The View from Here (23 page)

I was astonished. “And Patsy?” I asked in a small, adolescent voice.

His pally expression faded. “Let's not get into that,” he said curtly, flipping the towel briskly over a chair back.

I felt my face crease at the harshness of his tone. I was exhausted. I could no longer fight the tears.

“Look,” he said quietly, “just because you feel something for one person, it doesn't mean you can't feel anything for anybody else.”

I was shaking. None of my imaginings had prepared me for a scene as colorless, as unfeeling as this. He was watching me. The few inches between us were furlongs. I became acutely aware of his persistent, shrinking withdrawal. Raising my eyes to his, I was filled with a sudden urge to run my nails down his cheek, to see blood. To make him real. I lunged and he caught my wrists.

“I am not going to discuss it,” he said, looking steadily into my eyes.

“You're in love with her, and I was just a…”

I was flailing. It was ghastly. He kept his grip firm for a second on my wrists, then, as the strength seeped from me and I dropped my eyes again, he let go. I had lost control, and I knew somewhere inside that my doing so had made it easier for him and that I would regret it later. But I didn't care then. I wanted so badly to hold on to the conversation, to make it go on at least until I had extracted something from it, from him, that made sense to me.

“And New York?” I asked, hopelessly. It was all so shadowy.

He looked mildly surprised. As if something had dawned on him. He reached out and put a gentle hand on my shoulder. The warmth of it was painful. “You'll be fine, darling, really,” he said. “You're a survivor.”

He squeezed my upper arm, lifted his towel again, and wrapped it around his waist. I was dismissed. I was supposed to know that it was over, to go, but I could not move. He looked at me for a second longer, then sighed and walked away.

I was still staring glassily at the surface of the pool when I heard the shout. I put my hands to my head, shocked alert from paralysis.

“Frankie!” Richard yelled from the pool door. “For Christ's sake, call a doctor.”

He was, I noticed, unshaven and dressed like me, in the clothes he had worn the evening before. He turned and ran, and I ran too, not toward the telephone, but after him, along the hallway. Doors were banging.

Richard stopped running at the door of the room he shared with Patsy. I saw Christina, as he went in, sitting on their bed with Patsy's head cradled in her arms. “Llama el médico!” she ordered.

I turned and raced for the phone.

In the little vestibule, in the warm dark air, I hesitated. I was breathing fast and hard. I could hear voices, woken children. I picked up the receiver and dialed Arturo Rodriguez's number.

Richard's shouts, which had lost definition and merged into a kind of incessant bellow by the time I finished speaking with Arturo, peaked, and I made out the word “ambulance.” Then his dominant insistence quieted suddenly, and in its place came the twittering high-pitched concern of children.

“What's going on?” Paige asked, looking from me to Mason. We had met unexpectedly when I returned from the telephone. I was uncomfortable, both with his proximity and with Paige's unwitting casting of us as conspirators.

“Nothing, sweetheart,” he answered, and I felt a small, bitter twinge at the endearment, at the idea that he could reserve his coldness so cleanly for me.

Richard came to the door, distraught. “Where the hell is that ambulance? I'm gonna drive her to the hospital.” He looked around, panicky, searching for something. Car keys.

Ned had come into the room. He laid a hand on Richard's shoulder. “Give it a few minutes.” He looked at Richard, steadying him with his eyes. “If it's not here in five minutes, we'll go.”

Richard seemed to accept this.

“Who's sick?” Jenny asked.

Howie looked at his father. “Who's sick?” he repeated.

No one answered.

“
Who's sick!”
Howie yelled with his head thrown back.

Richard stared at his son for a moment, then he turned and left the room. He didn't seem to see Bee Bee, who passed him coming in, wrapped in a Chinese silk robe. She flattened her collar as she whipped her head to Richard's back and then, questioningly, to Ned.

Howie began to cry.

Ned picked him up. “It's all right, son,” he said. “Mommy's a bit sick, and Daddy is busy looking after her, and the doctor is coming soon. Isn't he, Frankie?”

