A Lady Under Siege (33 page)

Sylvanne eyes had moistened. “Yes, yes,” she answered. “I’m well pleased.”

“Thank God for that,” Mabel sighed with relief. “I wasn’t sure whether you still took his peculiar ideas as nonsense, like you once did, or whether you’ve come to accept them as real.”

“I must have accepted them,” Sylvanne mused. “For the words you have relayed feel to me like a sweet gift. A wedding gift.” Suddenly she felt so exhilarated she couldn’t stand still.

“What is it, Madame?”

“I feel an urge to fly to him, to throw my arms around his neck, and thank him with kisses.”

“Then do so!” Mabel cheered. “Run off to your lucky man, and I’ll head homeward to mine.”

The two of them met Daphne in the hall. “I’ll be right back,” Sylvanne called out in passing.

“What about your dandelion tea?” asked the startled girl.

“You drink mine for me,” Mabel told her. “Your soon-to-be mother needs to kiss her husband-to-be.”

Sylvanne found him in a nearby courtyard, reciting history to a half dozen boys. Without a word she took him by the hand and steered him to a shaded alcove, and told him, “Mabel has delivered your message. I thank you for the gesture, which pleases me very much.” A little furtively she looked about to make sure no one was watching, then stood on tiptoes to kiss him on the lips, and afterward let him hold her close.

“I’m glad,” he replied. “It’s a token of my intentions. I want you to feel cherished.”

“But what of Daphne’s health?” she asked suddenly. “I thought of that later—that’s the one risk we take in severing your connection to this woman’s counsel.”

“I’ve weighed the danger,” he replied. “My feeling is that Daphne is cured—she’s fitter now than she’s ever been in her life. That Lady’s dictums as to hygienic treatment healed the girl’s arm, while such things as oranges and onion and garlic improved her physical health, and I will be forever in her debt for prescribing them. But I also give much credit to you, for the company you’ve kept with her, and the cheer you’ve brought to a lonely girl whose very heart and spirit were broken by her mother’s passing.”

“You give me too much credit,” Sylvanne protested. She pressed herself close against him, her head on his shoulder. “The fates are strange animals,” she murmured. “They brought me here for what seemed a dark purpose, and now they bestow happiness upon me. I pray their work is done, and they leave us from here to build joy upon joy.”

48

D
erek left a message on Meghan’s phone, but she didn’t return it. The next day he left another, and again she didn’t respond. He saw Betsy across the fence and asked her what was up—she told him her mom was super busy with work and kind of depressed. On day three with still no contact he wanted answers, and was about to walk next door to take matters in hand when Meghan showed up on his doorstep.

He decided to keep it light. “Hey neighbour,” he welcomed her. “I’ve been worried about you, not to mention dying to hear the latest—how’d the wedding go?”

“I don’t know,” she answered.

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“I’m taking sleeping pills to stop me dreaming.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yep. Thomas asked me to. Because three’s a crowd. He didn’t want me there on the wedding night. He wants me to go away and leave them alone.”

“Wow. First impression, though, he’s probably right.”

“I know he’s probably right,” she said. “They need to get on with their lives, and have a healthy, normal, loving marriage, a happily-ever-after. He’s the grown-up who saw it and called it. It still hurts, though. Remember I told you it felt like I’d been dumped? Now I
really
feel like I’ve been dumped.”

“Half dumped,” Derek said. “I didn’t dump you. Though I was beginning to think you’d dumped me.”

“No, I didn’t. I haven’t. I just needed time. I got very angry, for a bit. I was mad at both of you—you and him. For conspiring against me.”

“Not against you. For Sylvanne.”

“I know that. I’ve calmed down. I’m on her side too. But I still need time.”

“Of course you do. Your heart is half broken,” he said. “Which is better than fully broken. It’s like the glass half full—we can fill it back up. We can mend the heart.”

“You’re very sweet,” she said. “I missed you.”

“What would you like to do?” he asked gently.

“I’d like to lie down with you on your couch, just lie on your chest, and kind of be held, and comforted. No hanky panky, just tenderness. I’m feeling tender.”

Derek led her by the hand and they lay down. It soothed her to curl herself against the contours of his body. He played with a few stray strands of her hair at her temple, and noted that she was making no effort to look into his eyes.

“Here’s the deal,” he said. “You taking those pills means he’s got his privacy now, but it doesn’t mean we do. He’s still in me, taking this all in, right?”

“Yep,” she replied. “It’s unfair.”

“So what should our strategy be? How do we proceed, knowing he’s there?”

“I want to start pretending he’s not. If I’m not dreaming him anymore it means I won’t see him, and he’ll become like an ex-lover, or ex-friend, or some guy I once had a crush on—he’ll fade from my mind. He’ll diminish, and then maybe, when I look in your eyes, I won’t distinguish what’s him and what’s you—maybe I’ll just start thinking it’s all you.”

“A lot of maybes,” Derek said. “You know what I think? I think we should just relax. Thomas or no Thomas, in the end we’re like any other couple trying to figure out if it’s worth it—it’s going to come down to how compatible we are, how lovable we find each other, and whether our neuroses clash or mesh. Right now it feels very good to lie here with your head on my chest. I wish we could just stay like this forever, but before too long we’ll need to get up and carry on. When we do, let’s just hold hands and keep walking forward. As long as we’re holding hands we’ll be fine.”

