A Place For Us
Page 6
For the most part, he succeeded in hiding his feelings from his dad. But that didn’t do anything to stop the pain; it just concealed it. But what happens to bottled-up anger in a teenage boy? It’s like any volatile substance under pressure. Eventually it’s going to explode. No, Michael often wished he could tell his son, I’m actually about as far from perfect as you can get.
• • •
He’d been vaguely aware of a light tick, tick, tick coming from somewhere above him before he glanced up and saw that snow was accumulating on the skylights. Fat flakes swirled through the columns of light cast upward from the studio overheads into the night sky. He put down the sander and took off his gloves, flexing his fingers. He should go back down to the house soon. Brook would be wondering what had happened to him.
He stretched and then walked over to check on the Jøtul stove. Embers still glowed in the back, but it would be safe now to shut the vents and close the latch. As always when he finished for the day, he cleaned up and swept around his work area. Self-taught from workbooks and Internet courses, Michael had learned to be a stickler about neatness and attention to detail. Yes, he had a natural talent for what he did. But it was his dedication and meticulous work habits that really had gotten him to where he was today. Over the last twenty years, Michael Bostock Fine Wood Designs had grown into one of the most prestigious high-end custom-made furniture concerns on the East Coast. He had a team of eight woodworkers who turned out his designer chairs, tables, and lamps in a converted barn in North Barnsbury, while Michael handled new creations and one-of-a-kind projects in his mountainside studio. It was work that he loved, and which, especially since he’d signed on with a new dealer in New York five years ago for his custom-made pieces, was becoming increasingly lucrative.
His success had become a lot more important to him than he ever let on to Brook. He took pride in the fact that in the exceedingly unlikely event that the Pendleton Family Trust should suddenly collapse, he’d be able to keep his wife and children in the style to which Brook’s inheritance had accustomed them.
“You know what I love about you?” Brook had asked him early on in their marriage.
“There’s only one thing?”
“Of all the many, many things I love about you? I really, honestly think you don’t give a damn about my having money.”
But she was wrong. He did care. He’d fallen in love with someone whose name—along with the fortune that went with it—was almost as well-known as Du Pont or Vanderbilt. If you were any kind of a man, that level of wealth was a burden, a weight that was forever needing to be shifted and adjusted as you tried to establish a normal, loving marriage. And it only became more unwieldy and treacherous as you attempted to raise happy, well-adjusted children who understood the value of hard work and initiative.
“You lucky bastard,” one of their New York friends had told Michael when Brook and he first announced their engagement. “You’ve hit the mother lode.”
But, in fact, his only real luck had been in finding Brook. The Pendleton part? It was a curse, really. Brook’s two domineering half sisters. The trust lawyers. The corporate board. The financial advisers. There wasn’t one person—except Brook’s father, who was a mere in-law, like Michael—whom Michael honestly admired or felt comfortable with. He would have been perfectly happy to donate the whole damned thing to charity. Except it wasn’t his to give away. It was just his to have to deal with.
And as if the Pendleton money hadn’t come with enough problems of its own, the trust had, as far as Michael was concerned, poisoned Brook’s relations with his family before they even had a chance to meet her. It hadn’t helped that the local Northridge paper had somehow gotten hold of the engagement news and run a piece on Brook’s background, rehashing all the old society gossip about her mother and making Brook seem like some poor little rich girl with whom his family would have nothing in common.
“She’s the kindest person I’ve ever known,” Michael had reassured his mother when she confronted him with the article and her own fears. “Just wait until you meet her—you’re going to love her, I promise.”
But Brook never managed to break through to his family. Not for lack of trying—or was the problem that she tried too hard? He thought at least their hearts would melt—and their arms open—when he and Brook decided to move back to Barnsbury after 9/11. What clearer signal could they send that they wanted to be part of their lives and this town? But the family had remained standoffish. Judgmental. Like those little signals of disapproval Lynn kept sending Brook’s way just that evening. With Michael’s two oldest sisters, Jeannie and Beth, who came back to Barnsbury with their families only every other summer or two, it was easier. But that was only because those big family get-togethers tended to be such chaotic free-for-alls. Even then, Michael’s sisters would keep to themselves, not making much of an effort to include Brook in their conversations. It infuriated Michael that they wouldn’t give his wife a chance.
He was thinking about this and how he was going to spin the less-than-joyous supper to Brook as he checked the stove one last time. The skylights were now blanketed in white. He could hear the wind rustling through the hemlocks.
He opened the front door, then turned off the last bank of lights. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness—out of which, after a moment, shapes began to emerge. The long ledge of the woodpile. The old oil drum where he stored the kindling. The stand of birches.
Down below, a door slammed. A moment or two later, he saw a man climbing the steps to the studio from the parking area—two at a time—as though he couldn’t wait to reach Michael. His heart leapt when, for a brief moment, he thought it was Liam—come to apologize or explain. But he soon realized the figure was too broad, his forward motion too purposeful. A moment later Michael recognized who it was. What exactly was coming at him.
