Queen of the Owls Page 20

  Did her story make any sense? It might, if she didn’t trap herself in too many details. But it still didn’t explain what she was doing at Michael’s office.

  “Anyway,” she added, “that’s why Michael couldn’t sub her for her. He’s one of the people in charge of the coat drive. It’s a big deal, apparently, part of their whole image. So I stopped there on the way home, you know, to drop off a few things.”

  Ben gave her an odd look, and Elizabeth tried not to react. She’d kept a deadpan face when she lied about going to Richard’s studio but she was flushing now, as if she had an important secret to hide, not a silly fib about an hour at the co-op. She was sure Ben didn’t believe her, yet the whole thing was absurd. She’d had Katie with her, for god’s sakes. What could she possibly have been doing with Katie in the stroller?

  She tried to turn it into a joke. “Andrea will be green with envy that Katie said his name before hers. Actually, I think Daniel did the same thing.” She gave a crisp, stilted laugh. “We’d better not tell her just yet. Let’s wait till Katie says Aunt Andie and pretend that came first.”

  She really had to stop babbling. It was unlike her, excessive. The same way she had acted with Michael.

  Deflection, that was the best strategy. Plus, Ben looked exhausted. She reached across him to retrieve the windbreaker. “How’s that case going? The pro bono one?”

  “It’s not supposed to be pro bono,” he said. “In theory, I get a percentage of the settlement. Only there are too many plaintiffs and they’re all broke, so who knows?”

  “Isn’t the landlord evil and loaded?”

  “Wyckoff? Evil, anyway.”

  Elizabeth shook out the jacket and arranged it on a hanger. It smelled like Ben, a scent she’d gotten so used to that it hardly registered, sweat and soap and something that reminded her of rosemary, wafting into the air when she changed the sheets. It had been a long time since she’d been close enough to breathe it straight from his skin.

  Since she began to pose for Richard, in fact.

  For the first time in weeks, she thought about the peach-colored negligee and wondered if she ought to put it on. Before she could decide, Ben stood, gym shoes dangling at his side. “At least they fixed the hot water at the gym. Finally. But I’m fried. I’m going to pour myself a shot of Maker’s Mark and watch the news.”

  Elizabeth shut the closet door. Never mind about the negligee. Not tonight. “I think I’ll do some reading. Harold loaned me a book so I’d better skim it or he’ll feel unappreciated.”

  She brushed past Ben on her way to the desk, tensing as their arms touched. Then she reached, again, for the book Harold had loaned her. The doorway in contemporary art.

  He hadn’t said it was an open door.

  Only a passage, a possibility.

  Either Ben had forgotten the incongruity in her story about the food co-op or else he hadn’t cared. But it bothered Elizabeth. She worried that he had made a comment to Michael, which meant that Michael might make a comment to Andrea—What was Liz doing, snooping around my office?—and then Andrea’s plan would backfire.

  Andrea’s whole point had been to gather evidence without Michael knowing—so she’d have power, that’s what she had tried to explain. If Elizabeth had attracted attention when she was supposed to be invisible, it meant she’d bungled the whole thing, ruined Andie’s one advantage, maybe even put her sister in a humiliating position.

  She needed to talk to Andrea, confess, and offer to do whatever she could to minimize the fallout. It was a non-Lucy day, so she took Daniel and Katie with her to Andrea’s salon, telling them, “Why don’t you play with Stephanie’s toys while I talk to Aunt Andie for a minute?” Stephanie was at kindergarten and wouldn’t be happy that her cousins were using her toys. But Elizabeth needed the two of them occupied and out of earshot.

  Weary of all the subterfuge, she sank into the salon chair and began to explain. Andrea put up a palm to silence her. “Never mind, Lizzie. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “You don’t need to be so nice. I take complete—”

  “Stop. I told you. It doesn’t matter.”

  “What doesn’t matter? That Michael might—”

  “All of it.” Andrea’s voice was firm. “I fixed it. It’s over. Problem solved.”

  Elizabeth didn’t understand. Had Andrea confronted him, given him an ultimatum?

