Regrets Only (6 page)

Archer paused for a moment and seemed to stare at something between her eyes. “Today is the anniversary of the day my mother left him. He tends not to leave the house.”

Her attempt at polite chatter had failed miserably. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

“Thanks. But it was nearly thirty years ago. I don’t have memories of her or of life with her so there’s not too much to miss.”

“You haven’t seen her at all? Is she alive?”

“No, and very much so I think is the sequence of answers to your questions.” He took an awkward step backward, as if startled by the sudden realization that he was standing too close to her. Apparently he needed to respect an imaginary line, the appropriate physical distance for a second date in a public setting. “My mother, if you can call her that under the circumstances, is quite a prominent psychiatrist over at the U Penn Medical School. You’d probably recognize her name. She’s been in the paper a lot recently because she’s under consideration to run that new psychiatric hospital.”

Lucy nodded. “King shrink. Or should I say queen.” News of the Wilder Center had filled the business and health sections of the
Inquirer
for months. Huge amounts of money, primarily from a large pharmaceutical company nearby, had been poured into lavish accommodations for the discreet, state-of-the-art medical facility. With an electroshock therapy room directly above the health club and professionals providing everything from urinalysis to complete spa services, the hospital seemed to be something out of science fiction.

“An Arab sultan has already reserved a bed and the place won’t open until early summer. Apparently whatever ails him is interfering with his diplomatic obligations,” Archer continued, chuckling.

“We read the same article,” Lucy said, recalling that several noteworthy people had signed up at a cost of more than $2,500 per day: In addition to the sultan, there was a Hapsburg dynasty descendant who suffered from schizophrenia, the chief financial officer of a Fortune 500 company whose fits of mania were causing legal problems, and a soprano with the Metropolitan Opera who hadn’t been able to leave her apartment in seven weeks. Lucy couldn’t imagine having that much money, let alone having the luxury to spend it on an attempt at self-understanding. But she didn’t need to imagine the nightmare of mental illness.

Could proper treatment have saved her brother?
An accident, a horrible accident
—her parents had clung to that explanation, refusing to see any other interpretation. Aidan had driven his Jeep at fifty miles per hour into a parked utility truck. “It was late. It was raining. Who expected the electric company to leave their truck on the road after the close of business? Why in God’s name wasn’t the thing parked in ComElectric’s lot for the night?” her father had said, but she’d always wondered.

“I guess the esteemed Dr. Reese will have her hands full if she gets the job,” Archer said with obvious sarcasm. “Although from what I read, her specialty is children and the Center can’t be expecting too many of those. Doesn’t it take at least a decade or two to get totally screwed up?”

“I don’t know about that. I think it happened to the three of us in the O’Malley clan at about six months,” she retorted, willing to play along with his attempt at humor. It had to be agony to know his mother was just miles away yet had no interest in him. That she became a pediatric psychiatrist only added to the painful irony. “You don’t see her at all?” She reached for his hand and gave him a wink. “You have to realize it’s my instinct to pry. It’s also my profession.”

“In that case, Miss Detective, I’ll give you the short answer. I saw her here and there for a while, but it was very sporadic. We’d go six months. Then I’d see her standing on the side of a soccer field during my game, but she’d be gone before I had a chance to talk to her at the end.” He paused for a moment and then added, “You’ll get the longer version when I know you better. I don’t want to drive you away with boring details.”

“I doubt that would happen,” Lucy said as images of her own mother flashed into her mind: Mary O’Malley in a stained apron, scrubbing Lucy’s back with oatmeal when she had chicken pox; hand-stitching lace on her First Communion dress and pearls on her white gloves; driving her out to the Chestnut Hill Mall to buy her a push-up bra at Bloomingdale’s; making her hot tea with lemon and honey when her high school boyfriend stood her up for the senior prom. Since she’d moved out of the house on Washington Street, they spoke nearly every day. A motherless life seemed inconceivable.

“Anyway, suffice it to say that she broke Dad’s heart,” Archer said, obviously wanting to close the subject. “The sixth of March is the one day he still allows himself to mourn his loss.”

“Astounding,” she mumbled. “I couldn’t control my emotions that well.”

