Blessing in Disguise (52 page)

Grace studied her mother’s face for signs of panic. As Mother went on about Chris—something about a note left on his computer—she found herself not so much listening as allowing herself to be lulled by her mother’s carefully modulated tone. True, she looked a bit more flushed than usual, but that could have been from being hurtled over here, and half scared to death by one of New York’s kamikaze cabbies. Mother would have politely thanked him for his unnecessary speed ... and stiffed him his tip.

“You must have misunderstood,” Grace said. Otherwise, wouldn’t Mother seem more upset?

“I can read as well as you, thank you very much.” Then all at once Cordelia’s face seemed to sag, revealing the tiny lines scoring its smooth, powdered mask. Now Grace
was
beginning to feel alarmed. “Grace ... I didn’t want to upset you by letting myself get into a dither over this ... but I have every reason to believe that Chris is serious about not coming home—to you
or
Win. Dear, are you going to ask me in,” she asked wearily, “or must I stand out here all night?”

Grace realized with a start that her mother—in her coat, with a pretty flowered scarf knotted under her chin—was still standing in the hallway outside her door. As she entered, Mother’s presence somehow took over, leaving Grace, as she dutifully took her coat, feeling as if it was Cordelia who lived here, and she was the visitor.

In the living room area, she watched her mother lower herself carefully into the deep chair across from the sofa, her arms extended stiffly on either side of her to ease her descent. She look tired—more than that, actually
ill
. Not that she’d admit it.

No. Autocratic and stubborn, she’d suffer the worst headache rather than let on to a soul. Admitting to being sick, in her book, showed a lack of character.

“Some coffee or tea?” Grace asked. “To be honest, you look as if you could use a shot of brandy.”

She felt something fluttering in her chest, like the moths and butterflies she had, as a child, held cupped in her hands, their wings frantically beating in an effort to escape. She must not go to pieces. She must act normal, play the perfect hostess, or this thing inside her
would
break loose.

“Thank you, no. Grace, dear, sit down. Please. You
must
listen. I’m not imagining this. I haven’t lost my marbles, and I’m not the type to rattle easily, as you know.” She took a deep breath. “My grandson is out there somewhere ... and he might be in trouble.” She gestured toward the bank of tall windows, dark except for the room’s partial reflections swimming ghostlike in the glass.

My fault,
Grace thought.

That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it, Mother? All my fault. Divorcing Win. Leaving Chris with a broken home, a broken heart. If only I’d been a better mother, a better wife, then Chris would right now be toasting marshmallows with his Boy Scout troop instead of roaming around the park with his dog while we all worry ourselves sick.

She felt a dark rose of anger blooming in her chest, its thorns sharp, pricking her. She had to concentrate to hear her mother’s soft voice as she went on.

“Grace, I overheard him on the phone with Jack. He said he’d been trying to reach you ... that he called here and there was no answer. It couldn’t have been more than an hour ago.”

“I was out of milk,” Grace remembered. “I ran down to the corner store.”

“He was upset. Jack tried to get Chris to open up, talk to him. But Chris got angry ... said some things which he shouldn’t have.”

“What things?”

“He told Jack about you and Win ... that Win had spent the night with you.”

Grace slumped down onto the sofa. There was a queer, flat buzzing in her ears, like from a phone receiver that’s been left off the hook.

Jack knows. ... Oh, God ... he knows he knows he knows.
Her mind whirled. She thought about Jack, how she’d been avoiding him and missing him at the same time. Wanting to return his calls, but not sure what to say. And now would he ever forgive her? How could he?

Chris.
To have lashed out at Jack like that, he had to have been more than merely upset. Confrontation wasn’t Chris’s style. And how had he even known? Could Win really have been such an idiot as to have told him?

“All right, yes, it’s true.” Grace felt sixteen again, caught necking in the back seat of Clay MacPherson’s Olds Cutlass: her face on fire, her whole body seeming to fold in on itself.

But Mother—wasn’t this just what she’d hoped for? Wouldn’t she secretly be pleased?

Cordelia surprised her by saying, “Grace, there’s something you ought to know about Win. ...” She stopped, frowning, appearing to reconsider.

