The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  "Unfortunately, he had a will and left me a dollar."

  "You may be able to sue the estate."

  "I don't want to sue anyone, Francine."

  "If it helps, I think the technical term is 'file a claim against the estate.' Come by and see me Monday."

  "The funeral's Monday."

  "Then Tuesday."

  "Sophy!"

  The dock was aswarm with bodies, people cascading into one another, people gleeful, giddy, ecstatic finally to be here, the beautiful island at the start of summer. They carried suitcases, knapsacks, shopping bags from Bread and Circus, babies in corduroy Snugglies pressed to their chests, bicycle helmets, anxieties from the mainland, dreams like the ones Francine and I had acted on, that if you stayed all year long, you would always feel the way you did tonight, invigorated, engorged, in love.

  "Sophy!"

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see Evan, his other arm loosely around a young woman so strikingly beautiful, I would have noticed her coming off the boat if I hadn't been talking to Francine. She had short, wavy dark hair, olive skin, eyes large and wide apart, movie-star cheekbones; she belonged on Crete. She was a young Isabella Rossellini, but smaller and very nervous.

  When Evan introduced us, we nodded and mumbled weak hellos, uncertain, I think, how gracious the circumstances required us to be.

  "You'll be all right getting out there?" Evan asked me. "Jenn'll point you in the right direction."

  "Sure," I said, though I didn't sound convincing, even to myself. Evan vanished into the crowd; I grew lightheaded as I led Jenn to the car and tried to make sense of the news from Francine. In the eyes of the law, I was married. I was Will's wife. "My car's this way," I heard myself say. Does that change anything, I wondered, anything at all? Change what I am entitled to feel? To fight for? Could I bring myself to sue my stepdaughters? Take to court the closest thing to children I had in the world to assert a claim on behalf of a person I no longer wanted to be?

  "Are you here on vacation?" Jenn asked as I turned the key in the ignition. "Or is this your regular summer place?"

  "Evan didn't tell you?"

  "He just said you were an old friend and very discreet."

  The ferry traffic was moving swiftly down the road that led to Ocean Drive, though my thoughts ran in circles, spirals—you could say they ran away with me—and a short time after we turned the corner and started up the hill, I realized I'd said nothing in reply, that I had no idea where to begin the story of what I was doing here and no idea where it would end.

  This is not news: women talk. This may not be either: Jenn and I said little on the long, dark drive to the woods. Once we were through the town, she asked whether she could smoke. I said if she opened the window. A few miles later she asked whether she could turn on the radio. I said it didn't work; they'd knocked a few dollars off the cost of the rental because of it. A while later—by this time we were clear on the other side of the island—she asked whether I wanted to stop somewhere and have a drink. I could have said that we were many miles from the nearest bar, which was the truth, but it was more important for me to say "No, thanks," important to decline, though I sounded a little abrupt. I'd been expecting all day to feel a new craving for the stuff, checking to see whether the mugger still lurked in the neighborhood. No signs of him yet, no whispers, no shadows I could not account for. "I'm on the wagon," I explained. "Otherwise I'd—I don't think a bar is the best place for me tonight."

  "Sure." Her inflection was not a pat on the back; it had a rough edge. I think it was a euphemism for "whatever."

  So we drove in silence, through miles of leafy darkness, past forests of scrub oak, pitch pine, sassafras, in many places the trees overhanging the narrow road as tightly as a tunnel, headlights and brake lights our only illumination. She kept a cigarette going and tipped her head to blow smoke out the window. I knew I could easily break the silence and that it would be the polite thing to do, the decent thing; she was a kid in trouble, after all; the car was older than she was. But I couldn't talk to her about my circumstances, and I wasn't sure how much I wanted to know about hers. If this was going to become a full-blown scandal, I did not want to know enough to be a source or a witness. I aspired to nothing loftier than chauffeur. That's what I was thinking when Jenn pierced the silence with a dagger: "So did you ever fuck him?" she asked.

