Untold Story (2 page)

“And you saw that? You saw that ahead of time?”

Tevis hesitates a moment, then scrupulously shakes her head. “No. It was more like a general premonition.”

“And that was—what?—two years ago? How many you had since then?” Amber, her anxiety rising, glances at the Dundee cake, enthroned on a glass stand as the table’s centerpiece. It is mud brown and weighs a ton. Lydia mentioned it one time, a childhood favorite, and Amber found a recipe on the Internet.

“None,” says Tevis, “until today.”

“You never get a bad feeling in the mornings?” says Suzie. “Man, I get them, like, every day.”

Amber gets up and starts washing the three dirty wineglasses. She has to do something and it’s all she can think of except, of course, calling Lydia again. But when Lydia strides through the door, that swing in her hips, that giggle in her voice, Amber doesn’t want to feel too foolish. “Damn it, I’m calling again,” she says, drying her hands.

“There’s no reason why it should be to do with Lydia,” says Tevis, but the more she says it, the more certain she feels that it is. Only a couple of days ago, Lydia came over and asked for the tarot cards, something she had always refused before. Tevis laid the cards out on the mermaid mosaic table but then Rufus wagged his tail and knocked two cards to the floor. Lydia picked them up and said, “Let’s not do this,” and shuffled all the cards back into the deck. Tevis explained that it wouldn’t matter, that to deal the cards again would not diminish their power. “I know,” Lydia said, “but I’ve changed my mind. Rufus changed it for me. He’s very wise, you know.” She laughed, and though her laugh contained, as usual, a peal of silver bells, it also struck another note. Lydia was intuitive, she knew things, she sensed them, and she had backed away from the cards.

“Absolutely no reason,” Tevis repeats, and Suzie says, “It’s probably nothing at all,” which sounds like words of comfort and makes the three of them uneasy that such comfort should be required.

Amber tosses her cell phone onto a plate. Lydia’s phone has gone to voice mail again and what’s the point in leaving yet another message? “Maybe she took Rufus on a long walk, lost track of time, forgot to take her phone.” She knows how lame it sounds.

“She could’ve got the days mixed,” says Suzie, without conviction.

“Suzie, it’s her birthday. How could she get the days mixed? Anyway she called this morning and said see you at seven. There’s no mix-up, she’s just . . . late.” Lydia had sounded distracted, it was true. But, thinks Amber, she has frequently seemed distracted lately.

“What the . . .” says Suzie.

“I told you,” says Tevis. “Hail.”

“What the . . .” says Suzie again, and the rest of her sentence is lost in the din.

“Come on,” shouts Amber, racing for the front door. “If she arrives right now we’ll never hear the bell.”

They stand outside on the front deck and watch the hail drum off Mrs. Gillolt’s roof, snare sideways off the hood of Amber’s Highlander, rattle in and out of the aluminum bucket by the garage. The sky has turned an inglorious dirty purple, and the hail falls with utter abandon, bouncing, colliding, rolling, compelling in its unseemliness. It falls and it falls. The hail is not large, only dense, pouring down like white rice from the torn seam above. “Oh my God,” screams Amber. “Look at it,” Suzie screams back. Tevis walks down the steps and plants herself on the lawn, arms held wide, head tilted back to the sky. “Is she saying a prayer?” yells Suzie, and Amber, despite the tension, or because of it, starts to laugh.

She is laughing still when a car pulls off the road; the headlights seem to sweep the hail, lift it in a thick white cloud above the black asphalt driveway, and spray it toward the house. Tevis lets her arms drop and runs toward the car, her Realtor’s cream silk blouse sticking to her skinny back. The others run down too. It must be Lydia, although the car is nothing but a dark shape behind the lights.

When Esther climbs out of the front seat, clutching a present to her chest, they embrace her in an awkward circle of compensation that does little to conceal their disappointment.

Back in the kitchen, Amber sets another place at the table. Esther brushes hail from her shoulders, unpins her bun, and shakes a few hailstones out of her long gray hair. “Forgot I was coming, didn’t you?” she says, her tone somewhere between sage and mischievous.

“No!” says Amber. “Well, yes.”

