A Lady Under Siege (20 page)

D
erek opened the front door to find Meghan on his step, carrying a heavy leather satchel. “Can I come in for a minute?” she asked.

“On one condition—you say nothing about the squalor.”

“I’ll hold my tongue.”

“And possibly your nose.”

She followed him down the hallway toward his living room. “I can only stay a minute, so I’ll say this quickly and without a lot of—” she stopped in her tracks, struck speechless seeing his living space for the first time. It looked like an indoor version of his back yard. A pigsty.

“Now remember what you promised,” Derek said. “As you can see, I’m a packrat, I can’t stand to throw out perfectly good trash.”

“It’s not that,” she replied. “No matter how it looks, it’s a bit disconcerting, to come into a place with a floor plan just like mine next door, and see how someone else uses it.”

“Which is a polite way of saying you couldn’t live like this. I know what you mean about identical layouts, though. A dozen near-identical houses run cheek by jowl up this side of the street, and in every one of them the walk from the bedroom to the toilet is three steps north, seven steps east, two south, drop your drawers. I bet at rush hour, seven in the morning or eleven at night, all sixteen toilets flush simultaneously. We might as well all be rats in a Skinner box. Now, what exactly can I do for you?”

“A couple of things.” She sat herself down on Derek’s old couch, opened up her satchel, and spread several medical books on his coffee table. “These are for you to read,” she said. “I’ve saved you some trouble and marked with Post-It Notes the pages that look promising—there are a bunch of conditions I think might apply to Daphne. They’re all cross-referenced. I hope you can read my handwriting on the notes, sometimes it gets pretty tiny. I’ve been insanely busy with work so I haven’t had time to sit down and go through them properly. You, on the other hand, seem to have all the time in the world, so I’m hoping you’ll have a look at least. Ideally you should read them out loud—I think if Thomas hears them spoken, he’ll be more likely to understand. Thomas, if you hear me, it’s no slight on your intelligence, me saying this to Derek. It’s just there’s a ton of medical terminology, some of which I don’t understand myself.”

“I thought his daughter was getting better,” Derek said.

“She is. She actually got up and walked, which is like a miracle. But I still want to cover every angle. She still hasn’t been properly diagnosed.”

“Speaking of daughters, yours has stopped coming out to the back yard.”

“I know. She’s been shunning you because of how you treated her the other morning, and now she’s giving me the silent treatment too, brooding in her room. Her father told her he’s going to have a new baby. She’s not taking it well.”

“I didn’t know that part. I thought you two are still married, that you’d just recently split up.”

“That’s right.”

“Guy moves fast.”

“Guy moves sloppily, is more like it.”

“And the mom to be? It’s not your former best friend or something sordid like that, is it?”

“Not exactly. A student of his.”

“Does Betsy know her?”

“Why do you care?”

“I don’t know. I do, a little. I like Betsy. I am sorry I growled at her.”

“I think she feels she’s been replaced, and her dad’s going to abandon her. And I’m dealing with deadlines and don’t have time to deal with it. Right now I have to run to a meeting, which if it goes well will give me a chance to catch my breath and pay some attention to her. God knows she needs it.”

Derek nodded, but said nothing in reply.

“It’s nice of you to worry about her,” she added. “Especially since you told me the other day worry is maggot food.”

“I didn’t say I practice what I preach,” he smiled. “I’m a human being. We’re all liars and hypocrites.”

“Not always,” she protested. “Sometimes we’re good. Thank you for asking about her. I’ll tell her you did.”

“Whatever. Is that it?”

“No. There’s something else. Thomas has spoken to me. He spoke to Sylvanne, exactly as I asked him to.” She hesitated, searching for the right tone. “It was very cute. He was amazed you brush your teeth.”

“Jesus Christ. He’s going to have to do better than that.”

“Oh he did, he did. He’s smart enough to figure out tooth brushing isn’t all that rare and exotic in this day and age, so he moved on to something else he saw you do yesterday. You went to visit your mother, because your sister asked you to. She was worried because your mom didn’t recognize her anymore.”

