“Tessa?” her father prompted.

  She looked away. She couldn’t see his earnest worried face and talk about it. “We’re studying DNA at school. Inherited characteristics.” She pulled her hands away from his.

  “Ah.” He leaned back in his chair. He folded his arms over his chest. He sighed. “Have you told your mother this?”

  Tessa snorted.

  Calmly, her father said, “It’s not the best of times to drop it on her, do you think?”

  “Why does it always have to be about her?”

  “That’s not fair, Tessa, and you know it. It isn’t always about her. This is just a difficult year for her, a complicated one. Our divorce. Her campaign for the state legislature—”

  “I don’t care!” Tessa burst out. She brought her fists up against her mouth to hold everything else back.

  “You should care. Your mother loves you very much. Your happiness is her first priority. And you’re not a child anymore, Tessa. You’re twelve.” His voice was level but firm. He wasn’t shouting at Tessa, but Tessa felt like he was shouting. “You need to cut your mother some slack, Tessa.” His voice dropped. “Look. Let’s make a deal. The minute the election’s over, we’ll start the search.”

  She was so full of emotions it was like trying to contain a tornado inside her skin. She wanted to throw a tantrum like Brooke’s little brother did, flinging himself on the floor, kicking and wailing. Why, when everyone said she was getting older, more mature, did she feel so childish?

  “Fine,” she muttered.

  Her father stared at her without speaking.

  “I said fine.”

  Her father heaved a gusty sigh. “Want me to fix you a salad?”

  She shook her head.

  “How about a banana?”

  “I’m not hungry.” Her poor dad. He hated leaving when she was sad. He’d blunder around forever trying to find something or say something to make her smile. Then he could leave. “I’m okay, Dad, really. I’m stuffed from McDonald’s.”

  “Sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “You’ve got camp tomorrow, right?”

  “Right.”

  “What will you do?”

  “Tennis. Swim. Maybe do beadwork.”

  “Did you make that?” He nodded at a beaded bracelet around her wrist.

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s cool.”

  “Want me to make you one?”

  “Well, yeah. Yeah, that would be great. Only no pink, okay?”

  The thought of her dad with a pink beaded bracelet on his wide hairy wrist brought a helpless smile to her face. “Let me measure your wrist.”

  She found the measuring tape from the miscellanea drawer—one good thing about her mother being such a neat freak, you could always find whatever you needed, unlike her grandfather’s house where everything was cluttered together. Her father’s wrist was eight inches around. Hers was barely five.

  “If it rains,” she told him, “I might get it done in one day. If it’s sunny, we’ll probably be out all day.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow night.”

  “Okay.”

  He stared down at her. “I love you, Tessa.”

  “I know, Dad. I love you, too.”

  “Eat a banana, for goodness’ sake. For my sake. So I won’t feel too guilty about McDonald’s.”

  She smiled. He left.

  Tessa waited until the front door shut. She took a banana from the fruit bowl and went out to stand in the hall. Her mother’s office door was closed.

  She didn’t really want a banana. But her mother would interrogate her about what she ate, so Tessa carried it up to her bathroom, stripped off the skin, broke it in little pieces, and dropped it into the toilet. She was afraid the skin would plug up the toilet if she put it in all in one piece, so she found her scissors in her desk and cut the skin into segments, then put those in the toilet, too, then flushed the toilet. Everything went down.

  She was a horrible person. People just a few miles away were malnourished, people would be glad to have had that banana that she’d just wasted. There was nothing her mother could say to chastise her that Tessa wasn’t already saying to herself. And her mother didn’t even have a clue about the horrible feelings that swarmed inside her belly and heart like a pack of Stephen King monsters.

  Tessa was pretty sure her birth mother was a criminal in prison.

  Tessa often thought about her birth mother. She’d be fat, with cold dead eyes and a frightening hideous temper. Probably she’d killed someone, or more than one person.

  Or maybe her birth mother was crazy. Maybe she was in one of those special security prisons for the criminally insane. Maybe she paced back and forth, back and forth, in her cell, muttering swears to herself, laughing maniacally, tearing at her flesh with dirty fingernails.

