A Bridge to Love (2 page)

Two

Kate
walked into an uncharacteristically silent house to find a note in her oldest
son's handwriting: “Gone to park to play soccer. Took Gretchen. Brigid will
make sure we get home in time for dinner.”

She
smiled. Clay and Patrick felt that at ages twelve and ten they no longer needed
a baby-sitter. However, they always had fun with Brigid. She checked her watch;
they should be home soon.

She
sat down and let the peace and quiet of her much-loved house wrap around her.
She and David had bought it two months after they had gotten married. It was a
Victorian, very dilapidated, and they had loved it on sight. She smiled at her
memories of choosing wallpaper, curtains and furniture together. David had been
as involved as she was. With his architect's spatial perception, he was a
wizard at arranging furniture. She had been the one who got the tiles to line
up and mitered the corners for the ceiling moldings. David's presence was so
vivid in this house, their home, that the whole encounter with Randall Johnson
began to fade into unreality.

The
telephone interrupted her thoughts.

“Hello,
Kate.” It was Oliver Russell, one of David's two partners in his architectural
firm. Actually, Oliver was far more than a business associate; he was a trusted
friend. Since David's death, he had come by regularly on weekends to play
soccer and chess with the boys. He often stayed for dinner, keeping her company
in the lonely evening hours.

“Oliver!
We missed seeing you this weekend. Georgia dragged me to a wretched Princeton
alumni picnic...”

“Kate,
I'd like to stop by the house tomorrow. I have some business to discuss.”

“It
sounds like bad news.”

“No,
not really. Just inevitable, I suppose. Would one o'clock suit you?” Oliver
sounded more cheerful as he continued, “I'll come visit the boys next weekend.
Tell Clay I have a new opening gambit for him. And, Kate, don't worry;
everything will be fine.”

Now
she was worried, but she had no
time to speculate. As she hung up the phone, she heard voices coming around the
side of the house, so she simply pushed Oliver's visit to the back of her mind
as she unlocked the door. The sight of her two handsome young sons always
lifted her spirits.

Patrick
spilled through the door first, his streaked blond hair dark with sweat. He
allowed her a brief kiss and then pulled away, saying, “There was the coolest
radio-controlled plane at the park!”

Clay
followed, looking so tall and grown-up that Kate had to give him a hug. He bore
it with a charming grin. “It's only been three hours since you saw us, Mom.”

Kate
laughed. “I know. But I just love hugging sweaty boys.”

Clay
ran his hand through his own thick blond hair in a gesture so like David's that
Kate's heart lurched. Although both boys had her gray eyes, they looked more
and more like David as they grew. “We sure are sweaty. A bunch of guys were
there already so we got into a good scrimmage.”

Brigid
came in with their black Labrador, Gretchen, and closed the door behind her.
“You should have seen your lads kicking that football. It was a joy to behold.”

“Soccer
ball,” Patrick corrected.

“Och,
I'm too old to be changin' my vocabulary to American,” Brigid said.

“Kate,
you get more gorgeous every time I see you.”

Kate
laughed. Since David had died, Oliver had been paying her ridiculous
compliments to boost her spirits. His flattery sounded particularly absurd
because he said it in the same calm, composed tone with which he asked you to
pass the salt. She ushered him into the living room, where she had a tray of
tea and sandwiches ready. He was early.

“Would
you like some tea?” she asked, as they sat down.

“Thanks,”
he said, accepting the cup she poured him but then putting it down without
tasting it. He leaned forward with his elbows resting on his knees. “I'm here
because we need to talk about the future at C/R/G. David was terrific with the
clients, you know, and brought in a lot of business for us. We're suffering
without him.”

He
adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses and stared at his hands for a moment. Then he
seemed to brace himself. “Ted and I feel that we have to bring in a new partner
to fill that gap. A classmate of Ted's from Cornell is ready to leave Polshek
and Partners, and he's a good man for the job. The problem is that we can't
support four partnerships right now. He would have to buy out David's share of
the company.”

