* * *
LOOKING BACK ON that winter, I can see this insistence in everything I did. I see my obsession with appearances. My need for control over every aspect of them. Jim might have been keeping his distance, but I can see how tempting I made it to stay away.
Just a few days later, for instance, I opened a shipment of holiday tapers and cried out in distress.
“Steph! What is it?” Jim appeared in the doorway of the kitchen.
“These candles!” I said.
“Good lord, Stephanie, this is about candles? You scared me. I thought something bad happened.”
“This is bad.”
“What’s wrong?”
“These candles are white. They’re supposed to be ivory.”
Jim’s brow creased in confusion. “Ivory is white,” he said after a moment. “Isn’t it?”
“Not bone white. Ivory’s more like cream. Like almond. It’s off-white.”
“All right . . . is that . . . important?” my husband asked carefully.
“It’s very important!” I exclaimed. “Ivory is soft, and subtle, and comforting. This shade is sterile and soulless and awful.”
Jim looked at the candles again and then back at me.
“I’m going for a soft rustic effect,” I went on. “These are like candles for a freaking séance. I mean, they hurt my eyes.”
“Honey?” Jim said finally. “This is a first-world problem if I ever heard one. Do you think anyone besides you could possibly care?”
“Jim, you don’t get it,” I told him. “Design is a subliminal experience. People might not be aware of how a color affects them, but that’s beside the point. I know the experience I’m trying to create in my own space. We have to send these candles back, because there’s no way I can use them.”
My husband gave up and retreated to his home office.
The month of December was like this. It was like no other time of the year. Seven days a week, I set my alarm for four thirty a.m., ninety minutes earlier than usual, and I went to bed later than usual, after midnight on most nights. I spent these extra hours decorating the tree, making wreathes, baking and freezing five or six kinds of cookies, wrapping dozens of gifts to put beneath the tree. The rest of my week was as usual: designing homes, competing in tennis matches, and managing Heritage School.
Each night I fell into bed exhausted, depleted, and anxious. Back aching, feet hurting, head swimming with ideas, worries, tasks. None of this is worth it, I told myself. I will never do this to myself again.
Yet when the night of our party was finally upon us, I felt the usual rush of triumph. Our house looked enchanted. Garlands of holly and pine were twined along the mantel and the staircases. There were candles in every window—a bright and cheery crimson since I hadn’t been able to find the right shade of ivory—and poinsettias adorned every surface.
The tree was beautiful, trimmed in gold and white and ablaze with hundreds of tiny, twinkling lights. I had trays of canapes out on the island: jewel-colored caviar piled on rounds of toast, walnuts and blue cheese nestled into split figs, smoked salmon and chives on squares of rye. There were little hot dogs wrapped in phyllo dough and tiny mincemeat pies. There were rich cheeses and assorted olives and marcona almonds and roasted chestnuts. There were cut-glass bowls of punch and eggnog set out on the sidebar, where guests could spike their drinks with anything they wanted. In the ovens were roasting Cornish hens and a maple-glazed ham, scalloped potatoes, bacon-wrapped asparagus.
I took in the scene around me in the lull before the first guests arrived and felt a tug of pride. All the kids who sneered at me as I was growing up, for being poor and dirty and illiterate: Wouldn’t they be surprised if they could see me now?
Jim’s family was the first to arrive. His older sister, Joyce, came through the front door along with a blast of wind. Snowflakes were clinging to her hair and coat. Her cheeks were rosy, but her face was drawn and mournful.
“The roads are a mess,” she fretted. “I’m surprised we made it here in one piece. I honestly thought the wind was going to blow us off the bridge.”
“Merry Christmas, Joyce!” I said, with a cheer so forced it bordered on aggression. “May I take your coat?”
Crystal, his younger sister, arrived next, wearing mittens and clutching a glass pan.
“Merry Christmas, Stephanie,” Crystal said. “Do you have a nice serving plate I could use? I don’t own any dishes in Christmas colors, but I don’t think my casserole looks very nice in the baking pan.”
