Blessing in Disguise (54 page)

Then his vision cleared, and there was Win sprawled on the carpet at Cordelia’s feet, his feet tangled amid the sinuous wrought-iron legs of the coffee table, one elbow shakily supporting his weight while his forearm rested on the toes of his former mother-in-law’s shoes. Cordelia sat gaping down at him, as if she wasn’t quite sure whether to help him up ... or pull away in disgust.

“Damn you! Both of you!”
Grace shrieked.

Jack’s anger cooled abruptly. He felt himself dully, almost creakily, swiveling in her direction. But before he had turned all the way around, he could see her out of the corner of his eye—standing erect and fierce.

He started to move toward her, but then he heard an odd, gurgling sound that made him turn back toward Win.

The man was trying to get up, one knee under him and the other bent with his foot planted on the floor, half-facing Cordelia in a position that made Jack think somehow of a Victorian swain begging his beloved’s hand in marriage. Blood was threading down from one nostril of his aquiline nose—
Even that he does beautifully, like a Hollywood stunt man.
Jack thought. But something was wrong with this valentine. ...

Win was crying.
Real
tears were coursing down his cheeks in shiny rivulets.

“Win, really, you
must
tell them what got Chris so—” Cordelia’s imploring was cut off by Grace’s rushing over, crouching before Win.

“For God’s sake, if you know something ... please, please, tell me! Even if it is something you’re ashamed of. I deserve to know. I
have
to know. Chris’s
life
might be at stake. I know you love him as much as I do. I know you don’t want anything to happen to him.”

Win’s head dropped. Tears dripped off his chin, pink with the blood smeared over it. His voice, when it came, was low and guttural.

“He ... he wanted to go home. So I told him about us, the other night. I figured it was only a matter of time before we were a family again, all under the same roof. And my having Chris—well, it would help you make up your mind that much faster. Chris wanted to believe it, but he was scared, too ... of getting his hopes up and being disappointed. I guess I just ... I lost it.” His head sank even lower. “I told him, if he went back to you, I didn’t know if I’d be able to take care of the dog on my own. I didn’t mean it—I swear to God I would never have gotten rid of Cody. I was ... desperate. He had to have known I wouldn’t have done a thing like that. ...”

Cold anger—not the instinctive rage of a moment ago—filled Jack. He wanted to grab Win by the throat and shake him. But that wouldn’t bring Chris back.

While Grace stumbled to her feet. Jack strode over to where Win was still crouched, his forehead resting on his one bent knee. He grabbed hold of Win’s elbow, and pulled him to his feet, roughly, but not unkindly.

“Let’s go,” he said tersely. “We have a lot of territory to cover.”

“Wha—?” Win blinked at him in teary-eyed confusion.

“He can’t have gone too far, not with the dog. So we can rule out Greyhound or Amtrak. And I doubt he’d get very far on foot, or hitchhiking. I suggest we follow up on those phone calls to his friends with a visit—one of them might be covering for him. We’ll check back in a little while, see if Lila has any other ideas.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Cordelia get up and move toward the kitchen. A moment later, she was back with napkins and some ice for Win’s bloody nose, which she tended to briskly and efficiently. When Win was cleaned up, she gave him a little nudge in Jack’s direction, as if to say,
Go on, now, be a good boy.

Jack could feel Grace’s stricken gaze following them as he steered Win toward the vestibule and dug their coats from the closet. He was almost out the door when he heard her call his name, a cry so faint it seemed to be coming from a great distance. Jack turned to see Grace gliding over the rug, her bare feet making small whispering sounds against the silky nap, her eyes full of anguish.

“Jack.” She stretched a hand toward him as she had done before, but this time she didn’t let it fall to her side. She held it there, aloft, as if she were directing someone who was lost, pointing the way toward safety. But all she said was, “Take the umbrella. It’s going to rain.”

He heard the deep throb of loss in her voice, as if she were warning him, not of a rainstorm, but of something far worse.

Jack didn’t have to ask what it was, because he already knew. He could find Chris; he could bring home the moon in his pocket ... and still it wouldn’t change anything. This grim fantasy he’d had since the beginning, of waiting for the other shoe to drop, fearing that in a year or two she would leave his bed for that of a younger, handsomer, more vigorous man—it was now a cold reality.