“You’ve got a hell of a lot of explaining to do,” Troy Lansing said when he reached the top of the steps, his breath coming out in ragged little puffs, his gloved hands balled into fists at his sides. Later, Michael would wonder why he hadn’t been more surprised by Troy’s sudden appearance that night. Of course, he couldn’t have known then why specifically Troy had come, but the larger, deeper reasons for his angry outburst were never all that far from Michael’s mind.
6
Brook lost her mother when she was nine years old, capsizing her world. For several years after Tilda Pendleton’s death, Brook lived in a state of emotional vertigo. She moved through her daily existence with great care, keeping a firm grip on her feelings, for fear that the slightest vagrant memory would undo her. It was one of the reasons why, as she grew older, she worked so hard to keep her life upright and secure. Even as an adult, though, when faced with a real crisis, she tended to founder. Which was what had happened with Liam that past June. “Don’t you think the real problem is that you’ve let him run wild up here?” her sister Peg had asked during the painful postmortem the morning after Liam had gotten drunk and disgraced himself at her daughter Kristin’s wedding. Brook couldn’t have been more thrilled when Kristin had asked to hold the wedding at the Bostocks’ mountainside home—and that R.S.V.P. handle all the arrangements. Her fiancé’s family lived in Albany, so it was a convenient location for both families, not to mention a lovely setting for the June nuptials. Within a week of the invitations going out, all the best rooms at nearby inns and B and Bs had been booked for the weekend.
Though the ceremony and dinner had gone off without a hitch, the situation began to unravel when the Bostocks’ closest neighbors complained to the Barnsbury police about the loud music and the cars that had been parked on their property without permission. When Chief Henderson came to investigate, one of the first things he saw was Liam passed out on the front lawn. It was a disastrous end to what Brook had hoped was going to be a proud affirmation of her decision to raise her family in Michael’s hometown.
“We actually have a very regulated home life,” Brook told Peg
and Janice defensively at the start of the discussion. They were sitting in the Bostocks’ great room. On the back lawn, the catering company was taking down the big white party tent and folding up the rented tables and chairs.
“We know you’ve tried to do your best,” Janice told her. “But, honestly, we have to ask: why do you insist on stacking the cards against Liam? We understand you and Michael are determined to live a simple life and all, but you don’t want your choices negatively impacting your children, do you? What kind of education is he getting, what kind of people is he associating with in—where is he enrolled exactly?—some public school up here?”
Janice was two years older than Peg, and both sisters were the products of Tilda Pendleton’s eighteen-year marriage to the investment banker Howard Flatt. Brook, fifteen years younger than Peg, was the unexpected result of Tilda’s midlife love affair with the left-leaning magazine editor Peter Hines. Peg and Janice had been teenagers at the time of their mother’s well-publicized liaison and their parents’ subsequent divorce. Hurt and humiliated by Tilda’s flagrant disregard for their own reputations, they had chosen to live with their father.
It seemed to Brook that her half sisters had overcompensated for their mother’s transgressions by setting the strictest possible ethical standards for themselves. Even after Tilda Pendleton’s sudden death—at forty-eight—they avoided mentioning her name. Having rejected the institution of marriage after the painful split from her first husband, Tilda had never married Peter, so Brook was quite literally a “love child.” This stigma only added to Brook’s many difficulties growing up. Peter Hines did his best to take care of Brook, but without Tilda, his best was really pretty bad, especially during the period when Brook needed him most. So Brook ended up as the odd little duckling, paddling frantically in the wake of the proper swans with whom Peg and Janice circulated.
It had taken Brook years before she stopped measuring herself against everything her sisters said and did. Starting her own business had been her first real attempt to stand on her own. Falling in love with and marrying Michael—something both sisters advised strenuously against—had, Brook believed, allowed her to finally break free and gain a real shot at happiness.
But Liam’s behavior at the wedding had forced her to face the fact that the Bostocks’ life in Barnsbury wasn’t as perfect as she longed to believe. Though she made it seem to her sisters that her son’s drinking had been an isolated incident, actually it was only the most recent. She’d first sniffed alcohol on his breath after an eighth-grade graduation party two years before. Michael and she had immediately sat him down and explained the dangers of underage drinking, but less than two months later she found three marijuana cigarettes tucked in the back of his sock drawer.
She’d lost track of the many times she’d discovered that he’d been drinking or smoking since then—and didn’t like to dwell on the likelihood of other occasions when she hadn’t found him out. She began keeping these episodes from Michael, who tended to react with anger and harsh disciplinary measures, which only made communicating with Liam more difficult. Instead, she began reaching out to Liam on her own. And her loving, concerned approach had appeared to be working. For six months or so, there’d been no new signs that Liam was misbehaving, allowing Brook to believe that their problems were behind them.
So Liam’s backsliding at the wedding, made worse because it was so public, really shook her up. Frightened and at her wit’s end, she listened attentively to the advice Peg and Janice offered. It had boiled down to one simple, very concrete suggestion: get Liam out of Barnsbury and send him to Moorehouse, the prep school in Connecticut that had educated the last four generations of Pendleton boys, including her half sisters’ many sons.