“You’re not my father. Thank God, I might add. He seems to be able to control how quickly the lawn grows. Chaos theory is his greatest nightmare.” Archer lifted his drink to his lips and drained his glass. “Let’s look around. Although I may not find it in this tropical paradise, I’m on a quest for mistletoe.”

Lucy gave him a quizzical look.

“I’ve been waiting since long before Christmas to kiss you.” He smiled and took her hand. “If I can find the perfect sprig, or even a close relative, maybe I’ll have an excuse to plant one on the finest of Philadelphia’s finest.”

9:12 p.m.

“I don’t think this is an appropriate conversation. Not here. Not now,” Tripp Nichols whispered as he glanced over Morgan Reese’s shoulder, scanning the crowd for his wife. In the distance he thought he saw the bright turquoise of her floor-length dress. Although he could safely assume she was absorbed in conversation with one of the many patrons she knew at the preview dinner, the last thing he needed was for her to notice him alone in a corner with a beautiful woman, especially one whose professional accomplishments had recently filled the media.

“If you had returned one of my calls, I wouldn’t have to hunt you down at a charity event,” Morgan said.

Tripp said nothing. He couldn’t deny that his secretary had faithfully handed him nearly a dozen messages in the last week, or that he’d heard her voice on his voice mail and felt a mixture of emotion and fear. Morgan had been out of his life for almost seventeen years, and he’d done his absolute best to forget her. Even if he’d failed at the latter, he’d kept his thoughts—and fantasies—to himself.

“I’m here with my
wife
,” he said, although Morgan would hardly need reminding. He’d been the adulterer. He’d removed his thick gold wedding ring and never once mentioned his wife of five years, their toddler, or their second baby who was due in a few months. She’d been a resident who, because of her relatively older age, no doubt had difficulty making friends among her peers. But her fabulous figure was impossible to overlook and he hadn’t cared if she was fifteen or fifty. He’d done everything in his power to seduce her. “If it’s that important, I’ll call you next week.”

He started to walk away when he felt the firm grip of her slender fingers on his forearm.

“Please don’t make this more difficult than it is. I . . . I don’t know quite how to phrase this other than to be blunt. But I need you to listen.” She loosened her hold.

He took a gulp of his drink and felt the vodka burn in his throat. Given the intensity of her stare and the tremble in her voice, he had the creeping suspicion he’d need several more before this conversation ended.

“I know it’s been a long time,” she began.

Yes, he thought. And as the four months he’d shared with Morgan receded into his distant past, he’d realized how very lucky he was to have survived an affair with his marriage intact. Little escaped the notice of Sherrill Bishop Nichols, but he’d managed for that brief season to pull it off. Perhaps she’d been too absorbed with her daughter or her pregnancy with their son to question his late nights at work or his weekend travel. But such distractions had been an aberration. He couldn’t do it again.

And he didn’t want to jeopardize his current situation. Sherrill had been the winning lottery ticket for this son of a Baltimore Realtor. His father had supported a decidedly middle-class existence selling ranch-style homes and center-entrance Colonials in subdivisions with names like “Rolling Acres” and “Windy Hill.” Now Tripp lived in an eighteen-room mansion in Haverford with a full-time housekeeper and gardener. He and his wife shared a trainer twice a week. A personal assistant paid the insurance on his Infiniti, dropped off his dry cleaning, reminded him of his anniversary, and arranged for weekly floral deliveries to his wife, including larger bouquets for special occasions. He liked the comforts that came from marrying a woman with a substantial family fortune, a woman who asked for little by way of intimacy and wanted no part of intellectually or emotionally charged conversations. As long as he dressed appropriately and accompanied her to myriad social and charitable events, as long as his name appeared after hers on the photo-ready Crane’s Christmas card of their smiling children, as long as he didn’t embarrass her in any way, his life was easy.

“I never terminated my pregnancy.” Morgan now stumbled, as if the weight of her words made her lose her balance.

“What?” Instinctively, he looked around again, scanning the crowd for the telltale turquoise.
Please, Sherrill, stay away
, he thought, feeling sweat break out on his forehead.

“I’d told you I was pregnant. I told you at the time it was your child.”

“But . . . but . . .” he stammered, although he knew she was right. He couldn’t argue that point.

