by CD Reiss
As soon as we got outside, Peter draped his coat over my shoulders. I wasn’t even cold, but I let him because it made him happy. He looked more like a Midwesterner and I looked more like an Angeleno.
“Sol’s bringing the car around,” he said, rubbing his hands together. He was from Encino, after all. A tall, handsome man with broad shoulders and powerful arms that had thin blood running through them.
“Your gloves are in the pockets,” I said, twisting around to reach for the sideseams.
“It’s fine.”
“You look cold.”
“And you look really beautiful tonight.” His gaze was made of pure aesthetic appreciation. It wasn’t an unusual expression, and I knew enough to not confuse it with love or respect. That was a different expression entirely, and rarer.
“Don’t you wonder why he hides his face?” I asked. “His name is fake. What’s the point of anonymity for a cellist?”
“You’re so naïve. It’s a gimmick. I have a stop to make. Do you want me to drop you home or do you want to wait in the car?”
It was almost eleven o’clock at night. What could he possibly need to do?
I knew better than to ask.
“How long will you be?”
“Fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll wait.”
“There’s Sol. Come on.”
Peter took me by the elbow and guided me toward the Bentley, which was just as well. I had plenty to say about who Adam Brate couldn’t possibly be.
Peter’s stop was deep in Downtown LA, on a line of industrial train tracks that curved between a warehouse and a scrapyard. When we turned the corner, two men I didn’t recognize got out of a chrome-hubcapped white Honda.
“I’ll be back.” He pecked me on the lips. “Sol?”
“Yes, sir.”
“If I’m not back in fifteen, call Vlad, then take Carrie home, in that order.”
“No problem.”
Without looking at me, he got out and closed the door. He and the men exchanged a few words while getting into the Honda, then they were gone, peeling away in the southward direction of the tracks. They turned when the brake lights were dots.
I sighed and leaned back. Peter had late-night meetings all the time. Strange for a banker, but maybe not for a banker who worked for my father.
“Some music, Mrs. Thorne?” Sol asked.
“Sure.”
He put on a classical station. Stravinsky.
Anyone who said the universe was a cold, insentient garble of atoms and energies was either blind or had never been in love.
Love had brought me to Stravinsky, and when the love died, classical music had stayed.
Seven minutes later, Sol turned on the ignition and put the car in drive. The Honda appeared from the north, headlights off. It stopped a few feet away. Peter got out alone and opened the door next to me. I slid over to make room as the Honda’s headlights went on, blinding me for a moment before it made a sharp turn and disappeared.
Sol took off as soon as Peter’s door was closed.
My husband put his hand inside my thigh. A lock of hair was brushed down, creating an imprecise fall over his forehead. A line of something—maybe motor oil—curved along his chin. There was something wild about him. Something untamed and dangerous.
“Ready to scream tonight?” he asked under his breath.
I’d seen him like this before, and I knew what he meant when he said he was going to make me scream.
I looked at his hand where it moved up my thigh. The shirt stayed faithful to his wrist, shifting with it, while the jacket was left behind, exposing the crisp white cuff.
A streak of blood was soaking into the fabric.
Chapter 4
LOS ANGELES - 1993
The day after a gorgeous violinist chased me across Jefferson Blvd. to return a hundred-dollar bill, I went to my parents’ house in Malibu for my sister Deirdre’s thirteenth birthday. The oldest of us, Margie, was there, as well as Leanne, Theresa, and Jonathan, my precocious ten-year-old brother.
My parents were Catholic. Capital-C Catholic. I had been raised to be one of eight obedient, God-fearing, Rome-compliant, redheaded children. I didn’t know people lived any other way until college. Not that that changed my behavior or me. My curiosity about other ways to live didn’t extend to my conduct.
Declan Drazen was a powerful man. He moved mountains. Brought monoliths to heel. When my sister Fiona was having trouble at our private school, he protected her from expulsion with little more than a meeting with the head of the school and a donation. We—his children—knew the donation was collateral on whatever he’d said in the meeting.
Fiona, who was thirteen at the time, assumed the worst. Threats. Blackmail. Coercion. I didn’t; I argued that the school knew she was a good kid. I was convinced Daddy had simply reminded them, laying out his case with facts and compassion. That was what Mom had told me, and I believed her.
Daddy had been born into money and used it for the best interests of his children. Up to my senior year of college, I lived to make my father proud, to take his guidance and obey his rules. That had crumbled so slowly, I didn’t notice the deterioration until that party.
The kids were playing, and the staff was cutting slim portions of designer cake. I stood on the back patio overlooking the beach, in a cluster with Mom, Dad, Margie, and family friends, Gennie and Harry Sackler.
Margie was three years older than me and fifteen years older than Jonathan. She’d benefitted from untrained parents. They’d left her alone to do whatever she wanted, and she’d spent her adolescence screwing up before going to law school. Unmarried at twenty-three. No prospects. Practically a spinster.
They weren’t going to make the same mistake with me apparently. That was their official excuse for setting me up with sons of family friends and hovering over my social decisions.
