Tides of the Heart

by Jean Stone

  “Oh, my,” Mrs. Hawthorne said. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.” Her gray eyes clouded as her gaze moved from the paper to some faraway place perhaps filled with memories of the little girl in the silver frame, the child she’d raised as her own.

  Jess leaned forward. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Hawthorne. It seems as if all I ever do is intrude on your grief.”

  The woman wiped away a tear and attempted a smile. She shook her head. “It’s all right, dear. Amy has been gone a long time now. But I don’t see what I can do to help you.”

  “Well, I’d like to figure out who sent me that letter. And why.”

  “Do you think your baby was someone else? Not Amy?”

  Yes, Jess thought. That was the answer.

  Wasn’t it?

  “When you adopted Amy, you went through Larchwood Hall, is that right?”

  “Oh, my, yes. Larchwood was private, you know. We never would have gone through one of those state agencies …”

  “Did you deal directly with Miss Taylor?” It was Miss Taylor, the housemother, who had given Jess the Hawthornes’ name.

  Mrs. Hawthorne frowned. “I don’t remember. I know we had to talk with a social worker … someone who came out to the house.”

  “Would your husband remember?”

  “Oh, my. Jonathan’s worse at these things than I am.” She folded her hands in her lap. “Would you like a cup of tea, dear? I made some delightful lemon cookies today.…”

  “No,” Jess said, shaking her head. “No, thank you. I’m afraid I’m too upset for anything.”

  “Well, dear, I don’t know what else to tell you. I never had any idea who Amy’s birth mother was until you came to our door. You’re the one who told me. Perhaps there was a mix-up with your records.”

  A mix-up? “I suppose it’s possible.” But somehow Jess doubted it. She was not the kind of person who came out on the good side of mix-ups; she was not the kind of person to whom miracles happened.

  “In which case,” Mrs. Hawthorne added with a whisper of envy, “your baby might still be alive.”

  “Yes,” Jess replied, “maybe she is.” She took back the letter from Mrs. Hawthorne. “Or maybe it’s someone’s idea of a very sick joke.”

  Once home, Jess sat on the sofa of her vaulted-ceilinged, marble-fireplaced, “executive-style” condo overlooking Long Island Sound where she’d moved with the children after the divorce and tried to think of everyone who had known she’d had a baby back then, back when she was not much more than a child herself.

  She tried to think of who would do this. And why.

  She wrote on a white sheet of paper: Father. But Father had wanted nothing to do with Jess, nothing to do with the fact she had been pregnant, unmarried, and only fifteen. He had not wanted even to see her until “the ordeal was over.” And of course, Father was dead now—had been dead several years. And Jess had no other family who could have found out about her shame, could have learned she’d become a disgrace to Gerald Bates’s good name.

  She thought about Larchwood Hall. She wrote down the name of Miss Taylor, the housemother, and beneath that added P.J., Susan, Ginny: the other girls who had been at the home the same time as Jess and who had given up their babies, too.

  Then she wrote, Dr. Larribee, the doctor, and Bud Wilson, who was both the sheriff and the postmaster of the small town of Westwood where Larchwood Hall was. They had all known Jess Bates was there. They had all known Jess Bates was pregnant.

  Staring at the paper, Jess let out a long sigh. It was ridiculous to think that any of them would have sent her the letter. They would have no reason to pretend to be the baby she’d given away. They would have nothing to lose.

  Nothing to lose? She chewed on the end of her pen while another thought crept uneasily into her mind. There was someone else who knew. Someone who had lost a great deal already on account of her baby: his home and his family and his access to Jess’s abundant trust fund. That someone was Charles, her ex-husband. Charles had known, and though he had been only too eager to leave when she’d opened the door, and he had quickly remarried a not surprisingly much younger woman, Jess often wondered how he managed to maintain his facade of grand wealth: she knew he was not the most brilliant investment banker ever born despite what he thought. Or let others think.

  Charles, she wrote on the paper. Without thinking, she added Chuck, Maura, and Travis. She’d had to tell the children; she’d wanted them to know the truth. But surely her children would have had nothing to do with this.

