Only Ever You (2 page)

David drove them back to retrieve Jill’s car. She sat next to Sophia, unable to be apart, running her hand repeatedly over her silky hair. “I shouldn’t have looked away, she moves so fast these days.”

“She needs to learn to stay with you,” David said. He drove fast; she could see his hands gripping the steering wheel, read the tension in his shoulders.

“It’s over,” she said, trying to calm down, trying to calm him. “She’s safe.”

That night she dreamed of someone lurking in the woods waiting for her daughter, and of Sophia waving good-bye before being swallowed by the trees. Jill woke in a cold sweat and got out of bed in the darkness, padding silently across the hall to check on Sophia, surprised when she heard voices coming from her room.

In the muted glow of the night-light, she saw the outline of David sitting on the edge of Sophia’s bed, the big-girl bed she’d lobbied for, not the least because she liked to climb out. She looked so tiny in it; the bed seemed huge around her. Jill stepped in the doorway and her husband looked up, startled.

“What’s going on?”

“She had a nightmare.”

Sophia whimpered and reached out to her mother. Jill took David’s place and held her, rocking her daughter back and forth.

When the little girl slept she crept back to her own room, sliding back into bed next to David. He reached out his arms to hold her. “You know how much I love you, right?” he said. “Love you and Sophia?”

“Of course.”

“You know I’d never let anyone hurt you?”

“What is it?” she said, searching his face in the darkness. “Are you afraid because of what happened today?”

He shook his head again, unwilling or unable to answer, but his arms tightened around her.

It was just residual anxiety. They’d faced every parent’s worst nightmare and gotten a reprieve. It was only natural that they’d feel some leftover stress. Everything would be okay. Their daughter was here and whole, and what had happened to her was just an isolated incident. Nothing this bad would ever happen again; they had nothing to fear.

Jill was wrong.

chapter two

AUGUST 2013—TWO MONTHS

The real-estate agent had a nervous laugh and smelled of the peppermints she sucked to hide the fact that she smoked. They didn’t. The smell of burnt tobacco lay beneath the peppermint odor, both of them nauseating, and emanated out of Patsy Duckworth’s Land Rover whenever she opened the driver’s door.

“Ready to see the next one?” she said with a big grin, as resolutely chipper after two hours as she’d been first thing that morning. She was a tiny woman who compensated with ridiculously high heels. It was amazing she hadn’t broken her neck at one of the other houses. Bea Walsh nodded, unable to return the smile. They’d already seen five rental properties and none of them had been right. She’d known within two minutes at each house that it wouldn’t work—they were too close to neighbors or didn’t have finished basements—but she’d had to play along anyway, traipsing through rooms that didn’t matter and pretending to appreciate features that weren’t important.

“Are you looking for yourself?” Patsy had asked when Bea first came to the realty office, taking a not very discreet look at her left hand. “Or are you sharing the rental with someone else?”

The gold of Bea’s simple wedding band was burnished from years of wear. “It will be me and my husband.”

“Any children?”

She’d looked away from the woman’s prying eyes. “Just a small dog.”

“Pittsburgh will be quite a change from Florida.”

Bea just smiled.

A nervous laugh. “I guess you’ll miss the sun.”

If she closed her eyes, Bea could see the waves of heat shimmering above the asphalt of the hospital parking lot and feel the sweat dampening the armpits of her scrubs. “No.”

They drove to the houses separately, Bea in her modest sedan trailing behind the woman’s SUV through the wooded, hilly roads that lined Fox Chapel. “I think you’ll like the location of the next one,” Patsy said. “It’s on a dead-end street; very private.”

They were of a similar age, but while Patsy obviously struggled to hold onto her fading youth, paying lots of attention to hair, skin, and nails, Bea had ceased to care. Sixty-two years old last week and she knew she looked older, the stress of the past year deepening the once faint lines on her forehead and at the corners of her eyes. Her hair had more salt than pepper and she’d stopped tending to it, cutting it unfashionably short and no longer bothering to color it. The creases on either side of her nose were prominent and she blanched at seeing her face as she adjusted the rearview mirror, the physical changes shocking her, as did catching glimpses of her daughter’s younger, prettier face hiding in her own.

