New England White (9 page)

“It’s not my fault, Mrs. Carlyle. She changed her mind. She didn’t want to go. She had something else to do. So I saw Melanie here, you know, from school? And I figured—”

“What else?”

“What?”

“What did she have to do, Casey? Where’s my daughter?”

He pointed, vaguely, toward the parking lot. Nearby Jeannie’s eyes were huge and excited, as they always seemed to be at the hint of Vanessa causing trouble. She reached for her mother’s hand. Odessa was now on her own cell phone, joining her brother in ignoring the world around her.

“She said she had to see about something.” He began to look worried. “She was acting all weird. I tried to stop her, Mrs. Carlyle. Honest.”

“See about what? Where did she go?”

Casey glanced at the trivial blonde, who had backed off a pace to nibble at a fingernail. “She always does this. Whenever we’re together.” He was whispering now, eyes on the carpet, and Julia, against her will, sensed his bewildered pain. Perhaps he really did care for Vanessa. “We go to dinner, we go to the movies, we go wherever, and everything’s fine, and then, all of a sudden, she hops up and runs off. And it’s always the same reason.” The tortured gaze came up, and, for a moment, they shared the guilty knowledge of being unable to control, or even understand, what they loved. “It’s always because Gina needs her.”

(IV)

J
ULIA’S EMOTIONAL RANGE
had never quite encompassed panic. Veazie women were planners and problem solvers, organized and assertive and in small ways incautious, willing to risk error in preference to inaction. It was only through the determination and toil of its women, Mona often said, that the darker nation had survived the foibles of its men. When Julia had discovered, just weeks after moving in with Lemaster, that she was pregnant, she neither dithered nor sobbed, but went straight to her boyfriend to tell him the news, taking it for granted that their future would turn on his first reaction. Had he proposed an abortion, she would have slapped his face; had he proposed that the problem was hers to solve, she would have gouged his eyes on her way out the door, hoping to blind a minimum of one; when, instead, he proposed marriage, Julia turned him down, on the arbitrary ground that she did not want to trap him into a rash decision. The decision was not rash, Lemaster had assured her. He had been thinking about asking her for some time, but shyness had held him back. Julia nearly slapped him for that claim, too, because Lemmie had never had a shy moment in his life. Hands on hips, she had invited him crossly to prove it. He smiled and said, “If the baby’s a girl, I’m even willing to name her Amaretta.” But the baby was a boy, and they named him Preston, after Granny Vee’s husband, and Julia’s only known grandfather.

Now, planning always, she called neither her husband nor the police. Instead, she called Vanessa’s cell phone.

Voice mail.

Think. Plan. Act.

Gina. Whenever Vanessa went roaming, she said she was doing it for Gina.

She piled the kids into the Escalade, made the protesting cousins hang up their cell phones, and began driving along Route 48, peeking around the half-empty strip malls, deserted industrial plazas, and listless car dealerships that seemed to surround every suburban multiplex these days. After a few minutes, everybody got in on the fun, but just as Cedric began speculating aloud about possible disasters that might have befallen her, Vanessa called back.

“I’m at the Historical Society. I saw you were trying to reach me, but I can’t use my phone in the reading room.”

“You’re where?”

“Doing some research. I had an idea.”

Forget the idea. “How on earth did you get there? That’s four, five miles from here!”

“Called a taxi.”

“Vanessa—”

“I know, Moms. I know. I should have asked you.” Irritably patient, like a long-suffering adult. “But you would have said no.”

“That’s right!”

“Well, that’s why I didn’t ask. I didn’t want you to say no. It’s okay if you want to ground me, Moms.” Giving permission, making it sound like parents punish children for the parents’ sake: which, often enough, they do. “I got what I came for.”

“Which was what?”

“I’ll tell you about it later. They’re getting ready to close. Do you want to come get me or what?”

So Julia rearranged the sequence. She picked up Vanessa first, saving the piece of her mind for later. She had planned to take Vanessa to the mall, to look for a dress for the Grand Orange and White Cotillion right after Christmas, the social event of the year for the New England branch of the Clan, but Vanessa wanted not to go. Maybe that was really why she had run off: to avoid shopping with her mother for a dress.

