Chapter Six
Kathy had never felt so excluded in her life. All morning she’d done her best to befriend the women Ray had told her were truly wonderful. “They’re very funny,” Ray said. “And we talked for hours. I told them some very private things. Those women got more out of me than Dr. Hightower ever did.”
Kathy hadn’t commented on that because he’d kept his visits to Jeanne Hightower so secret that she’d come to resent the woman. What was he talking to her about? Kathy had her hopes, but she wouldn’t be sure until he told her.
But these women! What about them had made Ray say they were so easy to talk to? She could hardly get more than ten words out of them. She’d tried to get them to leave the house and go into Summer Hill with her, but she hadn’t succeeded.
She couldn’t help but wonder if the problem was her weight. Both of them were so skinny that at any moment Kathy expected them to “suggest”—in that superior tone skinnies had perfected—that if she ate “healthy” she would, you know, lose weight. They probably thought she ate doughnuts four times a day.
This would, of course, be followed by their suggestion that she exercise, as though she sat around all day eating bonbons. Skinnies always believed they knew the answer to every weight problem. Eat less; move more. In their minds, it was oh so simple.
All this would be said while the skinnies were eating and eating, then eating some more.
And their idea of exercise was three leg lifts and a brisk walk to their car. Kathy’s favorite suggestion was that she park her car far from the store and walk. Her reply was a deadpan “Should I give up my daily three-mile jog to do this?”
Kathy had three personal trainers, one for boxing (guaranteed to make a person lose weight, ha!), one for HIIT—high intensity interval training—that had her pushing a steel sled full of forty-five-pound plates, and one for yoga (Kathy could bend over and slap her hands on the floor).
As for food, she gained on Weight Watchers, barely maintained on twelve hundred calories a day, and never lost no matter how much she moved, lifted, or stretched. Or how little she ate. Whenever a skinny followed Kathy around for a day, she’d sit down and say, “I have to have something to eat or I’m going to pass out.” Kathy was then supposed to feel sympathy for her thirty-six-inch butt.
But these women barely spoke. When they did, it was impersonal. Politely, kindly, Olivia told her the history of the estate. Elise told about River House, where Olivia was to live with her new husband, and how there was a pretty little island in front of it.
Kathy didn’t miss the fact that during this last bit the two of them were twitching with some shared secret about the island. They did not share it with her.
Olivia chatted about gardening and church, and told of a play the town had put on last summer. Elise said that in the last year she had become very interested in gardening. In fact, she’d spent hours each day just watching the plants.
Again, there were the little smiles of secrets shared. And again, Kathy was excluded. Right now the skinnies were sitting in the living room, each with a book, and silent.
Suddenly, the thought came to her that maybe the problem could be with whatever Ray had told them.
That idea nearly made her heart stop. Had he told them—please no!—about their nonexistent sex life? How women everywhere came on to him? Kathy had seen and heard a thousand versions of What’s a gorgeous guy like you doing with a fatty like her?
What could her reply be to that endless question? My father owns the company where Ray works? Perfect. That would make it clear that a hunk like Ray wasn’t passionate about a chunk like her.
What could Ray have told them? It had been odd that he’d said he was going to Virginia by himself. He liked people around him. After Ray left, his secretary, Rita, called and told her about the situation at work, and Kathy knew he had to go to Australia.
When she finally got him on the phone last night—he didn’t answer her emails, and her first two calls went to voice mail—he’d raved about the women so much that Kathy wanted to meet them. It was her idea to go to Virginia and stay for a while.
Oddly, Ray had suddenly started discouraging her visit. He’d said the house was “too small to move around in” and he disliked the grounds with an empty mansion and a wall around it. But she’d very much wanted a vacation, and he’d made the women sound fascinating.
She should have known it was too perfect to be real. Maybe these women were like so many others and had fallen for Ray. Maybe young Elise was after him. Was that why they were looking down their noses at his less-than-svelte wife?
By lunchtime, Kathy had decided to repack her bags and leave. She was used to women falling for her husband, but this was ridiculous!
“Is anyone hungry?” Olivia asked. “I am.” She was standing in the doorway, and unless Kathy missed her guess, there was pity on her face.
Kathy had had it! “Shall we order in three supersize pizzas? A slice for each of you and I’ll eat the rest of them? And let’s not forget the huge bottle of regular Coke and those cinnamon bars.” Skinny Elise was standing next to Olivia. “Better than delivery, I’ll go get them so you two won’t have to be seen with me.” She went to the stairs.
“What’s wrong?” Elise asked. “What did we do?”
It was Olivia who realized that they had unintentionally been too reserved with Kathy.
