As she contemplated the house she became gradually aware of a shrill, high-pitched keening. The noise was too constant to be birds chirping; it sounded almost mechanical, like a continuous knife sharpener or lathe, and at first she thought she was imagining it. Or perhaps her own ears were ringing; she’d polished off half a bottle of wine the night before to celebrate her new status. She shook her head, swallowed. No, the noise was still there, all around her.
She headed back to the house. The baby monitor might not be effective so far from the nursery, and the strange, grating noise was starting to seem relentless. A man crossed the lawn about twenty yards from her—late middle aged, dressed in baggy overalls.
“Hello!” he called out, then changed course to intercept her. “Mett Piacevic, caretaker for Penaquoit.”
“Gwen Amiel, baby-sitter for Tess.”
“I thought so. Are you finding your way around all right?”
She nodded. “Are you the person responsible for keeping this place so immaculate?”
“Me and two men from the village. Day help.” Like his wife he spoke with a thick, somewhat funereal accent. But his smile at her compliment was kindly, his eyes warm. “It is big job, making everything perfectly.”
“Do you and your wife live here?”
“Above the garage.” He pointed over his shoulder to a two-story building fairly close to the main house.
“Anyone else?”
“Live here? No, only us. Rosa gets help from a village girl twice a week.”
Village girl. It was all so medieval.
“The last baby-sitter lived here, but she left. Too quiet for her, I think.” He smiled. “Except for the insects.”
“Insects? Is that what we’re hearing?”
He crouched and picked up something from the ground. “They come only one time in seventeen years.” He handed her the shell of an insect, about an inch long. It felt as light as an ash. “The trees are full with them. And the ground.” He looked mournfully at the grass, which she now saw was littered with carcasses.
“Cicadas,” she said, remembering an article she’d read.
“They wait under the ground seventeen years,” he said quietly, leaning toward her as if imparting a scandalous local legend. “They eat sap from tree roots. When their time comes, they dig up through the dirt to the air and make the noise to bring the mates.” He smiled shyly. “They like Penaquoit. So many oak trees, so much grass. Myself? I am looking forward to seventeen years of quiet.”
They listened for a few moments. The whining penetrated the body like a chill.
“I don’t know how Mr. Lawrence play his music with this…this sound of crying babies always in the air.” Mett Piacevic sounded genuinely concerned. “But he play all the day and all the night, with no audience except for his daughter. Once I tell him, how come you don’t play for the town, maybe give big concert at the high school? He look at me like I insult him, then walk away. He has moods, Mr. Lawrence. But he love his little girl, he love her like his music.”
“I’m sure he and Mrs. Lawrence both love her very much.”
“You think?” He shrugged. “Now I have to work some more. We take care of the old man’s place too, you know.” He pointed to another stand of hemlocks. “Behind there is the house.” He left her and headed in that direction. “You will like it here,” he said over his shoulder. “Everything perfectly. Completely perfectly.”
Later she checked on Tess, who was still sleeping, then explored the house. There wasn’t much else to do; she certainly wasn’t about to hang out in the kitchen with Rosa Piacevic.
But the mansion was curiously uninteresting, for all its opulence. The furniture was top-notch, of course, but on the bland side, the kind of safe, pedigreed pieces a high-end decorator would choose for wealthy clients who weren’t much interested in antiques. Where were the Lawrences when she’d owned the shop?
And the house offered few clues to the personalities of its inhabitants; she wouldn’t be surprised to find Gideon Bibles in the Queen Anne bedside tables in the dozen or so guest rooms on the second floor.
Gwen had just entered the big living room downstairs when she heard voices through a doorway at the far end. She stepped farther into the room, curiosity overcoming an initial instinct to flee.
“…Hit it off. She’s awfully pretty.” Priscilla’s voice.
“I suppose.” Nick.
Priscilla snorted.
“Where were you earlier today?” Nick asked.
“Out.” She sounded as if that one word had exhausted her.
“Out where?”
“Errands.”
Gwen heard him sigh, and she easily understood his frustration. What possible errands could someone like Priscilla Lawrence have in Sohegan? Rotating the tires?
