Lady in Waiting: A Novel (35 page)

When my phone rang, I was in bed with my laptop, reading the last of many Web entries on Lady Jane Grey. I could see on the display that Brad was the caller, but I waited for four rings before picking up. He had only just that morning told me the truth, and I was still swimming in troubled thoughts. Still, I didn’t want his call to go to voice mail. I wanted to know what he had to say. I wanted to hear his voice. I wanted him to hear mine. I flipped the phone open and said hello.

“You got back to New York all right? Everything go okay?” He sounded like he was pacing perhaps. I leaned back into his pillow.

“Yes.”

“And Molly and Jeff were there to meet you at Newark?”

“Yes.”

“Look, I know maybe you don’t want to talk to me right now, but you know I saw Connor. I told him everything, Jane.”

I grimaced. “What did he say?”

“He wanted to know if it was over with her. I told him yes, it is.”

Silence.

The only light in the room was coming from my laptop, and at that moment, it had reverted to standby mode. I wiggled the mouse, anxious for light, even just a spill of it, to return to the room.

“What else did he say?” I asked a moment later, wondering if Connor had asked if it was over between Brad and me as well.

“He didn’t say much else. I think … I think he needs some time to absorb this. I think he’s disappointed in me. I told him he didn’t have to say anything else.”

“So then you just left him?” I didn’t mean for it to sound accusatory.

“He said he had a paper to write. I told him to call me later, if he wanted. He needs to process this his own way, Jane. But I don’t regret telling him. After … after you were here, I knew I had to tell him. He needed to know.”

“Did he?”

“You both did.”

I had said nothing, but in my heart, I knew he was right. For Brad to be Brad, he had to tell me what he had done. Brad was thoughtful and sincere—two qualities that I admired about him. Plus, I’d already begun to understand that Brad’s confession had moved me to a different place. A place of decision rather than limbo. I would need to forgive Brad if our marriage was going to survive. And forgiveness is always a choice.

Then Brad told me he’d call me if he heard from Connor again. He apologized again for everything. And then he said good night.

I hung up and immediately called Connor, but he didn’t pick up. I left a message telling him to call me back and that I didn’t care what time it was. He didn’t.

But he was calling me now.

I flipped open my phone. “Hi, Connor.”

“Hey, Mom.”

Awkward silence.

“You okay, honey?”

“Are you going to get a divorce?” He sounded mad. But it wasn’t the tone of his voice that startled me. It was the question. The word “divorce” sounded hopeless and terminal in my ears and in his voice. Like a diagnosis of cancer.

“No one’s said anything about getting a divorce.”

“Are you?”

I said no, and it struck me that up to that point, I had only fearfully wondered how I would react if Brad said he wanted to divorce me. It hadn’t yet crossed my mind that I could decide if I wanted to divorce him. Even as I realized this, I knew that wasn’t what I wanted. Brad had wounded me, but I did not want a divorce. Divorce seemed a bottomless abyss.

“Mom, do you still love Dad?” Connor’s tender question pulled me from my introspection.

I heard him, but I still said, “What?”

“I said, do you still love Dad?”

As I stood in my antique store, surrounded by hundreds of remnants of past lives, both blissful and unfortunate, I knew that I did. I loved Brad. For a million little reasons, not for one big obvious one, reasons too subtle and numerous to count. We were like two people in an arranged marriage who were complete strangers on their wedding day, but who woke up twenty years later, unable to imagine a life of happiness without the other beside them. At least that is how I felt. And I knew I needed to open my eyes to those myriad little reasons. We both did.

He had hurt me, but I still loved him.

They were wonderful, they were awful, those two truths.

“Yes,” I said, and I heard Connor sigh on the other end of the phone.

“What happens next?” he asked.

I was about to say that I wasn’t altogether sure when the door to the shop opened and in swooped my mother with a large wicker laundry basket and a weatherworn Macy’s bag. I needed to cut the call short. Especially this call.

“Grandma’s here, Connor. I’m sorry, but can I call you later tonight?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

I told him I loved him and we hung up. My mother walked briskly toward me as both Stacy and Wilson called out a hello to her. The basket in her arms was half filled with fabric. I recognized one of her old Christmas tablecloths. She set the Macy’s bag down by her feet.

“Jane! I’m staging a town house in Brooklyn, and I need to borrow your Blue Willow dishes. Please? They will look perfect in the dining room.”

“Hello, Mom, good morning to you too.” I slipped my phone back into my pocket.

“So may I?” She was wearing a melon green linen suit with a creamy white shell underneath.

“I only have service for six.”

“That’s perfect. That’s all the chairs they have. And may I take that marble chess set? The little one. I tore up some old tablecloths to wrap everything in. I don’t need the whole set of china, just the plates, cups, and saucers. Please? This one’s going to sell by the end of the month. You’ll have it all back in no time.”

“Sure. Come on. I’ll help you wrap it.”

We headed to the oak barley twist table where the Blue Willow china currently spent its days and nights.

“Yes, this is perfect,” she cooed, picking up a plate. She looked over her shoulder and saw that Wilson was helping a customer who’d just walked in and Stacy was on the computer at the back of the store. “So. How did it go this weekend?” she asked.

I picked up a plate and set it in the fragmented corner of a faded fabric poinsettia. I knew what she wanted to know. But I told her Connor did great.

She pursed her lips. “I don’t mean that! I mean with you and Brad! Did you talk? Did you fix things? Leslie said you stayed at his house.”

