Goodnight Nobody (29 page)

Even almost forty years after the fact, I could hear bitterness in Bonnie's voice, sadness mixed with a little sister's grudging admiration for what her big sister had gotten away with.

"Here," said Bonnie, pulling a photograph out of a drawer at a wooden desk against the wall. I looked and saw a tall, slender girl with long dark hair like Kitty's. She wore a peasant blouse that dipped low enough to show off her smooth, tanned skin and a miniskirt cut high enough to show coltish legs.

"That was taken when she was seventeen," Bonnie said.

"So what happened in New York?" I asked. "Did she support herself?"

Bonnie shrugged. "My father sent her money, but I wasn't supposed to know about that." I wasn't sure whether she could hear the bitterness in her voice. "Judy sent letters home to us, about the walk-up she was living in, her roommates, the restaurants where she was working. She'd send postcards with pictures of the city--Central Park, the Empire State Building." She stretched out her hand for the photograph. I gave it to her, and she slid it back into the drawer. "She lasted seven years down there, and when she came home, she was six months pregnant."

"Had she gotten married in New York?"

Bonnie shook her head. "Judy talked a good game about how marriage was an instrument of the bourgeois oppressor, how she wanted to experience different men the same way she wanted to experience different cities, how she never wanted to be tied down, but I shared a room with her. I was the one who heard her crying at night. After a while, she told me that she'd fallen in love with the baby's father, but that there were complications." She ran her hands through her silvery curls. "He was a very important man, she said. And married, but trying to get out of it. Once he did, they'd be together. He loved her, she told me, and she knew they'd be together." Her voice cracked, and she pressed her hands against her eyes.

"Did you..." I began.

Bonnie shook her head. "She never told me his name." She straightened her shoulders. "I wish I had a picture of Judy when she was pregnant with Kitty," she said. "She never got bloated or blotchy or had her fingers swell. I know it's a cliche, but she just glowed. Like she'd swallowed one of those candles she was always burning, or like she knew some secret, some big, delicious secret that she'd never have to tell."

"Wow." I'd never glowed when I was pregnant. The best I'd been able to manage was a certain fresh-scrubbed, rosy-cheeked look, usually after I'd splashed cold water on my face after a vigorous bout of vomiting.

Bonnie sighed. "Even nine months pregnant, there wasn't a boy we'd known in high school who didn't want to take her out. They'd stop by the house with treats for her--scented candles, journals, an embroidered pillow she'd seen in some head shop in Hyannis, a crate full of lobsters--"

I must have made a face, because Bonnie looked at me sharply and said, "Lobsters aren't free. And that was what Judy wanted when she was pregnant. Not ice cream and pickles, but lobster with lemon juice." She smoothed the tablecloth again. "She didn't care for any of them. She was just waiting for the man back in New York City. And after she had Kitty, as soon as she was able, she left the baby here and went back to New York."

I couldn't believe it. "She just left?"

Bonnie shrugged. "Her big-shot boyfriend was paying her rent in the Village. He wanted her there to be available for him. She went back to wait."

"He wanted her, but not the baby," I said.

The table trembled as Bonnie got abruptly to her feet and put her mug in the sink. Weak wintry light filtered in through the white cotton curtains at the window, etching the lines of her face in shadow. "Judy was a fool," she said roughly. "She thought he really would leave his wife and marry her and give Kitty his last name. She died believing that."

"What happened?" I asked, even though the pain in the pit of my stomach was telling me that I already knew how the story had ended.

"When Kitty was seven..." Her voice caught in her throat. "Oh, you should have seen the two of them together. Kitty loved her mother so much. She would just light up when Judy came home, and whatever Aunt Judy gave her--a little plastic snow globe with the Empire State Building inside of it, or a mug that said 'I Love New York'--she'd act like it was treasure. She'd sleep with Judy's things next to her pillow."

I nodded, feeling my eyelids prickle, seeing my own children in my mind, the way they'd go running to the door whenever Aunt Janie arrived with gifts.

"We gave her an allowance. Two dollars a week. She never spent a penny of it. We'd take her to the penny-candy stores in Provincetown, or to the mall in Hyannis, and she'd never buy herself a single thing. She'd make birthday cards for me and Hugh, she'd make our Christmas presents. Hugh used to tease her. He called her his little miser. But I knew what the money was for. When she was old enough, she told me, she was going to buy a bus ticket to go to New York City and live with her Aunt Judy."

"Did Kitty know that Judy was her mother?"

She slumped in her chair. Even her gray curls and the straps of her dress seemed to droop. "We always meant to tell her," she said. "When she was old enough to understand. Hugh and I just never could agree on when that was. Kitty found out when she was twelve. One of my father's old friends told her," she said bitterly. "Came over for Christmas, got in his cups, and said it was high time that Kitty knew the truth."

"How did she take it?"

"She was angry. She asked why we'd lied to her. Then she asked why her mother didn't want her," Bonnie said. "What was I supposed to tell her? What was the answer to that? Judy was dead by then." She looked down at her hands. "She died of an overdose. Heroin."

