Tides of the Heart (5 page)

But it was Friday and Maura was coming and somehow Jess had made it through the day despite not having slept at all, despite not being able to keep her mind on her work but on the letter that was still in her purse.

She turned on the gas jet and watched the soft orange flames come to life in the fireplace. What she needed, Jess knew, was a peaceful weekend alone. She’d almost had one: Travis had gone skiing in Vermont with some friends, and Chuck—well, she reminded herself—Chuck was in
Boston
, and, anyway, he rarely appeared since he’d rented the loft in Manhattan. If Maura weren’t coming, Jess could have had her peace. She could have wrapped up in her old chenille robe and spent Saturday and Sunday immersed in a book, shutting out the snow and the cold and allowing—or not allowing—herself to obsess about the letter, to feel her emotions swing from anger to hope, from anxiety to bliss, and to think about what, if anything, she could do.

But Maura was coming and there would be little time for emotion. Instead, there would be a trip into Manhattan to pick out a wardrobe for Maura to take to Sedona. A trip
into Manhattan, endless chatter from Maura, and no time to ponder the past or fantasize about the future. Still, Jess realized as she moved from the fireplace and gazed out the window at the dark waters of the Sound, she was grateful that Maura wanted her mother as a shopping companion, that she still valued her mother’s opinion as much as her credit cards.

Touching a finger to the cool glass, Jess wondered if she would have spent hours, days, caught up in the giddy fervor of shopping with her own mother, if her mother had lived, if her mother had not died when Jess was only fifteen.

They’d had their rituals, of course, when Jess had been a child … scooping up treasures at Bonwit’s and Saks, toting their violet-painted and crinkly-brown bags to the Plaza for tea in the Palm Court, skipping across to F.A.O. Schwarz for a romp with the toy soldiers and musical dolls.

Those had been the moments of magic in Jess’s young life; the magical moments when mother and daughter escaped into one of their dreamy flights, away from the sternness of Father, from the have-to-do things and the have-to-be ways that being the family of Gerald Bates had demanded.

But when Jess was fifteen, it had all changed in a heartbeat, a heartbeat that stopped.

She rubbed the chiseled stones of her mother’s diamond and emerald ring now—the ring that Jess had worn since the day that the magic had been snuffed out forever.

“Pills,” Jess had overheard one fur-draped lady whisper to another at the funeral on that grizzly New York morning in March.

“And booze,” the other added.

Shock had ripped through her.
Suicide?
The idea had cut to Jess’s heart like one of Father’s icy stares when she’d done something of which he didn’t approve.

Suicide. Her mother? It couldn’t be possible. Not her mother. Not her light-spirited, happy-times mother.

But somehow, Jess had known it was true, as if she’d
always known her mother was fragile of soul as well as of body, as if she’d always known that light spirit was too perfect to last.

Shaking her head now, Jess moved her eyes to a string of faraway lights on a faraway barge and wished she weren’t thinking of her mother. Thirty years had passed. Thirty years, many good times, many more heartaches. But nothing had ever quite equaled the magic—or the despair—her mother’s life and her death had brought to Jess. Nothing, except maybe the hope, then the loss of the baby she’d given away.

She twisted the gold-banded ring on her finger once more, as if trying to lock in the past, as if trying to hold back the guilt and the emptiness and the memory of Richard that thoughts of her baby always evoked.

Richard—the one who had been there to comfort Jess at the funeral. Richard—the boyfriend Father had detested because his family did not measure up. Richard—who had quietly taken Jess’s hand and led her to her father’s limousine, where he had held her and kissed her tears. Where she had held him and kissed him back, and where, on that grizzly, drizzly, March afternoon, a baby had been conceived. The one who now was dead.

Or not.

I
am your baby
, the message had read.

She gripped her hands together, the stones of her ring pressing into her flesh. “What is going on?” she cried into the glass. “Why does this pain keep coming back?”

“Mom?” Maura’s voice called from the foyer.

Jess blinked. She wiped her eyes, turned toward the sound, and tried to pull herself back to the present. “Maura,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Who were you talking to? I thought someone was here.”

Unlocking her fingers, Jess tried to smile. “No one. I wasn’t talking. I was singing.”

