Nanny Returns (32 page)

“Bitsy,” I sputter,
“seriously?”

“What?” she says, looking at me like I’m crazy. “He wasn’t a virgin.” With a wink to him she rolls her shoulders back with self-possession. “See you downstairs.” She descends the pickled planks.

I turn incredulously to Grayer, who is throwing his looped tie back over his head. “Party time?” He says grimly, shimmying the knot up.

“Grayer?” I reach out and grab his arm as he tries to pass. “If you’re testing me—”

“Yeah, Nan, it’s all about you.” He tosses his bangs off his face and jogs down the stairs to the filling atrium below.

Collecting myself, I slowly descend to see through the front hall’s plate glass window a steady stream of cars arriving as Clark hangs the painting back in the first spot he tried this morning.

Couples flood into the living room, the wives in gossamer-thin shawl cardigans over dresses short enough to expose formidably toned thighs, the husbands in seersucker blazers that cling unflatteringly on their arms and that they couldn’t button if they tried. I fin my way through the crowd, looking for Ryan in the sea of slicked hair.

“You won’t believe this—look.” People with iPhones hold them out to their drinking companions to watch this afternoon’s footage of tiny helicopters hovering above Jarndyce as if it were carrion.

Roger comes into the room, phone in hand, and announces, “My friend said when they got the police over there they found the front door chained up with a sign that says ‘Closed until further notice.’”

Everyone looks at one another, stupefied.

“An official sign?” I ask. “From the school?”

“Ladies and gentlemen!” Clark suddenly shouts as Aquino takes his cue to ping a fork against a crystal glass. “Thank you all so much for coming to my little viewing.” Clark claps his hands together and the crowd quiets while my mind races, skin prickling. I surreptitiously scroll for Josh’s number. “Now, as many of you know, I have had a great year.” Chuckles ripple through the male half of the crowd. “And I’ve wanted a Chagall since I can remember.” I look for Ryan. Across the room, adult attention diverted, Grayer swipes champagne from a tray and knocks back a gulp. “Many of you scoffed that I couldn’t pull this off, that it could not be done without paying outrageous auction block prices. But that’s not how I roll. Tom, I believe you owe me a few bucks.” A balding man raises his glass. “So, without further ado . . .” He whips the white cloth from the gilt frame, revealing a blue-toned painting of a family in front of a tilting house.

Smash!

A glass shatters and all heads turn to where women in open-toed shoes leap away from Grayer’s doused loafers. He mumbles an apology for dropping the flute and backs out of the room as people clap for Clark’s acquisition. I move to follow, but Ryan steps into my path, blocking me. “Let him be,” he says, voice low.

“I can’t. I know how that sounds, but I can’t.” I put my phone in his hand. “Can you please call Josh and see what the official word is on Jarndyce?”

I loop through the crowded ground floor, coming to a stop at the sound of sniffing from Clark’s study, and hesitantly push the door open. Grayer leaps up from behind the desk, wiping his hands over his wet eyes. “I can’t deal with you right now.”

“Okay . . .” I nonetheless shut the door and sit on the edge of a club chair.

“Just—” He braces either side of his head with his hands and paces. “I need to—Where’s Stilton?”

“Watching the
Pirates of the Caribbean
trilogy in the media room with the other kids, why?”

“Because I need to—we need to get out of this house. I can’t be here anymore.”

“Just one more hour. As soon as people start leaving we’ll drive back, I promise.”

“You
promise
?” He spins to me. “What the fuck is your deal?”

“Can you be more specific?”

“Specifically, you’re not our fucking mother. You
do
know that, right?”

“Of course I know that, Grayer.”

“Then stop bullshitting me.”

“I’m not—I have never bullshitted you.” I stand.

“Never?” He gapes. “You mean like the nine months when I was four?”

“Yes! God, why are you so angry at me? Grayer, where is your dad? What’s happening?”

“What’s happening?”
He takes a step back. “Thursday night Dad says we’re gonna hang out—wanted to take me to Greenwich—suddenly had an
interest.
And it was a fucking lie. His back was out. He just needed a pair of hands. He used me …used me.” His voice thickens, his head dropping to his chest as he lets out a choked moan.

I step tentatively over and reach out my hands to his shoulders. “I—I don’t follow, Grayer. I want to help you, but I can’t unless you ex—”

“You can’t! Exactly, Nan-
ny.
Write it on a card, stick it in a bus pass.
You can’t help me.
”

“But maybe I could, Grayer,” I entreat. “Maybe you could come, with Stilton, and live with Ryan and me. Maybe we could be your—”

“
You?!
Why would I want
you
? You’re a fucking mess,” he sneers, his nose dripping, his face contorted, ugly. “God, do the world a favor, would you? Don’t have kids.”