They’d not meant to, but they had excluded her. Olivia spoke loudly. “My stepson and his wife have camped out in my house at the far end of the estate. They’re planning to hit me up for money, so I don’t want them to know I’m back in town. And the police are probably after Elise, so she can’t be seen outside the grounds. That’s why we didn’t want to go into town with you.”
Kathy halted at the doorway but kept her back to them.
Olivia continued. “We were too embarrassed to tell you so we kept quiet. I apologize.”
“Me too!” Elise said. “I wanted to go shopping with you, but I’m afraid that if I use a credit card, my dad will send men after me and I’ll be put back in a loony bin.”
Kathy turned to face them.
“And if I go out,” Olivia said, “someone in town will tell my daughter-in-law, then she’ll be over here nagging me to death. And crying. I know I’ll eventually have to face up to it, but...” She shrugged.
Kathy was trying to understand what they were telling her. “You two are also patients of Dr. Hightower?”
“I am,” Elise said. “She broke me out of the mental institution where my husband, Kent, and my father had put me.”
“Jeanne got her out by hiding her in the trunk of her car,” Olivia said. “There may be legal repercussions. I’m not one of her patients but I think she arranged for me to be here.”
“Do you?” Elise asked. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“It’s just a theory I have and if I ever meet the woman I plan to find out.”
“She’s—” Elise began, but Kathy cut her off.
“You two haven’t been excluding me because of...” She motioned to her body.
“Of course not,” Olivia said. “What a dreadful thought.”
“But I ought to,” Elise said. “You look like a taller version of Carmen. But your face is prettier and what do you use on your hair? It looks great. Oh, and Carmen is the woman my husband dumped me for. They have a little girl. He didn’t want to start a family with me.”
As Kathy sat down on the couch, she named a salon shampoo. She was staring at Elise. “I’m not understanding this. Your husband...?”
“Had a second family,” Elise said.
“And so did mine,” Olivia added.
They looked at Kathy—and waited. They knew that her husband was on the verge of starting a new family, but they didn’t tell her that. And if Kathy knew, she gave no indication of it.
Elise broke the silence as she looked at Olivia. “Do you think Jeanne put us together because you and I have the same problem?”
“I have no idea, but it makes sense,” Olivia said. “I have come to believe that this is supposed to be a therapy weekend.”
“We spill our guts, that sort of thing?” Elise asked. “Actually, I’d love to tell my whole story. As long as no one even mentions suicide.”
The two women turned to Kathy, silently asking if she’d like to hear of Elise’s problems.
Kathy could just blink. Maybe it was all the zillions of diet programs she’d been on in her adult life, but they made a person feel that if you just lost weight everything would be perfect. If you had marriage problems, thinner thighs would resolve the issues. And a skinny you would stand up to the Mean Girls of the world. Hey! You might even be asked to join them.
But that didn’t seem to be true. Tall, model-thin Elise’s husband preferred a woman with meat on her bones. “Please,” Kathy said, “I’d like to hear whatever you want to tell.”
“But wait!” Olivia said. “I have to get sandwich makings and wine. That all right with you two?”
“Perfect,” Elise said. “I think maybe I should start at the end and go backward. I want you to know what was actually going on while I was so innocently frolicking in the dirt with Alejandro.”
“Alejandro?” Kathy asked.
“Our family’s gardener’s little brother. The most beautiful man on earth.”
“I have another candidate for that title,” Olivia said, and they looked at Kathy.
“Still looking for mine.”
“What about—?” Olivia began, but stopped herself and looked at Elise. “Please begin.”
“When I look back on it,” Elise began, “it seems that everything—Kent, Alejandro, Carmen—were all caused by Tara. I knew her in school and she was an absolute bitch. About two months ago, on a lazy afternoon, she showed up at my house, uninvited. I could tell by the wild look in her eyes that she had something dreadful to tell me. It was always some gossip about someone we both knew. It would be a divorce, or that she’d seen a husband with a pretty girl. Something salacious and mean.”
“What does she do?” Olivia was on a pillow on the floor on the far side of the coffee table. She began slathering bread with mayonnaise and loading it with cold cuts and lettuce.
“She’s a lawyer—which she loves to rub in my face.” Elise’s voice changed to falsetto. “‘How I wish I could be like you, Elise, and spend my days doing nothing but enjoying myself. A stress-free life.”
“Zinger there,” Kathy said.
“Jealousy is what that is.” Olivia handed Kathy a plate with a thick sandwich. “Did she make a pass at your husband and get turned down?”
Elise gave a little smile. “Not that I know of, but two times she told me she was expecting an engagement ring from a guy she was dating. But it never happened. That day, I could tell that she had Big News. She didn’t say a word, just handed me her cell phone. It was a photo of Kent out shopping with a pretty woman and a little girl. I handed her phone back and said that was Carmen, our gardener’s sister. Mostly, I was annoyed that Kent was at a mall when he was always telling me that he never had time to leave work.”
