Diana couldn’t help her gaze shifting to the open beer bottle on the side table, next to the chips. Brad saw her looking, and shrugged. “I’m staying off the hard stuff. They call it harm reduction.” Diana thought they could more properly call it bullshit, but she kept quiet. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.
“What?”
“Oh, sure. What with all this #MeToo stuff in the news…” He waved one hand above his head and declaimed, “First they came for Harvey Weinstein, and I kept silent, because I was not a big-deal Jewish movie producer. Then they came for Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer, and I kept silent, because I wasn’t on TV. Then they came for Brett Kavanaugh, and I kept silent, because I’m not a judge. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak.” He turned the bottle in his hand. Speaking quietly, he said, “I’ve been waiting a long time for this. For you. So.” He put down the bottle and clapped his hands together, the bluff, hearty host welcoming a guest to his abode. It reminded her of Reese, except Reese was always sincere, he genuinely wanted to host people, to make them feel welcome, whereas this man only wanted her gone. “Here you are.” He picked up his bottle again and raised it in a toast. “What happens next?”
“What?”
“I mean, there’s kind of an order to these things now, right? You tell my boss, or the paper, or my ex.” She saw his throat give a jerk as he swallowed. “Or my kids.”
Diana didn’t answer. Knowing that Brad had children, knowing that any revelation would hurt them, too, had been bad enough when the kids were just theoretical. Now that she’d seen them, the knowledge weighed on her even more heavily.
“So what do you want? Money?” He gave a smirk. “Can’t help you there. Could have, once. But two divorces and four kids will clean a man out.” He looked at her closely. She imagined she could feel his attention, like an insect, something many-footed and loathsome, crawling on her skin. “So what, then? An apology?”
She swallowed, as best she could. “Words are cheap.”
Brad Burlingham put his hand on his heart. In a mocking tone, he said, “How about my solemn pledge to never, ever do a terrible thing like that again?”
She looked at him steadily. “It was a terrible thing.”
He glared at her for a minute. Then his shoulders slumped. “Yeah,” he said. “It was.”
They sat for a moment in silence. Diana thought that this wasn’t the leering, laughing boy she remembered from that night at the beach. Brad seemed… the word “damaged” dropped itself into her mind. She pushed it away, watching as he drank, his Adam’s apple bobbing and jerking with each swallow. He drinks like it’s his job, Diana remembered the bartender saying.
“You know what I want?” she asked. “How about this. I want to know why. You had to know…” She wiped her hands on her legs. “You had to know that what you did to me was going to have consequences. That it was going to hurt me. To the extent that I was real to you at all.”
He looked at her, rubbing at his mouth with the back of his hand. “Look,” he finally said. “The guy—the one who did it—he wasn’t my friend.”
“Oh, no? Because you seemed pretty close.”
“None of those guys were my friends,” he said. His voice cracked. “I thought they were. I wanted them to be. But they weren’t.”
“So that’s why you let Hal Shoemaker rape me? That’s why you laughed about sloppy seconds? You were trying to get in with the in-crowd?”
“Yes,” he said. His voice was almost inaudible. “I wanted them to like me. And I knew it was wrong…” He picked up his bottle, seemed surprised to find it was empty, and held on to it with both hands, clutching it like a life preserver. “Look,” he said. “I went to Emlen because my brothers went, and my dad went, and my uncle, and their dad went there, too. And they were all…” His voice trailed off. He gestured vaguely with his free hand. “They could handle it there, you know? I couldn’t. I wasn’t smart, and I wasn’t good at sports.” He dropped his head, so that his chin almost rested on his chest. “No one liked me.”
Diana stared at him in disbelief. “No one liked you?” she repeated. Her heart was thumping, and her face was burning, and she wanted to slap him, to claw at his smug face, to pull out what was left of his hair by the handful. “Do you know how I felt when I went home? Do you know what it did to me? I almost flunked out of high school, and I did flunk out of college. It’s been all this time, and I still have nightmares. I wake up in the middle of the night because I think that someone’s in my house, or in my bed with me, or in the closet. I was a virgin, before that night.”
He dropped his gaze and slumped backward like he was trying to merge his body with the couch.
“Do you know what you did to me?” Diana asked him again, leaning forward.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “I know.”
“No,” she said. “You don’t.” She sat back, waiting for him to say something else. When she realized he wouldn’t—that this was all she was going to get from him, that he didn’t have the capacity to give her any more—she stood up and picked up her bag.
With his eyes on his lap, Brad said, “I went to rehab the first time when I was twenty-six. I couldn’t figure it out, you know? Couldn’t hang on to a job when people gave them to me. Couldn’t keep a girlfriend. Couldn’t make anything work. So I drank. And then I totaled my car, and my wife finally left, and my brothers and my parents did an intervention, and they sent me to Minnesota. Everyone there talked about hitting rock bottom, and how maybe that was mine.” Finally, he raised his eyes, which were bloodshot and bleary. His gaze was unfocused and very far away. “But I don’t think that they were right. I don’t think that was my bottom. I think that maybe the best thing would have been if they’d just let me keep falling.”
