An Illusion of Trust (Sequel to The Brevity of Roses) (3 page)

"Long enough, Mr. Vaziri."

Later, when I hear Adam stir, I jump out of bed and scramble for my clothes. Jalal will never understand how it rips my heart to hear Adam cry out when he realizes he's alone.

"Hey," Jalal says. "Are you coming to Coelho with me tomorrow?"

"Why? You said you'd add the door."

"The door is a done deal," he says. "I want you to look at each room and discuss the remodeling with me."

"Each room?" He starts to respond, but I wave him off. "Adam's awake."

Adam stands in his crib, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. I pick him up, barely settling him on my hip before I lean over his crib and vomit. He begins to cry. In seconds, Jalal appears and takes him from me. I wipe my mouth with a corner of Adam's blanket.

"Morning sickness?"

"Uh-huh." I close my eyes against the mess in Adam's bed. But I don't straighten up for fear I'll set off another wave of nausea.

"Do you still have any of those pills the doctor gave you last time?" he asks. Before I can answer, he carries Adam from the room.

Despite my earlier caution, the stench is just as threatening, so I straighten up by inches and push away from the crib. In the guest bath across the hall, I rinse my mouth and splash cold water on my face. Jalal meets me at the door and hands me one of the little white tablets I took three times a day for weeks during my first pregnancy. Back then, I could spend half the day lying around; now with Adam to care for, I can't do that. Won't. "Where's Adam?"

"Safely corralled in his play area. Take your pill." When I place it on my tongue to dissolve, he pulls me close and cradles my head against his chest. "I hate this part for you," he says. "Go lie down. I will take care of Adam and clean up in here."

"I'll just rest in the living room for a bit," I say and push past him, ignoring his disapproving huff. I stretch out on the couch where I can watch Adam.

A minute later, Jalal hands me a glass of ginger ale with a straw. "Remember to sip," he says and returns to Adam's room to gather the bedding.

On the way to the washer, he stops behind me. I look up to see what he wants, but he's only stopped to watch his son. Adam smiles at Jalal and holds out his hand, offering a toy. I'm not surprised at the conflict evident in Jalal's expression. He never ignores his son, but he's holding a wad of filthy laundry.

I stand and move toward the corral. "Daddy will play with you in a minute, little man." It's picking at a scab, but whenever I watch Jalal with Adam, I can't help wondering how my father could have left me when I was four. Adam has already become our life; how much more will he mean to us by the time he's that age? But then Adam is an adorable child.

After Jalal starts the washer, he comes back and sits on the floor with us. I'm stacking blocks, which Adam delights in knocking down. Jalal says nothing to distract him. How generously he shares his son. I shove the blocks closer to him. "Watch Daddy build a
big
tower, Adam."

Being with a man who doesn't hide his emotions is a new experience for me. Sometimes he looks at me with such love it breaks my heart. And now with Adam, it's the same. How easily Jalal wells up when he looks at him. When he told me the story of his estrangement from his father, I couldn't imagine how he stood it, how he kept himself from begging his father to love him. And it was all for nothing, just a misunderstanding, because a hurt so deep in Jalal's childhood left a hole he could not fill and would not let his father fill.

I can't stand the thought I could wound my children. I fear that more than anything.

"I really think you should consult Azadeh about this renovation, not me," I tell Jalal, as we climb the steps along the outside wall of the garage. Garage, what a laugh. Yes, it houses cars, but it looks more like a showroom than any garage I've ever seen. I wouldn't be surprised if it equals the square footage of our beach house. The apartment above it is surely just as spacious.

Jalal holds a ring of unmarked keys, trying one after another in the door lock. "She will have her say, but this is your home now, and I think you should be involved."

