Beloved

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  "You can't see her now, Katie," she said evenly. Not now. Not ever.

  ****

  Helen ended up waiting a week for the call. More than once, she'd considered calling Linda Byrne herself; but after all her assurances that there was no urgency, she couldn't quite justify picking up the phone.

  Besides, it had been a godawful week: A nasty strain of flu was making the rounds, and kids and staff were dropping like flies. Helen had been one of the few left standing, despite a brutal week-long sinus headache.

  But Friday had come at last, and Helen was able, finally, to collapse on the sofa with an ice pack on her head. She was dressed in comforting sweat clothes, gazing listlessly through the wood blinds at the last of a bloodred sky and wondering whether she should close the school for a few days, when the phone rang.

  "Russ, answer that, would you?" she begged.

  She heard his grudging "H'lo" on the hall phone, followed by an assortment of monosyllables: "Yeah ... no ... 'kay ... no ... I'll tell her ... bye."

  Russ hung up and came into the family room, which was identical in size to the sitting room on the opposite side of the hall but upholstered in more rugged fabrics. He was buried under fourteen layers of plaid, dressed to go out.

  "So? Who was it?"

  "Some woman with a weird name," he answered. "She said some kid won't be signing up for preschool that you thought was going to."

  "I don't suppose you'd happen to remember the child's name either," Helen said dryly.

  "Yeah ... that one wasn't weird. Katherine, that's it!" Russ said, lighting up in the kind of endearing grin that Helen so rarely saw anymore.

  "Oh-h ... Katherine Byrne. So it must've been Peaches Bartholemew who called? Well, that's too bad. Katherine's a sweetie." The sadness lingered in Helen's voice as she said to her son, "Going out?"

  "Yeah. Over to Mickey's house. Him and Scott and me were thinking of going to a movie. Um ... could I have ten dollars?"

  "He and Scott and I. You spent your allowance?"

  "Yeah."

  It wasn't all that easy to do, since Russ had had to stay home the previous weekend. Because of the grounding— not despite it—Helen decided to give him the money. "Hand me my purse," she said, sighing.

  She fished out a bill from her wallet and gave it to him. "I want you home by nine-fifteen."

  "Ma-a!"

  "Nine. Fifteen."

  "That doesn't even leave time for a Coke!"

  "The fridge is full of Coke. Have your friends over after the show. I'll be glad to drive them home."

  He shrugged, which under the circumstances meant, "Naturally you must be insane," and took off.

  Broke again. Russ was always out of money, which was a good-news, bad-news thing for a worrier like Helen. The good news was, he couldn't be dealing drugs. The bad news was, she couldn't be sure he wasn't using them.

  Don't be dumb. You know the telltale signs; you've memorized them from the public-service ads. Russell Evett is not on drugs. He wouldn't betray his father's memory that way.

  Before she could run through the litany of symptoms again, she heard the front door slam. Russell had come back.

  He poked his head into the family room. "I forgot. She said someone died."

  Helen whipped the ice bag from her head and bolted up. "Died? Who?"

  Russ frowned in concentration. "I forget."

  "Not—" But she knew the answer would be yes before she said the name. "Not Linda Byrne," she said softly.

  "Yeah. That was it. Bye." He pivoted on one Nike.

  "Hold it. Miss Bartholemew didn't say anything more than that? What exactly did she say? Think."

  This was an utterly pointless demand, similar to many Helen had made of her son. He shrugged and said, "I dunno," with a hapless look. "She died. That's all. Or maybe she didn't say 'died.' Maybe she said 'death.' I'm not sure."

  Russ left his mother in a state of shock. Helen began pacing the room in her stockinged feet, wondering whether there was anything she could or should do at this point. Acting on her first impulse, she ran to the phone and dialed the number of the Byrne mansion. She got an answering machine, which she hadn't expected; like a fool, she hung up.

  Who should receive her condolences? Poor little Katie? Obviously not. But Helen didn't know the husband. For that matter, she hardly knew Peaches—and anyway, there was something irreverent about offering one's condolences to someone named Peaches.

  Besides, the fact that Peaches had given the message directly to the first person to pick up the phone suggested that the call had been the merest courtesy rather than a social event.

