“Night,” she muttered and rolled over, utterly confused, second-guessing herself. Was she completely wrong? Had he really been having dinner with Jimmy Moran?
Robert’s breathing quickly settled into a gentle rhythm, but Kathy couldn’t sleep. Was she being nothing more than the paranoid, mistrusting, insecure wife of a handsome man?
Or was she slowly unraveling half-truths from a tissue of lies her husband had so carefully crafted?
CHAPTER 13
Saturday, 21st December
Kathy sat in the car facing the Mount Auburn Cemetery and stared through the windshield at the Bigelow Chapel outlined against an eggshell-blue sky. She was chilled through to the bone, but it had nothing to do with the icy December air; it was the cemetery. She hated the finality of the place, the huge headstones, the carved angels, the great slabs of decorated concrete placed over the graves.
Her mother and father were buried there, sharing a grave in the heart of the old cemetery. Scattered in other graves, some marked, others without a marker, were various aunts and uncles and assorted cousins. Kathy hated the place, always had. She possessed a vivid imagination, and it was easy—too easy—for her to imagine the bodies in the ground, some still clothed in flesh, others nothing more than bones. In her imagination, they always had eyes that snapped open to look at her.
When she and her sisters were kids, it was a Sunday family ritual to come and visit Mount Auburn. Every week, as they walked through the gates, her father would make the same joke, the “dead-center-of-Cambridge” joke, and every week she, and her two sisters, would groan aloud in unison. It became part of the ritual.
They would start with the graves of her grandparents and gradually work their way, Sunday after Sunday, to the graves of all their dead relatives, cleaning them up, plucking out weeds, washing down the headstones with soapy water from lemonade bottles. She knew all the names by heart, all the dates, and even though she had never met any of the people, she felt she knew them intimately. She knew that Aunty Mae had fought with Cousin Darren and that they didn’t speak for nearly thirty years; she knew that Cousin Jessica—who wasn’t really a cousin at all—had been left at the altar by Tim, who later went on to marry Aunt Rita, and that Uncle Fitz had a special coffin made because he was so fat. It was only later, much later, that she realized that was how her father had kept alive their family history. Even now, all these years later, she would have been able to find each and every one of those graves. She knew for a fact that her own children wouldn’t be able to find their grandparents’ graves. They knew precious little about her side of the family, and even less about Robert’s.
But Kathy wasn’t planning to go into the ground with a stone slab raised over her head. When she died, she was going to be cremated and her ashes scattered in the Boston Harbor.
The clock just inside the gate clicked onto nine, and Kathy checked her watch. She’d wait another couple of minutes.
The cemetery was busy, and the woman selling flowers outside the gates had a huge display of Christmas wreaths and poinsettias. Kathy glanced over her shoulder at the backseat. She’d brought a small bouquet of flowers, and suddenly it seemed too small, too inconsequential to mark her parents’ grave. She’d get a wreath, she decided.
It had been six months since she’d last visited the grave. She could come up with any number of excuses why she’d stayed away so long, but the truth was simpler: She hadn’t wanted to come. This wasn’t the way she wanted to remember her parents, cold and dead in rotting wooden boxes in the ground. To her, they would both always be alive and vital. She remembered a quote she’d read somewhere: Nothing ever truly dies while it remains alive in the memory.
Except love. Love can die.
She didn’t want to think about that just now. She opened up her purse and fished out the two small memoriam cards she carried tucked into the front pocket. Holding one in each hand she looked at the fuzzy, slightly out of focus photographs of her mother and father. Her father’s card was cracked and faded, the paper slightly yellow; her mother’s card still looked new. Margaret Childs had died only eighteen months ago. There had been no reason, no illness. She simply went to bed and never woke up. Johnny, her father, had died seventeen years ago, a year after she’d married Robert. Johnny had been a smoker all his life, and a third heart attack had finally taken him.
A tap on the window made her scream and physically jump.
Kathy rolled down the window. “Jesus Christ, you almost gave me a heart attack!”
“Well, you’re in the right place for it.” Smiling brightly, Sheila Childs leaned into the car to kiss Kathy’s cheek, filling the car with cold air and a slightly bitter floral perfume. Then she saw the cards in her sister’s hand, and the smile faded. Sheila lifted their father’s card from Kathy’s palm and tilted it to the light. “I was thinking about him only the other day, and I couldn’t find my card.” She handed the card back to Kathy.
Kathy shoved both cards into her purse, rolled up the window, and climbed out of the car. “I think about him a lot,” she said. She reached into the backseat to lift out the small bouquet.
The two sisters linked arms and darted across the road. They could not have been more dissimilar. Sheila stood at least three inches taller than her older sister and was thin to the point of emaciation. The color of her hair tended to change with the seasons, but lately she’d been going back to her natural deep red, adding golden highlights to emphasize her pale, flawless complexion. Kathy was sensibly dressed in a three-quarter-length black leather coat, black trousers, and low-heeled black boots, while Sheila was elegant in a cream-colored belted Marc Jacobs raincoat and impossibly high-heeled ankle boots. She looked like she’d just stepped off of the runway.
