Crossroads (18 page)

*                           *                           *

Stan had not been in the shop. Even though Gwen knew it had nothing to do with her, that he had probably gone out on a job, after her outburst the night before she’d felt as if he was avoiding her. For the first time in weeks she found herself thinking about something besides her child and her loss. She’d read an article once in a magazine which quoted a lot of statistics about couples who had been driven apart by a tragedy. She’d forgotten the exact figures but she did remember how high they were.

Stan and I aren’t handling our tragedy well,
she thought.
At
least, I’m not. When we were first married, I couldn’t have imagined
that anything could ever come between us. Loving Stan was the
easiest thing I’d ever done.

But now she realized there was a reason for all those thousands of self-help books and dozens of television shows dedicated to helping married couples communicate. And commiserate, and empathize. And forgive.

I will not let our tragedy destroy us,
she’d thought as she stood in the middle of Stan’s empty shop.
The blaming and the anger
and the guilt stop here. I’m done with it.
And with those brave thoughts in her head, she’d turned around and started back to the apartment building.

*                           *                           *

The trouble with brave thoughts is finding the actions to match them. Particularly when you are younger than your years and naïve enough to believe that good intentions are enough. Gwen had reached her building, walked firmly up to the entrance, and stopped dead in her tracks.
I can’t go back in there,
she thought.
Not with Abby’s ghost and the ghosts of all my own dreams waiting
for me.
She stood in front of the entrance, knowing she was being irrational, and without wanting to, she wondered,
What
would Cassie do now?
The answer came back loud and clear:Cassandra Wright would face down her pain. She would look at it squarely and she would wrestle it to the ground. Galvanized, Gwen started for the little park at the end of the street—the one where all the kids played.

At first it seemed to Gwen as if there were hundreds of children—boys and girls—in the park, and the sweet little faces and high, delighted laughter overwhelmed her. She stood at the park’s entrance unable to breathe. But she was Cassandra Wright’s daughter. She forced air into her lungs until she could see that the actual number of children was closer to ten. Mercifully none of them were infants. But it was still too hard, too painful, to watch them. She was about to turn away when a voice at her side said, “Excuse me, aren’t you . . . that is,
weren’t
you Gwen Wright?” And standing next to her was a man she recognized from the many stories written about him in the newspapers. He was the owner and CEO of the JeffSon Corporation, but she would always think of him as the pirate who had come to her birthday party.

“I’ve been to your house . . . your mother’s house . . . it was about four years ago. But you probably don’t remember.”

“But I do. How do you do, Mr. Henry?” she said. She held out her hand for him to shake. “I used to be Gwen Wright. Now my name is Gwen Girard.” Then, she added because she couldn’t help herself, “Didn’t you marry Jewel Fairchild?”

Chapter Twenty-four

S
tan looked at the note Gwen had left for him on his workbench.
I stopped by to take you up on that lunch offer,
it said,
but you weren’t here. I want a rain check. I love you, Gwen.

So she was ready to forgive him. His heart leapt. They had never been seriously angry at each other before and he hated the feeling. On the other hand, he wasn’t sure that she was the one who should be doing the forgiving. Their loss had been his every bit as much as it had been hers, but she had not tried to comfort him as he had tried to comfort her. Instead she had blamed him—not in so many words, because she knew she was being unfair and unreasonable—but he was not a stupid man. He’d known what she was thinking. Stan sighed and unwrapped the pastrami sandwich he’d purchased at Berger’s Deli down the street.

He’d known when he married Gwen that she’d been privileged, and protected, and as a result, she really didn’t have any idea how the rest of the world lived. That naiveté had been a part of her charm as far as he was concerned. But living with it wasn’t always easy.

A case in point had been his apartment. Gwen had hated the entire building from the moment she’d set foot inside it. He was rather proud of the shiny lobby, the up-to-the-minute exercise room, the courtyard, and the roof garden, and he’d been surprised and more than a little hurt by Gwen’s reaction. His four small rooms could not compare with the Wright house, but Gwen had always insisted she didn’t want to live in a mansion with artwork on the walls and Aubusson carpets on the floors. But it was clear that she missed certain elements of her old life.

The things she had complained about had seemed rather trivial to him—the lack of privacy and quiet, for instance. You didn’t have much of either in an apartment, that was a given, but you learned to adjust to your neighbors’ noise, and when you couldn’t, you just tuned it out. As for the woodlands and the wild animals Gwen mourned so much, well, he ouldn’t see that it was worth it to make a fuss over a few trees and squirrels. Of course it was nice to have some land of your own, and he certainly planned to buy a house, but when he could afford it; he was not about to saddle himself with a huge mortgage. In the meantime his present apartment, which was far better than his last one, was a stepping-stone along the way.

