Undone (8 page)

Holly had already begun her afternoon cocktail hour. Drink
always made her belligerent. Her response was blunt. “If anyone should be locked up,” she said, “it’s that little slut of mine.” She did, however, attempt to question her daughter when Chloe returned from school that afternoon. But the child simply ran past her and vanished into her room, slamming the door behind her.

Chloe threw herself on the bed. Her heart and mind were in turmoil. After her last class, she had rushed to Dez’s apartment above the Mill—but found it empty, his belongings cleared out. He was gone. She would never see him again. She wept inconsolably. Then, shortly before midnight, the phone rang. It was Dez! He told her, in a hurried whisper (he was speaking from a pay phone at a pizza parlor ten miles down the lake, in Sayer’s Cliff), that he had moved to a trailer park, where he had rented a single-wide motor home. The location was secluded and would suit their needs for now. He told her how to get to him—”just follow the main road around the lake until you come to the sign for Black Point; take the next right, and then follow the narrow dirt path that leads into the woods and terminates at the grounds of the trailer park. I’m in a white and blue Tartarus.”

She went to him, pedaling furiously through the icy dark, past jagged, leafless black trees, with a sliver of silvery March moon keeping pace with her both above, in the sky, and below, in trembling reflection, in the thawing lake. And it was from Dez’s new location—the scrubby clearing in the woods, with the ramshackle collection of trailers and RVs parked in rows amid the surrounding black pines and maples—that they resumed their romance. Dez insisted that she continue to live at home, continue attending school (“You’ve got to act like nothing happened—let
them forget”); but he also insisted that she come to him, every night, without fail. And he vowed that he would think of a way to better their lot.

So matters rested for the next two weeks, until that morning at the end of March when Chloe arrived home from Dez’s trailer, at dawn, to discover a police cruiser in front of the house. Her mother’s car was not out front, in its usual spot. Dropping her bicycle, she ran up to the policeman, who was standing on the porch ringing the doorbell. She asked what was going on. Where was her mother? The cop, a young man with strangely lush, feminine-looking eyelashes, removed his hat. The cruiser’s red light kept spinning, intermittently bathing Chloe’s stricken, uncomprehending face in its harsh, hellish glow.

The cop asked if she had any relatives with whom she could stay. She said that she had no one—her father was dead; both sets of grandparents likewise; and she had no aunts or uncles. The policeman informed her that it was against the law for a minor to live alone, so he would be delivering her to the Department of Children and Families, in Newport. He told her to go and wait in the back of the cruiser while he finished his paperwork.

Chloe walked to the curb, but instead of getting into the squad car, she bent, slowly, never taking her eyes off the policeman, who remained on the porch, scribbling in his pad. She righted her bicycle, mounted it, then glided off, glancing behind her every few seconds to see if he was following. He was not. She rounded the corner, then stood up on the pedals and pumped hard, racing back to the trailer park in the woods at the far end of the lake, back to Dez.

S
he was surprised at the keenness of her grief. Long-buried memories of her mother—young, slim, sober, beautiful, smiling down at her in a garden somewhere, tickling her on a sofa long ago in some forgotten room in a slant of sunlight, a smell of talc and lilies of the valley … the nubbly texture of a white cotton bedspread at nap time with Mommy … These vague, jumbled impressions were joined by memories from a few years later, when she was a shy, melancholy preteen—fat, freckled and docile—and her mother, not yet addled by booze, was Chloe’s best, her only, friend. They would sit together on the sofa, in the evening, and Holly would reminisce about her various boyfriends, including Hughie Soames and Jasper Ulrickson, about
the original confusion over which one of them was Chloe’s father. She loved to hear these stories of her mother’s life, stories that took on the coloration of high Romance and that sharpened Chloe’s appetite for the days when she would be the object of rival males’ affections. “Tell me again about when you were young,” she would say as she lay with her head in Holly’s lap, her mother’s soft hand absently stroking the hair at Chloe’s temple. These were the memories that haunted her after Holly died, when Chloe, having taken refuge with Dez in the Tartarus, buried herself under the sheets and blankets on his bed and cried and cried and cried.

