Bleeding Heart Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF LIZA GYLLENHAAL

  Bleeding Heart

  “A compelling, adroitly crafted novel of suspense about a woman’s second chance at happiness. [Gyllenhaal’s] lucid prose illuminates everyday life while shining a light on the darkest secrets and desires. The taut and evocative prose is psychologically astute and powerful. Liza Gyllenhaal is one of our finest novelists of the heart writing today.”

  —Carol Goodman, author of The Lake of Dead Languages

  “A tale of betrayal, greed, and murder with more twists than the paths through the gardens she describes so poetically along the way. Gyllenhaal also handily highlights a contemporary social issue sure to spark debates in every corner, as well as creates female characters with heart and ambition. . . . Fans of Jodi Picoult and Chris Bohjalian, this book’s for you!”

  —Holly Robinson, author of The Wishing Hill and Beach Plum Island

  “Full of intrigue and heart, Liza Gyllenhaal’s new novel is sure to leave you feeling as if you’ve taken a stroll through your favorite flower garden and found that strength was in full bloom.”

  —Jennifer Scott, author of The Sister Season

  A Place for Us

  “As timely as today’s headlines, as eternal as familial love, this is a dazzling novel of the joys and perils of parenthood and the desperation of adolescents striving to belong and struggling to grow up. Gyllenhaal has written a lyrical, psychologically astute, heart-stoppingly suspenseful novel about what it means to be part of a family.”

  —Ellen Feldman, author of Next to Love

  Written by today’s freshest new talents and selected by New American Library, NAL Accent novels touch on subjects close to a woman’s heart, from friendship to family to finding our place in the world. The Conversation Guides included in each book are intended to enrich the individual reading experience, as well as encourage us to explore these topics together—because books, and life, are meant for sharing.

  Visit us online at penguin.com.

  “Gyllenhaal’s novel is a snapshot of a family and a community in crisis. It is a thought-provoking, all-too-familiar story of young people attempting to navigate the often treacherous road to adulthood and adults attempting to parent on an equally dangerous path.”

  —Booklist

  “Very compassionate and realistic. A very compelling, gripping story from the start to the last page.”

  —My Book Addiction Reviews

  “A powerful story about grudges, secrets, and family loyalty.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “[With] a timely, ripped-from-the-headlines story, this book will get readers thinking even after the last page is finished.”

  —News and Sentinel (Parkersburg, WV)

  So Near

  “Unexpected, jarring, and beautiful. . . . Gyllenhaal doesn’t just invite us to follow a story from the sidelines. She grabs our arms and yanks us right into the center of an emotional whirlwind. . . . Gyllenhaal demonstrates a deft hand at lyrical writing that subtly balances metaphors, philosophical realizations, and the realistic complexity of emotions.”

  —Berkshire Eagle

  “Intriguing . . . a real page-turner!”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Gyllenhaal plumbs the complexity of human emotions in this wonderful novel. With sensitivity and compassion, she creates characters that will pull at your heart on their journey through grief. I loved reading So Near, a truly believable and compelling story.”

  —Katherine Davis, author of A Slender Thread

  Local Knowledge

  “A bighearted debut.”

  —Miami Herald

  “This is a book to savor. . . . Selling real estate is the surface story, but as you peel back the layers throughout the chapters you realize it is about family relationships, old friends, and new friends.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A damn fine novel. . . . Gyllenhaal truly makes the Berkshire setting jump to life. And she is terrific with character—I particularly admired the way she wove personality into action—so that the behavior of her characters in her setting seems natural, unforced, and often really compelling. . . . I constantly felt as if I knew the people on the page, so I was captivated by their story.”

  —John Katzenbach, bestselling author of What Comes Next

  “Gripping and deeply perceptive, this powerful debut novel reveals the pleasures and struggles of true friendship and the painful decisions we often make for acceptance and love. Small-town life and work are rendered in vivid detail, as are the memorable characters, who come alive in the hands of a gifted new writer.”

