“Did you ever talk to Dad . . .” Regan paused, her face contorted in pain. “To Daniel about that night?”
“Of course I did.” Lady remembered the conversation well. On their fifth date, the night Daniel had professed his love for her on the bench swing on the piazza, she’d jokingly asked why he’d picked Nell and not her to make out with him that night.
“Geez, Lady, that was more than a decade ago. We were teenagers playing a silly game. Why does it even matter now?”
“Because Nell changed after that night, and I’ve always wondered what happened between you two.”
“Who is this Nell person to you anyway?”
“Nobody anymore. We used to be friends.” By that time, six years had passed since Nell’s college graduation when she’d banished Willa and Lady from her life. Instead of pressing him for more details about that night, she’d snuggled back up to him on the swing. “She’s in my past. You’re my future.”
Regan brought her back to the present. “Well, what’d he say?”
“He claimed he didn’t remember.”
“Isn’t that convenient?” Regan mumbled.
“Perhaps, but maybe he honestly didn’t remember. After the night of my birthday, I didn’t see Daniel again until his cousin’s wedding the year before we married. He didn’t remember me when we were reintroduced. He’d been away at boarding school, then college, then law school. He was working in Richmond, Virginia, at the time.”
“What kind of monster rapes someone and doesn’t remember it?” Regan asked.
Lady sighed. “I don’t know, honey. He was such a gentleman when we first started dating, and we were madly in love. He never gave me any reason to suspect that he might have mistreated Nell. At least not back then.”
“What do you mean, at least not back then? Are you saying that he mistreated you later?”
Lady debated how much to say. Regan would see right through her if she lied. “Toward the end of our marriage, he pushed me around a few times.” She decided to leave it at that. When her daughter was feeling less vulnerable, she would have a long talk with her about abusive men.
“Am I like him?” Regan asked in a small voice.
Lady moved from the rocker to the side of the bed. “Not at all, my darling. You are pure goodness. You have been since the day you were born. The light shines from within you. If you ever doubt that, look in the mirror.”
Regan turned on her side, placing her back to Lady. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to be alone.”
“Okay, sweetheart. Let’s talk more when you’ve had a chance to process everything.”
Lady picked up the empty glass and full cup of tea and left the room. She peeked in on her mother, who was sleeping peacefully, on her way downstairs. She filled her glass with ice and vodka and took her pack of cigarettes outside to the piazza. She lit a cigarette and inhaled.
Was it possible that Daniel had actually raped Nell? While her gut told her it was true, Lady had experienced so much uncertainty about that night that she needed to hear it directly from Nell, not secondhand from her teenage son. And what must Nell think of me for marrying a rapist?
Willa had insisted on sending Nell an invitation to Lady’s wedding. For the sake of avoiding an argument, Lady had agreed to invite Nell, but on the way to the post office, she’d removed Nell’s invitation from the stack and torn it up. She’d felt no obligation to invite Nell to her wedding. In the six years since her graduation, Nell had neither visited them nor answered any of Willa’s numerous calls or letters. In her own words at graduation, Nell had made it clear she wanted to move on with her life without Willa and Lady Bellemore.
Not until Daniel’s palm smacked her cheek for the first time was Lady able to identify with what Nell had experienced in the closet that night. But to this day, she still didn’t understand why Nell had held Lady responsible. Fine, if she wanted to take her anger at Daniel out on Lady. But why hadn’t she reported him to the police? Or at least told Willa? Their mother would’ve known how to handle the situation. Think of the heartache she could’ve spared not only Lady but all the other women Daniel had probably mistreated along the way. And Lady felt certain there’d been plenty.
She had been married to Daniel for seventeen years when he hit her for the first time. She’d been needling him about some insignificant household matter and pushed him too far. She’d been too stunned to react and dismissed it as an isolated incident. No harm done aside from a handprint on her cheek. And he’d been ever so remorseful, bringing her flowers and chocolates home from work every day for a week.
