"We believe in spacing our children carefully,'* Mary Ellen said, chuckling.
It was like being swept up in a cheerful tomado. Sentences were started, interrupted and finished later without anyone ever seeming to lose track of who was saying what. By the time Tony announced that he had to get back to the kitchen or risk ruining his business, Anne's head was spinning with a whirlwind of impressions.
The two brothers shared the same coloring but not much else. Tony was shorter and stockier, the blue of his eyes was not quite as brilliant, and his features hovered between ordinary and pleasantly homely. Until he smiled. When he smiled, you couldn't help but smile back and wonder if maybe he wasn't much better looking than you'd originally thought.
His wife was comfortably forty and comfortably plump. At Neill's insistence, she and Sophy had joined them for dinner.
"Of course, if I keep eating Tony's cooking, I'm never going to lose the extra weight I put on with
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the baby, but I guess that's what I get for marrymg a chef," she said, patting one ample hip. **Some-times I wish Fd fallen in love with a stockbroker, but then I figure he'd probably make enough money for me to be able to afford to buy Tony's cheesecake and I'd end up fat anyway."
"And divorced," her husband said, coming up behind her in time to catch the last comment **Be-cause the first time I delivered a cheesecake and saw you, I'd have to steal you away from your husband."
**You don't do deliveries," Mary Ellen pointed out, tilting her head back to look up at him. **Emie does."
*'But when Ernie told me about the beautiful, lonely woman who kept ordering my cheesecake, I'd have to meet you."
**Maybe Fd end up with Ernie instead," she said haughtily.
Since Anne had already met Ernie—^a painfully thin seventeen-year-old with royal blue hair, a nose ring and sticklike arms and legs that looked too long for his body—she couldn't suppress a quick snort of laughter. Neill didn't even bother trying to suppress his own laughter, and Tony grinned down at his wife.
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"You see, everyone knows we were destined to be together," he told her, pressing one hand over his heart and lowering his voice to a dramatic throb. *'Nothing could keep us apart. Not a stockbroker, not even Ernie, could stand between us." Grabbing her hand, he placed a passionate kiss in her palm.
'*I forgot to tell you that, right after the cowboy phase, Tony joined the drama club at school," Neill said, plucking an olive from the antipasto plate. **For weeks he went around the house with a sheet draped over his shoulder, declaiming 'a rose by any other name.' Mom was impressed that he'd suddenly become interested in the arts, but what he was really interested in was getting a chance to play Romeo to AHson Sinclair's Juliet. He spent most of that school year trying to get her to notice him."
*'Alison Sinclair," Tony said reminiscently. "She looked just like Marcia Brady. Half the boys in class had the hots for her."
"Da-ad." Sophy dragged the word into two syllables. "Puh-lease."
"What?" Tony arched his brows. "You don't think I should admit to having once had my heart broken by a tempestuous beauty with hair like spun
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gold and eyes the color of emeralds? Your mother understands and forgives me, don't you, honey?"
"Of course I do." Mary Ellen patted his hand absently. '^Especially since she brought her girlfriend to your high school reunion."
Her uncle's shout of laughter nearly drowned out Sophy's agonized plea of, "Mo-om."
Taking pity on her, her mother handed her the baby. "Would you take him upstairs and change him for me, sweetheart?"
"She's at that age when just having parents is humiliating," Mary Ellen said as Sophy disappeared up the stairs, where Tony kept his office. "If she could, she'd stuff us in a closet and only let us out to cook meals and pay for her clothes. When her father and I told her that we were having another baby, she seemed to think it was part of a deliberate plot to humiUate her."
"Why would you having a baby humiliate her?" Anne asked.
Mary Ellen raised her eyebrows in mock horror. ' 'The idea that her parents might actually be having sex. At our age!" She shook her head, her soft brown eyes sparkling with laughter. "Parents aren't supposed to have sex, you know."
"Aren't they?" For as long as she could remem-
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ber, Anne's parents had slept in separate bedrooms. She doubted if the door between them had even been opened in her lifetime.
**Everybody goes through the same phase, I guess," Mary Ellen said comfortably. *'And Sophy's very good with Timothy."
Anne let the other woman take her smile as agreement. She'd never gone through that phase. When she was Sophy's age, she could remember waking up with a knot in her stomach that didn't ease until she got to the breakfast table and saw that neither her parents nor her brother had disappeared during the night.
A waiter appeared just then, bearing plates of linguine in white clam sauce and a basket of crisp garlic toast. The first bite of garlicky sauce told Anne why Tony's restaurant was a success. When she said as much, Tony slapped Neill on the back and told him that he was glad to see his taste in women was improving.
**The last woman he introduced to the family was a brunette, about six foot tall and weighed maybe ninety pounds," he told Anne. **She ate two lettuce leaves, sipped a glass of water and said she was stuffed."
Neill considered jabbing his elbow into his
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brother's stomach to shut him up. He should have known that Tony wouldn't be able to resist the chance to embarrass him, which was the price you paid for family. But he wasn't sure Anne would appreciate hearing about some woman he'd dated in the past.
