Blue Bloods (11 page)

Not long after her parents left, the Italian arrived. He was a distinctly changed man since the day they’d met at Barneys. His cocky demeanor was gone, as was the predatory smile. She’d sucked that out of him. It was Mimi who was in con trol. She’d almost had her fill of him—he was so easy. No one was a match for her.

“I’ll drive,” she said, taking the keys from his pocket. He didn’t protest.

It was only a short distance to the American Society, but Mimi ran a few red lights on the way anyway, causing an ambulance to swerve to the side to avoid an accident.

She pulled up to the awning, where the doorman was waiting. They disembarked from the car, and Mimi threw the keys to the valet. The Italian followed her like a puppy. They walked into the mansion together.

Mimi looked devastating in a midnight satin Peter Som dress, with her hair in a high chignon, a triple strand of heir loom South Sea pearls as her only accessory. She tugged on her date’s arm and steered him up the stairs. There, she confronted the sight of her best friend, Bliss Llewellyn, in a passionate lip lock with that loser wastoid , Dylan Ward.

“Hell000.” Mimi’s voice was icy in the extreme. When did this happen? Mimi didn’t like being kept out of the loop.

Bliss disengaged from Dylan’s tongue. She blushed when she saw Mimi. Bliss’s lipstick was smudged and her hair was askew. Dylan smirked at Mimi.

“Bliss. The bathroom. Now.”

Bliss gave Dylan an apologetic look, but she followed Mimi to the ladies’ room without question.

Mimi checked the stalls and shooed the maid outside the lavatory. When she was satisfied there was no one inside, she turned to Bliss.

“What the hell is going on with you? You’re with that guy?” Mimi demanded. “You could be with any guy you want.”

“I like him,” Bliss said defiantly. “He’s cool.”

“Cool,” Mimi drew out the word so it had ten syllables. Cooooooollll .

“What’s your problem?” Bliss asked defiantly.

“Problem?I don’t have a problem. Who said I had a problem?” Mimi asked, looking around as if surprised to see no one there.

“Is it the Connecticut thing?” Bliss asked. “Because he had nothing to do with it.”

“What are you talking about?” Mimi asked.

“I don’t know, I heard there was some accident with some girl in Greenwich , and he was involved.” Bliss said. “But anyway, it’s not true.”

Mimi shrugged. It was the first time she’d heard about it, but it didn’t surprise her. “I just don’t know why you’re wast ing your time with him.”

“Why do you hate him so much?”

Mimi was taken aback. It was true—she reacted to Dylan with an outsize revulsion. Why did she hate him? She wasn’t sure, but she recognized the gut feeling, and her gut was never wrong.

There was something she didn’t like about that guy, but she couldn’t put a finger on it.

“What’s up with your boyfriend, by the way? He’s like a zombie,” Bliss said, pointing to the corner. The Italian heir had followed them inside the ladies’ room and was currently drooling on the doorway column. All of Mimi’s guys seemed to be like that—brain dead.

“I’ll deal with him later.”

“I’m going to go back to my date,” Bliss said pointedly.

“Fine.But you better be there on Monday for The Committee meeting.”

Bliss had almost forgotten. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to join some snotty social committee, but she had to appease Mimi somehow. “Sure.”

Mimi watched her friend leave. What a waste. It both ered her that Bliss was exerting her independence. There was nothing Mimi disliked more than rebellion in a subordi nate. She walked out of the bathroom, tugging on her date’s tie to move him forward. And that’s when she saw the second image that scorched her brain.

Her brother Jack, on the dance floor, with that Van Alen girl in his arms.Now Mimi really felt like vomiting.

When Schuyler was with Jack, it was like time and space stopped. She didn’t even feel like she was in a room full of crowded, sweaty teenagers. They moved with the same rhythm, their bodies perfectly in tune with each other. Jack expertly kept her body close to his, leaning down to breathe lightly on her neck. It was strange how she could see him so clearly in the dark, when everyone else was a shadowy blur. She closed her eyes, and for a moment, saw the two of them—dressed differently. They were in the same ballroom at the mansion, except it was a hundred years earlier—and she was dressed in a long evening dress with a tight corset bodice and silk petticoats, and he was handsome and debonair in a white tuxedo with tails. The music ceased to be the sexy enchantment of the Muse song and became a gentle waltz.

