The Chill of Night (2 page)

Deep down Lainie knew it would never happen. Divorce for Hank wasn’t an option. He was married for good or ill, till death do them part, to the plain, plump, immensely wealthy Barbara Milliken Ogden, the only granddaughter of Edward A. Milliken, one of the firm’s founders. Once the partnership was safely tucked away, it would be time to think of a good way to end the relationship without damaging her career. The idea of being free to pursue new adventures pleased her.

Lainie watched the activity below her window. Banks of dirty snow were pushed to the side, and the center of Monument Square was filled with people. Small groups, mostly twos and fours, scurried in and out of the shops and restaurants that lined the pedestrian plaza on the south side of the square. On this last Friday before Christmas, they were open late and busy. In the middle, near the monument, a brilliantly lit, sixty-foot blue spruce commemorated the season. A big, beautiful decorated tree. Not a Christmas tree, though. Lainie remembered reading that in the
Press Herald
. These days calling a Christmas tree a Christmas tree wasn’t done. A city spokeswoman told the reporter that Portland was calling it a
holiday
tree. ‘We want it to sound denominationally neutral,’ she said. ‘We don’t want to offend anybody.’ Lainie snorted. She hated such PC stupidity.

At the base of the tree, a troupe of carolers in faux Victorian garb sang. A few dozen people gathered around to listen and sing along. Most were bundled up against the cold and looked, from where Lainie stood, like little round Michelin men and women. Some held the mittened hands of even smaller Michelin children. Down near the entrance to Longfellow Books, she spotted Kyle, the hot-dog man, tending his pushcart, his trademark white apron wrapped tightly around a heavy woolen jacket. On his head he wore a leather aviator’s cap with the earflaps pulled down over his gray hair. He seemed to be doing a brisk business selling the gyros, hot dogs, and Italian sausages he grilled over an open charcoal fire.

Lainie smiled. Kyle was her buddy. He always asked how she was doing, when they were going to make her a partner, and, with a wink and a smile, when she was going to go out on his boat with him. He talked about his boat a lot. A twenty-eight-foot Chris-Craft. He’d have to sell a hell of a lot of hot dogs to be able to afford a thing like that. Then again, Lainie knew, because she was a customer, Kyle sold merchandise more profitable than snacks.
Need a little happiness? Need a little joy? Go see the hot-dog man.
Either way, she enjoyed his flirting, enjoyed his easy Irish charm. Sometimes, when she was making a buy, she caught him looking at her a little too directly. Sometimes he looked away. Sometimes he didn’t. Once or twice he said with that wry little smile of his that he might let her have a bag or two for free. God, what a thought. Lainie and the hot-dog man. There was no way in hell she would ever let
that
happen. Not now. Not ever. Still, he wasn’t bad-looking.

She wasn’t sure how old Kyle was but guessed somewhere in his early fifties. It was an age she found attractive. The same age as Hank. The same age as her Contracts professor at Cornell, the one who gave her the A she needed to make
Law Review
. About the same age, she calculated, her stepfather would be today.

Lainie had been thinking a lot about Albright lately, though she hadn’t seen him in years. Her mind went back, once again, to that time in their old house in Rockport. A year or so before his career started taking off. Two years before he divorced her mother and moved out. Without his income her mother couldn’t afford the old place. She sold it, used part of the money to buy the smaller, crummier place in Rockland, and invested the rest.

She could see that bastard’s face now. The handsome, brilliant Wallace Stevens Albright. A lawyer whose parents named him for a poet, though she’d never known a man with less poetry in his soul. He never let anyone call him Walt or Wally or any other nickname. It was always Wallace. Or Mr Albright. Lainie was seven when he married her mother and they went to live with him. He wanted her to call him Daddy. She never would, though she knew it made him angry. He wasn’t her father. He even wanted her to change her name from Goff to Albright. She didn’t want to do that either. Thank God, her mother said no and made it stick. Otherwise Lainie might be carrying that bastard’s name even now.

