Charlotte’s Story (18 page)

While I was happy to have the attention drawn away from me, it was a horrible moment.

Now we were all watching Rachel. Her hands were squeezed into fists on either side of her plate, but her face was unnaturally calm. I knew she was deeply angry.

“My name is Rachel, you bitch. I’m sure you’ll remember it now.”

She gave J.C. a toothy, insincere smile, then turned her eyes to Press.

J.C. had pretended to be wildly amused at Rachel’s response, but the rest of the lunch was tense. Rachel eventually mellowed somewhat, but I made her let me drive back to Old Gate, telling her my stomach was upset and that being a passenger would make it worse. I blamed her behavior on the hormones, but I really felt there was something else going on. She was quiet the whole way home, resting her head against the top of the seat just as I had done earlier with so much pleasure. But there was no pleasure in her face.

When we reached Bliss House, I asked her to come inside.

She didn’t answer, but got out of the car and came around to the driver’s-side door. I got out with my packages and stood by as she adjusted herself behind the wheel. When she had the door shut again, she looked up at me. I’d thought her more than a little drunk when we left the hotel, but there in front of the house she seemed dead sober.

“Don’t be naïve, Charlotte. You know he’s fucking that stick, don’t you?”

Rachel was prone to cursing, so it wasn’t her coarse language that disturbed me. It was that she’d given voice to my own thoughts. What had Press been doing at The Grange alone with
J.C.? Again I saw him settling her sweater across her shoulders. He hadn’t mentioned that he would be seeing her, and he had invited her to the house without consulting me. It all made a sick, strange sort of sense.

Only once had I ever imagined him unfaithful with another woman. (I found the idea that he might have had some physical knowledge of another man—Jack—so repellent that I had banished it to the darkest recesses of my mind.) And, strangely enough, that woman had been Rachel. But it had been only for that one moment, on the day we’d been introduced, long before I had any claim on him.

“Don’t be silly. She’s just a friend.” I tried to sound more convinced than I felt.

“Were you even watching her today?”

“I don’t know why you’re so worried about her.”

Rachel’s smile was just short of a sneer. It wasn’t a pretty look for her. “Well, he hasn’t been doing it with you, has he? I bet he’s not.” There was something ugly in her tone that I couldn’t quite identify.

“Just go home, Rachel. You wouldn’t be saying this if you weren’t tired.” It all felt too real at that moment. Too close. I wanted her to leave.

“Ah. I didn’t think so.”

Without another word, she put the car into gear. As she drove away, the Thunderbird’s tires crunching on the driveway, I realized that the emotion I’d heard in her voice sounded a lot like jealousy.

Chapter 16

Judgment

Michael crawled around on the library carpet, alternately playing with a stack of blocks and looking at some of his picture books. Press sat in a chair near the fire, nursing his after-dinner port. He stared into the flames, barely glancing at the old script in his lap. Was he thinking about J.C.? I’d begun to wonder why he hadn’t married her, or at least someone like her. Someone wealthy and independent. I hated how dowdy and insignificant I felt beside her.

I sat on a floor cushion near Michael, feeling Eva’s absence. This was the time when Eva would sit on Press’s lap and show him pictures she’d drawn during the day, or the things she’d collected on one of her walks with Nonie or me. She worked hard to keep his attention, serious about whatever she was showing him. Many times I’d seen him look past her, distracted, as she nattered on about the animals she’d drawn, the stories she’d made up or adapted from her favorite books. Had he loved her enough? He had wanted children, but sometimes I wondered if he really
saw
them. While
he was occasionally stern, he was never mean. But neither did he play with them. It was as though they were part of his life, part of the house. They were expected.

I should have known better than to bring up my idea for the ballroom that night. Or any night. While my guilt over Eva’s death colored everything I said or did, at that moment I was irritated about J.C.’s coming visit and the scene at the hotel. I wanted some kind of reaction from Press, some sign that
I
mattered, that our family mattered.

It took several minutes to explain what I wanted, and Press watched me carefully and with a strange curiosity in his eyes, as though I were speaking a foreign language that he didn’t quite understand.

When I finished, he looked over at Michael, who had taken advantage of my inattention and removed a page of one of his books and begun to chew on it. His lips were stained with spots of brown ink.

“Michael!” I hurriedly swept my finger through his wet mouth to get all the paper out. When I finished, he grinned and said, “Eccccchhhh.”

Press watched silently while I took care of Michael. When Michael was quiet, I asked him what he thought about my idea.

He laughed. “Charlotte, you’re talking about a permanent change. There’s no repairing it. It’s a seventy-five-year-old classical ballroom! You have half a dozen other rooms you could turn into a playroom. He
has
a nursery, and an entire estate to play on.”

“We don’t even use the ballroom, and the theater will be finished any day.”

He stopped. “Oh, I see. This is because you’re jealous about the theater?” He shook his head. “Darling, don’t you think that’s a bit immature?”

A retort about grown adults remodeling an entire theater just to create a more comfortable space in which to waste time came
to my lips, but Nonie’s frequent admonition about my picking my battles kept me circumspect.

“It’s not just about Michael. He’ll have little friends. It would be for them to have a big room to play in when the weather is nasty. And I have so many ideas for how it might look. I’ve missed my art so much, Press.” I had been an art history major in college, but I painted as well. I wasn’t terribly good, but had, at least, sold a couple of pieces to strangers at the senior art fair.

“I’ll think about it. You can run it by J.C. if you want. See what she thinks should be done with it.” He paused. “But with just one child in the house, it doesn’t really make sense, does it?” He spoke quietly, as though not wanting to point out my error in judgment too forcefully. Anyone watching us would think that he was being tender. With the firelight just beyond him, his eyes were darker than ever. I couldn’t read them, but I didn’t need to.

