While her father talked to her mother on the phone, Diane wandered onto the terrace with a cup of coffee. Alan followed.
“You’ve done well for yourself,” he said.
“Yes, I have. I have a good life.”
Diane tried to remember living with Alan. She couldn’t really-not the day-to-day life they shared for eighteen months. Just events. Arguments. Regrets. Nothing to make a scrapbook of. Nothing she wanted to remember.
“If we’d stayed together, we’d be married seventeen years next month,” he said.
“Where’s your wife?” asked Diane. She had noticed that she was conspicuously absent, but just assumed she didn’t want to dine with her husband’s ex-wife.
“We’re separated.”
“I’m sorry.”
It was twilight and still hot. Diane would have taken off her blazer, but hadn’t wanted to explain her bandage. She sat down at the wrought-iron table with her coffee, trying to think of some polite way to tell Alan to go away. But he sat down opposite her. In the coming darkness he looked younger and handsome. He had always been a good-looking man and had always known it. Alan had the upbringing of an only child with doting parents.
“I loved you,” he said. “I really did.”
“No, you didn’t.”
Even in the shadows, she could see the flush rise in his face.
“Don’t tell me what I felt.”
“When we were married you wanted to change everything about me. I had too much desire to get an education. I was too adventurous. I had a smart mouth, and my hair was too short. There was nothing about me that you liked.”
“I just wanted you to be happy.”
Diane felt her face getting hot and the anger rising. After all these years, he could still goad her into an argument. “I was happy doing all those things you didn’t like. You wanted me to be happy doing what you wanted me to do. That just wasn’t me.”
“If you had just tried. . You didn’t try.”
“Do you have any idea how that sounds? God, Alan. Why are we having this conversation? You know, in the divorce papers there was this line that said our relationship was now like we had never been married. Our marriage is history and should stay that way.”
“You never really loved me, did you?”
That was the way their arguments always went. Alan would ignore Diane’s response and go on to the next thing he wanted to take issue with. Alan could certainly suck the joy out a celebration.
“Don’t, Alan. It’s been seventeen years. Let it go.” Surely, thought Diane, he doesn’t want to get back together. “I did try. I tried for a year and a half, but I wasn’t going to give up graduate school. I wasn’t going to give up caving. I might have relented on the hair. All we did was argue. We both were miserable.”
She suddenly felt like making a dash for the door. She rose and started back into the house.
“Dammit, Diane, can’t you just listen for once?”
Alan grabbed her arm. His fingers pressed hard against the tender incision. Searing, crippling pain shot through Diane’s arm. Bile rose in her throat.
“You’re hurting me,” she cried out. “Let go.”
“Don’t be silly. I can’t be hurting you.”
The lights to the terrace suddenly came on. Susan and Gerald rushed through the patio doors.
“Stop,” said Susan. “She’s injured.”
“Dammit, man. Let her go,” said Gerald. “Look at her face. She’s about to pass out.”
Alan let go and Diane started to sink. Gerald put a chair under her.
“Shit, that hurt,” she said.
“Let me see if he broke the stitches.” Susan helped her take off the light cotton jacket she’d worn over her short-sleeved shirt.
“This is a long cut, Diane,” said Susan, looking through the translucent bandage at the line of stitches. “It looks like it was deep.”
“The doctor said it was to the bone. I had to have some muscle repair.”
“I didn’t realize,” sputtered Alan.
“You did,” said Diane, “because I told you that you were hurting me.”
“It didn’t make sense that my grasp was hurting. How was I to know?”
“It’s weeping,” said Susan. “But the stitches look intact.”
“Alan, that kind of logic is exactly the reason we are not married.” Diane’s arm throbbed. She turned to her sister. “I see Dad coming. Help me on with my jacket. We aren’t going to mention this.” She bored a hole through Alan with her gaze.
“There you are,” said her dad, coming through the patio door. “I talked to your mother. She’s in a cottage on the prison grounds. As you can imagine, she is greatly relieved. She suffered so much in there.” His voice broke.
