The Last Refuge (38 page)

She took Hampton Road out of the Village and headed east on Montauk. Even in October there was plenty of traffic. I let one car get between us and prayed it would keep pace. The three of us were in solid formation all the way through Water Mill, and most of the way to Bridgehampton. Right after the big shopping center outside Bridgehampton Village she took a hard left and zinged into the night. I followed as aggressively as I dared, losing sight of her taillights until I got to the next decent straightaway. I realized Jackie’s pickup would have trouble staying up with a rocket sled like Amanda’s A4.

She flew past a long row of white horse-farm fencing, but had to stop before turning right on Scuttle Hole Road. I took a chance and ate up all the slack as she waited to turn. When she turned right, I followed close behind.

She hit sixty-five miles per hour on Scuttle Hole, forcing me to back off again. At the Bridgehampton–Sag Harbor Turnpike she hung a hard left.

I fell in behind and followed her into Sag Harbor.

She turned right at a light a few blocks from the center of town. I let her get some distance, then followed. The street ended in a T. You could go left or right, or straight through a private entranceway. It was framed by a grand wrought-iron gate, capped with a large metal cross. Maybe it was the gates of heaven. Amanda shot straight across the intersection and disappeared through the hole.

“Okay,” I said, and after waiting a decent interval, followed her into paradise.

Just inside the gate was a small sign.

“Conscience Manor Retreat. Private.”

The grounds were deep and dark, filled with huge old shade trees. There was no general lighting, but you could see evidence of several buildings from lit windows peeking through the thinning foliage. I killed my lights and looked for Audis. Nothing.

I followed the crushed seashell drive up to a large stucco Victorian house that looked like the main building. Most of the windows were lit. There were two main stories plus a third built into an elaborate roof structure. A deep porch, partially obscured by sculpted yews, wrapped around the entire first story.

Amanda’s car was stopped at a small structure adjacent to the parking lot. I dodged around a row of cars and parked at the other end of the lot.

Her lights went out and she left her car and went into the little building. As my eyes adjusted to the ambient light the building took shape as a small chapel, with a high-pitched slate roof and a cross molded into the gable end. The door had an arched top and the windows were leaded glass through which a low light suddenly sprung.

The big medieval door opened more easily than I expected. The inside was dimly but uniformly lit, so I could easily see the interior detail. It was a rectangular room with an oval, molded wood bench in the middle. The outside walls, which you faced when sitting on the bench, were lined with square raised-panel drawer fronts, most of which had a small brass plaque, engraved with a name, date and simple message. Amanda sat on the bench, which up close looked more like a pew, or the curved oaken seating you see in old train stations, with her hands clasped in her lap and her head bowed.

I walked over and sat down next to her. She was directly across from the drawer labeled “Monica May Anselma. 1991–1996. My light, my dream, my hope.”

Amanda looked at me with swollen eyes. Then she looked back at the wall.

“I should have known you’d figure it out,” she said, quietly.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to say.

“You’re such a good figure-outer.”

We sat silently for a very long time. Amanda had
her head lowered and seemed to be having trouble breathing.

“How did you know I was here?” she asked.

“You drove by and sucked me into your tailwind.”

She nodded as if that was a fair explanation.

“I tried to tell you,” she said.

“I guess you did.”

“You didn’t let me.”

“I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t want to know. That’s what you told me. You didn’t want any old baggage. Well, there’s mine, right there. My little baggage.”

“I don’t mean to intrude,” I said. “I just wanted to talk to you.”

“I bet you do.”

We sat quietly for a while.

“Do you want to know?” she asked.

“About your daughter?”

“Yes.”

“Only if you want to tell me.”

“What else is there to tell?”

“Other stuff. It can wait.”

I looked up at the exposed rafters. They were mortised and tenoned and shaped into pseudo-Gothic arches. Tiny low-voltage quartz fixtures cast a clean but pale incandescent light. Torchieres mounted on the wall drew shadows across the orderly drawer fronts. Small bouquets were placed randomly along the floor. A larger arrangement anchored the far end of the room.

