A Lady Under Siege (10 page)

Before getting up from the computer she gave in to an urge to google Thomas of Gastoncoe, not for the first time. In fact she had done this every time she had used the computer lately, typing his name and Lady Sylvanne’s into every search engine she could think of, but she had never turned up anything meaningful. Browsing absently through the results, she heard Betsy heading downstairs. Time to get dinner started.

In the kitchen she rubbed some skinless chicken thighs with olive oil, slid them into a Pyrex dish, sprayed them with concentrated juice from a plastic lemon, slathered on some honey, and popped it in the oven. Betsy came in and stood watching her sheepishly, but Meghan didn’t pick up on it. “Can you get me some spinach out of the fridge, hon?” she asked.

It was only when Betsy brought the packet to her at the sink that Meghan noticed the clumsily fashioned mass of bandages that encased the girl’s index finger. In alarm she cried, “What did you do to your hand?”

“It got cut,” Betsy said timidly.

“How?”

“I was practicing golf with Derek.”

“Derek.”

“From next door.”

“I know who Derek is, thank you very much. And where exactly were you golfing?”

“In the back,” said Betsy, wincing in anticipation of what was surely to follow.

“In our back? Derek came over to our back lawn?”

Betsy nodded. “Kind of by accident.”

Meghan looked out the kitchen window and with a shock saw that her garden had been violated. A dozen or so heavy slats from the collapsed fence lay scattered in a random pile, crushing her flowerbed. The gaping hole in the fence felt like a breech in her defences. She rushed to the kitchen door, reached for the handle, and stopped dead in her tracks when she saw that a pane of glass had been reduced to a few shards clinging to the frame. She gingerly put a finger through the opening, to confirm what her eyes were telling her.

“I tried to get all the pieces out of it, and got a cut,” Betsy said defensively. “He said I don’t need stitches or anything.”

“You might, by the time I get through with you,” Meghan said. Glancing out onto the floor of the deck she saw splattered drops of dried blood. She looked down at her feet and saw that someone had done a very poor job of wiping up similar dots on the kitchen floor. There were faint smear marks from the door to the sink. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed them before.

“First thing is we’re going to take that bandage off and
I’ll
decide whether you need stitches or not. Hopefully not, but at least we’ll make sure it’s clean, and dress it properly. That mess looks ridiculous. Did you put any antiseptic on it?”

Betsy shook her head.

“No, he didn’t think of that, did he? Too busy wrecking my fence.” Her anger, slow to build, now made her shake with rage. “
First
thing is to give that man a piece of my mind,” she seethed. “Or I might just chop his frigging head off!”

She marched out of the kitchen, out of the house, and under a full head of righteousness marched straight toward Derek’s door. Betsy followed her as far as their own front step, then called after her, “He went to get a piece of glass! He measured it and everything!”

Meghan took no heed. She rang the doorbell and pounded on his door obsessively, and when it became abundantly clear he wasn’t home, it only increased the fury she felt toward him.

15

M
eghan examined Betsy’s cut and decided it didn’t warrant stitches. She cleaned it and rebandaged it, and they sat down to dinner in strained silence. She poured herself a glass of wine, which she never did unless she had guests, but Betsy was too unnerved to make a comment about it. They were both hyperaware of noises from outside, both straining for any sound that might indicate that Derek had returned next door. It began to get dark outside. When they heard an exploratory shout of “Hello?” from Derek’s back yard they both almost jumped out of their skins. The missing pane in the window amplified his voice, as if permitting it to trespass into their home. Betsy pushed her chair back and stood up, but Meghan grabbed her forearm firmly and said, “Sit down. We’ll finish dinner first. Any repairs he makes will be done on my schedule, not his.” From outside they could hear Derek call out a few more times, quizzically, as if he knew they were in there and couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t come out. This was confirmed when he said, “All right, then. I’ll be at home when you’re ready. See you.” It sounded as if he were talking to an imaginary friend, or a ghost.