Kate
froze. The company had been a part of her life since before Clay and Patrick
were born. She had taken as much pride in its success as David had. Creating
C/R/G had been his dream. To have to sell it... And the income from the
partnership paid the household's basic living expenses. She had accepted a
reduced share of the firm's profits after David died, but the amount she got,
she counted on.

“How
much would the new partner pay for David's share?” she managed to ask.

The
figure Oliver named seemed horrifyingly small. He offered her several sheets of
paper that explained his calculations. She took them, but couldn't focus on the
numbers.

“I'll
have to look at these later,” she said, dropping them on the coffee table.

Oliver
was watching her with concern. “Kate, I'm terribly sorry. We didn't arrive at
these decisions without considerable debate.” He jumped up, scraping his
fingers through his dark blond hair. “Damn, I hate this. You should never go
into business with people you care about.”

Kate
felt tears gathering in her eyes and willed them not to start down her cheeks.
All she could do was nod; she didn't trust her voice.

He
came over to sit beside her, and took her hands in his with a gentleness that
threatened to undermine her control. “Take some time to think about this. Call
me when you want to talk about anything at all. I'll go over the facts and
figures with you whenever you're ready.”

“I
will,” Kate said.

Oliver
stood up to go. Before he left, he rested his hands lightly on her shoulders
and said again, “Call me if you need
any
thing.”

She
dredged up a smile. “Thank you.”

Kate
closed the door behind him and then leaned back against it, feeling the
solidity of the big oak door that she had lovingly stripped of its old dull
varnish. She ran her hands along the grain, feeling the smooth, satiny surface.
She probably wouldn't be able to keep this house. She would have to uproot the
boys from Claremont and rent an apartment in a less costly area in a different
town.

An
unaccustomed flare of anger burned through her. David had reduced his life
insurance policy and refused the mortgage insurance that their agent had
recommended. She hadn't thought that it was a good decision, but she trusted
his judgment. They had sunk every penny of their savings into the C/R/G
partnership. Despite her reservations, she had agreed. Now Oliver said it was
worth far less than what David had always led her to believe. And she and the
boys were going to pay for it.

The
thought of Clay and Patrick pushed Kate's brain back into gear. David had kept
his own papers regarding the firm in a file cabinet in the attic. Maybe she could
find something there that would increase the value of his share. At the very
least, by taking some action she could stave off the panic threatening to swamp
her.

She
picked up the papers Oliver had given her and scanned them as she walked slowly
up two flights of stairs to the attic. Fitting an old brass key into the file
cabinet's lock, she pulled open the drawer and started looking through the
various folders. All were labeled in David's beautiful architect's printing,
but they weren't in any sort of order. She pulled out a handful and sat down on
the floor to sort through them. She was skimming through some contracts when
she spotted a folded handwritten letter stapled crookedly between the pages. It
had obviously gotten mixed in with the papers by mistake so she pulled it
loose. Idly curious, she unfolded it and started to read.

Dearest David,

You've just left and already I miss you so
much that I can barely breathe. I thought that if I wrote to you, I could
almost imagine that you had just stepped into the next room and that we were
holding this conversation through the doorway. But of course, I won't hear your
voice answering me or have the joy of knowing that you could walk back in at
any moment and kiss the back of my neck as I sit here at my desk.

Kate
stopped. This had to be an old, old letter. She flipped it over but there was
no date on it anywhere. It was signed “Sylvia.” She desperately tried to
remember if David had mentioned an old girlfriend with that name. Failing at
that, she looked at the document it had been stapled into. The contract was
less than two years old and was for a private home in Baltimore. Kate read the
clients' names, neither of which was Sylvia.

She
remembered David talking about that house. He had made a dozen or so trips to
Baltimore to check on the project.

But
he always made a point to meet with clients regularly. He said that he could
catch problems before they became disasters that way. She returned to the
letter.

And that's all that you would have to do—just
kiss me once—and we would be back in my now-empty bed. But I have to stop
thinking about that; my body aches for you.

I know that the house will soon be done. I
will have to find you a new reason to come here: a skyscraper so enormous it
will take decades to finish. I will make sure the contract requires you to
supervise even the smallest detail so that you will be here every day. And
every night, we can have dinner at my table and talk about everything in the
world and not have to hurry to the bedroom in desperation.

