Hale's Point

by Patricia Ryan

  “Did your father know how you were living?”

  “He was off doing his biker thing, he didn’t have a clue. I didn’t even know what he looked like till… till I was nine.”

  “He came back?”

  “He had to.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “I came home from school one day… it was early May, and I was so happy, ‘cause it was the first really warm day of the year. And the first thing I noticed when I walked into the trailer was this… this smell. I tried to wake up Mom to ask her what the smell was. I rolled her over, and—” Her voice caught in her throat, and her eyes burned with sudden tears. Tucker’s eyes were enormous, his face ashen. She looked toward the window again, at the rivulets meandering down the glass.

  She swallowed hard and continued. “Her face—” She swallowed again. There were some things she couldn’t bring herself to relive. “The coroner said she’d been dead for four or five hours.”

  Hot tears spilled down her cheeks, and she covered her face with her hands and drew her knees up. She felt him shift position on the couch, and then he was beside her and around her, taking her in his arms, murmuring, “Shh, that’s all right.” He dried her tears with the hem of his T-shirt. She nestled into him, letting him stroke her hair and back until she felt limp.

  “She did it on purpose,” Harley said. “Barbiturates and alcohol. There was no note, but every single one of her pill bottles was empty. They were scattered on the floor around her, and she was lying on top of a half-full bottle of Southern Comfort.”

  She glanced up at him; he looked stricken. Laying her head against his chest again, she continued. “They sent me to a foster home, and then a couple of months later my father showed up—God knows how they found him—and threw me on the back of his Harley and took off with me. I spent ten months with him, on the road.”

  He absently stroked the nape of her neck. “You didn’t go to school?”

  “No, and that was the worst part of it. I loved school. My father was a stranger to me, and his friends scared me. People—regular people in towns we would go to—used to look at me, all dirty and ragged, and you could see it in their eyes, the pity and disgust. I thought it couldn’t get any worse, and then I realized how he was supporting us. He was dealing grass and pills out of the saddlebags on the Harley. Not only was he a criminal, he was trafficking in the stuff that had killed my mother. I was horrified. Inside I was just a normal little kid, and I wanted my life to be normal. I’d look at other little kids, kids who had regular families and lived in houses, and I’d feel overwhelmed with envy. Despair, too, because I knew that kind of life would never happen for me—at least not until I was a grown-up and could make it happen.”

  He nodded again. Quietly he said, “Things do have a way of falling into place.” He kissed the top of her head.

  “Anyway, eventually my father was busted. It happened in Fort Worth, Texas, and they threw the book at him. He went to jail, and I went from one foster home to another. I won’t bore you with the details. It was not a pleasant adolescence.”

  “How did you turn things around? How did you end up at Columbia?”

  “Sheer force of will and about a hundred part-time jobs, plus the odd scholarship. I managed.”

  “Good for you. You should feel very proud of yourself. Whatever happened to your father?”

  “Two weeks after he got out of jail, he was killed in a knife fight outside a bar in Oakland, California.” He shook his head. “R.H. doesn’t look half-bad by comparison, does he?”

  He gave a long sigh. “No, I’m afraid he still looks pretty bad. There are things about him…” His gaze fell on the model of the Anjelica. “Your father destroyed himself. My father destroyed my mother. She killed herself, too. Did you know that?”

  Harley nodded against his chest. “Liz told me just now. I called her. I—I wanted to make sure it was okay for you to stay.”

  “I was going to suggest that you do that, just to put your mind at ease. Did she tell you why my mother committed suicide?”

  “She said it was an unhappy marriage.”

  He grunted dismissively. “Liz Wycliff, High Priestess of the Understatement. To R.H. it was an unhappy marriage. To my mother, it was a nightmare. Laura Tilton—the second Mrs. Tilton—was a dose friend of my mother’s, her confidante. When I found out that my mother had died by suicide, I asked her to tell me why. She said the seeds were sown before my parents even met. Turns out she was already engaged, to a young cousin of hers named Anatole. The family had encouraged the marriage—practically arranged it—in order to unite certain business enterprises.”

