Cameo Lake (27 page)

“I'm thinking about you . . . call me if you want.” I didn't know what else to say. I was afraid to commit to paper all the tumbling thoughts in my head, afraid that I would end up writing a chapter instead of a message of support. “I'm so sorry your secret got out. Let me know if there is anything I can do.” I held the tip of my fine-point pen over the notebook paper and wondered how to sign it. Sincerely? Your friend? Love? In the end I simply sketched my signature and folded the paper into one of my last engraved envelopes. I addressed it to Ben at the Cameo Lake post office and stamped it. The engraved return address caught my eye: Mr. and Mrs. Sean X. McCarthy. With a bold scribble, I blocked out the first line and wrote: “Cleo Grayson.”

“I'm going to the post box on the corner, answer the phone if it rings.” Halfway down the block, I wished I'd put on a jacket. The late-October air was winter-chilly and I could see my breath. I dropped the envelope into the post box and wondered how long it would take to get to Cameo Lake. I imagined the lake as it was in July, then imagined it as it must be now, past peak foliage season, still and quiet. Had Ben gotten electricity yet? Had all the lake people gone, leaving him alone? Was he even there? I didn't walk home right away, but kept going around the block, tormenting myself with thoughts of Ben. I kept thinking, has he wondered what's become of me?

“Mommy, Auntie Grace called.” Lily called down from her room.

I knew that she'd seen
ET
. Grace was an unabashed celebrity watcher. Her bathroom was littered with
People, InStyle,
and
Vanity Fair
. “Did you see it?” Grace demanded without preamble.

“Yes.”

“Why do you think he's kept that secret all this time?”

“I suppose because he was afraid that what just happened would happen.”

“He should have known this would come out.” Grace managed to sound sympathetic and cynical at the same time.

“He didn't want her to be a sideshow.”

“Well, she is now. This is the kind of thing the supermarket rags love. Photographers will be climbing in the windows of her room.”

“Oh, Grace, I hope you're wrong. Ben couldn't stand that.”

There was a pause in the conversation, an unusual thing for Grace, while she analyzed my remark. “You got to know him pretty well, didn't you?”

“We did get to be friends.”

“Have you called him?”

“I tried. His phone's disconnected.” I knew then that Grace was running the odds in her head. The odds that there was something more to this friendship of mine.

“Did you know about Talia?”

Now I paused, running my own odds against Grace reading more into my answer than I wanted. “Yes. Please don't ever tell him I told you.” I was slightly nauseous, knowing I had betrayed a trust, but I knew that Grace would know it if I lied.

“I see.”

“No, Grace. You don't see. We got to a point this summer where we shared the painful things in our lives. That's all.” I was glad that this conversation was taking place on the phone.

“Well, the cat's out of the bag, so now we all know.”

“I wrote and asked him to call me.”

“Cleo, can I give you a word of warning?”

“If I said no, would you stop?”

She laughed, not put off by my words. “Keep away from Ben or the spotlight will fall on you.”

Thirty-seven

H
alloween was on a Sunday night this year. A school night, and the school party, which took the place of trick-or-treating for the younger children, was early. It was Sean's weekend so he was the attending parent. I felt a little left out, especially since I usually volunteered to help with the party. Half of the fun for me was dressing up, usually as a witch, sometimes as a gypsy, once as a ballerina. I helped to oversee the apple bobbing or bean bag toss, making sure every child got a prize. My favorite party was the one last Halloween, when I was part of the haunted house—very zombie-woman. Someone had taken my picture, and when he saw it, Sean hung it on the refrigerator with Magnetic Poetry words spelling out: “Because I'm the Mummy, that's why.” It was still there. When I remembered that this would be the last year for Lily to attend, as next year she'd be in the middle school, I grew even more sorry I couldn't go with her.

I'd spent a long time making their costumes, turning Lily into a flamboyant movie star by making good use of a horrid bridesmaid's dress from 1982. I made a sweet little bat cape for Tim, complete with batwing shape and a felt hood. Lily moued and Tim struck a superhero pose as I took half a roll of film of them dressed up.

“After the party can I go trick-or-treating?” Lily didn't look at me as she asked this, but fussed with the strap on her shoe.

“No.” That sounded abrupt. “I mean, it will be too late.”

“No it won't.” Lately Lily argued everything and I couldn't be sure that it wasn't preadolescence or something more insidious.