It's going to take time for me to feel at home in this house. Meredith's presence feels strong to me, but Jalal acts indifferent to it. If that isn't just an act, it's quite a change from two years ago, when he truly faced Meredith's absence here for the first time. Right after her funeral, he walked out the door and drove away. It took him almost three years to work though his grief and find the courage to let her go. He took a big step toward healing on the day he came back here and said good-bye to her, but since then the house has served only as a guest house for his visiting family members. I certainly never pictured myself living here.

Jalal finally unlocks the door and we step inside. He opened the windows days ago, so though it needs a serious cleaning, the apartment doesn't smell musty. I walk through the empty living room and dining area into the kitchen, which is nicer than I expected, though nothing like the gourmet setup Jalal has in the main house. But then, even the best apartment I ever lived in ranked only a few notches above slum. "What exactly do you plan to change?"

"New carpet and paint, certainly. And I think we should update the kitchen and bathrooms. Is the layout good, do you think?"

"Sure." I'd glanced in the bedrooms as I walked past, and now I open the door at the end of the hall. "Where do these stairs lead?"

"Down to the laundry room, which has doors to the garage, the patio, and our kitchen."

Three staircases in one house. I'll be living in a maze. I point to the door directly across the narrow landing. "Does that lead into the upstairs of the house?"

"Yes," he says. "It can be locked from our side, but since Aza and Kristen are family …"

"That's fine."

When I close the door and turn, Jalal motions for me to follow him into one of the bedrooms. He crosses the room and opens the door to a walk-in closet. "These are the same in both rooms. They are nothing like your closet will be, but will they work? Of course we will have them fitted with all those drawers and cubbies you like."

"Do I?" I'm teasing. I've never had such a closet, but I've seen enough in magazines to have a healthy dose of organizer envy. "You're asking the wrong person. As it is, this is a bigger, nicer, closet than I've ever had." I open what I expect is the door to the bathroom. "Gross."

Jalal peers over me. "Bad, huh? Like I said, the bathrooms need updating."

"Surely that hideous pink tile is not original to the house."

"No. Someone remodeled … in the 50s maybe."

"Put it back to the original. Subway tiles, wouldn't it be? And order those reproduction period fixtures. All white, so Aza and Kristen can add their own colors."

Jalal wraps his arms around me and rests his chin on my head. "I knew you would have good ideas. Give me some for the kitchen?" He takes my hand and leads me there. "I think we should gut it," he says. "New cupboards, new floor, counters, appliances … everything."

"Do it." Anticipating his response, I press my fingertips against his lips. "Don't ask me to choose anything. You and Aza should decide."

He kisses my fingertips and then pulls them away. "You will have plenty of decisions to make for our house. Come." Jalal leads the way back down the hall to the inner staircase and down to our kitchen door. Halfway across the laundry room, he stops and turns to me. "Why are you out of breath? Were the stairs too much?" He splays his fingers across my stomach as though to shield the baby from the cause of my distress.

"I'm fine," I say, lying just like Jalal does when he refuses to admit he's anything but fine. My heart pounds, not with exertion but with dread. What do I expect; that Meredith's jealous ghost will rush at me, her nails clawing at my eyes for daring to claim my place in her house? Stupid. Yet, as we step into the kitchen, I'd swear it dims as though the sun sucked some of its light back out the windows. I am not welcomed. Threatened tears sting my eyes. Hormones. This has to be the pregnancy hormones. What next, a return of the mood swings that knocked Jalal off-balance and kept him on constant alert? I hug him tight.

"Whoa," he says. "Are you sure nothing is wrong?"

I nod against his chest, breathing in the scent of tea and spice that lingers on his skin, familiar, comforting. Then I give him another squeeze and push him away. The weird darkness still hangs over the kitchen, so I lead him out into the hall. "You're not really making changes to every room in the house, are you?"

Jalal stops at the entrance to the dining room and glances in, then turns and crosses the hall to the door of a room I don't know how to identify—what they call a sitting room, maybe? I hold my breath. Is he picturing Meredith in each room? Is he caught up in those memories? His silence makes me feel like a voyeur.

