Tides of the Heart

by Jean Stone

  He turned from the building and walked slowly toward the subway that would take him downtown to the train bound for Fairfield. It was Wednesday night, after all, when dinner was shared at the mahogany table that stood on the braided wool rug.

  “Call your brother on his cellular telephone and let him know you’re here,” Jeanine Archambault said as soon as Phillip stepped inside the house. “He’s been frantic trying to find you.”

  Phillip hung up his coat in the back hall off the kitchen, smiling at the stilted way his mother referred to the “cellular telephone” as if it was an important invention that necessitated a respectable proper name, like “automobile” or “mathematics.” At least she hadn’t chosen tonight to include a guest for dinner, some eligible young woman who would make Phillip a nice wife. Nor had his mother fussed over him with her usual questions—how was the train ride out from the city, had he had anything decent to eat all day, and why hadn’t he brought his laundry—she really wouldn’t mind doing his laundry because he must be so busy and she had plenty of time. Perhaps things weren’t typical tonight because Phillip had been “bad” and big brother was angry.

  He loosened his tie and walked past the stove on his way to the phone, stopping to lift the lid of the black enamel pot that simmered deliciously with the promise of dinner. “Hmm,” he said. “Beef stew.”

  “And rolls.” His mother took the lid from his hand and stirred the stew. “Now call your brother. Ask him what time he and Camille will be over.”

  Joseph and Camille, Phillip knew, would be there at seven-fifteen, the same way they were every Wednesday night. Seven-fifteen on Wednesdays, two-thirty on Sunday afternoons. Phillip’s brother and his wife were as predictable as Jeanine’s making whole wheat rolls for dinner tonight to go with the beef stew that she would put in the dark blue tureen and serve in the matching blue bowls. Phillip wondered what had ever made him suggest a few years ago that Jeanine sell the house and move to a condo. His mother would no more leave this rambling old place than she would play bridge on Wednesdays instead of cook for her grown-up sons.

  The tinny voice of a recording told Phillip that the Bell Atlantic customer he was calling was not available at this time. He glanced at his watch: 7:06.

  “They must be on their way,” he said, then pictured the Bell Atlantic customer behind the wheel of his BMW, his wife by his side, as he explained to her that the reason he was not answering his phone was because Phillip had taken off for God only knew where this afternoon and had totally pissed him off. “The biggest goddamn deal of our lives at stake,” Phillip could almost hear his brother sputter, “and he leaves the office without so much as a good-bye.”

  Camille would listen and nod but not interfere. The two had been married long enough for her to know not to wedge her opinions between the two brothers. And she was probably too preoccupied with awaiting the results of their third attempt at in vitro fertilization to care about the latest rift between the brothers.

  Still, the phone would keep ringing and Joseph would not move to answer it. “Well, little brother,” he’d bark at the black plastic rectangle, “you can just sweat it out. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you know what happened any too soon.”

  That, Phillip assured himself, was what Joseph was saying right now. And to make matters worse, Phillip couldn’t blame him. He should have stuck around for the McGinnis-Smith verdict. He should have pulled his head out of those go-nowhere clouds and not let himself get so … sentimental. Sentimental and stupid. Like the little kid he sometimes still felt that he was.

  “Want me to set the table?” he asked his mother, the same as every Wednesday night.

  “If you want,” she answered the same answer, then added, “I think we’ll use blue bowls tonight. The ones that match the tureen.”

  Phillip nodded and went into the dining room to get the dishes from the china closet.

  “I can’t believe you bailed out,” Joseph said, his voice low so their mother and Camille would not hear. “You just up and bailed out when we were waiting for the biggest break of our career.”

  Phillip leaned against the china closet, feeling small and naughty, trying not to look at the snarl on Joseph’s otherwise chiseled, fair-skinned face, the face that could have come from Irish heritage or Polish—Joseph had never cared to find out.

  “Sorry. It was business.”

  “Business? You didn’t even tell Marilyn you were leaving.”

