A Lamentation of Swans

by Valerie Bronwen

  I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear that they were back together again. The real surprise was that it took this long to happen, and I said as much.

  I said it lightly, like I didn’t care, but my heart sank down into my shoes and it took all my self-control not to head back into the city.

  What had I been thinking, coming out here?

  I had expected to come to Sea Oats, see Charlotte, and fall back into her loving arms again. That was the blunt, hard truth.

  I felt like an idiot for even daring to hope.

  “Lindsay is all wrong for Char,” Peggy replied. “She always has been. She’ll just hurt her again.”

  Lindsay had been the master of the passive-aggressive insult. She might not be Swann-rich anymore, but she had that snobby boarding-school bitch thing going for her. She knew exactly how to make me feel like an idiot from the Midwest, who didn’t know good wine from bad, which fork was for what, what soup went with what meat course, and the proper dessert, and all those little things rich girls are taught from childhood so it becomes second nature for them. She always made me feel like I didn’t know how to dress, like I was some big clumsy oaf, a bull in a china shop, saying something cutting and rude to me that sounded perfectly innocuous to someone else.

  And every time I saw her, I couldn’t help but wonder what Charlotte saw in me.

  Then again, Charlotte had loved me enough to marry me at one time. That had to be galling for Lindsay—and it must have been even harder for her to be polite to me.

  “Is that why you invited me out here,” I asked slowly, “to come between them? That’s kind of melodramatic, isn’t it? It’s like something out of The Young and the Restless.”

  Peggy threw back her head and laughed. Wiping at her eyes, she said, “Oh, Ariel, I’ve missed you so much.” She got a hold of herself again and leaned over, lowering her voice. “I won’t say that I’m thrilled Char is seeing her again. But I’m most definitely not trying to interfere in her love life. I would never do that.”

  “Good,” I replied. “Because I wouldn’t do that, Peggy. Not for you, not for anyone.”

  “Not even for yourself, Ariel?”

  “Not even for me,” I replied after a moment. It wasn’t the first time it occurred to me that I had been, in fact, the other woman; Lindsay had certainly pointed it out to me enough times for me to get her point. When no one else was around to hear her, of course. That wasn’t how Lindsay operated. She was like one of the mean girls in high school, sniping from the sidelines rather than being direct. I’ve always preferred being direct to subterfuge, even when subterfuge was the smarter course to take. Complaining about Lindsay to Charlotte didn’t do me any good, which of course, didn’t help my feelings of insecurity.

  Charlotte saying I married you, didn’t I? was not the help she thought it was.

  “Then why did you come?” Peggy asked. “After all this time?”

  “Because you emailed me and asked me to come.” I struggled to get my phone out of my pocket so I could read her the email out loud. When I finished, I added, “After reading that, how could I not come?”

  “I was a bit melodramatic, wasn’t I?” She placed her coffee cup back down in the saucer. “I didn’t mean to worry you, but things here are different now than when you lived here.”

  I remembered Charlotte’s words about her office being searched. “What is going on, Peggy? You can tell me.”

  “Well, for one thing.” She held up her hand. The ring on her finger caught the light and flashed multicolored fire.

  “Is that…an engagement ring?”

  She nodded, smiling.

  “But who?” I goggled at her. As far as I knew, Peggy had never been involved with anyone. I couldn’t have been the only person who assumed she’d never marry.

  “Roger asked me, and I said yes.”

  “Roger Stanhope?” I hoped my voice didn’t sound as shocked as I felt.

  I knew Roger, of course. He was a very successful investment banker, and an old family friend. When the Swanns had taken the company public years ago, he had handled the entire thing for them, making a small fortune for himself in the process. I’d always liked Roger—he was very kind to me, always willing to talk, and he had a smaller house on the outskirts of Penobscot, usually coming out for the weekends. He was an attractive older man, played regular tennis to keep fit. He’d been married once before, but his wife had been killed in a car accident and he’d never remarried.

