Just Breathe
Susan Wiggs
Sarah Moon tackles life's issues with a sharp wit in her syndicated comic strip, Just Breathe.With both Sarah and her cartoon heroine undergoing fertility treatments, her fiction often reflects her reality. However, she hadn't scripted her husband's infidelity. In the wake of her shattered marriage, Sarah flees to the coastal town in California where she grew up. There, she revisits her troubling past: an emotionally distant father, the loss of her mother and an unexpected connection with Will Bonner, the high school heartthrob skewered mercilessly in her comics. But he's been through some changes himself.And just as her heart is about to reawaken, Sarah makes a most startling discovery.She's pregnant. With her ex's twins.The winds of change have led Sarah to this surprising new beginning. All she can do is just close her eyes… and breathe.
Acclaim for No.1 New York Times Bestseller Susan Wiggs
“A lovely, moving novel with an engaging heroine…Wiggs’s talent is reflected in her thoroughly believable characters as well as the way she recognises the importance of family by blood or other ties.”
—Library Journal on Just Breathe [starred review]
“An emotionally wrought story that will have readers reaching for the Kleenex one moment and snickering out loud the next.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Wiggs is one of our best observers of stories of the heart. Maybe that is because she knows how to capture emotion on virtually every page of every book.”
—Salem Statesman-Journal
“Delightful and wise, Wiggs’s latest shines.”
—Publishers Weekly on Dockside
“The perfect beach read.”
—Debbie Macomber on Summer by the Sea
“A human and multilayered story exploring duty to both country and family.”
—Nora Roberts on The Ocean Between Us
Just Breathe
Susan Wiggs
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
In memory of Alice O’Brien Borchardt—gifted writer, cherished friend.
You live in the hearts of those who loved you.
Acknowledgements
It took a special effort to bring this book to publication.
I gratefully acknowledge my fellow writers for their gifts of friendship, humour and patience in reading my early drafts: Anjali Banerjee, Kate Breslin, Carol Cassella, Lois Faye Dyer, PJ Jough-Haan, Rose Marie Harris, Susan Plunkett, Sheila Rabe, Krysteen Seelen, Suzanne Selfors and Elsa Watson.
Heartfelt thanks to Greg Evans, creator of the comic strip Luann; to former fire captain Tom McCabe of the Kern County Fire Department—a real-life hero; and to Glenn Mounger, international man of mystery.
And, as always, thanks to the team of experts who make books happen—my agent, Meg Ruley, and Annelise Robey of the Jane Rotrosen Agency; my editor, Margaret O’Neill Marbury, and Adam Wilson of MIRA Books; and to Donna Hayes, Dianne Moggy, Loriana Sacilotto and so many others for making this business a guilty pleasure.
Part One
Chapter One
After a solid year of visits to the clinic, Sarah was starting to find the decor annoying. Maybe the experts here believed earth tones had a soothing effect on anxious, aspiring parents. Or perhaps that the cheery burble of a wall fountain might cause an infertile woman to spontaneously drop an egg like an overly productive laying hen. Or even that the soft shimmer of brass chimes could induce a wandering sperm to find its way home like a heat-seeking missile.
The post-procedure period, lying flat on her back with her hips elevated, was starting to feel like forever. It was no longer standard practice to wait after insemination but many women, Sarah included, were superstitious. They needed all the help they could get, even from gravity itself.
There was a quiet tap on the door, then she heard it swish open.
“How are we doing?” asked Frank, the nurse-practitioner. Frank had a shaved head, a soul patch and a single earring, and he wore surgical scrubs with little bunnies on them. Mr. Clean showing his nurturing side.
“Hoping it is a ‘we’ this time,” she said, propping her hands behind her head.
His smile made Sarah want to cry. “Any cramps?”
“No more than usual.” She lay quietly on the cushioned, sterile-draped exam table while he checked her temperature and recorded the time.
She turned her head to the side. From this perspective, she could see her belongings neatly lined up on the shelf in the adjacent dressing room: her cinnamon-colored handbag from Smythson of Bond Street, designer clothes, butter-soft boots set carefully against the wall. Her mobile phone, programmed to dial her husband with one touch, or even a voice command.
Looking at all this abundance, she saw the trappings of a woman who was cared for. Provided for. Perhaps—no, definitely—spoiled. Yet instead of feeling pampered and special, she simply felt…old. Like middle-aged, instead of still in her twenties, the youngest client at Fertility Solutions. Most women her age were still living with their boyfriends in garrets furnished with milk crates and unpainted planks. She shouldn’t envy them, but sometimes she couldn’t help herself.
For no good reason, Sarah felt defensive and vaguely guilty for going through the expensive therapies. “It’s not me,” she wanted to explain to perfect strangers. “There’s not a thing wrong with my fertility.”
When she and Jack decided to seek help getting pregnant, she went on Clomid just to give Mother Nature a hand. At first it seemed crazy to treat her perfectly healthy body as if there were something wrong with it, but by now she was used to the meds, the cramps, the transvaginal ultrasounds, the blood tests…and the crushing disappointment each time the results came up negative.
“Yo, snap out of it,” Frank told her. “Going into a funk is bad karma. In my totally scientific opinion.”
“I’m not in a funk.” She sat up and offered him a smile. “I’m fine, really. It’s just that this is the first time Jack couldn’t make the appointment. So if this works, I’ll have to explain to my child one day that his daddy wasn’t present at his conception. What do I tell him, that Uncle Frank did the honors?”
“Yeah, that’d be good.”
Sarah told herself Jack’s absence wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. By the time the ultrasound revealed a maturing ovarian follicle and she’d given herself the HCG injection, they had thirty-six hours for the intrauterine insemination. Unfortunately, Jack had already scheduled a late-afternoon meeting at the work site. He couldn’t get out of it. The client was coming from out of town, he said.
“So are you still trying the old-fashioned way?” Frank asked.
She flushed. Jack’s erections were few and far between, and lately, he’d all but given up. “That’s not going so hot.”
“Bring him tomorrow,” Frank said. “I’ve got you down for 8:00 a.m.” There would be a second IUI while the window of fertility was still open. He handed her a reminder card and left her alone to put herself back together.
Her yearning for a child had turned into a hunger that was painfully physical, one that intensified as the fruitless months marched past. This was her twelfth visit. A year ago, she never thought she’d reach this milestone, let alone face it by herself. The whole business had become depressingly routine—the self-injections, the invasion of the speculum, the twinge and burn of the inseminating catheter. After all this time, Jack’s absence should be no big deal, she reminded herself as she got dressed. Still, for Sarah it was easy to remember that at the center of all the science and technology was something very human and elemental—the desire for a baby. Lately, she had a hard time even looking at mothers with babies. The sight of them turned yearning to a physical ache.
Having Jack here to hold her hand and endure the New Age Muzak with her made the appointments easier. She appreciated his humor and support, but this morning, she’d told him not to feel guilty about missing the appointment.
“It’s all right,” she had said with an ironic smile at breakfast. “Women get pregnant without their husbands every day.”
He barely glanced up from checking messages on his BlackBerry. “Nice, Sarah.”
She had touched her foot to his under the table. “We’re supposed to keep trying to get pregnant the conventional way.”
He looked up and, for an instant, she saw a dark flash in his gaze. “Sure,” he said, pushing back from the table and organizing his briefcase. “Why else would we have sex?”
This resentful attitude had started several months ago. Duty sex, for the sake of procreation, was no turn-on for either of them, and she couldn’t wait for his libido to return.
There had been a time when he’d looked at her in a way that made her feel like a goddess, but that was before he’d gotten sick. It was hard to be interested in sex, Jack often said these days, after getting your gonads irradiated. Not to mention the surgical removal of one of the guys. Jack and Sarah had made a pact. If he survived, they would go back to the dream they’d had before the cancer—trying to have a baby. Lots of babies. They had joked about his single testicle, they’d given it a name—the Uni-ball—and lavished it with attention. Once his chemo was finished, the doctors said he had a good chance of regaining fertility. Unfortunately, fertility had not been restored. Or sexual function, for that matter. Not on a predictable level, anyway.
They had decided, then, to pursue artificial insemination using the sperm he’d preserved as a precaution before starting aggressive treatment. Thus began the cycle of Clomid, obsessive monitoring, frequent visits to North Shore Fertility Solutions and bills so enormous that Sarah had stopped opening them.
Fortunately, Jack’s medical bills were covered, because cancer wasn’t supposed to happen to newlyweds trying to start a family.
The nightmare had come to light at 11:27 on a Tuesday morning. Sarah clearly remembered staring at the time on the screen of her computer, trying to remember to breathe. The expression on Jack’s face had her in tears even before he said the words that would change the course of their lives: “It’s cancer.”
After the tears, she had vowed to get her husband through this illness. For his sake, she had perfected The Smile, the one she summoned when chemo landed him in a puking, quivering heap on the floor. The you-can-do-it-champ, I’m-behind-you-all-the-way smile.
This morning, feeling contrite after their exchange, she had tried to be sociable as she flipped through the brochure for Shamrock Downs, his current project, a luxury development in the suburbs. The brochure touted, “Equestrian center designed by Mimi Lightfoot, EVD.”
“Mimi Lightfoot?” Sarah had asked, studying the soft-focus photographs of pastures and ponds.
“Big name to horse people,” he assured her. “What Robert Trent Jones is to designing golf courses, she is to arenas.”
Sarah wondered how challenging it was to design an oval-shaped arena. “What’s she like?”
Jack had shrugged. “You know, the horsy type. Dry skin and no makeup, hair in a ponytail.” He made a whinnying sound.
“You’re so bad.” She walked him to the door to say goodbye. “But you smell delicious.” She inhaled the fragrance by Karl Lagerfeld, which she’d given him last June. She’d secretly bought it, along with a box of chocolate cigars, for Fathers Day, thinking there might be something to celebrate. When it turned out there wasn’t, she had given him the Lagerfeld anyway, just to be nice. She’d eaten the chocolate herself.
She noticed, too, that he was wearing perfectly creased trousers, one of his fitted shirts from the Custom Shop, and an Hermès tie. “Important clients?” she asked.
“What?” He frowned. “Yeah. We’re meeting about the marketing plans for the development.”
“Well,” she said. “Have a good day, then. And wish me luck.”
“What?” he said again, shrugging into his Burberry coat.
She shook her head, kissed his cheek. “I’ve got a hot date with your army of seventeen million motile sperm,” she said.
“Ah, shit. I really can’t change this meeting.”
“I’ll be all right.” Kissing him goodbye one more time, she suppressed a twinge of resentment at his testy, distracted air.
After the procedure, she followed the exit signs to the elevator and descended to the parking garage. Freakishly, the clinic had valet parking, but Sarah couldn’t bring herself to use it. She was already indulged enough. She put on her cashmere-lined gloves, flexing her fingers into the smooth deerskin, then eased onto the heated leather seat of her silver Lexus SUV, which came with a built-in car seat. All right, so Jack had jumped the gun a little, buying this thing. But maybe, just maybe, nine months from now, it would be perfect. The ideal car for a soccer-mom-to-be.
She adjusted the rearview mirror for a peek at the backseat. At present, it was a jumble of drafting paper, a bag from Dick Blick Art Materials and, of all things, a fax machine, which was practically a dinosaur in this day and age. Jack thought she should let it die a natural death. She preferred to take it to a repair shop. It had been the first piece of equipment she’d bought with her earnings as an artist, and she wanted to keep it, even though no one ever faxed her anymore. She did have a career, after all. Not a very successful one, not yet, anyway. Now that Jack was cancer-free, she intended to focus on the comic strip, expanding her syndication. People thought it was simple, drawing a comic strip six days a week. Some believed she could draw a whole month’s worth in one day, and then slack off the rest of the time. They had no idea how difficult and consuming self-syndication was, particularly at the beginning of a career.
When her car emerged from the parking lot, the very worst of Chicago’s weather flayed the windshield. The city had its own peculiar brand of slush that seemed to fling itself off Lake Michigan, sullying vehicles, slapping at pedestrians and sending them scurrying for cover. Sarah would never get used to this weather, no matter how long she lived here. When she had first arrived in the city, a wide-eyed freshman from a tiny beach village in Northern California, she thought she’d encountered the storm of the century. She had no idea that this was normal for Chicago.
“Illinois,” her mother had said when Sarah had received an offer of admission the spring of her senior year of high school. “Why?”
“The University of Chicago is there,” Sarah explained.
“We have the best schools in the country right here in our backyard,” her mother had said. “Cal, Stanford, Pomona, Cal Poly…”
Sarah had stood firm. She wanted to go to the University of Chicago. She didn’t care about the distance or the god-awful weather or the flat landscape. Nicole Hollander, her favorite cartoon artist, had gone there. It was the place Sarah felt she belonged, at least for four years.
She’d never imagined living the rest of her life here, though. She kept waiting for it to grow on her. The city was tough and blustery, unpretentious and dangerous in some places, expansive and generous in others. Great food everywhere you turned. It had been overwhelming. Even the innate friendliness of Chicagoans had been confusing. How could you tell which ones were truly your friends?
She had always planned to leave the moment she graduated. She hadn’t pictured raising a family here. But that was life for you. Filled with surprises.
Jack Daly had been a surprise as well—his dazzling smile and irresistible charm, the swiftness with which Sarah had fallen for him. He was a Chicago native, a general contractor in the family business. His entire world was right here—his family, friends and work. There was no question of where Sarah and Jack would live after they married.
The city itself was part of Jack’s blood and bone. While most people believed life was a movable feast, Jack could not conceive of living anywhere but the Windy City. Long ago, in the dead of a brutal winter, when she hadn’t seen the sun or felt a temperature above freezing for weeks, she had suggested moving somewhere a bit more temperate. He’d thought she was kidding, and they had never spoken of it again.
“I’ll build you your dream house,” Jack had promised her when they got engaged. “You’ll learn to love the city, you’ll see.”
She loved him. The jury was still out on Chicago.
His cancer—that had been a surprise, too. They had made it through, she reminded herself every single day. But the disease had changed them both.
Chicago itself was a city of change. It had burned to the ground back in 1871. Families had been separated by the wind-driven firestorm that left nothing but charred timber and ash in its wake. People torn from their loved ones posted desperate letters and notices everywhere, determined to find their way back to each other.
Sarah pictured herself and Jack stepping gingerly through the smoldering ruins as they tried to make their way back to each other. They were refugees of another kind of disaster. Survivors of cancer.
Her front tire sank into a pothole. The jolt sent an eruption of mud-colored slush across the windshield, and she heard an ominous thud from the backseat. A glance in the mirror revealed that the fax machine had done a swan dive to the floor. “Lovely,” she muttered. “Just swell.” She pressed the wiper fluid wand, but the ducts sputtered out only an impotent trickle. The warning light blinked Empty.
Traffic crawled in a miserable stream northward. Stuck at a stoplight for the third cycle, Sarah thumped the steering wheel with the heel of her hand. “I don’t have to sit in traffic,” she said. “I’m self-employed. I might even be pregnant.”
She wondered what Shirl would do in this situation. Shirl was her alter ego in Sarah’s comic strip, Just Breathe. A sharper, more confident, thinner version of her creator, Shirl was audacious; she had a screw-you attitude and an impulsive nature.
“What would Shirl do?” Sarah asked aloud. The answer came to her in an instant: Get pizza.
The very thought brought on such a craving that she laughed. A craving. Maybe she was already showing signs of pregnancy.
She veered down a side street and punched in “pizza” on her GPS. A mere six blocks away was a place called Luigi’s. Sounded promising. And it looked promising, she saw when she pulled up in front of the place a few minutes later. There was a red neon sign that read, Open Till Midnight and another sign that promised Chicago’s Finest Deep Dish Pizza Since 1968.
As she pulled up the hood of her coat and made a dash for the entrance, Sarah had a brilliant idea. She would take the pizza to share with Jack. His meeting was probably over by now and he’d be starved.
She beamed at the young man behind the counter. The name Donnie was stitched on the pocket of his shirt. He looked like a nice kid. Polite, a little shy, well-groomed. “Pretty nasty out there,” Donnie commented.
“You said it,” she agreed. “Traffic was a nightmare, which is why I took a detour and ended up here.”
“What can I get you?”
“A thin-crust pizza to go,” she said. “Large. And a Coke with extra ice and…” She paused, thinking how good a nice cold, syrupy Coke would taste. Or a beer or margarita, for that matter. She resisted temptation, though. According to all the fertility advice books she’d read, she was supposed to keep her body a temple free of caffeine and alcohol. For many women, alcohol was often a key factor in conception, not a forbidden substance. Getting pregnant was a whole lot more fun for people who didn’t read advice books.
“Ma’am?” the kid prompted.
The “ma’am” made her feel old. “Just the one Coke,” she said. Right this very minute, a zygote might be forming itself into a clump of cells inside her. Giving it a shot of caffeine was a bad idea.
“Toppings?” the kid asked.
“Italian sausage,” she said automatically, “and peppers.” She glanced yearningly at the menu. Black olives, artichoke hearts, pesto. She adored those toppings, but Jack couldn’t stand them. “That’s all.”