  Maybe sometimes she screamed, kicked the walls and screamed until her throat was raw. Tessa felt like doing that, a lot. She felt like doing that right now.

  Instead, she curled up on top of her bed, still wearing her clothes. Closing her eyes, she held on to her stomach and sank into one of her favorite memories: the animated movie Anastasia. Anastasia had lost her parents, her brothers and sisters, her whole world. When she was Tessa’s age, she’d lived in a terrible orphanage run by a cruel hag. But that was only the beginning of her story.

  Tessa assured herself that she was only at the beginning of her own.

  She was, wasn’t she?

  Which is worse, Kelly wondered, as she and Jason sat unlacing their Rollerblades on the steps of her apartment building: refusing to make love with your fiancé, or making love with him, while imagining, the entire time, another man?

  The heavens smiled down on her, delivering her from the choice—the Red Sox had an afternoon game. When they walked into the living room, the first thing Jason did was to turn on the television set.

  She took her time showering and then dressed in a severe beige sheath with, once again, her grandmother’s pearls. She put her hair up in a French twist. Jason trotted down to his car for the clothes he’d stashed in the trunk, and after his shower, pulled on summer-weight flannels, white shirt, blue blazer, red tie. Sunday evening dinners at his mother’s were not casual.

  It was a brief ride from Cambridge across the river to Boston, but in many ways it was a voyage to a different country. They parked in the garage beneath the Public Gardens, walked up Beacon Street to the redbrick buildings sternly lining the streets, buzzed themselves in, and took the elevator to the fourth floor.

  “Jason, dear. And Kelly. How lovely.”

  Eloise Gray stood before them, poised and cool, in a Lilly Pulitzer silk shirtwaist she’d probably worn thirty years ago. Certainly she hadn’t gained or lost a pound in all those years. And pearls. And heels. With, on this hot summer day, hose. Of course, the apartment was air-conditioned and humidity-controlled for the art and books.

  Briefly, Eloise held her cheek out to be kissed.

  They went into her living room, which glowed with ancient Oriental rugs, heirloom vases and furniture, and oil portraits of her ancestors. Above the fireplace hung a painting of Eloise at eighteen, when she was a debutante. She’d possessed the exquisite dramatic beauty her son had inherited, black hair straight and heavy as wood, piercing dark blue eyes beneath straight black brows, and skin as pale as snow. It was no wonder she’d had her choice of suitors.

  “Kelly, my dear,” Eloise said now, “I am so proud of you. The ceremony was most impressive. I thought we should have some champagne.”

  “Champagne would be wonderful, Eloise.”

  “In that case, Jason, will you do the honors?” Eloise nodded toward the silver bucket where a bottle of Perrier-Jouët waited on ice.

  At first Kelly had been uncomfortable with the stilted conversation, the formality, the stretches of silence in Eloise’s presence, and she knew from Jason that more than one woman had been so daunted by his mother’s disdain that they’d broken off with him.

  If she broke off with Jason, she would be damned if it would be because she couldn’t rise to his mother’s provocations. Deep in her character ran a rod of pride that made her face down any dare. So she had kept any negative thoughts about Eloise to herself.

  When Jason had asked, “Don’t you find my mother cold?” Kelly had replied, “Not at all, I like someone who doesn’t gush.”

  When Jason had asked, “Do you feel like my mother ignores you during dinner?” Kelly had responded, “I enjoy watching the two of you talk.”

  When Jason had asked, “Don’t you find my mother rather forbidding?” she had answered, “Jason, don’t be silly. I really like your mother.”

  Then, one day, she realized that what she said was true, because Eloise reminded her of her grandparents, her father’s parents, whom she had fiercely loved.

  When she was only eighteen, Kelly’s mother, Ingrid, had come from Sweden to work as an au pair. Within a year she’d met Otto, within two years she’d married him, and less than a year after that she was a widowed mother. Kelly’s father, Otto MacLeod, was killed in Vietnam in 1965, the same year she was born. He was an officer and a hero, but that was not much consolation to his parents, for he was their only child.

