Thorns of Truth (12 page)

“Speaking of which, where did all that mud come from?” She frowned down at his filthy boots with mock disapproval. “You’re supposed to be
overseeing
construction on that office building, not actually building it with your own hands.”

Nikos, she knew, was the kind of boss who simply could not resist demonstrating to any carpenter, welder, mason, and electrician unlucky enough to cross his path that there was a better way to do whatever it was they did.
His
way. Never mind that Anteros Construction had grossed over twelve million last year, and that their CEO ought to have been enjoying the retirement he’d surely earned. When he died, an employee had once joked, Nikos would be digging his own grave.

The days of Nikos’ coming in through the back door instead of the front seemed to have belonged to another lifetime. Sylvie had to struggle to remember the handsome young immigrant, like a lesser Greek god, who’d shown up one day to apply for the job of handyman. She’d hired him on the spot—how could she not? And maybe she’d been half in love with him even then. All Sylvie knew was that even her devotion for her husband, Gerald, couldn’t keep her from Nikos’ bed. She’d hated herself, yes, but had been as powerless against the inevitability of their affair as a barrel hurtling over Niagara Falls. Was it any surprise, really, that in one of those stolen hours in Nikos’ tiny basement room Rose had been conceived?

“… and then there was a problem with one of the mains in the subbasement.” Sylvie struggled to focus on what Nikos was saying. “I got it fixed in the end—after I fired the plumbing contractor.” He grinned, a flash of white teeth in a face as rugged as the broken-in boots he was now tugging off.

Nikos, padding over in his stockinged feet, drew Sylvie into his arms and kissed her. A lovely warmth spread through her, soothing her … as well as reminding her that, even at her age, she was far from immune to his charms.

“Hungry?” she murmured.

“Like a bear.” He nuzzled her neck, making her skin tingle and her cheeks grow flushed.

“Milagros left something in the oven,” she told him, pushing him away with a good-humored laugh. “I haven’t the slightest idea what. Isn’t that awful? I used to be so organized, and go over each week’s menu with her, but lately … oh, Nikos, you’re right, I
do
need to sit down.”

“Let me get supper on the table, then.” The authority in his voice made it clear he wasn’t just offering. “You can sit and tell me about your day.”

He brought her hand to his mouth, and the warm pressure of his lips against her chilled fingers was like a balm.

“My day? Well, Rose stopped by this afternoon.…”

“Sylvie, you’re trembling!” The concern in Nikos’ face turned to worry.

“I’m all right—it’s been a long day, that’s all.” She took his arm and leaned against him as they made their way toward the kitchen.

A memory leaped into focus: that terrifying day Gerald had surprised her coming up the basement steps, flushed and dewy from her lover’s embrace. Her husband had known—Gerald
had
to have known—but was too much a gentleman to confront her. So he’d fired Nikos instead. Sylvie hadn’t known it then, but she was already more than a month pregnant.

Nikos, who hadn’t known she was expecting, had unwittingly done her a favor by staying away. Even years later, when he learned of Rose’s existence, he’d respected Sylvie’s wish that he not reveal his identity to their daughter. It wasn’t until Gerald had passed away that Nikos had come back into her life … and into her bed.

And how had she rewarded him for his patience? By denying him the one thing he still wished for: his only child. It was his love for
her,
nothing more, Sylvie knew, that had kept him from publicly acknowledging Rose.

My darling, you deserve so much more.…

In the big, old-fashioned kitchen, Sylvie sank into a chair at the pine trestle table. She remembered how, after Gerald died, it had seemed the most sensible thing in the world to remodel this space—tear out the thirties kitchen cabinets and enamel sinks, replace the original black and white checkerboard tiles with something more modern. But she’d resisted the impulse, and now was glad that she had. For there was comfort in familiarity. Even, she thought, a kind of grace.

Nikos was standing at the stove, ladling something into bowls. “The last time I made us supper was when Rachel and Brian were here for your birthday,” he recalled.

“Maybe that’s why they haven’t been back since.”

Nikos laughed boisterously, and Sylvie felt her spirits rise.