“You got it.” The boy floured up his hands and went to work.
Sarah felt a faint tug of regret. She should at least get black olives on half the pizza. But no. Especially during his treatment, Jack had become an extremely picky eater, and just the sight of certain foods turned him off. A big part of cancer treatment was all about getting him to eat, so she had learned to cater to his appetite until she practically forgot her own preferences.
He’s not sick anymore, she reminded herself. Order the damned olives.
She didn’t, though. What no one told you about a loved one getting cancer was that the disease didn’t happen to just one person. It happened to everyone around him. It robbed his mother of sleep, sent his father to the neighborhood bar each night, brought his siblings jetting in from wherever they happened to be. And what it did to his wife…She never let herself dwell on that.
Jack’s illness had stopped everything for her. She’d put her career on hold, shoved aside her plans to paint the living room and plant bulbs in the garden, squelched her longing for a child. All of that had gone by the wayside and she had parked it there willingly. With Jack fighting for his life, she had bargained with God: I’ll be perfect. I’ll never get angry. I won’t miss our old sex life. I’ll never complain. I won’t wish for black olives on my pizza ever again, if only he’ll get better.
She had held up her end of the bargain. She’d been uncomplaining, even tempered, utterly dedicated. She hadn’t made a peep about their sex life or their lack of one. She hadn’t eaten a single olive. And presto—Jack’s treatments ended and his scans came back clean.
They had wept and laughed and celebrated, then woke up the next day not knowing how to be a couple anymore. When he was sick, they had been soldiers in battle, comrades in arms fighting their way to safety. Once the worst was behind them, they weren’t quite sure what to do next. After surviving cancer—and she didn’t kid herself; they had both survived the disease—how did you start being normal again?
A year and a half later, Sarah reflected, they still weren’t sure. She had painted the house and planted the bulbs. She’d rolled up her sleeves and plunged into her work. And they had resumed trying for the baby they’d promised each other long ago.
Still, it was a different world for them now. Maybe it was just her imagination, but Sarah sensed a new distance between them. While he was sick, Jack had days when he was almost entirely dependent on her. Now that he was well, it was probably natural for him to reassert his independence. It was her job to allow that, to bite her tongue instead of saying she was lonely for him, for his touch, for the affection and intimacy they once shared.
As the aroma of baking pizza filled the shop, she checked messages on her cell phone and found none. Then she tried Jack, but got his “out of service area” recording, which meant he was still at the work site. She put away the phone and browsed a well-thumbed copy of the Chicago Tribune that was lying on a table. Actually, she didn’t browse. She turned straight to the comic strip section to visit Just Breathe. There it was, in its customary spot on the lower third of the page.
And there was her signature, slanting across the bottom edge of the last panel: Sarah Moon.
I have the best job in the world, she thought. Today’s episode was another visit to the fertility clinic. Jack was hating the story line. He couldn’t stand it when she borrowed material from real life to feed the comic strip. Sarah couldn’t help herself. Shirl had a life of her own, and she inhabited a world that sometimes felt more real than Chicago itself. When Shirl had started pursuing artificial insemination, two of her papers had declared the story line too edgy, and they’d dropped her. But four more had signed on to run the strip.
“I can’t believe you think it’s funny,” Jack had complained.
“It’s not about being funny,” she’d explained. “It’s about being real. Some people might find that funny.” Besides, she assured him, she published under her maiden name. Most people didn’t know Sarah Moon was the wife of Jack Daly.
She tried dreaming up a story line he would love. Maybe she’d give Shirl’s husband, Richie, bigger pecs. A jackpot win in Vegas. A hot speedboat. An erection.
That would never fly with her editors, but a girl could dream. Mulling over the possibilities, she turned to the window. The rain-smeared glass framed the Chicago skyline. If Monet had painted skyscrapers, they would’ve looked like this.
“Regular or Diet Coke?” Donnie broke in on her thoughts.
“Oh, regular,” she said. Jack could use the calories; he was still gaining back the weight he’d lost during his illness. What a concept, she thought. Eating to gain weight. She hadn’t done that since her mother had weaned her as an infant. People who ate all they wanted and stayed thin were going to hell. She knew this because they were in heaven now.
“Pizza’ll be right out,” the boy said.
“Thanks.”
As he rang her up, Sarah studied him. He was maybe sixteen, with that loose-limbed, endearing awkwardness that teenage boys possess. The wall phone rang, and she could tell the call was personal, and from a girl. He ducked his head and blushed as he lowered his voice and said, “I’m busy now. I’ll call you in a bit. Yeah. Me, too.”
Back at the worktable, he folded cardboard boxes and sang unselfconsciously with the radio. Sarah couldn’t remember the last time she had experienced that kind of floating-through-the-day, grinning-at-nothing sort of happiness. Maybe it was a function of age, or marital status. Maybe full-grown, married adults weren’t supposed to float and grin at nothing. But hell, she missed that feeling.
Her hand stole to her midsection. One day, she might have a son like Donnie—earnest, hardworking, a kid who probably left his dirty socks on the floor but picked them up cheerfully enough when nagged.
She added a generous tip to the glass jar on the counter.
“Thank you very much,” said Donnie.
“You’re welcome.”
“Come again,” he added.
Clutching the pizza box across one arm, with the drink in its holder balanced on top, she plunged outside into the wild weather.
Within minutes, the Lexus smelled like pizza and the windows were steamed up. She flipped on the defroster and made her way westward through winsome townships and hamlets that surrounded the city like small satellite nations. She glanced longingly at the Coke she’d ordered for Jack, and another craving hit her, but she tamped it down.
Twenty minutes later, she turned off the state highway and wended her way to a suburb where Jack was developing a community of luxury homes. She slowed down as she drove through the figured concrete gates that would one day be operated by key card only. The tasteful sign at the entrance said it all: Shamrock Downs. A Private Equestrian Community.
This was where millionaires would come to live with their pampered horses. Jack’s company had planned the enclave down to the last blade of grass, sparing no expense. The subdivision covered forty acres of top-quality pasture-land, a pond and a covered training arena, lighted and lined with bleachers. The resident Thoroughbreds and Warmbloods would occupy an ultramodern, forty-stall barn. Bridle paths wound through the wooded neighborhood, the surfaces paved with sand to reduce impact on the horses’ hooves.
In the late-afternoon gloom, she saw that all the work crews had gone for the day, driven away by the rain. There was a Subaru Forester parked at the barn, but no one in sight. The foreman’s trailer looked abandoned, too. Maybe she had missed Jack and he was heading home. Perhaps he’d had an attack of conscience and left his meeting early to be with her at the clinic, but had gotten stuck in traffic. There were no messages on her mobile, but that didn’t mean anything. She hated cell phones. They never worked when you needed them and tended to ring when you wanted peace and quiet.
The unfinished houses looked eerie, their skeletal timbers black against the rain-drenched sky. Equipment was parked haphazardly, like giant, hastily abandoned toys in a sodden sandbox. Half-full Dumpsters littered the barren landscape. The people who moved to this neighborhood would never realize it had started out looking like a battle zone. But Jack was a magician. He could start with a sterile prairie or a reclaimed waste disposal site and transform it into Pleasantville. By spring, he would turn this place into a pristine, bucolic utopia, with children playing on the lawns, foals gamboling in the paddocks, women with ponytails and no makeup and thigh-hugging riding pants heading for the barn.
Darkness deepened by the minute. The pizza would be cold soon.
Then she spotted Jack’s car. The custom-restored GTO was the ultimate muscle machine, even though legally, it belonged to her. When he was ill, she’d bought it to cheer him up. Using her earnings from the comic strip, she’d managed to save up enough for a lavish gift. Spending her life savings on the car had been an act of desperation, yet she had been willing to give anything, sacrifice anything to make him feel better. She only wished she could spend her last cent to buy him back his health.
Now that he was well, the car remained his prize possession. He only drove it on special occasions. His meeting with the client must have been an important one.
The black-and-red car crouched like an exotic beast in the driveway of one of the model houses. In its nearly finished state, the home resembled a hunting lodge. On steroids. Everything Jack built was bigger than it had to be—wraparound deck, entryway, four-car garage, water feature. The yard was still a mud pit, with great holes carved out for the fully grown trees that would be installed. Installed was Jack’s word. Sarah would have said planted. The trees looked pathetic, like fallen victims, lying limp on their sides with their withered root-balls encased in burlap.
It was pouring harder than ever when she parked and killed the headlights and engine. A gaslight on a lamppost faintly illuminated a hand-lettered sign: “Street of Dreams.” There were at least two river rock gas fireplaces that she could see, and one appeared to be working, evidenced by a deep golden glow flickering in the upper-story windows.
Balancing the Coke on the pizza box, she opened her push-button umbrella and got out. A gust of wind tugged at the ribs of the umbrella, turning it inside out. Icy rain battered her face and slid down inside her collar.
“I hate this weather,” she said through gritted teeth. “Hate it, hate it, hate it.”
Rivulets of water from the unplanted yard ran down the sloping driveway and swirled away in muddy streams. The nonfunctioning sprinkler system tubes lay in a tangled mess. There was no place to walk without getting her feet soaked.
That’s it, she thought. I’m making Jack take me home to California for a vacation. Her hometown of Glenmuir, in Marin County, had never been his favorite place. He favored the white sand beaches of Florida, but Sarah was starting to feel it was her turn to choose their destination.
The past year and a half had been all about Jack—his needs, his recovery, his wishes. Now that the ordeal was behind them, she let her own needs rise up to the surface. It felt a tad selfish but damned good all the same. She wanted a vacation away from soggy Chicago. She wanted to savor each worry-free day, something she hadn’t been able to do in a very long time.
A trip to Glenmuir wasn’t so much to ask. She knew Jack would balk; he always claimed there was nothing to do in the sleepy seaside village. Battling her way through the wild storm, she resolved to do something about that.
No locks had been installed yet on the prehung doors of the huge, unfinished home.
She smiled as she pushed open the front door and sighed with relief. What could be cozier than sitting in front of the fire on a rainy afternoon, eating pizza? Quite possibly, this house was the only warm, dry place in the neighborhood.
“It’s me,” she called, stepping out of her boots so as not to muddy the newly finished hardwood floors. There was no reply, just the tinny sound of a radio playing somewhere upstairs.
Sarah felt a twinge of discomfort in her belly. Cramping was a side effect of IUI, and Sarah didn’t mind. The fact that there was pain lent an appropriate sense of gravitas to her mission. It was a physical reminder of her determination to start a family.
Shaking off the raindrops, she padded in stocking feet to the stairs. She’d never been here before, but she was familiar with the layout of the house. Though it wasn’t obvious to most people, Jack worked with only a few floor plans. The massive size and luxurious materials aside, he built what he unapologetically called “cookie-cutter mansions.” She had once asked him if he ever got bored, building essentially the same house, over and over again. He had laughed aloud at the question.
“What’s boring about netting a cool million on a tract home?” he had countered.
He liked making money. He was good at it. And she was lucky, because so far, she was terrible at it. Each year when they filed their income tax return, he would look at the revenues from her comic strip, offer her a generous smile and joke, “I always wanted to be a patron of the arts.”
At the top of the stairs, she turned toward the sound of the radio, her raincoat brushing against the machine-turned banister. “Achy Breaky Heart” was playing, and she winced. Jack had terrible taste in music. So bad, in fact, it was actually endearing.
The door to the master suite was ajar, and the friendly glow of the fire glimmered across the freshly carpeted floors. She hesitated, sensing…something.
A warning, beating like an extra pulse in her ears.
She stepped into the room, her feet sinking into the deep pile of the carpet as her eyes adjusted to the soft, golden light. The diffuse, kindly glow of the lifetime-guaranteed Briarwood gas logs flickered over two naked bodies entwined on a bed of thick woolen blankets spread in front of the hearth.
Sarah experienced a moment of complete and utter confusion. Her vision clouded and she felt light-headed and nauseous. There was some mistake here. She had walked into the wrong house. Into the wrong life. She fought against the panicky random thoughts playing Ping-Pong in her head. For a second or two she simply stood immobile, assaulted by shock, forgetting to breathe.
After endless seconds, they noticed her and sat up, gathering blankets to cover themselves. The song on the radio switched to something equally appalling—“Butterfly Kisses.”
Mimi Lightfoot, Sarah realized, was exactly as Jack had described her: the horsy type—dry skin and no makeup, hair in a ponytail. But with bigger boobs.
Finally, Sarah found her voice and spoke the only coherent thought in her head: “I brought you a pizza. And a Coke. Extra ice, the way you like it.”
She didn’t throw the pizza or spill the drink. She set everything carefully on the built-in media console next to the radio. She was as discreet and efficient as a room service waiter.
Then she turned and left.
“Sarah, wait!”
She heard Jack calling her name as she skimmed down the stairs with the speed and grace of Cinderella at the stroke of midnight. Shoving her feet into her boots barely slowed her down. In seconds, she was outside with her broken umbrella, heading for the car.
She started the engine just as Jack burst outside. He wore his good pants—the ones with the creases she had admired this morning—and nothing else. She could see his mouth working, forming her name: Sarah. She put the headlamps on bright and turned the car, feeling a satisfying crunch as the rear bumper of the Lexus toppled the custom river rock mailbox. Her high beams washed across the front of the house, illuminating the porch timbers and fine wooden window casements, the Andersen glass and the grand front entranceway.
For a moment, Jack appeared pinned by the glare, a prize buck frozen in the headlights.
What would Shirl do? Sarah asked herself. She gripped the steering wheel, threw the car into gear and floored the accelerator.
Part Two
Chapter Two
After creaming the newly constructed mailbox and mowing down the “Street of Dreams” lamppost, Sarah actually contemplated nailing Jack, too. Just for an insane moment, she allied herself with the crazed women you saw on TV being interviewed behind bars: “I didn’t think. My foot just pressed down and he hit the pavement…”
Somehow, she managed to aim the SUV away from him and toward the highway. She didn’t know what else to do and couldn’t think straight, so she headed home, exceeding the speed limit, like a horse sensing the barn after a long trek.
Predictably, her mobile phone rang right away. Jack was probably still half-naked. He probably still stank of Mimi Lightfoot’s scent of sex. Sarah killed the power on the phone and pressed the accelerator harder. She needed to get home, give herself some breathing space and figure out what to do next.
As she pulled into the landscaped, circular driveway, it struck her that this had never felt like her home; it just happened to be where she lived. This was the House that Jack Built, she thought, hearing the singsong rhythm of the old children’s story in her head. And this was the wife who lived in the house that Jack built. And there was the mistress that screwed the husband that ignored the wife who lived in the house that Jack built…
It was nestled amid similar houses in the exclusive lakeside subdivision. The trees that shaded the lane were spaced perfectly apart, the mailboxes all matched and every home’s entryway lay a uniform distance from the curb. The neighborhood had been planned by a designer who worked for Daly Construction.
She wheeled into the spacious garage, nearly grazing Jack’s work truck—a custom F-350 Ford pickup—and hurried inside. Then she stopped cold. Now what? She felt so strange, almost traumatized, as though she’d been the victim of a violent assault.
She looked at the wall phone in the kitchen. The message light was blinking. Maybe she ought to call…who? Her mother had died years ago. Her friends…she’d allowed herself to drift away from people back home, and her Chicago friends belonged more to Jack than to Sarah.
What would Shirl do? she wondered, plucking the thought from the panic swirling through her head. Shirl was smart. Tough-minded. Shirl would remind Sarah to focus on practical matters, like the fact that she had a separate bank account. This was something they had set up during Jack’s illness, so she’d have access to funds if the unthinkable happened.
Well, the unthinkable had happened. Not in the way she had feared, though.
Her stomach cramped, a sensation she would ordinarily welcome after the procedure, as it meant that biology was at work. Now the discomfort meant something altogether different.
The phone rang. Seeing Jack’s number on the caller ID, she let it kick over to voice mail.
She sat in the dark house for a while, her sodden coat and boots still on. It was such a strange puzzle. Husbands cheated on their wives all the time; daytime TV was filled with dewy-eyed betrayed women seeking solace on national talk shows. The problem was as familiar to anyone as ring around the collar. Yet the issue had always brushed past Sarah like a wind pattern on a weather map from another part of the country. She could recognize it, imagine what it was like. She thought she understood.
What the talk shows never explained—what no one ever explained—was what, precisely, you were supposed to do the exact moment you made the dread discovery. Probably you didn’t leave them a pizza.
She was familiar with the stages of grief: shock, denial, anger, bargaining…She had experienced them all when she’d lost her mother, and when her husband was diagnosed with cancer. This was different. At least in those instances, she had known how she was supposed to feel. It was horrible, but at least she knew. Now she saw a world turned upside down. She was supposed to be moving from the shock to the denial phase, but it wasn’t working. This was all too real.
Late into the night she sat mulling over her options—drinking, hysterics, revenge—but nothing felt quite right. Finally, exhaustion claimed her and she went to bed. She lay still, bracing herself for a storm of inconsolable tears. Instead, she stared dry-eyed at the shadows on the wall, and eventually fell asleep.
