by Elaine Fox
“Carl,” she said. “His brother’s name is Carl.”
“Carl,” he repeated.
She nodded.
“Carl Poole?” One eyebrow lifted.
Her expression froze but she continued nodding like a half-wit. Carl Poole…car pool…good Lord.
After a second she let her eyes drift toward his. She had to tell him the truth, she thought. And soon. Because the lies were killing her.
“That’s right,” she said wearily. “And now I really do have to go. Enjoy your frames, Jack.”
“I want to kill off Jim,” Delaney told Michael.
“Kill him off? What for? I was just beginning to like him.”
“He’s in the way.”
“Of what?”
Delaney sighed and lay back on her bed. A crack in the plaster ceiling above her looked like a sketch of Jack Nicolson’s profile. She was surrounded by Jacks.
“I’m thinking…” she hesitated, then resumed, “I’m thinking I might have to come clean, Michael.”
Silence gripped the line.
Delaney shifted the receiver. “Hello?”
“I’m still here. I just don’t think I heard you right. ‘Come clean’? You mean you’re going to tell him the truth?”
Delaney took a deep breath. “I think…yes, I think that’s exactly what I mean.” She squished up her face, unable to maintain the decisive tone. “Maybe. What do you think?”
“I, ah…” Water ran in the background. “I think that’s great,” Michael said. A muffled sound came through the receiver. “Sorry,” he said after a second, “I had to splash cold water on my face. For a second I thought I might faint from the shock.”
“Very funny,” Delaney said.
“Are you sure you want to tell him?”
“Why? Don’t you think I should?”
“It’s not that. It’s just…well, what are you hoping for? Has he suddenly turned into father material? Are you thinking he’ll want to jump into Emily’s life and be a dad?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know how I can justify not telling him anymore. I told you about the gossips, what they said about me. What if everything they said about him is just as false?”
“Well, you didn’t just hear stuff from those old coots in the diner, right? What about that cleaning woman? Margie?”
Delaney ran a hand through her hair, spreading it out on the pillow behind her. “Maggie. Yeah, but everything she said was always said so affectionately. That was one thing I never got, how she could say he was such a bad boy and still seem to like him so much.”
“I imagine it’s easier if you’re not the mother of the rake’s child.”
“The rake.” Delaney chuckled. “Makes him sound positively dashing.”
“Well, honey, from the way you’ve described him I’m thinking that’s what he is. Are you sure you want to tell him because of Emily? Or could there be some other, oh, more personal, reason?”
Delaney frowned. “What are you saying?”
He inhaled. “I don’t know. It just sounds like, well, after he kissed you and all…and you’ve been alone a while…”
She sat up. “Wait a minute. Are you saying you think I want to tell him because he kissed me? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m just saying it seems like things have changed. Since the kiss.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Hey, don’t blame me. I just call ’em like I see ’em.”
“Well stop it.”
He chuckled.
“Besides, I haven’t definitely decided to tell him. There are still a whole lot of unanswered questions about him. Important questions.” She would have called one up as an example but she couldn’t think of one just then. “Killing off Jim will make things a heck of a lot easier. There’ll be that much less of a chance of me making a mistake, for example, and my options will still be open.”
“Right.”
“Really.”
“Okay!”
She crossed one arm over her chest and rested her phone elbow on it. “So, all right, smartypants, how do you think I should do it? Kill off Jim, that is.”
“Smarty pants?”
“Well?”
Michael sighed. “So you’re dead set on this? So to speak…”
“Why are you sounding so negative? Seems to me you were the one who wanted me to tell the truth from the beginning.”
“Well, yeah. But…all right, to be perfectly honest, I was kind of getting into it. The twin thing was classic. A brilliant ad lib. I wanted to see where you went with it.”
“Where I went with it? Jeez, Michael, it’s not like I’m scripting this. I’m not Destiny’s Children, for God’s sake. Though frankly I think I could be.”
