Mating for Life (20 page)

“Everyone thinks that. It's because marriage is a mistake. But it's a necessary evil. Don't fight it, my dear. You are where you are.”

She ignored him. “I only married him because—because I came back from France heartbroken, because my first husband betrayed me and made me feel like it was what I wanted, and then . . . I came to visit my sister Fiona, to see her kids, and I met Tim, and I thought I was in love with him. Or maybe I was in love with him. Who knows? Being in love doesn't mean anything anyway. It's fleeting, all hormones.”

“So young to be so jaded.”

“I zeroed in on him and decided I wanted him. Because he was so good and so safe, and because Fiona—well, she seemed so content, so untouchable. I wanted to be untouchable, too.”

“Now, this is interesting,” Lincoln said, and Ilsa wanted to reach across the table and slap him, watch as her wedding
ring left a welt on his cheek. “What happened? Tim couldn't resist you, right? Who could? Especially years ago. I bet you were even more tantalizing when you were young.”

She gripped the table to keep her hand down. “Of course he resisted. Because he's Tim. He is good. He's probably the best man on earth. He said such lovely things to me, too, and of course they made me love him even more, at least for a time. Then I met Michael, and I thought I had my solution. Not Tim, but similar. Similar enough. I finally stopped dreaming about Tim, stopped wanting to stay in bed all day just to have the feeling of being with him, even if it wasn't real. In Michael I thought maybe I'd found a substitute, that I could have the safe, perfect life my sister had, and be safe and perfect, too, and freed from . . . from who I really am.
And
from people like you.” She reached across the table now and picked up Lincoln's hand, which was limp. She dropped it back on the table, where it landed with a soft thump, like he was a corpse already and not just an aging man. “I need to go home,” she said.

He lowered his eyebrows. His hand was still in a dead-­looking pile on the table. “Very well. I trust you can hail yourself a taxi.”

And that was that.

• • •

“How was the gallery opening?” Michael had asked Ilsa when she got home. He was on his way up the stairs, but he turned.

“Fine.” She looked up at him, forced herself to meet his gaze. “Fiona isn't doing Thanksgiving this year, so I told Tim to bring himself and the boys here for dinner.”

“Okay,” he said, not commenting on how odd it was that Fiona wasn't hosting this year. He continued up the stairs, then stopped again. “Hey. I have to ask you something.” He walked down the stairs and picked up four envelopes from
the side table. “Is this some kind of mistake? Did you adopt four children? There've been a lot of charges on the credit card. ”

“I . . . it
must
be a mistake. I'll call them tomorrow.”

“There are a few other things for you,” he said, and she stood and studied his face, holding the letters he had handed her.

“Do you want to stay up and . . . have a glass of wine with me?” she asked.

“I really shouldn't. I have a seven a.m. meeting tomorrow.” He turned and started walking up the stairs, his footsteps creaking in all the same places as usual.

“Michael?” she called.
I'm no longer following your unwavering path through our existence. I've gone off the rails and am potentially heading toward some sort of impact and you haven't even noticed.

The creaking stopped. “Yes?”

She walked to the bottom of the stairs and held out the envelopes. “I lied. I'm sorry.”

“About what?”

“It wasn't a mistake. I was up late one night and I couldn't sleep and got stuck on an infomercial and there were all those children with the flies crawling all over their heads, and there was one, she was Ani's age, and she had flies crawling across her
eyeballs
 . . .” Ilsa took a deep breath, gulped in air. It felt like confession, this. She now understood what her father had been talking about, why he went into those confessional booths, performed such sacrilege. “So I adopted three at once, and then called back the next night to adopt one more,” she finished.
As my penance,
she did not add.

He peered down at her, his eyes barely visible behind his glasses, which were reflecting the light from the lamp at the bottom of the stairs.
My silver fox,
she used to call him. Now he spoke in a paternal tone. “But, Ilsa, it's a bit unreasonable, don't you think? Two hundred dollars a month . . .”

“It's not as though we can't afford it,” she said.

“What do you know about what we can afford?”

“I'll sell paintings.”

“And this is how you want to spend the money from your paintings?”

“It's my money.” She felt like a sullen child. “I'll spend it in any way I want.”

“Your choice,” he said, and turned, continued creaking up the stairs.

“Michael, please. Just wait.”

He turned. She took off her shoes and met him in the middle of the staircase. She kissed him and he kissed her back, but she sensed hesitation.
When did this happen to us?

