Day Three

by Patricia Spencer

  A terrible silence enveloped her, a hush that sequestered her in the circle of light hanging over the table. She drew into herself, more and more isolated, until a flutter of motion caught her eye. Her fork, hovering over her plate, shaking in her hand. She stared at it, as if she had never seen such an implement before.

  “I was promiscuous,” Brenna said. Her tone turned confessional. “I had sex with a lot of men I scarcely knew. Harsh, ugly sex with no trace of affection. Usually not sober, because I was a drunk. Briefly. But spectacularly.”

  “Brenna, dear,” Margaret said. “You don’t owe anyone an explanation.”

  Brenna lowered her fork onto her plate with studied care, released it when she heard the tink. “Not even Daniel? Don’t you think he should know? Get a feel for what it will be like for him when he leaves the seclusion of his home with me at his side? Because that’s the worry, isn’t it, Dr. Ellsworth? Shame by association. Humiliation, for your son? Diminishment.”

  Daniel rested his hand on her thigh. She flinched. He’d touched her wound. “I know what kind of woman you are, Bren. That’s all that’s necessary. The past is the past.”

  “No. It’s not. It’s never over with. I live in the public eye. My history will never fade.”

  Slowly, she lifted her head, looked at Daniel’s father. The expression on his face shocked her. There was no blood lust. No victory. And certainly, no prurient interest. He was just a dad, worried about his son. She wasn’t angry with him, she realized. She was angry with herself, for having lived the life that had brought her, shame-faced, to this moment.

  “I attended college in San Francisco,” she began. “Freed from my father’s constraints, I discovered the power that came with being a member of an influential family. I realized I was beautiful, wealthy, talented—and that people were drawn to that. I walked in a room, and heads turned, silence fell. I was a Rease. One of the glitterati with the sparkling intelligence, the bright white smile, and the aroma of sex. I was American Royalty, a heady fabrication. I became a Queen, holding court on a barstool, surrounded by sycophants handing me drinks, goading me to ever-more outrageous behavior.”

  Daniel, resigned, rotated the stem of his wine glass. Margaret watched her, eyes and ears acutely tuned.

  “Handed a weapon I didn’t know how to use, I pulled the trigger, sprayed everyone, myself most of all. Unbeknownst to me, the sons and daughters of America’s other rich and famous families were playing me for the sheer entertainment of watching me fall, the delight of being front and center with the gossip. I was the trophy, you see. The same men who played me, coveted me. I came with bragging rights: ‘I fucked Brenna Rease.’” She mocked their voices. “‘Oh, that’s funny, I screwed her, too.’”

  Daniel winced.

  “God,” she whispered. Emotion welled up inside her like a wave poised to heave itself onto shore. She’d never said it before, never put it into words—never felt the fullness of her fall through the simple process of open acknowledgement.

  “At first, I was too stupid to care. I was the Good Time Girl. Every sordid headline was revenge—a spear I shot across the country into my father’s side. Retribution. Hatred for hatred.” The wave crashed over her. Her voice shattered as she admitted the cruelest truth. “Punishment because he didn’t care enough to come rescue me from the mess I’d made of my life.”

  After a few moments, Margaret’s voice floated softly across the dinner table. “So in order to get his attention, you went to him and committed your final act of violence against yourself on his billiard table.”

  Brenna dropped her eyes. Yes, she nodded. Yes.

  Silence drifted over the table like a soft mist, evaporated, and left the outline of her shame.

  She straightened, saw Daniel staring at his dinner plate. “Don’t,” she whispered, her fingertips brushing his sleeve. “Don’t hang your head with disgrace that lies at my feet.”

  He shook his head.

  She’d ruined his beautiful dinner, embarrassed him in front of his parents, dragged out the ugly truth for them to step over. Good work for fifteen minutes. She slid her chair back, placed her napkin on the table beside her uneaten dinner. “For what it’s worth, I wish I could undo my past. Sit with you as a decent woman.”