  Ingrid MacLeod considered moving back to Sweden, but only her father was alive there, a dour, pessimistic fisherman drinking himself to death in a wind-blasted village.

  Besides, Otto’s parents begged her not to return to Sweden. Move in with them, they implored.

  The older MacLeods had a large house on a tree-lined avenue in Arlington, and no one to share it with. If she lived with them, they would take care of her while she took care of Kelly, and she could have time to decide what else she wanted to do with her life, perhaps attend college. Ingrid agreed.

  The MacLeods owned a handsome fabric store on Mass Ave where they carried the best of material, wools imported from Scotland, England, and Ireland, silks from Japan and China, accessories from Italy and France. Their home on Flora Street, within walking distance of the shop, furnished in sharp-cornered angular teak, reflected their stern sense of economy. They had only the necessary furnishings, and those were spartan and clean. Like Jason’s mother, their favorite adage seemed to be: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” They could make a chicken last a week, and even at their most prosperous chose to have soup made from old bones and leftover vegetables rather than throw anything out.

  Hardworking Presbyterians, they frowned on drinking, dancing, and card playing. Because they did not easily touch, kiss, or compliment, Kelly was always shy around her grandparents, but as the years went on, she came to appreciate their sensible reliability and the tranquil orderliness of their days, the logic by which they lived their lives.

  For Ingrid it was different. For the first few years her relationship with her daughter sufficed, but she was a young and beautiful woman who could not help yearning for more adult embraces.

  When she finally did fall in love, she changed everything in Kelly’s life. She betrayed Kelly. She ruined Kelly’s life. She broke Kelly’s heart.

  In a way, Kelly thought, her grandparents were returned to her, through Eloise. The same self-restraint, the same cool facade hiding a steady heart.

  On Sundays Eloise’s housekeeper had the entire day off, so Eloise prepared the meal, set the table, and served the dinner: lamb chops, wild rice, asparagus.

  “Will you pour the wine?” Eloise asked her son.

  “May I help?” Kelly offered, as always—and as always, Eloise refused.

  A bowl of roses sat between the candles in their twisted silver sticks. The silverware was luxuriously heavy. Eloise sat at the head of the table, her posture magnificently straight. Conversation passed among them with the measured solemnity of a pavane.

  “I attended the Symphony Friday night,” Eloise told them. “They performed Ned Rorem’s new song cycle, Evidence of Things Not Seen.”

  Jason cut into his chop, chewed a piece, swallowed. “Did you like it?”

  “Very much.”

  After enjoying chocolate eclairs from a bakery, they rose, leaving everything for the housekeeper to deal with the next day, to take coffee in the living room.

  “I’ve agreed to chair the committee for the renovations at the Sadler Museum,” Eloise told them, stirring cream into her cup with a heavy silver spoon. “I wonder, Kelly, if you would be kind enough to serve on the committee.”

  Kelly hesitated. “I won’t have much free time, with my new duties—”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to do much,” Eloise countered.

  Kelly paused. The Sadler was established to collect and display portraits by lesser-known Boston painters of the Boston aristocracy during the past three centuries.

  “Come on,” Jason urged. “It’s an honor to be asked to serve on anything to do with the Sadler. It’s prestigious.”

  I don’t care about prestige, Kelly thought. And I’m not even slightly interested in the Sadler. I want to spend my time on serious causes. She fastened her gaze on Jason, hoping he would read her mind. You ought to know that much about me by now, she thought.

  Kelly turned to Eloise. “May I have some time to think about it? I don’t know what my schedule will be like yet, how much free time I’ll have.”

  “Of course, dear. I understand.” Eloise turned to her son. “Are you going to the Holmes girl’s wedding on the Vineyard this Saturday?”

  “Absolutely,” Jason replied.

  “And Kelly?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t come. I’ve got so much to do …” Kelly had met Muffy Holmes and her fiancé, Buster Bendigen. They were a yacht club, sailing, tennis, skiing, martini-swilling couple just like their parents, without even the pretense of half a social conscience between them. They had buckets of money, it would be an amazing occasion, and Jason felt he had to go; he’d gone to private elementary and boarding school with Buster.