  She studied the list that had grown on the paper. But her eyes kept going back to one name, and only one name: Charles. She had no idea why he would do this, but it suddenly seemed obvious that it had to be him.

  She balled her hands into fists. A sputter of curses flicked through her mind. Then she picked up the phone beside the sofa and dialed the number at his townhouse in Manhattan.

  After two rings, the machine kicked in. “We’re unavailable at present,” his pompous voice said. “We won’t be returning to the city until the tenth of March.”

  Beep.

  Jess hung up. He wouldn’t be home until March tenth? Where could he have gone? Then a sick feeling crawled through her stomach as she wondered if he and his new wife might be winter vacationing on an island—Martha’s Vineyard, for instance.

  Quickly, she picked up the receiver again and called Chuck’s cell phone. If anyone would know the whereabouts of Charles, it would be his favorite son.

  “Hello, honey,” she said, after he’d answered.

  “Mom? Hey, how’s it going?”

  “Fine. Are you keeping busy?”

  Her son laughed. “Life was easier before I became an adult.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “You want anything special, Mom?”

  She winced at the reminder that she did not speak to him often, and that she never, ever called just to say hi. He had, after all, made it quite clear years ago that he did not want his mother keeping tabs on him. He was so much like Charles; he was so much like her own father had been. It all made her quite sad. “Actually,” she said now, “I was trying to reach your father. I need to speak with him about some tax information.” It was not true, of course, but Chuck would not know that.

  “Dad’s in the Caribbean.”

  The Caribbean? Not Martha’s Vineyard. “What on earth is he doing there?” she asked before remembering it was none of her business. Four years of divorce apparently did not wash away every stain of twenty years of marriage.

  “The last I heard, he was buying a boat.”

  Jess sighed, but did not comment that she wondered if her ex-husband would ever grow up. “Well, okay, honey. Thanks.” Then she added, “I miss you, honey. When can you come out for dinner?”

  “Not for a while, Mom. I’m not in the city right now. I’m at a seminar. In Boston.”

  “Boston?” she asked. “You’re in Boston right now?”

  “Yeah. The beauty of cell phones, huh?”

  Boston? she wondered. Wasn’t that awfully close to Martha’s Vineyard?

  She closed her eyes and tried not to think what she was thinking. Then she said something like yes, well, call me when you get back into town, then good-bye. But when she’d hung up the phone, Jess stared out the window and did everything in her power to convince herself that the fact Chuck was in Boston meant nothing at all, that just because he was so much like Charles did not mean he followed in every one of his footsteps. Besides, she reasoned, Chuck was her son. And he would never do anything to hurt his mother.

  She turned back to her list to divert her thoughts.

  Father.

  Miss Taylor—the housemother.

  P.J., Susan, Ginny—her long-ago friends.

  She thought of her friends now and of how only Ginny—of all people—had had a happy ending. She smiled and wondered how Ginny would handle such an obscure letter, and if she would stoop to accusing her own child of the deed.

  Chapt
er 2

  Ginny Stevens-Rosen-Smith-Levesque-Edwards preferred to divorce husbands. Not bury them. She stood in the front of the dim funeral home room in L.A. and stared into the oak casket framed in camellias, Jake’s favorite flowers.

  “You son of a bitch,” she whispered at the satin-covered pillow that cushioned his motionless head. “You rotten, pig-fucking, son of a bitch.”

  He had no right to die. For five years, Ginny had been faithful to him. She had loved him, for chrissakes, if love was a word that anyone could define beyond saying it was a feeling that made you do bizarre things, like be faithful and give a shit when you wished that you didn’t. But she had been faithful and had given a shit, at least for the past five years. And all it had gotten her was nowhere, except right here, staring into the box that held the bones of the man she had loved, and hoping she’d picked out the right kind of casket, and that he would have liked the pale blue satin lining.

  Everyone but Ginny had been surprised that Jake had specified he did not want to be cremated in popular California style. True, Los Angeles was overcrowded and land was at a premium. But Jake had always been afraid of fire, and Ginny knew that. She knew that the same way she knew so much else about her husband—the fact that he harbored a secret longing to be a singer though he couldn’t carry a tune, the fact that he had become a successful documentary film producer only because his alcoholic ex-wife, the mother of his two children, had not wanted him to, and the fact that he was the best goddamn thing that ever happened to Ginny.

