Hale's Point (15 page)

“You
are
well-rounded. Ridiculously well-rounded. That’s a wonderful thing, and it’s
thanks to your father that you turned out that way. It was all his doing, you
know. He wasn’t all bad.”

“He was just trying to make me like him. It backfired on him,
though. We couldn’t be more different.”

“Except for this thing about boats, planes, and cars. You’ve
both kind of got a fetish about machines that take you places.”

He nodded grudgingly. “Boats especially.” He turned to look
again at the model of the
Anjelica
,
and
sighed. “I wouldn’t want to be my father—I could never live my life the way he
lives his. But I’ll tell you, right now I’d trade places with him in a second.
Sailing from port to port, dropping anchor occasionally to fish or swim or eat,
then off again.” He gazed at the model, but seemed to be looking at something
very far away. “There’s nothing better than a long sailing trip. It’s the most
relaxing thing in the world,
and
the
most exciting, if you can imagine that. I’d give anything to be spending the
summer that way.” He looked at her. “Do you like to sail?”

She laughed. “I’ve never been on a sailboat.”

He looked surprised. “Never? Not even once, the whole time
you were growing up? You must have known somebody who owned a boat.”

“There isn’t a lot of room for forty-foot schooners in a
trailer park, Tucker.”

“I’ve made progress,” he said. “I found out you lived in a
trailer park.”

Harley looked at the raindrops battering the window and made
the decision to talk about the things she never talked about.

“It was… I don’t know how to describe it.” The raindrops
looked like hundreds of silver bubbles on the glass. “It was pretty low-end as
those places go. A shanty town, really. Nothing more than a couple of dozen
rusted-out old metal trailers on blocks in a field outside Dayton.”

Just thinking about it made her throat tighten instantly.
Maybe he could hear it in her voice. She looked at him. There was curiosity in
his eyes—he undoubtedly wondered why she was suddenly willing to open up like
this—but concern, also.

“The field was nothing but weeds and dirt,” she continued. “There
was this mountain of tires nearby, and that was our playground, the kids who
lived there.”

“Did you have any brothers or sisters?”

She shook her head. “It was just my mother and me. My father
was long gone.”

“Were they divorced?”

“I’m not even sure they were ever married, not legally. My
mother used to tell me that someone named Swami Bob had officiated at some kind
of ceremony in the desert somewhere. She wore a white sari, and my father wore
cutoffs and a Harley-Davidson T-shirt. Supposedly they exchanged homemade vows
and then chewed peyote and chanted and howled all night. Only I’m not sure
whether that really happened or she just… kind of made it happen in her head.”

“Ah.”

“‘Ah’ indeed.”

“What did she do?” he asked. “Did she work?”

“She drank.”

He waited for her to go on and then said, “She must have done
something else.”

“You’re right—she took pills.”

His big hand wrapped itself around her calf, and he shook his
head. “Sorry,” he said softly.

“The thing was, she was really sweet when she was sober. She
wanted to be a good mother, and sometimes she tried real hard, but she was very
young and completely aimless. I didn’t love her any less because she tried and
failed—maybe I even loved her more.”

Tucker nodded encouragement, and Harley went on. “But when
she wasn’t sober—which was most of the time—she was just hopeless. I had this
one little corner of the trailer that was all mine, and I kept it
superneat
. I tried to keep the rest of it picked up, too,
but it was like living with a… a child, who had no sense of order or
responsibility. I’d clean up in the morning and leave for school—I loved
school, school was my salvation—and when I came home, I’d be wading through
overturned ashtrays and dirty dishes and bags of pot and beer cans and piles of
clothes and God-knows-what, halfway to the ceiling. And Mom would always be
facedown
on her bed, asleep.”

“Did your father know how you were living?”

“He was off doing his biker thing, he didn’t have a clue. I
didn’t even know what he looked like till… till I was nine.”

“He came back?”

“He had to.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “I came home from
school one day… it was early May, and I was so happy, ‘cause it was the first
really warm day of the year. And the first thing I noticed when I walked into
the trailer was this… this smell. I tried to wake up Mom to ask her what the
smell was. I rolled her over, and—” Her voice caught in her throat, and her
eyes burned with sudden tears. Tucker’s eyes were enormous, his face ashen. She
looked toward the window again, at the rivulets meandering down the glass.

She swallowed hard and continued. “Her face—” She swallowed
again. There were some things she couldn’t bring herself to relive. “The
coroner said she’d been dead for four or five hours.”

Hot tears spilled down her cheeks, and she covered her face
with her hands and drew her knees up. She felt him shift position on the couch,
and then he was beside her and around her, taking her in his arms, murmuring, “
Shh
, that’s all right.” He dried her tears with the hem of
his T-shirt. She nestled into him, letting him stroke her hair and back until
she felt limp.

“She did it on purpose,” Harley said. “Barbiturates and
alcohol. There was no note, but every single one of her pill bottles was empty.
They were scattered on the floor around her, and she was lying on top of a
half-full bottle of Southern Comfort.”

She glanced up at him; he looked stricken. Laying her head
against his chest again, she continued. “They sent me to a foster home, and
then a couple of months later my father showed up—God knows how they found
him—and threw me on the back of his Harley and took off with me. I spent ten
months with him, on the road.”

He absently stroked the nape of her neck. “You didn’t go to
school?”

“No, and that was the worst part of it. I loved school. My
father was a stranger to me, and his friends scared me. People—regular people
in towns we would go to—used to look at me, all dirty and ragged, and you could
see it in their eyes, the pity and disgust. I thought it couldn’t get any
worse, and then I realized how he was supporting us. He was dealing grass and
pills out of the saddlebags on the Harley. Not only was he a criminal, he was
trafficking in the stuff that had killed my mother. I was horrified. Inside I
was just a normal little kid, and I wanted my life to be normal. I’d look at
other little kids, kids who had regular families and lived in houses, and I’d
feel overwhelmed with envy. Despair, too, because I knew that kind of life
would never happen for me—at least not until I was a grown-up and could make it
happen.”

