“Nice,” Hank said, smiling down at the dog. His eyes were very dark, gleaming with firelight. “One of the things I love about dogs—some dogs, anyway—is their empathy.”
Tory patted the dog again. “Johnson,” she mused. “It’s so—prosaic, I guess.”
“Apparently Puccini didn’t think so.” Hank chuckled, then held up his empty glass. “Mind if I have another?”
“Please do. Help yourself.” As he rose and moved back toward the kitchen, she said, “You know, Puccini didn’t choose the name. It was from the Belasco play. I remember reading that Puccini didn’t like any of the names—he thought they were ugly. Unmusical. Especially Minnie.”
“You’re an opera buff.” Hank sank back onto the couch. “Me too.” His height made the small couch look ridiculous. Having company, in fact, made Tory uncomfortably aware of how shabby the cottage was. She thought of her own beautifully appointed living room, her shining kitchen with its glass-fronted cabinets full of china and crystal, and felt a twinge of nostalgia.
Distracted by it, she said, “I love opera. A little too much, my son would say—” She very nearly clapped her hand over her mouth when she realized what she’d said. She fumbled for her wineglass to cover her confusion, and it went flying, spilling what was left in it over the braided rug. “Oh, damn!” she exclaimed, jumping up. She hurried to grab a wet towel from the kitchen. When she got back, Hank took the towel and crouched above the rug, first soaking up the wine, then scrubbing at places where small stains showed. In moments, there was nothing but dampness to show where wine had spilled.
“You need a fresh glass,” he said, smiling up at her.
Her cheeks burned, but she nodded. “So clumsy,” she said. “I’m embarrassed.”
“Don’t be.” He picked up the dropped glass, got to his feet, and went to wipe it clean and refill it. From the kitchen, he said, “You were telling me about your son?”
Tory clenched her hands together in her lap, chagrined at her slip. She had managed, all these weeks, to tell no one anything about her private life. Even Iris had ceased asking her. And now, this strange, tall man had come into her house and she had blurted out the very secret she needed to keep.
He came back, and handed over the wineglass. She said, striving for a casual tone, “He’s grown now,” as if that meant there was nothing to say.
“You don’t look old enough to have a grown son.”
She couldn’t meet his eyes. She let her gaze drift to the paperweight, still resting where Iris had left it on the coffee table. It didn’t help. Looking at it only reminded her of her dreams. A silence stretched, broken only by the dog—Johnson—yawning, turning on his side to lie flat on the rug. She wanted to say something, to fill the void, but she couldn’t think of anything safe.
“Well,” Hank said at last. “It’s getting late. I’d better go.”
Tory knew she had been rude. She hadn’t asked him anything about himself, about his life or his family. She said awkwardly, “It was so nice of you to come and tell me.”
“Thanks for the wine.” He rose, unfolding his long frame with some difficulty from the little sofa.
“Do I—do I just keep him, then? Johnson?” She rose, too, and the dog lifted his head to watch them both.
“That’s up to you,” he said. The look on his face had changed, and she was afraid she had offended him. “Otherwise he’ll have to go to the shelter. They’ll try to adopt him out, but—”
“No,” she said hastily. “Oh, no, I’d love to keep him. He seems to like it here.”
“Yes, I would say he likes it here.” They both looked back at Johnson, who had put his head down on his paws. Hank pulled on his coat as he walked to the door. “Let me know if you need anything for him,” he said as he put his hand on the doorknob.
“I will. I—” Tory wanted to say something else. She felt tongue-tied, fearful of offending this nice man, but more fearful of saying something to give herself away. “I really appreciate it,” she finished, knowing it wasn’t enough, wishing she could manage more.
He nodded. “Right. Good night, then.”
“Good night, Hank.”
Tory stood by the window, watching the SUV back out of the short driveway. She waited until it was gone before she pulled the curtains, as if that would erase the inadequacy of her conversation. The little house seemed emptier than ever when she was alone again. She picked up the wineglasses and carried them to the sink. Her own was still half full, but she poured it out. She scooped up dog food from the bag the reluctant Shirley had given her, and filled the dog dish. Johnson jumped up at the rattle of kibble in the dish, and padded into the kitchen.
