Under the Skin (6 page)

No wonder Gloria felt safe, tooling around Asheville in her snazzy little car—Jerry thought she was in Arizona. Too bad she wasn’t.

You’re starting to grind your teeth again, Elizabeth. Get off it and look at your mail
.

I’d picked up this lot on my way back from the grocery
store and hadn’t had the time or energy till now to remove the rubber band around the roll of magazines and envelopes. Bills … as always … invitations to subscribe, to donate, to buy … and a familiar lavender envelope. Another letter from Aunt Dodie? That seemed odd as she rarely writes more than two or three times a year.

But maybe there’d be something to explain that last baffling communication sent from England. I glanced at the stamp—U.S., honoring Longfellow.

Now totally confused, I opened the letter. The familiar lavender pages—and an enclosure on lined paper. I could hear the printer beginning to whir in the little office where Phillip was at work as I began to read:

The letter nattered on for another page, but with a sinking feeling I unfolded the enclosed piece of notebook paper. The clear, slanted printing was like a blow to my stomach—Sam’s handwriting. How long had it been …

There was no date. It couldn’t have been earlier than ’72—Sam hadn’t met the Old Gentleman till our honeymoon trip. And the Old Gentleman had died—it would have been toward the end of ’75—I remember that I was heavily pregnant with Rosemary and so we didn’t go to the funeral.

But Sam was out of the Navy before we married—so what was this all about?

I’ll reread that letter Dodie sent from England—maybe the two of them together will make some sense
.
And
what
bright red mailer? How could I have missed something like that?

Hauling myself off the sofa, I went to my desk to look for Dodie’s previous letter. From the back of the house floated the sound of music—Gloria had evidently made good on her threat to purchase a CD player for the guest room. Show tunes were her favorite—I hate show tunes.

At last I found the letter lurking under my desk calendar. No matter how hard I squinted at the smudged postmark, I still couldn’t make out the name of the town. But the date seemed to be March 19.

March 19 and I had just found it in Phillip’s paperwork last week. How could it have taken an airmail letter almost two months to get here?

“Phillip,” I said, walking into the office, “I was wondering—”

He was sitting at the computer with his back to me and looked up with a start. At the same time, whatever he had been reading vanished, replaced by the screen saver.

And at the same time, I felt a cold stab of doubt.

You’ve been down this road before, Elizabeth—back when you first met him. Things weren’t what they seemed. Still …

I shoved the letter I’d been going to ask him about into my pants pocket and extemporized. “I was just wondering if you had to work next weekend or not—I was kind of sketching out some plans …”

He leaned back in the chair, hand still on the mouse. “I don’t know for sure … It’ll depend—” The sound of Gloria’s heels tapping on the wooden floor of the living room stopped him.

“Lizzy?” she trilled. “I have a surprise for you! Lizzy, where are you?”

“Just a minute,” I called back. Summoning up a weak smile, I nodded at the computer screen. “Sorry I interrupted
you—it’s no big deal about the weekend anyway.”

Phillip shot a curious glance at the bit of letter sticking out of my pocket but said nothing. He turned back to the computer as I headed for the living room and my sister and James, who had followed her from the bedroom, the clicking of his toenails echoing the tapping of her heels.

She was standing there with a gift-wrapped box held out before her—shiny deep purple paper, almost surely the shade known to designers as
aubergine
—wrapped with an intricate arrangement of silk cords in pale green hues.

“I found the most wonderful store—Bravissimo or something like that.
The
most gorgeous clothing—‘wearable art’ they call it. And when I saw this”—she placed the box in my hands—“well, I immediately thought of you! Go on—open it!”

“Gloria—you don’t need to get me stuff.” I sat down on the sofa and began to undo the cords. It seemed like sacrilege to destroy the lovely web they made. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was wondering what sort of wildly expensive, completely unusable thing she had gotten for me.

I had been to Bravissimo—a kind of fusion between an art gallery and a high-end boutique—dragged there by Laurel when a fellow artist friend of hers had a series of innovative little jackets on display in the elegant shop. Gorgeous little jackets—with astronomical price tags, as I recalled. Beautiful one-of-a-kind handmade garments fit for Oscar night or the sort of event
I’d
certainly never be attending.

Gloria perched on the other end of the sofa and watched as I pulled off the last cord and set it to the side. Her face was glowing with a pure, unselfconscious delight
that made her look somehow younger and softer. James snuggled at her side.

“For goodness’ sake, just rip the paper off, Lizzy!” Gloria urged as I carefully peeled off the gold seals at either end of the package.

“It’s so pretty—I’ll save it to use again,” I answered, removing the thick glossy paper, rolling it up, and tying it with one of the silk cords. As I lifted the top of the white rectangular box, a hint of a clean, crisp fragrance wafted out from the folds of rustling tissue. Putting off the moment when I would be expected to gush over some costly, inappropriate, over-the-top piece of clothing, I smiled at my little sister. She obviously meant well. And I was going to do the right thing, even if it meant lying.

“Glory, this is really sweet of you—”

“Lizzy, if you don’t open your present this very minute, I’m going to
scream
!”