A strict disciplinarian and a stubborn perfectionist, Wallace Stevens Albright held himself, he said, to a higher standard. Lainie smiled bitterly at the memory. Yeah, right. A higher standard. Like pulling down her pants and spanking her when she was little for the slightest infraction. Bastard was getting off on it. But, oh, did he ever put on a righteous show. She was never able to please him or earn his praise, no matter how hard she tried – and, though she hated him, she did try. It seemed important to win him over, to impress him. Important but impossible. She remembered how once in ninth grade, she got a ninety-five on an algebra exam. It was an exam half the class flunked, even a lot of the smart kids. When she told him about it, proudly, he mocked her.
Oh, really? A ninety-five? What happened to the other five points?
She went to bed that night feeling like she had failed. Again. Fuck him.

She was fifteen when the really bad shit started. The day of the Belfast soccer game. Lainie closed her eyes and it all came flooding back, immediate and real. Her sophomore year in high school. Camden Regional, not Rockland, where she had to go after the divorce. It was an afternoon in late October. One of those cold, rainy fall days that in Maine presage the coming of winter. It was an away game, and it had rained on and off all day long. The field was a sea of mud. All the girls were slipping and sliding, and by the end of the game their skin and hair were covered in drying brown gunk. Lainie scored two goals and just missed a third when the ball hit the left upright and bounced back onto the field. She knew, if she told him, Wallace would focus on the one she missed.
Maybe if you’d worked a little harder you would have made it, Lainie. You can always improve. You can always strive to be better.
Yeah. Just like you, Daddy Dearest.

After the game, Annie Jesperson’s mom offered Lainie and another friend, Maddie Mitchell, a ride home. Both girls accepted. It was a lot more comfortable than riding in the team bus, and they wouldn’t have to stop at school and catch a ride home from there.

‘Get in,’ Mrs Jesperson told the girls, throwing a tarp across the backseat. ‘Just try not to get any mud on the upholstery. This car’s brand-new, and we’d like to keep it looking that way.’

‘We won’t,’ they promised and climbed in, shoving Dudley, Annie’s dopey golden retriever, over the seat top and into the cargo area. The girls giggled all the way home, pulling monster faces and rubbing mud balls into each other’s hair and fending off Dudley’s eager efforts to join in the fun. Mrs Jesperson dropped Lainie off first, in front of her house. The big white colonial with the wraparound porch and black shutters on Mabern Street in Rockport. The house they lived in when they still had money.

It was almost dark when they got there. There were no lights on in the house. That meant her mother and Wallace were still at work. Her mother managing her antiques shop in Camden, Albright tending his growing law practice. He stayed late at the office almost every night.
You’ll never achieve anything, Lainie, never amount to anything. Not unless you’re ready to put in the hours.
She fetched the key from where it hung under the back steps and let herself in. She pulled off her shoes at the door, stripped down, and tossed her muddy uniform onto the laundry room floor. She walked naked across the semidarkened front hall and climbed the stairs, heading for the bathroom on the second floor.

About halfway down the corridor, the door to her mother and stepfather’s room opened, and Albright stepped out. Lainie gasped. She threw her right arm across her breasts and her left hand over her thatch of pubic hair. He’d never seen her naked before, not even as a little kid, and she wasn’t sure which way to run. Albright just stood there looking at her, surprise on his face. He was blocking her way to the bathroom door. Blocking her way to her own room as well. She turned and thought about running back down the stairs – but where could she go stark naked? She turned back and saw his expression change, morphing from surprise to something very different. She heard his breathing quicken. She knew she’d made that happen. Not to some boy in sophomore class. To
him
. To Wallace Stevens Albright. The perfectionist. The man guided by a higher standard. For the first time since he’d come into their lives, Lainie felt a sense of power. It was amazing. Intoxicating. It lasted less than a second.

In the instant it took for Albright’s mouth to close, for his lips to draw back into a thin, ugly smile, power turned to fear. And then to panic. She darted for her bedroom door, blindly hoping she could get there before him. Hoping she could somehow slip inside. Slam the door. Lock him out.

