Michael’s Wife (19 page)

“They've been locked up in that smelly laboratory for months, don't even come up for meals. They actually locked me out.”

“Janet, you made that necessary—barging in at the worst possible times. Interrupting everything.” Paul's expression was one of irritation almost to the point of desperation.

“You can at least forgo meals in the laboratory while Michael and Laurel are here.”

Claire moved to Michael's side. She'd reverted to her plain Jane role and had even forgotten the brown-rimmed reading glasses that perched halfway down her nose, forcing her to look over the top of them.

“Well, get on with it. Whatever it is.” Paul sighed and sat beside Laurel.

“I just hope the light is good enough to do it justice,” Janet said, pulling a cord at the corner of the green velvet and uncovering a portrait in oil of a woman seated with a young boy on her lap.

With Janet's present mood and Consuela's swollen eyes, Laurel was ready for anything, expected something nasty. But the portrait seemed innocent enough. The woman was pretty in a dark, slender way. She sat at an angle, her black hair pulled back in a French roll, her white suit with too much padding on the shoulders setting off the pale olive of her skin. Her head was turned so that she looked directly into the eyes of the observer over the dark head of the child on her lap.

It wasn't until she felt a cold wetness on her sandaled foot that Laurel realized Paul had let his glass slip through his fingers. His hand was still cupped as though he held it. He made no attempt to retrieve the glass, no move at all, his eyes riveted to the picture above the mantel.

Laurel looked around for Consuela to come and wipe up the mess, but the housekeeper hid in the shadow of the little stairway that led to the balcony, her breath coming in sobs.

Claire peered with interest at the picture over her glasses.

Michael had gone pale. A muscle twitched in his cheek. His lips parted but he didn't speak.

And Janet gloated, watching each face for its reaction. She certainly got plenty of that. But why?

It was obviously a portrait of Maria and a young Michael. They must have seen it before. And it was good, fitting its place on the wall and in the room as though it belonged, much better than the hunting scene it replaced.

Maria watched them, too, unsmiling, sitting very straight as if she would clutch her child and dart from the picture if anyone moved suddenly. Her dark eyes, almost too large for her face, opened too wide as though the artist had just startled her with something slightly bewildering or frightening. Maria had doe eyes, too.

“I found the portrait in an old wardrobe, and the frame is one of my finds. The combination turned out well, don't you think?” Janet, satisfied that the bomb she'd dropped had had its effect, sat down on the couch and picked up her drink. “You don't like it, Michael?”

But Michael was almost to the door of the entry hall, and even from that distance Laurel could hear him swearing under his breath. Consuela hurried after him.

“Why, Janet?” Paul finally tore his eyes from the picture. “You've tried to stir up trouble all summer. And now this. Just tell me why?”

“Why not? It's the only family portrait I could find. Surely you're not ashamed of your precious Maria? Besides, it belongs here. It's much too good to be moldering in a drawer.”

Paul removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I'm going back to the lab. You don't need to come in until after lunch, Claire,” he said as he left the way he'd come.

“I heard nothing but Maria when I married Paul and came here to live. I wondered why there was no picture of her anywhere. She'd been dead two years and they were still in mourning. Father Devereaux would speak of her and then quietly sit and stare at the wall. Paul would get positively misty-eyed. And Michael would take on a hangdog look and go off and kick something.” Janet stood in front of the fireplace, gazing back at Maria. “I still can't see why they.… She's been something of a mystery in my life, I can tell you.”

“You could have looked at her and put her back in the wardrobe,” Claire said quietly and Janet turned to face her. “But you brought her down here so that you could watch Professor Devereaux and Michael hurt. Just because you're bored and everyone else is busy and because you're jealous of a woman who's been dead for twenty years.”

“There's something in what you say,
Miss
Bently. I was curious to see if Paul had this infatuation for his father's dead wife. I'd thought Michael over his mother complex until I saw this portrait. But I wanted you two to see it especially.”

“Why should
we
be so interested in it?” Claire asked.