They were all looking at me. I was responsible. “Yes,” I replied firmly. “The doctor is coming.”

The doctor arrived in Arturo's sleek, dark car and Sally appeared suddenly, a point of stability in the ether, dressed and clear-eyed, just as the doorbell chimed. She indicated, with a kindly inclination of her head and a gentle palm, that she would take things from here. No one challenged her smooth efficiency. I watched as she guided the doctor along the hall toward Richard and Patsy's bedroom.

When they'd gone, I went outside and sat at the long wooden table where, so far that morning, no one had eaten breakfast. Paige followed me, and Lesley followed her.

“Do you think that you two could take the little ones down to the beach?” I asked.

Paige looked at me for a minute. I made no attempt to undo the seriousness of my expression.

“All right,” she said.

Grasping some need for speed, Paige tossed swimsuits and towels and sodas into a basket that had been deserted, half unpacked from a previous excursion, in a cupboard in the hall. When she left with the other children, a small centipede of ascending height, she turned her head briefly over her shoulder to look at me before the gate closed again, obscuring her from sight.

When Sally came back with the doctor, neither of them spoke. I looked at the doctor and the doctor looked at me, and he saw in my eyes that I already understood that Patsy was dead.

The doctor took me aside and spoke with careful urgency in rapid Spanish. We agreed that he would speak with Arturo immediately. Arturo, he was sure, would be able to assist with all the necessary arrangements. I was sure of this too. As I shook his hand, I heard the steady murmur of Sally's voice break off. She left Mason and Bee Bee and Ned and joined us. She thanked the doctor graciously and saw him out. Turning away I saw Mason, stricken, in the doorway.

I gazed at my sallow reflection and went through it all in my head. I had come to my room, to be alone and, finally, to wash and dress. Outside there were no sounds of laughter or play or conversation. The house was blanketed with the muffled hush of shock. Patsy had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. She had stopped breathing some time in the early hours of the morning. Her advanced state of intoxication, it was thought, had hastened the process.

Richard had spent much of the night walking on the beach. Then, later, he had fallen asleep on the sofa with the yellowfringed cushions in the room where the whole horrible scene had unfolded the evening before. A maid had found him there when she'd gone in first thing to clean. She had started at the sight of him, and he had opened his eyes. He had left her to her work and made his way back to his bedroom. His and Patsy's bedroom. Where Patsy was sleeping. At first he had noticed nothing in particular wrong. At least, so many things were wrong that he had not been aware of any freshly jarring aspect. He had sat, for long a while, on the bed, staring at the curved outline of his wife under the cocoon of white linen. Thinking. Thinking about losing her, about losing everything. And eventually these thoughts, retraced so many times in the previous hours, had begun to spark and burn in his brain, and he had reached out to shake her awake, to assail her with them.

After Christina had heard the first shout and come running, he had found the note. Before that he had clung to what he knew now was impossibly frail hope. The note was scrawled and in parts illegible, but she said that she was sorry. It was written on a sheet of yellow legal pad, lying, trivially, on top of a pile of his work papers, mostly files, connected to a dull corporate tax case. If it hadn't been for the note, Richard would have sworn that the whole thing had been a mistake. That she hadn't really meant to do it. But a note made it all pretty clear. She had. She had intended to leave him one way or another. And the boys too. Her own children.

The toneless voice in which Richard had related all this broke at this point and he wept. We responded with silence, just as we had when he had first appeared, ashen, and sat down before any of us had trawled the collective mayhem of our thoughts sufficiently to unearth something appropriate to say.

It was Christina who took Richard by the elbow and led him away. A few minutes later she reported to Sally that she had administered one of the tranquilizers the doctor had left. He would sleep for several hours. In my room, staring into the mirror at my own ravaged eyes, I pitied him his awakening.

It had been decided that nothing should be said yet to the children. By whom, I couldn't remember. The entire morning, reviewed, had a vague, underwater quality. Downstairs, maids and Christina were doing whatever it was people did to corpses. Patsy had been moved to an unused bedroom on the ground floor. I had peered into that room once, leaning around a half-open door. It had a view from the end of the house toward the sea.