“You can knock on Mrs. Webster's door and the O'Callahans on your way to Gramma's.”

“The party is so babyish . . .”

“Lily. Take it or leave it, or you can hand out candy here.”

“Everyone else—”

“Lily!”

Buttons pushed, Lily left the house with her brother in tow, trooping to their grandmother's to wait for Sean. It was no secret that Sean spent most of his time with Eleanor, but he kept up the pretense of living with his mother. I supposed that, come the finale to this drama, this playacting would work in his favor.

It seemed very late, long past the time I knew the party ended. Long past when I expected them back. I called Alice.

“No, they weren't planning on coming back here. They were going to drop the kids off at your house. I'm sure that's what Sean said.”

“They?”

Stillness on the other line, then, “Yes.”

“I see. Did
they
mention other plans?”

“No. Well, they might have said something about going to Eleanor's neighborhood. I'm sure everything is fine.”

“How can you say that?”

“I'm sorry, Cleo. I don't really know what to say.” Alice hung up quickly, leaving me to simmer in frustrated anger. I knew that Eleanor was insinuating herself into Sean's life from every angle, but thus far I hadn't considered that Alice had met her. That Alice might be verging on accepting her as part of Sean's life, like she had accepted Francis's philandering.

I had a flurry of trick-or-treaters come by, mostly children of people-I knew. A few parents got out of their cars to say hello, that weak
I-know-something-bad-is-happening-but-I-won't-ask-about-it sort of hello. I kept the conversations Halloween-centered. A small group of teenaged trick-or-treaters descended and effectively cleaned me out of the rest of my candy. I shut off the porch light but left the front door open. Sitting on my stairs to the second floor, I could see the street perfectly through the storm door but was invisible to anyone there. Across the street most of the porch lights were out, universal announcement “We are out of candy” to those still wandering the streets of Providence at nine o'clock on a school night. I was getting pretty angry. From my vantage point I could see car lights when they turned the corner, but car after car went by.

Finally, I picked out the headlights of the Volvo. As it pulled up alongside the curb I got up from the stairs and went outside. I stood on the porch as the backdoor opened up and the kids emerged. As the interior light went on I could see both Sean and Eleanor. Sean and Eleanor dressed in costume. In three strides I was at the car and shooing the kids into the house. “I need a word with your father.”

“Night, Dad, night, Eleanor.” Much too friendly for me, much too comfortable.

I went around to Sean's side of the car. “Where have you been?”

“We took them to Eleanor's neighborhood to trick-or-treat.”

“Was that your idea or Lily's?”

“They needed some real trick-or-treat experience.”

“Sweet Mary Mother of God, how stupid can you be? You let Lily manipulate you into doing something we both agreed they shouldn't do?” I was spitting angry.

“Cleo, my neighborhood is a very safe one. You don't need to worry. They had a good time.”

I stared in at Eleanor, dressed as the Bride of Frankenstein, the makeup contorting her smug smile into a freakish parody of friendliness. “This is none of your business, Eleanor. My children aren't your concern.” I know my voice was loud in the quiet street and I was momentarily embarrassed.

“Cleo, don't make a scene out here.” Sean was fingering the keys and I knew then he'd drive away before I could say another word.
Make a scene. I wanted to heave a rock through his window. I wanted to scream epithets at them both. I didn't. As I had ever done, I didn't make a scene.

I stepped away from the car. The kids had lingered on the porch and I was glad of my control.

Lily was in the shower and Batman was in bed when I confiscated their bags and dumped it all into the garbage. I'd replace it with new stuff tomorrow. They'd be mad as hell, but they'd get over it. The fact is that this went way beyond taking chances with our kids, it was Eleanor's latest volley in the war for their affection. Convincing Sean to give them a forbidden treat, letting Lily get her way. Getting Alice's tacit approval.

I could hear Tim in his bed, making airplane noises as I, too, lay awake in my bed, wondering how much longer I could take this.

Thirty-eight

G
race was right. At least about the supermarket rags. I stood in line and stared with fascinated horror at a blurry photo of a recumbent figure in a hospital bed. It might have been Talia, it might have been an alien. The banner headline read:
T
ALIA BRIGHTMAN ALIVE BUT BRAIN DEAD, HUSBAND KEEPS YEAR-LONG VIGIL
. A different tabloid read:
POLICE INVESTIGATE MYSTERIOUS ACCIDENT, BENSON TURNER SUSPECT.

