She couldn’t stop it: more than anything, she yearned to have Carey holding her in his arms, taking off her clothes, touching her breasts, lowering his head to kiss them, to feel his body covering hers, against hers, in hers.
Like the magic that came into her head unbidden and told her of the future, this longing was too powerful to push away.
Christie could no more resist Carey Wolensky than she could stop her mind from seeing what might happen.
Faye and Maggie sat in Faye’s garden listening to the exquisite tones of Julie London on full blast telling everyone about how she’d cried a river and now it was his turn.
They had a bottle of rose between them and a giant box of Ferrero Rocher half gone, with scrunched-up gold foil wrappers littering the table.
Christie had said she’d drop in but hadn’t turned up.
It was four days since Amber had left and, the following day, Faye was going to the States to find Amber and she couldn’t wait to be off.
At least if she was travelling, trying to find Amber, she’d be doing something. And that was preferable to being at home in the silent misery of number 18. Without Amber, the house was gravelike.
Faye jumped every time the phone rang in case it was Amber; she checked her answering machine by remote access ten times a day, and in the morning, she ran to the letterbox when the postman came just in case there was a card, a letter, anything saying that Amber was all right.
‘Should I turn the music down,’ asked Maggie, In case the neighbours go mad?’
Faye’s next-door neighbour was an irascible man who had no animals, no wife, no children and no sense of humour - or at least, that’s what Amber had always said. Faye used to hush her when she said this. ‘He might hear!’
‘Screw the neighbours,’ Faye muttered. ‘If Mr Dork next door has a problem, he can come in here and tell me face to face.’
‘Fine by me,’ said Maggie, who knew a woman gunning for a fight when she saw one.
Since Amber had gone, Faye had appeared defeated and sad. Today, something had clearly changed inside her and she was filled with fierce energy and rage.
Maggie suspected she was going through the phases of grief: she’d done disbelief, and hopelessness, and now was on to anger.
Maggie had been through that herself.
‘Exercise helps me,’ she volunteered. ‘I do Pilates when … sorry,’ she added. ‘It’s very boring to have people giving you advice all the time, isn’t it?’ She wished Christie were here. She felt singularly incapable of saying anything useful. Her boyfriend had been cheating on her for years and she hadn’t had a clue about it, so both her skills of observation and her credentials as agony aunt were questionable.
Faye shot her a genuine, warm smile. ‘Thanks,’
she said. ‘I appreciate that. Everyone else wants to tell me what to do.’ Everyone else was Grace, whom she’d told about Amber’s disappearance, and who was full of suggestions about what action Faye should take next.
‘Grace at work has my head wrecked saying she’s there if I need her and after all, Amber was going to leave eventually and all families fight, don’t they?
She’s trying to help but she doesn’t understand. She doesn’t have kids … Well, perhaps that’s not fair,’
Faye amended. ‘You don’t need to have children to understand and I’ve only told her half the story. Me and my secrets. Perhaps I should have brazened it out and told her the truth years ago. We’ve been through a lot together professionally, so in many ways we know each other well. But at first I was too ashamed, I thought she’d look down on me.
Grace is so together, I couldn’t imagine her doing anything she was ashamed of. And then, too much time had passed for me to suddenly say: hey, Grace, I’m not really a widow after all. I just say I am.’
‘When you’re ashamed, it’s easy to build it up into a huge secret you dare not trust anyone with,’
Maggie reflected, thinking of her own past.
Faye looked interested now, so Maggie had to go on.
‘My problem was that when things went wrong for me, I felt I couldn’t confide in my parents,’ she said, amazed at her courage now. She’d never said that to anyone before.
‘About Grey?’ Faye was puzzled. Maggie had said her parents knew about her break-up, though not about Grey cheating on her.
‘No, before that.’
‘What … ?’ began Faye, and stopped.
Maggie’s eyes had filled with tears. Whatever her big secret was, it was too painful to touch.
‘So, back to this cheating man of yours,’ Faye said firmly, switching subjects. ‘What has your dad threatened to do to him lately?’
Despite herself, Maggie laughed. ‘They don’t have a surgical name for it yet.’
‘But it’s performed without an anaesthetic?’ ‘With two bricks and a rusty razor blade,’ said Maggie. Then sighed. ‘Poor Dad has got it into his head that I left Grey because there was no sign of us getting married. He calls Grey “that bastard who felt he was too good to put a ring on my daughter’s finger after five years”.’
