Beautiful Little Fools(69)

“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Nick said quietly. What a thing for a man to say in his own house. Though I supposed it served him right for setting me up this way.

“I need to be getting home anyway.” I kept my voice light and avoided Jay’s eyes.

“Don’t leave yet,” Jay said, his words stretching out, desperately. “Walk next door and see my house first. Let me show you everything I have.”

I glanced out the window. The sun was shining now, but Ferdie still hadn’t returned. I really should’ve driven myself. I sighed. I supposed I had no escape.

Jay grabbed my hand. “I won’t take no for an answer,” he said.

“Only if Nick comes with us,” I relented. Having my cousin there would at least keep the rest of this afternoon innocent enough. Old friends, catching up. Nothing more.



* * *



LATER THAT NIGHT, I lay in bed in the darkness all alone. Tom was god knows where. When I closed my eyes, I could see the woman’s face from the photographs Jay had shown me earlier. Her round cheeks and her soft curls, the voluptuous curve of her bosom, and the hint of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes.

Jay had given me a tour of his giant house, top to bottom, from his voluminous library to his sweeping bedroom, to his houseguest playing piano. Then he had begged me to dance with him. Just like in Louisville, he’d exclaimed, grabbing my hand and pulling me toward him.

But he was wrong. Nothing now was what it once was in Louisville. Time hadn’t stopped or stood still. It had moved forward and wrecked me. Until almost five years had passed and seeing Jay again had made me realize one thing and one thing only: I was merely a shell of that girl I once was.

Every single day living with Tom, living in this mansion or that one, had begun to feel like an eternity. Each betrayal stripped me again and again, peeling back another layer of my skin. I alternated between feeling raw and feeling numb. And then, here I was again, alone tonight and picturing her, that voluptuous woman in the photographs. On the telephone, she was a phantom. But now, she was a real, bona fide woman. What did she have that I didn’t?

I threw the covers back and got out of bed. I walked down the hall and peeked into Pammy’s room. She was sound asleep in her little bed, exactly where I’d left her a few hours earlier, her plump toddler cheeks puffing slowly in and out as she sucked on her thumb. She was so beautiful and so innocent, and my chest ached watching her sleep now.

I’d wanted East Egg to be our home, our permanent home. I’d wanted Pammy to grow up and run across the grass to the water, to ride a pony, and go to school, but what then? Attend parties? Meet a rich man who would treat her the way her father had treated me? No, I didn’t want that for her at all.

I shut her door quietly so as not to wake her and wandered down the stairs. The entire first floor was dark and quiet, and I walked into Tom’s study. There was a large window behind his desk that looked out onto the sound. I pulled back the curtains and stared at the green light that illuminated the end point of our dock. It burned brightly, close enough that Tom’s entire study glowed green. It was the same green light Jay had shown me earlier from his own window—only from here it was much closer, brighter, hotter. I looked past the light, across the sound. Jay was having yet another party, and his house was twinkling with a thousand lights, yellow and gold, swimming like the fireflies Rose and I used to chase by the river as girls. I remembered now how I’d capture them in glass jars, just to watch them glimmer for a little while, until Rose always made me let them go. Oh, Rose.

I turned away from the lights and sat down in Tom’s tall chair behind his desk, closed my eyes, and inhaled the familiar scents of him ingrained in the leather, cigarettes and whiskey. I ran my hand across the smooth wood of the desk, and then, I opened up his top drawer and pulled out his pistol.

I laid his gun on the desk and ran my fingers across it. Tom had kept his gun here, in the same place, in the same desk in Lake Forest, in Cannes, too. I knew it was here; I’d seen him take it out to clean it. But I’d never before come into his study just to touch it, just to run my fingers across it and feel the wicked thrill of the metal. I never invaded Tom’s space or touched his things, not his ponies, not his pistol. But touching the cool metal of the gun now, I felt a sheer wicked delight in holding something so dangerous that wasn’t mine. It coursed through me like a fire in my blood.

Daddy had taught me to shoot a gun when I was twelve years old. For protection, he’d said, but really I always thought it was because he was sad he didn’t have a boy, and there were just some things he couldn’t stand not teaching a child of his. He’d made me swear I’d never tell the old snow goose, who didn’t believe such a thing was ladylike.

I remembered now aiming at the bull’s-eye he’d hung on the old oak tree, pulling the trigger, hearing the snap and feeling it pulse through my veins, giving me a heady feeling of power. Pulling that trigger at twelve would make me feel that same way I did pulling Jay into my bedroom at eighteen. And there was a power now in simply touching Tom’s gun, too. In knowing I could pick it up, wait for Tom to return home from wherever he was, and just hold it up, aim, pull the trigger. His betrayals, his power over me, would end, just like that.

“Daise, what are you doing?” Jordan’s voice cut through the darkness, and I jumped, wrapped my hand around the pistol, and quickly shoved it back into Tom’s desk drawer, hoping Jordan hadn’t seen it. I wasn’t exactly sure how to explain to her what I was doing, what I was thinking, how the woman in the photographs had pulled me into this dark moment.