Custody (9 page)

Then a season ticket to the opera arrived in the mail. Kelly was mad for opera, but she never could have afforded such a marvelous seat, so she went, and was not surprised to find Jason in the seat next to hers.

It would have been churlish and silly not to talk to him. He invited her to the Federalist for a late supper after the opera, and she accepted. During the meal he was charming, and she couldn’t deny that he was handsome, and entertaining, and clever.

Still, over the next few months, she remained evasive. She wasn’t playing a game—she was just focused as she had always been on her work.

And deep inside, where she told herself the truth, lay the suspicion that it was only the challenge that kept Jason pursuing her; if he ever caught her, he’d lose interest in her. She didn’t need that kind of insult and injury.

Then René phoned to tell her that he and Ingrid had moved back to Boston because her mother was dying of cancer and needed to be hospitalized.

The world closed in on Kelly. She dropped almost everything but work to make time to visit her mother at the hospital. She became emotionally vulnerable in a way she hadn’t been for years. She’d kept herself so closed off for so long she’d almost forgotten how much she could hurt, but now sorrow pierced her again. It made her weak.

All she would tell Jason was that there had been a rift between her and her mother fifteen years ago. She did still love her mother, but she disliked her mother’s husband. Someday she would tell him the rest, she promised, thinking that that day would never come.

For the next few months, Jason accompanied her often when she went to visit her mother in the hospital. In spite of herself, Kelly became fond of Jason. He was the one who brought a small CD player with earphones and classical CDs for Ingrid, for the few rare times she felt well enough to listen. He showed an exquisite instinct for leaving Kelly alone with her mother when necessary, almost before Kelly wished it herself. He brought expensive, fragrant flowers. When he took Kelly home afterward, he often found ways to amuse her, even to make her laugh. Perhaps this was all a kind of game for him, another kind of adversarial event, Kelly thought, one grand challenge:
Jason Gray
vs.
The Grim Reaper
.

Still, she was grateful, and in gratitude and a kind of exhaustion, she finally gave in and went to bed with Jason. She enjoyed it, and didn’t feel guilty for the pleasure she took. She knew that the presence of death sharpened all the appetites of the living. She knew she was forcing back the sights and smells of the sickroom with those of the bedroom. She was not the first person to use the heat of sex as an antidote to the looming chill of the grave.

She’d assumed that was all it meant to Jason, too. She assumed she was a conquest for him or that he stayed around out of courtesy.

When Jason proposed marriage to her at her mother’s bedside, Kelly accepted with genuine gratitude for the smile this brought to her mother’s face. What a brilliant theatrical move, she thought! What a star he was!

She hadn’t actually believed he meant it, even when he brought, from his jacket pocket, a small turquoise Tiffany box, and inside it a small black velvet box, and inside that, a rather enormous diamond ring.

She said, “Yes, I’ll marry you,” but she nearly said,
“Well done!”

After her mother’s death, Kelly offered to return the ring to him. Jason was horrified. He’d
meant
it, he insisted. He wanted to marry her. Didn’t she want to marry him?

The truth was that she really didn’t know. She told him so. Things were all coming at her far too fast—her mother’s sudden return to her life and then, as suddenly and so finally, her departure. On the heels of the funeral, the nomination for the judicial position and all that entailed.

“Anyway,” she said to Jason, speaking as honestly as she could, “I don’t understand why you want to marry me.”

“Why, because you’re beautiful, and you’re intelligent, and you take the law seriously, and you laugh at my jokes,” he told her.

“But I’m not—how can I put this? I’m not part of your world, Jason.” Her frankness exposed her insecurities. “I didn’t go to private schools. I only recently learned to play tennis. I don’t know how to sail.”

“I realize that, but it doesn’t matter. Or rather, it does—it makes you rather glamorous.”

“Glamorous?”

“Yes. Mysterious. An unknown quantity. You didn’t see me stumble over my feet at dancing class or vomit when I was learning how to hold my liquor. You didn’t go wild at any of the painfully memorable house parties of my college years.”

“Ah,” Kelly said. “You mean I haven’t slept with any of your friends.”

Jason waggled his eyebrows. “Well, yes. There’s that, too.”

Now Jason continually pushed her to choose a date for the wedding. Kelly kept putting it off.

She couldn’t put a word to the cause of her reluctance. This afternoon, rushing through the bright air, she didn’t want to try. She was full of energy. “Slow down!” Jason ordered, more than once, but she
couldn’t
, somehow; she needed to
move
, so she circled around him, nipping at his heels like a puppy, shrieking with laughter.

“You’re in good spirits,” Jason remarked.

“Yes, I am,” she agreed, darting away from him in a burst of speed and then zipping back. Jason thought her good mood resulted from her recent appointment to the Massachusetts judiciary—and it did, really. Mostly. She was proud of the appointment and excited about it; it was the most important thing in her life, something she had dreamed of achieving. But it was a
serious
thing, and
right now
, for some reason, she was simply buoyant with a kind of
giddy
happiness.

She thought of falling that morning in the cemetery and of the man who’d offered his hand, so easily helping her up. “I thought an angel had fallen off her pedestal,” he’d said.

The taping had been exhilarating for Anne, but as she drove home her mind moved relentlessly to thoughts of the week ahead. There was
so much
good needing done in the world, and right when she should be focusing on that, she had the meeting with the psychiatrist to consider. All because of Randall,
damn
him, and his stupid, selfish insistence on ruining Anne’s life.

By the time she brought her BMW to a stop in the circle drive of her house she was shaking. Thank God, she thought as she stepped from the heat into the cool front hall, for this pale palace that rose around her like a medieval cloister. Shutting the front door firmly behind her, taking solace in the determined click of the lock, she leaned against it, taking deep breaths.