I had already spoken again to Arturo. He had called as soon as the doctor had passed on the terrible news, and arrangements were being made, smoothly, with none of the delays or obstructions that tended to mar these kinds of things for other people in this part of the world. Arturo would make sure that the grieving family was not disturbed by gruesome detail or meddlesome questioning. Undertakers would come. Patsy would be flown back to the United States. In a coffin, I supposed. I could not imagine it. Any of it. When I tried, I felt light-headed.

I rubbed my temples and looked out of my window. At the long table under the bougainvillea, a maid was laying things for lunch. No one had eaten breakfast. The children would come back and perhaps people would want to eat. Did people eat in the presence of death?

I saw Sally come out and speak to the maid. Then she turned her head and looked up. Too slow to react, I did not draw back, and we held each other's eyes for a second before she swiveled neatly and went back into the house. I stepped away from the window and began to wonder what I should do. I seemed to have performed all the duties required of me. I had no strength, though, and was far from clearheaded enough for cogent planning. So I just sat down on a wooden chair with a rush mat seat that I had never sat on before, in the corner of the room in which I had lived so fully for so many weeks, and waited.

When the tap at my door came, I was too tired and too befuddled to be startled or even to anticipate who it might be. It was Paige.

“Something's happened, hasn't it?” she asked, coming in and sitting, as she often had, uninvited on my bed.

“Yes.” I took up my corner position again. So much had happened.

“Something serious,” she said. The sun was on her face. She lifted her hand, briefly shading her eyes, then decided to lean, instead, on her elbow. The shadow from the window frame halved her neck.

“Yes,” I said again.

“Something you don't tell children, I suppose.” She curled her lip unattractively and might have descended into a sulk, but for the gravity which even I could detect in my voice.

“You will be told, Paige. It's just that I am not the person to tell you.”

She looked at me levelly. “You're the only person who ever tells me anything.”

I was surprised.

“You treat me”—she gazed at the bedspread, rubbing her fingers lightly back and forth over it—“not like a kid.”

“I don't think you are a kid,” I said. Then I shut my eyes very tight. Because I liked her so much at that moment that I was afraid my heart would break, and the fragile edifice of my composure would crack, and every tear in me would escape and drown us both.

“Is it something very bad?” she asked quietly.

“Yes, Paige. It is something very bad.”

We were called to lunch by Christina. It was not clear whether she had intended to include me in her summons, but Paige, standing, had gently and definitely taken my hand, and I had let her. Christina voiced no protest, and so I found myself, minutes later, seated once again at the same table as Mason and Sally Severance.

Richard was not awake yet; the rest of us, it seemed, were to keep up appearances for the sake of the still ignorant children. Sally gave discreet orders to staff, and Ned poured wine steadily. My eyes, from old habit, were drawn several times to Mason, and the images I caught of him in those glances assured me that he was broken. Felled and immobile.

“Christ,” Bee Bee said, “I still can't get it into my head.” She picked up her glass as Ned shushed her with a look shot in Howie's direction.

Hudson, poignantly, had been brought to the table in his high chair. He began to bang at it with his spoon. Sally signaled for someone to take him to the kitchen.

“I could feed him,” Lesley offered when the maid came to take the child away.

“No, princess,” Ned said, his voice subdued almost to nothing, “you just take care of yourself.” He leaned and kissed her very tenderly on top of her head.

“Where's Dad?” Howie asked, looking up then, his fork aloft with a too-large piece of ham speared on it. “And Mom?” The expression on his small face was tinged with suspicion.

“Taking a nap,” Sally responded crisply, without looking at him.

“Christ,” Bee Bee said again.

Very little had been eaten, but a great deal drunk, by the time the plates were cleared. Ned summoned the energy to invent some fort-building game for the younger children and sent them to play on the emerald grass at the front of the house, and Paige and Lesley were encouraged to retreat to the deep indoors with magazines. When they had gone, the adults sat a while longer, still, sad shadows under a vivid riot of bougainvillea.