“Are you two fucking kidding me? What the hell is going on here?” she said when she caught her breath. Rob’s whole body went rigid when he heard her voice. He turned to look at her and groaned, as Barb burst into tears and continued to struggle against the ropes around her wrists. He untied her with shaking hands, and stood up to face Winnie, with his penis in full erection, as Barb jumped off the bed and ran past them to lock herself in the bathroom, sobbing hysterically.
“Winnie, please, this isn’t what it looks like.” It was the oldest lie in the world.
“I can’t believe you just said that,” she said, pointing at his penis. “What are you doing? Giving her CPR? Of course it’s what it looks like. How long have you been sleeping with my best friend?” She was shaking from head to foot.
“It just happened a few times, I swear, it doesn’t mean anything to either of us. We were just having fun. Pete’s a dud in bed.”
“Apparently I don’t mean anything to either of you. Get out of my house.” Barb was out of the bathroom by then with her clothes on, still crying, and Winnie was trembling as she looked at them. She couldn’t believe she was still standing and could talk. She was in shock. And she realized that they had probably used her house because his apartment was such a dump and Barb lived with Pete. If they’d gone to a hotel someone might have seen them and squealed. Winnie’s house was so much nicer, and familiar to both of them. It had proved to be a disastrous choice.
“For God’s sake, please don’t tell Pete,” Barb begged her. “He’ll cancel the wedding. He won’t understand.” She was sobbing, pleading for mercy as Winnie looked at her in disbelief.
“Are you serious? You’re planning to marry him anyway? After this? The two of you are really pigs,” she said, looking at Rob.
“I love Pete,” she cried miserably, as Rob pulled his jeans on.
“And you’re doing this to him? You both make me sick. Now get out, and take your video with you. I don’t ever want to lay eyes on either of you again.”
Rob didn’t try to stay to argue with Winnie. He knew better. She looked as though she was ready to kill someone. And Barb was so hysterical he wanted to get her out of the house before anything else happened. The scene had been bad enough. Barb had sworn to Rob that Winnie would never come home for lunch. They had done this before, several times, and pulled it off. This time they didn’t. He wanted to give Winnie time to cool off.
Winnie’s legs were shaking so badly after they left that she had to sit down for a minute, and then leapt to her feet at the sight of the ropes still tied to her bed. She went over and pulled them off, grabbed her sheets and blanket off the bed, and ran downstairs to put them in the washing machine. She didn’t care if she ruined the blanket. She wanted to throw it all away. She was so upset she didn’t know what to do. She turned on the washing machine, and a minute later she left the house and drove to her sister’s, sobbing all the way. The floodgates had been opened and she couldn’t stop crying as she jumped out of her car at Marje’s and ran through the front door. Marje was sitting in her living room, watching one of her reality shows on TV. It was all she did every day until the kids came home from school.
“My God, what happened to you?” She got to her feet as soon as she saw Winnie, who was crying so hard she couldn’t speak coherently. Marje tried to calm her down, but it was a full five minutes before Winnie could say anything.
“I’ve had a terrible day,” Winnie said, sounding like a little kid again, and it reminded Marje of when Winnie was five and she was fifteen.
“I figured that much out. Tell me what happened,” Marje said soothingly.
“I quit my job,” she said, hiccupping through sobs. She told her about the promotion she didn’t get and what she’d said to Hamm Winslow in his office when she quit. Marje smiled as she listened.
“Well, he won’t forget you in a hurry, and the place will probably fall apart without you. I’d probably have done the same thing. What an asshole.”
“Then I went home,” she started to cry again. “Rob’s truck was outside.” Marje got a bad feeling as she said it, and suspected the story was about to get a lot worse. “I went upstairs to look for him.” She described the scene in her bedroom when she walked in, and her sister winced.
“Oh, Jesus.” She told her about the ropes and all of it. “What a couple of idiots. That was a rotten thing to do. I’m sorry, Winnie.” She put her arms around her while Winnie cried.
