An Illusion of Trust (Sequel to The Brevity of Roses) (14 page)

Ten minutes later, Eduardo and Korush exit the house and seat themselves at one of the tables which means food is on its way. "Lunch," I call out to the swimmers as the women begin the parade of dishes from the kitchen.

Kristen surfaces close to me. "Hey, Renee, got your demons back on the leash today?"

A collective gasp is followed only by the sound of water dripping off the guys standing at the edge of the pool. I laugh and give her a big mental hug. "Thank you for asking, Kristen. Yes, I think they're secured."

Apparently, my response is the signal for everything to return to normal because now everyone is smiling and chatting as they fill their plates. I'm debating whether I should have the lamb or chicken kebab when the doorbell sounds. Aza jumps up to answer it and I pray it's Paul she's expecting. No such luck. Diane's voice soon dampens my hunger.

"I don't want to interrupt your lunch," she says to no one specific as she steps onto the patio, "but I need to talk to Jalal about something."

Of course she does. Not that she couldn't have talked to him about it yesterday or the day before or tomorrow or next week, because she seems to find an excuse to be here nearly every damned day. I'd hoped that after Aza started dating Paul, she wouldn't have time for Diane, but Paul travels on business so often there's still room for her to be a constant bitch in my life.

Diane pulls my nearly naked husband aside to simper and smile only inches from him. I'm not the only one watching this display. Jennie hands Adam a strawberry and whispers in his ear. A second later, he slips off her lap, walks over to Jalal, and reaches to be picked up, so they can share bites. My smile matches Jennie's.

Then Goli calls out, "Jalal, continue that conversation after you eat." But I'm not sure she said that because she's watching my back until she moves over one seat, winks at me, and says, "Diane, come sit by Aza."

For the first time in my life, I'm surrounded by people who watch out for me.

Jalal smiles at me across the patio. Without warning, a sob escapes and I rise and turn away with Mia Grace in my arms, hoping that everyone will think I'm only going inside to change her diaper.

So. I went to the doctor and, when tests showed I'm anemic and deficient in a dozen other things, he loaded me up with supplements. Jalal read me the riot act on that one, since he's always after me about skipping meals. And Judith referred me to her therapist—"the best in town"—but after three sessions with him, each one less useful, in my opinion, I called it quits. In the last two weeks, I've learned more on my own by reading about dealing with trauma. I think just acknowledging the reason behind my fear of separation from Adam and Mia Grace is the major step toward my healing. I'm embarrassed that I reached that point so dramatically—that's repression for you. At least Adam and Mia Grace are too young to remember the day their mother went completely loco.

Despite the therapist's caution to move slowly, Jalal and I are taking Korush's advice. We've hired a private investigator to find Brandon, Nicole, and Amber. Today, we're filling out the online forms. "We don't have to send Nathan the actual photos, do we?" I ask Jalal.

"No. Scans will do." He hands me his phone. "Call Jason and remind him to get your lock box."

I text him instead. The guys asked last night if they could use our house in Bahía for the day. When Kristen found out, she invited herself and Brittany, so before they left this morning I told them where to find my photo box in the garage.

Jason responds,
First thing in the car, Uncle J. Spending the night.

"He's already put it in the car," I say, "but they're not coming back from Bahía until tomorrow."

Jalal grabs the phone and hits dial. He skips a greeting. "Jason, you guys can do what you want, but those girls are not sleeping in my house with the three of you." As he listens, he shakes his head as though Jason can see him. "Give me a break. Your Aunt Aza would kill me for allowing it. No. Jason, do not put—" He sighs. "Hello, Kristen."

Jalal listens to her plea. "And you cleared this with your mother?" He smiles. "Just as I thought. Your Aunt Renee and I will drive over and take you all out to dinner, after which you and Brittany will ride home with us." He shakes his head again. "No, they can stay. Yes, it
is
fair. See you at seven."

"Wow," I say. "That was a glimpse of the future."

"What do you mean?"

"You being the strict disciplinarian with Mia Grace."

"Not even close," he says. "In the first place, I would never allow Mia Grace to drive to the coast for a day with a boy."

I'll let him keep that fantasy, for now. He has no idea what he'll be dealing with when she's a teen. He'll know every trick Adam tries to play, but despite his considerable knowledge of women, Mia Grace will spin him like a top. It's my job to do my best to raise her right and intervene when she strays from that.

Today my job is to face the past. "I don't see what good those old photos are anyway," I tell him. "Kids change drastically in eleven years.

"Are you in any of them?"

"Some. Why?"

"I bet I could recognize you in them."

"Well, probably so, in the ones where I'm older, but Amber was only two and Nicole was four. Brandon was ten, so maybe they can see some resemblance to him now, but—"

"Can it hurt to include the photos? We need to do everything we can to find them."

"Okay. You're right."

I'm afraid we won't find them. Then again, I'm afraid we will.

"Nicole is dead." I throw the file folder at Jalal, scattering papers on the grass. He's standing in the back yard in the area marked off for the construction of his writing studio. It took the investigator less than a week to send that report to Jalal, but he kept it from me. This morning, I don't know why, I thought I might have told Jalal the wrong birth date for Amber. If I hadn't opened the files to check, I still wouldn't know about Nicole.

