Breeding Ground (26 page)

Even so, she knew she had to rest and pace herself. She'd be taking Warfarin for quite a while too, and she had to be careful not to bruise or cut herself or fall somehow like an idiot, because internal bleeding could be deadly, especially after abdominal surgery that was only beginning to heal.

Yet she told Booker again on Friday (for maybe the twentieth time) that he and Spence should still leave for England the next day, exactly as they'd planned, because she'd be fine at home. Their cleaning lady was a friend and a neighbor, and she'd bring her groceries and stop by everyday. Her secretary would bring correspondence and be there every day as well. Jack would be working in the yard off-and-on. And Richard would be in town too. (Though for her it was harder to ask help from a son than a stranger on the street, especially when it came to anything remotely connected to nursing.)

Booker still didn't feel right about leaving. He went over it with her till they were both exhausted, but he could see how much Alice wanted to paint with total concentration, and he finally agreed and gave in.

He and Spencer spent the day organizing the remaining details of their meetings with dealers in England and France, and clearing up as much as they could to prepare for being out of the office for two and a half weeks.

Late that afternoon, Spence met the barn hand who worked down the road, who'd be living in his house taking care of his horses, and explained what he needed to know.

Then he went to all four paddocks in the blistering sun to talk to the horses before he went in to pack, feeling freer and more himself than he had since he'd learned about Tara's past.

He was ready to start something different. To develop a new division of the business –
if
they decided it actually made sense. To see the France and England he'd known in a bloodbath the way they'd healed and rebuilt. To think about something beside Tara Kruse, and why he'd believed her as much as he had, and what she might do next.

Then he saw Gigi's face again, when he'd walked out her door two Fridays before, and asked himself for the thousandth time what he could do for her.

He knew there was nothing.

Which made him kick his paddock boots across his laundry room floor.

Packing forced him to concentrate on the minutiae that complicates leaving the country – the passport, the travelers' checks, the electric plugs for European outlets – till he pulled his suits from the closet.

A button was missing from the jacket of the charcoal gray he'd just bought for the trip. Two were off his old navy blue. And the threads looked as though they'd been cut.

He laid both suits on the bed, and examined the new one first. First the jacket, then the pants – where he found a two-inch vertical slice on the left side of the zipper that looked as though it must've been made by a sharp, wide blade, something like the butcher knife he used everyday. There were slices in the back on either side of the center seam too.

And two horizontal cuts in the pants legs of the old blue suit – one in each, above the cuff. They weren't as noticeable as the slice by the zipper, or the ones in the back of the gray. He thought he could wear the blue suit on the plane and then buy something new in England.

He sat on the bed and stared at the cuts in the charcoal pants, and said, “Bitch!” twice, in a loud hot voice, as a heavy hard stone settled deep in his chest. He was looking at what he'd been waiting for, without having called it by name.

She's done it before. It's not a complete shock. But how did she get in?

It was close to a hundred when Michael Westlake took a cab from the hospital to his impounded car. He paid the fee, drove home, and parked in front by the curb. He climbed out slowly, staring at the weathered white house, shaking his head at the toilet paper wrapped around the porch posts, and all four white wicker chairs.

He mounted the steps with the slow tread and obvious dread of climbing his own scaffold, and stepped through the front door into a hot, stuffy, sickly-smelling house where the curtains were drawn to keep the sun out.

Iris Westlake was lying on the flowered divan just where he'd expected her, a damp cloth on her forehead, while his younger sister, Bea, played in the downstairs bedroom. The Mickey Mouse record was on again, the one they'd heard thousands of times, and her hard-soled shoes stamped the floor like the crack of a repeating rifle in nothing at all like rhythm. She howled too until the record stopped, when she yelled, “Make it play!”

Iris didn't attempt to get up. She stared at Michael for almost a minute before she said, “I'll never recover. Not from this humiliation. Not as long as I live.”

Michael sighed, as he took off his coat and laid it on the back of a chair. “Bea's covered the house with toilet paper plenty of times before. It's up to you to hide the extra rolls.”

“Not the toilet paper! You know very well what I mean. That you, my only son, would be jailed like a common criminal and put in an institution for the same drunkenness your father succumbed to. Daily behavior, as you may recall, that made my life an unbearable trial.”

“I'm not going to argue with you. I'm only going to say this once. Our lives are changing today. I will not live here again, though I will continue to pay your expenses. I have arranged for a caregiver to be here with Bea, who has the know-how and experience to handle the behavior of a—”

“I will
not
allow a stranger in my home to observe and report the—”

“If the caregiver doesn't work out, so that you're both kept safe, and Bea's temper is controlled, Bea will go to a home that takes proper care of people with her type of retardation. She is twenty years old, and too large and too strong to stay here alone with you. The Sunshine Home—”

“Don't you even mention that name in the—”

“Does an excellent job. You've seen that yourself. And I believe she'd be happier where she's not the only one with her particular challenges.”

“Do not say another word!”

“They know how to teach her what she can learn, and she'd have people to play with who are like her, which would help her not to be so frustrated by her limitations.”

“How can you even suggest such a thing? I take care of Bea! I run this household! I will not be dictated to by a man who has to be inebriated to get through the day!” She'd made no attempt to sit up. She still lay on the couch, one hand on the washcloth now, the other pointing at Michael.

“And how will you support yourself?” He spoke calmly, and turned toward the stairs at the end of the living room farthest from her couch. “I've paid for everything since Dad left. I've provided someone to clean the house. I've cooked a good bit of the food. I've done a good deal of the shopping. I am no longer willing to live in a state of siege. A caregiver arrives in an hour.”

He started up the stairs, as Iris struggled to sit up. “You? How can you pay for anything? You've been fired! You're a failure, just like your father!”