Diana felt very heavy, as if her limbs, her hands, her heart had all been encased in lead. Was this victory? Not really. She couldn’t feel like she’d hurt Brad, or opened his eyes, or injured him. He’d been broken already, broken for years, well before he’d ever seen her face.
“So what now?” he asked with a chilling indifference. “You got a gun in that purse?”
“I don’t want you to die,” said Diana. “I want you to live with what you’ve done. Every time you look at your daughters, I want you to think about what you did to me, and think of some guy doing it to them. I want you to suffer.”
She stood, without looking to see how he’d react, and struggled against that paralyzing heaviness to make it to the door, taking one step, then another, and then she was in the hall, at the stairs, in her car. She drove straight through the night to Cape Cod, stopping just once for gas. Michael and Pedro were both already awake when she got home just after dawn, sitting side by side on the couch.
“Where did you go?” Michael asked. Diana didn’t answer; couldn’t answer. Michael looked at her carefully, then stood up and opened his arms. She stepped into his embrace, pressed her face against the soft plaid of his shirt, and let him hold her, rocking her gently against him.
“You could have told me, you know,” he said in his soothing rumble. “Whatever you do, I’ll support you as best I can. Only don’t shut me out.”
She sat down with him at the table and told him where she’d been. “I went to Emlen,” she said, head down at the small table in the kitchen, with Pedro at her feet. “I learned their names.”
Michael nodded calmly. “And that took you a week?”
“The guy who held me down—he lives in Baltimore. I went to see him. I watched him for a while, and then I knocked on his door yesterday morning and told him who I was.”
Her husband stared at her, his face dismayed. “Diana. You went there by yourself? Without anyone knowing where you were? Jesus! Did you think about what could have happened?”
“I did,” she said, and didn’t mention her gun. “But it was okay. We talked. And now he knows. And I feel…” She breathed in, trying to find the words to express this new lightness, like she’d taken o
ff a tight piece of clothing, like she’d set down a heavy load.
“Well, good for you, I guess.” Michael’s expression was still dubious.
“No, it is good,” she said. “I think that this is what I needed. Just to see him, and have him see me.”
“You deserve more than that,” Michael rumbled.
“Yes,” she said. “But I’ll take what I can get.” She stood up, and he stood, too, and Diana stepped into his arms, resting her cheek against his chest, hearing the familiar rhythm of his heart.
“Don’t do that again,” he said. “Don’t leave me like that.”
“I won’t,” she said. “I promise.”
She’d thought that things were getting better, as the days went by… but she’d forgotten that she still had a Google Alert set up for Brad’s name, the same as she’d set one for Henry, and for Danny. Six days after her return, her phone chimed with a story about Brad. Diana felt her pulse trilling as she clicked the link, which led to what turned out to be Brad Burlingham’s obituary.
Bradley Telford Burlingham, 51, died at his home Saturday afternoon. Burlingham, a son of Bradley Burlingham Senior and Tessa (White) Burlingham, was a graduate of the Emlen Academy, and attended Trinity College. Survivors include his parents, two brothers, Davis and Stuart, daughters Lila and Claudia, sons Austin and Eli…
Diana set down her phone and shoved her chair back from the table where she stood, breathing hard, her hands fisted at her sides. Maybe he had a heart attack, she thought. Maybe he’d been sick. But she knew the truth, even before she found the courage to go back to her laptop and do some digging. The Baltimore Sun had been circumspect, but the city’s alt-weekly website had all the facts.
Scion of Prominent Baltimore Family a Suicide. A police source has revealed exclusively to the Weekly that Bradley Burlingham III, the 51-year-old youngest son of city titan Bradley Burlingham Senior, killed himself in his Roland Park apartment Saturday night.
A few minutes later, Diana found herself outside, on her deck, with Pedro at her feet and no memory of how she’d come to be there.
“Diana?” Michael said, but all she could do was shake her head and wordlessly hand him her phone with the story still on its screen, the evidence of her guilt, a burden she’d have to carry until the end of her days, the knowledge that she’d killed Brad Burlingham, as surely as if she’d put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
24
Daisy
Ten minutes after Diana dropped them off, Daisy saw her husband’s car swing into the driveway. She felt her heart sink. Hal wasn’t due home for another hour, which meant he’d left work early. Beatrice’s face looked frightened beneath her purple bangs. Daisy straightened her shoulders and opened the door.
“Well, well,” he said, as soon as he saw Beatrice. “The prodigal daughter returns.” He swept Daisy and Beatrice with his gaze and asked, “Which one of you wants to tell me what happened?”
“I cut school,” Beatrice said, without meeting his eyes. “I went into Center City with a friend.”
Hal looked at her coolly. “Why?”
Beatrice shrugged. “I don’t know. It seemed like a good idea at the time?”
Hal walked right up to her, so close the lapels of his coat brushed her shoulders. “Do you think this is a joke? You think you can just throw your opportunities away? I work my ass off to pay for private school…”
“I never asked to go to private school!” Beatrice shouted. And then they were off, yelling at each other, You always and You never; I’m disappointed and I’m sorry I’m not who you want me to be.
