Blessing in Disguise (46 page)

Grace found herself agreeing, even as she wondered if this might be some new trick of Win’s to get her back. Then, with a sickening jolt, it occurred to her—could
Mother
have put this idea into Chris’s head?

Was Mother capable of something so underhanded?

Underhanded, no. But if she truly believed it was in Chris’s best interest
...

And what, exactly,
was
in Chris’s best interest? Grace wondered. Was she being selfish, holding on to him when he so clearly preferred being with his father?

Maybe ... but Chris needed her, too. He just didn’t know how much.

Grace stayed home most of the day, letting her machine answer the phone when it rang. Twice, it was Jack, sounding so unhappy she’d nearly given in and picked up. But mostly it was reporters. Someone from
Harper’s Bazaar,
desperate for an interview. Bob Tillotson, from
A.M. America,
wanting to do a spot on Nola and her. A woman from National Public Radio, who left both her office and home numbers, urging Grace to call her back tonight, no matter how late.

She thought about calling Nola, to see how she was handling this media onslaught, but then thought better of it. She pictured Nola, cool and imperious, with her smile that could turn frosty in a blink. Though she’d probably never had occasion to do so, Nola would instinctively know how to field even the toughest questions a reporter might throw at her.

As expertly as Mother would ... once the press got wind of her being in New York.

By late afternoon, the phone had stopped ringing. Grace, knowing she ought to be at her desk madly finishing the last rewrite, couldn’t seem to rouse herself from the sofa, where she lay curled, listening to the soft gurgling of the radiators, and the occasional rumble of a subway passing underneath her building. She was waiting for Win ... but it wasn’t her ex-husband she wanted to see walk through her door.

Jack.
She couldn’t bear thinking about him ... but at the same time she couldn’t seem to stop.

At last, with the light fading, Grace blinked as if waking from a long nap—how many hours had she been sitting here?—and hauled herself off the sofa to get dressed.

Minutes later, just out of the shower, she looked about her bedroom, where evening shadows, deepened by the gloom of the rain that had just begun to fall, angled through the skylight, casting her iron bed in a faint bruised glow. In the corner, by the window, was a low round glass table holding a vase with the spray of pussy willows she’d picked up yesterday at the greenmarket—a sign that spring finally was on its way.

A beautiful room, simple, almost Zenlike. Just a few pagan touches—the richly colored mohair shawl thrown over the bed, the intricately embroidered Susani hanging on the wall above. Yet, pleasing as it all was, it made her think of those eggs she and Sissy used to blow out and paint for Easter, lovely on the outside, hollow on the inside.

No one sharing it with her. Not Jack. Not even her son.

My little boy.
Was he really gone for good? She found herself listening for the muffled pounding of Chris’s stereo. But there was only the soft patter of rain against the skylight.

She thought of how she’d occasionally resented Chris, his sullen moodiness, and the times he was being really irritating, when she could have cheerfully thrown him out a window. But didn’t every mother get fed up from time to time? Probably Chris had felt that way about her, too.

Apparently more often than she’d realized.

Why else would he rather live with Win?

She felt a tightness in her chest that was sending out tiny darts of pain.
How could he love Win more than me?
But it wasn’t hard to imagine, not with Win—Win, who seemed impervious to bad moods, who had a way of making them disappear.

Damn you, Win.

He would be here any minute now. Furiously, she toweled her hair dry, jammed her legs into jeans, and yanked on a baggy sweater.

Moments later, Grace was opening her front door to let her ex-husband in, realizing as she did so that she had swung it open too wide, as if for a larger man—a man, say, about Jack’s size. Her heart contracted.

“Hello, Win,” she said.

“Hi,” Win replied, seeming to hesitate, as if not sure of his welcome. As he stepped inside, he grinned, cocking his ear at the familiar Miles Davis tune drifting from her stereo, lazy and undulating as cigarette smoke in a roadside bar.

She took his coat, draping it over her arm. “Is it still raining?” Dumb. She could feel the coat’s dampness through the sleeve of her sweater.

“It won’t last,” he told her.

“That’s not what I heard. They’re predicting three inches.”

