Invasion of Privacy (16 page)

"You didn’t tell him about me at all, did you, Mom?" She watched with sadness as the realization hit him, the slight hunching of his shoulders as he absorbed the blow. "He doesn’t even know who I am, does he?"

"Bobby, you have to trust me on this. I have to protect you."

"From my own father? Didn’t you love him at all?"

"Of course I did. But that was a long time ago."

"He is a good man, if you loved him."

"People change."

"Are you his lawyer?"

"He already has another lawyer. I went to see him, though." She led the way back into his bedroom, where Troy’s even breath steadily inflated and deflated the covers on the bed across the room. Bobby groped under his pillow and squeaked his new toy seal in his hand. Nina tucked him in. Just before she left, he put both arms around her, reaching up for a kiss.

"Mom, he needs us," he whispered into her ear. "You have to help him."

His words took hold of her and lodged inside her heart.

16

"TELL ME WHY YOU LEFT ME, KURT," NINA SAID INTO her telephone in the visitor cubicle.

She had gone back out of curiosity; that was all.

They didn’t talk about the case but had tried to make small talk about jail and the weather. You couldn’t have a casual conversation with a man in jail. You couldn’t say, so, how’s it feel to be back? Soon enough all that was left was to say what was between them.

"The story begins before I even knew you," Kurt said. "It’s an ugly story. I suppose I was afraid you’d leave me if I told you everything. After I left I thought of finding you, but I couldn’t. Terry was after me, and I might lead her to you."

Nina waited. She could hear him breathing over the line. Was he thinking up a story, or would he tell her the truth? She would judge that later. "I was twenty-three," Kurt began....

He was twenty-three, and she was eighteen. Her name was not Terry. Her name was Tamara.

Dragged along by an old friend to a hoedown hosted by the local high school, he’d found her tipsy and pretty as a wildflower, swaying to music. Because he didn’t like crowd scenes, he’d taken her outside. And one thing led to another.

That was all that happened at first.

Her parents would have disapproved, if they had known about the relationship. They didn’t know him by name. They only knew what she told them, that he was five years older, out of college, a musician, nothing about what they did together.

Tam’s father hadn’t worked for some time. Any little thing would set her father off, Tam complained to Kurt. Her wearing a leather jacket. Her dating a boy who wore an earring or didn’t like sports. Anyone who might take her seriously. Anyone who might tempt her from the academic goals they had set for her. The family was religious, but not hard-core, according to Tamara. Her father’s obsessive protectiveness drove Tam up the wall. Against all Tam’s angry protestations, her mother stood by her husband, and therefore firmly against her daughter. Tam said her mother drank secretly.

At first Kurt had believed what Tam told him about her parents. It wasn’t until later that he realized her parents had good reasons for pulling in the reins on their wayward daughter. Tam had problems, big ones, too big for her parents, and eventually too big for him.

He agreed when she insisted on seeing him on the sly, although it made him uncomfortable. But meeting parents was not his favorite thing. He was happy to put it off, figuring that, as things got more serious, they would come around.

Months of secret dates had followed, arranged by Tamara, at her whim. She had other friends that she saw occasionally. He met them once, Doreen and Michael, but had decided years before that he had nothing to gain by being stoned, and getting loaded was their primary form of entertainment. Music sent him to a better place, and he needed to keep his wits about him to play. They found him boring. He found them boring.

But sex with Tam was never boring. As time went on, they settled into a routine of meeting once or twice a week and going to bed. They enjoyed each other, and they could have gone on for a long time that way. He liked her energy, her bright eyes and cheerful manner. She was a rebel.

One night in early winter they parked on a knoll above Emerald Bay with Lake Tahoe below them, broken by the wind into crushed diamonds.

"Kurt, stop," she said, extricating herself gently from his touch, moving to her own side of the red Toyota, smoothing her hair. "I’ve got to tell you something." A faint bleariness in her eyes revealed to him that she had smoked at least one joint before meeting him that night. He was disappointed, but not surprised. She wasn’t ready to quit, but she would. He just had to show her a better time than those clods Doreen and Michael ever could, take her traveling, show her what was out there in the world. "Someone’s been watching me."

"Who?" He couldn’t entirely stifle his skeptical tone. Grass made you paranoid, everybody knew it. She smoked too much grass. Lately, she had been high every time he saw her.

"I don’t know, but someone’s watching my window at night."