  “What a cold-blooded reason to get married. She must have been dreading it.”

  “On the contrary, she was deeply in love with him, and he with her. They had grown up together, they were soul mates. She was a painter, he was a sculptor. They were going to let other people run the family businesses while they pursued their art.”

  Harley chewed this over. “Soul mates… I don’t get it.”

  “You mean, why did she marry R.H.?” Harley nodded. “He swept her off her feet. He has a very commanding personality, and she was susceptible to it. She had a… a passionate nature. Lots of creative people are like that—emotional, impulsive. Of course, like I said before, it’s the only impulsive tiling he ever did.”

  “So she found herself in love with two men. She had to choose, and she chose R.H.”

  Grimly he said, “She chose wrong. From the moment she moved in here, her life was a misery. He discouraged her from spending time with her friends in the New York art world so she wouldn’t have a career to distract her from hearth and home. He was busy with his law practice and didn’t have much time for her. With what little time he had, he tried to remake her into a proper Hale’s Point wife, like he was doing her some kind of big favor. He told her how to dress and what to order in restaurants. He told her how to make acceptable small talk. He monitored the books she read, the places she went, and the friends she spent time with. Laura Tilton was the only one they could agree on. She had no one else to confide in. Her father disowned her when she married R.H., and she never had any contact with her family after that.”

  “Then you came along.”

  “About five years into the marriage. I’d like to think I provided some comfort to her, but the truth is, I only made things worse. Soon after I was born, she started getting letters from Anatole. Secretly—he used a false name on the return address . He said he’d never stopped loving her, and he begged her to leave R.H. and marry him. She never returned his letters, although she shut herself up in her room and cried every time one came. She told Laura Tilton that she had responsibilities now. She had a baby, and was under an obligation to try and make the marriage work. So she toughed it out. Hale’s Point syndrome is catching, you know. Of course, it was the worst thing she could have done.”

  “You’re saying she should have bolted?”

  “Absolutely. For five years Anatole wrote to her, but she never wrote back. She started hearing from friends in Europe that he was becoming self-destructive, drinking too much, doing reckless things. One day she got a phone call. He had driven his Lamborghini off the side of a mountain road in the Swiss Alps, and died.”

  “Oh,no.”

  “She sank into a deep depression. A week later she checked into a motel on the expressway and hanged herself with a length of sailing line. She didn’t leave a note, but two days after that, Liz Wycliff received a letter from her, mailed the day she killed herself, asking her to look after me.”

  “Did she know how Liz felt about your father?”

  “Undoubtedly. Everyone did.” After a pause, he said, “You realize the only thing you and I have in common—aside from being driven, which we agreed on the other night, right?— the only other thing is that our mothers committed suicide. That’s a hell of a comment.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “That’s terrible. There must be something else.”

  “Name somethin
g.” She couldn’t. A bemused chuckle shook his chest. “Pretty scary, isn’t it?”

  They lay together quietly for a while, the only sound in the room the insistent pattering of raindrops on the window. They had settled together naturally and unselfconsciously, arms and legs comfortably intertwined. He continued to lazily stroke her hair, and she dosed her eyes, thinking, I could fall asleep like this. Marveling at her ability to relax so completely in the arms of a virtual stranger, she realized it was because he was relaxed. He was a very physical person, touching her whenever the spirit moved him, taking for granted that it was okay to do so. From another man such familiarity might have seemed threatening, but Tucker had a kind of sincerity that put her at ease.

  From the direction of the kitchen came the droning buzz of the oven timer. Tucker groaned. Harley began to disentangle her limbs from his, but he didn’t budge.

  “Let it ring,” he said.

  “I can’t stand that noise.”