“We actually wanted to suggest this last year,” Peg had confided, “but we all know how sensitive Michael can be when we offer ideas.”
Would Liam fare better once away from Barnsbury? Brook and Michael talked the question through. Had they made a mistake not giving him the very best education they could afford? Had they been selfish wanting to keep him at the center of their lives? Would he find the self-discipline there that he seemed to be lacking at home? They went over and over Peg’s and Janice’s arguments: Just consider the connections he’ll make, the much-needed confidence he’ll gain, as well as the enlarged sense of the world and his own potential. Michael seemed just as concerned and uncertain as Brook was.
“I don’t want to hold him back,” he told her. “But also I don’t want him to feel that we’re pushing him to go. I know what Peg and Janice think. What about you? Do you really think it’s the right decision?”
Should she have told him the truth? That she didn’t trust herself enough at that particular juncture to know for certain what was best for her own son? She’d always prided herself on the close, easygoing relationship she’d had with Liam. And she’d convinced herself that they’d reached a new level of understanding over the past few months. So his actions felt like a slap in the face. He’d turned inward and solitary in the days following the wedding, and she couldn’t seem to break through his newly erected line of defenses—slumping posture, hair in his eyes, monosyllabic responses. She felt she’d already failed him somehow, that she didn’t know how to begin to rectify her mistakes. She was aware that her youngest nephews, those closest to Liam in age, seemed to have flourished at Moorehouse.
The decision to go ahead had been a wrenching one. Far worse than she let on to Michael, who, she knew, still harbored serious reservations about the elite status of the prep school, its wealthy student body, and the demanding curriculum. Moorehouse, in fact, once Liam had been enrolled, became a subject they both tended to avoid. But Brook was counting on that changing over the holidays. Liam had told her on the phone recently that he felt he was finally “in a good place.” Whether that meant Moorehouse or some temporary emotional state, Brook wasn’t sure. Over the course of the fall, she sometimes worried about him so much she’d wake up in the middle of the night, her body rigid with tension.
• • •
“Liam!” Brook heard Michael call as he came in from the studio, the front door slamming behind him. She was in the kitchen, cleaning up after the dinner with Michael’s family.
“Liam! Get down here!” Michael called again, and this time Brook heard something in his tone—anger? fear?—that made her stop loading the dishwasher and head toward the front hall. “Liam!”
Michael was standing at the foot of the stairs, looking up. Troy Lansing, Phoebe’s dad, was standing beside him.
“Liam—,” Michael called again, then went up the steps. Brook heard Liam’s footsteps in the upper hallway, what seemed like a terse exchange between father and his son, and then the two of them came back down, Liam first, pajama top unbuttoned, hair in his eyes. Michael followed behind, his mouth set in a grim line.
“What’s going on?” Brook asked.
“I’m not really sure,” Michael said, glancing from Troy to his son. “Troy has some questions for Liam.”
As far as Brook knew, Troy Lansing and Michael hadn’t actually exchanged more than a few curt words over the last twenty years. They’d been best friends once, but then something had happened that set the two of them against each other. Of course, Troy had a reputation in town for being difficult. Temperamental. Phoebe had never alluded to the situation, but Brook suspected that Troy wasn’t all that thrilled when his daughter started working for them. On the rare occasions when he, rather than Wanda, picked Phoebe up at the Bostocks’, he never came to the door to let her know he was there. He stayed behind the wheel of his pickup and honked the horn.
“Troy has some bad news,” Michael added when Troy, who was glaring at Liam, didn’t say anything.
“Oh!” she said, looking from Troy to Michael to Liam. Nobody met her gaze. She suddenly resented Troy being in her house, filling up her front hall with whatever awful thing he had come to tell them. But it was Michael who once again broke the silence.
“What?” Liam said. “Phoebe? What are you taking about?”
“Don’t pull that innocent crap on me!” Troy said. “I know what happened. I made Phoebe tell me. The truth. She actually wanted to protect you.”
Brook waited for Michael to leap to Liam’s defense. But he just stood there, his eyes on his son.
“What truth?” Brook asked.
Troy looked at her. He pulled some papers out of the inside pocket of his parka. At first Brook thought he was showing her something Liam had sent to Phoebe. But when Troy handed them to her, she realized that they were actually a series of digital photos, printed out on regular laser paper, the color ink saturating the flimsy stock. She stared down at the photo on top, trying to make sense of the slightly blurred close-up. The shot was bisected diagonally by some kind of curve. She studied the shape for a moment—the curve was a cheek. A freckled cheek. And beneath that, slightly in shadow, but nevertheless quite clear: dark splotches. She brought the paper a little closer.
“They’re bruises,” Troy told her. “Along her neck. On her arms. Her stomach.”
“Oh, my God,” Brook said. She looked up and over at her Liam. He seemed stunned. He was blinking uncontrollably—the way he used to when he was much younger. And frightened. She felt her heart contract. She knew enough to realize that her son might very well have been drinking the night before. He might even have been smoking dope. But he’d never hurt anyone. Especially not Phoebe. Brook had absolutely no doubt about that.