Michael laughed. “I’ll say. I mean, you’ve got the List, right? And the imagination. And tell me you haven’t made notes on at least a couple of conversations you planned to have with Jack.”
“The only note I’ve made is to avoid having conversations with Jack.”
“Well, you could do worse than Destiny’s Children, you know. Like, for example, Sybill just married Ruark, you know that, right? And suddenly she’s showing like she’s eight months pregnant.”
“Oh, to have a soap-opera pregnancy,” she sighed. “Over in two months.”
“No kidding. So Drake corners her and asks what the deal is. Whose kid is it. And she tells him it’s Ruark’s, of course, but he doesn’t believe it. He says he’ll be watching, and if that baby doesn’t have blue eyes, he’s going to know. Because they both have blue eyes, right? Ruark and Sybill. And you can’t have a brown-eyed kid if you’ve both got blue eyes.”
“I went to four years of medical school, Michael, I know that.”
“But Drake’s got brown eyes. So, you know, if the baby ends up with brown eyes, there’s his proof.”
Delaney started to feel a little queasy.
“What color eyes does Jack have?” Michael asked.
She turned her head and looked at Magazine Jim and his identical twin brother, Carl, on her bedside table. Magazine Jim was black-and-white, and the picture was a little too distant to reveal eye color, something she’d taken into account when she’d cut him out.
“Brown. Jack’s eyes are brown, like Emily’s,” she answered. Her gaze shifted to Jim’s twin. “Oh my God.”
Full-color identical-twin Carl was another story. His eyes—smiling with buoyant insincerity—were blue. Light, robin’s-egg blue. Just like hers.
And not at all like Emily’s.
Chapter 15
“I was talking to Carl the other day.” Delaney leaned against the doorframe to Emily’s bedroom while Jack lay on the floor under the crib with two metal brackets and a drill. Emily was asleep in a bassinet in the kitchen. “You know, Jim’s twin brother.”
Sybill had nothing on Delaney.
Jack crooked his neck to look at her from under the crib, his eyes amused. “Uh-huh.”
“And I was asking him about those frame pictures. You know, if he had to pose for them specifically or if the frame company just bought portfolio pictures, kind of like clip art. And he said it was the funniest thing, they made him wear contacts.”
“Contacts?” He stuck two screws in his mouth and fitted a bracket against one crib leg.
Jack had shown up unexpectedly that evening after she’d gotten home from work to fix Emily’s crib. Delaney barely remembered mentioning the loose leg to Jack—had apparently done so during the awful five-and-dime episode—but she was glad he’d come. It gave her a chance to head off any suspicions he might have had about Emily’s eye color after seeing Jim’s “twin.” That was why she’d been relieved to see him, she told herself. Because she could stall a bit longer, think a little more about killing off Jim.
Looking at his capable hands now on the baby’s crib gave Delaney an unexpectedly warm feeling. There really was something to having a man around. They could fix things. Well, she could fix things, she amen
ded in a spurt of compulsive feminism, but it was so much easier to have someone else do it. A man, for instance.
“Yes, they made him wear contacts,” she continued. “Blue contacts. For some reason they liked the way he looked, but not with brown eyes. Because you know he’s got brown eyes just like Jim’s. And just like Emily’s, come to think of it.” She laughed lightly.
“Uh-huh.” Jack switched the drill from his right hand to his left, working for some angle he couldn’t quite make with the bulky tool.
“Isn’t that funny, that they’re so particular? Who would think the color of his eyes would make such a difference? I mean, would people not buy a frame with a picture of a brown-eyed guy in it?”
He took the screws from his mouth and shifted his body sideways. “Hard to believe.” He put the screws on the floor next to his head.
Delaney watched his hips as he moved. She liked looking at where his tee shirt tucked into his jeans, at the flat stomach below the muscled vee of his chest. The tendons in his arm stood out as he tried to position the drill to screw on the bracket.