Sarah was awakened from a fitful sleep by the sound of running water. She turned over in bed, seeing that Jack’s half was a vast, deserted wasteland. He had come home, but not to her bed. The events of the day before crashed down on her and drove away all possibility of going back to sleep.
In the past year, she had gone to bed alone nearly every night while Jack worked late. How many marriages crashed and burned on the altar of “working late”?
I’m an idiot, she thought. She got up and brushed her teeth, pulled on her robe. On the bathroom counter was the bottle of prenatal vitamins she’d been taking. Normally, the morning after artificial insemination, she would cheerfully gulp down the pills, filled with hope and possibility. She wondered when she had begun to think of artificial insemination as normal.
Now she stared at the bottle in dull horror. “I’d better not be pregnant,” she whispered.
Just like that, the dream of having a baby evaporated like a snowflake hitting a skillet. Ssst.
The good news was, she thought, combing her fingers through her hair, they had failed to make a child no matter how many times she made the trek to Fertility Solutions, so she was in little danger of being pregnant now. A small blessing, but probably a blessing all the same.
She phoned the clinic and left a voice mail: she would not be coming in for the second part of the procedure today. With a determined air, she unscrewed the top of the bottle and shook the vitamin pills into the toilet. Then, as though of its own accord, her hand snatched the bottle upright. She clutched it hard, saw that there were a few pills left. Slowly, deliberately, she put the cap back on the bottle. She should probably keep a small supply. Just in case.
She stuck her feet into scuffs and followed the sound of running water to the guest suite. Jack had come home late. She’d felt him looking in on her, but she’d lain still, feigning sleep, aware that he knew she was faking. There was much to discuss with him, but she hadn’t wanted to engage at 2:00 a.m. Now, in the light of day, she felt…not stronger. But the shock and denial had worn off, giving way to a cold rage she’d never felt before, a sensation of such violence it frightened her.
She stepped inside to find Jack freshly showered, a towel slung around his slim hips. Under normal circumstances, she would find him sexy. She might even try some seductive moves on him, not that those moves had done her any good in a long time. Now that she was beginning to understand the real reason behind his lack of desire, she saw him through new eyes. And he didn’t look sexy at all.
“So,” she said. “Who wants to start?” When he said nothing, she asked, “How long has this been going on? How many times a week?” A dozen more questions pushed to the fore, but Sarah realized her main question was for herself. Why hadn’t she seen or known?
He hung his head. Ah, shame, she thought. That might be promising. But if she was honest with herself, she had to admit that she didn’t want him to grovel and beg her forgiveness. She wanted…she wasn’t sure what she wanted.
When he looked up, she didn’t see disgrace, but hostility in his eyes. All right, she thought, so he’s not ashamed.
“Just a sec,” he said, and ducked into the bathroom. He emerged a moment later wearing a white terry cloth robe, one they kept in the guest bath for company. His arms protruded from the too-short sleeves, and his legs were bare from the thighs down.
There was probably no dress code for the breakup of a marriage. Robes would have to do. At the very least, it would prevent them from running out of the house in a screaming rage. Or maybe not. At the moment, she would rather be anywhere but here.
“We’ve both been unhappy,” he told her abruptly. “You can’t deny it.”
Oh, she wanted to. She wanted to swear her life had been perfect. That would make him responsible for causing it to collapse in an instant. Instead, she realized she’d been battling a pervasive disappointment, little sinking steps downward, so incremental they were easy enough to ignore until failure, wearing a ponytail and nothing else, held up a mirror.
“I won’t deny it,” she said, “as long as you won’t deny you chose pretty much the worst possible way to express your unhappiness.”
He didn’t. He acted as though she hadn’t even spoken. “I didn’t ask to get sick. You didn’t ask for a husband with cancer. But it happened, Sarah, and it screwed up everything.”
“No, you screwed up everything.”
He narrowed his eyes at her, coldly handsome. “When I was sick, when things were at their worst, it changed us. We weren’t like man and wife anymore. We were like…parent and child. I couldn’t get past that. When I’m with you, I see myself as a guy with cancer.”
Her stomach tightened, and for a moment, she focused all her bitterness on the disease. It was true, the cancer and its treatment had taken away his dignity, rendering him helpless. He wasn’t helpless now, though, she reminded herself. “That’s over,” she stated. “We’re supposed to learn to be man and wife again. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been working on exactly that. Apparently, you’ve been working on being a man again, only without the wife.”
He flung her a look of unexpected venom. “You’ve spent the past year trying to get pregnant,” he retorted, “with or without my help.”
“You’ve been telling me since we got engaged how much you want kids,” she reminded him.
“I never let it turn into an obsession,” he said.
“And I did?”
He gave an angry laugh. “Let’s see. Let’s just see.” Striding past her, he left the room and went to the master suite, barging into her mirrored dressing room. Feeling queasy, she followed him. He ripped a calendar off the wall and dropped it to the floor. “Your ovulation calendar.” He moved on to another wall hanging. “Temperature chart.” He ripped it down and threw it on the floor, then moved to the dressing table. “Here we’ve got your thermometers—looks like you’ve got one for every orifice—and fertility drugs. I figure your next step was to install a Web camera in the bedroom so you can record the exact moment it’s time for me to do my part. Isn’t that what they do at stud farms?”
“Now you’re being absurd,” she told him. Her cheeks felt hot with humiliation. Defend yourself, she thought. Then she realized that wasn’t her job.
“What’s absurd,” he said, “is trying to be married to you when you’re so focused on having a baby that you forget you have a husband.”
“I changed my whole life for you,” she said. “How can you say I forgot I have a husband?”
“You’re right. You didn’t forget. When it’s time to fertilize the egg, you demand a performance, and failure is not an option. Can’t you see how that might lead to a little anxiety on my part, every time you came after me?” “Came after you? Is that how you see it?” “Christ, no wonder I couldn’t get it up for you. But I have to hand it to you, Sarah. You didn’t let that stop you. Why bother with a husband when you’ve got a lifetime supply of viable sperm samples available?”
“Going to the clinic was your idea. You sat there and held my hand, month after month.”
“Because I thought it would get you off my back.” Oh, God. She’d tried to be sexy for him. Desirable. Understanding. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“It wouldn’t have made a difference, and you know it. Listen, Sarah,” he said, anger flashing in his voice. “Maybe I was the one who strayed—”
“I would say definitely, not maybe.”
“These things don’t happen in a vacuum.”
“No, they happen in half-finished houses.” She felt as though she was being smacked around by both of them and there was no stopping it, no laws to protect her from the agony, the humiliation, the sense of complete violation. She emitted a bitter sound, not quite a laugh. “I guess now I know where all your erections went. I was wondering. And does it bother your clients? To know their house had been christened by you fucking the stable girl?”
“Mimi’s not—”
“Don’t even.” She held up a hand to stop him. “Don’t tell me she’s not a stable girl, a slut, a home wrecker. Don’t tell me she’s the Robert Trent Jones of arena design. Don’t tell me how warmhearted and understanding she is.”
“Why, because you’re going to tell me you’ve been understanding? News flash—playing stud to your mare was not exactly a turn-on. Maybe if you’d been there for me outside the window of conception—”
“Oh, ‘you weren’t there for me,’” she said. “That’s a classic. At any point, you could have come to me, talked about this. But I guess it’s just easier to blame me for your choices.”
“Okay, I can see you’re not ready to acknowledge your part in this yet.”
“My part? I have a part? Oh, goody. Well, guess what? I’m on center stage now.”
He tilted his head to one side. “Fine. Go for it. Let me have it. Don’t stop at backing the Lexus over a mailbox. Do your worst.”
“That’s your specialty,” she shot back, wickedly pleased that he’d mentioned the Lexus. “What could be worse than what I walked in on yesterday?”
Jack fell silent for a moment. Then he said, “I’m sorry.”
Here it comes, she thought, ready to go limp with relief. Finally, a little show of remorse.
Stepping over the discarded things on the floor, he walked into the main room, his hands shoved into the pockets of the robe. “I mean that, Sarah,” he went on. “I’m sorry you had to find out like that. I wish I’d told you sooner.”
Find out…told you…Wait a minute, she thought. This was supposed to be the apology segment of the crisis. The we-can-work-it-out phase. Instead, he was telling her that this was not an anomaly, a one-time slipup. It had been going on for a while. Sarah’s stomach lurched. “Told me what?”
He turned around, looked her in the eye. “I want a divorce.”
Congratulations, she thought, forcing herself to hold his gaze. You just scored a technical knockout. But somehow, she was still standing. Still calm. “That’s supposed to be my line,” she said.
“I’m sorry this hurt you.”
“This is still not remorse, Jack. You’re sorry you got caught. You’re sorry my feelings got hurt. How about being sorry you destroyed us? Oh, and here’s a concept. How about letting me in on your little secret before I suffer through a year of fertility treatment, huh? Or were you going to change your mind if I got lucky and turned up pregnant?”
“God, I didn’t think.” He splayed his hand through his hair.
“You didn’t think? You dragged me into Fertility Solutions month after month and it never occurred to you to think about whether or not this was what you wanted?”
“You wanted it so badly, I didn’t know how to tell you I was having second thoughts. Listen. I’ll go someplace else for a while,” he said.
“Don’t be ridiculous. This is your house.” She gestured around the pristine home, indicating the warm, quiet elegance of the decor. Jack had once called it her dream house, but it had never been that. It came preplanned, prepackaged, like a magazine layout. She had simply moved in and unpacked her things like a temporary resident. It was filled with expensive things she had not picked out and had never wanted—tasteful artwork and collectibles, luxurious furniture. Deep down, she knew this was a place she had never belonged. She could picture herself leaving it behind like a hotel guest checking out of a luxury suite.
Leaving. The idea was there. It was not a decision she had worked herself up to. It just appeared fully conceived in her mind. The betrayal had occurred; now the next step was to leave, simple as that.
Or, Sarah thought, she could stay and fight for him. Insist on getting help, exploring their issues together, healing together. Couples did that, didn’t they? It all sounded terribly exhausting to Sarah, though. And the cold feeling in the pit of her stomach seemed to contain a terrible truth. He might be the one asking for a divorce, but she was the one who wanted to leave. When had everything gone off track for them? She couldn’t pinpoint the moment. She used to feel so lucky, wanting for nothing. Now she wondered where her luck had gone. Maybe she and Jack had used up all their cosmic Brownie points on the cancer.
“This is your life,” she said to him. “You can’t walk away from your own life, Jack.”
“I just meant—”
“But I can.” There. She’d said it. The words were out, a gauntlet flung to the ground between them.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked. “Where will you go? You don’t know anybody. I mean…”
“I know what you meant, Jack. There really isn’t any point in being diplomatic now, is there? This whole marriage has always been about your life, your hometown, your job.”
“This job made it possible for you to stay home all day and draw pictures.”
“Well, gosh, I guess I should be grateful for that. Maybe it was a way to deal with the fact that you were never home.”
“I never knew you felt put out by the fact that my job kept me busy.”
“You never knew how I felt about a lot of things. Take infidelity. If you knew how I felt about that, you probably would have left me before fucking someone else.”
His cell phone rang again. “I have to go to work,” he said, and went to finish dressing.
He emerged from his dressing room a few minutes later looking as neat and polished as an Eagle Scout. “Listen, Sarah,” he said. “We have to deal with this. Just…take it easy. We’ll talk about it some more tonight.”
She stood at the window and watched his large, shiny truck disappear down the rain-slick road. After he was gone, she stayed there, looking out at the gray day. Her mind worked sluggishly, weighed down by disappointment and a slow-simmering rage. She sorted through the things Jack had said, and found a grain of truth in one thing: they had been so focused on wanting a baby that they didn’t notice they had stopped wanting each other.
It was a lame, overused excuse for infidelity. And Jack was a grown-up. It didn’t excuse what he had done, or justify his demand for a divorce.
She took a deep breath. So she was, what, supposed to hang around all day waiting for him to come home and kick her to the curb? Good plan.
Chapter Three
The empty prairie, crisscrossed by a grid of startlingly straight roads, rolled out like a vast wasteland in front of the hood ornament of the GTO. It was remarkable, Sarah thought, how quickly the suburban sprawl of Chicago gave way to the broad gray-and-white checkerboard of the heartland at its most bleak.
In the late afternoon, her phone sounded off with Jack’s ringtone. She picked up without a greeting. “I’m leaving,” she informed him.
“Don’t be stupid. We agreed to talk about this.” Jack’s voice was sharp with both anger and distress.
“I didn’t agree to anything, but I guess you missed that part.” When had he stopped hearing her? she wondered. And why hadn’t she noticed? “There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Are you kidding? We’ve barely begun to discuss this.”
“The next time you hear from me, it’ll be through my lawyer.” As if she even had one at this point. She felt like such a phony, talking about “her” lawyer. But even just a day after discovering her husband with another woman, she had a clear vision of what her future held—legal counsel.
“Come on, Sarah—”
She gunned the engine to pass a semi.
“My God.” Jack’s voice squawked in disbelief. “Don’t tell me you took the GTO.”
“Fine. I won’t tell you.” She threw the cell phone out the window. It was a stupid, childish gesture. God knew, she would need a phone in the days to come.
She stopped at a RadioShack and acquired a cheap, pay-as-you-go phone, strictly for emergencies. She bought it with a brisk and icy calm, as if she did such things every day. As if she were not on fire with panic inside. There was a brittle outer shell around her and inside, a clockwork brain directing each step she took with passionless efficiency.
It was as if she had rehearsed the act of leaving her husband a hundred times before—pack a bag, burn CDs with all the personal data she might need, all the dark, sad-voiced music she might crave along the way. She’d had no trouble pulling the records—a simple step. She knew exactly where everything was. One of the terrible virtues of Jack’s illness was that it had forced them to keep all their affairs in order and well documented. Now their affairs—all but the extramarital one—were still in perfect order, including her separate bank account and the title to the GTO.
Driving through nowhere, she spared a thought for some of the things she had left—Waterford crystal lamps. An Italian leather sofa, the Belleek china and serving pieces, a set of Porsche forged cooking knives, a flat-screen TV. Maybe one day she would miss some of those things, but so far, she didn’t even want to think about them. Like a wild animal in a steel-jawed trap, she was willing to gnaw off a limb in exchange for a swift release.
Sarah stopped for gas in a town called Chance. She went to the ladies’ room to change clothes and discovered that she had stuffed her suitcase with far too many A-line skirts and blazers and had forgotten certain key items, like a hairbrush and pajamas. Maybe she should have spent more time picking the right kind of clothes to bring on her journey. But when you’re running out on your marriage, she thought, you didn’t really take time to shop or plan ahead. You didn’t even take the time to think.
She tugged a purse-sized comb through her hair, scowling when she hit a snag. Her hair was at that awkward in-between stage, neither impressively long nor sassily short. Jack claimed he liked her hair long and silky—“my California girl,” he used to call her.
“Can you take a walk-in?” Sarah asked the woman at the counter of the Chance, Illinois, Twirl & Curl.
“What do you need, hon?” Heather, the stylist, scrutinized her in the mirror.
Sarah touched her hair. “I want to be ritually shorn of the person I never was to begin with.”
Heather grinned as she led Sarah to a chair. “My specialty.”
It was a relief to lie back over the sink, close her eyes and surrender to the warm stream from the hose and the creamy texture of the shampoo. The familiar perfume of the salon comforted her.
“You’re a natural blond,” Heather remarked.
“I was experimenting with being a redhead but it didn’t work out. I’ve gone through every shade of brunette, too. Always looking for something different, I guess.”
“And now?” The stylist finished with the shampoo, then combed smoothly and effortlessly through Sarah’s hair.
Sarah took a deep breath and stared at her reflection in the big round mirror above the counter. The slicked-back hair made her look strange and unfinished, like a just-hatched chick. “Maybe I’ll think better with short hair.”
She heard the hungry rasp of the heavy scissors and with the first snip, she knew the decision was irrevocable. A cool breeze touched her neck, and a lightness lifted her, as though nothing anchored her to earth.
At a Wal-Mart outside Davenport, she bought a velour jogging suit to sleep in. The zip-up jacket and elastic-waistband pants were the perfect togs for terrible-looking roadside motels with sleepy desk clerks who had to be summoned by a bell on the counter.
At the state line, she caromed into a new-and-used car dealership so vast that its lot covered acres.
The GTO would fetch a handsome price, more than enough for a more appropriate car. She wouldn’t miss the muscle car in the least and felt nothing when she explained that she wanted to trade it in. She had presented the car to Jack with so much love in her heart. Where had that love gone? Was it possible for it to simply disappear?
Poof, rubbed out like a mistake she made in her comic strip.
The question was, what car was appropriate? A car was a car, a way to go from point A to point B. All of a sudden, the issue seemed to matter. If she couldn’t pick out her own car, what hope did she have of mapping out her own future?