"Oh," I said.

Bonnie's eyes shone with unshed tears, and her lips trembled as she spoke in a monotone. "The police told us it was an accident or maybe...maybe not an accident. They told us the drug hadn't been cut, that she'd taken enough to kill a dozen men. It never made sense to me," she said, shaking her head. "I know Judy did some...some things that weren't legal. I know she smoked pot, I know she took mushrooms, but heroin never made sense. She was so afraid of needles. She'd faint in the pediatrician's office every time she had to have a shot, and that week--the week she died..." She pulled a fistful of tissues out of her pocket and used one of them to blow her nose. "She called me and told me that he was finally going to be with her, and I found a postcard in her purse after she...after she." She gulped, wrapping her arms around her chest. "That she was happy. That they were going to be together."

Together,
I thought, remembering the postcard I'd pulled out of Kitty's desk drawer.
We are finally together. Happier than I can even believe.

"What was his name?" I asked.

Bonnie shook her head. "She never told me," she said. "And once she was...after she..." She gathered herself. "Once Judy was gone, we waited for someone to come to the apartment...or the funeral." She brushed angrily at her eyes. "Maybe he was lying to her. Maybe Judy just got tired of waiting. No matter what happened, Kitty was never the same after she found out. We lost her," she said. "She got good grades, didn't cut class, didn't run around with boys, but it was like living with a boarder. She barely spoke to us, and when she did, all she wanted to talk about was Judy--where she'd been, who she'd known, how she'd lived, how she'd died. There was always a coolness toward me, and she was even worse with Hugh--like she blamed him more for not being straight with her. I don't think she ever really trusted anyone after that. Not us, certainly. Not her husband. No one," she said, as her voice trembled, then broke. "No one except her girls. They'd come here...in the summer..." She was sobbing now, gasping between her words, like Sam or Jack or Sophie after they'd fallen down and gotten hurt. "I took them to the beach, I took them swimming, we'd pick blueberries and go clamming..." She covered her eyes with her small, shaking hands and sat there for a moment, breathing deeply, until she could look at me again.

"Kitty made it her mission to find him," she said.

I nodded, remembering the words of the poem Emmett James had recited to Janie:
"I lie here now as I once lay/in the crook of her arm, her creature/and I feel her/looking down into me the way the/maker of a sword gazes at his face in the/steel of the blade."
Kitty had grown up to become her mother's sword.

"She'd ask me questions, over the years: did I recognize this name or that one; did I remember if Judy ever went away for vacations," Bonnie said. "I knew what she was getting at. If there was a man who'd taken her mother's life--directly or indirectly--well, then, that man should pay." She rocked back and forth in her chair and twirled her beads around her finger again.

"Was Joel Asch one of the possibilities?"

"He was," said Bonnie, nodding. "He'd known Judy in the Village. And even after Kitty told me that he wasn't, she said he was good to her. He must have felt responsible, somehow--like he couldn't save Judy, but he could help her daughter. You know he gave Kitty a job." She shifted in her chair, smoothing her dress around her hips.

"The columns," I said. "The ghostwriting."

" 'The Good Mother,' " said Bonnie, shaking her head. "I think that maybe it soothed something inside of her to write those things about mothers who left. She loved Judith, but how could she not have been angry? Her own mother left her. I think that would be a hard thing for any child to think about."

It was my turn to nod, remembering some of the invective in "The Good Mother," the gleefully venomous way it eviscerated women who felt it was acceptable, even laudable, to work outside the home, to leave your babies for even an instant, to deprive them of an endless soak in the warm bath of mother-love.

"Hugh was furious about those columns--after all, I'd worked. I told him what Kitty said--that writing 'The Good Mother' was cathartic. And it was the means to an end," Bonnie said. She wiped at her eyes. "She told me, the week before she died, that she'd found out something big. That she'd come to the end of it. I told her to be careful. Kitty promised me she knew what she was doing..." She shrugged helplessly, her voice breaking. "I should have told her not to," she said. "I was as much of a mother as Kitty ever had. I should have told her that the past was the past and her future--her girls--they were what mattered. I should have made her stop."

Thirty-Eight

"Mommy, Mommy!"

I wheeled the bike down the driveway and saw Sophie stagger across the deck, straining to carry a purple plastic bucket with water sloshing over the top and onto her jeans and puffy purple down coat, with one brother on each side. Her hair was in pigtails, and her fingernails were each painted a different shade of pink. "Daddy took us to a bakery after the museum and we had hot chocolate and crullers and sticky buns and then we went down to the beach and I got a baby crab and now we're making leftover turkey sandwiches!"

"Excellent!" I said, bending down for a look. I had ridden home thinking of Kitty like some Greek goddess, tall and noble, striding through the streets of Manhattan. I pictured New York City's movers and shakers clutching Kitty's hands with their moist palms, lifting her glossy chocolate hair to admire the pale curve of her neck, while she looked them over, taking inventory, looking for the tilt of her own eyebrows or the shape of her nose, eyes shining and expectant as she spoke her mother's name.