(V)

B
ACK AT THE HOUSE
, Vanessa had homework, Jeannie busied herself writing a poem about a cat who went to the moon, and Astrid’s children vanished into the basement to do whatever they did. Astrid herself was fuming in the downstairs guest room. Lemaster was gone, attending a campus dinner, after which he would drop in on a small party the mayor of Elm Harbor was throwing for a few good friends. Actually, Lemaster could not stand the mayor, a pristinely corrupt man named Shea, but the requirements of the job were the requirements of the job. Later, Julia ran out to the supermarket, taking Vanessa along for that long-awaited lecture. The teen listened in stubborn silence, glaring out the window, and, when Julia was exhausted, said what she usually said: “You don’t understand.”

It was not until later that night, as they lay abed watching a late basketball game from the West Coast, Lemaster still cross from his argument with Astrid, that the two of them had the chance to spend any time together.

“Do you know what Astrid’s biggest problem is?” Lemaster asked his wife as she dozed on his hard shoulder.

“Mmmm-mmmm.”

“She’s the kind of person who thinks nothing’s as important as an election.”

“Maybe this time around she’s right.”

“No. She isn’t right.” Distractedly kissing her forehead, admitting no possibility of error: for, although a good deal more charming than Astrid, Lemaster was no less self-certain. He quoted a favorite maxim: “Winning is not a virtue.”

Julia waited, but it became apparent that the subject her husband had barely opened, he had already closed. She steamed a bit, as she always did when excluded. Then, after a couple of commercial breaks, and an unsuccessful effort to rouse him to amorousness, she finally told him about Vanessa’s flit, minimizing the teen’s disrespect, playing up the role of That Casey in order to give her husband somebody to blame. Lemaster heard her out, then flipped through the channels, finally ending on
Book TV,
where a famous novelist was explaining why men should never write in women’s voices. Julia knew better than to interrupt his pondering. Lemaster was the sort of general who would never fire until he was ready to blow the opposition to Kingdom Come.

“Brady is an idiot,” he finally said. “An absolute idiot. How was I to know? He’s chief of adolescent psychiatry at the med school.” Lemaster was answering an objection she did not remember raising. “People sing his praises. So—what does he do? He sits around talking about respecting Vanessa’s voice, allowing her—what does he call it?”

“To exercise her agency.” Julia shivered in the stifling room—Lemaster, aggressively tropical, especially in New England, loved to turn the heat all the way up, and never asked first—as she remembered the grueling months after Vanessa’s arrest. Lawyers, psychiatrists, social workers, judges, more psychiatrists, interviews and reports and courtrooms, on and on, Julia’s head whirling until she lost track of which one of them, mother or daughter, had gone off the deep end. And there were times—she would never admit it!—when she was relieved to have three other children, mostly normal, even if the primacy of Vanessa’s needs nowadays meant that the rest were starved for their mother’s time. Lemaster concentrated on the television, evidently unaware of her growing distress. Julia said, “He says she needs enough space to be an independent agent.”

“Exactly. Our daughter tries to kill herself, and Brady says she needs more space. What a moron.” Although he never raised his voice, Julia sensed the self-reproach. He made few mistakes, her Lemmie, and hated himself for the few. “They should take his license away,” Lemaster grumbled, and she wondered, because her husband knew everyone who mattered, whether he might be planning to give it a serious try.

“What do you want to do? Get somebody new?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” Annoyed at his own indecision, he changed the channel again, skipping past the news in search of a better truth. “Vanessa likes him now, I bet. Telling us to let her be a free agent. She sure was a free agent today, wasn’t she?”

Julia admired her husband, but sometimes she wanted to smack him. Did he really pay so little attention to the largest crisis in his own household? “Oh, Lemmie, she can’t stand him. She wants a woman.”

But Barbadian men have trouble backing down, even when, to stay ahead, they are forced to disagree with themselves. “Maybe that’s evidence that he’s doing a good job: that she doesn’t like him. Too much of the world is governed by what people
like.
How people
feel.
” As so often, her husband spoke as if to a roomful of people. “I don’t want Vanessa to
like
her therapist,” he pounded on. “She can hate his guts, for all I care, as long as he helps her. And that’s what I don’t know, Jules. What we don’t know. If he’s helping her or not.” A sound that might have been an angry snarl. “Gina again. Gina. All we need. Every time she runs off, it’s the same reason. Gina wanted her to. Heaven knows what she tells her friends.” He meant, what her friends told their parents. “Or writes in her blog.”