“The Fischer Fellowship is very prestigious!” Gennie Sackler exclaimed after I told the group. “Congratulations!”
“Thanks.”
“Honey,” her husband said, “he’s throwing sand.”
They looked over the rail to a length of beach on our property, where the children were playing.
Gennie hissed the name of their new nanny. “Excuse us.” She and her husband took off down the wood steps.
“I don’t think I’ll get it,” I added.
My mother sipped her second martini. “Well, it’s not like you need help paying for grad school.” The cuffs of her Chanel jacket had fringe and big gold buttons that clicked on the plate whenever she reached for her drink. We’d all inherited our parents’ recessive gene for red hair, but Mom and I shared the bright candy shade you couldn’t really get out of a bottle.
“Never turn down money,” my father replied, bright blue eyes scanning the party. Declan Drazen had been a wildly handsome young man who was gradually transforming into a wildly handsome middle-aged man. “Especially not under the circumstances.”
“What circumstances?” Margie asked.
He didn’t answer.
A caterer brought a tray of fresh martinis. Mom took one.
“Yeah,” I pressed, “what circumstances?”
My parents looked at each other. Dad’s shrug was almost imperceptible.
“We were just concerned,” Mom said in her best faux-casual tone. “What if you met someone before you left?”
“Someone? Like?”
“Someone you were interested in?”
I glanced at Margie. Her tongue was jammed into her cheek as if she wanted to stop it from moving.
“Like, a guy?” I asked.
“It would be a shame to leave something worthwhile behind. Don’t you think?”
“For something not worthwhile?” I asked in a dead tone.
Apparently sensing my irritation, Mom put her hand on my arm. “Sweetheart, you’re not going to practice. And these years are the best time to get married. We just don’t want you to end up… you know.”
&n
bsp; “Like me?” Margie interjected.
“I didn’t say that.” Mom took her hand away in favor of her drink.
“You know what?” I put my soda on the table. “You guys have some messed up priorities.”
“Family is the only priority,” my father said, stating the oldest proven Drazen Fact as he raised his glass to a guest.
“And I’ll start one when I feel like it.”
I stormed off, staring at the way my feet moved across the floor in pure annoyance. Margie was right behind me, locking the bathroom door as soon as we were in it.
“Why are you following me?”
“You need to calm down,” she said. “You know who they are.”
I turned on her. “They let you run around with rock stars. You were a groupie or whatever.”
“I know. You’re different.”
I leaned into the mirror and rubbed a speck of mascara from under my eye. “Did they ever tell you who to marry?”
She leaned on the vanity and looked away, as if remembering things a century old. “It’s complicated.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means…” She sighed. “They’ve taken control when they thought they needed to.”
Control? Things between Margie and my parents had been tense for as long as I could remember, but she was implying there had been an incident. A story she hadn’t revealed.
“You need to tell me what happened.”
I stood straight and ran my fingers through my hair. I didn’t feel like taking any more orders. “Why?”
“Because you want to.”
I did. I just didn’t want to be bossed about it. Margie always knew how to get me to tell her things I wouldn’t tell anyone else.
“So I get here this morning and Daddy calls me into his office. Mom’s sitting on the couch with her legs crossed like she’s… I don’t know. Like this is some kind of admissions interview. Daddy closes the door and, like, points to a chair. And he sits behind the desk. I felt like I was having a meeting with the dean. So he starts telling me that I’m an heiress, a member of a certain societal strata. Those words exactly. And though he’s been ‘generous’—that was his word—in ‘allowing’ me to date, it’s time to think about the kind of man I should marry.”
“What did you say?”
“I said I wanted to finish school first. I thought he’d want to hear that, you know? But he frowns. And I’m like, you don’t want me to go to grad school? And he says that’s fine. He doesn’t mind. Mind. Right? You’re in law school. Does he mind?”
“It’s complicated.”
I looked at her, waiting for an explanation.
“Finish,” she said.
“So I’m sitting there with my jaw on the floor and he lays it out. I have responsibilities to my—how did he put it? My family’s position. I shouldn’t cast the net too wide, he says. There are men who are an appropriate match, but there are a lot more who aren’t. And I said, can you tell me what you mean by ‘appropriate’? Which led to him basically saying guys from old money. And not to worry, he’d let me know who was good for me.”
“And Mom agreed?”
“Quote, ‘It’s for your own good, sweetheart,’ unquote.” Dad was uptight and controlling, but my mother’s assent had surprised me. She wasn’t involved in the business, and Daddy had been clear that he was being all business.
“Is that it?” Margie asked.
“You need more?”
“Here’s what I’m going to say,” Margie said, leaning into the mirror to tie her hair in a bun. “And after I say it, that’s all I’m going to say.”
“You always promise that.”
“Yeah.” Bracing herself on the vanity, she picked up one foot to restrap her shoe. “This is for your own good.”
“I’m going to grad school. That’s what’s for my own good.”
“Right. Obviously.” Her heel hit the tiles with a clack. “I meant me telling you what you should know.”