He felt unbearably sad as he watched Grace step forward and reach into the closet for the umbrella, and hold it out to him.

Jack shook his head. “Better not. I’d only forget to return it.”

What he didn’t say, and what she clearly dared not ask, was that after tonight, after Chris was found, he wouldn’t be back.

Hannah stared at her brother. “I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true. ... I was the one who let the cat out of the bag,” Ben told her. “Go ask Dad.
He’ll
tell you. He was just covering my ass, because I made him promise.”

Was this an apology? she wondered. But when had Ben ever owned up to his shit? Like the time he put that dent in Dad’s car, and said some idiot must have run into him when he was parked.

“How did you even find out?” she asked.

“Look, I wasn’t spying on you or anything. I heard you on the phone with your friend. You weren’t exactly whispering.”

Hannah, who’d been making herself dinner—strawberry jam on toasted freezer waffles, apple slices, and some leftover Chinese noodles from the night before—set down the knife she’d been using. Ben had come by to pick up Mom for one of her thousands of engagements, but even in a formal jacket and tie he looked a little messed up, like he’d taken the subway instead of riding over here in his car. Come to think of it, he’d been like this, a bit rumpled-looking and out of sorts, the past few times she’d seen him.

“I don’t get it,” she said, growing angry. “Why are you telling me this now?”

Keep him talking,
she told herself,
stay pissed at him.
That way she wouldn’t have to face the sick feeling, welling up inside her, that
she
was the bad guy—for blaming Grace, and for turning Grace against Dad.

Ben shrugged and looked away, pushing at a crumb on the cutting board with one elegantly tapered finger. “Maybe I’ve had enough of getting jerked around by other people. I know what it feels like ... and I don’t want to do that to you.”

“You’re too late,” she told him. “I already blew up at Grace.”

“What’s new about that?”

He had to be talking about Christmas Eve—her throwing a fit with Grace. Dad must have told him.

“Well, in this particular case, she didn’t deserve it. And, for your information, it just so happens that I’m
not
pregnant.” She lowered her voice so Mom, getting dressed in her room down the hall, wouldn’t overhear.

“If you’re not careful from now on, you will be.” He didn’t say it meanly. It was just Ben, as usual, thinking the worst.

Hannah screwed the lid on the jam jar, and began brushing crumbs off the counter before Mom could see what a mess she’d made. And so Ben wouldn’t see the tears in her eyes.

“No, I won’t,” she told him, clearing her throat. “Con and I ... Well, I can’t say it’s over, because I’m not sure it was anything much to begin with.” She felt stupid, telling all this to Ben, who would have been the last person she confided in if he hadn’t been standing right in front of her. What did she expect Ben to say? How could he know what it felt like, wanting so bad just to be held that you’d sleep with someone even if you knew that person didn’t really love you?

But Ben surprised her with the sympathy she heard in his voice when he said, “You’ll get over it.”

“There’s nothing to get over,” she told him. It was this emptiness inside her she wasn’t so sure she’d recover from. Maybe, if she had truly loved Con, and he had felt the same way about her, then she’d at least feel brokenhearted. Instead, she was left with this feeling that something momentous had slipped by when she hadn’t been paying attention.

“You missed a spot.” Ben pointed at a smudge on the snow-white Formica.

“Thanks,” she told him, swiping at it with her sponge harder than necessary.

“Look, Hannah, if it means anything, I’m sorry.” He straightened one of the copper pots hanging in a shining row over the Wolf range. “I know what it’s like to break up—even when it’s something you never really thought would last to begin with.”

He was rescued from revealing any more by Mom, sweeping in on a cloud of chiffon and Chanel No. 5.
“There
you are.” Her high heels clicked over the Mexican-tiled floor to where Ben stood. Rocking forward onto the balls of her feet, Natalie tipped her face up to be kissed. “We’d better hurry, or we’ll be too late for cocktails. I don’t want to miss seeing Louisa—she’s having her place in East Hampton redone, you know.”

She turned to Hannah, a tiny frown appearing between her expertly arched brows as her gaze swept the counter Hannah had just finished wiping. “We shouldn’t be too late ... and, sweetie,
do
remember how much I hate coming home to a mess.”