‘That is a very dad thing to say,’ Faye agreed. ‘Luckily for Amber’s father my poor old dad wasn’t around by the time I started getting into trouble with men. But what happened to you was pretty rough.’
‘You don’t seem that shocked actually,’ Maggie said, surprised. ‘Not that I’ve been broadcasting the information but so far, everyone I’ve told about what Grey did has been stunned.’
‘They all live sheltered lives, I guess.’ Faye grinned. ‘I’ve heard of guys doing much worse and he did say sorry afterwards, although I know that’s
not the point. You were living together, he was your partner and it was way out of line. You’re not taking him back, I hope.’
‘I wanted to,’ Maggie said. ‘Isn’t that pathetic?
I thought he was right for me. I loved him and our life together.’
Faye interrupted: ‘You just don’t love coming home and seeing him bonking some blonde babe on your bed.’
‘No,’ agreed Maggie, ‘that does sort of ruin things.’
‘So you’ve got to dump him and start again.’ ‘I’m going to dump him all right.’ Since Shona had told her about Grey’s other women, she’d thought of practically nothing else. She felt so humiliated by the news. To think how he’d looked her straight in the eye and lied to her. It’s never happened before.
I love you.
To think of him offering to marry her while hiding the fact that he’d betrayed her in the past.
Grey had tried to phone her every day but she never answered when she saw his number appear on her phone screen. She wasn’t ready for him yet.
She’d cry if she spoke to him and she didn’t want to do that: she wanted to build herself up to be strong and angry for that conversation.
‘I’m not starting again with anybody ever,’
Maggie said decisively. ‘I can’t go through all that dating, smiling and trying to be something you’re not. Hoping they’ll like you.’ She shuddered, partly with remembered shame. She’d tried so hard to be what Grey wanted and, in the process, had lost sight of who she was. The past had scared her and Grey had made her feel safe, so she’d never tried to work out who Maggie Maguire actually was and what she wanted from life.
‘Hoping they’ll like you sounds like me once,’
reflected Faye. ‘Trying to be something I wasn’t instead of having the courage to be what I really was.’
There was silence. The CD had stopped playing and there was no noise at all, apart from the sound of somebody’s lawn mower and a dog barking, far away in the distance.
‘You have to tell Amber about the past when you see her,’ Maggie said. ‘All of it.’
Faye nodded. She had been thinking a lot about everything over the previous few days.
Ellen, the makeover lady, had been right when she said Faye tried to be invisible. Faye had tried to blend into the background, to make herself as asexual as possible, so nobody could connect her with the wild child she’d been. And she’d protected Amber like a crown princess, stifling her out of love, never telling her the truth. It kept coming back to secrets and lies.
‘I’m going to tell Amber everything when I see her,’ she told Maggie. ‘It’s just that I thought I was doing the right thing by inventing this person: Faye Reid, mum extraordinaire, conservative, decent, long-skirt-wearing person, pillar of the community,
the sort of woman no one would ever imagine hanging out with dodgy men, having no respect for herself. I thought if I insulated Amber from the world, bad things would never touch her and she would grow up strong and confident. And if she ever met a man like her father, I thought by then that she would know better, that she would be stronger than I was. But I was fooling myself.’
The too,’ said Maggie, thinking that she wasn’t much different from Faye after all. At least Faye had changed her life and begun to respect herself once she’d given birth to Amber.
While Maggie had always felt as if she wasn’t worthy of Grey, that it was surprising someone like him loved her. She’d had to pretend to be the confident person to hide her insecurities. If that wasn’t living a lie, what was?
‘And the more you lie, the more you have to lie. The lies become bigger until there’s no way out, apart from admitting that you’re fabulous at being deceitful. What mother wants to say that to her daughter?’ Faye asked.
‘You thought you were protecting her,’ Maggie said. ‘She’ll understand that, when you tell her.’ ‘But it’s gone on for so long,’ sighed Faye.