  I laughed a little. It felt good to laugh. "When I was your age. And he was too."

  "What was he like then?"

  "Sexy and preoccupied. What's he like now?"

  I assumed she would echo my answer, but all I heard was her lighting a cigarette. I could see the burst of flame at the edge of my vision, and an animal, maybe a raccoon, dart across the road. "The thing is," Jenn said, "I've been trying to break it off with him for months, and now this comes up. It's sort of embarrassing, but the best times between us were when I threatened to leave. Suddenly he'd become this real emotional guy. It was hard to resist, you know? I'm supposed to start law school in September, and there's actually someone who wants to marry me. By tomorrow night, Barbara Walters is going to want to interview my mother."

  "I know this is cold comfort, but I don't think the details of Evan Lambert's sex life will hold the nation's attention for very long. A hotshot lawyer with a beautiful young woman is more of a dog-bites-man story than—"

  "He didn't tell you about Mavis?"

  "No specifics."

  "I'm the specifics."

  We had reached the turn in the road where I had to start reading the directions, close eye on the trip odometer, counting off tenths of a mile, and I thought Jenn was about to tell me that she had been Mavis's lover too; maybe that was the other pile of dirty linen that would be aired in the paper tomorrow. I was filled with an overwhelming desire not to know, just as I did not want to know in what position Will's body had been found, or what he had written in his diary, or what had happened to my dog Henry, because by this time I figured none of the news would be good.

  That was the end of our intimate conversation. For the rest of the drive, she read me directions, showed me the way, and did not importune me to answer more questions about Evan in the old days or what I thought she should do in the days to come. She thanked me for the ride, and I watched her go into the lovely, freshly shingled cottage that bore no vestige of its past life as a chicken coop. The tiny place glowed as she went through it, turning on lights, and I made a tight three-point turn and headed out.

  I did not lose my way going back through the woods. And it surprised me to feel as relieved as I did, maybe even content, on the long drive back to Will's. All I had done was move the prisoner from Point A to Point B; therapeutic, I guess, because it was simple and as distant as Cassiopeia from the chaos of my life. It helped that it was a beautiful night, soft air rushing through the open windows, broad bands of stars I could see through clearings in the trees, the scent of something piney, something sweet, the engine of the old car rattling, the sound strangely soothing the way it might be to hear the clacking of a manual typewriter. The car was the same vintage as Blueberry Parfait, the ancient VW Bug Will had picked me up in hitchhiking twelve years before. At the turn-off for Bell's Cove, I remembered that we were still married, that I was probably entitled to part of his estate; and I realized this might account for some of my implausible calm. I even liked the idea of returning to Will's house, because Henderson was there, because it held the promise of a phone call from Vicki.

  When I opened the front door and saw him look up and smile at me from the couch, where he sat with the computer on his lap, I figured the call must have come; it was a rich smile.

  "She's okay?"

  "No call. But some good news. Come sit down here. It's show-and-tell time."

  In the center of the paper-white screen was a box with this inside it:

  PASSWORD: •••••••

  When Henderson pressed the return key with his pinkie, the screen filled with words, a carpet of black letters
against a white page. My eyes fell on phrases: can't believe she had the fucking nerve to ... considering the consequences, it hasn't been ... Connie agreed with me that'S. is definitely ... wants to interview me for a book on the CIA, but he doesn't understand that my regrets are ... I jerked my head away, as if from a car accident, and stood up. "How did you figure it out?" I asked but did not really want to know, because there could be no light answer. Henderson would have had to dwell somewhere in Will's brain, and that wasn't a place I wanted to visit now. I didn't even want to wonder how someone who'd never met my husband could have divined his private password.

  "I tried thinking like a spy. It was quite delicious, an opportunity that had nothing to do with romantic espionage, spying on a lover. And then I threw in the idea of thinking like a movie buff, because of all that business with the videos you told me about."

  "Double-O-Seven? Goldfinger?"

  "Think clever."

