In Love Again (20 page)

“Oh, nothing. The usual. Family overload at my parents’ place in Pennsylvania. Would you come?”

“I don’t know…family…” Claire felt a shot of fear and delight snap through her. He was so sure of them as a couple.

He almost snorted. “Why? You scared?”

“Of your mother and at least five out of six militant feminist sisters? What would possibly give you that idea?”

He laughed. “Okay. Thanksgiving is a bit soon. I won’t subject you to my family just yet. I think we’re both wary of that for different reasons. What did you call it earlier? Contaminated, right? I’m not going to let my family contaminate what we have. I like the idea of spending Thanksgiving alone with you in Litchfield. Just the two of us…and no clothes.”

Claire smiled and exhaled.

“But there’s no way you’re getting out of Christmas.”

Claire was riding home on the Lexington Avenue bus a few weeks later when her phone rang. Normally she didn’t answer her phone in public, a silly etiquette rule that had never left her, but she looked at the number and was simultaneously excited and worried when she saw it was Lydia.

“Hi, Lyd,” she answered quietly.

“Hi, Mum. What are you up to?” It was loud and busy wherever she was calling from. Definitely not an African village, that was for sure, with the unmistakable street sounds of London punctuating her words.

“I’m riding on the Lexington Avenue bus, on my way home from work. Where are you?”

Lydia burst out laughing. A little too giggly. A little too loud. “You’re riding on a
bus
?…
Yes, Daddy, she is actually riding on a city bus…
” She laughed, and a male voice said something loud in the background.

“Is your father with you?”

“Yes, he’s been such a doll since I got back from that tedious trip to
Africa
.”

The way Lydia said
Africa
reminded Claire of the way Boppy said
polyester
: perish the thought.

Lydia continued, “He’s made tons of time in his schedule to go out and do fun things with me.”

Claire heard Freddy’s deeper voice in the background, but clenched her teeth together to prevent herself from saying something insulting about how fifty-year-old men shouldn’t be escorting their twenty-year-old daughters into Mayfair nightclubs. Instead, she glanced at her watch and saw it was nearing midnight in London. “So you’re back in London then? Where are you staying?”

“Yes, I’m back, but it’s ludicrously
boring
. I’m staying at Grandmother’s and I need a change.” Lydia’s voice was hitting that pitch that always made Claire worry, the voice that begged for someone else to just
do
something. Lydia carried on without any encouragement. “So…I was thinking New York City might be a fun change of pace. Daddy was just saying he thought that sounded like a lovely plan—” Lydia declined a cigarette from someone in the background. “Is there room in Bronte’s place for me?” She inhaled. “Or do you think James would let me use the Mowbray corporate apartment again?”

Claire took a deep breath. The combination of Freddy’s blasé encouragement and Lydia’s carelessness was simply too much. Having spent the entire week working ten-hour days, Claire felt simultaneously angry and deflated. “Can I call you in fifteen minutes when I’m home? I can’t really talk now.”

“What do you care what the people on the
bus
think of you?” Lydia laughed through the words, and Claire could have sworn she heard Freddy’s deep, malicious laugh chiming in.

Claire stayed silent. The line crackled a few long seconds, then Lydia exhaled on an impatient sigh. “Oh. All right. Fine then,” she huffed. “Call me back whenever you get around to it. I just thought it might spice things up a bit to come for a visit. If you don’t want me there, just say so.”

Claire closed her eyes. “Lydia, I didn’t say that at all. I would love to see you. I just meant…” She looked around the rush hour bus and resented her daughter for making her have this private conversation in public. Then she felt guilty she was never available for her daughter, that she wasn’t fun and dashing like Freddy. Then she tried to dismiss both waves of emotion as far too complicated to resolve on the rush hour bus. “Darling. I’ll call you back in fifteen minutes. I promise.”

Of course, fifteen minutes was a lifetime in the breakneck pace of The World According to Lydia, and when Claire finally got back to the apartment after hustling from the bus stop—in the too-high-heels she never should have worn to the office in the first place—too much time had passed, and Claire’s call went straight to voice mail.

“It’s your mum. We should talk more about you coming to New York for a visit…” She wanted to add that what she’d really love would be if Lydia came to New York
to get a job
, but she knew her oversensitive daughter would take it the wrong way—that she would see it as Claire being controlling or dictatorial or something—and not call her again for another month. “So. Call me back, and we can talk about it. Call me back, okay?” She ended the call and stared at the phone in her hand.
Call me back
, she repeated to herself as she sat down on the sofa. She didn’t even know how to tell her own daughter she loved her. It would have sounded awkward and stilted, especially on the recorded message.
I love you, Lydia
.

Claire repeated the words over and over in her mind and hoped they transmitted through some metaphysical pathway into her daughter’s distant heart. She loved her daughter, loved her laugh and her frivolity and her razor-sharp wit and how she didn’t give a fig what anyone else thought of her. But she worried for her for all the same reasons. She was a loose cannon, and Claire couldn’t help feeling she might detonate. Again.

The first time, the change had come upon her so gradually, Claire had missed it entirely. Mother and daughter had been inseparable during Lydia’s childhood. While Claire had been overseeing the renovation of Wick Castle, Lydia had toddled around with her, pointing at paints and fabrics, making drawings that she would tape to the walls. She always traveled with her on their monthly forays to London.

By the time Lydia was thirteen, Claire realized that history had repeated itself. Just as Claire and her mother had formed an unhealthy intimacy, to the exclusion of everyone else, so had Lydia and Claire. When they all decided it was time for Lydia to go to boarding school—or rather Freddy had decided it and Claire had reluctantly agreed and Lydia had screamed and cried wretched tears—something broke between them.