Her blond, petite daughter—a mirror image of Jess without
the beveled edges of time—bounced into the room and tossed her backpack onto the sofa. Jess said a quick prayer of thanks that Maura had emerged into a confident young woman who had not had to endure the kind of pain Jess had known, who had been spared the wondering, the guilt, and the years—decades—of grief.

“It didn’t sound like singing to me. Are you sure you’re not going batty?”

Jess walked toward her daughter and gave her a hug. “I didn’t realize that ‘batty’ was an acceptable term for a budding psychologist.” She caught a scent of wet wool. “Did you have a good trip?” It had only been this year that Jess had succeeded in not succumbing to the second-by-second dread that something would happen on the route between Greenwich and upstate New York, that Maura would be horribly, tragically crushed on the interstate, her Jeep mashed to a heap of charred metal and shattered glass, her backpack and textbooks flattened under the wheels of a semi trailer that had been going too fast. It was a dread that Jess had for all her children, arising, no doubt, from hearing years before of the accident that had ended Amy’s young life. But Jess’s other children had, thus far, survived. Unlike Amy. If Amy had been hers at all.

“It’s raining in New Haven,” Maura commented, stepping away from her mother’s hug and slipping off her coat. “What’s for dinner?”

“Travis is skiing this weekend,” Jess replied. “It’s just the two of us, so I thought you might enjoy the new Thai place in town.”

“Can we just order in pizza? I’m hoping that Eddie will call.”

Eddie was Maura’s new boyfriend, a Porsche-driving boy of “privilege,” who, despite the fact he was working on his MBA at Yale, had yet to convince Jess that her daughter would not be better off with someone less impressed with his own credentials.

Jess realized that perhaps Maura’s visit was due less to a
desire to go clothes shopping with her mother than to the geographic reality that Greenwich was closer to Yale than Skidmore was. She forced a smile and went into the kitchen, where she picked up the phone and ordered white pizza with extra broccoli—the way Maura liked it—consoling herself with the thought that she might have time this weekend for her chenille robe and a book after all.

Their shopping expedition was indeed cut short because Eddie had called the previous night, and Maura wanted to drive to the college to see him.

“You understand, don’t you, Mom?” Maura pleaded over a quick lunch in a noisy sandwich shop on Fifty-seventh and Third. Yes, of course, Jess understood. She understood that this was the nineties and mothers and daughters were not like they once were and that the chicken sandwich parked on the plastic plate in front of her was not fresh seafood cocktail in the Palm Court at the Plaza.

“You’re seeing a lot of Eddie these days,” was all she could manage to say.

“Hardly a lot, Mom. We’re a couple of hundred miles apart during the week.”

Jess picked at her sandwich. “Is it getting serious?”

Maura laughed. “Serious? Mom, you sound like you just stepped out of a George Eliot novel.
Serious
,” she repeated, rolling her blue eyes and pursing her lips. “Oh, Jessica, whatever will we do if the—
situation
—becomes serious?”

Despite her misgivings, Jess laughed in return, savoring her daughter’s happy mood, wondering how many years it had been since she herself had felt carefree, invulnerable to despair. In this moment, Jess wondered if she should share the letter with Maura, share her feelings about it.

“Don’t worry, Mom,” Maura said, “Eddie and I are being careful about everything.” Which, Jess knew, meant that yes, they were sleeping together, but they were using condoms to avoid pregnancy and, God help us, AIDS.

She swallowed a mouthful of tea and decided that now was the time to tell Maura about the letter. But Maura spoke first.

“I wish you liked Eddie better.”

She set down her cup. “I never said I didn’t like him.”

“I know. But it’s a feeling I get. Kind of like when I know you’re pissed off at me even though you haven’t said so.”

Jess blinked at her daughter’s language. She took another bite of her sandwich and realized that the moment for mentioning the letter had passed; that they were now reentering the mother-daughter tug-of-war zone.

“I think it’s because he reminds you of Daddy,” Maura blurted out.

“Your father has nothing to do with this,” Jess said quietly, although Eddie did seem to value the same things Charles always had: schmoozing with the right people, owning the right things.

“Well, he’s not a bit like Daddy,” her daughter continued. “Eddie is fun. Daddy’s an insufferable, snotty stuffed shirt.”

