Scared to Death (33 page)

American culture feels foreign to her even now; she's perpetually caught off guard by this penchant for barging into strangers' lives with such audacity. Europeans tend to respect each other's privacy.

“It's just that your skin is so beautiful, and your bone structure is amazing,” the shampoo girl continued, massaging Sylvie's temples, “I mean, I shouldn't be surprised—I know who you are—but I figured you must have had some work done. It seems like everyone does, especially in your business.”

“Not I,” Sylvie replied haughtily, though she was secretly flattered by both the praise and the recognition of her stellar career.

The shampoo girl refused to leave well enough alone. “I thought that was why you always go around wearing those hats with the little veils—to cover the scars.”

Sylvie was speechless at the audacity—so much so that she couldn't point out that she's been wearing hats with blushers for decades. They were—and remain—her personal trademark.

Now she turns her head from side to side, her legendary blue eyes narrowed as she studies herself in the misty mirror. Yes, the porcelain complexion and facial bone structure that made her one of the world's first supermodels have certainly withstood the test of time. And her hair, freshly dyed a becoming shade of brunette, looks as natural as it did when she was strutting the runways.

No wonder the handsome waiter mistook her and Elsa for sisters just the other day, when they were out to lunch with Elsa's daughter Renny, a student at NYU.

“Would you like to order dessert?” the waiter asked Elsa, turning to her after Sylvie had ordered
the crème brûlée, “or shall I just bring two spoons for your sister's?”

Sylvie—never big on sharing dessert—would have gleefully gone along with it, and with the waiter's mistaken assumption about their relationship, had her outspoken granddaughter not nipped it in the bud, probably because she thought the waiter was flirting with her mom.

He might very well have been. Elsa is strikingly beautiful even in middle age—nearly as beautiful as Sylvie herself. But her marriage to Brett Cavalon, having weathered many a storm, is stronger than ever.

“Actually, they're mother and daughter,” Renny promptly informed the waiter, “not sisters.”

“Is that so? Well, I sure can see the family resemblance in all three of you.”

As soon as he walked away, Renny rolled her eyes and sipped the pinot noir she'd glibly ordered as a newly minted twenty-one-year-old. “He's so full of crap.”

Sylvie scolded, “Renny! Such language at the table!”

“Oh, it could have been worse, Maman.” Elsa grinned. “She could have said he's full of—”

“Elsa!”

Her daughter had the audacity to laugh, and Sylvie shook her head.
Americans
.

“I didn't mean he was full of crap because he thought you were sisters, Mémé,” Renny told Sylvie, who couldn't help being as pleased by her granddaughter's French term of endearment as she was displeased by the repetition of the offending word. “But he's all, ‘I see the family resemblance.' Meanwhile, I'm adopted.”

“Well
I'm
not,” Elsa pointed out, “and you actually look more like me, Renny, than I look like Maman.”

C'est vrai,
Sylvie thought. While they were adopted
years apart from the foster care system, and don't share blood with their mother or each other, Elsa's grown children do resemble her
and
each other. Both Renny and Jeremy have dark eyes and dark hair. Renny's complexion is on the olive side compared to Elsa's fair skin, and Jeremy's eyes are darker than his mother and sister's, so dark they're almost black.

Ah, such a shame that Sylvie's blue eyes—which Frank Sinatra himself once told her were bluer than his own—will die with her.

But not, God willing, for a long, long time. She's feeling good, despite getting around with a cane these days: a handcrafted walking stick, imported from the century-old Fayet in France.

And yes, her cardiologist is always telling her to go easier on the butter and cream, but Sylvie has no intention of obliging. She's svelte as ever, despite butter and cream, wine and chocolate—all the pleasures of life, which she'll continue to enjoy to its fullest, merci beau-coup.

“Mon Dieu,” laments the great Piaf over the bathroom speaker, and begs God to let her lover stay with her a little bit longer.

Such a sad song. Sylvie thinks of Jean Paul as she turns away from the fogged-over mirror. Such a painful loss.