“Listen to me, you ungrateful shit.” Before I can stop myself, I’ve grabbed his chin. “I have beaten myself up for years and do you know why? Because I let your sociopath of a mother fire me.
Fire
me. Because you ran to me and not her when you hurt yourself at a party. I always thought if I’d just
handled
her differently, somehow I could have changed it for both of us.” My mind’s eye flits to Gloria upstairs, covered in makeup—standing as much a chance of handling Alex as Ingrid did of handling Grant—and then to those last hours in Nantucket. “Your narcissistic shit of a father drove me off an island in the middle of the night. They wouldn’t let me say good-bye to you, explain, even though you were screaming,
screaming
for me.” I drop his quivering chin to wipe at my wet cheeks. “I don’t know how they could do that to you. I don’t know if I’ll ever. But I do know your father has disappeared and your mother is most likely faking a terminal illness at the Chinatown Holiday Inn and I am the last man standing, trying, at the risk of my own marriage, to do right by you, and if you
ever
so much as breathe a word disparaging my maternal potential again, so help me, I will drop you like the guilty favor you are.” I catch my breath, shaking uncontrollably. His eyes saucer and he steps back, his face white. Tripping over the garbage can, he keeps backing up and I, oh God, realize what I’ve done. “Grayer . . .”

He spins around, grabbing the decanter of Scotch off the bar and flinging back the patio door.

“Grayer!” I scream, chasing after him as he runs into the darkness.

The party finally winding down, sometime after midnight I miserably descend the flight of stairs to the basement media center, where Ryan slinked off to join Stilton and the other kids, now passed out after watching all seven and a half hours of the trilogy. Stilton stirs next to William, a napkin tied over one closed eye. “Argh,” he mumbles, “who goes there?”

“Argh,” William echoes in his sleep.

Careful not to wake Astin, who has fallen asleep in his lap, Ryan shifts him onto the leather recliner, removes his own napkin eye-patch, and stretches up to join me. “Still not back?” he whispers, hitting the power button on a muted ESPN.

I shake my head. “Any word from Josh?” He shakes his. “I said horrible things about his parents.”

“But it’s the truth. And he’s going to find out eventually.”

I drop my forehead to his chest.

“Look, you pack them up and I’ll go out and drive around, check the beach, see if I can find him.”

“Nan! Nan!”
We both jerk up to see Citrine hysterical at the top of the stairs. “Your Grayer just stole Clark’s Jag!”

23

The sun is rising, orange and agitated, as we pull off the I-95 expressway at the exit for Greenwich, Connecticut, following not so much Clark’s Jag, which we lost sight of half an hour ago when we slowed past a parked cop, but a hunch. The minute one of the party’s panicked valets stammered, “The kid said something about Chinatown,” we threw our stuff in the trunk of Ryan’s rental car, tucked Stilton in the back, and took off, hoping that, even with his lead, Grayer’s inexperience navigating back to the city might give us a chance of catching up. And we did—briefly—near the Holiday Inn.

I cannot believe we’ve driven through the night. I place my hands on my face and close my eyes for a moment, digging my ring fingers under the ridge of my brow bone to ease the prickling feeling behind my eyes. “Take that left,” I say, breaking the tense silence. I orient myself with the Metro-North station to give Ryan directions to Mr. X’s office building. I glance to the backseat, where Stilton is slouched out cold, head lolled, mouth open, held up like a scarecrow by his seat belt. “
What
is Grayer’s plan?” I ask quietly, while digging in my bag for gum I know I don’t have. “Confront them both? Get them to confront each other? You don’t think he’d do anything violent, do you?”

Ryan stares at the empty street, one arm extended to the wheel, the other elbow propped on the door as he grips his temples. “I don’t know this kid, Nan.”

“I might not either,” I admit for the first time, tossing the bag at my feet. “Twelve years is …long.”

As soon as the squat black building comes into view, it’s blatantly apparent the parking lot is empty. I crane my head to see if Grayer is approaching from the other direction. “Maybe he stopped to get gas or pee?” I postulate. “Maybe he got lost?”

“Maybe he shot his mother and is now looking for the perfect bucolic spot to bury her. Maybe by those swans.”

“You’re helping.” I rub my face, watching the explosions behind my eyes. “So he hijacks his mother from the hotel . . .”

“Hijacks? Nan, we saw her get in the Jag.”

“But we were three blocks away. And it was dark. Her son shows up in the middle of the night, less than sober, and asks her to get in a Jaguar that isn’t his and she
does
? What the fuck?”

“It’s not like he had a gun.”

“He stole a car! And you just said shot!”

“It was a joke.” He clenches and unclenches his jaw. “They walked out together. She got in the
stolen
car of her own volition.”

