They settled down with a meal that she described as chicken fajita pizza, and she put the cookies on hold. He complimented her on her cooking and teased her when she blushed. It had been too long since he had enjoyed a meal cooked for him by a lovely woman, too long since he had basked in the feelings she wore for him in her eyes. Then, mindful that he was there to learn about Meg, not to savor the attraction of a woman strictly off-limits, he turned the conversation to his own purposes.
“What grade is Meg in?”
“What?” Laura looked up at him warily. “Oh, she’s in sixth.”
Algebra in sixth grade? He dug into his dinner and carefully did not look at her. “You never did tell me. How old is she?”
“Twelve,” said Laura without a pause.
Oh, you’re good, sweetheart. What does it take to rattle you? “She looks mature for twelve. Julie still looked like a little girl at that age.”
“How do you know what Meg looks like?” she asked sharply.
“I saw the picture in your room the other night.”
“Oh, that’s right. I forgot.” Only a flicker of her lashes betrayed her thoughts. “She is pretty, isn’t she? Don’t you think she looks a lot like Lucy?”
Well done, princess! “No, not much,” he said. “She doesn’t look like you either. Does she take after her father’s side?”
“The spitting image,” said Laura decisively.
Nothing like lying by telling the literal truth.
“Tell me about her,” he said. “What is she like?”
Ah, the heart of the matter. He watched her relax and tried not to hope for too much from her answer. So this question didn’t threaten her? And what, he thought, did he expect to hear anyway? The usual rhapsodies of a mother separated from her only child? A pæan to ensure that he knew just what he had lost? Did he really want to hear that Meg was a paragon among daughters?
She’s clearly undisciplined. She can’t be too perfect.
Laura smiled, and her smile was a warning.
“Meg,” she said, “has ruled with an iron fist since the day she was born. She knows exactly who she is and where she’s going, and woe be unto anyone who gets in her way. I’ve fought a battle of wills with her every day of her life, from nursing” (how cleverly she slipped that in!) “to bedtime to homework to household chores. Believe me, Attila the Hun could teach that kid nothing.”
He deserved that shock.
Had the gods been kind, giving him the rose and Laura the thorn?
“But we don’t have to spend all this time talking about Meg,” Laura continued cheerfully. “Let’s talk about you.”
Hoist with his own petard. And the damnable thing was, at any other time he might have enjoyed the chance. If he hadn’t seen that photograph…. He squashed the temptation to go with the flow.
She beamed across the table at him, but her body had begun to betray her. He saw the tension in her hands around her cutlery, the tightness of her shoulders beneath the cotton blouse, the desperation in her jaw. Do I have you on the run now, princess? And to give her credit, she tried. She asked about his business, his house, his horses. She even did what Lucy never dared and asked him if he was seeing anyone.
Of course, she turned bright red the second after the words were out of her mouth. “Never mind,” she said hurriedly. “It’s none of my business.”
“No, it isn’t,” he agreed affably, and ruthlessly cut back to his quest. “And, no, I’m not. And you aren’t either, you said. Meg takes up most of your free time?”
“Oh, yes. With her school and her ballet—”
“I imagine you’ve had trouble not spoiling her.”
“What?” Laura looked not a little irritated. “Oh, she’s spoiled, all right. Cam would never discipline her, and I always ended up playing the heavy. It’s sort of hard—”
She stopped. He wondered why.
“It’s easy to spoil an only child,” he said carefully. “Especially when you’re a single parent. I’ve had to watch myself with Julie.”
Why didn’t you have any kids of your own?
“She wasn’t an only child by our choice.” Laura refilled his plate. “But I wonder sometimes if Meg really wanted a brother or sister as much as she said she did.”
What a pity Meg St. Bride had never met her cousin. The rivalry might have done her good. “Bring her up so she can spend some time with Julie. She might enjoy being with someone close to her own age.”
