Blessing in Disguise (32 page)

“I believe you,” she told Nola in the dead cold voice of someone who has no other choice
but
to believe.

“Good.” Nola sat back, and Grace glimpsed the relief behind the grim set of her features. She stood. “I’ll be right back. Wait here.”

Watching Nola leave the room, Grace swallowed an ironic laugh. Leave now? How could she even get up?

At the same time, a voice in her head was telling her to run ... crawl if she had to ... just get away as quickly as possible from this person who claimed to be her sister, and from whatever proof—
photos, a diary?
—Nola was at this very moment digging from some drawer.

Grace, recognizing the voice as her mother’s, sank back in her chair.

She would stay.

She would hear it all.

An hour later, as Grace left Nola’s house, she walked as if in a dream, scarcely aware of where she was going. She didn’t notice the patch of ice until the sidewalk was suddenly snatched up from under her. She landed awkwardly on all fours, badly scraping one knee.

She supposed she ought to feel pain, but right now she was too numb. For several long moments, she simply stared at her knee below the hem of her long woolen skirt, watching the blood trickle down into her boot.

In her mind she was seeing Ned Emory, the white bedspread turning crimson beneath his body.

She shut her mind against the image, and pulled herself to her feet.

She had to snap out of this daze, or next she’d be walking into the path of a speeding taxi.

She thought of Jack. His arms and voice comforting her, bringing her back to earth again. After dropping her off earlier this evening, he’d said he was going over to his office to plow through the mail that had undoubtedly piled up while he was away. Maybe he was still there?

If she’d been thinking clearly, she’d have stopped at a pay phone. But in her fugue state, she found herself heading toward the Flatiron Building as if on a guided track. When she arrived, the doors to the reception area were open, but no one was behind the desk. She was about to leave when she heard an office door open down the hall. Moments later, Benjamin appeared.

As he stood gaping at her, Grace caught a glimpse of her reflection in the glass wall of the conference room, and realized what a shock she must have given him—white face, disheveled hair, bloodstained skirt, and all.

Ben quickly ushered her into the nearest office ... which happened to be Jerry Schiller’s. Seating her on the couch between helter-skelter stacks of books and manuscripts piled on the cushions, he bent to examine her knee.

“Whew. Looks deep. You probably could use a stitch or two.”

“It’s not that bad,” she told him, pressing a balled-up Kleenex to it to stop the fresh bleeding.

“Can I get you something?” Ben asked. “Band-Aid? Or maybe a brandy, if there’s any around? You look really shook up.”

“Honestly, it looks worse than it feels.”

“If you want to know the truth, you look like a kid who fell off her bicycle and is trying to be brave about it.” Ben, raising his eyes to meet her gaze, gave her so tender a smile that she felt immediately warmed.

He got up and perched himself on a corner of Jerry’s cluttered desk, his legs stretched out in front of him, narrow calfskin loafers planted on the carpet next to a stack of manuscripts. Looking at him, she imagined him the poised, accomplished young man she’d always hoped Chris would grow up to be.

It struck her again how odd it was that Ben didn’t have a girlfriend. She knew from Jack that plenty of women right here in the office were interested. But no one he dated was ever brought home to meet Jack or Natalie.

“My father used to say the reason I was so scrawny was because every time I gained a pound, I’d scrape it right off,” she told Ben. Suddenly it became too much of an effort, this lighthearted banter. In a bitter voice, she added, “He told me a lot of things ... not all of them true.”

As if hypnotized, she stared at the crease in Ben’s pant leg. How did he get corduroy to look so crisp? And how did he manage to keep his belt looped over itself like that, as perfectly knotted as a tie?

“Grace, what’s wrong?” She heard Ben speak, as if from a distance. “Forget what I said about falling off a bike—you look as if you’ve been hit by car.”

“In some ways, that’s what it feels like.”

“For God’s sake, what
is
it?”

Grace hesitated. “Is your dad around by any chance?” she asked.

Ben shook his head. “You just missed him. He’s on his way downtown to meet with some desperate author who called a little while ago. But, hey, I’m not a bad listener.”

The truth was, though she liked Ben, she didn’t feel all that comfortable confiding in him. But he was here, he was sympathetic. And Jack might be unreachable for hours ...

