Last Day (17 page)

She did not reply because anything she would say would come out in a scream.

“Not so great?” he asked. “Me neither, honey. It’s just unbelievable. God, I miss your mother. I just want to see her again. You doing okay at Kate’s?”

“Fine,” she said.

“You sound mad,” he said.

“Dad, what do you think?”

“At me?” he asked.

Her blood simmered, nice and low and constant, just like lava in a volcano before it blew. She fought not to.

“I didn’t say that,” she said.

“Well, you sound it. I’m suffering just like you, missing her, and . . .”

“You miss
Mom
?” she asked, the simmer starting to really bubble. “Because it honestly didn’t seem that way when she was alive.”

“Sam! Don’t you talk to me that way. I am devastated about your mother. Beyond that—I am destroyed. You can’t even imagine. We were trying to fix everything. The new baby, all of us together.”

“But you’re still with
her
, aren’t you?” Sam asked. “You’re with them right now, Nicola and Tyler, right?”

Silence on the line. She could hear her father breathing—wait, was he turning on the tears? “Dad?” she asked.

“Mom is gone,” he said. “I’m your dad, Sam. I am here for you. That’s all that matters to me right now.” Then he started to babble.
Here come the waterworks without the water.

Sam held the phone away from her ear because if she had to listen to her father faux weep, she would start to scream.

“Dad, please stop,” she said, her voice shaking.

“I wish I could, honey,” he said. “I’m so sorry to upset you.” She heard him trying to swallow a sob. She really couldn’t take it.

“It’s okay,” she said.

“Let me come pick you up,” he said.

“You don’t sound great to drive. It’s okay if you get me later,” she said.

“Oh, Sammy. Thanks for understanding. Things are just really hard right now,” he said. “They’ll get better.”

How the fuck?
Sam wanted to ask. But instead she just blew a kiss into the phone and said goodbye.

After hanging up, she closed her eyes. She didn’t like the way he always brought pity out in her. She hated herself for thinking that sometimes he faked crying. Her mother had always said what a rough life he had had. Born without money, always wanting it, his father dying young, his mother working just to put food on the table. Sam had never really understood how bad it was.

But now that her mother had died young, she did.

18

They’ll get better?
Had he really just said that to Sam? Her mother had been murdered.

Pete was waiting to hear back from his lawyer. Everyone said Mac Green was one of the top defense attorneys in Connecticut, but Pete found him incredibly annoying. He didn’t have the courtesy to return Pete’s calls in a timely manner. In fact, if Nicola hadn’t insisted Pete engage a lawyer, and if Lee Ackerley hadn’t asked around and gotten a referral to Mac, Pete would have been happy handling the situation on his own.

One thing Pete hated was someone telling him what to do and how to do it. Mac was an old-school, old-boy, white-haired Yalie who had rules for his clients. One was no taking a lie detector test, no matter what. Pete stared at his phone, pissed off that it wasn’t ringing. As soon as Mac deigned to call, he was going to hear
Pete’s
rules. He had a few of his own.

Beth had died angry at him, and she had had every right to feel that way. Waiting gave him too much time to think, and his mind kept racing through all the things he could have done differently, starting with letting Nicola stay in Beth’s grandmother’s house. It had been a horrible, disrespectful thing to do. His mother would be even more ashamed of him if she knew—at least Beth had left that detail out when she had
called to tell her about the affair with Nicola. She had run straight to his mother, knowing that would hurt him more than anything.

Maybe he deserved it. He literally could not bear to think about what he had put Beth through. And Nicola, too, for that matter. Nicola had loved being at Cloudlands at first, but even that had changed. He couldn’t believe she had actually taken Tyler home to her mother’s. What a slap in the face that had been. It had made him feel he didn’t matter. That she could leave so easily, even though she had returned, was disturbing. He wouldn’t forget it.

