Forbidden Fruit (33 page)

“Is a liar.” He tightened his fingers on the steering wheel. “My Lily is the mother of the story.” He looked at Glory. “She's your grandmother.”

Glory shook her head again, bright spots of color staining her cheeks. “This whole thing is absurd. I don't believe you.”

“It's absurd, all right. But it's also true.”

Glory brought a hand to her temple. He saw that it trembled. “If, all these years…Lily knew how to contact me, why didn't she? If she longed to know me, why didn't she simply make it happen?”

“Because she's ashamed of who she is. She's ashamed of what she spent a good part of her life being. Because she was afraid you would reject her, just as her daughter had. She bought the bullshit line your mother fed her, about how she would ruin your life. How she would
taint
it.” He took a deep breath, angry again. More determined than a moment before. “She needs you, Glory. She longs for you. She's dying.”

Glory caught her breath. “Dying?”

“Yes.” Santos tightened his fingers on the steering wheel, fighting off the hopelessness that washed over him, focusing instead on his anger, his hatred for Hope St. Germaine. “And your mother refused to go see her. It's the only thing Lily wants, her last wish. And your mother said no.”

He glanced at her and saw from her expression that, even though she didn't believe him, she was starting to wonder. He saw, too, that his story had touched her heart. “I know this is hard for you to swallow. I know what its being true will mean, to you. But I have no reason to lie about this.”

“Why should I believe you, Santos? Just tell me that. Your story is so farfetched it's ludicrous.”

“Because it's true. And because, if you'll let me, I can prove it.”

She hesitated again, obviously torn. She glanced at her watch, then back at him. “How long will this take?”

“Longer than you've got. To prove my story, we're going to have to take a little drive.” She opened her mouth as if to refuse; he cut her off. “Think about this, Glory. What if it's true? How will you feel, knowing you let an old woman die alone?”

For a moment, Glory said nothing. He could almost see her considering her options, weighing her choices, the ramifications of each. Finally, she sighed. “This would mean that everything I know about my mother is a lie.”

“I know. But isn't knowing the truth, even if it hurts, better than believing a lie?”

She caught her bottom lip between her teeth, then nodded. “You say you can prove this?”

“Yes.”

“All right, Santos. Prove it.”

 

Santos took her to the River Road house. During the drive, she said little, lost, he knew, in her own thoughts. He could only imagine what was running through her head right now; he understood that this was going to hurt her.

But he would do anything for Lily. And Lily needed her granddaughter.

They reached Lily's property; Santos stopped the car, climbed out and unlocked the huge iron gates. “Are you ready for this?”

She met his eyes, her expression tense. “Does it matter if I'm not?”

He smiled grimly. “No.”

“Then let's go.”

He drove up the oak-lined alley, slowly so Glory could get a good look at the house, and so he could, too. He understood Lily's unhappy feelings for this place, but he loved it. He thought it the most beautiful place in the world.

“It's beautiful,” Glory said, as if reading his thoughts, a catch in her voice.

“This was Lily's house. Her home, the brothel. And it was her mother's, and before that, her grandmother's.”

“It's the Pierron House,” she murmured, realizing suddenly. “I read about it. I remember a classmate pointing it out on a field trip to Oak Alley plantation.”

“I imagine most Louisianians have heard of it. The Pierron women, and this place, were quite well known. Especially in its heyday.” He stopped the car. “Here we are.”

Santos said nothing more until after they were in the house. Their footsteps resounded in the quiet. He and Lily had left most of the furnishings, covered now in white sheets. The apartment hadn't had room, and she hadn't wanted most of these things around her.

“I come as often as I can,” he said. “To check up on the place. A building as old as this always needs something. Lily can't afford to hire someone to take care of it, so I do what I'm able myself.”

After that, he didn't speak. He trailed behind her as she made her way through the massive rooms, her head swiveling from side to side as she tried to take it all in. Occasionally, she would stop and lift one of the sheets to see a piece of furniture. Her face wore an expression that he had never seen before—one of wonder and fear, doubt and certainty.

Glory stopped and stared up at a portrait above the fire-place. As a young girl, Glory had borne a resemblance to her ancestors. As a woman, she had grown into their image. She could have been gazing at a portrait of herself.

“My God. She looks just like…”

“I know.” Santos stopped beside Glory. “That's Lily's grandmother, Camellia Pierron. The first Pierron madam. There was Camellia, Rose, then Lily.”

“They were all named after flowers.”

“Until your mother. Lily wanted to break the chain. She hated being what she was. And she wanted better for her daughter.”

“So she named her Hope.” Glory made a strangled sound, part amusement, part despair. “I guess I come from a long and illustrious line of career girls.”

