by Liza Bennett
After the accident that killed her parents, Meg’s confidence in her driving abilities was severely shaken. She learned to manage well enough when the weather was clear, but even now hated to be behind the wheel when the roads turned wet or icy. On inclement weekends, Meg often accepted Abe Sabin’s standing invitation to ride upstate with him. A lawyer and longtime friend of Ethan’s and Lark’s, Abe commuted from the city every weekend to his sprawling contemporary home on a mountaintop overlooking Red River. It was there that Meg had first met Abe and his stunningly beautiful wife Becca, though it was back in New York that she had really gotten to know and respect him. When Meg was starting her business, Abe, who was going into practice on his own at about the same time, gave her free legal advice. Hardwick and Associates grew as Abe’s firm also flourished, and Abe eventually became Meg’s official legal counsel, guiding her with painstaking care and a well-honed cynicism over several rough business patches.
Over the course of the ten or so years that Meg had known Abe, they had made the trip together back and forth to Red River hundreds of times. Though Abe had long ago put an end to Meg’s attempts to pay for gas, he did let her help replenish and recycle his extensive supply of tapes and audio books. The great thing about Abe, Meg had discovered, was that he seemed perfectly content driving the full two-and-a half-hour commute without saying a word. If however, she needed to talk, Abe listened and—in his overassured, court-appointed manner—dispensed advice. After the usual chitchat, Abe rarely initiated conversation himself and Meg sensed that he liked to use this time to unwind and mentally sort through his problems. In the past year those had included the bitter breakup of his five-year marriage to a woman who appeared to be so absolutely perfect that Meg and Lark referred to her as “Becca the Beautiful.”
Meg knew that Becca weighed heavily on Abe’s mind, even though he hardly ever talked about her these days, but she never pried. Lark, however, had confided to Meg that Becca had taken Abe “for everything he was worth” and that, though he had fought her each step of the way, she had recently received a very lucrative divorce settlement. Today, with Abe in a particularly quiet mood and Meg mired in her own concerns, they’d exchanged about a dozen words. Meg had bought a new Joshua Redman recording for the trip, and for the last half-hour she’d sat with her eyes closed listening to music that seemed to tap directly into the turmoil that had taken over her life.
Ethan. He hadn’t followed through on his promise to forget her—not for a single day. In fact, Meg decided, he was now thoroughly out of control. For the past three weeks he had been calling her every night, late at night. Meg could tell from the sounds in the background that he often placed these calls from a noisy restaurant or bar. After the first two or three rambling conversations, Meg wouldn’t pick up the phone. He just talked into her machine instead.
“I can’t take this anymore,” he would begin. “I have to see you. Today was utter hell. I could hardly work, thinking about you. Do you have any idea how beautiful you look when you’re angry? That afternoon in Bryant Park your eyes were such an amazing green—I’ve been trying to reproduce that exact hue with my glass. Oh, God, Meg, it’s the only thing keeping me sane. Am I sane? Perhaps, you’re right, I am out of my mind. But it’s you, baby, who’ve driven me there.”
He stopped by the office three times, unannounced, bringing her ridiculously huge bouquets of flowers. At Meg’s obviously perturbed request, Oliver steered him back to the elevator banks each time, apologizing about how busy Meg was at that moment, but how he’d be sure to give his boss the lovely gift.
“What’s up with your brother-in-law?” Oliver had asked her after running interference during Ethan’s second unexpected visit.
“Believe me, you don’t want to know,” Meg had responded, though she was longing to confide in someone. She was losing sleep worrying. And, as the ordeal continued, Meg came to believe that Ethan was deluding himself—living out a fantasy that he seemed convinced Meg shared with him.
Ethan had always been somewhat histrionic and prone to mood swings. He was an artist, after all, and Meg had assumed that his volatile nature was part and parcel of his creativity. But when he didn’t ease off, when he refused to accept Meg’s rejections, she began to think he was experiencing some kind of nervous breakdown. Perhaps the whole awful affair could be written off as a male midlife crisis, a chemical imbalance in the brain, a sudden overproduction of testosterone. Whatever the case, some explanation was needed. Because someone had to let Lark know what was going on.
