by Meg O'Brien
He drew back, laughing, and took the pillow, putting it behind her head. Gently pushing a strand of her hair behind an ear, he said, “Actually, I didn’t have that in mind for tonight.”
“Oh?”
His finger paused at her ear, then traced her cheekbone. Finally he took her hand and sighed. “Lacey, sweetheart, I think we should talk.”
She sat up, pulling her hand out of his. Taking another sofa pillow, she held it tight against her. “I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”
Paul tugged at his tie, loosening it. Suddenly he was having trouble breathing. He felt as if he were on a precipice, about to do something that would change his life in ways he might be sorry for later.
“I, uh…I just think we should take this a bit slower. I mean, you know, spend less time together…”
His voice shook when she didn’t respond. “The thing is, Rachel’s home, and since the accident the other night, I think I should spend more time with her.”
He had told Lacey about the accident this morning, on the phone, when he called to say he’d be coming by. She hadn’t expected him on Christmas Day, of course, but it had been agreed upon that he would come here the day after, while Gina and Rachel were hitting the stores for sales. He would bring his present—a gold necklace—to her then, and spend the afternoon with her.
“Of course you need to stay home and take care of Rachel,” Lacey said now. “I understand completely.”
Her eyes, however, filled with tears. “That’s not what this is about, though,” she said in a low, husky voice. “You want to break up with me. You’re saying goodbye.”
“No! No, not at all,” Paul said, though he wondered if that were true. His motivations weren’t completely clear, even to him.
He ran a hand through his hair, which left the cowlick he tried so hard to gel down every morning standing upright. He knew this, and it irritated him. He wanted to feel in charge here today, not like a barefoot boy.
“Lacey,” he said, sounding more accusative than he’d meant to, “what was all that on Christmas Eve? At the church? Why were you there?”
She dried her tears with the back of her hand, then gave him an amazed look. Laughing shortly, she said, “Why was I there? Paul, Sacred Heart is my parish church! I might as well ask you why you and your wife and daughter were there. The truth is, I couldn’t have been more shocked. And you may remember that I left the moment I saw you.”
He had to agree that was true, but added, “I guess I never knew you were Catholic.”
She bristled. “Well, all you had to do was ask.”
He took in her large green eyes, brimming with tears, and heard the wounded tone in her voice. She’s right, he thought. We’ve never talked about our lives outside this apartment. That was a rule they had made. Correction—he had made, as if the less he knew about her, the less she infringed upon his life with Gina and Rachel.
The truth was, he had been a thoughtless, selfish bastard, thinking only of himself.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess my nerves have been on edge.”
Standing, he walked to the window that looked out on the street, three stories down. From here, he could almost see his home near the top of Queen Anne Hill. Gina and Rachel were still out shopping, but he could picture them there later, waiting for him to come home and do all the things Rachel wanted to squeeze in before going back to school. He felt pulled in so many directions it was physically painful.
Turning back, he said, “I really am sorry, Lacey. I haven’t been very thoughtful of you.” He made an attempt. “You go to Midnight Mass every Christmas, then?”
“Just about. It’s the only time I do go to church. No, that’s not quite true. I go on Easter, sometimes. It doesn’t have to be a Catholic church, though. As long as they have palms and lilies and a choir, I’m fine.” She smiled.
Paul returned her smile and felt the tensions leave him. “It was just such a shock, seeing you there. It threw me off balance.”
“I’ll bet. You were afraid I’d come up to you afterward and tell your wife who I was,” she guessed.
“No, of course not.” But he flushed, and he knew that she knew.
Lacey reached for the potato chips and popped one into her mouth, chewing it with her usual gusto for food. Washing it down with a gulp of Pepsi, she said, “And what were you doing there, Mr. Bradley? Churchgoing doesn’t seem like your usual M.O.”
“I…uh, well, Gina and I…” He flushed.
“Oh. Never mind, I get it. You were married there, huh?”
