The House on Sunset Lake

by Tasmina Perry

  ‘Sure, I screwed her,’ Bryn said, leaning back against the countertop and folding his arms in front of him. ‘Is that what you needed to know?’

  Jim blinked, feeling all the rage drain from him. Only moments ago he had wanted to strike his father; now he felt like he himself had been punched in the gut. He perched on a stool, his hands falling limp in his lap.

  ‘Jim . . .’ said Bryn. ‘God, son. I didn’t know how strongly you felt for the girl. I thought you were just friends, that’s what you told me and your mother a dozen times.’

  Jim looked at him. ‘So that made it OK? It made her fair game for you?’

  He closed his eyes and felt his head swim. When he opened them again, his father actually looked contrite.

  ‘Look, I’m not proud of myself, but she made herself available to me, and I took advantage of that.’

  ‘So it was all Jennifer . . .’

  ‘She’d come to the Lake House, looking for you if I remember. I was in the boathouse, she came in, we started chatting about something or other. Wasn’t she doing some documentary? And, well, one thing led to another.’

  Jim shook his head with fury.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ he hissed under his breath.

  ‘What don’t you believe, Jim? That a twenty-something woman actually found me attractive?’

  Of course he could believe that. His mother’s constant vaguely anxious expression was the result of living for fifty years with a man that all other women were attracted to. And he couldn’t deny he’d been jealous of the way he had seen Jennifer look at his father. The way she hung on his every word. It was easy to be seduced by Bryn Johnson. Very easy.

  ‘I’m not particularly proud of myself for cheating on my wife, your mother, but the girl flattered me.’

  ‘You like that, don’t you?’

  ‘How do you think it felt for me that summer, Jim? One minute I’m king of the world, the next minute I’m the man who was. I liked to think I was in glorious exile in Savannah, but I was no fool. I saw the panic, the pity in Saul’s eyes when he sent us to the Lake House.’ He took a deep breath, a frown line appearing between his brows.

  ‘Why you?’ asked Jim, the question echoing over and over in his head.

  Bryn looked ashamed. ‘Because I was just a bit older, wiser and more famous than the boy next door.’

  ‘I was in love with her.’

  ‘I didn’t know that. You have to believe that much. I was a middle-aged man who liked the attention and wanted an ego boost. Don’t pretend it hasn’t happened to you: someone young and beautiful presents themselves on a plate and you take it.’

  Of course it had happened to Jim before. The gorgeous junior PR executives, the interior design assistants. Hell, he remembered the first time he’d had sex with Melissa; she’d been a lawyer at the firm he’d been doing some work with.

  ‘Jennifer Wyatt is a beautiful woman,’ continued Bryn, ‘but she was brought up in a certain way . . . brought up to believe that she could use her beauty and charm to manipulate men, to get things from them, money, position, pleasure—’

  ‘She’s not like that,’ Jim said.

  ‘Isn’t she? Then why did she choose Connor over you? Why is she sleeping with you, the successful, dynamic you, when she is, I assume, still married? That girl is trouble, Jim,’ Bryn said intensely. ‘She always has been. She’s a prick tease. Look at how she led you up the garden path for weeks. Look what she did with me – that wasn’t just about my connections or my status, it was a fuck-you to her mother—’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Bryn looked hot and uncomfortable. He wiped his mouth and sank down on a kitchen chair. Jim could see sweat beading at his temples.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine. Probably had a bit too much to drink,’ he said, resting his elbows on his knees. ‘I started at lunchtime . . .’

  ‘Do you want a glass of water?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ Jim asked as his father seemed to sway.

  ‘Actually, I feel a bit strange.’

  ‘Should I call a doctor?’

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ Bryn said, looking up. His face had now completely drained of colour.

  ‘Dad, it’s not fine.’

  ‘I feel sick.’

  ‘I’m calling an ambulance.’

  As Jim pulled out his mobile, Bryn lurched forward and fell to the floor with a crash, the chair landing on top of him.

