Prospect Street (2 page)

H
ow often in one lifetime does a woman sign away her dreams? How many times will she date and initial the ending of the world as she knows it?

“And, Mrs. Bronson, if you'll just put your signature right here…” Carol Ann, the representative from the settlement company that was finalizing the sale of the Bronsons' house, shoved one more piece of paper at Faith. “Don't forget the date,” she said for what seemed like the fiftieth time that afternoon. “August 7th.”

“Thank you. I'm not in much danger of forgetting.” Faith didn't look up. She concentrated on signing away her past in neat, private school script.

“We're nearly done.” Carol Ann—who didn't seem to have a last name—patted the table near Faith's hand, as if that would make Faith's task easier.

Faith supposed Carol Ann meant well, but she'd taken an instant dislike to her. She wore mauve eyeshadow that stopped just short of thinly plucked brows and a smile that could turn steam to snowflakes. Carol Ann just wanted one more settlement. One more house signed, sealed and delivered. One more life set adrift.

“Now, Mr. Bronson. One last signature for you. Then I think we're finished.”

Faith slid the paper across the table to David. He was sitting still, as if by not moving a muscle he could keep Faith from remembering he was there. In the few encounters they'd had since she'd found him in his lover's arms, David had assumed the same lifeless posture. She didn't know if he was afraid he might fly apart, or if he simply no longer knew what to do with his body. It was a whole new body, after all, a whole new life, a whole new world he lived in.

Her husband, a gay man.

David signed the paper in script that strongly resembled Faith's own. Once they had laughed at how similar their handwriting was and how easily they could forge each other's signatures. Now the similarity seemed deceitful. Foolishly, she had taken it as just another sign that she and David breathed in the same rhythm. She had wanted to believe that. After all, how could a man who was so like her in temperament, who valued everything she valued, ever hurt her?

“Well, that went smoothly.” Carol Ann sharply tapped the papers on the table, like a judge pounding her gavel. “I hope you'll find everything in order,” she said to the young couple at the other end of the table, who had just bought the Bronsons' house. “If you have any questions, don't hesitate to call.”

Carol Ann's smile warmed marginally when she turned it on David, although she wasn't flirting with him, a useless endeavor under the circumstances. Faith was sure she knew the story behind this sale. As far as Faith could tell, the whole world knew. David's forceful ejection from the closet had been reported by every scandal sheet in the free world.

Faith hadn't been the only interloper at the cottage that infamous day in December. After hearing one too many snippets of gossip about the two men, a particularly heinous colleague of Abraham Stein's had followed them from the conference in Seattle and parked in the woods nearby. If the reporter had harbored any doubts about what was happening in the cottage be
fore Faith's arrival, her tearful flight to her car and David's tardy shouts from the doorway had confirmed his suspicions.

One more Washington role model tarnished beyond redemption.

Carol Ann stood. “Mr. and Mrs. Bronson, if you have any questions…”

“Thank you.” Faith gathered her purse and a navy blazer her mother had given her on the worst Christmas morning of her life. Faith had carefully packed away everything David ever bought for her, as if wearing clothing he had chosen would be like leaping back into his arms.

The young mother who was the new owner of Faith's house sidled in her direction. “You're sure you'll be out by the end of the month?”

The new owner was a little whiny, a little imperious. Faith could not imagine her standing at Faith's own AGA cooker every morning, heating water and boiling eggs for her husband and three small children. She was not kind enough for the house, not properly grateful for the weed-free lawn or the elegant stencils on the master bedroom walls.

“You don't have anything to worry about.” Faith slipped the blazer over her shoulders. She took a breath and lied politely—the way every senator's child is taught in the cradle. “I hope you'll love living there.”

“I guess we'll manage. The market is so tight, it was the best we could do under the circumstances. “

Faith was glad she'd taken a deep breath. Because suddenly she couldn't breathe at all. Her lungs had turned to stone, which was just as well, since if they began to work again, she didn't know what might spew forth.