He didn’t answer, and she said, “Now that I think of it, it figures, with her growing up in that neighborhood. So Midnight Mass at Sacred Heart is a family tradition?”
“Yes.”
“And there I was, all of a sudden,” Lacey continued with a grin. “Your worst nightmare.”
“Yes…well, no, I wouldn’t put it that way.”
Standing, she walked over to him and pushed him lightly on both shoulders. “Well, I would. Look, Paul, we’ve talked about this before. You know you don’t have to worry about me. You have to spend holidays with your family, and I understand that. Sure, sometimes it hurts. And I’ll admit that at Midnight Mass I couldn’t stay any longer, once I saw you there with them. I can’t tell you how jealous I felt. But, hey, look at us now. You’re here with me, for heaven’s sake—not them.”
Looking into those beautiful green eyes, the tremulous red lips, he hadn’t the heart to tell her he couldn’t stay. He thought about the fact that he had told Gina and Rachel he was going to the office, and that something urgent had come up.
How many lies had he told since meeting Lacey? How many were still to come before his wife began to sense they were lies and his entire world collapsed around him?
His guilt was nearly overwhelming. But when Lacey put her arms around him, stroking his temple with her fingertips and the hollow at his throat with her tongue, everything else flew out the window. All he could think of then was the way it was going to feel to hold her, to have her warm and naked against him.
There was no way he could ever explain this to anyone, this need for Lacey even as he loved his wife and daughter more than anything else on earth. It was if he were two men, one for Lacey and one for them. He knew that whatever this thing was that had him in its grip, it had to be a sickness. He just didn’t know how to cure it—nor, at this moment, did he honestly want to. He simply wanted it to go on and on, and for nothing bad to ever happen in his life again.
Three days after Christmas, Gina sat with Rachel at the kitchen breakfast bar. They had barely touched their coffee, even though it was a new blend they’d picked up at a café down the street and had looked forward to trying out.
“I’m just saying you’re living in a dream world,” Rachel argued. “You don’t see things the way they really are.”
Gina felt attacked, and responded in kind. “Well, my dear, everyone’s reality is different. That’s something you’ll learn, perhaps, as you grow older—and, hopefully, wiser.”
“Mom, don’t give me that ‘different reality’ thing. I know we all see things from our own perspective. I just think yours is really skewed.”
Gina sighed. “And just what brought all this up?”
Rachel shook her head and didn’t answer.
Gina picked up her coffee cup and took it to the sink, rinsing it out. “If you’re not going to answer me, we can hardly have an intelligent discussion, Rachel.”
And why the hell couldn’t this visit of her daughter’s just have been fun? Why was she trying to stir things up this time?
It reminded her of a period when Rachel was sixteen, and seemed intent on ruining the good spirits of everyone around her. The Spoiler, they had called her then, though not in a mean way, and not to her face. Paul and Gina would lie in bed at night and try to figure out what was bothering their daughter, and why she had to cast a negative light on everything.
Gina frowned. Her daughter was no long
er a teenager. It was time to grow up.
“I’m going upstairs to collect the laundry,” she said, drying her hands.
“The laundry can wait,” Rachel snapped. “Mom, I’m talking about Dad.”
Carefully Gina hung the dish towel on the decorative cherry-wood rod affixed to the upper cabinet, next to the sink. She had put it there the day they moved in, rather than have towels all over the counters, gathering bacteria and looking messy.
Sometimes she thought that she liked a neat house because it was the only control she still had over her life.
“Your father?” she said, keeping her back to Rachel. “I thought we already went through all that.”
“Not quite,” Rachel said. She rubbed her face the same way she’d seen her father do for years when irritated, as if the source of the irritation could be rubbed away. “Mom, what if he’s seeing somebody?”
“Seeing—” Gina’s expression went from an incredulous smile to a glare in a matter of seconds. “If you mean another woman, Rachel, that’s ridiculous. Your father is much too busy to have time for that, in the first place. And in the second place, he just isn’t the type.”