She watched him move about, banging open cupboards and drawers, reaching into the oven. At the last minute, he even remembered to set out candlesticks.

“Now,” he said when he was finally seated across from her, “will you tell me why it is you look as if the sky has fallen in?”

“Later,” she told him. “Let’s first enjoy this delicious cassoulet. Who would have guessed it, a Filipina who cooks like Julia Child?”

In the glow of the candlelight, Nikos looked as wonderfully solid as this kitchen, and Sylvie felt secretly grateful that she, not Nikos, would be the first to go. She couldn’t have borne life without him. It didn’t matter one bit that they’d never married. Her reasons for refusing him—reasons that had seemed perfectly valid when Nikos first proposed to her, all those years ago—were of less importance now than the food in front of her. No wedding vows could ever mean as much as the tenderness she saw in the handsome, work-hewn face of the man seated across from her at this table.

When his empty plate—and her barely touched one—had been pushed aside, Nikos reached across the table and took her hand, urging once more, “Now. Tell me what is making you look so sad.”

“Oh, Nikos …” Sylvie pulled her hand free and cupped it over her eyes, shielding them from the candlelight that was suddenly too bright. “Rose was so upset with me. You can’t imagine! I’d thought she was beyond being angry about the past, but I was wrong. For her, it might as well be yesterday. She hasn’t forgiven me, and she never will.”

A tiny sob escaped her. And then Nikos’ chair was scraping back, and he was stepping around the table to comfort her. “What did she want?” he asked, holding her head pressed to his belly, where she could feel his belt buckle against her cheek, cool and reassuring somehow.

“She seems to think I’m the only one who can convince Iris to break off this engagement,” Sylvie told him. “As if I could! As if
anyone
could.”

“So you refused.” Under the soft cotton of his shirt, Sylvie felt the hard muscles of his belly contract.

“I had no choice!” she cried.

“No wonder she was angry.”

“That wasn’t all. She accused me of taking sides.”

Nikos hesitated before asking, “And is she perhaps right?”

His words seemed to rise from some cavern deep within the mountain against which she rested. Sylvie abruptly pulled away, and looked up at him. “No,” she said. “Of course not. There
are
no sides.”

Nikos regarded her gravely, the flickering candlelight carving deep creases in his weathered face. When he spoke, his voice was gentle but firm. “In all honesty, can you blame Rose for feeling this way?”

Sylvie jerked to her feet and began stacking plates, gathering cutlery. A fork clattered to the floor, and she stared down at it as if it were the ceiling that had fallen in.

“No,” she sighed at last, “I don’t blame her. She has every reason to doubt where my loyalties lie.”

“Then you must tell her that.”

Sylvie turned to look at Nikos, standing in the middle of the kitchen with his arms folded across his chest, and his full mouth—
Rose’s
mouth—drawn into a tight line.

“What are you saying?” she asked, fearful.

“That Rose deserves as much as you’ve given Rachel.”

Sylvie felt something inside her snap. “Easy for you to say! Rachel isn’t
your
daughter.”

“She’s not yours, either.” In the moment of shocked stillness that greeted his words, Nikos stepped forward to seize her gently by the shoulders. “I’m not saying this to hurt you, Sylvie. But because I love you. I see how much pain all this has caused you—as much, in some ways, as it has Rose. How can Rachel’s peace of mind be worth so much misery?”

“It’s not just Rachel,” she argued, a tear slipping down her cheek. “It’s Iris, too. Are you willing to risk what might happen if she were to find out? That I’m no better than the mother who abandoned
her
?” She swiped angrily at her leaking eyes. “
Yes,
I want to shout from the mountaintops that Rose is our daughter! But don’t you see? I can’t. I can’t take that chance.”

How could she make Nikos understand? A secret, if kept too long, can become as frozen as a rusted padlock—one that won’t open no matter how hard you hammer at it. Dear Lord, did he think that she hadn’t
wanted
to claim Rose openly as their daughter? That she hadn’t yearned all these years for things to be different?

