The Guest Cottage

by Nancy Thayer

  Angie put her hand on Trevor’s arm. “Oh, gosh, I’m so sorry. What can I do?”

  “It’s all right,” Trevor told her. He felt bad for her. She had only been trying to be friendly. “He’ll calm down. He’s kind of touchy these days.”

  Sophie stood up. “It’s getting late. I think everyone is sleepy. Connor, we’ll take the bowls to the house and load them in the dishwasher. We’ll return them tomorrow.”

  “Suits me.” Connor had been sitting in a lawn chair just outside his doorway. Now he rose stiffly. “Thank you, Sophie, for that wonderful feast.”

  “You’re more than welcome.”

  Angie followed Sophie. Trevor joined Leo beneath the bushes, clicking the Legos back into place. Leo was calming down and Trevor thought, Thank God. It was painful when his son freaked out like this, especially in front of a group. He had thought Leo was getting better, too. When Leo was finally satisfied that the Legos were in the right place, he allowed Trevor to lead him back to the house and went through his bedtime ritual easily.

  Trevor tucked his son in, kissed his forehead, double-checked the nightlight, and left the room, closing the door behind him.

  Angie was there in the hallway, leaning against the wall. “Trevor, I’m sorry for causing your son such misery.”

  She was lovely, and her apology, her own misery, seemed genuine. If he turned her away tonight, she would think he was angry with her, or sulking. Trevor embraced her, kissing the top of her head. “It’s fine. He’s fine.”

  She nuzzled his neck. “And you? Can I make you fine?”

  He didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Plus, she was a delicious woman. “I’d like that,” he murmured, and with his arm around her, he led her into his bedroom.

  —

  In the dark of night, Trevor sat up in bed, heart pounding. His paternal alarm system was blaring through his body: something was wrong. Crawling over Angie’s sleeping body, he dropped to the floor, pulled on his swim shorts, and hurried out to his son’s room.

  Leo wasn’t there.

  Then he heard it: notes from the piano, the same four notes played over and over again, gently, experimentally, and then with more firmness.

  “Shit,” Trevor murmured. He raced down the hall and down the stairs.

  His son stood alone in the long music room, illuminated by moonlight, pressing the ivory keys.

  “Leo.” Trevor didn’t want to startle his son—was the boy doing some sort of sleepwalking?

  Leo turned and smiled at Trevor. “Hi, Daddy.”

  “Leo, we talked about this. No playing piano in the middle of the night.”

  Leo hung his head guiltily. “I just wanted…”

  “What, honey? What do you want?”

  “I’m ready to go back to bed now,” Leo said.

  “Good. Night is the time to sleep.” Trevor knelt to pick up Leo, who wrapped his arms around Trevor’s neck.

  Back in Leo’s bedroom, Trevor tucked his son in gently. “Go to sleep now,” he said.

  Leo fell asleep at once. Trevor watched him for a while. His child looked peaceful in his sleep.

  “Is everything okay?” Angie whispered from the doorway.

  Trevor walked over to her. “He wakes up in the night, sometimes.”

  “Is he okay now?”

  “I think so.”

  She held out her hand. “Come back to bed.”

  Trevor shook his head. “I think I’d better sleep in here with him tonight.”

  Angie hesitated. In the hall, lit only by a nightlight, he couldn’t read her expression. After a moment, she said, “Sure, sweetie. I understand. Good night.”

  She kissed his cheek lightly and slipped away. Trevor closed the bedroom door and lay on the other twin bed, listening to his son’s deep sleeping breaths. He wished sleep would come as easily to him.

  The next day dawned hot and intensely muggy, like a bathroom after someone has taken a long, steamy shower. Angie, Bess, Cash, and Betsy had appointments and plans in Boston, so Sophie drove them to catch the morning ferry. Trevor volunteered to hang out with the kids at home.

  Leo had had a good night’s sleep after his musical interlude, and he woke happy and refreshed. But even the little boy was influenced by the heat and humidity. All he wanted to do was watch cartoons on television. Trevor didn’t have the energy to argue. He didn’t want to do anything much more intellectually strenuous himself.

  After getting up to say goodbye to their friends, Lacey sequestered herself in her bedroom reading and Jonah slumped back to bed. The snores reverberating behind his closed door told of a deep adolescent slumber.

