Woman in Black (34 page)

“Not much,” Phoebe said in her usual desultory tone. In the old days, she would at least have offered to help clean up, but now she only stared at the flames leaping in the fireplace. Abigail wondered if she was still sulking from the chewing-out she'd gotten after the disastrous videotaped Christmas dinner, a confrontation that had quickly escalated into a shouting match. When Abigail had accused her of being more interested in some boy she'd just met than in her own mother, Phoebe had hurled back at her, “At least with Neal, I don't feel like I'm invisible! With you, it's like I'm not even there. I'm surprised you even noticed I wasn't at your stupid party.”

Hurtful words that had only served to make Abigail feel as if she were the invisible one.

Her thoughts flew back to Vaughn. In her mind, she replayed his kiss, the warmth of his lips against hers, contrasted with the delicious coolness of his fingers caressing her cheek. She wasn't invisible to
him
. To Vaughn, she was someone with feelings, desires, and needs. Someone who might have made her share of mistakes but who was doing her best to rectify them.

No sooner had she sat down than Phoebe rose languidly to her feet. “I'm going out. 'Bye, guys.”

“And just where do you think you're going at this hour?” Abigail spoke more sternly than she'd intended.

Phoebe gave her a blank look. “What do you mean? It's only eight-thirty. Besides, Daddy already gave me permission.”

“Permission for what?”

Phoebe sighed in the exaggerated manner of someone terribly put upon. “Neal and I are going for a drive,” she answered grudgingly.

“You were with him most of the day,” Abigail reminded her. “Besides, it's Christmas. This is the time to be with your family.”

Phoebe turned to Kent with a look of mute appeal. “Daddy?”

“I don't see the harm in it,” he said, sending Phoebe on her way with an indulgent wave. “Go on, baby, have fun. But, remember, I want you back before midnight.”

As soon as Abigail and Kent were alone, she turned on him, saying angrily, “Why do you always do that?”

“Do what?” He played innocent.

“Undermine me like that.”

“I did no such thing,” he said mildly. “I'd already told her she could go. I don't see why you're making such a big fuss about it.”

“So you don't think it's a big deal that our daughter is spending practically every waking minute with this boy?” Abigail retorted. “For all we know, they could be having sex.”

“She's a sensible girl,” Kent replied in the same maddeningly reasonable tone. “If we haven't raised her with the right values, it's too late to start preaching now.”

“You don't seem very concerned about it.”

He eyed her thoughtfully. “Is it the idea of her having sex, or is it specifically sex with Neal that you find so upsetting?” As usual, he'd cut to the quick with surgical precision.

“I don't have anything against Neal,” she replied somewhat defensively. “He seems like a nice enough boy.”

“Even if he happens to be related to Lila,” Kent finished the sentence for her.

“Now you're putting words into my mouth. Honestly, I don't care who he's related to. He's older than Phoebe, which means he's more experienced.”

“He's eighteen. Hardly what I'd call a man of the world.”

“Still.” Abigail didn't know what to say to that. It was true that Neal didn't seem all that worldly.

“Phoebe's always been her own person,” Kent reminded her. “How do we know it's not the other way around, that she isn't exerting some sort of an influence over him?”

“That's ridiculous. She's sixteen!”

Kent went on eyeing her with his steady, implacable gaze. “She's also your daughter. Don't you remember what
you
were like at that age? Pretty single-minded, from what you've told me.”

“Please don't make this about me,” Abigail said in a tone that was more pleading than angry. “Everything can't always be my fault.”

“Actually,” he said, “I have a feeling this has more to do with you and me than with our daughter.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “What makes you think that?”

“You know. Don't make me spell it out.”

She knew, of course she knew, but at the same time she wanted to refute it. He was her husband. She loved him and hoped he still loved her. All she could manage was a watered-down version of the truth. “Okay, since you brought it up, yes, I've noticed that you've been distant with me lately.”

“Have I? I would've have said it was the other way around. You've been distant with me for years, Abby. Not,” he held out a hand to keep her from interrupting, “that I'm suggesting you're cold or unloving. I don't think that. It's just … well, there's a part of you I've always felt I couldn't reach. It's like you don't trust me enough to share it with me.”

A memory of her uncle unfurled in her head like the smoke curling up the chimney. For an instant, she could almost feel the hard pressure of his body against hers, the disgusting hair on his chest prickling against her bare skin. A memory that brought the taste of bile to the back of her throat.

Helplessly, she gazed at Kent, struggling to find the words.
You can tell him. He's your husband
, urged a voice in her head. But the words wouldn't come; she could only stand there, mute. In the early days of their marriage, she'd kept it from him because she hadn't wanted to spoil what they had. Such a thing would have been utterly alien to him, however hard he'd have tried to understand. He'd grown up in a household where there were no dirty little secrets, no fearful locking of the bedroom door at night; at the dinner table, there had been no one barking orders or spewing foul-mouthed diatribes—people were respectful of one another, and only lofty ideas were discussed.

It was only as time passed and she'd grown more trusting of Kent that she'd realized nothing would have changed how he felt about her, not even that. Several times she'd come close to confiding in him. What had held her back then was the fear that it would come between them—not that she'd been molested but that she'd kept it from him all those years.

Now it was simply too late.

“Well, if that's how you feel, I'm sure nothing I could say would change your mind at this late date,” she said at last.

“Try me.” She saw something flash in his eyes and knew it wasn't just idle words.

Once more, she was tempted to come clean, but in the end she couldn't do it. She merely sighed and said, “Not tonight. I'm much too tired for this discussion. I've been on my feet in the kitchen all day.” She feigned a yawn, rising to her feet. “In fact, I think I'll head on up to bed.”

“I'll join you in a bit.”