“I don’t think I’m even in love with him. I’ve been trying to figure it out. But we’re still together and she’s been my best friend since we were kids. I can’t believe she’d do that to me.” The memory of what she’d seen made her feel sick. She’d never been betrayed by a woman friend. It cut her to the quick, even more than Rob doing it.
“They’re both shits,” Marje said with a look of fury, and then looked more seriously at her sister. “This isn’t your fault, Win, but maybe because neither of you ever made a real commitment to each other after all this time, he thought he was a free agent.”
“He never wanted to get married either. It didn’t feel right to me. I couldn’t see myself with him for the rest of my life, but it was never bad enough to leave. I just thought we’d hang out together for a while, and then suddenly eleven years had gone by, and we never made a decision. We talked about it after Christmas. I think it’s all about sex with him.” Marje nodded. It sounded that way.
“I thought he was better than that.”
“He isn’t,” Winnie said sadly. “And I’ve been so stupid to spend all these years with him. Now I’m too old to find someone, and I’ll be alone for the rest of my life.” It felt like a tragedy, and Marje smiled as she listened to her.
“Thirty-eight is not exactly the end of the road. You need some time to get over this.” They walked to the kitchen together, and Marje poured a glass of water and handed it to her. Winnie’s hand was shaking when she took it. She needed a job now too, but what Rob and Barb had done had overshadowed her quitting. “Why don’t you stay here tonight?” Winnie thought about it and shook her head.
“I want to go home. I put the sheets in the washing machine before I left. I never want to see either of them again.” Marje nodded. “I never thought Barb would do something so low. Our friendship means nothing to her. And she still wants to marry Pete.” She already had a dozen text messages from Barb by then and opened none of them.
Winnie stayed until the boys came home from school. They were surprised to see her there.
“What are you doing here, Aunt Win?” her younger nephew Adam asked her.
“Visiting your mom,” she said vaguely and left a few minutes later to go back to the scene of Rob and Barb’s crime and stupidity. Barb had kept sending her texts every few minutes that afternoon, begging for forgiveness, and pleading with her not to tell Pete. She’d finally read a few of them and erased the rest, unread. Rob had left her a long, rambling message about how it didn’t mean anything, it was just fun and games, how sorry he was, and could he come to see her that night. She didn’t answer either of them, and she took the clothes Rob had left in her closet and threw them in the garbage can outside.
She made her bed with clean sheets and an old blanket of her mother’s and lay down and felt like she couldn’t breathe, remembering what had gone on there hours before. She hated even being in the room. Then she noticed one of her Beauchamp DVDs sitting next to the TV where Rob must have put it. He had taken his porn video with him. She got up and put Beauchamp Hall in the DVD player, and hit Play on the remote control. It was comforting just hearing the familiar voices, like friends in the room. She didn’t try to follow the story, she just stared at the TV and started crying again. It had been a clean sweep, her job, her boyfriend, and her best friend, all gone in one day. It was Barb who mattered to her most. There was no one left now in her life except her sister. She had no idea what
to do next or where to start. Her whole life had come down around her. Ten years at her job, the promotion she should have gotten given to the girl who was sleeping with the boss, eleven years with Rob up in smoke, and her childhood friend’s ultimate betrayal. She lay staring at the TV screen and cried herself to sleep.
Chapter Five
For the next two weeks, Winnie drifted between her house and her sister’s, feeling dazed and numb. Most of the time, she was at her own house, and put one of the Beauchamp Hall DVDs in the machine, as a sort of background music for her fallen life. She had called the library and taken a leave from her volunteer job as “The Story Lady” and told them she was sick. She didn’t want to do anything and couldn’t face the children either, not for now anyway, until she regained her balance. She was nowhere near that yet.