She glanced at the address the agent had given her in case they got separated: 115 Fernwood Road. Bea entered it into her car’s GPS and on the screen an arrow moved north, taking them northwest, along a stretch of wooded road and past the palatial estates of some of the wealthiest people in the country to much more modest homes. They’d been driving for seven minutes before the GPS signaled that they’d finally reached the turnoff.

A shield-shaped sign dangling from a wooden post announced
FERNWOOD
. The road itself was in bad shape, the asphalt skimmed away in parts so that the car bounced and rattled no matter how slowly Bea drove. It was uphill, a long stretch with one driveway peeling off to the right, and then another long stretch before a second driveway peeled off to the left. Still climbing, another thirty yards, and there it was, a narrow road barely visible through pine trees on the right. A black tin mailbox marked the end of the drive, with the number 115 adhered to it in peel-and-stick numbers. The five hung at a weird angle.

The driveway was paved with pea gravel, which sounded like buckshot spraying the undercarriage of the car. Bea couldn’t hear anything over the noise and she couldn’t look around, having to slow down and focus to keep on the narrow strip of road, which was only one car wide and meandered between the slender trunks of pines and maples growing so close on either side that feathery branches brushed the windows and tapped on the car roof.

Another two minutes and then the narrow drive suddenly opened up and there was the house, gray stone with a silvery slate roof, tucked against the hillside like fungi in a sea of green.

“It’s really like an inverted two-story,” Patsy said, indicating the attached garage at ground level. “The owner is willing to rent, but she’d really love to sell. She had a buyer last year, but it fell through. She’s very motivated. Very.” She waited for a response from Bea, but when none was forthcoming she laughed, raising a hand to her hair as if to smooth back an errant strand, but the artificial red helmet had been shellacked to her head with enough hairspray to ensure it didn’t shift despite the late summer breeze.

The real-estate agent led the way, clicking up a flight of stone steps that climbed the hillside to the front door. Long grass crept up along the sides of the stone walls, and overgrown rhododendron bushes threatened what little light penetrated the wavy, dusty glass of its ancient windows. Bea could tell it had been vacant for a long time.

“This house was an estate caretaker’s home years and years ago,” Patsy said as she fiddled with the lockbox attached to the heavy wooden door. She took out the key and used it in the door lock, leading the way inside. “The estate still exists, apparently it’s some sort of public trust now, but this house and two acres of land surrounding it were willed to the caretaker years ago. You’d be renting it from his granddaughter.”

The house smelled musty and there was a faint odor of mothballs. Their footsteps echoed on hardwood floors darkened with age as they walked slowly through sparsely furnished rooms. There was an ancient green velvet sofa in the living room with two matching armchairs, the upholstery worn away in shiny spots and the legs of the chairs gouged with deep nicks.

“It comes furnished,” Patsy said. “Isn’t that wonderful?” Was she being ironic? Bea made a noncommittal noise and shifted her purse to her other shoulder. The day was overcast and the thick shelter of trees kept out what little natural light was left, making the house gloomy.

Lights flickered in a few rooms when she flipped on switches. Wallpaper covered some rooms, bubbling and peeling away in corners, while others were painted in faded, insipid shades of yellow or blue. Bea didn’t care about those details. Looking out a front bedroom window, she caught a glimpse of roofline poking through the thick foliage. “That’s the house we passed on the way up,” Patsy said, “an elderly widower, but he’s only here half the year—a snowbird.”

Bea smiled slightly. It was the first truly private place she’d seen. “You said there’s a basement?”

“Oh, yes, the lower level.” Patsy led the way back down the hall to a door in the kitchen, which opened onto a steep flight of wooden steps. The light disappeared as they descended; it was like entering a tomb. At the bottom of the steps Patsy fumbled along the wall and an old fluorescent light flickered on above them, emitting a low hum. The ceiling was low; it felt claustrophobic. Patsy turned left, heading down a hallway lined on either side with rusting metal storage shelves, dust-coated mason jars lurking in the shadows. The hall ended in a T. Large round support pillars had been mounted in the concrete floor to the right and the left. Patsy stepped forward past a door standing ajar. “Here’s the second bath.” She flicked a switch and Bea saw a baby-blue sink and toilet from the seventies and a flimsy shower enclosure with a grimy glass door. Relentlessly upbeat, Patsy said, “A little cleanup, and this could be really nice.”

