Three Times a Charm

by Jean Stone

  Andrew turned to Cassie and tried to speak calmly. “Honey, where’s the phone?”

  Cassie blinked, tears spilling onto her shirt. She pointed to the coffee table in the living room.

  “I have to find Irene,” he said. “I have to find her now.” But his sneakers remained epoxied to the floor.

  “She was still in Rio when she called,” Jo repeated.

  “What time was that?”

  “I don’t know. Around one-thirty.”

  “Do we know what hotel they were staying at?”

  “The Grande Corcovado. We made the arrangements for their honeymoon.” She pulled a paper from the pocket of her sweater. “I brought the number with me. I tried to call her back, but the operator said she isn’t accepting calls.”

  He took the paper, stared at it. “I’ll call the New York penthouse first. Maybe someone is there. The housekeeper. The cook.”

  “They have no family?”

  He shook his head. “Only me. And Cassie.” Cassie whimpered. He knew he must go to her, comfort her, reassure her that everything would be all right. But his feet still wouldn’t move.

  Jo went over to Cassie, sat on the arm of the chair, put her arm around her. Thank you, Andrew knew that he should say.

  But then the phone rang. His feet came unglued. He bolted toward the living room.

  “Irene,” he said when he heard her voice. He closed his eyes, trying to ease the throbbing in his head, trying not to think about where she was or what she was doing or what kind of pain she might be in. Trying not to picture her in another of those embedded-memory moments, standing in chiffon, a drink in one hand, a look of seduction just for him, the seventeen-year-old prep-school boy with an aching woman-need. He forced his eyes to open. “Irene,” he said, “what’s going on?”

  Her words were clipped. “Forty years,” she said. “The man has been one humiliation after another.”

  Oh. Her words answered the question without elaboration. John Benson wasn’t dead. “God, Irene,” he said. He looked at Cassie and at Jo. He gave a thumbs-up sign and mouthed the words He’s okay.

  Irene sighed a short, loud sigh. “I’m still in Rio. Dan Jervis is trying to get me out of here. It seems the bastard took the suitcase that had my passport in it.”

  Dan Jervis was a New York senator. He’d been friends with John and Irene for many years and had just been at the wedding. He was one of the guests whom Andrew had dodged to keep his connection to the women at Second Chances a secret. It all seemed so stupid now.

  “Are you at the hotel? Are you all right? I’ll come down.”

  “By the time you could get here I might be gone. I hope I’ll be gone.”

  There was silence for a moment. Andrew was suddenly aware that Cassie was watching him, that Jo was too. He turned slightly away from them.

  “Irene, what happened?”

  That’s when she cried, when her look-at-me-I’m-a-tough-New-York-society-lady exterior crumbled and Irene Benson broke down.

  God, he hated that.

  He turned another quarter-turn from Cassie and Jo, as if to protect Irene’s privacy.

  “We had a wonderful dinner. We went dancing. We spent some time in the hot tub in our suite. The bathroom has a glorious, panoramic view of the city. Have you been to Rio, Andrew?”

  Irene must be in shock, he thought. She’s sitting down there all alone and John has left her and she is hurting and confused and she is in shock. “Yes,” he replied, “I’ve been there.” He did not add “with Patty” because he didn’t want to mention his former wife to Irene, or within hearing distance of Jo. Women, he thought, remained the greatest puzzle in his life.

  Although John seemed now to have presented a puzzle of his own.

  “In the middle of the night,” Irene said suddenly, “I was awakened by a most definitive noise. It was the sound of sneaking footsteps. Sneaking. You know, furtive, irregular.”

  Well, yes, Andrew knew what sneaking meant.

  “At first I thought it was a burglar.”

  Andrew wondered how long it had been since he’d heard that word. An old black-and-white TV show maybe, like Perry Mason. It reminded him that Irene was so much older than he was. Only half a generation older, he’d told himself over and over that spring when he’d gone back to school and left his virginity at home.

  “ ‘John?’ I called out from the other side of the king-size bed. ‘John, is that you?’ ‘Go back to sleep,’ John said, so I knew it was him, it was no burglar.” She pronounced the word as if it had an extra u, as if it were burgular. He wondered if that was an old-fashioned way of saying the old-fashioned word.