She
couldn't bear to read any more. She had to be misinterpreting something! This
couldn't be to the David who was her husband, and it couldn't have been written
just two years ago! She searched frantically through the rest of the file,
looking for something, anything to explain the letter.

There
were only more contracts from that same year, the year that he had died so
suddenly of a heart attack, leaving her alone with two young boys to raise. She
couldn't catch her breath.

In
those first terrible days after David died, she had wondered how she could
survive without him. She put up a brave front for Clay and Patrick, only to
collapse in despair the minute she was alone. She found the strength to keep
going in the love of her children and in the memory of the love that she and
David had shared. In difficult moments, she even imagined that David was
standing beside her, supporting her decisions.

She
anchored her future on the foundation of a secure and happy past.

Now
that, foundation lay shattered, blasted to pieces by a single sheet of paper.

David
had not loved her.

Kate
stared at the letter in her hands as she tried to reconcile the image of her
golden, loving husband with this evidence of his other self. She felt so hollow
that she was afraid her body would simply crumple inward. She forced herself to
breathe as she kept staring at the letter. She sat there as the afternoon light
faded. No coherent thoughts formed in her mind.

She
felt only a swirling sense of cold, of being totally, utterly, completely
alone.

Three

“Mom?
Mom? Where are you?”

The
vibration of a slammed door reached some recess of Kate's mind. Clay and
Patrick. She frantically shoved the papers back into random file folders until
only the letter was left lying alone. She jammed all the files back into the
drawer as she heard the boys' calls moving closer.

She
didn't want to touch the letter again, but she had to hide it until she could
destroy it. The one certainty she had left was that she never wanted Clay and
Patrick to know this about their father. She picked it up by one corner and
carried it to a bookcase under the eaves. She folded it with her fingertips,
and then closed it into the middle of a dusty copy of
On the Origin of Species
.

“Mom?
Are you here?” Clay's voice had taken on a worried edge.

Kate
tried to call down to reassure him. Her first attempt came out as a hoarse
whisper, so she cleared her throat as she started toward the steps. Clay met
her on the landing. “Mom, didn't you hear us? We've been looking
all over
for you.”

Kate
shook her head. “I'm sorry. I didn't realize what time it was,” she managed to
push through her throat.

“Are
you okay? You sound kind of weird,” Clay said, then shouted down the steps,
“Pat, I found her. She's in the
attic
!”

He
turned back to her with obvious concern on his young face. “Are you sick? You
don't look normal.”

Kate
tried to remember how to look normal, but she felt so different that she
couldn't summon up the appropriate expression. So she enveloped Clay in a hug
and murmured in his ear, “I'm fine, just a bit distracted.”

Patrick
came pounding up the steps as Clay disentangled himself. “Hey, Mom. What are
you doing up here? We kept yelling all over the house for you.”

He
came over and gave her his usual perfunctory peck on the cheek and suddenly
Kate found “normal” again. Normal was what life had to be for Clay and Patrick.
If she could throw herself in front of a bus for them, she certainly could
pretend that she had never found one small piece of paper. That just happened
to annihilate her.

She
managed to fix dinner, clean up and check homework. But when bedtime came, she
went straight to her bathroom, flipping on the switch that lighted the mirrors
over the sinks. Kate braced her hands on her sink and stared at her reflection.
She looked like the same person she had seen in the mirror that morning. Why
didn't she appear crushed, or betrayed, or scared out of her wits? The woman
staring back at her looked confident and serene and, yes, attractive.
Attractive enough to prompt a connoisseur of women like Randall Johnson to
invite her to dinner.

So
why the hell had David slept with another woman? How had she failed so
completely in their marriage? And how could she have been so
unaware
that she didn't have even the
slightest
clue
about what was
happening?

“God
damn it, David! Why aren't you here to explain this to me? How can I understand
if you aren't here to talk to me?”

She
knew that she couldn't deal with this alone. She had to talk with
someone
or she would go in circles until
she went insane. The only person she trusted was Georgia. She returned to her
bedroom and called to ask her friend to come over after work the next day.