She was hearing her mother’s words, however—All men are the type—and that took some of the force from her tone.
Rachel just looked at her, and after a moment, Gina said, “I’m going upstairs to get the laundry now.”
Rachel stared into her coffee cup, making swirls in the cool, creamy liquid with a finger. Round and round, round and round, down and down…like life, she thought. Round and round…then, at the last dizzying moment, down and down.
Rachel dumped her jacket and purse onto the chair in Victoria Lessing’s office, then asked to use her bathroom. Victoria was on the phone but waved to her, whispering, “Sure. I’ll be off in a minute.”
The psychiatrist’s bathroom was as elegant as her office, both of which had recently been redecorated. There were gold fixtures and an ornate mirror, trimmed in gold.
Looks like an expensive antique, Rachel thought. I wonder if she got it from Dad. Towels were in a soft lilac, the only color in the room except for a five-foot-high plant in the palm family. Now, that—that’s more like Mom’s style.
Standing before the mirror, Rachel thought she looked older than her twenty-one years. Fine lines were already beginning at the corners of her eyes, and there were dark circles that no amount of concealer had been able to cover.
Well, the past few weeks hadn’t been easy. Add to that the accident the other night and the egg-sized lump on her noggin, it was a wonder she hadn’t turned gray.
She washed her hands for a full twenty seconds, hoping to ward off the many germs and new viruses that were all about these days. It seemed she was forever trying to wash them away, and God only knew what she might have picked up in the coffee shop that she and Gina had stopped at on the way here.
Vicki must be worried about germs, too, she thought, because there were plastic disposable gloves in her wastebasket. Rachel smiled. Vicky had beautiful hands that didn’t show her age. She probably wore gloves to bed, too, the way hand models did.
When Rachel walked back into the office, Vicky was still on the phone. “All right, all right,” she was saying. “I’ll let you know as soon as I know anything. Listen, I have to go.”
Victoria hung up the phone and smoothed her blond hair, which hung straight to her shoulders today. Golly, Rachel thought, she looks almost sexy. Idly she wondered who the boyfriend was. There must be one. When she sat at her antique desk like that, she looked so…pure, was the only word that came to Rachel. Like someone in a painting.
Victoria’s personal life, however, had always been a mystery. On one slender finger glittered a diamond and sapphire ring that she had worn ever since Rachel could remember. It wasn’t on her engagement finger, though, and so far as Rachel knew, she had never married.
Rachel took a seat and settled her jacket over her shoulders to ward off the nervous chill she was feeling. Opening up to Victoria wasn’t as bad as trying to communicate with her parents, but even so, it wasn’t something she looked forward to.
She waited as Victoria took a stack of papers from her desk and slipped them into a drawer. Her attention was caught by something new on Victoria’s desk—a bronze statue of a frog with a golden coin on its tongue. The tongue, too, was made of gold.
“Did you get that for Christmas?” Rachel asked.
Victoria’s face turned pink. “Yes. From a friend. It’s for good luck—especially with money.”
“Do you need good luck with money?” Rachel wondered. “Sorry. That wasn’t very polite, was it?”
“I don’t mind,” Victoria said. “And no, I guess I don’t really need good luck with that. I just like frogs.” She smiled. “This one may be a bit of an overkill, but I must say I love him.”
They went through the preliminaries, the “how are you?” and “how was your Christmas?” exchanges. As Victoria poured tea, she said, “You mentioned that you and your parents were in an accident on Christmas Eve. How are they now? And how are you?”
“My mom still hurts, but Dad’s okay. I look worse than I feel.”
She stared out the window. The rain was coming down in sheets now, blotting out the view. The entire world seemed gray. Flat, with no meaning. Even the EMP—the Experience Music Project building, so oddly futuristic and blazing with color—had lost its glow.