She never had a chance. As she reached for the knob, he grabbed an arm, turned her around, and wrapped his arms around her waist, pulling her into him, her back against his body. She could feel his erection through the fabric of his pants, pushing, probing at her butt. She tried pulling away but couldn’t. He lifted her off the floor and carried her, flailing and kicking and screaming, into her room. Across the oval knotted rug Grammy Horton made for her. He threw her down among the stuffed bears and bunnies that still populated the head of her bed. She tried a sudden bolt for the door. He grabbed her and pushed her down again. She screamed. He slapped her hard across the face. The pain was explosive, shocking. ‘Don’t try that again.’ He spat out the words in a quiet voice that was, for all its quietness, full of threat. ‘This is your fault, Lainie. All your fault. You asked for it, and you’re going to get what you deserve.’ He slapped her again. She felt a thin line of blood trickle from her nose.

She closed her eyes and retreated into the corner, more frightened than she’d ever been in her life. She pulled her muddy knees up, wrapped both arms around them, hugged them tight against her chest. When she dared open her eyes, he was unzipping his pants, pulling them down over his high black socks. Her mind froze. This couldn’t be happening. Not in her own room. Not on her own bed. He pulled down his underpants. He folded the suit pants along the creases and hung them neatly over the back of her desk chair. She supposed he was thinking he’d have to wear them to the office the next day. He left his underpants on the floor. He didn’t bother taking off his shirt or black socks.

From a distance of fifteen years, the adult Lainie could still see Wallace Stevens Albright’s hard little cock poking out, peekaboo fashion, from between the flaps of his blue-striped Brooks Brothers shirt. She was crying now. Sobbing quietly. She could still feel his soft white hands grabbing her ankles, pulling her out of the corner, pulling her legs apart. Then he pushed her knees up and apart and knelt between them. He lowered his chest so all she could see was shirt. She remembered that shirt so well. The feel of the starched cotton, the smell of it. All his shirts had a little blue monogram on the pocket. A
W
and an
S
on either side. A big blue
A
in the middle. It was all she could see. She felt him open her with his fingers and push himself up and in. It still amazed her such a little prick could inflict such pain.

Afterward, he smiled and spoke gently. Told her she’d done very well. It was the first time, maybe the only time, he ever praised her. He told her if her eye turned black where he hit her, she had to tell people she’d been hit in the face with a soccer ball. Then he made her go to the bathroom and wash herself out. He stood at the open door and watched as she did. Finally he told her in the same gentle voice that if she ever breathed a word about what happened, either to her mother or to anyone else, he’d kill them both. ‘That’s a promise,’ he said. She never doubted he would keep his word.

That night and many nights after that, he came back to her room for ‘a visit.’ Each time it was the same. Except sometimes, instead of fucking her, he’d make her get down on her knees and give him a blow job. Each time, before he left, he told her it was her fault. He did what he did because she was a dirty girl who tempted him. Then he would again threaten to kill her and her mother. She sometimes wondered if her mother knew where he was going when he left their bed in the middle of the night. Downstairs for a snack? To read a book? No. Her mother knew – she must have known – but she never had the courage to say or do anything about it. Never wanted to talk about Wallace at all. And Lainie never asked. Finally, two years later, Wallace left her mother. He found a younger woman who was rich and beautiful, and he filed for divorce. He gave her the white house in Rockport as part of the settlement. She sold it, and she and Lainie moved to the little Cape Cod in Rockland. It was over. But the stain stayed with her. It could never be washed away. Her mother was dead now. She committed suicide two years after Lainie graduated high school and went off to Colby. Swallowed a handful of Xanax tablets to still her anxiety and slit her wrists in the tub. But Wallace Stevens Albright was still out there. Still married. With two little girls of his own. Respected attorney. Oft-mentioned candidate for the federal bench. Child fucker. Bastard.

Lainie glanced again at the Time & Temperature Building. Seven fifty-five and still Hank hadn’t called. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and she was hungry. Despite, or maybe because of her usual regimen of plain grilled fish or chicken and garden salads, she found herself lusting after one of Kyle’s plump garlicky Italian sausages, covered with sautéed onions and Kyle’s own special sauce. She couldn’t actually see the sausages cooking from her seventh-floor perch, but she could sure as hell picture them, crackling away in the frosty air on their bed of hot coals. She could almost taste that first spray of hot fat bursting into her mouth as she popped the skin with her teeth.