“Maybe,” said Laura briefly, cooling rapidly, as if the idea of the cousins meeting was so bizarre as to be impossible.
Ah, Laurie, you’re a window.
He thought he had tapped the limit of her willingness to talk about Meg, at least for one evening. Gradually, he steered her towards the topic of her singing, hoping to drift into a discussion of her marriage. What went wrong? Tell me there were some happy moments for you. I don’t want to know that Meg was all that held you with him. She accepted the switch of subject and told her about her plans for her next album, the change in direction that she envisioned after the liberating effect of the London show, and he noticed how animated she looked, her hands flying to make her point. She met his eye now. Her childhood shyness had often been so painful that she could never quite look anyone in the eye, and if St. Bride had cured her of that, then it was all to the man’s credit.
They finished dinner, and he insisted that she sit while he washed the dishes. She obeyed for a couple of minutes and then hopped up, offering to dry. They worked side by side, and only then did he discover how she had fooled him so completely all those years ago.
“You’ve grown.”
“What?” She looked up, startled.
“You’re taller. You used not to come to my shoulder, but now—” He caught himself, and his tone changed swiftly to teasing. “I’m surprised I didn’t see it the other night, but you were wearing heels.” They both glanced down at her feet. “What happened, Laurie Abbott, you take growth pills?”
She had finally caught up to Francie’s height, sometime between her disappearance and that afternoon three years later. The stress of her new life, or had she just been a late bloomer? “Herbal tea, four cups a day.” She couldn’t know how obviously she was searching her memory to see how her extra inches might have betrayed her. “I gained a few pounds too.”
“It suits you,” he said gently, and resolutely did not look where those few pounds had landed.
She relaxed again, and he finished off the washing, heartily disgusted with himself. Unfair to tease her, he thought. She was honoring their relationship in its old ease, like the younger sister he’d always considered her. Not like Francie, who from age ten on had hung all over him, flirting, auditioning her budding sexual powers. He had long ago accepted that he must have been aware of Francie on some basic level long before that New Year’s Eve, but he had never once thought of Laura as more than vaguely female until the afternoon she had slammed it in his face.
Why did you do it? Why didn’t you speak up, tell me the truth, end it then and there?
She had moved away from him towards the kitchen island, hands hovering over her abandoned cookie ingredients, and he stopped her abruptly. “If you don’t mind, some other time.”
When I can keep you in focus as Diana’s sister….
“Oh, sure, this’ll keep.” Laura covered the bowl and placed it with the dinner leftovers in the refrigerator. “If you like, I’ll make up a batch tomorrow and bring it by for Julie, although—” and she glanced at him brightly, no longer Diana’s younger sister, “I know who’ll scarf them all down. Is Julie a chocoholic like her old man?”
“Worse.” Diana, he thought, Diana. “I talked to Lucy today—”
“Really? So did I.” Laura straightened the utensils on the island. “She’s been so sick, poor thing. I keep telling her that’s a good sign, although it’s hard to believe it when you feel as sick as she does.”
Diana. “She said that you saw Diana Saturday.”
The mood changed in the merest brush of an instant. Her hands stilled, and he saw her fingers stiffen around a spatula. She was still turned away from him, but the easy set of her shoulders hardened, and before his eyes, pretty, confiding Laura Abbott became the cool, accusing stranger of Friday night.
Francie he could understand, but what about Diana upset her so?
“Lucy says that Saturday was not one of Diana’s good days.” In fact, his wife had apparently drunk her way through the reunion. “Laura, I want you to know—”
She found her voice, quiet, deadly. “It takes a long time to reach that plateau of never being sober. She must be a very experienced drinker.”
He was surprised at the insight, disturbed by that cool voice. “Was that all she was? Just drunk?”
“No.” Laura turned around, and her eyes chilled him. “She was stoned on something, I’d guess cocaine. I didn’t figure it out for a while. She even sniffed it in front of me. She kept dabbing at her nose with a handkerchief, as if she had a cold, and all of a sudden she was alive and animated. It was quite a transformation.”