  Jim crouched down and rolled him over gently. His father’s face was ashen, and there was blood dripping down his chin from a cut on his lip. Ceramic floors were not a soft landing.

  He grabbed his phone and started stabbing buttons.

  ‘Mum, it’s Jim. Get home now.’

  ‘I’m just on my way. I’m in a taxi—’

  ‘It’s Dad,’ he said, cutting her short. ‘He’s collapsed. I think it’s a heart attack. I’m calling an ambulance.’

  He cut her off and dialled 911 immediately.

  Bryn’s breathing was so shallow it was barely there. Jim was not familiar with this part of town. He had no idea where the nearest ambulance had to come from. A siren screamed somewhere in the distance. Jennifer, Casa D’Or flashed in his mind, but then it was gone, his attention focused on his father as he willed him to stay alive.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The doctors were serious and the nurses sympathetic and efficient. You couldn’t really fault them; everyone did everything right. The ambulance had arrived within minutes and broken every traffic law getting Bryn to the emergency room. Jim had sat in the back, holding his father’s hand, watching his grey face behind the oxygen mask, urging him to live.

  Bryn had been wheeled straight into the treatment room, the gurney bumping through the double doors. Elizabeth had arrived half an hour later, white as paper, her cheeks stained. Jim couldn’t remember seeing her cry before. Three hours later, a doctor had informed them that a stabilising procedure had been a success, then explained that ‘success’ simply meant that Bryn had survived the procedure; his survival beyond that was not guaranteed. ‘We just have to watch and pray,’ he had said.

  ‘Go home,’ said Elizabeth now, putting her hand on her son’s shoulder. ‘Get a few hours’ sleep.’

  ‘I dozed a little,’ said Jim, forcing his eyes to snap open.

  He had not left Lennox Hill hospital from the moment he had arrived in the ambulance the day before. Now he glanced out of the window and saw that the sun was rising, a whole night had disappeared and he had not left the tiny, sterile hospital room, although his mother had gone home around midnight when she had been told her husband was stable.

  ‘Come on, Jim. You can come back later. We can rotate. Take the keys to the brownstone if you want. It’s closer.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked, thinking how much better he would feel if he had even just a couple of hours’ sleep and a shower.

  ‘Just go,’ she whispered as they both looked towards Bryn lying in the hospital bed. His skin was ghostly pale; a drip fed from his arm to an IV bag held up on a rack. The sound of the respirator was slow, steady, but despite everything, he looked peaceful.

  He got a taxi downtown, back to his apartment. It was a dark, wet morning, the streets of New York a sea of commuters and umbrellas, a jigsaw of colour on the rainy streets.

  The events of the past twenty hours didn’t make sense to him. His father had always been such a vibrant man. He’d turned seventy that year but he had the energy of someone twenty years younger.

  The first consultant Jim had met after their arrival at Lennox Hill had told him that his father had gone into a brief but complete cardiac arrest, which had limited the flow of oxygen to his brain. He knew the doctor was trying to break the news that his father might have incurred some sort of brain damage, though it was too soon to tell if this had been the case. The idea of Bryn Johnson without his mind, without the full range of his faculties, was unthinkab
le. His intellect and wit were what he prided himself on, what defined his very being. Given the choice, Jim knew his father would rather not wake up.

  His phone vibrated. He picked it up without even looking at the caller ID. He recognised Jennifer’s voice instantly.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, feeling his voice tense.

  ‘I thought I’d call. I thought you’d be back from the Caribbean.’

  ‘Yes, I’m back,’ he said briskly.

  ‘Are you OK?’ She knew him too well, and he was too tired to create the charade of being nice.

  ‘Something’s happened.’

  ‘What? Is everything OK?’ she asked with concern.

  ‘My father has had a heart attack.’

  ‘Oh Jim. I’m so sorry. How bad is it?’

  ‘He’s at Lennox Hill. He’s stabilised. That’s all we really know for now.’ He was aware how clipped his voice sounded.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In a taxi.’