“Sit down, Dad,” Susan said as she guided him to a chair.
“They had her in a dormitory with five hundred other women. Five hundred. Some were ill and vomiting. They have elderly people in with young people. Many of them were vicious. She said one woman died during the night and they couldn’t get a guard to come and see about her until noon. It was awful. Just awful. Someone is going to pay for this. Alan, I want you to start a lawsuit immediately.”
“I’ll look into it.”
“Don’t look into it. Do it!” he snapped.
“Of course. That’s what I meant,” Alan sputtered.
They skipped the champagne. The joy at getting her mother out of prison was dampened by the knowledge of the frightful conditions. Diane knew what to expect, but hearing it from her father was still sickening. Alan had the good sense not to say that prison was not supposed to be Club Med, as he had often voiced in the past.
Diane excused herself early, telling her father that she was tired from the flight.
“I understand. I’m going to bed myself. We have to get up early and get Iris away from that place. I tell you, they are going to be sorry they picked on a Fallon.” He kissed her cheek and headed for his room. “God, I’m tired,” he said, going down the hallway.
Alan went home, and Diane hoped it would be the last time she saw him. He apparently couldn’t bring himself to apologize for hurting her. An apology would be an admission of guilt, and that was simply beyond his ability to accept.
“I’ll go up with you and dress your arm,” said Susan.
Diane was suprised. There weren’t that many times during their childhood that they had acted sisterly toward each other. But something had changed between the time she talked with Susan on the phone yesterday and now.
They walked up the stairs and down the hall to what Diane’s mother called the Yukon room. The centerpiece of the room was a huge pine bed covered with a duvet of red-and-hunter-green plaid and littered with fleece pillows. All the furniture was rustic, from the dresser to the table and chairs in the corner. It was a cozy room.
Susan rummaged through the bathroom for fresh bandages. “Is it still hurting?” she called from the bathroom.
“Unfortunately it is. I’m going to take a painkiller tonight, so please call me in the morning when you get up.” Diane took off her jacket and her blouse.
“I’m going to put some Betadine on the wound.” Susan frowned at Diane. “Are you telling me that this didn’t hurt when it happened?”
“I felt something like a pulled muscle. It was crowded, and my attention was focused elsewhere.”
Susan left for a couple of minutes and came back with a bottle of Betadine and some cotton pads.
“I still can’t believe Alan grabbed you like that,” Susan said as she sat down next to Diane on the bed. “Diane, when you were married to Alan, did he. . was he. .”
“Abusive? No. He tried to be controlling.”
“Mother and Dad should have told him that wouldn’t work.”
Diane smiled at her. “Alan’s main deal was pouting when he didn’t get his way. That didn’t work either. I was happiest when he wasn’t talking to me. He also liked to try to wear me down until I agreed with him. He was like a dog with a bone trying to get me to drop out of graduate school. I could dig my heels in when I’d a mind to, so we argued constantly. He locked me out of the bedroom once for some reason, thinking that would be a deterrent to my disagreeing with him. I was very happy on the couch,” Diane said with a laugh as she swiveled her body sideways slightly so that Susan could reach her arm.
“Why did you marry him?” Susan asked.
Diane felt her sister blot the incision with a cotton pad soaked with Betadine. It was cool on the hot wound.
“Alan proposed. It was Mother and Dad’s wish that I accept. I wanted them to approve of something I did, so I accepted. It was a big mistake, and I regretted it immediately.”
Susan taped a fresh sterile pad on Diane’s arm. Diane turned back toward her and noticed how worn-out her sister suddenly looked.
“Diane, I need a favor,” she said after a long, awkward moment. “I know we haven’t gotten along. . ever, I guess. But you’ve always been good to my kids. You remember their birthdays and Christmas. You write them letters. Kayla loves getting letters from you.”
“What’s the matter, Susan? Has something happened?”
“Something. Yes. Something happened. I made a terrible mistake, and I don’t know what to do. I need you to speak to Gerald. He respects you.”
“I didn’t think anyone in the family respected me.”
