I stood there, the towel wound around me, and pulled out two folded sheets of paper. And then my knees began to shake. So I sat down on the little bench, unfolded the paper, and read.
Darling Kitty (he wrote),
In another time and place I would have made you gifts of substance. A length of lace, a string of pearls, an enameled box to keep your treasures in, a gold ring inscribed with our initials. But instead, Kathleen, I can only give you words.
What I want to tell you, Kitty, is that I love you. I never expected to. I never imagined this. But it is as right and true as anything that has ever been. I don’t know how I know this, Kitty, but I do. I shall spend my life with you, my rebellious lady, and we shall raise ourselves some brave and independent children in this fine land of yours. And years from now when I shall make you gifts of gold and pearls, you shall know that you already have my heart.
I could say these things aloud to you, but they would be no more than breath and sound. So I write them, making jewels of ink and paper. A small gift, Kitty, but from my soul.
*****
I don’t know how long I sat there on the bathroom bench. Eventually I forced myself to dress and slipped Robert’s note carefully into the pocket of my shirt. I had not a clue where I had left my cell phone or even, at this point, if it still held a charge. I thought for a minute. Then I snuck quietly downstairs and out to the driveway where, near the garage, I slipped into the Cadillac and carefully lifted Terri’s car phone. I punched in the number for Mary Stein’s office. It was only ten-thirty Sunday morning, but I knew I could count on her to answer the phone.
What I told Mary Stein was not that the shed was unsafe, or that a beam had fallen or that I thought I should tear the building down. In fact, however old and rickety the shed may have been, the beams were still in tact (Phillip appearing before we could remedy that), and the absolute last thing I wanted now was to tear it down.
I needed the shed. Mary Stein could sell the house but I couldn’t let her sell the shed, and that’s what I told her. She didn’t like it, and she made me repeat it twice, but in the end she reluctantly agreed.
*****
I hung up the phone and slipped back into the house where I found everyone huddled in the living room. Evidently I was interrupting some sort of conference because immediately everyone jumped apart and began to chatter. Then Lila came over to me and rubbed her thumb gently beneath my left eye and brushed the damp hair away from my face.
“Oh Kathy Lee, sweetheart, I was so worried.”
I wanted to collapse against my mother’s shoulder, but since I’m nearly 5 inches taller than she is, I knew the maneuver would be awkward. So instead I began to weep silently.
“Let’s go home,” Lila said, taking my face between her hands.
I nodded my agreement. I couldn’t get there fast enough. I needed my children. They needed me.
“Everything is packed,” Lila told me. “We can hop into the car right now.”
“Okay,” I whispered.
“Kathy Lee, baby,” Lila crooned suddenly. “Who was he? Where did he go?”
Trust Lila to cut to the heart of the matter. I straightened and pulled away, tossing my hair behind my shoulders.
“Back to Africa,” I said sharply. Behind Lila I could see Julie and Terri’s startled faces.
“Back to where?” Lila asked, surprised.
“Africa,” I snapped, and stomped outside to vend. I could hear the others behind me gathering things up and locking doors. They trailed me across the drive to the Cadillac, running down checklists (“everything was turned off, right? and we got all her luggage, didn’t we?”) and opening car doors. I stood at the right rear passenger door, looking out over the top of the car toward the garden, which was partially obscured from where I stood by shrubbery. And then I saw a flash of white.
In an instant I was bolting across the drive, past the garden, across the lawn and into his arms, my face buried against the shoulder of his white shirt, weeping and laughing, all at once. He swung me up and spun me around, pressed his lips to my mouth, my throat. I felt his heart hammer against mine.
At last he put me down and folded his arms around me.
“You didn’t really have that communiqué, did you, Robert?” I whispered into his shoulder.
“No, but I’m pretty sure I know who does.”
“Peter,” I said.
Robert tilted up my face toward his.
“We really must do something about that shed,” he told me.
Arrivals
Chapter 46
Lila Mansfield
River House
Until that weekend two summers ago when she left the kids with me and drove up to Bennett’s house in Pennsylvania, Kathy Lee had never given me a nickel’s worth of trouble. That was the weekend she left Cameron for good, although no one, including Kathy Lee and Cameron, realized it at the time. As it turned out, her weekend blitz evolved into a two-week road trip between the Pennsylvania and North Carolina. She drove right past the exit where we live, not once but twice, and never stopped to tell me what was really going on.
It was all about a man, of course. Whenever there’s trouble there’s always a man in the middle of it. I should know; I’ve been there often enough. Even so, when we found her that day in Pennsylvania, I couldn’t get a word about him out of her. And when I asked her where he was, she just pulled away.
