CHAPTER ONE
I have to act civil when I see him. That was part of the agreement. So, I plaster a fake smile on my face and bat my eyelashes at him. “Hello, Sinclair. I hope you had a nice weekend.”
“Rachel.” He says it as if my name is an answer.
His real name is Joseph Sinclair Winters, Jr., but his daddy goes by Joe so he was stuck with Sinclair, which suits him better anyway with the highfalutin family he comes from. It also suits his sophisticated looks—his soft face and thick black hair, with serious eyes staring out behind those thin gold spectacles of his. Not ruggedly handsome like a guy in a women’s magazine, but the kind you’d look for in Forbes; the kind voted Most Likely to Succeed in high school.
He has an IQ off the charts. Intelligent but no common sense, his mother says. She knew what I was at first glance. He probably agrees with her nowadays.
I agree with his mom about his lack of common sense. How else could he forget about our baby? He remembers now. He only forgot once. But that was enough to change our lives forever, and enough to end hers. Me, I’ll never forget our baby, ever. Just thinking of her sends a shooting pain through my gut.
The parking lot is full of cars, but we’re the only people standing out in the midday sun. We could be open with each other right now. No one would witness our conversation and pass it on during some social tête-à-tête. We could say what’s really on our minds, we could come to terms with the truth, but we don’t. We used to have so much to say to each other that we could stay up till the wee hours and not run out of words until our lips found better ways to communicate, but lately Sinclair doesn’t even answer my polite questions. I think of all we’ve been to each other and wither inside.
The day has offered respite from the cold weather in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The breeze has stilled, and the midday sun is beating down on us, evaporating early morning rain off the black pavement so that everything below my chin wavers slightly as if I’m looking through water, making me feel dizzy. I braved the cold and wore my short navy dress to impress Sinclair, to remind him why he fell in love with me, but it doesn’t matter. He looks down at me emotionless behind his gold-rimmed glasses. “Did everything go all right?”
“Sure. Fine.”
He nods. No more words. No small talk or anything personal to show we were married for years. I don’t think that’s very civil, but I’m not as fussy about the rules as he is so I don’t complain.
I push our son Seth towards him. Seth could cry and cling to my leg because he doesn’t have to obey any rules about being civil. The agreement is about him, but not for him. Very confusing. Seth doesn’t scream, or yell Mommy or anything, though. He walks silently to his father and places his perfect tiny hand in his father’s large smooth one. Just looking at them, I can feel Seth’s baby flesh as it used to clutch at my skin when I breastfed him, his sharp baby nails leaving red lines on my pale flesh, and Sinclair’s doctoring hands, so well guarded against rough work, reaching for me with equal urgency. Men take and take.
I raise my eyes to Sinclair’s and we stare at each other. He shifts his weight, uncomfortable with the memories he reads in my eyes, and says nothing. We were never this silent when we lived in the same house.
I wish Seth would cry so I could hug him and tell him how much I love him because I only get to keep him every other weekend. Every visit, we become more like strangers. I want to hold him, to make him love me, but I don’t want to reach for him here in the open. I tried it once and he shrank away into his father.
The agreement confuses me. I should have ended up with Seth. Dr. Arick says Sinclair got him because I need to rest, to get over the anxiety. He may be right because I do get anxious. A lot of things don’t make sense anymore. I have to work very hard to think straight. But that’s not the real reason. I know why they gave him to Sinclair.
Sinclair turns to go. “We’ll see you in two weeks, Rachel. I’ll bring him to your house.”
Two weeks. I’m not worried about remembering the date because he’ll call before he comes. He’s very careful about remembering everything nowadays, while I’m no longer expected to remember anything at all, anymore.
I stand in Applebee’s parking lot and watch them go into lunch. We used to eat at restaurants together. I used to fluff up my blond hair and curl the ends under, I’d rub blush into my cheeks, paint my lips a deep red, and file my nails to perfection. I had new outfits every week; I was never caught wearing the same outfit twice to anywhere we frequented. Sinclair loved to parade me to a reserved table, past his associates, past friends from the club, even past the women who flirted with him, showing me off to all of them. And I loved it. I loved being the one he chose against the prejudice of his family, his fair lady, the mutt who married a pedigree.
Now I’m left out here.
He said this meeting place was convenient for him. I might be blond, but I’m not stupid. He doesn’t want me to know where he’s moved. Dumb him. I already know. I watch him and Seth whenever I want.
I don’t like standing in the parking lot alone. People are probably staring at me out the windows and some media shark is likely to snap a photo and plaster it on the internet. Once upon a time it was about our Cinderella marriage, but dirt sells even better.
