Then he began to tease her about Drew, which embarrassed her to death. Drew was almost thirteen and didn’t know she was alive, except to express the occasional wish that she’d stop being such a pest. But she thought he was the cutest boy in the world, much cuter than anyone in her class. They were all dorks.
Damian loved to tease her about her crush. It made her mother mad when he did that. “She’s too young to be thinking about boys that way,” she’d say in that awful tone that warned them she was about to lose her temper. “Don’t plant disgusting ideas in her head, Damian.”
Her father would shake his head, looking very sad. “They're only disgusting to you, Elizabeth,” he’d say, and inexplicably Laura would feel very, very sorry for him, and she’d wish her mother would be nicer.
Of course, she loved her mother, and sometimes she felt sorry for her, too. Her mother cried a lot, especially at night, when she was alone in her room. Most nights Damian didn’t go to bed until it was awfully late, staying in the conservatory working long after ever one else was asleep. Laura suspected that had something to do with her mother’s crying. But then, when he did go upstairs, they always fought, and her mother ended up crying anyway, so Laura finally gave up trying to understand them.
“Drew said he’d take me fishing this weekend,” she told Damian proudly. Then she wrinkled her nose, remembering Drew’s strict conditions. “He will, that is, if I don’t bug him for the rest of the week.”
Damian smiled, though he was still staring at her chin. She’d gotten used to talking to him without eye contact. “Ah, young love. So romantic.”
She blushed, even though it made her feel good to hear him say it. “No, it’s not,” she said, shifting on the bench. “He thinks I'm just a really annoying kid. He only said he’d take me because he had his girlfriend over, and I wouldn’t go away until he said yes.”
Damian laughed. “Well, he’s right, then. You are a really annoying kid. Chin higher, please.” He twisted the sculpture, looking at the chin from another angle. “But the good news is you'll outgrow that soon enough. And you're going to be a real beauty. He'll be begging you to bug him then.”
That sounded wonderful. Laura studied the head Damian was making, trying to see whether she could detect any signs of beauty to come. But it just looked like her, and she couldn’t see further than that. She sighed, lowering her head in disappointment.
“Chin up, please!” Damian sounded impatient. Dropping his chisel, he stood and crossed to the bench. He tilted her head, adjusting by minute degrees, but seemed dissatisfied with every position. Standing back, he stared grumpily, his hand in his hair.
“It must be the collar. I just can’t get the proportions.” He bent over and began unbuttoning the top few buttons of her dress. He opened the fabric and folded it inside the dress, exposing her neck and collarbone. “There,” he said, fiddling with it, shoving it away a little further. “That’s better—”
Suddenly the air was filled with a wild flurry of strange sound and confusing movement. To Laura, it looked and sounded like the screeching flight of a weird jungle bird as it launched itself without warning from the trees. The dense plantings just behind Damian rustled and parted, and suddenly her mother was coming out of them, like one of the statues come to life, crying and flinging her arms and yelling at Damian.
“You get your hands off her,” her mother was screaming, in a voice so distorted that Laura could hardly believe it was her mother. Laura shrank back against the bench, terrified. “I knew you were touching her, you sick bastard, I knew you were, I knew you were.”
Damian’s face was white, horrified, as he tried to back away from his wife. Laura thought he looked too shocked to speak. Laura was paralyzed with fear. Her mother was like an unstoppable storm, whirling through them. She was beating her hands against Damian’s chest, screaming, screaming, screaming...
Laura never even saw the knife. She thought her mother was just hitting Damian with her fists. But suddenly something rained on the front of her dress, something that was warm and horrible as it seeped through the cloth onto her skin.
She looked down, trying to understand. It was red. It looked like blood. “Daddy,” she cried, looking over to where the battle was still raging. But her father was falling, falling so slowly it was like slow motion. His eyes were wide, filled with incredulous horror, and the front of his shirt was covered in blood.
“Daddy!” She finally found the strength to move, and she lunged toward her father as if she could somehow stem the tide of fury that was pouring over him. But he was already sinking to the ground, and his eyes were staring blankly into the trees. “Daddy, no. No...”