The week before, Meg had decided to face Ethan head-on with the problem. She agreed to have lunch with him at a very busy, very public restaurant in midtown. From the beginning, he’d been impossible. He kissed her on the cheek as he arrived and sat down next to her on the banquette.
“Sit opposite me, please,” she’d said. “In the chair. And keep your hands to yourself.”
“It’s just so great to see you.” Ethan slipped around the side of the table and settled down across from her. Meg had noticed several heads turn as Ethan, tall and magnetic, strode through the restaurant. He was now gazing at her with a look of such unabashed admiration that the woman at the next table smiled at her and shook her head with good-humored envy. If she only knew, Meg reflected ruefully.
By the end of the lunch, as she might very well have predicted, they were going over the same well-worn ground in an increasingly heated manner.
“If you don’t stop with all this—the calls, the flowers—” Meg said, “I’m going to be forced to tell Lark.”
“Don’t do that, Meg, please.”
“So, you’ll stop. Today, this lunch, is the last time we discuss this madness?”
“It’s the gold I can’t get,” he told her, with a wide grin that would have seemed disarming to anyone except Meg at that moment.
“What are you talking about?”
“In your eyes. You have these beautiful golden flecks, kind of embedded in the green.”
“Ethan, please stop.” But it just started all over again.
Would this have been any easier if she and Lark weren’t so close? There was no one in the world Meg loved as much as her younger sister. There was nothing she wouldn’t do to keep her from being hurt. And yet, telling her about Ethan would cause Lark such anguish, Meg could hardly imagine it. Lark was still so glowingly, unashamedly in love with her husband. She was such a devoted, doting mother. And, ultimately, she was so proud of the beautiful family she and Ethan had created. She’d even managed to integrate the difficult, demanding Lucinda into the household. Lark had been able to accomplish what she and Meg had always longed for as children: she’d built a real home. And now it looked as though Meg was about to destroy it.
Because she usually confided every detail of her life to her younger sister, Meg stopped phoning Lark once Ethan started his campaign. Lark, who sometimes knew Meg better than she knew herself, quickly would have been able to detect that something was wrong. But not calling her proved to be a mistake after all.
“Hey there—what the hell is going on with you?” Lark had left a message on Meg’s machine the night before, an hour or two before Ethan called. “I know when you go into hiding like this that something’s wrong. Is that snake Paul Stokes back in the picture and you’re afraid to tell me? I asked Ethan how you seemed at your lunch with him the other day and you know what he said? ‘She seemed fine.’ Period. Men. Listen, believe me, I’m going to get it all out of you this weekend, so be forewarned. Also, it turns out that Fran and Matt are coming to dinner after all and I just don’t have the time to do any more baking. Could you pick up two of those great little Dutch apple pies from Cupcake Cafe for me? Love you. See you Friday.”
And Meg knew that Lark would come after her, probing, cajoling, unrelenting. Even as a small girl Lark had demanded intimate and direct access to Meg’s feelings, a result, Meg believed, of having an older sister as quasi-parent. When Lark became a mother herself, she honed her skills of observatio
n and emotional control to a fine art. In the past, this intense concern had been a comfort to Meg. It was Lark’s way of expressing love and, Lord knew, Meg could use all she could get. But now, with the prospect of three long days under siege, she dreaded the thought of what Lark’s persistent questions would force into the open.
“So? Who is it?” Abe asked. They were crossing the short bridge just below the Columbia County border; the lower Berkshire hills rolled away to the east, like so many misty, gray-green breakers.
“Pardon?”
“Who’s the guy? You’ve had this little frown on your forehead all afternoon. In my experience that can mean only one thing.” Abe himself was smiling as he asked the question—the slightly down-turning, self-deprecating grin that Meg had seen him use to his sly advantage on many occasions. Abe seemed so easygoing and harmless at times that one could easily forget the razor-sharp, unforgivingly logical mind that was constantly at work. His dark, unruly hair had started to recede at the temples and his compact frame had grown lean from years of tennis, but he could still pass at a glance for the brilliant Harvard Law graduate who had clerked for Justice Rehnquist. Until one met his gaze. Abe had the weary, slightly hooded eyes of a man twenty years his senior.