“You could say that.” A smile tugged at his mouth. “They were all smart. They kept this place going long after it was fashionable. And they were all beautiful. Incredibly beautiful.”

“And trapped,” Glory whispered, almost to herself. She turned to him. “What of their sons?”

“There were none.” He shook his head. “Only daughters. One for each Pierron woman.”

Just like her mother.

The unspoken thought hung in the air between them. Glory rubbed her arms, visibly shaken. “This could be a coincidence. Many southern Louisianians of French descent have similar coloring and features. I went to school with a girl who was often taken for my sister.”

“Come.” He led her to photographs that could not lie. She picked up one after another, studying each, growing pale, her hands beginning to tremble.

“You see? You're the image of them. And look, there's one of your mother.”

This time she said nothing, but met his eyes, hers bright with tears, then quickly glanced away. “Is there anything else?”

“Yes. This way.”

He led her to the attic and a trunk he had discovered years ago, though Lily had never known. It was filled with letters, ones that Lily had sent to Glory's mother, ones that Hope had opened and read, then callously returned to sender. They were letters from a desperate and lonely mother to the daughter she adored. They were pleas for forgiveness, pleas for love. He had cried when he read them, though he had been eighteen years old and had thought himself pretty tough.

Glory sank to the floor. With hands that shook, she selected one, though she didn't open it. She stared at it, and he had a sense that she was afraid to read it—because she feared what she would learn.

He understood. Because he had read the letters himself. And because, although she was selfish and spoiled and self-centered, Glory was not mean the way her mother was. What Hope St. Germaine had done to her mother, Glory could never do.

He cleared his throat. “I'll give you some time alone. If you need me, I'll be downstairs.”

“Thank you,” she murmured, not looking up.

Forty minutes later, he returned. The pattern of light on the wall and floors had shifted and mellowed, the stack of letters beside Glory had grown. But she sat just as he had left her, head bowed, hands closed over a letter in her lap.

Only now, her shoulders shook. Now her breath came in short, ragged gasps.

She was crying.

He stepped into the attic. “Glory?”

She looked up at him. He caught his breath at her expression, soft and guileless with pain.

“How could she?” Glory whispered brokenly. “How could she have read these and not relented? How could even my mother have been so heartless? So cold and unforgiving?”

“I don't know.”

Her tears welled and spilled over again, dropping onto the letter in her hands. She wiped them carefully away. “How long…how long have you known?”

“I learned the night your father died. Lily told me then.”

She nodded, her lips trembling. “I don't know my mother at all, do I? All these years, I thought…all these years, she told me my grandparents were dead. She lied to me.” Glory drew in a trembling breath. “All this time…I've had a grandmother.”

“One who needs you.” Santos squatted beside her and cupped her face in his hands. Her tears ran over and between his fingers. “All she longs for, all she's ever longed for, is you and your mother. I called your mother this morning. She refused to see Lily. I begged her, Glory. I swallowed my pride and begged.”

Glory searched his gaze. “Is my…is Lily very ill?”

“She's had a heart attack. A bad one. We don't know the extent of the damage yet, but the doctor isn't encouraging.” Santos tightened his fingers. “She needs you. Will you come with me? Will you give her this?”

Glory covered his hands with her own, and for one long moment, simply gazed at him, her heart in her eyes. Then she nodded. “Take me to my grandmother.”

G
lory gazed at the elderly woman, pale even against the white hospital sheets. She looked so vulnerable lying there, hooked up to machines and an IV, so fragile that Glory doubted she could fight off even a strong gust of wind.

This woman, this stranger, was her grandmother.
Glory drew a careful breath, emotion flooding her. She could have lost her before she'd had a chance to know her.

Glory pulled a chair up to the side of the bed. Hesitantly, she reached a hand out to the older woman's hand and covered it with her own. Lily's skin was papery with age, so translucent Glory could see each vein. But warm, Glory thought, curving her fingers around the other woman's. Still flowing with life. Thank God.

Glory swallowed hard. She felt light-headed, as if she'd had one too many cocktails or had been deprived of oxygen. She couldn't quite grasp what had happened, couldn't quite place all the things Santos had told her.

In the space of minutes, she had learned she had a family and a history she had never even suspected existed.
Prostitutes.
She came from women who had sex with strangers for money. She breathed deeply through her nose, remembering being twelve or thirteen, remembered she and some other girls giggling and whispering about the Pierron House. About the women who lived there and about what they did inside those walls. One of the girls had snickered and called it a cathouse.

Those women had been her women—her people. She was one of them. She was a part of that place.

Trembling, she tightened her fingers around Lily's. In those same minutes, she had learned that her mother was a liar and a fraud. Dear God, which, of all the things her mother had told her of her childhood and youth, had been true? Had any of them?