“That’s what happens to women,” says Esther. “We reach an age where we get forgotten about.” She doesn’t sound remotely aggrieved.

Amber, through her cloud of embarrassment and anxiety, experiences a pang for what lies ahead, fears, in fact, that it has already begun, at her age, a divorcée the rest of her life. She gathers herself to the moment. “The thing is, we’ve all been a bit worried about Lydia. Has she been working late? She’s not answering her phone.”

“Lydia took the day off,” says Esther. “You mean she’s not been here?”

Nobody answers, as Esther looks from one to the next.

“We should drive over to the house,” says Suzie.

“Wait until the hail stops,” says Tevis.

“We can’t just sit here,” says Amber.

They sit and look at each other, waiting for someone to take charge.

Chapter Two

One month earlier, March 2007

For a town of only eight thousand inhabitants, Kensington pretty much had everything: a hardware store, two grocery stores, a florist, a bakery, a pharmacy with a wider-than-usual selection of books, an antiques store, a Realtor’s, a funeral home. When there was a death in Abrams, Havering, Bloomfield, or Gains, or any of the other not-quite-towns that tumbled across the county, nobody would dream of calling a funeral home in the city. They would call J. C. Dryden and Sons, a business established in 1882, a mere four years after the founding of Kensington itself. If, as sometimes happened, demand was running so high that a funeral could not be accommodated in timely fashion, Mr. Dryden would call the bereaved to advise personally on alternatives. Kensington was thus sought after in death, and if it was not quite equally sought after in life, real estate prices were certainly on the high side. A couple of Kensington’s stores were located on Fairfax but the majority lined Albert Street or turned the corner into Victoria Street. From Albert, the town fanned away on a gentle incline to the north, to the south reached down within five miles of the interstate, handy for those with a city commute, to the east was bounded by a thirsty-looking river, and to the west by the sprinkler-saturated greens of the golf course that eventually gave way to a forest of tamaracks, sweet gums, and pines.

Lydia drove past the golf course on her way into town. Wednesdays she worked a half day at the Kensington Canine Sanctuary, a sprawling block of kennels and yards just outside of town that picked up mutts or had them delivered from “the area of darkness”; that was how Esther described the county, which had no other dog shelters at all. Four days a week Lydia worked until six in the evening, ordering supplies, cleaning kennels, training and handling, humping thirty-pound bags of Nature’s Variety dried dog food, eating Esther’s chicken rice salad out of Tupperware. But Wednesdays Lydia nudged Rufus awake with the toe of her sneaker at noon. He’d be sleeping in the office with his ears flapped over his eyes, and he’d stretch his butt up in the air, shiver his front paws, and shake his head as if he knew not what the world was coming to, then race ahead of her to leap in the back of the dusty blue Sport Trac.

Usually Lydia scooped him out of the cargo box and set him on the front passenger seat but today she let him ride in the box with the wind streaming back his ears, so when she said, “Do you think I should stop seeing Carson?” there was no quizzical face looking up at her, urging her to continue. She shrugged at the empty passenger seat and switched the radio on.

She drove up Fairfax, past the sports field, playground, elementary school, and bed-and-breakfast and turned into Albert, parking by the bakery where she bought two toasted pastrami and Swiss paninis and walked up to Amber’s store, Rufus padding so close to her ankles she had a job to avoid tripping over him.

The store didn’t close for lunch and Wednesdays Amber’s assistant went to hairdressing school in the city so Lydia always took sandwiches in.

“Hey,” said Amber, looking up from a magazine. She came around from behind the counter adjusting her skirt and her hair, touching her finger to the bow of her lip to make sure no lipstick had strayed.

The first thing Lydia had learned, the first among many first things, when she had taken the job she had held, or that held her, for most of her adult life, was never to fiddle with any part of her wardrobe or makeup. Yes, they had taught her that explicitly, though there was much that they had not. It was a lesson she could hand on to Amber. Amber, who could not pass a mirror without checking it, who used a window if a mirror was not available, who was fearful of being looked at by everybody and terrified of being looked at by no one. But poise, Lydia had decided, was overrated. Only fools and knaves gave a fig about that.

“You look great,” she said. “New skirt?”

