The Carson Springs Trilogy: Stranger in Paradise, Taste of Honey, and Wish Come True (132 page)

The blood had drained from Liz’s face. She muttered, “I think I’m going to be sick.”

Anna took her aside. “Did he—?”

“God, no.” Liz looked aghast. “You?”

Anna shook her head.

Their mother continued to rock back and forth, making that awful moaning sound. Anna felt her stomach clench and thought she, too, might be sick. Slowly, ever so slowly, she lowered herself onto the bed. “Poor Monica. If only we’d known.”

Liz shook her head. “She wouldn’t have wanted our sympathy.”

“She must have been so ashamed. All those years …”

“No wonder she hated them.”

Anna nodded. How could she not? Their mother had been too weak to put an end to it, and by the time Monica left home, the damage was done.

“She showed him, didn’t she?” Betty’s head jerked up, eyes glittering with triumph. “His famous daughter who’d as soon spit on him as look at him.” A horrid smile momentarily animated her face, and her shoulders shook with soundless laughter.

Anna thought of her mother’s scrapbook, every article and photo lovingly pasted onto its black vellum pages. And all the while the real Monica had been lost to her. The degree to which Betty had been deluded even then was staggering.

Felicia chose that moment to pop her head in. “Everything okay in here?”

Anna started as if at a thunderclap. It seemed as if a hundred years had passed since they’d set foot in this room. “My mom’s a little upset, as you can see,” she heard herself reply in a remarkably calm voice. “I think it’d be better if we came back another time.”

“What could we have done?” Liz said.

“Nothing.” There was a lump in Anna’s throat like a dry swallowed aspirin.

They were sitting on the front porch, collecting themselves before the drive home, which at the moment neither was in any condition to do.

“I feel sick just thinking about it.” Liz was pale.

The old-fashioned glider creaked rhythmically beneath them. “I remember this one night when Dad came into my room,” Anna recalled. “I must’ve been eight or nine. He was kissing me goodnight when Monica walked in, hogging all the attention as usual. She wouldn’t leave until he did. Now I wonder if she was trying to protect me.”

Liz shook her head. “Mom knew. I can’t believe she
knew.
Why didn’t she
do
something?”

“It wasn’t that simple.”

“There you go, defending her again.”

“All I’m saying is … never mind.” Anna sighed. What was the point? She and her sisters had grown up under the same roof, but it might have been different universes. “Look, whatever her reasons, it was inexcusable. She should have gone to the police, or at the very least divorced him.”

“Shoulda, coulda, woulda … it’s too late now.”

Anna couldn’t argue with that. “You know something? I don’t think Monica was ever happy, even when she was famous. It was always like she was acting the part.”

“The greatest role of her career.” Liz’s mouth twisted in a wry smile.

“What about you?” Anna asked softly, lulled by the creaking glider and rustle of leaves overhead. Somewhere down the street a power mower droned.

“Am I happy?” Liz gave a harsh laugh. “It depends on which day of the week you ask. Monday through Friday, I’m usually too busy to notice. It’s the weekends that pretty much suck.”

She didn’t need to spell it out: With married lovers, weekends were generally reserved for wives and kids. “How often do you two, uh, see each other?” She was careful to remove any trace of judgment from her voice. Who was she to talk?

The glider squealed to a halt. “Not as often as I’d like, if that’s what you’re getting at.” Liz looked miserable. “He keeps saying he’s going to leave her, but I’m beginning to wonder if it’s worth all the agony even if he does. Besides, there’s his kid. I can’t stop thinking about what it’d do to him.” She swallowed hard, darting a sheepish look at Anna. “Listen to me. Here you’re on trial for murder and I’m crying over a stupid affair.” A tear rolled down her cheek. “Why can’t I be noble like you?”

“Being noble isn’t much fun,” Anna said. “Anyway, I’m not as noble as you think.”

Liz gazed at her bleakly. “I know I don’t always show it, but I worry about you, Anna.”

“I’ll be okay.” Anna was amazed to find she believed it, for the moment at least.

Liz rose heavily. “I should be going. I have to pick up Dylan at school.”

Anna pulled herself to her feet with an effort. “Will you be home later on?”

“Where else would I be? I don’t dare step outside for a breath of air in case he calls.” Liz gave another harsh laugh.

“Good. We can talk then.”

