Public Secrets (2 page)

“I told you I couldn’t find you at first.” Jane moistened her lips and wished she’d had just one more drink. She didn’t think it would be wise to tell him she’d enjoyed playing the martyr for a while, the poor, unwed mother, all alone. And there’d been a man or two along the way to ease the road.

“I went on this program, they have them for girls who get in trouble. I thought maybe I’d give her away, you know, for adoption. After I had her, I couldn’t, because she looked just like you. I thought if I gave her up, you’d find out about it and get mad at me. I was afraid you wouldn’t give me another chance.”

She started to cry, big fat tears that smeared her heavy makeup. They were uglier, and more disturbing, because they were sincere. “I always knew you’d come back, Brian. I started hearing your songs on the radio, seeing posters of you in the record store. You were on your way. I always knew you’d make it, but, Jesus, I never knew you’d be so big. I started thinking—”

“I’ll bet you did,” Johnno murmured.

“I started thinking,” she said between her teeth. “That you’d want to know about the kid. I went back to your old place, but you’d moved and nobody would tell me where. But I thought about you every day. Look.”

Taking his arm she pointed to the pictures she’d crowded on the walls of the flat. “I cut out everything I could find about you and saved it.”

He looked at himself reproduced a dozen times. His stomach turned. “Jesus.”

“I called your record company, and I even went there, but they treated me like I was nobody. I told them I was the mother of Brian McAvoy’s baby daughter, and they had me tossed out.” She didn’t add that she’d been drunk and had attacked the receptionist. “I started reading about you and Beverly Wilson, and I got desperate. I knew she couldn’t mean anything to you, not after what we had. But I had to talk to you somehow.”

“Calling Bev’s flat and raving like a maniac wasn’t the best way to go about it.”

“I had to talk to you, to make you listen. You don’t know what it’s like, Bri, worrying about how to pay the rent, whether you’ve got enough for food. I can’t buy pretty dresses anymore or go out at night.”

“Is money what you want?”

She hesitated just an instant too long. “I want you, Bri, I always have.”

Johnno tapped out his cigarette in the base of a plastic plant. “You know, Bri, there’s been a lot of talk about this kid, but I don’t see any sign of her.” He rose, and in a habitual gesture, shook back his gleaming mop of dark hair. “Ready to split?”

Jane sent him a vicious look. “Emma’s in the bedroom. And I’m not having all of your troop in there. This is between Brian and me.”

Johnno grinned at her. “You always did your best work in the bedroom, didn’t you, luv?” Their eyes held for a moment, the disgust they had always felt for each other clear. “Bri, she was a first-rate whore once upon a time, but she’s second-rate now. Can we get on?”

“You bloody queer.” Jane leaped at him before Brian caught her around the waist. “You wouldn’t know what to do with a real woman if she bit you on the dick.”

He continued to grin, but his eyes frosted over. “Care to give it a shot, dearie?”

“Always could count on you to keep things running smoothly, Johnno,” Brian muttered as he twisted Jane around in his arms. “You said this business was with me, then keep it with me. I’ll have a look at the girl.”

“Not them two.” She snarled at Johnno as he shrugged and pulled out another cigarette. “Just you. I want to keep it private.”

“Fine. Wait here.” He kept his hand on Jane’s arm as she walked to the bedroom. It was empty. “I’m tired of the game, Jane.”

“She’s hiding. All these people put her off, that’s all. Emma! Come here to your mam right now.” Jane dropped to her knees beside the bed, then scrambled up to search through the narrow closet. “She’s probably in the loo.” Rushing out, she pulled open a door off the hallway.

“Brian.” Johnno signaled from the kitchen doorway. “Something here you might want to see.” He held up a glass, toasting Jane. “You don’t mind if I have a drink, do you, luv? The bottle was open.” He jerked the thumb of his free hand toward the cabinet under the sink.

The stale scent was stronger there, old liquor, ripening garbage, molding rags. Brian’s shoes stuck to the linoleum as he crossed to the cupboard, then crouched. He pulled open the door and peered inside.

He couldn’t see the girl clearly, only that she was hunched back in the corner, her blond hair in her eyes and something black hugged in her arms. He felt his stomach turn over, but tried to smile.

“Hello there.”

Emma buried her face in the furry black bundle she held.