“It looks lovely to me!” I told her. “But I’m sure we can find another holiday platter.”
Jim’s parents then came in. They greeted me with warmth, but their faces lit up at the sight of their son and three grandchildren. Or so at least it seemed to me.
Joyce glanced around the room. “You sure went all out for this party,” she said. “Look how you’ve done the place up—everything’s so fancy.”
Fancy? Was that a compliment? I waited for her to go on, to say that it was beautiful, magical. But it seemed that no other commentary was forthcoming, and I was suddenly grateful for Crystal’s request for a holiday casserole dish. It gave me a reason to turn my back and rummage in my cupboards.
“Here we are,” I announced as brightly as I could, pulling a red oval platter from my holiday serving set.
“Oh, look, honey, this should be perfect,” Jim’s mother said as she and Crystal moved to the kitchen island. “I’ll help you transfer the casserole. I’m amazed you found time to make it. I know how busy you’ve been.”
I watched as Jim’s mother helped Crystal arrange her candied yams just so, my throat aching with the childish howl it held: What about me? What about everything I’ve done and how busy I’ve been?
Joyce seemed to share my angst. “I wanted to bring something,” she told her mother. “I was planning to make my cranberry Christmas cake. I ran out of time, and with all the holiday expenses, there’s just nothing left over for extras. Nothing at all!”
She burst into tears and covered her face with both hands.
Jim’s mother looked aghast. “Joyce sweetheart, I wasn’t criticizing you! We know you always bring something when you can.” She put a consoling hand on her daughter’s arm, but Joyce shook it off and ran out of the room.
We all stood in silence for a moment, and then Crystal handed her mother the spatula. “Could you finish this, Mom?” she said. “I’ll go talk to her.”
Jim’s mother turned to scraping the last of the casserole from the pan onto the plate.
“I hope you can understand, Stephanie,” she said, her voice low and pained. “Joyce is going through a challenging time, what with her divorce and financial upheaval and such. So naturally the holidays are a hard time for her.”
THE NEXT MORNING, I lay in bed, drugged with exhaustion and resentment, barely able to imagine getting up and facing the day. All that work, all that loving effort, and for what? Jim’s mother would never love me like she loved her own daughters. They would always come first in her heart.
That was only natural. I knew that. And yet.
I’d turned off the ringer, but I heard my phone vibrate on the nightstand, and a notification that I had a voicemail appeared on the screen. The message was from my favorite client.
“Stephanie, my sweet girl, it’s Mama Mae. Can you fit another client into your schedule? My son just bought a new home and, well, you know how men are. He has no idea what to do with it. Do you have time to meet next month? I’d love to take you to lunch and then send you over to his house.”
The last few weeks had been fraught with so much tension and sorrow that Mae’s message in my inbox made me feel weak with relief. I listened to it several times, drinking in the warmth of her voice and the love for me that was always in it.
I didn’t really have time for lunch during my workweek, let alone space for a new client, but the thought of saying no to Mae never occurred to me. For her, I would make time. I loved Mae,
loved being in her presence and basking in the tenderness she lavished on me. And after the holidays with Jim’s family, I was starved for it.
“Of course I’d love to help your son,” I said when I called her back. “And I could meet next Friday, if that can work.”
“Oh, thank goodness,” she said. “Owen saw what you did with his sister’s beach house, and of course he’s seen what you did with mine, and he’s ready to give you full creative control. His girlfriend is no help at all. She just doesn’t have the eye.”
MAE HAD A homespun beauty. There was a light within her and around her, and she was wonderfully real. There were crinkles at the corners of her eyes, laugh lines around her mouth.
Mae had been a secretary before meeting her second husband, a local real estate magnate, and though she was very wealthy, there was nothing intimidating about her. She had the wholesome look of a small-town librarian, with her tidy brunette hair, her sweater sets, the reading glasses that hung around her neck on a beaded chain. Her eyes were gentle and her smile was kind.
