Untold Story (14 page)

I did, however, give the matter a great deal of private thought. As it related to our project, I came to the conclusion that contrary to our previous supposition, it did no harm. After she had behaved in a somewhat extreme and unpredictable manner, the closing chapter of her life, though shocking, would take on an air of inevitability.

The apogee came with the “Near-Fatal Car Crash” as it was hysterically billed. The fact that the driver, who had not been wearing his seat belt, was the only one hurt, and not even seriously, did nothing to discourage the headline writers. The “near-fatality” angle was cooked up by saying that had the swerve to avoid the photographer on his motorbike come earlier, say in the Alma tunnel when the car had been clocked at around ninety miles per hour, death would have been instantaneous. There was, I suppose, a grim—if twisted—kind of logic to the headlines. What the press wanted to focus on was how she could have died trying to escape the paparazzi (the pursuit had certainly been reckless, if not downright crazy), a story of which they were robbed, albeit temporarily. It ran as a kind of rehearsal to the main event—when the mainstream consensus was that she died because she had tried to elude the press.

I do not believe, though, that she manipulated the circumstances. She can certainly, though it pains me to admit it, be manipulative. I think that she was sinking. Her manic need to be seen was a form of self-harm. Worse still, it harmed her children. She knew it. It was her worst addiction, one for which there is no recognized treatment or cure.

From London and then Washington I watched her closely, and by the time they flew into Montevideo in mid-August I was hugely relieved that we were moving into the final phase.

Chapter Twelve

Carson’s first job had been as an insurance clerk and he had hated it. When Sarah left and took Ava with her all the way to the other side of the world he had stuck with it because he wanted to save up enough money to visit his daughter. That didn’t pan out so he quit and drifted for a while. He worked dead-end jobs, busing tables, dealing cards in a casino, valeting cars, anything mindless and busy. One evening he went for a drink with his old boss, who started giving him a hard time. Know what your trouble is? The man looked like a wilted houseplant, not enough nutrients, but Carson liked him. He’d doubled his workload when Sarah took off and Carson understood that as a silent kindness. Know what your trouble is? You’re a snob.

Carson knew he was anything but. He was hosing down cars for a living and got along with his colleagues just fine. He was nearly fluent in Spanish by then. Couldn’t care less about his college degree.

No, said his old boss. You’re a snob. You didn’t go to grad school so you’re dropping out. You think it’s beneath you to work your way up in the office, too dull. Let me tell you something, you’re wrong about that.

Carson went back to the company, not because he thought the old man was right, but because he didn’t care what work he did anyway, how boring it was. And he didn’t like being called a snob.

He trained as a claims adjuster and that was still what he did, though he was on his third company now.

“Last week I went out to a family whose house burned down in the middle of the night.” Lydia was sitting on the swing seat on the deck and Carson was lying on his side, just out of kicking distance, he said. “Situation like that—I’m there the morning after they just lost everything—you have to understand how they’re feeling. You have to deal with them right. Their world got torn apart, and there you are with a set of forms.”

“What happened?” said Lydia. “The whole house burned?”

“Electrical fault. That’s what it looks like. You always have to consider arson, but you can tell a lot from how people act. You learn how to read them, figure out who’s faking, who’s got something to hide. The investigation has to happen, but I usually know if it’s going to turn up anything.”

“He was right, then, your old boss. It’s not a dull business.”

“There’s the paperwork,” said Carson. “But there’s a lot more to it. Last year I had a claim made by the university. They’d insured an exhibition of artworks that was moving around the country. It was being displayed on campus for three months—big sculptures made out of scrap metal, road signs, fenders, railway sleepers. There were twenty-three pieces out on the lawns, and one goes missing. I drive into the city and go to the campus to see the dean of arts. I interview her and her colleagues and I’m getting nowhere. The best theory we have is someone’s come with a truck and stolen this sculpture in the night.”

“What would they do with it?” said Lydia. “Who’d put it out on their drive if it’s stolen?”

“Right. So I ask the dean to show me where this sculpture had been and we walk across to the other side of the campus. There’s nothing to see but I ask what’s in the nearest building and she says it’s the workshop, where the maintenance guys hang out. I say I’d like to talk to them. The head of the workshop doesn’t know anything, so I say my good-byes and get in the car to go home and make my report.

“But as soon as I turn the engine on it strikes me that the workshop guy was holding back. As we were talking he never looked away, not even once. People who lie overcompensate because they’ve heard that liars can’t meet a gaze. That’s the popular opinion out there.”

“What did you do?” Lydia slipped off the seat and sat cross-legged on the deck. A papery moon had insinuated itself into the pink and gold sky. A flycatcher took a bath in Madeleine’s water bowl.

“I go back to the workshop and say, I think there’s something you’d like to tell me. This time the guy looks away to the back of the room. There’s a long workbench that’s been put together out of different metals. I say, where’s the rest of it? Alessandro, one of the workers, took the aluminum siding to repair his trailer. Pablo thought the railway sleeper would make a good mantel for his fireplace. Nothing had been wasted. They were recycling a heap of dumped garbage as far as they were concerned.”

Lydia laughed. “Good for them. I hope they didn’t get in trouble.”

“We worked it out,” said Carson. “Sometimes you catch a bad guy in this business. This wasn’t one of those times. Sometimes,” he rolled onto his back and rested his head on clasped hands, “the bad guy is the insurance company. There are companies that aim not to pay out anything, even when the claim is fair.”

“That’s terrible. Imagine if your house burned down and you couldn’t get the insurance money.”

“Yup,” said Carson, staring straight up at the sky, at the few shy stars overhead. “I do. Imagination is part of the job. Thinking yourself into someone else’s shoes. Now I’m imagining you might be getting hungry and I’m imagining driving over to Dino’s and getting us a pizza. How does that sound?”

