Hell to Pay

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Okay. So he’s only human. She does the same thing herself. Who doesn’t?

  Still . . .

  Somewhere in the back of her mind, there’s always a shred of a reminder that her husband once had anger issues so severe that twice he’d nearly taken a life with his bare hands.

  La La Montgomery’s life.

  Both times, in fact.

  The first time, they were both children—Jeremy newly adopted out of foster care and adjusting to life with the Cavalons. The incident happened at the country club where he was taking junior golf lessons. Apparently, La La—a spoiled Daddy’s girl—was teasing Jeremy, and he snapped, swinging his club at her, striking her in the face and head.

  La La was rushed to the hospital, stabilized, and intubated—a medical necessity that helped save her life, but tragically, her voice would never be the same. Once a gifted vocalist who had dreamed of growing up to be a star, little La La would never sing again. Thankfully, reconstructive surgery gave her a nose, cheekbones, a jaw. A whole new face—just as Jeremy bought himself a new face after he fled California, not long before he found his way back into La La’s world. Into her arms. Her bed . . .

  That’s ancient history, Lucy reminds herself. She can’t bear to think of the two of them together any more than she can bear to think about the way it ended—with Jeremy inflicting an attack that was strikingly similar to the first one.

  But that was strictly a heroic effort to save his sister’s life after La La went crazy and tried to kill them both.

  Crazy—now there’s a loaded word.

  There are so many ways—so many reasons—a person can become lost in the haze of madness. He can inherit mental illness from a family member, as Garvey Quinn reportedly did from his grandmother. He—she—can suffer damage to the frontal lobe of the brain, as La La Montgomery probably did when Jeremy struck her with the golf club thirty years ago. A person can lose touch with reality in the wake of a trauma, like poor Elsa Cavalon, years ago after Jeremy was kidnapped. Or a person can self-medicate to take away the pain and get caught up in the madness of addiction, like—

  No. Don’t think about her. That was just too awful.

  Really, it’s miraculous that anyone in Lucy’s world has managed to stay sane in the wake of all that’s happened to them over the years.

  “How can one family survive so much pain?” Lucy’s friend Robyn once asked her.

  She just shrugged and said, “Look at the Kennedys.”

  “That’s your answer? ‘Look at the Kennedys’? C’mon, Lucy.”

  “What do you want me to say? What do you want me to do—go around wallowing in misery?”

  “You have every right to wallow. Trust me, if I were you, I’d be wallowing. Most people would.”

  Maybe. But Lucy doesn’t wallow. She just tries not to dwell on it. Any of it. So much pain . . .

  Right now, back to his sweet, gentle self, Jeremy jangles his key chain. “Listen, the U-Haul is double-parked, and I need to get it back up to White Plains before rush hour. Anyway, I don’t want to bug Ryan—he’s got enough going on right now between the new job and the new girlfriend.”

  Lucy’s brother has fallen head over heels in love—pretty much overnight.

  “I really think she’s The One,” he told Lucy.

  “How can you say that about someone you’ve only known for a few weeks, Ry?” she asked, worried that Ryan, who had never been in a serious relationship, was jumping into this one too quickly and headed for heartbreak.

  “Well, we all can’t be lucky enough to fall in love with someone we’ve known forever, the way you did.”

  “I haven’t known Jeremy forever.”

  “You met him when you were fourteen, so—”

  “I was fifteen.”

  “Sorry, you’re right. That makes a huge difference.”

  Lucy rolled her eyes, feeling as though she and Ryan were kids again, bickering about some stupid thing that didn’t even matter.

  But this does matter. Not only is Ryan finally involved with someone, but he hasn’t introduced her to the family yet.

  “Thanks, but no thanks,” Ryan said when he turned down Lucy’s invitation to bring his girlfriend over for dinner. “Maybe over the holidays.”

  “It’ll just be me and you and Jeremy on Christmas Eve this year,” she reminded him.

