The Replacement Wife (9 page)

“Not much chance of that,” Camille replied bitterly.

“Well, he would if I asked.” Holly had always been more forgiving toward their dad. Maybe because she hadn’t borne the brunt of his absenteeism. “Still . . . he’d probably pass out, and then where would I be?”

“Better off, no doubt.”

“Come on, Cam. Cut him a break. I’m sure he felt horrible about it when you told him your news.”

Camille said nothing.

Holly stared at her, head cocked to one side. “Oh, my God. He doesn’t know, does he?”

Camille sighed. “No.”

Holly stared at her with slack-jawed incredulity. “Let me get this straight: I get a load of crap for not telling Curtis about the baby, and you haven’t told Dad your cancer is back. Don’t you think that’s a tad hypocritical?”

“It’s not the same thing,” Camille replied defensively. “You don’t know how Curtis will react—he might be thrilled, for all you know—but Dad is Dad. He’s totally predictable. Which is why there’s no reason for him to know until it’s absolutely necessary. What difference would it make?”

“For one thing, I’m sure he’d want to spend more time with you.”

Camille snorted in derision. “Right. Like the one time he came to see me in the hospital and then spent the whole time talking about his golf game? No, thanks. I don’t need that right now.”

“What about what
he
needs?”

Camille shrugged. “He’ll survive just fine without me. He’s already demonstrated that.”

“But . . . but you’re his daughter!”

Camille’s gaze drifted once more to the photos of new moms cradling their infants. Snapshots taken by the proud papas, no doubt. Where had her own father been when she and Holly had needed him most? She flashed back to the day she and her sister had been helping him clear out his apartment in preparation for the move to Fort Lauderdale, following his retirement ten years ago. They were emptying a cabinet in his study when they came across a leather-bound scrapbook, one they’d never seen before. They were excited at first, imagining it filled with mementos of their childhood—old report cards, diplomas, and certificates, the award Camille had gotten for the best English essay her senior year of high school. It wasn’t until they opened it that the stark truth of their lives was revealed, in page after page of scorecards from their dad’s golf games.

Yes, if nothing else, Larry Harte was predictable.

Dr. Farber, an otherwise competent-seeming middle-aged woman with graying hair in an untidy bun and eyeglasses slipping down her nose, swept into the examining room just then. After checking Holly’s blood pressure and asking the routine questions, she pronounced her in good health and asked, smiling, “Now, are we ready for our first peek?” Holly nodded, wearing a goofy grin as Dr. Farber smeared goo over her belly in preparation for the ultrasound.

When the grainy image appeared on the screen, Holly, propped on her elbows to get a better look, observed, “It looks like the dancing peanut on the Planters jar.”

“The most beautiful peanut I’ve ever seen,” said Camille.

“It won’t be dancing for a while yet,” said Dr. Farber, “but so far everything looks good.”

Good.
Camille had almost forgotten what that was like.

Afterward, they went to a French café in Holly’s neighborhood—near Prospect Park, in Brooklyn—for cappuccinos and croissants. Holly talked of her plans to turn her spare bedroom into a nursery and about her latest “score”: a leather jacket worn onstage by Bruce Springsteen during his
Born to Run
tour. A cascade of bright chatter designed to keep at bay the topic neither of them wished to discuss. But there was no escaping it, Camille knew. When it was her turn, she said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about Mom lately.”

Holly’s smile drooped. “Yeah, I know. Me, too.”

“Imagine what it must have been like for her at the end. Lying in bed day after day, knowing she’d never get well, then having to say good-bye to everyone she loved.” Her throat tightened at the memory.

“I remember,” Holly murmured, her eyes welling with tears. Tears that weren’t just for their mother, Camille suspected. “Poor Mom.”

“She never complained. Not once. She was always thinking of us, never herself. Remember that video she made?” They’d found it among their mother’s things after she died, in an envelope marked
For my girls
. She’d filmed herself while she was still well enough to do so. In it, she told them how much she loved them and gave advice for when they were older.
Always send a thank-you note. Never spend more than you make. Don’t be afraid to try new things. Kiss your children every single day. Take a trip to Africa.
Camille had sobbed so hard the first viewing she could barely make out her mother’s words. But in the years since, she had tried her best to live by those words. The only thing she hadn’t done was take the trip to Africa, and now it looked as if she never would, any more than her mom had been able to realize that lifelong dream.

