“He’s my father. You’re talking about my father, do you understand that?”
“Did he tell you that? Did he say he was?”
“He doesn’t have to.” She opened her car door.
“Fiona!” he called abruptly, but softly, with torso, arms, voice straining toward her as if he were being monitored by thousands of eyes in the spindly shrubs, the skeletal trees, the barn and house, the heavily massing white clouds. “Listen to me! Don’t trust him. He’s cunning. If he’s being kind or attentive it’s only because he wants something.”
She closed the door, approaching him now, slowly, steadily, every inch his match, her own blood high, her head so clear she seemed to be breathing a vapor of such absolute clarity that she felt almost giddy. “Did you forget that my mother called me? I know what you told her. And I know why she left. You chased her off, didn’t you? You and Aunt Arlene, the two of you. Because she was like me, wasn’t she? Too much of a problem. Too embarrassing! Too, oh now I remember, yes, Ginny told me once, she said my mother was too trashy, and that’s why she had to leave. Well, I’m sorry, Uncle Charles. Unfortunately for all of you I’m not only staying, but I intend to have a relationship with my own father. A perfectly normal relationship!”
Such willful pleasure it gave her, the slamming door, the roaring engine, the stone-spitting tires, his patrician face rigid with shock.
They had always tried to make her into something she could never be. She was proud to be the daughter of Natalie Range and Patrick Grady. Energy surged up from the accelerator into her body. There was a force at work here, and her uncle was powerless against it. Yes, she thought as she sped along the narrow road into town, she had struck a deep and vital nerve. Never had she seen him so shaken.
“I got these for you,” Patrick said, handing her the gold-foiled box of candy through the door. She’d just gotten home. He must have pulled in moments after she had.
“Oh, Patrick,” she said, taking the box and following him as he strode into the living room, looking quickly around. “Thank you. Thank you so much,” she said, her voice hoarsening with tenderness. “But why? What’s the occasion?”
“No occasion. I just did it,” he said so gruffly she was afraid she’d offended him.
“Well I’m glad you did then. I love presents—especially when there’s no real reason.” Her energy subsiding, she felt childish and flustered.
“Has that guy, the one with the sneakers, been back?” he asked, glancing around again.
Rudy was probably at work now at Dearborn Memorial, she said, not mentioning their meeting in Dunkin’ Donuts or their return here.
“He drives by here all the time, you know,” Patrick said, flopping down onto the sofa. He sat with his arms over the back, looking up at her.
“Yah, well he doesn’t live too far from here.” She peeled back the thin gold foil. “Actually, just a few blocks away.”
“Salem Street. That big gray house, the old one with all the apartments.”
She couldn’t remember telling him which house was Rudy’s, but obviously she must have.
“He always slows way down,” he said.
“Probably to see if Elizabeth’s car is here.” She held out the open candy box, but he pushed it away.
“He always looks up. Like this,” he said, craning his neck forward. “Up at your window there.”
“I guess he and Elizabeth are going through a tough time right now.” She looked for his reaction. “But I guess that happens a lot right before people get married,” she said carefully. “All the pressures and everything.”
“A few times he even stopped, and then he just sat there staring up at your window.”
“When?” she asked, conscious of how cold her apartment felt. “When was that?” She got up and turned up the heat.
“Mostly late. Like around midnight.” He watched her switch on the two lamps in the darkening room. “The other night it was on his way to work,” he said.
She reached around the corner and turned on the overhead light in the kitchen, the drizzle of light over the messy countertop oddly comforting. One of the few things Aunt Arlene had told her about her mother was that she was afraid of the dark. The only way she could sleep was with a light burning. For years pine trees had flanked the north side of the house, but when eight-year-old Natalie complained they made her bedroom too dark, her father had cut them down. Her aunt had related this with a note of wonder at the child’s power even then over grown men, over her own stern father.
“So what the heck are you doing out that time of night?” She laughed. “Some kind of one-man patrol?”
