Birthright (15 page)

He couldn’t tell her she was his sister. Not now. Not after they’d already told each other too many things. Not when his only proof of their relationship lay in the beating of his heart.

“I can’t. That’s all.” Before he could say another word, before he could destroy her world any more,
he turned and stalked down the porch, around her house to the front and into his car. Gravel flew as he drove into the night.

T
RYING TO FALL
asleep would have been futile, so she didn’t bother. After cleaning the kitchen, she changed out of her dress and into an old shirt and jeans, then slammed a Don Henley CD on her stereo, a collection of songs about lovers screwing up, wounding each other, leaving each other in forlorn solitude and staggering alone through the landscape of love. Then she attacked her canvas.

The halogen lamp blazed in her studio, filling it with a light brighter than the sun at noon. The paints lent their pungent scent to the air. She mixed them on a plate, slapping browns and greens together, stabbing the dollops with her palette knife and slashing the resulting colors onto the canvas.

She was painting corn. Indiana. The open endless fields of her home, the bleakness of her world. Dying corn, broken stalks beneath a lemon-hued sky.

She wouldn’t cry. Not over the mess she’d made of her life. Not over the travesty of her marriage, the decade she’d spent trying to prevent her world from crashing and burning, and not over the ultimate crash, the ultimate burn. She wouldn’t cry over her inability to reach out to her old friends or her inability to connect with a new friend.

She wouldn’t cry over Aaron. She wouldn’t shed a single tear over how she’d taken the biggest risk of her life by kissing him, and he’d pushed her away.

How many failures could the golden girl of Riverbend High rack up? How many imperfections
could Miss Perfect carry inside her? How many times could a woman crash and burn before all that was left were ashes?

He’d said he wanted her, she recalled, studying the Dijon-mustard blob of paint on the plate and adding more green to it. She blended the paints until the blob was the shade of a drying husk, then daubed it onto the canvas with a half-inch brush.

Aaron had said he wanted her, and he hadn’t had to say it. When he’d kissed her, those few blissful moments when he’d let go, given in, taken the same chance she’d taken, he hadn’t had to say what had been so obvious. She’d felt it in his kiss, in his ragged breath, in his hands stroking her cheeks, in the pressure of his arousal.

Her own husband hadn’t responded to her like that, not at the end. The last few years of her marriage had been as bleak, as dry and broken as the cornfield she was painting. Half the time Tyler had been too drunk to function—and she’d been relieved. The other half, she’d given in to him to avoid a fight. Until that last night, when she’d had enough and thrown him out of their bed.

Aaron hadn’t completely convinced her she wasn’t responsible for Tyler’s death. But he’d made her feel a little better, a little less guilty. Before tonight she’d found him irresistibly attractive. After he’d said what he had, she’d gone beyond simple attraction. Any man who could offer such healing words to a woman like her…

She could fall in love with him.

But he wouldn’t let her. What felt so right had suddenly turned wrong. Aaron had seemed sickened
by her, and he’d run away. The man who had goaded her to stop playing it safe had fled like a coward at the first sign of danger.

She stepped back to study her canvas. She’d been at it for hours. The CD was finished; the house was silent. Someone who didn’t know what the painting was supposed to be might not guess by looking at it. The canvas was covered with angles and points, stalks bent and broken as if they’d just been pummeled by a midsummer hail storm. The sky had an eerie post-storm glow.

It was a sad picture, she realized. A mournful picture. An angry picture.

It was the most honest picture she’d ever painted.

“H
I
, M
OM
,” L
ILY SAID
.

It was eight-thirty in the morning, and she was running on fumes. She’d dozed off on the floor of the studio for a few hours and been awakened by the warmth of the sun spilling in through the windows. As her eyes had adjusted, she’d kneaded the stiffness out of her neck and studied the painting on the easel. It was still angry, still mournful, still an honest depiction of her life—only, she noticed something else: some of the stalks were still green and standing.

If the painting was a reflection of her, she wasn’t dead yet.

She’d taken a long hot shower, loosening her cramped muscles a bit more, then consumed a cup of coffee. She’d felt odd, as if she had one foot in Riverbend and the other in a dream somewhere, a dream brimming with possibilities. If she could survive one risk, she could survive others. Her life
might be a disaster, but at least it would be an interesting, daring disaster.