Hannah waited until they’d been gone ten minutes or so; then she grabbed her mother’s car keys from the cloisonné dish by the phone. She’d gotten her driver’s license last fall, but had never driven the Mercedes before—Mom was too worried she’d put a dent in it. All of a sudden, Hannah didn’t
care
what her mother would say or do ... even if it meant being grounded until she was eighteen.

She scrawled a note on the pad by the telephone, and stuck it up on the stainless-steel refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a dragonfly.

Gone to Berkshires. Don’t worry, will take good care of car.

Several hours later, Hannah lay on her bed in her father’s country house, staring at the shadows on the ceiling.

What, she wondered, could she have imagined she’d accomplish by sneaking off, coming all the way up here? The drive had been fairly easy, only one real traffic jam, but when Mom found out her Mercedes was missing, she really would shit a brick.

And for what? It wasn’t cozy or comforting up here, the way she’d thought it would be. In her underpants and flannel pajama top, she was shivering in her unheated bedroom on the top floor of this empty cabin, while everyone else was miles and miles away, probably living it up and not even noticing that she’d split.

A tear slid down her temple, tickling along her hairline. She felt like such a jerk ... wanting to go on hating Grace, and at the same time hating herself for not even giving Grace the benefit of the doubt before shooting her big mouth off.

Why couldn’t she get it right for once? Why couldn’t things just
work out?

Hannah became aware of a steady ticking noise, and realized it was the icicles dripping onto the sill outside her window. Somewhere off in the distance, a dog barked, and she heard a truck door slam, followed by an engine roaring to life. Two floors below, in the cellar, the old boiler kicked in, and the heat register by her bed began its asthmatic rattling.

She clung to the familiarity of these sounds, so she wouldn’t have to think too hard, or let in the feeling that was tapping against her rib cage. She thought of the family therapist Mom and Dad had dragged her and Ben to when they were breaking up—what Hannah remembered most about those sessions was that stupid wave machine in the waiting room, a continuous stream of white noise so you couldn’t hear the voices in Dr. Dickenstein’s office. Right now, she wanted a machine like that to drown out the voices clamoring inside her head.

No wonder Daddy would rather be with Grace; just look at you, sulking all alone in the dark.

Hannah pictured a clean square of origami paper, and now she was folding it in half, once, twice. She could almost feel the folded paper sliding along the pad of her thumb as she pressed it to a pleat, neat, precise, the way life never was. Why couldn’t she get along with the people she loved, and who she knew, deep down, loved her?

Shivering now, she climbed under the covers, and pressed her face into the softness of the cotton pillowcase. The creaks and rumblings of the old cabin made her heart beat a little faster. Suppose some burglar, one of those escaped convicts or mental patients she was always reading about in the paper, were to break in? She imagined that she could actually bury herself in the mattress, so that, should anyone happen to look in on her, all he would see would be the slightly rumpled chenille spread under which she lay submerged.

But suppose, in the middle of the night, the furnace cut out. She’d freeze! As she drifted asleep, she imagined herself, come morning, a solid block of ice, her wide-open eyes fixed on the ceiling.

Daddy would be sad for a while, but in the end they’d all realize—Mom, Ben, and especially Grace—how much better off they were without her ...

Klonk!

Hannah, jerked from a sound sleep, bolted upright. Her fingers automatically spider-walked over to her old teddy bear, scrunched between the bed frame and the wall. She clutched Boo-Bear against her wildly pounding heart.

Klonk-thunk.

There it was again. A raccoon? Sometimes they got into the garbage cans if Daddy or Ben forgot to put the lids on tight. Once, she’d heard a raccoon on the roof, right overhead, and it had sounded like road work was going on up there. But this was different—it was ...

Inside. Coming from
inside,
downstairs.

Hannah felt her heart vault into her throat. Her armpits were suddenly swamped. “Please, God,” she tried to whisper. But her voice had dried up, and all that came out was a hoarse croak.

Then she heard a new sound, an odd skittering noise like ... like ...

She thought of Roo, an English spaniel they’d had until she was fourteen, and how, after he got old and sick, he used to wander around at night, his toenails making that same clicking noise on the old floorboards in the kitchen.