Stolen Grace (3 page)

Ravishing, Marie. You’re a real stunner, that’s for sure
♥ . . . and:

Yet
another gorgeous photo, your charm and talent are beguiling
♥ and:

Amazing! Wow, Marie, that would make a fabulous album cover. Eat your heart out
American Vogue!
You really are superb, so classy, with a naturally profound look in your
beautiful eyes – so rare, so unusual. Where can I buy the poster? LOL
. ♥♥♥

“
Profound?
” Sylvia sniggered. “Talent?” As if being pretty was a “talent.” She remembered flicking desperately through more online photos, with messages that seemed like they’d been written by a teenage boy, not Sylvia’s thirty-two year-old husband.

Yes, yes and yes!
♥ And
I have a fabulous idea for a project, Marie, can’t wait to tell you all about it.

The messages, Sylvia saw from the dates, had been piling up for over a year and a half. There were about thirty of them. These were not private messages but public—right there on Marie’s main page for anyone who was her Facebook friend to see. The comments had begun around the same time Sylvia felt her marriage had started flaking apart. Like filo pastry. Crumbling into little morsels, still there to taste, but fragmented. Separate. No longer one whole.

“But Tommy loves you so much,” Melinda offered, her telephone voice irritatingly positive. “He’s not going to jeopardize your marriage. Or Gracie. You should be more confident.”

Sylvia wet a sponge and started cleaning the bathroom sink. Cleaning, scrubbing. She used to be so glamorous, and now look. And yes, she
had
always been confident about Tommy. Then. He’d been crazy about her. The Bel Ange had been a wake-up call, an alarm bell screeching in her ear. Sylvia smiled at Melinda’s encouraging words but then caught sight of herself in the mirror and her smile faded. “I know I should be more forgiving, for Grace’s sake if nothing else.”

It was true what Melinda said, though. Tommy hadn’t slept with the girl, hadn’t—as far as she knew—even kissed her. But the intention was there. The mental betrayal. Still, she needed to get over it.

“You don’t want this silly Third Party saga screwing things up again,” Melinda warned.

Sylvia looked into the mirror again and pushed her shoulders back.
Grace. Poise. Stand tall, woman!

Melinda was right. Tommy had been Sylvia’s second chance. The Third Party saga
had
messed up her life when she was at college. Sylvia’s then boyfriend, Lance, had kissed another girl. So she, in retaliation, kissed another boy. Lance was devastated. He got drunk and spent the night with a girl called Judy Merchant, a senior. So Sylvia did the same with a fraternity boy. The irony was that Lance was so sozzled with vodka when he was in bed with Judy Merchant, that nothing happened. But the damage had been done. Sylvia broke his heart and the relationship was over. They both had broken hearts. All for nothing. All because of that silly kiss with the first girl. Sylvia didn’t want history to repeat itself. What’s more, she had a child to think of now.

“You’re right, Melinda. Listen, I have something in the oven.”

Melinda rippled with laughter. “That, I really believe!” Then she said in a serious tone, “Why are you shrugging off this conversation, Sylvie?”

“I swear, I’m not kidding, I’m baking an apple pie.”

“Okay, so you really are trying to make things work between the two of you?”

“I’m trying, yes.”

“Well good for you!”

“Bye,” Sylvia said. “Send a kiss to Aunt Marcy, will you? And give Dad a big hug from me. Thanks again for spending so much of your vacation time with him.”

“A pleasure, my dear. Go, go. You have your apple pie to think of and that drop-dead gorgeous husband of yours. We’ll speak soon.”

Sylvia sauntered back to the kitchen, feeling momentarily uplifted by Melinda’s belief in Tommy.
Yes, she could do this.

Grace skipped into the room, one of her teddies tucked under her arm, his mangy torso, poor thing, devoid of legs. One arm clung on—forlorn but loved. Sylvia heard her say to Tommy, “Don’t you know that Mommy likes your natural smell, Daddy?”

Sylvia laughed.
Doesn’t miss a trick, that one
. Her daughter was hugging the solid legs of her beloved dad, clinging to his trousers with her tiny nails. Those small five-year-old hands were such a marvel, and Sylvia pitied Tommy for missing out on even a week of their growth. It seemed like yesterday that she was a baby and now she was a proper person, a separate entity who had her own vision of life.

