Untold Story (6 page)

There was a time when Lydia had thought—oh, the arrogance, the almighty arrogance—that nobody had known loneliness like hers. Her life was so . . . singular, so
removed
from the common experience. What a fool she was. There were so many lonely people, and she was just one of them. Hadn’t Lawrence been lonely too? She’d been blind to it at the time, but wasn’t that something that had bound them together?

“I bought tickets to the ballet,” Carson said.

“I love the ballet,” said Lydia.

“I know. You told me. One of the few things I’m allowed to know.”

Lydia laughed. “What are we seeing?”

“
Swan Lake
at Lincoln Center.”

“You’re taking me to New York?”

“Don’t you have a birthday coming up? Thought we’d have a weekend away. Walk in Central Park. Nice dinner. The ballet.”

She was quiet as she looked at him. She didn’t know if she wanted to go to any of the places she used to go. A few years ago she definitely would have refused. Now she just wasn’t sure.

“That’s so sweet of you,” she said.

“Then you’ll come? I already bought tickets—the weekend after your birthday. Was going to keep it a surprise, but then I thought maybe you wouldn’t appreciate being kidnapped.”

She really should stop this thing right now before it turned into a mess. Already she was breaking her own rules, having him stay some nights at the house.

She said, “I’ll have to find something to wear.”

After Lydia had put the dogs away she watched Esther training Delilah in the yard.

“I’m not getting too ambitious here,” said Esther. “A five-second sit-stay is where it’s at for today. Good girl!” She gave Delilah her treat and the Lab jumped up, a great lolloping yellow ball of glee. “Don’t spoil a good thing, now, Delilah. Down.”

Lydia was still learning about obedience training. She’d read a couple of books. She’d worked with a number of dogs, including her own. But watching Esther was still the best.

“So does she do a little longer each day?”

“That’s the idea,” said Esther. “We add the three Ds—duration, distance, and distraction. We don’t try to do too much at once.”

They took a break in the staff room with mugs of herbal tea. It was a horrible room, with a leak-stained ceiling and a sink that dripped constantly. Aside from the table and plastic chairs there were two easy chairs that smelled of mildew. Esther kept saying she was going to throw them out. She kept saying too, that she was going to do something about the general nastiness of the room, but whenever they got any money Esther said the dogs had to come first—that’s what people gave the money for.

“Kid came in with his mom this morning, gave thirty-two dollars he’d saved himself.”

“What a darling,” said Lydia.

“Darling is right. I told him so. Eight years old.”

“Anything else come in?”

“Janice Lindstrom came by with the collecting cans. We counted up eighty-nine bucks and ten cents.”

“Oh,” said Lydia.

“Right again.” Esther ran her hands up and down her bare arms. She always wore a sleeveless T-shirt and camouflage pants that she bought from an army surplus store in the city. It was a look she pulled off with panache. She had long steely gray hair that she wore tied back in a ponytail, up in a bun, or corralled in two thick braids.

Esther examined a bruise on her bicep. She was careless about letting the kennel doors swing against her arm, standing half-in, half-out of the doorway while she let one dog out and held another back. “Oh, and four new adoptions over the website, that makes another hundred and twenty dollars per month. We should say hallelujah for that.”

“Every bit helps,” said Lydia.

“I’m packing it all in,” said Esther. “I’m packing it in and moving to Maui to sip margaritas by the sea.”

“Can I come?”

“Sure. Let’s go pack our bags.” Esther laughed. “How did we end up in this town anyway?”

After all those years of moving and renting Lydia had been looking for a place to buy in Gains, ten miles down the highway. When the Realtor in Gains ran out of options she put Lydia in touch with Tevis and the idea of living in Kensington immediately appealed. If you kept a sense of humor you had not lost everything.

“It’s not so bad,” said Lydia.

“If you’d told me when I was twenty,” said Esther, “that this is where I’d end up . . .” She shook her head, but she was smiling. “If you’d told me that I’d ever be
old
. Sixty-six! An old woman. Me. No way.”