At the sound of Laura’s frightened voice, her mother whipped around, the knife still in her hand. Its bloody point grazed the skin at Laura’s throat before her mother pulled it back.
“This is your fault,” her mother said in a voice that made Laura begin to whimper. “I told you not to come here with him.” She shook the knife, and Laura saw that blood was streaming down her hand all the way to her wrist. Laura’s legs gave out from under her, and she sank to her knees just feet from her father’s body. She started to cry.
“Didn’t I tell you not to come here? Didn’t I?” Her mother sounded crazy, and Laura was afraid to look up. “Didn’t I?”
Laura nodded silently, tears falling down her naked throat, mingling with the blood that had splattered across her clothes. She nodded again. “Yes,” she managed to say. “Yes, you told me.”
Now her mother had begun to cry, too, but the noise wasn’t sad. It sounded crazy. “Now what will I do? What will I do? Look what you've done, you with your selfish disobedience. Just look at what you've done!“
Laura didn’t look up, afraid to see her mother’s face, afraid to see her bloody hand. She kept her eyes on the floor, and she could see only her mother’s shoes. She seemed to be pacing around wildly, her movements as driven and disoriented as her speech. Laura saw her step over her father’s limp arm, as if it was no more than a log in her way, merely an annoyance. Laura moaned, low and desperate, and suddenly she threw up.
Her mother came back at the sound. “Look at you!” She grabbed Laura’s sleeve and hauled her to her feet. “Look at the mess you've made of yourself.” Laura couldn’t speak. She could barely stand up. She was afraid she might be sick again—the odor of vomit and blood was thick in her nostrils. “Get that dress off.”
Laura didn’t move. “Get it off!“ her mother screamed. “It’s disgusting. Get it off.”
“I can’t,” Laura said, crying loudly now. “Mama, there’s blood all over it. I can’t touch it.”
“You let him touch it, though, didn’t you?” Her mother’s hands were hurting her as they pulled her straighter and forced her hands up to the top button. “Do it,” she commanded, her voice vibrating.
And so, with shaking fingers that were so numb she could hardly feel them, Laura slowly, clumsily unbuttoned the rest of the buttons. She slipped out of her dress, trying to stand very still, trying not to cry, as if her mother was some kind of strange bomb, as if the slightest noise or movement could make her explode.
“Your dress was practically down around your waist.” Her mother rubbed her face, leaving a smear of red across her cheek. Laura gagged and swallowed hard. “And you not lifting a hand to stop him!”
No, Laura thought. No, it wasn’t like that. But she didn’t dare say anything.
Her mother’s voice was like a bludgeon, hammering her over and over. “It’s all your fault. It’s all your fault.” Her mother seemed to be crying again, but it still wasn’t a sad crying. It was a crazy, angry crying, and it made Laura even more afraid. She felt her mind begin to go numb, too, from the fear.
Her mother frowned fiercely at Laura. “Take off your slip, too. It’s all over everything.”
As if she was in a dream, Laura pulled her slip over her head, trying not to feel where the wetness made it cling to her torso. And then her underclothes,
too, because they were stained, as well.
And then, shivering and ashamed of her nakedness, Laura knelt on the cold floor, crying into her fingers. She knelt there for what seemed like hours, refusing to look up while her mother kept moving around the conservatory. She heard a hundred strange and gruesome things—the metallic clank of a shovel, the sibilant sound of shifting dirt, the swish of something being dragged across the marble floor, her mother’s moaning, labored breathing. Laura didn’t try to make sense of any of the noises. She couldn’t bear to know, any more than she could bear to see. It was all her fault....
She cried and cried, and she thought perhaps she might cry the life right out of her body. She hoped that could happen. But it must not have been possible, because later, much, much later, she felt her mother’s arms waking her, urging her up to bed. Her mother smelled very strange, very bad, all dirty and sweaty and sickly sweet, and Laura didn’t like the thought of her mother’s hands on her skin.