True, she wished that Dez could be more sympathetic toward her in her grief. But she knew that he was dealing with his own problems. After losing his teaching job, he had sunk into a dangerous lassitude, unable most days to get out of bed until noon and only then to sit, unshaven, unwashed, in front of the television. He had even lost all interest in sex, pushing Chloe away when she made an advance or, on those rare occasions when he had tried to make love to her, rolling off with a muttered curse, sweat-slicked and shame-faced, but offering no excuses, no explanations for his failure. She had even begun to worry, after her mom died, that he had fallen out of love with her. But then came that
Tovah
show. And the moment when Chloe heard the name Jasper Ulrickson and told Dez, in all innocence, that her mother had been with a man of that name. The words had acted on Dez like a spell from a fairy tale, woke him from his slumber, brought him back from the dead. For weeks, he had barely budged from the sofa. Now, he barely slept.
In fevered bouts of pacing the tiny trailer, he thought aloud, talking out the plan, throwing out his hands, and laughing when he found his way around some blockage that threatened to ruin the scheme.

So glad and relieved was she to see him alive and happy again, she would have been willing to go along with any plan he dreamed up. But this scheme in particular, the plan for her to seduce, then expose, Jasper Ulrickson, struck her as right and just—especially after Dez patiently explained to her
why
Ulrickson deserved to have the trick played on him. Dez had made her see how Ulrickson had cruelly
used
her mother, taken
advantage
of her, then tossed her aside to go and pursue his education, his career, his fame and wealth, while poor Holly, in the years and decades that followed, sank into poverty and despair and drink. Had Ulrickson ever called to ask how Holly was? Had he ever offered to help her out a little financially? Think of the difference that would have made to Holly—and to Chloe! And what if Ulrickson had ever deigned to return to New Halcyon to visit the woman he so casually seduced and then shunted aside? “Do you think for a minute that your mother would have become a desperate alcoholic?” Dez asked. “Do you think she would have been trawling the singles bars every weekend? Chloe, do you think she’d be
dead
?”

All of this strengthened her resolve to play her part in the scheme. But her motivation was less about punishing Ulrickson than it was about making Dez happy. And he
was
happy! Suddenly, he was voracious—alternating his bouts of planning with absolutely brutal attacks upon her body. Sometimes, he continued to
plot and plan even during their lovemaking. Thrusting into her, he would grunt into her ear that she was his “secret weapon,” his “equalizer.” Sometimes it frightened Chloe to know that the fulfillment of all his dreams rested on
her.
One night, after a particularly fierce session—which Dez had punctuated, at climax, with a triumphant shout about how the plan was going to “change everything!”—she began to cry.

“What if I mess it
up
somehow?” she asked tearfully, in the panting aftermath. “I don’t want to wreck all your dreams.”

She was lying on her back on the trailer’s narrow bed, her wheat- and honey- and rope-hued hair fanned out around her flushed face. Dez, sitting cross-legged beside her in a stupor of sexual satisfaction, simply laughed as he looked down at her Eden-naked body. He dreamily swept his hand from her collarbones over her improbably full and shapely breasts (she was otherwise so slender), down the incurved bare belly, which still rose and fell rapidly, to the poignant points of her pelvic bones, down her legs until he cradled one of her delicate feet in his hands. “I assure you,” he said, kissing the tips of her pink toes. “You are the one element of the plan about which I have no doubts. No doubts whatsoever.”

O
n a Friday morning seven days after her mother’s death, Chloe rode her bike into Sayer’s Cliff, bought a ticket at the greasy spoon–cum–bus terminal, then boarded a Greyhound bound for the city of Newport. She was dressed in the sober ensemble that Dez had picked out for her at the local mall the day before: white blouse, black blazer and matching slacks. Her hair was in a no-nonsense ponytail, her face free of makeup.

She arrived in Newport (a down-at-heels resort city perched on a peninsula at the southern end of Lake Memphremagog, on the Canada-US border) just before noon. As Dez had instructed, she walked six blocks east to the Division of Family Services district office, a large gray government building at 100 Main Street,
across from a block-long dollar store. On the second floor, she spoke to a receptionist, and a minute later a heavy, pear-shaped man in shirtsleeves, crumpled tie and brown slacks appeared and identified himself as Mr. Stubbs, Family Services Division Officer. He invited her back into the rat’s maze of work cubicles, to a small corner office. There, he invited her to sit in a chair facing a desk heaped with papers and file folders from which a brownish-gray computer sprouted like a mushroom.