Grace pummeled her dad’s rock-hard legs. “Why do you have to go away, Daddy? You promised we’d go to the river and swim. You
promised!
”

“We will, Bunnykins, we will. When the water’s warmer. And we’ll do some fly fishing, too. But Daddy has to work. I’ll bring you back a present from LA.”

“What’s LA?”

His arms were clasped about his little girl. “It’s a place, darling. With lots of palm trees and a very blue sky.”

“What present will you get me?”

The edges of Sylvia’s lips tipped up. She loved that word, “present,” instead of gift. Grace had picked up British expressions from him, the cadence of his voice, the lilts, the inflections. Sylvia wasn’t sure of all the nuances of the tiered English class system, but Tommy was well spoken. Educated, too. He’d got a double first at Cambridge University in Engineering and had been head hunted for a job in Silicon Valley as a techie, deep in the world of IT. That’s what brought him to the States. Then he moved to New York, where they met. Sylvia still didn’t understand
exactly
what it was he did back then, but she knew that only super-smart people had those kinds of jobs.

She observed him, hugging Gracie. Yup, he was smart, alright—not so smart to not be caught by her, though.
Women’s intuition always wins in the end.
But in other ways he was a genius. His job title had been something like, “Oracle Designer.” Sometimes he’d spout off about this program or that—a clever new app—but she wasn’t on his level when it came to technology, and found it hard to concentrate on what he was saying. She knew the basics but had always switched off with anything that reminded her of a math class. Switching off—a terrible habit she wished she could break. She still hadn’t even changed her cell. What was the point? Her life in Wyoming was so simple; she really didn’t need to be checking e-mails and Facebook on a Smartphone every five minutes.

Sylvia observed her daughter cling to her dad with such devotion, she felt ashamed for harboring suspicion. Tommy was a wonderful father—surely he wouldn’t risk their family life?

But the Bel Ange thing made her wonder if he felt incomplete, if he was secretly wishing to sow his seed, father a biological child of his own. The threat of a young, fresh twenty-year-old, ovaries pumping away, had made Sylvia more vulnerable than she believed possible, and she felt Tommy had betrayed their child, even though he had not seen his fantasy through.

Yet Melinda was right. In reality, he had
done
nothing except take the young woman out to lunch one time, promising her a portfolio of free headshots. But Sylvia’s unwavering trust was betrayed, her puppy-dog faith broken.

That St. Valentine’s Day duplicity was still a half-open wound. She never wore red anymore even though he loved her in red. She’d punished him, by kicking him out of the house. Punished him for making her feel like a fool in her red dress, make-up, and heels. She remembered how much she had toiled over that intricate, Valentine dinner of Milanese chicken, how she’d chilled the pink champagne, and laid the table with her late mom’s white damask tablecloth, and decorated the place mats with glittery, crimson hearts. Tommy seemed nonchalant about the whole affair. Not uninterested, but disinterested, as if he had no part to play. After dinner, he was using his iPhone, and the next day, despite Sylvia’s threats and tears from the weeks before, she saw that he had used his phone to send a goddamn message to the Bel Ange. (That darn Facebook again—public, for all to be read as if he subconsciously wanted to be caught. Who knew? Maybe he’d been sending private messages as well?) It was nothing romantic, just an “
I’ll
call you soon, take care, Marie,
” but still, that was it, as far as Sylvia was concerned. She, standing in uncomfortable heels for his benefit, too cold in her thin red dress, while he was busy thinking about someone else, the egg dripping down her Valentine’s Day face.

Now Tommy was back. She’d forgiven him for his schoolboy, mid-life crisis crush.

And now she was baking apple pie, wasn’t that proof enough? They were a family, and she was prepared to endure the bumps along the path of marriage.

For Grace’s sake.

And her own, if only she could shed that hurt the way a snake sheds its skin.

Sylvia turned off the oven, took out the pie, set it on the table, and breathed in the homey aroma. She looked out the window but the moose had moved on. It was lonely living in the middle of wild, Wyoming countryside. Sylvia assumed her love of the red-ochre-colored hills, the sweep of valleys and creeks, the blue-ribboned rivers, and skies bigger than God, would last forever. But she reminisced about her old life in New York, sparkling with friends and parties. Trips to art galleries, delicious take-out food, buying shoes for shoes’ sake that now clustered up closets, unworn.