She caught David's eye, something she'd tried not to do throughout the whole ordeal. He looked shaken. For a moment they were bonded by their sorrow. David loved the house as much as she did. They had built it with the help of one of Washington's most talented architects. David had landscaped the extensive yard, installed a sprinkler system, even dug a fishpond
last fall. They had planned to buy koi and water lilies this summer. Instead, the new owners had asked them to fill the hole as a condition of sale.

“Do you need a ride?” David asked before Faith could avert her eyes.

She found her breath and voice. “My mother's coming.”

“I could take you—”

“No.” She slung her purse over her shoulder and turned to say goodbye to Carol Ann and the Realtor who had represented the Bronsons' interests. Then, before David could say another word, she left for the parking lot.

Her refusal to be alone with him wasn't new. Since that morning in December they had spoken only when their attorneys or her father were present. Joe Huston, Virginia's senior senator, had been with her on the day David explained that the board of Promise the Children had fired him and invoked the morals clause of his lucrative contract. The bonuses he had carefully invested through the years had to be returned, and the downturn in the stock market had taken care of the remainder of the family's assets. The house in McLean and the vacation cottage in West Virginia, both mortgaged, were almost all they had left.

At least Faith hadn't been sorry to sell the cottage.

The closing had finished early, and Lydia hadn't yet arrived to provide a clear escape. The lease had come due on Faith's Volvo the previous week, and she hadn't had the cash to purchase it outright. Now, on top of everything else, she had to find a reliable used car she could afford.

Despite her efforts, David caught up with her. Reluctantly she faced the man who was still, until their divorce became final, her husband. She knew it was important to make this look like a casual conversation. She knew too well that outsiders were always watching.

Her voice was low. “Please don't say anything. I don't want to hear how sorry you are, or how bad you feel. It doesn't matter.”

“I'm sorry you're upset.”

She was dry-eyed, because her tears had all been cried. For eight months, whenever her children were out of sight, she had indulged her sorrow, and now she wanted to move on. “You should leave. The children don't want to see you, and they'll be in the car with my mother.”

“That will have to change.”

As usual, David was wearing a suit. He had a Brooks Brothers wardrobe that might last him for several years of fruitless job searches unless he continued to lose weight. He had always been thin. He was thinner now, almost gaunt. His blond hair was threaded more heavily with gray.

“I don't know how to change anything,” she said. “I'm not poisoning them against you. I try not to mention you at all. But both Remy and Alex understand what happened and why. Neither of them is ready to face the new you.”

“Not a new me.”

“That's right. Nothing new. Just something you forgot to mention.”

“Something I forgot to face, Faith.”

She didn't know what possessed her. She had just signed away her home, and the loss was immeasurable. By the same token, she felt newly unburdened. “You mean when you and I were making love and you were disgusted by my body, you refused to acknowledge it?”

“For Pete's sake, this isn't the time to imagine things that never happened. How can you believe that's true?”

“I believed a lot of things were true that weren't, didn't I?”

“I tried to believe them, too.” He moved a step closer. “I want you to understand that. I locked away who I was. Not just from you and the rest of the world, but from myself. Maybe I was in the closet, but I liked the view well enough to stay there the rest of my life.”

“Until Abraham Stein came along. A liberal journalist, David? Certainly not a born-again Christian. How many about-faces can one man make?”

“
Not
until Ham came along. He didn't cause this. I was living a lie, and it was wrong for you. For both of us.”

“Really? That's funny, because I sort of liked it. I was married to the man I adored. I had two beautiful children, a home, respect. Now I have the truth and nothing else—except the children, who are falling apart. And at the end of the month we won't even have a place of our own. We'll be moving in with my parents.”

“You were married to a man who couldn't love you the way you deserve.” He put his hand on her shoulder, and when she tried to squirm away, he tightened it. “Listen to
me
for once. You deserve better. You deserve a man who can't keep his hands off you, somebody who can't wait to get home to you and doesn't want to leave you every morning. Not a best friend. A lover.”

She stood very still, but contempt colored her voice. “You did this for me? Out of charity?”