"Have you told your father?"

"I thought maybe you could do something."

"Such as?"

"After you drop me off tonight? Stick around. See if you see anyone."

To please her, he spent the rest of that evening skulking in her neighbor’s scrawny oleander bushes. He loitered behind bushes and trees on several other nights. He never saw anyone. Tam got madder and madder at him, insisting someone was out there. But she wouldn’t give him any details. He thought it might have to do with drugs, and she didn’t want him to know about that part of her life. Or she was just using way too much.

And then, one day, she told him it was over, just like that. He knew she’d changed and found somebody else, and he found he didn’t mind too much. They agreed to be friends, and stay in touch.

A few weeks later, when the local paper carried a story on her disappearance, he didn’t worry. She had talked often about leaving. Naturally, her parents didn’t know her whereabouts. However well-in
_t
entioned, they didn’t get along. She would make them wait a long time, he guessed, wreaking this vengeance on them for their expectations and interference.

The days went by. Then the months. He began to wonder. Should he have done more to deal with her fears? Had someone really been after her? Who? He considered and rejected the notion of telling her parents. They couldn’t do any more than the police were already doing. Had Tam run off? He didn’t believe she could resist the urge to call or write him. She wouldn’t treat him that way, would she? He was uneasy for months, but his concern changed nothing. He never heard from Tamara Sweet again.

Terry had been someone Kurt and Tam didn’t know very well. He remembered running into her several times around town while he was seeing Tam. An artistic type, she had very long chestnut hair and liked to dress in bright colors. Tam said Terry had a crush on him, but he laughed it off.

He was living at his parents’ cabin at the time, alone while they finished out the winter on the coast, near San Luis Obispo, their final winter, as things turned out. A month or so after Tam disappeared, Terry showed up one day out of the blue, on his doorstep, with a homemade lasagna.

"I heard you were back," she said. A sky blue wool sweater with reindeer running around the border topped her tight jeans. She wore a muffler wrapped around her neck, and her nose poked out, red in the biting wind.

"I never went away," Kurt said.

"I mean, in circulation," she said.

She looked like she was freezing. "Come on in," he had said, showing her in. He made a cup of coffee for her, which she drank greedily, her fingers clutching the mug, thin and white as bone. And then she had gone.

A week later he had run into her at a coffee shop. And then a few days later, at the movies, he ran into her again, alone, like he was. He invited himself to sit beside her. Alone at home, with no one to talk to, sending out resumes and driving the local librarians crazy with his requests for information about symphony orchestras in his search for a real job, he had gotten tired of the sound of his own voice singing off-key in the shower.

A few weeks later, plotzed from a heavy meal and the red wine, they had stumbled out of a local theater in the middle of the play they had gone to see, and kissed for the first time.

January. A month of wind, snow, and cold that froze blood in Tahoe.

Kurt still thought often about Tamara. He felt guilty that he hadn’t taken her concerns seriously enough. He worried as the time went by and she never called. But Terry kept him busy and his thoughts well occupied, and, wearing the fabulous lynx coat that had once been her mother’s, kept him tucked closely beside her.

They spent more and more time together and at some point he realized she was in love with him. He knew he should break it off, but he enjoyed her wit and her great ambitions. He let things slide. Within five months from the day she appeared at his door, Terry and Kurt were married.

It was a whole different level of the oldest story in the world. Terry had gotten pregnant.

He found out by accident. They were scheduled to go to a party, but had spent the afternoon in bed together. As had happened repeatedly since their first encounter, Kurt got the distinct impression that Terry was faking her excitement. He didn’t have a lot of experience, but he could tell when a woman responded, and she just didn’t, although she made quite a show of hard breathing. Her heart remained steady. Her cheeks stayed pale. She never sweated. She was like chiseled stone to touch—smooth, perfect, and cold. Kurt got up first, picking his jeans and shirt up off the floor. Having washed his face and checked his armpits for stink, he reappeared in the bedroom door, thinking they needed to have it out.

"Terry..." he started to say, but stopped at the sight of her.

Terry stood in front of a full-length mirror with a sheet covering nothing but the round of her stomach.

"What are you doing?" he said.

She pulled the sheet up over her breasts and turned to look at him. The swoop of her back and hips filled the mirror behind her. "Nothing."

"You’re pregnant," he said.