Mechanically,
she got ready for bed and climbed between the sheets. She didn't bother to pick
up a book from the bedside table or to click on the television news. She turned
out the light and lay there, staring sightlessly upward in the darkness. She
found some comfort in the occasional soft dream whimpers from the dog, who was
stretched out as always on the rug beside the bed. But even Gretchen's faithful
presence barely penetrated the swirling fog of failure and loneliness that
engulfed her. Kate's brain spun like a kaleidoscope, shifting jagged images of
David in bed with a strange woman around thoughts of selling the house against
panic about paying college tuition. She sorted through her memory,
reinterpreting scenes from her now ruined marriage, finding dissatisfaction
where before there had seemed to be none.

She
could manage neither tears nor sleep.

Somehow
she smiled for Clay and Patrick the next day. They were stunned but grateful to
be treated to Domino's Pizza for dinner. Clay eyed her a little worriedly but
evidently decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth and so kept quiet. When
Georgia breezed in after dinner and saw the pizza box, and the dirty dishes
still scattered around the kitchen, she stopped dead and looked hard at Kate.
Going straight to the refrigerator, she opened a bottle of wine and poured two
large glasses, one of which she thrust into Kate's hand. “Drink this now. We'll
talk when the boys are in bed.”

Kate
put down the glass. “No, I don't really feel like wine, thanks.”

Georgia
put it back in her hand. “If you don't drink this, I'll pour brandy down your
throat and you know what a hangover that will give you.”

Kate
took a sip of wine. “Thanks for coming, Georgia. I've been feeling so alone.”

Georgia
turned to Clay. “Why don't you and Patrick head upstairs and let your mom and
me talk woman-to-woman?”

The
boys agreed to her request with unusual promptness and pounded up the steps.

“All
right, Kate, spill it,” Georgia said once they were ensconced in the den with
the doors firmly closed. “And feel free to cry on my shoulder. You look like
you need to.”

Kate
blinked in surprise. She hadn't cried once since she read the letter. She
couldn't summon up enough strength to cry. She hadn't really thought about how
to tell Georgia the awful truth, so she just said flatly, “I found a letter
from another woman to David. He was having an affair sometime in the year
before he died.”

“He
was
what
? Jesus Christ, what a
bastard! How could he do that to you? And he saved her letters?” Georgia was so
angry she couldn't sit still; she got up and paced around the room.

“Letter,”
Kate corrected. “I only found one. And I don't think that he meant to save it.
It was stapled into a contract.”

Georgia
came over to Kate's chair and knelt in front of her, taking her hands. “I'm so
sorry, Kate. To find out now when there's no way to change things... it's
awful. What can I do to help?”

Suddenly
the tears came.

“Tell
me what I did wrong. Tell me why David needed to sleep with another woman. Tell
me that my family's life wasn't built on a huge lie.” Kate lifted her
tear-streaked face. “Tell me how I could have been that
blind
!”

“You
did not do anything wrong. You were a wonderful wife. My dates always envied
David.”

Kate
shook her head and wrapped her arms around her own waist to hold in the sobs.

Georgia
took Kate by the shoulders and shook her gently. “Stop blaming yourself. David
is the creep here, remember?
You
didn't go off and sleep with another man.”

“I
never even
wanted
to. That's what I
don't understand. What made him even think about it?” Reaching a decision Kate
put down her wineglass and stood up. “I'll show you the letter and then we're
going to burn it. I don't want Clay and Patrick to know about this. Ever.”

She
brought the letter down from its dusty hiding place and handed it to Georgia.
She wanted Georgia's clear, legal mind to find the flaw in her reasoning, to
tell her that she was wrong about David.

“Son
of a bitch!” Georgia muttered as she finished reading. “She definitely wasn't a
one-night stand.”

“How
could I not have known? I thought that we were so close, that we knew each
other so well.”

Georgia
sat on the arm of Kate's chair. “I remember you saying that year that David was
traveling constantly. You thought that the stress might have contributed to his
heart attack. You probably didn't see him enough to be able to tell. Stop
beating yourself up.”

“Why
did he do it, Georgia?”