I looked down and absently smoothed Michael’s hair where his head rested on my leg. He was contentedly sucking his thumb and reaching out with the other hand to play with the buttons of my cardigan.

It was a brutal question, and one that I couldn’t answer.

“Time for you to go on up to Nonie, big guy.” Press rose swiftly from his chair. He wasn’t a particularly lithe man, but his movements were athletic and oddly graceful. Sweeping our sleepy boy from the floor, he perched him on his shoulder.

“Tell your mama good night.”

Michael waved, opening and closing his small fist. “Mama.”

“Good night, darling. Go right to sleep for Nonie.”

When they were gone, I sat for a moment staring into the fire in the same way Press had. He was right, of course. And he was right to point it out, even if it hurt. I believed I deserved far worse treatment. With tears in my eyes, I picked up the bits of paper from the book’s torn page. Balling the mess in my hand, I tossed it on the burning logs. The paper curled and smoked and quickly turned to blackened ash, indistinguishable from the rest of the burnt wood.

Then I went to the library table where I’d laid the oversize edition of Beatrix Potter stories whose images I had planned to copy and put on the walls. The strange, friendly little community of animals was a perfect bridge from Eva to Michael. Something they both might have loved. I sank down in Press’s chair and turned the pages beneath the warm yellow lamplight.

I was turning the pages blindly, comforted by their familiarity, when Press came back a few minutes later. Surprised, I closed the book and looked up at him.

His footsteps dragged a bit. He had probably rowed early in the morning, and then there had been tennis with J.C. at the Racquet Club. I wondered how things were going to be between us. Would he ever really forgive me? He had told me again and again—every time I needed to hear it—that he didn’t blame me for Eva’s death. I couldn’t quite believe him. If the situation had been reversed, if I had come home to find one of our children crying in his crib and the other child drowned in a bathtub, I would not have forgiven him.

I would have killed him.

The realization shocked me, but as I watched him going about the room, returning books to the shelves and neatening his papers on the desk, I knew it was true. He had to despise me. It would explain why he would break our marriage vows and seek out the company of another woman.

Was that why he’d lied about telling me he’d be at the club?

“Press.”

“What is it? I’m going to bed.”

I twisted in my chair to look up at him. “I wanted to ask you why you said you’d told me you were going to be at the club. You never told me that.”

He frowned, his heavy brows coming together. He ran one hand through his rough hair.

“Charlotte, I told you this morning.”

I sat up straighter.

“I didn’t even see you this morning. You were gone when I got up.”

Now he came back over to my chair. He got down on one knee, and he looked so serious that I had the strangest feeling he was about to propose to me again. Taking my hand, he squeezed it.

“I was on my way downstairs to go rowing and went in to check on you. But when you weren’t in your room, I found you in Mother’s morning room. On that fainting sofa by the window.” He gestured across the room as though we were there instead of the library. “When I covered you with the blanket, you opened your eyes. Really, you seemed like maybe you’d been awake for hours. You said you were looking at slides?”

“I guess I fell asleep.” What else had I said to him?

“Charlotte, you said you were waiting for Eva. What did you mean?”

Why couldn’t I remember? Then it came out in a rush before I had a chance to reconsider.

“She did come to me. She was here, Press. And oh, God, she looked so miserable.”

He touched my face. I couldn’t bear the look of pity in his eyes. “You’re torturing yourself. Don’t do this. You know she’s not here.”

“She is. She touched me.” I remembered her cold fingers on my face, how the chill had lingered even after she’d left the room. “You know it’s possible.”

“Stop, Charlotte. You and I both know you must have dreamed it. I know you miss her, but this is just cruel. To both of us.”

I looked away. It was exactly what I’d known he would say.

“Charlotte.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t want to talk about it. It was a mistake.”

He came around the chair. “Listen. Of course you dream about her. No one’s going to blame you for that.”

When I didn’t answer, he scowled. “You should stay away from that lantern. Some of those pictures scared the hell out of me when I was a kid. I’m not surprised they gave you bad dreams. But I am surprised you didn’t go back to your room to sleep. I thought you didn’t like Mother’s rooms.”

“I said I was tired.” Truly, I had no memory of going to the sofa or of falling asleep.

“Well, be careful.” He stood up, then bent to kiss the top of my head. “That old lantern is dangerous. Mother was always worried that it might start a fire.”

I watched after him as he opened the library door and left, leaving the door open behind him. The draft from the hall pulled at the fire, drawing out a few tiny embers that spent themselves in the air above the hearth. No, I should never have told him about Eva. It bothered me that I could remember every detail of what Olivia had shown me, but couldn’t remember talking to him that morning. Had he really been there? The detail about putting the blanket over me seemed to make sense. But there certainly hadn’t been any danger of the lantern catching on fire. That much I knew for certain.

Chapter 17

Counted Losses

The next day dawned clear and autumn-bright. If I had known what hell that day would bring, I might have barricaded myself along with Nonie and Michael in my bedroom the night before and not come out for several days, living on whatever Terrance (oh, perhaps not Terrance, now!) left at the door for us to eat. As it happened, I’d shut my bedroom door and undressed and put on my gown and robe, thinking I would go back into the morning room. But when I looked at my bed, an intense weariness came over me, and it was all I could do to keep my eyes open long enough to pull back the sheet and shut off the light. If I dreamed, I can’t remember. But I woke with a strange sense of urgency, as though I’d slept too long and had gone to bed with something undone. Really, wasn’t it the same urgency I’d felt every moment since Eva had drowned? I hadn’t been there to stop her, to keep her from the tub.
Not now, darling. Bath tonight, before pajamas. There you go, darling. Run and play.
How many more mornings
would I wake with that same question?
What have I left undone? Who will suffer?