“Africa,” she said, and stormed outside to Terri’s car. Immediately, I envisioned a tall, lean Watusi with ebony skin and chiseled features, but I knew I was being fanciful. How many Watusis would there be in a place like Pennsylvania? No, more likely he was a South African businessman or a missionary or a Peace Corps worker. Someone utterly ordinary.
But as I followed Kathy Lee to Terri’s car, I saw, in my mind’s eye, a tall, elegant man with bare feet and a spear. And the thing was, such a man could have walked across the Aubusson on my living room floor to deposit a dead gazelle at my feet…and have been far more credible, more believable, than the man who — a handful of minutes later — made his appearance.
Not in my living room, precisely, but on Kathy Lee’s lawn.
*****
What Kathy Lee and Robert eventually told me was stranger and more surreal than anything I could ever make up. I don’t know when I began to believe it, but it surely wasn’t that day in Pennsylvania when I watched my daughter sprint across the lawn and into Robert’s arms. When the delirium died down, she brought him over and introduced him to Terri and Julie and me. If she hadn’t failed to come home the night before, if she hadn’t forgotten to call, if we hadn’t found her earlier that morning looking worse than road kill, we might have been warmer in our greetings. As it was, the three of us stared at him with narrowed eyes.
“I think we are all far too tired to travel and should stay here another day,” I said tartly. We had planned to head home in Terri’s car, since Kathy Lee was hardly fit to drive, but now I reconsidered. I needed to figure out what was going on before I brought this man back home with me.
Meanwhile, Robert was looking quietly over his shoulder, his eyes darting around the shrubbery, like a posse was after him. When I spoke he turned to me and smiled, looking tired and, well, concerned. Then he glanced at Kathy Lee.
“I want to go home,” she said. “I know Terri and Julie need to get back.”
“They can go back,” I snapped. “But we can stay here.”
Robert cleared his throat quietly. Kathy Lee looked at him like she was trying to read his mind. Then she said to me: “No, Mother, we’re going now. I promised the children. We’ll leave as soon as Robert gets his luggage.”
“Oh, right,” Robert replied blandly. “And where would my, um, luggage be?”
“In the garden shed,” she told him, as if that was a completely logical place to store a suitcase, and off they went at a fast clip, returning a few minutes later with a white canvas bag not much bigger than something you’d use to take tennis shoes t
o the gym. Then, with Kathy Lee announcing, “I’m fine, Mother; I can drive perfectly well,” Terri and Julie got into Terri’s Cadillac while Robert, Kathy Lee and I crowded into her Accord.
I was in the passenger seat next to Kathy Lee. Robert was in the back seat behind me. The first words out of Kathy Lee’s mouth, as she followed the Cadillac out of the drive, were:
“What happened to—”
“Has he been back?” Robert interrupted quickly. “Have you seen him?”
“No, have you?”
“Yes. Well, for an instant. After I fell.”
“He was there?”
“Yes. You may not have realized, but he fell just before me. I tumbled out to find him standing there calmly brushing leaves from his trousers. I had not quite gotten to my feet when he lunged at me, toppling both of us backward. In the next instant I found myself sprawled on the floor of the garden shed and he was nowhere to be seen. How long have I been gone, anyhow?”
“About twenty four hours. A little more.”
“Only minutes, from my perspective.” He paused. “I’d feel a little safer if I knew where he was.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I broke in finally. “Who in hell are you all talking about?”
Kathy Lee glanced over at me, then reached for my hand. “Phillip Olson,” she said quietly.
And then they told me everything.
*****
We lost sight of the Cadillac, which we had been following down 202, before we were halfway to Wilmington. Kathy Lee usually drives hell bent for leather, which is exactly the way she rides, but we were taking our time on this trip. As it was, their recitation lasted till we were almost at Baltimore. It was then I realized Kathy Lee had turned off the interstate and onto progressively smaller and less trafficked roads.
Finally, on a bridge over an inlet of the Chesapeake, Kathy Lee pulled over by the rail and Robert bolted from the car. A instant later he jumped back in and we drove on as if nothing at all had happened.
“What did you do?” I asked sharply.
“Robert threw something out.”
“Here?”
“I thought it was a good place. There was no one around to see.”
“You threw something into the water?” I twisted so I could look at Robert behind me.
He nodded. I could see him meet Kathy Lee’s eyes in the rear view mirror, deferring, as he had been doing all along, to her judgment.
“Go ahead and tell me,” I told her. “It can’t be much worse that what you’ve said already.”
“It was only a gun,” Kathy Lee said.
Only a gun. But at the moment, I was inclined to agree with her.
After all, in the scheme of things, what was one little gun?