Georgia
moved back to her own chair and stared up at the ceiling for a minute. “All
right, I'm going to give you my honest opinion of David. Promise you won't hate
me.”

Kate
almost felt like laughing. “At this point, the worse it is, the more I'll like
it.”

Georgia
looked relieved at this small flash of spirit and launched into her argument.

“When
you and David met, you were both rising stars in your firms. You were a
brilliant engineer, and David was a brilliant architect. You also happened to
be poised, beautiful and great with people, the perfect up-and-coming
architect's wife.”

“Oh,
please.”

“David
went after you with every weapon in his arsenal. Remember how flattered you
were?”

“How
could I not be? David could have had any woman he wanted; they were falling all
over him. Evidently even after we were married.”

“Stop
it. But you've put your finger on something important. David was used to being
the center of attention. He loved working with clients because they admired him
and listened to him.”

Georgia
paused a moment, then continued, “David expected you to be the adoring and
supportive wife, so he tried to eliminate anything that competed with him. He
made you shut down your very successful consulting business the moment he could
afford to.”

Kate
couldn't believe Georgia's implication. “
I
shut it down because I couldn't keep up with the work while I had small
children.”

“That's
because David focused entirely on his own career and left you to bring up the
children, run the house, entertain clients and draw plans for C/R/G. He forced
you into a situation where you had to give up your profession for your family.”

“And
I've never regretted it.” Then she remembered her financial difficulties and
amended that, “Until now.”

Georgia
looked at her speculatively, but she was on a roll and didn't want to change
the subject. She brought forth the clincher. “David could force you to dump the
job but ultimately he couldn't compete with the children.”

Kate
felt completely dazed. Georgia was painting a picture of a manipulative
self-centered man whom Kate didn't recognize as her husband. “David was crazy
about the boys!”

“Of
course he was. They were his sons. Men love having sons. But he missed the
focus on him and on C/R/G. David leaned on you all through your marriage.”

“We
leaned on each other...” Kate faltered in her defense. Her nighttime agonies
came back to support her friend's comments. She had asked Georgia to tell her
why David had betrayed her, and Georgia was building a formidable case against
him.

Georgia
ignored Kate's comment. “I think he found this woman who stroked his ego with
her undivided attention, and he indulged himself in an affair with her.”

Kate
could not refute Georgia's logic, so she changed the subject. “We're getting
rid of this right now,” she said, taking the letter to the fireplace. She
picked up a long fireplace match from the mantel and lit three corners of the
letter, letting it fall on the grate as it flamed. She torched every remaining
fragment until only a pile of ash was left. She looked up at Georgia. “We are
the only two people who will ever know about this letter.”

Georgia
crossed her heart with one finger. “My discretion is absolute. Now, what are
you going to
do
about this?”

“What
do you mean do about it?” Kate asked, stirring the ashes around with a poker.

“You
can't just burn the letter and forget about it. You have to do something to
help you get over David's betrayal.”

Kate
looked at Georgia and realized that she was serious. “What would you suggest?
Painting a scarlet
A
on David's
gravestone?”

“You
could find Sylvia and throw rotten eggs at her house. Or slash all the tires on
that old Porsche that David was always working on.”

That
reminded Kate of her other problem. “I need that Porsche in mint condition. I'm
selling it.”

“I
thought that you were keeping it for the boys when they got old enough to
drive.”

Kate
slumped into her chair and let her head fall back on its cushion. New tears
welled up and she angrily wiped them away with the back of her hand. “I forgot
to mention my other problem. Oliver and Ted want to sell David's share of C/R/G
to a new guy, which means that I have no income.”

“Can't
you invest the proceeds and live on the interest?”

“Not
if I want to keep the house.”

Georgia
looked murderous. “If David were standing here now, I would give that bastard a
piece of my mind.”

“I
thought that his share was worth more than Oliver says it is.”

“Do
you trust Oliver?”

“Completely.
He would never cheat me.” Kate took a sip of her wine before the irony of her
statement struck her. “Of course, that's what I thought about David, too.” Kate
felt anger rip through her. Because of her husband's betrayal, she was even
questioning Oliver's integrity.