Derek raised an eyebrow.

“Your mom’s only seventy-seven, but she must have some kind of early-onset dementia. Her memory is going. She lives in some kind of home. A big building with lots of floors, lots of elderly folks.”

“Uh huh.”

“And when you got to her room, she was thrilled to see you, and you were quite relieved that she recognized you—and then she called you Thomas.”

Derek’s open face turned thoughtful. “Know what?” he said. “This is getting weird.”

“That’s what Thomas said too—he looked at your mom and was shocked at how much she looked like
his
mom. But he felt a connection when she looked at you—at him—and then when she said his name he knew she felt the connection too. He just knew it.”

Derek studied her face carefully, looking for some hint that this might still be an elaborate practical joke. If not, what was it? She met his gaze, and they locked eyes.

“What is your game?” he asked.

“It’s not a game.”

“Whatever it is, it’s pretty good,” he said. “Except for one thing. There’s an orderly on her floor named Thomas. As we walked to the elevator she said hi to him. Did your Thomas tell you that?”

“No, he didn’t. Don’t tell me you’re still holding out on me, Derek! That orderly is irrelevant, he wasn’t in the room when you spoke to your mother. No one was, except you and her. Now how could I possibly know all the intimate details of a conversation that only you and your mother shared? How could I know what your sister said to you on the phone?”

“I don’t know. You’re not the type to hack a phone line, you wouldn’t have the skill set. But you could have hired someone—tapping into a cordless is easy as tuning into a radio. Or you could listen in by putting your ear to our common wall here—I’m loud when I’m on the phone, and I pretty much repeated the conversation to my sister when I got home. Or maybe you’ve drilled a hole through the wall, or hidden a mini-cam. Maybe you’ve hired a private detective to stake me out, tail me across town. I’ve seen the movies, I know what lengths an obsessive female will go to, to ferret out a man’s secrets.”

“What reason could I have to obsess about you?” Meghan cried in exasperation. “Have you looked in the mirror lately? Have you looked at how you live? Have you looked at
where
you live? You know what this room screams to me? Three things—cockroaches, bedbugs, and head lice. All harmoniously coexisting in perfect, squalid harmony. I’m sorry, Derek, squalor is not attractive, to me or to any other woman on the planet.”

“I have no trouble finding women, thank you very much.”

“Right. You bring them in at two a.m. and they’re out by three. But this is all beside the point. The point is, I came over here with what I thought was clear and obvious proof, thinking you’d finally have to accept the truth—why can’t you face up to it?”

“Put it this way,” he said. “I’d prefer if you turned out to be just plain old-fashioned nuts. It’s not even pejorative. More like welcome to the club.”

“I’m not nuts,” she answered. She took a deep breath. “Look, I’m sorry I got my back up. I’m the guest here, the one intruding into your space, your life, and it’s not my place…” She hesitated, like a high jumper staring at the bar, visualizing what it would take to make the leap. After all the cutting things she’d said to him just now he stood before her without malice. He still looked upon her with an open, unguarded face, willing to hear her out. She felt her nerve almost fail her, and then she spoke. “In your mother’s room there’s a photo. Of your wife and child. They’re dead.”

“I see.” Derek’s eyes showed a flicker of bewilderment. “Why didn’t you just tell me about that, right off the bat, instead of all the minor details first? Why pussyfoot around?”

“I felt like I don’t know you well enough.” She wondered if she saw a tear at the corner of his eye. He brought a finger up to touch it. She herself felt like crying.

She looked at his smooth, honest face. He said, “It’s true. I found a great woman and I married her. And we had a lovely little girl. It’s not a secret I keep hidden, but I’m surprised you know about it.” His words, and the casual, matter-of-fact way he delivered them, left Meghan a little at a loss.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be sorry.” He stared at her evenly, with just a hint of defiance. “The wound has healed, Meghan. What you’re seeing are the scars.”