It was like a dream, but it wasn’t.

“What’s happening?” she asked, looking at him as he twirled her around.

Around them, the ballroom was filled with light and soft music. The tinkling of champagne glasses, the gentle flutter ing from the ladies’ fans.

But Jack only smiled.

They continued to dance, and Schuyler found that she knew the intricate steps. At the end of the song, they clapped politely.

Schuyler looked around, and suddenly she was back in the present again, wearing her fifties prom dress, Jack in his blue blazer and red tie. She blinked. Had she imagined it? Was it real?

She was confused and disoriented.

“Let’s take a break,” he said, as he took her hand and steered her off the dance floor. They walked out to the bal cony. Jack lit a cigarette. “Want one?”

Schuyler shook her head.

“Did it happen to you too?” she asked.

Jack nodded. He took a puff and exhaled.

They looked out atPark Avenue . Next toRiverside Drive , Schuyler thought it was one of the most beautiful streets in the world.Park Avenue , with its regal array of pre war apartment buildings, fleets of yellow cabs streaming up and down along the median. New York was a magical place.

“What was it?”

But before Jack could reply, there was a scream from inside the mansion. They looked at each other, thinking the same thing. Aggie’s death. Was there another? They ran back into the hall.

“It’s fine,” Mimi Force was saying. “He just passed out. God, get a grip, Kitty.” Mimi’s Italian date was splayed out on the landing, completely passed out, his face drained of all color. “Jack, a hand?” she snapped, seeing her brother in the doorway.

Jack hurried to his sister’s side and helped lug the Italian to a sitting position.

Schuyler could see Jack saying something angrily to Mimi, and she overheard bits of his harangue, “stepped over the line … You could have killed him … Remember what the Wardens said…”

She stood there, not knowing what to do, when Bliss and Dylan appeared. Dylan took one look at the compromising tableau. “Let me guess, he was with Mimi Force?”

Schuyler nodded. “I think it’s time we blow this joint.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Bliss replied.

Schuyler gave Jack one last look. He was still arguing with his sister. He didn’t even notice that she was leaving.

Catherine Carver’s Diary

20th of December, 1620

Plymouth , Massachusetts

The men have been gone for days now, and still there is no word. We are frightened. They should have arrived there and returned by now, with news of the colony. But all is silent. The children keep me company and we make time pass by reading aloud from the books I was able to bring over. If only we could leave this ship – it is always wet and terribly crowded, but the structures are not yet ready. The men are allowed to camp ashore, but we must remain here in this dark place.

I am afraid, but I comfort myself with the knowledge that I will know if John and the rest of the company are lost. So far, I have not felt nor seen anything in my visions. There is doubt among the colony as to whether we have truly escaped. Rumors are spreading that on of them is here, hidden among us – there is much whispering and suspicion. The Billington boy has been missing, they said. Disappeared. Taken. But someone remembers that he could have gone with the Roanoke party, so no one is worried for now. We watch, and wait, holding our breath.

— C.C.

SEVENTEEN

Ever since Schuyler could remember, she had spent every Sunday at the hospital. When she was younger, she and her grandmother would take a cab all the way to the uppermost reaches of Manhattan . Schuyler was such a familiar face, the guards never even gave her a visitor’s badge anymore but simply waved her through. Now that she was older, Cordelia rarely joined her on the weekly visits, and Schuyler made the trip solo.

She walked past the emergency room, through the glassed-in lobby, and past the giftshop selling balloons and flowers. She bought a newspaper from the stand and walked to the back elevator.

Her mother was on the top floor, in a private room that was outfitted like a suite in one of the city’s best hotels.

Unlike most people, Schuyler did not find hospitals depressing. She had spent too much of her childhood there, zooming up and down the hallways in a borrowed wheel chair, playing games of hide and seek with the nurses and orderlies. She ate every Sunday brunch in the basement cafe teria, where the servers would pile her plate high with bacon, eggs, and waffles.

She passed her mother’s regular nurse in the hallway.

“It’s a good day,” the nurse informed her, smiling.

“Oh. Great.” Schuyler smiled back. Her mother had been in a coma for most of Schuyler’s life. A few months after giving birth to her, Allegra had suffered an aneurysm and gone into shock.

