Adopted father. Laura averted her eyes, drawn again to the fountain statue, to the laughing, happy, healthy little girl.
“Well?” Stubbornly persisting, Stephanie obviously wasn’t going to let it go now. Laura almost wished she had never brought the subject up. “Well, you didn’t really think he was perverted, did you?” She listened to Laura’s silence for a moment, and then all at once her voice grew deadly serious. “You did. That’s exactly what you thought. Laura, Laura, for God’s sake, why?”
Laura pulled her shawl tightly closed in front, suddenly awash with shivers. She’d been standing out here in the cold for too long.
“It’s complicated, Stephanie. I don’t really know anything. I just wonder. I have some problems—” She decided not to elaborate. It was, ultimately, simply too personal. “I'm trying to find out what might have caused them.”
“Problems?” Stephanie said the word slowly, and Laura could almost hear the wheels spinning as she processed the implications. Stephanie, in spite of her giddy manner, had an extremely nimble mind. “And Drew is aware of these problems?”
Laura nodded slowly. The snow sparkled like bits of glass through the tears that hung precariously in her eyes, and she didn’t dare try to speak.
“All too well, I take it.” Stephanie wasn’t asking a question. She clearly had it fully sorted out already. She was quiet another moment, and then she cleared her throat decisively. “Well, kiddo, I'll help you any way I can, you know that. But it seems to me the best thing I can do to help is to warn you you're barking up the wrong tree.”
Laura still didn’t turn around. Two of the tears had spilled, running warm along her cheeks. She traced an invisible figure eight on the window with her fingertip. “Why?”
“Because Damian was a gentleman, that’s why. He was unhappy, maybe, and lonely, maybe, but I guarantee you he wasn’t easing his loneliness by seducing little girls. I sat for him off and on for years, you know. Lots of times I even sat there while he sculpted you. Do you remember that?”
Laura nodded again, retracing her finger’s path. The figure eight. Circles leading to more circles. Infinity. An endless, winding road to nowhere. “I remember.”
“Well, you may have been a naive, foggy-minded little kid, but I wasn’t.” Stephanie lumbered down off the window seat with a pretty groan and smoothed her dress over her stomach. “I was, what, about fifteen? I had sort of discovered boys myself by then, as I recall, so I was particularly tuned in to things like that. If there had been any sexual vibes floating around that room, I would have known it.”
She reached out and stopped Laura’s nervously tracing finger. “But there weren’t. I mean it, Laura. Let it go. It just didn’t happen.”
7
THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, as he sat in the office of Spencer Wilkes, psychiatrist, Drew was already beginning to wonder whether his decision to come had been a wise one.
Drew had just reached the end of his story, and Spencer, who was eating lunch at his big oak desk, froze midbite, his mouth open, his corned beef sandwich poised between his teeth.
He lowered the sandwich. “Good God, Drew,” he said slowly.
Drew shifted, hitching his pants leg over his knee with an impatient flick of his fingers. “Spencer,” he said, frowning. “If I were one of your paying patients, would you be sitting there gawking and saying 'Good God, Drew'?”
Spencer, who had been one of Drew’s best friends and his weekly racquetball partner for several years—but never before his psychiatrist—smiled sheepishly.
“Probably not. But you're not a patient. You're a friend. And when you began this story, the last thing in the world I expected you to say was, 'It turns out she was asleep the whole time.'” He bit into his sandwich, shaking his head. “That’s one hell of a punch line.”
“It’s not a punch line.” Drew held back the urge to curse. “This is not a joke.”
“I know, I know.” The other man wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, then crumpled the napkin into a small ball, tossed it on top of the sandwich and shoved the whole thing to the edge of his desk. “Sorry. I'm not being very professional here, am I? Let’s start over.”
“Maybe I should have gone to someone else,” Drew said, rubbing his temples, which were aching miserably. “Someone I don’t know. I can’t imagine why I thought this would be easier.”