“Even when we were first dating you used to disappear, sometimes for an entire weekend.”
“You never seemed to mind.”
A pause, then Nick, sounding almost wistful. “Do you ever think about that first meeting?”
“What?”
“Do you ever think about—”
“I heard you. But why?”
“I was feeling sentimental.”
Priscilla hissed, a kind of laugh, Gwen supposed. She heard the crackle of a magazine page being turned.
“I’ll never forget your first words—”
“Oh, please.”
“You walked into my studio for your piano lesson and announced, ‘I’m your two-thirty.’”
“Brilliant.” Another page crackled, then another.
“You always knew your place, Priscilla. ‘I’m your two-thirty.’ Amazing.”
“Shouldn’t you be practicing?”
“Am I boring you? Am I keeping you from your precious magazines? Bon Appetit? Since when do you care about cooking? Vogue? Glamour?” Gwen heard two thuds as the magazines hit the floor. “Dog Fancy?” Thud. “We don’t have a goddamn dog. Field and Stream?” Thud. “Are you planning on taking up fishing any time soon?”
“I might.”
“It’s…bizarre. You live through these things. Get a dog if you’re interested, just stop reading about it.”
Gwen heard a page turn.
“Our basement is a fire hazard…”
“Our basement?”
“…Full of old magazines. At least throw them out when you’re done.”
“What if I need to look something up?” she said with placid sarcasm.
“You can’t let anything go, even old magazines,” he said. “I wish I knew what you were afraid of.”
Gwen heard another page turn. She left the room and exited the house through the front door. She stood on the small terrace for a few moments, grateful for the warm, dry air and the agreeable silence, then explored the grounds. As she circled the side of the house she heard something from a screened porch, a low, anguished moan. She stepped a bit closer.
“Oh, God, Nick.”
Gwen backed away from the porch.
“Don’t stop, oh my God, don’t stop!”
Priscilla’s moans were intensifying into full-throated shrieks that reverberated through the tall oaks that shaded the expansive lawn.
“Don’t stop. Oh, please, don’t stop!”
This was a new Priscilla—animated, hungry. And very noisy. Gwen immediately thought of the uptight junior leaguers she’d had to socialize with as part of her business, the pearl-draped blondes who danced on the baby grand after the second gin and tonic and fucked the pool boy while their husbands toiled in the city. Only Priscilla’s trigger seemed to be sex.
Gwen walked away, then broke into a run. Fifty yards from the house she still hadn’t escaped the screaming. She spotted Mett Piacevic pruning a shrub. He looked at her, a bit shamefaced, Gwen thought, but quickly turned away when Priscilla let forth a high-pitched shriek that seemed to last forever.
Then silence.
Piacevic glanced up from the shrub as Gwen passed him on her way back to the house.
>
“Cicadas,” he said with an embarrassed shrug.
She nodded—the lawn was anything but silent. The cicadas had resumed their wailing.
Barry Amiel felt the tap on his right shoulder as he waited to cross Fifth Avenue. Brooklyn’s Fifth Avenue, the shabby, Bodega-lined stepchild of its Manhattan namesake. He turned slowly; his reflexes weren’t what they once were, especially at ten in the morning.
“You Barry Amiel, mister?” Meester. Some days he thought he’d give up drinking just to hear a full sentence of unaccented English again.
“Yeah.”
“I got a message for you.”
His heart quickened—amazing how it could still kick into high gear after what he’d put it through. He didn’t know anyone anymore, other than the other losers at the rooming house. The Puerto Rican was about twenty, maybe younger. Same height—five-nine—but heavier, built.
“Message?” Barry moved closer. “What kind of message?”
The Rican frowned and stepped back. Shit, even drug dealers couldn’t take the liquor on his breath.
“You wanna see your kid? You wanna see Jimmy?” Jeemy.
Now his heart was really stoking, and his throat was closed up so tight he thought he might burst.
“Who…who the hell are you?”
“You wanna see your kid, you come to this place.” He handed him a slip of paper with a Manhattan address penned in small, precise handwriting. There was a time, too: tomorrow at noon.