She was crossing the room when something made her pause and turn around. “Kent, I—” She longed to bridge the gap between them. It had been weeks since they'd had sex. But pride prevented her from being the first to make a move, so she only said, “I'll wait up for you.”

She didn't expect to see him again until morning—recently he'd fallen into the habit of staying up late, then slipping in under the covers after she'd gone to sleep—so she was surprised when minutes later, he appeared in the bedroom doorway. She'd been sitting up in bed, reading, and now she closed her book and set it down on the nightstand.

“You certainly took your time,” she teased.

Smiling, he walked over to the bed and sat down. “I had to take Brewster out.” A nightly ritual, she knew, that involved their dog's sniffing at every bush before peeing on it and that could sometimes take up to half an hour. The fact that Kent had cut it short said something in itself. Now he placed a hand on her leg. Even through the covers, she could feel its warmth. “That was a nice dinner you made. The whole day was nice, in fact.”

“Thank you. I'm glad somebody noticed.”

“Phoebe liked it, too.”

“Really? That must have been why she was in such a hurry to get away.”

“Don't take it personally. She's in love.”

Their daughter hadn't used those words—she insisted that she and Neal were just friends—but it was a natural assumption. “Yes. I'd almost forgotten what that was like.” Abigail's lips curled in an ironic smile.

“Would you like me to remind you?” Kent's hand moved farther up her leg.

“Oh, I don't know. It's been a while. I'm not sure I can remember that far back.”

He stood up, wearing a sly grin. “Why don't I refresh your memory? Just let me get out of these clothes.”

Minutes later, they lay naked together under the covers, her arms around her husband, her hands moving over his body, which she knew as intimately as her own. It felt good slipping back into their old routine.
This
was what she wanted, she told herself, striving to push any thought of Vaughn from her head. If tonight she'd kissed another man, it had only been to reassure herself that she was still desirable, that that part of her life wasn't over.

Kent's mouth traveled down her neck in a series of soft butterfly kisses. He ran his fingers through her hair. She was reminded of the first time they'd made love, of how gentle he'd been, as though he'd sensed her trepidation—not of him but of the act itself, which back then she'd still associated with her uncle—and hadn't wanted to scare her off. Now, all these years later, with the lights turned low, they might have been those young lovers embarking on a life together. She might almost have believed they could turn the clock back if she hadn't seen his face just then, illuminated by the wedge of light slanting from the door to the bathroom. Kent's eyes weren't on her. He was staring past her into the darkness at some imagined lover. Or so it seemed.

When he came, it seemed almost wrenched from him. His face twisted as if in pain, and a shudder went through him. Moments later she was climaxing, too, with an ease born of long practice with the same lover. Afterward, snuggled in his arms, pleasantly spent, Abigail allowed the thought that had briefly reared its ugly head to resurface. If her husband's mind hadn't been on her the whole time they'd been making love, whom
had
he been thinking of? The answer came to her like a bolt of lightning following a thunderclap.

Lila
, she thought.

12

Concepción had gotten the job through a friend of Jesús. It was in an office building in Century City, where she cleaned after hours. The pay was decent, and if the work was hard, she nonetheless felt lucky to be employed. Also, it had been easy to fall into a routine, since each of the four floors to which she'd been assigned was divided up in the same way—executive offices around the perimeter and the center space taken up by a series of interconnected modules lit by banks of ceiling fluorescents. The one thing she still hadn't gotten used to was the solitude. At the factory, at least, she'd been working around other people. Here, the only people she came into contact with were the scattering of office employees finishing up at their desks when she arrived at the beginning of each night's shift, and they never spoke a word to her except the occasional mumbled greeting.

Nonetheless, she thought it likely that she knew more about those employees than they did about each other. She knew that the person whose desk was nearest to the largest of the executive offices on the sixteenth floor, and whose computer showed an image, presumably of himself—a fair-haired young man at the helm of a sailboat—yearned for something more out of life than the eternal high noon of his cubicle. She knew that the woman with the pink sweater draped over the back of her chair and the collection of porcelain cats covering nearly every spare inch of her desk was lonely, judging by the absence of any other, more personal, mementos … and that the female occupant of the cubicle across from the break room was a slacker, from the discarded crossword puzzles filling her wastebasket and the fashion magazines haphazardly tucked beneath the folders on her desk.

Concepción had become a voyeur of sorts. Each night, between the hours of five and midnight, she made her way through the labyrinth of cubicles, pushing her cart and inadvertently stealing glimpses of people's lives as she tidied up. From underneath chairs and desks, she retrieved bits and pieces of those lives: lost keys and earrings, carelessly discarded bottle caps and gum wrappers. From the partially filled mugs left on desktops, she knew who took their coffee black and who liked it with cream. And emptying the contents of wastebaskets, she could determine who was watching their waistline and who ought to be, and, from the occasional condom wrapper, if a male executive in one of the offices had had sex.

Her boss, a squat man by the name of Felix Salazar, with a face as weathered as a barn door, was from Taxco, not far from where she'd grown up—a
paisano
—so when Jesús had prevailed upon him to hire her, Salazar had taken pity on her, though he'd been reluctant at first, saying it wasn't his practice to employ illegals. Thus, they had an understanding: He always paid her in cash, and she took what was given without complaint. It was less than she would have made if she'd had a green card, she knew from asking around, but it took care of her modest needs, with enough left over to put away a little each week.

Jesús had also found her a place to live—a house in Echo Park, which she shared with nine other people, all of them Mexicans like herself. It was noisy, and there was no privacy. She slept in the bed next to that of a fat woman named Soledad, who snored loudly enough to wake the dead, and there was always a line for the one bathroom. Still, she was grateful for a roof over her head. Most of all, she was grateful for the kindness of Jesús. Since that first day, he'd been her guiding light, making sure she wanted for nothing and asking for nothing in return.