“Do you want me to hold that?” Delaney asked, bending over to look at him under the crib.
“Yeah, would you mind?” He put the screws back between his lips.
She knelt next to him on the floor and took hold of the bracket and leg of the crib.
He reached up and moved her fingers to a higher spot. The touch made her blush for some absurd reason.
Taking a screw from his mouth, he held up the drill again, and this time she watched the muscles in his neck as he lifted the tool.
“Damn,” he muttered around the second screw. “I think I’m going to have to use a screwdriver. Can you hold that for just a second? I’ve got to run over to the house.”
“Sure.” She nodded, watching him scoot out from beneath the bed. “But I’ve got a screwdriver. In the drawer in the kitchen.”
“Phillips head?”
“Both.” She smiled. The Capable Woman.
“Great, I’ll be right back.”
Jack trotted down the stairs, Delaney’s smile fresh in his mind. There was something about her face when she smiled, even when she just flashed that quick, fleeting smile. It always reached her eyes, crinkling them in such a way that made him feel as if he’d done something delightful. Maybe it had something to do with being Irish.
He turned into the kitchen and pulled open the top drawer at the edge of the counter. Sure enough, it was the Everything Drawer. He used to work on houses during summers when he was in college, and every kitchen inevitably had a drawer where Everything went. Paper clips, rubber bands, scissors, corks, twist ties, newspaper clippings, coupons. You name it, it ended up in that drawer.
Including—he saw, pulling out a sheet of notepaper filled with a column of writing—a list of what appeared to be personal attributes. He studied the piece of paper, starting with the first word on the list: Jim, underlined several times.
His eyes flew down the page. Jim was followed by: Lawyer, Married five years, Emily—four months, b. March 10…
A thunk sounded from above.
Handsome, he read on. Tall, 6'2"…
Rapid footsteps sounded on the stairs.
“Jack!” Delaney called.
Jack threw the paper back in the drawer, closed it, and opened the one next to it. Serving spoons, spatulas, cheese grater, he noted with relief. He began pawing through the implements, making as much noise as possible.
Delaney rounded the corner with one hand on the jamb, nearly skidding to a halt beside him. Her eyes were unnaturally wide and her lips were parted breathlessly.
“Did you find it?” she asked, voice tinged with panic.
Inexplicably, he felt nearly as agitated as she looked. What he’d found was—well it was proof. Wasn’t it? Intractable, unexplainable, raw, shocking truth that she had fabricated her husband. Why else would you need to keep track of such things as what he looked like, or how long you’d been married?
How he could be shocked after suspecting for so long he wasn’t sure, but he was.
“No, I think I’m in the wrong drawer,” he said, pushing the utensil drawer shut with a hand that shook with astonishment.
“It’s in this one,” she said, indicating the one he’d just been looking in. “Did you look in this one?” Her eyes were pinned on him as if his answer meant the difference between life and death.
“No,” he said quietly, shaking his head.
He wanted to soothe the frenzied look from her face, take her in his arms and ask her to tell him the whole story. What was it that made her go to such lengths to appear married? What sort of insecurity would prompt a person to invent a husband? Certainly it was an insecurity that Delaney Poole—beautiful, intelligent, successful Delaney Poole—shouldn’t have.
She wilted with his answer. “Really?” she asked, relief that might as well have been a neon sign in her eyes.
He shook his head.
She edged around so that she could turn her back to him and open the drawer, but he made it easy on her and moved toward the front door.
“You know what?” he said, feeling the sudden need for some air. “I think I’ll just go get mine. It’s, you know, big, industrial strength. A little household one probably wouldn’t do the trick.”
“Oh, okay,” she said. Eagerly, he thought.
“Yeah, I’ll just be a minute.”
She followed him into the front hall and he opened the door.
Rain pelted down in sheets. When had it started raining? And why hadn’t he noticed?
He glanced at the coat rack where Jim’s Burberry raincoat had hung for the last several weeks.