She didn’t say anything for a long time. He felt her breathing get slower, and synchronize to his own. With her head on his chest he couldn’t see her eyes, and he thought she might be falling asleep. He liked the idea of them curling up and napping together—it would bring on a sense of warmth, of trust and healing. But suddenly she sat up and said, “You know what? If we’re really talking about a future together, just aimlessly wandering into it holding hands isn’t going to cut it.”

“The plan is to get to know each other.”

Meghan chose her words carefully. “Some things I know about you make it difficult to really imagine it could work out.”

“Like what?”

“Like the way you drink, and smoke. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to take a page from Sylvanne. I was so impressed with the way she just laid out her conditions. I’m going to lay down mine. First and foremost, no substance abuse.”

“Well of course no substance abuse. No one likes abuse,” Derek answered. “But there’s also substance
use
—substances in small doses can actually be good. A glass of wine with dinner, an occasional puff of weed after a stressful day—that’s substance use. It’s moderate, and medicinal.”

“Don’t try to weasel out of it.”

“I’m not weaseling, I’m negotiating.”

“Okay, I’ll be more specific. No drinking to get drunk, and no drugging just to get stoned. No partying your face off, in other words. No drugs harder than pot—”

“I don’t do anything harder than pot anyway.”

“—and no pot around Betsy, or me for that matter. It’s the smoke I hate. I’d love it if you quit smoking.”

“You drive a hard bargain, Miss Meghan.”

“Not really. I’m already compromising on the pot. You can still sneak off and do it sometimes. Medicinally. Although what you have to be stressed about, I don’t know. You don’t even have a job.”

“I don’t need a job. I own this place, and I have money making money, not a lot, but enough to keep me out of the rat race.”

“Must be nice,” she said.

He brought his legs up to give her more space on the couch. She leaned back and rested her chin between his knees, looking at the playful smile on his broad face.

“I feel like quitting smoking, just to show you I can,” he said.

“It’s more the booze, really.”

“No no, if I’m going to do it, do it right. Do it big. Booze, drugs, cigarettes—I’ll tackle the whole shebang. Besides which, if we’re going to hold hands and walk into the future, then Betsy will be there too, and she might want to hold my hand sometimes, and you’ll have my other hand, and then, how would I smoke?”

“Exactly,” she laughed. “It’s not possible.”

“So it’s necessary I quit smoking, whether you want me to or not.”

She kissed his knee happily, then made a face. “Your jeans don’t taste very good,” she said. “They’re quite dirty, now that I look at them.”

“I’ll wash them more often. You see? I’m agreeing to conditions before you even express them. I must really like you.”

49

O
f all his vices Derek found nicotine the hardest to wean himself from, but after two weeks he could think about a cigarette without his teeth clenching with the craving of it. He hired a cleaning service and two meticulous women came to scrub his house from top to bottom for three days straight, and he arranged for one of them to come back every Thursday afternoon to keep it ship-shape. He stocked his kitchen properly, and started to cook, not just for himself, but for Meghan and Betsy. Sometimes they came over to his house to eat, but usually he carried the meal over to their place. Very quickly this became a routine, and after a month, with Meghan’s approval, he built a gate in the fence between their back yards to speed the passage from kitchen to kitchen. One night at dinner he joked that they should just knock a hole in the shared wall between their townhouses and have one big place together. Betsy was very excited by that idea, and thought it would be the coolest thing in the world to show off to her friends that the two homes, so normal from the street, shared an amazing secret. “Let’s do it!” she cried.

“I hate to be the party pooper,” Meghan told her. “But it’s a bit too rash and permanent at this stage.”

“Maybe someday though,” Derek said. “Then we could tear down the fence and have one big back yard, too.”

“Yes! Awesome!” Betsy yelped. “We could even play proper badminton.”

Meghan smiled. “Why do I always feel outnumbered by you two?”

“We operate on the same wavelength,” Derek said.

O
N THE SIXTH-WEEK ANNIVERSARY
of his smoke-free sobriety he showed up on Meghan’s back deck on a Friday afternoon and came in the kitchen without knocking. He had a handful of documents. “I need to you fill these out and sign them,” he said.

For a moment she felt wariness, and, almost, dread. “What are they?”

“Character references. I have to get a criminal record check, too. I went out and got a job. Not a paying job, but a volunteer gig.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I went down to the Boys and Girls Club on Spruce Street to see what I could do to help out. I’m actually thinking of going back to school and getting my CYC.”

“CYC?”

“Child and Youth Care. It’s a certificate you need.”

“I’m shocked,” she said. “In a good way.”

“Yeah, well. Being around Betsy so much has reminded me I like kids, and I’m good with kids. Working with them wouldn’t pay real well but it’s good for the soul. I’m lucky I’m set up financially, more or less, so I can do it for love.”

The way he said the word love sent a tingle through Meghan. “Let me hug you,” she said, and stood on tiptoes while he held her that way, so that she was nearly floating on air above the kitchen floor.

“I used to think hiding from the rat race and puttering around the property was the perfect way to live, but now I see that sitting on my ass for days and years was bad for me,” he told her. “It allowed me to slip. Sobering up isn’t just about quitting drinking, it’s having a cascade effect.”

“I’m so glad for you,” she murmured. She pulled back to look into his face. “Funny, isn’t it? You cleaned up, and now I wish I could.”

“Sleeping pills still messing you up?”