Tears stung her eyes. The grandparents she had thought she'd known, didn't exist. The stories her mother had told her—of growing up in the big, sunny house on a hill in Meridian, Mississippi, of the times she and her daddy had walked hand in hand to get ice cream on Saturday afternoons, of Christmas Eves spent singing carols around the huge tree they had cut themselves—they were all lies. All of them.

Despair built inside her. Panic with it. Now, here she sat, holding the hand of a stranger she had been told was her grandmother, holding her hand and hoping, praying, she didn't die.

Glory squeezed her eyes shut, fighting back the wave of emotions that threatened to swallow her. How could her mother have done this? How could she have lied this way—for all these years, to the people she loved and was supposed to trust? To her daughter? Her entire family?

Family.

Glory thought of her father, of the things he had taught her. About family. About heritage. What he had told her of knowing who she was by her family name and history. Those things, he had told her, could never be taken away from her, just as they could never be erased.

Though her mother had tried.
Her mother had tried to steal her heritage from her.

The panic returned, swelling inside her. Half of who she was was a mystery. A lie. Who was Glory St. Germaine? How could she know herself, if a part of her was a blank?

Her head filled with the image of the River Road house, filled with the scent of the air, with the sound of the breeze through the ancient oaks, the creak of the floorboards beneath her feet, and her lips lifted. She had felt an instant affinity for the house, she'd felt comfortable there, as if she belonged. Before Santos had said a word, before she had seen the photos, before she had
known
the truth.

The River Road house had felt like home. More like home than the house she had grown up in. Why? What did it mean that she had felt that way about that place?

Santos stepped into the room. She knew it was him, though her back faced the door, though he didn't speak. She sensed his presence, she felt it as an almost physical thing. The way she always had. A slow shudder of awareness moved over her, unwanted but unstoppable. His effect on her, too, had not changed in the ten years that had passed since they'd been lovers.

Ten years in which he had known who she was and she had been in the dark.

A cry raced to her lips. She bit it back and glanced over her shoulder at him, the questions clawing at her, needing, demanding, answers.

He only had eyes for Lily.

Glory swallowed hard, forgetting the past, forgetting awareness and longings. Forgetting her questions. Her heart broke for him. She saw such grief in his eyes. Such love.

And she saw fear. He had already lost one mother. Now, he stood on the threshold of losing another.

This woman was not his mother, but he loved her as one, Glory realized. She had earned his devotion. That said something. It meant something.

Lily had been a prostitute. But she was a good woman, anyway, Glory acknowledged. A special woman. One who had made her way into Santos's heart, a boy who had been tough and cynical, a boy who had been let down again and again. And she had changed his life by loving him. By believing in him.

Hurting, Glory turned quickly back to Lily. Santos would not want her to feel compassion for him. He wouldn't like it; he would misinterpret it as pity. Or worse.

Santos wanted nothing from her. In terms of basic human decency, he expected even less than that.
He thought she was like her mother.

Her mother.

Glory's throat closed with emotion. If she had been forced to beg for her life right now, she would have been unable to utter a sound. How could even her own mother have been so unforgiving? So heartless? How could she have read those wrenching letters, then returned them without a response?

The image from before her eighth birthday, of her mother's twisted features, the memory of the nailbrush moving punishingly over her skin, filled her head. With the image, her frightening words.
“I will cleanse you. If I have to, I will scrub the flesh from your bones. You will be clean, Daughter.”

Glory shuddered, bile rising in her throat, nearly choking her. It made a kind of twisted sense now, why her mother had reacted so violently when she had come upon her and Danny in the library, and years later when she had caught her necking in the church parking lot. As did her constant quoting of scripture, her obsession with Glory behaving like a perfect little lady, her obsession with the vile nature of the flesh.

“It's hard to believe they're mother and daughter,” Santos murmured, crossing to the side of the bed, stopping beside Glory. “They're nothing alike. I promise you that.”

She didn't ask what he meant or for him to clarify, his expression and tone told her everything. He loved Lily completely. “What did the doctor say?” she asked instead.

“Not much. Nothing happened while I was gone. She's resting comfortably. She's stable for now. She could wake up anytime.”

“She looks so…fragile.”

Santos didn't answer, and Glory knew he didn't trust himself to speak. She swallowed past the lump in her throat. “I wish I could tell you that it was going to be all right,” she said after a moment, softly.

He cut her a glance, then looked quickly away. “But you can't. No one can.”

She felt his pain, his isolation, and yearned to take it away. She yearned to touch him, to wrap her arms and herself around him and offer him comfort and support with her body.

She caught herself starting to do just that and dropped her hand. He would rebuff her. Or laugh at her. And it would hurt. She had no right to touch him, no right to try to comfort him. They had ended a long time ago.