She’d decided to pay a call on her mother, another golden girl of Riverbend, someone who had always lived up to everyone’s expectations. Maybe Lily and her mother hadn’t been close when Lily had been younger. But that was no reason for them not to become close now. Eleanor might have knowledge she could teach Lily. Lily wanted to learn.

She found her mother still in her bathrobe, her breezy blond hair unbrushed and her face untouched by makeup. Eight-thirty was perhaps a half hour before civilized people dropped in on each other. But Lily was family. Her mother didn’t have to groom herself for a visit from her daughter.

“Lily! Hello!” Her mother’s smile was warm enough to assure Lily she was welcome. “Dad isn’t home. He’s already left for the clinic.”

Lily suffered a pang at the realization that her mother thought she would stop by only to see her father. “That’s fine,” she said softly. “You’re the one I want to talk to.”

A fleeting look of bewilderment crossed her mother’s face, and then her smile widened, its courtesy failing to mask her curiosity. “Come on in,” she said, holding the door wider so Lily could enter. “You must think I’m a lazybones, not even dressed at this hour…”

“I think lounging around in your pajamas is a blessed luxury.” Lily said. “No need to explain.” She followed her mother into the sun-filled kitchen.

The room hadn’t changed much since Lily had left home. It was still cheery, the knotty-pine cabinets
golden in the morning light, the tile floor spotless. Lily’s mother could afford to pay someone to wash and wax her floors, but she didn’t. Her career was keeping her husband’s life tidy and comfortable, and she wasn’t ready to retire.

“Coffee?” she asked.

“Yes, thanks.” Even though Lily’s mind was alert, her body was sore and sluggish from having slept on the floor—and slept too little. Another cup of coffee would give her nervous system a much-needed jolt.

Her mother fixed two cups, adding skim milk to Lily’s as well as her own. They sat facing each other at the round pine table by the window.

“How are you?” Eleanor asked.

Could she tell Lily was teetering on a fine edge? Was she asking a question she already knew the answer to—that Lily was a wreck? Or was she just being polite?

“I don’t know,” Lily replied, determined to remain as honest with her mother as she’d been with her painting last night, and with Aaron before that.

Her mother’s gaze softened with concern. “Ah, sweetie. You’ve been through so much these past few months. Losing Tyler so horribly, selling your house, moving back to Riverbend—”

“Tell me about love,” Lily said. Her voice sounded young to her, a child begging for a lesson.

Her mother’s eyes widened. She sat back in her chair, and Lily almost laughed at the puzzlement in her mother’s expression. Her eyebrows quirked up, her mouth pursed; even her hair looked more mussed, stray tufts standing on end. “Love?”

“I’ve been married, I’ve been widowed, and I still don’t get it.”

Her mother regarded her thoughtfully. The puzzlement seemed to fade from her eyes as she took a sip of her coffee. “Didn’t you love Tyler?” she asked.

“Of course I did,” Lily said. She
had
loved Tyler—very much at the beginning and intermittently even at the end. He’d swept her off her feet, but even swept, she wouldn’t have married him if she hadn’t loved him. She wouldn’t have tried so hard to keep the marriage alive if she hadn’t cared. “But…there were bad times in the marriage, too, Mom.”

“There are always bad times in a marriage.”

“Not yours,” Lily argued. Her parents were perfect together. Yet her mother abruptly looked away, staring out the window into the morning sun. Lily leaned forward and covered her mother’s hand with her own. “Mom?”

“Even the best marriages have bad times in them,” her mother murmured.

“But you and Dad love each other so much. I know you do.”

“I love him more than I can say,” her mother confessed, her voice barely more than a whisper.

“And he loves you.”

Her mother snapped her head around to Lily, and she saw the pain, a damp shimmer in her mother’s eyes. “I don’t think so.”

Lily’s heart thumped against her ribs. Her own woes and frustrations went forgotten as she absorbed her mother’s words and joined them to her own recent observations: her mother’s investing in anti-wrinkle cream and perking up her hair, her father’s
seeming indifference to her mother’s upcoming birthday. “What are you talking about?” she asked, trying to tamp down her suspicions.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” her mother said hastily, blinking away her tears and shaping a poignant smile. “I don’t know why I said such a thing.”

