by Joy Fielding
“I’m scared.”
“I know, sweetie. I’m so sorry about everythin’.”
“I don’t want him to hurt you anymore.”
“He won’t.” Dani sees the fear in her son’s eyes. “I promise you, I’m not gonna let him hurt any of us ever again.”
“Will you stay with me?” Tyler asks when they reach his room. “Until I fall asleep?”
“Sure thing, possum.”
The bed is narrow, but Tyler doesn’t take up a lot of space. Dani curls her body around her son’s, the heat of his body as soothing as a hot-water bottle. Within minutes, she’s asleep.
* * *
—
Sean wakes up from a dream in which he is trying to climb his way out of a deep, dark pit. But every time he’s only feet away from reaching the top, he loses his footing and slips back down to the bottom, dragging ever more dirt on top of him until he risks being buried alive.
“No!” he cries, jolting up in bed, his body bathed in sweat.
“Sean?” Olivia says, sitting up beside him. “Are you all right?”
“Sorry,” he says, wondering if he’ll ever stop apologizing. “Bad dream.”
“Try to sleep,” she says, laying a gentle hand on his arm to guide him back down, then smoothing the covers over his shoulders, and laying her head back on her pillow, smiling at him through the darkness. “It’s going to be all right,” she tells him. “Everything is going to be all right.”
Sean marvels at his wife’s support, recalling the changing expression on her face as he unveiled the depth of his deception, the full extent of his lies. They’d talked for hours. During that time, he’d watched her eyes alternately widen and narrow in disbelief and outrage, her expression careening between loathing and concern. Amazingly, the outrage and loathing had faded, replaced by compassion, acceptance, and most amazing of all, love.
He’s promised to see a therapist, to join AA, to accept help from her parents until he’s truly back on his feet. Hopefully he can eventually regain her trust.
Regain himself.
Only time will tell, he hears his father say.
Sean closes his eyes and slowly drifts off to sleep.
* * *
—
Julia is returning from her fourth trip to the bathroom in as many hours. Too much excitement for too small a bladder, she thinks as she climbs back into bed.
It’s been quite the day: agreeing to sell the house she’s lived in for much of her adult life, deciding to move to a senior living community, actually signing the lease on a new apartment. Not to mention the rapprochement with her son, the return of her grandson, the knowledge that come the fall he’ll be back in school, that he’s turned a corner, is on the right path.
Maybe.
Hopefully.
Of course, there’s always the chance that things will fall apart, that she’ll hate Manor Born, that her newfound admiration for her son will prove temporary, as will his patience with her, that Mark will drop out of college, lose his way again.
There’s also the chance that she might not wake up tomorrow, she acknowledges, accepting that there are some things she can control, and many more things she can’t.
She hopes that everything will work out. She hopes that she’ll wake up in the morning to face another day.
In the end, she decides as she closes her eyes in sleep, hope is all we have.
* * *
—
Lisa turns over in bed and opens her eyes, not sure what she’s doing up. She squints at the clock radio on the bedside table. Not quite three in the morning. “Are you kidding me?” she mutters, flipping onto her other side, trying to will herself back to sleep. But after twenty minutes, she’s more awake than ever, unable to rid her mind of her son’s strangely obstreperous behavior. “I choose Heidi,” he’d told her.
Fat chance of that, Lisa scoffs. She knows her son. He’s just lonely, and likely more than a little horny. He doesn’t miss having Heidi in his life so much as he misses having her in his bed. Come morning, he’ll have come to his senses. He’ll realize that girls like Heidi are a dime a dozen and that he deserves better. He’ll apologize for ordering her out of the house she paid for, tell her he understands that, by making those threats to cut him off financially, she was merely forcing him to acknowledge his reality.
And then they’ll move on.
Without Heidi.
It’s taken Lisa longer than she thought it would to get rid of the girl—she’d proved surprisingly tenacious—but now that it was done once and for all, they could get on with their lives. She’d arrange for Aiden to see a good divorce attorney, maybe even offer Heidi a small settlement in order to get rid of her as quickly and painlessly as possible. She has no doubt that once Heidi realizes Aiden is serious about ending the marriage, she’ll opt out of motherhood as well. A pretty girl like her will have much less trouble finding another sucker to marry if she comes without a screaming infant attached.
After another ten minutes of lying in bed wide awake, Lisa decides she might as well go downstairs and watch TV. That always seems to put her right to sleep. She gets out of bed, throws on a robe over her nightgown, and walks toward the stairs.
The light is on in Aiden’s bedroom.
So he’s having trouble sleeping as well, she thinks, so upset is he at the shabby way he treated her earlier. Might as well go in there and comfort him, assure him that all is forgiven. “Aiden,” she says, stopping in the doorway.
Except he isn’t there.
“Aiden?”
She knows he’s gone even before she checks the closet and finds all his clothes missing. She opens the dresser drawers. But the only things she finds are the guns he’s left behind.
