Undone (16 page)

“Chloe!” Jasper cried, nearly losing control of the car. He gaped down at her upturned face in his lap. “What in God’s name are you doing?”

“Resting,” she said matter-of-factly. “I didn’t sleep much last night, I was so nervous about meeting you.”

“Well, I’ll pull over and you can get into the backseat!”

“I don’t
want
to lie in the backseat. I want to be here with you.”

“This is insane,” he cried. “It’s dangerous. I can’t drive like this.”

“Why?” she said. “You’re driving right now.”

“Please sit up,” he said. “You’re not wearing a seat belt.”

“You won’t crash. You drive so slow.”

“Nevertheless, a policeman might see us.”

She batted her lashes at him. “Are we doing anything
wrong
?”

“Yes—it’s illegal not to use your seat belt.”

She ignored this and rolled toward him onto her side. She heaved a contented sigh, then joined her hands as if in prayer and slid them between her cheek and his thigh, pillowing her head. She felt, suddenly, quite genuinely tired; her claim about sleeplessness last night because of nerves had been true.

“Chloe?” he said. “Are you listening?” Her eyes were closed. “Chloe?”

“Mmmm?”

“Will you sit up?”

She merely nestled herself more snugly onto him. Then she got an inspiration. She took one of her hands from under her cheek, placed the thumb between her lips, and began to suck.

“Don’t be silly, Chloe,” he said. “That’s not good for your teeth.”

He grasped her wrist and pried her thumb from her mouth. Instinctively, she seized his hand and jammed his little finger into her mouth, sucking on it avidly. He felt a thrill like a stream of electricity pass through his hand, up his arm and into his body. For a moment he could not react. He was remembering how he had used precisely this method to pacify Maddy, as a newborn, between feedings in the middle of the night when she woke him with her squalling and he was too tired to fetch the bottle of milk expressed by pump, each day, from Pauline’s breasts. He would simply roll over to the crib beside his bed and
stick his little finger, blind, into Maddy’s mouth. She would suck for a minute or two on the tip and soon fall asleep—a practice his pediatrician had frowned on (“You don’t want her to get
nipple confusion
”) while admitting that every exhausted parent resorts to it. Then as now, Jasper felt the soft enveloping wetness sheathing his digit, the ridges in the curved upper palate, the ticklish workings of the velvety tongue and lips. Stunned, he could only gape down at Chloe for several seconds before pulling his finger from her mouth.

“That’s enough,” he said sternly. “You’re being quite ridiculous!”

But she did not protest. Her lips had gone slack, her hands limp. Her breathing had taken on a smooth, deep, slow rhythm and her head felt heavier against his thighs. He said her name. She did not respond. Her fingers twitched. She was, in fact, deeply asleep, lulled by the slight rocking motion of the car, the warmth of his thighs and the strange, unexpected comfort she had taken in sucking on his finger, as if she truly were a small child,
his
child.

He looked down at her vulnerable, outlandishly pretty profile. Certainly, it was inappropriate for her to have sucked on his finger that way—but perhaps, he thought, this was a natural reaction to the strangeness of the situation she found herself in. Hadn’t Doreen Edwards warned him that the child might display just such episodes of regression, of defensive slipping back into infantile states, as a coping mechanism? Thinking of this, he felt a surge of paternal love and protectiveness, but he was not tempted to slip his finger back into her softly working
mouth—or, rather, dismissed as ridiculous the obscure impulse to do so.

He looked out the windshield. Evening was coming on. They had entered the northern part of Connecticut. The lowering sun deepened to purple the green of the surrounding fields and lengthened the shadows of the trees and fences that bordered the farmhouses sliding past. He felt a flutter of nervousness, not the first, at the thought of their arrival home, of Pauline. He saw before his eyes that look she had given him as he left the house yesterday. A dark, almost accusing look. He pushed the thought from his mind. He told himself that everything would work out, that Pauline would come round. To calm himself, he looked down again at that impossibly pretty face and inhaled through his nose. Her bouquet acted on him like a calming drug, a tranquilizer.

He looked at his watch. They would be home in less than an hour! He let Chloe sleep for another thirty minutes, and then decided it was time to wake her. He reached down and stroked her hair. She snuffled, pawed at her face, and her eyelids quivered.

