Thorns of Truth (2 page)

What could suddenly have gone so wrong?

And if Rose
was
right, why was Iris standing here now lit up like Times Square on New Year’s Eve?

Shaping her mouth into a smile, Rachel replied lightly, “Is there something I should know?” She hoped her voice sounded upbeat, that of a mother whose heart wasn’t drowning in worry.

Iris smiled mysteriously. “Not yet. But Drew said we needed to talk. Tonight. After the party.” Her dark-lashed eyes, the color of old Egyptian amber, seemed to hold a buried history of their own.

“What makes you think it has to do with marriage?” Rachel asked.

“Something Drew said—about needing to make some decisions about the future. What else could he have meant?” Iris’ smile faltered then, but only slightly—as if it had only just then occurred to her that things might not be quite as rosy as she’d imagined.

“Oh … I don’t know,” Rachel ventured. “It could be anything. Every couple has wrinkles to iron out.”

Iris shot her an odd look, as if she sensed Rachel was keeping something from her. Then, with a sigh, she confessed, “You heard about the fight we had, right? From Rose? Okay. But it was no big deal. I think Drew and I are still recovering from being apart for so long. But now that we’ll be at graduate schools that are practically next door to one another, why not make it official?” She laughed. “Stop looking so panicked, Mom. We’re still a few years from a wedding. But if we got engaged …” Her voice trailed off.

Rachel waited a moment before asking, “Do you two fight a lot?”

Iris frowned. “Mom … you’re not
listening.
Of course we fight—that’s the whole point. If we were together more, we wouldn’t be so stressed out.”

Rachel, poised before the mirrored vanity, peered closely at the necklace puddled in her palm. She remembered when Brian had given it to her, how the pearls in their velvet box had glowed in the soft light of the sterling menorah that had been her great-grandmother’s. What would it be like, she wondered with a pang, to have no sense of where she’d come from?

“A diamond ring isn’t always the answer,” she said.

“It’s not like that with us.” Iris sounded a little irritated at Rachel for not getting what was so obvious. “It’s never been a question of
if,
only a matter of
when.
As far back as I can remember, Drew and I have talked about what it would be like when we were married, how many kids we’d have.”

“You know how your father and I feel about Drew. We’d like nothing better than for him to be our son-in-law,” Rachel replied cautiously.

“Then why are you acting this way? Like … oh, I don’t know, like I just told you I was pregnant or something?”

Rachel felt a dart of alarm. “Are you?”

“God. You’re such a Jewish mother!” Iris threw her arms up … and with an exaggerated sigh toppled backwards onto the bed. Blowing away the wisps of hair spread over her face like fine lace, she smiled dreamily up at Rachel. “I just want to spend the rest of my life with Drew. That’s all.”

Rose’s words at lunch echoed in Rachel’s mind.
He loves her, honestly he does…. Maybe that’s part of the problem. When you love someone that much, it hurts to see them suffer….

She fought to keep from darting a furtive glance at her daughter’s bare arms with their exposed wrists flung out on either side of her on the woven blue spread.
Don’t,
a voice in her head warned.
Don’t look.
But she couldn’t help herself. And, yes, oh God, there they were: pale raised scars like the thinnest of silver bracelets circling each wrist. Hardly visible … unless you knew to look for them.

But Iris wasn’t suffering now. She looked happy. Nearly ecstatic, in fact. Except Rachel knew how abruptly her daughter’s mood could change—like a tropical storm sweeping down out of a clear blue sky, blacking out the sun, and flattening everyone around her.

Gently, Rachel dropped her choker onto the vanity, next to the crystal perfume bottle that had been her mother’s. The pearls made a soft slithery sound against the polished surface, a sound that for some reason set her teeth on edge. What now? Where were the written instructions on how to repair a damaged child? How had she arrived at this point in her life, with the ground she’d always thought of as rock-solid melting from under her feet?

A glance in the mirror showed a reasonably attractive middle-aged woman with shoulder-length blond hair going gently silver, who only vaguely resembled the image of a much younger self Rachel carried about in her head like an outdated wallet photo: the idealistic resident in hippie clogs and poncho who’d traveled halfway around the world to minister to the injured and dying in a village no one had ever heard of, in a zone of hell otherwise known as Vietnam.