Her footsteps dogged by an overeager saleswoman named Doreen, she strolled the lot, trying to tune out Doreen’s constant, upbeat patter about the can’t-miss attributes of every car they passed. “Here’s a beauty,” she said, indicating an ultraconservative Mercury Sable. “That’s actually the same model I bought after my divorce.”
Sarah ducked her head and tried to resist hunching her shoulders. Had Doreen somehow guessed that she was fleeing her husband? Was she wearing the unwarranted shame like a scarlet letter on her chest? She nearly ditched Doreen then and there. But she needed wheels, and she needed them now. At least, Sarah thought, she wasn’t dealing with a guy wearing a plaid sport jacket and too much aftershave.
There was a slight reprieve when Doreen’s phone rang. She glanced at the screen and said, “Sorry. I’m afraid I have to take this.”
“You go right ahead,” Sarah said.
Doreen turned aside and lowered her voice. “Mommy’s busy,” she said. “What do you need?”
Sarah slowed her steps as if to check out a silver hybrid. In actuality, she was checking out Doreen, who had been transformed in seconds from yappy high-pressure salesperson to harried single mom. Overhearing Doreen trying to referee a sibling dispute on the phone, Sarah realized there were worse things than being divorced. Like being divorced with kids. What could be harder than that?
All right, she thought, Doreen would get a commission from her. She grew more serious about her search, but all the cars seemed the same—bland, practical, ordinary. When Doreen got off the phone, Sarah said, “You’ve got every car in the world here. And none of them seems right.”
“Why don’t you tell me a little more about what you’re looking for? Do you need four-wheel drive? A sports car…?”
The sodium vapor lights came on over the parking lot, buzzing to life in the late-afternoon twilight. Sarah thought about Doreen’s kids, waiting for her to come home from work.
“I’m leaving my husband,” she said, the words frosting the air, seeming to hang there a moment like a speech balloon from Shirl’s mouth. “I’ve got a long drive ahead of me.” For some reason, it helped to tell this stranger the truth. “It seems like I should have the right car. I want…I’m not sure.” She offered a self-deprecating smile. “Maybe I’m looking for a magic carpet. Or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. With a drop top and a great sound system.”
Doreen didn’t bat an eye. “Hold that thought,” she said, and consulted her electronic inventory tracker. “We need to hurry.” Her voice was edged with urgency now. “This won’t last another five minutes.”
Mystified, Sarah followed her off the lot, back to a shop where cars were being prepped for market. “We’ve got a one-year waiting list for this. It was some woman’s dream car, but she traded it in after owning it for just a few months.”
They found a mechanic in an insulated jumpsuit under the hood of the cutest midnight-blue-and-silver car Sarah had ever seen. “You have a Mini,” she said.
Doreen beamed like a proud parent. “My first. It’s a Cooper S convertible—rare as hen’s teeth. I’m sure it’s promised to the top person on the waiting list but…gee…I just can’t seem to find that list, and I’d hate to bother someone at the dinner hour.”
They exchanged conspiratorial smiles. The little British-made car was adorable, like a windup toy. She could just hear Jack now, laughing and pointing out all the reasons a Mini Cooper wasn’t practical or safe. It was a passing trend, overpriced, prone to breakdowns, he would say.
“It’s perfect,” Sarah told Doreen. “But I have to ask, why did she trade it in?”
“Right after she bought it, she found out she was expecting her third child. You can probably fit a family of four in a Mini, but five would be stretching it.”
Plenty of room for me and my fax machine, Sarah thought.
“It’s got autolock, which is an antitheft feature. It doesn’t have OnStar, though,” Doreen admitted.
“That’s okay. I’ve never locked my keys in the car before, and I don’t plan to start. I don’t need a GPS, either. I know where I’m going.” An hour later, she drove it off the lot. The car was crowded to the rear with her stuff, and the sound system didn’t disappoint. She headed to the highway, darting up the on-ramp and merging into the stream of traffic headed west. In the middle lane, she suddenly found herself flanked by a pair of semis rising like steel walls and looming in close, ready to crush her. A terrible fear squeezed her heart. What the hell am I doing?
Sarah set her jaw and eased back on the accelerator, letting the trucks pull ahead. Then she turned up the radio and burst into song, “Shut Up and Drive” by Rihanna. She sang with a crushing sense of loss that mingled oddly with a terrifying exhilaration. She sang for the things she’d left behind. For a marriage she used to believe in, but didn’t anymore. For the hope of having a baby, which was now as dead as her love for Jack. For the anonymous woman who had ordered the Mini and then traded it in when she realized her life was about to change radically.
Sarah found the first of a series of cheap roadside motels and lay staring at the blank ceiling of her room and listening to the sound of the highway. This felt like someone else’s life, she thought, someone she didn’t recognize at all.
Sarah drove west, her new car like a tiny bluebottle fly, flashing across the prairies, past endless seas of alfalfa and dried corn and deep emerald-green winter rye. By the time she reached North Platte, Nebraska, she made a terrible admission to herself. She had not been happy in a long while. This was not sour grapes. Humbly grateful for Jack’s recovery, she had been afraid to voice her discontent. It would have seemed so petty and ungrateful. Instead, she had existed in a state that passed for happiness. Jack was well, they were financially comfortable, they lived in a lovely home in a nice neighborhood, they were trying to start a family to prove to the world that all was well. But happy?
That was the trouble with the human spirit, she realized as she drove the Mini across the mountains and finally to the edge of California. You could pretend all you wanted that you were happy, but discontent was bound to manifest itself. For Jack, it was in the arms of another woman. For Sarah, it was her dogged determination to get pregnant.
“So far, not so good,” she said, her eyes fastened on the horizon.
On her final day on the road, she woke up at dawn and drove the final leg of the journey, along Papermill Creek through the murky, uninhabited forest of Samuel P. Taylor State Park, where the tall, thickly branched trees arched over the winding road, creating a canopy of shadows. Finally she reached the tiny hamlet of Glenmuir, on the western edge of Marin County, remote and nearly forgotten, surrounded by a wilderness so spectacular that it was protected by an act of Congress.
Emerging from a green tunnel of gloom, she passed rolling green hills dotted with dairy farms and ranches, through misty valleys to the gray-shrouded bay, where old dock pilings pierced through the fog. It was about as far as she could get from Jack without actually leaving the continent.
At the end of the journey, she found herself in a place she had not lived since heading off to college. She passed the dock where she used to stand, a pale shadow watching the world go by. Then she pulled up the drive and parked. She walked into the house by the bay where she had grown up, feeling the ache and fatigue of her marathon drive in her neck and shoulders. “I left Jack,” she told her father.
“I know. He called me.”
“He was screwing around.”
“I know that, too.”
“He told you?”
Her father didn’t answer. He gave her an awkward hug—things were always awkward between them—and then she went to bed and slept for twenty-four hours straight.
Chapter Four
If she didn’t know better, Sarah would have thought it was a bad idea to hire a divorce lawyer named Birdie. Birdie Bonner Shafter, to be exact. It sounded more like a porn star than an attorney.
She did know better, though she wondered if Birdie would remember her from high school. Probably not. Three years ahead of Sarah, Birdie had been too busy running the show—student council president, Girls State, volleyball team captain and Key Club were just a few of her roles—to spare a thought for lesser beings. The fact that she had been the meanest girl in the school was actually an asset now.
Sarah had been invisible to everyone who mattered in high school. Come to think of it, she had been invisible all her life, until she met Jack. Now she remembered why. It was safer to fly below the radar. She should have stayed that way—unnoticed, watching the world go by, drawing her private observations, making fun of the things she secretly envied. But no. She had to go and plunge into life—and into love—as though she belonged there. As though it was her right.
She got up and went to the window of the outer office, sending the receptionist a nervous smile.
“Can I get you something to drink?” the receptionist offered.
“No, thank you,” said Sarah. “I’m fine.”
“Ms. Shafter should only be a few minutes longer.”
“I don’t mind waiting.” The tall casement window was surrounded by gingerbread molding. Some of the glass panes were original, judging by their slightly brittle, wavy quality. Birdie’s law office occupied one of the historic buildings of downtown Glenmuir. Since Sarah had moved away, the main square had barely changed. It was a cluster of Victorian and carpenter Gothic wood frame buildings, some original, some knockoffs, the old ones built by nineteenth-century settlers who had come to fish the abundant waters of the secluded bay. A few local B and Bs attracted tourists from the Bay area, including May’s Cottage, a private beach retreat that belonged to Sarah’s great-aunt. The snug white bungalow was so popular as a vacation rental that it booked up months in advance. Most tourists, however, found the town remote and strange, hanging on the edge of nowhere, and they let the locals be.
When not festooned in fog, the area around Tomales Bay had a clarity of light she had never seen anywhere else in the world. The intense blue of the sky was reflected in the water. The placid water in turn mirrored the wooded wilderness that surrounded the bay. It looked exactly as it had five hundred years ago, when Sir Francis Drake had sailed in on his soon-to-be-legendary Golden Hind, to be greeted by painted members of the Miwok tribe.
Sarah smoothed her hands down her tailored blazer, feeling overdressed in her Chicago outfit. People around here tended to dress in organic fibers and homely, supremely comfortable shoes. She didn’t really own anything like that anymore. Jack liked her to dress like a Neiman Marcus catalog model, even when she protested that she worked at home, alone.
When they were first married, she liked to draw at her drafting table wearing a faded University of Chicago sweat suit and thick wool socks, her hair held back with a clip. “It helps me be creative,” she had once told him.
“You can be creative in a sweater and slacks,” he replied, and gave her a three-hundred-dollar cashmere cardigan set to make his point.
She gritted her teeth and focused on the bay in the distance. A seaplane came in for a landing, the lawn-mower whine of its engine briefly filling the air. Sometimes the aircraft brought tourists to town but most of them came to pick up fresh oysters and transport them, still alive, to big-city restaurants. There was a boat out today, its full sails pulling it toward the horizon. Closer in, she could see the harvest skiffs her father used to take out three hundred sixty-four days a year, until he’d handed the business over to his son. Sarah’s brother Kyle was as conventional as she was odd, and he’d been perfectly content to take over the family business. Meanwhile, their father had traded his cultivation trays for a 1965 poppy-red Mustang GT convertible in dire need of restoration. He lavished attention on the car, which seemed to occupy a permanent berth in Glenn Mounger’s auto body garage.
A woman came in, breathless, and headed straight for the water cooler. Her athletic body was encased in gleaming black-and-yellow spandex. The chest-hugging top was covered with sponsors’ logos. The stripe up the side of her skintight shorts read Trek. She wore an aerodynamic helmet and wraparound shades. In cup-heeled cycling shoes, her walk was stiff-legged, the toes pointing up.
She drank six cone-shaped cups at the water cooler and finally turned to Sarah. “Sorry about that. I used up my hydration pack.”
“Oh.” Sarah was at a loss. “I hate when that happens.”
“Birdie Shafter,” the woman said, taking off the helmet and shades. A riot of black hair and a supermodel face were revealed. “You’re Sarah Moon.”
Sarah covered her surprise. Somehow, she’d expected Birdie to have changed more from high school. “That’s right.”
“I’m training for a triathlon, so my schedule is pretty crazy these days.” She held open a door marked with the nameplate Bernadette Bonner Shafter, Attorney at Law.
Sarah stepped into the office.
“Give me two minutes,” Birdie said.
“Take five,” Sarah offered.
“You’re a peach.” She ducked through a side door. Sarah heard the sound of running water.
Despite Birdie’s unconventional appearance, the law office was all business. The array of framed diplomas and certificates did its job of instilling confidence in the client. Birdie had earned her bachelor’s at USC and her law degree from San Diego State. She had numerous credentials displayed, and gold embossed stickers designated her a summa graduate from both schools. The State of California Bar Association empowered her as a member in good standing.
Dark wooden built-in shelves provided a wall of fame. Either Birdie was star-struck or she ran in exalted circles. She had pictures of herself with the Governator and Diane Feinstein, Lance Armstrong and Brandi Chastain. There was a shot of her with Francis Ford Coppola in front of his winery and another with Robin Williams with the Coast highway in the background.
The photographs propped on the big tiger oak desk were more personal. There were shots of the Bonner Flower Farm, which Sarah recalled had been founded by Birdie’s counterculture parents. Another photo showed Birdie and her husband, Ellison Shafter, whom Sarah’s father said was a pilot for United.
There was also a picture of Birdie’s brother, Will. Either it was an old photo, or he hadn’t changed a bit. In Sarah’s head, Shirl’s voice asked, Why should you change if you’re already perfect?
Of all the people Sarah remembered from high school, she remembered Will Bonner best. This was ironic, since he had probably never known her name. The framed photo triggered a flood of memories she didn’t know she had. Standing there in the unfamiliar office, the antique pine plank floor creaking beneath her feet, she was surprised to discover old resentments festering in secret beneath the surface. Her life with Jack had formed a gloss over the past. Maybe that was why she’d married him. He took her away from people like this.
Now that he was out of the picture, there was nothing standing between her and old memories, and she fell into the past like Alice down the rabbit hole, grasping at stray roots on her way to the bottom.
She scowled in hostility at the picture of Will Bonner. He grinned right back at her. He had been in the same grade as Sarah, but unlike her, he was the epitome of high school perfection—a top-ranked athlete, blessed by all-American good looks. He had jet-black hair and the same twinkling eyes that used to make her knees melt when he looked at her. Not that he ever actually looked at her. Embarrassed by her futile and utterly predictable crush, Sarah had fought back the only way she knew how. In the underground comic book she self-published in high school on an old mimeograph machine in the basement, she’d depicted Will Bonner as a vain, bull-witted, steroid-abusing poster boy. He probably hadn’t noticed her biting satire, either, but it had made her feel…not better…but vindicated. More in control.
No doubt he wasn’t aware that she had sat in front of him in Honors English all four years, or that she made sketch after sketch of him, telling herself she needed the studies for her underground comics. Bonner had treated her as if she were a piece of furniture.
The years since high school had brought about at least one huge change, Sarah observed. In the picture, he was holding a dark-haired child whose face was buried against his burly shoulder. Some guys looked awkward with kids, like contestants on Fear Factor. Others, like Will Bonner, looked at ease and natural, approachable.
Under different circumstances, Sarah might be filled with questions about her high school obsession. Not now, though. Now, she had to explain her situation to Birdie and figure out what to do next.
Pulling her gaze away from the array of photos, she forced herself to wait quietly. The shock of leaving Jack had still not completely subsided, and that was probably a good thing, because it kept her numb. She was like a soldier with a limb blown off, staring uncomprehendingly at empty space. Later, she supposed, the pain would come. And it would be like nothing she’d ever felt before.
There was a fee schedule posted on the wall, like the specials menu of a restaurant, or a list of services at a beauty parlor, only it covered legal matters rather than hairstyles—family law, immigration, wills and probate, elder law. Sarah tamped back a feeling of apprehension. Could she even afford a lawyer? She suspected that none of her transactions would be simple. Or cheap.
She couldn’t let money—or a lack thereof—stand in her way, though. She had to reinvent her life. Starting now.
“Thanks for waiting.” Birdie stepped into the office. She had shed the cycling getup and donned a more familiar look—unbleached cotton, Dansko clogs, no makeup and an open, guileless expression of earnestness. On Birdie, the look didn’t seem contrived. She wore the natural style well, as though she had invented it.
Yet the sight of her, looking so sincere and inoffensive, gave Sarah second thoughts. What had become of the meanest girl in school? Had she gone soft, just when Sarah needed a hard-ass? She needed a lawyer who would protect her interests through this process—she couldn’t quite bring herself to use the D-word yet—not Mother Earth.
“No problem,” Sarah said. “Thanks for seeing me on short notice.”
“I’m glad I could work you in.”
A soft burble from the intercom box interrupted her. “Sorry to interrupt you, Ms. Shafter,” said the receptionist, “but there’s a deadline attached to this. It’s Wayne Booth of Coastal Timber.”
Sarah moved toward the door, but Birdie waved her back, covered the receiver mouthpiece and said, “I won’t be a minute.” Then her posture changed. She stood straighter, held her shoulders back. “Wayne, I’ve already given you my client’s answer. If that’s your best and final offer, then we’ll let a judge do better.” She paused, and an angry voice crackled at her. “I understand perfectly, but I’m not sure you do. We’re not playing a game here…”
Sarah watched as the earth mother turned into a corporate dominatrix, chewing out the legal counsel of a major timber company, getting her way and then gently setting down the phone. When she turned her attention back to Sarah, she looked serene and unflappable, as though the exchange had never happened. Sarah knew she’d found the right lawyer after all. The mean girl had figured out how to harness her powers.
They shook hands and took their seats, Sarah in a comfortable upholstered chair and Birdie at her desk. Sarah took a deep breath and plunged right in. “I just got here from Chicago. I’ve left my husband.”
Birdie nodded, her expression turning soft with sympathy. “I’m sorry.”
Sarah couldn’t speak. Birdie pushed a box of tissues closer to her but Sarah ignored them. She twisted her wedding set around and around her ring finger. She really should take it off, but it was from Harry Winston, three carats total weight, and she couldn’t think of a safe place to keep it.