She heard a door slam in one of the offices down the hall, and watched the ladder of shadow and light from the building’s exterior fixtures shining through the blinds behind her play across Ben’s handsome face. And in that instant, while dust motes flickered through bars of rippling light, while his shadowed eyes rested on her, cool and green and somehow remote, a voice in Grace’s head whispered,
You’ll regret telling him.

As if sensing her reluctance, Ben moved away from the desk, and pushed aside a stack of books to sit beside her. “Grace, whatever it is, you can trust me.”

Ben was Jack’s son, she told herself. And he’d always been decent to her. Anyway, she’d only promised Nola she wouldn’t make any of this public.

“It’s Nola,” she found herself blurting. “Nola Emory, you remember her?”

“How could I forget?” Ben smiled.

“I just found out that we ... she and I ...” She filled her lungs, and finished in a rush of expelled breath, “We’re sisters.” She felt once again that sudden, spinning loss of gravity that had come over her at Nola’s.

Haltingly, she told him the rest. How Nola had erased any last doubts by showing her a letter written to Margaret by her father. In Grace’s mind, like an epitaph engraved on a tombstone, one line stood out:
It’s killing me. Margaret, this double life. Is there a way to end it without hurting those I love?

There were more letters, Nola had told her, but what would be the point of her reading them all? Wasn’t this all the proof she needed?

Ben listened without moving or shifting his gaze. When Grace was finished, he inclined toward her, his eyes alight with more than just sympathy.

“What if you could get her to hand over those letters?” Benjamin’s voice took on a quiet urgency. “Your book. My God, Grace, do you know what we’d be looking at in terms of publicity?
Sales?”

“I wasn’t thinking of my book,” she replied.

Grace wished now that she hadn’t told Ben. Jack would not have reduced this to simply a matter of the bottom line.

Her head cleared suddenly, and she sat up straighter. “Ben, you won’t tell anyone, will you? Not even your father, if you happen to speak to him before I do?”

“Not a soul,” he promised. “But Grace, you have
got
to get those letters.”

She let his words sink in. Ben might be an opportunist ... but he also happened to be right. This wasn’t just about her and Nola. What she had just learned in Nola’s kitchen cast a new light on everything she had written. Everything she had ever
believed.

“I’ll talk to her again. ...”

But she had the unsettling feeling that she and Ben were interested in the letters for different reasons.

For a moment or two, he appeared sunk in thought, his head lowered, chin held clasped in one hand. Then he raised his head abruptly.

“Have
you
told anyone besides me?”

“I came straight here.”

“Good,” he said, as if to himself. “That gives me time.”

“For what?” Grace asked.

He smiled. “What I meant was, there’s still time before we go to press. For you to make additions, or rewrite certain chapters.”

“Maybe ... but what if Nola refuses to cooperate?”

He grinned, and something behind that flash of perfect white teeth made her suddenly uneasy. But not as uneasy as his next words.

“Well, you know what they say—there’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

Jack held her until the trembling subsided.

“Do you want to sit down?” he asked. “Can I get you something? I think I have a bottle of sherry in here.” He turned and began rummaging on a shelf of the linen press he’d converted into both bar and catchall for things like manuscripts he hadn’t yet gotten around to, ABA posters he kept meaning to have framed, promotional giveaways like the box of balloons bearing the slogan:
HOW TO RISE TO THE TOP WITH BOTH FEET ON THE GROUND
.

“You’re the second man this evening to ply me with liquor,” she told him with a shaky laugh as she sank onto the sofa. Luckily, Jack had been home when she called a short while ago. He’d offered to come right over, but she’d made him promise to stay put. She hadn’t wanted Chris to hear all this ... not yet.

“Who was the first?”

“I stopped by the office before coming here, and ran into Ben.” She glanced at her watch—half past ten. How had it gotten to be so late? It felt as if she’d left Ben no more than an hour ago.

Jack poured her a glass of sherry and set it on the table by the sofa. In his apartment’s good-sized living room, made even larger by an absence of all but a few pieces of furniture, she would have felt marooned had it not been for Jack.