Spencer raised his brows. “To tell you the truth, you probably should have. As your friend, I may be too close to be objective. But as long as you're here, as long as you've already told the sad story once, let’s see what I can do.” He picked up a pen and scribbled a couple of notes on a blank pad.
Watching him, Drew struggled with his discomfort. He’d never expected to find himself consulting a psychiatrist about anything. Even at the most difficult times of his life—his parents' deaths, and of course Laura’s flight—he’d known he could handle his emotions. He’d been brought up to function productively even when he was hurting, and to trust that the pain would eventually pass. He’d never felt the need to hire someone else to make it go away.
But now he saw that what he had mistaken, somewhat smugly, for robust mental health was really just extremely good luck. The truth was, he hadn’t ever needed help because he hadn’t reached that quicksand pit in his life yet—the place where confusion and frustration and fear all pulled at you, rendering you almost incapable of making tough decisions. Now he realized that a similar pit probably lurked somewhere in everyone’s life. Laura, for instance, had come to hers tragically early.
“So what exactly is it you want to know?” Spencer rested his chin on the heel of his hand, and it distorted his voice slightly. “Whether you should tell her what you did that night?”
“Right.” Drew was grateful that Spencer had grasped the basic dilemma so quickly. “If she knew, would it help or hurt?”
Spencer massaged his cheek absently, shoving around the loose skin that always made him look a little like a mournful basset hound. He didn’t answer for a long time, then finally he spoke.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Oh, great.” Drew shoved irritably back against the chair and jammed his hands in his pockets. “And how much does that pearl of wisdom cost me, Sigmund?”
Spencer smiled, the corner of his mouth folding up against his hand, and scratched his eyebrow with his index finger.
“A hundred and fifty,” he said. “Except you're not paying, remember? This is my lunch hour. But even if you were paying, I’d say the same thing. I don’t know. Any chance you could get Laura to come talk to me? I’d feel more comfortable if I could gauge her emotional condition firsthand.”
“I could try.” Drew held his palms up. “But I doubt it. She’s got this idea that her father molested her, and she thinks all she has to do is remember the details and, presto chango, she'll be fine. Only problem is, her father didn’t.”
Spencer raised his brows. “You sure about that?”
“Damn it, Spencer, I told you already. Laura was—”
“Yeah, I know. She was a virgin.” Spencer didn’t look impressed. “So what? Did you ever look up 'molestation' in the dictionary? It’s got more than one definition.”
Drew had to concentrate to keep all the ugly pictures from turning his mind into a museum of horrors. “Well, of course I know that,” he said, his voice sharp-edged. “But I just don’t believe it. I knew her father. He was a good guy. And Laura—God damn it, Spencer, it’s none of your business, but she made love like...like no woman I've ever known. It was healthy and open and—”
He stopped. He hated, God how he hated talking about this to anyone. It felt like the worst kind of locker-room betrayal. “It was goddamn miraculous. Doesn’t that prove anything?”
Spencer leaned back, sighing. “Yeah.” But he still didn’t look impressed. “It proves there’s nothing physically wrong with her. That’s important, of course. And it proves that, below the conscious block, she’s still got a lot of healthy sexuality l
eft. That’s great. In fact, it’s critical to a full recovery. But the conscious block is still there, Drew. You can’t wish it away. And it’s obviously a significant block, if it’s strong enough to repress her memory of an entire goddamn miraculous night.”
Drew scowled at his friend. This wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “Okay, but the bottom line is still the same—what do I do now? Do I tell her or not?”
Spencer tapped his pen against the arm of his chair a few times, slowly, while he appeared to be considering Drew’s question. Drew had to take a deep breath to force himself to wait patiently. The air smelled of corned beef.
“I've got two questions to ask,” Spencer said finally, “before I can answer yours. Number one—who benefits if you do tell her? And number two—who are you protecting if you don’t?”