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I miss you. I miss
us
.” But this wasn't true and she knew it. What she really missed was herself. Still, she kissed him again.

“Let's go to bed,” she said.

• • •

The next morning, he rolled over in bed and slung a leg across her body.

She got out of the bed and went to the bathroom, turned the shower on, hot.

She had been in the shower five minutes when she heard the bathroom door open. She thought for a moment that it was Ani, up early and needing to pee, but when she realized it was Michael, she felt irrationally annoyed.

He pulled aside the curtain. “Morning.” He squeezed into the small shower. She had conditioner on her hair and was exfoliating her legs and she smiled back but with gritted teeth as she moved out of the stream of water and stood in the cool air while he began to wash his hair.

“Got to make that early meeting,” he said. “That was fun last night.” And a wink.

She rinsed her hair and her legs. “I'm done. Enjoy.”

“You okay?”

“Just tired.”

She got out of the shower and wrapped a towel around her head and one around her body, then looked at herself through the steam forming on the mirror. She blinked a few times, reached for her eye cream on a shelf, and patted away the stinging.

10

Eastern Coyote
(
Canis latrans
)

In general, mated pairs of coyotes are monogamous and packs consist of close family members. This need for a dedicated mate exists in part because of the high demands the pups place on their parents; most are born in large litters and require an extended period of training and care to learn to hunt and survive. Sometimes, however, coyotes practice polygyny, and two females raise pups with one male in one den—but this is rare.

I
t seemed later than it was—because the glass of wine Helen had ordered to her room had made her drowsy and she had tried to write and then eventually given up, made tea, felt officially ancient, and crawled into bed—when the phone rang.

“Hello,” said an unfamiliar voice. “My name is Iris McKellah and I'm calling about Fiona Sherman. She has you listed here as her emergency contact.”

Helen felt a shock of fear, instant, numbing. Her sleepiness evaporated instantly. She thought,
I've waited so long for a call like this about one of my children that I forgot I was waiting.
“What happened? Is she . . . hurt?” Unthinkable, the other option. No, she couldn't be. Not Fiona. Never Fiona. She was the strong one.

“Well, not exactly. I mean, she's hurt
ing
, yes. But she's not hurt, not physically.”

“I'm confused,” said Helen.

“I run the Crystal Springs Body Mind Spirit Retreat and Spa here in Neversink, New York, where Fiona is currently a guest. She checked herself in yesterday afternoon.”

“Checked herself in? Is it . . . a rehab center?” Then Helen laughed. Of course not. Fiona wasn't in rehab.
“Good lord,” she said to herself, before realizing you couldn't talk to yourself when you were actually on the phone with another person.

“Oh, no, not a rehab center. A place where women seek positive change, so perhaps you
could
call it a life rehab. I own it, and am also the chief chakra and aura therapist.” Helen could picture Iris. She was likely wearing several multicolored scarves and earrings made of feathers or some repurposed, recycled material. (Probably very similar to the ones Helen herself usually wore.)

“Are you sure you have the right Fiona Sherman?”

“I can't imagine how there could have been a mix-up.”

“And what's wrong with her? Is she sick?”

“I did a reading this morning—Angel Cards—and was told she needed external help. A friend, I assumed, although one of the cards also suggested sisters. She doesn't seem open to making any friends here, though, and especially not
sister
friends, so I thought . . . well, you
are
a friend of hers, aren't you? She put you down as the person to call in case of an emergency.”

“Well,” said Helen, and then wasn't sure how to continue.
Well, I'm not exactly her friend. And I don't think she likes me most of the time. I always
wanted
to be her friend, though. That was my goal, when I became a mother to her—my first baby, so beautiful, so stoic, so different from me—to be a friend instead of just a typical mother. I failed at that, with Fiona at least, but I really did try.
“I'm her mother,” she said.

“I see. Do you think it might be possible for you to come out here for a few nights? I won't charge you, of course. Fiona has a large room. You can stay in there. It seems the only answer. Are you able to?”

Helen looked around her hotel room, at the papers and the clothes and the wineglass and the tea mug. She had checked into the Chelsea, but it was just a stop among many. Over the summer, she'd also visited San Diego, Paris, Toronto, and an old friend in Munich. Then fall had arrived and she had decided she would hole up and finally write her memoirs because Edie had done it, written all those things about her in her memoir that only sold because Edie was Nate's wife and Helen's friend. Maybe she'd stay for a week. That would be enough to get a good start. And, she decided, she'd write it all by hand, the way she used to write her songs.

