“I already told the police everything.”
“You mean Captain Harris.”
“He is the police, dear.”
“But did you see anything … I don’t know, anything else? Was I angry?”
Her bright-red lips took to the edge of the crystal glass. She took another sip before saying: “I think you were having a fight with Penny.”
“A fight?” That dim recollection of someone screaming. Was that his wife screaming at him? Or him at her?
“But you were very drunk.”
“And Penny decided to drive me home?”
“I don’t think you should trust Penny.”
“So you didn’t see us get in the car.”
“No.”
“But you did try to get Atticus to change the terms of our family trust when I was in a coma.”
The grandfather clock in the hallway ticked through the seconds of silence.
“So that’s what this visit is really about.” His mother lowered her drink to her lap. “Did your wife tell you that?”
“Is it true?”
Virginia looked away. She pursed her lips, the edges of them crinkling with lines. “You were dead for half an hour after the accident, before they resuscitated you—and almost another hour during the operation.”
“Dead?”
“Legally dead. I was just trying to protect us, to protect you. You know the terms of the trust.”
If Roy died or went to prison, the entire contents of the trust was directed to go to charity. His mother had barely been able to contain her rage when the executor read out the terms after the funeral.
Roy had just come home after being expelled from Yale for selling pot, just before his father’s heart attack. That little stunt hadn’t made things any better—maybe had caused the heart attack. It was one of Roy’s most private fears, something no one ever said but everyone had considered.
His father had been under investigation by the SEC at the time, regarding questionable financial transactions in tech IPOs during the height of the dot-com crash, when millions of investors had lost billions of dollars. The charges were dropped, but then, the terms of the trust weren’t really about that.
His father had never really trusted his mother.
“I know the trust ends with me,” Roy said. “Is that why you pushed Danesti to keep me alive?”
“That’s a horrible thing to say. You’re my son.”
“Who you barely ever paid any attention to.”
“You always were a little monster, you know that?”
She was already drunk. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
“You didn’t fall from my tree.”
“Meaning what?”
She closed her eyes and seemed to count to ten before reopening them. “I’m sorry. I just mean, you’re very much like your father. Bullheaded. And yes, I know I wasn’t a good mother. It’s something I regret, Roy. And seeing you there, on that table …” Her upper lip trembled, and she brought her hand up. “I realized that I might lose you. I did everything I could, begged everyone. You don’t know how hard … but you’re here now; that’s all that matters.”
Was that a tear in the corner of her eye? She dabbed it away, her hand shaking.
Roy gulped a mouthful of whisky. Was he always this awful with her? How had they gotten to this place? This was his mother. He sighed and said, “I don’t mean to be ungrateful.”
“Just nasty.”
“You can come over anytime.”
“But … she’s there.” Virginia finished her drink.
Roy had always been perplexed by the animosity between his mother and his wife. Was it simple jealousy over taking away her little boy? But his mother had never really made an effort to be close to him.
She added, “Anyway, in a few months, the trust will be done. You’ll have your inheritance.”
On Roy’s forty-fourth birthday, the trust fund would dissolve, and all the remaining cash left in it would be transferred to him. Two months from now. His dad had started his company when he was forty-four.
“This house is worth way more than what’s left in the trust,” Roy pointed out.
The property had to be worth ten million, and while technically it was still part of the trust, he had promised a long time ago that his mother could keep it. You could say a lot of things about Roy, but he always kept his word once he’d given it.
He said, “I’m still leaving it to you. It’s written down. Atticus has a copy.”
“Thank you, Roy.” Another tear welled. It was either honest or a damn good performance, or she was drunker than usual. Maybe a combination of all three. “That woman—”
“Has a name. It’s Penny, and she’s my wife. Now, can we just stop?”
“If something ever happened, you could come and stay here. You know that, right? I love you, no matter what.”
Roy finished his drink in one gulp. “One more thing.”
“Yes?”
“What happened to Leila?”
“She died, dear. Why do you keep asking about that dog?”
11
The Chegwiddens’ property sat at the edge of Montauk, where the steep white-sand beaches of the Hamptons began to spread wide and flat. The house had the same washed-gray cedar shingles that Roy remembered, the white-framed windows still staring out over dunes and sea grass.
“Everyone, everyone, our guest of honor has arrived,” Charles Chegwidden announced, his cheeks already florid with alcohol. “Just in time for dinner.”
He had opened the front door before Roy and Penny reached it.
An attendant took their coats as the driver circled the Escalade behind them to find a parking spot down the scrub-lined road leading to the beach. His mother got out of the car and went straight into the house, but Roy and Penny had stopped briefly to inspect the new reinforced-concrete wall before the forty-foot drop to the beach. Two years ago, it had just been a low brick wall and wooden fence with stairs leading down, before Penny had plowed through it in the dark, sending them tumbling into the abyss.
Dr. Danesti had said it would be good for them to face the past head-on, that it could help with memory recovery. All Roy knew was that his stomach felt as though something inside had been trying all afternoon to stab its way out. But coming here did feel good, as if they were starting to put the past behind them.