“Is this a recent development?” Birdie asked.
Sarah nodded. “As of last Friday.” The clock in her car had read 5:13 when she had peeled away from Shamrock Downs and Jack and Mimi Lightfoot and everything she’d ever believed about her life. How many women knew the precise moment their marriage cracked apart?
“Are you safe?” Birdie asked her.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I need to know if you’re safe. Is he violent? Have you ever had an incident of domestic abuse?”
“Oh.” Sarah deflated against the back of the chair. “Oh, God, no. Nothing like that.” In truth, she felt as though a violent act had been committed against her, but it wasn’t the sort you could report to the police. “He was unfaithful.”
Birdie sent her a matter-of-fact look. “You should get tested, then.”
Sarah regarded her blankly, uncomprehendingly. Tested. Then it dawned on her. Tested for STDs. For HIV, even. Son of a bitch. “I, er, yes, of course. You’re right.” A cold ball of fear formed in her gut. The realization that he’d put her in physical danger added fresh horror to the betrayal. “Sorry. That didn’t occur to me until now. I still can’t believe Jack did this.”
“Jack.” Birdie opened the laptop on her desk. “I’m going to make some notes here, if that’s all right.”
“Sure. This is all new to me.”
“Take your time. So your husband’s legal name…?”
“John James Daly,” Sarah supplied. “I kept my maiden name after we married.”
“And that was…”
“We’ve been married five years as of last June—2003. I met him when I was in college—University of Chicago—and married him right after graduation.”
Birdie nodded. “The Bay Beacon ran a beautiful picture and did a little piece about it.”
Sarah was surprised Birdie had noticed the picture and remembered it, but perhaps that had more to do with the uneventfulness of small-town life than to Sarah’s importance. The twice-weekly local paper had always kept readers abreast of small matters—weddings and births, tides and the weather, roadwork and school sports. When she was in high school, Sarah had submitted some editorial cartoons to the Bay Beacon, but the paper’s editor had declared them too edgy and controversial. Ironically, her drawings had poked fun at big-city developers vying for the chance to build shopping malls and condos right next to America’s most pristine national seashore.
“I never saw the piece,” Sarah said. “We live—I mean, I lived—in Chicago.” She twisted the wedding set some more. “I wish I’d come back to visit more often than I did, but Jack never liked coming here, and time just seemed to slip by. I should have pushed harder. God, I feel like such a loser.”
“Let’s get one thing straight.” Birdie folded her hands on top of the desk.
“What’s that?”
“You don’t ever need to justify yourself to me. I’m not here to judge you or to hold you accountable or anything like that. I’m not going to criticize any choice you’ve made, insult you or divulge details about your personal life to strangers.”
Sarah’s face burned with shame, because she knew exactly what Birdie was referring to. When Birdie was a senior in high school, she’d had a breast reduction. It was no secret; after all, she’d gone from having a triple D rack to wearing tank tops. Sarah had lampooned it in her underground comics. Why not poke fun at the meanest girl in the school? Now Sarah knotted her hands in her lap. “I’m sorry about that stupid high school comic book.”
“Don’t be. I thought it was funny.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, kind of. Back then, I tended to like anything that was about me. I was awful in high school, with or without the boobs. To be honest, I sort of liked the attention of being featured in the funny pages. It was a long time ago, Sarah. Let’s hope we’ve both moved on.”
“I’m still drawing,” Sarah admitted. “I have a syndicated comic strip, but I get my inspiration from my own life these days, not other people’s.”
“Good for you.” Birdie shook her head. “Some people spend their whole lives filled with regrets about stuff that went on in high school. I’ve always wondered why that is. It’s just four years. Four lousy years in a life that can span a century. Why do people get so fixated on those four little years?”
“Good question,” Sarah said quietly.
Birdie took a form from the printer on the credenza behind the desk. “This outlines the terms of our agreement. I want you to read it carefully and call me if you have any questions.”
The sheet was covered with dense legalese, and Sarah’s heart sank. The last thing she wanted to do was wade through this. But she was on her own now, and she had to look out for herself. She studied the first paragraph, and her eyes started to glaze over. “Do you have a Reader’s Digest version of this?”
“That’s as simple as it gets. Take all the time you need.” She waited while Sarah read over the document, seeing nothing questionable—other than the fact that this was going to cost a lot of money. She signed the agreement and dated it at the bottom. “Done,” she said.
“Done. So let’s get started. Mind if I record this interview?”
“I guess not. What are we going to talk about?”
“I need the whole story. Everything from the beginning.”
Sarah glanced at the old-fashioned clock on the wall. “Do you have other appointments this afternoon?”
“I have all the time you need.”
“He’s in Chicago,” she said. “Can I be here and, um, divorce him if he’s in Chicago?”
“Yes.”
Divorce him. It was the first time she’d actually said it aloud. The words came out of her yet she didn’t understand them. It sounded like a foreign phrase. She was mimicking random syllables in a strange tongue. Div Orsim. Divor Sim.
“Yes,” she repeated, “I do want a divorce.” Then she felt sick. “That’s like saying I want to disembowel myself. That’s how it feels right now.”
“I’m sorry,” Birdie said. “It’s never easy. But one thing I can tell you is that even though the loss hurts, it also creates new space in your life, new possibilities.”
Sarah fixed her gaze on a spot out the window, where the waters of Tomales Bay flowed past. “I never meant to stay in Chicago,” she said. “Never could get used to the god-awful weather there. After graduation, I planned to live in San Francisco or L.A., work for a paper while trying to get a comic strip into syndication.
“Then I met Jack.” She swallowed, took a deep breath. “His whole family is in the construction business. He got a contract from the university to build a new wing for the commercial-art studio, and I was on the student advisory committee, with the job of supplying input for the designers.”
She felt a smile turn her lips, but only briefly. “The students would feed them our pie-in-the-sky ideas and Jack would tell us why our plans wouldn’t work. I drew a series of satirical cartoons for the student paper about the situation. When Jack saw them, I thought he’d be furious. Instead, he asked me out.” She shut her eyes, wishing the memories were not so painful. But God, he’d been charming. Handsome and funny and kind. She had adored him from the start. Often, she’d wondered what he saw in her, but she didn’t dare ask. Maybe she should have asked. She opened her eyes and stared at her knotted-together fingers.
“The family welcomed me with open arms. They treated me like their newest daughter.” She still remembered her sense of wonder at the historic mansions in the shady neighborhood where Jack’s family had lived for generations. “You have to understand, this was huge for me. After losing my mother, my dad and brother and I unraveled. It just felt so good to be with a real family once again. Jack grew up in the same place and had friends he’d known from nursery school. So I just…stepped in to this ready-made world. It seemed effortless. I suppose I was in love with him from the beginning and was changing my plans for the future by the third date.”
From where she was now, she could look back and see that, for her, the process of falling in love had been an act of survival. She had lost her mother and was drifting out to sea. Jack—and all he stood for—was a solid object to cling to, something she could grasp with all her might and pull herself to safety.
Somewhere in the distance, a siren sounded, the throaty blast of a fire engine. Sarah’s mouth was dry. She got up and went to the water cooler and poured herself two cups of water. When she turned back to Birdie, she felt momentarily disoriented. She sat back down and sipped the water.
“It’s all right to cry,” Birdie said.
Sarah pictured herself floating out to sea alone again, like Alice in Wonderland drowning in her own uncontrollable tears. “I don’t want to cry.”
“You will.”
Sarah took a deep breath and another sip of water. She didn’t feel like crying, yet her sense of loss was intense. She was coming to realize that she had lost so much more than a husband. Her ready-made community of family and friends. Her house and all her things. Her own identity as Jack’s wife.
“We got married in Chicago,” she reported to Birdie. Their wedding had been lopsided, the friends of the groom outnumbering the friends of the bride by ten to one, but Sarah hadn’t minded. People adored Jack and she was proud of that. She had counted herself lucky to find a ready-made group of friends and a warmhearted family. “No assembly required,” she had told him with a grateful smile. “We went to Hawaii for our honeymoon. I never did like Hawaii, but Jack just assumed I did.”
She hadn’t seen the truth then. She barely caught a glimmer of it now, but she was starting to understand. From the moment she met Jack, she was a satellite to his sun, reflecting his light but possessing none of her own. Her wants and needs were eclipsed by his, and it all felt perfectly fine to her. They lived in his world, did the things he wanted and became a couple according to his vision, not hers.
Every once in a while, she would make a suggestion: What about Mackinac Island instead of Hawaii? Or the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City? He would pull her into his arms and say, “Yeah, right. It’s Hawaii, babe. Cow-abunga.” And so it went. She found herself listening to country-western music that made her cringe, and learned to stay awake during White Sox and Cubs games.
“And the thing was,” she told Birdie, “I was happy. I loved our life together. Which is probably crazy, because it was nothing like the life I would’ve chosen.”
“It was the life you had,” Birdie reminded her. “The fact that you liked it is a blessing. How many people endure a life they hate, every day?”
Sarah looked at her sharply. She suspected the rhetorical question was more about Birdie than about rhetoric.
“So here’s the big irony about what happened next,” Sarah said. “After our fairy-tale wedding and dream honeymoon, he wanted to start a family right away. For once, I asserted myself. I insisted on waiting a year or two, at least. I planned to focus on my career, so I lobbied hard to keep up the birth control a while longer.”
“This is the twenty-first century,” Birdie reminded her. “I don’t think you’re going to raise any eyebrows with that.”
“Not at the time. I think it was the one decision in our marriage I truly owned. The one choice that belonged to me and me alone.”
“Why do you say it’s ironic?”
“Because that one decision almost killed Jack.”
Chapter Five
Forty minutes before the end of Will Bonner’s duty shift, the quick-call went off—“Battalion! Fire and Ambulance StandBy!”—followed by two tones, signaling an alarm. Will acknowledged immediately, summoned Gloria on the loud-speaker, then yanked the ticket from the printer. After years of following routine, he had the exit down to a bare minimum number of moves. He donned gear as he strode from the office, snatching HTs up off the charger. Then he was off, out the door in less than a minute, shifting seamlessly from where he was a moment ago to the place he was headed. That was the life of a firefighter; one minute, watching reruns of Peyton Place on the SOAP channel, the next, checking the area map, putting on his bunker gear, jamming his feet into boots.
The town of Glenmuir boasted a Seagrave rescue pumper, circa 1992, and a crew of captain, engineer and a rotating stable of volunteers. While Gloria Martinez, the engineer, cranked up the engine and the volunteer crew went to their on-board stations, Will and Rick McClure, one of the on-call volunteers, jumped into separate patrol vehicles and sped ahead to find the fire. That was the trouble with nonspecific reports, like the one that had just come in. Someone would call, reporting that smoke was visible. In these parts, the term “yonder” was considered a cardinal direction.
Locals were skittish about fires in these parts. The legendary Mount Vision fire of ‘95 still haunted the landscape with skeletal black trees, ruined structures, meadows choked with the nonnative fireweed that took hold after the disaster.
As he headed up a nameless road labeled Branch 74, he scanned the horizon for some sign of the reported glow or header of smoke. Although he stayed focused on the search, his mind flashed on a thought of Aurora. This was going to make him late to dinner. Yesterday, he’d missed career day at her school.
“No big deal,” she’d told him. “It’ll be just like last year.”
“I missed last year.”
“Like I said. It’ll be just like that.”
At thirteen, his stepdaughter had a tongue as sharp as her appetite for teen fashion magazines, which, by Will’s judgment, she spent far too much time reading. When she was little and he had to leave her for a duty cycle, she used to throw a tantrum and beg him not to go. Now thirteen, she was either dismissive or brittle and sarcastic about his absences.
Will preferred the tantrums, if forced to make a choice. At least they were straightforward and over quickly. Being father and daughter used to be pretty effortless even though they were not related by blood. Will loved being her dad, and when Aurora’s mother took off, that didn’t change. If anything, it increased his devotion to her.
For a single parent, the job of fire captain was a mixed blessing. The schedule meant he got to be with her for long stretches of time, yet his absences were equally long. When he was on duty, she stayed with Will’s parents or, occasionally, her aunt Birdie and uncle Ellison. The arrangement had worked for years; it was one of the reasons he stayed in Glenmuir. Without the infrastructure of his family, raising Aurora would be next to impossible. His parents considered it a joy and a privilege to care for her—a sweet-natured, bright and beautiful child who had come into their lives like an early springtime. Now that she was thirteen and at odds with the world, he wondered if she was becoming too difficult for them to handle.
If he dared to suggest such a thing, his family would think he’d lost his mind. His parents, who ran an organic flower farm, believed sincerely in karmic balance and the idea that life never gave a person more than he could handle.
Will spotted the black billows of smoke rising over a familiar ridge just beyond the hamlet of San Julio, then radioed Gloria with the milepost marker and sped to the scene. He wasn’t sure whose property this was, a rolling spread of hay and alfalfa. No dwelling in sight, but a barn was on fire, the entire front a mask of flame. He slammed the truck into Park, leaving the keys in the ignition in case the vehicle was needed. Rick parked the other vehicle some distance away and ran to join Will, who was already surveying the area. A shadow flirted in his peripheral vision, and he turned in time to spy a stray dog.
He’d seen it around before, a collie mix with matted black-and-white brindled fur. The sight of Will and Rick in their helmet and bunker gear sent it racing away at top speed.
“I hope like hell this barn is used for storage, not livestock,” he called to Rick.
“I hear you.” Rick, a young volunteer just out of training, squinted a little fearfully at the building.
“I’m going to have to do a search of the premises,” Will said, reminding himself that not so long ago, he’d been as green as Rick McClure. By the time the engine arrived, Will had donned his SCBA, though he didn’t hook up the mask. He hoped he wouldn’t need to put himself on air.
He went around the perimeter, radioing a report to his battalion chief. One good sign—he couldn’t hear any sounds of trapped livestock. That kind of thing—it tended to etch itself on a firefighter’s soul. With no rescue involved, saving the building wasn’t the goal here; it was going up like tinder. But they needed to kill the fire to keep it from spreading to the surrounding wildlands.
The plan was to vent the blaze through a large panel door on sideways rollers. Will radioed task assignments to the engine crew. While the helmeted firefighters were pulling hose, he signaled for Rick to open the door and stand ready with the portable extinguisher. The goal was to vent in order to delay flashover—the transition from the fire’s growth stage to the explosive eruption of the entire structure—until the hose line was in place. Then the fire would be pushed out through the front of the building. The blast of heat was always expected, yet always a surprise. When he was a rookie, it used to scare the crap out of him, that pressure pulsing against his face, an invisible force like the hammers of sound at a loud rock concert.
The fire was at the rollover stage, with lightning flashes of flame through the smoke. He heard a hiss and figured his air bottle was blistering in the heat. Cathedral-like, the tall Nordic-style barn was bathed in unholy light, the stacked bales of hay burning like a giant funeral pyre. I’m okay, he said, as he always did in these situations. I’m okay. In his mind, he made a clear picture of Aurora, his best reason to survive.
Birdie went to the window and lowered it to keep out the noise of a distant siren. Then she sat back down and leaned her forearms on the desk. “Sarah, I don’t understand. Why do you say your decision to delay starting a family almost killed your husband?”
“If I’d agreed to try to get pregnant right away, like Jack wanted, we would have realized sooner there was a problem.” Sarah cleared her throat. “How much detail do you need here?”
Birdie seemed to understand. “Don’t worry about detail for now. Unless you think it’s information I need in order to help you.”
At some point, Sarah knew she would be forced to reveal the most intimate details of her marriage, opening them up like an unhealed wound to expose the raw nerves. She knew enough about divorce to realize this was part of the process. Knowing this didn’t make it easier, though. Exposing her private pain behind the guise of her comic strip was one thing, but discussing it openly was quite another.
“Eventually, I wanted kids as bad as he did. Both of us seemed to be in fine health. So when we didn’t get pregnant for a whole year, we checked things out. For some reason, we expected to find something wrong with me, not him.” Determined to leave the wedding set alone, she picked up a pen and rolled it between the palms of her hands.
“I think it’s a fairly common assumption,” Birdie said. “No idea why, but it is.”
Once it was determined that there were no problems with Sarah’s fertility, Jack agreed to be checked out by his uncle, a urologist. Sarah braced herself for a report of low sperm count or poor motility or impaired delivery. In fact, the tests had revealed something far worse.
“Testicular cancer,” she told Birdie. “It had metastasized to the lymph nodes in the abdomen, and to his lungs.”
The oncologist’s can-do attitude was reassuring. “Statistics and projections aren’t going to turn this around. Fighting with everything we’ve got—that’s what’ll turn it around,” the doctor had said. Jack was also lucky to have supportive friends and family. His parents and siblings had rallied around him the moment the diagnosis was made. People who had known him since nursery school came to see him, to hang out and add their good wishes to the seemingly bottomless pool of support.