Daisy had known that her husband would be furious about Beatrice’s dereliction. Her plan had been to nod along, calmly agreeing with whatever points he wanted to make, while praying her daughter wouldn’t provoke him. She should have known better. Provoking her parents was pretty much Beatrice’s job description at this point.
“If you get kicked out of another school, how’s that going to look on your college applications?” Hal demanded. “You’ve already got one strike against you. Why are you going for two?”
“I don’t even want to go to college,” Beatrice replied. With her chin jutting out and her brows drawn down, Daisy thought she looked exactly like her father, a small, female, purple-haired version of Hal Shoemaker. “I keep telling you guys! I tell you and I tell you and I tell you and you don’t listen.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hal said. “Of course you’re going to college.”
“Why?” Beatrice demanded. “I don’t need college for what I want to do.”
“And what’s that again?” He threw his arms wide, appealing to an invisible jury. “Sit around poking a needle into a bunch of fluff? You think you’re really going to support yourself that way?”
“I won’t know until I try.” Which, Daisy thought, sounded pretty reasonable. Clearly, Hal disagreed.
“You can do whatever you want with your life,” he said, his voice low and dangerous. “After you go to college.”
“Not everyone needs college!” Beatrice howled. Don’t say it, Daisy prayed, but of course Beatrice couldn’t hear her. “Mom never graduated, and she’s doing fine!”
“Mom is doing fine,” Hal said, through clenched teeth, “because I am supporting her.”
Daisy’s head snapped around. “Excuse me?” She hadn’t meant to say anything, but that was just too much.
Hal kept talking, as if Daisy hadn’t spoken. “Do you think that you’d be living in this house, in this neighborhood, going to an excellent school, if I hadn’t gone to college? Maybe I should’ve just decided to sit around and knit or make muffins.” His lip curled as he said “muffins.” Daisy felt his scorn like a slap. And then she asked herself, what would Hannah have said to this, if she’d heard? What would Diana say, if she was listening?
“Hal,” said Daisy. Her voice was cool, and hardly sounded like her own. “That’s enough.”
Hal, red-faced, muttered something about “ungrateful” and “disrespect.” “That’s enough,” Daisy said again, and, finally, he subsided.
Daisy turned to her daughter. “Beatrice,” she said. “All your father and I want is for you to have options. If you decide you want to make a living doing crafts, that’s your choice, but a college degree opens a lot more doors than a high-school diploma does. And maybe you can get an arts degree.”
“Not on my dime,” Hal muttered, but at least he’d stopped shouting.
“My point,” Daisy continued doggedly, “is that we don’t need to decide any of that right now.” She pulled in a breath. “But you can’t cut school. You can’t get into any more trouble. You need to follow the rules.”
“Fine,” Beatrice muttered. She gave her father an insolent look, handed her mother her phone without being asked, and sauntered up the stairs, with floral skirts swishing around her legs and her carpet bag banging against her hip.
Daisy turned to her husband, but Hal was already on his feet.
“Hey,” she said, in a sharper tone than the one she normally used to address him.
Hal turned, and on his face was an expression of such cold fury that Daisy found herself breathless. “What?” he asked, but Daisy could barely speak. The way he was looking at her, it was like he was trying to decide whether to talk to her or just pick up one of the steak knives and throw it at her heart.
“Just… do you think that denigrating the work I do is going to make Beatrice want to go to college?” She used the word “denigrating” on purpose and hoped that she’d pronounced it correctly. “Because I don’t.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. He didn’t sound sorry at all. “But maybe you don’t understand the reality of the situation any more than she does. There’s no way you’d be living in this house, if you were trying to pay the mortgage with what you earn giving cooking lessons.”
“Well,” said Daisy, struggling to sound pleasant, “I also might not have decided to live in Lower Merion. I might not have thought I nee
ded a four-bedroom house for three people. There’re all kinds of places to live in the world. All kinds of ways to live.”
“I never knew you had a problem with our life.” Hal’s voice had taken on a distinctly sarcastic edge.
Daisy threw up her hands. “I don’t have a problem with it, Hal. I’m happy here. I’m very happy. I’m just saying…” God, what was she saying? What was even the point?
“I know what you’re saying,” Hal replied. Unbelievably, he had picked up a stack of mail from the table by the door and was going through it, as if Daisy only required half of his attention. “And I’m glad you have your little business.”
My little business? But of course that’s how Hal would see it. He earned many, many times what Daisy brought into the family coffers. Maybe she could have earned more, if she’d rented space and opened a school, if she’d advertised or solicited clients more actively, but her current arrangement allowed her to be home every morning and every night, endlessly available for whatever the two of them might need.
Hal put down the mail. He opened his arms, waiting, with a patient, avuncular look, until Daisy stepped against him and let him hold her.
“You know, the feminists can say whatever they want, about women making money and men staying home,” Hal said into her hair. “But in my opinion, this is the way it’s supposed to work.”
“And what do you mean by ‘this,’ exactly?” Daisy’s voice was faint. Hal didn’t seem to notice.
“I’ve got the job. You keep the house. You cook us wonderful meals. You take care of Beatrice.” He kissed the tip of her nose, then her forehead. “You make our house a home.”
That Summer Page 28
