Intrusion: A Novel (22 page)

TWENTY-FIVE

O
n the morning of the anniversary of Chris’s accident, as a warm breeze carries the scent of juniper and litters the sky with pink paper-thin clouds, Kat stands at the open bedroom window, aware of the air on her damp skin. She has just bathed and still has the towel wrapped around her.

“Going to be a hot one,” Scott says, coming up behind her. She leans back against him, murmuring a good morning. He, too, is fresh from the shower and smells of shampoo and pine-scented soap. His kiss, soft on her neck, triggers a memory of last night’s lovemaking. Since her return from England, shaken, close to collapse, wanting only to find Scott, Kat has rediscovered the soothing quality of physical closeness. She would like to stay like this, his arms around her, the breeze lifting the curtains. Scott kisses the top of her head, releases her, and reaches for his shirt.

“Better get going,” he says. “Before the traffic builds up.”

“You’ve got the whole day off?”

“Yep. Took a vacation day.”

It is his first vacation day since he accepted a position with the large public-interest law office on the other side of the city.

“Civil liberties focus, so it’s interesting work,” Scott said when he described the job offer to Kat. “But it’s a huge drop in income.”

“If you’ll like the work, then take it. We’ll manage.”

When Kat first learned the details of the loss of his partnership, she had wanted Scott to fight the board decision. It was too late, he told her, shock and disbelief still in his voice. Sarah had removed all her files on the day she left for England and cited his incompetence as the reason. She had taken Bianchi with her. The decision had been effective immediately. It was all in place.

“I had to resign,” he said. “It was such an enormous loss to the firm.”

The shock of Sarah’s death has now faded in the Los Angeles legal community. Scott has discovered, through tentative inquiries to former colleagues, that all her old matters are now being handled in Europe. Kat wonders if anyone mourns her, besides Mrs. Evans, the housekeeper, so wretched at the accident site.

“Next time we go to England, we should take some flowers to that lane by the cottage. Gardenias maybe. Some remembrance,” Kat said to Scott one evening.

“Remembrance? For that woman? After all she did?”

“For the girl she was, not the woman she became.”

He shook his head, touched her cheek with the back of his hand.

“You’re nuts,” he said.

At odd moments, Kat experiences flashes of memory, fragmented images of those hours in Sussex. She recalls Sarah’s visible fury just before the car hit and the blood pooling on the asphalt; she remembers the roiling sea and clifftop, the sucking sound of stones in the surf and the crash of shattering glass. At these times, she reminds herself that Sarah, in trying to destroy her life, had actually saved it. There is an appealing irony in that, one that Sarah would certainly have recognized.

In the kitchen, dressed and ready to leave for Forest Lawn, she makes coffee.

“One quick cup,” she says, handing a mug of coffee to Scott.

He takes it, regards her steadily.

“You’re okay now, Kat?”

“As okay as I can be. Considering the date.”

Soon after they were reconciled, she had apologized to Scott for her obsession with the adoption plan and the conflict it caused between them.

“I was impossible,” Kat said to him. “Crazy. I’m so sorry.”

“Not impossible. No. Just grieving. And manipulated by Sarah.”

“Oh, it was more than that. I believed what I wanted to believe. I thought I could just rewind and begin again. Start over with a new baby—and change the ending. Change the ending! As if I could. As if I could replace Chris. As if he could
be
replaceable.” She stopped, sighing. The words she needed to explain her mixed emotions eluded her.

“I should have been more understanding,” Scott said. “I was just so busy. I was overwhelmed.”

Now, Kat turns away, makes a small adjustment to the bowl of roses she has picked from the garden. The rich red and gold colors glow in the thin morning light. She reaches for the card she will attach to them and writes a few lines from a Carver poem she loves. When she is almost at the end, she hands the pen to Scott.

“Write the last two lines,” she says. “This is from both of us.”

He hesitates. This is the kind of sentimentality that, just a year ago, Scott would have mocked, but on this, the anniversary of their son’s death, he is not the same man. He takes the pen and reads the first four lines from “Late Fragment.”

“I hope he felt that,” he says.

Kat looks at her husband quizzically.

“Chris? Or Carver?”

“Chris. I hope he felt what Carver describes. I hope he felt beloved on the earth.”

“Of course he did,” Kat says, hugging her husband. “He was loved. He knew that.”

The grave site, when they arrive just before noon, is already piled with flowers. Kat places her roses by the others and bends down to read the cards. Ben and Matt have left a balloon displaying a picture of a rock band. Chris’s former English teacher has placed a bowl of white camellias by the side of the grave and written out, in her graceful script, the entire Frost poem, “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” There is a bunch of mixed flowers from Brooke, now back in the neighborhood, her new job having ended as abruptly as it began, and another one from Maggie and Paul. Kat smiles when she sees, right in the center, a vase of purple-and-white tulips from Chloe. Attached to it, and clearly visible, is a picture of Chris with all his friends around him.

We love you,
Chloe has written.
Don’t you forget it.

“Look at all this,” Scott says. “It’s amazing.”

“We have to remember that he wasn’t just ours,” Kat says. “A lot of people loved him.”

She turns back to her husband, holds his hand briefly before kneeling down on the grass and bowing her head.

“Find peace, sweet son,” she whispers.

Kat feels Scott’s arm around her shoulders as he crouches beside her at the graveside.

“We miss you, Chris,” he says aloud. “We miss you, son.”

A soft breeze carries a dampness from the ocean a few miles away. Kat thinks she can taste salt in it. Scott stands, reaches for her hand to help her to her feet.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to Julia Kenny, my agent, and to Carmen Johnson, my editor at Little A, for excellent support and guidance.

I’m grateful to the talented writers at Zoetrope Writers’ Studio for their encouragement and friendship over the past fifteen years. Too many wonderful people to list here. You know who you are. Special thanks to a few pals, both inside and outside the studio: Steve Augarde, Jo Barris, Brian Burch, Jai Clare, John Cottle, Terry DeHart, Lucinda Nelson Dhavan, Pia Z. Ehrhardt, Marko Fong, Avital Gad-Cykman, Alicia Gifford, Debbie Ann Ice, Webb Johnson, Lucinda Kempe, Roy Kesey, Andy Morton, Jean Saunders, Tom Saunders, Kay Sexton, Maryanne Stahl, Wendy Vaizey, and Bonnie ZoBell.

My thanks to three superb writers, Pamela Erens, Charles Lambert, and Ellen Meister, for taking time out from their busy lives to read and endorse the manuscript.

To my son, Nick, brother Jim, and in-laws, Linda and Chris—thank you for cheerleading with such enthusiasm and style.

Finally, I owe so much to my sister, Helen Chappell, and to my good friend Bev Jackson. My love and heartfelt thanks to you both.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mary McCluskey’s prizewinning short stories and essays have been published on
Salon.com
and in the
Atlantic
, the
London Magazine
,
StoryQuarterly
, London’s
Litro
, and other literary journals in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Hong Kong. She divides her time between Stratford-upon-Avon and Los Angeles.