  It’s been her tradition to host a seafood dinner for her family before they all go to midnight Mass. But right after Thanksgiving, her mother and stepfather—Sam was newly retired—headed to a condo in Florida. They’re planning to stay through January. Lucy’s sister, Sadie, and Sam’s son, Max, both away at college, will be joining them there for the holidays.

  It’s Lucy’s first Christmas apart from them all, though she and Jeremy will, as always, drive to New England to spend Christmas Day with his parents and Renny. And then there’s Ryan . . .

  “You are planning to come here on Christmas Eve, right?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “What do you mean?” It’s bad enough that the rest of her family has bailed on the holiday this year. “I’m inviting both you and Phoenix,” she said, “if that’s what this is about.”

  “Thanks. I’ll have to let you know.”

  Lucy figures Ryan must be putting off the introduction to his girlfriend because he thinks Lucy will find fault with her.

  “Well, I’m sure you will,” Jeremy said mildly, when she mentioned that theory to him. “I mean, you already had an issue with her name.”

  “Phoenix? All I said was ‘What kind of name is that?’ ”

  “Okay. But let’s face it, you can be a little hard on people—and so can your mom and Sadie.”

  “It’s not that we’re hard on people. We’re just slow to trust anyone new. Can you blame us?”

  Of course he can’t—he’s the same way. After what they’ve been through—all of them, including Jeremy—it’s a miracle they’ve managed to live relatively normal lives over the past decade and a half.

  When Lucy was fourteen, her father, Nick, left her mother for another woman. Then he became entangled in a lethal web spun by politician Garvey Quinn, who engineered the murders of Nick Walsh and his mistress, and the abduction of Lucy and her siblings. Fortunately, they were quickly rescued.

  Not so for Jeremy, whose fateful connection to Garvey Quinn resulted in his own kidnapping as a child. He was left for dead overseas, “rescued” by a pedophile, and kept isolated in California until he was twenty-one. That was when the man Jeremy knew as “Papa” died, and he found his way home at last.

  No—not home. First to La La Montgomery, the victim of his childhood attack. She forgave him, seduced him, then obsessively began hunting down anyone she believed had wronged Jeremy in childhood, blaming them all for his act of violence that had destroyed her vocal cords.

  Lucy met him shortly afterward, as he was coming to terms with finding that he had not just one family, but two: the Cavalons and the Quinns.

  Lucy never thinks of the latter without a pang of regret. The Quinns, more than anyone else, lived a charmed life before Garvey’s unthinkable crimes came to light. And look what happened to them afterward, one by one . . .

  There but for the grace of God, Lucy thinks whenever Marin Quinn and her daughters, Caroline and Annie, come to mind.

  Lucy met the girls only once, years ago. It was Mom’s brilliant idea that they should all get together for a mother-daughter lunch in Manhattan: Lauren with Lucy and Sadie, Marin with Caroline and Annie, and Elsa with Renny.

  “Why doesn’t Ryan have to go?” Lucy remembers grumbling when she found out about it. That was during one of her adolescent rebellious stages—which, by contrast to what Mom later went through with Sadie, weren’t very rebellious at all.

  “Ryan would feel out of place with all those girls. Sam is taking him fi
shing.”

  That was a disaster, as it turned out. Fishing was something Ryan and Dad used to do together. He resented his mother’s then-boyfriend trying to take his father’s place, and he let Sam know it.

  The girls’ lunch was also pretty much a disaster. Mom had reserved a tatami—one of those small private dining rooms—at a Japanese restaurant. That didn’t go over well with Renny, who was claustrophobic. She melted down in a panic attack, and they had to leave early. Sadie wanted to follow her lead, but Mom insisted that they stay.

  Annie Quinn, the younger of the two sisters, was sweet and shy—and allergic to pretty much everything on the menu. She was overweight, and self-conscious about that, Lucy could tell. Later, Marin told Mom that food was Annie’s drug of choice.

  Famous last words, Lucy would think years later, in retrospect.

  And then there was Caroline.

  Lucy expected to relate to her in a fellow-big-sister way, but she was a difficult person to know—much less like.