“Nasty little brat. I’ll teach you to hide from me.” Jane started to make a grab, but a look from Brian stopped her. He held out a hand and smiled again.

“I don’t think I can fit in there with you. Would you mind coming out a minute?” He saw her peep up over her folded arms. “No one’s going to hurt you.”

He had such a nice voice, Emma thought, soft and pretty like music. He was smiling at her. The light through the kitchen window was on his hair, making the deep, rich blond shine. Like an angel’s hair. She giggled, then crawled out.

Her new dress was smeared and spotted. Her wispy baby hair was damp from a leak under the sink. She smiled, showing little white teeth with a crooked inciser. Brian ran his tongue over a similar one in his own mouth. When her lips curved, a dimple winked at the left corner of her mouth, a twin of his. Eyes as deep and blue as his own stared back at him.

“I fixed her up real nice.” There was a whine in Jane’s voice now. The smell of the gin was making her mouth water, but she was afraid to pour a glass. “And I told her it was important to stay tidy. Didn’t I tell you to stay tidy, Emma? I’ll wash her up.” She grabbed Emma’s arm hard enough to make the girl jump.

“Let her be.”

“I was only going to—”

“Let her be,” Brian repeated, his voice flat and dull and threatening. If he hadn’t been staring at her still, Emma might have dashed under the sink again. His child. For a moment he
could only continue to stare at her, his head light and his stomach fisted. “Hello, Emma.” There was a sweetness in his tone now, one women fell in love with. “What have you got there?”

“Charlie. My doggie.” She held the stuffed toy out for Brian to examine.

“And a very nice one.” He had an urge to touch her, to brush his hand over her skin, but held back. “Do you know who I am?”

“From the pictures.” Too young to resist impulses, she reached out to touch his face. “Pretty.”

Johnno laughed and swallowed some gin. “Leave it to a female.”

Ignoring him, Brian tugged on Emma’s damp curls. “You’re pretty, too.”

He talked nonsense to her, watching her closely. His knees were like jelly, and his stomach tightened and loosened like fingers snapping to a beat. Her dimple deepened as she laughed. It was like watching himself. It would have been easier to deny it, and a great deal more convenient, but impossible. Whether he had meant to or not, he had made her. But guidance didn’t come along with acceptance.

He rose and turned to Pete. “We’d better get to rehearsal.”

“You’re leaving?” Jane dashed forward to block his path. “Just like that? You only have to look at her to see.”

“I know what I see.” He felt a pang of guilt as Emma inched back toward the cupboard. “I need time to think.”

“No, no! You’ll walk out like before. You’re only thinking of yourself, like always. What’s best for Brian, what’s best for Brian’s career. I won’t be left back anymore.” He had nearly reached the door when she snatched up Emma and raced after him. “If you go, I’ll kill myself.”

He paused long enough to look back. It was a familiar refrain. He could have set it to music. “That stopped working a long time ago.”

“And her.” Desperate, she flung out the threat, then let it hang as they both considered it. The arm she had banded around Emma’s waist tightened until the girl began to scream.

He felt a bubble of panic as the child’s, his child’s screams bounced off the walls. “Let her go, Jane. You’re hurting her.”

“What do you care?” Jane was sobbing now, her voice rising
higher and higher to drown out her daughter’s. “You’re walking out.

“No I’m not. I need a little time to think this through.”

“Time so your fancy manager can make up a story, you mean.” She was breathing fast, gripping the struggling Emma with both arms. “You’re going to do right by me, Brian.”

His hands had balled into fists at his sides. “Put her down.”

“I’ll kill her.” She said it more calmly this time, having centered on it. “I’ll slit her throat, I swear it, and then my own. Can you live with that, Brian?”

“She’s bluffing,” Johnno muttered, but his palms were sweating.

“I’ve got nothing to lose. Do you think I want to live like this? Raising a brat all on my own, having the neighbors gossip about me? Never being able to go out and have fun anymore. You think about it, Bri, think about what the papers will do when I call in the story. I’ll tell them everything right before I kill us both.”

“Miss Palmer.” Peter held up a soothing hand. “I give you my word we’ll come to an arrangement that suits everyone.”

“Let Johnno take Emma into the kitchen, Jane. We’ll talk.” Brian took a careful step toward her. “We’ll find a way to do what’s best for everyone.”