Elise took a breath. “Tara opened her briefcase and pulled out a thick folder. It was full of photos and documents—all of them about my husband. It looked like she’d been working on it for quite a while. She left it all with me and scurried away.”
Olivia reached out and took Elise’s hand.
“I sat on the couch and went through the papers. Over and over. At first, all I could see was the money. Somehow, Tara had tapped into a bank account that I didn’t know Kent had. He was always on me to save money. His favorite words were ‘How much did it cost?’ But his secret account showed that he earned more than he said he did, and he was spending a lot on...on...them.”
Elise was trying to get her emotions under control. “It was a while before I saw that there was a birth certificate listing Kent as the father of Carmen’s daughter. I remembered the week she was born. It was just a few months after our wedding, and Kent had to go away to a two-week conference. He didn’t call me while he was away because he said his phone broke and he didn’t have time to fix it or get a new one.”
She paused. “After a while, I realized that the money put into the account was direct deposit. That meant his boss, my father, had to know about Kent’s other family.”
“You were being betrayed by everyone,” Olivia said.
“Yes, I was.”
“What did you do?” Kathy asked.
“That night when Kent came home—it was after eleven—I was still sitting on the couch with the papers on my lap. I hadn’t moved in hours. I got up and handed him the folder. You know what he said?”
Both Olivia and Kathy shook their heads.
“I can quote him as it’s burned into my memory. He said, ‘I bet Tara did this. She’s always liked sticking her nose into other people’s business. Elise, baby, you ought to stay away from her.’”
“Yeow,” Kathy said. “That was cruel.”
“That’s the voice of a man who is scared.” Olivia was frowning. “And what did you reply to that?”
“I lost it,” Elise said. “I started screaming. By that time Alejandro and I were...” She stopped talking.
“You told him about Alejandro?” Olivia asked.
“No. I had enough sense not to mention Carmen’s brother.”
“Ah,” Olivia said. “But part of you wondered if Alejandro was a decoy.”
Elise took a drink of her soda. “It certainly did seem to be a huge coincidence that he and Carmen were together, and that Alejandro and I were...were friends.”
“How was Kent during all this?” Kathy asked.
“He seemed calm, but he wasn’t. He made me a drink and he was shaking so much that he spilled half of it.”
“And he put pills in it,” Olivia said softly.
Kathy gasped.
“He did.” For a moment, Elise’s jaw clamped shut. “I was pacing back and forth and yelling so I didn’t see him do it. I wanted to grab something and hit him with it. He had no idea how much I was planning to give up for him! I had such a deep sense of loyalty that I hadn’t... I never...” She swallowed. “Anyway, I was so angry that I couldn’t see or hear much. When he handed me a drink, I gulped it. It was almost straight vodka and I hadn’t eaten all day. It went straight to my head. I was so dizzy that Kent pushed me toward the bedroom and I fell down on the bed. He left the room.”
Elise stood up, paced for a moment, then looked back at them.
“As soon as my head stopped whirling, I got up, went to the door, and opened it. Kent was on the phone. I heard him say, ‘She knows.’”
“And that’s when reality hit you,” Olivia said.
Elise nodded. “I finally, at last, saw that my husband was never going to really love me.”
“It was about love,” Kathy said. “You weren’t angry about money or even another woman, but about love.”
“Yes. That’s true.”
Again, Olivia squeezed Elise’s hand. “That’s when you wanted oblivion, so you took a pill.”
“Yes, but only enough to calm me so I could think,” Elise said. “There was a bottle of Kent’s prescription sleeping pills on the bedside table. He said that the stress of his job kept him from sleeping.”
“Maybe it was his guilty conscience,” Olivia said.
Kathy grimaced. “Or worry about how to afford everything.”
“That’s more likely,” Elise said.
“You took a pill.” Olivia’s voice was encouraging. “But you didn’t know that Kent had already given you some.”
Elise nodded. “When I felt sleepy, I was glad. It was all horrible, but at the same time it was a relief. I thought about how in the morning I’d contact a lawyer.”
“Would it be Tara?” Kathy asked.
Elise smiled. “She certainly would know the meanest, most soulless lawyer there was. When I drifted off to sleep, I was almost happy.”
“You were thinking about Alejandro,” Olivia said.
“I was hoping about Alejandro. Maybe he didn’t know about his sister and my husband. But then, he and his brother had said things that suddenly made sense. Had everything between us been to distract me? Or could it have been some huge, cosmic coincidence that my husband and I had fallen for two people from the same family?”
“Or just old-fashioned proximity. They were both there, near you two,” Olivia said. “I can attest that youthful hormones tend to guide people, not wisdom. What happened when you woke up in a hospital?”
