The House On Willow Street (13 page)

“Do you know, I thought you were coming up here to tell me that you were having even more financial problems than we had been already and . . . oh . . .” Tess shook her head. “I didn’t know what you were going to say, but not that. That wasn’t on the list.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “The thing is, how do we tell the children?”

“What do you mean,
we
tell the children?” she demanded.

“Well, we have to.”

“
We
don’t have to,” said Tess grimly, “
you
have to. And do you know what, Kevin, right now I think you’d better go. Just go. Get out of here.”

He got up and crossed the room, turning back at the door to say, “I’m really sorry, Tess. I never meant for it to turn out this way . . .”

“Just go,” she said wearily.

After he’d gone, she sat with Kitty through twenty minutes of something on the Disney Channel, although Tess would never have any memory of what it was: she was in shock. Instead, she held Kitty’s hand and tried not to cry. She wouldn’t let it all out in front of her daughter, she couldn’t. This would devastate the children. Zach had hated it when his father had moved out, and even though Kitty had coped in her own childlike way by asking for a kitten, she was like all young kids and hated change.

Tess had worked hard to make the separation appear perfectly normal by saying things like: “Grown-ups sometimes live apart for a bit and then it all works out again.” How could she explain this?
Nothing
would explain this. Her family had broken into two pieces—and it was all her own fault.

At two a.m., when she had finally given up on sleep, she rang her sister in Massachusetts.

“I don’t understand it,” Tess whispered, not wanting to wake the children. “What’s gone wrong? We tried counseling. All the magazines and books say that when people love each other, counseling fixes it. When that didn’t work, I read that separation can shock you back into realizing what you might lose. You know: it’s make-or-break time. Kevin didn’t want
to try that, it was me who said let’s give it a go, separation could work.”

“That’s bull and you know it,” said Suki, who was an expert markswoman in shooting straight. “Listen to me, Tess. I may have screwed up more relationships than you’ve had hot dinners, and I made a mess out of
my
only marriage, but I get the two facts that have been eluding you for the past few months: separation never leads to anything but breakup and
people change.
When you met Kevin, you were vulnerable.”

They were both silent and the gulf of the Atlantic Ocean felt huge. The two of them were the only ones who really knew just how vulnerable Tess had been back then. Vulnerable almost wasn’t the word. Tess had felt so horrendously alone. Her sister was in America, her father was dead, Cashel had gone and there was nobody else in her life.

“You needed to be rescued. Now, you’re a grown-up. If any rescuing needs to be done, you do it yourself. So you’ve changed. When Kevin met you, he loved being the strong silent type who could take care of you. But you don’t need him the same way any more. That’s probably why he’s fallen for this Claire girl. She thinks he’s the strong man who’s going to take care of her, and he loves that.

“And what those magazines and books of yours didn’t tell you,” Suki added in a dictatorial voice, and Tess could imagine her sister saying this in a lecture on the differences between the sexes, “is that men are far less likely than women to stay alone after a breakup. I can’t recall the precise statistic offhand, but a high percentage of widowers remarry within a year of their wife’s death. The same isn’t true of widows. Men don’t like being on their own, honey, and you sent him off into the wide, blue yonder on his lonesome.”

“He was living in the granny flat behind his mother’s
house,” Tess hissed, “in the same town as me and the kids. He said he couldn’t wait for the separation period to be over because the minute we were apart, he knew we ought to be back together!”

“What about you?” Suki asked.

She’d always known the right and hardest question to ask, even when they’d been kids.

“I was changing my mind,” Tess admitted slowly. “It’s been lonely.”

“I know what that’s like,” Suki said quietly on the other end of the phone, so quietly that Tess only thought she’d heard it. Any other time, she’d have dived in and asked Suki what was wrong, being the good sister, trying to help Suki sort out another tangled romance in her hectic dating life. But tonight she wanted it to be about her. Tonight, Tess needed Suki to put that fabulous brain to use and help her sort this mess out in her head.

“I was used to being married, Suki. Used to waking up with Kevin, used to the stuff he did. Now, I have to do everything—the grocery shopping, the cooking, sort out all the school stuff, work out all the bills. And Kevin gets to play couple-in-love with his child girlfriend. Whom
I’m going to really like
, apparently.”

Tess exhaled and lay back on her pillows miserably. “I still can’t believe he said that.”

“Honey, I wish I could help you but—”

“Yeah, but you’re three thousand miles away and you’re broke too. I get it,” Tess said sadly. “We should offer our services to some marriage counseling clinic. They could use us on their posters:
Meet the Power Sisters, whatever you do, don’t do what they did—that way you’ll be happy.
”

“There’s one thing you never mentioned,” Suki went on as if she hadn’t been interrupted. “Love. You haven’t talked
about love, Tess. You miss Kevin and all that, but is your heart broken because he’s not there, or is it broken because there’s no one to share the chores and no one in your bed at night? Only you can answer that. If you decide that you do love him, then you have to fight the child girlfriend for him.”

For the first time that evening, Tess laughed. It was hysterical laughter, and once she started, she found she couldn’t stop. She tried to muffle her laughter in the pillows.