“Sometimes I don’t sleep too good,” he said.
“So that’s what you do? You go out and drive around?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes I just walk.”
“Where? Where do you go?”
“All over. I got different routes.”
“God, you must see some strange things that time of night,” she said, growing a little sad to see his face brighten.
“I do. I sure do.” He chuckled, and she leaned forward, smiling.
“Like what? What do you see?”
“I don’t know if I should say.” He bit back a grin.
“Yes! Oh come on, tell me!”
“Well . . .” He looked up, then patted the sofa cushion. “Sit down and I will.”
“What?” She felt big and clumsy as she sat beside him. Her thighs seemed enormous next to his rail-thin legs. She was conscious of her breasts resting heavily on her folded arms.
There was a certain path he always took along a ridge high over the dirt road that led into the recreation park. From there he could see down and not be seen by cars below.
Her face was hot. Her eyes burned. She held her breath. How many nights had he seen her there, his own teenage daughter, legs akimbo, sometimes even dangling out the open window the way he was describing now. Or on hot nights on blankets spread frantically on the needle-covered ground, and as he spoke she was remembering the piney smell, the prickly cloth against her back.
“Sometimes it bothers me though. The ones that boom, bam, boom, buckle up and they’re off. Like it’s just one more bodily function, you know?”
She nodded stiffly. He knew. This was his way of telling her.
“Especially with all the diseases now. It’s important to be with someone you care about. I been alone a long time,” he said.
The back of her neck bristled and she tried to lean slightly forward, away from the touch of his thin, hairy arm.
“And I’m so used to being alone now that when I’m with a woman I say all the wrong things.”
“Like what? What do you say that’s wrong?” She held her breath. Finally he wanted to talk about her mother.
“I don’t know. I just do.” He shrugged. “You like the candy?”
“I love it. It’s delicious.” She took a chocolate, then offered him the box. He shook his head. He’d rather watch her eat them, he said. She swallowed, and though she felt a little queasy took another, mindful of the pleasure in his gaze as she chewed.
“Wait. You got some here.” He leaned closer and wiped a smear of chocolate from her chin.
The doorbell rang.
“You gonna answer it?” he asked when she didn’t move.
“It’s okay. They’ll go away.” She knew by the way he kept looking at her that he wanted to tell her something about her mother.
“Answer it!” he demanded, glaring at her.
“But . . .”
“Then I will!” He jumped up and opened the door. It was Todd Prescott, glassy-eyed and grinning in at them.
“Patrick, my man!” he cried. He looked at his watch, then shaded his eyes, peering past to Fiona. “Whoa!” he said, holding out his arms for balance. “Where the hell am I? Am I at your house, Fee, or am I at Paddy’s place? Jesus Christ!” He laughed as he came inside. “My two favorite people in the whole world. Fee,” he said, throwing his arm over her shoulde
r and pulling her close. He put his mouth at her ear. “I’m in kind of a bind and I need some place to stay,” he stage-whispered.
“Get out of here!” she said, jerking free.
He was so high he continued laughing as he swayed and teetered backwards. “But I love you, Fee! I’ve been missing you so much.”
“Go! Just go!”
“I’ll just be here a couple hours, that’s all,” he said. “Sandy locked me out.”
“No, not even a couple minutes.”
“But I have to!”
“She said no. What’s the matter, don’t you get it?” Patrick snarled.
“But I miss her so much. And you too, Paddy. I’ve been missing you too,” Todd said, grinning. “Want some stuff? I got some very nice stuff here, Paddy.”
Patrick’s hand clamped onto the back of Todd’s neck. He steered him out the door. “Come on, get outta here, you asshole,” Patrick muttered as they went down the hallway. Their footsteps were heavy on the stairs as if one was stumbling. “What the hell’re you tryna do?” she heard Patrick growl before the outer door banged shut behind them.