“Kent was holding my hand and he’d been crying.”
“Out of fear of going to jail?” Kathy’s voice was angry.
“My guess is that he was genuinely sorry,” Olivia said. “I doubt if he meant to harm you.”
“He didn’t,” Elise said. “He was just stupid, that’s all. He was kissing my hand and saying he was sorry. And he was telling me that from now on he’d be a better husband and we’d start over fresh. We’d forget about the past and go on from there.”
“Did you believe him?” Olivia asked.
“All I could think about was his cute little daughter. He was going to abandon her? I didn’t think so—and I didn’t want that. My throat was raw from the tube that had been stuck down it, but I managed to say, ‘I want a divorce.’”
“What did he say to that?” Kathy asked.
“He started pleading. I knew he was afraid that a divorce would make my dad fire him. But Kent could see that I wasn’t going to back down. That’s when my parents and his arrived.” Elise looked at Kathy. “A therapist was with them and she was talking about my suicide attempt as though it were a given. She was telling them how to ‘handle’ me to make sure I didn’t do it again and talking of a place where I’d be ‘protected.’ I could hardly speak but I kept saying no and trying to get Kent to tell them the truth.”
“But he saw his opportunity and took it,” Olivia said.
“He did. I think he was afraid that I’d press charges against him. Putting pills in somebody’s drink is a crime.”
“What did your parents say?” Kathy asked.
“My mother—as always—was disgusted with me. I don’t think I’ve ever pleased her in my entire life. But my father...” Again, Elise’s jaw clamped down. “My father was giving Kent looks as though to say, ‘I knew this was going to happen.’”
“Do you think he knew Kent had put the pills in your drink?” Olivia asked.
“No. I think my father thought I’d found out about Carmen and had tried to kill myself. He wanted me put under constant care so I couldn’t try to do it again. He and Kent signed papers and I...” Elise shrugged.
“You were put in a psychiatric ward,” Olivia said.
“And no one there believed me when I said I hadn’t tried to kill myself. One of the doctors said I was so angry that he was afraid that if I were released I might harm Carmen and her child.”
“That’s horrible!” Kathy said. “You were made into the villain. And meanwhile, Kent was at home like nothing had happened.”
“Then you met Jeanne,” Olivia said.
“She wasn’t my doctor so she couldn’t release me without the permission of my father and my husband. The, you know, sane people.”
“So you escaped in the trunk of her car.”
“I did. She let me out after we crossed the state line, and I sat in the front seat. We took turns driving.”
“What did you talk about?” Olivia asked.
Elise smiled. “Jeanne said, ‘Just so you know, I think your whole family is a bunch of douche wads and I’d like to see them locked up. But let’s talk about happy things.’ So we did. Food, gardens, and places we’d been. The next day she dropped me off at the diner in Summer Hill. She said, ‘I’m going to see that you will be given a chance to fix all of this.’”
“With lawyers,” Kathy said. “I know some.”
“I guess so, but I got the idea that she meant something else.”
Olivia smiled. “I’m on Jeanne’s side. I want to hear about happy things. I want to know about your shirtless hero.”
“Who may or may not have been spending time with me to cover for Carmen and—”
Olivia put up her hand. “Tell us the story, then let Kathy and me be the judge. How did you meet Alejandro?”
“Through Tara,” Elise said. “At least she’s the one who made me actually see him.” She shook her head. “It’s hard to imagine now but I was so involved with my husband that I paid no attention to the gorgeous, half-naked man sauntering through the garden two days a week. But then, Tara showed up and—”
“Wait!” Kathy said. “When and where was this?”
“Long Island, the summer before I found out about Carmen and their child. Back in the days when I still believed that Kent and I could possibly be a happy couple.”
“I want to know how you and Kent acted when you were together,” Olivia said. “And especially what you were like.”
Elise grimaced. “I was perfect because that’s what I thought it took to make a man love me.”
“Been there, done that,” Kathy said. “With every diet I hoped that—No. This is your story. Tell us about you and Kent, then we want details about you and the beautiful Alejandro.”
“We were and are nothing but friends. That’s all.” Elise’s voice softened. “It never went past that. On that last night, I tried, but he said no.” Her eyes seemed to fade as though in a dream.
“Does Alejandro have dark eyes?” Kathy asked.
Elise came back to the present. “Like a stallion at midnight.”
“And you never went to bed with him?” Kathy asked.
“I was never unfaithful to Kent. Not so much as a kiss. But there was one night with Alejandro when I was tempted to the point where I nearly broke. Moonlight and margaritas. We’d had an argument and he was leaving the country. I had some decisions to make and...” She looked at the women. “I guess I better start at the beginning.”
“Yes, you should,” Olivia said and the women settled back to listen.