“I only want you to come back.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” Braced, he watched her grip relax. “We’ll talk.” He signaled Johnno with a slight nod of the head. “We’ll talk it all through. Why don’t we sit down?”

Reluctantly, Johnno pried the girl from her mother. A fastidious man, he wrinkled his nose a little at the grime she’d accumulated under the sink, but carried her into the kitchen. When she continued to cry, he sat down with Emma on his lap and patted her head.

“Come on now, cutie, give over. Johnno won’t let anything bad happen to you.” He jiggled her, trying to think what his mother might have done. “Want a biscuit?”

Damp-eyed, hiccuping, she nodded.

He jiggled some more. Under the tears and dirt, he decided she was a taking little thing. And a McAvoy, he admitted with a sigh. A McAvoy through and through. “Got any we can pinch?”

She smiled then, and pointed to a high cupboard.

Thirty minutes later, they were finishing up the plate of
biscuits and the sweet tea he’d brewed. Brian watched them from the kitchen doorway as Johnno made faces so that Emma giggled. When the chips were down, Brian thought, you could always depend on Johnno.

Going in, Brian ran a hand down his daughter’s hair. “Emma, would you like to ride in my car?”

She licked crumbs from her lips. “With Johnno?”

“Yeah, with Johnno.”

“I’m a hit.” Johnno popped the last biscuit into his mouth.

“I’d like you to stay with me, Emma, in my new house.”

“Bri—”

He cut Johnno off, lifting a hand palm up. “It’s a nice house, and you could have your own room.”

“I have to?”

“I’m your da, Emma, and I’d like you to live with me. You could try it, and if you’re not happy, we’ll think of something else.”

Emma studied him, her full bottom lip pushed out in a pout. She was used to his race, but it was different somehow from the pictures. She didn’t know or care why. His voice made her feel good, safe.

“Is my mam coming?”

“No.”

Her eyes filled, but she picked up her battered black dog and hugged it close. “Is Charlie?”

“Sure.” Brian held out his arms, and lifted her.

“Hope you know what you’re doing, son.”

Brian sent him a look over Emma’s head. “So do I.”

E
MMA HAD HER
first look at the big stone house from the front seat of the silver Jag. She was sorry that Johnno, with his funny beard, was gone, but the man from the pictures let her push buttons on the dash. He wasn’t smiling anymore, but he didn’t scold. He smelled nice. The car smelled nice. She pushed Charlie’s nose into the seat and babbled to herself.

The house looked enormous to her with its arching windows and curvy turrets. It was stone, weathered gray, and all the windows were made up of diamond shapes. The lawn around it was thick and green, and there was a scent of flowers. She grinned, bouncing with excitement.

“Castle.”

He smiled now. “Yeah, I thought so, too. When I was little I wanted to live in a house like this. My da—your grandda—used to work in the garden here.” When he wasn’t passed out drunk, Brian added to himself.

“Is he here?”

“No, he’s in Ireland.” In a little cottage Brian had bought with money Pete had advanced him a year before. He stopped the car at the front entrance, realizing he would have to make some calls before the story hit the papers. “You’ll meet him someday, and your aunts and uncles, your cousins.” He gathered her up, amazed and baffled at how easily she cuddled against him. “You have a family now, Emma.”

When he walked inside, still carrying her, he heard Bev’s light, quick voice.

“I think the blue, the plain blue. I can’t live with all these flowers growing on the walls. And those beastly hangings have to go. It’s like a cave in here. I want white, white and blue.”

He turned into the parlor doorway and saw her sitting on the floor, dozens of sample books and swatches around her. Part of the wallpaper had already been stripped, part of the replastering was finished. Bev preferred tackling a single job from a dozen angles.

She looked so small and sweet sitting amid the rubble. Her dark cap of hair was cut short and straight to angle down toward her chin. Big gold hoops glinted at her ears. Her eyes were exotic, both in shape and color. They were long-lidded with gold lights flecked in pale sea-green. She was still tanned from the weekend they had spent in the Bahamas. He knew exactly how her skin would feel, how it would smell.

She had a small triangular-shaped face, and a small angular body. No one looking at her sitting cross-legged in snug checked pants and a tidy white shirt would suspect she was two months pregnant.

Brian shifted his daughter in his arms and wondered how his pregnant lover would react.

“Bev.”