Not that she was so old, Rachel was quick to remind herself. She could still get the zipper up on most of her size eights, and the squarish jaw that made her look stubborn, even when she wasn’t butting her head against a brick wall, had turned out to be a blessing: it refused to sag. Even the fine lines that radiated from the corners of her eyes worked to her advantage; they softened the stark blue that had so often caused people to squirm.

She’d been as good a mother as she knew how to be. One thing for certain: if Iris had been her own flesh-and-blood child, Rachel couldn’t have loved her more. That’s what made it so damn frustrating, this battle against demons she’d had no hand in making. Against the woman who’d given birth to Iris, and who, eighteen years ago, had excused herself to use the restroom in McDonald’s … leaving her three-year-old waiting in a booth, like an empty wrapper or a dirty tray, for someone else to find.

Rachel sank down on the bed beside Iris. “Oh, sweetie, I only want what’s best for you,” she said. “Whatever happens.”

Iris must have caught something in her voice, for she suddenly grew very still, and her expression darkened. “Drew would never,
ever
leave me, if that’s what you’re implying. He wouldn’t. He just wouldn’t. And if he ever did—” She stopped.

“You’d talk it over. Straighten out whatever was wrong,” Rachel supplied briskly in her doctor’s voice, using it to cover her own rising panic.

Iris looked right through her then, eerily, her gaze fixed on some vanishing point only she could see. In a voice as matter-of-fact as the weatherman reporting that tomorrow it would rain. Iris said, “I’d kill myself.”

The ground that had been melting under Rachel suddenly dropped away altogether. All at once she was flying backwards down the slippery slope she’d spent the last seven years scaling, that ghastly day jolting past in vivid splashes of color, and bursts of memory out of sequence. She saw blood. Everywhere. Staining the bathwater a deep rust, and soaking the pink mat next to the tub; dappled over the wall tiles in feathery patterns, oddly—it had struck Rachel in the first moment of glassy shock—like the ones Iris had made in kindergarten, using fern fronds dipped in poster paint.

She had seen Iris, floating pale and still as a fish gone belly-up in all that shocking redness. Her face partly submerged, so that the lower half appeared distorted, shimmering grotesquely below the clouded surface. Her gaping wrists seeming to grin up at Rachel.

Towels. So many towels. Swaddling Iris like a large infant as she was carried out to wait for the ambulance. Leaving pink, glistening trails of watery blood on the hallway’s parquet tiles. Rachel had left the towels piled on the floor by the front door, where to this day—never mind that the entire vestibule had twice been refinished since then—a faint cloudiness marked the spot on the old oak floorboards.

As a reminder.

Rachel was jolted back to the present with a suddenness that caused her to bite down on the tip of her tongue. She felt a heated rush of pain, and her mouth filled with the taste of blood.

She stared at her daughter. In fifteen minutes, they were to be dressed and downstairs, ready to meet the car that was picking them up, but Iris might have been a million miles away. Fear, rage, impotence—all of it came surging in on a dirty, foaming tide. Rachel fought it back, reminding herself that Iris was no longer in danger. Dr. Eisenger would have warned them if she’d shown signs of slipping back into that abyss.

“You wouldn’t do anything of the sort,” Rachel scolded with the gentle force of a doctor applying pressure to a wound—not a mother who felt as if she herself were bleeding. “No matter what happens, you have me and Daddy. And Grandma.”

At the mention of her grandmother, Iris brightened, her mouth flickering in a brief smile. She adored Sylvie—more, in some ways, Rachel thought with a twinge, than she did her own mother. From the very first instant, the two had taken to one another like parched grass to rain. As if forming a silent pact of some kind—one that didn’t include Rachel.

Abruptly, Iris sat up. “Will Grandma be at the party?”

“She said she’d try her best to make it. If she’s up to it.” Rachel sighed, smoothing one of her daughter’s fallen slip-straps back into place. She didn’t want to think about her mother’s fading health right now.

Iris shot her a sharp look. “You’d tell me, wouldn’t you? If she were
really
sick, I mean. She’s always saying she’s fine, just a little tired … but I don’t know.”

“I’d feel better if she got a second opinion,” Rachel admitted. “But you know how stubborn Grandma is.”

