“This color really is beautiful,” I said in a last attempt to change her mind, but she was having none of it.
“Too beautiful. People notice it. They remember it.”
“But you like that.”
“Used to like it,” she said, her voice almost childlike. “It’s too noticeable now. It gives me away wherever I go.” The eyes meeting mine in the mirror were haunted. “The People article hits this week, Jay says. It’ll be bad.”
“He told you that?”
“Only that it’s coming out, but I know it’ll be bad. All publicity is bad publicity.”
The expression actually was, All publicity is good publicity, but I knew what she meant. “Imagine that issue three months from now. Where’ll it be? Long gone in the trash.”
“After the whole world’s read it.” In her lap, her thumb picked at a cuticle. “At least you were right about Jay. He knows his stuff. He got the prosecutor to agree to waive a pre-sentencing report—family background and all. That,” she said, with a wry twist of her lips, “would not have been fun.” The twist faded, leaving her frightened and bare. “This is my worst nightmare, Maggie. I can’t stand it. I want to disappear.”
Oh, I knew that feeling. “You won’t disappear with raven. It’s too extreme.”
“Okay, but this brown is too rich. I want dirty brown. I mean, dirty—like, mousy.”
“And mousy is you?”
“I don’t want to be me. That’s the point.”
I came around front for the sake of directness. “You can only disappear up to a point. If the press wants to find you, they will. So you go with a different color now, but what happens when they catch on? You can’t change it every few days, and, anyway, if you did that, you’d only give the media something else to write about.”
That seemed to register. “Oh God. Not what I want. But mousy is understated. Isn’t understated good?”
“I’m not sure you could be understated if you tried,” I said with a smile.
Her chin came up. “Excuse me. We can’t all be as dignified as you.”
Leaning in, I closed my hand over hers. “That’s not what I meant, Grace. I love your flair. You’re one of the few people I know who can pull it off. It’s what makes you you.” I gave her hand a jiggle, let go, straightened. “And that’s a good thing. Only a strong person can do it. Only a strong person can stand up to those cameras and say, fuck you, I don’t care what you think, I’m a good mother, my son is a good kid, these charges are bogus.”
Her eyes held mine for a split second before shifting off. Guilt. Ah. So the charges weren’t bogus. Chris had been able to tell me how hacking worked from firsthand experience.
Where to go after that silent admission? I wanted to ask why he had done it or what Grace had said when she learned it, but I couldn’t criticize her when I knew the People story would. For now, “How is he?” seemed safe enough.
“Dense,” she murmured. “He doesn’t get that this goes beyond him to me. He keeps saying it’s no big thing, but he’s not the one whose life is at stake.”
I might have argued. It seemed to me that Chris had more to lose with regard to future choices than Grace, who already had an education, a skill, a job, a home. Chris’s life was up in the air in every regard. I wondered what he felt about that. I wondered if Grace had even asked him, or whether she was too conflicted to talk.
Actually, I wondered if they ever talked about things—deep things—things beyond what time to leave for school or whether to bring in pizza or Thai. My mother and I had often talked about those deeper things when I was growing up. College changed that, like I’d become someone she couldn’t relate to. She hadn’t gone to college. She had married at twenty, at which point my father became her world.
“Maggie?” Grace prompted.
I wanted to yell at Chris, to ask what he had actually thought breaking the law would accomplish. I wanted to tell Grace to yell at Chris. I wanted to lash out at both of them for dredging up issues in my own life, which would, of course, get us nowhere.
Instead, I said, “You’re a survivor. You’ll get through this.”
But how, my past asked? In what shape or form? Life wasn’t fair. Just when you thought you’d reached a good place, a crisis could boil up and over, spilling into even the corners you thought most secure. Grace’s life would be forever changed, if only by the veil of suspicion that might linger in people’s minds.
Her thoughts must have gone there, too, because she seemed suddenly withdrawn. For both our sakes, I brought the discussion back to color. We looked at charts. When she pointed to the blandest brown, I pointed to one several shades brighter. When she pointed at one up from the blandest brown, I pointed at one down from my original. Liver to milk chocolate, wood brown to russet, we bargained back and forth a minute longer before I hid the chart behind my back.
“I’ll give you what you want,” I promised, “but I can’t ruin your hair. I’ll do a quiet, woodsy brown. Do you trust me in this?”
Her eyes held doubt. “That depends. Do you understand my fear?”
“More than you’ll ever know, but I’m also thinking about the cut. If you want a different look, you can do it with style. Leave the color as it is, but go short and straight.”
She was shaking her head even before I finished. “The color goes. And I don’t want short.”
“Okay,” I said, lifting swaths of her hair and letting them fall to imagine how her current layers would settle without curls. “A shag maybe? That would be easy. Unadorned. Very wash and wear.”
“Maybe.”
“Unadorned is big here. You’d totally blend in. You could still pull it up if you wanted, but it would frame your face and leave you enough to hide behind.”
The word “hide” resonated, as I knew it would. “Okay,” she said. “Go with that.”