  Phillip moved past his brother and straightened the soup spoons beside the knives. “It’s Sandy, not Marilyn. If we had a decent secretary instead of those temp girls, you might keep the name straight.”

  “Well, not that you care,” Joseph said haughtily, “but we can afford one now.” He turned and began to leave the room.

  Phillip blinked and went after him. He grabbed his arm. “We got them?”

  The anger on his brother’s Irish-Polish-whatever face melted into a smile. “We’re going uptown, little brother,” he said. “We’re in with the big guys.”

  Phillip’s hands flew to his face. He had done it. They had done it. He let out a whoop and smacked Joseph’s high five. “McGinnis and Smith,” he hollered. “Unbelievable!”

  “Un-friggin’-believable!” Joseph exclaimed, then threw his arms around his wayward little brother and together they laughed and hugged and danced around the braided rug like two little boys who had won their first Little League game.

  Chapter 7

  As the yellow cab barreled up Sixth Avenue, dodging people and bicycles and other yellow cabs, Jess stared out the dirt-filmed window and thanked God that the week had finally passed. It had been one of those weeks when most things that could go wrong did, and when things one never dreamed would happen had.

  It started when she arrived home from the Cape. Wendell, the dining and banquet room manager of the country club—the country club, Fox Hills of Greenwich—had called asking her to quote on new draperies and decor for the ballroom.

  At first she was flattered.

  “Celia Boynton’s dining room is the talk of the club,” Wendell had said. “I need someone I can trust, and I know you’ll come through.”

  Of course he did. Wendell had watched Jess come through for function after function over the years, volunteering her time because she had so much of it, doing whatever was asked, making Charles look good.

  But that was then and this was now, and Jess didn’t think she was ready to deal with the people she’d once courted. It had not escaped Jess that Celia had probably only hired her so she could spread the word about what Jess was doing and, of course, how she looked. Dealing with Celia Boynton was one thing, but the whole club? Where Jess’s work would be visible for all to see and critique? Where her name would be bandied about like locker-room gossip, where the men in Jess Randall’s life—or lack thereof—would become as talked-about as her drapes?

  “As far as I know, she’s not seeing anyone.”

  “She hasn’t, you know. Not since the divorce.”

  “And she must have financial problems—why else would she work?”

  The tut-tuts and whispers would be difficult to take: She’d heard them before about other former club members like KiKi Larson and Maggie Brown who had leaped—or had been thrown—into the outré black hole of divorce. But behind the gossip-monger facades, Jess always suspected that more than one woman kept her hideous marriage intact simply to avoid being served as verbal fodder at lunch.

  So she had wanted to say “no thank you” to Wendell with a noble excuse that she was much too busy to devote the kind of detailed attention the club so deserved. It would have played well on the grapevine, if not on her profit statement. But the fact was that a job as large as the club’s would keep her assistants busy for several weeks and would look impressive as hell on her “Designs by Jessica” résumé.

  So Jess had sent Grace, her most dependable assistant, to the club to take measurements, then had given Wendell an exorbitant price, half hoping th
e club’s officers would not accept her bid. Three days later, they did, just as Grace announced she was moving to Tucson because her husband had been transferred.

  Then Maura had phoned to tell Jess the spring break trip was off: Liz had decided to go home with her boyfriend, and Heather did not want to go without her. What should Maura do? Jess did not know what to say, so she said, “Why don’t you come home and work on your paper for psychology?” which, of course, was the wrong thing to say to a college sophomore. “Mother, you just don’t understand” was her reply, followed by an abrupt hanging up of the phone.

  Even Travis had been in an uncharacteristically foul mood the past week, having bombed his math midterm because he’d come down with the flu.

  The only positive thing about the week was what had not happened: There had been no more ominous, anonymous letters, no more nebulous, garbled phone messages.

  As the cab screeched to a stop at Tavern on the Green, Jess clutched the armrest and wondered if Maura had been right—maybe it would be better to put out of her mind the remote possibility that her baby might still be alive. Then she thought about Ginny and about the note for fifty thousand dollars, and she knew that it was too late to turn back.