  “In that case, Jason, would you be my escort?” Eloise inquired.

  “Sure.”

  “Lovely. We’ll stay with the Worths.” Eloise smiled at Kelly. “I’ll make certain he behaves at the reception and doesn’t spend too much time with any of the bridesmaids.”

  Four

  MONDAY MORNING MONT MADISON stepped out of the shower, toweled his arthritic grizzled old body dry, and, spotting the robe hanging from the hook on the back of the door, pulled it on.

  It was Madeline’s. He knew that. Of course he did. He wasn’t senile enough quite yet to think this robe of pink terry cloth with white piping and white flowers embroidered on the pockets was a man’s robe.

  The thing was, it was so damned comfortable. Once, by accident, in the days just after Madeline’s death, he’d accidentally pulled it on after a shower, not discovering his mistake until afternoon, and even then he hadn’t taken it off because it brought Madeline back to him so forcefully.

  “I’d be glad to pack up Mrs. Madison’s clothes and take them to the church thrift sale for you,” their cleaning lady, Dorothy, had offered, more than once.

  Mont knew she was well intentioned, but he found her infuriating and intrusive. For God’s sake! Why would he want to get rid of Madeline’s things? They still held her scent, and a life full of memories surrounded him whenever he entered their bedroom and saw them, through the open closet door, hanging in the same colorful disarray in which Madeline, in her later years, had lived her life.

  Now Mont shuffled down the stairs and into the kitchen for his standard breakfast of orange juice and Grape-Nuts. Without Madeline around, it wasn’t worth brewing a pot of coffee, and he couldn’t stomach the instant stuff, so he did without. He tripped going over the threshold into the kitchen because he was wearing Madeline’s slippers. One thing about Madeline, she had had big feet for a woman. She’d hated their size, but Mont had always found them oddly attractive, sexual, generous, like the rest of Madeline’s body, and bold, like her spirit.

  He stood in front of the sink, spooning cereal into his mouth, staring at the yard—the grass needed cutting again—thinking how much he wanted to die.

  Not in any sentimental, mawkish, searching-for-attention, crying-for-help bullshit way. But just plain honest die.

  He couldn’t tell his son this because it would distress Randall so much, when, in fact, the truth of it was the very opposite of distressing.

  How many people could say they’d had a marriage like his? He and Madeline had been together for over fifty years, and loved each other passionately, even in the midst of savage disagreements, every second of every one of those decades of days. Volcanic in their early lusty years, life and its pressures had pressed them together so firmly they were, finally, one single thing, bedrock lined with a deep gleaming vein of gold. With Madeline gone, Mont was not even less than half of something. He was only the shape of something, the substance vanished.

  Sure, he loved his son. That love was what drove him to pretend he was working on a book. Randall, dutiful enough for two since his sister Evangeline moved out to the West Coast, was clearly relieved by any signs that Mont was pursuing something intellectually, that he was in any way at all going forward.

  Neither one of his children could comprehend the kind of marriage Mont and Madeline had. Mont loved his daughter, and was admiring of and slightly amused by the way she lived her life, unmarried, bisexual, weaving tapestries and shawls from the hair of animals—goats, sheep, dogs—on an island off Puget Sound. Evangeline was always too adventurous, too fickle in every way, to settle down to just one person. And Randall, well, now, he was a sweet lad, deep down. Mont was sad that Randall’s marriage hadn’t worked out. Divorce was always sad, but secretly Mont was glad for his son, for he had always thought Anne was one frigid, neurotic, cantankerous harpy. Mont was glad Randall had another chance at finding happiness.

  Mont loved his granddaughter best. Tessa was a joy. Always had been. The only reason he didn’t write a farewell note and ingest several dozen tablets was that he felt he needed to do what he could to help Tessa, who, as she grew into a young woman, was being poorly served by Anne with her nerves, phobias, and tics. Mont had seen many things in his long life, and nothing about Anne had ever pleased him, but more and more about Anne just plain frightened him. How Randall, a physician, could not see that his daughter was clearly undernourished, troubled Mont. The thinness, of course, was only a symptom, the tip of a particularly sinister iceberg.