  Okay, so that was that. Helen Evett and Linda Byrne were simply two ships that had passed in the night. It was sad but hardly extraordinary. Helen picked up her ice bag from the floor and lay back down on the sofa. The pacing had made a horrendous headache worse.

  Inevitably, her thoughts focused on her conversation with Linda Byrne. Helen regretted not having been able to satisfy the woman's last request. Not that it was Helen's fault, really. After all, she'd gone to see Linda Byrne the first chance she got. She'd been prepared to accept Katherine into the class. There was nothing more she could have done.

  So where's all this damn guilt coming from?

  "Oh, God ... this hurts," she said, interrupting her own reverie. She remembered that Hank had once had a sinus infection that had leveled him for two or three days—and Hank had been as big, as strong, and as stoic as they came.

  Yeah, but this one's lasted all week, a voice kept prodding.

  It was the headache, she decided, that was making her feel such deep remorse; before it, she hadn't felt nearly enough sympathy for Linda Byrne. All that was different now.

  She tried to siphon off some of the pain with a low, prolonged sound deep in her throat. It was neither moan nor whimper, but a kind of pleading pant—as if she were begging for mercy. After a moment, the sound came out again.

  But this time it wasn't coming from her.

  Instantly Helen held her breath, listening. There it was again: a soft pant, with something like a shiver underlying it. Someone crying? But no one else was in the house.

  She sat up on the denim-covered sofa, trying to track the source of the sound. It seemed to evolve into another, sharper noise—as if someone were trying to jiggle a locked door.

  Helen turned off the light, tiptoed to the big bay window, and peeked through the lace curtain on the side window nearest the front stone steps. The night was inky black: a streetlight had gone out the day before, leaving the house in a big black hole. She thought of flipping on the porch light, but it was obvious that no one was jimmying the lock of her front door. Unsure now whether she'd dreamed the whole thing, Helen lay back down on the sofa. And listened.

  Again the panting ... again the jiggling.

  She sat back up. Someone was in the house. God in heaven. Someone was in the house.

  "Helen? Dear? Are you home?"

  Ah. "In here, Aunt Mary," Helen said, relieved. Of course someone was in the house. When you give your key to a kindly old aunt who lives in the apartment in the back bumpout, you can reasonably expect the aunt, sooner or later, to be in the house.

  With soup. Into the room walked Helen's seventy-three-year-old relation, a gentle, gray-haired bundle of quirks and good intentions. "How're you feeling, dear?" the old woman asked, sitting next to Helen and patting her hand with her own veiny, wrinkled one. "I brought you something to clear your sinuses. It's on the stove, on low. You want me to bring you a bowl, dear?"

  The soup fumes—aroma seemed too kind a word—were turning the corner just about then. "Gee, Aunt Mary, I don't know ... ," Helen said feebly. "What's in it?"

  "This and that. Sauerkraut ... pigs' feet ... I fiddled with the recipe your Uncle Tadeusz taught me."

  Tadeusz Grzybylek, a member of Salem's spirited Polish community, had wooed Helen's spinster aunt late in her life. No kids, but plenty of amazing food, had come out of the union.

/>   Helen smiled wanly. "Only a taste. It doesn't have the blood of anything in it, does it?"

  Her aunt gave her a little laughing pinch and said, "No, no, you're thinking of czarnina—duck soup. You just lie there, dear. I'll be right back."

  With a mixture of affection and dread, Helen watched the elderly woman scurry out of the room for a bowl of her brew. Aunt Mary had given up a life of her own to raise Helen after Helen's mother—Aunt Mary's sister—had died; Helen owed her everything. Now that Uncle Tadeusz was gone, it gave Helen great pleasure to give her aunt the back apartment and let her have the run of the house.

  Nonetheless, she could do without the soup.

  Helen sighed. It came out in a shudder, and that reminded her of the deeply distressing sound of panting that she thought she'd heard. The jiggling—okay, that was because Aunt Mary's cataracts made the back-door keyhole hard for her to find. But the sound of panting—that, Helen couldn't explain.

  Ironically, the panting could just as easily have been of someone in the throes of passion as someone in the throes of distress. Helen ought to know. In bed with Hank, she used to make the sound regularly. And yet. . . no. This sound had been too full of pain. Something deep inside Helen had responded the way a mother would ....