‘Imagine if you have an adopted child and you never find the right time to tell them. Maybe, you miss that window of opportunity when they’re two or three, when it should become part and parcel of their life - You’re adopted. Mummy and Daddy love you and picked you to be our baby, so our love is special - and time moves on and you haven’t told them. So you wait a bit longer and then you have to turn around when they’re an adult and go, Well, actually, by the way, we’re not your parents, we adopted you. It’s like that with me and Amber. I should have told her in the beginning, but I didn’t know how. It’s gone on so long that telling her will destroy her and she’ll hate me and I…’ Faye paused. ‘I don’t know if I can face that. I love her so much, Maggie. Everything that I’ve achieved in my life this past eighteen years, has been for her. I couldn’t bear for her to hate me.’ Maggie got up and put her arms around Faye, holding her tightly.
And Faye, who longed for the comfort of another human being since Amber had stormed off, leaned against Maggie and began to sob.
‘I just wish she’d come home, I wish she’d make contact, anything. Just so I could tell her I love her and explain it all to her, that’s all I want,’ she said, as she sobbed. ‘I’m sorry, Maggie, I’m sorry.
You don’t need this.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Maggie, still holding Faye tightly, as the other woman’s sobs subsided. ‘Hey, you’ll be doing this for me in a minute, when I tell you all my deep, dark secrets.’
‘You mean you have deep, dark secrets too?’
hiccupped Faye. ‘Oh please, tell me, I don’t want to feel like the only screw-up on Summer Street.’
Maggie laughed. ‘There are lots of screw-ups on Summer Street,’ she said. ‘It’s lust we don’t
know about them, that’s all. Do you think everyone hiding inside the pretty houses, with the coloured doors and the beautiful maple trees, lives a perfect life? Of course they don’t. If you knew my mother; then you wouldn’t think that. She knows everything that goes on around here.’
‘Really?’ asked Faye.
‘Oh yes,’ said Maggie, seeing that Faye looked cheered by this line of conversation. ‘Mum is a fount of knowledge about everyone on Summer Street. It’s the cafe, you see. She and dad go into the Summer Street Cafe at least once a day and Mum learns things, all the time. Not in a bad way: she’s not a gossip, but she’s interested in people’s lives and she knows what goes on. Christie’s the same, really,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘Christie seems to know about everyone.’
‘She’s a wise woman,’ agreed Faye. ‘I wish I’d known her properly before, instead of just nodding a distant hello in the street. That was another one of my obsessions,’ she added. ‘I thought if we kept ourselves to ourselves, nobody would get close enough to ask what exactly happened to Amber’s father. But someone like Christie, she’d never ask you those sort of questions, would she? If I’d known her then, she might have been able to help me, stop me screwing everything up.’
‘No,’ insisted Maggie, ‘we’ve got to help ourselves. I’ve got to fall out of love with my cheating boyfriend, a man who must think I’m the dumbest woman on the planet if I agree to marry him when he’s had other women all the time we were going out.’
‘You can’t be the dumbest woman on the planet,’
Faye joked. ‘That’s me.’
‘No,’ argued Maggie. ‘It’s me, I’m afraid.’
‘Did you cut the arms off his suits and throw paint all over his car before you left?’ Faye inquired. ‘Don’t be daft,’ said Maggie. ‘I’m a wimp. I went back to the apartment that night, talked to him like an adult and even considered - in my own head of course, I didn’t say this out loud - letting him sleep in the bed with me because then he’d hug me and cuddle me and it’d all be all right.’ ‘Ouch,’ said Faye.
‘I know,’ Maggie agreed, ‘not just the world’s dumbest woman, but the wimpiest too. But fortunately I stood firm and made him sleep on the couch. Then, the next morning, I packed and flew home to Summer Street. Cutting the arms off all his clothes might be fun though. He doesn’t really wear suits, he’s more of a casual jacket type of guy.’
‘You could tell people he had some appalling venereal disease?’
‘My friend, Shona, thought of that one too,’
laughed Maggie. ‘She works in the library with me and was all set to spread the rumours, but I said that sort of revenge would be beneath me.’
Faye grinned. ‘It wouldn’t be beneath me. Fight fire with fire. He slept with a student, so why don’t you let that be known? He’d be sacked. The ultimate revenge.’
‘True,’ said Maggie, ‘but I’m trying to put myself in that happy, Zen state where the only true revenge is living my own life well.’
‘You’re right,’ Faye said gravely, ‘that’s exactly the right thing to do. Modern and very politically correct.’ But she added wickedly, ‘It would be great fun, wouldn’t it?’