Anna’s thoughts turned once more to Marc. Was she chasing rainbows as well? What would become of them when all this was over? Even these past few nights without him she’d been lonelier than she would’ve thought possible. She’d grown used to slipping across the field under cover of darkness like a Bronte heroine, and to the sight of Marc poised in the doorway of Hector’s old room, the light from inside spilling out around him. She missed their long talks and the hours lost in each other’s arms when they didn’t speak at all. Tonight she would lie awake again thinking of him. The question was, Would he be thinking of her?

She recalled their last night together, when she’d shown him the latest e-mail from Krystal. After it had been made public that she’d ghosted for Monica, she’d been bombarded by phone calls and letters. Some were like the one from the Texas grandmother who was crocheting her a shawl for those cold nights in jail, but most were irate. One woman hoped they locked her up and threw away the key; another wrote that burning in hell was too good for her. Only the message from Krystal was an enigma.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: ????

Monica,

I know you aren’t who i thought you were but you were still right about everything you said. You don’t deserve this, i know your innocent, i wish i could tell them.

Please don’t hate me. i have to think of my kids. It’d kill them (and me) to be taken away again.

Krystal

“What do you make of it?” she’d asked Marc.

“I don’t know, but it strikes me as odd.” They’d been lying in bed, the window open to let in the night air.

“She obviously feels guilty about something, but the question is
what
?”

“She might know something.”

“How could she?” Unless she was there that night, which Anna rejected as too far-fetched.

He frowned in thought. Outside, the dogs had begun to bark, probably at a raccoon that had gotten into one of the garbage cans. “Still, it’s worth looking into.”

“I wouldn’t even know how to reach her. All I have is an e-mail address.”

“I have a friend—hacker for the rich and famous. He makes a living tracking down cyberstalkers.”

“I suppose anything’s worth a try at this point.” Though her hands were tied, there was no reason he couldn’t do a little digging on his own.

Now, of course, she knew it was a dead end. Even if Krystal wasn’t who she claimed to be, how could a boy of twelve or thirteen, judging from his shoe size, have fooled her into believing he was a thirty-four-year-old single mom? More to the point, why go to all that trouble? It didn’t make sense.

Anna walked Liz to her car, feeling oddly protective of her. To the world, her sister might appear poised and polished, but Liz was more fragile than she let on. Anna hugged her tightly, ignoring the sharp corner of Liz’s purse digging into her ribs. “I’m glad you were here. Thank God I didn’t have to go through it alone.”

Liz drew back with a loud sniff, her eyes glistening. “We’ll get through this, won’t we?”

Anna didn’t know whether she meant the shock of their mother’s revelation or their own predicaments, but she smiled and said with far more conviction than she felt, “Don’t we always?”

H
E STOPPED AT THE
second set of reinforced steel doors, leaning into the intercom. “Dr. Raboy to see Dr. Fine.” It was a line that always seemed to carry a hint of the burlesque each of the hundreds of times he’d spoken it.
Hello, Doctor. Nice to see you again, Doctor. How’s our patient? Fine, you say? Glad to hear it, Doctor.
Whenever he visited Faith, he always stopped for a word with her doctor before continuing on down the hall—exchanges that had begun to feel less and less like the relaying of important information and more and more like a ritual.

The door buzzed, and he stepped through it.

“Hey, Shirley.”

His favorite nurse broke into a wide grin that turned her cheeks into shiny dark plums. She wore a light blue smock that snapped up the front (standard issue on this ward, where buttons had a habit of getting torn off and occasionally swallowed) and a bright pink scrunchie about one wrist—Shirley always braided Faith’s hair before every visit, a small kindness that touched him more than he could say.

“Hey there, Doc. How y’all doin’?” It’d been more than twenty years since Shirley had lived in Alabama, but each word still came out dipped in molasses.

“Hanging in there.” His standard response. With any luck she hadn’t caught his fifteen seconds of fame—the shot of him scurrying down the courthouse steps with an arm about Anna.

“You lookin’ a little scrawny. They feedin’ you at that rich folk’s resort?”

Marc smiled. Shirley considered his work at Pathways a Sunday stroll in the park compared to her frontline combat in the trenches of Thousand Oaks, and she never failed to rib him about it. He ignored it this time to ask, “How’s everything?”