  Grateful for having survived the ride, and promising herself—not for the first time—that she would never take a death-defying taxi again, Jess paid the driver and stepped out of the cab. Her head was aching and her heart was heavy. But then, as if whisked by a feather in a light summer breeze, her anxiety disappeared as she spotted Phillip Archambault waiting by the door.

  He had not changed. His cheeks were still round and rosy, his smile warm and happy, his eyes the same vibrant emerald as P.J.’s had been. Jess felt a small ache of longing for her long-ago friend. She hugged Phillip gently, trying once more to process the fact that this tall, handsome man had been one of their own, one of their babies, who had grown into an adult.

  “Jess,” Phillip said. “Gosh, you still look so young.”

  Jess laughed and stood on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek. “Flattery, young man, will get you everywhere.”

  Inside the restaurant they were escorted past long brass rails bordering richly paneled walls, past finely stenciled glass partitions and pots of thick, green plants to a small corner table set away from the lunch crowd.

  “I hope this is okay,” Phillip said after they had been seated and the maitre d’ left. “I asked for something private.”

  “It’s fine.” Jess sipped from a thin crystal water glass, her pleasure in seeing him slowly giving way to the disquiet over the reason they were there. She so hoped that P.J.’s son would be supportive; she so hoped he would understand why she needed to do this. She did not need another reaction like Maura’s; if that happened, surely she would give up. And then she would never know.

  “What’s going on, Jess?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “No. Tell me about you first. Tell me how you’ve been and if you’re happy … tell me everything.”

  He laughed. “Well, for starters, I’d be a lot happier if you hadn’t said this was business. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that when anyone asks for a lawyer, it means there’s some kind of trouble.”

  “There’s no trouble, dear, only a minor complication.” She twisted her ring and realized that, along with the eyes, Phillip had apparently also inherited his mother’s no-nonsense directness. “I really want to hear about you. You’re working in Manhattan, but are you still living in Fairfield?” Fairfield, Connecticut, had been where she’d located Phillip’s mother when she was tracking down the children for the reunion; it was not very far from where Jess had lived in Greenwich, where she had raised her three children and pretended to be happy as Charles’s wife.

  “Nope,” he replied. “I hated the commute. I see Mom every week, though, on Wednesday nights. Sometimes on weekends, unless I’m stuffed in the law library, looking up cases.”

  “You work hard. Your mother—I mean, P.J. did, too.”

  A boyish grin crept across his round, sunny face. “It gets confusing, doesn’t it? That I have—had—two mothers?”

  Jess felt her face flush. “Did you ever tell your … mother … about P.J.?”

  He shook his head. “It would only have hurt her, Jess. It was probably wrong, but I just couldn’t do it.”

  Sensitive, Jess thought, and kind. If P.J. had lived, she would be so proud of her son. Then a mother-instinct darted through her mind: Why couldn’t Maura find someone like Phillip instead of the arrogant, spoiled boys she latched on to? Quickly, she pushed away these thoughts and asked, “Any girlfriends?”

  “They come, they go,” he replied with a nonchalance Jess was not convinced that he felt. “My life is too busy these days for anything more.”

  The waiter appeared and asked for their orders. Without looking at the menu, Phillip recommended the grilled salmon to Jess. “It sounds wonderful,” she said.

  After the waiter left, Jess toyed with her water glass; Phillip’s eyes held steady on her face. “So,” he said firmly, “enough of this small talk. What’s your ‘minor complication’?”

  There was apparently no use in stalling. She sipped her water again and cleared her throat. Then she told him about the mysterious letter, the phone call, and the fact that Miss Taylor was dead. He listened with the patience of a veteran attorney, nodding at intervals, his expression revealing neither a glimmer of surprise nor the least hint of judgment.

  She told him about the note in Miss Taylor’s things for fifty thousand dollars. She even mentioned the payoff her father had given Richard’s family. Throughout it all, Jess felt oddly detached again, as if she were speaking of other people and other people’s lives.

