A Woman's Place Page 7

  “No. I’m handling it. Dennis is the one who isn’t. He should have been with us in Cleveland. He could have come if he’d wanted to. Or was that his last fling at freedom before becoming a full-time father? He had this all planned. He must have been planning it for a while.” I took a quick breath, lowered my eyes. “Did he tell you his thoughts about Brody?”

  There was a pause, then a quiet, “Yes.”

  I had to get used to it, I supposed. Such an intimate subject, such a personal accusation. Dennis had told his lawyer, who had told the judge. He had told his parents and God knew who else. I felt betrayed, and angry.

  “And you believe it? You know Brody,” I cried, darting a quick look at the man. He had the small of his back to the sink and his arms folded over his chest. His expression spoke of the same betrayal, the same anger. “He spends holidays with us like he’s family. Do you truly think he’s capable of carrying on with his partner’s wife?”

  “He and Dennis ceased being partners five years ago.”

  “There was never, never anything sexual between Brody and me,” I swore and lowered my eyes again. I was embarrassed for Brody, embarrassed for me. “Dennis is wrong. It’s all in his imagination, his own insecurity, jealousy, whatever.”

  “I have to go, Claire.”

  “When will the children be back at the house?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Will they be sleeping home over the weekend?”

  “Claire.”

  “I’m just trying to get a handle on this, Howard. I don’t know what to do. I don’t want them hurt, they’re innocent of wrong-doing. I don’t want Dennis telling them lies. I don’t want him trying to turn them against me. If he has a gripe with me, he should take it up with me and leave the children out of it. They aren’t pawns.”

  “He knows that.”

  “Once certain words are spoken, that’s it. They won’t be forgotten. They can’t be taken back. Permanent damage will be done. Take care of my children for me, Howard?” I begged. “Make sure Dennis understands how vulnerable they are. If he says the wrong thing, it’s done.”

  “He loves them, Claire.”

  Yeah, well, he was supposed to have loved me, too. Hadn’t he said the words just last month on my birthday? He had handed me a gift-wrapped package that contained another gift-wrapped package that contained a third. Inside was a pair of earrings made by an artist he knew I admired. I had been touched by the thought he put into the gift, touched that he had taken pains in the packaging, drawn, as always, by Dennis’s flair for the dramatic. And yes, he had said, “I love you.”

  So what had he meant by the words?

  I spent the night at Brody’s. It seemed the only sensible thing to do; it was late and I was upset. Brody was my dearest friend. He knew how I worried about what the children were thinking and how starkly I felt the separation. With Brody, I was free to rant and rave or sit quietly. I did both. He made me eat his burgundy chicken and take a long, hot bath. He even turned down the bed in Joy’s room for me.

  In the morning, he insisted on driving me into Boston to see Carmen, and I didn’t argue with him there, either. A hole gaped inside me where home and family had always been. I felt washed out and empty, weak, frightened. I’m not sure I could have managed without Brody holding my hand. I was eternally grateful for his presence.

  Carmen Niko wasn’t.

  four

  Carmen’s office was on the fourth floor of a building the stone face of which was streaked with city grime. The elevator was quaint, a square lift encased in scrolled iron bars that jangled with the fits and starts of opening, closing, and rising, but the office itself had a newer feel. The reception area was early morning immaculate—neatly fanned magazines beside a telephone on a polished oak table, two chairs and an upholstered loveseat, a receptionist’s desk to match the coffee table, scenic prints tastefully framed, vacuum marks on the carpet.

  Nothing was glitzy or pompous, overdone or intimidating as Lloyd Usher’s lobby had been. This one was attractive and down to earth. The colors were warm—greens, apricots, and tans—clearly meant to be soothing, though that was a tough order. I doubted I would feel better until I was back with my kids, doubted I would breathe freely until I had a grasp of what Dennis was about. Still, there was a gentleness to Carmen Niko’s waiting room that gave me hope.