  “I did as I was told,” she said.

  Andrew realized that he’d been holding his breath, though he didn’t know for how long.

  “When I woke up in the morning he was gone,” she added. She sucked in air, she blew it out. Then she said, “He left a note. Gone to Tahiti, he wrote. Or some other exotic island. Don’t wait up. Then he added a meek little Sorry on the bottom, as if that would make everything all right.”

  The words hung there in the space between the phone and Andrew’s ear, having traveled five thousand miles with extraordinary velocity and clarity and, unfortunately, finality. John Benson had left his wife. The idea that he was sorry sounded debatable to Andrew.

  “Do you think…do you think he went…alone?” Andrew didn’t know why it was so hard to ask her that. Irene, after all, had been down the infidelity road before.

  “Who knows,” she said. “He’s over sixty now. One would think that’s too old for a midlife crisis. Though I suppose people are living longer these days.”

  Andrew stopped himself from saying that John had been having a midlife something most of his adult life, or at least as long as Andrew knew him. Irene surely wasn’t perfect, but she didn’t deserve this.

  “I don’t care if our planes cross in the air,” he said. “I’ll get to Rio. I can drive to New York tonight. While I’m on the road, maybe Jo can check for flights.” He flicked his eyes to Jo, who remained with her arm protecting Cassie. He hoped she didn’t think he was treating her like an assistant or, worse, a taken-for-granted wife.

  “No,” Irene said again. “I’ll need you in New York. I can’t face it alone. The media…the people…” He felt her shiver across the line. Despite her social should-and-should-nots, Irene had never really embraced the attention the way John always had. “Can you and Cassie meet me there tomorrow morning? Jensen will let you into the penthouse if I’m not back yet.” Jensen was the doorman; his first name was Jack, his last was Jensen, but he preferred the latter. When Cassie was a little girl, she’d said Jensen was more doorman-sounding anyway. They’d laughed at the wisdom of a four-year-old: John, Irene, Andrew, and even Patty.

  That’s when Andrew remembered. “Oh, God, Irene, I’m sorry, but we can’t get there until tomorrow night.” He might be inclined to forget his cell phone, but at least he had the paternal sense to recall that tomorrow was Cassie’s boy–girl birthday party, and he wouldn’t—good grief, couldn’t—miss that for anything, not even Irene.

  “Despicable, this is despicable,” Lily said, flitting from one corner of Jo’s kitchen to the other, voicing the word Jo needed to hear to remind her that Irene had been the woman scorned, not her.

  After leaving Andrew’s, Jo had stopped by her mother’s looking for some conversation and…well, she wasn’t sure what else. Mothering, perhaps. The emotional upheaval had left her exhausted, spent.

  However, Marion and her husband had gone out.

  So she’d driven home, where she tried calling Sarah, but there was no answer. She couldn’t talk to Elaine—she’d be busy creating the menu for Cassie’s birthday party. Which left Lily, of course, who Jo thought probably was out with Frank, but she tried her anyway.

  Within half an hour there was Lily in Jo’s kitchen, with Frank Forbes sitting at the table, commiserating as best he could or would, she guessed, because he was a man,
after all. She wondered if he had any idea how hard it was for her sometimes to be in the same room with him, not because he looked very much like his brother, because he didn’t, but because he had Brian’s voice, the same low voice as her old lover who had scammed her, dumped her, and pretty much wrecked the first half of her life. Frank, however, had been awfully good to Lily, and Lily seemed to like him, so Jo just kept grinning and bearing it.

  “Lily’s right,” he said, “what a rotten thing to do.”

  Neither of them acknowledged the similarity to Brian’s stunt last year.

  “So?” Lily asked. “What are the details?”

  “Details?”

  “You know, the gossip. Why did he leave, what about their money, did he take a young bimbo with him?”

  “All I know is Andrew said John left a note that said something about Tahiti.”

  “Andrew is such a man. So lousy at conveying this sort of information.”