I turned my face away, as from a car crash. I wondered how long Ben could keep a low profile with these sorts of things being written. The tabloids had indeed latched on to the story. One expressed it as romantic, Ben Turner's bedside vigil and all. The other spun it as an unsolved mystery—how did she fall and who was responsible? Both were determined to keep the story alive as long as Talia was.

In the week since I'd sent the letter, Ben hadn't contacted me. Part of me wasn't surprised, most of me was very disappointed. I only wanted to say I was thinking of him, I only wanted to hear that he was all right.

Halloween past, Thanksgiving loomed. The first official “family” holiday to be contested on the field of emotional football. Without
any family of my own, the holidays had never before needed planning. For nearly twenty years it had been simple, Alice had as many as could gather at her house. Sometimes all the daughters and their husbands and their many children descended from all parts. Sometimes the husbands kept the daughters from coming, proclaiming other family obligations, and only two or three of the daughters would come. But always the McCarthys were there, the mainstay family. Sean was the only son, lived closest in proximity, and had a conveniently orphaned wife. No other claims on holiday visits could be made. There were Margaret, Mary Alice, Siobhan, then Frances, named for her father after all those sonless pregnancies, then Sean, apple of his mother's eye and delight to his sisters, followed by a last stillbirth and finally, late in life, the baby, Colleen, never in the world a more spoiled little girl who managed to grow up selfless and sweet.

To them, I was another daughter, another sister. Sean and I had been so young, barely in our twenties when we married, that it seemed to all of us I had always been a part of the family. It was this which kept me tied to Sean.

Only Colleen remained unmarried, a career Navy nurse stationed in Bethesda. She was coming home on leave for this Thanksgiving and in honor of that fact the whole family had earmarked the date last March, in the time before my world fell apart. Each of us women promised to bring our specialties, mine being the pumpkin pies. Alice would only have to cook the turkey and set the massive dining room table. Her current house had been chosen as much for its old-fashioned formal dining room as for its proximity to us.

The kids, numbering now eleven with Margaret's surprise fourth baby, ranged in age from the six-month-old baby to a fifteen-year-old girl, Margaret's oldest daughter, Rachel. The children would sit together at the collapsible metal table and folding chairs in the adjacent living room, separated from the adults only by the low mahogany room dividers on either side of the wide archway where Alice kept her display of the children's school pictures. The furniture would be pushed aside for the occasion. The combined volume of the
two rooms would be loud. Some child would cry, some adult would get angry at another and then, just as quickly, forget about it.

That had always amazed me about Sean's family. They argued right out loud. In mine the arguments were stifled, then drowned in alcohol.
Don't make a scene.

Even the year Francis McCarthy died, the Thanksgiving celebration went on as before, but the absence of the Patriarch, as we jokingly referred to him between ourselves, subdued us. The laughter was still loud, but the arguments were stilled. That was the year Sean was elevated to Francis's position at the head of the table. Alice remained at the foot, closest to the kitchen. I sat on Sean's right and the sisters and brothers-in-law alternated around either side. There were twelve of us that year, but I can't recall who was missing.

I remember it as a moment of mythic significance, when Sean held the familiar carving knife, the bone-handled knife carried over from Ireland by Francis McCarthy's father. There was a moment's hesitation, like a child might take when he first attempts to do a man's task. Then the long blade of the knife touched the crisp brown skin of the turkey and the first cut was made. Sean looked up from his task and looked at me, a proud, slightly self-conscious smile on his face. An overwhelming comfort suffused my body and I felt as though this was where I had always been. Where I would always be.

“Joanie and I are having a gathering of loose ends.”

“And I'm a loose end?”

“You're
at
one, aren't you?”

“Grace, whatever are you talking about?”

“Surely you don't have Thanksgiving plans?”

It was a continual source of amazement to me just exactly how perceptive Grace Chichetti could be. I don't know how she could have known before I told her that the kids would have dinner at Alice's, with Sean. I suppose it was a logical assumption, but I might have said we were spending the day together, to hell with the McCarthy traditions. Evidently Grace assumed there was little chance of that. I asked her anyway.

“How do you know I wasn't planning on having you and Joanie to my house for dinner?”