He nodded again. Quietly he said, “Things do have a way of
falling into place.” He kissed the top of her head.

“Anyway, eventually my father was busted. It happened in Fort
Worth, Texas, and they threw the book at him. He went to jail, and I went from
one foster home to another. I won’t bore you with the details. It was not a
pleasant adolescence.”

“How did you turn things around? How did you end up at Columbia?”

“Sheer force of will and about a hundred part-time jobs, plus
the odd scholarship. I managed.”

“Good for you. You should feel very proud of yourself.
Whatever happened to your father?”

“Two weeks after he got out of jail, he was killed in a knife
fight outside a bar in Oakland, California.” He shook his head. “
R.H.
doesn’t look half-bad by comparison, does he?”

He gave a long sigh. “No, I’m afraid he still looks pretty
bad. There are things about him…” His gaze fell on the model of the
Anjelica
. “Your
father destroyed himself. My father destroyed my mother. She killed herself,
too. Did you know that?”

Harley nodded against his chest. “Liz told me just now. I
called her. I—I wanted to make sure it was okay for you to stay.”

“I was going to suggest that you do that, just to put your
mind at ease. Did she tell you why my mother committed suicide?”

“She said it was an unhappy marriage.”

He grunted dismissively. “Liz
Wycliff
,
High Priestess of the Understatement. To
R.H.
it was
an unhappy marriage. To my mother, it was a nightmare. Laura Tilton—the second
Mrs. Tilton—was a dose friend of my mother’s, her confidante. When I found out
that my mother had died by suicide, I asked her to tell me why. She said the
seeds were sown before my parents even met. Turns out she was already engaged,
to a young cousin of hers named
Anatole
. The family
had encouraged the marriage—practically arranged it—in order to unite certain
business enterprises.”

“What a cold-blooded reason to get married. She must have
been dreading it.”

“On the contrary, she was deeply in love with him, and he
with her. They had grown up together, they were soul mates. She was a painter,
he was a sculptor. They were going to let other people run the family
businesses while they pursued their art.”

Harley chewed this over. “Soul mates… I don’t get it.”

“You mean, why did she marry
R.H.
?”
Harley nodded. “He swept her off her feet. He has a very commanding
personality, and she was susceptible to it. She had a… a passionate nature.
Lots of creative people are like that—emotional, impulsive. Of course, like I
said before, it’s the only impulsive tiling he ever did.”

“So she found herself in love with two men. She had to
choose, and she chose
R.H.
”

Grimly he said, “She chose wrong. From the moment she moved
in here, her life was a misery. He discouraged her from spending time with her
friends in the New York art world so she wouldn’t have a career to distract her
from hearth and home. He was busy with his law practice and didn’t have much
time for her. With what little time he had, he tried to remake her into a
proper Hale’s Point wife, like he was doing her some kind of big favor. He told
her how to dress and what to order in restaurants. He told her how to make
acceptable small talk. He monitored the books she read, the places she went,
and the friends she spent time with. Laura Tilton was the only one they could
agree on. She had no one else to confide in. Her father disowned her when she married
R.H.
, and she never had any contact with her family
after that.”

“Then you came along.”

“About five years into the marriage. I’d like to think I
provided some comfort to her, but the truth is, I only made things worse. Soon
after I was born, she started getting letters from
Anatole
.
Secretly—he used a false name on the return address . He said he’d never
stopped loving her, and he begged her to leave
R.H.
and marry him. She never returned his letters, although she shut herself up in
her room and cried every time one came. She told Laura Tilton that she had
responsibilities now. She had a baby, and was under an obligation to try and
make the marriage work. So she toughed it out. Hale’s Point syndrome is
catching, you know. Of course, it was the worst thing she could have done.”

“You’re saying she should have bolted?”

“Absolutely. For five years
Anatole
wrote to her, but she never wrote back. She started hearing from friends in
Europe that he was becoming self-destructive, drinking too much, doing reckless
things. One day she got a phone call. He had driven his Lamborghini off the
side of a mountain road in the Swiss Alps, and died.”

“
Oh,no
.”

“She sank into a deep depression. A week later she checked
into a motel on the expressway and hanged herself with a length of sailing
line. She didn’t leave a note, but two days after that, Liz
Wycliff
received a letter from her, mailed the day she killed herself, asking her to
look after me.”

“Did she know how Liz felt about your father?”

“Undoubtedly. Everyone did.” After a pause, he said, “You
realize the only thing you and I have in common—aside from being driven, which
we agreed on the other night, right?— the only other thing is that our mothers
committed suicide. That’s a hell of a comment.”

“You’re right,” she said. “That’s terrible. There must be
something else.”

“Name something.” She couldn’t. A bemused chuckle shook his
chest. “Pretty scary, isn’t it?”

They lay together quietly for a while, the only sound in the
room the insistent pattering of raindrops on the window. They had settled
together naturally and unselfconsciously, arms and legs comfortably
intertwined. He continued to lazily stroke her hair, and she dosed her eyes,
thinking,
I could fall asleep like this
.
Marveling at her ability to relax so completely in the arms of a virtual
stranger, she realized it was because he was relaxed. He was a very physical
person, touching her whenever the spirit moved him, taking for granted that it
was okay to do so. From another man such familiarity might have seemed
threatening, but Tucker had a kind of sincerity that put her at ease.