  The woman herself was warm and straightforward, not naturally beautiful but put together in a way that belied it. Tall, dark-haired, and olive-skinned, she wore a soft, squash-colored suit and no jewelry save gold hoops at her ears. She greeted me with an open smile and a handshake, greeted Brody with a wry, “Hey, handsome,” and a peck on the cheek. Without missing a beat, she gestured him into one of the loveseats, clamped a hand around my arm, and ushered me down a short hall to her office.

  Rather than putting the desk between us, as Lloyd Usher had done, she took up a legal pad and settled into the chair kitty-cornered to mine.

  I watched her face while she read the court order. No matter what Brody said about the woman, if she turned around and put me on trial the way Usher had done, I was out of there fast. I was too tired, too frightened, too raw to withstand another attack.

  Yeah. Right. The truth was that I was too tired, too frightened, too raw to go elsewhere if I struck out with Carmen Niko, so my bravado wasn’t worth much. I steeled myself for whatever her response might be.

  But she simply nodded when she was done, said, “This is a standard order,” and set it aside. She uncapped her pen and—softly, sympathetically—asked me to tell her what had happened the day before. She took notes while I talked, asked questions when I skimmed details, returned to the beginning when I had finished, seeming intent on knowing everything there was to know about my homecoming.

  “So your husband knew when to expect you.”

  “Give or take fifteen minutes. He had my flight number and my sworn promise to be on that particular plane.” He had been insistent. What had I thought? That he was that eager to see me? Maybe. More likely, that he was tired of baby-sitting the children. Foolish me, I hadn’t guessed the truth.

  “Between the time when you opened the front door and when he came out of the den, would he have had time to call the constable?”

  “Yes. Especially if he saw the car pull up. I still had to sign the voucher and get my bags from the trunk.”

  “Tell me about the police officer who came. How much did Dennis say on the phone?”

  “Not much, I don’t think—but I’m not sure.” My mind was muddled about the things that had happened when I was most upset and confused. “I was arguing with him. ‘Get someone here fast.’ That’s all I remember him saying.”

  “But only one officer came. Jack Mulroy. He rang the bell and waited patiently for Dennis to answer. Did he have a gun drawn?”

  “Good God, no.” It was a minute before I saw what she was getting at. My voice jumped an octave. “You think Dennis tipped them off beforehand?”

  “It’s possible. Probable, actually. They know your family. They know there isn’t a history of domestic violence. So the normal reaction to a ‘Get someone here fast’ would have been that either your daughter was having an attack, or there was a break-in or an assault. But they didn’t send an ambulance or a SWAT team. They sent one guy, one peaceful guy, who they figured you knew and would listen to.”

  Feeling humiliated, I rubbed the spot on my chest that burned. I shot a helpless look at the ceiling. “I left here two weeks ago thinking Dennis loved me. Now I find that he talked with the police? Told them about the court order? Told them he thought I would make a scene?” But it did make sense, given the police response. “Why would he do that?”

  “To make you look bad,” Carmen suggested. Her voice was throaty but soft, her manner calm. “We have to find out whether what he really wants is the kids or something else. Most immediately, we need to counter his arguments.” Her pen scratched a line across the page. “Okay. Tell me again the examples he gi
ves of how you’re a neglectful parent.”

  I went through the list and gave arguments against each. Finishing, I asked, “How can a judge make a decision after hearing only one side?”

  “They do it all the time,” Carmen said. “My job is to make sure he hears the other side.” She flipped her pad back to an earlier page. “What about the allergy medication?”

  I had been racking my brain about that one since Dennis had thrown it at me. “We don’t go anywhere without that medication. It’s a ritual that goes with having a child with a severe allergy problem—like reading package ingredients, shopping in health food stores, buying baked goods only in certain bakeries. She even wears a small medic-alert bracelet, not always willingly, but I insist. She can’t eat shellfish, nuts, or celery. Nuts are the biggest problem. If they’re ground up, you can’t tell they’re there. So we always pack the medicine kit. There’s an Epi-pen for injecting epinephrine, and an oral antihistamine. I put them in a carry-on, just in case she eats something on the plane. She always brings her own food with her, but I don’t take chances. When she gets sick, it happens quickly. Her throat can be swollen and closing in twenty minutes.