He could still picture her sitting across the Formica table at Eddie’s Diner with a cup of lukewarm peppermint tea. She’d worn a pale blue sweater and gray flannel skirt. Psychiatric journals, papers, and patient folders were piled on the banquette next to her. She’d made her announcement with what he thought was dismay. She’d spoken of how much she wanted to finish her residency, to begin her practice, that she wasn’t sure she was prepared to revisit that plan. She’d given up her domesticity once because she’d believed in what she was doing. “You told me you’d had a vasectomy,” she’d said.

And then he’d had to confess to the greatest lie of all. He’d never had surgery of any kind. She’d been so apprehensive about sleeping with him, about even the remotest possibility of getting pregnant, that he’d said that to reassure her while making himself sound more liberated, more egalitarian than he’d ever dreamed of being. He’d never expected the relationship to last past that first night, or ever to see her again. And the lay was worth the lie. “I have a family,” he’d said. “I can’t leave my wife. I can’t abandon my children.” Those words had sounded more pitiful than he’d intended.

That look on her face—her mouth slightly agape, her head tilted, her nostrils flared—he’d never forget that. Had it been shock? Anger? Disbelief? It had taken her a moment but then her eyes had welled with tears. “I’m sorry,” he’d said, but he didn’t have to articulate anything more. They both knew instinctively that it ultimately didn’t matter what she decided because his mind was made up.

She hadn’t said a word. She’d just stood, gathered her papers and journals into a bundle in her arms, and walked out. Two days later, he’d received a small ivory card upon which she’d written simply:
How could you think I wouldn’t find out? Or did you just not care?
He’d had no answers. He hadn’t spoken to her again and hadn’t given the baby another thought. Of course it had been aborted.

“I thought about having the twins, of raising them on my own.” Her voice pulled him back into the present. “I debated so long that by the time I decided I couldn’t do it, that I couldn’t be a single mother, it was too late. I was well into my second trimester. I’d seen their hearts beating on a sonogram. I’d seen an ultrasound image where they almost appeared to be holding hands. Placing them up for adoption seemed the best course for them and for me.”

Blood rushed to his head. What was she saying? She’d given birth to twins who were his? There were now two adolescents in the world who were his offspring? What was going on? He felt completely disoriented. Ten minutes before he’d stood with a vice president of PNC Bank debating the degree of flex for a custom fairway driver. “Depends on swing speed,” he’d said. “That’s why you pay for quality. They test your swing in a wind tunnel. State-of-the-art stuff.” Next to him, Sherrill had discussed with the man’s wife, a decorator, a cranberry Brunswig & Fils pattern with coordinated two-tone cording she was considering for the armchairs in the library. All around him, permutations of similar conversations were occurring, the types of conversations he liked, conversations that didn’t alter the universe. Now he’d just learned information that changed everything.

“Our daughter lives right in Gladwyne. Her name is Avery Herbert. But . . . but . . . but her brother is dead.”

What was going on? None of this made sense. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a glimpse of turquoise. Was another woman in the same couture color or was Sherrill approaching? The pinks, reds, oranges, yellows, blues, and purples of dresses and scarves and accents and flowers assaulted him. His heart raced. He needed to get out of here. Despite the enormity of the convention hall, he felt claustrophobic.

“What happened to the boy?”

She bit her lip. “Suicide,” she said, so softly he thought he’d misheard. But she repeated, “He killed himself.”

“This is insanity,” he blurted out.

“If you’d just returned my calls, we could have talked about this in a calmer way,” he heard Morgan saying. “I’m not trying to disrupt you or your life. But I’ve felt desperate to find Avery. To tell her about me, about us, to tell her she has biological parents, too.”

Parents.
Parents
! His daughter, Beth, was a senior at Pine Manor. She’d accepted a job as an intern at the Barnes Foundation. He’d provided the first and last months’ rent for her two-bedroom apartment. The lease started June 1. Tripp Jr. was at the Naval Academy, learning discipline and playing rugby. He’d be home for Easter in a few weeks. They were going together to the Volkswagen dealer to buy his first car. Those were his children. They were the two who each got $11,000 a year deposited free of gift tax into a money market account. They appeared on either side of him and his wife in the biannual family portraits. Beth and Tripp Jr.; there was no room for anyone else.