Most days, she lay placidly on the bed, not moving, barely breathing.

But on “good” days, something happened—a flutter underneath the closed eyelids, the movement of her big toe, a twitch in her cheek. Once in a while, her mother sighed for no reason. They were small, infinitesimal signs of a vibrant woman trapped in the cocoon of a living death.

Schuyler remembered the doctor’s final prognosis, made almost ten years ago. “All of her organs are function ing. She is perfectly healthy, except for one thing. Somehow, her mind is closed to her body. She has normal sleep and wake patterns, and she is not brain dead by any means. The neurons are firing. But she remains unconscious. It is a mystery.” Surprisingly, the doctors were still convinced there was a chance she could wake up given the right circumstances. “Sometimes, it’s a song. Or a voice from the past. Something triggers them, and they wake up. Really, she could wake up at any time.”

Certainly, Cordelia believed it was true and encouraged Schuyler to read to Allegra so that her mother would know her voice and perhaps respond to it.

Schuyler said thank you to the nurse and peeked through the small glass window cut in the door so that the nurses could check in on their patients without having to disturb them.

There was a man inside the room.

She kept her hand on the knob, without turning it. She looked through the glass again.

The man was gone.

Schuyler blinked. She swore she had seen a man. A gray-haired man, in a dark suit, kneeling by her mother’s bedside, holding her hand, his back turned to the door. His shoulders had been shaking and it looked like he was crying.

But when she looked through the glass again, there was nothing.

This was the second time now. Schuyler wasn’t as much troubled as curious. The first time she’d glimpsed him was several months ago, when she’d left the room for a moment to fetch a glass of water. When she’d returned to the room, she was startled to see someone there. Out of the corner of her eye, she’d seen a man standing by the curtains, looking out the window at theHudson River below. But the moment she had entered, he had disappeared. She hadn’t seen his face—just his back and his neat gray hair.

At first, she had been frightened of him, wondering if he was a ghost, or a trick of the light and her imagination. But she had a feeling she knew who the nameless, faceless visitor could be.

She pushed open the door slowly and walked inside the room. She put the thick layers of the Sunday newspaper by the rolling table next to the television.

Her mother was lying on the bed, her hands folded at her stomach. Her fair, blond hair, long and lustrous, was fanned out on the pillow. She was the most beautiful woman Schuyler had ever seen. She had a face like a Renaissance Madonna—serene and peaceful.

Schuyler walked to the chair next to the foot of the bed. She looked around the room again. She peered into the bathroom her mother never used. She pulled back the cur tains in front of the window, half expecting to find someone hiding there. Nothing.

Disappointed, Schuyler resumed her spot by the bed.

She opened the Sunday paper. What would she read today? War? Oil crisis? Shootings in theBronx ? An article in the magazine about new, experimental Spanish cuisine? Schuyler decided on the “Styles” section—the “Weddings and Celebrations.” Her mother seemed to enjoy those. Sometimes, when Schuyler read her a particularly interest ing “Vows” column, her toes wriggled.

Schuyler began to read. “Courtney Wallach married Hamilton Fisher Stevens at the Pierre this afternoon. The bride, thirty-one, a graduate of Harvard and Harvard Business School …” She looked hopefully at her mother. There was no movement from the bed.

Schuyler tried another. “Marjorie Fieldcrest Goldman married Nathan McBride in a ceremony at the Tribeca Rooftop yesterday evening. The bride, twenty-eight, an asso ciate editor at …”

Still nothing.

Schuyler searched the announcements. She could never predict what her mother would like. At first, she thought it was news from people they knew, the marriages of heirs and heiresses to old New York families. But just as often, her mother sighed upon hearing a moving story of two com puter programmers who had met at a bar inQueens .

Her thoughts drifted back to the mysterious visitor. She looked around the room again, and noticed something. There were flowers by the table. A bouquet of white lilies in a crystal vase.

Not the cheap carnations they sold downstairs. This was an exquisite arrangement of tall, glorious blossoms. Their intoxicating smell filled the room. It was funny how she hadn’t seen them as soon as she walked in. Who would bring flowers to a comatose woman who wouldn’t be able to see them? Who had been there? And where had he gone? More important, where had he come from?