“We’re getting close now,” he said softly.

Her eyes flew open and she sat up. “Close?” She had been a million miles away, submerged in a dream that seemed to feature two other girls and a small apartment in some densely populated metropolis where she had never been. Jolted back to the perilous present, she looked around in panic at the unfamiliar landscape and was once again on high alert. She began to rearrange her hair, which had come loose from her bun and lay in messy
tangles around her face. “How close?” she asked, trying to keep the fear out of her voice.

“Maybe fifteen minutes,” he said.

It was now dark outside. Gone were the mountains, pastures and farmhouses. They drove through a wasteland of widely spaced industrial parks twinkling with lights, dark highway under- and overpasses. A scattering of hangar-like big box stores appeared on either side of the road. These gave way to a denser grouping of garishly lit gas stations, fast-food restaurants, Cineplexes, strip malls. They arrived at a large intersection where eight lanes of traffic converged. Jasper turned right, took another turn and still another. Then they were skimming along a quiet road, semi-rural in its wooded seclusion, lit by widely spaced old-fashioned street lamps among the lit leaves of huge, massy black trees.

Chloe quickly touched up her face with the help of a compact drawn from the small purse over her shoulder—brushing some mascara onto her lashes, touching some color onto her pursed lips—then turned and retrieved her shoes from the backseat. She slipped the high heels on, then sat up alertly, her back straight, moving her head from side to side, looking at the large stone estates wheeling past. Her anxiety about soon meeting Jasper’s family mingled with genuine excitement and fascination at seeing the lush and luxurious neighborhood where he lived—where
she
would now live. “I’ve never seen places like this,” she said with awe. “Except in the movies.”

They turned onto Cherry Tree Lane. “Your new home is coming up on the left,” he said.

Chloe gaped at the long, low-slung structure behind the
maple on the front lawn. She leaned forward, almost pressing her face against the windshield. “Wow,” she said, “it’s huge.”

Actually, it was one of the neighborhood’s smaller houses. Jasper’s father had deliberately built it to sane proportions—with just enough room to accommodate himself, his wife and his two children. Jasper, in his turn, had honored his father’s, and his own, aesthetic by resisting the orgy of expansions and renovations even then being undertaken by his neighbors in the overheated housing and home equity–loan bubble soon to burst—the building on of extra wings and higher stories and additional outbuildings. But he knew that Chloe was comparing the house with where she had grown up, on New Halcyon’s River Road, a stretch of houses quite literally on the wrong side of the tracks. On one of his days off from the club, that long-ago summer, he had paddled in a canoe under the disused railroad trestle bridge and down the stagnant, weed-choked river where ramshackle dwellings were clustered on the overgrown bank. One of those dilapidated shacks, he realized with a pang akin to the one he had felt when he saw her pathetic carry-on, was where Chloe had been raised. Well, all that was behind her now.

He pulled into the driveway, the wheels crunching on the gravel. He parked and cut the engine. Into the sudden aural vacuum flooded the muffled sound of crickets. He looked at Chloe, who was staring at him with a look now of frank, and unfeigned, terror.

When the plan had been nothing more than theoretical, a series of actions outlined by Dez in their trailer in the woods, Chloe had scarcely bothered to imagine what it would be like
to arrive, for the first time, at Ulrickson’s house, and to meet his family. She had not
wanted
to imagine it. But now that this was about to happen, she found herself seized with a fear so acute it almost made her cry out to Ulrickson and confess the ruse. But, of course, she could not do that. Instead, she smiled at him with trembling lips, trying to mask her fear. With that strange ability he seemed to have to sense her anxiety and apprehensions—just as she imagined a real father might do—he smiled back at her, with warm reassurance, and said, “Don’t worry, everyone’s going to love you.” Yet for all the steadiness in Jasper’s tone, he too was in a state of high anxiety. For the last hour at least, he had felt a steadily rising stress at the prospect of Chloe’s impending meeting with Pauline.

He got out of the car, went around to the trunk and popped it open. He pulled out the carry-on, lowered it onto the driveway and closed the trunk. Chloe had gotten out of the car and was standing on the driveway waiting for him. She was lit by the iridescent glow of a half-moon, and she was—he saw with a shock that made his guts jump—breathtaking, her hair, which she had tried to tuck up into the bun, falling around her face, her hands folded over the front of her abbreviated skirt as if she was afraid a stray breeze might lift it, one knee turned in slightly. This vision obscurely troubled him, in a manner he could not identify.