He doesn't look at me as he picks up the scattered papers and stacks them in the folder, squaring the edges. "Nathan's report came the day before your birthday," he says. "I wanted to find a better time to tell you."

"That was two weeks ago."

"Yes, but I was hoping for some good news before I had to tell you the bad."

Nicole never went to live with her father as I'd thought. In the statement CPS took from Becky, she refused to identify Nicole's father, even though she had a man living with us at the time she got pregnant. Larry moved in and out several times over two years, so I assumed he fathered both my sisters, but Becky didn't name him on Nicole's birth certificate. She was fostered out numerous times, flagged as a discipline problem, labeled a runaway by the time she was ten, and recorded as "missing" at twelve. She died of a meth overdose two weeks after her fourteenth birthday, a date I can never forget. "She died the day after our wedding."

Jalal grasps my shoulders. "You are not responsible for Nicole's life," he says.

I'm not responsible for her death is what he really means. "I know. She was just more of Becky's collateral damage. But if I'd looked for her sooner—"

"Stop." He cups my face in his hands. "You cannot change the past. You can worry, regret, and
what if
for the rest of your life, but you will never change a second of the past. I am sorry that Nicole had a horrible life, but not one bit of that is your fault."

I clasp my hands over his and turn my face to kiss his palm. I don't want to think of the Nicole I never knew, but it hurts too much to think of the one I did. He pulls me into his arms. I hold him as tightly as I can, wishing I could press all his love into the hole in me I thought I'd already filled. After several minutes, he tilts my head back, looks into my eyes and then further, into my broken heart. "Let yourself mourn, sweet love. Go. Be alone with your memories for a while."

I leave him in the yard and go up to our room. I'm too numb to cry. The fuchsia metal box under my bedside table, so out of place in this elegant room, draws my eye. I open it on the bed and take out the photos I've viewed more in these last three weeks than I had in the eleven years since I left Indianapolis. After we got them back from Bahía, Jalal scanned them all into his computer and then framed the one of me at two, his favorite. He keeps it on his desk, still trying to decide whether Adam or Mia Grace resembles me more.

Looking at these photos with Jalal and Aza that night was a trip. The first one he pulled out of the pile was of me at sixteen, in heavy makeup. He couldn't hide his shock. Aza laughed and called me Goth Girl, but Jalal only mumbled something about liking my natural look better.

Aza held up one photo of Brandon, looking from it to me. "Your brother resembles you."

"You think? Well, we had different fathers, so it must be something we both got from Becky."

"Oh," she said. "I'm sorry. I didn't know."

"Only Nicole and Amber were full siblings."

"Both brown-eyed blondes," Jalal said.

I couldn't bear the images from my past any longer, the reminders of things I'd rather forget, so I gathered and locked them in the box. "Aza," I said, "let's look at your old family photos."

"Oh no," Jalal groaned.

"I'll go get them," she said.

For the next two hours, I perused the entire Vaziri pictorial history and enjoyed every minute of it.

Now, I pull the only two photos of Nicole from the pile on the bed. Both show her round-faced, eyes defiant. This is how I remember her. The only way I want to remember her. Finally, the tears come, blurring her face like a symbolic erasure from my life. "Good-bye, Nikki."

The scent of Jalal's spiced tea wakes me. He's standing by the bed with a tray. "I hate to disturb you," he says, "but the kids will be up from their naps soon, and they already missed seeing you when they came home from the zoo."

"I'm glad you woke me. I didn't mean to fall asleep." I sit up. Jalal joins me on the bed, setting the tray between us. He pours and hands me a cup. Tea is his magic elixir, good for any occasion. Right now, it does taste like magic.

"You were looking at your photos again," he says.

I pick up one of me at fifteen. "Why did this upset you?"

"It just surprised me. You looked so different."

"You were more than surprised."

He sets down his cup and slowly traces his mustache with a thumb and forefinger, ending with a tug on the soul patch below his bottom lip. "This will sound—" He shakes his head and sighs. "I guess, I never think of you as ever being different than you are now. Almost as though life for both of us began when we met." He questions me with raised brows.

Really? He's asking if I feel that way too? "Your past is what I knew
most
about you, Jalal. Your life with Meredith …"

He looks away. "You are right. I apologize. We have been married for almost three years, and I am just realizing how much I have left to learn about you. You rarely talk about your past, and I think I understand why you find that difficult. I think we both prefer to live in the present—our present. Still, my narcissism is inexcusable. If I had tried to understand sooner, I would have realized the cause of your separation anxiety with Adam and Mia Grace."

"It doesn't matter now," I say. I'm sorry I opened this door again. I want him to stop thinking before he realizes his self-centeredness is the only thing that allowed our marriage. It's dishonest, but I want him to go back to feeling that I didn't exist before he met me. I want to be only Renee Vaziri.

He picks up a photo of Becky. "You look nothing like her," he says.

That's far from true, but he's only trying to reassure me that I'm not
like
her. And in the way that really matters, he's right. I got the genes that shaped her chin and nose, not the one that made her an addict. The therapist said I don't really hate Becky, I hate the person drugs and alcohol turned her into. It's almost impossible to separate the two, but sometimes when I'm with Adam and Mia Grace, I think I remember my real mother a little bit. That's what I need to hold on to.

"Jalal, I think we should call off the search for Brandon and Amber."