Freddy tried to tell Claire it was the natural order of things—adolescent girls and their mothers fought, full stop—so Claire had forced herself to refocus her energy on her charity work in Wick and the ongoing maintenance and renovations of the castle and land. Claire’s stewardship of the land and the historically important building had seemed honorable. Her father had always instilled a sense of cultural responsibility in each of his children. Claire convinced herself she was living an honorable life. Freddy stayed in London more and more frequently and Lydia only came home on holidays.

Near the end of Lydia’s second year away, on a glorious April afternoon when the land was full of new life—pheasants and grouse and lambs everywhere—Claire walked in from the stables and picked up the ringing phone on the kitchen wall. Lydia’s housemaster was on the line to let Claire know her daughter had overdosed on Adderall.

When the phone rang in her hand, Claire was startled back into the present. “Hello?”

“Hey, sexy, it’s me. You ready?” Ben’s voice sent a warm comfort through her that began to smooth away some of the anxiety and worry that always lingered after she spoke with Lydia. She had already told Ben all about Lydia’s struggles, as she called them.

“Oh, dear. I just got home. And I had a rather disappointing call from Lydia. She’s back in London. Partying with her father.”

“Do you feel like you need to go see her?”

“No. I mean, I don’t know. I have a job and a life, and I don’t think it’s being entirely selfish to let her realize that. I don’t know.” Claire sighed into the phone. “I’m just exhausted, I guess. It’s been a long week.” She stretched her shoulders and took a deep breath, and decided she would call Lydia again in the morning.

“Why did you leave the office so late?”

Claire smiled to herself. “There’s this one client in Litchfield, Connecticut, who has become so demanding. I had to stay late and make sure all the final orders went through for the wallpaper in his front hall and the carpets in his guest bedrooms.”

“He sounds
deplorable
.”

She loved how Ben made his voice sound like some version of hers, British and appalled. “He makes up for it in other ways…”

“Really? Like how?”

“Well,” she said as she got up from the couch and walked across the living room. “He’s a really good kisser.”

“Mm-hmm. Go on.”

Claire went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. “And he drives a really fancy car, very fast and powerful.”

“Sounds like my kind of guy. Handsome too, right?”

“Oh, he’s all right to look at, I suppose.”

“You suppose?”

Claire laughed. “I have to jump in the shower, darling. Let me get cleaned up, and I’ll meet you at the movie theater, okay?”

“You sure you don’t want me to come pick you up?”

She took her clothes off while she talked to him. “You know if you come up here, we’ll never even make it to the cinema.”

“That sounds like an awesome plan to me.”

She stood naked in the bathroom. “Ben, stop. I want to see this movie. Abby’s friend made it, and I promised her I’d go. Plus, I want to.”

“I know, I know. But after the movie?”

“Good-bye!”

“Bye. Love you.”

“I love you too. Now I’m hanging up.” She ended the call and realized Ben made it so easy to say
I love you
all the time.
So why with Lydia did it seem nearly impossible?
she wondered. Claire pulled back the shower curtain, stepped into the tub-shower, and tried to forget about her flibbertigibbet of a daughter and to focus instead on her loving boyfriend.

Ben set the tray on the bed and smiled down at Claire. True to his word, they’d made an entire Thanksgiving supper—prepared, served, and about to be eaten—with both of them naked the entire time.

“I like this whole American Thanksgiving idea,” Claire said a few minutes later, between bites, when they were both tucked up in Ben’s big bed in Litchfield. “It’s very festive without a lot of pressure.”

“Especially
naked
Thanksgiving,” Ben said. “I think we should make it an annual tradition.”

Claire smiled and looked back down at her tray, almost shy.

“What?” Ben prodded.

She looked back up into his eyes. “When you say things like
annual tradition
, it makes me feel all wobbly inside.”

“Why?”

“You know. It sounds so permanent.”

He burst out laughing. “It sounds permanent because it
is
permanent. If you think I’m ever going to let you go again, you’re nuts.” He shook his head and took another bite, never taking his eyes off her.

“Well, I probably am a little. Nuts, that is.” She took a sip of wine and smiled.

“Not any more than the rest of us. You’re really quite sane, you know that?”

She shrugged it off. “You make me feel sane. Grounded, I guess.”

They finished eating and did the dishes, still naked. When Claire was filling the dishwasher with liquid soap, she shivered. “This whole naked thing is a bit impractical after a while.”

Ben came up behind her and ran his strong hands along her bare thighs and hips. “That better?”

Claire snapped the dishwasher closed and pressed the buttons to start it running, then leaned back into him. “Much better.”

He wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her in tight. “Let’s go back to bed. I know just the thing to warm you up.”

She shivered again, but this time it was from the press of his body and the thrum of his voice. “Mmm, I can’t wait.” She turned in his arms and kissed his neck. “Happy Thanksgiving, darling.”

He put his lips to hers with a tender hesitance, then gradually began to kiss her more passionately. As usual, Claire was swept into the torrent almost immediately. A few minutes later—without really knowing how they’d moved from one room to the other—they were on the newly delivered velvet couch in the living room.

“Damn it,” Ben grumbled as his kisses worked their way down Claire’s neck, between her breasts, into her navel.

“What is it?” Claire asked.

“The condoms are upstairs. Hold on—” He stood up to go fetch them.

Claire grabbed his hand before he could escape her reach. “Don’t.”

His eyes narrowed and he stared down at her. At first, he was looking into her eyes, as if he could bore directly into the center of her mind with his intensity. Then his gaze flickered down the length of her flushed naked body. “Why not?” he asked, looking at her lips and reaching out to touch the pulse that was fluttering along her neck.