  “I decided to preempt the whole thing,” Andrea said. “To forget all that worrying about what he might be doing and make sure he didn’t want to do it.” She gave Elizabeth a smug, cat-like smile. “I told him the only reason I was suspicious was because he was so damn attractive. That turned him on, like I knew it would. Apology followed by make-up sex. A sure-fire remedy.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Of course I did.”

  Elizabeth stared at her. “You apologized? For what? You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Don’t be such a prig, Lizzie. I did what I had to do to preserve my marriage.”

  “What about facing what happened, talking it through?”

  “Not everyone’s like you, Lizzie, with your precious talk, talk, talk. I don’t have your great big IQ. I have to use what I have.”

  Apology sex. How could Andrea do that?

  No, she’d called it make-up sex. Affirmation that they were rejoined in body and spirit.

  Not fair, Elizabeth wanted to cry. Not fair for her sister to be allowed to fix everything so easily. She wanted to tell Andrea about that Caro woman, show her that everything might not be as wonderful as she thought. But what was there to tell? Your husband sat next to someone with a laptop, and then she had to go to a Pilates class.

  She wanted there to be more; it would mean that Andrea’s marriage was no better than hers. But Andrea’s marriage was better than hers. Her husband loved and wanted her.

  There it was, the unadorned truth. Ben might think he loved her— and in his own way, he did—but he didn’t desire her. He had to work at the task, the way he worked at his job, or hope for the pressure of flesh against flesh in his sleep—anyone’s flesh, not God, you’re beautiful, Elizabeth.

  Undesired, she had turned to dust, like the center of the hibiscus.

  Who was she to say that Andrea was wrong, using what she had? A long moment passed, and then Elizabeth said the only thing that seemed safe to say. “If it’s what you want.”

  “It’s what I want.” Andrea’s face softened. “And what about you, Lizzie? What do you want?”

  Elizabeth looked at Daniel and Katie, kneeling on the playroom rug, surrounded by trains and blocks and plastic animals. “Obviously,” Andrea said. “I meant, what else?”

  Elizabeth inhaled, filling her lungs with the acrid scent of mousse and hair spray. What else? She wanted what Andrea and Michael had, but she wanted what Marion Mackenzie had too. Georgia had gotten both. Why couldn’t she?

  “What do I want?” She tried to make it into a joke. “Oh, I want it all. Don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t,” Andrea said. “The way I see it, you get what you get, and it’s up to you to make it work.”

  Elizabeth’s forehead creased. “Then why did you ask me what I wanted, if you think people just get what they get?”

  The sound of crashing blocks filled the room. Elizabeth wheeled around, just in time to catch Katie as she threw herself against her mother’s legs. Daniel raced after her, indignant. “It was her fault. I told her not to put the giraffe on top of my tower. I told her it would knock it over.”

  Elizabeth shut her eyes for a brief, steadying moment. “Yes, I’m sure you did. She didn’t understand that it really would topple.” Then she put a hand on Katie’s head and extended her other arm to Daniel. “Let’s pretend a volcano erupted and the tower exploded.”

  “What’s erupted?”

  “Blew up. With a lot of smoke and hot bubbly stuff.”

  “Two volcanoes.”

  “Two huge volcanoes.” Gently, she pried Katie’s arms a
way. “Go play for a little longer, and then we’ll clean up and head home.”

  Daniel and Katie ran back to the play area, and Andrea laughed. “I probably should have had a second child. Then Stephanie wouldn’t be on me all the time.” She gave another cat-like smirk. “On the other hand, making arrangements for one child is easy. Which I just did.”

  Elizabeth pushed her hair away from her face, the glinting strands that Andrea had coaxed into existence. “What do you mean?”

  “A little weekend getaway, grownups only. Stephanie’s having her first sleepover, so she couldn’t be more thrilled. As I intend to be too, thank you very much.”

  “You and Michael are going away for the weekend?”

  “We most certainly are.” Andrea lifted her hair, twisting it into a knot and letting it tumble back down in a glossy heap. “Like I said, I know what I have to do, and I do it.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “For you.”