“When I was twenty,” said Lydia. She stopped.

Esther had told Lydia about how she’d spent her teenage years and early twenties. (Have you heard of
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
? I was there, baby. I was on that bus.) She’d stayed a hippie long after that, living in Haight-Ashbury, baking hash brownies with rare groove Lebanese black, sleeping with whoever wasn’t too stoned to get it up. A friend of hers was arrested at a gay rights demo for kissing a police officer, who beat him and then booked him for assault. He got eighteen months in the state penitentiary and Esther bought herself some law books because the lawyers were all too dumb-ass for words. By the time she had a single clue about law, her friend was on parole but Esther went back to school. She straightened out. She wanted to specialize in international human rights, get a job at the UN in New York. Where she ended up was Boise, Idaho, in a corporate law firm where she made partner within eight years. Her BMW was top-of-the-line. Her lawns were mown by Mexicans. Her high heels hurt her feet. The day she handed in her notice was the happiest of her life.

“When I was twenty,” said Lydia, “I had just got married. My husband belonged to a very stuffy family. It was all so suffocating. I scarcely breathed for years.”

She had come to realize, slowly, slowly, now that she had a few friends, that it wasn’t as difficult as she had assumed to mention certain things from her past. Nobody was out to get her; they weren’t waiting to catch her out, trip her up. And they didn’t find it so very peculiar that she had chosen to leave so much behind. In the States people moved around, lived far from families. Self-reinvention was American as applesauce.

“You poor kid,” said Esther. “What did we know at twenty? I thought I knew everything. Think you’ll ever get married again?”

“Not in a million years.” She liked Carson. She liked him a lot but she wasn’t going to allow herself to fall in love. Even when she was in her thirties she fell so hard it was always terrifying, out of control. Another form of addiction, of course.

Esther seemed to be studying her. She said, “Carson’s a decent guy.”

“I know,” said Lydia.

They’d met about a year ago when he showed up at Kensington Canine, hitching his jeans with his thumbs. He filled in an application form, looked at some of the dogs, and arranged a date for a home inspection. When he returned he picked out an Irish red setter called Madeleine. Lydia had been certain he’d go for a bulldog, a boxer, or a German shepherd. She liked that she’d been wrong.

“Listen,” said Esther. “Get out of here. Don’t get married. Not to this place either. Not to the dogs. You’re still too young for that. And I know you like to be needed, but I really do not need you today. I got more volunteers coming in. So go on out there and get yourself in some trouble while you still can.”

Driving into town to pick up some groceries, Lydia said to Rufus, “Doesn’t hurt to open up a little, does it?”

Rufus kept his counsel.

At the traffic light she leaned over and kissed the top of his head. He smelled of pet shampoo, forest floor, and dog. He pushed his nose under her chin.

“Of course it doesn’t,” she said.

She allowed herself a few moments to reflect on a memory. Her boys, flanking her on the sofa, watching a movie, flicking popcorn at each other, laughing when a piece got caught in her hair. Not too long. She pulled herself back. The past was an ocean, and although she swam toward the shoreline, she knew it could suck her down. The trick was to swim at an angle, not fight the currents directly yet not give in to them.

After she had finished the grocery shopping she remembered she had promised to lend Mrs. Jackson a book that had been sitting in the glove compartment for several weeks because she kept forgetting to drop it off. Mrs. Jackson was a pillar of Kensington society, and Esther kept muttering about trying to rope her into fund-raising. It was worth a little detour now. Lydia walked up to the bed-and-breakfast, a three-story colonial revival brick house on Fairfax, which the Jacksons owned.

Mrs. Jackson was on her way out with Otis who, only a few steps in front of the bed-and-breakfast, was already tangled up in his leash.

“Oh, goodness,” said Mrs. Jackson. “This naughty dog.”

Lydia pulled the book from her purse. “We’ve found this really useful up at the shelter,” she said.