“Whatever. He hijacks her, drives her up the highway to Connecticut—”

“Nan,” he cuts in sharply, swerving the rental to a stop in front of the pond. “They might not be here at all.”

I twist to him. “So then what next?”

He squeezes the wheel.

“I
can’t
just drive home and forget this, Ryan! That you could even—”

“Nan, I walk out of situations every fucking day where I want to strip myself to the bone to fix things.
I get it.
You’re just way too close to see that you’ve done everything you can for this kid—”

“I have fucked this kid up!
Again!
Again, Ryan!” I lower my voice, darting my eyes back to a snoring Stilton.

“I’m not adopting him, Nan.”

“I know that.”

“And you’re not adopting him.”

I stare at him, unable to answer, Grayer’s backing away from me in Clark’s study replaying itself over and over.

“That’s it.” He lifts up and tugs his cell from his pocket. “We’re calling the police, telling them about the Jag. We’ll drop Stilton off with Boozy or Ditsy—”

“Bunny.”

“Whoever. And they can go back to being a family—”

“They
aren’t
a family, they
never were
a family. Just generation after generation of disappointment and—” I slap my hand over his. “I know where they are.”

As directed by Ryan’s iPhone white pages, minutes later we drive the length of a long, high brick wall until we come to an imposing fourteen-foot wrought-iron gate open on its hinges. Far up a rolling lawn, I spot the Jaguar parked like a silver slash across the drive. Ryan cuts the engine and we both get out on the lilac-lined road, gingerly shutting our doors so as not to awaken Stilton. The temperature has only begun to creep up from its overnight low and I shiver reflexively, buttoning my cardigan over the thin dress.

He approaches the call box, but I grab his arm. “Don’t. I’m just going to go up.”

“Nan,”
he says firmly.

“What?”

His hands find his hips and he drops his head. “You’re acting like a crazy person.”

“See, Ryan, that’s what parenting is—if the baby climbs a fence and runs six hundred miles, you climb a fence and run six hundred miles. You keep saying you want this. But I don’t think you get what
this
is.”

“Most people don’t! Unless you have twelve younger siblings, most people don’t have your level of experience—they just dive in. I get for me this will be on-the-job training. I also get that’s somehow not enough for you.”

“Because how are you going to get the training if you don’t show up for the job! You left me. For almost a month, Ryan. And there’s still no end in sight.”

“I’m sorry. But if you’re going to—”

“If I’m going to what?”

“Make the most important decision of our marriage based on four weeks out of the last twelve years.”

“It’s not even about us. Or you. It’s about me.” I pound my fingers into my solar plexus. “Me.”

“Jesus, Nan.” His eyes drop to the reddening mark.

“What?”

“I give up.” He raises his palms.

“What does that mean?”

“Just what it sounds like,” he says simply, his face flattening with hurt. “I’m not going to force you to want a baby. I’m not going to force you to anything. We’ll just …be us. In a big house that we’ll rent out and our old dog and that can be our lives.”

And as he articulates this alternative that I had somehow completely overlooked, the opposite of becoming a mother—not becoming one—I feel sadness clamp my heart. “I have to get up there.” I gesture to the redbrick mansion.

He waves for me to go ahead and I pass the open gate to jog up the sixty or so yards to where the drive splits off toward a multiple-car garage, or maybe a stable, and, as I stop to catch my breath, I realize Ryan hasn’t spun around back to New York. He’s rolling the rental slowly up the gravel. He parks behind Clark’s car—left at a haphazard angle, the passenger door still open—and gets out, leaving his window ajar for Stilton. As we approach the house birds chirp from the oaks towering overhead, the sun slanting in bright rays through the tree line. Glancing uneasily at each other, we step onto the veranda, where the flagstone is in desperate need of a sweep and the plantings in the urns languish brown and papery.

“Nan.” He points at the black front door, also left open.

Confused by the disrepair, I push and it gives into a grand entrance hall. Across from me, two staircases sweep up opposite sides of the room to join on a landing one floor above, visible through white balusters. Under the balcony is an archway to the rear of the house, conjuring servants scuttling back and forth with coats and galoshes, the husband’s ironed paper, the wife’s contribution to the parish’s charity lunch. But now, the room is cold and barren. I look down at the sole furnishing, a pedestal table, its dust-free center circle suggesting an object recently sat there. Ryan touches my back and we step fully inside, taking in the walls bearing numerous dusty outlines where paintings must have hung. Has Elizabeth X died?

I round through the wide arched doorway into the formal double-height living room, its wood-paneled walls empty, the floor bordered with a ring of scuffs demarking a rug no longer present. Chintz couches sit guard beside family pictures piled on the floor, assumingly divested from occasional furniture.

“Grayer’s grandmother lives here?” Ryan asks from the doorway.