  Trevor spent some time finishing the final cleanup from last night’s party. He unloaded the dishwasher, wiped off all the counters and tables, and like a zombie janitor, slowly swept the patio, then swept and mopped the kitchen floor. As he worked, he wondered what Angie was telling Sophie about their nights together. He didn’t want Sophie to think badly of him and he didn’t want her to think that he had used Angie.

  He heard the front door close.

  “Great, Trevor!” Sophie stood there, dangling her car keys, in shorts and a tank top and flip-flops. “That floor so needed washing. Is there any coffee left?” Without waiting for him to answer, she checked the coffeepot, filled a glass with ice cubes, and made herself iced coffee. “It’s brutal out there today. Hot as Hades and cars everywhere.” She appeared completely friendly and normal, as if she had developed no new opinion of Trevor during the car ride. Was it possible that Angie hadn’t said anything at all?

  “Jonah is sleeping. Lacey is reading. Leo is watching cartoons. And I am subhuman.” Trevor rinsed the mop and stuck it in the closet. “No beach today for me.”

  “Good. Nor for me, either. The best I can do today is lie around like one of those blubbery seals and digest.” Sophie took her coffee into the living room.

  Trevor went into the family room to check on Leo. He’d fallen asleep again, his hair damp with sweat. Trevor went to Sophie, who was getting settled on the sofa with a book.

  “I vote to turn on the air-conditioning,” Trevor said. “I’ll pay the electric bill if it’s too extreme.”

  “Yes, please,” agreed Sophie. “I hate when everything I touch is moist.”

  Trevor found the temperature controls, and soon the soothing white noise of cool air began rushing into the house. He went back to join Sophie.

  “Done.” He dropped down onto a chair. “I never want to eat again in my life.”

  “I never want to move again in my life,” Sophie replied, but denied her own words by curling up on her side to face Trevor.

  Did she have any idea how sensual she looked lying there, completely relaxed, no makeup, messy hair, barefoot and serene as she snuggled against the pillows? Trevor wanted her to stay there so he could look at her and be happy. He started to ask whether her friends had had a good time but was afraid she would mention Angie. He didn’t want to go there.

  “Will you play the piano again today?” he asked, genuinely curious.

  “You know, I think I will. I want to. And I hope Leo wants another lesson. He learns fast and seems to have a real aptitude for it.”

  “Another Mozart?” Trevor joked. Sophie obviously hadn’t heard Leo toying around in the middle of the night, so he didn’t bring it up.

  “I don’t think so,” she answered, taking his question seriously. “But he doesn’t have to be a prodigy. Perhaps he can just enjoy it. That might be more fun for him, anyway.” She narrowed her eyes, observing Trevor as if seeing him for the first time. “Trevor, tell me about your work.”

  Trevor stopped himself from grinning like a kid and eagerly asking, Really? just in time. Act like an adult, he told himself as he faced the very adult Sophie. “Don’t Panic. That’s what my business is called. Mostly I build and maintain websites for large and small businesses. I have one employee, River Ford—I know, what can I say? It’s what his parents named him. He looks like your typical slacke
r/hacker with tattoos and a soul patch, but he’s a good guy and probably a genius. The CIA wanted to hire him, but he wouldn’t sign a form swearing he’d never smoke pot, plus he didn’t want to work in a cubicle.”

  “So you don’t have cubicles in your office?” Sophie shifted on the sofa to make herself more comfortable. Her breasts moved slightly.

  It took Trevor a moment to stop thinking about those breasts. “I don’t really have an office. I have an apartment in Cambridge, the second floor of a tall, narrow, three-family unit. River and I use a closed-in sun porch for our computers. The rest of the place is average—my bedroom, Leo’s bedroom, and an all-purpose room with kitchen and bath.”

  “What if you have to meet a client?”

  “I take my laptop to their place or meet at a Starbucks. They don’t really need to see me. They need to see the work.”

  “Do you like working at home?” Sophie asked.

  “Yes, I do. First of all, I’m always there for Leo. I’ve set my office up the way I like it—efficient, easy, and not fussy. I can work in my boxer shorts, drink coffee, and not have to suck up to bosses or deal with annoying co-workers.”

  Sophie smiled. “You don’t have any annoying clients?”