  “I spent a whole long time telling the flight attendant what to do. I told her where the medicine was. I’m positive I packed it, Carmen. There’s no way I wouldn’t have. And, anyway, if I hadn’t, my sister, Rona, would have found it. It was in her refrigerator. That was a week and a half ago. I stayed at my mother’s apartment on the return trip, but I saw Rona every day, and she didn’t mention the medicine. She wouldn’t have thrown it out. She knows about Kikit’s allergies. She’s seen Kikit have an attack. She adores Kikit. Besides, I remember packing it in Kikit’s bag. I remember packing it.”

  “Who would have done the unpacking?”

  “Dennis.” But that would mean he had knowingly risked Kikit’s life. I couldn’t even consider it. “Maybe Kikit unpacked. Maybe she inadvertently tossed it somewhere. I keep spares, but Dennis is a where-do-you-keep-the-milk kind of guy. Then there’s the whole issue of what she ate. It wasn’t anything in the casserole, that’s for sure. But, okay. She got sick. So why didn’t he call me when she had the attack? I wasn’t incommunicado. He could have reached me. Everyone else who wanted to did.”

  “Which brings us to Brody,” Carmen said. “How often did you talk with him while you were away?”

  “Every day. Just like I talked with the children—or tried to, but at the end I couldn’t get through. I kept getting the machine.”

  “Didn’t you start to worry?”

  I had asked myself the same question and others, had tried to look at different angles during the hours I had spent lying awake in Joy’s bed. Had I worried? “Honestly, no. Kikit and Johnny were with their father. I trusted that he would call if there was a problem. It wasn’t like a week went by with no word. It was only two days. Besides, once before when I was traveling and couldn’t reach them, I called Dennis’s parents, and he was livid. Said I’d embarrassed him. Said I’d insulted him. Said he was perfectly capable of taking care of his own children. So I’ve trained myself not to worry.”

  “But you did talk with Brody.”

  “Brody is business. Besides, I don’t have to work through a machine. He answers the phone himself.”

  “And you talked business.” Her insistence might have been accusatory, if it hadn’t been for the apology in her voice. “If your husband has phone records, he’ll know how long you talked.”

  “We talked a long time,” I said, because it seemed foolish to be evasive, “and it wasn’t all business. My mother is getting worse by the day, and it’s upsetting. Dennis hates it when I’m upset, hates it when he doesn’t have answers. He thinks I deliberately ask him questions that put him on the spot, but I don’t. Hell, there isn’t any answer to death. There’s just airing the fear and the sadness. I need to talk. Brody lets me.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “Brody? Don’t we all?”

  “But you’ve never been sexually involved?”

  “Never.”

  “Any close calls?”

  “We’ve never even kissed on the lips. We touch like friends touch. There’s never been anything inappropriate. Dennis is jumping to conclusions. He doesn’t have a shred of concrete evidence to prove an affair. The problem,” my voice rose with the frustration of it, “is that I can’t prove he’s wrong. All I can do is say he’s wrong. We’ve had opportunity, Brody and I. Plenty of it.” I had to laugh at the irony of it. “If we had wanted to do it, we could have, and Dennis couldn’t have proven that, either. Brody and I are business partners. We travel together a lot. We take separate rooms, sometimes two-bedroom suites—so easy, if we’d wanted to sleep together—but we never did and there never seemed anything wrong with those kinds of accommodations, because Brody is a family friend. Hell, he was Dennis’s friend before he was mine.”

  “So you denied the charges, that one and all the others. What did Dennis say then?”

  “He thinks he’s right. He thinks the court order proves it.”

  “And at the time when each thing happened? How did he react, for instance, when you first realized you missed that parent-teacher conference?”

  Thinking back, I remembered feeling terrible. What had Dennis said at the time? “He wasn’t overly upset. I’d have remembered if he was. He was comfortable with the idea of my setting up another meeting, which I did, which he then didn’t even ask about because he was away at the time—fly-fishing in Vermont, I think it was. I can check that out.” He kept his calendar on the computer, easily accessible. Two could play the game.