Lately, she kept saying she wished she could feel clean again. She had had an affair with him while he was married, gotten pregnant, and had his child. Now it seemed she wanted to go back to the easy piety of her days as a Catholic girl. Obeying God and the capital
C
Church was easier than existing in moral ambiguity and let her feel as if she was a good girl. Pete, a lapsed Catholic himself, knew that guilt had been drummed into her from the start.

There was so much about Nicola he understood. They had similar backgrounds. He had sensed her nervousness when she had first started working at the gallery—although she was brilliant and beautiful, it was daunting to be around all that old money. He knew because he had felt it himself. His mother had worked her fingers to the bone to send him to private school, but the kids at Saint George’s—Episcopal, of course, the high-class religion—would ask him how the other half lived. They’d meant from the wrong side of the tracks. His mother would have been furious if she’d known how they’d treated him.

He had shown Nicola compassion, knowing it would move her. He had a special gift for knowing what women needed—not just wanted. She began to find ways to be near him at the gallery. At first, she was just scholarly and pretty, and then she was scholarly and sexy. It wasn’t that she changed the way she dressed—she wore a near uniform, slim black pants and a white silk blouse, sometimes with a black blazer. It was more a shift in attitude. They gravitated toward each other.

Beth never would have believed this, but Pete had grappled with his desires for a long time before giving in to Nicola. He enjoyed the act of seduction, getting someone to want him. He craved knowing a woman felt passion for him, but acting on his own was another story.

He had been a good husband. He had had plenty of opportunities too. Women would stop by the gallery, divorced women from town or visiting their summer places, pretending to look at art but so obviously lonely, seeking what everyone wanted: someone to love.

Sometimes the women would pretend to consider buying a painting; occasionally they would actually do so. At openings, when there was wine, they would stand a little too close, link arms with him to lead him across the gallery and ask about the provenance of this Hassam, that Morrison.

The affair with Nicola began in the least romantic of places—down in the gallery basement, damp from the water table, recent rains, and shades of the Woodward family horrors. Pete had been framing a little jewel of a painting by Malcolm Grant, a lesser-known Black Hall artist. It was a tiny oil of a frozen stream at dawn, bright with breaking light.

He stood at the workbench, measuring segments of wood. A harsh overhead lamp illuminated particles of sawdust in the air. Nicola walked over to him. He could picture the painting as if it were in front of him right now, he could feel the sawdust stinging his eyes, but he couldn’t remember the words she said. Suddenly his mouth found hers, her arms were around his neck, and he swept all the framing materials and that valuable little picture aside, lifted her onto the table, his cheek against hers.

Six months later, six months of passion, they were in the basement again.

“I’m going to . . . ,” she said.

“Going to what?”

“Have your baby. Love you.”

“I love you to death,” he said, putting his hand on her belly, already starting to get slightly round. He knew he should be upset—they hadn’t
planned on her getting pregnant, and when Beth found out it was going to be hell for everyone. But he had never felt love like this, so pure and true.

“I want to be with you forever,” she said.

Her words filled him with such emotion. “I want that too,” he whispered.

“Just one little problem. You’re married to someone else,” she said.

He hadn’t liked her saying that. It made her sound callous, and he knew she wasn’t. She cared about Beth. That was what caused them exquisite pain—they both had Beth on the mind, but their desire was so great it overrode their consciences. Too often the institution of marriage became one of convenience and habit; he and Beth had let that happen. He would have to extricate himself as kindly as possible—take care of Beth and Sam. He would not fall into habit, into the mundane, when he and Nicola were finally able to marry. He wouldn’t make the same mistake again with her.

“Besides, we don’t have a choice,” she said. He had removed his hand, but now she placed it back on her belly, as if he needed reminding. Every time he touched her he felt emotional.

“I want this so much,” he said.

“Tell me.”

“A life with you.”

“Yes,” she said, her voice beautifully warm and sweet. “We will be so good together. I’ll make you so happy, Pete.”

“You already do.”

“I want to wake up next to you every day. Live as a family. I know I shouldn’t ask you for that, and I won’t. Not now. When you’re ready, you’ll tell me, won’t you?”