“You must never tell anyone what happened tonight, Laura,” her mother whispered as they climbed the stairs. “You do understand that, don’t you?”
She nodded, but she didn’t understand, not at all. She had already lost the memory somewhere in that endless river of tears, and she didn’t really know what her mother was talking about.
But she was too tired to worry about it. She fell into a deep, dreamless sleep the minute her head hit the pillow. And when she woke up in her own little bed the next morning, she heard the maids talking about the tragedy that had struck her world in the night. Her father had run away, they said with knowing voices. He had packed up all his clothes and his sculpting tools, but he had left his family behind. There must be another woman.
They weren’t surprised, the maids said, unaware that she could hear them. If ever there had been a cold, unloving woman who could drive a man away, it was that awful Mrs. Nolan.
10
TWO MONTHS LATER, Laura sat across the desk from Spencer Wilkes, perched on the edge of her chair, her coat folded in her lap, surreptitiously checking her watch.
Spencer’s normally morose face was smiling, his resemblance to a hound dog far less pronounced than usual. He looked at his watch, too. “You don’t have to stay the full hour,” he said, his smile deepening. “It’s therapy, Laura. Not parole.”
Laura laughed, realizing she must have been ridiculously obvious. Of course, Spencer knew her pretty well by now. She had been seeing him twice a week for the past two months, ever since the day the police had found Damian Nolan’s body buried beneath the conservatory pond. For those two months Spencer had listened while she raged, while she mourned, while she sorted out her fears and rebuilt her dreams. This was their last scheduled session.
“It’s just that, now that I've decided to do it, I'm feeling a little impatient to get started.” She refolded her coat. “Of course, if things don’t work out the way I'm hoping they will, I'll probably be right back here tomorrow, crying on your doorstep and begging for another appointment.”
Spencer chuckled. “My door is always open for you, Laura. You know that.”
She nodded. Spencer had been wonderful, the perfect therapist, listening when she needed an ear, talking when she needed a voice. She had come to him because he and Drew were old friends, which had given her a sense of comfort in his presence, but she had stayed because he was a wise and very dear man.
“But you know, Spencer, somehow I can’t help feeling that things will go right.” She squeezed her coat to her chest, holding in the bubbling sensation of intense anticipation. “I hope I'm not just kidding myself.”
Spencer shrugged. “I've never noticed any tendency toward self-delusion on your part. Seems to me you've faced things pretty much head-on since you've been here.”
She grimaced. “Well, after fifteen years of repression and denial, it was about time, don’t you think?”
“I think it was the perfect time.” His gaze was serious, refusing, even at the end, to jest about it. “It may have been the only time you could have faced it without permanent damage. Could you really have lived with being the witness who sent your mother to jail? Or, even if you hadn’t turned her in, could you have gone on taking care of her all these years if you had consciously remembered what she did? I don’t think so.”
She knew Spencer was right—they’d been over this a hundred times. Obviously her mind had blotted out the whole tragedy until the last person who could be hurt by it—her mother—was gone.
Her mother. Though Laura had finally begun the long process of forgiving Elizabeth Nolan, the past two months had been rocky, full of rage. She had asked herself and Spencer the same two questions over and over again, until she had thought she’d lose her mind. How could her mother have done such a thing? And, having done it, how could she have let Laura live all those years in ignorance, locked in her confused and haunted darkness?
After all, her mother had known, better than anyone else, exactly what Laura’s sleepwalking episodes signified. Yet, night after night, she had said nothing. She had merely draped a robe across Laura’s naked shoulders and led her, weeping, back to bed. She had even dissuaded Laura from seeking psychiatric help, a decision so self-centered, so self-protective that Laura could hardly believe it even now. Had Elizabeth cared nothing for her daughter’s happiness—the daughter whose safety she had once been willing to kill to protect?