“Mind if I borrow that?” He gestured toward the coat.
“No. Sure,” she said, pulling the thing off the rack and handing it to him. She couldn’t be rid of him fast enough.
Married five years…he thought, Emily—b. March 10…
Why would she have to remind herself of her daughter’s birthdate? The thought crossed his mind as he slid his arm into the sleeve of the coat—and his hand popped so far out the other end many inches of bare skin spanned the space between wrist and sleeve.
Jack looked at Delaney, Tall, 6'2"…running through his mind.
Delaney looked at his arm, a kind of shocked dismay on her face.
“Isn’t this Jim’s coat?” Jack asked.
She nodded mutely.
“And isn’t he tall?”
She nodded again.
Come off it, Delaney, he wanted to say. He wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her, just enough to make her look at him, really look at him, and see that he was someone to trust.
“Six-foot-two, right?”
Her eyes closed for a fraction of a second longer than a blink. Jack had never seen anyone actually pale as if they’d seen a ghost, the way people always characterized it in movies, until now. Delaney blanched.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, opening the door again. He couldn’t look at her. Couldn’t stand the despair and confusion on her face. He didn’t want to be the one who pushed her, the one who threatened her carefully controlled secret.
He wanted to be the one she confided in. Willingly.
“I’ll be right back.” He edged toward the threshold of the door, motioning toward his house. “I’ll just get that screwdriver. Hope the coat doesn’t shrink any more in the rain.” He forced a laugh, then turned away, rolling his eyes at the dismal attempt at humor.
Her eyes were on him as he jogged across the drive to the back door, he could feel them. She must be wondering what he was thinking, if he suspected, if he’d seen the list in that drawer and was putting the pieces together. Maybe, he thought, by the time he got back she’ll have figured out the jig was up anyway so she might as well admit it; but he doubted it. She was not one to give up on things, that much he thought he knew about her.
He pushed open the back door and squished into the utility room. His hair felt plastered t
o his skull, and rivulets of water dripped from it down his forehead and neck. He jerked his head as if he’d just surfaced in the water, flipping the hair from his face, and moved to the closet. He bent to retrieve a tool kit and pulled from the molded-plastic insert a sturdy Phillips head.
Emily—b. March 10…he thought again. That was the piece that didn’t make sense. If she made up the husband she could make up the wedding date, and there’d be no reason to worry about Emily’s birthdate. So why fudge it? The only reason you’d do that is to keep someone from guessing—
Jack froze, his entire body going numb. The screwdriver dropped onto the tile floor.
No, he shook his head. No, that was ridiculous. He rubbed a hand over his face as he bent to pick up the tool. But he had to tell himself to breathe.
He’d worn a condom.
An ancient condom that had been in his wallet for God knew how long…and they’d made love more than once, his arousal returning without him even leaving her body, he’d wanted her that much…
He felt dizzy and reminded himself to breathe, inhaling sharply as he pressed one palm against the cool metal of the washing machine.
He remembered, all of a sudden, Aunt Linda going on and on about how advanced Emily was. A remarkable baby, she’d said. So mature for her age. In all her years as a pediatric nurse she’d never seen any five-month-olds sit up on their own….
And what had Delaney been talking about this evening? Jim Poole’s eye color—or rather his evil twin’s eye color. She was explaining why his eyes were blue.
No, he corrected himself, like a detective working through a killer’s motivation, she was explaining why Emily’s eyes were brown. Like Jim’s, she’d said.
Like his.
A surge of nausea took him by surprise. He dropped the screwdriver on the washer and moved to the utility room’s small bathroom. Pushing the door open so hard it slammed against the wall, he bent over the sink and pushed the water lever to cold. He bathed his hands in the icy water, then splashed some on his face, as if he needed to be wetter after the downpour outside.
He straightened, water running from his chin onto his tee shirt. He stared at himself in the mirror. Was it the face of a father who stared back at him?