When I walk into the kitchen she doesn’t look up. The room is airless, oppressive. I shove the window back open a few inches. There’s a pile of rice and chicken liver and onions already dished out on my plate. Beyond the kitchen door I hear the rumble and wheezy breath of the service elevator as it stops on an upstairs floor.
Mum puts her wineglass on the wooden table, pulls out a chair for me, hands me the bottle of ketchup. We sit in the silence. “I was in your closet today,” she says finally. “I thought it would be nice to donate your old ice skates to the school charity drive. You’ve outgrown them.” She shakes her head, as if she’s trying to scramble whatever image is inside. “How could this have happened?” There’s an unbearable edge of desperation in her voice.
“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” A teardrop of salt water lands in my rice and disappears, swallowed up in a sea of white.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” She searches my face.
“I didn’t want you to hate me.” I stare at the kitchen floor.
“I could never hate you. It’s him I hate.”
“I’m sorry, Mum.”
“It wasn’t your fault. I’m the one who brought him into your life. If I had known he was hurting you . . . I’m glad he’s gone.” She takes my hand and grips it too tight. “Jesus. I should have seen it. How did I not see it?” The tips of my fingers turn pinkish, then white. There is something in her face that I haven’t seen in a long time. Steel. A spark of light.
“If I ever see him again, I swear to God I’ll kill him.”
“What?”
“I should take out a warrant for Leo’s arrest. I should call the police.”
6:15 P.M.
I shut off the kids’ light and close the door behind me as fast as I can so the mosquitoes won’t get in. The surface of the pond is quieting, inky, the evening air pushing out the last warm motes of late afternoon. I head to our cabin to get out of my bathing suit. From the Big House, I hear Peter’s bellowing laugh. Once, after that night, Leo called my mother, drunk, from some bar. He begged her to take him back, swore he still loved her—she was the love of his life, he said. She hung up on him.
21
1989. March, London.
Peter and I have sex on our third date. He takes me to a hole-in-the-wall Indian restaurant on Brick Lane, full of steam and cloves. “Westbourne Grove is for tourists. This is proper Indian,” he assures me. Afterward, he invites me back to his flat for a quick drink, and I surprise myself by saying yes. I rarely date, let alone go home with a man. But Peter is a financial journalist, and for some perverse, old-fashioned reason, the fact that he writes about money makes me trust him—as if anyone with a job that boring couldn’t be dangerous.
We drive back to his house in the endless rain, windows steamed up, the smell of diesel, a warmth. Peter lives in Hampstead, which is practically the opposite end of London. At a zebra crossing, Peter stops for an old man. He rolls the window down an inch, lights a cigarette. The old man shuffles his way across the high street, inch by inch, collar pulled up tight against the downpour, his pale wrinkled hands clutching a broken umbrella. Peter doesn’t look at me when he takes my hand for the first time, his eyes trained on the blinking yellow lamppost, the sheeting rain.
“Is this all right?” He seems almost shy, and it surprises me.
We turn down a narrow street and make a hairpin turn onto a lovely cobbled square, stop in front of a row of Georgian houses.
I’m drenched before I’m halfway out of the car. Water funnels down on us from all sides, puddles, rises against his front door. “This rain is nuts,” I say.
“What rain?” Peter laughs as we run for cover.
Peter’s flat is beautiful—much larger than I’d expected: high ceilings with ornate plaster moldings; huge windows looking out onto the dark heath, the glass so old it has dripped; six-paneled doors with brass knobs the shape of eggs; rough pine floorboards. A working fireplace. Along the front hallway, wooden pegs hang thick with tweed and corduroy jackets, a mud-covered Barbour. Beneath them, toes to the wall, a line of beautiful worn-leather shoes and boots.
“Apologies in advance,” Peter says, throwing his keys on a chest in the front hall. “It’s in a bit of a tip.” Old newspapers are strewn everywhere, ashtrays full of cigarette butts, an open jar of seeded mustard on the coffee table, a pinstripe suit flopped over the back of an overstuffed chair.
“My mother,” he explains as I take in the heavy velvet curtains, ancestral portraits, scattered Turkish rugs. “She’s very tasteful.”