Chapter 10
The telephone was ringing. A man’s voice came through the answering machine. Fiona opened one eye: ten of seven, Sunday morning. She pulled the pillow over her head.
“Hello, Fiona? Fiona, I hope you’re there. This is Uncle Charles. Something has happened, and it’s very important—”
“Uncle Charles!” she said, snatching up the phone. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
“It’s Todd. He was hurt last night, quite badly, I’m afraid,” he said, his long sigh filling her with dread.
“Oh my God. What was it, an accident? Who was driving?” She closed her eyes. Something had happened to Patrick, and he didn’t know how to tell her.
“It wasn’t a car. Apparently he’s been beaten. Badly beaten.”
“Oh my God. Oh my God.” She looked around in panic.
“His father just called me,” Uncle Charles was saying. “It seems he was dropped off. Actually ‘dumped’ is what Steve said. And the only intelligible thing he’s said so far is your name . . .”
She gasped. “Oh, poor Todd!”
“And Patrick Grady’s!” he continued angrily. “I’m on my way down now to see him.”
“What do you mean? On your way where?”
“The police station. They just brought him in.”
“But why? He was just going to give Todd a ride. I don’t understand. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Did you see them last night?”
“Yes. Patrick was here, and—”
“What?” her uncle said, shocked. “You mean there? With you? In your apartment?”
“Yes, he stopped in. He brought me a box of chocolates, and we were talking and then Todd came to the door. He was on something. I mean you could tell, he was so high, and it bothered Patrick, the way he was talking to me,” she said, her voice softening. “So he made him leave. He said he’d give him a ride home.”
“Oh no,” her uncle groaned.
“But he must have dropped him off someplace,” she said. “God, Toddie goes everywhere. He knows just about everyone in town, you know that.”
“All I know is that Steve Prescott’s convinced Patrick has beaten his son to a bloody pulp.”
“Patrick didn’t do that. I know he didn’t!” she insisted, closing her eyes against the image of Patrick being pulled off the young man in Pacer’s and the look on his face as he tried to get at Chester.
“Fiona, why do you think I told you to stay away from him?” he said, his hard, weary voice lodging in the pit of her stomach. “Because I was afraid something like this might happen.”
For the past ten minutes Steve Prescott had been sitting on Fiona’s sofa, hands tight on his knees as they awaited Judge Hollis’s arrival. A slightly built man, he was always carefully dressed. Even this morning, after a night of trauma, he managed to look not just elegant in his French cuffed silk shirt, onyx cuff links, black cashmere blazer, and houndstooth slacks, but imperturbable. He had come “purely on impulse,” an inclination so alien his lips had curled on the words as he stood in her doorway, wanting to know what had happened here last night. She explained that she’d be glad to tell him, but first she had to talk to her uncle. She didn’t let on that the call she made was to the police station.
“Uncle Charles,” she whispered when he came on the line. “Mr. Prescott’s here.”
“Don’t say anything. I’ll be right there,” he said.
She could hear his footsteps now taking the stairs two at a time.
“Fiona,” he said, patting her shoulder the minute she opened the door. “Steve!” Hand outstretched, he hurried across the room. Flashes of similar meetings came to her: the cold wet night in Rocky Point, Maine, when the men had arrived in separate cars to pick them up. At sixteen she and Todd had tried to elope, but the one justice of the peace they thought they’d conned into believing she was eighteen had told them to wait in the wedding parlor while he got his marrying suit on. While they held hands giggling on his musty maroon loveseat he had been on the telephone with the state police, who identified them as juvenile runaways from Massachusetts. She still remembered the monotonous tick of the mahogany mantel clock and its hollow gonggonggong as both men paid the justice for his time and trouble. She reached down now and took a chocolate from the box that was still on the coffee table.
“He’s conscious, thank goodness,” her uncle said, taking off his topcoat. When Prescott didn’t reply, he turned to Fiona. “I was just talking to Rudy on my way over.” He looked back at Prescott. “Rudy’s Elizabeth’s fiancé. He’s on staff at Memorial.”