Win shrugged. “Call me an optimist.”

Yes, she thought. That was Win. But what if she were to remind him that even the sunniest outlook wasn’t always enough to keep a person sane when raising a child, especially a
teenager,
full-time?

Easy, she told herself. A drink first, maybe two. Then you can turn on the charm, try to convince Win that assuming full custody of Chris would not be in his own best interest. All that extra responsibility tying him down, getting in the way of his work, his social life.

For Chris’s sake, she’d
beg
if she had to. And if that didn’t work? She couldn’t bear even thinking about it. Because, if Win was determined to take this to court, she’d have no choice but to back down. It wasn’t just that Win’s powerful connections and legal expertise would give him a good chance of winning—she simply would never subject her son to such an ordeal.

But, looking at her ex-husband now, she wondered that she, or anyone, could think him capable of fighting dirty. In his navy suit and pale-blue Oxford suit, with the striped Dunhill tie she’d given him the Christmas before they’d split up, he looked like a handsome, clean-cut senior-class president posing for his graduation photo. Despite everything, she felt oddly reassured by him—the way certain doctors, by their mere tone of voice, can seem to transform an imagined tumor into a benign cyst, or an especially personable saleswoman could send her out of a store with a dress or a pair of shoes she didn’t need and couldn’t afford.

Grace gestured toward the sitting area; Win waited for her before seating himself in the Morris chair. When he folded his hands in his lap, one atop the other—like a Flemish nobleman in a painting by Van Dyck—she smiled at the formality of the gesture. It felt so strange, their sitting together like this, as if it were some kind of pantomime that any minute would send them into peals of laughter. She had a weird sense of their leading parallel lives, as if, while they sat here enacting this old-fashioned drawing-room drama, their real selves, which had never ceased being married, were loafing around in stockinged feet, sipping wine, and giggling over the funny things that had happened that day.

“How’s Chris?” she asked, making sure not to sound too anxious. “Does he need anything?”

“He’s fine. Did he tell you about his new Macintosh?”

“No, he didn’t,” she told him, straining to keep her voice even. First a dog, and now a new
computer?

“I guess you two had more important things to talk about.” Win sounded sheepish.

He’s feeling guilty, she thought. She could tell from the way his knees were jiggling. Also, he was looking everywhere but at her. Good. Maybe she could play on it.

“To Chris, nothing could be more important than a computer. If he ever got shipwrecked and washed ashore on an island with no food or water, the thing he’d miss most would be Nintendo.”

She watched Win smile his class-president smile, no doubt relieved that she wasn’t giving him hell.

“Last night, he was teaching your mother a game called Tetris. Ever play it?”

“I don’t have much time for games,” she said, more sharply than she’d intended.

But Win didn’t seem to notice. “Maybe not these days, but remember when we were first married and we couldn’t afford the rental fee for the TV cable?” he recalled with a smile. “All we had was that deck of cards. After I taught you to play two-handed bridge, I swear, you wouldn’t let up until you’d beaten the pants off me.”

“And you, of course, were too much of a gentleman to let me keep on losing.”

“I had no choice! You’d have kept playing until you either won or wore me into the ground.”

“That bad, huh?” She gave a rueful laugh.

“Not all the time.”

His mouth relaxed, but the smile remained in his eyes, creasing their corners. He shifted a bit, leaving his face half in shadow. She found herself thinking of the hall light they’d started leaving on all night after Chris was born, how Win’s face on the pillow beside hers had seemed dissected into two halves, light and dark, like a harlequin mask.

But she couldn’t, not for the life of her, remember what it had felt like when he’d kissed her ... or any of the things he must have whispered to her when they were making love.

Whereas Jack, while softly caressing her face, her neck, her breasts, her belly, and between her legs ... and murmuring to her how beautiful she was, how much he wanted to be inside her ... could almost make her come.
Oh God, Jack ...

But she mustn’t think about Jack now.

“Win ... I don’t want to lose my son.” She heard the crack in her voice, and willed herself not to cry.

