“That’s not fair. And it doesn’t excuse what you did. What you and Mom did was wrong.” But her words ricochet within me, triggering a cascade of thoughts. Was Krystle right? Had I tucked away everything about that time in my life out of shame, because I didn’t want to carry that part of my past with me? I packed it away as if it belonged to another person in another life. But it belonged to me. It shaped me and who I’ve become.
But now I need to face it, all of it.
“How did it all happen?” I ask, my tone cool. I can’t trigger a reaction from her now. There will be time for recriminations later. I need the truth. “Exactly how did we get the house?”
“Sharon and I made it happen, that’s how. You can thank us that you never had to take a single loan out for college or art school.” She takes a deep breath. “I’ll never forget when that lady came to our apartment looking for you. It was a Saturday; you weren’t home. She was borderline hysterical. She wanted to make the whole thing go away for her precious Paul. She offered Sharon money to drop the charges.”
“What did Sharon say?” I picture a faceless woman at the doorway to our dark, cluttered apartment, begging a sneering Sharon for help. How much my mother would have enjoyed that, holding that kind of power over someone else.
“She told her to get lost,” Krystle says. “But then I guess Sharon changed her mind. The lady left her phone number, and when Sharon called later, she told us to meet her at her house in Westport. She didn’t want to risk anyone seeing her in town again. Paul was arrested by then. Tampering with a witness is a crime, you know.”
“I remember when you guys took that trip,” I say. “You told me some story about a job interview, how Sharon had to drive you.”
“We drove down there to her house. It was beautiful.”
Their duplicity disgusts me. All those secretive talks they must have had—Don’t tell Alexis! I wonder who cooked up the elderly aunt story. Fury rises in me. All these years that I’ve been looking after the two of them, they were probably laughing behind my back.
“I only saw it once,” I say through clenched teeth. That was five years ago when I moved Sharon out of it and into her first assisted living facility. At the end of the long gravel driveway sat a modest white farmhouse enveloped by a wraparound porch. The house was simple, just six rooms with one full bathroom—it didn’t even have central air-conditioning, but what it did boast was a sloping green lawn that stretched down to the Long Island Sound.
“The house was no big deal, but the view was amazing,” Krystle says in a faraway voice that makes me want to scream at her, bring her back to reality. The reality in which her and Sharon’s actions may be what’s led to my life being destroyed. “I knew right away that what Margaret was offering wasn’t enough. If she thought Sharon and I would be all cowed, she miscalculated. It was more like, whoa, this lady is seriously lowballing us. So we improvised.” Her tone is mischievous, proud.
“What do you mean, improvised?” The word catches in my throat. Dread fills me. This is getting even worse. A glance at the clock on the bedside tells me that I need to get going if I am going to make it to Zucker’s office by five. I start down the stairs.
“We told her you were pregnant,” Krystle says, pride in her voice. “I even cried, acted freaked out, so concerned for my big sister. And I could see this lady’s face doing the calculations. Prison for her precious husband, some bastard kid in their lives forever. Child support. That’s a lot of freaking money for the next eighteen years. Then Sharon just went for it.”
I inhale sharply and stop short on the stairs. “You did what?”
“Sharon said, ‘Give me the house, and it’ll all go away. I’ll make sure Alexis has an abortion, and you’ll never hear from us again.’ I couldn’t believe when that lady said yes. It was that easy.”
“That’s when Sharon sent me to San Francisco.” At the time, my mother acted as if the only concern she had was for my well-being. I didn’t want to press charges, because I still thought I was in love with Paul. And in the middle of all that, Sharon took me aside and said I should go stay with a third cousin in the Bay Area.
That a police investigation would ruin my life.
That, if I stayed, the shame of what I had done would cling to me like a bad smell I could never wash off.
That she was only thinking of me.
She bought me a one-way ticket, drove me to the airport, and gave me one hundred dollars jammed in an envelope to go start a new life. I felt understood and supported by her for the first time, so grateful that she wasn’t forcing me to cooperate with police detectives who looked at me like I was trash. One of them told me that I wasn’t worth ruining a man’s life over but that the notoriety of the case had forced the department to pursue it.
And the whole time, my mother was covering her ass, getting me out of town so I wouldn’t ask too many questions. “His poor wife.”
“Of course,” Krystle says, “I think hormones had, like, everything to do with it.”
“What does that mean?” Dread blooms within me.
“She was pregnant.”
Krystle’s words seize me on a primal level. A realization claws its way up from the depths of my consciousness like a feral animal desperate for air. “If she was around the same age as