“You have to understand,” Sarah told Birdie, “when something like this happens, the whole world stops. You drop everything. It’s like joining the military, and the disease is your drill sergeant. We started treatment right away, aggressive treatment. Thanks to his age and general good health, they went at it hard.”
“Interesting that you say we started treatment. Not Jack started treatment.”
“We were a team,” Sarah explained. “The disease invaded every moment of our lives, waking or sleeping.” She flicked the pen tip in and out, in and out. “Actually, I’m not sure if this is important now or not—we took care of one small detail before we started treatment.”
“And the one small detail?”
“It was the doctors’ suggestion. Jack and I were too panicked and scattered to think of it. Jack was advised to preserve some sperm samples. The treatment carried a risk of infertility so this was a precaution.” She smiled a little. “Jack was always a bit of an overachiever. He preserved enough sperm to populate a small town. And up until last week, this story had a happy ending.” More or less, she thought. Jack’s performance at the sperm bank had been far more productive than his performance had been with her.
“Sorry, I need to clarify. You were his chief support during the treatment?”
“Financially, no. Fortunately, Jack and his family are extremely well-off. I barely had a career.”
“The comic strip you mentioned earlier?”
Agitated, she continued clicking the pen up and down, up and down. “Yes. It’s called Just Breathe.”
Birdie leaned back in her chair. “It sounds terrific, Sarah. Really.”
“It’d be better if I was actually making a living wage. For the time being, I’m self-syndicated, which means a lot more work for me but ultimately, more independence and a bigger share of the earnings. When Jack was sick, I put aside the syndication work and did advertising art and greeting cards. I never stopped drawing my strip, though. In fact, during the worst days of the treatment, I did some of my best work. But I can’t honestly say I contributed financially in any major way.”
“How about moral and emotional support? And in the area of his care?”
“I did things I never thought myself capable of.” She stopped, surprised to feel a wave of emotion as she was swept back to the endless, anguished postchemo nights, when even love and prayers were not enough to comfort him, when she held him while he shook with chills, when she cleaned up his puke and changed his bed as he moaned in agony. “I’ll spare you the details of that. Suffice it to say I was steadfast, and anyone who tries to deny that I supported him is a liar.”
“And the happy ending?”
“Before all this happened, I would’ve told you our happy ending was the day he was found to be cancer free and his treatments were stopped. I guess there’s no such thing as a happy ending. Life is too damned messy for that. Things don’t ever end. They just change.” She looked down to see that she had completely disassembled the pen in her hands.
Birdie folded her arms on the desk and pretended not to notice. “So was there any point when you suspected your marriage was in trouble?”
Shamefaced, Sarah lined up the broken pieces of the pen on the desk—the cartridge, the tiny spring, the tube, the pocket clip. “It was the last thing on my mind. The last thing I was looking for. I was so full of gratitude and sheer elation over Jack’s recovery that I couldn’t see straight. I swore then, to myself and to Jack, that I was ready for a family. More than ready. It’s stupid to postpone something you know you want. Life’s too short. At the time, I had no idea that trying to get pregnant was a sign of desperation. I thought if I could make us look like a happy family by having a baby, then we would magically be a happy family.” She carefully threaded the cartridge through the coil. “We tried both ways.”
“Both ways?”
“Naturally and by artificial insemination. After treatment, Jack had a good chance of regaining fertility, so we both had high hopes. But…we didn’t have much intimacy during or after his illness. He, um, couldn’t perform and eventually quit trying.” Sarah screwed the two parts of the pen tube together. “He still claimed to want a family. In fact, it was his idea to keep up the fertility treatments and the artificial insemination. Our lack of success turned out to be a blessing in disguise, I suppose. Bringing a child into our mess would be a disaster.” The pen’s clicker didn’t work. She would have to take it apart and try again.
Sarah had come to realize that the rift had existed long before it was discovered. It had progressed and spread out of control by the time Mimi Lightfoot came along.
“After the illness,” she said, “I kept reminding myself I was in a posttrauma state. We both were. So while I was going to the fertility clinic every time I ovulated, Jack was dealing with the trauma in his own way. I don’t know when he hooked up with Mimi Lightfoot, but I bet it was a while back.” The name tasted bitter in her mouth.
“This is the woman he was unfaithful with,” Birdie prompted.
“Yes. He started a huge building project about eight months ago—luxury homes in a neighborhood designed for equestrians, and he was incredibly busy all the time.” Sarah couldn’t believe what a dupe she’d been. It had all the sorry hallmarks that had become clichés—late, vaguely described meetings, canceling engagements with her. Begging off sex with her. “I thought he needed more time to come to terms with what happened to him, but I had faith that he’d get over it. And he did, I guess. Just not with me.”
She took a deep breath and told Birdie the worst part—the events of that cold and rainy day, her last as a happily married woman. She told about her loneliness for her husband after going to the fertility clinic by herself. She told about stopping for pizza on the way to visit him at the work site, because he loved pizza and she wanted to surprise him. She even told about the moment she had walked in on every woman’s nightmare.
The eerie calm that had enshrouded her since that night was growing threadbare in places as flashes of emotion crept in—anger at Jack, shame and humiliation, a sickening sense that she had lost her dreams. She felt bombarded by thoughts of the babies that would never be, the perfect home that had only been an illusion.
Until now, dazed shock had insulated her from facing the hard questions about what might have been had she done something differently. Numbness dulled the embarrassment of having to air her dirty laundry to a virtual stranger, muffled the body blow of knowing the life she’d taken such satisfaction in was a sham.
Forced to describe her husband’s infidelity, she felt her womanly pride bleeding on the floor. She struggled through this, the hardest part of her narrative. “So there you go. The end of happily-ever-after.” Slumping back in the chair, she sensed fatigue sneaking up to conquer her. She had buzzed across the country on an adrenaline rush. Finally, exhaustion spread over her, pressing down.
“You know,” she concluded, “I do have one big regret.”
“What’s that?” asked Birdie.
“I wish I’d ordered black olives on the damn pizza.”
Chapter Six
Will Bonner walked around the smoldering barn, studying the ruined structure in silence. He took a bandanna from his back pocket and wiped his face. He should be home already, fixing supper with his kid. Unfortunately, people who started fires showed no regard for the captain’s duty schedule. He was counting his blessings, though. The barn had been vacant.
Vance Samuelson, one of the volunteers, and Gloria Martinez, the engineer, were putting the truck back in order.
“Well?” asked Gloria, loosening her suspenders, “what’s your assessment?”
“Deliberate,” Will said, motioning her to the middle of the floor. The roof lay in corrugated metal sheets around them. The surface was still hot beneath his feet. “That’s what the arson investigator will rule. But they can only figure out so much. To find out who’s doing this, we’ll need you and me. Hell, we’ll need the whole county.” He stuck the bandanna in his pocket and led the way out of the wreckage of the barn. “I’m pissed off, Gloria. This reminds me of that incident almost five months ago, the one I haven’t figured out yet.”
“It’s the arson investigators’ job to figure it out, not yours. You’ve got your own job to do.”
He nodded and peeled off his protective jacket, which now felt like a sauna.“ In theory. We know this community. We know who’s doing what, who’s feuding with his neighbors, who has money troubles, whose kids are out of control. We’ll be the ones to figure out who’s setting these fires.”
“Sooner rather than later, I hope.” She scuffed her boot in the black cinders around the foundation of the barn. “Same culprit with both fires?”
“Probably. I think he used different accelerants for number one and number two.”
“Just what we need. A smart arsonist.”
“He’s not supposed to be smart,” Will reminded her. “According to profile, he’s got below-average intelligence.”
“Maybe he’s addicted to crime shows. You don’t have to be smart to copy something they demonstrate step-by-step on TV.”
“Crime shows provide such a valuable public service,” he said, feeling weariness settle into his bones. “They make our job so much easier.” He rolled back one sleeve, checking his forearm for a burn. The skin was bright red, appearing slightly sunburned. The dragon tattoo, imprinted on a much younger, much stupider Will Bonner, was unscathed. He checked his watch, then put on his dark glasses. “I’m going to be late getting home. Again. You want to have dinner with us?” He often invited her, and not just because he liked and respected her. So did Aurora, and lately, his stepdaughter seemed to prefer discussing shoe shopping with Gloria to hanging out with Will.
Gloria sent him a weary smile. “Thanks, but I have plans.” She patted him on the sleeve. “See you around, partner.”
The Mini still had that new-car smell even though Sarah was its second owner. Following her meeting with Birdie Shafter, she got behind the wheel, feeling wrung out. She didn’t know what to do next and didn’t really have a road map.
She told herself there was no shame in being back in Glenmuir. Soon the whole town would know she had returned home in defeat—a woman betrayed—and that her perfect life in Chicago had been a sham. But so what? People started over all the time.
Her phone was ringing. She checked the screen, tamped down a jolt of panic and took the call. “How did you get this number?”
“We should talk,” Jack said, ignoring her question. “My folks think so, too. Everybody does.”
“I don’t. My lawyer doesn’t.” Actually, Birdie hadn’t said so specifically, but she had advised Sarah not to give him any more information than necessary at this point.
“You have a lawyer?” Jack demanded.
“And you don’t?” She suspected he had called Clive Krenski the moment—the very second—he had thrown on his clothes that day, still sticky with Mimi Lightfoot. His hesitation confirmed it.
“I already gave her Clive’s number,” Sarah said. From the brick-paved town parking lot, she had a view of the harbor and of Glenmuir’s picturesque square. It looked as quaint and pristine as the set of a nostalgic movie, with striped awnings over the shop fronts, bowls of water set out for any dog that might pass, lush flower baskets suspended from the light poles and businesses that respected the town’s resistance to change. There were no franchise stores or glaring signs, just an air of simpler times past.
“Don’t do this.” Jack sounded drained and stressed-out.
Her old habit of worrying about every breath he took threatened to kick in. She stiffened her spine against the seat back. “Her name is Bernadette Shafter—”
“Oh, perfect—”
“—and I’mnot going to discuss certain things with you.”
“Then how about you listen?”
She stared out at Tomales Bay. A flotilla of brown pelicans bobbed on the water under a late afternoon sky of layered blue and cotton candy clouds. Jack hadn’t liked Glenmuir. He considered it a backwater, a place where old hippies might go to die…or become oyster farmers. Though years had passed, she still remembered that jab at her father. It had bothered her then and it bothered her now. The difference was, now she was doing something about that and all the other little hurtful things he’d said and she’d swallowed while making excuses for his lack of consideration.
“I’m listening,” she said.
“You can’t just piss away five years of marriage—”
“No, you did that.” She watched some seagulls rise in a flock, creating a shadow on the water. “How long have you been with her?” Sarah asked.
“I don’t want to talk about her. I want you to come back.”
Sarah was stunned, not just by his words but by the fear in his voice. “You want me to come back. What for? Oh, here’s an idea. We can get tested together. Yes, Jack. As if being cheated on isn’t bad enough, I’m going to have to get tested for STDs. We both are.” She blinked back tears of humiliation.
“That’s not a factor. Mimi and I are exclusive.”
Are. Not were. “Really? And you know this…how?”
“I just know, okay?”
“No, it’s not okay, and you have no idea who she was with before you.”
“She was—” Jack fell silent for a moment. Then he said, “Sarah, can we not just throw this away? I’m sorry I said I wanted a divorce. That was stupid. I hadn’t thought anything through.”
Oh, my. Apparently Clive had explained the fiscal pitfalls of running off a perfectly good wife. “So are you saying you’ve changed your mind?”
“I’m saying I never meant it in the first place. I was scared, Sarah, and embarrassed and guilty. To hurt you that much…it’s the last thing I wanted. I was in panic mode, and I handled it badly.”
She actually felt torn, she noted with an unpleasant jolt. Although she was clearly the injured party, she was at war with herself. The part of her that was conditioned to love him, the part that had carried her through his cancer treatment and her fertilization attempts melted at the sound of his voice. At the same time, the part that had just endured the overwhelming humiliation of the attorney’s office was still choking on the devastating memory of seeing her husband screwing another woman.
“I have a headache, Jack. It doesn’t matter to me whether you handled it well or badly.”
“Forget what I said that morning. I didn’t mean it. We can get through our problems, Sarah,” he told her, “but not this way.”
The flock of birds disappeared, leaving the bay flat and empty, beautiful in the afternoon light.
“Well, guess what?” she asked. “I’m doing this my way for a change.”
He hesitated. “We need to talk about us,” he said. “About you and me.”
“You have no idea what I need.” Sarah wasn’t angry. She was so far past anger that she had entered a red zone of emotion she had never felt before, didn’t even know existed. It was a tight, ugly place with dark corners where rage festered and gave rise to images she never realized she could conjure. These were not pictures of her doing horrible things to Jack, but to herself. That was what frightened her most of all.
“Sarah, come home, and we’ll—”
“We’ll what?”
“Deal with this like people who care for each other instead of communicating through lawyers. We can’t just call it quits. We can fix this, go back to the way things were.”
Ah. Initially he’d spoken from an angry, impulsive, honest place. After the lawyer explained what this would cost him, he was filled with remorse.
She saw a chartreuse-colored pickup truck merge onto Sir Francis Drake Boulevard and troll slowly northward. The side door bore the seal of the city of Glenmuir, established 1858. There were red conical lights on the top, a big tank with some sort of pump in back. A sun-browned, tattooed arm, with the sleeve rolled back, was propped on the edge of the window. The driver turned a little and she caught a glimpse of a baseball cap and dark glasses.
“Why would I want that?” she asked Jack. She’d spent most of the cross-country drive thinking about the way things were. The hours and hours of driving alone had forced her to confront the harsh truth about her marriage. She’d been fooling herself for a long time about being happy. She’d been acting like a contented, fulfilled wife, but that wasn’t the same as being one. It was such a lousy thing to realize about yourself. She took a deep, steadying breath. “Jack, why would I want to go back to the way things were?”
“Because it’s our life,” he said. “Jesus—”
“Tell me about the bank accounts. All four of them.” A strange feeling came over her. Deep inside, she discovered a core of calmness that radiated outward like a general anesthetic. “How soon did you put a freeze on them? Did you remember to zip your pants first?” Actually, she knew the answer. He had made his move within hours of the pizza delivery. In Omaha, she had stopped at an ATM to make a withdrawal from their joint checking account, only to find that the card was declined. The same was true of the other three accounts. Fortunately for her sanity, she had a credit card she used for syndication business. And, though she had never seen it that way before, she had an ace in the hole. There was a large sum of money in an account she held in her own name. On the advice of their CPA and Clive—who, up until now, she had considered a friend—she had opened the account when Jack’s cancer had been discovered. If the worst happened, there might be some decisions she would have to make on her own.
The decision to divorce her husband had not occurred to her back then.
“I did that to protect both of us,” Jack said.
“Both of us? Oh, I see. You and your lawyer, you mean.”
“It’s clear you’re not thinking straight. I got a call from the bank about a transaction with State Line Auto Sales—”
“Ah, so that’s what’s got you worried,” she said, suddenly realizing the true reason for his call. “And here I thought you called about me.”
“Now you’re trying to avoid the subject.”
“Oh, sorry. I traded the GTO for a car I actually want.”
“I can’t believe you did that. Of all the childish, immature things…You had no right to trade in my car.”
“Sure I did, Jack. I bought the thing, remember? The title’s in my name.”
“It was a gift, dammit. You gave it to me.”
“Boy, you sure know how to scold a girl about a car,” she said. “I’d like to hear what you have to say about something really bad, like…oh…infidelity?”
He didn’t bother responding to that. How could he? “I wish I could take back what I did, but I can’t. We have to move on, Sarah—together. We can heal from this. I need a chance to make it up to you. Please come home, sugar-bean,” he said, using his pet name for her in a voice that used to beguile her.
Now it just made her queasy. With a curious feeling of detachment, she stared at the scene in front of her—a sleepy seaside town. Two women chatting on the sidewalk. A shy-looking mongrel flashed around a corner, furtively looking for scraps.
“I am home,” she said. Birdie had explained that there was an advantage to initiating the divorce from California, a community property state. She had warned Sarah that Jack’s lawyer would probably fight it tooth and nail.
“What about everything I gave you?” Jack reminded her. “A beautiful home, anything you wanted or needed. Sarah, there are women who would kill to have those things…”
Jack was still talking when she turned off the phone. He just didn’t get it and probably never would. “Those things were worthless.” Her hand shook a little as she fitted the key into the ignition. Nerves, she thought. Rage. She knew enough about divorce to realize she was in for the entire painful spectrum of emotions. She wondered how and when they would strike. Would she be smacked down as though hit by a truck, or would the pain creep up on her and lodge like a virus under her heart? Now, for the first time, she fully understood how Jack had felt before undergoing his first treatment. The absolute terror of what she was about to do was excruciating.
