Michael Tayson watched her, his eyes wide. He was looking at her in that wary way all men looked at unpredictable, emotional women. The same way her father looked at her mother before she said something brash and irrational, the same way James looked at Sylvie in this very house the night before he died, saying, Don’t turn this into an argument about that.
The girl. It had been a girl? A teacher? A student? The word meant too many things.
Tayson’s ice clinked in his empty glass. If it were her grandfather standing here in Sylvie’s place, Sylvie knew just what he would do. Even if someone had just told him all this, he’d take his guest’s glass and say, Can I refresh that for you? In her grandfather’s world, etiquette won the day. Manners were worth their weight in gold.
But Sylvie wasn’t her grandfather. She set her empty glass on the sideboard where it would leave a watermark. Then she turned around abruptly and walked out without even saying good-bye.
Chapter 15
T uesday morning dawned misty and warm. There were geese on Charles’s back lawn, a whole flock of them. He walked around every room of the house, looking at their furniture. He gazed across the street at the silent, identical houses. He noted the property line between his house and his neighbor’s, so clearly defined by a crisp line of cut grass on their side, a scruffy tuft of longer grass on theirs. Then he got into his car.
His heart beat uncomfortably in his throat the whole drive down the turnpike. The seat belt cut into his chest. When he got to the exit, he nearly drove into a lane of oncoming traffic.
He arrived at the Back to the Land site too early, so he pulled into a gas station to kill some time. He went in, bought a cup of coffee, and used the bathroom, shaking out the nerves in his hands. He walked outside again and leaned against his car’s hood, looking around. It was just farmland out here. The day was still, sober—a sickly gray. A crow cawed from a tree, a piece of loose metal fence flapped. Across the street was another gas station, much older, all the pumps vacant. A string of frayed, faded flags hung from the eaves of the little mini-mart, probably to once announce a grand opening. After a few moments of staring, Charles’s body felt shaky. It was the coffee; probably the wrong thing for him right now. He swirled it in the cup, feeling the liquid slosh back and forth against the sides, and then threw it into a trash can.
The turn to Back to the Land was a pitted gravel road. After about a mile, he came upon a log cabin. It was the visitor’s lodge—he knew from all the pamphlets he’d looked through. Residents lived much farther inside the woods, secluded from the highway.
His was the only car in the lot, but there was a light on inside the cabin. Charles wondered how the person inside had gotten here. Had he or she walked? Bronwyn was supposed to meet him here, too; would she also walk? He gazed into the thick woods. The ground looked soggy and half frozen. The only things he could see in the distance were more trees.
The little beep of his car alarm activating was jarring in the stillness. He crunched up the crude gravel path and knocked on the door. “It’s open,” a woman called. Charles’s heart thudded. When he opened the door, he saw a large, older woman at a desk, staring at a computer screen. A phone sat next to her, a fax machine next to that. A fluorescent light shone above her head. Off in the cabin’s corner was a bathroom, the door slightly propped open.
Charles breathed out. It was a relief to see technology, as if he’d been away from it for years.
The woman looked up at him. She had short gray hair, downslanted gray eyes, and a straight mouth. “Hi?”
“I’m from Fischer Editorial,” Charles said. “We’re producing your promotional materials. I’m supposed to meet someone here for an interview. Bronwyn … Pembroke. But I’m early.”
The woman plucked a Kleenex from a box on the desk and shook her head. “You didn’t get her message?”
“Message?”
“She said she was going to call. She wanted to meet you at nine, not ten. Really killed her, having to come down here and use the phone. But it was important she keep her doctor’s appointment today. He’s making a house call, a last-minute thing.”
Charles blinked. He hadn’t checked his office voice mail before he left last night; she must have left a message there. Only, if she had, she would have heard his name on his outgoing voice mail message. This is Charles Bates-McAllister; I’m not available, et cetera. She might not have left a message at all.
“She was here at nine,” the woman went on, turning back to her work. “But she only left a few minutes ago. You might still be able to catch her.”
Charles’s heart lurched again. So she had come. “Which way did she go?”
The woman pointed out the window. “Through those trees there. You’ll probably see her. She’s not walking too quickly these days, because of how far along she is.”
Charles bolted out the door and into the woods, slogging through the soft, murky earth. Far off in the distance, he smelled wood smoke. And then, he heard a twig snap. A footstep. He stopped and quieted his breathing. There it was again, ahead of him. He ran a few steps and saw a figure walking quickly down a ravine.
She had dark hair and that same sharp profile. She wore a simple gray dress, a black coat, and black loafers. And she was hugely pregnant. He sucked in his breath, stunned.
