Thorns of Truth (53 page)

Together, the four of them trooped along the gravel paths, armed with a map, on which Max’s plot was circled in yellow felt pen. It even had a number, C-125. For some reason, that depressed Rose even more than the sterile-looking graves with their pathetically stilted inscriptions.

“Here it is.” Mandy, who’d wandered off the path onto the grass, pointed out a headstone that looked as if it had been recently installed.

Yes, Rose saw, it was the one she’d ordered. Polished black granite inscribed simply with Max’s name and the dates of his birth and death. She’d resisted the impulse to include declarations about what a devoted husband he’d been, and how beloved by his children. They all knew exactly what Max had meant to them, so what would have been the point?

Drew, after a moment of reflection, remarked, “It’s not what I was expecting, somehow.”

“It’s plain, I know,” Rose said. “Daddy would have hated anything else.”

He looked at her, brushing a lock of dark hair from his forehead. “That’s not what I meant. I wasn’t thinking it should be fancier. It just … it doesn’t seem to have anything to
do
with Dad.”

Rose thought of all the usual clichéd disclaimers. Like,
He’s in our hearts.
Or
We’ve never been a very religious family, I know.
But she didn’t say them. All she said was, “I know.”

Drew was right. Wherever Max was now, it wasn’t here. If he had been, there would have been more color to this place, an air of festivity instead of gloom. He’d have smiled at the picture of his family huddled around his grave, each of them struggling to come up with a heartfelt response that didn’t sound as if it had been borrowed from a movie. He’d have scolded them, and sent them home. Or to the beach. If nothing else. Rose thought, freezing water makes you feel alive.

Her thoughts returned to Eric. Surprisingly, they didn’t leave her feeling guilty. Max would have understood. He no more would have wanted her to bury her feelings than he would have wished her dead.

It wasn’t a choice, she reminded herself. She wasn’t choosing between two men she loved. It never would have come to this if Max were still alive. She wouldn’t have fallen in love with Eric in the first place.

Then what are you waiting for? Permission to be excused?
Max’s voice, affectionately mocking, filled her head.
Rosie, you never in your life asked permission to go after anything you truly wanted. What’s holding you back now?

Rose blinked hard. Her throat felt tight, and her eyes stung as they did when staring into too bright a light. But the sky was overcast, and the grass, she suddenly noticed, wasn’t as green as it had looked just moments before. Patches of brown, here and there, freckled the gentle swell of lawn, and a number of the trees had lost their leaves. Winter was just around the corner. Even the squirrels foraging a few feet away seemed bolder than usual.

As if from a distance, she heard Mandy say, “I thought it would be nice if we said a prayer.”

Rose swallowed thickly, and nodded. Before she was aware of it, the words were coming to her, as naturally as if she’d planned to say them all along. “
Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name.…
”

It wasn’t until she was in the car, on her way home, that she began to cry. Hard enough so that she had to pull over to the side of the road and let Jay take the wheel, even though she’d insisted it was her turn. This time, however, his driving didn’t make her nervous. Jay really
had
grown up, she thought. That’s how you knew. Not when they stopped growing out of their clothes, or even when they stopped mouthing off at you. It was when they looked after you as you’d once looked after them.

At home, she immediately kicked off her shoes and put water on to boil for tea, ignoring Mr. Chips, who was squawking for attention in his cage. Jay had plans to go to a soccer game with his friend Curtis, but was careful to ask if she’d be okay on her own. Touched, but not wanting to embarrass him. Rose made a face and pushed him gently out the door. Then she switched off the burner under the kettle, got undressed, and climbed into bed. She wasn’t tired. She wasn’t even that depressed. It was just that she seemed to think, more clearly when lying down.

Maybe that was her problem: she’d been thinking
too
much, intellectualizing when she should have been simply
feeling.
All her life, she’d been famous for acting on impulse. Where was that recklessness when she needed it most?

Rose reached for me phone beside the bed. This time, she wouldn’t analyze or cross-examine it to death. She wouldn’t get mired in heavy sentiment. She wouldn’t even stop long enough to glance down at the scary plunge yawning below. She would simply dial.

Amazingly, he answered on the second ring. On a beautiful fall Sunday afternoon, while thousands were stuck in traffic on the LIE or the Sawmill, on their way home from the seashore, or countryside … and while many more, like Jay, stood in line for a sporting event, or shot baskets in a pickup game at a park or schoolyard … Eric just happened to be home. Almost as if he’d been expecting her.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi yourself.”

“You sound as if you have a cold.”

“I’ve been crying.”

There was a pause before Eric—rather than ask why, as most people would have done—merely remarked, “I’m glad you told me.”

“I just got back from the cemetery, but that’s not why I was crying,” she said. “Well, partly, maybe. It wasn’t as awful as I thought it would be. I felt sort of removed, in a way.”

“That’s how it was with me at my dad’s funeral,” he confided. “Like I was going through the motions. I’d cried more as a kid watching
Lassie.
It’s not that I didn’t love him. It just means you can only handle so much grief at one time.”