“She had on that ugly scarf I gave her for her birthday,” Holly recalled.

“She loved that scarf.” Camille could see it in her mind’s eye, a pink-and-blue Gucci knockoff only a fifth grader would find beautiful, but her mom wore it every day after all her hair fell out.

“Yeah, I know. That was the problem.” Holly gave a choked laugh.

They were both quiet for a minute. There was only the sound of the spoon clinking against the cup as Holly stirred another packet of sugar into her decaf cappuccino (she’d always had a sweet tooth, but now it was times two), and the ambient noises of the café in the background.

“Remember Louise?” Camille ventured at last.

Louise had been their dad’s secretary when he was vice president of operations at Pan Am. Pretty in a fresh-faced, captain-of-the-girls’-soccer-team kind of way, she was from a small town in Kansas and had once told Camille that everyone back home thought her a “glamorous” big-city girl. “Actually, I live on Long Island,” she said, “but it’s all the same to them.” Louise wasn’t glamorous. She commuted to work by train. She shopped for clothes at Bolton’s. And she was nice in the way that people from the Midwest were: She smiled even at people she didn’t know, and when she told them “have a nice day,” she truly meant it. Camille and Holly had always liked her in the distant way one likes one’s father’s secretary; she was part of his other life, his work life, which to them was as remote as the far-flung locales he traveled to on business trips. Then their mother got sick, and Louise became more of a fixture in their lives. On Saturdays, she would take Camille and Holly to a movie or museum and chatter away as if nothing were wrong, as if their mom weren’t lying in a hospital bed at home. That was when Camille began to hate Louise. She hated everything about her: her big teeth and blue eye shadow; the way she dotted her
i
’s with big round
o
’s like smiley faces; her annoying habit of folding her napkins neatly before tossing them in the trash; even her stupid banana-yellow Walkman. But mainly what she hated about Louise was the adoring way she looked at their dad.

Finally, she couldn’t take it any longer. “I hate her!” she cried to her mom after Louise had taken her and Holly to the Children’s Museum to look at antique dollhouses. Dollhouses, for God’s sake! She was fourteen!

“Oh, sweetie.” Mom sighed. She looked tiny and frail, her bald head wrapped in the scarf Holly had given her and her legs barely making a dent in the bedcovers: a stick figure in a child’s drawing. “You mustn’t hate her—she’s trying her best. She really cares about you and Holly.”

Camille shook her head. “No, she doesn’t. She only cares about Dad.”

“I remember when I first met your dad, how handsome he looked in his captain’s uniform.” Her mother’s eyes glazed over. With the meds she was on, she had a habit of drifting off in the middle of a conversation or switching to another subject. Now, in her wan, hollow-eyed face, Camille caught a glimpse of the red-lipstick-wearing mom who used to dance in the living room in her bare feet to the tune of Sam Cooke’s ‘Twistin’ the Night Away.’ Oh, he was something. All us stews were mad for him.”

“Mom. We were talking about Louise?” Camille prompted gently.

“Louise . . . yes.” Her mother’s eyes cleared in that moment, like fog shifting to reveal the contours of the surrounding landscape. “Well, of course she has a crush on him. How could she not?”

Ugh. It was a disgusting thought. Camille felt her stomach turn, imagining her dad and Louise doing what she herself had done with Tim Watkins, a boy in her ninth-grade class with whom she’d made out at Serena Hughes’s Christmas party the year before. She had a feeling it wouldn’t stop at Seven Minutes in Heaven for her dad. “You need to talk to Dad about it,” she said primly as she lowered herself onto the bed. “You have to warn him. He probably thinks she’s just being nice.”

Her mother sighed again. “I’ve already spoken to Dad about it.”

“You did? What did he say?”

“If it makes you feel better, he wasn’t any happier about it than you were when I first suggested he ask Louise to get more . . . involved.”

“You mean . . . you mean this was
your
idea?” Camille eyed her in confusion.

“Sweetie pie.” Her mother shook her head sadly. “Trust me, it’s for the best.”

Camille, too shocked and upset to understand what her mother was trying to tell her, blurted “How can you say that? Can’t you see she’s trying to take your place?”