She had an instinct to comfort him, to touch his arm, but something in his eyes kept her at a distance.

“I’m going to go. I didn’t mean to invade your privacy and bring up things I probably have no right to know.”

“We’re neighbours,” he said. “If we ever became
good
neighbours you’d have heard about it eventually.”

“We can be good neighbours,” she said.

“Deal.”

She glanced at the medical books on the table, “You will look at these, won’t you? It would mean the world to me.”

“Sure. I will,” he said. “I’m still not sold, but I’m running out of plausible explanations for the things you tell me. So I’ll have a look, just to be on the safe side. If there’s a Thomas, he might learn something. I might too.”

27

S
ylvanne was combing Daphne’s hair. She picked up the young girl’s long tresses and piled them atop her head. “I prefer my hair down, not up,” Daphne told her. “I have a neck like a stork, so I like to keep it cloaked.”

“But this is the neck of a swan,” Sylvanne disagreed. “How gracefully it curves from your bodice to your chin. Any handsome knight would fall off his horse at the sight of you.”

“You really think so?” asked the girl, blushing.

“Have you seen yourself in a looking glass lately? The little stork is growing into a lovely swan, for certain,” Sylvanne insisted.

“You’re thinking of that fable about a duckling who’s ugly.”

“I’m thinking of a pretty girl named Daphne.”

Sylvanne planted a sweet peck of a kiss on Daphne’s neck. Just at that moment Thomas entered, and saw it, and saw his daughter, dressed in day clothes, rise from her chair and come to him, radiant and beaming.

“Daddy, do you like my hair this way?” she asked, doing a little pirouette to show it off from all angles.

“I can honestly say I do,” he replied. “You’re looking quite the lady.”

“I wish I had some fancy soirees to attend,” she mused. “I wish I lived in the capital. I wish a prince would see me like this.”

“That’s three wishes,” Thomas said tenderly. “Don’t spend them so freely. Save one for getting well.”

“I am well,” Daphne insisted. “Sylvanne says I’m well enough to go riding, and I think we should all three go out on horseback together, this very day. This very minute! She’s been telling me all about the horses she kept when she was my age. Her father’s farm had two sturdy draught horses she brushed and fed, and rode them bareback in the summers. She had two, and I’ve never yet had one.”

Thomas glanced at Sylvanne. She smiled back at him discreetly. Her hair had been fashioned into one long braid, and pinned up, displaying her lovely neck to fine effect.

“If wishes were horses…” Thomas said dreamily. “Well, I suppose a horse is a reasonable wish for a girl. We’ll find you one.”

“Today?” Daphne cried.

“No, not today, but tomorrow I’ll put out word. There may even be something appropriate in my own stable, although offhand I can’t think of one. They’ve all been bred for warfare, I’m afraid. Very spirited bunch. You’ll need something gentler, a sweet old mare with a motherly streak.”

“But I want a spirited one,” Daphne demanded. “And it should be chestnut in colour, and bigger than a pony. Sylvanne says ponies are for girls, and I’m a young lady now.”

“Suddenly it’s Sylvanne, Sylvanne, Sylvanne,” Thomas said good-humouredly. “Has she convinced you to regard the perfectly apt word girl as pejorative?”

“She recognizes what’s there for all to see,” Daphne replied. “You said yourself that I’m looking quite the lady.”

“And does Sylvanne herself have anything to add on this subject?”

Sylvanne smiled slyly. “Nothing needs adding,” she told him. “The young lady is so articulate and polished in her language, I fear that by comparison my own voice sounds as waves slapping an empty boat.”

“Hardly,” Thomas replied. “Your voice is the wind that fills the sails.”

Sylvanne made a little show of whispering to Daphne like a girlish conspirator, “I think your father just called me a windbag.”

Daphne giggled, and gleefully scolded him, “Daddy, did you call Sylvanne a windbag?”

“My my, how women like to twist men’s words,” Thomas replied. “No wonder we have such trouble speaking from the heart.”