Thanks a lot, Leslie.

“Of course we talked, Mom.”

“And?”

“And we have some things we need to work out.”

“Like what? What things?”

“Mom.”

“What? I am just saying if you would admit you need help, you wouldn’t be trying to fix your marriage while being two hundred miles away from your husband!”

I folded the aging poinsettia scrap over a blue dish and took a measured breath. “Mom, this is not just about me, it’s about Brad too.”

“That’s exactly what I mean! How are you going to figure out how to fix this if you don’t get professional help?”

I set the wrapped dish down hard on the table. “Please, Mom. We’re not going to talk about this right here, right now.”

“You never want to talk about this.”

“It’s not something you and I need to talk about!” I grabbed a cup.

“Well, you should talk about it with someone. A professional certainly. That’s what marriage counselors do. They help couples work out their differences.”

I nearly tossed the cup onto the floor. “Brad and I aren’t quibbling about differences, Mom! He almost had an affair! There! Now you know.”

My voice was a rasping whisper that made me sound a little like
Dorothy’s witch, but it was out. All of it was out. Brad was in New Hampshire because he had almost had an affair.

Mom’s eyes were wide in her head. “Brad … had an affair?”

“I said almost. That’s why he moved to New Hampshire. To get away from her. Not away from me. Away from her. Because he was afraid he was falling in love with her.”

My mother looked down at the wrapped dish in her hands. “I don’t believe it.”

But I could see that she did. The disappointment in her face was chilling.

“Did … did you kick him out? Is that why he left? Is that why he’s in New Hampshire?”

“He left before I even knew about this.”

I wrapped another cup while my mother stood statue-stiff with a dish in her hands.

“Why?” she finally said. “Why would he do that?”

Anger filled me, and I placed my hands on the table. Jane’s ring winked at me. It was almost as if the ring on my finger made me bold. “Are you suggesting this is somehow my fault?”

She gazed up at me. “Is it? Did you push him away?”

My mother didn’t want to believe Brad was practically unfaithful to me, but she was seconds away from believing I had pushed him into another woman’s arms. I looked down at my hands pressed to the wood, and I saw the ring. The blue stone in the middle looked like a bit of ocean, the rubies like blood. I couldn’t help but think of the woman who I wanted it to have belonged to. The woman robbed of choice. The spurt of anger swirled away.

“Why did you want me to marry Brad, Mom? Why did you like him so much?”

“What? Why are you asking that now?”

“Why?”

“I can’t believe you’re asking this!”

“I’m asking.”

“Because we wanted you to be happy!”

“Happy.”

“Yes. Happy! All your Dad and I have ever wanted for you was for you to be happy. Brad was a wonderful young man with a bright future. We just wanted you to be happy! Is that so terrible?”

“But you aren’t responsible for my happiness, Mom!”

She stared at me, speechless.

And I was speechless as well.

My parents weren’t responsible for my happiness.

Nobody was.

Except me.

Everything about my life suddenly shifted into focus. It was like time froze, and I was given a dazzling moment to comprehend the difference between that moment and the one before it. This was what Dr. Kirtland had wanted me to understand. No one made my choices for me. I made them. If I took no risks in the choices I’d made, it was because I didn’t have the courage to take them or didn’t want to live with the consequences. I didn’t want to risk disappointing myself. It had been safer to defer than to strike out on my own. It had been safer.

The bright moment dissolved as my mother angrily snatched up the last dish. Her movement seemed to set the world back to spinning. I reached for a chair back to steady myself as she placed the dish in the basket. “I have to go.”

She swept past me with the laundry basket and headed for the door, swishing past the Macy’s bag that she’d placed on the floor when she had arrived.

Wilson, watching her go, reached for it and called her name. “Sophia. Your bag.”

She turned her head but kept walking. “That’s Jane’s.” Her tone was clipped. “I wanted to surprise her.”

My mother was out the door.

Wilson turned to me and lifted the bag. Wordlessly I walked toward him, took it, and looked inside. The mantel clock she had borrowed for the town house lay wrapped in several folds of gray fleece. The
Titanic
clock. I drew it out of the bag.

It was ticking.

I sat at the acquisitions table with a cup of Earl Grey and a bottle of Tylenol. The clock rested on the table next to my cup, marking the minutes in a slow, cadenced dance. Whoever had fixed it had also shined its brass fixtures and oiled the mahogany blooms. The wood glistened like melted chocolate under my store lights.

Wilson stood next to me. He held something in his hands, but I didn’t raise my eyes to see what it was.

“I can’t believe she got it fixed,” I said.

“I’m sure she didn’t know how much you liked it broken.”

“I
told
her I liked it broken. I told her I didn’t want it fixed!”

I sensed him shrugging. “Then break it,” he said.

“It’s not that simple, Wilson. It was … special.”

“It’s still the same clock, Jane.”

I rubbed my left temple and raised the teacup to my lips. I took a sip.

Wilson touched my shoulder. “She forgot one of the saucers.”

I turned to look at his hands. He held a Blue Willow saucer.

“Great,” I muttered.

“Maybe you could take it to her,” he said gently. “On your way to
your appointment. And then you can tell her she’s ruined your life by fixing that clock.”

I snapped my head up to look at him.

“I never said my life was ruined because of it.”

“Oh.” He handed the saucer to me and winked. “My mistake.”