And yet, life goes on. She has much to look forward to. Fashion Week begins in a couple of days. Come summer, she's spending a month visiting friends on the Côte d'Azur.

And when she returns to New York, if all goes well this time, she'll be a great-grandmother at last. At lunch, Elsa told her that Jeremy and his wife Lucy are expecting again.

“The kids have been through so much. Will you offer a novena that nothing goes wrong again, Maman?”

“But of course.”

Two lost babies in less than a year is a lot to bear. God willing, there won't be a third. Sylvie, who attends daily mass at Holy Trinity, is a strong believer in the power of prayer, as is her granddaughter-in-law.

Sylvie is impressed by Lucy's unshaken conviction that she will be blessed with a child.

After all she's been through—the tragedy that marked her childhood, and now the heartbreaking miscarriages in the past year—she's been remarkably resilient.

A woman like Lucy can survive anything. Sylvie just hopes she won't be tested again in the months ahead.

Poking a fingertip through the frothy layer of bubbles into the steaming tub, she decides the water temperature is just right. She turns off the tap, fits a shower cap snuggly over her fresh coiffure, and uses the sleeve of her robe to wipe a small window into the mirror.

Checking her reflection to ensure that her hair is neatly tucked beneath the shower cap, she glimpses a flutter of movement reflected in the filmy glass. Frowning, she wipes a wider swath.

Reflected in the mirror, a robed, hooded figure stands behind her.

The sight is so shockingly out of place that Sylvie blinks, certain it's a trick of the light. But it still seems to be there.

Slowly, she turns.

She isn't alone.

The cloaked intruder swoops upon her, hands outstretched—ominously wearing rubber gloves, Sylvie realizes in horror.

“Mon Dieu!” Edith Piaf sings, reaching the crescendo as the gloved hands push Sylvie down, down,
into the full bathtub. She thrashes and gasps, sucking hot water into her lungs.

I can't breathe…I can't breathe…

Panicked, she struggles futilely to free herself from the strong hands that hold her face submerged.

Drowning…I'm drowning…Mon Dieu…Mon Dieu…

 

Climbing the stairway to her second-floor apartment, Lucy Walsh Cavalon—who not so long ago regularly ran the New York Marathon—is pretty sure she's about to collapse from sheer exhaustion.

“Stay strong, Lucy—stay strong!” her father used to shout from the sidelines when she was on the middle school track team.

Stay strong,
she's been telling herself for the last twenty minutes.
Stay strong.

But her fatigue isn't due to running—or even walking, really, despite the five blocks she briskly covered from her office to Grand Central and three more blocks from the train station home.

No, what did her in was standing on her feet in the aisle on an overheated train for the duration of the forty-minute commute from midtown Manhattan to Westchester County.

It's a Wednesday—matinee day on Broadway, when the Metro North trains are always crowded with the usual commuters plus chatty suburbanites clutching theater Playbills. Lucy can always find a seat anyway, if she leaves the office with enough time to spare.

Being super-organized, that's something she manages to do most nights without any problem.

But this was one of those frustrating days when nothing was within her realm of control: the phone kept ringing and e-mail kept popping up and she was
running late. With Valentine's Day this week, there were even more matinee-goers than usual—mostly couples—so the train was standing room only. And no one, not even the retirees who can usually be counted on for more gentlemanly behavior than their thirty-and forty-something counterparts, offered to give up a seat for Lucy.

It's not as though she's showing yet, but even so…

You'd think someone would have noticed that I was on the verge of keeling over.

Then again, if anyone knows better than to count on the kindness of strangers, it's Lucy. You have to take care of yourself out there, because nobody else will.

The thing is, I'm not just trying to take care of
myself.
I have a baby to protect now. Again.

Please, God, let this baby be born. Please…

She crosses herself and says a quick prayer.

Ever since a pregnancy test confirmed the new life she's carrying, she's felt terrifyingly fragile—not that she'd confess that to anyone, even her husband. Jeremy is worried enough for both of them. She reassures him every chance she gets.