“
When Pigs Fly!
” read Mrs. Jackson. “
Training Success with Impossible Dogs.
Did you hear that now, Otis? Did you?”

Lydia knelt down, picked up the dachshund, and unwound the leash from his legs.

“Last night he pulled all the cushions off the couches and when I came in there were feathers all over the room.”

“Oh dear,” said Lydia. She made a fuss over Otis, who wriggled on his side while Lydia rubbed his belly and his back. She looked up at Mrs. Jackson. On the steps of the bed-and-breakfast, over Mrs. Jackson’s shoulder, she saw the back of a man’s head, square and gray, going inside.

“And there he was, lying on the floor, looking like butter wouldn’t melt, with a feather behind his ear.”

Lydia laughed. She set Otis down and stood up. She chatted a while longer with Mrs. Jackson and when she glanced up at the bay window, the curtain stirred as if moved by the breeze.

Chapter Six

Grabowski lay on the four-poster at the bed-and-breakfast. When he’d kicked off his shoes and loosened his belt he’d been thinking about knocking one out then a quick nap before lunch. But the prissy white lace curtains and the overstuffed room (colonial style furniture—mincing fiddleback chairs, haughty side tables with animal paw feet) was definitely a turnoff. His gut wasn’t helping either, when he looked down at it now. He sucked it in. Then he closed his eyes and tried again.

Riffling through his stock of mental images, he failed to land on anything that caused a stir. He wondered if he’d bolted the door. Wouldn’t put it past Mrs. Jackson to come busting in unannounced. She was desperate for someone to talk to and she’d already bored her husband to sleep in his armchair. That woman she was with earlier was pretty. Long dark hair, long legs, amazing blue eyes, which she’d turned up toward Mrs. Jackson just as he’d walked by and up the front steps. He’d gone into the sitting room and checked her out from the window, thought about going down and trying to strike up a conversation. Bottled it, of course. All mouth and no trousers. Funny, before Cathy kicked him out he’d found it easy to chat up women. It seemed so much harder now.

He gave up and zipped his trousers, stumbled over to the desk, and switched his laptop on. All the photos, even from the early days, were on the hard drive. He’d had all the film turned into digital files. He opened one at random, Necker Island. That was a “private” holiday, but she’d arranged a photo call, inevitably. She looked stunning in that red bikini, coming out of the surf. He zoomed in. She was smiling, apparently carefree and enjoying a little time to herself. Just her and a phalanx of photographers, out of view.

He spun through more shots. Why couldn’t he get himself going? He hadn’t even made a final selection of pictures, never mind got off the starting block with the writing. This book was supposed to be his retirement fund. Although Cathy might put a stop to that with her incessant financial demands. It didn’t excite him. He was a photojournalist, not a bloody archivist. He liked the thrill of the chase. Crawling through the gorse at Balmoral, staking out her favorite restaurant haunts, getting tip-offs from his network of informers, intercepting the police radio with his handheld scanner while eating sandwiches in his car in Kensington. He’d broken the code almost straightaway—
52 rolling
—that meant she had passed the internal security checkpoint in her dark blue Audi and in another minute would be nosing out into the West London traffic. One minute and he’d be on the move.

Grabowski sighed. He pulled his rosary beads out of his pocket and rubbed them one by one through his fingers. Well, he wasn’t going back to London to take more pictures of all the second-rate celebs. He’d had enough of them. When you start at the top, it’s very hard to come down. Pop singers, soap opera divas, reality television goons. The occasional genuine Hollywood star. But even then . . .

No point being stuck in the past.

He picked his cell phone off the desk and jabbed in a number.

“It’s John Grabowski,” he said.

“Grabber,” said Tinny, “what gives?”

“I’m coming out.”

“Finally he comes to his senses. Why’d you want to be anywhere but LA? I’m sitting by the pool, drinking a Bud Light, I’ve got five guys on Britney, boy, is she going to blow, I’ve got three on Cameron, she’s up to something, I’ve got . . .”