When Victoria took a seat behind her desk again, Rachel said, frowning, “I wish I had a golden tongue.”
“And why would that be?” Victoria asked.
“I still can’t seem to get through to my parents. I think they’re both in denial.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“Well, you know what I mean. There’s something wrong, and they just won’t talk about it. They won’t talk about Angela, either, and what happened back then. It’s like that was another whole life, and somebody else lived it. If it wasn’t for my grandmother…”
“What about your grandmother?” Victoria asked.
“Well, she’s at least willing to tell me stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“You know. Like the way Daddy always liked Angela best.”
“Roberta told you that?” Victoria’s blue eyes widened slightly.
“Well, no, I mean I’m the one who actually brought it up. Gamma just talked with me about it. Which is more than my mother and father ever would.”
“What did Roberta say about your father always liking Angela best?” Victoria asked.
Rachel shrugged. “She said parents and children are like anyone else. Like friends, you know, and sometimes you just click with one person more than another. She said my dad always loved me, though.”
Rachel paused, her gaze drifting away from Victoria’s. “Do you think that’s true?”
“Are you saying you don’t believe it?” Victoria countered.
“I don’t know. I guess I’ve always wondered.”
“Have you ever talked to your father about this?”
“I tried talking to him, but he denies it. I remember once, after Angela was gone, I got mad and said he’d never loved me as much as her.”
“And how did he respond to that?”
“He didn’t. Didn’t say anything, I mean. He—he just started to cry.”
Tears sprang to Rachel’s eyes. Victoria gave her a moment, and said, “What did you do then, Rachel?”
Rachel made an effort to collect herself, wiping the tears away with a tissue she took from a box on Victoria’s desk, and squaring her shoulders. “There wasn’t much I could do,” she said. “He walked out of the room.”
Her eyes flashed with a trace of anger. “He still does that. Walks out of the room when I try to talk to him about Angela.”
There was a brief silence before Victoria said, “You seem to be asking a lot of questions about your sister these days. Is that only because of the time you thought you saw her at school? Or is there some
thing else?”
Rachel shrugged. “I guess maybe I’m thinking about her more because I thought I saw her. At first I was shocked, and then for a minute I wanted to run up and hug her. But she disappeared, and I realized it couldn’t have been her. Like, I just made it all up in my mind because I’d been wanting to see her, or something.” She met Victoria’s eyes. “You were probably right about that.”
“So you were wanting to see her?”
Rachel hesitated. “I’m not sure. I keep asking myself, ‘What would she be like, now? Did she get adopted again? Did she get over the problem she had? Was there even any cure for it back then? Is there now?’ Nobody ever told me any of that.” The note of anger in her voice returned.
“Well, you were only five when Angela left,” Victoria said. “We all thought it would be best to keep it simple for you.”
“Simple!” Rachel’s voice rose. “So you told me my sister was sick and had to go away for a while? Didn’t any of you realize that I thought she was coming back?”
“Rachel, we went through all of this as you grew older,” Victoria said calmly. “We sat here in this very room when you were ten, twelve, fourteen, and we talked about it. Many times.”
“Well, maybe I didn’t understand what you said back then. Anyway, I don’t remember what you told me about it.”
“I told you we were all just doing our best to protect you,” Victoria said. “And that we tried to do what was best for Angela, as well.”
She sat forward and folded her hands on her desk. “Rachel, it was a very difficult time. I had worked with Angela an entire year before that night, and even I didn’t suspect she would ever attack you that way. I honestly thought she was getting better.”
Rachel nodded. “I remember. You said that kids like her can be charming, and that they can fool everyone into thinking they like them, when they don’t really have any normal feelings at all.”
“Because they never had a chance to bond with anyone, like a mother,” Victoria confirmed.
“But Angela and I were taken care of pretty well at Saint Sympatica’s, weren’t we? I mean, it wasn’t like some of those Romanian orphanages you hear about, where the babies were neglected from the time they were born.”