“I want to know exactly what happened last night,” Prescott said, ignoring him. There had been a time years ago when the men had been close friends. Their families had visited at each other’s homes, celebrating birthdays and holidays together. One of Fiona’s earliest memories was jumping into the deep end of the Prescotts’ gunite pool when she was six because Todd was screaming for help and she thought he was drowning. For a few years the story had been told as an amusing incident, an example of their prankish natures, until they hit their teens, when it became the paradigm of mutual self-destruction, their negative attraction to one another.
“Nothing happened,” she said, recalling the time of Todd’s arrival, his condition, his brief stay until his language started to get out of line.
“What do you mean, out of line?” Prescott asked.
“Well, mouthy. Careless. You know how Toddie can get when he’s . . . well, when he’s high; silly almost,” she tried to explain because he was looking at her so blankly. “But mean too. He was right on the edge.” Her chest felt tight, breathless in the stricture of her uncle’s gaze.
“And so Grady got mad at him?”
“No, he didn’t get mad. Todd wanted to stay here. I said no, and Patrick told him he had to leave, that’s all,” she said.
“So where’d you take him then?” Prescott asked.
“I didn’t take him anywhere!” she said almost in unison with her uncle.
“Fiona didn’t take him anywhere, Steve. She didn’t say that,” he said.
“So he did stay here then.” Prescott’s eyes narrowed with his struggle to understand.
“No, he left,” she said.
“Alone? By himself?” Prescott asked.
“Think carefully now, Fiona,” her uncle warned. “Be specific. This is very important.”
“Well, Patrick went downstairs with Todd, to make sure he left,” she began slowly, looking only at Prescott. “But then he came right back up here. I looked out the window, and I could see Todd going down the street. The whole time I watched him, he was alone,” she said, fully expecting her uncle to leap up and demand the truth.
Both men stared at her. Her uncle’s expression was gray, wretched with her lie and his loyalty to her.
“I don’t believe you,” Prescott said.<
br />
“I’m sorry, but that’s what happened,” she said.
“No you’re not. You’re not sorry in the least. Sandy told us what’s been going on, how badly you’ve been treating her. And Halloween night how you even tried to seduce—”
“Get out of here!” she cried, jumping up. “You get out of my house right now!”
“Fiona!” her uncle said, also on his feet.
“She put Grady up to this.” Prescott pointed at her. “I know she did! She’s a no-good—”
“That’s enough, Steve! That’s quite enough,” Uncle Charles warned. “You be careful what you say now. I know you’re upset. I know you’re worried, but you’re speaking to a member of my family now, Steve. Do you understand?”
“Understand! I don’t understand anything anymore.” Prescott groaned, rubbing his face. He looked up. “I mean there’s something deeply wrong here. Patrick Grady’s a dangerous man, Charlie.”
“Well, now,” Uncle Charles began as Fiona glared at Prescott, “Patrick’s odd, we all know—”
“Odd?” Prescott demanded. “He’s way past odd, Charlie. I mean, think of it, think of all the trouble through the years, fights and drugs, all the strange and unexplained incidents. The Belleau boy!”
“That was a diving accident,” her uncle said quickly.
“My God, your own sister-in-law!” Prescott said with a glance at Fiona.
“Let’s not go off on tangents now. The important thing is how Todd’s—”
“Tangents?” Prescott cut him off. “How can you say that? Charlie, what was it, twenty-nine, thirty years ago that Natalie disappeared, and the last anyone’s—”
“Wait a minute! Wait just a minute now, Steve,” Uncle Charles insisted. “Let’s get the facts straight here. Natalie left. She left of her own volition, her own accord.”
“And has never been heard from since,” Prescott added with a look of astonishment. “Or is that just odd too?”
Fiona Range Page 22
