go,” she said then, pulling her hand from his and walking rapidly to the door of the barn. “Um, thanks for the talk. It was—fun.”
Alex wouldn’t have chosen the word “fun” to describe their conversation, but he wasn’t about to argue. “Sure,” he said, masking his keen disappointment. “Anytime. And be sure to get something hot to drink when you get home. You’re turning blue.”
And then Becca was gone and Alex was left alone with his board of quotes and images, his collection of cast-iron toys, and his stack of paperback spy novels. He felt more than a little frustrated. He’d been dying to kiss Becca Rowan. And he’d give anything to know what was really going on in her head!
45
Becca was sitting in the living room, an unopened book about birds native to New England on her lap. Rain was stretched out on the couch under a woolly plaid blanket. The twins were seated on the floor by the tree, poking through boxes and boxes of glass ornaments, silver tinsel, and gold garland.
The Christmas tree, a large, long-needled Scotch pine that Steve had cut down and hauled into the house with the help of Alex, stood naked still. Decorating the tree was usually a family affair, with the requisite amount of arguing about the amount of tinsel that should be used, but this year nobody seemed interested in the ritual. Not even Nora, who always had taken an almost childlike pleasure in the event, insisting she be the one to hang the three remaining ornaments she had gotten from her mother when she’d died—three delicate glass birds with wings of some shiny white material that stuck out from either side of the birds like slim, shimmering brushes.
Becca glanced over at Rain. Rain had taken a prescription pill for relief of the migraine and was feeling much better, but was not into doing anything more strenuous than flipping through another of her glossy fashion magazines. She seemed to have brought an endless supply of mindless “reading” materials and Becca couldn’t help but wonder if she was doing enough real reading. If she were Rain’s mother—
The thought and the way it had shaped itself called her up short. But there was no time for further contemplation as David came in from the dining room.
Malcolm held up a box of ornaments. “Isn’t anybody going to help?” he asked his father.
“Why don’t you guys decorate the tree all by yourselves this year?” David suggested. “I’ll help with the high parts. And be careful with the glass ornaments, especially Great-Grandma’s birds. They’re old and very fragile.”
“And if they break we could get cut from them, right?”
“Yes, Malcolm, you could. If you break them, which you’re not going to do, right?”
Becca looked up at her brother. His mouth was set and his posture revealed how tense, how full of anxiety she thought he must be feeling. Yes, there was a dark pall over the Rowan house, and Becca was terribly unhappy at having been the cause. What had she done? What havoc had she wreaked? And why had she not guessed just how bad she would feel for being the cause of so much misery? Her ignorance about her own emotions appalled her. Being the cause of such unhappiness was very close to assuming a larger importance inside her than her desire to “claim” her daughter.
“I’ll help with the tree,” she said suddenly.
Michael shrugged and Malcolm said, “Okay.” The boys seemed unenthused, but why should they feel otherwise? She’d never made much of an effort with them. They had been little more to her than afterthoughts, really. What sort of message do you send to a child by almost always calling him by his brother’s name?
David eyed her dubiously. “You don’t have to help,” he said.
Becca knew that what he meant was “I don’t want you to help if you’re going to use my children to curry favor with me.” “I want to, David,” she said steadily. She put the book she hadn’t been reading on a side table and got up to join them.
With one last look of suspicion, David continued on
upstairs. And Rain continued to be oblivious to everything but her magazine.
Becca and the boys had been working for almost a half hour—and not one ornament had been destroyed—when the front door opened. It was James, returned from wherever it was he had driven off to earlier.
“Hey, Uncle James!” Malcolm cried. At least, Becca thought it was Malcolm. “Want to help us decorate the tree?”
James caught Becca’s mildly inquiring look and attempted a smile.
“We’d love your help,” she said. “But if you’ve got something else you need to do—”
“No, no,” he said after a moment. “There’s nothing else.”
His choice of words struck Becca’s heart. The feeling that something had gone terribly wrong between Olivia and her husband, the sense that some line had been crossed, was stronger than ever.
But she wouldn’t pry. James was a private man and besides, why would he want to open up to her, the person who had been wreaking havoc in the family for the past few days? There was no conversation between Becca and James as they decorated the tree other than requests for particular ornaments and a brief discussion about the judicious use of garland.
Dinner that evening, a collection of reheated leftovers, was a grim affair. Conversation was sporadic and dull. Becca thought that everyone, even the boys, seemed not his or her usual selves.
Olivia’s eyes were swollen and red, but nobody mentioned this fact. Becca noted that her older sister hardly touched her food and said not a word. Beside her, James ate little but made small, pleasant talk with her grandmother. Whatever could be said about James, it could never be denied that he was a gentleman.
What was Alex doing for dinner? The thought startled Becca. Though she certainly didn’t think he would enjoy the glum party the Rowans were making that Christmas Eve, she also didn’t entirely like the thought of his being alone.
Since when had she started worrying about her parents’ neighbor? Alex seemed the sort who could very well take care of himself. He had such strong opinions, such well-considered convictions. Still, that didn’t mean he should be left to his own devices on a holiday. . . .
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