  “For me.”

  Andrea didn’t answer, and Elizabeth sighed. She’d wanted to fix the complication she had caused, but Andrea had beaten her to it. She had nothing to offer—only, as her sister pointed out, her precious talk.

  She gave the salon chair a half-spin and stopped in front of their joint image in the oversized mirror. Lizzie, grave and concerned. Andie, sassy and smug. As usual, Andie had solved the problem by wielding her charm. Elizabeth wished her own problems were so easily solved.

  Even so, she needed to come clean about how she’d bungled things at the coat drive and pinged Michael’s radar. Better for Andrea not to be blindsided, just in case. She cleared her throat. “There’s something I should probably tell you.”

  “Oh?” Andrea gave the chair another half-spin so their real selves were facing each other.

  Elizabeth looked at her sister, wishing she didn’t have to confess her ineptness. “I’m glad you and Michael are working things out, I really am, but no thanks to me. I pretty much screwed up my assignment. You know, when I went to spy on him at the coat drive?”

  Andrea frowned. “What about that?”

  “I was—well, a total moron. Made up all these lame excuses about why I was there, and it was obvious he knew I was lying.” She opened her hands in surrender. “With Ben too. I made up one story after another, got them all mixed up. I’m sure he thought I was out of my mind or else hiding something. What I worry about is if he said something to Michael. You know, made him suspicious.”

  The change in Andrea’s face was swift and brutal. “What the fuck.”

  “Andie—”

  “Are you telling me that you gave me away, did the one thing I asked you not to do?”

  “It wasn’t like I—”

  “You did it on purpose.”

  “Of course I didn’t.”

  “You must have. You’re not that stupid.”

  “I am. I was.”

  “Since when?”

  Since that first Americano with Richard. Elizabeth opened her mouth, not knowing how she could possibly explain, but Andrea cut her off. “I trusted you.”

  “I’m not perfect, Andie. I make mistakes.”

  “You don’t. You don’t screw up, ever. It’s your job not to screw up.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You don’t. You’re too smart for that.”

  Elizabeth bristled. “That’s not fair. Why do I always have to be the wise, noble, reliable one?”

  “Because you like it that way.” Andrea’s eyes narrowed into angry slits. “It makes you feel superior.”

  Superior? A joke to think she had ever felt that way. Bitterness seeped into her words. “It was the only role left, after you took the role of everyone’s favorite. The one people wanted to do things for, and give things to. The cute, delightful, desirable sister, who got away with everything.”

  Andrea’s voice was cold now. “Don’t blame me if you don’t have the life you wanted. No one kept you from getting what you wanted except you.”

  Elizabeth could hardly believe this was happening. As if a cork had been pulled out of a bottle, and now all the demons were hissing and kicking and spitting out their poison. None of this would have happened if she hadn’t started lying to Ben. She’d never lied to him until she took up with Richard.

  The ugliness between them was too big now. It couldn’t go back in the bottle.

  But it had to. She couldn’t bear one more shaking block in the precarious tower of her life. “Look, Andie,” she began. “We’re both—”

  “Don’t tell me what I’m feeling.” Then Andrea, too, seemed to be wrestling with herself. “Just leave it, okay? Drop it, forget it.”

  How could she? But what was the alternative? Elizabeth could hear Daniel and Katie in the other room, shrieking with glee as another stack of cubes and cylinders crashed to the floor. “Volcano!” Daniel yelled. The sound of tumbling blocks filled the silence.

  After a minute Elizabeth cleared her throat. “I’d probably better get going, errands and all. Anyway, I’m sure you have customers.”

  “I do have customers.” Andrea raised her voice. “Hey guys, put Stephanie’s stuff back now. Your mom has to go.”

  Elizabeth put her hand on Andrea’s arm. “Have a great time this weekend. Really.”

  “Like I said, I intend to.” Andrea didn’t specifically remove Elizabeth’s hand, only stepped away to retrieve the children’s jackets.

  Quietly, Elizabeth took the garments from her. The weather was cooler now, the season for fleece; there had been frost on the windshield this morning. Soon it would be winter, and the end of the semester.