“Brian, I didn’t hear you.” She turned, half rising, then went still. “Oh.” Her color drained as she stared at the child in his arms. Recovering quickly, she stood and signaled to two decorators who were bickering over samples. “Brian and I want to discuss our choices a little more. I’ll call you by the end of the week.”

She hurried them out, making promises, flattering. When she closed the door on them, she took a deep breath, holding a hand over the baby growing inside her.

“This is Emma.”

Bev forced a smile. “Hello, Emma.”

“’Lo.” Suddenly shy, she buried her face in Brian’s neck.

“Emma, would you like to watch the telly for a while?” Brian gave her bottom a reassuring pat. When she only shrugged, he went on, desperately cheerful. “There’s a nice big one in this room over here. You and Charlie can sit on the sofa.”

“I have to pee,” she whispered.

“Oh, well …”

Bev blew her bangs out of her eyes. If she hadn’t felt so much like crying, she might have laughed. “I’ll take her.”

But Emma clung tighter to Brian’s neck. “I guess I’m elected.” He took her to the powder room across the hall, sent Bev a helpless look, then closed the door. “Do you, ah …” He trailed off when Emma pulled down her panties and sat.

“I don’t wet my pants,” she said matter-of-factly. “Mam says only stupid, nasty girls do.”

“You’re a big girl,” he said, stifling a fresh flow of rage. “Very pretty and very smart.”

Finished, she struggled back into her panties. “Can you watch the telly?”

“In a little while. I need to talk to Bev. She’s a very nice lady,” he added as he lifted her up to the sink. “She lives with me, too.”

Emma played with the running water a moment. “Does she hit?”

“No.” He pulled her into his arms, holding tight. “No one’s going to hit you again. I promise.”

Torn, he carried her out, past Bev, to a sitting room with a cushy sofa and a big console television. He switched it on, settled on a loud comedy show, and said, “I’ll be back soon.”

Emma watched him walk out, relieved when he left the door open.

“Maybe we’d better go in here.” Bev gestured to the parlor. Inside, she sat on the floor again and began poking at samples. “It seems Jane wasn’t lying.”

“No. She’s mine.”

“I can see that, Bri. She looks so much like you it’s scary.” She felt tears well up and hated herself.

“Oh Christ, Bev.”

“No, don’t,” she said when he started to slip an arm around her. “I need a minute. It’s a shock.”

“It was one for me, too.” He lit a cigarette, drew hard. “You know why I broke things off with Jane.”

“You said it felt like she could eat you alive.”

“She wasn’t stable, Bev. Even when we were kids, she was never quite right.”

She couldn’t look at him, not yet. She reminded herself that it had been she who had pressured him into seeing Jane again, into finding out the truth about the child. Folding her hands in
her lap, Bev stared into the dusty marble fireplace. “You’ve known her a long rime.”

“She was the first girl I ever slept with. I was barely thirteen.” He rubbed his hands over his eyes, wishing it wasn’t so easy to remember. “My father would get drunk, go on one of his famous rages before he passed out. I’d hide out in the cellar of the flat. One day Jane was there, like she was waiting. Before I knew it, she was on top of me.”

“You don’t have to go into all this, Bri.”

“I want you to know.” He took his time, drawing in smoke, letting it out. “We seemed a lot alike, Jane and I. Somebody was always fighting at her house, too. There was never enough money. Then when I started getting interested in music, I spent more time with that than her. She went crazy. She threatened me, threatened herself. I kept away from her.

“Then not long after the guys and I got together, when we were struggling so hard to get a break, she showed up again. We were playing in dives, barely making enough for food. I guess it was because she was someone I knew, someone who knew me. Mostly it was because I was an asshole.”

Bev sniffled, gave a watery laugh. “You’re still an asshole.”

“Yeah. We got back together, almost a year. Toward the end she was outrageous, trying to start trouble between me and the others. She’d break up rehearsals, make scenes. She even came to the club and went after one of the girls in the audience. Afterward, she’d cry and beg me to forgive her. It got to the point where it stopped being easier to say, sure, fine, forget it. She said she’d kill herself when I broke it off with her. We’d just hooked up with Pete and had a series of gigs in France and Germany. He was working on the first record deal. We got out of London, and I put her out of my mind. I didn’t know she was pregnant, Bev. I hadn’t even thought of her in over three years. If I could go back—” He broke off, thinking of the child in the next room with her crooked tooth and little dimple. “I don’t know what I’d do.”