“Same old same old.” Her massive shoulders rolled in a shrug.

“How’s Faith?” He spoke casually, too casually perhaps. Shirley had been on to him since day one: She wasn’t fooled by his laid-back friendliness and somewhat detached air.

She leaned across the desk. “She been askin’ after you, Doc. That skinny white dude with the attitude? I say. And she give me that look—you know the one, all innocent like. Then she say, ‘Why, Shirley, don’t you talk that way ’bout my husband. He not a bit skinny’ ” She let loose a laugh that rolled up in waves from her generous bosom, one he’d often longed to lay his head against the way he once had his mother’s. “I swear, sometimes I think she just foolin’ on us.”

He smiled knowingly. One of the more reassuring, and at the same time maddening, aspects of the disease was that one’s personality remained basically intact. Faith hadn’t lost her droll sense of humor. “I wouldn’t put it past her,” he said lightly, handing Shirley the box of See’s chocolates he always brought.

She slipped it out of sight with a conspiratorial wink. “Don’t want folks thinkin’ you gone sweet on me.” She waved a plump hand toward the corridor, where the speckled green linoleum shimmered with a fresh coat of wax. “Go on now.”

Bernie Fine was hanging up the phone when he walked in. He rose and stepped out from behind his desk, a large man running to fat with an untidy shock of gray hair and thick glasses that magnified his eyes, giving him the look of a sweet and somewhat goofy cartoon bear—never mind his was one of the sharpest minds in the field.

“Marc, good to see you. You’re looking well.”

Marc smiled. “Not according to Shirley. She thinks I’m underfed.”

Bernie chuckled. “She’d feed the whole world if she could.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“What’s up with you these days?”

Marc considered telling him, just to see the look on his face, but Anna’s woes were bad enough without being mined for shock value. “This and that. You?”

“Can’t complain.” Bernie, perched on the edge of his desk, looked like a pile of clothes that’d been dumped there. “My youngest graduates in June—magna cum laude.” He glowed with pride. “Did I tell you he got into Harvard Med?”

“That’s something. I mean, well … Harvard.”

“We’re treating him to that trip he’s always wanted.”

Marc reached into his memory banks. “I’ve heard New Zealand is beautiful.”

“Best surfing in the world, according to Zach. Go figure, my son the future doctor. But, hell, he’s earned the right to play beach bum for a couple of weeks.”

Marc had never met Bernie’s wife or three sons. He knew them only from the framed photos on Bernie’s desk. He waited for the little beat signaling that this portion of the program was over, then cleared his throat. “How is she?”

Bernie’s expression sobered. “Nothing much to report. We took her off the Paxil—she was having a bad reaction to it. We’re waiting to see how she does with the Wellbutrin.” He didn’t have to explain: With schizophrenics, the ever-shifting regimen of antipsychotics and antidepressants was like mixing a Molotov cocktail.

“Has she—?”

“No.” Bernie pulled a crumpled handkerchief from the pocket of his corduroys and began polishing his glasses. “We’re keeping a close watch, though.”

Three months before, Faith had stabbed herself with a letter opener swiped from the front desk. Fortunately, the wounds had been superficial, but it had given them all a scare. Yet Bernie Fine, to his credit, hadn’t suggested that perhaps another facility would be more suited to her “particular needs”—maybe out of kindness or professional respect, but more likely because she was that rarest of all patients, the kind whose monthly bill was paid in cash. She’d come into a little money when her grandfather died, enough so that Marc was able to avoid the inevitable quibbling and delays that came with insurance, or worse, governmental red tape.

“Does she seem depressed?”
Stupid question
, he thought. Who wouldn’t be in this place, even if they hadn’t been depressed to begin with? On the other hand, with the meds she was on, most of the time she was too doped up to feel much of anything.

“Not unusually so. In fact, I’ve seen some improvement.” Bernie spoke cautiously.

“Can you be a little more specific?” Marc asked.

“She’s been sharing more in group. In our private sessions as well.” He returned his glasses to his nose, his eyes swimming back into large focus. “She’s expressed a fair bit of anxiety about your visits.”

“I know I don’t come as often as I used to.” He felt a stab of guilt, but didn’t reach into the usual grab bag of excuses. He didn’t owe an explanation to this man, with his healthy wife and three healthy sons, however kind and helpful he was.