The entrance hall always calmed her, its floor a cool streaked rose-and-green Italian marble, the newel post of the winding staircase a marble basket of flowers, perfect immutable flowers greeting her every time. Her grandparents looked down on her imperiously from the heavily framed age-darkened oil portraits hanging above the refectory table. She liked having these portraits here, where anyone entering the house knew at once from what kind of stock she descended.

Thank you, Grandmother
, she prayed.
Thank you, Grandfather
. They had had the foresight to leave her a trust her own parents could not break to squander on their beloved immigrants. True, Randall had paid for half the house, as well he should have, but quite probably he wouldn’t have agreed to buy such a place—he found it ostentatious, undoubtedly because it wasn’t shabby and smelling like wet dog like his parents’ home—if he hadn’t known that Anne could pay cash for the property herself, and would have done so, if necessary. Now Randall was gone, and she was even more glad to have a beautiful,
serene
, home for a haven. It made such a difference in her life.

On the long refectory table against the wall rested two antique silver and marble epergnes, and between them a chased silver bowl. Over the years the family had gotten into the habit of dropping the mail here, and all messages. There was a note torn from his prescription pad, written in Randall’s distinct, direct, block writing—unusual for a doctor, but Randall was an
unusual man—for Anne.

Randall had taken Tessa off with him for the afternoon.

Legally, it was within his rights to do so. It was understood when Randall left that Tessa would remain in this, Anne’s, house. She and Randall would discuss, day by day, in a cooperative manner, Tessa’s care, even though they were battling fiercely, each one of them, for sole legal custody.

Anne had been so sure Randall’s departure was temporary. But the divorce, like an inexorable shredding machine, was grinding on, and Randall was driving it. She could not believe he was fighting her for custody of Tessa.

A kind of trembling moved over her. This day was too much. First Rebecca making that stupid scheduling conflict so that she had to miss her own fund-raiser. Then Tessa making such a violent scene about having to wear a truly beautiful dress! Now Randall taking Tessa off to his filthy farm without her consent.

Anne hurried up the stairs and into the safety of her own bedroom. Tearing off her clothes, she dropped them in the hamper in her pristine white bathroom and stepped into the shower. Using pHisoHex, the soap they used in hospitals, she scrubbed her limbs and torso, ten times, and shampooed her hair. Afterward, her skin was bright red, nearly raw.

And still she did not feel clean enough. She did not feel purged.

Randall had taken Tessa to visit her grandfather. On the farm. That
filthy
farm. Horseshit lay everywhere, and the cat was allowed to wander in and out of the house, catching rats, then with the same mouth and paws padding through the kitchen, licking Tessa’s hands. Anne hated the farm, hated it when Tessa went there. Hated it when Tessa came home, carrying into the house God only knew what sorts of germs and foul matter. When Tessa returned home, Anne would personally bathe Tessa herself, and shampoo her hair vigorously.

How Randall, a physician, could allow Tessa to be exposed to such a plethora of germs, Anne just couldn’t understand. Anyone who had ever worked in a hospital, who had ever seen the wounded human flesh, would know vigilance was necessary in this world. Cleanliness was essential.

Of course, it was a losing battle. Anne was aware of that. She was not a fool. As she pulled on clean, crisp clothes she admitted to herself that she was more intelligent than most people, and blessed with abundant energy and a keen perception. She intended to do her part to change the world for the better, but she would not let down her standards on the home front in the process.

She would not be like Randall, who had promised to love and honor her, who vowed to change the world with her and then betrayed her.

Who continued to betray her. Over and over again.

Fortunate Tessa,
spoiled
Tessa, fussing because she had to wear a two-hundred-dollar dress when children all over the city were hungry, illiterate, ill clad. Tessa, whom she had
ordered
to stay in her room, gone. With Randall. To the farm. Leaving Anne only a note lying face-up in the silver bowl on the front hall table. (What if Anne hadn’t seen the note? She would be frantic with worry by now!)

Anne stormed into Tessa’s room. Carmen had Sunday afternoons off, so it was up to Tessa to keep her room neat. Just for part of one day. Surely not too much to ask of a twelve-year-old.

And Tessa
had
hung up the lovely, expensive, painstakingly sewn dress she’d worn to church and then so recklessly stripped off at noon. Her shoes were neatly tucked away into the shoe bag hanging on the inside of her closet door.

With trembling hands, Anne opened one of the drawers of Tessa’s gilt-trimmed white bureau …

… And found chaos, T-shirts and sweaters and sweatshirts, crumpled inside out, crammed and jumbled together like rags.

How many times had she told Tessa to take proper care of her clothing? How often had she shown Tessa how her clothing must be folded when put away: face-down, divided into thirds lengthwise, the arms folded back and smoothed, then the shirt top lifted and brought back over the lower half, the collar arranged to lie just so, and all of it smoothed again. But no, Tessa had to just
toss
her things in any which way, as if they weren’t the best, most expensive clothes money could buy, while all around her thousands of poor girls wore hideous cast-offs, and ailing babies and old people in grave pain went without medicine.

Oh, Anne was angry. Still, she set to work. As a nurse she knew that the slightest disorder could breed disaster, a milligram of medication, a moment without oxygen, could bring tragedy down upon one’s life.

Tessa’s brush, silver-backed, part of a set Anne had bought for her daughter one year at Harrod’s in London, lay on the bureau next to the matching mirror. Long strands of blond hair gleamed, caught in the bristles. Anne shuddered as if those hairs were threaded in her throat. She hated hair. It was so unruly, pervasive, drifting everywhere, swirling like evil, just one hair making a web to catch dust and dirt.