“You didn’t know. About Monica.”

“No.”

She looked at me.

“So why are you here?”

“Bay Side.”

“Oh that. You figured that out, too.”

“Maybe. Not sure.”

She took a deep breath to force the quaver out of her voice.

“You ever live in the City?”

“For over ten years,” I said. “We left when my daughter was born. Abby wanted her to have a yard.”

“I really couldn’t afford to be there, but I was determined to make it work. My mother was so mad at me for leaving home. She didn’t understand you can’t be born, live and die in just one place. Even a place like Southampton. Especially a place like Southampton—it’s so unreal in so many ways. Kids have to get out in the world and live a little. I was only a few hours away, but she rarely came to see me. To her, I might as well have moved to Calcutta. It was a matter of pride that she’d never been up the Empire State Building, or rode the boat out to the Statue of Liberty. She surely never set foot in Times Square. My God, she’d have had a coronary.”

“My mother didn’t like it, either. I think my dad built the cottage so he had a place to keep her outside the City.”

I noticed tears falling as she talked. She stopped occasionally to wipe her nose.

“I was the secretary for the editor of this semi-scholarly technical magazine. I worked my way up to editorial assistant. I was a biology major at Southampton College, but I was also good with grammar and spelling.
I proofread the articles and worked with all the authors. There were only a few of us in the office. It was nice and friendly. And the work felt like it meant something. Didn’t pay much, but enough to live on, to pay rent on my apartment. I had to move a few times till I scored a semi-permanent sublet in the west seventies from this young guy who’d been transferred to Japan. I even published a few of my own articles. My boss encouraged me to write. It would take me months to research and compose. I’d agonize over it like you wouldn’t believe. But they were patient with me, him and the other editors. Like those guys in
My Fair Lady
, you know? Help the ignorant girl make something of herself.

“If they only knew what I did after work, which was mostly go out and fuck myself all up. You’re young, you’re pretty, you get a lot of attention. You go to the disco.”

She said it with a feigned French accent.

“You dance like a crazy person and feel like a beauty queen. You snort a lot of coke and bring home handsome young assholes in flowered suspenders who tell you about possessions you never even
heard
of, and want to fuck you before you’re even up the stairs to the apartment. One of these guys left me with a little present, but unlike every other girl I knew, I didn’t want to go to the clinic and zip-zip, ‘take care of it.’ I wanted to keep it, whatever
it
was. So I did, and the guys at the magazine were totally cool and never asked me anything or made me feel weird in any way. Instead of hassling me, they gave me two months maternity and an apartment full of kid stuff. I think they loved me, in a really nice way.”

The tears were now rolling out in full flow. She didn’t bother to wipe them off her face.

“It’s not very easy to raise a kid in the city, especially when you’re a single mom without a lot of money. But, I loved my little baby with every particle of my being. She was my light and my dream and my hope.”

She stopped to wipe her face and take a breath.

“You don’t have to,” I started to say.

“Yes I do,” she said, through her teeth. “And you have to listen.”

“Okay.”

“She was so smart—her dad was this really sharp professional guy, I think. Cute as hell, and destined for great things. I never tried to find out for sure, or pull any paternity stuff. I didn’t want that kind of thing to spoil what I had with Monica. It’s hard to explain, but some people understand. We had our own little universe, and I didn’t know if I could let anyone else in. But oh man, the cost of a nanny in New York. There were plenty of nights when I’d lay in bed and daydream about money and apartments with lots of rooms and Monica’s daddy bringing her toys and sending her to private school. I didn’t have a daddy of my own, but Mom did what she could. Whenever she had a spare twenty or something she’d slip it into some ridiculous Hallmark card and send it to me. I showed her pictures when we came home. She even forced herself to come to the City a few times. She’d fuss over Monica like you wouldn’t believe. And I was doing it, by God.