Sylvie leaned weakly against the counter … and at once the hard lines in Nikos’ face relaxed into an expression of concern. Faintly, as if from a great distance, she heard him sigh, “You’re tired. Come, let me put you to bed. We can talk in the morning.”

“I
am
tired,” she admitted.

Sylvie allowed him to lead her out of the kitchen and through the darkened dining room, then up the marble staircase to the bed that all at once seemed the only place in the world where she would ever feel safe.

She wouldn’t think about the party in just three weeks. And how, when it was her turn to toast to the happy couple, she’d have yet another lie to tell—one that, this time, might prove to be the end of any hope she’d had of winning Rose’s forgiveness.

August

You are cordially invited to

celebrate the engagement of our daughter, Iris,

to

Andrew Griffin

on Saturday, August 10th

at 6:30 p.m.

for

cocktails and buffet

at

12 Gramercy Park South

Apartment 5

New York, NY

R.S.V.P. Mr. and Mrs. Brian McClanahan

889-9078

Chapter 4

R
ACHEL TOOK ONE LOOK
at the pigtailed schoolgirl on the examining table, then motioned to Kay Krempel, codirector of the East Side Women’s Health Center. As they stepped out into the corridor, she asked in a low voice, “How far along?”

“Roughly? Around four months,” Kay guessed. “We’ll know more after Althea’s examined her.”

Kay was in her usual take-no-prisoners mode, Rachel could see. All five feet two inches of her drawn up as if to cast a shadow as tall as her reputation around here. Hands on hips, her chin thrust out as if in preparation to do battle. Her frizzy hair had gone almost completely gray, but the fire in Kay’s hazel eyes burned as brightly as when they were roommates back in the seventies—when ideals had been more than warmed-over slogans in Nike commercials, when “just do it” had meant burning flags and marching in peace rallies.

Wasn’t it Kay, all those years ago, who’d inspired her to abandon a promising internship at Good Shepherd in favor of a missionary hospital in a war zone at the other end of the world? Vietnam hadn’t been what either of them bargained for, but Rachel had no regrets. For one thing, she wouldn’t have met Brian. Nor would she have learned the true definition of a friend.
If I were ever shipwrecked, I’d want Kay in my lifeboat,
she thought, smiling to herself.

“Is it my imagination, or are they getting younger every year?” Rachel sighed as she handed the girl’s chart back to Kay.

“We had one in yesterday, a thirteen-year-old expecting twins.”

Rachel shook her head, more in weariness than disbelief. Fact was, these girls could easily be the
daughters
of women she and Kay had treated back when the clinic first opened—a storefront operation cobbled together out of donated supplies and a meager HEW grant, serving coffee and doughnuts to win over a neighborhood suspicious of well-meaning newcomers.

The East Side Center now occupied the entire building—a brownstone on the corner of Fourteenth and Third—but how much had they achieved, really? Teen moms bearing unwanted babies was as much of an epidemic now as it had been back then.

“Holy Angels?” Rachel asked.

To many parents, she knew, the all-girl Holy Angels and its male counterpart, St. Sebastian’s, seemed the perfect answer to the Lower East Side’s overcrowded, violence-plagued public schools. Though from what Rachel had seen here at the East Side Center, Holy Angels was as much a problem as it was a solution. Reading, writing, and arithmetic were being taught, all right, but its students had yet to learn the meaning of birth control—a subject best left to those who hadn’t yet learned to exercise self-control, one nun had frostily informed them. Or, as Kay had put it, “They teach their girls to cross their legs as well as their ‘T’s.”

Right now, Kay was nodding grimly, her mouth drawn into a tight line. “Seventh grade,” she affirmed. “Maybe it’s something in the holy water. I wonder what that old bat Sister Alice would say if we told her that praying is giving those girls of hers more than just sore kneecaps.”

“She’d accuse you of being a heathen, no doubt.”

“That’s the least of it,” Kay snorted. “Guess what came in this morning’s mail? A copy of a petition that was sent to the mayor’s office. Looks as if Our Lady of the Gadfly isn’t satisfied with keeping her girls ignorant in the classroom: she and her minions want a ban on
us
giving out any information about the birds and bees.”