Birthday Girls (23 page)

Kris shrugged. “UCLA wasn’t up to the challenge.”

“Are you giving up?”

It was Kris’s turn to grow somber. “I thought it would be easy. Shit. Everything has always been easy for me. You want a bestseller?” She snapped her fingers; “You get it. You want fame and fortune? Its yours. I sure didn’t think I’d get hung up having some stranger’s sperm inside me.” She laughed. “God knows, that part was nothing new.”

Abigail stubbed out her cigarette.

“Besides,” Kris continued, “maybe I really am too old.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

Smoothing the front of her cashmere dress, Kris paused before she replied. “They shot me up with some stuff guaranteed to make me produce more eggs. Improbably had a whole henhouse inside me, and the rooster wasn’t interested.”

Abigail sat beside her. “What are you going to do?”

Kris was unsure if Abigail was more concerned about her or about the vow not to leave until the birthday wishes came true. “I can’t speak for Maddie,” she said, “but as for me, you’re off the hook. There’s no point in you keeping your life on hold until I get pregnant. It may never happen.”

Lighting another cigarette, Abigail smiled. “You’re sure?”

“Absolutely. Now let’s spend the weekend getting your shit together so you can get out of here.”

Damn
. It just wasn’t fair. Maddie sat on her bed in the darkness—the same bed, in the same slant-roof room where she’d spent her childhood, where she’d passed so many nights looking out at the stars and wondering if she would ever be like Kris or Abigail … or even Betty Ann.

She thought about her old Mousketeer T-shirt, a long-ago treasure, then dust rag, then trash. Still, there were so many times she felt like that awkward, unhappy girl trying so hard to pretend that all was well, trying so hard to act as if she were having fun, trying so hard to make others like her. Things hadn’t changed. Aside from her mother and the twins—well, Timmy, anyway—there was no one who really cared.

Maybe life would have been easier if her father hadn’t died when she was so young. Other than Parker, Harvey Kavner was the only man who had ever held her hand, who had ever truly cared. At night, after dinner, they would go
for walks—just Maddie and her father, hand-in-hand when she was small, then simply side-by-side. They rarely spoke much on their ritual jaunts; they just enjoyed being together, enjoyed being father and daughter, at peace with one another.

It had been so long now since he’d died that she barely remembered him, barely remembered his face, the sound of his voice, the touch of his fingers linked through hers.

She thought about the day of his memorial service. Climbing the steps of the synagogue, thirteen-year-old Maddie had linked her arm through her mother’s.

“What are we going to do without him, Mommy?”

“We’re going to be fine,” Sophie commented, patting her daughter’s hand. “We’re going to miss him like hell, but we’re going to be fine.”

It was the first time Maddie had heard her mother swear, and it implied to Maddie that they were not going to be fine at all—that the one man who loved them had abandoned them, that there was no chance of him coming back.

Three decades later another man had abandoned her, too. The two men in her life had packed up and left: one in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes; one in a satin-lined box. Of the two, she knew she could have counted more on her father. Yet he was the one she couldn’t win back.

When her father died, he had been her best friend. Well, there had been Abigail and Kris and Betty Ann, too. Then again, she thought now, maybe the girls would not have remained friends if he hadn’t died, if they hadn’t felt sorry for her.

Her thoughts drifted to them: she’d not spoken to Kris since coming back on the red-eye; Abigail hadn’t called to see how her date went. Years ago Maddie would have been on the phone to them both, pursuing the friendship without ever realizing that maybe it wasn’t what
they
wanted. That maybe they only tolerated her the way they tolerated Betty Ann, simply because she was there.

Despair, she’d read somewhere, was the fabric of self-pity.

Yet Maddie could not stop the warm tears from rolling down her cheeks. Even in the darkness, even with her new look, she knew what she was. She was the daughter of an introspective college professor, a matronly frump, nothing more. No one, certainly, at whom Parker would ever cast a side glance again.

Besides, Parker had had his chance tonight. But he’d put on his jacket and gone out the door, laughing at her perhaps, perhaps shaking his head, then getting into the car next to his young, gorgeous, blonde wife and secretly applauding himself for having had the sense to get out.

Menopause, Madeline. It’s part of life
. Sophie’s words reverberated in her mind. Maddie took as deep a breath as she could and tried to determine how long menopause would last. She’d heard five years. She’d heard ten.

In five years Cody would be thirty-three. In ten, thirty-eight.

She sat up on the bed and pulled her torn chenille robe around her.
Damn
, she thought,
why am I thinking of him?

“You are thinking of him because he makes you feel good,” she said to the darkness. Then she admitted that he
did
make her feel good. Like the new haircut. Like dropping the weight. Like looking like something other than a tearsheet from a decades-old Montgomery Ward catalog, or a poster child from Woodstock.

And maybe Abigail was right, that surely Parker would notice if she were with a younger man.

Quickly Maddie hauled herself from the bed and fumbled in the bag that was slung over the doorknob. From the bottom of the bag she dug out the crumpled napkin from Hilliard’s. Then she went over to the phone on the nightstand.

Crazy or not, she was going to do this. She didn’t care what anyone thought. Besides, Sophie had told her to distract herself. And Maddie had always tried to do what she was told.

She lifted the receiver before she could change her menopausally altered mind.

Abigail
snapped off the reading lamp, pulled the thick comforter up under her chin, closed her eyes, and prepared to pretend she was asleep. From her bed she could hear Edmund using the steam room; though they hadn’t shared the same bed, the same room even, for many years, she did not want to encourage one of his infrequent conjugal visits tonight. The sex might be good—and then where would she be? Confused as hell and riddled with guilt and at risk of changing her mind.

