A Tangled Web (74 page)

What does that mean? I have no way to keep them without destroying their love for me and for Stephanie.

She was crying. She turned from the terrace and walked blindly to the closed door of the bedroom. The lamp beside her double bed was on; in the other bed, Stephanie lay curled up on her side, her back to the room. Silently, Sabrina closed the door of the marble bathroom and washed her face and undressed, then slipped between the cool sheets of her bed. She could hear Stephanie's irregular breathing and knew she was awake, but she said nothing; in her separate space, she lay awake through the night, thinking of home and imagining Garth holding her hand, as he did every night as they fell asleep and every morning as they awoke and turned to each other to begin a new day.

When the sun reached their room, Stephanie threw back the covers and stood up. She glanced at Sabrina's closed eyes and thought, She isn't asleep, I know she isn't, she didn't sleep any more than I did, but she doesn't want to talk. And even if she did, what can we say to each other?
She walked past her sister without speaking and closed the bathroom door quietly behind her.

She showered and washed her hair and dried it, combing it with her fingers. She dressed in the clothes she had brought into the bathroom with her, then eased open the door and went back into the bedroom. Sabrina was not there.

She's gone! Stephanie thought wildly. Garth will be here tomorrow, and she's left me to face him. I can't, I can't, I'm not ready! I don't know what to say to him; I don't know what to say to Penny and Cliff. I'm not ready; she can't leave me here alone!

She ran into the sitting room. Sabrina was sitting on the terrace, wearing her silk robe. Coffee and a covered basket were on the table beside her next to a folded copy of
Le Figaro;
she had not opened it.

“Oh, thank God,” Stephanie said. “I thought you'd gone.”

“Not yet.” Sabrina's face was pale and Stephanie saw a reflection of her own sleeplessness and uncertainty in her sister's eyes.

“Are you going to wait for Garth?”

“I haven't decided anything about tomorrow. Have you called Léon?”

“Not yet.”

“What will you tell him?”

“I don't know. I don't know!” She stood in the doorway. “What should we do today? We have to do something, don't we?”

“Alexandra called while you were in the shower; she wanted to have lunch. I told her I was thinking of Giverny or the Marmottan for today, and she said she'd like to go along and she'd be here about ten.”

“Giverny or the Marmottan?”

“Well, anything to do with Monet. When I was in school here, whenever I had a problem I took refuge in his garden or his paintings. There's something about their perfection, even while it's not quite real, that always made
me feel there was a core of serenity I could reach, even if it took a long time.”

“A core of serenity. Oh, if only . . .” Stephanie shook her head and, after a moment, said, “Is there more coffee?”

“Of course. And croissants. I'll take a shower and then we'll ask the concierge for the train schedule to Giverny.”

Stephanie sat down as Sabrina went to the French doors. But as she reached for the pot of coffee, Sabrina came back and bent down and kissed her on both cheeks.

“Good morning, Stephanie. I love you.”

Stephanie turned and put her arms up. “Oh, I do love you, Sabrina. I love you and I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, but there's nothing I can do about it! I wish . . . I wish . . . oh, God, I don't even know what I wish!”

Sabrina knelt beside the chair and they embraced, their cheeks together, their eyes closed. The sun warmed them. “I'll get ready,” she said, and left quickly, while Stephanie's eyes were still closed.

Stephanie poured coffee and bit into a croissant, barely tasting it. She gazed for a long time at the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, thinking of people stopping in on their way to work, looking for something.
A core of serenity.
And maybe they find it, she thought, unless they've gotten themselves into the kind of mess we have.

But if we hadn't started this whole crazy thing a year ago, I never would have met Léon. I wouldn't have met Robert or Jacqueline; I wouldn't have found out all the things I could do in London; I wouldn't have been Alexandra's friend.

But I would have had my children.

And taken them for granted, the way I used to do.

She was dizzy. She closed her eyes and opened them to the brilliant sun and still nothing was clear. I want it all, she thought again, with despair—
all, all, all
—haven't I learned anything? She felt herself tense with the impossibility of it, and then she thought, Well, no one can have it all, I know that, but it would be a lot easier to accept
whatever I can have if Sabrina would decide what we're going to do, so I wouldn't have to—

She was ashamed, and she gripped her hands in her lap.
I'm sorry, Sabrina: I'm still trying to get you to take the responsibility for my life.

The knocker on the door of their suite startled her. The maids, she thought, walking through the sitting room. They can come back when we're gone. She opened the door.

“Mom!” Cliff yelled, and flung himself against her, pushing her backwards into the room.

“Mommy,
bonjour, bonjour!
” Penny was dancing up and down in her excitement as she burrowed against Stephanie under Cliff's widespread arms. “Daddy taught me that, did we surprise you? We did, didn't we? That was our surprise! You didn't know we were coming!”

Stephanie staggered beneath the onslaught of her children. Joy flooded through her and she bent her head and clasped them in her arms.

“You didn't know, did you?” Cliff demanded. “We kept it a secret, didn't we?”

“Yes, you did,” Stephanie whispered. “Oh, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you . . .” She could not stop saying it. Her lips were against the upraised faces of her children, her body opened to their warmth and electric energy, and she felt faint and stumbled backwards again.

She heard the door close and looked up, over the heads of the children, into Garth's eyes.

Shock struck her like a wave, and she looked quickly away. She had cut him so completely out of her life that it was incredible to see him this close, with the children there, almost as if they were the family group she had long since denied. And he had been reaching toward her with a love in his eyes she had not seen since their first years together, sending a stab of jealousy through her that her sister had brought that out in him where she herself had been incapable of it.

