The Winter Lodge
Page 23
When he’d first given her the camera, she’d been obsessed with photographing him and Sophie and Max, preferably together. He figured it was because a picture froze a moment in time: here is my family now, before it gets shattered apart. Then in her photography class, she had branched out, taking pictures of architecture, nature, any color or shape or motion that caught her eye. In a way, he was reminded of himself at her age, discovering his passion for design. In time, his success had actually been his downfall. Creating his own firm had consumed him, leaving little time for family—and his marriage. Ultimately, he’d lost the latter and was hanging on to the kids by a thread, by reorganizing his life. He wished he could tell Daisy to balance her passion for her art with other elements, so she wouldn’t be consumed and neglect the things that really mattered. But you couldn’t tell her anything, just as his own elders couldn’t tell him anything when he was a kid.
For a while, Daisy seemed to forget he was there. He suspected the shots she was getting today would be outstanding. It was one of those perfect winter days that arrived like a gift of gold.
“Keep looking off to the side,” she said, surprising him by aiming the barrel-like lens at him. “Okay, now take a drink from the water bottle.”
He humored her, taking a drink, then propping himself on the split-rail fence, arms crossed, then leaning on his ski poles, then grinning.
“I didn’t say to smile,” she scolded.
“I can’t help it. You’re so serious about your work.”
“And this is funny?”
“Nope. I just like watching you. Now, put the shutter on timer and come get in a picture with me.”
“Dad—”
“Humor me. I don’t have enough shots of us together.”
Understatement. Of course he and Sophie had many photographs of the kids growing up. And for him, one of the saddest, most wrenching moments of the divorce had occurred, not when they were divvying up wedding gifts of expensive crystal and silver, but when they went through photo albums, marking the pictures they wanted duplicated. Halfway into the first album, Greg had paused at a shot of blond, laughing Sophie holding the toddler Daisy aloft like a trophy she’d won. They looked so beautiful it made his eyes smart, like staring too long into the sun. At that point he had shut the book with a thud and said, “I’m sending everything off for copying.”
Sophie had not argued, he suspected, because it was as painful for her as it was for him to page through album after album crammed with all the moments they’d shared. Because that was the thing about photographs. There was a reason they were called Kodak moments. When the camera came out, people put on a happy smile every time. You didn’t get shots of screaming tantrums, of couples giving each other the cold shoulder after a long day, of teenagers coming home from school to announce they didn’t want to go back.
When Daisy set the camera on its retractable tripod, triggered the shutter and then stood next to Greg for the shot, he couldn’t tell whether or not it would be a Kodak moment. She just kind of leaned against his arm while they both looked straight ahead.
They did a few more shots together, and then he got the camera and pointed it at Daisy.
Predictably, she protested. “Hey. I don’t need any more pictures of me.”
“I do.” He fired the shutter several times. One nice thing about digital was that you never worried about wasting a shot. “Humor me, okay? I like taking pictures of my kid.”
“Sure, whatever,” she said, and gamely smiled for the camera. After a few shots, however, something changed. An angle of the light. A shift in the breeze. The shadows on the snow.
It took Greg a moment to realize that the change was in his daughter. It was subtle but unmistakable, something he’d seen earlier in the day—a flicker of trouble in her eyes, a softening of her mouth, which, he suspected, was a prelude to tears.
“Daisy?” He lowered the camera.
Something about her melted, as though her bones had gone slack and she had to lean back against the split-rail fence for support. “Daddy.” Her voice was faint, pleading.
“What is it?” His mind raced through the possibilities. Daisy had dished out a lot in her adolescence. She had admitted to drinking, smoking cigarettes and pot. To skipping school, flunking tests on purpose, getting failing grades until they had to withdraw her from school. But none of those had caused her to look at him the way she was now.
“Honey?” he prompted.
“There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just say it.” She took a deep breath, looked at the sky and then back at him. She released the breath with a cloud of mist formed by her next words: “I’m pregnant.”
The words didn’t even register. It was as if she had spoken in a foreign language he didn’t understand. He could see her mouth moving, forming the syllables, could hear the sound coming out, but it made no sense. The announcement simply hung there, suspended and meaningless between them. Then something happened—another shift in the breeze, maybe—and the full impact of her words slammed into him like a bullet shot from point-blank range.
I’m pregnant.
All the air rushed out of him. Daisy was pregnant. His daughter—his little girl—was standing here telling him she was pregnant.
Only one thought streamed through his mind. Oh, holy shit. Oh, holy fucking shit shit shit. The words raced through his head until they lost their meaning.
He saw a line of tracks in the snow between them. A dividing line. Ten seconds ago, he was struggling to be a father. Now he was—oh, sweet Jesus, Mary and Joseph—on the verge of becoming a thirty-eight-year-old grandfather. Shit. Shit. Shit.
All the usual questions crowded up into his throat—How did this happen? Are you sure? How could you be so careless? But as the words spun through his mind, he realized they were merely recriminations cloaked as questions.
Questions to which he already knew the answers.