I stare at the ground thinking about where I should go. At my feet, I see a picture. Not a photograph, but a little card with a colorized sketch of a nun on it, and with a flash I remember the nun in the graveyard standing off to one side by herself. Why was she there? I stoop down and pick up the picture. It might be the same nun, but probably not. The card says Saint Thérèse of Lisieux across the top. I doubt a saint would get caught anywhere near me. I smooth the dirt off it and slide it into my pocketbook to look at later. I don’t want to look at it too closely here because I might start thinking about it all. I might cry and fall apart with everyone in the restaurant staring at me out the window. With Sinclair and Seth staring at me.
Nervous heat washes over me. I wish I could melt away into the pavement.
I need to go somewhere.
I can’t go see my mother. She lives two hundred miles away. Even if she were ten miles away, I wouldn’t visit her because she doesn’t want anything to do with me. She never liked Sinclair or Seth. She thinks Sinclair is stuck up. It’s his manners. She thinks they’re put-on airs because she’s never been around anything but beer-swilling jerks. She wouldn’t know a Chardonnay from a Grenache. Her idea of a three-course meal is chips and dip before the entrée and ice cream afterward.
I used to be just like her. I grew up in her shadow in a decrepit apartment in downtown Raleigh. I don’t know who my father was. He could have been any of the guys that wandered in and out of our lives, but she never pointed to one of them and said, “There’s your father.” She never said anything to me about any of them. She’d tell me to get them a beer out of the fridge and to go to my room to get out of her hair. I was twelve before I realized I didn’t have to lie in the dark listening to her bed thump against the wall. I didn’t have to listen to the whispers and moans and feel so useless, so unwanted, so set apart and in the way. I could crawl out my bedroom window and leave for the night and she wouldn’t care a bit.
I found my own comforts.
I was a waif of a thing, with gold spun hair that hung down my back as long and thin as my pale limbs, far from a beauty at that point, but it didn’t matter. I quickly learned there were men aplenty waiting to comfort a young girl with empty eyes and a heart as unformed as her body.
I’d planned to spend my first escape night with my girl friend, Jennifer, but I never got there. I met Kenny Sprat on the way. He was walking home from a ballgame. Kenny wasn’t the best looking guy in school, but he was fourteen and worked out at the Y a lot, so most girls thought he was pretty hot. He fell in step beside me. Asked me where I was going. Turned out his dad worked the nightshift. That night I learned all about thumping beds.
Kenny got bored with me after a few months, but I’d learned the ropes by then, and there was a little more fire in my eyes. With each guy, I learned about the power I held, and unlike my mother, I learned control. I learned how to make a man want me, and I learned to make them wait. By the time I was a freshman in high school, I realized I wanted more than guys with a little pocket money. I knew the moneymakers were all headed to college, and that’s where I had to go to set my future straight. I managed to pull my grades up enough to get accepted to the University of North Carolina, and with my mother’s lack of income, I was given all the financial aid I asked for. I preferred art to science, but I put my major down as a pre-med, thinking that to catch a doctor I ought to play in his field. I didn’t care about the degree or a trail of distinguished letters; I wanted a gilded Mrs. in front of my name. My plan worked.
I played my cards carefully during my first year, only dating selectively. The back alleys had taught me that no one held on to an easy catch. I became the beauty regarded as a rare prize. A date with me was something boys hollered about in the halls of their sweat-laden dorms. After years of sleeping with the worst scum, the best of Carolina rejoiced over a kiss from me at the end of the night.
I moved into better circles. I dated the brother of Susan Chance, president of a sorority that mingled with grad students, until I was pledged. I studied those rich girls until I knew their every mannerism. I moved lithely among their eager boyfriends searching for the right one, one with the smarts to make it big in a cosmopolitan practice, one with class and culture. When I saw Sinclair walk in one Sunday on Susan Chance’s arm, I knew he was the one. He reeked of money. He walked with class. Over champagne punch, I listened to his confident drawl, more restrained and cultured than most of my companions. He regaled our lunch crowd with tales of his last trip to Europe, dropping names of people and places that had others nodding in recognition. His tale wound its way into my head, interspersed as it was with long words and philosophical ideals. I became determined his next trip would include me.
He wasn’t a student. He was finishing up his internal medicine residency. In May he would be ready to pack his bags for home to join his daddy’s well-established practice. As he spoke, I caressed him with my eyes and deliberately turned away when he fastened his gaze on me. As the gathering wandered off to the dessert buffet, he settled at my side. After that, he was putty in my palm.