“I’m sure it was.” He had seen Diana change many nights, swiftly and terribly, long ago when she still lived with him. He felt weary, drained, all the magic tension of Laura’s presence wiped out. He said flatly, “If she used cocaine, it was one of her better days. I thought she exhausted its possibilities years ago. Ecstasy seems to be more her drug of choice these days.”
“Ecstasy!” Her cool front shattered. She looked at him in horror. “My God, that could kill her! Why haven’t you stopped her?”
Did she think it was that easy?
“I’ve tried,” he said. “Lucy’s tried. But Diana doesn’t want to stop. I don’t think you’ll succeed with her either. She’ll tell you that she’s in control, she can stop whenever she wants, all the excuses we’ve heard. She doesn’t want to give it up.”
“But there’s professional help….” Her voice trailed off.
“Honestly, Laurie, don’t you think we’ve tried everything?” He did not try to curb the sharpness of his tone. “She won’t cooperate. I’ve told her over and over that, if she will make the effort to lick this, she can have Julie stay over with her again. That doesn’t motivate her.”
“But she’s going to kill herself,” Laura repeated, as if he had never thought of that. She bit her lip. “Richard, I know what I’m talking about, really. One of the first musicians I ever worked with died from X, when I lived in San Francisco. It scared me so badly I never even smoked pot. I’ve never met anyone who can handle it, and Di – she seems really whacked out—”
He reached out and took the spatula from her, just for something to do. “I agree. But we’ve tried everything we can think of. I hoped when she started the club that it would give her something to do, but it’s just turned into a good place to meet dealers.”
“If she’s drinking heavily too—”
“I know,” he said quietly, tiredly. “And she knows too.”
She seemed to find nothing to say to that. He turned away from her, back to the counter, seeking some small task to deaden the silence. At that moment, he wanted nothing so much as the solitary comfort of his own home, away from the pain of her eyes. Not surprising, given her career, that she had run into drug users; she had apparently stayed clear herself. He was glad for that, really he was, but he wanted to leave this abruptly unfriendly room.
“She wants to die.”
A blunt, bald way to put it – and her voice, calm, indifferent, shocked him.
“That’s one way of looking—”
She sliced across his words. “Convenient for you,” she said. “You’ll get rid of her yet.”
~•~
Her words hit him in a sharp, brutal blow. He felt their force smashing through his limbs, and for a moment, their blackness echoed in his ears and masked anything else she might have said. Convenient for you – He shook his head to clear the sound.
“What did you say?”
She said nothing. She lifted her hand as he turned around, as if she wanted to catch physically at her words. The shock of seeing that defensive gesture cleared the mists from his mind. He watched her swallow convulsively once, twice, and something that might have been fear and might have been regret flashed across her face.
He repeated, softly, “What did you say?”
She closed her eyes, her only refuge.
Her silence stretched between them, and he thought she must now realize that she had gone too far. He might have forgiven her the vicious remark of the week before – he already had, his own guilt demanded it – but this time, he thought, she had crossed a line she had not intended. She had intruded into his marriage, and that sea of anguish and desire was all his own and Diana’s.
He looked at her, and he knew that nothing could now be fixed between them.
He said quietly, “Answer me, God damn you.”
“Di—” She opened her eyes, and they were wet. He did not care. “Di doesn’t have a reason to fight for her life, Richard. You’ve taken that from her.”
He drew in a sharp breath. “Oh? The answer, just like that? I’ve ruined Diana’s life, so she’s trying to kill herself?”
Her face relaxed fractionally, and his mind seized upon that inexplicable relief.
“You’ve taken Julie from her,” she said. “You’ve taken yourself. I’ve been in her place. I know what it’s like to be alone while my husband is out chasing another woman. I was stronger, I survived. But it still hurt. It still robbed me of my confidence. And I had Meg. No matter how Cam and I fell out, he never once threatened to take Meg away. How do you think you’ve made Di feel?”