  Trevor thought about it. “Well, my clients are human beings. It’s not so much that they are annoying as that they are unintentionally unclear. For example, they’ll tell me they want a website with completely light colors, so I’ll do a design with pastels. But no, what they meant is a high-contrast site with lots of dark lines to highlight light sections. Plus, don’t get me started on designing a website for two or more people, all with different opinions.”

  Sophie nodded. “Yeah, I can understand that. When Zack started his architecture firm, he had similar problems with clients who wanted modern, for example, when they meant absolutely and only Frank Lloyd Wright.”

  Not thrilled to hear Zack’s name mentioned, Trevor forced himself to ask, “Tell me about working with Zack?”

  Rolling her eyes, Sophie told him, “I’d say it was more a matter of working for Zack, never with him. When he started out, I served as his secretary and bookkeeper for the first year. After Jonah was born, he brought in a real bookkeeper but I worked with her on and off while Jonah was a baby, until he was a toddler and too much to handle in an office.” Repositioning herself on the sofa—every time she did, Trevor’s heart stopped at the sight—she continued, “I liked being a secretary. It was so restful after practicing, competing, interpreting.”

  “I get that. June seventh is always June seventh. No ambiguity, no misunderstanding. If you make a mistake, it’s clear. I like working with the logic of computer puzzles, especially after dealing with the ambiguity of personal relationships.”

  Sophie sat up straight, pulling her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. “Piano requires math and mathematical analysis—measures, rhythm, beats, and so on—but after that it requires a kind of personal translation.” She leaned her head against the sofa and lowered her eyes, looking drowsy. “You can play one piece of music many different ways, depending on your mood, even on your instrument. Some instruments are more responsive.”

  “More user-friendly,” Trevor interjected with a smile.

  “Right. And music is so emotional. It can be dreamy, or lighthearted and cheerful, or dark and ominous, or romantic. When you surrender to it, give yourself over to it completely, it can transport you to another world.”

  I’d like to be in that world with you, Trevor thought. Instead, he asked, “Do you think you’ll continue playing now that you’ve started again?”

  “I’m sure I will,” said Sophie, nodding so that her chin knocked against her knees lightly. “I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Actually, Leo is a godsend.”

  “How so?”

  “Because he’s a child who wants to learn to play and I’m learning how to teach. I think when I go home, I might start offering to teach piano. I never knew how much I’d enjoy it. Well, maybe when I was younger and all about ambition I wouldn’t have enjoyed it. But it hasn’t gone away, you know, the love?” She looked questioningly at Trevor.

  Trevor was struck dumb by her words and her look. His brain wouldn’t work.

  “I mean the love of music.” Twisting around, she held out her hands imploringly. “How could I have gone for so long without playing? I don’t understand myself. At first it was me, I know. I was traumatized and I felt guilty for making my parents spend so much money on my piano career. I was a failure. When Zack came along, it was like a rescue. I became a girlfriend, a helpmate, a wife.” Laughing at herself, she settled back on the sofa, reclining sideways and pulling a pillow against her chest as if in protection, as if she felt she had revealed too much. “I’m such a whiner. Do me a favor, talk for a while.”

  “What about?”

  “Tallulah. Tell me about her.”

  He shrugged. “I’d rather talk about you. You’re more interesting.”

  “More interesting than the mother of your child? The woman you lived with for what, five years?”

  Had he ever talked to anyone about Tallulah? Had he ever wanted to? “I’m not that dig-deep-into-the-tar-pits-of-my-mind kind of guy,” Trevor joked.

  Sophie simply looked at him. That was all. Her blue eyes contained something he’d seldom seen—perhaps it was pity, or possibly he had no idea how to differentiate between pity and attention. It wasn’t a sexual, come-hither look and it wasn’t maternal, either. It held curiosity but not the eager, give-me-the-good-stuff curiosity. It held warmth but not heat, and caring but not desire. It occurred to Trevor that possibly he seldom noticed the looks women gave him unless they were flirtatious.