They were through the cemetery’s tall, wrought iron gates before Kathy remembered her intention to buy a wreath. Suddenly it didn’t seem to matter.
This section of the cemetery was deserted, and they had the narrow pathways to themselves. The air was crystal clear, and although the winter sun was without heat, it painted the tumbled stones and ancient trees in sharp relief, making them look almost artificial. Frost and frozen snow glittered in the shadows and dusted the tops and crevices of some of the more ornate headstones.
The two women walked in silence, turning right down an avenue of evergreens, heading into the heart of the old cemetery. A robin darted into the middle of the path, cocked its head at them, then twisted away. Sheila turned her head to follow its path through the trees. “It’s so peaceful here,” she said. “I love it.”
Kathy looked at her in surprise. “You love it?”
“Always have. Remember those Sundays when we were younger, when Mom and Dad would take us here to clean all the graves?”
“I hated those trips.”
“I loved them. I loved the peace and tranquillity of this place. No matter how hot it was, it was always cooler here.” She gripped her sister’s arm and stopped. “Listen.”
Kathy stopped. “I can’t hear anything.”
“Exactly,” Sheila smiled. “That’s what I love about this place. It’s like a cocoon.”
“You always were weird.” Kathy squeezed her younger sister’s arm to take the sting from the words.
The two women wound their way past the crypts of the cemetery’s more famous historical residents like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Winslow Homer and turned left, long shadows dancing ahead of them. The graves in this section were old, most no longer tended and forgotten, but dotted amongst them, like strange blooms, were newly dug graves, a profusion of colored wreaths and cards amidst the withered grass.
“Are you going to tell me what you wanted to see me about?” Sheila asked finally. “It’s not every Saturday morning I get a call from my favorite sister.”
“I’m glad you said favorite sister. Your big sister was asking after you last night.”
“Your? Don’t you mean our?”
“When she’s in one of her moods, you can have her all to yo
urself.”
“I’m afraid to ask. . . . How is she?”
“Wants to know if you have a boyfriend yet.”
“Tell her if she wants to know she can pick up the phone and ask me herself,” Sheila snapped. “She’s not my mother.” Then she smiled. “She only thinks she is.”
“If it’s any consolation, she’s the same with me. Are you going to her place for Christmas?”
“I might. I haven’t decided yet.”
“You could shock her and bring your boyfriend with you.”
“No way. I’m definitely not bringing Alan.”
“So he has a name. Alan.”
“I told you that.”
“No, you haven’t! You’ve been completely secretive about him. I was beginning to wonder what was wrong with him.”
“There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s perfect.”
“Sure. The last one was perfect. And the one before that. Even the one with the lazy eye was perfect,” Kathy reminded her.
Sheila laughed, the sound loud and startling in the silence of the graveyard. “Okay, maybe he wasn’t perfect. But he was extremely rich and that compensated for a lot of his other failings.”
“Sheila!” Kathy was genuinely shocked.
“What? I’m just being honest. But this isn’t why you asked me here this morning, is it, to talk about my taste in men? I can’t remember the last time you wanted to visit Mom and Dad’s grave. What’s up?”
Kathy walked a dozen steps in silence. “I need to talk to you about something,” she said finally. “I need some advice.”
“Wow, this is a first. You’ve never asked me for advice before in my life.”
“Well, this happens to be an area in which you’re an expert.”
“Which is?”
“Men.”
Sheila started to smile. “I’m not sure that was meant as a compliment.”
The two sisters turned left onto a narrow pathway. Their parents’ grave was about halfway up on the right-hand side, a simple white headstone, with the surface of the grave covered in fine white pebbles. A single black pot stood in the center of the grave. Wilted and long withered carnations drooped from the vase.
“Julia was here,” Kathy muttered.
“But not recently,” Sheila added.
The two sisters moved silently around the grave. Kathy emptied the dead flowers and carried them off to the nearby trash can. When she got back, Sheila had arranged Kathy’s bouquet in the bowl and was rubbing down the surface of the stone with a tissue. They then stood side-by-side and stared at the stone.
“ ‘A loving father. Sadly missed,’ ” Kathy read aloud. “We should have added a line when Mom went down. Something similar.”
“It’s funny—I know he’s been gone longer, but I remember him more than Mom,” Sheila said.
“I have better memories of him. Fonder memories,” Kathy agreed.
In the last five years of her life, Margaret Childs had become increasingly bitter and disillusioned with life. She had found fault with everything, and it had reached the stage that the grandchildren—and indeed her own daughters—had found it difficult to visit with her. Family occasions were a nightmare, and she’d ruined Julia and Ben’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary celebration with her bickering and fault-finding.
“When I go, I want to be cremated,” Kathy said.
Sheila shrugged. “I don’t care what you do with me when I’m gone. Have a party. I’d like that.”
“You’re the youngest. You’ll outlive all of us.”
“Maybe.” Sheila smiled, but it was the slightest twisting of her lips, and her eyes remained distant. Then she turned to look at her sister. “So?”
Kathy took a deep breath. “So, I think Robert is having an affair.” Her breath steamed on the air, giving the words a form. “I don’t know what to do about it.” In the chill December air, it sounded so cold, so matter-of-fact, so unbelievable. She glanced sidelong at Sheila. “What do you think?”