Yet it's unsettling for a woman who's always prided herself on being in control to accept that she'll largely be at the mercy of fate for the next eight months or so.

She's afraid to even tell anyone about the pregnancy this time. Her mother, her brother, her in-laws—that's it. Even Jackie, Lucy's closest friend, doesn't know yet—though she'll be one of the first Lucy will want to tell when she feels more comfortable sharing the news.

Aching and yawning, she trudges up the last few steps, wishing she could just crawl into bed and not set the alarm.

Maybe she really should, as her husband keeps urging, consider taking a leave of absence from her job as a network administrator for a Fortune 500 company.
Between the stressful commute, dealing with the crowded daily chaos in Manhattan and the regular pressures of Corporate America…

“But we count on my salary,” she points out whenever Jeremy starts down that road.

“We can get by on mine.”

Not really. He's a youth counselor at a group home in the Bronx. Overworked, underpaid.

“Or we can borrow money from my parents if we need to,” he suggests.

Maybe, but Lucy's in-laws aren't exactly rolling in dough. While the Cavalons won a sizable damages settlement years ago, what isn't being held in trust for Renny was lost in a series of bad investments, or used for living expenses back when Brett was forced into early retirement from his nautical engineering job.

“Let's just see how it goes,” Lucy keeps telling Jeremy. “Plenty of women work through pregnancy with no problem. And it's not like I'm slaving away in a factory or something. All I do is sit at a desk…”

…
for eight hours a day troubleshooting with frustrated employees whose computer systems aren't working the way they're supposed to…

Still, she's really good at what she does, makes decent money with good medical benefits, her job is stable, and she generally works a regular forty-hour week. Things could be worse.

Much worse.

I just have to stick it out until maternity leave.

Please, God, let me get to that point this time.

Statistically, the odds are stacked against her carrying a baby to term after multiple miscarriages. Still, at twenty-nine, she's relatively young, and her obstetrician failed to find evidence of a physical problem. He assured her there's no reason to think that anything
she'd done—or hadn't done—during the prior pregnancies might have caused her to lose them.

That doesn't mean she shouldn't be extra-careful this time around.

Thank goodness for the long President's Day weekend ahead. Her old, hyper-industrious, non-pregnant self would have seized the opportunity to take a trip, or get things done around the house. But aside from attending Sunday mass, all she plans on doing from Friday night until Tuesday morning is sleeping. She's pretty sure Jeremy won't mind. It'll give him a break from constantly telling her to sit down and take a break.

An envelope is taped to their apartment door at the top of the stairs. Plucking it off as she stomps the slush from her boots, Lucy sees that it's addressed to
Mr. and Mrs. Jeremy Cavalon
in handwriting she doesn't recognize.

Odd.

The building, a duplex, is kept locked. No one should be able to get in here other than the first-floor neighbors, or—

Carl Soto?

Having torn open the envelope and spotted the landlord's signature, Lucy quickly skims the typewritten page. Her eyes widen in dismay.

This can't be right…can it?

Rereading, she sees that it is, indeed, an eviction notice giving her and Jeremy just thirty days to vacate the apartment. That's it. No further explanation.

So much for sleeping through the weekend, Lucy thinks grimly, resting a hand on her stomach.

 

When it's over, Sylvie Durand's limp body, now stripped of the white bathrobe, lies facedown in the bathtub, par
tially obscured by a foamy drift of perfumed bubbles. The wineglass sits undisturbed, the candles remain aglow, and Edith Piaf croons a new song.

“Thy will be done.” With a satisfied nod, still wearing the surgical gloves, she swiftly takes off her hooded cloak, soaked in the struggle. After hanging it on a hook beside Sylvie's dripping robe, she picks up the thick white bath towel Sylvie had lain out on the heated towel bar.

The label is familiar—
Le Jacquard Francais.

Long ago—before she'd been condemned to using thin, scratchy prison-issue towels—she herself had lived in a grand home whose marble bathrooms were stocked with fine European linens.