A month later, however, he’d gone postal on her when she’d confronted him about the pink lipstick on the collar of his white starched button-down shirt. She’d been waiting for him at the top of the stairs when he’d come home late from work for the fourth night in a row. “Who is she, Daniel?”
“You don’t know her.”
Lady’s eyebrows shot up to her hairline. “I don’t know her? You’re not even going to defend yourself, hotshot criminal attorney that you are?”
“What’s the point, Lady? You and I both know this marriage is over.”
“So now our marriage is over? We’ve had a few bumps in the road, Daniel, but divorce never entered my mind.” He tried to turn away from her, but she grabbed him by the elbow. “You can’t drop a bomb like that and just walk away.”
“Let go of me!” He raised a hand to strike her, and when she used a nearby side chair to shield herself from him, he threw her and the chair down the stairs.
He started down the stairs after her, and she scrambled up, limping through the dining room to the kitchen on a broken ankle. She snatched the cordless phone off the wall, locked herself in the pantry, and called 911. She talked to the operator while waiting for the police to arrive.
After she gave her statement, Daniel pulled the two policemen aside. He handed each of them his business card with the name of his law firm printed across the front. “I’m sorry, Officers. This is embarrassing. My wife’s had too much to drink tonight. She tripped over the chair in the upstairs hall and fell down the stairs. I was in the bedroom when it happened.”
Both officers’ eyes traveled from the broken chair on the floor to Lady, who was sitting on the bottom step, icing her ankle.
“I thought I smelled alcohol on her,” the younger of the two officers said.
“She gets delusional sometimes when she drinks.” Daniel twirled his finger near his head as if to say his wife was nuts. “I’ll tuck her into bed, and she’ll be fine in the morning.”
“All right, then. Make sure she gets that ankle looked at.” With a final glance toward Lady, the older officer slipped his notepad back in his shirt pocket. “Call us if you need us.”
Just like that, her husband had manipulated the situation to make her look like the guilty party. Naturally, the policemen believed a successful attorney over a drunken housewife.
After the policemen left, Lady called a taxi to take her to the emergency room. She returned home, her ankle set, just after midnight. She slept in the guest room with the door locked, and the next day, she kicked him out of the house and changed the locks. Lady gave herself a high five. That was one of the few take-charge moves she’d made in her life. She found out a week later when he called to say he was moving with his new secretary to Chicago that he’d been planning to leave her for some time. He’d been offered a position with one of the top criminal defense firms in the nation, a career move that had been in the works for months without her knowledge.
Lady called Daniel’s secretary the next day to warn her. “I think you should know that he’s abusive. He pushed me down the stairs and broke my ankle.”
She’d met Sheila the previous December at the firm’s Christmas party. She was everything Lady was not—young and blonde with a toned body and gigantic breasts.
Sheila laughed, a high-pitched cackle that made Lady shiver. “Puh-lease. Your pathetic attempt to get your husband back i
sn’t going to work.”
Lady’s knuckles turned white as she gripped the phone. “I don’t want him back! You can have him. You deserve each other.”
Lady couldn’t have cared less what happened to Sheila. She’d called out of a sense of obligation. No woman should be mistreated by a man. If only Nell had had the courage to do the same, Lady wouldn’t have married Daniel. But then she wouldn’t have Regan, and her sweet daughter was worth all the pain and suffering she’d endured.
For the rest of the afternoon, Lady sipped vodka and chain-smoked cigarettes while watching the storm system move through. She was more than a little tipsy when she went inside to fix dinner around six o’clock. She browned hamburger meat in an iron skillet on the gas stove and dumped in a jar of store-bought spaghetti sauce. While she watched the sauce simmer, she pinched off pieces of a french baguette and stuffed them into her mouth to soak up some of the alcohol. The sweet fragrance of Carolina jasmine drifted in through the open window over the sink, reminding Lady that springtime was upon them. The season of rebirth usually made her feel alive, but all she wanted to do was curl up and die.