Tory watched him munching for a moment, but she was thinking about Hank. In all the years since her marriage had ended, there had been no men in her life. Kate had tried, once or twice, to introduce her to someone, but Tory had been busy with her practice, with raising Jack, with keeping up her house. As Kate had said, with a shake of the head, she was naturally solitary. But this—this utter emptiness—it was all but unbearable. Everyone she loved thought she was dead, and in a way, she felt as if she had died. As if the Tory Lake she had always been was gone, buried, truly vanished.
Who would Paulette Chambers be? Was there ever to be any happiness for her? Or, failing happiness, peace?
Johnson went to sit by the front door, and Tory guessed he needed to go out. She pulled on her bedraggled jacket, and the two of them went out again, side by side. They crossed the road to go down to the dark beach, where Tory stood shivering inside her jacket, waiting as the dog sniffed the sand and lifted his leg on pieces of driftwood. More lights shone now from the houses up and down the beach, people arriving for their Christmas holidays. As she and Johnson went back through the gate, the light from the cottage’s windows seemed muted, cooler than the lights in other people’s houses. Tory paused for a moment, looking at it. She knew it was her imagination, but that didn’t alter the impression.
“How did it get to be this way, Johnson?” she asked aloud. He wagged his tail and panted. “Right,” she told him. “It just happened. It’s not fair, though.” His ears turned toward her. “This is why lonely people have dogs,” she said. “So they’re not talking just to themselves.” He grinned at her, and she tugged at his ears. “I’m glad they couldn’t find your people,” she whispered as she opened the front door. “I know it’s selfish, but I don’t care. It’s the best thing that’s happened to me in quite a while.”
She hung up her coat, then added a small log to the fireplace. She stood in front of it, thinking, watching the flames begin to flicker around the new piece of wood. Johnson flopped onto the rug again. Silence filled the cottage, broken only by the crackle of the fire and Johnson’s occasional sigh.
Tory went into her bedroom to find the CD player Iris had given her. She carried it out, and set it beneath the lamp, where the cord could reach the outlet. She took the Mozart CD—Don Giovanni, with Octavia Voss singing Donna Anna—and put it into the machine. The familiar overture began. She leaned against the fireplace, listening for several moments, thinking how much like an opera her life had become. When Donna Anna began to rail at Don Giovanni in the first act, Tory suddenly straightened, and went back to her bedroom.
She opened the bottom drawer of the bureau, and took out the file that had lain untouched for two months. She carried it back to the fireplace, her heart thudding with the urgency of her wish to wipe it out, to make it go away. She moved the screen, and knelt in front of the fire, the folder in both hands. Her heart raced even faster as she held it out to the flames, an offering to whatever power there might be that could remove the story of Ellice Gordon from her conscience forever.
The corners of the folder had just begun to char when she snatched the file back, and pressed the sparks from the cardboard. She sat back on her heels, her mouth dry, the pounding of her heart beginning to ease. The dog was sitting up now, watching her, as she laid the folder to one side, and rep
laced the fire screen.
She stood up, retrieving the folder from the floor. She sat on the sofa, and opened the file on the little table, moving the paperweight to one side to make room. Ellice Gordon’s statistics—birth date, occupation, marital status, health insurance—were on an evaluation sheet stapled to the inside front of the folder, and her own notes, pages of lined paper, were clipped opposite, neatly dated, the most recent on top. She smoothed them with her hand, but she didn’t read them. There was no need.
The CD stopped after the first act of the opera. In the silence, Tory closed her eyes, one hand on her own notes, the other pressed to her heart. Ellice had trapped her, cornered her with the deft cruelty, the merciless determination of a sociopath. She should have known, should have seen. Should have reported her before she could act on her fantasy. Before she killed a man who was, as far as she knew, innocent of any wrongdoing. Before she could threaten Jack.
Jack. Oh, God.