She had no idea what to do next. She knew there was a position at the front desk of the hotel. She’d seen in the newspaper that an insurance broker needed a new assistant, and the local mortuary needed a hostess to greet the mourners. It was all so depressing, although working at a printing company hadn’t been a dream job either. There weren’t many opportunities in Beecher, and she didn’t want to commute two hours each way to Detroit and back, nor move there. And she felt too old now to move to Chicago or New York to try to start over. It seemed as though her life had come to a full stop.
Rob was still sending her text messages saying he wanted to see her. He had even shown up at the house late one night. She’d had the locks changed the day after she’d found him in bed with Barb, and when he came by, Winnie didn’t answer the door. She responded to nothing he sent. She was finished with him, mourning the lost years more than the man. He wasn’t a loving person and hadn’t treated her well, with kindness or respect. She saw that now, more clearly every day.
Barb had written her a long letter, trying to explain everything. She said that she thought Winnie didn’t really care about Rob, so it didn’t matter. They got together just for sex, and some fun. Winnie thought it was pathetic, and even more so because she was about to marry another man, who in fact bored her and didn’t excite her in bed, but could pay the bills and drove a Porsche. Barb liked the idea of being a dentist’s wife, but she was much more attracted to Rob, who only wanted to have sex with her. They were partners in porn. Winnie didn’t bother to answer her. The bond between them had been severed and Winnie never wanted to see her again. She was grateful to Barb for introducing her to Beauchamp Hall, but that was it. After what had happened, it was clear that their nearly thirty-year friendship was over. Winnie had nothing to say to Barb and didn’t respond.
Winnie kept trying to figure out what she was really feeling. In quiet moments, she realized that she wasn’t heartbroken over Rob, but her trust was shattered by all of them. Her boss, her boyfriend, and her best friend had betrayed her, and she felt as though she’d hit a wall. She had enough money saved so that she wouldn’t have to work for several months, and some money her mother had left her, which she had never touched. She wasn’t financially desperate but she felt as though someone had pulled the plug on her life. She could barely get out of bed.
“You can’t sit brooding in your house with the TV on forever,” Marje told her. Erik had offered her a job as an assistant office manager at his plumbing company, but he didn’t need her and was doing it as a favor, and she didn’t want that either. There was a bookstore in town that didn’t do a lot of business, several restaurants, some motels, a computer store, a realtor, and a smaller printing firm than Winslow’s, which would have been happy to have her, and she was well trained for the job. But that didn’t interest her either. None of it did.
“I feel like I’m having some kind of out-of-body experience,” she tried to explain to her sister, “where I’m looking down at myself. It’s like I’m swimming underwater. Everything is happening in slow motion. I think I’m drowning, and most of the time I don’t even care.”
“You’re entitled to feel sorry for yourself,” Marje said gently, “but at some point you have to come up for air.” Winnie nodded, went home after that, flipped on the DVD player again, and hit the remote, without looking at the screen. She was surprised when she glanced at the TV and saw the same familiar faces, with the actors not in their costumes, and some of their accents slightly different and not quite so upper crust as on the show. She had accidentally clicked on the icon for “Extra Scenes” and “The Making of Beauchamp Hall.”
She was about to turn it off, and go back to the episodes she knew almost by heart now, and then stopped when she saw one of the actors walking through the town where the show was shot, with the castle in the background. It was quaint, with little cottages and old-fashioned storefronts, with smiling people walking along and waving to the actor who was explaining how much he had come to love the village, his fellow actors, and the show. “This is home to me now,” he said, “we’ve all been here for six years. We go home for a while during the hiatus between seasons, but most of us can’t wait to come back. We love this place, and they love us.” The camera showed the smiling villagers again, looking warmly at the actor who played one of the main heroes on the show. Winnie smiled. It gave her a warm feeling, just looking at the village and the castle that felt like home to her now too. The show had given her a rich fantasy life that kept her from getting even more depressed about her own. And as the segment ended, she sat staring at the dark screen and suddenly knew what she wanted to do. She had the time, enough money to drift for a while, and no reason to stay in Beecher right now, except to find another job that she’d probably hate. And she didn’t want to run into Barb or Rob, which was so easy to do in a small town. She was afraid to see them whenever she left her house, even to buy food, so she went to the store at odd hours to avoid them.