  He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her down on top of him. “I can live with it.” He cupped the back of her head with his big hand, brought her face close to his, and gave her a quick but enthusiastic kiss.

  She looked down at him. “The lasagna will burn,” she said.

  “Then you can make some gray, goopy stuff to take its place.” His arms surrounded her, holding her tight.

  “You’re willing to eat gray stuff just so you can stay here with me?”

  “Yes!” He loosened his grip to move his hands down to the small of her back, pressing her to him. When she felt his fingers slip beneath the waistband of her shorts, she pulled away and stood.

  “Well, I’m not.” She offered him a hand, which he took.

  “You’ve got a hard heart,” he said, gaining his feet and looking around for his cane.

  “I’ve got an empty stomach. You’re trying to keep me from my dinner. You’re the one with the hard heart.”

  He followed her as she headed for the kitchen, and she thought she heard him mumble, “Right idea, wrong organ.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Chapter 7

  “YES, I AM!” Harley gave Mimi’s lasagna pan one last scrub with the Brillo pad, rinsed it under the tap, and handed it to Tucker.

  “No, you’re not!” He dried the pan with quick, angry strokes and slammed it down on the counter next to the sink.

  She felt around in the soapy water with a rubber-gloved hand—no more dishes, they’d done them all—and pulled out the drain plug. The gloves made a wonderfully angry snap when she peeled them off, the better to punctuate her wrath.

  Wheeling to face him, she said, “Just because we’re going to be living in the same house doesn’t give you the right to run my life, like some kind of overbearing, know-it-all…” What was the word she was looking for?

  “Paternalistic,” he supplied.

  “Paternalistic, full-of-himself, know-it-all…”

  He leaned on the counter and grinned at her. “You’re repeating yourself.”

  “You know what I mean!”

  “God, you’re beautiful. You glow with indignation.”

  She wasn’t going to let him charm her out of her anger. “Phil said if I felt up to it, I should do it.”

  “He was talking about a walk on the beach, not swimming.”

  “He meant any physical activity. I need some kind of exercise, and I love my evening swim. Now that the rain has stopped, I intend to take it.”

  Tucker rubbed at his neck. “Look, I know you don’t remember yesterday very well, but you were very, very sick. I don’t think it’s a good idea to swim—not for a while.”

  “A doctor of internal medicine let me climb down to the beach and take a pretty long walk this afternoon.”

  He rolled his eyes. “That doctor of internal medicine happens to have ulterior motives.”

  “Oh, please. First Jamie, now Phil. You think every man who knows me has designs on me, just because… because—”

  He leaned his cane against the counter and moved closer. “Because I have designs on you? I know what you think. You think I’m panting after you like a hungry wolf, that I’d do anything to get you into bed.”

  She took a step back and felt the sink behind her. “No, I don’t.”

  He quickly dosed in on her. “Well, I am, and I would.” He took her face in his hands and kissed her, deeply and passionately. When he released her, she gasped for air, and he murmured, “Anything. Just tell me what it’ll take.”

  “You’re crazy! Men don’t just come out and say things like that. They, they finesse you, they—”

  “Buy you flowers and take you to dinner and spend a lot of money on you and bring you home and turn off the lights and turn on some tunes and engineer some ridiculously obvious seduction, all the while pretending they’re madly in love with you, and a month later you’re history. Right?”

  “I take it you’re more into dragging them by their hair into the nearest cave. Right?”

  He stood with hands on hips. “At least it’s honest.”

  “And they’re still going to end up history, only probably the next morning, not the next month, because you’re heavily into bolting. Am I on target?”

  A slight pause on his part. “Pretty much.”

  She crossed her arms, looked down at the wide-planked floor, and shook her head. “The thing is, I know why you’re coming on to me like this, and it doesn’t have anything to do with me, really. I just happen to be the only woman around, and you’re… Well, you know, you spent a year ‘out of circulation,’ as you called it, and you’re—”

  “Horny.”

  She shrugged and nodded.