“Sorry for being so difficult,” Roy whispered to his wife, holding her hand for both comfort and balance.
“Don’t worry,” she replied. “I know it’s been hard.” Then she added, “Did you hear? About Roger? Our neighbor in the back?”
The guy who wanted to kill the stray cats. “What about him?”
“He’s been missing for a month.”
“This way, this way,” Charles said, urging them through the entryway. The Englishman had a habit of saying everything twice—a tic accompanied by brisk hand motions. Sam was already here. Seeing Roy, he raised his glass.
When they were here the night of the accident on New Year’s Eve, there had been a crush of people, hundreds of them. Tonight was more intimate, less formal. Roy wore a black turtleneck and patch-elbowed sport jacket, but most of the sixty- and seventysomething men wore open-necked shirts, the much younger women accompanying them in short black dresses or close-fitting jeans.
Ambient electronic music played from hidden speakers. In the middle of the great room straight off the entrance, a thirty-foot table was set for dinner. The white leather couches beyond it spilled out into a rough marble exterior courtyard and swimming pool.
“Charles, I didn’t get to thank you and Prim yet for helping with the costs of—”
“Oh, please, please, think nothing of it,” Charles said, with more fluttering of hands. “Least we could do, old boy. Such a terrible, terrible bu
siness, all this.”
“Well, thank you, all the same.”
“Ah, Alexi,” Charles said as they approached the first pair of couples. “I would like to introduce you to—”
“No introduction needed.” The short, almost cylindrical man nearest them thrust his hand forward. He spoke in a thick Russian accent. “Alexi Berezovsky, and this is Anastasia.” He motioned with his eyes to the pretty brunette at his left, a full foot taller than him. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Royce.”
Roy took the man’s hand, which gripped tighter and tighter as they shook. Roy returned the pressure, and Alexi’s eyes widened. An old game, which Roy won.
“Amazing,” the Russian said after Roy let him have his hand back.
“And this is my wife, Penny.”
The man to Alexi’s right was someone Roy recognized. Bobby.
“My god, you look good!” Bobby said. “It’s been too long.” The guy didn’t try to shake hands, instead reaching in for a hug. “And holy cow, the muscles on you!”
“Thanks.” Roy remembered that Bobby did something in pharmaceuticals and ran some kind of bodyguard army in sub-Saharan Africa. He’d told him once, if you go down there, call me to make sure you’re safe. A nice guy.
Roy never stopped being amazed at what people in the Hamptons did for a living.
One by one, they went through introductions. Roy had never been good with names and didn’t even try to remember the twenty-odd people he didn’t know. A collection of characters, to be sure, but they all had a certain sameness to them, a perfectness that was unnatural but beautiful at the same time, as if the lines of their faces were sculpted by the same expert hands.
The last person they greeted was Danesti himself.
“Thank you for coming,” the doctor said. He had a house just down the beach.
“Everyone, everyone, let’s sit,” Charles said.
Penny and Roy took their arranged seats at the center of the table, straight across from Charles and his wife, their hosts. Roy’s mother sat at the head of the table, three people to their right. Maurizio—a thirtysomething Spaniard, her “tennis partner”—sat to her left.
Sam seated himself to Roy’s right. “Glass of wine?”
He hadn’t taken a drink when they came in, but one or two couldn’t hurt. “Sure, some red?”
Sam motioned to the waiter. Dinner conversation murmured in the background.
Although Roy took center stage tonight, Primrose Chegwidden was the real star in the room. Both she and her husband were psychologists, but she had turned her practice into a television show, syndicated internationally—“Dr. Rose,” as she was known to millions of adoring fans.
Primrose sat straight across from Roy, inspecting him. Her thin fingers matched lips pressed tightly together, her short hair dyed red beyond anything close to natural. A web of fine lines at the edges of her eyes—not the fat, good-natured lines born of laughing, but more like cracks in porcelain, and unalleviated by the hard black arcs of mascara and the thin flaring nostrils.
“How are you feeling, Roy?” she asked. She picked at the amuse-bouche that a waiter had set in front of her.
“Good. Better than new.”
She smiled, but not in a way that made Roy feel that he’d said something funny. He felt like an exotic insect being observed under a bell jar. Primrose’s face had that expression of bored indulgence that the English once reserved for their colonial subjects—one that barely concealed the unspoken understanding that they had somewhere better to be.
“It is so nice to see you,” she said. “Thank you for coming.”
Her husband, Charles, was the yin to her yang, the jovial British counterpart to her cool intellectual conceit. Ruddy-cheeked and snaggletoothed, with a quick smile that invited jocularity, he was reliably the only one wearing a tie, which was always a little off-center. He was the researcher, Roy had heard—the behind-the-scenes part of this partnership. Primrose was definitely the one who wore the pants.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” Roy heard a woman next to his mother exclaim. “Dr. Danesti helped me arrange a surrogate mother in India. I had my eggs frozen when I was forty-two”—the woman was probably pushing seventy—“but I just met Matty,” she said, squeezing the hand of the young man beside her—“and we’re going to have children.”