“That's not what I'm saying.”

“I would appreciate it if you
never
touched me again.”

He dropped his hand. “What I have isn't catching.”

“No? Some things associated with it certainly are.”

“My attorney assured you, Faith. I didn't make love to you after Ham and I became lovers. And I was always faithful to you before then. You were never at risk for HIV.”

“I've been tested anyway. Why should I take your word?”

He looked distressed. “Because if you can believe I was faithful, you'll understand what a struggle I put up. I wasn't the man I wanted to be, but I tried to be that man for you. For all the years of our marriage, I tried.”

She was rarely sarcastic, but she couldn't stop herself now. “Oh, thanks so much. Just for me?”

“Faith—”

“Or was all that self-denial really for your father, or maybe mine? Until the day he died, your father thought he'd raised the perfect son. And my father? My father was grooming you to take his place in the Senate one day.”

“That was Joe's idea.”

She continued as if he hadn't spoken. “Or maybe you struggled for that world you created for yourself. The paragon David Bronson, family values czar. The man everyone looked up to for guidance.”

“I wanted to be that man, Faith. For all of you.”

She wasn't angry enough that she couldn't feel a flutter of compassion, despite wishing it weren't so. Perhaps her tears weren't all dry, because she wanted suddenly to cry.

“Why didn't you just tell me? At the beginning? Before…Before everything.”

“I couldn't tell you what I couldn't tell myself.”

“You're saying that before we were married you weren't attracted to men?”

“Homosexuality was a sin. I couldn't believe I was…”

“Gay,” she snapped, to keep the tears from her voice. “The word is gay. One of the better words, as a matter of fact. Not the one Alex heard at school when the story got out. Not the one Remy uses every time she sobs her heart out.”

He flinched. “I never meant to hurt them.”

Even before the newspaper exposé, the infrastructure of their lives had collapsed and could never be reconstructed. But now she asked the question that had haunted her.

“Then why didn't you just
stay
in the closet, David?” Despite her efforts, she could feel tears filling her eyes. “Would you have, if I hadn't discovered you with Ham? If I hadn't come to the cottage that day, if the reporter hadn't come, would you ever have told me? Or would we still have everything we lost?”

“Would you want any of it? Knowing what you know now?”

She couldn't answer, because she didn't know.

“I was going to tell you. As soon as I found a way.” He tried to smile, but it was ghostly and fleeting. “I was still working on an opening sentence. It would have been the toughest speech of my life.”

“One picture was worth a million words.”

He reached into his suit pocket and pulled out a handker
chief. He always had a crisply ironed handkerchief. Once upon a time she had seen to it. David offered it to her, but she shook her head.

He stuffed it back in his pocket so that it hung askew, like a distress flag on a sinking ship. “I'm going now, but you know where to reach me. I'll be there if you need me.”

“Can you help me put my life back together?”

“I can offer friendship.”

There was nothing she could say that could be said in public. She turned toward the road and away from him. “Worry about your children, David. That should keep you busy enough.”

A
woman who suffers nightmares prefers not to sleep, but years of sleeplessness take their toll. For nearly four decades Lydia Huston had been afraid to close her eyes.

The all-pervasive fatigue had started before menopause, and her joy in life had fled long before even that. Lydia ate only when she had to and found the simplest tasks daunting. In the last months she had watched her blond bob thin, and her carefully cared-for skin pucker and fold.

Of course, in the nightmare she was always young. Not a golden-haired debutante leaning proudly on her ambassador father's arm, not an eager bride leaning on the arm of her congressman husband, but a young mother, frightened and alone, for whom no arm could ever be support enough.

In her dream the house surrounding her was dark. Despite tiny rooms and a narrow hallway, she could not find her way through it. She felt along walls, stumbled over carpets, fell to her knees and lost what little sense of direction she had.

Music sounded, echoing off walls and stretching toward the attic. Arpeggios rippled; chords crashed like waves on a storm-
tossed sea. She stood an inch at a time, not certain what was above or below her, and began to move again.