Her daughter Kim was the first in her family to become a client of mine. I’d designed her beach house on the Oregon coast. Several months later, she called to say there was an emergency. The designer working with her mother was turning out to be a disaster.
“My mom’s calling the whole thing off,” Kim reported. “She’s literally returning one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of furniture and fixtures. We’re scrambling here for someone to step in and save this renovation. Please, Stephanie, she loves the beach house so much, she thinks you’re just brilliant, can you help?”
Mae lived in the upscale neighborhood of Lake Oswego, on the Willamette River. I loved everything about her house. The intricately carved red front door. The great room with the double-sided fireplace and the authentic Ming Dynasty panels on the walls. I loved the infinity fountain in her courtyard, the koi pond in her backyard and the stone bridge across it.
Her children and grandchildren were always over, and I envied them for having her love all their lives.
Mae took in any stray or injured animal that was lucky enough to cross her path. She had a pair of rabbits, three or four dogs, and half a dozen birds. Sometimes I felt like another wounded creature slinking around her doorstep.
“What a lovely woman you are,” she said a week or so into our acquaintance. We’d spent hours poring over paint chips, flooring options, and swatches of upholstery, and now we were having lemonade on her patio. “Is your mother as proud of you as I would be?”
“Well,” I said. There was an awkward pause while I wondered how to answer her. The quick deflections and evasions that I’d practiced so long on everyone else, I couldn’t bring myself to draw on them now. “Well, no, she isn’t,” I said finally.
“Oh dear,” said Mae. “She hasn’t passed on, has she? Is your mother still with us?”
“You mean, is she alive?” I asked. “Yes, she is.”
“I apologize if I said the wrong thing,” Mae said. “I take it she’s not very supportive of you. Or perhaps she’s not in your life at all?”
“Well, right now she’s in jail,” I said.
I don’t know who was more surprised by this disclosure, Mae or me. It had been more than three decades since I’d told Jim about my mother, and I’d told no one outside of our family since. But I couldn’t bear the idea of lying to Mae. I wanted to confide in her, wanted to surrender to the safety of her gentle gaze.
It was easy to be honest with her. She was stricken; she was sympathetic. It wasn’t long before I’d told her much more. With every detail I disclosed, it felt as if heavy boards were being pried away from some self-imposed prison and sunlight was slanting in. It felt as if—just as in a fairy tale—I’d found my real mother at last, and the one I’d grown up with was just a jealous stepmother, an evil stand-in.
Mae made it easy to indulge in this pretense. She told me I was like a daughter to her. She even asked me to call her “Mama Mae” as the rest of her family did. She said I was like a lotus flower, blooming above the darkest mud. She was always cooing over me, sending me loving notes, making me lunch. She had a yacht docked on the river beyond her house, and she invited me along whenever she and her daughters were taking it out.
“Kim and Lara want to go out on the boat this weekend,” she’d tell me, “and please, Stephanie, I hope you’ll join us. I’d love to have all my girls with me on the river.”
I loved Kim. She was easy-going, down-to-earth, and fun to be with. And her sister Lara was lovely too. So why did I always feel like an outsider on the yacht?
It was because it drove home the hard truth that Mama Mae was not, in fact, my mother after all. She was theirs, and that was manifest in her every gesture around them, her every glance at them. She loved me, I knew that, but I was not her blood and never would be.
When we gathered in her house before going down to the boat, her kids were rummaging through her purse in search of a pen, they were eating out of her refrigerator, disappearing into her bedroom to take a phone call. It was their house too, and they felt a freedom and license there that I never would, no matter how many times she made me lunch.
I loved spending time with Kim and loved to be around Mae, but I didn’t feel good when I was around both of them at the same time.
It was startling, though, to realize now that as close as we were, I had never met Mae’s son.
“Owen will love you,” she promised on that bleak post-holiday Friday. “I told him you’d be over at the end of your work day. He knows how busy you are and he’s just grateful that you’re finding a way to fit him in. Here, I’ll text you his address right now.”