I told her exactly what I was doing as I mixed the color, which looked nothing in the bowl like it would once it oxidized on her hair, and even then, a leap of faith was required. Applying color over color took an understanding of the chemistry involved. I had it. I actually liked the puzzle part of this so much that I had initially considered being a full-time colorist. Then my classes turned to makeup, and the more personal, therapeutic part of it won hands down.
Wearing thin latex gloves, I used the pointy end of my brush handle to separate sections and the front end to apply color, taking care to cover the vibrant browns by starting at the very root and working out. We didn’t talk. She closed her eyes, but I could feel the tension in her head and neck. Hoping to relax her, I turned up the wall speakers to allow for the soothing of soft guitar sounds.
After a bit, quietly, she said, “Three other men had their accounts hacked. Jay got their names.”
My hand faltered for an instant. I waited. “And?”
“They’re repeat clients.”
“Yours?”
“Yes. All in the last year.”
“Why did Chris choose them?”
She didn’t answer at first. Then, reaching down, she lifted her satchel from the floor, opened it, and took out what looked to be computer printouts clipped together. After removing the clip, she showed me one at a time. Each of the men was fortyish, light-haired, and fit. The last shot was a close-up of Benjamin Zwick, standing before a cluster of phones, recorders, and mics. A similar one had appeared in the local paper.
“They’re all good-looking.”
“That’s what Jay said. He said he was the exception.”
It was a minute before I followed. “You were with each of these men?” The question came out more startled than condemning, though, given the circumstances, I felt a touch of the latter. I understood a woman’s sexual desire. Oh boy, did I ever. I understood that the power of it could push her beyond reason. But the thought of being with one man after another after another made my skin crawl.
“Not all,” Grace said. “With one of them, it was only dinner. My son didn’t know that.”
/> “What did he know? And how? And why would knowing push him to this?”
She pointed from my hand, which had stopped working, to her head. I went back to applying color, while she reclipped the pictures and returned them to her bag. Her hand reemerged with a snapshot. She kept it in her lap for a minute before holding it up for me to see. The man in the photo was as good-looking as the others. The details of his features were different enough, but still, yet, oddly the same.
“My ex-husband,” Grace said.
I gasped. She had mentioned Chris’s father the week before—and Chris had certainly asked about him—but in all the time I’d known Grace, she had never mentioned having had a husband. Never wanting to mention mine, I hadn’t asked. But this, now, was significant. Had Chris come from a one-nighter or from an ongoing affair with a married man, Grace would understandably avoid the discussion. But a husband?
“He’s obviously Chris’s father,” I said. The resemblance was marked. In the full color of a snapshot, rather than a black-and-white printout, the hair wasn’t just light; it was sandy and had the waves that Chris might have if his hair was tamed.
“The other guys look a little like him, don’t you think?” Grace asked tongue-in-cheek.
Not just a little. “Is that why Chris targeted them?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you ask?”
“No. It’s a tricky subject.”
I took that to mean she was uncomfortable with it, which bothered the hell out of me, because if not now, when? Her son had committed a crime. Had she even told him how wrong that was?
“Are you in touch with his father at all?” I asked.
She shook her head, slipped the picture back in her bag, and dropped the bag to the floor. “We left when Chris was two, so he doesn’t remember how bad the guy is. I didn’t know he’d seen this picture until I found it in the back of my closet. I mean, like, who keeps real pictures anymore?” Me, I thought, but she went on. “I keep a few old things in a locked box. He jimmied it open.”
If Chris’s father was so bad, I wondered why she kept his picture. I also wondered why she was drawn to men who looked like him. But who was I to wonder that—me, who hadn’t been drawn to a man in five years until tall and dark came to town in the form of Edward Cooper?
“So maybe,” Grace said, “he was curious?”
Chris. About his father. “That’d be normal. Or jealous of men who take your time.”
“Either that,” she looked heartsick, “or he’s as evil as his father.”
I doubted that. I’d never sensed a mean bone in Chris’s body, and while I was furious at him for doing what he had, he was only fifteen. “Not evil. Confused.”
“Dense,” she repeated her earlier word. This time it sounded way more like stupid.
Part of me agreed. But he was only fifteen. “Puberty does things, Grace.”
“Yep. Makes boys bad.”
“Maybe shortsighted.”
“Selfish.”
“Self-absorbed. His features have totally changed in the four years I’ve known him. So he looks in the mirror and wonders who he is.”
She seemed disheartened for a minute before conceding a quiet, “Maybe.”
I went back to applying her color. The timing of it wasn’t as critical as it would be if we were doing highlights, but oxidation in the bowl wasn’t ideal.
“Or maybe not,” she suddenly said, her voice shooting up. “How could he do this to me? He knew I liked Devon. People here let me do my own thing. They don’t ask questions, or stare at me or talk behind my back. They trust me. Trusted me. Now? Disaster. My son has an identity crisis and screws the whole thing up? Suddenly he’s judging me?”