To the left of the bathroom another door opened onto a utility area with an older-model washer and dryer separated by a laundry tub. To the right, the hallway receded into darkness. In the dim fluorescent light, Bea could just see the frame of a door partially hidden by the support pillar. “What’s that?”

“That’s the fourth bedroom.” Patsy clicked her way across the concrete floor and tried the handle. The door creaked open. Dim light revealed a completely empty room. “Of course, technically this can’t be considered a bedroom because there are no real windows.” Patsy pointed at the one window, set high on the wall, but below grade, which looked onto a leaf- and debris-covered aluminum well.

“You could always freshen the paint,” she added, tapping a dingy white wall. “That would brighten it up a lot.”

Bea circled the space, examining the door that enclosed the bedroom. It was heavy and fit securely in the doorframe, not like those cheap hollow-core doors.

Patsy led them back up the hall and out another door into a musty-smelling garage. She pushed a button on the wall and a light came on as the garage door whirred slowly up and back against the ceiling. “This is obviously an update,” she said as daylight rushed into the gloom. “It’ll be great to have it in the winter.”

The last thing they looked at was the backyard. Patsy led the way back up the stairs and out the kitchen door to the flagstone patio that ran the length of the house. Beyond it the hill had been graded and fenced, tendrils of ivy and overgrown grasses twining themselves between and around the wooden slats, separating a small strip of lawn from the woods that rose immediately behind it.

As they stood there, Bea heard the noise of a car bumping down the road, but she couldn’t see it. “There’s one other house way up at the top of the hill,” Patsy said. “I’m sure you’d never see them.” She swept an arm wide. “Isn’t this a nature lover’s oasis?”

Bea surveyed the loose and cracked flagstones, the overgrown shrubbery, and piles of last year’s fallen leaves molding in corners at the base of each sagging fencepost.

“Well, take some time and think about the houses we’ve seen,” Patsy Duckworth said, jangling her keys. “Or if you want to bring your husband back to look at any of them—”

“No,” Bea said. “I’ll take this one.” She looked around the gloomy yard and smiled. “It’s perfect.”

chapter three

JOURNAL—FEBRUARY 2009

Do you remember the first time we met? I believe that I can relive every detail, but memory is notoriously faulty and our first encounter was over three months ago.

So here is my undoubtedly flawed account: Rain. A cold, steady drizzle from a dingy sky. Umbrellas dripping on the lobby’s marble floor. Two elevators pinging up and down twenty-eight floors. Hordes of half-asleep people waiting their turn. I am wide-awake; it is only my first month at the firm. Before stepping in the open car, I shake out my umbrella. It’s black of course, everything in somber colors because I must compensate for my sex. Everyone trundles on, packed in close like a herd of peculiar sheep.

And that’s the moment I met you. Or heard you. It was your voice first. A clear, low tenor, the first words you spoke to me:
“Hold the elevator!”
Not just to me, of course. Your voice—commanding, some might say imperious—does not move the other professionals who don’t want to be delayed. The woman behind me shifts impatiently. I hear your footsteps—soon I will know that distinct, brisk walk—and I stick my soaking wet umbrella in the door just as it starts to close.

“Why did you?”

You asked me this recently, but not about our first meeting. We’d just made love in that awful, stale room, our clothes in a tangle on the thin red carpet, bodies and sheets equally sweaty, and suddenly it was that moment afterward when all feeling returns, life rushing back bleating its demands, and my body no longer held your interest. You twisted your wedding ring back on and wanted to know why I’d agreed to meet you. In that moment you wanted me to be responsible, to be the actor, to have pulled you toward what now seemed like purely, grossly animal behavior.

But back to that first meeting. Back to that moment in the elevator. Why did I hold the door? I can’t see your face, not yet, but I like your voice. When the doors bounce back there is a collective groan from the other occupants of the car. Then you appear, slipping around the corner, dashing on board like it’s the last train of the day.
“Thanks,”
you say, shaking your wet, blond head like a dog, and then you look directly at me and your perfect, crooked lips part in a smile
.