  “So what I need,” she said, “is your help. I need to know if Amy was my daughter, or if my daughter is still alive.”

  He loosened the knot of his tie and fixed his emerald eyes on her. “I don’t see how I can help, Jess. I’m a lawyer, not a private investigator.”

  “I don’t want a private investigator, Phillip. I don’t want to pick someone out of the yellow pages. I need someone I can trust. I can trust you.”

  “But I’m a corporate attorney, Jess. I deal in takeovers and mergers and that kind of stuff.”

  “Not in lost babies?”

  His expression was apologetic and sincere. “I’m sorry.”

  Their lunches arrived. Jess stared at the delicate presentation of the orange-pink salmon and willed herself not to cry. She was so tired of thinking about this, so tired of wondering what to do and what not to do. Closing her eyes, she decided maybe it was for the best, that maybe this was one of those clues from the universe the kids today spoke of—a clear, God-ordered message to drop the whole thing. If Phillip couldn’t help her, she would not look elsewhere. Then she felt his warm hand rest on hers.

  “It isn’t that I wouldn’t like to, Jess. But I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  Her eyelids lifted along with her spirits. At least he didn’t seem to think she was foolish. Or wrong. “I don’t know either. That’s why I called you.”

  “But even if things were different, well, we’re so busy at the office … we just landed a big account.…”

  “A corporate account,” Jess commented.

  Phillip nodded. Jess looked down at her wilted spinach salad. It was hopeless, she thought. The message was clear.

  “Other than the housemother, who else might have known the truth?” he asked quietly.

  “I made a list,” she said. “There was the doctor, of course. Dr. Larribee.” She tried not to get her hopes up when she noticed that Phillip had produced a small pad and was now making notes.

  “Do you remember his first name?”

  “William. William Larribee. I only remember that because I used to stare at his name badge rather than look him in the eyes. It was so embarrassing.…” She looked away again, scanning the other luncheon customers, wondering if their lives were as complex and painful as hers had
been. “But I have no idea where Dr. Larribee is, or even if he’s still alive.” She turned back to Phillip and tried to smile, reminding herself that none of this was his fault. “In fact, Dr. Larribee brought you into this world, too.”

  “I’ll be sure to thank him,” Phillip said with a grin. “Who else?”

  Jess recalled her list. “Bud Wilson. The town sheriff and postmaster. Apparently Miss Taylor and he … well, they were good friends. I don’t know what happened to him either.”

  “What about the other girls?”

  “I’ve spoken with Ginny. She has no idea. Susan is off to England. And P.J.… well, it was just the four of us.”

  Phillip took a bite of his salmon and slowly chewed. “What about people not connected to that place? Who else knew that you were …”He hesitated a bit.

  “Pregnant?” Jess asked. “Only my father knew. And Richard, of course. The boy who …” her words trailed off, as if it were her turn to feel awkward.

  But Phillip nodded. He understood.

  “This is difficult for me,” Jess said. “Thank you for being so kind.”

  His brow wrinkled into a frown. Jess noted that there were far too many frown lines for someone so young. “And that’s it?” he asked. “No one else?”

  She bit her lip. “Well, my ex-husband, of course. And my children. I told the children just before the reunion. And the Hawthornes, Amy’s parents. No one else.”

  He ate more of his lunch, the frown lines growing deeper with every mouthful. “What’s the deal with your ex-husband?”

  “The deal?” Jess asked. A small touch of that too-familiar fur ball tickled her throat.

  Phillip set down his fork. “I’m not trying to pry, Jess. But often when, well, when hostilities erupt in a family, it comes from within. Especially when divorce is involved.”

  He took a long drink of water. “But I’m sure you know that.”

  Allowing her gaze to drift among the other diners again, Jess said, “I’ve been divorced four years, Phillip. There’s been no problem so far—and I have no reason to believe there is now.” She blinked and looked back at him. “I think our best clue is the postmark from Martha’s Vineyard. At least it’s something concrete.”