  He leaned toward her, one hand on the sink while the other lifted her chin, tilting her face toward his. She thought he was going to kiss her again, but he didn’t. He just looked at her, his expression open and direct. “You’re wrong,” he said. His tone had lost its jocularity; he was quiet and sincere. “I don’t just want a woman. I want you. Mimi and Brenna are attractive women, but they don’t do anything at all for me. You do.” He withdrew his hand, but she still didn’t move her head; she couldn’t take her eyes off his. “Frankly, that surprises me. You’re fourteen years younger than I am, you’re going for your M.B.A., and you iron your blue jeans, for God’s sake. I wouldn’t be surprised if you were a registered Republican.”

  “I am a registered Republican.”

  He blinked. “You are?’

  “I thought you said it wouldn’t surprise you.”

  “I lied.”

  She smiled. “I thought you said you never lied.”

  “You’re a Republican? Really?”

  “Yes. I am a member of the Republican Party. Not the American Nazi Party and not the Ku Klux Klan. The party of Abraham Lincoln. What’s so wrong with that?”

  “It’s just that I never lusted after a Republican before. Not knowingly, anyway.”

  “Well, there’s a first time for everything. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go change for my swim.”

  Exasperation clouded his features. “Harley… damn it. All right. All right. You can swim.”

  “Thanks for the permission, boss. I’ll never forget this.”

  “But only with me there.”

  She swept past him, heading upstairs to change. “Are you going to swim, too?”

  “Not a chance. I’ll act as lifeguard. I’m very good at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Want a demonstration?”

  “Not a chance,” she echoed over her shoulder, grinning.

  “Can’t fault me for trying,” he mumbled.

  ***

  Tucker reclined in the dark on a chaise longue, drawing slowly on his cigarette as he watched Harley’s sleek form glide toward him beneath the water, brightly lit by underwater pool lamps. When she reached a point about ten feet from the end of the pool, she surfaced, skimming both hands back from her hairline to smooth down the slick tresses.

  Tonight her swimsuit
was a wisp of burgundy Lycra that dung to her as if it had been painted on. It was cut low front and back, and the whole thing was held up—rather tenuously, he thought—by spaghetti straps tied in bows on her shoulders. Suits like that were designed with bodies like hers in mind, he decided. He watched, mesmerized, as, head back and eyes closed, she twisted her hair to wring the pool water out of it.

  Some might think her boyish, with her small breasts and slim hips. Tucker thought her anything but. Yes, she was strong and athletic, and no, she would never win any Dolly Parton look-alike contests. But she was incredibly nubile and, to his way of thinking, intensely female.

  She stood waist-deep in the water and looked at him, and her pure, unadorned beauty took his breath away. The water’s phosphorescent glow reflected onto her in quivering waves of light. With her gold-green eyes and sleek bronze hair, she looked like a virgin goddess emerging from the sea.

  “Join me,” she said.

  Her words inspired an instant physical reaction in him that took him completely by surprise. Words—such innocent words, at any rate—had never done that to him before. To cover his speechlessness, he drew on the cigarette again, then tapped it into the jar lid he held in his other hand.

  He cleared his throat. ‘‘Haven’t we already had this conversation?”

  She took a couple of slow-motion steps toward him in the water. “Come on. Let me see if you can swim a lap.”

  “Look, Harley, I’ll save us both a lot of effort. I can’t swim a lap. End of story.”

  “How do you know? You haven’t tried.”

  He stabbed the cigarette into the lid. “Trust me, I know what my body’s capable of.”

  “You don’t have a clue what your body’s capable of if you haven’t even tried. I’d have a lot more respect for you if you tried and failed than if you didn’t even give it a shot. That’s like giving up without a fight.”

  He chuckled. “No offense, but that’s a pretty lame excuse for inspiration. Your friend Eve what’s-her-name had the right idea. What did she tell them? ‘Catch me and you can have me?’ That’s motivation.”