Bev drew up her knees and leaned over them. She was a young, practical woman from a stable family. It was still difficult for her to understand poverty and pain, though those were the very things in Brian’s background that had drawn her to him.

“I guess it’s more to the point what you’re going to do now.”

“I’ve already done it.” He stubbed out the cigarette in a
nineteenth-century porcelain bowl. Bev didn’t bother to mention it.

“What have you done, Bri?”

“I’ve taken Emma. She’s mine. She’s going to live with me.”

“I see.” She took a cigarette. She’d cut, out drinking and her dabbling with drugs since her pregnancy, but tobacco was a harder habit to break. “You didn’t think we should talk it over? The last I heard we were going to be married in a few days.”

“Are going to be.” He took her by the shoulders then, shaking her, afraid that she, like so many others, would turn away from him. “Goddammit, Bev, I wanted to talk to you. I couldn’t.” He released her to spring up and kick at the sample books. “I walked into that filthy, stinking flat intending to do no more than threaten Jane if she didn’t stop harassing us. She was exactly the same, screaming one minute, pleading the next. She said Emma was in the bedroom, but she wasn’t there. She was hiding.” He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “Jesus, Bev, I found the kid hiding under the sink like a frightened animal.”

“Oh God.” Bev dropped her head on her knees.

“Jane was going to beat her—she was going to beat that tiny little girl because she was frightened. When I saw her … Bev, look at me. Please. When I saw her, I saw myself. Can you understand?”

“I want to.” She shook her head, still fighting tears. “No, I don’t. I want things to be the way they were when you left this morning.”

“Do you think I should have walked out on her?”

“No. Yes.” She pressed her fisted hands on each side of her head. “I don’t know. We should have talked. We could have arranged some sum of settlement.”

He knelt beside her to take her hands. “I was going to leave, drive around a little and think before I came home to talk to you. Jane said she’d kill herself.”

“Oh, Bri.”

“I might have handled that. I think I was furious enough to egg her on. But then, she said she’d kill Emma, too.”

Bev pressed a hand against her stomach, over the child that was growing inside her, a child that was already beautifully real to her. “No. Oh no, she couldn’t have meant it.”

“She did.” He tightened his grip on her hands. “Whether
she would have followed through, I don’t know. But at that moment, she meant it. I couldn’t leave Emma there, Bev. I couldn’t have left a stranger’s child there.”

“No.” She took her hands from his to lift them to his face. Her Brian, she thought. Her sweet, caring Brian. “You couldn’t have. How did you get her away from Jane?”

“She agreed,” Brian said shortly. “Pete’s having documents drawn up so it will all be legal.”

“Bri.” Her hands firmed on his cheeks. She was in love, but she wasn’t blind. “How?”

“I wrote her a check for a hundred thousand pounds. In the agreement she’ll get twenty-five thousand a year every year until Emma reaches twenty-one.”

Bev let her hands drop away. “Christ, Brian. You bought that baby?”

“You can’t buy what’s already yours.” He bit off the words because it made him feel dirty. “I gave Jane enough to be sure she would stay away from Emma, from us.” He laid a hand on her stomach. “From ours. Listen to me. There’s going to be press, some of it will be ugly. I’m asking you to stick with me, ride it out. And to give Emma a chance.”

“Where would I go?”

“Bev—”

She shook her head. She would stick with him, but she needed a little time yet. “I’ve been reading a lot of books lately. I’m pretty sure you shouldn’t leave a toddler alone for this long.”

“Right. I’ll go take a look.”

“We’ll take a look.”

She was still on the sofa, her arms curled tight around Charlie. The blare of the television didn’t disturb her as she slept. There were tears drying on her cheeks. Seeing them, Bev’s heart broke a little.

“I guess we’d better get the decorators busy on a bedroom upstairs.”

E
MMA LAY IN
the bed between fresh soft sheets and kept her eyes tightly closed. She knew if she opened them, it would be dark. There were things that hid in the dark.

She kept a hammerlock on Charlie’s neck and listened. Sometimes the things made swishing noises.

She couldn’t hear them now, but she knew they were waiting. Waiting for her to open her eyes. A whimper escaped and she bit her lip. Mam always got mad if she cried at night. Mam would come in and shake her hard, tell her she was stupid and a baby. The things would slink under the bed or into the corners while her mam was there.