"Her name is Princess Fiona," Sophie said.

"Great, but how do you know she's a girl?"

Sophie considered the question, then considered the crab. "Because she is beautiful. Mommy, can she come home with us?"

"Well, maybe she can stay up on the porch while we're in Cape Cod, but I don't think she'd like Connecticut."

"Why not?"

"Well, she'd miss the ocean, don't you think?"

Sophie scratched her nose, then bent over the bucket. "Princess Fiona, would you miss the ocean?" she asked.

Ben smiled at me wearily from behind the glass door. Three hours later, once each sandy child had been stripped, showered, dressed, fed, and put down in one of the darkened downstairs bedrooms for a nap, Ben and I sat together on the couch, in the living room overlooking the ocean. He'd lit a fire in the fireplace, and we were almost but not quite holding hands.

"Am I still in the doghouse?" I asked.

"Some doghouse," he said, and sipped from a mug of whiskey-laced coffee. The waves rolled in and out, and above them, white clouds, tinged faintly pink, floated low in the periwinkle blue sky. The sunset was sure to be spectacular. I turned my own cup in my hands. The whiskey and the warmth of the fire after the brisk bike ride were making me sleepy. I wished I could stretch out on the couch underneath a blanket, turn off all the thoughts about Kitty Cavanaugh and Delphine Dolan, Bonnie Verree and her sister Judith, not to mention Evan McKenna, and just drift.

Ben set his cup down on the coffee table. "Kate, there's something I want to discuss with you."

My heart froze.
He knows.
Someone saw me at the Time Hotel, or spotted Evan's car at the end of our street. I swallowed hard and tried to prepare for the accusation, delivered in a dry and toneless voice; followed by reiteration of his quite reasonable demands of a helpmeet and spouse (not to get involved in harebrained murder mysteries, a la meddling kids in
Scooby-Doo,
not to almost have sex with guys I'd known back in New York, not to fling accusations of murder at his most prominent clients or make up lies to cover for any of the above).

"What's that?" I managed to ask.

Ben turned toward me, setting one hand on my upper arm. "I've been feeling bad about giving you such a hard time with the Kitty Cavanaugh thing." He slid his arm around my shoulder. "You miss using your mind," he said. "I understand that."

"I love being a mother," I said reflexively.

"But the kids are kids," Ben said. He patted my shoulder. "There's only so far a conversation with a four-year-old will get you." I held my breath as he nuzzled my cheek. "So here's what I've been thinking," he said. "How would you like to come work for me part-time?"

"I..." I pulled myself out of his arms and stared at him, certain that I'd heard wrong. "What? What would I do? I haven't exactly endeared myself to Ted Fitch. And I don't really know anything about politics."

"Well, it's not rocket science," he said with an indulgent chuckle. "You could answer the phone, help with the mail--"

"Help with the mail," I repeated. "So I'd basically be, what? An intern?"

Ben's expression--and the speed with which his hands made their retreat--suggested he was beginning to appreciate the magnitude of his error. "Oh, no, not an intern. You'd be sitting in on all of the strategy meetings, helping to implement the media plans--"

"Lucky me!" I said lightly. "Now, would I bring coffee too, or is that someone else's job?"

He turned away, sighing. "Kate, I'm trying to help you. I'm trying to help us."

"I just don't think it would be a good idea, me working for you. Besides, politics really isn't my thing."

"What was your thing, exactly?" Ben asked. "Dead celebrities?"

"Genital warts, actually," I said.

"Okay," he said stiffly. "Why don't you go lie down for a while? Relax. Take a nap."

I eased the bedroom door shut, lay down on the salmon-and-turquoise cover, closed my eyes and tried to let the whiskey do its work. Fifteen minutes later, when Ben slipped onto the bed beside me, I kept my eyes closed and my breathing slow and even.

"I love you, Kate," he whispered. I murmured sleepy nonsense words back. The space between us seemed to stretch out until it was as wide as the ocean outside the windows. I held myself still until I felt him sigh and roll off the bed. After he closed the door I counted to one hundred before pulling my cell phone out of my pocket and tiptoeing into the bathroom to make my call.

"Dude, I can barely hear you," Janie complained when she answered.

"I know," I said. "The reception here is really bad." So bad that I'd ended up crouching in the center of the Jacuzzi tub before I'd gotten enough of a signal to make the call. "Can you check something for me?" I asked, and told her everything Bonnie had told me, including Judith Medeiros's last name and the year and circumstances of her death. "You've got friends in the police department, right?"

"But of course," said Janie. "I've got all the major precincts covered. Let me guess: you want to find out if her accidental death was really accidental."

"Anything," I said. "I want to find out anything. And are you by any chance free on Monday morning?"

"You know I don't like Mondays," said Janie. "Or mornings."

"Trust me," I said, heaving myself out of the tub. "It's for a good cause."