Undone (18 page)

Deepti came from the kitchen and said that it was time for Pauline to go to bed. Chloe got quickly up off the sofa. She bowed slightly to Pauline. This gesture too seemed to soften something in Pauline’s gaze.

“Good night, Mom,” Chloe said. “If I can call you that.”

There was a weighty pause as Pauline considered the girl. Seconds passed. Then she blinked. Jasper, ecstatic at this turn of events, bent and kissed his wife on the forehead. “Night, honey,” he whispered. “And thanks.”

Deepti rolled Pauline out of the room. A minute later, they heard the back door close.

Jasper, who had poured another glass of wine, sat down again next to Chloe. “That was wonderful,” he said.

“What was?” She had opened the album again on her lap.

“Calling Pauline ‘Mom.’ It means so much to her. And to me.”

“Well,” Chloe said, “she
is
my mom, now.” She meant this, oddly enough. If the last few hours had shown Chloe anything, it was that she would not be able to live in this house, even for as long as it took to complete the plan, if she did not at least try
to act like a daughter to Ulrickson and Pauline, and a sister to Maddy. Besides which, against all expectations, Chloe had, over the course of the evening, begun to feel stirrings of real sympathy for Pauline, trapped as she was in that wheelchair, in her paralysis. Dez had described her to Chloe as a kind of monster, a grotesque being hardly human. But you only had to look into the woman’s eyes to realize that that was far from true.

She turned the thick page to a photograph of Pauline standing on a beach. Jasper explained that he had taken the picture, near the end of their honeymoon, in the town of Zihuatanejo, a small fishing village some miles from their hotel. He remembered now how they had eaten scrambled-egg burritos at a tiny roadside restaurant and gotten terrible stomach cramps. Jasper later surmised that the cramps were from the water used to wash the lettuce in the burritos. But the picture was taken before their symptoms had set in, and Pauline was smiling broadly. She looked beautiful in her sleeveless linen T-shirt, her sun-bronzed arms exposed. She was gazing at the camera (and Jasper behind it) with a look of melting contentment, love and satiation. Looking now at her expression, Jasper remembered, suddenly, that they had made love in their hotel room that morning, gingerly, Pauline on top because of his burn, before setting out in a cab for the small seaside town. The memory pierced him like an arrow.

“It’s so sad about Mom,” Chloe said, as if reading his mind.

“Yes,” Jasper murmured. He was remembering, viscerally now, the sensation of lovemaking, the warmth of skin on skin, the sense of velvety, sheathing engulfment, a tactile memory that
he usually strove to keep at bay; the memory almost made him gasp. It had been so long.

Chloe felt a mood of sadness about Pauline settling over both of them. An absurdly misplaced impulse to comfort Ulrickson, as if he were her actual father, arose in her, but she quickly tamped it down, remembering the plan, remembering Dez’s imperative that she stay focused and detached, that she remember the injury Ulrickson had inflicted on her mother, the misery he had visited on Chloe. She closed the album and shifted it off her thighs onto the cushion beside her, exposing her long, bare, brown legs to view. Men, she had long noticed, could never ignore the sight. On Dez’s orders, she had, on the eve of the hearing, submitted to a full-body waxing, legs included, and her private awareness of all-over silky smoothness enhanced her sense of desirability and emboldened her now in her efforts at entrancing her prey. She looked at him. “Are you all right?” she said.

Jasper nodded. He realized that he had probably had a glass or two more of the pinot grigio than was strictly advisable after such a tiring two days. All that driving. An eleven-hour round trip. Not to mention the stress of meeting Chloe for the first time, the emotions of the hearing and the racking tension of introducing her to Pauline. He was exhausted.

With the photo album gone, Chloe’s legs stood fully revealed to his gaze, shining in the shaded lamplight. He must remember to insist, as a father, that she wear longer skirts in future, he thought. He remembered that dirty-minded hotel clerk. Not to
mention the two lawyers and their slavering and gawking. And all those people on the sidewalk. And in the fast-food place. Even that insane judge had alluded to her beauty!