"It doesn’t matter," she said. "It doesn’t change anything." The look on her face should have told him something, but it didn’t. He took the tightness of her mouth and the furrow of her forehead as expressions of the same anxiety, hope, and awe that filled him.

"Oh, Terry. Of course it does."

"I don’t want to talk about it," she said. "I’m getting dressed." Her clothes hung on a wooden chair beside the bed. The chair, which she had painted vermilion one day while he played the piano in the next room, had two high points edging the ladderback, onto which she had draped various items of her colorful clothing, a scarf in pinks and blues, a royal blue sweater. Changing her mind, she sat down on the chair, completely nude, her eyes as wide and bright as a child’s, fixed on his own, examining his reaction.

He knelt in front of the chair, then on impulse, put a hand up to the curve in her belly.

"I’m having an abortion," she said, matter-of-factly.

Stunned, he sat back on the rug. "Don’t do that," he said. "There’s no reason to. You’re healthy, aren’t you?"

"Yeah, and I’ve got business in the world. I’m not about to have a kid. Don’t make me laugh."

"You’re twenty-eight. It’s the right time. I’ll help you."

"You have it then. Nine months looking like a pachyderm, followed by years of slavery to some little brat. Not me."

He couldn’t believe it. They had made a child. He was going to be a father. She couldn’t destroy his child.

"Terry, please—"

"You don’t love me," she said. "One always loves more than the other. I hate loving you so much. I’m like a beggar with you. And you’re just waiting for someone else to come along, and then you’ll leave me."

"I do love you." It was a lie. He didn’t love her, he never would, but they were in this together, something wonderful had happened, and he had to prevent her from making a dreadful mistake.

As if reading his mind, she said, "Liar."

"Don’t," he said. "Marry me."

"So I won’t get rid of the kid?"

"No. Because I love you. I’ve just been waiting for the right time to tell you." He’d cemented the lie, made her believe it and almost convinced himself

He got used to the idea over the next few days, convincing himself that this child would bring them together in a way nothing had so far. The relationship between him and Terry hadn’t gone much beyond the roll-in-the-hay phase. The disappointments could be fixed, he told himself, pushing his worries away.

He had many other doubts. She kept so much hidden. She told little lies that had no purpose. He might say, "Did you go to Safeway?" and she would correct him, saying she had gone to another supermarket. Later, he’d unload the groceries from bags clearly labeled Safeway. Without any close friends or relatives, this strange and needy woman had no one except him, and soon, their child.

He could see nothing but a vague cloudiness where his feelings were concerned. A baby would make things clear. Priorities got straight when a baby cried, his mom said. "Pick ’em up real quick or suffer the consequences."

Was he more unprepared than most people for the reality of a child? It was about then, when he would talk about their baby and how great it would be for them both, that she would get quiet and thoughtful and sometimes, he had to admit it, downright sullen.

They had a quick ceremony in Incline Village. His parents came. Terry’s parents had died in an airplane crash a few years before he had met her. The same crash had killed her only sister. She had nobody to invite. The lunch afterward, in an empty restaurant, had been a bad idea. Terry drank too much champagne and Kurt, whose early warning about alcohol had been followed by a nasty public rebuttal, didn’t stop her. "Let’s drink a toast to the goddamn baby!" she said, spilling a little from her raised glass. "Baby got Kurt to the altar when he didn’t want to go, and took over Terry’s body just when she was beginning to have some fun with it!"

Kurt’s elderly father, who had also gone the excessive champagne route, cast a befuddled eye around and raised his glass. He was the only one who drank with her that time.

They honeymooned at a hotel overlooking the lake in South Tahoe. Terry spent the night hanging over the toilet, throwing up.

The last good times together turned out to be before the baby, before the wedding, before he really knew her.

The morning after their wedding, she sprang her first surprise on him.

Sitting on the balcony in a heavy white robe, she drooped over a cup of coffee and a congealing egg. "You didn’t want to marry me, Kurt. So why did you?" she said.

"Eat the egg," he said. "You’re just feeling low this morning. Something in your stomach will help." He had not criticized her, even though he had spent the whole night listening to her activities in the bathroom, wondering how much damage she had done to their baby.

"You married me because I’m pregnant." Despite her dirty hair and unpleasant mood, she looked fresh in the morning sun. And he had no reason to believe this ugliness of spirit would continue. There was no precedent to make him think she would change in ways he could never before have imagined.