  “Congratulations,” I finally managed to say. I’d never imagined Roger and Peggy as a couple, and even now, I couldn’t see it. She was so devoted to Char and Bast, and the house!

  She put her hand down again. “We’ve gotten close over the last year, and when he asked me, how could I say no?” She gestured around the room. “I’ll miss living here, of course, but…” She hesitated. “It’s past time for me to go. I should have moved out of here years ago. It’s Char’s and Bast’s house, after all.” She shook her head. “But Roger is ready to retire, and we’re going to be doing a lot of traveling.”

  And then it hit me—why she’d wanted me to come. She was going to be leaving, and she wanted to make sure both Charlotte and Bast were settled before she went.

  “You know all I want is for Charlotte to be happy.” She looked back at the fire. “I don’t believe Lindsay will make her happy. You made her happy, Ariel. I’ve never seen Charlotte as happy as when you were living here. And she’s not been happy since you left.”

  That admission was an enormous betrayal for her. I shook my head. “I appreciate that, Peggy. But that’s over now. I’ve accepted it, and I’m sure Charlotte has, too.”

  “But you’re here, you came! So you still care, don’t you? Don’t you want to make this all work out? I know you still love her, Ariel—it’s all over your face.”

  “I—I don’t know how I feel.” I wasn’t lying to her. I had pushed it all so far down inside for so long…and seeing her again brought up a lot of feelings I thought, or rather convinced myself, I’d been certain were gone. My hand shook as I poured myself some more coffee. It was perfect, strong and hot the way Maeve always made it. I’d missed that.

  I’d missed so much more.

  But I wasn’t going to get my hopes up.

  What we had was over.

  “You know Lindsay’s wrong for her,” Peggy went on.

  “And what about Bast?” I heard myself saying. It was the elephant in the room and it needed addressing. “Is he here?”

  Peggy didn’t miss a beat. “He’s coming in from the city this evening,” she replied. “His fiancée is staying here already. She’s right down the hall from you, in the red room.”

  Sebastian.

  I couldn’t very well face the past without facing Sebastian.

  He was why I’d run away in the first place.

  Sebastian, or Bast as we called him, was Charlotte’s younger brother. He was her opposite in every way. From earliest childhood Charlotte was interested in Swann’s, wanted to go to work there, and studied hard so she could learn how to run the company one day. Bast, on the other hand…he was such the wastrel playboy trust-fund brat, he was almost a stereotype. Charlotte and Peggy finally gave up on him getting a college education when he was twenty and decided the best way for him to make a living was as a celebrity of sorts, which apparently meant getting his picture in the tabloids and making scenes at parties and then getting paid to show up for parties and being asked to model here and there and some other things I never quite understood. I’d known who Bast Swann was long before I met his sister—he was kind of like a male Paris Hilton, always in the tabloids, always doing something crazy. He was nothing like Charlotte. They had an odd relationship for siblings—Char was deeply protective of him, but at the same time the way he lived his life sometimes pushed her to the limits.

  As a Swann, he had some voting percentage of the company and he wasn’t above using that as leverage to get access to the money in the famil
y trust, which Char was the trustee of. Char had explained it all to me once, how it all worked, but it confused me then and I’m still not entirely sure I grasp it. Everything was wrapped up in separate trusts—Sea Oats, for example, had its own separate trust—and the family money was in another, and there was another for the charity work, another for the company. I wasn’t sure how many there were, if I was going to be honest. Managing my own money was enough of a challenge for me to deal with, and the complicated trusts Charlotte’s grandfather had set up to protect everything were too much for me to wrap my mind around.

  Besides, I didn’t need to know all the details.

