One More Time

by Deborah Cooke

  “What about your boyfriend?”

  “Oh, he left at the first sign of trouble.” Beverly shook her head. “He had a great deal in common with my father. We had a lot of fun together, but he has probably never yet had a job of any kind.”

  “I thought you loved him.”

  “So did I, until I realized I’d have to pursue him and live in much less luxurious circumstances. The governess explained it all to me to in very stern terms. Maybe she was making up for all those years in which no one listened to her: I had no choice but to listen and heed her advice and she knew it.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “She fainted every time I tried to talk to her about it. I don’t think that one of her daughters being pregnant out of wedlock was fun, so she refused to have anything to do with it.”

  Leslie eased her stool closer. “It must have been very frightening for you.”

  “Well, it could have been worse than it was. You see, there was an ambitious young man who had started to call on me. I hadn’t thought that he was very amusing, because he was serious and so driven, but in this crisis, he began to be more appealing to me. He was solid and reliable. He was stern and disciplined. He wasn’t much fun, but it seemed to me then that maybe we had had too much fun growing up and weren’t very aware of our responsibilities as a result. He was very aware of his responsibilities.”

  “Robert Coxwell.”

  “The very same. But here was my mistake: I didn’t want to tell him the truth, in case he took it badly or held it against me. He struck me as the kind of person who would have firm ideas of what a woman should be like and what she should do, and although I admired that, I didn’t want to fall short of the measure. So, I never told him and we were married quickly—impulsively, he thought, but I wanted to get down the aisle before I started to show—and we had one of the largest premature babies ever born in Massachusetts.”

  Leslie laughed. “You had to subtract a couple of months from your pregnancy to make it sound legitimate.”

  “And James did not play along. How many babies arrive two months early, but weigh seven and a half pounds?” Beverly laughed and Leslie joined her. “Mercifully, Robert had no sisters and his mother had already passed away. His only source of information about matters feminine was me, and I lied.” She shook her head and met Leslie’s gaze. “We never met as equals. Part of it was the times and the expectations people had of marriage—”

  “And gender roles,” Leslie contributed.

  “But a lot of it was that lie. That combined with my own sense that Robert was stern and tough, the way a father should be, to put our relationship on an uneven footing. I always felt like the naughty little girl, waiting for him to find out just how I’d disappointed him. I looked for the father I never had in my husband, and that, plus my lie, doomed our marriage to be less than it could have been.”

  “You can’t take all the blame yourself. Robert’s nature was not exactly nurturing.”

  “More so than you might imagine.” Beverly smiled sadly and traced an imaginary line on the counter around the shampoo bottle. “I knew him before his defenses were so formidable. I had seen some of his vulnerabilities, so he was more likely to show his weakness to me than to anyone else. That doesn’t mean that he did so often, but he did do it once in a while, usually when he had no choice.” Beverly looked up. “Those moments kept me there, and those moments are the ones assaulting me now.” Her tears welled and she averted her gaze.

  Leslie studied the shampoo bottle, for lack of a better place to look. “You need this shampoo because you’re coloring your hair brown again.”

  “Yes,” Beverly said curtly.

  It seemed a good time for a compliment. “You look so much younger than with it gray. I never did understand why you let it go silver the last couple of years.”

  Beverly gave her a wry glance. “Well, if I tell you that Robert preferred it brown, that might give you an idea.”

  “You stopped coloring it when you left him?”

  Beverly nodded. “Yes. I didn’t want my appearance to be shaped by his expectations, and I was tired of looking like the young trophy wife I surely had been.” She shook her head and pushed the bottle across the counter. “But, you know, he was right. It does look better this color. I didn’t like looking like the grandmother I know I am.”

  “So, you colored it back.”

  “And I was dreading the first time he saw it, because I knew he would gloat that I had agreed with him. I knew he would say I had come to my senses or something equally infuriating.” She glanced up sharply. “But now he’ll never know. He never did see it. He never did have a chance to remind me that he was right.”

  Leslie didn’t know what to say to that. Whatever she said would sound insensitive, because even though she appreciated that Beverly had fond memories of Robert, it was impossible for her to think kindly of the man who had so cruelly arranged his death for Matt to discover. She turned the shampoo bottle on the counter and said nothing.

  Beverly clearly her throat and spoke lightly. “Unless, of course, we both end up in the same camp in the afterlife. Although I doubt that will happen.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, Robert always aimed to achieve the best and so he’s probably hoping to make the cut for heaven.” Beverly looked up with a smile. “I’m personally planning on hell, as it sounds like more fun. That’s where the sherry will be, after all. So, he’ll never know.”

  “You’re forgetting your doctrine,” Leslie felt obliged to point out. “Suicide is a mortal sin. In the middle ages, suicides couldn’t even be buried in the hallowed ground of the churchyard. They were buried at crossroads, because people believed that would keep the corpses in their graves.”

  “I didn’t need to know that.”

  “Sorry. Occupational hazard.” Leslie touched Beverly’s hand. “I think you need to shoot for heaven, and I think you can get there from here.”