“Lived, I think. So of course Mr. X’s been MIA—his mother passed away and he’s obviously been undone by it and clearly this family navigates grief with as much health as they do love. Let me just see that he’s okay, get the Jag’s keys and we’ll go.”

Nodding, he follows me into the chinoiserie dining room, where, above the table large enough to comfortably seat twenty, raw wires dangle and a massive Chippendale breakfront is empty of whatever treasure it had displayed.

Then voices. We follow, turning through a gallery of undressed china cabinets and back into the entrance hall, where they get louder—coming from the second floor. I jog up the stairs, Ryan beside me.

Stepping onto the floral-wallpapered landing, I see, at the far end of the hall, Grayer’s back outlined in a doorway.

“No my fault,” I hear a woman with a Latin-American accent state defensively as we pass a framed photograph of Elizabeth as a young bride, her son seated in linen bloomers by her spectator pumps, her cigarette smoke blowing out of frame.

“Grayer?” I ask and he looks over his shoulder, barely registering me before whipping his attention back to the once glorious room, now just dotted with indelible marks in the pile carpeting where furniture must have been. We step in behind him to see at the chamber’s other end, past the string of lead-pane windows overlooking the garden, Mrs. X standing in front of a marble fireplace in silk pajamas and a barn jacket. She stares up at a large rectangle on the wall above the mantel, a reverse shadow in the faded yellow paint.

But then a raspy haggard breath turns me to where, between us, buried under blankets, Elizabeth X lies in a hospital bed, hooked up to a feeding tube and heart-rate monitor.

“He sold the Chagall?” Mrs. X asks, her small fingertips to her lips.

“I never knew it was Chagall,” Grayer says quietly. “Not until last night.”

“Is no my fault,” the agitated home health aide repeats as she huddles in a quilted coat by the bed. “He take the pictures and rugs and makes rules. No heat. Last summer no air conditioner. The winter I afraid she die, no heat. Sometimes I plug in space heater I bring for her and hide it when he comes.”

“Dad brought me up here last week to help him take it,
steal it, sell it.
”

“Shit,” I hear Ryan murmur behind me. Oh God, no wonder he was so—

“He drained her trust. I’m over him, Mom, done. Stilton will be, too—”

Her head oscillates from side to side.

“So, okay, Mom?” Grayer crosses to her, his loafers leaving a trail of sandy prints on the buttercup carpet. “I’m sorry. I’m saying I’m sorry—I thought how you were kept him away, but I just—didn’t get it.” He throws his arms around her from behind, squeezing her tiny frame tight as she stares above the mantel. “So we can come home. And we’ll just forget Dad. You don’t have to be sick or pretend or whatever or any of that shit anymore because I believe in you now. We’ll be cool to you, okay?
Okay
?”

Her arms flattened at her sides, her gaze remains riveted by what isn’t there. “Where are the dogs?” she asks.

“The pound,” the aide answers with a melancholy tsk-tsk, unzipping her coat as the morning sun starts to warm the room. “They make missus so happy, but he no want to feed them.”

“But why?” Mrs. X asks, tugging her arm free from Grayer’s hold to touch a crack in the exposed yellow paint.

“Because, he’s bullshit, Mom.” he says, desperate for her to get it. “His hedge fund never took off. He started using investor money to pay off other investors. He’s done some seriously illegal shit. He only proposed to Carter because he thought her Hollywood friends would give him a few million fast to cover his debts. We have to go to the police and—” Her hand flies to his face. A slap. A sickening sound. “He’s your father.” She bores into him. “He’s been having some cash-flow problems this year—getting some new ventures off the ground—”

“He’s a fucking con man.” Grayer stares at her, his cheek reddening. “Charities. Museums. Schools. Did you watch the news last night?
He’s
the reason that school closed.” I look to Ryan.

“Stop distorting things. He does what’s
required.
I’ve had to spend the last two weeks holed up in some intolerable hotel room, faking an illness, for God’s sake, because that’s what was required. People will not tolerate failure.”

“So let’s find new people.”

She draws herself up. “You think you don’t like your friends at tennis camp so you’ll make some new friends at sailing school?” she asks, her voice soaked with sarcasm that shifts to outright contempt. “They’re the
same
people, Grayer. Your life has been so easy. When I was your age I was cleaning toilets at Swensen’s. Don’t stand there in the clothes he paid for and tell me what I can and cannot give up.”

“But he
left
you.”

She turns to the bed, crossing her arms. “This is between him and your grandmother. He can handle it.”

“
Handle
it?” Grayer repeats, his voice thickening. “We don’t know where he
is
. He may already have left the country.”

We all watch this land as she whips back to him, the veins in her neck in sudden relief. “They will seize
everything—do you understand?
The apartment, the bank accounts,
everything
.”