With trembling hands, she called the airline and made a list of things she had to do, then went to the bank, and withdrew money. She didn’t need too much cash, she had credit cards and no debt on them or unpaid bills. She checked her savings, and if she was careful she’d be able to coast for several months. She had never done anything crazy in her life, and she knew she was about to. But she had no husband, no children, no job now, no man, nothing to tie her down. She was as free as the wind, and as she thought about it, she could feel herself moving quickly toward the surface. She wasn’t drowning anymore. She was swimming with long, clean strokes toward where she wanted to go.
She drove to the passport office in Detroit, and with her ticket booked, they promised her a passport the next day. She had to come back for it, but she was determined to get everything done.
She went to Marje’s when she got back, and burst through the front door. The boys were doing homework and Marje was getting dinner started. She looked up in surprise when she saw Winnie smiling at her. She looked like a different woman from the one who had left, deeply dejected, hours before.
“You look like you won the lottery.” Marje smiled at her.
“I think I did. I know what I’m going to do.”
“Does it involve a gun and any of the people who screwed you over?”
“Better than that. I’m going to England.”
“England?” Marje looked startled. “What for?”
“To have some fun. I’m going to North Norfolk, to a village called Burnham Market. It’s a three-hour drive north of London, or two hours by train. It’s supposed to be a lovely place, full of history, and I want to look around. It’s where they film Beauchamp Hall. I have the time right now, and I’ll never get to do it again. I just want to see it, and breathe the air there. There are supposed to be beautiful beaches too.” Marje looked a little puzzled. Winnie looked as if she might be high on something, and Marje wondered if her sister was drunk.
“Have you been drinking?”
Winnie shook her head. “I know it sounds crazy, but I love that show. If you could meet the housewives on your Las Vegas reality show, would you do it
?”
“Maybe. If they came here. I can’t see myself going to hang out in Las Vegas, or stalk them,” she said, worried about her sister. Winnie was euphoric.
“You have a husband and kids, I don’t. I have nothing here right now.” Marje stared at her. “Except you, of course,” she added. “But you have a life here, I don’t.”
“And after you’ve seen it, then what?”
“I don’t know. I’ll figure it out. I don’t need to work for a few months. I have to do it, Marje. I feel it in my gut. It’s one of those things I have to get out of my system.”
“It’s just a TV series, you know,” Marje reminded her. “Sooner or later you have to come back here to reality.” But she was going nowhere for the moment, moving from her bed to the couch in her living room, living like a shut-in, and crying all the time. For the first time in two weeks, she was smiling and looked excited and alive again. Marje wondered if maybe it would do her good. “When do you want to go?”
Winnie took a breath. “Day after tomorrow. I got a good rate on a flight to London. I’m going to stay there for two days. I’ve never been there before, and then I’ll head to Burnham Market. It looks like a really charming place. There’s a house called Holkham Hall nearby, it was built in the eighteenth century, and is one of the grandest homes in England. I want to take a tour there. And Haversham Castle, where they film Beauchamp Hall, is even more fabulous. I want to visit them both. There’s a lot of interesting history in the area, and they let the locals watch the outdoor filming of the show.” She had seen it on the DVDs, and everyone looked happy to be part of it. She wanted to be there too. She’d been reading descriptions of the village and couldn’t wait to see it, with quaint shops and antique stores, and a thirteenth-century church. The year-round population of the village was less than a thousand people. It was a small and very appealing place. “I know it sounds crazy, but it’s what I want to do.” She sounded like a kid, not a thirty-eight-year-old woman whose life had been hanging in limbo for years, and had totally fallen apart two weeks before. Marje wondered if it was what she needed to get her going again and to find someone decent to settle down with this time when she came home.
Beauchamp Hall Page 6