  A spoiled Daddy’s girl who had been spectacularly deserted by her father—though Garvey would never have left her willingly—Caroline was alternately prickly and withdrawn that day at lunch. It was obvious that she blamed her mother for what had happened to them—which made little sense to Lucy—but it was Caroline’s contempt toward her younger sister that Lucy found hardest to take.

  By then, thanks to the press, she—along with everyone else in the world—knew that Annie had been conceived as a savior sibling for her critically ill sister, but rejected by Garvey when in utero testing showed she wasn’t a match.

  Caroline had grown up mirroring her father’s indifference toward Annie, and it turned into blatant resentment after their lives fell apart.

  Fiercely protective of her own younger siblings, Lucy tried to give Caroline the benefit of the doubt. Who knew—maybe she’d have behaved the same way in Caroline’s shoes. She had been through so much . . .

  But by the time that disastrous lunch date was over, Lucy knew she didn’t want to spend any more time with Caroline Quinn. Luckily, Mom was of the same mindset. And anyway, both Quinn girls went away to boarding school that fall, and after that, to distant colleges. They rarely came home. Who could blame them?

  Marin still came around, though, to visit the Walshes. With Jeremy.

  Lucy had a tender spot for Jeremy, as did her mother, and he gradually became a fixture in their household. Six years older than Lucy, darkly handsome with haunted eyes, he had a lot of pain to work through—but then, so did she.

  He was like a big brother as she navigated her high school years. They were both in therapy, trying to work through the past—though Jeremy’s issues were far more complex than her own.

  They stayed in touch by e-mail and phone when they simultaneously attended college—a hundred and fifty miles apart, with different majors and circles of friends. Already in his mid-twenties by then, Jeremy stayed in New York, tending to his mother, attending Hunter College, earning undergrad and graduate degrees in social work.

  Lucy went to Rensselaer Polytech and stayed there through graduate school, emerging with a master’s in computer science, summa cum laude. She returned to the city to start working, and somewhere along the way, realized she had fallen in love with Jeremy.

  Now, he pauses on his way to the door to rest a hand on her belly. “How are you feeling, Goose?”

  Goose: his longtime nickname for her, evolved from the distressingly unromantic—at least, in her teenage opinion—Lucy Goosey.

  But it grew on her—just as Jeremy did.

  “I’m feeling great,” she tells him.

  “I thought you were nauseous.”

  “I am—I feel like I could vomit any second.” Though her morning sickness had subsided after the first trimester, she’s been feeling queasy again lately.

  Jeremy raises an eyebrow. “Wow, vomit. That is great.”

  “It’s a good sign. It means the pregnancy is going strong.”

  Jeremy, who had cried with her when she started spotting last time—and the time before—and held her hand when the doctor confirmed both miscarriages, says nothing, just kisses her on the cheek.

  “You’re sweet,” she tells him, and he wraps her in his arms and nuzzles her neck.

  “How about if we go christen our new bedroom?”

  “Right now? I’m nauseous, and you’re in the middle of unloading a truck, remember?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Later, though. Tonight.”

  “Maybe, if I can stay awake long enough.”

  “I’ve got a brilliant idea—why don’t you take a nap? I’ll leave the door to the hall propped open while I go down for another load so you don’t have to get up and let me in.”

  She grins. “A nap doesn’t guarantee I’ll be able to stay awake later.”

  “Yeah, well, no nap pretty much guarantees you won’t, so . . . you just go rest and nest, Goose Girl.” He disappears into the hall.

  Lucy gladly leaves the circular foyer, with its crystal chandelier, seventeenth-century paintings, wall-sized gilt-framed mirror, and French Classical Baroque chairs.

  The large oval living room, too, looks more like a palace than a starter home, cluttered with Jeremy’s late grandmother’s gilt and marble Louis XIV furniture, velvet upholstery, and tasseled draperies.

  What Lucy wouldn’t give to swap out the fancy furniture for some shabby-chic Pottery Barn stuff.