“Win and I aren’t ... I mean, just because he spent the night doesn’t mean we’re getting back together.”

Chris was the one she ought to be explaining this to—but where was he? The fluttery thing in her chest was breaking free, swelling, becoming huge, until she could hardly breathe. What if he
wasn’t
in the park, or at a friend’s? What if he was roaming the streets, heading for God knows where?

As if she’d read her mind, Mother was telling her, “His note said he’d be all right, and not to worry.” She sat up straighter, squaring her shoulders, as if by good posture alone she might somehow shield them both. “The good news is, he can’t have gotten very far.”

“How do you know?” Grace, as she pushed her hands through her hair, noticed that her palms were wet.

“I heard him on the phone not ten minutes before I discovered he’d gone.”

In Grace’s mind, Chris was four again—a little boy in Oshkosh overalls who hadn’t yet lost all his baby fat, wandering around out there, alone, frightened, prey to the muggers, perverts, crazies who haunted the streets of New York.

She forced herself to her feet. Only a short distance from here to the phone on her desk, but it felt like a continent.

“The police,” she said, as if there were another person inside her, riding shotgun, coolly instructing her. “I’ll call the police—isn’t that what people do?”

She had never in her life summoned the police, not even when she’d had good reason—like the time she’d used Chris’s old cap gun to scare off a burglar up on her roof trying to break in through her bathroom skylight.

“I’ve already taken care of that, dear.” Cordelia sighed, smoothing the lap of her already perfectly smooth dress. “They can’t help us. Not until he’s been missing at least forty-eight hours. The officer I spoke to suggested we sit tight and wait for him to come to his senses and return home. Most of them do, he said.”

“Did you apologize for bothering him, and thank him for his trouble?” She hadn’t meant to say that—the sarcasm had just slipped out.

Cordelia didn’t move, not even to flinch. She merely stared at Grace with a calmness that might have seemed eerie had Grace not noticed how tightly her lips were clamped together.

Now she was rising, the effort seeming almost too much, causing her arms and legs to quiver. Dull patches of color stood out in her cheeks. Grace felt ashamed for snapping at her, when it was obvious Mother was only trying to help.

“Mother, I ...”

“I suggest we start with Chris’s friends,” Cordelia said briskly. “Do you have a notepad and a pencil? I can start calling while you make a list of their numbers,”

“I have a school directory,” Grace told her. “I could try his classmates. He doesn’t have many friends, but maybe ...”

“No maybes,” Cordelia cut her off, once again in perfect control. “Heavens, I can’t think why I went off my head, getting so worked up over nothing—of
course
he’s at some friend’s house. No grandson of mine would be addle-headed enough to wander the streets in this nasty cold when he had someplace warm and safe to go to.”

“Remember how you were always out looking for
me
long after dark?” Grace recalled. “Sometimes, I’d hear you calling me and I’d hide so you wouldn’t see me.”

“Just to be contrary.” Cordelia sniffed. “Now, what about that directory?”

“How far could they get, a boy and a dog?” Grace fought to keep her hands from trembling as she searched on the bookshelf near the entrance to her office for the St. Andrew’s directory.

“Farther than you might imagine,” Cordelia replied in a soft voice heavy with sorrow. It wasn’t just Chris she was talking about, Grace realized.

Grace, her eyes welling, thought of all the missed opportunities for closeness that stretched between her and Mother like mile markers along a lonely stretch of highway. She prayed that she and Chris wouldn’t end up like this—two people linked by a bond closer than any other, but strangers to each other.

“You can start with the A’s.” Brusquely, so Cordelia wouldn’t see how choked up she was, Grace handed her mother the school directory. “I’m going downstairs to ask Chris’s friend Scully if he knows anything. Then I’m going to call Jack.”

Jack.

Please, God, let him understand,
she prayed, even while she knew in her heart that such a thing was beyond understanding.

Let it not be too late.

More than an hour later, after exhausting every number in the school directory and getting nowhere, Grace collapsed onto the sofa, feeling utterly drained. She knew that she ought to call Win at his office, that she couldn’t keep putting it off. But after going to bed with him ... God, how could she face him? She felt both foolish and angry, mostly at herself, but at Win, too. How could he have raised Chris’s hopes by telling him? What kind of father would have done that to his son?