“Bronwyn,” he called out. It emerged from his lips as not much more than a croak. “Bronwyn,” he said, louder.
She stopped and turned and shaded her eyes, looking up the hill. Charles raised a hand to his mouth. He’d tried to prepare himself for this, for it really being her, but his heart still raced, his knees still trembled. Her skin was blotchy, her hair slick. There were rafts of pimples on her chin and her forehead, and her lips were cracked and dry. She met his eyes, first unknowingly, and then her eyebrows sank together. He held up one hand. She squinted, taking a few steps backward.
“Bronwyn,” he said, walking down the ravine. The wet ground seeped through his thin loafers, sending a shiver up his spine.
He stopped a few feet from her. Bronwyn’s face had gone white. She dropped her hand from her forehead. “Charles?”
He tried to smile. She was now staring at him almost angrily, as if he’d caught her doing something terrible.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded. She placed her hands over her stomach. The gesture seemed vaguely protective.
“I’m the … writer. Working on the … the magazine. I’m the one interviewing you.”
“You?”
“I didn’t know it would be you. Mirabelle didn’t tell me who I was meeting with. But when I saw you here, I …”
The words tumbled out of him unwittingly. He didn’t know if lying was the right way to play this, but admitting that he’d known seemed so insidious.
Bronwyn blinked. Her eyes were cold and black. Uncomfortable. She picked at her lips with her pinkie finger, a gesture Charles recalled from when they were dating. It was like an old smell, wafting back to him. “They said the writer’s name was Charles,” she said in a faraway voice. “They didn’t give a last name. I didn’t ask.”
They stood still for a long time. There were no sounds. Charles’s gaze fell to her swollen stomach. Her thin, dirt-colored shoes looked like they were made out of cardboard.
“Do you … like this?” He swept his arms around, indicating the woods, the solitude.
Bronwyn nodded meekly. “Yes.”
“Is it like … camping?”
“A little.”
“And you’re going to have a baby here?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think that’s wise?”
“Please,” she said quietly, pleadingly.
He paused, grateful she’d stopped him.
She took a breath, composed herself. “This is a little unexpected, Charles.”
He placed his hand against a tree trunk, digging his nails into the bark. Her discomfort didn’t surprise him. He’d had time to prepare for this, time to gather his emotions, but he would have responded the same way if the situation were reversed, if she had ambushed him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll see if I can get another writer to do this. I’ll see if we can reschedule.”
Bronwyn nodded.
“I mean, it isn’t that I don’t want to see you,” he rushed on. “I just … I want to do what’s best for the magazine.”
“The magazine,” she repeated.
Behind them, sticks crackled. Charles turned. The woman from the office was standing at the top of the hill. “Winnie?” she called. “You okay?”
“Fine, Laurel,” Bronwyn called back, her voice halting.
Laurel shrugged, remained for another long moment, and then trudged back into the cabin.
“Winnie?” Charles asked when she was gone.
Bronwyn blinked back at him.
“I’ve never heard anyone call you Winnie before.”
She jutted her chin away from him, staring at a spindly tree. Nothing had bloomed out here yet. Everything was still bare. “How do you know, Charles? Have you met everyone who’s ever spoken to me?”
Charles opened his mouth, and then shut it fast. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just . . . this is about the last place I expected to see you. When did you move here?”
“A few months ago. I got married. We lived in LA. But then my dad got sick, so we moved back.”
“You lived with your dad when you first moved back?”
“No, Leon and I lived here. We made this decision together. Anyway, Dad has lots of people caring for him. Round-the-clock nurses and stuff. He has Alzheimer’s.”
All the information hurtled at him too quickly. Leon. Only a few months. And her dad had been sick. Why hadn’t they lived in her family’s big, beautiful house when they moved back? Why had they chosen this instead? His eyes landed on her stomach again. Her clumsy, handmade dress. One of her fingernails was black.
“I like this,” Bronwyn said simply, as if sensing his observations. “I like what I’m doing. I’m happy.”
“But you could have been so many things,” he blurted out. He had to say it; there was no way he was leaving without saying it. “You could have become so much.”
She laced her hands over her belly. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I just mean … well, what do your parents think about this?”
“Well, my dad doesn’t have much of a grasp on it. And my mom and I don’t speak.”
“Because of this?”
She paused on him for a long time, as if it was the stupidest question he could ask. “No, Charles. Not because of this. We haven’t spoken for a long time.”
The tip of her nose was red. He knew, from years of being with her—standing with her out in the cold weather, talking, kissing, arguing, promising things to each other—that her nose wasn’t red right now because of the cold. It was because she was upset. He was upsetting her. She led an insulated, pleasant life, and here he was, tramping on it, cheapening it.