  "Jonathan Pollard?"

  "Clever, darling, not pedestrian."

  "Smiley?"

  "I went upstairs to his bedroom. There are a bunch of videos in the console under the TV. Things he owns."

  "Not much, is there? Chinatown, North by Northwest, a few of those Civil War things, maybe Vertigo?"

  "Citizen Kane was one of them," Henderson said, prophetically. "I tried 'Rosebud' purely for the hell of it. It opened right up." His gaze returned to the screen, his fingers to the keyboard, and I tried to remember whether Will and I had ever made Rosebud jokes. But all I could think was that Henderson must have read a chunk of the diary and that he was keeping something from me. He looked up, puzzled at my silence. "You're not upset with me, are you, for fooling around with it? You didn't exactly give me permission."

  "God, no. I'm speechless at how clever you are. And terrified I have to read the thing, now that I can. Even more terrified that you already did and there's something awful you're not telling me."

  "No," he said, seriously. "Since you ask, I did read the last entry, to see if there was anything about suicide, because I didn't want you to have to—"

  "Thank you."

  "There wasn't. I flipped through the rest to see if I got the whole document—I think I did—and I dipped into the recent stuff. I didn't see anything there either, but I didn't read it thoroughly. You don't have to look at it until you're ready."

  "What will I find?"

  "A lot of anger and sadness."

  "Does that mean I should have stayed?"

  "Almost every man I ever cared about is dead, most of them under the age of forty. Friends, lovers, collaborators, and all of their friends, lovers, and collaborators."

  "So this must seem paltry to you."

  "On the contrary. What I'm trying to say is that people are resilient. I have the names of nine living people in my address book, but I'm okay now. I'm happy to be alive. Some days I'm intensely happy, but I never thought I'd be able to say that when I was going to funerals as often as I went to the dry cleaner. It would have taken some time, Sophy, but Will could have gotten through this—this loss."

  I slept that night on the couch in my used-to-be living room, with the portable phone on the floor next to me. Henderson volunteered to sleep in the house, in one of the bedrooms upstairs. I insisted that it wasn't necessary, although I still couldn't go up there and had to ask him to fetch me a pillow and bed linen.

  He didn't say, but I got the feeling that he planned to stop off somewhere on his way back to the motel. I knew there was a gay bar in town. What made me think he might go there? I imagined he wanted some relief from the sadness in our midst; or maybe I wanted it for him, wanted to know he would be comforted for his losses, which he did not often talk about. Something else led me to think he was not going straight back to the motel. Before he left Will's, he spent time in the downstairs bathroom and emerged with his hair combed, his shirt freshly tucked in, the lenses of his glasses cleaned to a Windex sheen. And he was too solicitous of me, wanting to be sure I would last the night alone. Maybe because he had doubts that he could. Maybe because he knew that if I called him in a three A.M. panic, I'd discover he wasn't there.

  But it was nothing like panic I felt at eleven-thirty when he left—with an extra spring in his step, I couldn't help noticing. I was remarkably subdued, as if the house were a library or a church, a place for contemplation. I checked two or three times that the portable phone worked, that I got a dial tone, and made up the couch while I imagined Vicki calling in a few minutes. While I imagined Henderson striking up a conversation with a kind stranger.

  I dozed off with the light on. When the phone rang several hours later, waking me from the deepest sleep, the illuminated living room startled me more than darkness would have. I thought the ringing was the doorbell and that Vicki had finally arrived. It was another ring or two before I got the receiver to my ear.

  "Sophy? We've located her." It was Daniel's voice, gravelly with sleep. "I just spoke to her. She's fine."

  "Where is she? What happened?"

  "It's a long story for another time. But she's perfectly okay. Not a hair out of place. Go back to sleep."

  When I woke up a few hours later, the sun cascading through the living room windows, through the filmy white curtains and across my back, I was afraid I had dreamed that call. But when I picked up the phone to dial Daniel and ask if Vicki had been found, it came back to me, everything he had said and the words I had fallen back to sleep saying to myself, words that had lulled me into something faintly resembling tranquility: The rest will be easy, the rest will be a cinch.