“Congratulations!” Roy’s mother replied to the woman. “You’re going to need to stay healthy, Angela. Talk to my microbiomogist. Your microbiome is the most important thing. He gets samples from first-contact tribes in the Amazon …”
“Poop. Fecal transplants. They’re talking about someone else’s excrement,” Sam whispered under his breath, the ever-present grin barely visible under his bushy mustache.
He handed Roy a glass of wine from the waiter and explained. “They get it from some god-awful country they’d never set foot in, yet they’re happy to stick some smelly native’s poo up their asses. Something poetic in that somewhere, no? I just can’t quite put my finger—”
“I think I’ll stop you there.” Roy grinned and lifted his glass. “Cheers,” he said, and they both took a sip of their drinks together.
Whatever else, it was good to be back goofing around with Sam at these things.
The couple across from them was talking about bee-venom therapy, and Alexi, the Russian fireplug he’d met on the way in, was deep in discussion with Danesti about a liver transplant.
They finished the opening course, a lemon-and-pine-needle sorbet, each tiny bowl topped with a sprig of pitch pine that Primrose explained she had collected that very morning from the woods surrounding the house. More wine and drinks followed before a rustic soup arrived in clay bowls. Charles—after asking everyone whether they could believe it twice—said Primrose had thrown the bowls herself in the pottery studio by the beach. Everyone responded with coos and congratulations. As they awaited the main course, which the head waiter announced as a boeuf bourguignonne garnished with microgreens and fresh herbs from the garden, people came up in twos and fours to talk to Dr. Danesti, stopping on the way to congratulate Roy and ask him how he felt.
Dr. Danesti stood and clinked a spoon against his wineglass. “Everyone, I would like to be the first to announce the upcoming Art for Humanity exhibition and auction, organized by our own Virginia Vandeweghe.”
Roy’s mother smiled but held up one hand in feigned embarrassment at the attention.
“I trust that everyone will be attending. All proceeds will be donated to the Women Build program of the Habitat for Humanity.”
Roy frowned in surprise. That was his wife’s program. “You didn’t tell me that,” he whispered to her, leaning over to get close. Was this his mother’s way of melting the ice?
“I was as surprised as you,” Penny replied.
“You know, you two could almost be twins.”
“Pardon?” Roy looked up. The alcohol was already hitting his bloodstream.
A beautiful brunette in a form-hugging black knit dress and red stilettos stood to one side of Dr. Danesti, resting a perfectly manicured hand on the doctor’s shoulder. It was Anastasia, Alexi’s date. She smiled at Roy, then at Danesti, then back at Roy. “You two. Roy and Dr. Danesti. Is it just me? Don’t they look like brothers?”
That got Sam’s attention. “Hey, she’s kinda right. Minus the glasses …”
“How old are you?” the brunette asked.
“Ah, forty-three,” Roy replied, still off balance. Did he look like Danesti? Maybe. He hadn’t thought of it before. His own family was solidly midwestern, but he thought his great-grandfather was from Europe. “Doctor, where are you from?”
Danesti took his seat and smiled awkwardly. “I was adopted.”
“But that accent?”
“My adoptive father was Romanian. Hence the name.”
That made sense. Roy’s head was swimming.
The brunette was still smiling at him, her lips as bright red as her fingertips. Danesti kept speaking, but the words garbled together. Roy grabbed his water and downed it, and the words began to make sense again.
“This is what we call ‘newgenics,’” Dr. Danesti said loudly, picking up where he had left off. “Preimplantation genetic diagnosis. By taking a dozen fertilized embryos and making modifications, we can test to make sure the DNA is complete and unmutated, while still allowing nature to play its hand. The genome can then propagate by itself in the germ line. Just as a résumé uses past performance to judge the future, genetic enhancement is what you might call a ‘présumé.’”
The assembled guests clucked at his clever wordplay.
“Can we do that?” Angela, Roy’s mother’s friend, asked. “I mean, could we do that with my surrogate?”
“Chinese scientists have already produced the first genetically altered children.”
“So it’s possible?”
“Not here, and not without strict state oversight, even in China. The only sure way forward would be to create our own sovereign nation-states floating in international waters, outside the regulatory environment of America or any other country. But that is a discussion for another day.”
“Are you okay?” Penny whispered to Roy.
“I’m fine.”
“I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years,” Dr. Danesti proclaimed, his voice rising in volume. “To authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitable death of every individual. For these reasons, I call myself a libertarian, and as proof, I present my greatest achievement, Mr. Royce Lowell-Vandeweghe.”
The gathering erupted into applause, and Roy raised a hand in acknowledgment, but the images and faces melded and merged into one another. He had another drink in his hand and was laughing with someone, and a moment later, he was again sitting by his wife and Dr. Danesti.
“I can repair your body, your physical self, Roy, but do you remember what I said in the hospital?”
The Dreaming Tree Page 6