He approached her, rolling the bag bumpily over the gravel. She took a half step forward to meet him. He stopped and she stood close, and he felt, in the early August chill, the warmth of her body.

“I’m scared,” she said, placing her hands on his chest and looking up at him.

“Scared?”

“To meet your family.” She dropped her eyes and added: “Your wife.”

“Just be yourself,” he said. “She’ll love you.”

She leaned against him, in genuine search of physical comfort. He put his arms around her. The cicadas creaked deafeningly, like rhythmically laboring bedsprings. He could smell the salt and seaweed aroma of the nearby Sound mingled with her scent. When he tried to release her, she clutched at him and breathed, “Hold me!” He would not have been able to say how long they stood there, bodies pressed together as if for warmth, when suddenly he heard the crunch of the front-door lock. He stepped away from her almost guiltily and looked toward the house.

The door swung slowly on its hinges, a fan of light opening across the dark porch stone. There was a pregnant pause, then, in a moment of absurd anticlimax, a small barefoot figure in an ankle-length cotton nightgown with a high white collar stepped out from behind the door onto the stoop.

“Maddy!” Jasper said.

“We’re waiting for you!” the little girl cried. “Why arnch’ya coming?”

“We
are
coming,” he said.

Jasper led Chloe up the walk, his hand on the small of her incurved back. She moved with short, uncertain steps, hindered in part by the height of her unfamiliar heels but also by her
fear at approaching the house, which loomed before her like a haunted mansion in a horror movie.

Maddy’s eyes grew ever wider at Chloe’s approach. Jasper read in the little girl’s expression her surprise (so similar to his own, this morning, in the anteroom at the courthouse) that the promised sister was no child after all, but a statuesque, almost fully grown young woman. Chloe, smiling, stopped in front of Maddy, who stared up at her, round-eyed.

“Maddy,” Jasper said, “this is Chloe. Chloe, meet Maddy.”

“But—but—” Maddy spluttered in a voice that rang with a sense of betrayal, her eyes going back and forth between the two of them. “She’s all grown-up!”

Chloe, feeling some of her fear disperse in the presence of this unexpectedly adorable child, squatted on her haunches, bringing her face to the same level as Maddy’s. “I’m not really so old,” she whispered. “I’m still a kid. Like you. I’m just dressed up right now. And I have some makeup on.” And indeed, in her apprehension about entering the house, and seeing Ulrickson’s wife, and executing the plan, she really did not feel any different from a defenseless, inexperienced child, a child no older than Maddy.

Craving the comfort of the child’s touch, Chloe now opened her arms and said, “Hug?” Maddy stepped into the older girl’s embrace. Chloe held Maddy to her and felt the security of sheltering her small body.

After a moment, Maddy pulled away and said excitedly to Jasper, “She’s warm and smells like
cake
!” She turned and ran into the house, yelling, “Chloe’s here! Chloe’s here!”

Chloe rose to her full height. Jasper noticed that she seemed to be avoiding his gaze, keeping her face down and turned away, as if something in her exchange with Maddy had unsettled her.

And indeed, that encounter had, for the first time, brought to Chloe’s awareness how the successful execution of Dez’s plan was going to tear this family apart, changing the little girl’s life forever. Dez had sketchily addressed this, telling Chloe that the girl would suffer no deprivations worse than what Chloe herself had faced growing up—and, when it came to that, a good deal less harsh, given Ulrickson’s indecent wealth, which would help to cushion the child’s passage through life, a cushion denied to Chloe, especially after her mother’s death, which was (in Dez’s telling) directly traceable to Ulrickson’s unconscionable abandonment. “No, no,” Dez had said with finality, “I wouldn’t lose a lot of sleep over Ulrickson’s pampered little brat.” This had seemed to make sense to Chloe at the time. Now, having actually seen the child, she was not so sure.

“Are you okay?” Jasper asked, breaking into her thoughts.

She started and looked at him. “She’s so cute,” Chloe said in an uncertain, wondering voice. “You didn’t tell me how cute she was.”