When he’d said that to Gwen, he’d realized for the first time just how wide the gap between them actually was. His wife didn’t understand about stepping-stones. Not really. Intellectually she knew that when she’d married Stan she’d given up the life of wealth she’d once had, but she’d never had to do without something she considered a necessity because she couldn’t afford it. To her, a house was a necessity, and the idea that they had to save up for one was a hardship for which she just wasn’t prepared.

So when Cassie had wanted to buy a place for them, Gwen had seen it as a way to escape the living arrangement she hated, and she’d been eager to accept. To Stan, it had been a demeaning offer from a woman who felt he wasn’t worthy of her daughter. He’d been hurt and angry that Gwen hadn’t understood why he couldn’t accept Cassie’s offer, and she, he knew, had been equally hurt and angry that he had not jumped at the chance to end a situation that was intolerable to her. Then they’d lost the baby. And Gwen, who had been so protected, did not know how to accept the fact that life is full of random cruelties which are no one’s fault. She had needed someone or something to blame, and he and his apartment were available. He had resented it, even though he’d understood why, and he hadn’t reached out to her the way he should have.

But today she had come to the shop to have lunch with him.

I love you,
she’d written.

He knew that, would have bet his life on it. And he loved her. He thought that perhaps he’d stop at the florist down the street when he went home after work tonight. He wouldn’t get pink roses for Gwen, although he thought of them as her flower, because he didn’t want to remind her of the little bush she’d fought so hard to keep alive. Maybe some daisies.

*                           *                           *

Jeff and Gwen had left the little park together, and he invited her to have some coffee with him. She had accepted and they walked back to his office building, where there was a fancy little café that dispensed lattes and other such trendy variations on the good old-fashioned cup of Joe. As they walked they had established that yes, indeed, he had married Jewel Fairchild, and for a brief moment he had wondered if for some reason Gwen Wright—and why couldn’t he remember her new last name?—was keeping tabs on his wife as much as his wife kept tabs on her. But why would she do that? Jewel was jealous of Gwen for all the obvious reasons, but surely Gwen Wright Whatever had no reason to return the favor.

When he and Gwen had reached their destination and they were seated across the table from each other, Jeff found himself momentarily at a loss for something to say. The thoughts in his mind—
There are dark circles under your eyes; are you sleeping
enough? And there is a haunted expression in them that I find horribly
sad. Is there anything I can do for you?—
wouldn’t be appropriate. Finally he settled on, “Do you go to that park often?”

And he thought to himself,
Wonderful, Jeff, could you have asked
a question that was more of a cliché?

But she answered seriously. “I haven’t been there in a while. I . . . haven’t been well. . . .”

I know,
he thought of saying but didn’t. She didn’t need to be reminded that she was still a Wright, and the loss of her child was the subject of gossip in their city. She didn’t need to know that one of the chief gossips was his jealous wife.

“I’m afraid I don’t like that park very much,” she went on. “It’s so small and crowded.”

He thought of her athletic stride and the feeling he’d had that she should be walking on country roads and open fields. This was the wrong setting for her, he thought. It was so very wrong. But what had Jewel said about the man she’d married—the one whose name Jeff couldn’t remember? Jewel said he was beneath Gwen. A nobody. So probably this was the best they could afford. But still it didn’t seem right.

“What does your husband do for a living?” he asked.

“Stan has his own electrician’s shop” was the answer. An electrician’s shop! Probably a one-man band where he repaired people’s toasters. And her family owned one of the biggest glassworks in the country. No, make that the world. Jewel was right, the poor girl had married beneath her. Still, it was an interesting coincidence that the man was an electrician and JeffSon owned power plants.

“I really should be getting home,” Gwen Wright—no, it was Gwen Girard, he remembered now—was saying. “Thank you so much for the coffee.”

“I’ll see you to your building,” Jeff said.

“You don’t have to do that.”

“We’re right across the street from each other. We’re neighbors.”

*                           *                           *

“I don’t know what to do for Gwen. That idiot she married won’t let me help them,” Cassie said to Walter. They were sitting on the front porch of the Wright house watching the sun set behind the red maples.

“You can’t take Gwen’s pain away.”

“But I want to make it easier for her.”

“There is nothing you can do or give, darling. And if there were, you shouldn’t do or give it. Don’t you see? Gwen has a husband now. He’s the one she must lean on.”