No. There would be no sex, and she would not change her mind. She was going to be free. Free to be the Abigail Hardy she had never known—or whatever her new name would be.

Seattle
. The name kept creeping back to her mind. It wasn’t as exotic as Madrid or Marseilles, but she’d had a lifetime of exotic, a lifetime of being where and doing what was expected. Seattle seemed so less … confrontational. A place where the people spoke English, where the money was in dollars, and where she could vanish among the lumber-jacks and other western pioneers—pioneers, like Great-Grandfather Hardy had once been, on a different coast, in a different time.

She’d heard Seattle was dreary—cold and rainy. But for some reason the image of rain on the roof of a log cabin and giant pines creaking outside in the darkness while Abigail was tucked inside beside a blazing fireplace, all snug and cozy and blessedly alone, seemed blissfully safe and very alluring.

Maybe she would even get a dog.

A big, furry dog who would curl up at her feet and keep her toes warm.

An island
, she thought. An island off the coastline across from Seattle. She could have her solitude; she could have a city nearby in case she craved people. And in the meantime she would have nothing hut time to become who she was. A smile of peace inched over her lips.

“Honey? Are you awake?”

She forced away the smile. She squeezed her eyes.
Go away, Edmund
, she wanted to scream. Instead she did not answer. It didn’t matter. The sound of his footsteps moved closer to the bed.

“I just wanted to say it was a wonderful Thanksgiving. An excellent dinner.” The weight of his body sank onto the edge of the mattress.

The log cabin, the big, furry dog, and the island vanished, his words popping the bubble of her dreams.

“Thank Louisa for dinner,” she said, her eyes still closed. “I didn’t make it.” She wondered why everyone always thanked the hostess for dinner, when all the hostess did was pay the cook.

He shifted his weight on the mattress. “Everyone seemed to have a nice time, too.”

“Yes. I guess.”

“It was a wonderful idea to surprise everyone with your news.”

She opened her eyes.

“Even
I
didn’t know you’d made your decision.”

“I didn’t keep it from you on purpose,” she replied. “I didn’t think it much mattered to you.”

He began to fondle the edge of the comforter. “I’m sorry about our argument the other day. What you do does matter to me.”

Go away
.

“Edmund,” she said, “I’m tired. Please go to bed.”

“I was hoping I’d be invited to sleep here.”

She closed her eyes again, pulled an arm from beneath
the covers, and patted his hand. “Please understand. I’m really tired. And Kris is staying the weekend, so I’m sure we’ll be busy.”

He remained for a moment, not speaking, just breathing. Breathing the breath of a husband who didn’t know quite what to make of his wife. Finally he rose from the bed, his footsteps crossing the carpet and disappearing down the hall.

Larry’s
dick had not been this hard since he was seventeen. He drizzled massage oil around the tip and rubbed it up and down the shaft.

This was a moment he wasn’t going to share with Grady. No, Larry deserved to keep this all to himself—a reward for his victory.

Fifteen-percent-of-ten-million-dollars victory. For finally Larry had won.

He smiled. He wondered what Abigail would think if she could see him now, see the pleasure it gave him that she had, in fact, just fucked herself.

He’d get Sondra now, too. Some way, somehow, he’d manage to win her over to his side. For things were at last going to go Larry Kaminski’s way.

And Mother would be so proud.

He stroked himself some more.

God, his dick was beautiful.

Kris lay
under the huge comforter in the west wing at Windsor-on-Hudson and slowly rubbed the mound of black
curls that “v’d” up from between her legs. It had been weeks since she’d had sex—not since that brief foray with Mo Gilbert, that unexpected, delicious romp that only a stranger can provide.

But tonight, sleeping in this house, this mansion, where her youth had slipped away, tonight she’d give anything to do more than hold a penis in her hand, to put it between her lips.

Tonight she’d give anything to feel … loved.

She thought about Abigail, who did not seem to know—or care—that she had a husband, a man who loved her.

Her thoughts turned to Edmund. What would it be like to be loved by a man like him? He was attractive in a conservative, upper-class way. Certainly he was interesting. He had warm, blue-gray eyes that looked caring and sensitive. And despite his age his body appeared firm, his hands looked strong.

Then, unintentionally, Kris found herself trying to picture him above her, scanning her body, tasting her nipples. She pictured him smiling down at her, then lowering his face to her treasure.

Folding her fingers around her clitoris, Kris fluttered her fingertips around the swelling bud. Her breath quickened; her need rose. Then, as she slid her hand toward the dampness of her opening, she caught the edge of the tampon string.

The image of young Doctor Kildare sprang to her mind. The sterile syringe. The bios in the book.

“Fuck,” she said, and pulled her hand away.

She raised an arm over her head and stared at the vacant ceiling. Her breathing eased, her need evaporated, and a few lonely tears crept from her eyes.

The breakfast
room was sunny and bright, the way every breakfast room in every billionaire’s manor was supposed to be.

Sitting there in her short black satin robe, sipping black coffee and nibbling strawberry jam from the edge of a croissant, Kris admitted she was grateful that apparently Abigail did not know what had happened here over thirty years ago. It made her return here almost cathartic, as if she would finally be able to have closure on the past and look forward to a clean, unburdened future in which to, hopefully, raise a healthy, well-balanced child.

She looked out over the tiered gardens and remembered the many times she’d sat there as a child, then as a teenager, envying Abigail for living in a real home instead of one of five apartments scattered around the world, and for having a grandfather who was always around, who cared where Abigail went and what she did, who was not on the other side of the globe when it came to important events like parents weekend, the school play, and graduation.

It seemed odd to Kris now that she had always been considered the independent one, the loner, as if no one ever noticed that she’d really not had any choice.