Drew opened his mouth, ready to toss his easy answer at the psychiatrist. Laura, he wanted to say. Laura first. Laura always. But then he met Spencer’s mournful, hound-dog gaze, which seemed to see through to his confused and selfish soul, and suddenly he couldn’t say it. Oh, sure, he’d been telling himself he was protecting Laura, and it was even true—as far as it went. But at the same time he had to admit he hated the thought of telling her. He suspected she’d never forgive him.
“I don’t know,” he admitted slowly, spreading his hands out and staring at them. “It’s complicated.”
“I thought it might be.” Spencer twirled his pen twice like a six-gun, then clenched it in his fist and sighed heavily. “Okay, old buddy. You're not going to like this, but here’s my best advice. It’s rarely a good idea to lie—even by omission—to protect yourself. The truth is hard sometimes, but it’s always the truth, so by definition it’s preferable to a lie.”
Spencer paused but Drew didn’t say anything and after a moment’s silence the psychiatrist continued.
“Best of all, though, would be to get her to come talk to me first. It sounds as if she’s leaning pretty hard on you during all this, so it’s going to shake her up to discover that you're not entirely...trustworthy.”
Drew’s hand moved sharply, and he bit back a tight, low curse.
“I know,” Spencer said, his eyes sympathetic. “But it’s true. I'm speaking as a friend here, Drew, not a shrink. It really would be better if she had someone else to turn to. It doesn’t have to be me, any professional would do. Just see if you can get her to someone.”
He tossed his pen on his desk with a definitive clatter. “And then, old buddy, you've got to tell her.”
* * *
LAURA stood at the door to the conservatory for a long, long time, her hand on the knob, before she could bring herself to open it. She hated this room. Maybe Drew and Stephanie were right. Maybe nothing terrible had ever really happened to her here. But she hated it nonetheless. To her, the whole house was like a hideous monster and the conservatory was the malevolent, beating heart of it.
Which was why she knew she had to conquer it.
With her jaw clenched tightly, she twisted the handle and entered. Take it slowly, she reminded herself as she shut the door behind her, listening to her shallow, rapid breaths that seemed so loud in the silence. One step at a time.
The irrigation system must have been on quite recently. The air was steamy with moisture, and the plants were a rich, luminous green that glistened in the sunlight. As she stood looking down the serpentine path, she heard occasional soft, wet plops, and all around her leaves quivered as water droplets rained down from higher plants.
She began to walk slowly, forcing herself to look at every plant, forcing herself not to panic when the curling finger of an overgrown ivy brushed her ankle. They were just plants, she told herself, nothing more sinister than that. Just ferns and philodendrons and ivy, all mindlessly straining toward the sun, completely unaware of her presence.
Just plants. But every now and then she heard a slow, swishing sound, like the drag of something soft across the path. Or a strange, hollow sighing, like the exhale of someone beside her, unseen and unknown. The heating system, she would tell herself. Or the last spurts of a dying sprinkler. Absurd to imagine the statues breathing, their marble chests stretching horribly, in and out... Ridiculous to think of shuffling marble feet inching inexorably toward her...
Ludicrous. But at every sound her heart stopped, just for a second, while she listened, and she was afraid.
She kept moving, but her nerves seemed to tingle along the surface of her skin, and she knew her control was slipping. When she brushed against the dangling, dripping cluster of a hanging spider plant, she gasped in spite of her resolve. And when, just as she reached the first of the statues, the door creaked open behind her, she let out a low, strangled cry, her heart suddenly huge and throbbing in her throat.
“Laura?”
Her cry turned into a sigh of relief. It was Drew.
“Yes,” she called, her voice echoing weirdly under the thirty-foot domed ceiling. “I'm over here.”
She heard his confident footsteps traversing the same path she’d taken so tentatively just moments before, and in a matter of seconds he was standing before her, irritably shaking moisture out of his hair.
“It’s a damn rain forest,” he muttered, running his hand back and forth vigorously, creating an absurdly becoming tousle. He dropped his hand and frowned. “What are you doing in here all alone? I thought you hated this place.”