Chloe, humming lightly to herself and looking straight ahead, seemingly wholly unconscious of his gaze, abruptly raised her feet off the floor, bent her knees and rested her toes on the coffee table in front of her. Her toenails, he noticed, were like ten shiny little mirrors in the lamplight. The toes themselves were curiously childlike, smooth and without obvious knuckly joints. The baby toe curled slightly under. Were she actually a baby, or a toddler, it occurred to him blearily, he could seize one of those adorable feet and kiss the ticklish arch. But she was almost full-grown now, and although she was his daughter, there was no chance now, or ever, of his taking one of those appendages into his hands, of kissing it affectionately. The crazy judge, come to think of it, had said something about this.

A small bone twitched on the outside of her ankle.

“You know, I’m beat,” Jasper said, snatching his gaze away and rubbing his eyes. He massaged his closed lids for almost half a minute, rubbing away the image on his retinas. “I think I’m going to turn in.”

“Me too,” Chloe said, but she made no move to get off the sofa. Neither did Jasper. She yawned and shifted on the cushion. For the first time, she thought she might be making some progress in the plan. She was convinced that Ulrickson was looking at her legs—or, rather, trying
not
to look at them. Which amounted to the same thing. She decided to increase the pressure.

“I’m so stiff from the drive,” she said. She lifted her right foot off the coffee table, straightened her leg and raised it slowly to a forty-five-degree angle toward the ceiling, pointing her toes like a ballet dancer. “I really need to stretch.” She flexed her foot, pulling the toes back. She lowered it to the table and repeated the action with her left leg. Jasper, leaning back against the sofa cushions, watched mutely. This was good. She definitely had his attention now. She said, “Feels so good. Do you do yoga?”

“No, never,” he said. He sipped his wine. “Never done yoga.”

“It’s the best,” Chloe said. “This is a great one.”

She placed the soles of her feet together, then reached forward and enclosed them with her two hands. She pulled toward herself, pressing her knees flat to both sides, her right thigh suddenly lying warm against Jasper’s legs, pressing down on them. She arched her spine backward. She breathed in slowly, then sighed blissfully. She held the pose for several seconds, her eyes closed. She rolled her head forward, released her feet, extended her legs and placed her toes, once again, on the edge of the table. She smiled at Jasper. “Gets out all the kinks,” she said. “You should try it.”

“No, no,” Jasper said. “I’d tear every muscle in my back.”

“Actually, it gets you right here.” She turned out her leg and placed a hand flat against the inside of her thigh. “The muscle is still twitching,” she said. She looked at him closely to gauge his reaction. She saw him close his eyes and breathe evenly through his nose for several seconds. Surely, he would now open his eyes and place his hand on her thigh in a feigned “fatherly” caress—
at which point she could torture him by jumping up from the sofa, skipping away and blithely saying that she needed to go to the bathroom.

But instead, he slapped his legs and rose from the sofa. “Yup,” he said, “I’m going to hit the hay.”

Nonplussed, she groped for a way to prevent the encounter from coming to an end. He had seemed so close to a slipup. But had he been? She could not say for sure. At the moment, he was looking at her with an expression indistinguishable from how she imagined any father might look at his daughter. And then he said, with a clipped paternal sternness, “You should get to bed too. You had a big day.”

“Okay …” she said. A new inspiration had struck her. “But, Dad?”

He looked at her expectantly.

“Can you show me the house? I don’t know where anything is.”

“How stupid of me,” he said. The anxiety of introducing her to Pauline had driven all such thoughts from his head. “I’ll give you the grand tour. But quietly. We don’t want to wake Maddy.

“You know the kitchen, of course,” he went on, as he led her into the unlit hall. He pointed to the door on the right and whispered, “Bathroom.” He advanced a few paces, Chloe following on her silent bare feet. “Maddy’s bedroom.” He indicated the rooms at the end of the passage. “My office and my bedroom,” he whispered.

He stepped around her in the narrow space and began to
lead her back down the hall when, from behind him, he heard her say, “Can I see?” He turned and saw her pushing through the door of his bedroom.

“Hey!” he said. He hurried back up the hall and stepped in after her.

S
he had advanced several paces into his room, halting near the foot of the bed. She turned and looked at him. He glanced around and was relieved to see that he had tidied the place up, which meant that he had put away in his bedside table the dog-eared stack of
Vogues
and the accursed lingerie catalog that had arrived on the day of the paternity claim. Two nights ago, he had thumbed through these periodicals, not in an effort to arouse himself but rather to see if he could, as a kind of test of his will, override the impulse that had flared up, badly, in him. He had succeeded.