“No, I can't tell you that,” she whispered. “But I am sorry. So terribly…sorry.”

He met her eyes, and for a moment, she sensed that he was grateful for her support, for her presence beside him. And in that moment, she felt close to him, close in a way she hadn't felt to anyone since Santos. Close in a way she had missed.

She lifted a hand. “Santos, I—”

He stiffened and took a step away from her. “I need to call headquarters. If she wakes up while I'm gone, will you—”

“Of course.” She turned back to Lily, not wanting him to see her hurt. “I'll come get you right away.”

But Lily didn't wake up. Not then, not in the six hours that followed. Glory didn't leave her side save to call the hotel, go to the bathroom and grab a bag of chips and a Coke from the vending machines down the hall. She couldn't bear the thought of not being by her grandmother's side the moment she woke up. Too, she harbored the horrible fear that she might have only one chance to be with Lily, that she might awaken once, but never again. And she would miss it.

That couldn't happen. She couldn't let it happen.

Santos, too, rarely left Lily's side. So they shared the small space, like adversaries forced to guard the same post, not talking, not swapping reassurances or even reassuring glances.

Finally, Lily moaned, then stirred. Santos jumped to his feet and crossed to her. “Lily…Lily.” He took her hand. “It's me, Santos. I'm here.”

Her eyelids fluttered up. Her gaze landed on him. She tried to speak, but couldn't.

Glory took a deep, careful breath. Her heart was pounding, her palms sweating. She was afraid, she realized. Of being rejected by this woman she now desperately wanted to know. Of not living up to Lily's expectations, as she had never lived up to her mother's. Of saying the wrong thing, of hurting this woman more than she had already been hurt.

“Lily,” Santos said softly, “there's someone here to see you.”

Glory stood and went around to the other side of the bed. The woman's gaze moved to her. Even in her grandmother's weakened, drugged state, Glory could see the hope in Lily's eyes. Then the recognition.

“Glo…ry?”

“Yes. It's me.” Glory moved even closer to the bed. “Hello, Grandmother.”

Lily looked back at Santos, as if for reassurance. He gave it by smiling. She shifted her gaze back to Glory, tears flooding her eyes. “I've…waited…so long.”

She took Lily's hand. “Me, too, Grandmother.” Lily curled her fingers around hers, the old woman's grip no stronger than a child's. “It's good to be here.”

Lily opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Santos held a cup of water to her lips, and she sipped, then tried again. “Your…mother?”

At the desperate hope in the old woman's eyes, Glory glanced at Santos, uncertain what to say, not wanting to hurt Lily by telling her the truth.

He stepped in without pause. “She couldn't come,” he said quietly. “She had an…an engagement that she…that couldn't be…”

He let the words trail off. Lily wasn't being fooled. She closed her eyes and turned her head, tears slipping silently down her cheeks.

Glory's heart broke, even as fury at her mother's callousness built inside her. She tightened her fingers on Lily's. “But I'm here, Grandmother. I wanted to come.” Lily looked at her, and Glory leaned closer. She smiled softly. “I want us to get to know each other. I want us to make up for some of the time we missed.”

Lily clutched Glory's fingers, her expression so grateful it hurt Glory to look at her. Glory brought her grandmother's hand to her cheek. “I love you,” she whispered. “And I'm so glad we're finally going to be together.”

After that, Glory sat beside the bed, talking softly, mostly about nothing of great importance. Occasionally, Lily would manage a question, always about Glory, and she would hang on the answers as if they were worth more than gold.

While Glory talked, Santos either paced, seeming to almost crackle with barely contained energy, or he stood as still as a predator studying its prey. She was aware of every step he took, his every breath, his every glance her way.

Her awareness of him exhausted her.

It wasn't long before the nurse scurried in and shooed them both off. Lily needed rest, she said. They could return later.

Together Glory and Santos walked to the elevator. Santos punched the call button, then looked at her, the naked animosity in his eyes taking her aback.

“Will you come to see her again?” he asked. “Or have you done your duty?”

She felt his words, his total disdain for her, like a physical blow. She'd thought that she and Santos had begun to bridge the gap between them, to forge a truce, even though a tenuous one. She had been wrong. It took her a moment, but when she met his gaze, she met it evenly, hiding her hurt.

“How can you even ask that question? Do you think this is some sort of game to me? Do you really think I would so cavalierly hurt that sweet woman? That I would tell her I love her, then never come to see her again?”

“It crossed my mind.”

She caught her breath, wounded beyond words. “You bastard. I'm not my mother, despite what you think. I'll be back.”

“Good.” His mouth thinned. “It meant a lot to her for you to be here. I don't want her heart broken again.”