“Because you both want Michael. And you saw him just now.” Janet pointed dramatically to the portrait. “There's the only woman he'll ever love.”

“Most everyone loves his mother, Janet. This whole melodramatic scene is disgusting.” Laurel set her glass down and rose from the couch.

“Laurel, dear. I'm only trying to tell you what you have a right to know. You're trying to get him back, but you never had him. He didn't marry you for love but because you look like her.” Janet clutched her arm. “Look at the eyes, Laurel, the shape of her head, her expression.”

“Are you through?” Laurel pulled away and turned to leave, but Janet took Jimmy's hand. He tried to wiggle loose but she held him, talking rapidly now so as not to lose her victim audience.

“No. There's one more thing. Look at Jimmy and then at Maria and Michael.” She grinned almost haglike. “There's proof there.”

“Proof of what? Janet, you're hurting him.” Laurel rescued Jimmy and picked him up, wanting only to get them both out of the room.

But Janet's next words stopped her.

“Proof that Jimmy is not Michael's child.” Sure again of her audience, Janet turned back to the portrait. Even Claire's interest was revived.

“Maria was Mexican, but most of her family came from Spain. Consuela told me there were some blue eyes in the family. Father Devereaux had eyes like Michael's and Paul's, hence Michael's eyes are possible. But how could he with his background and you with your darkness have a blond child? This is hardly probable.”

Claire moved closer to the fireplace and looked from the portrait to Jimmy. “We've always known of Michael's background. Why is this suddenly proof?”

“Because with her out in plain sight, Michael will have to admit to himself what the rest of us have known for a long time. That Jimmy must have had a blond father. The heir is a fake.”

Laurel hugged her son tighter, old questions that she'd refused to let surface rising in her mind. She'd wondered too when she first saw Jimmy how he could be Michael's. Even Colleen had noticed it.

“I think you've outsmarted yourself this time, Mrs. Devereaux. This is the first I've noticed any resemblance between Michael and Jimmy.” Claire looked squarely at Laurel and shrugged. “It was a good try though.”

Laurel took a closer look at the young Michael. He nestled against his mother in a way that gave an impression of security, possession, his expression seeming to dare anyone to come between them.

She guessed him to be about Jimmy's age when the portrait was painted. Only in the incongruous metallic eyes did he resemble the powerful, self-sufficient man he would become. The plumpness of his cheeks did not suggest Michael's rugged cheekbones. His size, the shape of his head and nose were Jimmy. Change the color of the eyes and hair and that would be Jimmy sitting in the portrait.

They left Janet alone in the immense salon peering at her brittle victory, her shoulders hunched.

“Jimmy wants go home.” He didn't even remove his thumb to speak.

“I'm with you there, big boy. Let's hunt up your father and persuade him, too.” They were just starting up the staircase in the entry hall.

Claire, a little ahead of them, turned with her embarrassing giggle. “Consuela has put you and Michael together in your old room. I'm interested to see how you work that out.”

The wild horses still romped over the spread on the king-sized bed. Dark wooden furniture as massive as ever. The light spilling through the windows onto the parquet floor was still cut into patterns by the bars of iron grillwork. This room looked enormous after the cubbyholes in the beige bungalow.

But all was not the same. The lamp that once sat on the dresser between the double mirrors now lay in several pieces across the red rug. And Michael stood at a window overlooking the desert outside. He turned to glare at her with such an intensity that her request wavered on her lips.

“Jimmy and I … would like to go back home.”

“This is Jimmy's house and mine.”

“I don't think this is a good time to visit, do you?”

“I won't be forced from my home by that bitch.” It was the kind of a statement that should be shouted but it wasn't. It was delivered in a quiet, emphatic manner that made it useless to argue.

“But what are we going to do? Consuela has put us both in here.”

He didn't answer but continued to stare at her. Drops of moisture glistened on his upper lip.

“What's wrong?”

“I guess I'd forgotten what my mother looked like. I didn't realize how much you resembled her.”

“Is that why you married me?”

“I was a grown man when I met you, Laurel, looking for a wife, not a mother.”