“Because you live in a state of denial and you haven't mentioned the holidays once since you got the official separation. Please note: Thanksgiving is next week.”

“I know that. I've been busy.”

“Okay, let's say it's that. Now, for the record, will you come?”

“Yes.” I hurried to qualify my answer, “but only for dinner, I'm to have dessert with Alice and the clan when I go pick up the kids.”

“With Sean?”

“God, no. He'll have left by that time. Alice is unhappy about things, but growing more tactful. She's pretty much given up getting us in the same room”

“What about Eleanor?”

“Who?” I couldn't help myself.

“You know who. What are her plans?”

“Oh, you mean Bride of Frankenstein.”

My story of the Halloween argument had struck Grace as funny. As I described Eleanor's own big blond hair raised into a pyramid on her head it suddenly struck me that way as well.

What I didn't say to Grace was that Alice had not specifically said Eleanor wasn't coming. But in my heart of hearts I knew she'd never allow that to happen, at least not while there was a chance, in her view, of our reconciling. As long as our divorce wasn't final, Alice held out hope like a weapon.

Thanksgiving morning I tumbled my kids out of bed and made them a real breakfast. Alice's dinners were always at two o'clock. I knew the kids would be so hungry at noon, they'd be both grouchy and picking at the pickles and olives, stuffed celery and pitted dates until they'd be full by the time dinner was served and everything piled on their plates would go to waste. So I made them French toast, scrambled eggs and bacon and hoped that that would hold them until dinner. We ate breakfast in the TV room just off the kitchen, watching
the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Just as Santa and his reindeer appeared on the screen, the phone rang. Automatically, Lily jumped up to answer the kitchen phone.

“Mom! It's Ben!” Lily called as matter-of-factly as had it been Grace or Alice on the phone.

I was on my feet and into the kitchen in a shot. The thumping of my startled heart threatened to deafen me. I know my voice was a little tentative as I spoke. “Ben?”

“Cleo, hello.”

I was nearly speechless. “Ben. How are you?”

“The better for hearing your voice.”

“No, tell me if you're all right or not.”

“You mean with my newfound celebrity?”

“Something like that.”

“I've had better PR.”

“Stop kidding around.”

“Cleo, I'm all right. I'm keeping a very low profile, and an unlisted number, which I want you to have.”

I scrambled around looking for a piece of paper within reach of the wall phone.

“And how are you, how are the kids doing?”

“We're okay. I won't bore you with the details, but Sean and I are separated, the kids are beginning to accept it, and my mother-in-law insists I forgive him.”

“Can I see you?” It sounded blurted, as if he hadn't planned on saying that. “I mean, if you want to.”

I made sure the swinging door between the TV room and the kitchen was shut. “Ben, is that a good idea?”

“No, probably not, but that doesn't stop me from wanting to see you.”

I felt a rise of tears, “I can't think of anyone I would like to see more.”

“I have to be in Boston in a couple of weeks. Could you come up for the day? Or maybe we could have dinner?”

I appreciated Ben's subtlety, he wasn't asking for more than what our friendship had been based on.

“Lunch would be best. Yes, I could do that.” Yes. Now I could. All the holding back, the fear that to speak to him or see him would be corrupted by my state of mind, had dissipated with the first words out of his mouth. He was Ben, my lakeside friend. We were friends, irrespective of our personal upheavals, not because of them. Even as I thought that, I knew it wasn't quite true. Our personal upheavals had formed us into the people we now were.

“I've got to go. I'm having dinner with Talia's parents and I'm only halfway there.”

“How is Talia?” It seemed so odd asking that, as if all the publicity-would have affected her somehow.

Even over the poor-quality pay phone, I could hear him sigh. “We're losing her slowly. We're losing the battle against the contractures in her legs. She's starting to draw into a fetal position.”

“Oh, Ben. I'm sorry.”

“Cleo, I wish it was over.” It was a cry from the heart. I knew what he meant, and that he meant it in the most loving way.

“I know, Ben. I know. It will be, and you'll have done everything you could have for her.”

“Almost everything.” His voice was suddenly hardened and I knew he meant he hadn't stopped her from jumping. He pulled himself back from that abyss quickly. “Cleo, give the kids a kiss for me and have a nice holiday. I'll see you in a couple of weeks.”

“Ben, I'm glad you called. I was worried.” I felt a little shy saying it, but it needed saying.

“Thank you.”