  ‘Going where?’

  ‘Home.’

  ‘I’m coming round,’ she said more urgently.

  ‘Jennifer, please. It’s fine. I just need to sleep, and then I’m going back to the hospital.’

  ‘Jim . . .’

  ‘We’ll talk tomorrow,’ he said, and before he knew it, he had ended the call.

  His apartment had never seemed so small, the four walls of the living room like a cell.

  He kicked off his shoes and took the short walk to the bedroom, pulled down the blinds and sat on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. Guilt, regret made his throat thick. His body was crying out for sleep but he could not even lie back on the bed.

  He ran the argument with his father over and over in his head.

  If only he hadn’t gone to Saul’s apartment, if only he hadn’t been given the manuscript and read it, or seen Jennifer’s mole and put two and two together.

  His shoulders slumped in hopelessness. He wasn’t even sure what hurt most any more. Certainly the fact that Jennifer had slept with his father had lost its force. It was only a paper cut now, not the fatal wound it had felt like the day before.

  Too restless to sleep, he stood up and went to make some coffee. Every second seemed to stretch out interminably, but he found strange comfort in the simplicity of grinding the beans, filling the machine with water, listening to the glug of the coffee filter through to the jug.

  He was pouring the black liquid into a mug when the intercom to his apartment buzzed. It made him jump, then panic made his heart thud hard. He put down the jug and pressed the intercom button.

  Jennifer’s voice brought some relief, although she was the last person he wanted to see.

  ‘Shit,’ he whispered under his breath as he buzzed her up. The night they had spent together just two days earlier felt like another lifetime.

  ‘I’m sorry for coming over. I just had to.’ She had a nervous gentleness in her expression. As if she wanted to hold him but something was keeping her back.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said quickly. ‘I just need to sleep.’

  She took a step forward but he felt himself instinctively flinch away.

  Neither of them said anything for a few moments.

  ‘Can I do anything? How about brownies to go with that coffee? I can run down to Molly’s Cupcakes . . .’

  ‘No, it’s fine, honestly.’

  Another long silence. He almost felt sorry for her until he thought about Chapter 37 in College.

  ‘What happened?’

  Jim shrugged. ‘He had a heart attack last year, but he still drinks, smokes . . . Infallible Bryn Johnson, or so he thought.’

  ‘Did it happen at the party?’

  ‘No. A few hours before it started, although I think he might have quite enjoyed the drama of collapsing in front of New York’s finest.’

  He snorted lightly, then shook his head at the macabre humour.

  ‘We were at his house,’ he said quietly.

  ‘What? And he just keeled over?’

  He closed his eyes and knew he had to tell her.

  ‘We had a disagreement.’ The words were right there on the tip of his tongue, but they wouldn’t come out.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I hope you’re not blaming yourself.’ She tried to catch his eye but he would not let her fix her gaze on his. ‘It’s not your fault, Jim,’ she said.

  ‘Look, Jen, I don’t want to be rude, but I should get some sleep. I was at the hospital eighteen hours straight and I have to be back by eleven o’clock so I can swap shifts with my mum.’

  She nodded tightly, then her face softened and she reached out and touched his shoulder, stroked the cotton of his shirt.

  ‘I’m here if you need me.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said crisply.

  She headed for the door, then turned back.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, not now, but you should know that I’ve left Connor.’

  She paused as if she was waiting for an answer, then opened the door.

  ‘The argument was about you,’ he said.

  She closed the door slowly. He instantly regretted saying anything. But it was done, and it needed to be said. Her expression was like stone until her lip began to quiver. Right then he wanted her to feel pain. The pain he had felt, that his father had felt.

  ‘Me?’ she said finally.

  He inhaled sharply, wiped his dry lips with the palm of his hand.

  ‘I read his book. College. The first draft. The one he started when he was in Savannah. And the character, the beautiful brunette, she had a mole. A diamond-shaped mole, just like yours.’

  He looked at her but she remained quiet. A tiny tear glistened in the corner of one eye.