“Grown men don't break lamps.”

“Would you rather I broke heads?”

“I don't think anyone would be too upset if you went down and bopped Janet a good one right now.”

“Did she explain her little performance after I left?” he asked, turning back to the window.

“She wanted to get everyone's reaction. She thinks that Paul still loves Maria and you married me because I look like her. That you'll never love anyone but Maria and that Jimmy is not your son because he has blond hair.”

“That's all nonsense.” He picked up Jimmy and held him against his shoulder.

“Then why all the reaction, Michael? It's a good picture and belongs in that room. Why was it put away? No one's ashamed of Maria. Why wouldn't you all want to remember her?”

“My father had her things put away because we didn't want to be reminded of our loss.”

“But.…”

“Do you know what I remember—what the portrait downstairs brings back to me? Screams. Screaming tires and a screaming woman. Blood all over everything and a form covered by a sheet that wouldn't answer when I called to it. Blood soaking into it, pieces of flesh and hair sticking to it. Arms that held me back so that I couldn't touch it, go to it.” His voice was so low yet so powerful that it forced the ugly, pathetic picture from his mind to hers. But his hand, so gentle, protective, stroked his son's hair.

“We can't all block out what we don't like to remember as conveniently as you, Laurel.”

“Then you do believe that I can't remember?” A tenuous hope flared within her.

He considered her a moment but didn't answer her question. Instead he carried Jimmy to the connecting door. “You can sleep in here tonight. I'll sleep with Jimmy.”

But Jimmy didn't sleep with Michael that night. He crawled out of the crib and crept into Laurel's bed. He barely spoke all weekend, refused to let his mother out of his sight, to take a nap. They had to set him a place in the dining room where he could eat with Laurel, perched on a stack of books.

Neither Janet nor Paul appeared for lunch or dinner Saturday, so they ate with Claire and spent most of the afternoon and evening at the pool. Jimmy trailed Laurel like a shadow, screaming and kicking if she tried to close the bathroom door on him.

That evening at the poolside Michael lounged in a deck chair after a rigorous, monotonous, exhausting swim that had taken him from one end of the pool to the other so many times that Laurel lost count. He was still breathing heavily, watching Laurel with half-opened eyes that frightened her a little, embarrassed her a little more. She wondered how Collen would interpret that look.

Her pink bikini seemed to weigh a ton but covered nothing as she dragged herself out of the pool and stretched out on a beach towel. Jimmy sat close beside her. He'd refused to get into the water but had walked beside it, keeping pace with her.

“What have you done to him?” Michael's voice startled her, coming out of the quiet, darkening night—the moon not yet up.

“Bathed him, fed him, comforted him, read to him, spanked him, loved him, been at his beck and call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The same thing any mother does.”

“Sounds exhausting.”

A bat swished close over head, dived toward the pool for a drink and flew off. Laurel felt the goose bumps rise.

“It's no more than your mother did for you.” She sat up and put her arms around Jimmy, drawing him close. He was fighting to stay awake.

“I lost my mother at an early age.”

“Jimmy isn't going to lose me … not again.” She laid him back on the towel and he didn't move.

“You sound sure of yourself,” Michael said in a warning whisper.

Laurel returned his stare, surprised at the determination in her voice. “I'll fight for him, Michael. I don't know how, but I'll fight.”

“And you think I won't? That I'll just give him to you?”

“No.” She looked away, unable to stare him down. “I think it would break his heart to lose either of us.”

“He's young.” And then a low rumbling chuckle and that infuriating lift of his eyebrow. “Are you suggesting we continue to live as we have been? Just how long do you think that can last?'

“I don't know. You're leading a full life, out almost every night. You seem to be enjoying yourself.” She hated the shrewish tone in her voice.

“Do I?”

Suddenly angry, she rose and stood over him—her nails cutting into her flesh as she balled her hands into fists. “I'm sorry I messed up your life. I can't go on apologizing forever. I don't know how or why I left or why I came back. I just know I'm here. I exist. I have no excuse for it, but I exist. And you're going to have to face it, Michael.”