“Good,” Meghan said to Betsy. “You’ve got to put them in their place.” She allowed herself a smile. Seeing it, Betsy felt a weight lift from her. It was the first flicker of hope that she might be forgiven. She’d been picking at her chicken, but now she tore into it with relish. “Is your finger hurting?” Meghan asked her. She held it up, now properly disinfected under a neat bandage. “Maybe a little,” she said. “Not too bad.”

“If somehow it had been my fault, you’d be telling me it’s excruciating,” Meghan teased her. “You’d be writhing around on the floor right now.”

“Maybe it hasn’t hit me yet,” Betsy answered, then worried it might actually be true.

“Oh, it’s hit you,” said Meghan. “Unless it gets infected. But let’s not go there.”

They were silent again for a minute.

“Mum?”

“Uh huh.”

“Before you were married, did you desire Daddy?”

“Where did that come from?”

“Just asking.”

“Uh huh.”

After a pause, Betsy said, “Derek’s been married twice.”

Meghan’s hackles went up. “Oh?”

“He says sometimes people fall in love because they desire someone. But once you have the person, the desire can go away,” Betsy explained. “He told me the difference between desire and love: you can only desire something you don’t have, but love is when you love what you have. I think that’s what he said.” Betsy, feeling very grown-up discussing such a topic, didn’t notice that her mother was fuming. “He says what happened to his first marriage, it was all desire, no love. But his second marriage, that was love—but then his wife just disappeared. She just vanished. Why would a wife do that?”

Meghan threw her fork to her plate and rose from the table. “Wait right here,” she demanded. This has crossed a line, she told herself. It needs to be stopped, now.

She strode out of her house and was quickly back at Derek’s front door, ringing the bell. She could hear music inside, the thump thump thump of hard rock, not a genre she took much interest in, so she didn’t recognize the song, even though she could hear Derek singing along, off-key but with serious passion. She caught fragments of it—something about suffering through life without love—and then, through the heavy front door, she heard him howl like a wolf at the moon. She rang the bell again, then rapped her fist on the door until her knuckles hurt. She was livid. She thought, The bastard is going to make me wait until his idiotic song ends. When the song ended she rang the bell again, and soon the door opened, and there was Derek, looking at her sympathetically through a cloud of tobacco and marijuana smoke. She could hear other voices from within, then laughter, then a new song came on, drowning out all else.

“Just a minute,” said Derek, and he disappeared, leaving her to stare down a long narrow hallway with a bare hardwood floor scarred by deep random gouges she couldn’t begin to imagine the origins of. She heard the blare of music lowered just enough to allow conversation on the doorstep. Coming back down the hall toward her he said, “I yelled for you in back earlier, don’t know if you heard me—wanted to tell you I couldn’t get a piece of glass cut to size on such short notice, the store was closing by the time I got my shit together. It’ll have to be tomorrow. Your back door won’t exactly be secure, but what the hell, it’s only one night, and nobody knows about it except you and me.”

“I want you to stay away from my daughter,” Meghan said.

“Yeah, sorry about the little accident. Bit of a disaster, I did tell her not to touch that glass—”

“I’m not talking about the glass, or the accident, which wasn’t an accident so much as an inevitability, given the hazardous things you keep encouraging her to do. I’m talking about discussing who you desire and how you desire them with a ten-year-old girl who’s home alone.”

Her words sobered him—in fact he looked as though he’d been slapped. “But she
asked
me,” he protested. “She asked if I’d ever been married, and I said, Yes, twice, and she asked Why didn’t any of them last, and I said, You’re too young to understand.”

“Right,” said Meghan caustically. “Then you went ahead and explained anyway.”

“No, I tried to put her off,” he replied, “But she told me she was plenty old enough to understand, that her dad says she’s wise beyond her years and knows lots of things she shouldn’t. And I said, Like what? And she said, My homeroom teacher’s bisexual, which means he can fall in love with a man or a woman.” He raised an eyebrow and asked, “Did you know her homeroom teacher is a bisexual?”