  ‘He told me what happened. I know it didn’t mean anything and I understand that he’s an irresistible man,’ he said with a note of sarcasm. ‘But you have to understand how it hurt me and I’m not sure how easy it’s going to be for me to get past it. Not now.’

  Her lips were pressed together, full, trembling.

  ‘We shouldn’t let what happened twenty years ago spoil things between us again.’

  ‘How can it not?’ said Jim, feeling his own emotions rise again at her tacit admission. ‘How could you do that to me? I was in love with you.’

  The tear had escaped and was trickling down her cheek.

  Jim shook his head. ‘Why does everything have to be so difficult between us?’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be,’ she said, inhaling audibly. ‘Please, Jim. Let’s talk about it.’

  ‘Just get out,’ he said quietly. ‘If you care about my feelings at all, just go.’

  She nodded and walked with purpose out of the apartment, not looking back. As Jim listened to the fading sound of her footsteps in the stairwell, he heard another noise – the insistent ringing of his mobile phone.

  He snatched it up. At first he heard nothing, just a cavernous silence, and then the small and defeated voice of his mother, uttering the words, ‘Your father is dead.’

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Casa D’Or was finished. The paintwork gleamed, the marble shone and the linens on the king-sized beds practically crackled when you lay on them. The old house was almost unrecognisable from the sagging wreck Jim had seen that day he had bumped down the driveway. All those potholes had been filled, of course, the trees forming the avenue expertly trimmed, the gardens primped and planted to look as if an army of gardeners had been carefully tending to the grounds since the twenties. Not that Jim was seeing any of that. There was less than thirty-six hours to go before the bells-and-whistles party to launch the resort was due to begin, and there were a thousand things to see to before then: the wine, the catering, the crooner who would serenade the VIP guests as they arrived, and who was currently stuck in Reykjavik.

  In the six weeks since his father’s death, Jim had let work be his saviour.

  He had returned to London for his father’s funeral and sp
ent a week’s compassionate leave with his mother. Simon Desai had been incredibly understanding and had told him to take as long as he wanted. But Elizabeth’s sister and brother-in-law had moved into the Hampstead house to be with her, and when she had insisted that he return to America, Jim had decided it was for the best.

  ‘Just go and finish that property,’ she had said when she had waved goodbye to him at the airport. He knew exactly what she meant. He wanted to put it all behind him, and had thrown himself into the final preparations for the Casa D’Or launch with a fervour that even the most zealous workaholic would have found tiring.

  ‘Excuse me, Mr Johnson, you have a visitor.’

  Jim was having a final inspection of the spa, which had been created in the style of a boathouse on the far reaches of the property. He was wondering whether to ask to actually try out a massage himself – his back seemed to be a series of knots these days – when Liane, one of the receptionists, came to find him.

  ‘Who is it?’ he frowned, glancing at his phone, where all his appointments and calls for the day had been logged. He had nothing scheduled for that moment.

  ‘Says her name is Marion Wyatt.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Jim more brightly. ‘She used to own this place. Bring her to the terrace and send over a couple of glasses of sweet tea.’

  He wrapped up his conversation with the spa manager, and by the time he got back to the house, Marion was waiting for him at one of the white wrought-iron tables under the shade of a linen parasol.

  ‘Hello, Marion,’ he said, kissing her warmly on both cheeks.

  ‘How are you, Jim?’ she said, squeezing his hand. ‘I was so sorry to hear about Bryn.’

  Jim sat down and nodded at the reminder of his father’s death. He had been trying so hard to shut it out, but whenever someone mentioned it, or whenever he stopped working and caught his breath, he was knocked sideways by a wave of grief and emptiness.

  ‘Thank you. I guess you know what it feels like,’ he said quietly, remembering David Wyatt’s passing.

  Marion nodded. ‘I don’t think it ever goes away. Every hour of every day I still stop and feel displaced, and for a split second I don’t even know why something feels so wrong, until I realise it’s because David isn’t ever coming back.’