  “Really? You want to know about Tallulah, really?” He wriggled his shoulders, chewed a thumbnail, and considered a moment. Remembered. “Okay, well, she was beautiful, the most physically beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Sometimes, even after we’d been together for years, I’d look at her and wonder if she were a real person. She was so physically perfect.” He looked down at his feet. “But she wasn’t perceptive or concerned about, say, the state of the world or global warming or who was running for president—I don’t mean she was stupid, either. She hadn’t had an easy childhood. I don’t mean she was abused, nothing like that, but her family was poor. She had a lot of brothers and sisters, but I never met any of them. Never met her father or mother, either. I think she learned early on that the only way she could find a place in the world was through her beauty.” Something inside Trevor was coming alive or beginning; he could sense it the way he knew when he was coming down with a cold or when the stomach flu first made its delicate rumblings. He felt helpless and resistant and slightly angry. He felt as if he were in a line at the post office and someone was crowding him, invading what people called “his personal space” and creating a sense of heat, like being pushed when trying to get on the subway.

  Sophie was sitting quietly, one finger resting on her lips. Suddenly Trevor wanted to crawl into her deep, warm eyes like a kid crawling onto his mother’s lap, and what kind of a bizarre thought was that to have? He realized he had tears in his eyes. He was so grateful to Sophie for not saying something goopy like, “That’s okay, go ahead and cry.” After Tallulah’s death, Trevor had been surrounded by preschool mommies wanting to hug him while he cried. Their sympathy—which appeared to him like a kind of emotional greed, almost a ghoulish hunger—had caused him to close up like a clamshell, tight and inviolable.

  “She had so many faults,” Trevor admitted, and fuck it all, the tears were coming and he wasn’t going to leave the room or make a joke or suck it up. “In many ways, she was simply hopeless. She had almost no time for Leo. She was totally, and I mean totally, self-absorbed. She’d go on these diets, she was always trying to lose weight, although she didn’t need to, but she didn’t use drugs—I mean at least when she was pregnant with Leo she didn’t use. I don’t know when she started that.” Trevor shot a frantic glance at
Sophie.

  “Leo has turned out just fine. He’s a wonderful little boy,” Sophie told him calmly.

  “Right. True. Thanks.” Trevor nodded, and the nodding moved into a kind of psycho mini-rocking. “Tallulah wanted the baby when she found out she was pregnant. I did, too, and when Leo arrived, I did everything I could. I took care of him. I fed him. She didn’t nurse him because she was afraid it would ruin her breasts. She didn’t like touching his diapers, or his throw-up when he got sick. She didn’t have the patience to do the necessary stuff like teaching him to brush his teeth. Well, and I can’t blame her—it’s hard, thankless work. And Tallulah, well, she was glamorous. Babies, children—they totally weren’t her thing.”

  So much raw confession made Trevor feel itchy with guilt. He stalked across the room and peered down the hall, listening for a moment to hear any sounds that meant Leo was awake. When he returned to his chair, he looked at Sophie with a self-deprecating smile.

  “Do you want more?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Sophie replied quietly.

  “Okay. Tallulah loved acting. Her dream was to be in a New York soap opera. When she wasn’t rehearsing, trolling through the used-clothing stores for a fabulous find, hanging out with her girlfriends doing each other’s nails and hair, or, although I didn’t know it, doing drugs with Wilhelm, she was at home watching TV shows like American Idol and The Voice. Oh, yeah, reality shows were a big hit with her, too. She’d say, ‘I can do that. I can do better than that.’ ”

  “And with Leo?” Sophie prompted.

  “She was kind to Leo. If she was home, she would hold him on her lap and cuddle him. He loved that so much. Some days, especially when she had a part in some play, she’d be all dizzy with joy. She’d try on her different outfits and dress Leo up, too. He would stumble around in one of her sequined tops, getting his feet caught in the hem, tripping and falling, and Tallulah would laugh and clutch him and fall on the bed with him, tickling him. Those were Leo’s best times in his life. He was just a little kid. He didn’t know what a perfect mom was supposed to do. In his eyes, Tallulah was perfect. And you know, in my eyes, she was kind of perfect, too.” The powerful heat within him pushed its way to his throat and Trevor made an odd choking sound. “I had just started my business when I met her. I like my business. When I’m working at my computer, I get into a kind of zone and it’s like the rest of the world disappears. And, it was so cool, the way she didn’t care about the house. Like all my friends were getting married, and the wives wanted stuff like All-Clad cookware and silver and platters and throw pillows, and if Tallulah and I would ever go out to dinner with them, the wife would just go on and on about decorating. Tallulah never did that. She couldn’t have cared less what the walls looked like. That really freed me up to work on my business.”