The most terrible cruelty of it all, though, was how wrong her mother had been. Laura’s memories were intact now, and she knew without a doubt that Damian had always treated her with the normal, loving affection any father felt for a daughter. Nothing more. All the unnatural horrors her mother had suspected were just the product of Elizabeth’s own fevered imagination. They would never know, Spencer pointed out, what events in Elizabeth’s history had left her with her twisted attitudes toward sex. Perhaps she was as much a victim as Damian had been.
And even though Elizabeth had caused incalculable pain, Spencer helped Laura to see that her mother must have endured pain, too. Elizabeth’s personality, once so strident, almost overbearing, had begun to fade on the night of Damian’s death. She had, through the years, grown more and more passive and withdrawn, until gradually she had become a meek shadow of herself, dependent on her daughter for everything. And then, at the too young age of fifty-five, she had finally simply faded away.
It was then, but only then, that Laura’s subconscious had begun to push the memories to the surface, expelling them the way the ocean might reject a foreign object that was ultimately too buoyant to sink. From that first episode of sleepwalking at her Boston town house to the last terrifying flashback in the conservatory two months ago, she had been struggling, little by little, to get free.
And now, perhaps, she had succeeded.
All things considered, she felt good. Lighter. And calmer, somehow, as if something deep inside her had been spinning in a state of perpetually agitated uncertainty, like the ballerina constantly twirling in her glass globe. Finally, though, it had come to a stop. That internal quiet was a peaceful, solid feeling, and Laura thought that maybe she finally understood what people meant by being centered.
“So. You look great. New dress?” Spencer was chewing on the edge of his pen. “Does he know you're coming?”
She shook her head, smoothing down the soft blue wool skirt. Spencer was right, of course. The dress was new, bought especially for today. “I only made up my mind this morning.”
Spencer raised his brows. “Oh, I think your mind’s been made up a little longer than that.”
She smiled again. Everything Spencer said seemed wonderful today. Everything made her smile. It was like being a little drunk on hope.
“Perhaps,” she admitted. “But I have been ambivalent, you know. Sometimes I feel so guilty, and I think I shouldn’t do it no matter how much I want to.”
“Guilty?”
She flushed. “Well, maybe selfish is a better word. Selfish for being willing to put Drew through all this
again. I mean, suppose I'm wrong? Suppose I'm not totally well yet, not ready to...”
“Not ready to have a sexual relationship with him.” Spencer had never been one to mince words, and he clearly wasn’t going to start now.
Laura nodded. “Suppose it’s just another disaster? Isn’t it selfish to risk hurting him again?”
“Do you think so?” Spencer leaned back in his chair. “Well, let’s talk about it. You're fairly sure, you said, that you are ready. Is that right?”
She nodded again. “Everything feels different now. I haven’t walked in my sleep since they found my father’s body, you know that. But it’s more than that. For the first time in fifteen years, I wake up really rested, as if I haven’t even been dreaming...at least, not about my father.” She smiled sheepishly, plucking at her coat. “Sometimes I dream about Drew.”
“Sounds normal,” Spencer said, rocking his chair slightly. Laura had learned to read Spencer’s little signs—chair rocking meant that he was pleased. “So, let’s see. You're pretty sure you're ready to have a normal sex life. The only way to be one hundred percent positive is to give it a try, but you're afraid it’s not fair to Drew to get his hopes up prematurely.”
She nodded. “A real mess, isn’t it?”
Spencer smiled, his smug-cat smile. “Not at all. The answer is simple, really. Just give it a try with another man first. Then, if you're okay, Drew can always be second. I'm sure he wouldn’t mind. He’d probably appreciate your thoughtful concern for his feelings.”
Laura made a horrified sound in her throat, leaning forward, her hands on the desk. “Good grief, Spencer, that’s the most ridiculous—I could never—”
“Exactly.” Spencer grinned.
She settled back, embarrassed that he’d been able to reel her in so easily. “Point taken,” she said with a sigh. “Now I guess there’s only one thing left to worry about. Suppose he doesn’t want to see me? Stephanie calls all the time, checking on me, but I haven’t actually heard from Drew in two whole months. Maybe I'll get there and find that Ginger’s come back or something.” She knitted her fingers together. “What then?”
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