When everything was ready, she made a tray for her mother and took it upstairs.
Feeling wretched after her last chemo treatment, Willa pushed the tray away. “I can’t eat a bite. I just want to sleep.”
“Then let’s get you ready for bed.” Lady helped her mother to the toilet and into a clean gown before tucking her back into bed.
“You stink, Lady,” Willa said when her daughter leaned down to kiss her forehead. “You drink entirely too much. No man wants a drunk for a wife.”
Lady ignored her mother’s comment. She’d start worrying when her mother stopped criticizing.
“Your dinner tray’s on the nightstand if you get hungry. Ring your bell if you need me.” She’d found a sterling silver bell, engraved with CHRISTMAS 1965, the year Lady was born, at the back of the breakfront in the dining room. The bell had saved Lady from having to run up and down the steps to check on her mother during these past few weeks when she’d been so ill after her chemo treatments.
Turning off the overhead light, she left her mother’s door ajar and went down the hall to Regan’s room. She knocked lightly on the door. “Regan, honey. Dinner’s ready.”
Her daughter’s voice sounded faraway and muffled as though coming from beneath the covers. “I’m not hungry.”
“How ’bout I make a tray for you?”
“I said, I’m not hungry.” At the sound of her daughter’s angry tone, Lady stepped back from the door. Regan had never snapped at her before.
“Good night, then,” she said and returned to the kitchen.
She toyed with her spaghetti with one hand while holding her glass of vodka with the other. She’d never felt so lost and alone. Regan would leave for college in the fall, and the reality that Willa wouldn’t live forever was beginning to hit home. Lady had few friends, no career, zero romantic prospects. What would she do with the rest of her life?
After she’d dropped out of college but before she’d married Daniel and become a stay-at-home wife and mother, Lady, with Willa’s help, had secured a position as an administrative assistant for an executive at Charleston’s First National Bank. Lady had excelled at managing her boss’s life, much better than she’d ever managed her own. Considering her twenty-five-year absence from the workforce, no one in their right mind would hire her now, no matter how efficient her organizational skills.
She gripped the neck of the Tito’s bottle. Vodka was the one thing she could count on. Her constant companion. Her past, her present, her future.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
REGAN
Regan woke up in the worst mood ever. She considered faking sick for school. She felt nauseated, although she suspected the icky feeling in her stomach had more to do with hunger than sickness. She hadn’t eaten since lunch yesterday, and she’d vomited that up in the bathroom at school. Her attendance record was exemplary. Didn’t she deserve a mental health day every now and then? She’d missed her afternoon classes the day before and had done no homework. Her teachers would be lenient this once, but missing another day of school meant getting further behind.
By the time she convinced herself to go to school, she was running late and didn’t have time to shower. She rolled out of bed and changed into her uniform, which was still damp from her walk home in the rain the day before. She was all thumbs as she tried to braid her hair. Frustrated, she removed a pair of scissors from her top dresser drawer and sawed off the bottom four inches of her hair. “It’s only hair. It’ll grow,” she said to herself at the sight of her ragged hairline in the mirror. She raked her straggly locks back, secured them with an elastic band, and left the room.
Her mother’s bloodshot eyes popped out of their sockets when she saw Regan’s spiky ponytail. “What happened to your hair?”
“It was time for a trim.”
Lady planted her hands on her hips. “I could’ve scheduled you an appointment at a salon.”
“Too late now.” Regan’s mouth watered at the sight of two poached eggs and applewood-smoked bacon awaiting her at the kitchen table. “I don’t have time to eat.” She grabbed a banana from the bowl of fruit on the counter and her backpack from the bottom of the stairs and fled the house.