“I do.” She sat on the wrought-iron bench, which luckily had escaped the sprinkler’s drenching. She angled her face away from him, suddenly self-conscious. “But I've got a new plan. You see, I've decided that I may never really know what caused my fear of this place. I guess you and Stephanie have finally convinced me I'm probably wrong about Damian. But I can at least try to control the fear. I thought I’d start by just spending some time in here.”
To her surprise, he didn’t seem to find her idea ridiculous. He nodded thoughtfully. “It might work.”
She turned toward him eagerly. “Oh, I hope so. At first just being in here terrified me. But already I'm feeling much more relaxed.” Of course the most obvious explanation for her increased comfort was Drew himself. How could she be afraid of the simple hiss of the sprinkler system, how could she imagine all those dumb, nightmarish things, when Drew was standing next to her, so solid and sane and safe?
“Good.” He leaned against one of the interior columns, surveying the area. “Since this room is clearly a focal point for some of your anxieties, it’s an excellent place to start.”
The focal point for her anxieties. She could have kissed him for the discreet expression. “Yes. I've been remembering a lot of little things,” she said conversationally, hoping he planned to sit with her for a while. She wasn’t quite ready to be alone again yet. “I used to spend a lot of time here, I think, even when I wasn’t posing. I can sort of remember hearing Damian and the gardener talking about the plants.”
Drew nodded, smiling. It obviously pleased him that she remembered something good about Damian. “I'm sure you did. Damian loved tending the plants almost as much as he loved sculpting. He worked very closely with the gardener.”
It was silly, she thought, how glad she was to have pleased him even in this tiny way. She gazed around, looking for anything that would trigger more pleasant memories so she could please him again. For a moment she could almost hear echoes of Damian’s voice as he and the gardener puttered along the paths, pinching off dead heads here, pulling errant weeds there.
“They talked about the plants as if they were people,” she said suddenly. “I remember thinking that was strange.”
“People?” Drew tilted his head, the green, watery sunlight painting one side of his face, as if he was wearing a verdigris mask.
“Well, they talked about the plants having spines and veins and throats. Things like that, like people. It sounded so weird to me. Kind of scary. And some plants were tolerant, they said, while other ones were resistant. And I remember they talked about having to coax some plants.
Coaxing them...” She stopped, swallowing, her throat suddenly painfully dry. “And forcing others.”
Even as she spoke, she knew she’d taken a wrong turn somewhere in the recollection. Her shoulders ached, because she had started to tighten them unconsciously. These weren’t happy memories. Far from it. She had always been vaguely unnerved by the way the gardener, an ugly man with wet, fat lips, had looked when he had talked about the delicate pink throats of the lady slippers, about the fleshy, sap-filled petals of the succulents and the thick, bulbous stalks of the floating Eichhornia.
The floating Eichhornia. She wondered from what random pocket of memory she had pulled that strange name. She shivered in spite of the damp warmth of the room. Realizing that Drew was looking at her, obviously sensing her change in mood, she jerked to her feet, seeking a distraction. She moved nervously past the statue of herself toward a half-hidden bank of shelves on which Damian had always kept trays of sculpting and gardening tools.
“I remember once Damian let me chip away at my very own piece of marble,” she said, talking too fast. She rummaged through the half-empty bags of vermiculite, the seedling trays and the trowels, until a flash of red caught her eye. Her hand froze. It couldn’t be Damian’s toolbox, could it? He had taken all his sculpting tools with him when he left, she was sure of that. It was the detail that had made his leaving seem so final.
But, on closer inspection, she saw that it was just another toolbox of the same generic style, red with silver hardware on its three or four drawers. She opened the box and found it full of gardening tools. No sculpting tools. Not Damian’s box.
She was still babbling. “He let me use whichever tools I wanted, the gouges or the chisels or the picks. It was really a lot of fun.” She dug her hand through the assorted clippers, trowels and weeding forks absently. “The only problem was,” she said with a pretty good attempt at a chuckle, “I made such a mess of the marble it was only about six inches tall by the time I was through. And it looked all pitted and hacked up, like an old piece of coal.”
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