  She stood up, remembered she’d abandoned the walking stick at the sofa before dinner, relied on Daniel’s arm to get to the table rather than use his father’s heirloom. She stepped forward, hid the pain of placing her full weight on her injured leg, and continued.

  Dr. Ellsworth’s chair scraped the floor behind her. He crossed the family room, retrieved the stick, and appeared in front of her, offering it to her.

  “It’s yours,” she said, trying to circumvent him. “I don’t need it.”

  He shifted his weight, impeding her. “For a father to aid his daughter, he must not only come to her, she must accept the gesture.”

  She wavered. Alden Ellsworth was as kind as his son. She’d baited him, and in response, he was helping her.

  He held the silver handle higher.

  She relented, finally, and accepted the cane.

  “When you come back from the bathroom,” he said, offering her an alternative to leaving, “there’s sorbet and fresh berries for dessert.”

  She bit her lip. Glanced over her shoulder in Daniel’s direction.

  Alden’s glance followed hers. “You’ve owned up,” he said softly. “Now stick around and see it through.”

  After dinner, after his parents retired for the night and Brenna went to her room, Daniel stayed downstairs, putting away leftovers, loading the dishwasher, grateful for the time alone.

  Well, there it was.

  The first half-day of managing alone with Brenna.

  He shook his head, squeezed out the sponge in the hot running water.

  He hadn’t heard what his father said to Brenna, but it worked. She not only took the damned walking stick, she came back to the table after what could only have been a spurious trip to the bathroom. When she got up from the table, he knew, she intended to exile herself in her bedroom—maybe for days until his parents left. Who knew? Even when she was lucid, she was a loose cannon.

  His parents, skilled in the art of facilitating family harmony, had helped her re-enter the meal, easing the conversation to neutral topics, compensating for his own sudden inability to do more than grunt.

  He started wiping the peninsula counter.

  He was uncomfortable that his parents received such an awkward welcome. He should have predicted that Brenna would notice his dad’s discomfiture and head straight for it. Wasn’t that her life’s work? To identify the conflict and zoom in for close-ups? If she’d had her camera on her shoulder it would have made total sense.

  She wasn’t one to look away. Even when the lens was dissecting her own life.

  The picture she developed of herself had been brutal. Its edges sharp, unforgiving. No soft focus. No filters. Just the awful truth. She’d been a drunk. She’d been promiscuous. She’d had harsh, ugly sex with too many men.

  Honestly, he wished she hadn’t revealed that part of herself. Not until his folks had gotten to know her better, anyway. He wanted them to like her, to see the good in her as he did, to want her in the family.

  Before tonight, her past had seemed theoretical, distant, diluted by his skepticism about its accuracy. Hearing her admit the truth in her own voice, however, had stripped away even that one flimsy self-deception.

  He shouldn’t be surprised. She’d warned him that day of their picnic, that she would always be the object of speculation, that he’d have to contend with the conjecture that buzzed around her. His father’s doubt, at least, was rooted in his concern for him. Other men, however, would wink and nudge and recall bawdy stories about sex with Brenna. Stories that were true.

  After tonight’s test run, he understood how much it would cost him to carry that baggage.

  His loss of speech had unnerved Brenna—unnerved him. The poor woman spent t
he rest of the night glancing peripherally at him, avoiding eye contact, her hands fluttering in her lap like injured birds. He felt badly for her but didn’t dare speak.

  He’d experienced a shockingly visceral response to her revelations. He found himself feeling like a Neanderthal. Primitive. Possessive. Territorial. He despised the men who came before him, who had tasted her kisses, tangled their limbs with hers, entered her delicate interior and heard her breath catch in their ears. He was jealous of men he didn’t know, disturbed by events long past that hadn’t concerned him in the first place.

  He understood why men dragged women into caves, flooded them with their seed, laid claim to them for generations to come. Mine. My woman.

  He flicked his wrist, sent the sponge sailing in the direction of the sink. Christ. His rationality was foundering under a flood of testosterone.