Jess burst into laughter. It was the perfect description of Charles.
Oh, yes
, she thought, holding a hand to her side, sometimes she underestimated her children’s ability to think for themselves. “Hand me the check,” she said, trying to stop laughing. “We still need to get to Saks before you have to get home.”

Maura handed Jess the check: thirty-four dollars for two sandwiches and tea. Jess shook her head and opened her wallet. Even though she’d not had the chance to tell Maura about the letter, at least she’d had herself a good laugh.

As Jess helped Maura bring in the bags from Bloomingdale’s and the one from Macy’s with the “Mom, I
have
to have it” straw hat, she avoided asking if her daughter planned to spend the whole night in Eddie’s dorm room. Instead, she counted her blessings that Maura was happy,
and that it was neither snowing nor sleeting, though the late winter air had turned hard-bitten, New England frigid, and perhaps the roads would be slick from last night’s rain.

Jess set the packages on the white tile floor of the two-story foyer and willed herself not to think about fast-moving trucks.

Maura breezed past her and went into the kitchen. “I’m going to check the phone …”

Jess opened the hall closet and squeezed her coat between ski parkas whose chair lift tickets clung to one another as if braced for the next storm.

Beep.

From the kitchen came the sound of the answering machine, but Jess was too weary to listen. She straightened the ski parkas and closed the closet door. Tonight she would have her night of peace. Tonight she would curl up in the old chenille robe.…

Maura appeared in the doorway. “Mom? There’s a weird message on the machine.”

This comment was not surprising: since the advent of Eddie, Maura seemed to feel that most of Jess’s new friends were, indeed, “weird,” that Jess’s life must be weird without the country clubs and cocktail parties and dinner invitations that once had dominated her life. Jess hoped that someday Maura would see that for what it was, too. “Who is it?” she asked.

“I have no idea. I think you’d better listen.”

Jess went into the kitchen. Her daughter stood back from the answering machine, staring at it as if it were a dead animal on the side of the road. Jess suddenly knew the message must have something to do with the letter.

“Well,” she said, trying to sound in control, “let’s have a listen.” She leaned forward and pushed the button.

Beep.

“Why haven’t I heard from you?” a hushed, garbled voice asked. “Why haven’t I heard from my mother?” The caller hung up. The machine shut off.

Jess stood next to Maura, the two of them as still as the house when the children weren’t home, like statues, like rocks.

“Mom?” Maura finally whispered. “Who was that?”

Wrapping her arms around herself to ward off the sudden chill that had entered the room, Jess thought for a moment. She could have told Maura that it was a client, one who enjoyed playing practical jokes. She could have said it was a friend, or a friend of a friend being silly. Jess could have said anything and Maura would have shrugged her “whatever” shrug and left to go see Eddie and do whatever it was she planned to do. But Jess remembered the pact they had made years ago, the decision made on their own, away from the offices of family therapy, from the easy chairs of the analysts’ offices. It was a promise to always—no matter what—be honest with one another, a pledge to always tell one another the truth.

She had already lied to Chuck about the reason she wanted to reach Charles. She had lied to Chuck; she could not lie to Maura as well.

Jess pulled her stare from the answering machine and twisted her ring. “Do you have time for hot chocolate?”

Maura blinked quickly and pretended to smile. “Oh, God,” she groaned. “I feel a mother-daughter talk coming on.”

Maura had been Jess’s greatest supporter, her us-against-him child, her buffer against Charles. She had once stood—albeit on legs that were only sixteen—resolutely beside Jess when she learned about Amy, when she learned that her mother had, in fact, become a mother long before she’d been a mother to Chuck and Travis and herself, long before the stigma of unwed and underage had ceased to matter to anyone but the right-wing moralists of the world.

Maura had stood beside her, helping Jess win the boys’ acceptance of their mother’s unsavory past. And though
she had not succeeded in swaying Charles, she had made it a point to let Jess know that it was okay, that whatever her mother had done was okay, because she was their mother and they knew that she loved them.

Of course, that had all been five years ago, and the innocent high-school-girl-Maura of then was quite unlike the experienced, college-sophomore-Maura of now.