"If you were cooking, then she didn't know what she was missing," Anne said, and, when her eyes met Neill's, he saw nothing to suggest that his brother's mild indiscretion had bothered her.
If he'd asked, Anne could have told him that hearing that he'd once dated a tall, slim brunette might have bothered her even yesterday, but the fact that he'd spent the whole night—and part of the morning—^making love to her had made it pretty clear that—^for now, at least—^he wasn't thinking of another woman.
It was after ten when they left the restaurant. Anne's mood was pensive, and Neill didn't press for conversation. From the things he'd said, she'd known that his family was very different from her own. When he spoke of them, it was with affection and warmth and genuine liking—^words she could never apply to her own family. She loved them, and she thought—^she hoped—^that they loved her, but she couldn't honesfly say that she knew them.
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It had taken Lisa pointing it out for her to see that Jack had a drinking problem. Once it was pointed out, she had to admit that the signs had been there, but she'd never really looked at what he was doing. Because no one in her family every really looked at each other. And even now that she'd seen the problem, she didn't know what to do about it. The thought of saying something to Jack about it boggled the imagination. There simply wasn't enough of a personal connection between them. He was her brother, but the ties were of blood only.
She tried to imagine what Tony would do if he thought Neill had a similar problem. Probably cuff him alongside the head and drag him to counseling, she decided, smiling a litde. From what Neill had told her, she thought the rest of the family would have a similar reaction. They were...tiiere for each other.
It hurt to realize how far short of that ideal her own family fell.
Neill watched her face as they rode up in the elevator. She was so wrapped up in her thoughts that he wasn't sure she'd even noticed that they were almost back to their room. He'd watched her tonight, too, seeing the way she opened up to the
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warmth of his brother's family, talking to his niece and sister-in-law, holding the baby,
her eyes soft and tender as she looked down at him.
The need to see her holding his child had caught him by surprise. He'd never given much thought to having children of his own, putting it in the category of maybe, someday. But he wanted to see Anne's belly round with his baby, wanted to hold a child that had been bom of the love he felt for her, the love he was nearly sure she retumed.
He opened the door to their room, stepping back to let her enter first. Watching her cross the room, he thought of how pretty she looked and of how much he loved her. He opened his mouth to say one or the other and was amazed by what came out instead.
"Anne? Tell me about Brooke," he said softly.
Anne had been about to set her purse on the table. It hit the floor instead, and she stared blankly down at it for a moment, gathering her thoughts, telling herself that his question didn't really mean what it so obviously meant. She bent to pick up the purse, taking her time, trying to still the nervous chatter in her head. Setting it on the table, she tumed to look at him, her expression calm, faintly surprised. »
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'*What do you mean?"
**I know what happened to her, Anne/*
Shock flared in her eyes, and her head jerked back as if recoiUng from a physical blow. There was a thick, painful silence, and, when she spoke, her voice sounded thin in her own ears. **What do you...how did you find out?"
'*I looked it up at the library."
**The library?" It seemed ridiculous that he could have leamed about her sister's murder in such a prosaic way. **Were you looking for something else?"
For an instant Neill considered letting her believe that. She could hardly blame him for stumbling across the information, could she? But he wasn't going to lie to her about something that was so important to her.
**I went there to find out what had happened to your sister," he admitted steadily and felt something twist in his chest at the hurt in her eyes. He wanted to go to her, put his arms around her and hold her until that look went away. But this time, he was the one who'd caused her pain, and he was just going to have to live with that guilt
**Why?" She sounded bewildered. "Why would
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you want to know about something that happened so long ago?"
Neill slid his hands into the pockets of his jeans as protection against the urge to take hold of her. *'It was obvious that whatever happened to her was still very much a part of your life. When that guy tried to mug you, you were more terrified that people would find out than you were by what had happened. You said that you didn't want anyone to know, because they'd remember and look at you. You even started to say Brooke's name." He shrugged. *lt wasn't hard to guess that whatever you were afraid of had something to do with her death."
*'Why didn't you ask me about it?" Anne's mouth felt numb, the words hard to shape. She hadn't realized until now how much she'd counted on him not knowing about her sister's murder. Freed of the burden of his knowledge, she had been able to be someone else, someone whose life wasn't defined by her sister's death. Finding out that he knew about the murder made her feel like she'd been caught out in a lie, as if he must have known all along that she wasn't what she was pretending to be.
*'I did ask," he reminded her gently. *'You said
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she was dead and that it was a long time ago. You told me you didn't want to talk about it, so I went looking. Fm a writer, Anne. Research is a big part of what I do for a living."
**And you felt you had the right to pry into my private Ufer'
Neill's brows rose at the sharpness of her tone. He wasn't sure what he*d expected, but it wasn't the anger that darkened her eyes to storai gray. Then again, he would rather deal with anger than tears.
*'Since it was in all the papers at the time, it wasn't exactly private," he said evenly. **And it was obvious that, whatever had happened, it was still very much a part of your life, a part of who you are. I wanted to know what it was."