Tory’s eyes flew open, and she leaped up to dash across the living room to the kitchen. Johnson leaped up, too, sensing some sort of crisis. Tory groped through her bag for her cell phone. She held it in her hand, staring at it, and then she dialed.
She didn’t stop to think about what time it was in the east. She didn’t even know what time it was here, in her lonely cottage on the Oregon coast. She only knew that she had to hear his voice. She couldn’t bear not knowing. She couldn’t bear it for another moment.
Jack jumped when he heard his phone ring. He couldn’t think where he was, why he was asleep sitting up instead of in his bed—and then he remembered. The house was cold and dark around him, and when he pushed the afghan off his legs, the hatchet slid off the couch and clattered on the floor.
Jack, half asleep, staggered toward the kitchen, where he had left his cell phone in the tray where they always kept keys and pencils and pens, the flotsam of daily life. Beneath his sneakers, the sound of broken glass and the sharp fragments of shattered china brought him fully awake.
The phone had rung four times already. On the fifth it would go to voice mail. It wouldn’t matter, really, except . . . something made him hurry, made him lunge across the darkened kitchen to seize it and push the button. He was still leaning across the granite counter, his belly pressing against its sharp edge.
“Hello?”
The hiss of an open line greeted him.
He said again, his voice scratchy with sleep, “Hello? Who’s there?” There was no answer except a gentle click, the sound of the connection being broken.
He tried again just the same. “Hello?” And then, softly, hopefully, “Mom?” But the line was dead.
He crunched across the floor to turn on the light. He had to squint against the sudden glare as he looked at the phone for the number that had called him. 503. Where was that prefix? He didn’t think he’d ever seen it before.
He could just redial, but that didn’t seem like a good idea. It could be whoever had trashed the house. Or it could just be a wrong number, the simplest explanation. Everyone got wrong numbers from time to time. It was rude for the person—especially at one in the morning—not to apologize, but if the caller was embarrassed at the mistake, or just thoughtless, it could be—
Jack dropped the phone into his pocket and hurried upstairs to his computer, turning on every light along the way. He did a reverse phone search: 503 was in Oregon. The number, though, wouldn’t come up, and an advisory at the bottom of the page told him it was probably a prepaid cell phone. For a fee, he could find out where it had been sold. It would be a start.
He pulled the phone out and looked again, then wrote the number down on a sticky note. He pressed the note onto the edge of the computer keyboard, then got up, slowly, to make his way back downstairs.
It was one-thirty. He couldn’t call the Binghams before seven at the earliest, or maybe eight. He was wide-awake now. In fact, he felt jittery and dry-mouthed, as if he’d just drunk a double espresso. The pizza he’d eaten churned in his stomach. He went out to the garage refrigerator for a soda, and on the way back he picked up the push broom and dustpan. Might as well get to work on the mess. There would be no more sleep tonight.
Tory held the phone in her trembling hand after hanging up on her son. He had sounded sleepy. With a stab of compunction, she saw that it was after ten, meaning it was after one at home. Was he home? Was he at school? She had no way of knowing.
But he was okay. He had answered his phone, and he was okay. She dropped to her knees, buried her face in Johnson’s soft fur, and wept. She sobbed aloud, with all the drama of a diva’s theatrical weeping. She cried for a long time, and Johnson lay still, supporting her, waiting for her. When at last she stopped, the dog lifted his head to lick at her tears.
19
Sì, tutto in un istante io vedo il fallo mio. . . .
Yes, all in one moment I see my wrongdoing....
—Pinkerton, Madama Butterfly, Act Three
Tory opened her eyes, not sure for a moment where she was.
She was shivering with cold, the chill of midnight, with the wintry ocean air seeping through the shutters and glass of the picture window. She had fallen asleep on the little sofa, and when she sat up, pain shot through her neck and shoulders, forcing her to full wakefulness.
Johnson lay at her feet. He lifted his head and regarded her solemnly, his eyes shining faintly in the darkness. Tory remembered crying herself to sleep against his silky fur, then, for some reason, curling up on the sofa. The file still lay on the coffee table, and the paperweight rested precariously at the edge. The gold butterfly was invisible in the darkness.