  Becky! Had something happened to Becky? Helen jumped up, terrified that she'd had some kind of premonition. At that instant the phone rang.

  It was Becky, calling to ask whether her mother was interested in a set of Liz Claiborne sweats at seventy-five off.

  "Thanks, no, I'm all set," said Helen, buckling with relief onto the sofa. "And, Becky? Please drive carefully. You know how intense you get when you're yakking with your pals."

  "Yes, Mother," Becky said in an exaggerated way.

  Obviously her girlfriends were near the phone: Helen heard giggling. Becky said good-bye and Helen, reassured, was left waiting for her medicine.

  Aunt Mary came bearing a galleried brass tray on which a bowl of kapusniak sat like a queen's coronet. Helen made herself sit up straight to receive the tray across her lap, then took the round-shaped spoon, part of the old set her aunt had foisted on her when she moved in, and skimmed a bit of clear liquid into it. "Here goes nothing," she said with a game smile.

  Aunt Mary sat perched on the edge of one of the corduroy chairs and shook her head. "You look so pale. I don't know ... maybe you need more protein. Say what you will about czarnina, it's high in that, at least. It would put some color in those cheeks."

  "Don't even think about it," said Helen, shuddering. The one time her aunt had made a batch of czarnina, a neighbor had called the police.

  "She was overreacting," said Aunt Mary, reading Helen's mind.

  Helen grimaced. "Well, what do you expect when you throw a quart of blood in a vat of water? It doesn't smell like anything normal."

  Aunt Mary gave a little tuck to her single long gray braid and said with great dignity, "I'm glad your uncle Tadeusz isn't here to hear you say that about Polish cuisine. He'd be very hurt."

  And so, obviously, was Aunt Mary. Her pale brown eyes were glazed over in tears and her rather small, once pretty mouth was trembling in distress.

  "I'm sorry," Helen said at once, closing her eyes. "It's this stupid, stupid headache. I wish it would go away."

  "Maybe that's what I should do," her aunt said, pushing herself up from the chair with a sigh. She gave the bowl of soup an appraising look, then shifted her gaze to her suffering niece. "Eat it," she said, and then she left.

  Helen, feeling honor-bound, finished the serving and then lay back down, closed her eyes, and dreamed of ducks being hunted, their quacks dissolving into panting sounds as hunters with bloodied hands wrung their necks.

  She woke with a start at the sound of the front door opening.

  "Mom!" yelled Becky up the stairs. "It's me! How're you feeling?"

  Helen sat up, groggy and tentative. "I'm down here, Becky. And I'm feeling. . . better," she said, surprised and pleased that the headache had retreated, if ever so slightly.

  Becky came in—mercifully free of shopping bags—and Helen smiled a greeting. "I guess that last decongestant kicked in," she explained. "What time is it?"

  "Eight-thirty. So what's going on?" asked Becky, flopping tiredly into one of the corduroy chairs. Obviously she expected her mother to answer "Nothin' much."

  But the death of Linda Byrne was uppermost in Helen's mind. She related the call that Russell had taken, then said, "I feel unbelievably bad about it."

  "Yeah.. . I can see. I'm surprised you didn't notice something in the obituaries," Becky added. "You always read them."

  "Ah, but not this week," Helen realized. "It's been so crazy, I've hardly had time to scan the headlines."

  She went to the butler's pantry and fished out the week's copies of the Evening News from the iron recycle rack, then dumped them in a pile on the claw-footed, round oak table in the center of the kitchen. She pulled the chain on the stained-glass lamp above the table, throwing light that was more quaint than bright across the walls and high ceiling of the carefully restored room.

  Becky came in with the big brass tray and left it on one of the marble counters—Helen's one indulgence when they redid the kitchen—and pulled out a carved-back oak chair.

  "Why do you want to look her up, anyway?" Becky asked, dropping her chin onto the cupped palms of her hands. "Isn't that a little ghoulish?"

  "When you're older, you'll understand," Helen said, flipping through Monday's obituaries without success. She picked up Tuesday's paper and went straight to the deaths, then sucked in her breath. "Here it is. It's true, then," she added rather stupidly.