  Brenna sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on her knees, twisting the gold bracelet ‘round and ‘round her wrist. Daniel had looked so stricken as she’d related her history. He’d scarcely spoken. Unable even to look at her, his easy manner had vanished.

  She shouldn’t have said anything, just ignored his dad’s speculative glances. But Daniel needed to hear the truth—from her. He was keeping company with a spectacularly-fallen woman. He hadn’t been out of the house with her. This was his foretaste of the real world. His parents, at least, wouldn’t snigger about his involvement with her. They’d just wonder what happened to his good judgment.

  She heard a shuffle and lifted her face toward the doorway.

  Daniel.

  His gaze coursed down her neck into the V of her nightgown, lingered over the curve of her breasts, the flare of her hips.

  She’d seen that look before.

  On Ari.

  Her debauchery hadn’t hit the headlines in Israel, way back when, but when American NATO officers had seen her in the press corps and made lewd comments about her within Ari’s hearing, he had nearly started a brawl, trying to defend an honor Brenna didn’t possess. Luc, professional peace-keeper, had intervened, taken Ari aside, and tactfully suggested he talk to her.

  Ari came to her, dark and brooding. Sitting on the beach in Tel Aviv, she prodded him until he revealed he’d had a confrontation, and he asked if what he’d heard was true.

  “Yes,” she had said. “It is.”

  Suddenly, he insisted they leave. He got up, folded his chair, and walked her back to her apartment, the slap of their flip-flops the only discourse between them. He regretted this affair, she thought. He wished he hadn’t fallen in love with her.

  But when they reached her door, he didn’t leave. He came inside. His expression transformed into the same one she saw on Daniel now. It was possessiveness. A desire to own, to claim. To conquer.

  She’d seen that look on men’s faces often enough, and always rejected them. Nobody owned her. Nobody.

  Ari closed the door with his foot, dropped the beach chairs, and advanced. He was a soldier, muscular, powerful, heading into full-frontal attack. Fear rippled through her. He possessed the brute force to overpower her. She stepped back, afraid.

  Her retreat froze him. “Brenna,” he said, her name Israeli-inflected on his lips. He turned his palms up, then dropped them.

  In that moment, she understood. Ari wanted everything. But it was up to her to give it.

  The sex that followed was intense, unprotected, repeated all night, until there was nothing left between them but two hearts beating as one.

  And now, Daniel was standing in this doorway, wanting the same thing.

  Her eyes cut to the wooden ledge of the captains’ bed, where the condoms James had left her formed a multi-color stack.

  Daniel frowned.

  Before she could speak, he turned away.

  “Goodnight,” she heard, from the staircase.

  Chapter 25

  Sleep did not come. Brenna tossed restlessly. Memories of the dead were flashing through her brain like an unending slide show. Her mother. Ari. The hundred and sixty-seven in the market. The scores she had photographed individually in Israel and Kavsak. Broken, torn, forsaken victims of humanity’s disregard for life.

  She got up, went to the bathroom, plucked her jar of sleeping pills out of the medicine chest. She’d already taken one and it hadn’t worked. Her brain didn’t cease. One at bedtime, the label said. She poured a handful into her palm and stared at them. She shook off the impulse to quaff them all, and be done with. She scolded herself. Disregard starts at home. Using the lip of the jar, she scooped all but one back into the container.

  She swallowed the pill and staggered back to bed, placed her head on her pillow, and closed her eyes. The children appeared behind her closed eyelids, as vivid as if they were alive. Squeak. Heckle and Jeckle. Grub. Mr. Fierce. Kristjan. She couldn’t bear to think of them. And yet she thought of nothing else.

  Lake Needwood, a small body of water as lakes went, was located in the regional park at the top of Rock Creek Trail—over fifteen miles from Daniel’s home. On his bicycle, he blasted through the dawn at the top of his cadence, heedless of the gravel patches, slick leaves, and slippery wooden bridges beneath his racing tires.