  “No sherry for all of eternity isn’t much incentive,” Beverly said with mock solemnity. “But who knows? Maybe it doesn’t even taste good to souls who have left their bodies behind.” She tapped her chin, then stood up. “That reminds me. I’d better check with the church about the arrangements. Wouldn’t it be embarrassing if Robert couldn’t be buried in the family plot?”

  “I don’t think they do that any more, if indeed it was done consistently in the first place.”

  “I think I want to check,” Beverly said firmly, so firmly that Leslie suspected her mother-in-law wanted something concrete to do.

  She could relate to that. Unfortunately, there was no lack of papers to mark, the rest of the house could use a cleaning, and there was dinner to be made. She wondered how Annette was doing with her homework and hoped desperately that she wasn’t having trouble with algebra again.

  Leslie put the trash outside, then strode toward Annette’s room with purpose. Maybe she was destined to get better at math now, too.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Matt was sleeping like a corpse. The shrill ring of the telephone made him leap, made his dreams change into something horrifying.

  It was his father on the phone.

  It was his father summoning him.

  It was his father, loading his gun.

  Matt snatched at the phone. “I won’t come!” he shouted.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” a polite voice said. “I’ve connected to the wrong room. Excuse me, sir.”

  Matt sat there, clutching the receiver, sweat running down his back as the line went dead.

  He was in his father’s study at Rosemount. He could see his father at his desk, putting the receiver back in the cradle, straightening his dress uniform. Robert Coxwell opened the drawer of his desk and removed his service revolver. He checked that it was loaded, he brushed a speck from the metal, he glanced around the room one last time.

  He put the gun in his mouth, looked straight at Matt and pulled the trigger.

  “No!” Matt screamed
, leaping from his bed. The telephone cord wasn’t long enough and the phone fell from the nightstand with a jingle. The blankets were knotted around Matt’s ankles and the hotel room was empty.

  He blinked and looked around himself in a panic.

  There were no books, no desk, no gun, and certainly there was no sign of his father. His heart was racing, he was breathing hard and his hands were shaking. Beyond the window, the lights of New Orleans twinkled in the darkness, looking so unfamiliar and alien that for a moment he wasn’t sure where he was.

  Then it all came back to him.

  He peered in all the corners of the room, of the closet, of the bathroom, seeking some clue that things had happened as he had witnessed them.

  But there was nothing. He was alone.

  Alone with his memories.

  Matt licked his lips and shoved a hand through his hair. He was going crazy. There was no doubt about it.

  And there was only one person with whom he could share such an intimate and terrifying truth. He took a deep breath, sat on the side of the bed and dialed home.

  * * *

  The phone rang in the wee hours of Sunday night, startling Leslie out of a fitful sleep. “Hello?”

  “Leslie!” It was Matt. He exhaled her name like a benediction, something that would have been more encouraging if he hadn’t been where he was.

  She sat up and turned on the light. “Matt, what’s the matter? Where are you?”

  “Just talk to me.”

  “But what’s going on? But…”

  “Leslie! Talk to me!” His voice faltered, as if he was at a loss for words, which was not typical of Matt. “Just, um, tell me what you did today.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “More or less.” He half-laughed. “Come on, talk to me. Please.”

  “It’s two-thirty in the morning. You must know that.”

  “Oh? Oh, yeah, it is. Well, there’s no time like the present, is there?”

  Leslie nibbled on the bottom lip, uncertain how to continue this bizarre conversation. “Are you drunk?” she asked quietly.

  “No.” Matt took a ragged breath. “Maybe that’s the problem.”

  The fact that he tried to make a joke reassured Leslie. “So, what is the problem?” she asked in her best Crabcake Coxwell voice. “Why are you calling in the middle of the night to chat?”

  “Because, um, I was thinking of you…”

  “Liar.” Leslie whispered the single word and it stopped Matt cold for a heartbeat.

  “No, that’s not a lie,” he said angrily, as if he was prepared to fight about it. “I was thinking of you and that is why I called you. It’s that simple.”

  Leslie thought about where he was and what he might have been doing at this hour of the night and had a funny feeling that he’d thought of her because he’d just done the horizontal boogie with Sharan and felt guilty. It wasn’t the most inspiring thought she could have had, but once she’d had it, it was tough to shake.

  She folded her arms across her chest, and reminded herself that she wasn’t going to flinch from the truth anymore. “Why?”

  “What do you mean?” His voice sounded steady again.

  “Why were you thinking of me? What could possibly have made you think of me in the middle of the night?”

  There was a pause, as if he wasn’t sure what to tell her, though Leslie thought that the truth should have been easier for Mr. Honesty to cough up.

  Maybe it was a question of being overheard. Or of worrying about waking someone up. Sharan, surely, was snoozing contently beside him, exhausted from multiple spectacular orgasms.

  Leslie gritted her teeth.

  “Okay, here’s what happened.” Matt’s voice lowered. “I don’t know how to say this, but that doesn’t make it any less true. I think I’m cracking up. I think I’m going crazy.”

  “Why?”