  “Well,” Jo said, sitting across from Frank, toying with the silk tulips that she’d bought to make the winter less dreary, “I’m sure he’ll at least help Irene feel better. He and Cassie are going to New York after the party tomorrow.” She wondered what either Lily or Frank would think if they knew about her new relationship with Andrew. She wondered if they would think she’d be upset that he was going to Irene. It wasn’t as if she should be jealous, after all. It wasn’t as if he were leaving her the way John had left Irene.

  “We’ll go too,” Lily said as she stopped abruptly in the middle of the floor and planted both her hands on her tiny hips.

  “What?” Jo asked.

  “We’ll go too. We’ll be there for Irene.”

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  “Not? Why not?”

  “Because we hardly know her, Lily. We hardly know John.”

  She tossed her scarf around her neck. “Well, we know Andrew. And we know Cassie. And we know a thing or two about what it takes to be a friend.”

  Jo stood up. “No,” she said again. “We have too much to do here.”

  “We’ll see,” Lily said, with that sparkle in her eyes, that sparkle Jo had seen over the years just before Lily was about to launch into something really dumb.

  17

  Sarah hadn’t eaten supper. She hadn’t answered the telephone, which had rung on five or six different occasions throughout the evening until way past midnight. She hadn’t answered the phone for the same reasons she hadn’t eaten. The only movement she could manage was to change one VHS tape for another, after the credits rolled.

  Laura Carrington had been beautiful—well, Sarah already knew that. But beyond the woman’s beauty, Sarah scrutinized every close-up (Was that sorrow in her eyes? Was it self-centered arrogance?) and examined every turn (Did she walk in the same long strides as Sarah? Did she cross her feet as Sarah did every time she sat down?).

  Nothing seemed obvious, nothing seemed apparent. Then, halfway into the Hitchcockesque thriller, Lavender and Lace, Laura tipped her head.

  “Excuse me?” the woman on the small screen was asking a handsome stranger, who said he’d come to fix her telephone, who claimed there were reports of problems with the phone lines in the neighborhood because of a car accident at the intersection of State and Main.

  People in the audience no doubt would have been cringing in their seats, wanting to cry out Don’t let him in! to the unsuspecting beauty on the screen. None of them would have paid attention to the way she tipped her head slightly to the right, a motion that was a mirror image to the way Sarah tipped hers when someone asked her a question she needed to think about.

  She hit the pause button, then rewind, then stop, then play.

  “Excuse me?”

  Pause. Rewind. Stop. Play.

  “Excuse me?”

  Pause.

  Except for the red hair and the blue eyes, the woman might have been Sarah questioning a stranger.

  “Excuse me?” The slight tip of the head. It seemed so insignificant, and yet it was so huge.

  Sarah stared at the frozen image. And then she recognized the tiny birthmark on Laura Carrington’s left cheek. It was a dainty, diamond-shaped image that had given her distinction. On the other hand, Burch, Sarah’s son, had hated his since he was old enough to be teased by other boys.

  He’d tried Clearasil and Erase. On the advice of his best friend, he’d once tried to bleach it out. At twelve now, almost thirteen, he seemed to have accepted that, short of laser surgery, the birthmark would be his for life.

  She studied the woman’s image.

  A gentle tip of a head.

  A tiny, diamond-shaped birthmark.

  Were they evidence enough that she was Sarah’s mother? That she’d been the one who had loved Sarah’s father?

  Only three words came into her mind: How could you?

  Then she remembered Gold Dust. The film that Sutter Jones said Laura was making when she met Joe Duncan, when he’d been working as an extra, when they’d fallen in love.

  She quickly ejected the VHS, scrambled through the others on the floor, and popped in the next.

  He was so young, so handsome, that Sarah barely recognized her father, his sleek black hair, his high, jutting cheekbones, his copper skin, his black eyes shot with silver like Sarah’s were. She barely recognized him—not that he’d been much older, almost seventeen years later, when he died. She barely recognized him because he was dressed-up Hollywood: deerskin pants and shirt and moccasins, not the denim and rugged work boots that Sarah’s father wore to work every day.