She often wondered when it was, exactly, that she and Tommy had made the decision to sell their Brooklyn apartment. Was it that one Christmas when they were drinking eggnogs by the fire in Saginaw with her parents, when her mother was still alive? Or the summer afterwards, crammed onto Jones Beach, clawing for their patch of sand? Whose idea had it been to cash in the profit from the apartment and sink it into an environmentally friendly log cabin in Wyoming? Hers? Tommy’s? She asked herself that now, as she stared into space—into the never-ending view. Sylvia had a talent for decoration and had made their humble apartment a showpiece, but restoring a house in the countryside was a different story. They had not reckoned on the toil that eco country living would demand. It had all seemed so romantic at the time; moving to the heart of Native America—the two of them leveling out the garden and building their year-round greenhouse for their organic vegetables.

But the novelty wore thin. They ran out of stamina. The eco-friendly heating system had left them shivering. The furnace broke. It was freezing (they’d bought the house in summer, wide-eyed as they were). The snow fell thick, and the wind, like a howling wolf, yowled relentlessly about their chilled ears—so strong even Tommy, with his heavy frame, could sometimes lean against it, his weight supported.

Sylvia’s horse fantasy was pushed aside. The stables that came with the property stood empty. Just paying the bills was tough, never mind supporting an expensive equestrian hobby. Tommy had once been handsomely paid working in IT. She, too, made a good income from her job as a theatrical agent in New York. Yet both of them decided to turn their lives around, to live at one with nature and explore their creativity. Lord knows, she’d read enough movie scripts. She knew the format. She could write one too. Why not? And Tommy had always dreamed of being a photographer. They packed it all in, packed it all up, and drove out West to rolling skies and nights the color of indigo. They could live like cowboys, fulfill their dreams, and then sell the house in a few years with a nice chunk of profit if things didn’t work out. They could always return to their old jobs in New York. Or even start up afresh in California.

But neither they, nor the world, saw the recession like a sly fox waiting to pounce. Neither knew the extent of elbow grease a rural place demanded—the extra costs like a new septic system, the plumbing, and replacing the fire-hazardous wiring. Sylvia had imagined that Tommy (with his hardy, worked-out physique) would be the consummate Fixer-Upper and embrace chopping wood for the greedy stove all winter. She was wrong. He grew tired of their project; even the knotty pine doors and cedar-lined closets ceased to thrill him. The twenty-two feet cathedral ceilings that made them whoop with joy when they first set eyes on the house now spelled out C.O.L.D in cruel capital letters. The wrap-around porch made of redwood decking no longer held the most beautiful view on earth, because when December came the view was home to icy-tipped mountains that gnawed their bones with a walloping wind.

Then spring and summer would arrive and life was blissful again. Wild flowers sprinkled themselves like daytime stars across the hills, skies sang deep blue, and sparkling rivers were brimming with trout. But the joy all this brought was tempered by the Big Winter Threat lurking around the corner. Pretty summer days were interrupted by frosty visions of what was to come around again. She, Tommy, and Grace were caught in a never ending eddy, round and round they went as if they were in a little canoe looking out over gushing white water, stuck by the danger around them. If they sold, they’d lose every penny. They’d sunk all they had into this house. Besides, where would they live? They’d have to start from scratch and rent again. But there weren’t any jobs anymore, how would they make the rent? Tommy’s salary was history. So were the jobs. The IT world moved so swiftly, with thousands of wiz-kids jumping aboard the train every month that, even at thirty-two, Tommy seemed like a dinosaur. And he’d been out of touch, out of circulation. Getting another job, even with a pay decrease, was not an easy task. The theatrical agency Sylvia worked for had been bought out by one more powerful. Many of her old colleagues had been fired and her contacts were now spread thin.

Sometimes, she dreamed of her little family moving to Europe but Tommy wouldn’t hear of going back. Besides, the dollar was as weak as “an ex-Marine Colonel dying of cancer,” he said. Once a force, it now grappled to survive.

She and Tommy had also been a force, and were now grappling to survive.

So they soldiered on. Perhaps this disillusionment was what had caused the Bel Ange fantasy to hatch. A distraction, like looking at porn or sports cars. Living in a two-dimensional daydream world. Something to ease the stress for a thirty-something male who’d bitten off more than he could chew.