Except that memoirs weren't songs. And it was just easier to write on a computer. Not having brought one, Helen felt stymied rather than inspired. “Yes, I'll come.”

“And are you far from here?”

“I'm in New York City at the moment.”

“It's only about a two-hour drive.” Iris said it as though it were as simple as driving around the corner to pick up eggs. And maybe it
could
be that simple.
Your daughter needs you, so you go.

It was just that Helen couldn't come to terms with the fact that Fiona needed anyone. It was making
her
feel helpless. “How do I get there?” she asked.

“There are directions on our website.”

“I don't have a computer with me here,” she said, feeling embarrassed.

Iris recited directions, and Helen wrote them down. “See you soon,” she said, and hung up.

All summer, Helen had felt like something was missing. She had been afraid that that something was Iain, whom she
had been trying hard to convince herself she didn't miss. But she now realized what the hole was: it was the girls she missed. All of them together, warts and all. She'd seen them, yes, had visited them all, but they had not all been together at once. She thought about the last time she had seen Fiona, during an early fall visit to Rye. She hadn't seemed like herself, but Helen had thought perhaps it was early menopause. She'd had it early, too. It was the likely explanation, Helen reassured herself now, and this Iris just didn't realize.

But still, it was an opportunity. She needed to seize it.

• • •

“Ilsa?”

“Hi, Mom.” There was a clatter in the background.

“You sound busy. Should I call you back?”

“I'm cooking. Thanksgiving dinner.” There was another clatter, and a sigh. “Although it's not going that well.”

“What are you making?”

“I was trying to re-create Fiona's menu. Huge mistake. Do you have any idea how high-maintenance chestnuts are?”

“I'm calling because I think I need you. Correction: Fiona needs you.” She explained about Iris's call. “I don't know if there's really anything wrong with her, but I thought we might as well go and check it out. It seems like a good chance for all of us to be together, since our early summer weekend was such a bust this year. I'm calling Liane next. If I can pry her away from her brand-new knight in shining armor—who is an absolute
doll,
by the way—I can use my points to fly her down. And I called Iris back to see if we could get our own room and she said of course. She loves the idea of all of us coming. Although I suppose if you're doing Thanksgiving dinner, you can't . . .”

There was a sound like a spoon and pot banging into the sink. “I'm officially not cooking any longer,” Ilsa said deci
sively. “Tim and Michael can handle it. Or they can take the kids to the football game at the high school and eat hot dogs. At this point I really don't care. I'm just not a traditional feast type of girl, it turns out. So how do I get there? Should we meet somewhere first?”

“I think you're about an hour and a half away and I'm two.”

“Let's just both start driving and see who gets there first.”

“Road trip!” Helen said, but Ilsa didn't laugh.

• • •

It was dark when Helen turned her car down the spa's driveway. She had been in the car for an extra hour, having turned off the GPS Iain had once given her because she was always getting lost. It felt a little pathetic to be actively defying someone she hadn't seen or spoken to in months, not since that afternoon at the cottage when she had shouted at him about his greens and he had said, “You should go,” and she had.

I didn't want the GPS. I told him I didn't need to be told where to go all the time, that I'm excellent with directions
. And then he had said, “I just always want you to be able to find your way back to me.”

She felt a plummeting sadness. Just then, she hit a patch of black ice and started to skid and thought,
What if I die out here, what if this is it?
but she felt nothing at all in response to this thought.

She turned on the GPS.

Soon, at the insistence of the disembodied voice, she turned into the parking lot of the spa, stopped the car, and cut the engine. The building was constructed of stained wood planks with churchlike windows, and there was an ivy-covered stone tower with a peaked roof in the center. She could see there was a lake. She looked around the lot and saw Ilsa's car. The windows were fogged up. She must have been sitting inside, waiting.

Helen got out of the car and walked toward Ilsa's car, carrying her small bag. Ilsa wiped the fog off her window, peered out at her mother, and then reached into the backseat for her valise and got out of her car. Helen embraced her and told her she looked beautiful instead of tired.
This spa weekend will do
her
good, too.

“We can surprise Fiona, and then maybe you can take a bath and go to bed,” Helen said.

“Surprise her,” Ilsa repeated. “Do you really think she's going to be excited to see us?”