  He was so young, so handsome, as he sat among a crowd in a makeshift saloon. With all the times that Sarah missed him, had yearned to see his face again, she hadn’t known that all she needed to do was rent a video.

  He was an extra, one of the miners who witnessed the murder of the father of Laura’s character. He’d been a witness but said, “No, ma’am,” when Laura asked him if he’d seen anything.

  “No, ma’am.” Her father’s voice startled her. She hit the pause again, her pulse beating softly in her throat, her facial features motionless, her eyes fixed on the screen.

  Then, and only then, did Sarah allow herself to stretch out on the floor, to lean against poor Elton, who hadn’t had dinner either, to stay there with Joe Duncan’s face paused on the screen until dawn began to leak into the room and her wet tears finally went dry.

  18

  Dad, this is Eddie.”

  “Mr. Mindelelewski, I presume,” Andrew said, shaking the boy’s hand and hoping his grin would not reveal that he’d have preferred Eddie to be a scrawny kid with glasses instead of the tall, good-looking, blond-haired boy he was. “It’s very nice to meet you.” He thought he was being very cool for a dad. He thought he was being very cool for not shouting, You lay one finger on my daughter, Mr. Mindelelewski, and you’re a dead man. Got it? He thought he was very cool for having spent most of the morning practicing the pronunciation of the kid’s last name. Deep inside, though, Andrew knew he was not cool at all. He simply had his mind (for once) on other things. On John, Irene, the present situation, not on all the awful things that could happen to his daughter in the weeks and months and years to come.

  “Mount up!” Mary Delaney, the West Hope Stables instructor, hollered to the group of twelve sixth-graders and two remaining adults, Andrew and Jo. Elaine had said she needed to be sure the food would be ready for their return; Lily had looked at the short, plump horse originally assigned to her and said, “I don’t think so, thank you”; and Sarah had not arrived yet.

  Andrew helped hoist the kids up onto their mounts as if he’d done this more than twice: once at Cassie’s first horse show at the “Big E” in West Springfield, when her trainer had the flu and Andrew volunteered to be the substitute because he couldn’t bear to see his daughter’s disappointment; a second time two summers ago at a party just like this (except it was all girls) for Cassie’s friend Marilla. He’d ridden for the first time, though he wouldn’t have really called tha
t “riding,” more like walking, because the horse they’d picked for him was an old gray nag.

  He was grateful that he could at least get up on the damn thing and not embarrass himself more than he already had in his earlier athletic endeavors in front of Jo.

  He glanced at his watch: The trail ride was supposed to last forty-five minutes, which would bring them back to the barn just before dark. They’d watch a few rope tricks and take turns trying to ride the mechanical bull, have pizza in the mess hall, then Cassie would open the mountain of gifts already on the table, right next to the cake. A short campfire, a few ghost stories, and if all went off without a hitch, they’d be out of there by eight, eight-thirty at the latest and in Manhattan before midnight.

  This morning he’d packed suitcases for both of them, putting in enough to last a week. Cassie had said that being out of school that long would be okay except she was worried about French. He’d left room in her suitcase for her French book. Irene spoke the language fluently and might enjoy tutoring her goddaughter for fun as much as for distraction.

  He wondered what John was doing right now and if he would have left Irene if they’d ever had kids. Not that kids could keep a marriage glued—hell, he certainly knew that—but they at least gave couples something in common, something to have to pay attention to beyond their often too ego-driven selves.

  “Andrew? Mary is waiting.”

  He hadn’t heard Jo gallop up next to him. He gripped his reins. “Sorry. I was lost in thought.”

  Jo smiled. “Thinking about me, I’m sure.”

  “Sure,” he lied, and smiled back, then fell into line behind her and headed up the trail.

  “I tried calling you a million times last night,” Lily announced when Sarah at last made it to the party later that afternoon. Before she’d finally gone to bed Sarah left a message at the shop saying she wanted to sleep late and she’d meet them at the stables. She woke up at noon, her thoughts quite clear, her “next step” apparent to her. Thankfully she hadn’t had to think about a birthday gift for Cassie. To Andrew’s chagrin, Lily had convinced the women to chip in and give Cassie a spa day for her and a friend.