Like always, Eric understood what she was feeling without her even having to express it. There was only one part he’d left out. “It wasn’t
Lassie
I was thinking about,” she said with a congested little laugh. “It was
you.
”

A heavy silence fell, and this time Rose imagined she knew what
he
was feeling, and even what he looked like right now, with his sandy hair mussed from raking his fingers through it, and his blue eyes narrowed slightly in anticipation of the hidden catch he never stopped looking for.

“You picked a good time to call,” he said guardedly in that low, smoky voice of his. “I was just on my way out.”

“I don’t want to keep you.”

“It can wait.”

“Well, good. Because this can’t.” She pulled in a breath that felt like dragging something up from the bottom of the ocean. “Eric, I’ve missed you. Not just sort of. I’m crazy with missing you. After the fire … I picked up the phone to call you at least a dozen times. But I guess I wasn’t ready.”

“Are you now?” The wariness hadn’t left his voice. “I don’t want us to go back to where we were, Rose. I want to marry you.”

“I know.”

“Are you willing to at least consider it?”

“Yes.” she said, amazed at how easily it had slipped out.

“Well. Okay, then.” Eric sounded just as dumbstruck as she did. Then, all of a sudden, he began to laugh. “Rose, I didn’t think it was possible for me to run out of things to say … but I guess nothing that happens with you should surprise me.”

She laughed, too, feeling as if she’d swallowed a thunderbolt. Its tingling heat pulsed through her in blue-white veins of electricity. “Good,” she said. “I’ve had enough surprises to last me the rest of my life. I’ll settle for what’s right in front of me.”

“Do you want me to come over? I could be there in twenty minutes.”

“Not yet,” she told him. tightening her grip on the receiver. “I’m not ready to hang up. I have so much to tell you.”

“Let’s talk, then.”

She smiled up at the ceiling that swam overhead like the bottom of a listing boat suddenly righting itself. “So much has happened just in the past few weeks. I don’t even know where to …” She stopped, reminding herself to take a breath. Then another. Better. “Why don’t I just start at the beginning?” she finished, feeling suddenly calmer, and not at all confused. “That’s always a good place.”

Acknowledgments

O
VER THE PAST DECADE
or so, since the publication of my first novel,
Garden of Lies,
readers from all over the world, and from all walks of life, have uttered the magic words every author wants to hear: “Those characters were so real to me, I keep wondering what might have happened to them.” I, too, couldn’t stop wondering. And having written the following, in which that question is at last answered—for now, at least—I wish to acknowledge all those who cared enough to ask, as well as every bookseller who believed in and supported me from the start. With particular thanks to the most dedicated and tireless of my supporters, Hermine Lieberman and the gang at Bronx Bookplace.

A Biography of Eileen Goudge

Eileen Goudge (b. 1950) is one of the nation’s most successful authors of women’s fiction, beginning with the acclaimed six-million-copy bestseller
Garden of Lies
.

Goudge is one of six children, and the joys and strife that come with a large family have informed her fiction, much of which centers on issues of sisterhood and family. At eighteen she quit college to get married, a whirlwind experience that two years later left her divorced, broke, and responsible for her first child. It was then that she started writing in earnest.

On a typewriter borrowed from a neighbor, Goudge began turning out short stories and articles. For years she had limited success—selling work to
McCall’s
,
Reader’s Digest
, and the
San Francisco Chronicle
—but in the early eighties she took a job writing for a new young adult series that would become the phenomenally successful
Sweet Valley High
.

Goudge moved her family from California to New York City, where she spent several years writing young-adult fiction, creating series such as
Seniors
,
Swept Away
, and
Who Killed Peggy Sue?
In 1986 she published her first novel of adult fiction,
Garden of Lies
, inspired by a childhood anxiety that, because she did not resemble her brothers and sisters, she had been secretly adopted—a suspicion so strong that, at twelve, Goudge broke into her father’s lockbox expecting to find adoption papers. (She did not.) The tale of children swapped at birth was a national sensation, spent sixteen weeks on the
New York Times
bestseller list, and eventually yielded a sequel,
Thorns of Truth
(1998), which Goudge wrote in response to a decade of fan mail demanding she resolve the story.

Since then, Goudge has continued writing women’s fiction, producing a total of thirteen novels to date. Her most popular works include the three-book saga of Carson Springs—
Stranger in Paradise
(2001),
Taste of Honey
(2002), and
Wish Come True
(2003)—a small, secret-ridden town that Goudge based on scenic Ojai, California. She has also published a cookbook,
Something Warm from the Oven
, which contains recipes that Goudge developed as a reprieve from the stresses of writing novels.

Goudge met her current husband while conducting an interview over the telephone. Entertainment reporter Sandy Kenyon was so taken with the author that he asked if he could call her back when the interview was done, and after weeks of late-night conversations they met in person and were married in 1996.

Goudge lives with Kenyon in New York City.

  Goudge at age two, sitting on her father’s shoulders at the San Francisco Zoo. Goudge’s father was a talented painter. In the 1940s he painted caricatures at county fairs though once his family grew he focused on his insurance agency and self-taught skill at architecture.

  Goudge, age three, and her sister, Laura, in a playhouse built by their father. In addition to being a painter and insurance agent, Goudge’s father also designed and built houses.