“I’m sorry,” she said, coming up for air. “I had a vision of me and this lovely twenty-nine-year-old in hand-to-hand combat in the main square. Me whacking her through the pub window, bare-knuckled.”

“Tell me when that bout’s scheduled,” Suki said drily, “and I’ll book the first flight home.”

C
offee was Suki’s drug of choice these days. A silky Colombian macchiato with a hint of soy foam from the small coffee shop down the block. She’d pick up a cup to go and then take it out to the porch at the back of the house. Once a fine, albeit small, clapboard house owned by a local potter, it was prettily decorated and had several storm lanterns hanging from the porch roof. There was also an old peeling swing seat with a cushion that probably predated the last ten political administrations, but it was the perfect place to sit in with her coffee and smoke the first of her ten cigarettes of the day.

The radio had forecast a fierce nor’wester that morning, and in the jungle of a backyard, the skinny trees shivered in the wind. Gardening was not Suki’s strong point.

Compared to the old cottage she’d got in the divorce settlement from Kyle, the view was nothing to speak of. There, she’d looked out over the fine sand of the beach, watching as the waves rolled over driftwood. She used to collect interesting pieces of driftwood; they complemented the pale blue of the cottage walls and blended nicely with the various
bits of nautical paraphernalia Kyle’s mother’s decorator had added to the cottage when they’d first moved in.

In this house, with its wallpapered walls and mustardy cream paintwork, the driftwood looked dirty. It was all a matter of setting.

Another difference was the skyline: no Richardson had lived within hailing distance of the neighbors for decades. Neighbors were what poor people had. The rich could afford glorious isolation, and their cottage had been suitably solitary, the only one on the beach.

Here, on the edge of a small estate in Falmouth, Massachusetts, she had another line of houses behind hers. Rather than look at them, she stared up into the sky as she blew smoke out and sipped her coffee. It was a good time of the day for thinking.

Today, she needed to get groceries, pay some bills online and progress a little further with the book.

It wasn’t moving.

“
Do you write all the words?
” a woman had said to her at a cocktail party once. This had been back in the days when Suki had felt loved by the world, so she had merely smiled kindly and said, “
Yes, I write all the words.
”

Today, she’d have been less kind: “
No, the Word Fairy comes in the night and does them. I just read them through in the morning to make sure she’s written enough. By the way, you need to go back to your village, ’cos they’re an idiot short.
”

The Word Fairy wasn’t working at all these days.

Growing up in Ireland, she’d never been a morning person except in the summer holidays, when shafts of morning sun would slant in through the holes in the curtains in her bedroom. Sometimes, Suki would get a cup of tea from the kitchen—summer was the only time Avalon House wasn’t
arctic—and then climb up the back stairs to the third floor, where a window led out on to the ersatz Norman battlements. Nobody but she and Tess ever went up there. Suki used to scatter her cigarette butts everywhere, until Tess brought up an empty baked-bean can and it became the ashtray, occasionally emptied when it was overflowing. They had dragged two old cushions up to the window and on nice days, she and Tess could sit in comfort, hidden from the world, and gaze down from their lofty position at the top of Willow Street. They could see the comings and goings of Avalon, could see the line of caravans in Cabana-Land and the rocky spur to the right where children loved to explore in the daytime and where young lovers liked to make out at night.

Suki liked being near the sea. There was a claustrophobia in being landlocked. Sea and trees, they were her lodestones.

The beach at Avalon was so beautiful, the curve of the sand on one side, tailing off to a tiny cove covered with smooth rocks that shimmered in the sun. Valley of the Diamonds, it was called.

Once, a boy had taken Suki there. She hadn’t let him go all the way, whatever he told his friends. Suki Power was lots of things, but stupid wasn’t one of them.

Cigarette finished now, she made her way wearily upstairs to her office.

The office was really a glorified cupboard. Two years ago when she bought the house, the realtor had enthusiastically described it as “the nursery.” Suki had shot him an angry look at this description. Did he seriously think she was looking for a place to settle down and raise a family at her age? But the realtor was, she realized, a self-absorbed young man who was operating on autopilot, trotting out the same spiel whatever the house, whoever the client:

 . . . through here the kitchen/diner, and look, an original
wood-burning stove! And upstairs, conveniently placed next door to the master bedroom, a nursery!

She no longer walked into the tiny room and thought of it wistfully as the nursery. Even though she railed against older mothers, there was still a tiny place inside her that mourned her own childlessness.

But she was beyond that ever becoming a reality. These days, the “nursery” was more of an office-cum-torture-chamber. The place where she went to suffer and stare at a blank screen, wondering how to fill the endless pages that stood between her and the next tranche of the advance from her publisher—money she needed so desperately.

When she emerged from the wasteland that had been her life on the road with Jethro, Suki had been broke. Not a penny remained of the divorce settlement from Kyle Junior; it had either gone up their noses or on her back, indulging a penchant for ridiculously expensive clothes, jewelry, cosmetic treatments to make her look younger. The pretty Maine cottage she’d been given as part of her alimony had been sold to pay the debts she’d run up, splashing money around, settling bar bills with bravado to show that she was a famous feminist writer and not just another groupie hanging around with TradeWind. Except that’s exactly what she was—another groupie.