  And now where was he? Cold as a clam. Dead as a doornail. The rotten son of a bitch.

  The touch of a cool hand at her elbow did not avert Ginny’s eyes from the pillow under his head.

  “Ginny?” The voice came from Lisa, Ginny’s TV-star daughter, the only person left on earth now who gave a shit about her. “They want to begin the service, Ginny. Come and sit down.”

  Drawing in a breath, Ginny nearly gagged on the pungent aroma of hundreds of floral grotesqueries: pots and baskets and sprays and vases from studios and clients and actors and producers—everyone in the movie business who was shocked that Jake Edwards had dropped dead at sixty-four. Of course, many of the flowers were from Lisa’s camp of ass-kissers: the herds of groupies who apparently felt it essential to send condolences to the girl they knew as Myrna the witch-bitch on Devonshire Place, the girl whose real-life sort-of-stepfather now lay in the box, which meant she must be devastated and they really must let her know that they cared.

  “Ginny?” Lisa/Myrna repeated.

  Ginny raised her chin and swallowed back a tear. Then she took a last look at the son of a bitch and let her daughter lead her to the bank of wing chairs reserved for the family that had been set apart from the white folding chairs and came complete with boxes of pop-up Kleenex at no extra charge.

  • • •

  She supposed she’d have to keep Consuelo on even though they’d never gotten along, even though the housekeeper/cook/laundress had never really liked Ginny, only tolerated her on account of Jake—the man she’d lie down and die for because if it weren’t for him she’d never have her green card. Jake had un-alienated her in a world of illegals; he had made her someone, a Californian, an American. And aside from the fact it had most likely been Consuelo’s cooking—her overindulgence of Jake by way of breakfast steaks and fried eggs—that had logjammed his arteries and crushed the life from his heart, the woman was probably entitled to some payback for her loyalty.

  Shit, Ginny thought, surveying the heaping platters of postfuneral noshes spread out for the guests like barley for geese, she might as well keep her because she couldn’t stand her own cooking and she’d never lifted a dust rag in her life. Besides, Jake would probably have wanted it that way. Consuelo, after all, had no one else: her revered Jake, his two totally fucked-up adult children, his unfortunate choice of a second wife, and the wife’s illegitimate daughter had become the woman’s family, like it or not.

  Ginny plucked a stuffed artichoke leaf and wondered why those who serve ultimately are transformed into those who need to be served. It had been the same way with her mother: the woman who had once nurtured her little girl had ended up needing that same little girl to work her ass off to keep them in frozen dinners and booze, to keep bringing home tissues into which her mother hacked God-only-knew-what, until there was no more air left to come out of her lungs, until her liver was swollen beyond repair, until she was dead. Like Jake was now.

  “Ginny,” Lisa said, guiding a bald, bulky man toward her, “I’d like you to meet Harry Lyons, my director. Harry, this is my mother, Ginny Edwards.” Ginny frowned at the daughter who oddly resembled Ginny’s mother more than herself, then moved her gaze to Harry Lyons, the man who took credit for making Lisa a star. Ginny knew it had really only happened because of Jake. Jake, who had tirelessly bled his Hollywood connections until Lisa had screen tests secured from one end of town to the other. Jake had done it for Lisa, and he’d done it for Ginny, so she could be near the daughter she’d only just met.

  But that had been almost five years ago, and it was Harry Lyons—a fat man with big teeth and jello-like jowls—who stood in front of her now, who had taken the credit for Lisa’s fast rise to fame.

  “Mrs. Edwards,” the somber-face said perfunctorily, “I am so pleased to meet you. And I am so sorry about your husband.”

  Sucking the stuffing off the artichoke leaf, Ginny wondered why he cared. “Thank you,” she said between the cream cheese and rosemary. “I’m sorry about him, too.”

  He cleared his fleshy throat and eyed the hors d’oeuvres. “Lisa tells me you were an actor, too. You must have trained your daughter well. Or you must have fantastically creative genes.”