*****
Less than a week after we got home, Cameron agreed to a divorce. To this day I cannot figure out why this man, who had refused to even discuss it, caved so completely and suddenly. All I can imagine is that Kathy Lee must have had something on him, but no one said a thing to me. The divorce went as quickly as divorce does in Virginia, which is to say it took a year. There was no haggling and the terms of the agreement were simple: Cameron got the Prince Edward Street house and Kathy Lee got the kids, which means they both got what they wanted. And ten days after the divorce was final, Kathy Lee and Robert were married on the lawn at River House.
The children fell in love with Robert, and he with them. He’s the first man to pay them any real attention — God knows their father doesn’t — and they thrive in his care. Kathy Lee went back to teaching and Robert tends the farm. I’ve had this place since my first marriage, but I’ve never managed it myself. Instead, I leased the fields to other farmers and boarded our horses at a stable down the road. Robert was appalled. He researched modern faming and equine management — we both did, to tell the truth — and then we brought the horses home and put in a crop of hay. In the beginning I wasn’t sure if Robert was a madman or a con artist or exactly who he said he was, but one thing I knew for sure: he was absolutely born to the land.
Almost immediately I decided I would help him. You may well ask, considering all my doubts, why I went to such risk, trouble and expense in Robert’s behalf, but the answer to that is obvious: Kathy Lee loves him and whatever trouble he was in wasn’t going to get any better without my help. Until I helped him, Kathy Lee would be at risk, one way or another. Besides, it was clear to me that he loved her and was here to stay. Everything had changed. Nothing would be the way it was. And maybe that was good.
Conveniently for us, I am on excellent terms with one of my former husbands, Harry Fowler, an internationally reknown computer criminal. Of course, Harry saw himself more as a consultant than an actual criminal, but the federal government disagreed and he spent several years of what was originally a much longer sentence in a federal penitentiary near the Pocono Mountains, one of those facilities with tennis courts and private rooms that politicians always complain about. I often visited him on weekends, which meant, given my dislike for driving north of the Potomac, that Kathy Lee usually had to drive me there. Eventually he cut a deal and was released. Now he really is a consultant, with the government as his exclusive client, making a career of tracking felons through cyber space and even the occasional spy.
Fortunately for us, he indulged in one last criminal caper before he gave it all up and went straight for good. Within weeks Robert had everything from a birth certificate to a university degree. His name appears on all the appropriate rosters and registries from Kent to Virginia, creating a paper and computer trail so complete it is virtually unassailable. It was Harry’s last project, his masterpiece, and a miracle we weren’t all caught.
Sometimes, it was all too much for me. I rationed my Xanax and hoped it would last.
*****
It took awhile before anyone noticed Phillip Olson was missing. The police had a field day sorting out his finances and business connections, which were much more extensive, complicated and questionable than anyone knew. Kathy Lee fretted that Phillip remained on what she and Robert called the other side, perhaps stalking some of Robert’s friends. Robert was sure Phillip had tumbled back through the trap door with him and proposed two possibilities: that he was somewhere in this particular time, if not actual place, having been drawn back in Robert’s wake — or, if not, he had fallen back where he landed the first time, following his original path. The second theory held great appeal for me. This way, it would be another 40 years before he’d catch up with us, and by that time he’d almost certainly be dead.
And then months later, one evening after dinner, I finally got around to picking up the morning paper. And there in the Region section of the The Free Lance-Star was the headline, “Missing City Resident Tracked to Caymens.” Phillip had been found — or detected, anyway — having emptied out a large off shore and not quite legal bank account. This is good news, I suppose: he is neither threatening people on the other side nor is he lurking around Fredericksburg attempting to do the same. Clearly, he’s not about to come back here, what with the police waiting for him and all.
*****
One thing I noticed almost right away was that Kathy Lee had a firmness I had never seen in her before, a kind of gentle self-belief. She and Robert renovated the old tenant house, doubling its size, and we have made a path between her back door and mine. Our lives revolve around the children and the land, and we have found ourselves at peace.
This morning I walked down to the schooling ring to see a young mare that Robert’s training. Kathy Lee and the children had gotten there before me, accompanied by the cat, one of Helen’s black and white kittens the children named Earl Too. I saw them at the fence, the children perched along the top rail and my daughter standing on the middle one. She leaned out and called to Robert, who reined the mare in close beside her. I watched as he laid his palm on the swell of his wife’s rounding belly. The children stroked the horse.
We look everywhere for happiness. In the end, we find
it where we least expect.
About the Author
Deborah Truscott lives in Virginia with two beagles and one high-maintenance cat. When she isn’t writing, she is a graphic designer and editor.
She may be reached at [email protected].
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