"Would this be good for a play room, a family room?" he asks. Then he frowns. "It would be nicer opened to the kitchen to make a great room, but that would require another remodel. Maybe later?"

"That's perfect," I say, hiding my relief. He hadn't been thinking of Meredith at all.

For another minute, Jalal stands in the doorway and then walks in. I fill his vacancy at the door. He stands in the center of the room staring at one wall. "On second thought, if we relocate the bank of cupboards on the other side of this wall, we could install an archway from this room to the kitchen now. Not quite a great room but close." He turns to me, brows raised.

"You're going to do all this work before we move in?"

"Yes."

"Won't that take months …
several
months? I thought we'd be settled here long before the baby comes."

"No problem. I will offer them a bonus to work harder."

"I thought you were talking minor changes. Painting and stuff."

"Oh yes, that too," he says, backing me into the hall.

Jalal heads toward the living room with me on his heels. This massive space has numerous leaded-glass windows. Despite its facing north, light floods the room. My mood lifts, even though evidence of Meredith's interests—and Meredith and Jalal's travels too, I suppose—fill the walls and shelves in the room.

"You have free reign," he says, making a sweeping gesture. "New furniture, new paint, new carpets … whatever you like."

"Not before we move in," I say. "It's fine for now."

"I want you to make it yours."

How can I make him understand that I've never had the luxury of such decisions? I simply don't have the experience or knowledge necessary. He's waiting for a response, so I nod. "Show me what you intend to do to our bedroom."

As I follow him up the stairs, I steel myself for my second ever look at the room where he made love to Meredith. My first had been little more than a polite glance, so brief I held my breath through it. Jalal stands at the top of the stairs scrutinizing me as I climb.

"Are you all right?" he asks.

"Stop it." I shoo him down the hall toward the back of the house. When I step into the bedroom, I catch my breath, but not for the reason I did the first time. The room is empty. Every trace of Meredith erased. I remembered the room as big, but now it looks enormous. "The furniture's in storage?"

"I gave it away."

"Gave it?"

"To Lorena. She has taken care of this house for years, so …" He shrugs.

The man gave thousands of dollars' worth of furniture to the housekeeper he already pays a ridiculous salary. How he manages his inheritance from Meredith is a mystery to me. "But … why?"

"I thought—" He shakes his head and gestures halfheartedly around the room. "I want it to be your dream room."

I smile. He's not fooling me. He wants his memories of this room erased. "Don't you want any input? It's your room too."

"I have only one request … no twin beds."

I crook my arm in his and rest my head against his shoulder. "I'll buy the largest bed I can find."

He laughs. "Of course you will because soon you will want to have
both
children sleeping with us."

A
zadeh and Kristen moved into the renovated apartment in the Coelho house a couple of weeks ago. The contractors have several rooms of the main house torn up, but Jalal promises they'll finish work by mid-November, six weeks from now. It's weird to think about not living here in our beach house. This is my first real home, the first place I ever felt truly loved and safe. But we're out-growing it. Even with one child, on some days these four rooms seem to shrink to one.

When it's time to move, I won't have much to pack. I've already gone through the boxes I brought with me when I moved in here. Jalal teased me about having a
back-up plan
, saying I kept that stuff in case I couldn't stand living with him and wanted to move out. We're long past that stage, so it was time to get rid of most of it. Now, I've distilled my previous life into one box containing some spiral notebook journals and a few mementos and photos, which I'll probably leave here in the garage.

One last time, I sort through the photos of my brother and sisters—Brandon, Nicole, Amber. I haven't seen them in ten years. The photos show happy faces, not the terrified ones I last saw when Child Protective Services ripped them out of my life and sent me to live with the father I hadn't seen in almost twelve years. I have a few photos of my mother, Becky. Only one shows my father. God, how young they were when they married. My father's face is partly scratched out. Did Becky do that during one of her weepy drunks or did I do it in anger? I don't remember now.