“She says she gets it from you.” Iris allowed a grin to surface.

Rachel, seated on the bed, had to smile, too, in spite of the dread weighing heavily on her heart.

“Your dad has another name for it, which I won’t repeat,” she joked. “I think he misses the old me, who used to deliver babies for a living. Administrators have to be tough as nails.”

“Do you ever miss it?” Iris asked. “All the blood and guts?”

Rachel sighed again, thinking,
How can I explain it?
All those feelings too complex to be contained in a single sentence? If she’d had to, she would have summed it up as an overdose of adrenaline in those early years—the madness of Vietnam, followed by her residency in obstetrics at Beth Israel, then the battle to establish her free clinic. Except the truth was that in a perverse way she’d loved it all, deep inside where logic held no sway.

Before Rachel could explain—that her place now was at the helm of the East Side Women’s Health Center, along with Kay—Iris was jumping off the bed, exclaiming, “God, look at the time. It’s after seven! If Daddy sees me like this, he’ll have a fit.”

Watching her dash for the door, Rachel smiled. Brian would make the usual disgruntled noises, for sure, but he was much too besotted with their daughter ever to get truly angry with her.

Her husband strode into the bedroom as Rachel was dabbing perfume behind her ears. She could see his reflection in the mirror as he walked toward her—a long ramble of a man who moved with the loose-limbed ease of someone more accustomed to jeans than to black tie. He was wearing the dark-blue suit custom tailored for him during his trip to London last year to promote the British edition of
Twelve Degrees North.
Now, though, the jacket fit more loosely than she remembered. Had he gotten thinner?

If he had, he’d lost none of his appeal. Brian, she reflected, had the kind of looks that other men never thought much of, but that women seemed to find irresistible. Like the lady standing in line at a book signing in Cincinnati, who’d whispered loud enough for Rachel to hear that she’d like to run her fingers through his hair—hair still as long and full as it had been in his twenties, its light brown now brushed with silver at the temples. His bookish face, with its slightly irregular features, always made him appear to be listening intently to everything you said, while his thoughtful gray eyes seemed to say,
Yes, I know just what you mean.

The damnedest thing, Rachel thought, was that he usually
did
know. It was what made him such a fine writer.

Tonight’s party, thrown by Brian’s publisher, was in honor of Brian’s having won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for
Dawn’s Early Light.
A hundred guests, ranging from print and television
moochers
to book publishing heavyweights, all coming together at Avery Hammersmith’s Riverside Drive penthouse to pay tribute to her husband. Yet here Rachel stood, wishing they could sneak off somewhere, just the two of them. Somewhere quiet where they could talk. Or make love.

Lately, they hadn’t done enough of either.

She retrieved the pearl choker from her vanity and held the hair off the back of her neck while Brian fastened it around her throat. The warm pressure of his fingers as he fumbled with the clasp soothed her, but at the same time sent a light chill trickling down her spine. She hadn’t told him about her conversations with Rose and Iris; that would only have made her fears more real somehow. And what would have been the point of getting Brian all worked up over something that might turn out to be, as her mother would have said, nothing with nothing?

Now wasn’t the time. She mustn’t let anything ruin this evening for Brian. Tomorrow she would tell him.

“I heard the intercom a minute ago. Was that our car?” she asked, feeling edgy all of a sudden.

“Take your time,” he soothed, patting her shoulder. “I told the driver we’d be a few minutes.” If she had to pick one thing she loved best about her husband, Rachel thought, it was that he always seemed to know when something was bothering her. Like now, asking softly, “Want to talk about it?”

“It can wait,” she told him.

“That’s what you said the last time.”

She realized then, with a guilty pang, that he was reminding her of how busy she’d been lately … and how distracted. These past months, when her husband reached for her in bed at night she was usually too tired for more than a drugged kiss. Then up at the crack of dawn, her mind filled with lists of things to do at the clinic for which there were never enough hours in the day.

“We’ll have all weekend. Well, most of it anyway,” she added, remembering her meeting with the technician from Pure Logic, scheduled for Saturday morning—the only time the clinic’s computers weren’t in use, when the new software they’d ordered could be installed. “We could drive up to Lake Waramaug on Sunday.”