“Where’s he? Where’s my boy?”
The Puerto Rican turned and walked away.
“Where’s my boy?” Barry shouted after him, almost keeling over from the effort. “Who the fuck’re you?”
The kid kept walking. Barry started to go after him but his legs were wobbly. Mornings were hardest; some days it took until two, three in the afternoon to get his strength back. Someone knew where Jimmy was. The information would cost him—he was a drunk, not a fool. But he knew he’d do whatever it took to see him, reclaim him. Jimmy was his son, always had been and always would be.
The Rican didn’t know where Jimmy was, but someone had hired him to deliver a message, set up a meeting. Maybe Gwen had arranged it, wanted to get some kind of visitation thing going. Nah, she’d kill him before she’d let him near Jimmy, and in a way he couldn’t blame her. She took a lot of shit, Gwen did, but she wouldn’t let nothing bad happen to the kid. Any kid, for that matter. She always said she didn’t like children, but once, at a market near their old apartment, she saw some black dude backhand his own son and she would’ve slugged the guy right there in the checkout line if he hadn’t caught her arm. Almost got herself punched out that time. She never could stand to see a kid get hurt.
So if Gwen wasn’t the one wanting to meet him, who was? Barry shrugged—what difference did it make? One way or another he’d get Jimmy back. He smiled and headed for the liquor store on Garfield, feeling something like hope for the first time in months, clutching that slip of paper so hard his hand began to shake.
Chapter 5
“I hate waffles.”
Jimmy pushed the plate across the table to Gwen.
“Since when?”
She pushed the plate back. “At least take a few bites. You’ll be hungry by ten o’clock.”
This time he shoved the plate with just enough force to send it crashing to the floor.
“Damn it!” She covered her mouth to keep from saying worse, then spotted his little grin of victory. He’d never acted like this before they moved up to Sohegan. Almost never.
The grin was Barry’s, of course, showing just a sliver of white teeth. Sometimes Barry’s face came through Jimmy’s in the most heart-stopping way, like the moment when the picture buried inside one of those 3-D images unexpectedly begins to emerge.
“Pick it up,” she said. He just sat there, not even looking at the scattered bits of plate and waffle. “Pick it up!”
His expression was angry but unworried; he knew she wouldn’t hit him, not after what he’d been through with his father. Was breaking the plate—or stuffing an entire roll of paper in the toilet, or wetting his bed a couple of times a week lately—Jimmy’s agenda for punishing her? Or just venting?
The bus honked from the corner. Jimmy ran from the kitchen.
“Come on, Mom!” He stood in the hallway, holding open the screen door. She walked a few feet behind him to the corner.
“Jimmy?” He stopped but didn’t turn. “We’ll talk about this later,” she said, then shoved a small bag of chocolate chip cookies into the outside pocket of his backpack. “In case you’re starving to death at ten o’clock.” He turned, unable to repress a smile—her smile, this time, the corners of his mouth turned up, a full row of top teeth visible—and ran to the bus.
She noticed an unfamiliar straw hat in the pantry at Penaquoit that morning, lying next to a tube of expensive suntan lotion. The daily routine at Penaquoit was so unvarying, she was intrigued by what she took to be evidence of a visitor. At this point, any change would be welcome. Priscilla’s parents lived next door, Russell and Maxine Cunningham, yet they’d never once come by while she was working. In fact, there’d been no visitors to Penaquoit since she’d started working, other than the gardening and cleaning crews who helped the Piacevics. Sealed off the way Tess was, Gwen actually felt sorry for her, but Priscilla scoffed at her offer to take Tess to the playground in town. “We have better facilities here,” she’d said.
On her way to the sunroom that morning, where Rosa Piacevic discharged the morning handoff of Tess, she paused just before crossing the open doorway to the music room. Nick Lawrence was practicing, of course, the same Beethoven sonata he’d been working on all month. Though she hadn’t tired of the piece, she had long ceased paying much attention to it. Sometimes she found herself humming the slow opening bars at home, but at Penaquoit the music had become the house background. This morning, however, she stopped to listen, drawn by something different in the music, an added richness. Maybe he’d had the piano tuned.