She shook her head as if to fling off her thoughts. She had registered, in one swift second, that there was more gray in his hair than she remembered, that his lean face had a gentleness she did not remember and that he was far handsomer than she remembered, but then she withdrew from him and returned to the clamor of her children. That outstretched hand, the love in his eyes, were not for her, and she could not tell him she wasn't Sabrina. She wasn't ready. She could not even greet him as if she were his wife. If he didn't like it, that was too bad; what right did he have to spring this surprise on her? She would deal with it later. Maybe he would just go away and leave her with her children.

With the children and Léon.

“You smell different,” Penny said accusingly. “Are you wearing perfume? You told me you don't like perfume.”

“Oh. Well, most perfumes . . . Maybe it's my shampoo; it's a new kind. Tell me about your plane trip. And how come you're here. I thought . . .”

Huddled together, they moved past the closed bedroom door and onto the terrace, Penny and Cliff's high, excited voices propelling them along. Garth stayed where he was, cold with shock and fury. This woman was not his wife. He had known it the moment their eyes met. He had lived with Sabrina for thirteen months and he knew her as he had never known another human being, and this woman was not Sabrina.

This woman was Stephanie.

Not killed in an explosion. Not buried in London. Not mourned for a year. Instead, living in . . . well, wherever the hell she'd been living; what difference did it make? Wherever it was, she would have had to be in hiding, since she was supposed to be dead. But here she was, traveling with Sabrina, sharing a hotel suite, having a couple of weeks together—was that why Sabrina had come to London so often in the past year, to visit her sister?—then going back to whatever life she was living now.

Sending Sabrina back to Evanston.

They hadn't been satisfied with playing at a new life for a few months; they'd wanted it for good. And so the deception had never ended.

He watched Stephanie's radiant face as his children chattered about O'Hare Airport in Chicago and De Gaulle in Paris, and about their trip. They were so full of new adventures that they asked her nothing about herself; they looked directly at her but always through the haze of their self-absorption, adjusting reality—if indeed they needed to—automatically as they went along.

As I did once, Garth thought. But never again.

“Look, Mom, they gave us these neat little kits; see, the toothbrush folds up—”

“And there's a mask, Mommy, look, and some of the people wore them when they went to sleep and they looked so weird!”

Garth watched them, his face frozen.
Why didn't she tell me? If they wanted to make it permanent, that was what I wanted, too. Why in God's name didn't she tell me so we could deal with it together, make our marriage valid, live an open life . . .

Because she would have had to tell the children.

But we could have done that together.

Could we?

What would we have told them?

That the woman they thought was their mother had fooled them. That their real mother had waltzed off one fine September day and stayed away for a month before she was killed—well, supposedly killed—without making any effort to see her children or talk to them in all that time. Could we have told that to Penny and Cliff?

“And a comb and these funny slippers. Why would you wear slippers on a
plane?
”

“And they gave us a book of crossword puzzles and we did
six
of them!”

Of course we could have told them. They're strong children, and with enough love we could have found a
way to help them deal with it. It would have been better than living a lie. If she'd told me from the beginning, she and I could have worked everything out, made a life together. And now we can't. Now we have nothing together.

I will never be deceived by her again.

His muscles were taut beneath his cold skin, like wires wound on a spool almost to the breaking point. His face was rigid, his eyes blank, hiding the turmoil of his thoughts as he watched Stephanie and his children. She never looked at him.

God damn it, look at me! Look at what you've done to us, to all of us
 . . . He took a long step toward her and saw her flinch—so she was aware of him; she knew exactly how much distance was between them—and he stopped. There would be no confrontation in front of Penny and Cliff. Not now, not until he'd had time to think of some way to bring them up to date on how their mother and their aunt had made fools of all of them again and again and then, most devastatingly, again. He felt he would explode with the rage within him; he wanted to tear his children from that woman's arms and take them away, cradled protectively, shielded even from the sight of her. But he did not move. He would wait until he could get her alone.

Or get Sabrina alone.

Where was she?
It was no longer a question of his dealing with one impostor or the other; now, for the first time since this damned game had begun, he would face them together.

But he could not ask Stephanie where her sister was until he could get her away from Penny and Cliff. And how the hell was he going to manage that?

There was a knock on the door behind him and he jerked around. If that was her—No, of course it wasn't; she wouldn't knock. The maids, he thought. Good; they might distract Penny and Cliff. He opened the door.

“Garth!” Alexandra exclaimed. “Good heavens, a day early? Husbands should never do that to wives, you know,
it's—” She saw his stony face and his rigid stance. “Oh, my God.” She looked beyond him, at Stephanie and the children close together on the terrace, and turned back to him. “I gather that's Stephanie, and she told you.”

“Does the whole world know?”

“Almost no one. Did she tell the whole story? Where she's been?”

“She told me nothing. We haven't spoken.”

“Then how did you know?”

He gazed at her in silence.

The color rose in her face. “Well, I guess, if you really do find that kind of love with someone . . .” She looked again at the terrace. “Where's Sabrina?”

“I don't know.”

“And from the sound of your voice you don't care. But I don't believe that, and I'll bet you don't either.” She gazed at Penny and Cliff. “I think we've got to get the youngsters out of here so you can explode. I do believe you're going to any minute now.” She strode past him, to the terrace. “Penny and Cliff! What a fabulous surprise!”

“Is
everybody
in Paris?” Cliff demanded.

“The whole world, at least. Don't I get a hug?”

They ran to hug her, and Stephanie looked up, as if just awakening. “I forgot. Giverny . . . the Marmottan . . .”

“Slight change in plans. The grown-ups have a lot to talk about so the younger generation is going to be whisked away.” Casually she put her arms around Penny's and Cliff's shoulders. “Come on, you two, we're going to give your parents some time together. I'm taking you to my favorite cafe, a few blocks from here, as it happens; there's a magician there every day at eleven-thirty, and I'll treat you to lunch and cafe au lait.”