Instead of answering, he had made love to her, right there on the workbench in the gallery basement.

But as time went on, he felt how tense she had gotten, how worried about their future. At the very beginning, when they’d first found out
she was pregnant, she had said she didn’t expect him to leave his wife, that she understood Beth and Sam were his family, and that she and their baby would be fine. She was an independent woman, a grown-up. She had gotten into this with her eyes wide open.

And she had been amazing, self-sufficient, and accomplished, a winner of academic prizes, the author of an important and widely circulated monograph on Benjamin Morrison. Someone Pete would have been proud to be with.

But midway through the pregnancy, everything changed. She had become needy, even nagging. Whispering “I want to wake up next to you every day” had given way to constant tears and whining, “When, when, when?”

By the time she gave birth, he had watched her confidence drain away, witnessed this gorgeous, brilliant woman transform into someone who couldn’t completely lose the baby weight, who smelled like Tyler’s spit-up, who would rather read parenting magazines than keep up with trends in curation and advances in her work as a conservator.

The seduction had been lovely, but the pressures were ruining his life. All he had ever wanted was to do justice to the sacrifices his mom had made for him to get ahead. He wanted to make people, especially her, proud of him. Beth had given him so much. She represented stability, prestige, the life he had worked for. They had a wonderful daughter together. They were known and respected in the art world.

But once he fell in love with Nicola, she was all he could think about. Before her, he’d had a hard time really understanding love—it had felt more like an ambition, a responsibility, than an all-consuming feeling. He was all set to leave Beth for her until his lovely, crafty wife outsmarted him: right after Tyler was born, Beth gave him the news.

That
she
was going to have a baby too.

To Pete, the pregnancies were a one-two punch.

The sick irony was, Beth no longer wanted him; even though she was pregnant, she had asked for the separation. He had never seen her
like this, the way she had been in the months before her death. She had become almost brash, standing up for herself, even when it was at his expense—like when she’d called his mother and told her everything.

Back when they’d first met, he had sensed her vulnerability—she was only twenty-two, a recent college graduate, running the family gallery, dealing with the horrible way she had lost her mother. She needed a man who would be everything to her—to heal her pain, to be her family, to make up for what her father had done. Pete’s instincts about Beth, about women, had been dead on.

He thanked his mother for that.

His mom was a saint—there was no other way to look at it. Pete remembered how the kitchen light would be on past midnight, his mother studying at the Formica table. Pete had to find a way to make her life easier.

She had not been able to afford a new computer on her own, but even though Pete was only in eighth grade, he had saved from his after-school job cleaning up at a downtown gym, given her money to help buy it. His brothers and sisters could not be bothered, and his mother had rewarded him for it. “Here comes my jewel,” she’d say when he’d go into the kitchen for his nightly glass of milk. Nothing had made him feel better than the sound of her fingers clicking on the keyboard, doing her schoolwork.

And now, thanks to Beth, his mother knew about Nicola and Tyler. He had never wanted to disappoint his mother, a devout Catholic who despised anyone who committed adultery, never mind getting divorced. This woman who had given the best years of her life so Pete could succeed.

It was a struggle. Nicola had wanted a future for them. Beth had tired of him. She had not been able to hide it, and he hadn’t been able to keep pretending that their lives had been great—that what had gone on between them privately matched up to how they had looked from
the outside: the perfect Black Hall couple with the elegant art gallery and big house and lovely, brilliant daughter.

He’d made a fucking mess of everything. And now he couldn’t go back and fix it, not at all. It was too late.

He couldn’t stop thinking of his and Beth’s last minutes together. He had hugged and kissed her, told her how much he loved her. He had told her he was worried about her health, wondering if he should leave on the sailing trip at all. He had begged her to rest, to stay cool and out of the sun, not worry about the garden, keep her feet elevated, stay in bed as much as she could while he was gone. He ran through these thoughts over and over, until he could feel them happening again.
Hugged, kissed, I love you, worried, you need to rest, Beth, keep your feet up, stay in bed . . .