Tory knew she should go to bed. She had promised to be at the flower shop in the morning. Perversely, she wanted to stay where she was, thinking of hearing Jack’s voice, contemplating the almost-destruction of Ellice’s file. She padded into the bedroom and got the zippered sweatshirt and the extra blanket from the foot of her bed. She put a fresh log on the fire, and stirred the embers until it began to burn. She opened the shutters, despite the cold, so she could see the dark ocean beyond the window, and then she went back to the sofa. She collected the pages of the file and slid them back inside. She tucked the blanket around her feet, and curled up on the sofa again. Johnson sighed, and put his head on his paws. Tory gazed at the water for several moments before she felt a weight against her thighs.
She looked down. She had, evidently, taken the paperweight into her lap, and was cradling it between her hands. It seemed to vibrate against her skin, to echo with memories. It was easy, in the middle of the night, in the darkness and silence, to explore them.
Her fingers caressed the cool glass, and in her mind she saw the things of the past—an ocean voyage, a wedding in a tiny church, a village with dirt lanes and donkey carts.
Tory wondered if Nonna Angela had felt these things, and if that was why she kept the paperweight with its gold butterfly out of her granddaughter’s reach. She wished she could ask her now.
Tory let her head fall back against the top of the sofa, and closed her eyes. She pictured Nonna Angela’s wrinkled face, her bright black eyes, her aureole of gray hair. She remembered the softness of her veined hands, and faintly—because it had been such a long time—the welcoming cushion of her lap as she rocked little Tory and told her stories of a village by a lake.
Tory’s mother had resented her Italian mother-in-law, complained of her ignorance and her “Catholic superstitions,” as she called them. She had bitterly opposed Nonna Angela coming to live with them, but at least in this one thing, Tory’s father had put his foot down. Tory couldn’t remember the words now, because she had been little more than a toddler, but she knew there had been a harsh argument, her father losing his temper, her mother eventually withdrawing to her bedroom for hours, or it could have been days. Tory couldn’t be sure, but it seemed, to her child’s perception, that Nonna Angela came and her mother disappeared, all at the same time. Nonna Angela moved in, bringing her cracked cardboard valise full o
f surprises to delight a child. For the all-too-brief years that followed, Nonna Angela was Tory’s one constant parent, her defense, her solace, and her confidante.
Except for the paperweight, Nonna Angela allowed Tory to explore anything she possessed. A sweater, already old when Nonna Angela was a girl, became a cloak for a captured princess. A funny long skirt and a faded black hat turned Tory into a witch for Halloween. There were bits of cheap jewelry, a dried-up nosegay of white flowers pressed flat between the pages of an Italian Bible, and there was a wooden St. Francis, the paint worn from its brown robe, which Nonna Angela said Tory’s father played with as a boy.
There was a photograph in a wooden frame, showing a bright-eyed young woman standing next to a tall, fair-haired young man in uniform. Behind them was a stone church, and in the distance, glistening with sunlight, a broad lake edged with reedy marshes. Tory had to practice saying the name of the lake, but she did it again and again until Nonna Angela said she had it right. Massaciuccoli. Nonna Angela had learned to swim in Lake Massaciuccoli, and her family fished there before the war.
Nonna Angela didn’t tell Tory about the war. Tory dreamed of it. She was five, and had been sleeping in her grandmother’s room one stormy night. She woke up screaming from a dream of bombs and fierce men with guns. Tory knew nothing of such things, but her Nonna Angela did. She knew them all too well. She remembered every detail as if it had happened the day before instead of forty years ago, and thunderstorms always brought it back to her.
Nonna Angela comforted the little girl, soothed her weeping, held her close until she calmed. She murmured endearments, but she didn’t try to tell her granddaughter that her dream was just a nightmare. She couldn’t say there were no monsters, tall cruel creatures with fierce eyes who invaded people’s homes and brought terror and destruction with them. When Tory wept that she had seen people burning, Nonna Angela could only hug her, and murmur into her tumbled hair, “Lo so, bimba, lo so.” I know, little one, I know. I remember.
The Glass Butterfly Page 22
