Thorns of Truth (6 page)

Sylvie couldn’t see her face, only her long hair stirring in the faint breeze. It was the absolute correctness of her granddaughter’s posture, like the first brave daffodil spears in spring, that wrested a low cry from Sylvie, and caused her to tighten her grip on Nikos’ arm.

She caught sight of one of Iris’ slingback pumps on the tiles by the low glass table that had been pushed up against the ledge, and it cut her to the quick: the sight of that child-sized shoe stranded there like a discarded toy.

Oh, Iris.

Sylvie fought to control her panic. She could see from the frantic expression on Rachel’s face—she stood poised several yards away—that a steady hand was needed on the tiller right now.
God, give me the strength.…

She drew away from Nikos to slip an arm about her daughter. Rachel was shivering violently. A deep shadow, like a gash, angled across the lower half of her face, leaving her blue eyes starkly exposed. Sylvie longed to be able to calm her daughter’s fear the way she had when Rachel was a child. How long since this brisk, competent daughter of hers had even let Sylvie hold her?

In a low voice that was almost hysterical, Rachel pleaded, “Brian’s calling the fire department, but that won’t help. Mama, she won’t listen to me … or anyone. You’ve got to do something. Please. She trusts you.”

Sylvie felt the pull of responsibility like an ocean current, dragging her down. “I’ll do what I can,” she whispered.

She walked slowly past Drew, who stood with head bowed, his cheeks polished with tears. Sylvie wanted to console him, too … but Iris needed all her time and attention right now.

Cautiously, she stepped over to the ledge where Iris sat gazing out at the distant expanse of the Hudson, glittering with the drowned reflections of brightly lit buildings.

“Iris?” Sylvie spoke softly, as if to keep from frightening away a bird. “It’s Gran. Won’t you at least look at me?”

Nothing. It was like talking to a statue. Sylvie waited, holding perfectly still. At last she caught a flicker of movement. With aching slowness, Iris turned to look at her—her eyes bright against all that dark emptiness.

Sylvie reached up and lightly stroked the pale fingers gripping the ledge for support. They were like ice.

“Don’t,” Iris moaned.

“We can go to the house, where it’s quiet… where we can talk.” Sylvie leaned into the rough concrete. Iris had always loved coming to her house, had asked her once, as a child, if it was magic, like the castles in her storybooks. “You could spend the night, and in the morning we’ll have breakfast in the garden. You should see how pretty it is now. Remember the Cécile Brunner you helped me plant? It’s all covered in pink blossoms. You can’t imagine how heavenly it smells.”

Sylvie longed to tug her granddaughter into her lap as she had when Iris was younger, soothe her with the motion of the deep padded rocker that had once occupied a corner of Rachel’s nursery. As a little girl, her granddaughter had been like a stray kitten, clinging as if for dear life. And no wonder. She’d been abandoned once before, and didn’t intend to let it happen again.

The way you abandoned Rose.

Sylvie stole a look at Rose, standing with her arm around Drew, looking anxious and at the same time faintly defiant— as if she’d have spit in the eye of anyone who suggested her son was in any way to blame for this. Dear, brave Rose. Who had been there to protect and comfort
her
as a child?

Iris was saying something now, in a voice so soft Sylvie had to strain to hear her. “It’s no use, Gran. I can’t pretend anymore.”

“I know, dear. But with me you don’t have to. Come, let me take you home, where you belong.” Sylvie stretched out arms that felt like lead.

Iris shook her head, left to right, with slow deliberateness. A tear slipped down her cheek, and Sylvie, frozen with terror, watched helplessly as she turned away and scooted farther out onto the ledge.

“Iris!” she heard Drew cry. His raw anguish was like icy water dashed over Sylvie.

All at once, she was acutely aware of the agitated murmurs floating around her, and the horrified guests silhouetted against the light, like cattle too stupid to realize their presence might only be making things worse. She was relieved when, out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of Brian, with Nikos and that nice man, Eric Sandstrom, herding them back inside.

“I don’t belong anywhere. Not really,” Iris said with an exhausted resignation that tugged at Sylvie more than if she’d wept or gotten hysterical. “And, Gran, I’m too old to be babied.”