Chloe stood looking at him, a peculiar, unreadable expression on her face. She was thinking it was essential that she move
the plan along. Over the course of the day with Ulrickson, she had continually felt herself slipping in her concentration, gliding into a confused state in which she saw in him, not a target for seduction, but an actual, longed-for father figure, a kindly and loving man deserving of nothing but her gratitude for taking her in. Remembering Dez’s warnings about Ulrickson’s charm and duplicity, she was now convinced that the absurd daughter-like feelings he had awakened in her were only part of a deliberate plan on his part to disarm her, to control and manipulate her, just as he had her mother. A memory of Holly—slumped on the sofa at home, overweight, drunk and railing against the direction her life had taken—flashed before Chloe’s eyes, that vision of a life squandered and destroyed, and which Chloe had been convinced, by Dez, to believe was Ulrickson’s doing. She scolded herself for her gullibility and, thinking how Dez would praise and love her if she could bring it off successfully, refocused herself on the seduction.

The chamber was illuminated only by a feeble trickle of light that fell through the venetian blinds. Jasper reached for the wall switch.

“Don’t!”
she cried. Then she added, softly, “My eyes. And it’s so nice and peaceful in here.”

He dropped his hand to his side.

She swept her gaze around the room, her eyes playing over the dresser, the small velvet-covered divan in one corner, the king-size bed, which she now stepped over to with a sinuous, silent, tiptoe gait. She stopped, turned and faced Jasper, her hands folded in front of her, as she had stood on the driveway when
she first got out of the car. “Mmmm,” she said, “so nice and peaceful in here. Your bed is huge,” she added, bending slightly and touching its surface with her fingertips. She straightened and looked levelly at Jasper. “Where does Mom sleep?”

He explained about the guesthouse. “It’s a very nice little house, actually,” he said. “And it makes more sense. Now.”

She nodded. She looked at the bed, where the shadows of the blinds lay in diagonal stripes across the light cotton spread. “So sad,” she said softly. “You must get so lonely.”

Jasper was about to answer when Chloe, on a sudden diabolical impulse, dropped into a sitting position on the edge of the bed. She looked at him with a stricken expression. “Dad,” she said woefully, “I hope you’re not
mad
at me!”

“Mad at you?” Jasper said, mystified. “What do you mean?”

She was looking at him pleadingly, her hands clasped between her knees. “Mad that I told Child Services about you,” she said. “That I made them look for you. I mean, I’ve come into your perfect life, here, and … and changed everything for you and Mom and Maddy—”

“My goodness, no,” Jasper said. “No, no, no.” He came forward and sat beside her. “No, I’m very glad you did that.” He placed his arm around her shoulders.

“I was just so scared of being in foster care,” she said, looking down at her hands. “I didn’t want to mess up your life. I didn’t want to wreck everything for you! But I was frightened! And sad about my mom, and just so … so …” She turned and looked at him; her features were contorted, as though she were about to start crying. “So confused and lonely.”

“Oh, my dear,” Jasper said, “I couldn’t be happier that you’re here with us! Couldn’t be happier that you spoke up about me.”

“Honest?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Oh, Dad!” she cried, and she lifted her legs and swung them around so that they lay over Jasper’s thighs. She put her arms around his neck then hiked herself up so that she was sitting athwart his lap, twisting her torso around and hugging him tightly. Jasper felt her crush her almost disconcertingly womanly-feeling upper body against his chest, nuzzling her face into his neck. “I promise to be a good girl,” she said, her voice muffled, her lips moving against the ticklish flesh where his neck joined his shoulder. “I just want to make you happy. Happy and proud.”

“You will,” Jasper said into her soft hair. “You do.” He rubbed her back.

“Oh, Dad,” she said, “never let me go!”

They sat this way, silently breathing, for several minutes in the semidarkness. It felt so
good
to hold her. It must have been simply his natural shyness that had made it difficult earlier, when they first met at the courthouse, to obey the instinct to embrace her. He had felt the same constraint several times today. A hesitation. He hoped that she did not, in seeing that balkiness, think him standoffish, cold, remote. But now, all those worries were swept away as he unselfconsciously held her to him, gently rocking her, as when he lulled Maddy to sleep after a bout of tears. He could actually feel her heart beating against his chest, and he suspected that she could feel his. He breathed deep of her exquisite aroma, burying his face in her soft neck.