  12. The Humane Society

  THE PHONE rang not long after I got up. I'd been standing at Will's kitchen sink, gazing out the back window, taking inventory: the overgrown grass, the wilted, weedy garden, the clear plastic bird feeder that could have been Barbie's Bauhaus Dream House, a squarish, two-level box with a tiny terrace where the birds were supposed to perch and peck for seed in the little holes in the walls. I'd bought it the day I hung the three flags from the front porch. It was part of the same decorating scheme: an announcement that ours was a happy house.

  "Sophy, Francine Cooper here." The phone at my ear, my thoughts drifting from the backyard to the front porch, to the moment two years ago after I put up the flags and stepped back to the street to look at the house. But it had been a windless day, and the purple and yellow and bright pink flags hung like flypaper. "I don't have an island number for you, but I thought there was a chance you'd be at your husband's. Got a minute?"

  "Sure." The bird feeder was starkly empty, like an abandoned gas station with the pumps still standing. When I got off the phone, I'd look around the basement for the plastic bag of seed.

  "I came downstairs to my office to get a phone number, and I remembered what we talked about last night at the ferry. I'm afraid my information wasn't up to date. Looks as if my secretary sent the separation agreement to Will's lawyer Friday morning. While you're at the funeral tomorrow, I'll try to do some damage control., Since the signed agreement is with Will's lawyer now, which says you're on record as walking away from the marriage with nothing but your pajamas, getting you a share of the estate may be a little trickier than I'd thought. It might make sense to sue the estate. Or it might not."

  "Damage control?"

  "A colleague at my old firm in Boston had a case like this last year—husband died while the divorce was pending. I'm going to talk strategy with him, see how far he thinks we can push the envelope."

  "Francine, I'm not interested in pushing any envelopes. And I'm not sure I want to sue my stepdaughters."

  "Sophy, you're in the middle of a divorce. This wouldn't be personal, against them. It's a strictly legal, by-the-book—"

  "Don't intentions count for anything? The marriage was about to end because I wanted it to."

  "I never thought you should have walked away empty-handed. Now that he's dead, you may not have to."

  "All I asked you last night was what my marital status is."

/>   "I'm looking through your file. Tell me again your rationale for leaving with nothing."

  "He had a government pension and two thousand dollars in the bank."

  "The house is half yours. Community property."

  "He didn't want the divorce, and I didn't want to drag it out by taking him to court. And I wasn't going to make him sell his house so that he could give me half the proceeds. I think the legal term is adding insult to injury.'"

  "Hypothetically, if you'd known he was going to drop dead, would you have walked with nothing?" Her bedside manner was beginning to resemble Betsy Schmidt's. Or maybe John Gotti's.

  "There's a possibility that he killed himself. He may not have dropped dead, as you put it."

  "You didn't tell me that last night."

  "Because it's not certain. They're still doing the autopsy."

  "That might make a difference. Suicide."

  "To whom?"

  "The judge."

  "But my husband spoke loud and clear in his will."

  "Which is why I want to find out about challenging it, because it's out of bounds."

  "But you just said that since I signed the separation agreement, and it's with Will's lawyer, I may not have a good case."

  "It's not open and shut, but I don't think it's impossible."

  "I can't decide this minute, Francine."

  "You've got to move quickly."

  I started to say that I would come talk to her on Tuesday, but she cut me off. "Was that Evan Lambert I saw you with last night? He a friend of yours?"

  "Yeah."

  "How's he taking it?"

  "The nanny case? He's not exactly a novice, so it's—"

  "The girlfriend and the wife case. It's all over the news. Good thing he likes attention; he's getting plenty of it."

  "This is the first I've heard." This must have been the reason she called me. Of course it was.

  "It won't be the last. Seems that two years ago, when his wife—"