  Carmen asked, “Did he ever, then or at any other time before yesterday, accuse you of being a negligent mother?”

  “No.”

  “Did he ever, before yesterday,” she flipped back several pages, “suggest that you were in ‘a state of personal crisis’?”

  “No, and I have to tell you, he didn’t think up that term himself. Dennis doesn’t go in for pop psychology. Business buzzwords, yes. Psychoanalysis, no. Someone else fed him that. His lawyer is Arthur Heuber. Would he have done it?”

  Carmen frowned. “He could have, I guess.”

  I pointed at the court order that lay on the near edge of Carmen’s desk. “Could he be behind this whole thing? It’s such a sudden step. Such an extreme step. Dennis claims he mentioned separating three times, but he never went beyond the mentioning stage. He does that a lot—says things to upset me, tells me to sell the business or something—but he doesn’t mean it, and if he did in this case, he could have pressed the issue, or suggested we see a therapist, or actually moved out. He could have told me he was seeing an attorney. Boy, did I miss that one. They put together a whole case against me without my knowing a thing.” A new thought came. I pushed it away, but it slid back with dawning force. “If I wanted to be cynical, I could say he set me up.”

  I expected her to tell me I was paranoid. Instead, she said, “You could.”

  “My God.”

  “What makes you suggest it?” she asked.

  “Little things,” suddenly making sense. Oh, yes, the evidence was circumstantial. But if circumstantial evidence had been good enough for a judge, it was good enough for me. “Like the smell in the kitchen the morning I left for Cleveland. He made a big deal about it, then produced a rotting half-onion from the wrong cabinet, like he knew where to look. And the mix-up with my ride to Logan. I arranged for it. Someone canceled it,” something else struck me then, “and he conveniently couldn’t take us to the airport, knowing that Brody would, so he could hold that against us, too. And as for the mess-up with Johnny and Kikit’s return from Cleveland”—I was on a roll—“Dennis says I gave him the wrong information. Maybe I gave it to him right and he got it wrong. And then there’s the fact that he wasn’t as bad as he usually is when I’m getting ready to leave. Usually he picks fights—about the kids, the house, whatever, and he pushes and pushes until he knows I’m upset. Only he di
dn’t this time. Like maybe he was looking forward to my being away. Like maybe he knew what he had planned and was looking forward to that. Like maybe there was no business meeting in the Berkshires, just a weekend away with some buddy or other. Like maybe he could have come with us to see my mother after all and just didn’t want to.”

  I ran out of breath and venom at much the same time. I hated Dennis just then, not because he might have done any of what I was thinking, but because he was making me think it. I had been agreeable for fifteen years. Suddenly he was reducing me to a shrew.

  All that, even before I analyzed Kikit’s allergy attack.

  Carmen’s pen scratched across the paper for several more minutes. Then it, too, stopped.

  I was close to tears. “I want my kids back. This is a total, total nightmare. My life was fine. Our lives were fine. Dennis was never a full-time father. He never wanted to be one. So why is he doing this now?”

  “Probably for money,” Carmen said.

  I gawked. “He has plenty of money.”

  “He does, or you do?”

  “We do. Our savings are in joint accounts. He has access to it all.”

  “Who earns the most?”

  “Me.”

  “By how much?”

  I was about to say twice as much. Then I thought about the figures we had reported to the IRS the April before. I hadn’t paid much heed to them then, rarely did when it came to comparisons. Dennis was thin-skinned. If I looked at him the wrong way at tax time, he bristled.

  Thinking about those figures now, though, I realized that saying I earned twice what he did was an understatement. “I earned four times what he did last year.”

  “Will it be the same this year?”

  “No. The discrepancy will be greater. He’s working less.”

  “By choice?”

  “Partly. He doesn’t have to work. WickerWise brings in more than enough for us to live well on.”

  “What’s the other part?”

  I hesitated. Dennis was my husband. Badmouthing him to a stranger seemed wrong.