“She takes on so much. Maybe she's just stressed out. Maybe we can
convince
her to be happy we're here.”

“Helen. This is Fiona we're talking about.”

Helen grimaced slightly. “Maybe we need to wait until Liane gets here?” Liane had always been their buffer. And she was taking an early morning flight. She'd be there, in a taxi, in time for a late breakfast.

“We can go to her room, all three of us, in the morning,” Ilsa said.

“That's a better idea, isn't it?”

They walked across the lot, pushed open the heavy door, and entered a lobby with stone walls and high ceilings. It was empty, but there was a bell and a sign that read
PLEASE RING
. Ilsa sat down in a chair. Helen didn't want to seem impatient; she could already tell this was no place for impatience—there was a sign beside the bell that read
ANGELS GIVE US FAITH TO WAIT FOR MYSTERIES TO BE REVEALED
—so she stood and waited. Finally, though, she leaned forward and tapped the bell gently. Then she went back to the pamphlet she was reading, which said that the center rested on a mineral deposit with healing properties. There was a labyrinth for meditation, a sea salt pool, a green-tea hot tub, infrared saunas, a spa, yoga, guided meditation, vision-boarding, and, of course, the chakra readings and color therapy sessions.

A moment later, a woman with shoulder-length dark hair—she was likely the same age as Helen, but her skin was smooth and her eyes were clear and Helen felt momentarily envious, having just that morning looked in the mirror and compared her own skin to an old piece of flannel—rounded the corner. She was wearing a white blouse, several colored scarves, dangly earrings (exactly as Helen had suspected), and black yoga pants. Her feet were bare.

“You must be Helen. I'm Iris. Thank you so much for coming. And is this one of the sisters?”

“Yes, I'm Ilsa.” Ilsa stood. She extended her hand, but Iris hugged her instead, then turned and hugged Helen. She smelled of patchouli.

“And your other daughter is coming first thing in the morning?”

Helen nodded.

“This is so wonderful. I really feel we're gathering the forces Fiona needs to survive this.”

“That's the thing: survive what?” Helen said.

“What she's going through,” Iris said.

“But
what
exactly is she going through?”

“Let's just go upstairs,” Iris said. “I'll take you to Fiona's room first, and you can get settled in your own space later.”

“Um, well—” Ilsa began. Helen opened her mouth to speak, too, but what was she going to say?
Actually, we thought we might hide in our room until Liane, our buffer, gets here. Fiona doesn't like either of us much
.

Iris stood, her head tilted slightly, waiting for one of them to voice whatever it was they wanted to say. But neither of them continued.

“Has it ever seemed to either of you that Fiona has a drinking problem?” Iris said.

“
Never
.”

“I'm not even going to answer that,” Ilsa said.

“What about prescription abuse?”

“Are you joking?” Helen said.

“Of course not.” Iris shook her head. “This is not a laughing matter, not at all.” She said it like it was all one word: “a
tall
.” Helen felt chastened. “Fiona is in a very dark place. I'm just trying to figure out where it might all be coming from. She has one of the saddest, most despairing auras I've ever seen. Her chakras . . . they're in wild disarray.”

As though that explained everything, Iris turned and started walking again, up a staircase and down a hallway painted pale yellow and lined with wall sconces and doorways, before tapping on a doorway with the number 212 on the outside. No answer. She tapped again. “Fiona? It's Iris.” Still no answer. Iris frowned, and Helen began to feel sick, scared. Before she could stop herself, she reached up and banged the door with her fist. Iris looked startled.

“Fiona!” Helen shouted.

“Mom,” Ilsa said. “She might just be sleeping. Maybe she took a sleeping pill.”

“I have the master key,” Iris whispered. “I'll let us in and we can see if she's okay.”

It was only when Helen was standing beside the bed her daughter was sleeping in, when she had touched her chest softly to make sure she was breathing, the way she had when each of the girls were babies because she had a friend who lost a child to crib death and the memory of her haunted eyes had never left Helen, that her own breathing returned to normal. The light from the hall and the noise of the three of them entering the room didn't cause Fiona to stir. And there was indeed a bottle of Tylenol PMs on the end table beside Fiona. Only a few were missing—Iris had checked the bottle like she was a forensics expert, and Helen had found herself waiting, holding her breath. But no. She hadn't done anything drastic.
Of course not. Not Fiona.