She sat and watched the only traffic signal in town turn from yellow to red. At the main intersection, a school bus lumbered to a halt and its stop signs cranked open like a pair of large ears. Sarah suspected it was one of the same buses she had ridden all her life. The sides were stenciled West Marin Unified School District. Judging by the ages of the kids who emerged from the bus, this was from the junior high. She watched a group of schoolkids with back-packs walking down the streets, pausing in front of the candy store to dig through their pockets for change. Some of the boys were smooth-cheeked while others sported a five o’clock shadow. The girls, too, came in a variety of shapes and sizes, their manner ranging from awkward to cool.
One of the cool ones—Sarah could spot them a mile off—was a self-possessed blond demigoddess who made a big production of lighting a cigarette. Sarah flinched, wondering where this girl’s mother was and if she knew what her daughter was up to.
Once again, Sarah told herself it was a good thing her quest to get pregnant was over. Kids were a constant challenge. Sometimes they were downright scary.
The last to emerge from the bus was a remarkable-looking girl. Small of stature, she had shining jet-black hair, pale skin and the perfect features of a Disney princess. There was a flawless, other-worldly quality about her that made Sarah want to stare. The girl was Pocahontas, Mulan, Jasmine. Sarah half expected her to burst into song at any moment.
She didn’t burst into anything, of course, but walked over to the fire department pickup truck. The driver was talking on the phone or a radio. The girl got in, slammed the door and they drove off.
Sarah was a watcher, not a doer. She’d always been that way, watching others live their lives while she lived inside her own head. And it struck her—hard and against her will—that even though she was the wronged party in her marriage, she wasn’t blameless for its demise. Ouch.
The black-and-white dog feinted away from a group of boys horsing around, and darted out into the street. Sarah jumped out of the car and dashed toward the mongrel. She shooed it back onto the sidewalk. At the same moment, she heard the thump of brakes locking up. She froze in the middle of the roadway, a few feet from the chartreuse pickup.
“Idiot,” the driver called. “I almost hit you.”
Embarrassment crept over her, quickly followed by resentment. These days, she was bitter about all men and in no mood to be yelled at by some tattooed redneck in a baseball cap. “There was a dog…” She gestured at the sidewalk, but the mongrel was nowhere in sight. “Sorry,” she muttered, and headed back to her car.
This was why she was a watcher and not a doer. Less chance of humiliating herself. Yet now, thanks to Jack, she had discovered that there were worse things than humiliation.
Chapter Seven
Flames leapt at the face of Will’s daughter. Each individual golden tongue seemed to illuminate a different facet of her pale skin and shiny black hair. The overfed charcoal fire roared at her, seeming to lick her eyelashes.
“Jesus, Aurora,” he said, running to the patio to clap the lid on the barbecue grill. “You know better than that.”
For a moment, his stepdaughter merely stared at him. Since coming into his life eight years before, she’d owned his heart, but when she did things like this, he wanted to shake her.
“I was firing up the barbecue,” she said. “Did you pick up the stuff for the Truesdale Specials?”
“Yes. But I don’t recall saying it was okay for you to start the grill.”
“You took too long at the store. I was sick and tired of waiting.”
“You’re supposed to be doing homework.”
“I finished.” Her eyes, lavishly surrounded by dark lashes, regarded him with reproof. “I was only trying to help.”
“Aw, honey.” He patted her on the shoulder. “I’m not mad. But I figured you knew better than to start a fire. Think of the headline in the Beacon if anything happens—Fire Captain’s Daughter Goes Up In Smoke!”
She giggled. “Sorry, Dad.”
“I forgive you.”
“Can we still make Truesdales?”
The burgers were their special meal, and theirs alone—mainly because no one else would touch them. They were made of SPAM, Velveeta and onion forced through a meat grinder, then grilled and served with a sauce of tomato soup. Heaven on a bun. Aurora was the only person Will had ever known who would eat them with him.
He lifted the black dome of the lid. “No sense letting a perfectly good fire go to waste.”
Over the years, of necessity, he had learned to cook. Round-the-clock shifts at the firehouse gave him plenty of time to learn the craft. He was famous for his fluffy pancakes, and his savory beef stew had once won a fire district prize. For someone who’d once expected to be drafted by a pro baseball team, firefighting was an unusual career choice. And for a single stepfather, it was risky, but for Will, it wasn’t even a choice. It was a calling. Years ago, he had discovered that rescuing people was what he did best, and risking himself was simply part of the job. And when it came to keeping himself safe, Aurora—his heart—was more powerful than body armor. Failing to come home to her was not an option.
With the burgers sizzling on the grill, he and Aurora worked side by side, putting together a macaroni salad. She chattered about school with the kind of breathless urgency only a seventh grade girl could convey. Each day was packed with drama, rife with intrigue, romance, betrayal, heroism, mystery. According to Aurora, it all happened in the course of a typical day.
Will tried to follow the convoluted saga of someone’s text message sent to the wrong phone, but he was preoccupied. He kept mulling over the barn fire, trying to figure out why it had been set, and who had done it.
“Dad. Dad.”
“What?”
“You aren’t even listening. Geez.”
She was getting too good at catching him. When she was little, she didn’t notice him zoning out. Now that she was older, she had a well-developed sense of when she was being ignored.
“Sorry,” he said. “Thinking about a fire today. That’s why I nearly missed picking you up at the bus this afternoon.”
She quickly turned, took a jar of mustard from the refrigerator and set it on the table. “What fire?”
“A barn up on one of the branch roads. Deliberately set.”
She carefully folded a pair of napkins, her small hands working with brisk efficiency. “By who?”
“Good question.”
“So are you, like, totally clueless?”
“Hardly. There are tons of clues.”
“Like what?”
“Footprints. A gas can. And some other stuff I can’t talk about until the arson investigator finishes his report.”
“You can tell me, Dad.”
“Nope.”
“What, don’t you trust me?”
“I trust you completely.”
“Then tell me.”
“No,” he said again. “This is my job, honey. I take it a hundred percent seriously. You heard anything?” He glanced at her. Kids at school talked. Arsonists were proud of the work they did, and typically enjoyed a sense of notoriety. They could never keep quiet about anything for long.
“Of course not,” she said.
“What do you mean, of course not?” He slid two SPAM burgers onto grilled buns and brought them to the table.
“I mean, you’re assuming someone at school would actually talk to me.” She spoke flippantly, almost jokingly, but Will sensed real pain beneath the remark.
“People talk to you,” he said.
She neatly tiled her burger with a layer of pickle slices. “And you would know.”
“What about Edie and Glynnis?” he asked, naming her two best friends. “You talk to them all the time.”
“Edie’s busy with her church group and Glynnis is all freaked out lately because her mom’s dating Gloria.”
“Why is she freaked out?”
“Come on, Dad. I mean, when it’s your own mom…” She wrinkled her nose. “Kids don’t like their parents dating anyone.”
He glowered at her. “Present company included, I assume.”
“Hey, if you want to go out with some woman—or some guy, even—don’t let me stop you.”
“Right.” Will knew she had a million tricks up her sleeve for keeping him from dating. Given the roughness of her early years, her clinginess was understandable. No big deal for the time being, though. He wasn’t seeing anyone.
“Maybe I set the fire,” she suggested. “Out of boredom.”
“Don’t even joke about that.”
“My life’s a joke. And I am bored. Edie and Glynnis live too far away. I don’t have a single friend right here in Glenmuir.”
He pictured her at the big glass-and-brick school, a long bus ride into alien territory. Only a handful of kids lived in Glenmuir, but naively he had hoped she would make other friends and head into high school with a bigger peer group. “Hey, I grew up here, too. I know it can be hard.”
“Sure, Dad.” The look she gave him spoke volumes. She poured warm tomato soup over the burger, then centered the top bun on it. She took a large bite and slowly chewed. Despite her delicate beauty, her fingernails were lined with dirt.
Will knew instinctively that now would be a bad time to make her wash her hands. Lately, he wasn’t so hot at reading her mercurial moods, but he knew that much. He had practically made a career out of reading parenting books, even though they all seemed to give conflicting advice. One thing they agreed on was that rebellion stemmed from a need to escape parental control, running up against a need for boundaries and limits. Not that it made dealing with a thirteen-year-old any easier.
“What, you think I had it made?” he asked.
“Hello? Granny and Grandpa told me pretty much your life story. Including the fact that you were this big basketball and baseball star, and a straight-A student.”
He grinned. “In their totally objective opinion. Did they tell you I used to bike to school instead of taking the bus because I was scared of being picked on?”
“Like that’s supposed to make me feel better?” She ate methodically, without a single wasted movement.
He was grateful to see her eating. According to the reading he’d done, Aurora was definitely at risk for an eating disorder. She fit the profile perfectly—beautiful, intelligent, driven to succeed…and a loner with self-esteem issues. Abandonment issues, too, given her history.
“How about we discuss things you can do to be happier at school?” he suggested.
“Sure, Dad,” she said, stabbing her fork into the macaroni salad. “I could try out for the cheerleading squad or the chess club.”
“Either one would be lucky to get you,” he pointed out.
“Yeah, lucky them.”
“Damn, Aurora. Why do you have to be so negative?”
She didn’t answer right away, but took a long drink of milk, then set her glass on the table. A pale mustache arched over her lip, and Will was struck by a jolt of sentiment. He suddenly saw her as the silent child who had come, uninvited, into his life eight years before, clinging to the hand of a woman who had wreaked havoc on both of them and left a raft of emotional wreckage in her wake.
Then, as now, Aurora’s looks had been striking, wide brown eyes and glossy black hair, creamy olive-toned skin and an expression of bewilderment at a world that had treated her harshly. From the first moment he saw her, Will had made it his mission to atone for the sins committed against this child. He had given up his dreams and plans for the future in order to protect her.
And not once, not for a single second, did he regret any of the sacrifices he made.
Or so he told himself.
She wiped her mouth with her napkin and suddenly she was thirteen-year-old Aurora again, half-grown, her appearance turning womanly in a way Will found intimidating.
“She’s Salma Hayek,” Birdie had remarked last summer after taking Aurora shopping for swimsuits.
“Who’s that?”
“Latina actress who looks like a goddess. Aurora is absolutely gorgeous, Will. You should be proud of her.”
“What, like I had one damn thing to do with the way she looks?”
Birdie had conceded his point. “What I mean is that she’s growing into her looks. She’s going to get a lot of attention because of it.”
“And getting attention for looks is a good thing.”
“It was for you, little brother,” Birdie had teased. “You were the prettiest thing the high school ever saw.”
The memories made him wince. He had been so full of himself, he was probably swollen like a tick with unearned pride.
Then Aurora had come into his life, helpless as an abandoned kitten, and everything else had ceased to matter. Will had dedicated himself to keeping her safe, helping her grow, giving her a good life. In turn, she had transformed him from a self-centered punk into a man with serious responsibilities.
“Why do I have to be so negative?” Aurora mused, finishing every crumb on her plate. “Gee whiz, Dad. Where do you want me to start?”
“With the truth. Tell me from your heart what’s so intolerable about your life.”
“Try everything.”
“Try being a little more specific.”
She stared at him, mutiny in her eyes. Then she pushed back from the table and went to get something from her backpack—a crumpled flyer printed on pale pink paper. “Is that specific enough for you?”
“Parents’ night at your school.” He knew exactly why that upset her, but decided to play dumb as he checked the date. “I can make it. I’m not on duty that night.”
“I know you can make it. It’s just that I hate it when they expect parents to show up.”
“What’s so bad about that?”
She plunked herself back down in her chair. “How about I have no mother. No idea who my father is.”
“He’s me,” Will said, fighting now to keep anger down. “And I’ve got the adoption papers to prove it.”
Thanks to Birdie, the family’s legal eagle, he had a father’s rights. Those had never been challenged—except by Aurora, who sometimes dreamed her “real” father was a noble political prisoner pining away for her in some Third World prison.
“Whatever,” she said, her inflection infuriating.
“Lots of kids have single parents,” he pointed out. “Is it really that bad here?” He gestured around the room, indicating their house. The wood-frame house, built in the 1930s, was nothing fancy, but it sat a block from the beach and had everything they needed—their own private bedrooms and bathrooms, a good stereo system and satellite TV.
“All right,” she said. “You win. Everything is just super.”
“Is this some new class you’re taking in seventh grade?” he asked. “Sarcasm 101?”
“It’s just a gift.”
“Congratulations.” He clinked his beer can against her milk glass. During his duty cycle, there was no drinking, of course, but on his first night off, he always had one beer. Just one, no more. Heavy drinking meant nothing but trouble. Last time he’d really tied one on, he had wound up married, with a stepdaughter. A guy couldn’t afford to do that more than once in a lifetime.
“So spill,” he said. “What’ll make you happy, and how can I give it to you?”
“Why does everything have to be so black-and-white with you, Dad?” she asked in annoyance.
“Maybe I’m color-blind. You should help me pick out a shirt for parents’ night.”
“Don’t you get it? I don’t want you to go,” she wailed.
He didn’t let on that her attitude was an arrow to his heart. There was never a good time for a child to be left by her mother, but Will figured Marisol had picked the worst possible age. When Marisol took off, Aurora had been too young to see her mother for what she was, yet old enough to hold on to memories, like a drowning victim clinging to a life raft. Over the years, Aurora had gilded those memories with a child’s idealism. There was no way a flesh-and-blood stepfather could measure up to a mother who braided hair, served pancakes for dinner and knew all the words to The Lion King.
He’d never stop trying, though. “I hate to disappoint you, but I’m going,” he told her.
Aurora burst into tears. This, lately, had become her specialty. As if cued by some signal he couldn’t see, she leaped up and took off. In a moment, he’d hear a thud as she flung herself on the bed.
Will thought about having another beer, but decided against it. Sometimes he felt so alone in this situation, he had the sensation of drifting out to sea. He went over to the slate message board by the door. He and Aurora used it for reminders and grocery lists. Picking up the chalk, he wrote, “Parents’ night—Thurs.” so he wouldn’t forget to attend. Upstairs, Aurora landed on her bed with an angry thump.
Chapter Eight
As she drove away from town, Sarah told herself not to dwell on Jack and the things he’d said. Instead, her mind worried the conversation as though seeking hidden meaning in every syllable and inflection: You’re not ready to acknowledge your part in this yet.
Of all the things he had said, that was surely the most absurd. What was she guilty of? Trading the gas-guzzling GTO for a Mini?
Please come home, Jack had urged her.
I am home.
She didn’t feel it yet. She had never been comfortable in her own skin, no matter where she lived. Now she realized something else. Her heart had no home. Although she’d grown up here, she had always looked elsewhere—outward—for a place to belong. She’d never quite found that. Maybe she would discover that it was a place she’d left behind. A place like this.
It was a land of lush abundance and mysterious wilderness, demarcated by flat-topped cypress trees sculpted by the wind, gnarled California oaks furred with moss and lichen, forget-me-nots growing wild in hilly meadows and ospreys nesting atop the light poles.
Her father lived in the house his father had built. The Moons were an old local family, their ancestors among the town’s first settlers, along with the Shafters, the Pierces, the Moltzens and Mendozas. There was a salt marsh behind the home and a commanding view of the bay known locally as Moon Bay, even though no printed map ever designated it as such. At the end of the gravel road was the Moon Bay Oyster Company, housed in a long, barn-red building that projected partially onto a dock. The enterprise had been started by Sarah’s grandfather after he came home wounded from World War II. He had been shot in the leg by a German in Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, and he walked with a permanent limp. He had a good head for business and a deep love of the sea. He chose to grow oysters because they flourished in the naturally clean waters here and were prized by shops and restaurants in the Bay Area.
His widow, June Garrett, whose married name—Moon—made her sound like a Dr. Seuss character, was Sarah’s grandmother. She still lived in what the family called the “new” house simply because it was built twenty years after the original one. It was a whitewashed bungalow with a picket fence at the end of the lane, a hundred yards from the main house. After Grandpa had died, Gran’s sister, May, had moved in with her. The two sisters lived together, happy in their retirement.
Sarah decided to stop in at Gran’s before heading to the main house. She had arrived in a whirlwind of fury and grief, and hadn’t seen Gran and Aunt May yet. Now that she’d consulted a lawyer and rebuffed Jack’s attempt to change her mind about the divorce, she felt more in control. She turned down the lane toward her grandmother’s house, the tires of the Mini crunching over the oyster shell gravel of the driveway.
The sounds and smells of the bay and tidal flats caused the years to peel away. With no effort at all, she regarded this place through the filter of memory. For a child, this was a magical realm, filled with dreams and fairy tales. With the sturdy, handsome house by the bay as her home base, and her grandmother’s cottage a short walk away, she’d been surrounded by security. She had explored the marshes and estuaries; she’d raced the tide and tossed homemade kites to the wind. She’d lain in the soft grass of the yard and imagined the clouds coming to life. In her mind’s eye, she’d turned the clouds into three-dimensional speech bubbles filled with words she was too shy to say aloud. This had been her dreamworld, scented with flowers and alive with blowing grass and the buzz of insects. As a child, she’d been a great reader, finding the ultimate escape within the pages of a story. She learned that opening a book was like opening a set of double doors—the next step would take her inside to Neverland or Nod, Sunnybrook Farm or Mulberry Street.