“She never writes about Gina in her blog.”

“Right. Because Gina doesn’t want her to.” Lemaster sighed, and then, to her relief, Julia felt his body relax in her arms. “I guess nobody can be an idiot about everything. Brady said we shouldn’t indulge this Gina business any longer. I wasn’t sure before, but I think he was right.” This took Julia by surprise. He had bypassed entirely the relatively juicier questions of Vanessa’s brief disappearance and That Casey’s complicity, landing with both feet precisely where she wanted him not to go. “So—here it is. She cannot spend any more time worrying about what happened to Gina. She just can’t. Brady can work and work to get to the source of her obsession, but, meanwhile, he wants us not to let Vanessa pursue it. He’s been very clear about that. So let’s make it clear to Vanessa that we agree.” He gave his wife no opportunity to express an opinion. “And you know something? Vanessa has been doing better. A lot better. Or she was. Until…well, until recent events.”

Did he mean Kellen’s murder? Astrid’s visit? Or did Lemaster mean—could he possibly mean—that he blamed Julia for somehow putting thoughts of Gina back into their daughter’s head?

“She’s still doing better,” said Julia.

“We’ll see.”

“What will we see?” she asked, holding on for dear life, wondering—oh, she hated these moments!—wondering if her husband even liked her, or viewed their marriage, as he did most of life, through the stultifying lens of duty.

“We’ll see,” he said slowly, “if she can give up the obsession again.”

“You make it sound like she can choose.”

“I think she probably can. Unless events tempt her in the wrong direction.”

It was just like surface tension, Julia decided, for deep inside she was still the biologist who used to teach science to middle-schoolers, and she searched constantly for analogies. Her hidden anger was akin to the air inside a bubble, pressing, pressing against the thin skin of self-control, which could contain the expanding gases completely until the moment that it popped. Then everything would come out at once. Feeling cornered and ready to snap at him, Julia stiffened against Lemaster’s small body.

“Oh well,” he said, sensing that he had pushed too far. “It doesn’t matter. It’s over. Vanessa is safe. That’s the important thing. All right, so she slipped the traces a little. I suppose that’s what Thoroughbreds do, isn’t it? She’s fundamentally a good kid. She didn’t do anything stupid.” He seemed to be talking himself away from his worst instincts. “Maybe Brady hasn’t been a complete disaster. As for That Casey, well, no point in dumping on him. He’s just the way he is. A spoiled Caucasian faculty brat.”

“At least Vanessa is being more social now,” Julia ventured hopelessly, now that Lemaster was through judging everybody.

“Yes.” Cold as steel. “She certainly is.”

He switched channels again: an action-adventure movie in which only the hero knows the truth, and is forced, without visible reluctance, to kill anybody who gets in his way. They watched him reload and keep on shooting. Julia, the empiricist, wondered how he dealt with the weight of the ammo.

“Lemmie?”

“Hmmm?”

“Tonight, while we were waiting for you”—she hesitated, not wanting to mention their daughter’s name just when the storm had calmed—“I was wondering if whatever it is that Astrid wants—”

“She wants dirt.” Voice still chilly. “The President and I were roommates, we’ve been friends forever, she figures I must know all his dirty secrets. I told her Mal was his roommate, too, we all shared Hilliman Suite, so ask Mal for dirt. She says the Senator is much too fine a man, et cetera, et cetera, but, really, I think her problem is Mal doesn’t know any.” A pause. “And, of course, Jock is dead, and Astrid, the way her mind works, says that’s proof that there’s dirt. Jock died of a heart attack, in bed with his mistress, so Astrid says the mistress was in on it.”

It was a moment before Julia realized he was done. “Is there dirt to know?”

“I can’t talk about that, Jules.”

“I know. I know. I just meant, um, even if you can’t tell me what it was? I just kind of wondered if it might have something to do with Kellen.”

Another time-out while her husband consulted the odd little referee inside his head. “Same old Astrid. Does what she wants, and devil take the hindmost.” Lemaster yawned. “When she’s on one of her crusades you can’t talk sense to her. Well, don’t worry. I’ll talk to Mal. He’ll have to call her off.”