“What?” I scoffed. I didn’t believe she had anything new to tell me, but Margie was going to say what she wanted regardless.
She got behind me and met my gaze through the mirror. “Have you noticed that since you turned… twelve or so, they… well, Daddy treats you differently?”
“How?”
“The way he looks at you? The way he introduces you to the people he works with? You’re old enough now to notice how all this works. I mean, it could have been me, but it wasn’t. I’m cute. I have that going for me. But once you came into your own? I guess I was about fourteen and you were eleven. It was obvious you’d be their prize. They stopped treating my reputation like a commodity that needed protecting.” She looked away, as if remembering something. “To a point, of course. But up to that point, I was free to get into trouble because of you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I tried to turn to face her, but she held me by the biceps, forcing me to look in the mirror. There were things she wasn’t saying. I could see the calculations in her expression.
“It’s the nineties, but this family? We live in a fiefdom, and we’re leverage. They didn’t know how to handle me, but they wanted to. And when they couldn’t, it didn’t matter because… you. Look at you.”
We took stock of my face in the mirror. I was supposed to get something from what I was seeing. Some secret lay there.
“Is this about Pretty Girl Syndrome?”
Margie laughed. “Is that what you call it?”
“Women hate me. Men want to own me. People do things for me and they don’t know why. Blah blah. I’m just trying to live.”
“You have an objectively perfect face.”
“Whatever.”
“Don’t let it go to your head. That doesn’t make you a good person or particularly bright, even though you are. I’m not saying you’re not. But your stock? Looking like that? Way up. That means you have a value that needs protecting.”
“And what about you? Why’s it all so complicated?”
She stepped aside and leaned on the counter so we could talk without a mirror between us. “Remember the semester I spent in Ireland? You were twelve or thirteen?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, what?”
She blinked, biting the corner of her lower lip. “They wanted me away from… someone.”
Hiding my shock wasn’t an option. They’d sent her away because they didn’t like who she was seeing? If she was right and I was somehow more valuable, what would they do to me?
Margie said, “Did you know our mother was basically married off to our father?”
“I know she was young.”
Young was an understatement. They couldn’t get married in the state of California.
“Where did Donnelly money come from?” Margie asked. Donnelly was our mother’s maiden name.
“Textile mills in North Carolina. Why?”
“Back in the day, Gramps paid his black workers less than his white workers.”
“That’s gross.”
“When Jim Crow ended, the black workers found out and they struck for a union. Because they were cheaper, they were eighty percent of the workforce. Grandpa fought it. He fought to keep the pay as it was, and he fought the union.”
“Okay?” None of that surprised me, but I didn’t know what it had to do with me.
“He was hemorrhaging money but going broke as a matter of principle. He thought he could last it out, but the unionizers kept coming up with cash flow. They paid the workers, the lawyers, everyone. Money flowed until the mills went into foreclosure. Everyone lost their jobs. Grandpa was insolvent.”
“But they had those mills up until last year.”
“Right. But what I’m telling you? It’s all there in the microfiche. So what happened?” The question was rhetorical, because Margie continued. “I think… no, I know the union and their lawyers… everything was financed by the Drazens.”
I blinked as if closing my eyes
for a second would make sense of my father—because Drazen money meant my father and no one else—putting money behind the unionization of black workers. Especially in opposition to his future father in-law. It didn’t work. I was still confused.
“How can that be? Grandpa would hate him, but they get along fine. Always did.”
Margie nodded. “I’m not sure Grandma and Grandpa Donnelly know. Or Mom either. I’m not telling them and neither are you.”
“I don’t know what this has to do with Mom being ‘married off’ to Dad.”
“Before all this happened, Aunt Rose came out to society. Daddy was there, and she had her eyes on him. His name’s on her debut dance card four times. After that, he met the family. From that moment, he wanted her little sister, Eileen. Mom. Of course she was too young. Legally and morally, neither of which Dad concerns himself with. He did what he had to, I guess.”
I couldn’t connect the dots. “Destroyed her father?”
“So she could marry into Drazen money, which saved the mills.”
My father wasn’t a righteous man. Religious, maybe. Pious, definitely. But he’d never let ethical proscription get in the way of a good deal or family necessity. When—in a fit of road rage—our sister Sheila used a tire iron to bust a guy’s windshield so she could get at his face, Daddy acted as if whether or not she spent a night in jail was his choice. And when she came back in the morning, it was seemingly her apology to him that made the problem go away. When I was a freshman in high school and Brice March, who was a senior, cornered me in the supply room, putting his hands up my shirt and his tongue down my throat, Daddy said he’d take care of it. He said not to tell anyone. The following Monday, Brice showed up to assembly with a broken nose. I didn’t think anything of it until dinner, when Daddy asked how Brice had looked. Even then, I didn’t think much. Brice changed schools mid-semester. A year later, I saw him at a volleyball game. When he saw me in the bleachers, his face went white with fear.
“So, wait,” I said. “You’re saying Daddy made Grandpa broke, then offered to bail them out if he could marry Mom?”
“Yes. He bought her.”