“Not judging—”
“Yes, judging. He thinks I sleep around too much, like I go from one man to the next, and they all look the same. He thinks I’m screwed up, so it’s okay for him to be screwed up, like he can fool with computers and play at being someone else. And I’ll never know, because I’m not smart enough or I’m too busy chasing men or working so I can send him to Montreal with the hockey team or buy him the high-tops he wants or fill a prescription for the zit cream that is not covered by my insurance, but he was the one who complained that he didn’t have a girlfriend because of acne. He thinks I kept him from the one man he wants to know, and who in the hell was I to do that?”
“Has he actually told you these things?”
“No, but he’s thinking them, I know he is.”
I had stopped working again. Our eyes held in the mirror. Her outpouring was pure guilt. Right or not, a mother always blamed herself when something went wrong.
“But why?” Grace asked, pleading. “Everything I’ve done in the last fifteen years has been for him. I’ve tried to keep him safe. I’ve tried to make a good home. So I’m not perfect. Are you perfect? Is Joyce or Nina? Where’s the fairness of this? I’ve deliberately kept the men in my life out of his life. Isn’t what I do on my own time my own?”
“Not when you have a child.”
“How do you know?” she asked with just the slightest emphasis on the you.
I might have taken offense, if I hadn’t known she was upset. “I saw it with my parents when I was growing up,” I said. My mom had eased into baking, but once The Buttered Scone took off, she struggled with the balance. Though my dad liked the money she earned, he was always after her to do more for and with Liam and me. There had been some serious arguments, bits of which we had heard and, of course, discussed between ourselves. Our parents would have been good candidates for marital counseling. Actually, my father could have used counseling himself. He was decidedly passive-aggressive.
With that thought, I asked, “Maybe Chris should see a counselor?”
She cleared her throat. “He already is, and if you think I’m thrilled about that, think again. The court makes him see a forensic psychologist. They’ve had one meeting of three. I’m losing sleep over what was said in that room.”
“He would never say anything bad about you.”
“Like he would never search my closet for some sign of his dad? Hell, yeah, I’d love to talk with someone, too. I’d love to yell and scream about everything I did not plan. But I would never, never tell a counselor private things.”
“Why not? They’re bound by confidentiality.”
“And you believe they keep it?”
I considered my own therapist. “Yes. You wouldn’t have to see someone in Devon. Hanover has a ton of therapists—”
“No counseling. I’m telling you, Maggie, if it weren’t for Chris, I’d run away in a heartbeat, just disappear and reinvent myself.”
Hadn’t I considered doing the same thing? Granted, it was the nuclear option, so I was holding off. Still. Returning the brush in my hand to her hair, I asked, “Where would you go?” Dreaming was as good a way as any to soothe emotions.
“Another spa. Maybe Canyon Ranch. You know, the one in Lenox? I could go there in a heartbeat.”
I couldn’t. Edward and I had often visited friends with second homes in the Berkshires. We had even been there with Lily. The memories would be too strong.
“Not the Berkshires,” I said. “The weather is neither here nor there. Vermont winters are real winters, but if you want warmer, head south.”
“What about Florida? We could do Fisher Island.”
“We could,” I said, “but there the work is seasonal. Here, we’re booked year-round. How about San Francisco?” The weather there was moderate all year, and the spas were amazing.
“No.”
“Austin?” Texans loved spas, and Austin was a fun place. I could do Austin.
“No. Nothing west of the Mississippi.”
Her clipped tone implied it had something to do with her ex, and I didn’t ask. Leaning around one way then the other, I made sure I hadn’t missed even the smallest section, then applied the remaining color to what was soon a cap of goop swirled flat to her head.
“Vi
rginia,” I suggested setting a timer. “There’s a Canyon Ranch at Hot Springs.” I could go there in a heartbeat. Hot Springs had history. Anything with roots appealed to me.
Except, those were someone else’s roots. Mine were here, now. I didn’t want to pick up and move to Virginia. Or Texas. Or California. I liked Devon.
“New York would be safe,” Grace said. “I could get lost in New York.”
That was why I wouldn’t move there. During the time I was at college in New York, I’d been surrounded by people, but lonely. “Philadelphia would be less anonymous,” I tried. “Or Washington. Both have good spas.”
But she seemed decided. “New York. I want to be nameless and faceless.”
“You do not.”
She gave me a strange look. “Why are you arguing with me?”
“Because I know you—”
“Know me?” she cut in, as though I had no sense at all. “You haven’t been where I am. You don’t know what it’s like to run. You don’t know what it’s like to feel hunted. There are people in my past who would love to know where I am. You don’t know what it’s like to be hated so much that if the idiot who hates you had a gun he’d shoot you dead.”
No. I didn’t. Other than the accident, I hadn’t known violence. I had never feared for my life.
Her eyes went wide, then she squeezed them tight. “Forget I said that. I’m just hyper-emotional.”
But emotion alone couldn’t explain away real fear. “Is the idiot your ex-husband?”
“Please, Maggie,” she begged, eyes open now, “I shouldn’t have said anything. You know how it is with relationships that go bad, he said she said, two sides to every story, yadda yadda. I shouldn’t have mentioned him at all.”
But she had. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would hate her that much. “Would he come after you?”
Before and Again Page 18