THE MAN WHO came to the door toward five o’clock that afternoon had cropped dark hair, blue eyes, and a strong build. He wore blue jeans and a dark gray t-shirt. He looked like he knew his way around a loading dock or construction site. I hadn’t expected Mae’s son to be so good-looking.
“I’m Owen,” he said, extending a hand and ushering me inside. “I’ve heard a whole lot about you. And I’ve seen your work. You’re great at what you do.”
I felt myself flushing. “Your mom is very special to me,” I told him.
“Well, it’s mutual. She raves about you too. And you did an amazing job on her house.”
“Thank you,” I said. “That means a lot to me. And I intend to do an amazing job on yours too, so why don’t we talk about your vision for your home?”
“If I had a vision, I wouldn’t need you. Listen, I trust you with this space,” he said. “Just tell me what you have in mind and I’m sure I’ll sign off on it.”
I let him provide a tour of the place. It was a typical builder’s special. It was as dark and drab and artless as a college dorm and looked as if it had last been remodeled in the late eighties. He showed me the still-empty bedrooms, the spare room, the living room and the basement, and finally we ended up in his bistro-style kitchen.
On the island was an open bottle of Cobos Malbec and a glass, half-full.
“That’s a fantastic wine,” I said without thinking.
Immediately he whisked a second glass from the nearest cabinet. “Join me?”
“Oh no,” I said. “I mean, thank you, ordinarily I’d love to, but I shouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I’m working,” I said, and cringed inwardly as soon as I’d said it. I sounded prim and uptight even to myself. “It would be unprofessional,” I added lamely.
“It’s Friday,” he said. “It’s five o’clock.”
“That’s true,” I conceded.
He poured a generous portion into a glass and held it out to me. “I’m not a man who likes to drink alone,” he said. “Hey, every true professional will tell you the customer is always right.”
I took the glass, swirled the wine a few times and breathed in the aroma. It was potent and lovely.
“To guilty pleasures,” he said, and touched my glass with his. The wine warmed me through, and I
found myself laughing.
“Are you always so charming?” I asked. “Your mother should have warned me.”
“And me as well,” he said, smiling. “She never told me you were so beautiful.”
As we laughed and bantered and flirted and drank, I was overcome by a feeling of well-being, the kind I hadn’t felt in a very long time. When was the last time a man had told me I was beautiful? Had any man besides Jim ever dared? I’d married so young, and my wedding ring tended to deflect such remarks.
Is this what life was like for young single people? I’d missed it all: the chance to meet exciting strangers, to feel this romantic tension.
What I liked was the sense of safety, the sense of irony, beneath our playful repartee. None of this was serious and we both knew it. I was married; he had a girlfriend. He was Mae’s son and I was her adopted daughter. All this innuendo was a mutual joke; we could enjoy it while knowing full well it would never cross a certain line.
Or so I told myself.
Chapter 6
ON MAY 13, 1972, my mother was summoned by the police to a motel two miles away, where she was asked if she could identify the dead man on the bed.
She confirmed that it was her former husband, Louie Madera. It was his birthday. He was forty-two.
On both nightstands, the rickety dresser, atop the television, and along the windowsill were dozens of photographs of his children. Of us.
In the bathroom, hanging on the shower rod, were two red dresses: the larger one in Isabella’s size and the smaller one in mine.
The stale motel air reeked of cigarette smoke and liquor. Empty bottles were everywhere, as well as a nearly drained liter of tequila. There were a few pills scattered on a side table as well. Later they were identified as secobarbital sodium, a barbiturate that people were then calling “reds” or “red devils.”
Once my mother had made this identification, the police did not keep her long. But she would encounter them again, later that day, when they were called in response to a naked woman running through the streets. She was holding an infant in her arms, and she was screaming. Over and over, at the top of her voice, she shrieked: You can’t kill me because I’m already dead!
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