“Him? You heard what he said when I tried to buy them a house! All that twaddle about how no one should have special advantages because of their family or their background. Or some such nonsense.”

“I believe he actually said that he and Gwen were no different from any other young couple just starting out.”

“In the old days, my father would have said he was a Communist!”

“Isn’t it nice that we’ve all evolved since then?”

“I’m serious, Walter.”

“So am I. You mustn’t interfere, Cassie. Right now, Gwen is still a girl. If she’s to grow up, to become a woman—and for her own happiness she must—she has to find her own way in life. And she must do that with Stan. Not you.”

*                           *                           *

In the dark, Gwen could make out the daisies Stan had brought her. They were in a blue vase sitting on her nightstand, where she had insisted on putting them. Stan was asleep, his body wrapped around hers the way it always was after their passion was spent. It was as if they couldn’t bear to separate from each other after such closeness, as if they had melded and would have to tear themselves apart. But Gwen’s mind could always wander. She closed her eyes. Once when she was a child, she’d spilled boiling water on her arm and burnt it badly. What she remembered about the burn was not the initial searing agony, but the days and weeks that followed as the blistered skin peeled away, leaving the raw, exposed wound. The slightest breeze passing at random over that wound could trigger new pain that was almost as strong as the original. She felt that the pain that was now inside her was like that; it was always there, waiting to hit her when she didn’t expect it, and she didn’t know when or if it would ever stop. All she could do was wait and see. She wondered if Stan felt the same way. She looked at his arm draped so possessively over her shoulder. The books said it would be better if they could talk about these things—if she could have said,
I was so hurt and angry that I took it out on you, and I’m sorry,
and then he could have said,
I was so hurt that I pushed you away and
I’m sorry.
But she was learning that that was not their way. They said “I love you” and “I’m sorry” with daisies and surprise lunches and unspoken compromises. And then they came together in their bed. It might not be what the books suggested, but it lifted the gray mood for a little while and made the pain more bearable.

Gwen turned her head to look out the bedroom window. All she could see was the office building across the street, but somewhere behind it was the moon. Tonight she was able to summon up the imagination to picture it shining down on Stan and her.

*                           *                           *

The penthouse suite in the glittery hotel where Jewel and Jeff were camping out consisted of five rooms with views that stretched as far off as the glassworks. Jewel got up out of bed, and walked to one of the massive bedroom’s floor-to-ceiling windows. How many times had she done this in her old apartment when she couldn’t sleep? Back then, she had looked out onto a dirty street and a tree that was old and bent. Tonight, she could see the whole city spread out at her feet. And soon her view would be even more grand, when she moved into her new house. The house that would make it up to her for all the early years of desperate wanting, for the time of watching Ma die so slowly and painfully, for Pop’s abandonment. And the house would do even more than that for her; it would be her ticket into the echelon of Wrightstown society populated by the likes of Cassie Wright and Gwen Girard. Finally, Jewel was going to belong!

She wished she could go into the next room and look once again at the plans for the new swimming pool her landscape designer had submitted to her earlier that day. Behind the pool there would be an artificial waterfall that could be activated by a switch found on a panel in the foyer of the house. There was another switch which would turn on the amber, pink, and golden lights that would play over the pool. Still another switch would turn on the sound system. If Jeff had been away on one of his business trips she might have driven out to the building site, even though it was the middle of the night, so she could picture her miraculous backyard coming to life in all its glory. But Jeff was home. Jewel turned back to bed where he was sleeping. He used to love watching her pleasure at the toys and gifts he was able to shower on her. But lately she’d sensed a certain disapproval coming from him, as if there was something distasteful about her throwing her arms around him and squealing with joy over her new diamond earrings, or their new Lear Jet. At such moments he looked a little too much like his father. Trying to keep him happy was going to be difficult if he turned into the old goat. She walked quickly to the mirror and stared at her image—even without the lights on, she could see that her talisman beauty was still there. In a couple of years she’d need a nip and a tuck, but her figure was still perfect, as were her violet eyes, and her ebony hair shone in the darkness. There was no way Jeff would walk away from all of that. She went back to bed, and slipped in between the sheets—the sheets with the five-hundred-thread count from Porthault. Her negligee was French silk from Léron. The perfume she dabbed on herself every night after her bath had been specially created for her by Floris.

As she started falling asleep she thought of something Jeff had told her at dinner. He’d seen Gwen Wright that afternoon. He’d been taking a walk around the block to clear his head and he’d bumped into her, and he’d felt that it was only good manners to invite the Dreary One to have a cup of coffee with him.