  Daniel and Katie came running from the playroom. As she held out their coats, Elizabeth’s gaze darted to the window. The long naked arms of an oak tree reached across the glass, moving together against the curtain, reaching upward, as if in supplication.

  Eighteen

  Katie insisted on wearing her snowflake costume on Saturday morning. Within minutes, she had opened the refrigerator, removed a carton of orange juice, and spilled its contents all over the white fabric. Between making a new costume and assuring Katie that it was even more beautiful than the first one, and then helping Daniel make a cardboard-and-tin-foil sword, since he now wanted a new costume too, Elizabeth barely had time to open the book Harold had loaned her.

  On Sunday evening Phoebe called, wanting to pin down a plan for the four of them to go out for what she kept describing as grown-up fun. “Next weekend, right? Like you said, once the kids’ play is over.”

  “I’m trying to survive this weekend,” Elizabeth told her. “Lucy’s extravaganza has Daniel and Katie beyond wired.”

  “Us too. The twins are beside themselves with excitement. Translation: they won’t stop whining and fighting. Naturally it’s right when Charlie and I have two new clients and another one with an oh-so-emergency update. Good thing I’m such an amazing multitasker. I’ve figured out how to do web design with one hand while separating punching siblings with the other.”

  Elizabeth had to laugh. “Yep, I get it.”

  “All the more reason to take time for our grownup selves.”

  There was no getting out of this. “Well, you’re more plugged into things than I am,” she said. “Why don’t you find something that looks interesting and let me know?”

  “Okay, I’ll see what’s on. A reward for surviving.”

  “Survival is good.”

  Phoebe gave a soft chuckle. “I’ll see you tomorrow. At the play.”

  On Monday morning Ben told her that he wouldn’t be able to come. “We finally got the landlord to agree to a face-to-face meeting. Today, naturally, and I have to be there. There’s no way around it.”

  “Oh dear. The kids will be so disappointed.”

  “I know. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

  Daniel was crushed when Elizabeth told him that Daddy wouldn’t be there, but rallied when she added, “I’ll film the whole thing, and we’ll watch it with
Daddy after dinner. Then you can see exactly how you looked.”

  “A doctor-mennery. Like my ship.”

  “Just like your ship.” Elizabeth knelt and put her hands on Katie’s shoulders. “And you, my pumpkin, are going to wear your gorgeous new snowflake dress. I can’t wait to see it on you.”

  “Mama come?”

  “Of course I’ll come, you silly. Have I ever, ever not done what I promised?” She gave Daniel a reassuring smile. “I’m going to drop you guys at Lucy’s for a little while so I can run over to my school, okay? But I’ll be back in plenty of time for your play. So let’s all scoot into the car and you can show Lucy how amazing you look in your costumes.”

  Elizabeth knew Harold would want to talk for a few minutes, and then she had to go to the admin building to copy some handouts for her class, but none of that would take long. She grabbed the shopping bag with Daniel’s tin-foil sword and Katie’s tiara—a new addition, since Daniel had a sword, and why couldn’t a snowflake have a tiara?—and flung it onto the passenger seat. As she drove, she rehearsed what she planned to say about the book Harold had loaned her, even though she hadn’t actually read it.

  But Harold cut off her effusive remarks and tossed the book onto his desk as if it were an irrelevant parcel. “Don’t reference it more than once or twice in your paper, especially not to please me. The doorway’s an over-used motif.”

  Elizabeth smiled. “O’Keeffe would have appreciated the warning. She hated ready-made images.”

  “Not entirely,” Harold said. “Didn’t she use familiar images in her Hawaii paintings? Fall back on painting flowers that reminded her of ones she’d already done?”

  Elizabeth thought of the Bella Donna O’Keeffe had painted in Hawaii, so similar to her Jimson Weed that the O’Keeffe museum didn’t think it needed both. And Cup of Silver Ginger, an elaboration on the camellias and petunias she had painted fifteen years earlier. It was true that Georgia began by turning to what she knew. But she’d kept going, moving toward what she didn’t know.