“You are classified, by the Vermont state police, as a runaway,” Mr. Stubbs said, peering at the computer screen. “You fled the custody of a police officer.”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “I did run away, but there was a reason.”

(“You’re going to tell them about your mother’s history with Jasper Ulrickson,” Dez had told her when he coached her about this meeting. “You’re going to say that she told you never to tell anyone that he is your father.” He warned her that the agency people would doubt her—at first. “So you’re going to tell them that the proof is in your mother’s house—the diary and photos.”)

Chloe did as Dez instructed. She even drew on the acting skills she had honed in her role as a fairy in a middle-school play, and pretended to weep. Stubbs listened, impassively, then tapped at his computer. He said that a police officer would be dispatched to her mother’s house to collect the diary and photos. In the meantime, Chloe would be kept in Department of Children and Families custody. “Which means,” he said, “we will place you in short-term foster care while we work to resolve the paternity issue.” (Dez had told her, in advance, not to panic; that her time in foster care would be brief.)

Stubbs was able immediately to place Chloe with an elderly, childless, Christian couple, the Gaitskills, on the Capeville Road in a house filled with lace doily–draped furniture, porcelain Nativity scenes, crucifixes and a baby grand piano with keys the color of yellowing teeth and upon which old Mr. Gaitskill played hymns from a songbook while Mrs. Gaitskill sang along in a quavery voice. They did not own a television, but they did listen, after dinner, to the “wireless,” an ancient radio on which they tuned in a religious program broadcast from Burlington. At bedtime, Chloe would retreat to her room and, under the gaze of various framed saints, call Dez in the trailer—their sole form of contact for the time being, since it was, he said, far too dangerous for them to see each other while the plan was in its early, delicate, stages of development.

Shortly after she began her imprisonment with the Gaitskills, Chloe learned, in a call from Mr. Stubbs, that both she and her reputed father, Jasper Ulrickson, would have to submit to DNA testing. Stubbs and a lawyer, Mrs. Barnes, would drive her to the appointment in Newport. Before he could hang up, Chloe asked the name of the clinic, the time of her appointment and the name of the contact. (Dez had drummed into her head, over and over and over again, that it was
crucial
to the success of the entire enterprise that Chloe learn these details.) Stubbs said that the appointment was for Thursday (the day after tomorrow) at the G-Tek Clinic in Newport, at 255 Main Street, at 10 a.m. with a man called Ames. Chloe jotted the words on the back of an envelope, then dashed up to her room and phoned Dez.

He had been awaiting her call.

H
e wasted no time—had no time to waste. First hastily assuring her, in cooing tones, that she had done “wonderfully,” and that “everything was going to work out fine,” and that they would “soon be back together,” he hung up and then burst into frantic motion, peeling off his jeans and T-shirt and donning the pair of white coveralls he had purchased a few days earlier at Home Depot. He grabbed his pre-packed travel bag (which contained a quite different disguise) and slung it over his shoulder. Then, toting the (empty) toolbox he had excavated from the trailer’s storage space, he biked into Sayer’s Cliff. There, he caught a bus for Burlington airport and used his credit card to buy a round trip to JFK, departing 11 a.m. Dez loathed flying, hated being
thirty-five thousand feet in the empyrean where only God and angels—or those about to
become
angels after double engine failure or a terrorist bombing—belonged. Fortunately, the flight was smooth, with only a single colossal bouncing bump upon landing. At the Hertz counter, he rented a subcompact, then drove thirty minutes north to Clay Cross. He felt increasingly at home as his rental car was enveloped by the surroundings of the wealthy enclave: sweeping lawns, stately mansions and century-old trees; indeed, he might have been back in affluent Hayes Barton, in Raleigh, where he had grown up. (Thank God he was not!) With the help of the rental car’s mellifluously voiced GPS, he easily found his way to Cherry Tree Lane and to the house near the end of the street, a long, low, single-story dwelling with a great spreading maple shading its white clapboard front. Number ten. Dez pulled up to the curb, parked, then glanced at his watch. It was six minutes past three. He was right on time.