“Monica was just starting first grade. I was cutting back my hours so I could be there when she got home,
and making up for the lower pay by writing articles at night. My nanny already had her next thing lined up. Getting rid of that expense more than compensated. She was a sweet woman, really. She knew what raising a kid on your own was like. She had a son. I didn’t see him much—he was in fourth or fifth grade at the time. She had him with her that day when she went out for a second to buy some milk and cereal. I’d forgotten to get any, and Monica needed breakfast. I didn’t know this, until later.

“They called me at my office. Monica was in the hospital. The nanny was too hysterical to talk to me, so I didn’t know anything till I got there. Apparently, Monica was hungry and fussy and threw a little tantrum. The nanny’s kid was alone with her, and thought he’d get her to stop crying by hitting her on the head. And then, after she was unconscious, he thought he’d hit her some more, which he did until she suffered massive, irreversible brain damage.

“I was seriously thinking about swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills, but I was afraid to leave Monica alone. What I really couldn’t do was support myself now that I had this crazy huge expense. I came home to Southampton hoping my poor mother, bless her, could look after both of us. But look, you can’t expect a person to care for somebody in a state like that. Especially an elderly woman. I might have been young and healthy and crazy with grief, but I couldn’t do it all either. Monica couldn’t do anything on her own.
There was nothing there.”

She pulled some more tissues out of a box on the side table and wiped her face.

“I had to keep her in the City to stay on Medicaid. They all made it clear I should pull the plug. All the doctors and Medicaid people. I can understand why. The rest of the world shouldn’t have to pay for one little vegetable. But she was my
daughter.
I loved her with all my heart. How could I do that, Sam?”

She was crying now in a solid, steady kind of way. I took her hand and she squeezed hard. With her other hand she pulled out a few tissues and blew her nose. She looked at me.

“Then she made it easy for her mommy. She just left.”

It took a long time for her to catch her breath.

“I’m so sorry, Sam.”

“Nothing to be sorry for.”

“Oh yes there is.”

She shook her head and a long sweep of auburn hair fell in front of her face.

“It’s about Roy. I knew him in high school. We dated a little. He was nice enough, but, you know, not very interesting. Not for a girl like me who was burning to get outta town. Roy had no such desire, though he had a real thing for money. His father died when he was little and his grandparents basically raised him with his mother. They never had anything. I bet you always wondered who lived in those houses along the dump road. One of them was Roy’s grandparents’. You wouldn’t believe how they lived, so close to so much.

“But Roy was going to change all that. He was going to make money, goddammit, and he did. He did really well for himself. Paid for his own college, went to business school, joined the bank, worked his way
up. I was very impressed with him, really I was. Proud of him for actually doing something he said he was going to do. It’s hard, you know it is Sam, to be around all this money out here and not have any of your own. It can twist you all up, if you let it. But Roy was never like that. He just did it the hard way, working his ass off and doing what he had to. For years he supported his whole family. Now he’s got me, and—”

She looked at the mute wall of ashes, lowering her voice to a near whisper.

“I could have never afforded this place. Even this tiny little place for my baby girl. Roy paid for it all.”

She looked over at me for the first time. Beseeching or questioning, I couldn’t tell.

“He tried to ask me out from the get-go, when I came back from the City, but I couldn’t face anybody. Finally, I went to dinner with him a few times. Invited him over. He was very sweet to my mother. He’s not a bad man, he’s just who he is. And he loved me. He told me he always had, and that when I left for the City it was the saddest thing that ever happened to him. I didn’t even know he felt that way. He was so shy and self-conscious.

“But then he made some pretty good money—you know, he started a whole commercial lending operation out here for Harbor, and did great—it gave him some confidence. It was nice. And easy, and I was so tired and lost. When he offered to marry me I felt like an angel had come along and plucked me off the tracks. He saved me, he really did.

“I knew this wasn’t what I wanted, but it was far better than killing myself, which I strongly considered,
oh, maybe a thousand times. But then I thought about my mom, and what I was going through over Monica. So we got married and it all happened like he said it would. I didn’t love him, but I appreciated what he’d done. I tried to hold up my end, and I think I did pretty well. He was always patient with me. He liked to control things, and I was so sick inside, I liked letting him do it.