  Char was chair of the trusts; even though she was young when their parents died, their parents were quite aware that Char was the responsible one and the best person for the job. They were managed for her before she turned twenty-five and took over control, not only of the trusts, but of Swann’s. Bast had never married, and his love life was tabloid fodder—he had a penchant for misbehaving in public, and for young starlets. Bast loved his sister, but there was also an element of competitiveness there with him as well. It couldn’t have been easy growing up with such a driven and intelligent older sister and to always be compared negatively to her. People expected Bast to be a wastrel, and he lived up to those expectations for him. I kind of felt sorry for him.

  At first.

  Bast was kind to me when I first came to Sea Oats, which I greatly appreciated. He was always willing to give me a sympathetic ear whenever Lindsay had said something that upset me, when Charlotte couldn’t be bothered with what she called the junior high school theatrics of it all. Bast kept me company when I was lonely with Char in the city, taking it upon himself to teach me the family history and show me around Penobscot.

  It never occurred to me that Bast’s kindness was just a façade, a game he was playing to earn my trust. He didn’t see me as a friend, or as family. Bast saw me as another pawn in the game he’d been playing with his sister since they were children. So, of course every time Char and I had an argument or a disagreement or I had another fit of jealousy about Lindsay, Bast was there with a shoulder for me to cry on, to comfort me and tell me I wasn’t wrong to dislike Lindsay or feel unappreciated and ignored by Charlotte.

  It never occurred to me once, in my unbelievable stupidity and naïveté, to question why Bast was being so kind to me, why Bast was always there for me, why he made such an effort to fill in for Charlotte in keeping me company while she was in the city at work. It never crossed my mind that he saw my boredom as another way to twist the knife in Charlotte, to punish her for whatever he wanted to get even with her for at the time. I didn’t know that he was saying things to her about me, making her suspicious of my feelings for him—which were never more than friendship, ever—making her question whether I might not…

  That I might not leave her for a man someday.

  Yes, Bast knew Charlotte’s weaknesses, knew that the one thing she’d never been able to get past with Lindsay was that Lindsay had left her and married a man—three times.

  And the fear I would do the same thing was always in the back of her mind.

  Bast played us both like fiddles, and made fools out of both of us.

  So, of course, the night Charlotte and I had yet another blowout about Lindsay, of course the person I ran crying to was Bast. I’ve wondered sometimes, in the two years since, if Lindsay hadn’t deliberately provoked me into that quarrel, if she and Bast hadn’t been working together to get rid of me.

  When you’re alone in your apartment with nothing more than a bottle of wine and regrets, it’s easy to see conspiracies where they don’t exist.

  And yet…everything had played out perfectly for the two of them if that had in fact been their endgame.

  “I really don’t have time for this,” Charlotte said to me at the height of my anger, tears running down my face, waving her hand wearily, dismissing me like my feelings were childish and meant nothing to her and she was tired of having to deal with my silliness. “We can talk about this more, if you like, but only when you’ve calmed down and stopped acting like a child.”

  Had Charlotte been trying to push every insecurity button I had about our marriage, she couldn’t have been more successful.

  Somehow, I managed to get myself under control and, dramatically wiping the tears from my eyes, said, “I’m so sorry to have bothered you. But don’t worry. It won’t happen again.” I turned and left our shared bedroom, slamming the door so hard the paintings on the hallway walls shook.

  I stood there, my hand on the doorknob, close to hyperventilating, wounded to the core and trying so hard not to start crying again.

  She doesn’t love me, she’d rather be with Lindsay, we both made a huge mistake, she wouldn’t care if I left.

  I don’t really remember walking down the hallway. My memory is kind of vague. I know I was stumbling, almost fell once or twice, had my hand out against the wall to steady myself as I staggered down the second-floor hallway. I do remember that Bast’s door was open, and he was standing in the doorway, a sympathetic look on his face. “Are you all right?” he asked in a very quiet voice. “I can’t believe how cruel Charlotte was being to you.”

  It didn’t occur to me until much later—too late—that the only way he could have heard us was to stand outside our bedroom door. Sea Oats was built solid, and his room was too far away for him to even have been aware that we were arguing, let alone what either of us had said.