  But the move isn’t permanent. Even if they were in love with the sprawling, old-fashioned place—which they are not—they’d never be able to afford it.

  Made up of several flats that were combined over the years as the original tenants moved out, this is one of the largest apartments in the historic Ansonia, and worth a fortune. Elsa would probably already have it on the market, had her mother’s sudden death not coincided with Lucy and Jeremy unexpectedly finding themselves evicted from their Westchester duplex.

  The timing couldn’t have been worse—or better, depending on how one looks at it.

  Certainly, Sylvie’s death was disturbing. She hadn’t been getting any younger, but she was hardly a frail old lady, either. No one expected her to drop dead out of the blue, the victim of a tragic accidental fall and drowning in her own bathtub.

  In one of life’s cosmic coincidences, it happened just as Lucy and Jeremy learned they’d have to move. While they’re not thrilled about moving into the apartment where poor old Sylvie Durand died in a tragic fall, this is the least complicated solution to their immediate housing dilemma. The place is all theirs, rent-free—for the time being, anyway.

  Lucy just wishes she knew why Carl Soto had kicked them out of their apartment in the first place. Unfortunately, the lease revealed that he was well within his rights as a landlord, and he had no legal obligation to explain, though of course Jeremy left him a couple of messages about it. He didn’t bother to return the calls. Coward.

  Well, he’d better return their security deposit now that they’re out. They’re counting on that money to help pay for extra expenses they’ve had the last few weeks: the truck rental, Christmas, doctor visit co-pays and prenatal vitamins, the flowers and a decent black suit for Jeremy for his grandmother’s funeral . . .

  “I have a suit,” he’d said, as Lucy stood beside him in front of his open closet door the morning of the wake, shaking her head.

  “It’s old and gray and completely out of style. Sylvie would roll over in her grave if you wore that to her funeral.”

  They both smiled at that, knowing it was true, and he agreed to get something nice.

  Lucy plops down on the couch—as much as one can “plop” onto a Louis XIV sofa—and reaches for the cup of tea with lemon that waits atop a coaster on the marble-topped coffee table.

  Situated on a far-flung wing of the H-shaped building, this place is so still compared to their former second floor
apartment on a busy Westchester thoroughfare. There are plenty of windows—many embellished by the building’s trademark wrought-iron Juliet balconies beyond the glass. And yet, high above Broadway, insulated by century-old stone and plaster, these rooms are known as being virtually soundproof. Even with the door open, there’s not a hint of sound from the building’s carpeted corridors.

  Lulled by the silence, Lucy leans her head back with a yawn.

  Is it a good sign that she’s even more tired now than she was in past pregnancies? Does it, like the morning sickness, mean the hormones are stronger this time around?

  Oh, come on—who isn’t tired in the middle of a major move?

  She still can’t quite believe that they’re living in the cold, impersonal city, the last place she really wanted to start a family. Having grown up in a suburban house with a big backyard and neighbors and friends she’d known all her life, she wants the same thing for her own child.

  But it makes sense to eliminate the long commute, and to live close to Dr. Courmier’s office—and to New York–Presbyterian Hospital, where she’ll be delivering the baby if all goes well. She and Jeremy are already enrolled in a childbirth preparation class there after the holidays.

  Plus, as long as they can live here rent-free for a while, they’ll be that much closer to saving a down payment on their future house in the suburbs.

  That’s what they both want: picket fence and all. A normal life, the kind Lucy had until she turned fourteen and her father moved out. The kind Jeremy experienced fleetingly with Elsa and Brett before he was snatched away.

  Normal life. You can strive for it, you can actually achieve it, but even then, there are no guarantees.

  Lucy closes her eyes. The baby gives her stomach a hard kick, and she smiles.

  Please, please, please God . . . let this baby be born . . .

  Suddenly, the silence is broken by a sound in the front hall.

  “Wow,” Lucy calls out, “that was quick!”

  No reply.

  She must have been mistaken. Or dreaming—had she fallen asleep?

  Maybe. It’s so peaceful here.