  He had tried to sleep. He knew he needed his rest. He was carrying himself as well as Brenna and he needed emotional balance. But by five that morning, tired of tossing and turning, he had pulled on his cycling shorts and jersey, and quietly rolled his bike out of the shed at the top of his driveway.

  He needed to think, to stabilize his own thoughts so he could better cope with Brenna’s volatility.

  Weak light tinted the sky as he arrived, sweaty and out of breath. He dismounted, walked the bike along the path to cool down, then veered off the trail. Resting the bicycle against a maple, he tugged his water bottle out of the holder and went to sit on a fallen tree trunk to look at the lake.

  Ever since Kavsak, he’d stopped feeling that he knew who he was. He’d done things in that city that he never imagined himself capable of, and now that he was home again he was worried he’d opened some sort of Pandora’s Box, and that other traits he didn’t know he had were waiting to escape.

  Standing in Brenna’s doorway last night, his eyes coursing over her breasts, her hips, her legs, it occurred to him: Two weeks had passed since she got her last period. He knew, because he shopped for her supplies. She would be near ovulation now, fertile, especially desirous of intercourse. He could arouse her easily at this time of month. Make her abandon caution.

  Get her pregnant.

  Last night, Brenna had meant to invite him in. She had glanced at that stack of condoms by her bed, to verify she could safeguard herself.

  But he wanted children with her too damned much to trust himself. He’d already had that one episode with her in Kavsak where he’d almost not restrained himself. What if he got started with her and the Neanderthal took over?

  What made a child precious was the knitting of one new being from two original strands, neither of which, once committed, could ever be reclaimed. A child was a gift—an act of trust, a symbol of hope in the future of a family. A child wasn’t something a man grabbed from a woman.

  It had taken all his fortitude to make himself go upstairs.

  His eyes brimmed with hurt. He raised his knees, crossed his arms over them and rested his chin. He had to get it in his head. He would never be the father of children with green eyes that looked like sunshine in the pines. No baby would ever be placed in his arms who was the embodiment of her great spirit, whom he could cherish for a new generation.

  She’d made that abundantly clear after the pregnancy scare. I am not having children. What had he thought—that she was upset and didn’t really mean it? That in time she would come around?

  If he continued in this relationship with her, his vision of himself as a father would never come to fruition. He would remain a childless man.

  When Joseph Alden died, the minister presiding over his funeral called the death of a child ‘a particular sorrow’.<
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  But what about the sorrow for children desired and never conceived? Was there a homily for that? For when a man pictured himself with a daughter shyly hiding behind his knees at the approach of a stranger, or a son slipping sticky fingers into his hand? When that would never come to pass, was there a name for that hollow feeling? A prayer? And what insight might a pastor give to a man denied of a family, to keep him from becoming resentful of his wife?

  Behind him on the path, he heard the steady crunch-crunch-crunch of a runner’s shoes hitting the dirt, gradually coming nearer. He lifted his head, glanced over his shoulder. A young woman in satiny pink shorts and a white tank top approached, making good time, her blond pony tail swinging through the back loop of her baseball cap. A woman like that would appreciate a good husband, he thought, picturing her pushing a stroller, glad to come home to a beautiful house and a loving man.

  He tracked her as she ran, turning his head to watch her over his other shoulder as she passed.

  She was attractive, twenty-something, maybe early thirties. She had the untroubled face of a woman who had not yet been tested by life, confident still that things would go her way, bend to her will if she tried hard enough. She hadn’t faced intractable circumstances, been humbled by forces beyond her control. Unscarred, unripe in human experience, she was still immortal, still knew all the answers. She didn’t know that the real challenge lay in learning to live with the things you couldn’t change.

  The woman turned up the hill, out of sight. He turned back to the lake, chided himself for resting his assumptions on shoulders he knew nothing about, and watched the water lap the shore.

  Brenna was complex, her personality rich and textured. She was generous. Deep. Sensual. Intelligent. Caring. And loving, too, as she was able in her damaged fashion. When she laughed, his heart spun. When she kissed him, his stomach flipped over. When she made love to him, he lost himself in her.