  It came as no surprise that Harry Lyons was more interested in talking about Lisa—his abundant meal ticket—than in trading musings about dead Jake. But Ginny was too weary to explain that she’d never even laid eyes on Lisa until a few years ago. That she’d never planned to, that she’d never wanted to. “She’s my daughter, all right,” Ginny replied as expected, though a small part of her would have loved to watch his porky face fall if she told him that Lisa’s “fantastically creative genes” were the product of Ginny’s rape by her stepfather with a bit of her alcoholic mother thrown in for good measure. But that was cocktail party talk, and this was not a cocktail party. Not that any of the food-grabbing, drink-guzzling guests seemed to realize it.

  “Lisa,” Ginny asked as she bypassed the artichokes and scooped up a pair of cheesy, gooey quiches, “have you seen Brad and Jodi?”

  Rolling her camera-perfect, huge topaz eyes, Lisa gestured toward the patio. “Brad is sulking. Jodi is meditating.”

  “Excuse me,” Ginny said to Harry Lyons, “but I really must check on Jake’s children.” The blank look on his face made her want to shout: “Jake. The man who is dead, the reason you’re here.” Instead, she drifted through the French doors to the patio, pulling the black widow’s scarf from her throat as she went and tossing it onto the counter for Consuelo to pick up when the spirit moved her.

  Brad, indeed, was sulking. He was slouched on a chaise, a beer in one hand, staring at Jodi, his white-robed sister. She was cross-legged on the concrete, eyes closed, arms folded, head raised toward the sky. Firmly planted atop her long, straight, flat hair was a wreath of daisies, the symbol of the New World Covenant to which Jodi had sold her soul several years ago. To Ginny, the girl merely looked like a leftover hippie who, but for the grace of three decades, might have taken up with Charles Manson instead.

  “Mommie dearest,” Brad chided as Ginny strolled into the scene, “why aren’t you entertaining the guests? Too distraught over the loss of your dear departed?”

  “Shut up, Brad,” she said. She sat down, kicked off her sling-back heels and propped her feet on another chair. “We have to talk. Do you think you can coax your sister from her trance?”

  “I’m not in a trance,” Jodi’s light voice drifted from her pale, thin li
ps. “I’m trying to connect with Daddy’s aura.”

  “Daddy’s aura is long gone,” Ginny said. “Now open your eyes and listen to what I have to say.”

  Brad swigged his beer.

  Jodi opened her eyes.

  Ginny looked from one pathetic stepchild to the other, and had no problem deciding where to begin. “I expect the reason you showed your faces here today is because of the money.”

  “Ginny!” Jodi squeaked in her overmeditated, mousy squeak. “That simply is not true! I have no need for material things. New World is my life force … my essence rises above it all.”

  Brad snickered.

  “Well, whether you know it or not,” Ginny said to Jodi, ignoring Brad, “your father sent a ‘gift’ to that life force every month. Five thousand dollars, to be exact. The price to keep you rising above it all.” She shook a cigarette from a pack of Brad’s Marlboros that lay on the table and lit it with an old match. “And as much as I hate the thought, I’ll keep paying as long as you insist on staying there.” The truth was, Ginny feared that Jake would come back to haunt her if she didn’t. New World had been the only way to keep Jodi from relapsing into a drug-riddled hell.

  Sucking in her breath and closing her eyes again, Jodi responded, “I do not stay there, Ginny. New World is my home.…”

  “Whatever,” Ginny said and blew out a sharp stream of smoke. It had been years since she’d smoked: the taste was dry and harsh, like a mouthful of sand mixed with warm camel shit. She picked a shard of tobacco from her lower lip and turned an eye to Brad. “I couldn’t help but notice that you haven’t said a word.”

  Brad shrugged, a slow, childish smirk creeping across his two-day-old beard growth and making him look like a cross between Tom Cruise and Don Johnson. “Whatever makes my sister happy …”

  “Give it up, Brad. It’s a little late to try and impress me with your familial caring.” She narrowed her eyes at the errant son. “I am quite sure, however, that you are interested in the money.”