And so I did. I laid back the crackling leaves of tissue to see a shimmering of silk—periwinkle blue, lavender, blue-violet, cobalt—the most delicious shades of blue and purple all in one amazing fabric.

Carefully—no, reverently—I took the wonderful thing out of the box, stood, and shook out its glimmering folds.

A kimono—quite possibly the loveliest garment I’d ever seen. The colors—like all the irises of spring … like a mountain lake … like—

“I
knew
it was right for you,” Gloria crowed. “Go look in the mirror—hold it near your face and just see what it does for your eyes.”

“I don’t know what to say, Glory. It’s … it’s magnificent.”

And it was—I had thought I was beyond caring about clothes, but this … “What is this fabric? It’s incredible.”

“There’s a little folder in the box that tells all about it—it’s handwoven ikat silk—ikat is where they dye the silk threads in all different colors before they ever start to weave. The man in charge of the shop explained the process very nicely. That’s how they get all those shades fading into one another.”

I was staring in the mirror—maybe I was imagining it but my eyes
did
seem changed when I held the robe up to my face—deeper, with a hint of violet. The thought of how the silk would feel against my bare skin, of the delicious sensation of—

“Glory, I know how expensive things are at that place. You really shouldn’t—”

“Oh, hush! I knew you’d say that.” She beamed at me, still full of that happy goodwill. “Just think of it as a little something for your trousseau—and while we’re on the subject, tell me about your wedding plans. You said next month—but where? And what will you wear? I saw a lovely dress—”

There was a sudden coldness in the pit of my stomach.
Of course, you’ve already “sorted” the matter
, Aunt Dodie had written.

But I hadn’t. And now all the doubts that had tormented me before came boiling up out of the hidden places to buzz and chatter in my head.

“I … we wanted to wait till the end of June when Phillip’s kids and Rosemary could be here. We haven’t actually picked a day but—”

“Well, you’d better get cracking so you can send out a Save the Date card—no, it’s really too late for that. Might as well just go on and send the invitations.”

The old Gloria had returned.

I began to fold the lovely kimono, savoring the luxurious slide of the fabric against my fingers. With a last appreciative look, I laid the beautiful gift back in the tissue.

“The wedding’s only going to be small—a few phone calls or emails will take care of inviting people. We plan to be married here—”

“
Here?
Are you sure?” Gloria frowned. “Well, I suppose your garden is pretty enough but what if it rains? Let’s see, you could put the tent—”

“No tent,” I said. Suddenly it was an effort to talk about what had been an occasion I’d been looking forward to, keeping a surreptitious list that I amended from time to time. “Like I said, really small. If we had to, it could be right here in the living room. But nothing’s set in stone just yet.”

Nothing at all
.

Monday, May 14, and Tuesday, May 15

P
hillip was still at the computer when I told Gloria good night and headed for my bath. There has always been an unspoken pact between me and the rest of the world to the effect that no one bothers me when I’m in the tub—no phone calls, no messages, no questions. Even when the girls were very little, it was Sam who was on call while I zoned out in my bath for a half hour or so. This time of respite has kept me reasonably sane through various rough patches and I guard and treasure it. The old iron claw-foot tub where I can run the water hot and high, then relax with a book till the water gets too cool, has always been my safe place, my comfort and sanctuary where cares are left on the other side of the door. Unfortunately, however, this time I’d brought them in with me.

A friend had recently sent me a bottle of some wonderful-smelling orange-ginger bath gel and I dumped a generous dollop under the flowing faucet and watched the bubbles froth higher and higher. They seemed an apt reflection of the thoughts and suppositions, the hints and allegations that were threatening to overflow my mind, but hoping that the warm water would work its usual magic, I pulled off my clothes, pinned my braid atop my head, and stepped into the
bath. My reading material—the latest
New Yorker
, as well as both of Dodie’s letters—lay on the edge of the wash basin but I ignored it all in favor of lying back, eyes closed, for a long thoughtful soak.

How could I, in Aunt Dodie’s words, “sort things” without making Phillip think I was having second thoughts, without making him think I didn’t trust him?
Or
, I mused,
without letting him know what I’m worried about—in case it’s true
 … 
What if Phillip
is
the mysterious Hawk that Sam didn’t trust? What if
I
shouldn’t trust him?

There was so much in the past … lies and half-truths … first from Sam … later from Phillip. Even in the beginning—Phillip’s moving to Asheville and looking me up—there’d been a hidden agenda.

All of that had been resolved, explained away by Phillip … at least, I’d
thought
it resolved. But I knew from bitter experience that the past has an ugly way of persevering … and becoming the present.

I stared at the white billows piled high atop the water, trying to put my unspoken questions into words: What exactly was in that first letter of Sam’s, the letter that had gone missing in its bright red mailing envelope? Wherever it was, why had it made Aunt Dodie think that I might not be going to marry “my Mr. Hawkins”? She had obviously believed there might be a connection between Phillip and this person called the Hawk, this person Sam had been worried about …

You need to read that letter from England again
.

Sitting up, I reached for my towel, dried my hands, and took the airmail letter from its hiding place between the pages of the magazine.
Hiding place? Is that how you’re really thinking … already? Sounds like you’ve made up your mind
.