“You said it because you believe it.”

“No. It’s just the silly insecurities of an old lady.”

“You’re not old, and your insecurities aren’t silly. Talk to me, Mom. We need to talk to each other about these things.” She tightened her hold on her mother’s hand, as if she could pass trust from her fingertips through her mother’s skin and into her heart.

“It’s really nothing.” Her mother used her free hand to dig a tissue from the pocket of her bathrobe. She dabbed at her cheeks, blew her nose and attempted another feeble smile. “Your father and I have been together forever, Lily. You know that. Maybe the fire is just burning itself out a little, that’s all.”

“Dad is devoted to you,” Lily insisted, wanting desperately to believe it.

“Dad has his life. He has his job, his golf, his friends. He has glory in this town. Everyone knows and loves him. I—” she sighed deeply and gave up trying to smile “—don’t fit in anymore. I think he’s…bored with me.”

“You aren’t boring!”

“He’s been staring at the same face across this table for thirty-seven years, Lily. That’s an awfully long time. He’s tired of me.”

“But you’re not tired of him.”

“I’m different from him. It takes much less to make me happy.” Eleanor sighed again. “I used to think all I needed to be happy was to know that I was making
him
happy. And you. When my loved ones were happy, I was content. It was all I needed.”

“You need much more than that, Mom. Everyone does.” Lily stroked her mother’s hand gently, feeling the bones beneath the skin. “Has Dad said he wants to leave you?”

“No, but—”

“Is he cheating on you?” It hurt her to speak the words, but she forced herself to get them out into the air.

“I don’t know.”

Lily’s heart slammed against her ribs again. “Do you have any evidence?”

Her mother sipped her coffee. She seemed stronger, not quite as shaky or close to tears. “He’s inattentive. He sometimes seems to forget I’m here. He drifts off when I’m talking to him. I wonder if he’s thinking about someone else.”

“Just because he drifts off—”

“And he doesn’t tell me where he’s going. He leaves and goes off and I have no idea where he is.”

Lily recalled that past Saturday, when she’d gone to the golf course to find her father and he hadn’t been there. Where had he been while her mother had thought he was golfing? Lily had finally found him at the Sunnyside Café, chatting with Aaron’s mother, of all people, but where had he been before that? What had he been doing Saturday morning?

“All these things add up to circumstantial evidence,” Lily said, resorting to the legalisms she’d
learned in her decade as a lawyer’s wife. “They don’t prove a case. Maybe Dad assumes you know where he is. Or he thinks it’s not that important that you know. Maybe he leaves intending to go one place, but he gets sidetracked and winds up somewhere else. Without more concrete evidence, you can’t say he’s having an affair.”

“What should I be looking for? Lipstick on his collar?” Her mother smiled sadly. “I’m a fifty-nine-year-old woman. Your father is a handsome man. I can’t compete with the young women out there. They flirt with him and he loves it.”

“Of course he loves it. What man doesn’t love to flirt with young women?” Lily drank some coffee, her eyes never leaving her mother. “Maybe you ought to flirt with him.”

“Me?”

“If you think he’s bored, why not put the spark back in the marriage? Flirt with him. Seduce him.”

“You’ve been reading too many of those women’s magazines,” her mother scolded.

Lily had certainly read her share of them during her years in Massachusetts, searching for ways to repair her relationship with Tyler. But her marriage had been in critical shape. Her mother’s marriage—God, she hoped she was right about this—seemed only to be in the doldrums. “You said you loved Dad,” she reminded her mother.

“Of course I love him.”

“Then do what it takes to get your marriage back on track. Fight for it if you have to. When you love someone, sometimes you have to fight for him.” She’d fought for Tyler when she’d hoped there was
still a chance of salvaging their marriage. She’d talked to his parents, to doctors, to experts at lectures and participants at Al-Anon meetings. She’d talked to the minister of the Congregational church she used to attend with him—and, more often, without him. She’d bought books, read articles, fought with him about the martinis, thrown away unopen bottles before he could open them. She had tried and tried, until it gradually became clear she couldn’t win the battle.