  “The phone rang tonight: it was a wrong number, but it woke me up.” He was sounding agitated again and Leslie didn’t want to interrupt his story to ask why Sharan hadn’t answered the phone. “Or at least it woke me up enough that it started a dream. Or a nightmare. I thought it was that night again, I thought my father was calling.” He swallowed audibly. “I saw my father with the phone in his study, putting the receiver back into the cradle, reaching for his service revolver…”

  “Matt, you need to get help,” Leslie interrupted him crisply, knowing that this was not a path of recollection he should go down tonight. He was too shaken for this to be anything else than the truth and she wanted to help him help himself. “The Chief of Police was right. You can’t resolve this alone.”

  “I know.” He took another one of those uneven breaths and her heart wrenched a little. “That’s why I called you. I understand now that I need to go for counseling. I need to talk to a professional about this, but I don’t know who to call.”

  “So, you’re asking me.”

  “Well, yes.”

  Leslie bristled. “And I’m such a good secretary. Is that why you called me? So, I can do your paperwork and manage your appointments?”

  “No, I trust you…” Matt protested, but Leslie wasn’t interested in any excuses that he might make.

  “You trust me to always facilitate everything. Well, it’s very sweet to find myself useful after all our years together. Nice to know that being organized is such an asset. Let me get this straight: you’re living with your girlfriend, having sex with your girlfriend, but you’re calling your estranged wife to manage your appointments.” She lowered her voice and growled. “Don’t even think about sending your laundry home.”

  “I’m going to come home,” he said, with a resolve that surprised Leslie for a heartbeat.

  Then she realized the subtext of what he was saying, and knew that she had to make her own expectations clear. “You may be coming back to Massachusetts,” she said sternly. “And it may be that we’ll see each other again. But the location of your home is a matter of dispute.”

  “But…”

  “You left, Matt. You left and you hurt me and you hurt Annette and you cast everything into doubt. You can’t hurt me like that again,” she concluded, knowing as the words passed her lips that they were not true. He could hurt her just as badly, but only if she allowed him to do so. “I won’t let you do it.”

  There was silence on the line, a silence that Leslie knew was born of shock. He hadn’t expected her to say no to him.

  “Fair enough,” he finally said, his words soft. “I’ll call the Chief for a reference myself.”

  It was that single final click, the click that maybe signified that he was slipping away from her forever, that broke Leslie. She closed her eyes and bowed her head and let her tears roll. She listened to the dial tone, felt her stomach roil, and reminded herself that she had done the right thing.

  Why did the right thing always have to be so hard to do?

  Why did love have to hurt so much?

  Love was based on respect, and one couldn’t exist without the other. Leslie knew that, although it hurt like hell to so clearly state the stakes. That must be why she had started to cry.

  It certainly was why she couldn’t stop. She hung up the phone and nestled lower in her bed, trying to muffle the sound of her tears so she wouldn’t have to explain herself to either of the other women in the house.

  Although she knew she could have used a hug.

  Her door was nudged open and two shadows slipped into the room. With a single bound, Champagne was on the bed, cuddling up beside Leslie, breaking several household rules but so warm and reassuring that Leslie couldn’t evict her. Champagne licked Leslie’s fingers, perhaps liking the salt from the tears, then nestled closer. She was warm and soft and very reassuring.

  When she buried her fingers in the dog’s warm fur, Caviar leaped up on the other side. The two dogs settled in to sleep, pressed against her like sentinels.

  Or warm teddy bears.

  * * *

  On Monday morning,
Leslie went for a Victoria’s Secret bra in soft blue, an underwire special that promised extra lift. She needed a lift like nobody’s business.

  There was no way that she was up for that fuchsia sweater and lipstick on this particular Monday, though Annette expressed disappointment over that on the way to school.

  She got to her office without incident and checked her email. There was a message from someone outside the university, someone named Graham Mulvaney.

  Leslie considered the message for a moment. The only Graham Mulvaney that she knew was the student who had failed her medieval history survey class.

  Twice.

  It seemed unlikely that this message would contain a ray of sunshine. She opened it with some trepidation, and had to read it twice in her shock.

  Dear Dr. Coxwell;

  You probably don’t remember me, but I failed your excellent medieval history survey course twice, once in 1993 and subsequently in 1994. You might be expecting this to be a letter bomb, but the truth is that your high standards inspired me to demand more of myself. I had never failed a course before, but neither had I ever really tried to excel. I graduated summa cum laude as a result of the lesson I learned from you and probably should have thanked you sooner.

  Since graduation, I have worked as a headhunter, with a specialty in recruiting post-secondary educators for positions at established universities and colleges. I’m contacting you now because a very interesting position has become available at a high profile university close to Boston. They are seeking to establish a medieval studies department that will integrate specialties from across the university. Many professors will be cross-appointed, and their main interest is in finding a candidate to pull everything together. The successful candidate will not only demand excellence from students, but would be capable of guiding such a department—with a considerable administrative staff—and actively pursue his or her own research in order to raise the university’s profile in this area. There would undoubtedly be some travel to conferences involved.