Michael stopped halfway up, but didn't turn to her before he spoke. “I'm a graduate mechanical engineer. I will find a position. Perhaps even the one I had.” He stared down at her then, her large soft body tightly corseted, trussed in flowered cotton, her short permed hair dyed a dull dark brown, her drooping jowls, her plucked and penciled eyebrows, her small eyes sunken in soft flesh staring at him with hatred.

“Mikey, Mikey, Mikey! Come play now!!” Bea had lumbered into the living room, her round face beaming as she looked at him, her short stubby body heavier than when he'd last seen her, a candy bar in her hand.

“We'll go to the park in a few minutes. It'll be cooler there in a little while.”

“NOW!! You play now!!”

“No, Bea. In a few minutes. You have to wait.”

“No!” Her face was red and sweaty, and she stamped a foot twice as she glared at him.

“I won't play with you at all if you don't behave. You know how to be patient. Then we'll have some fun.”

“NO!”

“Yes. Somebody's coming to see you too. A very nice lady who'll play all kinds of new games.”

“She won't be staying! She'll be turned away at the door!” Iris was standing, her arms folded across her stiffly bound stomach.

Michael Westlake walked down the stairs and stopped a foot from his mother. “No, she won't. She will come in and stay a week. And then I'll reevaluate. If you do not cooperate, I will give you no financial support of any kind.”

Iris reared up, her head held high, as she said, “You wouldn't do that! Not when you know how little—”

“Yes, I would.”

“So you're just like your father!”

“No. I haven't abandoned you. Though I understand why he did. And I won't, if you act in a reasonable manner. I won't be cleaning up the porch either, by the way, so maybe you ought to get started while I pack my things.” He turned away and climbed the stairs without looking back.

Iris and Bea stood side by side and stared at the steps where he'd stood.

Saturday, May 19, 1962

Spencer picked Booker up at nine and drove him to the Lexington airport, where they were catching a puddle-jumper to Cincinnati, to connect with a flight to New York.

By the time they were in the car, Alice had started painting on the wide glassed-in gallery she and Booker had built in back between the kitchen and bedroom they'd added to the left and right of the original house. They used the gallery for eating most of their meals, and watching wildlife come out of the woods, and for Alice's periods of concentrated painting once or twice a year.

The gallery faced west, but there were old trees shading the whole width of it, and skylights as well that flooded it with filtered light from under the overhanging branches. The floor was flagstone, and she'd laid canvas drop cloths across it now, even under the gate-legged table where they ate – where she'd laid out her paints and palette, her linseed oil and turpentine, her rags and sponges and can of soapy water on top of a heavy sheet of plastic.

It was pleasant that morning. Cooler than it'd been, and she opened the three sets of French doors that led onto a large flagstone terrace edged by a row of boxwood.

She had a three-foot-square canvas primed and set on the big wooden easel Booker had made her when they'd first married, when he'd worked for John Deere and had hoped she could have a life that allowed her to paint fulltime.

She started with a landscape that had been in her mind for months, a loose watery abstract impressionistic riverscape that had grown out of her love for Twachtman. She was painting it as an homage to him, but it was her own vision of what he did so well applied to the Kentucky River she'd walked along with Booker for years.

She'd drawn in the horizon line, and suggested the banks of the river, and the line of hills beyond too, and begun to rub them into something softer with a painter's rolled paper pencil-like smudger – when the phone broke her concentration.

She threw the smudger on the table and thought about not answering, but finally walked down the hall to her study, thinking it could be Spencer or Booker, or a weekend emergency at the plant.

The woman's voice, which seemed vaguely familiar, said, “Hello, Alice. I'm sorry to bother you but I thought you ought to know.”

It was when she realized who it was that she sat down in the guest chair by her desk without noticing what she'd done.

Tyler Babcock's wife, Sandy, said she didn't want to alarm Alice unduly, but from what she could tell, Tyler was probably on his way to see her. She couldn't say for sure, but she thought so. He wasn't really himself. He hadn't been since their daughter died.

Sandy didn't think he actually meant Alice harm, not physically, at least. But emotionally he could be very unpredictable and alarming to be around, and he still seemed to blame Alice's father for their daughter's death. She'd thought Alice ought to be given a chance to decide whether to see him, and how to talk to him if she did.

Alice told her how much she appreciated her calling and asked how she was coping herself. Once they were through, she sat staring at a wall, wondering what she should do.

Her neighbor, Mary Treeter, brought her mail at four, when Alice had been painting for two and a half hours, totally fixated on the oil paint – the feel of it as she blended colors, the thickness and thinness as she laid it on the canvas, the effects in texture from turpentine and linseed oil (sometimes one, sometimes both), the smell she loved that came from it all, the subtleties of tinting and shading, the chameleon changes in every color depending on what was next to it on the canvas – and what wasn't working the way she wanted, that forced new choices that taught her too.

She sat down when Mary left and pulled her legs up on an overstuffed ottoman, then drank from a glass of iced coffee, staring hard at the start she'd made – before she glanced at the mail.

There was one white envelope, postmarked North Falmouth, Massachusetts, in handwriting she didn't want to see, and she stared at it for several minutes before she slit it open with a putty knife.

I've given you enough time to think about what your family has done without facing opposition.

The time has now come to force you to confront a contrary view of circumstances you would rather ignore.

I cannot forget or ignore those circumstances. Not a single day has past without a nearly overwhelming sense of what it is I've lost.

You have lost nothing. And the time has come for you to admit your guilt, and your father's too.

It wasn't signed. It didn't need to be.

And Alice sat, and stared out the back, praying silently, as sunlight splintered by tree-shaded skylights scattered across the floor.
Show me what to do when he's here, because I don't have any idea.