While he was out Lydia worked through the magazines and found what she was looking for in four of them. Her sons were organizing a concert in Hyde Park in September to commemorate the tenth anniversary of her death. She didn’t experience the agitation she had expected. She knelt with the magazines open on the couch in front of her, looking at the photographs. “Thank you,” she said out loud. The concert was a lovely thought but she was grateful most of all for the way they had got on with their lives.

Rufus scrambled onto her knee and she put her hand on his back and felt the rapid rise and fall of his rib cage. She picked him up and buried her face in his fur.

When she heard the door she closed the magazines and tossed them into a pile. She followed Carson into his kitchen and watched as he cut the pizza into slices and got out the plates.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said.

“Tell me.”

“You’re thinking how lucky you are to have such a handsome dude at your beck and call. Am I right?”

“Something like that,” said Lydia. She’d been thinking Lawrence wouldn’t disapprove of this. She wasn’t letting him down. “I was thinking about how I’m doing okay. How I’d do just about anything not to rock the boat. I’d like things to stay as they are.”

He turned around to her. “Done enough of the boat rocking, huh? Next up for you, the rocking chair.”

“You’re not out of kicking distance anymore, so watch it.”

“Not out of kissing distance either.”

“The pizza will go cold,” said Lydia.

“I’ll heat it up. Right now I’ve got something more interesting in mind.”

Later they watched cable, a slick heist movie that slid down like a pint of ice cream. When it was over Carson went into his study and came out with an envelope.

“Here,” he said, “the last photo I’ve got of Ava. Her handprint’s in there as well.”

Lydia opened the envelope. “She was three? Four?”

“Three and a half.”

“She’s gorgeous. Those pretty little teeth.”

He sighed. “For a long time it made me so upset that her mother couldn’t send me a letter or a photo. Once a year would have been fine. But I gave up my rights. And she never responded to anything.”

“That must be tough.”

“Maybe she was right, though. Maybe it was better that way. Clean break. It might have been harder to see her growing up from a distance.”

“I don’t know,” said Lydia. “I don’t know about that. At least you’d know that she’s okay.”

“She could find me now, if she wanted. Ava, I mean. She’s twenty-five, an adult. If that’s what she wanted, she could track me down.”

“Oh, Carson, she might not even know about you. Or she might think you wouldn’t want that. And it would be so difficult. It wouldn’t be easy, unless you’re still in touch with her mother.”

He sat down next to her and put an arm around her shoulders. She slid a couple of fingers between the buttons of his shirt. “Sarah moved,” he said. “My letters came back. The phone number I had didn’t work. I think about getting on the Internet, but then I think it should be Ava’s decision, her choice.”

“I’ll bet Ava grew up fine.”

With his free hand he cupped her chin and drew her face very close. He didn’t speak. Then he let her go. He took the photograph and the handprint and put them back in the envelope.

He said, “Would you trust me if you needed to? I’m not going to ask you anything else.”

A swell that started inside her chest spread through her body. The tips of her fingers prickled. “Yes,” she said finally. “I would.”

The next morning she swung out of Carson’s front door dressed in yesterday’s jeans and T-shirt and paused a moment on the stoop. Rufus ran back up the steps to see what was going on. She breathed in the air that was soft with the scent of pine trees. Most of the time it didn’t occur to her to appreciate the small things. Like going out in the same clothes as the previous day. Being free to do that.

She wondered if it was the same if you’d been in prison. Years later maybe you’d be boiling a kettle or shopping for drain cleaner and start marveling at how you were allowed to do these things whenever you chose.

“How daft is that?” she said, as she got in the Sport Trac. She had to start the engine three times before it caught. Then she clarified her question to Rufus. “Comparing myself to an ex-convict.”

Rufus thumped his tail on the seat as if he couldn’t agree more. He lay down and started chewing surreptitiously on the seam.

It wasn’t prison, but getting out was just as hard. Princesses were always locked in towers in fairy tales. In reality there wasn’t a tower and there were no locks. You stood at the top of a crystal staircase a mile high in glass slippers, and there was no way down without breaking your neck.

Lydia chatted with Hank and Julia who were today’s volunteers at the shelter and made sure they knew which dogs they were going to exercise.

Hank wrote everything down with his stubby pencil. He read back the list. “Thank you, Lydia,” he said. “You’ve got us all organized.”

He was a regular volunteer, a retired embalmer who had worked at J. C. Dryden and Sons for nearly thirty years. Such extensive proximity to death had equipped him with a calmly accepting attitude to life. It was a quality that was useful when working with the trickier dogs. Sometimes he seemed to move in slow motion, but he never flapped and never fussed.

Lydia went into the yard to find Esther.

Esther was squatting by the kennel at the far end, the one where they put the snarliest dogs to try to keep them calm. She looked glum as she straightened up.

“They should be shot,” she said.

“Morning,” said Lydia. “Who?”

“These damn breeders who do this to the dogs.” She looked down at the young pit bull who was pressed up to the wire, saliva hanging down from his jaw. “We can’t home him. There’s no way. They’re breeding these dogs to be killers. I’ve seen puppies attack each other at eight weeks old. It’s not natural.”

“What are we going to do with him?”

“I don’t know,” said Esther. “Look at this.” She kicked at the remains of something on the floor. “I was doing the adoptability test with him. I took his food away, no problem, passed that with flying colors. Then I put the cat in the kennel and he locked on immediately. You can see what he did to it. His prey drive is in overdrive.”

“Couldn’t risk letting that happen to a real one,” said Lydia.

“Nor to a child,” said Esther. She scraped the mechanical cat together with the toe of her boot. “I don’t know what we’re going to do.”