“Goodness, isn’t a grandmother allowed to fuss?” Sylvie, despite her mounting panic, managed a weak chuckle.

“It won’t work, Gran. You can’t make it better this time.” Iris’ voice was like a violin string, taut and trembling.

Sylvie felt her control start to crack. Yet she knew that any show of panic could be fatal. Taking a breath, she replied matter-of-factly, “I know. Talking isn’t going to change how you feel. But it’ll give you a chance to think things over.”

“What would be the point?” Iris heaved a defeated sigh.

“Well, for one thing you’d have to be either simpleminded or cowardly to end your life without at least giving it some serious thought. And you’re neither.” Sylvie spoke briskly, yet she couldn’t imagine where it was coming from, this measured strength flowing outward from her core, like ripples on water from a tossed stone.

“I must be crazy then.
Everyone
thinks so, not just Drew.”

“Nonsense. You’re not crazy.”

“How can you say that? You don’t
know.
”

“I know enough. I know what it’s like to hurt so much you want to die.”

There was a long silence in which only the noises of the city could be heard—the hum of traffic, the distant bleating of horns, the sound of a jet overhead that was like a long, exhaled breath.

Iris half-turned, asking in soft amazement, “You do?”

Sylvie straightened with an effort. “I may look like an old lady content to putter about in her garden, but I’ve had my share of heartaches, darling.” She hesitated a moment before adding gently, “Nothing is as bad, though, as the heartache we bring to those we love.”

Iris appeared to think this over. Then a shudder passed through her, as visible as a gust of wind blowing the branches of a supple tree. In a tiny voice that Sylvie had to strain to hear, Iris whispered, “It hurts.”

Sylvie’s eyes filled with tears.

“I know,” she said simply, sensing that less was better.

“Does it ever stop?”

“It gets better.”

“What if that’s not enough?”

Sylvie drew in a deep breath. “Sometimes all it takes is a little faith.”

Iris fell silent again, and in that eternity of waiting, the universe seemed to shrink, to become as small and weightless— and finite—as a suspended breath.

Then, all at once, with a sigh, she was swinging around, a bare foot dancing tentatively over the surface of the table below before she slid her weight onto it.

Sylvie sagged with relief, pressing her knuckles to her mouth to stop from crying out.
Oh, dear Lord… oh, thank you.

In the heated commotion that followed—Drew pitching forward to gather Iris in his arms, and Rachel throwing herself against Brian with a strangled sob—Sylvie stood perfectly still, not daring to move, certain that if she took one step she would collapse. With no one to catch her, not even Nikos, who was off inside.

Sylvie felt certain death would come soon. Dr. Choudry, though vague about how much time she might have, had been careful not to raise false hope. Oh yes, there had been X-rays, and EKGs, and every other kind of diagnostic test imaginable. But even with the vast body of medical technology available, what it had all come down to in the end was that her heart was worn out.

She wouldn’t be terribly sorry to leave this earth. Like Iris, she was well acquainted with how seductive death could seem, when living became too difficult or painful. It was saying goodbye to those you loved that was hard.

Especially when you had regrets …

She glanced over at Rose, standing alone by the ledge, the soggy breeze making her dark hair, with its startling ribbon of white, look even wilder. Her high cheekbones were hollowed with shadow, her black eyes glittering with unshed tears. Watching her from the opposite end of the terrace was Eric Sandstrom. Sylvie couldn’t read his face, only his stance—he appeared to be waiting, but it wasn’t clear for what, or for whom. Not Rose, surely. They’d only just met. And yet … there was something in the way he held his arms—bent slightly at the elbows, with the light skimming the knuckles of his loosely cupped hands—as if he were holding something out to her, a promise or a gift.

It reminded Sylvie of how little
she
had given her daughter. A bundle of letters not sent, locked away in a desk drawer? A love that was like some hothouse hybrid, confined to a life behind glass? No wonder she resents me, Sylvie thought bitterly. How could she not?

Yet Rose couldn’t know—
no
one could—the circumstances that had led Sylvie to betray her own flesh and blood.

In her sick exhaustion, she found tonight’s harrowing experience blending with the memory of another, long-ago ordeal. The shock of going into labor while shopping at Bergdorf s.