If I’d kept everything on that level, if I’d remembered I wanted him for position and power, for financial security and a place in society, I would have been fine. But I fell in love with him, and that was my undoing.
Love wasn’t a sudden thing. It wove its way into my being like a fine, stray thread of silk in a tapestry. In some ways, my love for Sinclair began years before I knew him, in the formation of who I became because of my stumbling course through life, so that when we crossed paths everything was in place; I’d become who I needed to be. If we had met any earlier, I wouldn’t have been ready for him.
But there was a moment I realized he had accepted me despite my past. We were at the club and I was being introduced around as his fiancée. Jed, one of the boys from my early years, happened to be sitting at a table. I hadn’t noticed him, but he noticed me. He kept staring at me, waiting for a chance to destroy me. Finally his moment came. He put out his foot as I passed him on the dance floor, and I tripped. He was right there, breathing on my neck, pulling me up, sneering at me. “That’s what happens when you get above yourself. You fall. Watch your step.” Then Sinclair stepped up. He was so serious, so heroic. He took my arm and glared at Jed. “No fear. It’s my job to catch her. She’ll never fall farther than my arms.” And there in his arms, within the fold of his hands with his eyes blazing in my defense, I knew he loved me no matter my past. My original station in life hadn’t bothered him back then.
Nevertheless, I couldn’t possibly have taken him to see my mother—he wasn’t so saintly he would overlook her slop of a hovel—so we invited her out to dinner for introductions before our marriage. We made reservations at The Pines, the most expensive restaurant in Chapel Hill. She showed up in black stretch pants and a leopard-print velour shirt. If he’d had any doubts about where I’d come from, I could tell by his face he knew as soon as she arrived. But he laughed it off.
Who I had been didn’t matter at that point.
Sinclair settled into his daddy’s practice, and I settled into being a fulltime wife. I got pregnant almost immediately, and there I was living the perfect life—rich, pampered, with husband and child. Everything sailed along blissfully until Seth was three and Caroline was born.
Inside the restaurant, I see Sinclair and Seth being led between tables to a window seat. I don’t want them to look out and see me still standing in the open like a discarded person. So I leave.
I drive around awhile to waste time. I can’t go home and stare at the television. The cable guy has been working on it for two days and it still wasn’t fixed when I left. I head to the bookstore and spend an hour picking out a new stack of books to read, then drive over to the mall to buy some jewelry, a couple of toys for Seth, eat Chinese food alone in the food court, and buy a couple of outfits. I stop at the park to go for a walk as the sun turns to a glowing globe behind the trees. I pick up a milkshake and eat it in the car as I listen to the radio before I finally decide to head home to visit my friend Colette. I live on her estate, now, right beside her charming Tudor. She’s renting me the unused servants’ quarters out by her pool, a little thing originally built as a pool house, supposedly converted to an apartment by the second owners because they disliked having their maid living in the upper quarters. My living in the pool house doesn’t bother Colette; she doesn’t swim. In fact, other than wearing short sleeves, I don’t think she’s bared her heavyset body to the world in over a decade.
I don’t care for the pool house. It’s too small, but it suited the agreement, so I gave in. It’s hard to go backward in life after getting used to the Ritz.
It’s usually a twenty-minute drive back to Colette’s, but I take the scenic route through the park to watch the sunset and then through town to the drug store, the grocery store and the car wash, wasting time. I can’t get there too early or Colette will still be eating or something. If I wait until nine or ten, her husband, Henry, will have gone to bed, and she’ll be ready to kick back, offer me a gin and tonic, a smoke and a hand of cards. Colette is like that—down home. She’s perfectly proper in public, but alone with me she’s different. We lay out our real selves in private. Colette would rather have liquor than wine any day, and prefers poker to bridge, but if I said so to the crowd at the club she’d laugh me under the table. And I would do the same to her, except I don’t go to the club anymore.
When I get to her house, what I see are blue lights and orange lights flashing all over the place. Police are swarming over the property.
The lights make me dizzy. They bring tears to my eyes. My throat feels thick and clogged. I’ve been here before, surrounded by police and lights and cameras—a time warp, but different. It can’t be happening again. It wasn’t at night. And it wasn’t this house.
My body twists and spins and I know I’m fainting, but I force myself to stand. I swallow the bile rising in my throat. I remind myself that this house is Colette’s, not mine. I have to put one foot in front of the other. I have to find out what’s happened.
Cameras flash at me as I cross the driveway, hungry photographers hoping there is more money to be made from the saga of my sorry life.
I ignore the orange streamers around the perimeter and stride across the yard to the front door.