She stumbled over the bottom step of the staircase and grabbed the banister to break her fall. One foot on the step, pulling herself upright. The other foot beside it, swaying, reaching into darkness, swaying again.

The music crescendoed until she wanted to cover her ears. She tried to focus on the darkness, to single out a whimper, a murmur, but now scales soared, then descended, octave after octave.

She accomplished the third step with difficulty. On the fourth the banister ended suddenly and she nearly fell. The banister should have been there—it had always been there before. But not today.

Today.
Not
tonight.
It was daytime, even if there was no light. She was getting closer, but not quickly enough. The unseen musician began a spirited polonaise, Liszt or Chopin. She had hoped for a waltz, a nocturne, anything that might allow sound from upstairs to filter through. She listened between phrases, during lengthy fermatas, hoping that in the pause between one musical thought and another, she would hear the sound she most longed for.

But there were few pauses and no sounds from upstairs.

She took one more step, and something, some
one,
brushed past, nearly throwing her backward into the void. She threw herself forward, teetering wildly, and just as she found her balance, the music ended.

On the floor just below her she heard laughter. One terrible, demonic laugh, then the wail of a newborn. A thin, piercing wail, followed by the most profound silence imaginable.

She tried to follow. She tried to scream for help. And when she did, as she always did, she awoke.

“Hey, the light's been green forever, Grandmother.”

Nightmares could follow a woman into her waking hours, too, and Lydia had allowed it to happen again. She stepped on the accelerator and shot into the intersection just as the light
changed to amber. “I can drive perfectly well without your help, Alex.”

“Well, you weren't paying attention. And Remy won't say anything. She wants
me
to get in trouble.”

Lydia had been transformed by the nightmare and the event that sparked it. Both tolerance and patience had disappeared with her energy, but most of the time she had learned not to show it. She could visit inner city schools, throw impromptu dinner parties for fifty, pretend her husband was God's gift to the United States Senate. But she could not find pleasure or comfort in the people she was supposed to love. Taking care of her grandchildren, a job most grandmothers savored, was like being thrown into a lion's den.

As she steered her Mercedes into the narrow lane where Faith waited, she snapped at her grandson again. “I won't tolerate another word from you, Alex. I've heard enough. Your sister just wants to be left alone.” And so do I, she added silently.

“You always take her side.”

“Her side rarely involves pushing and shoving.”

“I didn't touch her.” Alex paused. “Not for a while.”

Alex was nothing if not honest. She had to give the child that. She glanced over her shoulder at the mop of auburn curls, broad face and temporarily sullen expression that was her grandson. “Do you want to walk home? Because if you do, you're well on your way.”

He didn't answer. For the short term, at least, she'd won.

Lydia pulled to a halt beside her daughter and unlocked the door. Faith's dark blond hair shone in the summer sun, a sleek bell that almost touched her shoulders. She looked pale, but, as required from childhood, her spine was as straight as a flagpole, and when she got inside, she mustered a smile for her children.

She had been taught well, this daughter of Lydia's.

“Hi, you two. Did you have a good day?” Faith turned around to address them.

“Like that's possible,” Remy said.

Lydia's fourteen-year-old granddaughter strongly resembled Faith and, for that matter, Lydia herself. Petite and golden-haired, Remy had clear skin and naturally straight teeth, putting her a step ahead of some of her friends. Lydia hoped Remy used this God-given lead wisely.

“How about you, Alex?” Faith asked.

“I can't talk!”

Faith shot a quick glance at her mother. “And the reason would be?”

“Because he can't say anything we want to hear.”

“How long has he been cooped up in the car?”

Lydia sent her daughter a warning glance. “Doing errands in a Mercedes is not exactly being cooped up.”

“Alex, hang in there,” Faith told her son. “We'll be home before long.”

“You spoil him,” Lydia said.

“Who wouldn't? He's irresistible.” Faith winked at her son.

Lydia took her foot off the brake, and the car rolled forward. She turned into traffic. “As a matter of fact, we aren't going home. Unless you absolutely have to.”