“You’ve been talking to Lark?”
“No, I’ve been talking to Paul Stokes.” Abe had introduced Paul to Meg, and he had followed their burgeoning affair with a proprietary interest. “Paul said he saw you at lunch the other day with some man he didn’t recognize. He said the guy looked like he really had a thing for you.”
“You lawyers sure have a fine way with the English language.”
“I’m sorry. Have I offended your feminine sensibilities?”
Meg considered Abe’s tone of voice. “Why are you so upset, Abe? I’m a bona fide SWF.”
“Me? Upset? Not at all. I was just curious. From the way you were talking post-Paul, I thought you were giving up on the male of the species for a while.”
“Actually, I am,” Meg said, pressing the button to roll up the window. The sun had fallen behind the larger mountains and with its departure the temperature had plummeted. Meg felt the chill on a deeper level. If other people were noticing Ethan’s attraction to her, then she had no choice. She would have to tell Lark what was going on.
“Whatever you say.”
“What’s with you, Abe? You know, it feels like you’re actually sniping at me.”
“Not so.”
“If you’re pissed at me about Paul, just come right out and say so.”
“You’re accusing me of holding back?” Abe said, laughing. He glanced at her quickly and then turning his eyes back to the darkening road. “You know me better than that. No, this isn’t about Paul. I told you before that I was a little stunned when you two seemed to take. Opposites attracting and all that. I guess I’m just puzzled these days by the whole subject of couples, and of love. You usually tell me when you’ve got something hot going on.”
“Hot? That’s really how you boys talk?” Meg asked, though she felt relieved. “I didn’t tell you because, well… it was nothing really. Just some guy not understanding what ‘no’ means.”
“You okay?” Abe asked, the gentleness in his tone surprising her. Though keenly observant and quick to judgment, Abe had never been particularly solicitous of Meg’s feelings. He’d seen her operate in the business arena and knew her to be tough and demanding, and he gave her the same treatment in return. Which was, Meg had observed over the years, very different from the gentlemanly, almost gallant way he treated Becca, or even Lark. She sensed that Abe mentally categorized her as a guy—a grown-up kind of tomboy—and that they both enjoyed their bantering camaraderie.
“Oh, sure. I’ve been here before.”
“I don’t know why this one seems different to me,” Abe said, the Saab grumbling as he downshifted for the exit that would lead them, through curving back roads, up to Red River. “Maybe because you didn’t say anything to me about it.”
“Oh, puh-leeze, Abe! From now on I promise to tell you the minute I so much as look at a man.”
But as they made their way in silence along the glistening black river, a full moon following them shyly through the trees, the question Abe had initially asked remained unanswered—hanging delicately in the air between them: Who?
*
The smell of wood smoke and mulching leaves. The sound of the river, swollen by a midweek rain, roaring through the culvert. The last of the cicadas singing its thin, sad song. The air was so dry and clear that the whispering voices Meg heard ahead could be a dozen steps from her—or a quarter mile away. Abe had left Meg at the bottom of the drive, and she was walking up the curving graveled roadway to the house when she stumbled on an exposed tree root and fell, her left elbow taking most of the punishment.
“Damn!” she cried out.
“Who’s there?” Meg recognized Lucinda’s whiny voice, followed by a hurried exchange, and the sound of someone running away.
“Meg? You okay?” Lucinda crouched down beside Meg as she pulled herself to her feet and rubbed her elbow. The joint hurt like hell but didn’t seem seriously damaged.
“I think so.” Meg took in Lucinda’s glazed expression and realized with dismay that the teenager had been drinking.