Then the mad dash to the hospital in the sweltering July heat, where she was met with unfamiliar faces and cold, probing hands. Followed by pain, so excruciating she was certain she would die right then and there. Yet it wasn’t until afterwards, while she slept—the fitful sleep of an unfaithful wife who dared not let her husband see the dark child he would never believe was his own—that the fire had broken out, that the
real
nightmare had begun.

They said she looked like me. Tiny Rachel, with her fair hair and blue eyes.

It was fear that made Sylvie go along with the assumption at first—fear that if Gerald ever learned the truth she’d be disgraced, thrown out onto the street without a cent. But what kept her silent in the end was Rachel herself, the love she felt for her changeling daughter—a love that seemed to grow, perversely, in direct proportion to her guilt over her other daughter, her
real
daughter. The child of her lover, who’d grown into the beautiful, strong woman standing before her now.

Fate had blessed her with a second chance, Sylvie thought. All those years ago. Rose seeking her out, demanding the truth. And out of the ruins of lost opportunity, they’d managed to build something seaworthy, if not exactly unsinkable.

Sylvie blinked, and felt a tear slip down her cheek.

The lines from the Robert Frost poem came to mind.
But I have promises to keep … and miles to go before I sleep.
She had promises of her own to keep. And people she loved to help keep safe. Iris, buckling under the weight of a past she scarcely remembered. And Rachel, struggling to hold together a marriage, and a family, without knowing where to begin. Rose, too—grieving for Max, and torn between her affection for Iris and wanting what was best for her son.

In her mind, Sylvie was seeing her roses: the climbers sagging under the weight of their blooms, the grass below the shrubs littered with petals now growing withered and brown. Just as her garden needed extra care in summer, this was a time for tending to her family. When winter came, stripping the boughs and spreading its soft blanket of snow over the earth, she could rest … and let go.

Until then, she must hang on. If she’d been able to make it this far in life, with all the briar patches she’d had to pick her way through—bruised and bloodied at times, but still managing to put one foot in front of the other—then surely she stood a fighting chance of seeing her loved ones safely home out of the dark.

Chapter 2

T
HE CALL CAME THE
following morning, just after nine, when Rose was in the midst of cleaning Mr. Chips’ cage. The gray cockatiel sat with his plumed head cocked, watching from his perch on the back of a kitchen chair, as she dropped the tray she’d been washing into the sink and reached for the phone. Rose saw that her hand, which had dripped soapy water over the counter, was shaking.
Please don
’
t let it be who I think it is. Make it someone I don’t know. Some idiot pitching a magazine subscription, or conducting a survey …

“Hi, Mom. You get home okay last night?”

Drew. She felt some of the tension go out of her—and then, surprisingly, the tiniest twinge of regret. But how stupid, she berated herself, to think that Eric would call. Even if she were interested in him—which she wasn’t—after that awful scene last night, why on earth would he want to get involved with her? She might no longer be a wife, but she would always be a mother, for better or for worse.

And right now, it was her mother’s instinct that was causing the tiny hairs on the back of her neck to stand up. Drew, she sensed, hadn’t called to say he’d had it with Iris, once and for all.

“All in one piece,” she assured him. “What about you?”

“I called when I got back to my place, to let you know everything was okay. But you weren’t home.”

In a voice as bright and false as the silk flowers on the windowsill above her—African violets given to her by Rachel after Max’s death, when every plant in this apartment had withered from neglect—Rose informed her son, “I shared a cab downtown with Brian’s friend—Eric Sandstrom—remember him from our table? We stopped for coffee on the way home.”

“Did he hit on you?” Drew wanted to know.

Rose was startled into a nervous laugh. “I hardly know the man!”

“Hey, just asking. Aren’t I allowed to worry?”

“If anyone should be worried, it’s me.” Rose squeezed her eyes shut, and asked, “Drew, what happened last night?”

He sighed and she could picture him unconsciously scrubbing the hair over one ear, making it stand on end—exactly as Max used to. “My fault,” he confessed. “I opened my mouth when I should’ve kept it shut. The thing is, with Iris … she feels things more than other people. Yeah, it scares the shit out of me at times, but—Mom, I don’t want to lose her.” He inhaled sharply. “Right now, I’m probably not making much sense. Iris and I were up all night talking, and I’m a little whacked.”