  “Am I crazy?” I asked, my voice shaky, the tears starting to form in my eyes again. “Why can’t she understand how hard it is on me for her to be friends with Lindsay? Why can’t she just understand and stop acting like I’m some stupid little girl?”

  “There, there.” Bast pulled me to him, and put his arms around me, kissing the top of my head while I gave in to the sobs, my entire body shaking with them as he stroked my back, murmuring soothing sounds to calm me down.

  And it was like every frustration, every problem, every little thing that had bothered me since I moved to Sea Oats came bubbling up to the surface, and I couldn’t stop sobbing. I couldn’t stop thinking, wondering, wishing it was Charlotte who was comforting me, putting her arms around me, understanding and caring.

  Why wasn’t it Charlotte?

  And after what seemed like hours, I was cried out. I was spent, so tired, emotionally and physically exhausted, still angry but the flames had died down considerably. I started to pull away from him, saying, “Oh, thank you, Bast—”

  And he pulled me back into him and kissed me.

  On the lips.

  I was stunned, startled, didn’t know what to do. I remember thinking, What the hell? and freezing. I didn’t kiss him back, of course, but I didn’t know what to do at first.

  It had been a long time since I’d had to push a man off me.

  Then the anger began to bubble up. I was bringing my hands up to violently push him away from me when Charlotte—surely regretting her angry words and how we’d left things, had come after me, perhaps to apologize, to make things right with me—had cleared her throat.

  I spun around and saw her, her eyes narrow, her face white with fury, her lips compressed into a thin line. “Well,” she said coldly, “isn’t this a pretty picture?” She turned and walked back down the hallway toward our bedroom.

  And Bast started laughing.

  I spun around, and directed my humiliation and my anger at him. “You,” was all I could get out as I slapped him across the face as hard as I could, the sound of the slap hanging in the air, the look of amusement on his face transitioning quickly to shock and then naked hatred, and in that moment I realized Bast had never been my friend, never, and he hated me and wanted me gone, had set me up with his kindness, played me for an utter fool.

  If I’d had a gun in my hand, I would have gladly shot him dead right then and there.

  Instead, I turned and ran after Char, calling her name, but she refused to answer me, speak to me. Afte
r I shut our bedroom door behind me, sobbing, trying to get the words out, trying to make her understand it wasn’t what it looked like, she ignored me, wouldn’t let me put my arms around her, wouldn’t let me even touch her. The way she flinched away from me in revulsion was something I’d never forgotten, would probably never forget.

  And when she finally did speak, her voice was cold. “You need to leave,” she said. “Pack your things and go. Stay in a hotel, get an apartment, I don’t care where you go. You just can’t be here anymore. We’re finished.”

  And she walked out of the room, slamming the door behind her with a finality.

  I cried for about another minute or two, and then got angry.

  She thought I would do that? With her brother?

  What kind of person did she think I was?

  So I packed and made a reservation at a hotel for a week. Joseph drove me into the city, and my mind was made up. I was never going back to Sea Oats unless she begged me to come back to her.

  I was going to make it on my own. I would use the credit cards—she owed me that much at least—until I had a job and a place to live.

  But deep down, I always believed she would come for me. Joseph knew what hotel I’d gone to, which was one of the reasons I had him take me. But by the third day, it became obvious to me she wasn’t going to come, that she believed I was the kind of woman who not only would cheat on her, but would do it with her brother.

  It was a slap in the face.

  That’s when I got good and angry.

  I called Hollis and got my job back, spent the rest of the week finding an apartment I could afford on my salary, and once I got my first paycheck, I cut up every one of the credit cards Charlotte had given me and mailed the pieces back to her at Sea Oats. I cleared out the contacts in my cell phone and started my life over.

  But a small part of me always kept hoping she’d come for me, despite everything.

  Which was why I refused any dates, refused coworkers’ offers to set me up with friends. I worked and I went home, watched movies and read books, went to museums and theater events. I didn’t mind it, really, being alone.