Lucinda McGowan, Ethan’s stepdaughter from his short-lived first marriage was, according to the last bluntly worded report from the local high school, “Seriously Troubled.” She should have been graduating this year but, at eighteen, had been so truant and inattentive that she was now flunking out of junior-year courses. Five feet nine, thirty pounds overweight with scraggly burgundy-dyed hair and a pasty, uneven complexion, Lucinda had been nicknamed “Bozo” by the local tightly knit teenage crowd.
She’d reentered Ethan’s life—and invaded Lark’s—a little over a year ago when the state of Pennsylvania notified Ethan that Lucinda’s mother was to be institutionalized. Mimi’s alcohol and drug abuse had reached life-threatening proportions, her real father had deserted the family years before, and Lucinda would have gone into foster care if Ethan and Lark hadn’t taken her in. It had been a disaster from the moment the foul-mouthed, hostile, beer-drinking Lucinda belligerently unpacked her dirty duffel bag.
Over the course of the last twelve months Meg received Lark’s regular reports on the teenager’s progress. The bottom line: There wasn’t any. Her room was always a mess. She sneaked out at night. She skipped school. She was nasty to the little kids. Talked back to Lark. Hung out with a bad crowd from Montville, the neighboring town that was big enough to have two movie theaters and a mall—a magnet for teenagers all over the mostly rural county. Lucinda had been picked up late one night by Tom Huddleson, Red River’s police chief, for peeing at the base of the VFW monument in the center of town. But the worst of her behavior, the distilled potent essence of her anger, was directed at Ethan.
“It’s horrifying,” Lark confided to Meg after one particularly bad fight between father and daughter. “It’s like she’s possessed or something. She’s totally irrational when it comes to Ethan—screaming out the most vile things. And poor Ethan, he tries to reason with her. He’s so patient. I know he feels guilty, guilty for leaving her with Mimi all those years, but what else could he have done? Mimi won custody and, in the beginning at least, she made a stab at being a decent mother. It went downhill after Brook was born and we moved to Red River. I think, until then, Mimi believed she could somehow win him back.”
Meg remembered all too vividly what it was like to be raised by irresponsible parents. She could imagine the pain and confusion of a childhood marred by a single mother’s downward slide into addiction. Perhaps it was this innate empathy that Lucinda sensed. Whatever the reason, where Ethan and Lark had failed to make the least impression on Lucinda when it came to discipline, the troubled girl would—and often did—listen to Meg. Six weeks ago when Meg had been visiting, she thought she’d persuaded Lucinda to stop drinking, promising to have her down to visit in
Manhattan over the Christmas holidays if she could stay the course. Since then, though the teenager remained impossible on every other front, Lark had been giving Lucinda good marks for sobriety. But now Meg was detecting the unmistakable odor of beer on Lucinda’s breath.
“You’ve been drinking, Luce. I’m really disappointed.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Yes, you have.” Meg tried to avoid losing her temper with Lucinda. “You’re fucking wrong.”
“You reek of beer,” Meg said. She slung her overnight bag over her shoulder and started back up the drive. Off to the right she could see a glimmer of lights through the trees from Clint and Janine Lindbergh’s small, shingled Cape house. Years ago, when the property operated as a mill and large, prosperous farm, their home had served as the hired hand’s cottage. For the last decade, the Lindberghs had lived there and helped Ethan in the studio, doing the dirty work while Ethan turned out his award-winning stemware and paperweights. In the afternoons, while Ethan concentrated on his sculptures, Clint handled the studio’s paperwork and shipping and Janine helped Lark at what everyone called “the big house.”
“Don’t, Meg, please,” Lucinda whined, following her. “Don’t count this. It was just this one time because … because Ethan got me so fucking mad I couldn’t take it.”
“Here, help me with these pies, though I bet that fall ruined them,” Meg said, handing her the plastic shopping bag to carry so she could rub her sore elbow. “What did Ethan do?”
“He won’t let me go to the basketball game in Montville Monday night.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s fucking irrational, that’s why. Just because I got into some trouble with some Montville kids, suddenly anything having to do with Montville is off limits. I mean, like, Meg, it’s a fucking basketball game, okay?”