Regan panicked in first period when her calculus teacher ordered them to clear their desks and handed out stapled sheets of paper. She’d forgotten all about the scheduled test. Should she ask the teacher for more time to study? Surely Mrs. Becker would understand. After all, she’d gone home sick from school the day before. But when she reviewed the material on the front page, she thought, I know this stuff, and elected to go ahead and take the test. A mistake, she realized by the third page.
She suffered through, and when she finished, brain fried, she handed the test to Mrs. Becker and bolted from the room.
A group of her classmates gathered by their lockers after class. “Was it me, or was that test ridiculously hard?” Janie asked.
“I doubt I got any of the problems right,” Wes said, hanging his head. “It’s spring semester of our senior year. I thought teachers were supposed to give us a break.”
Janie nudged Regan with her elbow. “How’d you do?”
She shook her head. “Same.”
Booker joined their group. “What about you, dude?” Wes asked. “What’d you think of that test?”
Booker shrugged. “It was hard, but I did all right, I guess.”
A collective moan escaped the group. “There goes any hope for a curve,” Wes said.
Regan’s day proceeded downhill from there.
Her government and politics teacher reluctantly granted her an extension on the paper that was due that day with a stern warning. “You’re in the homestretch, Regan,” Mr. Gill said in an abrasive voice. “Don’t start slacking off now.”
Staring at him, she thought, Seriously? I ask for one extension in my four-year high school career and you make me feel like a criminal. But she held her tongue and hurried out of the room.
When her French lit teacher called on her to recite the passage they were required to memorize for homework, she was forced to admit in front of the whole class that she wasn’t prepared. Then, as if all of that wasn’t enough, in chemistry lab, with Booker breathing down her neck scrutinizing her every move, she clumsily knocked over a beaker and nearly caught the lab on fire.
Booker caught up with her on the way to the library after school. “Regan, wait!” He ran ahead of her and stopped her in her path. “About yesterday. When I said your father raped my mother, that wasn’t exactly the truth. He got rough with her, but he never actually . . . well, you know.”
Regan glared at him. “Are you saying you lied?”
“I prefer to think of it as stretching the truth.” His lips spread wide into his stupid grin, the one he used when he was trying to make her laugh.
“Either you lied yesterday or you’re lying today. Whic
h is it, Booker? You know what? Never mind. I don’t want to hear it. It won’t make me feel any better either way.” She pushed him out of her way and continued on her path to the library.
She bypassed the table where she usually studied with Booker and found a cubicle in a remote corner of the second floor. She removed her books from her backpack and set them on the desk, but thoughts of her father prevented her from focusing on her schoolwork. Had he raped Nell or not? Did it really matter? He’d gotten rough with her, and that was bad enough. He was cruel and inhumane. He’d pushed her mother around, his own wife. Maybe he’d pushed Regan around too. Surely she wouldn’t forget something like that. Or would she? The brain was an amazing organ, capable of repressing memories that were too difficult to process.
Two hours ticked off the clock before she was able to focus on her homework. But even then, she wasn’t on top of her game. Her government paper was only mediocre, and she struggled with the calculus problems that usually came so easy for her.
It was almost eight o’clock when she left the library. She arrived home to find her mother reeking of booze and cigarettes, while sitting at the table with two untouched dinner plates in front of her.
Regan sat down opposite her and forked off a bite of cold Salisbury steak. Her eyes narrowed as she studied her mother’s face. Her forehead was wrinkled and her lips pursed in concern. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s your grandmother. This last treatment has hit her hard. She’s having a rough go of it.”
“I’ll go up and see her.”
When Regan moved to get up, her mother grabbed her arm and pulled her back down. “Don’t disturb her now. She’s settled in for the night. I’m hoping the worst is behind her and tomorrow will be a better day.”
“She’s not going to die, is she?” Regan asked, her blue eyes wide with alarm.
Lady gave her head a solemn shake. “I don’t know, sweetheart. I certainly hope not. Your grandmother’s a fighter, but she needs our prayers right now.”
Regan cast an anxious glance toward the stairs. “Should we call somebody or take her to the hospital?”
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