Even so, she found herself saying, “I should call Win.”

“Yes, of course,” Cordelia agreed.

Grace stared at her, trying to read her expression. Was Mother hoping this crisis would accomplish what Win’s charms had failed to? That her and Win’s shared worry over Chris would somehow reunite them?

“I know what you’re thinking,” she told her mother, unable to hold back any longer. “If I hadn’t left Win in the first place, none of this would have happened.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Cordelia said, “but if you hadn’t left Win, you wouldn’t have gotten to know Jack.”

“I thought you didn’t like Jack.”

“What on earth gave you that idea?”

“But you and Win are so ...”

“I know what I must seem like to you,” she broke in. “A pigheaded woman, set in her ways, not willing to bend or change. Not willing to accept that a marriage I thought was perfect could be anything but.” Her hands, loosely laced in her lap, suddenly knotted, the diamond wedding band she had not taken off after her husband died flashing against a whitened knuckle. “But lately I’ve been forced into seeing a lot of things.”

“Daddy.” Grace nodded in understanding.

Cordelia bowed her head briefly, bringing her tightly laced fingers to her forehead. “I wonder if you can know what it’s like, to love someone so much that the thought of being without him, or of him not loving you back as deeply as you love him, is almost like death.”

Grace thought of Jack and hoped he loved her even half as much as that. Enough, at least, to forgive her.

“After you and your sister were born ...” Mother dropped her hands and lifted her head, her silver hair fanning across her cheeks. “It was as if ... the four of us, we formed some kind of magic circle, and nothing bad could ever get through to hurt us.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “I didn’t count on the hurt coming from
inside
our circle.”

“He didn’t do it to hurt you,” Grace said.

“Maybe not. But whether he meant to or not doesn’t make it any easier to bear.”

Grace saw anger in the pinched line of Mother’s mouth, and in the queer flatness of her gaze. Good. She wasn’t keeping it locked inside.

“I know you’re angry at me, too,” Grace said, keeping her voice soft. “And I don’t blame you for thinking I wrote this book partly to get back at you. I didn’t, of course, but that’s not the point, is it? You and I—the problem we have with each other goes way back.”

Grace’s throat closed up—like when she was little, after something bad at school, wanting desperately to ask her mother for comfort but unable to say the words.

“You were such a willful girl,” Mother stepped in, not without gentleness. “Always crossing me, questioning every bit of advice, every ultimatum. I suppose I thought you needed a strong hand to guide you.” Her mouth, oddly naked-looking without the rose-colored lipstick she almost always wore, turned up in a rueful smile. “For all the good it did either of us.”

“A strong hand wasn’t what I needed,” Grace answered. “All I ever wanted was for you to listen to me. Like I want you to listen to me now.”

“Some things are just too hard to hear.”

“Even the truth?”

“Especially
the truth.” Cordelia looked away, her face contorted with pain. After a moment, she added, “I spoke with Nola Emory.”

Grace stared at her. “When?”

“Today. We met in the park.”

“Oh, Mother ...” She suddenly was overwhelmed with compassion.

“Things are seldom as terrible as you imagine they’ll be,” Cordelia said in a strained voice that seemed to deny her words.

Grace managed to get up and walk over to her mother. She placed a hand on Cordelia’s shoulder, feeling the sharpness of her bones, like one of the delicate but sturdy pieces of antique furniture that filled the old house in Blessing.

“But don’t you see?” she said. “In the end, he chose
us.”

The words hung in the air, seeming to echo in the cavernous space.

“Yes, he chose us,” Mother replied, staring at the bookcase in front of her. “But that doesn’t change what’s happening now, does it? All this scandal—I can’t imagine what it’ll be like back in Blessing. And his library—so many pledges will disappear because of this.”

Grace cleared her throat. Since her last run-in with her mother, an idea had been taking shape in her mind. Now she realized that she must have known for some time what she was going to do. As Eugene Truscott’s daughter, she had no other choice—not if she wanted to feel good about herself.

“How much do you need?” she asked.

“At least a million, in addition to what we’ve already raised.”