Faith settled back against the leather seat. “Where are we going?”

Lydia ground out her answer, gnawing at the “r's.” “Prospect Street.”

Faith was appropriately surprised. “Now? What for?”

“The house is empty.”

“Empty? Don't you have Georgetown students renting it? The school year's about to start.”

“They took off. Last week, it seems. The property manager went to see about repairing an attic window—something she was supposed to do months ago—and found the place empty.”

Lydia switched lanes and sped up to avoid an accident. “I spent the entire morning on the telephone tracking down the students. It seems one of them got an internship somewhere out of D.C. Another one moved in with a girlfriend. The third boy couldn't find roommates to share the place, so he's commuting from Maryland.”

“And no one thought to mention this to you?”

“After the first year, our agent never renewed the rental contract. Seems she thought this would never happen, since housing near the university is so difficult to find. So she didn't worry about the lease.”

“What about a security deposit?”

“There was no reason to think the students would get the money back, so they didn't bother to try.”

Faith glanced at Alex—who was beginning to pick at Remy again. Lydia wished her daughter would discipline the boy. He was rowdy and rude, not at all the sort of child she had expected quiet, orderly people like Faith and David to raise. The fact that he and his sister would soon be living with her didn't boost her grandmotherly impulses.

Faith turned around in her seat. “I gather the house has been trashed?”

“A colorful way to put it. Yes, apparently it has.” Despite everything that had happened in the house on Prospect, Lydia's heart was heavy at the thought. “I discovered what I could from the agent before I fired her. But I thought I'd better see for myself.”

“I don't see why
we
have to go.” Remy leaned forward. Lydia could just see her head in the rearview mirror. “I'm supposed to go to the movies with Megan.”

“Because I don't have the time to take you home first,” Lydia said. “For heaven's sake, Remy. It certainly seems with everything else I've done for you, you could do something for me.”

Remy's head disappeared from view.

Faith spoke in low tones. “Mother, this is a tough time for all of us. Let's give Remy and Alex the benefit of the doubt, okay?”

“I've done little else all day, or most of the summer, for that matter.” Lydia heard her own sharp tone and wondered for a moment who was speaking. When had she made room inside herself for that voice? When had the gentle, soft-spoken young woman changed into the shrewish, unfeeling matron?

The answer was simple. The transformation had begun on Prospect Street.

“We're all grateful for your help.” Faith sounded anything but. She sounded wounded and vulnerable, exactly as anyone else would under the circumstances. The life she had built for herself was over, and the future couldn't be more uncertain.

Lydia reached deep inside to find some remnant of the gentler woman. “Going to Georgetown is never easy for me. I wanted…” She didn't know what else to say.

“I'm sorry. We'll be happy to come and give you some support.” Faith touched her mother's arm. “Or at least I will. The kids can be our prisoners.”

Lydia remembered when Faith was the tiniest little girl, how she would rest her fingers on Lydia's arm. How she would look at her with eyes as big as tomorrow, as if Lydia had all life's answers right under her skin. She remembered brushing off that tiny hand, afraid, oh so afraid, that the answers she had found in her own short life would destroy her daughter.

She pulled into the turn lane so she could take Chain Bridge into D.C. “It won't take long. It's not as if I can do anything today. I just need to take stock. I wish the timing were better. School starts in a few weeks, and there won't be time for serious repairs. I doubt I'll find renters before second semester.”

“I wish you'd just sell the house,” Faith said. “I've never understood why you keep it.”

“That house has been in my mother's family since it was built, and it will be yours one day. Hopefully someday it will be Remy's.”

Faith leaned closer. “It's not worth the pain it causes.”

Lydia slowed to a crawl, inching along the bridge in a line that seemed to extend to the capital's center. She came to a traffic-induced halt. “You really don't understand, do you?”

“I'm sorry, but no.”

Lydia turned to look at her. “Prospect Street was the last place I saw your baby sister. How could I sell the house to strangers, Faith? How could I ever?”