Amber said that it was and probed Lydia for a detailed opinion, explaining that it was from a range she was considering for the store. Lydia wore jeans and a T-shirt nearly every day but Amber seemed to think she knew a great deal about clothes and fashion, which was not an impression Lydia was ever aiming to give.

They sat on the repro fainting couch by the window. Amber had bought it, she said, for the husbands who became a little dizzy when they saw the price tags. “Though there’s nothing in here over four hundred bucks,” she had added, a little wistfully.

“I’ve got to show you these photos,” Amber said now. She retrieved the gossip magazine from the counter. “This one was taken last week. And then here she is in the nineties. Doesn’t she look so different?”

“Don’t we all?” said Lydia, barely giving the page a glance.

“Her nostrils are uneven,” said Amber. “That’s always a telltale sign.”

Lydia took another bite of her panini so she didn’t have to say anything.

Amber started reading aloud. “‘She may have had a lower eye lift and, judging by her appearance, her surgeon may have employed a new technique by going in underneath the actual eyeball—this reduces the risk of scarring and can have excellent results.’”

Lydia pulled a face. “Why do you read this stuff ?” She waved the sandwich at the stack of magazines on the coffee table.

“I know, I know,” said Amber. “It’s ridiculous. She’s definitely had Botox as well.”

“Who cares?” said Lydia. “Her and every other actress her age.”

Amber tucked her hair behind her ears. Last year she had cut bangs and this year she was growing them out and her hair kept falling over her eyes so the tucking was a repeated necessity, but it had also become part of her repertoire of self-adjustments and taken on an apologetic quality. She laughed. “I don’t know why I read this stuff. But everybody does. There’s even a college professor comes in here and she spends more time flicking through the magazines than flicking through the racks. Guess she doesn’t like buying them herself, but what do you think she reads at the hairdresser’s? Not one of her professor books, for sure.”

Lydia held a sliver of pastrami out to Rufus. “Well, we think it’s silly, don’t we, boy?”

Rufus licked her fingers in assent.

“Oh my God,” said Amber.

Lydia loved the way Amber said
oh my God
. It was so American. It reminded her of how English she felt after nearly ten years in the States, and that when everything else about her felt not so much hidden as worn away, her Englishness, at least, remained.

Almost ten years. It was 1997 when she arrived—not only a decade but a millennium ago.

“Oh my God, I’d forgotten—I’ve got these gowns in back I really want you to try. They are going to look so fabulous. I can’t wait to see.” Amber ran into the stockroom, and Lydia watched through the open door as she shucked plastic-sheathed dresses off the revolving rail and laid them over her arm.

When she’d arrived in Kensington, it was Tevis who had sold Lydia the house, but Amber with whom she’d first made friends. They had shared a table in the bakery, there were only four tables so you normally had to share. Over a cappuccino for Amber and an Earl Grey for Lydia they recognized in each other an instant acceptance, and Lydia, who for seven years had made only acquaintances, was relieved to give herself up to this inevitability. She was careful, of course, but after a few conversations, filling each other in on their backgrounds, there wasn’t much need for caution, and Lydia found herself wondering why, for so long, she had held back from everyone.

That first afternoon Amber told Lydia about her marriage, to her childhood sweetheart, how he’d cheated on her with her best friend, how she’d forgiven them both because “it just kind of happened,” they were attorneys in the same law firm and she was a stay-at-home mom and looked kind of schlubby most days, and how when she looked in the mirror she felt sort of guilty about the whole thing. She’d given herself a makeover, of course, and they did “date nights” and talked and got a whole lot of issues out on the table, like how he hated her meat loaf and had never been able to say. And it had been sweet and dandy for a while, before she found out about another affair, with a waitress at their favorite “date night” restaurant, but he said it was “only physical” and she had forgiven him again. She’d cried about it anyway, as anyone would, and it was Donna who comforted her. Donna, her best friend. Who was still sleeping with her husband as probably everyone knew except Amber, who, when she walked in on them, in the moments before they noticed her, fought the urge to tiptoe away and pretend to have seen nothing. At the age of thirty-nine with two children and no career, it seemed more sensible to treat it as a hallucination than to face the howling truth.