A Lady Under Siege(27)

“She loves you. She’s very worried about you. She hates her dad for wrecking a good thing. She hates being forced to visit him. She’s a nice kid. Very smart. Feisty.”

His words had the momentary effect of draining all the fight out of her. Her shoulders drooped. Suddenly she felt more tired than anything. “That, I knew,” she said.

“Right then, I’ll see you tomorrow,” Derek said brightly. “I’ll aim for an early start, up with the songbirds, decked out in amateur carpenter’s gear. I’m looking forward to it. I haven’t worked with putty in years.”

Meghan felt a need to reframe and reiterate the message she’d come storming over to deliver. “I may not like you, but she does,” she told him. “I’d tell you to stay the hell away from her, but we’re neighbours, she’s bound to see you, and ordering her not to talk to you would make her want to talk to you all the more. Just keep your distance, especially if you’re drinking or smoking pot, or messing with any other substances like that. If you do see her, be nice. She’s a fragile kid.”

Derek shook his head. “Fragile? You’re projecting. That kid is tough as nails. She was such a trouper—that was a nasty cut, you know—there was blood everywhere. Grown men faint at less, some anyway—I felt lightheaded myself.”

Meghan sized him up anew. “I can see why Betsy likes you, you’re a child. If she were a few years older, she’d see right through you.”

“I wasn’t counting on her as a friend for life anyway. She’ll make her own choices, she already does. She likes me—big deal. I may not be terribly presentable or successful on your terms, but I am in no way responsible for an ugly divorce that’s messing up her ten-year-old head.”

His words tore at her, adding another blow to a heart already battered and aching with a mother’s guilt. She wanted to cry, but ordered herself not to. “You’re mean,” she muttered, but the thought trailed off, unfinished. All she could think of was Betsy, and the impossible sum of things known and unknown that would be required of her to make her daughter’s life right again.

BACK IN HER KITCHEN Meghan found Betsy doing dishes at the sink, and scolded her. She had told her not to get the bandage wet.

“It doesn’t hurt,” Betsy said.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said sternly. “Go get into your pj’s and I’ll change it for a dry one.”

“How’d it go with Derek?” Betsy asked.

“Oh, we had a lovely chat,” Meghan said acidly. “There’s no glass until tomorrow.”

Betsy looked at the empty window pane in the door. It was close enough to the handle that anyone could reach through and unlock it.

“What are we going to do about the door?” she asked.

“I’ll figure something out.”

“Like what?”

“Go and get ready for bed,” Meghan told her. “Just give me five minutes to sit and think of something.”

“How come it’s always five minutes?” Betsy wondered.

“Go!”

She did as told. Meghan slumped into a chair at the table. She could actually feel a draft of cool night air coming through the empty pane. One small little puncture in her home had altered everything. She really wished she was handier with tools. Was there a way to nail the whole door shut without wrecking it? Then she realised she didn’t have any tools in this house, the tools she was thinking of were all Seth’s tools and they were all with Seth. She hated herself in this moment for having to rely on men to fix things, for never having learned self-reliance of the practical sort. Maybe it’s time to change that, she thought, maybe tomorrow I’ll tell Derek to forget it, and I’ll go to Home Depot or whatever and get a pane of glass myself, and some putty or whatever they use, and do it myself. How hard can it be? I’ll be like the women on those home reno shows that get all empowered by doing it for themselves. But then she thought, who am I kidding—I never watch those shows because I never want to be those women, I’d rather hire a plumber than get all excited about figuring out how to hook up a faucet. I just wish there were female plumbers, I’d hire one in a second. After she’d crawled around under the sink I’d make coffee and we’d dissect our disastrous love lives.

In the end she rigged up a sort of early warning defence system at the door. She rummaged around for a bit of rope, tied it around the door handle and then up to an unused hook some previous occupant of the house had mounted on the wall nearby. She pulled the rope as snug as she could and knotted it, and found that when she tried to open the door the rope allowed no more than a four inch gap. Of course an intruder could always cut the rope, but they wouldn’t be expecting it, and dealing with it would take time. For a second line of defence she stood a roll of paper towel on the floor next to the closed door, and set a wine glass on top. The glass would topple and shatter if anyone opened the door, at least in theory. She didn’t feel like testing it with an experiment. For the third line of defence she would sleep on the couch in the living room downstairs, with both her cordless phone and her cell phone by her pillow. Betsy would be upstairs in her bed as usual.