How it happened was simple biology.
Was she sure? Good God, only absolute certainty could induce her to say this to her father. There was no way she would drop this bomb if she wasn’t absolutely a hundred percent certain.
And how could she be so careless? She was seventeen. It was what teenagers did—careless, stupid things. He’d done them himself. He had been wild, maybe even wilder than Daisy. And like her, he’d been trapped by his own wildness. He and Sophie had met when they were both counselors at Camp Kioga, just having finished their first year of college. It was no great secret that they’d “had” to get married. Anyone who did the math from Daisy’s birthday could figure it out. And now Daisy was in the same damn place. Ah, dammit. Shit, shit, shit.
“Daddy,” she prompted, her voice a rough whisper. “Say something.”
“I’m standing here thinking, ‘Oh, shit,’” he admitted. “That’s about as far as I’ve gotten.” He stabbed a ski pole deep into the snow. “Damn it, Daisy. How the hell could you—” He stopped himself. The words echoed across the empty golf course and died away. He knew exactly how she could, the same way kids had since the beginning of time. Honest, he thought. Be honest. Tell her how much this sucks. No, not that. She would already be aware of that. “What, um, so now what?” he asked.
“I’m seeing a doctor on Monday,” she said.
“You haven’t been yet?”
“No. I did, you know, the home pregnancy test, like, four times. I kept hoping maybe it was wrong but...” She shrugged her shoulders. “Then I was so freaked out, I didn’t say anything.”
“To anyone?”
“No. I’m not sure, but I think Nina Romano might have guessed.”
God. Nina, of all people. He felt a surge of anger to know a stranger was in on the secret before he was. How is Daisy, anyway? That was what Nina had wanted to know this morning in the bakery. How’s your pregnant teenage daughter?
That sure as hell was true. One reason she got in so much trouble was that she tended to own up to things.
“Have you talked to your mother about this?”
“No.”
So this was a surprise. She’d told Greg but not Sophie. “You’re going to have to.”
“I know.”
“And the, uh, boy.” Greg felt something akin to murderous rage. If the little fucker was here right this moment, Greg would kill him slowly and deliberately, with no qualms. “You need to tell me about the boy,” he prompted.
“Logan O’Donnell,” she said.
O’Donnell, O’Donnell, O’Donnell. Oh, God. “Al O’Donnell’s boy.”
She nodded her head.
Great. They were one of New York’s big-money, shipping-fortune Irish families. The O’Donnells were rich, powerful and ferociously Catholic.
Again, Greg schooled himself to say nothing. He needed to figure out how Daisy felt about the boy first. The little turd who had knocked her up.
She began to talk, her voice insulated by the snow all around them and carrying clearly through the stillness. She told him about the parties she and her friends had had in Manhattan apartments and Long Island weekend homes. Greg felt queasy, not because he was shocked but because it all sounded so damn familiar. He and his friends used to do the same thing and for all he knew he’d knocked up some girl and she’d never told him.
There was no denying the separation and divorce had been rough on the kids. And Daisy’s reaction had been classic—a full-on rebellion complete with substance abuse and unprotected sex. The precise date of conception, she confessed, seemed to coincide with the weekend Sophie had flown overseas.
That weekend, Daisy had come to him with a forlorn expression on her face. “Can I go with some friends to Sag Harbor on Friday? Bonnie Mackenzie invited me.”
“Are her parents there?”
“Of course. You can call them if you want.”
“No need. I trust you, honey.”
And—God help him—he had. He had stupidly trusted her to go where she said she was going. He’d probably figured maybe there was going to be some drinking and fooling around. It was what kids did in high school. Telling her she couldn’t go would not stop her.
She studied him, and apparently was reading him like a book. “Don’t blame yourself, Dad. Or Mom or Logan. It was me. My stupid decision.”
“So what do you want to do about Logan?” he asked her. Greg knew what he wanted to do to the kid, but it was illegal and probably wouldn’t help Daisy.
“I’m not telling him anything until I decide what I’m doing,” she said. “If I decide not to have it, then there’s no reason to say anything.” She stabbed the toe of her ski boot into the snow. “Is it horrible, that I might want to have an abortion?”
He studied her, and could clearly see his towheaded little daughter, so proud of her first lost tooth, or crawling into his lap for a story, coming down the stairs all dressed up for a school dance.... She was gone now. Gone forever, as if she had died. In her place was this shamefaced stranger, and just for a second, the sight of her brought on a flash of dislike—maybe disgust?—and the feeling was so powerful that it scared him.
No, he thought. No. He was not going to let this thing cause him to waver. No.
“Dad?” she said, looking up at him. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“There’s something I forgot to say,” he told her. “I love you, and that will never change.”
A little shudder rippled through her. “I know, Dad. Thanks for saying so. But...you still didn’t answer my question,” she reminded him.
He didn’t know. He honestly didn’t know. “My days of making your decisions for you are over.” He studied the camera, which she held carefully cradled in her hands throughout the conversation. Later, he knew, he would look at the pictures she had taken today and remember that this was him and his daughter before.