“I won’t always be here,” her mother said.

Hearing the sad resignation in her voice, Camille could no longer deny what she’d known for some time: Her mother was dying. The days of hospital stays were over; now there were just the nurses who worked in shifts and twice-a-week visits from the hospice lady. Camille felt faint with the knowledge.

“No one could ever take your place,” she choked out.

Mom brought a hand as thin and light as an origami bird to Camille’s cheek. “I’ll always be your mom no matter what. But your dad will need someone to help look after you and your sister when I’m gone.”

“We can look after ourselves,” Camille declared staunchly.

Mom eyed her sorrowfully, maybe because she knew her husband wasn’t up to the task. Even with her doing all the work, he wasn’t the most attentive of fathers.

Wrapped in that ridiculous scarf of Holly’s, her head looked too big for her neck to support, as if it might snap with the weight were it not resting on the pillows at her back. Her eyes burned amid bruised-looking hollows. “I know you can, sweetie. But that doesn’t mean you should have to.” She closed her eyes, taking shallow breaths—even with the tube feeding oxygen into her lungs through her nose, it was often hard for her to breathe. “Louise is a good person, Cammie. All I ask is that you give her a chance. For my sake. Will you do that?”

Camille swallowed hard against the lump in her throat. “I . . . I’ll try.”

Her mother summoned a faint smile. “Good. Now come kiss me good night.” She held out her stick-figure arms, and Camille carefully navigated her way around the plastic tubing to lay her head against her mom’s bony chest. She smelled of the medicine bottles on the tray beside the bed, and her heart fluttered like a baby bird in its nest. She stroked Camille’s hair, murmuring, “My big girl. I know I can always count on you.” When Camille finally drew back, she saw that her mom’s eyes had drifted shut. She got up and tiptoed out of the room. Then she went to her own room and lay down on the bed, where she cried herself to sleep.

All these years later, the tears surfaced once more at the memory. She’d never told Holly the story—her sister had been too young at the time—and as she related it to her now, Holly nodded in understanding.

“Yeah, it makes sense,” she commented when Camille was done. “What I don’t get is what Dad ever saw in Louise—she wasn’t exactly his type.” Though they both agreed he never would have cheated on their mother while she was alive—for all his faults, he’d been loyal to her—but it was understood that he and Louise had become lovers afterward. “I guess she was . . . convenient.”

“I wonder what ever happened to her,” Camille mused aloud.

“Who knows?” Holly shrugged and took a bite of her croissant. “Probably she went back to Kansas and married some nice dentist and had a passel of kids. I’m sure she’s a grandmother by now.”

“I wonder why she and Dad didn’t get married.”

“Probably because he didn’t ask. Let’s face it: He wasn’t in love with her. Also, we were pretty mean to her. I think that might have had something to do with it.”

“If I was I mean, it wasn’t because I hated her. I just hated the fact that she wasn’t Mom.” Camille watched her sister take another bite of her croissant, scattering crumbs over the tabletop, before adding thoughtfully, “Actually, we’d have been better off if he had married Louise.”

Holly paused in mid-chew, staring at Camille in disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“She wasn’t a bad person,” Camille went on. “And Mom was right about one thing: We needed someone to look out for us, with Dad gone all the time.”

Holly dropped what was left of her croissant onto her plate and wiped her buttery fingers on her napkin. “Why do I get the feeling this isn’t just about Louise?” She spoke slowly, her gaze remaining fixed on Camille.

“It’s not,” Camille replied, sighing. “I was thinking about my own children. I worry about what it’ll be like for them after—” She broke off at the pained look her sister wore. “You know how Edward is. He adores them, but . . .” She gave a helpless shrug. After her extended hospital stay the previous year, she had returned home to find the refrigerator bare except for take-out cartons and the children out of sorts from having stayed up past their bedtimes. Not only that, Edward had been late several times picking up Zach from soccer practice and had neglected to sign the permission slip required for a field trip Kyra’s class had gone on, leaving their daughter in tears when the bus was ready to leave and he couldn’t be reached. Though the worst was when Ellie Keenan, the mother of Kyra’s best friend, Alexia, offered to have Kyra stay with them until Camille was “back on her feet.” Camille learned later that it had been at Kyra’s request.