  She read the headline aloud—" 'Linda Byrne, thirty-two; former art teacher' "—and then scanned the rest. "Born in Geneva ... graduated from Wellesley with a degree in art; taught at Boston College before she was married ... member of a couple of art societies ... survived by her husband ... one child ... a mother and two brothers in Geneva ... a couple of nieces and nephews. Huh. It's not much to go on."

  "What do you mean, 'to go on'?"

  "Hmm?" Helen looked up in a daze. "Did I say that?"

  "Mom. Get a grip," said Becky, laughing. She slid the paper over to her side of the table and studied the obituary. "Y'know, I think I've seen this name Nathaniel Byrne somewhere," she added, tapping her multi-ringed fingers on the page.

  "The husband? Can't say I have," Helen decided.

  "Yeah ... wait ... somewhere in the house ... I know!" Becky dashed out of the kitchen, went flying up the stairs, stomped across Helen's tiny but efficient home office overhead, and came roaring down again.

  "Ta-dah! 'Nathaniel Byrne, Mutual Fund Manager of the Year,'" Becky said, holding up an investment magazine that Helen subscribed to but never had time to read.

  "If he's the same Nathaniel Byrne," said Helen. She took the magazine and studied the cover of the magazine. "And anyway, since when are you interested in mutual funds?"

  "Who cares about those? He's what caught my eye when I dumped the mail on your desk. It was like, when you walk into a supermarket and you see Brad Pitt's picture on the cover of People? It was like that. You can't help but look."

  She was right. The Fund Manager of the Year was a dark-haired, steely eyed, square-chinned, unsmiling male who wasn't the least bit shy about looking straight into the camera and daring it to expose his inner self. His brows were thick and straight, his hair, attractively unruly. He was wearing a heavy wool shirt, khakis, and work boots and was sitting on a massive tree stump in an autumn setting, with his thighs pulled up to his chest and his arms slung loosely across the knees. A gold band adorned his left ring finger and, if Helen wasn't mistaken, that was a Rolex on his left wrist. He was the kind of man that women described as intense rather than hunky.

  Near the tree stump was a woodpile with an ax leaning against it. Helen took in the man, took in the setting, and shook her head. "Wrong guy. The Byrne I heard about is a workaholic who ignores his family, flies h
is own plane, and is never at home. He wouldn't have the time or inclination to chop wood. Besides, look at his boots. They're brand-new."

  "Mom, you are so naive," Becky said, rolling her eyes. "The ax and shoes are just props. If he's Fund Manager of the Year, obviously he can afford to get his wood split and stacked. Look him up, look him up," she urged. "See if they say he's from Salem."

  Helen did as she was told. The cover article was long, and it finished up, as all such pieces do, with a few scraps of biographical information. "For goodness' sake," Helen said. "You're right. It says he lives on a 'prestigious street in Salem.'"

  "Oh, like he's gonna live on a slummy one? What else? Let me read it."

  "When I'm done," said Helen, pulling the cover away from her daughter's pesty, hovering grip. She read aloud:

  "Byrne and his wife, Linda Bellingame Byrne, to whom he's been married for eight years, have one three-year-old daughter and another child on the way. Mrs. Byrne, an art historian who lectures occasionally in the area, abandoned a professorship at Boston College when her husband began putting in eighty-hour weeks after his promotion to manager of the Columbus Fund. in the five years since then, they have taken no vacations.

  "'Nathaniel Byrne has made a lot of money for a lot of investors,' Mrs. Byrne told us. 'After the new baby's born, I'm hoping that they let the poor man have a week or two off now and then,' she said with a teasing smile at her husband.

  "So she was pregnant," Helen mused. "How sad." She added, "It's funny that the article lets her have the last word."

  Becky, meanwhile, was impressed. "This is so cool. You know this guy, Mom!"

  "Number one, I don't know him," Helen reminded her daughter. "And number two, there's nothing cool about it. The timing of this is tragic."

  With the ruthless indifference of youth, Becky shrugged and said, "It sounds like Linda Byrne wouldn't've been all that impressed by an article about him anyway."

  "Rebecca! A little less cynicism, please."

  Brought up short by her mother's sharpness, Becky defended herself. "I only said what you just told me, Mom. Why are you taking this so seriously?"