“No, I didn’t, in fact,” she said through clenched teeth. “Anything else I should know about her?”

“She loves you. She’s very worried about you. She hates her dad for wrecking a good thing. She hates being forced to visit him. She’s a nice kid. Very smart. Feisty.”

His words had the momentary effect of draining all the fight out of her. Her shoulders drooped. Suddenly she felt more tired than anything. “That, I knew,” she said.

“Right then, I’ll see you tomorrow,” Derek said brightly. “I’ll aim for an early start, up with the songbirds, decked out in amateur carpenter’s gear. I’m looking forward to it. I haven’t worked with putty in years.”

Meghan felt a need to reframe and reiterate the message she’d come storming over to deliver. “I may not like you, but she does,” she told him. “I’d tell you to stay the hell away from her, but we’re neighbours, she’s bound to see you, and ordering her not to talk to you would make her want to talk to you all the more. Just keep your distance, especially if you’re drinking or smoking pot, or messing with any other substances like that. If you do see her, be nice. She’s a fragile kid.”

Derek shook his head. “Fragile? You’re projecting. That kid is tough as nails. She was such a trouper—that was a nasty cut, you know—there was blood everywhere. Grown men faint at less, some anyway—I felt lightheaded myself.”

Meghan sized him up anew. “I can see why Betsy likes you, you’re a child. If she were a few years older, she’d see right through you.”

“I wasn’t counting on her as a friend for life anyway. She’ll make her own choices, she already does. She likes me—big deal. I may not be terribly presentable or successful on your terms, but I am in no way responsible for an ugly divorce that’s messing up her ten-year-old head.”

His words tore at her, adding another blow to a heart already battered and aching with a mother’s guilt. She wanted to cry, but ordered herself not to. “You’re mean,” she muttered, but the thought trailed off, unfinished. All she could think of was Betsy, and the impossible sum of things known and unknown that would be required of her to make her daughter’s life right again.

B
ACK IN HER KITCHEN
Meghan found Betsy doing dishes at the sink, and scolded her. She had told her not to get the bandage wet.

“It doesn’t hurt,” Betsy said.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said sternly. “Go get into your pj’s and I’ll change it for a dry one.”

“How’d it go with Derek?” Betsy asked.

“Oh, we had a lovely chat,” Meghan said acidly. “There’s no glass until tomorrow.”

Betsy looked at the empty window pane in the door. It was close enough to the handle that anyone could reach through and unlock it.

“What are we going to do about the door?” she asked.

“I’ll figure something out.”

“Like what?”

“Go and get ready for bed,” Meghan told her. “Just give me five minutes to sit and think of something.”

“How come it’s always five minutes?” Betsy wondered.

“Go!”

She did as told. Meghan slumped into a chair at the table. She could actually feel a draft of cool night air coming through the empty pane. One small little puncture in her home had altered everything. She really wished she was handier with tools. Was there a way to nail the whole door shut without wrecking it? Then she realised she didn’t have any tools in this house, the tools she was thinking of were all Seth’s tools and they were all with Seth. She hated herself in this moment for having to rely on men to fix things, for never having learned self-reliance of the practical sort. Maybe it’s time to change that, she thought, maybe tomorrow I’ll tell Derek to forget it, and I’ll go to Home Depot or whatever and get a pane of glass myself, and some putty or whatever they use, and do it myself. How hard can it be? I’ll be like the women on those home reno shows that get all empowered by doing it for themselves. But then she thought, who am I kidding—I never watch those shows because I never want to be those women, I’d rather hire a plumber than get all excited about figuring out how to hook up a faucet. I just wish there were female plumbers, I’d hire one in a second. After she’d crawled around under the sink I’d make coffee and we’d dissect our disastrous love lives.