“You’re not losing him,” Win told her. “He loves you as much as ever.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Maybe what he needs right now is just a change of atmosphere.” He paused, as if gathering himself up to launch into a courtroom argument. “From what Chris tells me, things have been sort of tense around here lately.”

“Look, Win, all this stuff with the book, and now with my mother here ... you know, it hasn’t exactly been a picnic.”

“I wasn’t talking about Cordelia.”

She could feel heat rising in her cheeks. “What are you getting at?”

He shrugged. “I’m not here to judge you, Grace. Believe me, that’s the last thing I want to do. My main concern here is Chris’s welfare. He’s obviously not happy. He’s not up to his old tricks, but even so ...”

He didn’t have to elaborate. She knew he was thinking of that awful time Chris had been caught shoplifting. She’d told him about Chris’s cutting school, too.

“I know he hasn’t been happy,” Grace admitted. “But since when do teenagers need a reason to be moody?”

“I’m not blaming you, Grace,” Win repeated.

“Then don’t do it. Win—don’t take him from me!” She jumped to her feet, feeling as if she were trying to hold her balance aboard a rushing train, the floor seeming to tilt and sway beneath her.

“I ...” He stopped, as if he’d thought better of whatever he was going to say. Finally, surrendering, he spread his hands and looked up at her, his handsome, clean-cut face full of longing and confusion. “The last thing I want is to hurt you, Grace. Maybe the thing to do is to let Chris stay with me, just for the time being. Until your mother leaves.”

“When will that be?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think she does, either. She’s been running around visiting as many of your father’s old New York friends and cronies as she can find, trying to drum up contributions for the library. Also, a lot will depend on whether or not she goes ahead with this lawsuit of hers.”

“But ... she
can’t.
The letters ...” The whole room was spinning now, seeming to rock her from side to side.

“You
say they were written by your father,” he explained, patiently, as if to a child. “But have you had them verified by a handwriting expert? And if so, are you prepared to have his or her testimony refuted in court by an expert witness of your mother’s?”

“Win, I
know
my father’s handwriting. There’s no question the letters are genuine.”

He held up a hand. “Look, let’s not get off-track here. Cordelia might stay another week, maybe two. But a lot could change in that time, as far as Chris is concerned. I promise I won’t push him into any kind of final decision. Then, when the smoke has cleared, we’ll talk it over with his therapist—the three of us. We’ll decide together what’s best.”

Grace felt relief wash through her. It wasn’t quite what she’d hoped for ... but better than what she’d feared. Standing before Win, feeling unsteady, she suddenly realized she’d barely eaten all day, and hadn’t slept more than a few hours the night before. Now she felt herself sinking to her knees onto the carpet, slowly, gracefully even, as if she were kneeling to pray.

She became aware that Win was staring at her, longing in his face. And wouldn’t it be the most natural thing in the world simply to hold out her hand for him to pull her to her feet?

She felt the air around them grow charged.

Then Win was moving toward her, falling on his knees beside her, cradling her in his arms. And how odd now that, instead of being alarmed, she felt a strange, floating relief. He wasn’t clinging, as he had when she’d told him it was over between them, but holding her sweetly, almost tentatively, as if claiming her for a dance. Tears stung her eyes.

“Oh, Win ...” She brought her forehead to rest against his shoulder. He smelled faintly of the outdoors and of English Leather—a scent as familiar to her as her own.

His arms tightened about her, almost convulsively. “I play it over and over in my mind. ...” His voice was tight, too, almost choked. “I keep trying to come up with a new ending. Only I can’t. It always ends up the same ... and I ... I can’t turn it around. I’d give anything if I could.”

She’d heard this before, but back then she’d been a woman made of glass, his apologies distant-seeming and hollow, sliding off her like raindrops from the windshield of a speeding car. Now his words pierced her.

“I forgave you a long time ago,” she said, looking up and meeting his blue eyes, which were full of sorrow.

“Not soon enough.” She caught the faint bitterness in his tone, which dissolved into remorse with his next words. “But you had good reason, God knows.”

“Look, Win, what’s the point in going over all that again?”

“Because ...” He swallowed hard. “Because I thought that, in spite of everything that happened, what we had was pretty damn good.”