* * *
—
Craig opens his eyes to find Maggie, her bare feet protruding from the bottoms of her cotton pajamas, standing in the doorway. “What?” he says, his breath catching in his lungs as he swings his legs off the family room sofa and sits up. “Has something happened? Is anything wrong?”
“I can’t sleep,” Maggie says.
Craig exhales with relief and pats the cushion beside him. “Come sit.”
Maggie walks slowly to the couch and drops down beside him. “Did I wake you?”
He shakes his head. “Not really. I’ve kind of been drifting in and out. What’s up?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you want to talk?”
“Not really.”
“Do you want to watch TV?”
“No.”
“You just want to sit here for a while?”
“That sounds nice.”
Craig smiles. “Sounds nice to me, too.”
* * *
—
Dani feels his presence looming over her even before she opens her eyes.
“What the hell is going on here?” Nick demands from the side of Tyler’s bed.
Dani looks nervously from her husband to her sleeping son. “Shh. You’ll wake him up.”
“Don’t tell me to shh!” Nick grabs Dani by the hair, pulling her from the bed and dragging her back into their bedroom as she struggles to stand up straight. “What are you trying to do? Turn our son into a sissy, a goddamn mama’s boy?”
“No, Nick. I was just tryin’ to comfort him….”
“He doesn’t need comforting. He needs a good kick in the ass. Like his mother,” Nick says, the toes of one bare foot piercing the thin cotton of her nightgown, his fists pummeling her head. The blows crash against the side of her temple, her cheeks, her jaw. He continues his assault as her body sinks toward the floor, blood dripping from her split lip, the room spinning around her.
“Stop!” she hears a small voice shout as she struggles to stay conscious. “Get away from her!”
Through her te
ars, Dani sees Tyler in the doorway, his face ashen, his arms stretched out in front of him, the gun in his shaking hands aimed squarely at his father’s chest.
“Well, would you get a look at Goldilocks! Give me that thing.” Nick steps toward Tyler.
Which is when Tyler closes his eyes and pulls the trigger.
* * *
—
Maggie and Craig are still sitting silently side by side when they hear what sounds like a car backfiring down the street.
“Oh God,” Maggie cries instantly, jumping to her feet. “He did it! The bastard shot her!”
Craig hesitates only a fraction of a second. “I’ll call the police,” he says.
* * *
—
Dani screams as the gun goes off, the bullet missing Nick by a good foot and tearing a hole in the white shade of the bedside lamp.
“You stupid kid,” Nick says, advancing menacingly toward his son. “If you’re going to shoot at someone, you damn sure better not miss.”
The gun in Tyler’s hand falls to the floor as his father grabs him by the neck of his pajamas, Nick’s free hand raised and poised to strike.
Dani throws herself at the gun, scooping it up off the floor and aiming it at her husband’s head.
“You dumb bitch,” Nick starts, the last words out of his mouth before Dani pulls the trigger.
She doesn’t miss.
Epilogue
It’s a year later.
To an outsider, the street looks essentially the same as it always has: a tree-filled horseshoe-shaped cul-de-sac containing five identical two-story homes in a variety of pastel shades, each with an attached double-car garage to the left of its front door.
But, of course, it’s not the same.
Death changes everything.
Only two of the houses are occupied by the same families as were living here on that hot July night. The other residents have moved away, some to neighboring communities, some clear across the country.
Lisa was the first to sell. The same morning that most of the residents were gathering outside, trying to make sense of what had happened, she was on the phone with a real estate agent, arranging to make good on the threat she’d delivered to her son. She’d been awake when the police cars and ambulance arrived, observing the scene from her window as the officers and paramedics rushed into the Wilson house. She saw the body bag being carried out on a stretcher, watched as a blank-faced Dani Wilson and her two sons, one of them carrying what appeared to be a bowl of some sort, were led down the walkway into a waiting patrol car.
As for Lisa’s son, Aiden, he was nowhere near the so-called scene of the crime, having left hours earlier to be with Heidi. Shawna subsequently helped them find a tiny apartment close to hers, which they rented for several months before relocating to San Francisco. Aiden now works for his father and continues to see a therapist weekly. Heidi is a stay-at-home mother to a beautiful baby girl they named Annie, after Heidi’s mom. She sends regular updates and pictures of her daughter to Maggie.
Lisa hasn’t talked to her son since the night he left, has never met her granddaughter. When asked, she tells people that her son reenlisted and was killed in Afghanistan.
The house sold quickly and for a good price. A new family moved in last October: a limousine driver, his artist wife, and their two daughters, ages thirteen and eleven.
Which is good news for the couple who bought Julia Fisher’s home the following month, since they also have two daughters, roughly the same ages.
As for Julia Fisher, she’s alive and well, and totally enjoying life at Manor Born. Her son visits weekly, sometimes with Poppy, more often without. Amazingly, Poppy’s swimsuit designs have proved to be very popular, and the online company Norman helped her found is an unqualified success. So she’s very busy designing and running the company, which may or may not bode well for the continuing success of her marriage to Norman.