Her younger sister looked shocked. She finally took a deep breath. “Are you sure?”
“Nearly positive.”
“Nearly positive doesn’t sound too sure,” Sheila said quietly. She took her tissue and rubbed it absently over the top of the headstone, not looking at her older sister. “Tell me everything.”
Kathy sat down, perching on the edge of the stone. It was cold and hard beneath her, but in a strange way she welcomed the chill. The last couple of days had been so unreal, dreamlike almost. This was real: sitting here, now, on the icy stone in the deserted cemetery. She could no longer take anything for granted. The illusion of her safe, secure world had been shattered. Maybe the last week had not been the dream; maybe the weeks and months and maybe years preceding it had been the dream. And now she’d finally woken up.
“Six years ago . . .”
“Whoa, this started six years ago?” Sheila was stunned. How could she not know this? How could she be so close to Kathy, yet know so little about the important details of her life? Then again, Sheila realized, she had her own secrets she’d elected not to share with Kathy.
“Yes. Well . . . in a way it did.” Kathy ran her gloved hand over the pebbles on the grave. “Six years ago, I first suspected that Robert was having an affair. A woman called Stephanie Burroughs joined the company as a researcher on a project, a documentary. Young, about your age, ridiculously pretty, extremely bright. They spent a lot of time together. It was around that time he started coming home later and later at night. Her name kept cropping up in conversation. Eventually, it got too much for me; I confronted him and accused him of having an affair with her.”
“With what evidence?” Sheila wondered.
Kathy lifted her head to stare into her sister’s dark eyes. “Intuition.”
“I wonder how many marriages intuition has ruined?” Sheila asked softly, then waved Kathy on before she could comment.
“I confronted him. He denied it. Naturally.”
“But you got over it. You must have; you’re still together.”
“We got over it, sure, but it was hard. We’d just moved into the new house, and there was a lot going on. It was easy enough to concentrate on other things and just . . . well, just let it slide. Stephanie Burroughs moved away, and Robert stopped talking about her.”
Sheila wrapped her arms around her chest and sank down on her haunches beside the headstone. “So what changed?”
“The day before yesterday I came across her name—Stephanie Burroughs’s name—in his iPhone.” Even as she was saying it, it sounded flat to her ears.
Sheila looked at her blankly, obviously expecting more. “And?”
“Her name was in his phone, with a little red flag alongside it.”
Sheila dug in her pocket and pulled out her own phone. She ran her index finger across the screen before handing it across to her sister. “Scroll through this; I’m sure you’ll find the names of the last four men I’ve dated. That doesn’t mean I’m still seeing them. I’m also Facebook friends with most of my exes. I think you’re jumping to conclusions.”
“But her name is on Robert’s new phone. He only got it a couple of months ago.”
Sheila shoved her phone back into her pocket. “I got this less than a month ago. All that happens is that the names are stored on the SIM card in the phone. When you pop the card into a new phone, all your contact details are there.”
“There was a red flag beside her name.”
Sheila stared at her sister, saying nothing.
“I know, I know. It sounds completely pathetic, doesn’t it?” Kathy straightened suddenly. “Look, I’m sorry for dragging you out here. Maybe I’m losing my mind.”
“Honey, maybe you’re just reading too much into a situation.”
Kathy dusted down her coat. She faced the grave, crossed herself automatically, then turned away and headed back down the narrow path. Sheila hesitated a moment, then followed her. They walked a few yards in silence together.
“I’m dying to go there.”
“So am I,” Kathy said pointedly.
“Oh.”
“I also found a speeding ticket for a time when he was supposed to be in Connecticut.” Spoken aloud, in the cold light of day, she realized again just how weak her accusations were. “He spends a lot of time away from home. He works late,” she added. Now that just sounded petty, she thought.
“So what are you asking me?” Sheila said.
“Do you think he’s having an affair?”
“Do you really want my advice and opinion or do you want me to support you?” Sheila asked. “Because they are not the same thing. If you want me to support you, I’ll do that. But I don’t think you want my advice.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You don’t have to. How can you explain the evidence?”
“What evidence?”
“The credit card.”
Sheila reached into her pocket and lifted out an olive Hobo wallet. She snapped it open. There were four credit cards in little plastic windows. Tucked into folds behind them were at least another half dozen plastic cards, Starbucks, Anthropologie, Banana Republic, Peet’s Coffee. “At home, I get an offer of a credit card at least once a day. Gold cards, platinum cards, AmEx, Visa, MasterCard, Bank of America, First National. Maybe he simply took up the offer of a good rate.”
Kathy rounded on her sister. “What about the speeding ticket? He got it in Jamaica Plain on Halloween. The same night he was supposed to be in Connecticut.”
“Did he drive or take the train to Connecticut?”
Kathy opened her mouth to reply, then closed it again, suddenly feeling sick. Had Robert taken the train that time? He sometimes did. Particularly if he was going to be away overnight—he hated driving on 95. He’d been taking the train more recently. He had even gotten an Amtrak frequent traveler pass. “But how would that explain the car?”
The Affair Page 8