Chapter Twenty-One
After Jenny went to the city, Rourke returned to a life that felt strangely hollow. He told himself he ought to be happy to get his routine back. He was used to living alone, on his own terms. Bringing Jenny to stay with him, even temporarily, was a huge disruption.
Really, she was a pain in the ass. She took long showers and cluttered the bathroom with a mind-boggling array of soaps and shampoos and beauty products. She insisted on eating a nutritious breakfast and she watched the most god-awful TV shows he’d ever seen—Project Runway and America’s Next Top Model. Who thought up these things?
So it was a relief to get back to his uncluttered bathroom, uncluttered life. Hostess Ho Hos for breakfast and boxing on TV. Definitely a relief.
Yet for some reason, he was restless and irritable. He snapped at his coworkers, snarled at his assistant and yelled at both deputies. Memos and paperwork pressed down on him like a great weight. During a budget meeting with Matthew Alger at his city hall office, he discovered he was on his last nerve.
Alger made no bones about the fact that Rourke wasn’t his favorite person on the city’s payroll; the city administrator tended to object to Rourke’s spending habits. From the look on his face now, he was about to object to something else. “I’ve been going over these numbers,” Matthew said, handing Rourke a well-thumbed spreadsheet. “There’s no room in the budget for the four squad cars you put in for.”
“Then make room,” Rourke said simply. “I’m not withdrawing them.”
“Fine. I’ll withdraw them myself.”
Rourke reminded himself not to get riled up. Alger tended to argue over every item, line by line, and to make much of this habit to the taxpayers. “Don’t,” Rourke said simply, a note of warning in his voice.
“The money’s not there.” Alger had a deceptively mild delivery, behind which was a steely resolve. “We’re not going into reserve spending.”
“Did you read the requisition?” Rourke asked, his delivery anything but mild. “We’re driving cars that should have been replaced five years ago. One sedan was just judged unsafe at any speed. I’m not backing down on this, Matthew.”
“You don’t have a choice.” Alger took another document down from a shelf behind the desk—the city code manual. “Capital expenditures are subject to the final approval of the city administrator. And I don’t approve.”
“Then you’re an ass, and I’ll make sure people know you don’t give a shit about public safety.”
“Sure, send your bleeding-heart friend Nina to whine about it in her next speech. People drive old cars all the time, Chief—”
“And someone’s life could depend on a cruiser being in perfect condition.”
“That’s a long shot and you know it.”
Rourke felt the fire of his temper crackling just beneath the surface, ready to burst forth. Without taking his eyes off Alger, he opened a desk drawer and took out a document of his own. “I did the math,” he stated. “The budget can cover it.”
“Doing the math is my job, and the revenue isn’t there.”
“Tell you what,” Rourke said. “There’s an independent audit coming up next month—”
“That has to be rescheduled,” Alger said.
“Look it up in your damn city code. It can’t be changed.” As he strode out of the office, Rourke reminded himself that there was no point in getting pissed. They simply needed to fix the problem. This wasn’t supposed to be his issue, but since a hefty percentage of the city’s budget went to public safety, he had to justify every penny his department spent. City revenues were down and no one could understand why. Something didn’t add up, and Nina was scared, because she was up for reelection this year. With city fin
ances in such bad shape, she was a sitting duck for her opponent. Matthew Alger would ride in like a white knight, promising to take control.
Rourke headed into Nina’s office, his annoyance unabated. Even the decor of her office irritated him. Everything was just so damn friendly, from the sunny-yellow walls to the cheerful pictures of special Avalon citizens and Nina’s personal heroes—Gloria Steinem and Madonna—to the framed photos of Nina’s daughter, Sonnet. Not for the first time, Rourke felt a twinge of envy. Nina had a kid who was pure joy, a huge extended family she adored. Rourke had none of those things, and it didn’t usually bother him, but today it did.
If she noticed, she didn’t let on as she opened a file of spreadsheets. “We need to go through your departmental budget again,” she said. “We’re going to have another shortfall this quarter.”
“Oh, no,” he said, holding up his hand, palm out. “You’re not revising the budget again. Jesus, Nina, our cars are ten years old. I’m not cutting another dime, so don’t even bother asking.”
“I’m not asking for cuts,” she assured him. “I know there’s nothing left in your department to trim away.”
“Thank you.” He was still suspicious of her. She wouldn’t have asked for a meeting if she didn’t have something up her sleeve.
“What I’d like is to apply for a state grant for the digital video cameras you requested for the cars.”
Okay, now he saw where this is going. “My father is chairman of the state law enforcement division.”
“That’s right. Rourke—”
“We’re not doing it. Find another way to fund the project.”
“Like what?”
“Like how about you figure out why the budget’s in such trouble, Madam Mayor?”
“Quit being a wise guy. I’ve been trying to figure this out for months.” She swallowed hard, pressed her palms on the blotter on her desk. Something was making her nervous. “I think it’s time we had a forensic accountant go over our books. And yes, I know how paranoid that makes me look.”