“Do you think that, really?” Susan looked at the painting of a moose at the edge of the woods that hung on the wall opposite the bed. “You’re the smart one. Everyone respects that.”
Yes, the smart one. . and Susan’s the pretty one, Diane thought. That was how Diane’s mother described her children. Diane guessed her mother was trying to tell people that each had her own special qualities, but what it had always sounded like to her-and she guessed to Susan too-was that Diane was the ugly one and Susan was the dumb one.
Susan must have been thinking the same thing. “Prettiness fades with time,” she said. “I didn’t realize that when I was young, and if that’s all you have. . ” Susan looked down at her hands and twisted her wedding ring on her finger.
“Would it do any good for me to tell you that is not all you have and that you are plenty smart. . and still pretty? What’s this about, Susan?”
“Last New Year’s Eve, Alan and I kissed. It was nothing. I don’t know why I even did it. But that’s all it was. Honest. We never went beyond that one rather silly kiss.”
“Did Gerald see it or something?”
“No. Alan”-she spit his name out like it tasted bitter-“Alan told Gerald this morning.”
“Why?”
“I know you think Alan is a good financial lawyer, but he isn’t. Dad had to find him a job because he was fired from the firm where he worked before.”
Actually, Diane didn’t think Alan was a good lawyer. She had just been trying to soften her remark about Alan’s not being a criminal lawyer. “Fired? I thought he would have been a partner,” she said.
“No. We all thought it was a raw deal. . jealousy, infighting. Mother and Dad think the world of him, so Dad got him a job with the firm that Fallon and Abernathy use. Alan’s made some mistakes with their accounts. He told the partners that Gerald is the one who gave him the information and told him how he wanted things handled. Gerald found out this morning and called him. They had a row, and that’s when Alan told him. Now Gerald thinks we. . that we had an affair. I swear we didn’t. That’s why we sent the children to his sister’s. We didn’t want them to witness us sorting this out.”
“I’ll tell Gerald that I believe you, if you think that will help.”
“Do you?”
“Believe you? Yes.”
“Why?”
“I have experience with people who lie.” Diane didn’t say that one of the people she had experience with was Susan herself when they were children, and that Diane knew exactly when Susan lied and when she was telling the truth.
“Gerald is a good man, and I don’t want a divorce.”
“Is that what Gerald is threatening?”
“He hasn’t come out and said it, but. . Alan really rubbed his nose in it.”
“I’ll talk to him tomorrow.”
“I appreciate it, Diane. I’d better get back. I don’t want Gerald to think that I’m. .” She left the rest unfinished.
Susan kissed Diane’s cheek as she left for home. Her family got downright affectionate during times of stress. She realized that she hardly knew them. Perhaps that was her fault. She could be as stubborn and intransigent as they in her opinions. On the other hand, they had never understood how much Diane loved her daughter. That lack of empathy was hard for Diane to forgive.
Diane undressed and tossed her clothes over the back of a chair. She put on her nightgown, fished a paperback of Foucault’s Pendulum out of her duffel bag and crawled into bed. Her eyelids were heavy, but she was looking forward to continuing what she started on the plane-and getting her mind away from current events.
Something caused her to jerk awake. The book had fallen to the floor. That was probably what woke her up. She picked up her cell and looked at the display. After eleven. She got out of bed, retrieved the book and turned out the bedside lamp.
She had one knee back up on the bed when she heard soft footfalls in the hallway. On the carpeted floor the sound was only a whisper, but Diane had a good ear for faint rhythm. Her father, probably. He was the only other person in the huge house. And when she and Susan were little, he would look in on them before going to bed. She started to call out, but instead she picked up her cell phone, moved away from the bed and secreted herself in the closet, looking out through the space between the louvers.
Okay, now what was she going to say to her father-I’ve been personally attacked so many times that I automatically run for cover at the sound of footsteps? She put a hand on the door to push it open, but stopped when she saw a shadow come into the room. Her father would have knocked-unless he was just checking. The shadowed form passed through rays of moonlight from the window. It was Alan.