When she passed the music room she glanced in. Perched on a footstool a few feet from the piano was a striking woman of about thirty-five, watching him play with unblinking eyes. An audience at last, she thought.
The visitor came in to the kitchen while Gwen was giving Tess lunch. She was tall and thin, with very full lips, very green eyes, and thick red hair cut in a severe, angular fashion that showed off a long, graceful neck. She wore a light blue oxford shirt over tight black leggings. Redheads were usually pale, but this woman’s face and arms were tanned to caramel perfection.
“You must be Gwen,” she said in an unexpectedly husky voice. “I’m Valerie Goodwin.”
Gwen had been crouching in front of the high chair, trying without much success to coax some applesauce into Tess. She stood up, wiped her right hand on her jeans, and shook hands.
“I hear you’re terrific with Tess,” the woman said.
Gwen couldn’t help feeling patronized, but she smiled. “She’s not much of a challenge, except when I’m trying to feed her.”
Valerie leaned over from the waist, as if bowing to royalty, wiped a streak of applesauce from Tess’s chin with the tip of a beautifully manicured index finger, and inserted it into the tiny mouth. Tess smiled and pounded the high-chair tray with both hands. Smiled? She was practically cooing. Valerie took the small silver spoon from Gwen’s hand and began feeding Tess from the jar.
“I haven’t seen her in almost two months,” she said. “You don’t really think about time passing until you see them. Children, I mean. Then you realize what you’ve missed. You have a child of your own, of course.”
“A son. He’s six.”
“Jimmy?”
She nodded. Surely they had better things to do at Penaquoit than talk about her and her son.
“I’m Tess’s godmother,” Valerie said. “It kills me to live so far away from her.”
“Where do you—”
“In the city,” she said qui
ckly, as if the answer were self-evident. “I’ve known Priscilla and Nick since they met each other. They’re like family.”
“Are you a musician too?”
Valerie used the edge of the spoon to wipe a drizzle of applesauce from Tess’s chin, then expertly slipped it into the baby’s mouth.
“No, no. Nick has talent enough for the three of us, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
“Is he preparing for a concert?”
Her hand froze for an instant in front of Tess’s open mouth. “Nick is preparing for…” She seemed at a loss, finally just shook her head, and fed Tess a final spoonful. “All done!” She dropped the spoon inside the jar and handed it to Gwen.
“You said Nick is preparing for something.”
“Right.” Valerie moistened a paper towel in the sink and cleaned Tess’s face. “He is preparing for perfection.”
Give me a break.
Valerie picked up a philodendron cutting from a small vase on a windowsill. The rootless stem had turned limp and black.
“Do you mind if I take Tess for a swim?” she said as she dropped the cutting back into the glass.
“No, not at all. I have…” She had laundry to fold in the nursery, but she wasn’t about to share her to-do list with Ms. Golden Tan.
After Valerie left with Tess, Gwen walked to the front hallway and up the main staircase—she made a point of avoiding the service stairs off the kitchen. She’d promised herself not to give in to bitterness over the job, and most days she kept the promise. Good pay, good benefits, good hours, good riddance in a year’s time—her new mantra.
But every so often something or someone would remind her of just where she fit in on the Lawrence food chain, and bitterness boiled over. Today it was Valerie Goodwin and her silky fingernails, feeding her godchild as if she were tossing treats to a puppy and doing a goddamn good job of it.
She felt a stirring of possessiveness and promised herself she wouldn’t fall for Tess any more than she already had. But the truth was, she missed having a baby to take care of, she hadn’t realized just how much until Tess came along. She’d spent most of her adult life trying to avoid having anyone depend on her, and then when Jimmy was born she’d realized that being completely responsible for someone else was perhaps the most liberating thing of all. Old demons lost their power to threaten once your life’s focus shifted to someone else, someone totally dependent on you. Holding Tess, she felt that same relief—Jimmy was carving out a life apart from her, but here was a child who needed her completely. She would have to work harder to keep from getting more attached.
Disillusions Page 4