'*Did it ever occur to you that it was none of your business?" Rage bubbled up in Anne's chest, a sharp acid heat. His knowledge was a betrayal. **You had no right." Her voice cracked on the last word, and she spun away, hands clenched at her sides. **No right."
Lx)oking at her rigid back, Neill searched for the right words to make her understand why he'd felt as if he did have the right to know what had hsq)-
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pened to Brooke. Before he could fonnulate them, Anne spoke again.
*'She was murdered, but we never use that word,'' she said casually, the way she might have conmiented that it looked like rain. **My family, I mean. When it comes up, which it almost never does, no one ever says, *Brooke was murdered/ We just say she died." She swung around to face him, her mouth quirked in a humorless little smile. **You know that routine George Carlin does about the seven dirty words? In my family, murder is number eight." She looked down, smoothing her fingers over an invisible wrinkle in her skirt * Tunny, isn't it? As if using a different word changes what happened."
'*What did happen?" Neill resisted the urge to go to her, to pull her into his arms and tell her not to talk about it anymore, not to even think about it. There had akeady been too much of that in her life.
**You read the newspaper reports. You already know what happened."
*l'd rather hear it from you."
She hesitated, then shrugged, as if it didn't matter to her. **The papers were pretty accurate. Jack was supposed to pick her up after school, but he
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was late. When he got there, she was gone. He figured she'd gotten a ride home with someone else. He and some friends went out for hamburgers. My parents thought Brooke was with him, so no one knew she was missing until Jack got home." Anne folded a series of tiny pleats in the fabric of her skirt, then smoothed them out again. '*I was ten when it happened. I remember my father started making phone calls. I can still hear the strain in his voice, and I couldn't understand why he was so upset, because Brooke was all the time spending the night with a friend. When I asked if something was wrong, my mother hushed me and sent me to bed.
"It was two weeks before they...found her. I was so scared but no one would tell me anything. And then, suddenly my parents were saying Brooke was dead, but no one would tell me what had happened to her. Just that she'd died. I suppose they thought I was too young to be told what had really happened."
So instead they'd left her at the mercy of her imagination, Neill thought. And their well-intentioned silence had probably frightened her more than the truth could have.
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**It must have been terrifying for you/' he said, keeping his tone neutral.
**I suppose." Anne moved over to the window, staring blindly out at the lights of the city as she tried to order her thoughts. She'd never talked about this. The topic had been forbidden in her family, buried away like a guilty secret. It was only in the last couple of years, after she'd moved into the cottage, away from her mother's control, that she'd even let herself think about it.
*'They quarreled the day before it happened," she murmured, almost as if talking to herself. **My mother and Brooke. They were always quarreling about something. When I got older, I could look back and see that it was because they were so much alike. My mother is the original steel magnolia, velvet over pure steel. Brooke didn't bother to coat the steel in quite such a pretty cover. My mother wanted her to be a debutante—^all virginal dresses and soft voice. Brooke wore red spandex and blue jeans.
"They clashed constantly, especially after Brooke started dating. I didn't understand much of it at the time but, over the years, I've pieced together what was happening. Brooke was sleeping around—or my mother thought she was. My room
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was next door to Brooke's, and I remember hearing them fight over the fact that Brooke was taking birth control pills. It was just after her six
teenth birthday. She was furious that Mom had gone through her room, and Mom was saying that she wasn't going to let her daughter act like a slut.
''They went back and forth, and Brooke finally shouted that if Mom didn't get off her back, she was going to go fuck the whole football team. It was the first time I'd ever heard anyone say that word," she mused. "I didn't even really know what it meant, but I looked it up in the dictionary afterwards."
Anne fingered the edge of the drape, her eyes distant, focused on the past. "Mom slapped her. It was such an ugly sound. I wanted to put my hands over my ears, but I just sat there, frozen in place, afraid to move. Afraid to breathe. Brooke didn't cry. I don't think she said anything at all. She just left. She didn't come back that night, and I heard Mom and Dad arguing in their room. I couldn't hear what they were saying. I didn't want to hear. I remember lying in bed, wondering if Brooke had run away, wondering if Mom would love me more if Brooke wasn't there anymore. But Brooke came home the next day, and everything went back to
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the way it was before, except that, after that, she and Mom fought constantly. They fought about Brooke's clothes, about the boys she dated, about her grades, about where she was going to go to college. It was so constant that, after a while, I stopped hearing it.
**The day before...it happened, they quarreled over me. I was ten, and Brooke did my makeup. Mom was furious with her. With us. She accused Brooke of trying to tum me into a slut, too, and told me to go wash my face. I told her not to be mad at Brooke. We were just having fun. She grabbed my shoulder, and I can still remember the way her fingers dug into my skin."
She reached up to touch her shoulder, as if touching an old bruise. **She looked at me like she hated me, Fve never forgotten the look in her eyes.*' She was silent for a moment, and then sighed and spoke softly. '*The next day, Brooke disappeared. For a long time, I thought it was my fault.''
Neill stkred abruptly, but Anne shook her head before he could speak. '1 know it wasn't I figured that out a long time ago, but children are so egocentric, and, at first, when we thought Brooke had run away, I thought it was because she and Mom
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