When she started high school, Sarah’s attitude changed. That, she suspected, was when her heart had come unmoored from this place. She became self-conscious about the family business. Other kids’ parents were dot-com millionaires, lawyers, rich movie execs. Being an oyster farmer’s daughter made her a total misfit. That was when she taught herself to disappear. In her many sketch-
books, she designed special places of her own, filling them with everything she wanted—adoring friends, puppies, snow at Christmas, floor-length dresses, straight-A report cards, parents with normal jobs, wearing business suits to work instead of rubber aprons and gum boots. She let herself forget the magic; it was teased out of her by kids who made fun of the very idea of living in this rustic, seaside family compound.
Reflecting back on those days, she realized what a dumb kid she’d been, letting someone else’s perception dictate the way she felt about herself. Independent and solvent, her family was living the dream, an American success story. She’d never appreciated that.
“It’s me,” Sarah called through the screen door.
“Welcome home, dear,” Gran said. “We’re in the living room.”
Sarah found her grandmother waiting with open arms. They hugged, and she shut her eyes, her senses filling with the essence of her grandmother—a spicy fragrance redolent of baking, soft arms that felt delicate, though not frail. She stepped back and smiled into the kindest face in the world. Then she turned to Aunt May, Gran’s twin, every bit as sweet and kind as her sister. She almost wished they were not so sweet; for some reason, their sweetness made her feel like crying.
“So did Dad tell you?” she asked.
“He did indeed, and we’re very sorry,” Aunt May said, “aren’t we, June?”
“Yes, and we’re going to help you in any way we can.”
“I know you will.” Sarah shrugged out of her sweater and sank into an ancient swivel rocker she remembered from her childhood. “I survived my first meeting with the lawyer.”
“I’ll make you a chai tea,” Gran said.
Sarah sat back and let them fuss over her. She took comfort in their homey clucking and in the fact that they never changed a thing in their house. They had the same cabbage rose carpet on the floor, the same chicken-print tablecloth. As always, Gran’s area of the living room was a storm of clippings and magazines piled haphazardly around her chair. Sketchbooks and an array of drawing pencils littered a side table. By contrast, Aunt May’s side of the room was painstakingly neat, her knitting basket, TV remote and library stack arranged just so. This had always been a place of familiar things, where she could always find a homemade fig-filled cookie, or lose herself in Gran’s display of World’s Fair souvenirs, or simply sit and listen to the twins’ murmured conversation. It was soothing, yet at the same time there was something stifling about this place. Sarah wondered if the sisters ever felt trapped here.
Because they were twins, the sisters were considered a bit of a novelty, and always had been. Growing up, they had enjoyed the peculiar social status afforded young ladies who happened to be pretty, popular, well-mannered and nearly identical. The story of their birth was the stuff of legend. They were born on the last day of May, at midnight during a terrific storm. The attending doctor swore that one twin was delivered a minute before midnight, and the second a minute after. Hearing this, their parents named them May and June.
Although biologically they were fraternal twins, most casual observers had trouble telling them apart. They had the same graceful drifts of white hair, the same eyes of milk glass blue. Their faces were all but indistinguishable, like two apples side by side, drying in a bowl.
Despite their physical resemblance, the sisters were polar opposites in many ways. Aunt May was conventional and neat as a pin. Gran was considered bohemian in her day; she preferred painting over housework and raising a family. More traditional, Aunt May dressed in calico cotton prints and crocheted shawls; Gran favored overalls and tribal print smocks. Both women, however, spent their lives fanatically devoted to family and community.
“You probably don’t want to talk about your meeting,” Aunt May suggested.
In this family, denial was a fine art. “I’ll spare you the details.”
Gran served the chai in a Raku-fired mug. “You probably need a break from brooding about all this nonsense, anyway.”
Sarah tried to smile back. Relegating her shattered marriage to “all this nonsense” did seem mildly amusing at that.
Her grandmother and great-aunt willingly changed the subject. They chattered on about the things that filled their days. Gran and Aunt May seemed to be completely without ambition or curiosity about the world beyond the quiet, protected bay. They organized things—the annual Primrose Tea. The Historical Society’s benefit banquet. They presided over a monthly bridge tournament and faithfully attended meetings of the garden club. Currently they were preoccupied with projects and plans, as always, working on their presentation on bulbs for the Sunshine Garden Club. And if that didn’t keep them busy enough, they had to get the place ready to host their weekly potluck and bunco game.
Sarah marveled at how seriously they took these social functions, as if they were matters of life and death.
The old women studied Sarah, then exchanged a glance filled with meaning. What was it with twins? Sarah wondered. They had some crazy Vulcan mind link, and seemed capable of holding whole conversations without saying a word.
“What?” Sarah asked.
“You don’t appear to have much patience for things like garden club meetings and bunco evenings.”
“I’m sorry, Gran. Just preoccupied. And tired, I guess.” She tried to look interested. “But if they’re important to you—”
“They’re important to all of humankind,” Aunt May said.
“Garden parties?” Sarah squeaked. “Bunco games?”
“Oh, dear. Now she’s irritated,” Gran said to her sister.
“I’m not irritated. Mystified, maybe, but not irritated.” Deep down, she wondered how it could possibly mean a thing that Reverend Schubert’s birthday party had fresh flowers or that they put out the good china for their potluck.
“Showing respect and thoughtfulness to those we care about is the part that matters. It’s what separates us from the beasts of the field.”
“The cows in Mr. Prendergast’s pasture seem pretty content to me.”
“Are you saying you’d rather be a cow?”
“At the moment, it sounds very appealing to me.” As a cheeky, awkward teenager, Sarah had unleashed her pen, drawing comic satires of the Historical Society’s display of the Drake landing, or creating send-ups of the women of the garden club, chattering away while birds built nests in their fantastically ornamented straw hats.
“Someday you’re going to tick off the wrong person,” her older brother, Kyle, had warned her. He had dedicated his life to pleasing his parents. Every time Sarah attempted to do this, she failed.
But mostly, she realized, she’d failed herself. When you lived your life to please others, there were hidden costs that often outweighed the rewards. Years later, in the wake of the ultimate failure—her marriage—she was finally waking up to that fact. Looking around her grandmother’s house, she wondered if she was seeing a glimpse of her future. The thought depressed her, and she felt the old ladies studying her.
“You’re home, dear,” said Gran.
“Home where you belong,” Aunt May added.
“I never really felt like I belonged here.”
“That’s your choice,” Gran pointed out. “Deciding where you belong is a choice.”
Sarah nodded. “But…I don’t want to be that divorced woman who moves back to her father’s house. That’s just…pathetic.”
“You’re entitled to be pathetic for a while, dear.” Gran smiled gently at her. “No need to rush into anything.”
With her grandmother’s permission to be pathetic, Sarah made her way down the lane to her father’s, passing marshes fringed by wild iris, with the green-draped coastal hills looming in the distance. She parked in the driveway and went into the garage, a handyman’s nirvana with an adjacent workshop. Generations of tools hung on the walls and littered the workbench, and the sharp odor of motor oil tinged the air. A half-dozen projects occupied benches and sawhorses, all related to her father’s new passion—restoring his 1965 Mustang convertible.
“Dad,” she called out. “Hello?”
There was no answer. He’d probably gone into the house. Sarah hesitated, haunted by memories she hadn’t thought about in a very long time.
Her mother used to work in the well-organized garage annex. Jeanie Bradley Moon had been a master spinner and weaver, known for her textiles of cashmere and silk, created on a counterbalance loom of cherrywood. She and Sarah’s father, Nathaniel, had met at a local artisans’ market and were married only a few months later. They’d made a life here together, raised Kyle and Sarah. She still remembered the long, late-night girl-talks with her mom—her rock, the most steady thing in her life. Or so she thought. Now she yearned to talk with her mother again, and the wish felt like a rock crushing her chest. How could her mother just be gone?
Sarah took a deep breath and stepped into her mother’s world, a place of shadows and skeletons now. This was the hardest spot on earth for Sarah to be, because it was where memories of her mother burned the deepest. At the same time, she felt the irresistible pull of remembrance as she looked around the room. It used to be a hive of activity, alive with the clack of the loom and the smooth, quick rhythm of the treadle. But all that had changed eight years before.
Sarah had been a sophomore at Chicago when the call came from her sister-in-law, LaNelle. Kyle and Nathaniel were in shock, so it had fallen to LaNelle to give Sarah the devastating news.
She’d lost her mother.
Sarah had never understood why people used the term “lost” when somebody died. She knew exactly where her mother was—unreachable, untouchable, felled by an aneurysm that was as heartless and indiscriminate as a bolt of lightning. What did you do when the mooring you’d been clinging to was suddenly taken away? What were you left holding?
She still hadn’t found the answers. Yet here in the shop, it looked as though Jeanie had stepped out for a minute to check the mail. Everything was the same as she’d left it eight years before—the balls of spun yarn tucked neatly in their cubbies, a peony-pink swath of fabric still hanging from the loom, waiting for the next row to be woven.
Sarah was the one who was lost. It was as if someone had pulled a dark hood over her face, spun her around until she was dizzy, then thrust her forward, to grope her way blindly through life, praying she would find something to hold on to.
Eventually she had—Jack Daly. She had held fast to him, hauling him home like a trophy for having survived her loss. She held him up as proof that she had transformed herself from an oyster farmer’s daughter into a career woman, adored by the likes of Jack Daly. She wanted to shout to the world—look at what I’ve made of myself. Look at the man who loves me—a prince from Chicago.
She had taken pride in showing off her handsome, successful fiancé to a town that considered her a loser. Like Cinderella, she wanted the world to know she’d found the mate to her favorite pair of shoes, and was about to marry a prince. She had it all—the glass shoes, the hot guy, the golden future.
To give him his due, Jack had played his part. Everyone could see how good-looking he was. They had visited the town at the height of springtime’s Primrose Days, when the eucalyptus trees festooned themselves in long, willowy foliage, the hills exploded with wild iris blossoms and lupine, and the steelhead were running in the mountain streams. The pristine inland sea of Tomales Bay and the craggy western shores that edged the Pacific created a dramatic backdrop for her triumphant homecoming.
And again, in true fairy-tale fashion, her boastfulness had unintended consequences.
“When am I going to meet your friends?” Jack had wondered.
He had to ask. There were people who knew her, acquaintances of her parents, former classmates, employees of the Moon Bay Oyster Company, Judy the Goth, a clerk at Argyle Art & Paint Supply. Sarah had run around with a group of other misfits, but hadn’t stayed in touch with them after high school. She’d fumbled through an explanation. “I was never very social…”
“You must’ve had friends.” To a guy like Jack, who was surrounded by a vast and happy group of friends—good friends, real ones—this was unthinkable. There was no way Sarah could explain this to him. No way he could understand that her entire adult life was spent trying to escape her adolescence, not relive it.
Unable to produce a vibrant social group from her past, she suggested they leave Glenmuir a day sooner than planned, ostensibly to play tourist in San Francisco but actually to get away from reminders of the person she’d been. After that, she embraced Jack’s world and it had embraced her. His parents were like a latter-day Ozzie and Harriet. He had enough close friends to populate a small town. At his side, she was liked and accepted, even admired.
The idea of coming home after that, to the empty house on the bay and her father looking lost, was flat-out painful. She made subsequent visits home without Jack, spending quiet hours wishing she could ease her father’s agony, but failing at that. Her father soon took to visiting her in Chicago, and his company was a comfort to her during Jack’s illness.
Now she felt like a stranger here, her footsteps sounding hollow in the empty workshop. She studied the ball of bright pink cashmere yarn still on the spool, remarkably untouched even now, as though endlessly waiting. I still see you in dreams, Mom, she thought. But we never talk anymore.
She touched the top of the spindle with the tip of her finger. Suppose she were to prick herself and bleed, and then fall asleep for a hundred years?
Good plan.
“I’m home,” she said, putting her purse and keys on the Formica counter in the big, sunny kitchen of her father’s house.
“In here,” he called out. In his easy chair, with catalogs spread out on the coffee table in front of him, Nathaniel Moon looked like a man of leisure. He had certainly earned the privilege. Before retirement, he had the business to grow and teach to Kyle. Now that he’d stepped back, he spent most of his free time researching and restoring the Mustang.
“You look busy,” she said.
“I’ve been reading up on how to repair an intake carburetor,” he said.
These days, his passion consumed him. When not over at Mounger’s garage, working on the car, he was surfing the Internet for parts or watching car restoration shows on television. Sarah saw him disappearing into the car the way she disappeared into her art.
Embarrassingly enough for his children, he had become a babe magnet since being widowed at a relatively young age. He was a kindly, tolerant man, unfailingly polite as he rejected the women vying for his attention.
Everyone in town knew Nathaniel Moon, and everyone liked him. “Such a nice, good-looking man,” people often said.
Sarah could not disagree with a single thing that was said. Yet she felt now, as she had all her life, that she didn’t really know him. He was like a TV dad—well-groomed, sympathetic, benign and ultimately unknowable.
“Does this town have an animal control department?” she asked him.
“I think so. Why? Did you spot an animal out of control?”
“A stray dog. I saw it nearly get hit in the middle of downtown.”
“We’re a progressive area,” he said. “We have a no-kill shelter.”
“That dog better hope you have no-kill drivers.”
“I’ll see if I can find a number for you. How did your meeting go?” he asked without looking up from the catalog he was studying.
“It went. I was surprised Birdie Bonner remembered me.”
“She’s Birdie Shafter now,” he reminded her. “Why surprised?”
“Because we weren’t friends,” Sarah said. “We went to the same school, but we weren’t friends. I never had many friends.”
He flipped a page. “Sure you did, honey. There were kids over all the time when you were young.”
“Those were Kyle’s friends. Remember him? My perfect brother? The only time people came to see me was when Mom put the squeeze on their mothers and they were forced, or bribed.”
“I don’t remember that at all.” He flipped another page.
She studied her father, saddened by the distance between them. There was plenty more she could say. She wished she could ask him if he missed her mother the way she did, if he still saw his wife in his dreams, but she felt used up, too emotionally frazzled to deal with her father’s curious distance.
“Come on,” he said, standing up with an unhurried motion. “Let’s take the boat out. I’ll bring something to eat.”
She wanted to say she wasn’t hungry, she’d never eat again. The fact was, she was starving. Betrayed by her own primal greed.
Within fifteen minutes, they were out on the water, the Arima Sea Chaser pushing up a V-shaped wake behind them. They pulled out into the channel and slowed down to trolling speed so the motor would run quietly. Power-boats were restricted on the pristine bay, but as a local oysterman, her father was exempt. The feel of the soft vinyl-covered seat, the rich smell of the tidal flats and the taste of the air evoked a feeling of days gone by. For a short while, time flowed away. The marriage and Jack’s illness and his final betrayal might have happened to someone else.
Her father opened a beer and offered her the can. She reached for it, then hesitated.
“Not your brand?” he asked.
In the pit of her stomach, she felt a swift, dull terror as the illusion shattered. Those years had happened to her.
Her father studied her face. “Did I say something wrong?”
“No, I just…It’s been a while since I’ve had a drink. Before all this happened, we were trying to get pregnant.”
He looked supremely uncomfortable, his eyes crinkling behind his shades. “So, um, are you…?”
“No.” Part of her wanted to tell him about the clinic visits, the drugs and discomfort and nausea. Another part wanted to keep her pain private. “After Jack’s treatments ended,” she went on, “getting pregnant was my main goal in life.” Hearing herself speak the words, she felt a twinge. When had her priorities shifted from her marriage to her reproductive system?
“Anyway, I’m not,” she said quickly, knowing this conversation was going to be a challenge, “and I’ll take that beer.” She took a swig, savoring her first gulp. God, it had been too long. “For the past year, I’ve been undergoing artificial insemination.”
He cleared his throat. “You mean Jack couldn’t…because of his cancer?”
She looked out across the water. “The doctors always encouraged us to set positive goals during treatment, the logic being that every reason for him to get better reinforced his recovery.”
“I’m not sure it’s a baby’s job to be that reason.”
Sarah felt a stirring of defensiveness. “We wanted to start a family, same as any other couple.” After all that had happened, she was forced to examine her real motives. Deep down, she had known for a long time that something was wrong, something that having a child would not fix.
“So anyway,” she said, trying to get the conversation back on track, “I might as well celebrate my new freedom.” She tipped her beer in his direction. “And I promise, that’s all the detail you’ll get from me.”
Clearly relieved, he slumped back on his seat. “You’ve had a tough break, kiddo.”
“I hope it’s not too weird, me telling you this stuff.”
“It’s weird,” he admitted. “But I’ll deal with it.”
She ducked her head to hide a smile. Her father was a Marin man, through and through, trying to be sensitive.
“You warm enough?” he asked.
She savored the flow of the breeze over her face and through her hair. “I’ve been living in Chicago, Dad. Your worst weather feels like a heat wave to me.” She pictured herself in Chicago, shoveling snow off the driveway in order to get her car out. She had once drawn Shirl digging her way out of a second-story window and escaping to Mexico.
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