Her eyes darkened as she spoke. Her voice ran down, as though her words had only so much momentum, and he thought, You’re scared. Good. Don’t you presume to lecture me after what you did, you little bitch.
Something in his thoughts must have shown in his face, for she started to move away. He reached out and tightened his fingers around her arm to pull her back.
“I’m sorry your husband cheated on you,” he said, “but it has nothing to do with me. To answer your question, what I think you were asking, no, I’m not hoping that Diana kills herself, and I resent that coming from someone who cared so little about her family that she let them swelter in guilt for fourteen years! My God, you have a hell of a nerve! Diana is my wife. I don’t love her anymore, and I will never live with her again, but I don’t want her to die. I don’t need my freedom. I will never marry again. After eighteen years of hell, I’ve had enough of marriage to last a lifetime.”
She tried to pull away, but his hand held her. “Then why all the women? Lucy made it pretty clear that you haven’t been lonely.”
Richard said flatly, “Go to hell.”
She flinched. She hadn’t been expecting that.
“You’re damn right I see other women.” Better not to explain; he owed her nothing. She had her own sins to answer for. “I’ve been separated from my wife for over a decade. In those ten years, I’ve been with a grand total of three women. I don’t feel guilty, and I won’t apologize, except that I regret that I didn’t feel more for any of them. They were all nice, affectionate women who gave me far more than I gave them in return. I’m grateful to them. I’d have gone mad without them.”
She struck back. “Then why don’t you get a divorce? Let her go?”
“Go to hell,” he said again, and to give her credit, this time she did not react. She merely stood there still and absorbed his anger in her own. “I don’t want a divorce, Laura, and neither does Diana. She has the best of both worlds. I’m a very accommodating husband, or haven’t you heard? I give her money when she needs it, I lend her a shoulder to cry on when some man dumps her, and I never say a word about her periodic disappearances or the abortions or the times she’s tried to dry out and failed.”
Her jaw dropped. She backed up a step. “I don’t believe you.”
“Fine. Don’t believe me.
Ask Lucy. Ask her about the times we’ve had to drag Diana out of the most unspeakable dives. We’re near a port, remember, there are all kinds of places that you can’t begin to imagine. Do you know why she doesn’t see Julie? And, by the way, that’s not my choice anymore, it’s Julie’s. She doesn’t want to see her mother, and I won’t force her. Once, years ago, I made the mistake of taking her to stay with Diana for a weekend, and at two in the morning, the police called me to come get my little girl. They found her crying outside Diana’s apartment because Diana had passed out cold and Julie was afraid that her mother was dead. She was six at the time.”
She had gone completely pale, and he saw the sledgehammer effect of his words on her. He didn’t let up on her. She had asked for every bit of this, and he intended her to hear it all.
“There are a few other things you can ask Lucy. I don’t know if she’ll tell you. She still feels a certain loyalty. Ask her how many abortions Diana’s had. I’ve lost count. The first, not that it matters now, was my child, a year after we were married. Ask her about the parade through Diana’s bedroom. I went over there last week to tell her you were back, and I couldn’t find her because she had spent the night with someone.”
He walked over to the table and slung his jacket over his shoulder. Then he came back, and for a moment he felt sorry for her. She looked shell-shocked. He had grown used to Diana’s devastation; he had lived with it for the whole of his marriage. He had not thought how it would affect a sister for whom Diana was still a stranger.
“Be thankful,” he said, “that your husband was a decent man, even if he played around. You and he must have still gotten along well enough that he flew across the ocean to celebrate your birthday. I wish to God that Julie would see her mother occasionally. She needs a mother desperately. And I need relief from the burden of being a constant combination of mother and father. If I’m successful at all, it’s only because Julie is a sweet and loving girl.”
All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) Page 22