“Now,” he said, settling beside her, one arm wrapped about her shoulders. “Do you want to talk about it?”

She told him everything, including her having confided in Ben.

Jack fell back against the sofa cushion, clearly astounded by her bombshell. She was thankful that he wasn’t leaping up to point out gleefully what a publicist’s dream this was, the way Ben had ... but why wasn’t he saying anything?

Finally, Jack turned to her and in a grave voice said. “Are you going to be okay? Screw the book—all I care about is how you’re taking all this.” It was exactly what she needed.

Tears welled in her eyes. Always, all her life, it had been this way. She would twist herself into knots to keep from crying in public, but the merest hint of sympathy when she was feeling low, and she started leaking like a sieve.

“Oh, Jack ...” She swallowed against the lump in her throat. “I’ll be okay. I’m just so ... so ... oh, I don’t know.” She slumped into the crook of his arm.

“Angry?”

Grace looked at him, and realized he was right. She
was
angry, damnit. At her father, for having lied to her. At Nola, too, for waiting until now to tell her. It didn’t change what had happened to Ned Emory—she knew without a doubt that his death had been an accident. But in a way, wasn’t Daddy indirectly responsible? Despite Ned not knowing who Nola’s real father was, he
had
been well aware of the fact that she wasn’t
his.
Otherwise, would he have been driven to turn his gun on Margaret?

“How could he do this to us?” she cried.

“What makes you think he was doing it to hurt you?” Jack asked.

“Jack, don’t you see? He
lied
to us. Not only that, he had a
child
with Margaret.”

“A child you’re afraid he might have loved more than you?”

At that moment, Grace hated Jack. But then it dawned on her that he was only trying to help her sort out her emotions. She took a deep breath.

“Maybe.” Something twisted inside her, bringing a hot pain. “Oh, Jack ... what if he did?”

“I think it’s entirely possible,” he began slowly, “that he loved you even
more
than he would have under ordinary circumstances. I imagine that, when he looked at you, he wasn’t thinking of Nola, but of how terrible it would be if you were ever to turn your back on him.”

Grace’s tears spilled over, scalding her cheeks. “Yes, he loved me—that much I
am
sure of.”

“What you don’t know, then, is where your mother figures in all this.”

Grace remembered Mother’s impending visit, and clapped a hand to her mouth. “Oh, God, she’ll be here in two weeks!”

“Are you going to tell her?”

Grace thought for a moment, then said, “I have to. But I have a feeling she might already know—even if it’s only deep down.”

“Does this mean you’re planning to revise your book?” His expression gave away only a hint of the expectation he had to be feeling.

She put her hand on Jack’s knee, feeling more steady than she had in the past several hours. “Yes,” she told him. “Not because it’ll help Cadogan—and don’t get me wrong, because I
do
want what’s best for you, too—but for me. I think, in some ways, I’ve always known there was something missing from our perfect family portrait. I didn’t know what it was, but that didn’t stop me from looking. Maybe that’s what made me decide to write this book in the first place.”

Jack smiled. “I can’t help thinking of that Chinese curse: Be careful what you ask for—you might get it.”

Grace stood up. “I’d better be off. I told Chris I wouldn’t be gone long.”

“I’ll drive you, then.”

“Jack, you don’t have to—”

He hushed her with a kiss. “There have to be some things in life you can count on. I’m one of them.”

Can I really count on you?
Grace wondered. If both Win and her father—whom she had counted on and believed in the way she’d believed in the epistles taught to her in Catechism—could let her down so profoundly, then could she trust that Jack wouldn’t as well?

An hour later, as Grace was getting ready for bed, she paused in the midst of brushing her teeth, arrested by a startling thought:
Nola is more like me than Sissy is.
Shaken by the realization, she rinsed her mouth, and dropped her toothbrush onto the marble counter next to an apothecary jar filled with odds and ends—tiny jewel-like seashells, old marbles, buttons, sequins, and beads—she had picked up here and there over the years.

She stared at her reflection in the mirrored medicine cabinet, absently noting the paleness of her skin and the dark circles under her eyes. One word echoed in her head:
sister.
Now that the shock was beginning to wear off, she wondered what it would be like having Nola as a sister.