As for Mark, he’s also a frequent visitor to Julia’s new residence, driving up from Miami whenever time allows. In another month, he’ll be starting year two of his three-year degree program at the Florida College of Culinary Arts, and he remains as happy as a butterfly.
Things haven’t been quite so rosy for Sean and Olivia Grant, one of the two families still living on the tiny cul-de-sac. They’ve had their share of ups and downs this past year. Sean did indeed follow through on his promises to see a therapist and join AA, and has remained clean and sober ever since. And three months ago, he was offered a job in the marketing department of a small but prestigious agency in nearby Stuart. But recapturing Olivia’s trust has proved harder than either of them anticipated. They’re now in couples’ counseling, and as Sean’s father would undoubtedly say, Only time will tell.
Ironically, for someone who spent as much time as Sean did staring out his window, he was sound asleep at the time Tyler Wilson awoke to the sound of his father beating his mother and tiptoed down the stairs to the den. He found the key he’d seen his mother drop in the desk drawer, opened the cabinet, retrieved his father’s loaded gun, then entered his parents’ bedroom to confront his father. Olivia heard what she assumed was either a car backfiring or some kid setting off firecrackers, but she, too, was asleep by the time the police arrived.
In the end, no charges were filed. The district attorney’s office decided that Dani had acted in defense of both herself and her son, and that no jury in the world would convict her. It was agreed that Dani and her sons would receive ongoing counseling, and the family, unable to face returning to the house, rented a small bungalow a mile down the road.
Dani put the house on Carlyle Terrace on the market and it sold to a middle-aged couple for well below market value because of the grisly shooting. Nick’s gun collection, on the other hand, was appraised for a small fortune, and the proceeds from its sale helped support Dani and her sons during Dani’s extended leave of absence from her practice.
She’ll be starting work again when the boys go back to school next month. Last year, she transferred them out of their expensive private school and enrolled them in the same public school as Leo McKay. All three boys have since become good friends, almost as close as their mothers.
Erin is as popular as ever. She has a new age-appropriate boyfriend and is looking forward to going off to college in another year, although she has no idea where she wants to go or what she wants to study.
Tyler Wilson, on the other hand, has confided in his therapist exactly what he wants to be when he grows up: an oceanographer. He’s getting taller, filling out more; his hair is getting darker.
Nobody calls him Goldilocks anymore.
Maggie and Craig reconciled. He remains his dealership’s top salesman. She’ll be returning to teaching high school English at the start of this semester, having given Nadine more than enough time to find her replacement. They still reside in the house at the rounded end of the cul-de-sac.
“How do you like our little enclave?” Maggie recently asked the couple who bought Julia Fisher’s home.
“We love it,” the husband responded.
“Hard to believe what happened here,” his wife added, taking a long, satisfied look around. “It’s such a peaceful neighborhood. Such a quiet street.”
For Hayden and Skylar
Acknowledgments
Amazingly, Cul-de-sac is my twenty-ninth novel!—I had to count to make sure—and, shockingly, the list of people I have to thank has remained startlingly consistent. Regular readers of my novels will no doubt recognize many of the names. While there are some new additions, many of those mentioned have been with me a very long time.
First, of course, is Warren, my husband of forty-seven years! I can’t believe the man has stuck it out so long, since I am often crabby and not always the easiest person to live with. I truly lucked out as far as he is concerned.
Next in line
are my two gorgeous and talented daughters, Shannon and Annie, who have been a constant source of pride and joy, as well as providing me with enough material to write another twenty-nine books. Additional thanks to Shannon for doing such a good job managing my Twitter (@joyfielding) and Instagram accounts (@fieldingjoy).
By now, readers will surely recognize the names Larry Mirkin and Beverley Slopen, two close friends who also serve as early readers of my manuscripts. As always, your advice and encouragement are both needed and appreciated, as is your friendship. Thank you also to a newer member of my team of literary first responders, Robin Stone, a gifted writer in her own right, whom I met when I was teaching a course in creative writing at the University of Toronto some years back and who has since become a close friend as well as professional sounding board.
Another familiar name is Tracy Fisher, my terrific agent at WME, who works tirelessly on my behalf. We’ve been together a long time, and I hope our association continues for many more years to come. Thanks also to her former assistant, Alyssa Eatherly, for all her help and kind words, and to her new assistant, Oma Naraine.
Special thanks to Anne Speyer, my wonderful editor at Ballantine. Cul-de-sac marks our third collaboration, and my writing is all the better for her input.
Thanks also to the entire team at Ballantine—Jennifer Hershey, Kim Hovey, Kara Welsh, Cindy Murray, Allison Schuster, Justine Magowan, Steve Messina, and Scott Biel.
Thank you to everyone at Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House Canada. I am, more than ever, grateful to be a Canadian, and so pleased to be part of this amazing team. In particular, I would like to thank Kristin Cochrane, Amy Black, Val Gow, Kaitlin Smith, Robin Thomas, Susan Burns, Emma Ingram, and Martha Leonard, whom I inexplicably left out of my acknowledgments for my last novel, All the Wrong Places, and who has been gracious enough to never mention it.