  —Ben Sherwood, author of Charlie St. Cloud

  “Deftly draws the reader . . . down through the layers and layers of intimate entanglements her characters have with each other, the land, and the new and old ways of life. I highly recommend Local Knowledge to anyone who loves good writing.”

  —Tina Welling, author of Cowboys Never Cry

  “Enjoyable and intriguing. . . . Gyllenhaal has a magnificent grasp of small-town dynamics. . . . Gyllenhaal breaks the mold of expectation by weaving in complex interactions over years of shared economic and emotional struggles. . . . [T]hrough Gyllenhaal’s superb skill there is an almost poetic quality to how the events of the past tie into the fragile relationships of the present.”

  —Jody Kordana, Berkshire Eagle

  “How accomplished this first novel is . . . a rich, authentic read . . . with a tightly focused cast of characters once again proving the old adage that less is more . . . a timely enough message if ever there was one.”

  —Berkshire Living

  ALSO BY LIZA GYLLENHAAL

  A Place for Us

  So Near

  Local Knowledge

  NAL Accent

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014

  USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  First published by NAL Accent, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  Copyright © Liza Gyllenhaal Bennett, 2014

  Conversation Guide copyright © Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Gyllenhaal, Liza.

  Bleeding heart / Liza Gyllenhaal.

  p. cm

  ISBN 978-0-698-13755-4

  I. Title.

  PS3607.Y53B58 2014

  813'.6—dc23 2014015574

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Praise

  Also by LIZA GYLLENHAAL

  Title page

  Copyright page
/>
  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part Two

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part Three

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Part Four

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Epilogue

  Conversation Guide

  About the Author

  For W.E.B.

  Part One

  1

  “C heater! Cheater! Cheater!”

  I stopped on the pathway leading out to the barn to listen to the male cardinal’s repeated cry. He and the missus lived in the stand of hemlocks behind the house and spent their days alternately foraging under the kitchen bird feeders and reminding me over and over again of my folly. Cheater! Most ornithologists identify the call as cheer, cheer, cheer or birdie, birdie, birdie. But I knew better. The soundstage effect of the snow muffled the bird’s cry, but I still heard the warning clearly. Don’t forget! You must never forget!

  Not that I could even if I wanted to. It would be like forgetting that I’d lost an arm or a leg. The source of the pain was gone, but its throbbing absence would always be with me. For, in fact, I had been cheated. Something had been taken from me. Many things, actually. Trust. Security. Identity. The wonderful complacency of marriage and motherhood. Of knowing exactly where I stood in the world. And that the sun would come up again over the sugar maples bordering our old Westchester property. The Hyatt house on the corner. I could still see it all so clearly in my mind’s eye! My daughters, bent dutifully over their cereal bowls at the kitchen table. Richard, flapping open the Wall Street Journal. The row of African violets on the windowsill. All of it gone now. Swept away—no, cruelly severed. Without warning. Or recourse. Or even—and this was the worst of it, really—explanation.

  “You got a call from the Mackenzie residence,” Mara said as I came into the office, stamping the snow off my boots. Last night’s unexpected late-winter storm had dumped another six inches on the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts. The thrill of January’s sun-dazzled snowscapes was long gone. It was mid-March, after all. Daffodils were blooming in other parts of the country.

  “What?” I asked, shedding my duffle coat and hanging it on the wall rack next to Mara’s oversized parka.

  “The Mackenzie residence,” she said again. “That big new place on the mountain. The one you and Mrs. Boyland were talking about last week.”

  I’m always a little taken aback when I realize that my self-effacing assistant, Mara, might actually be listening in on my telephone conversations. I guess it’s hard not to overhear each other in the winter when I close off most of the old barn to save on heat, and Mara and I are forced to share the small front office. I know I should probably just shut down Green Acres altogether during the off-season. But a nagging fear that I’ll somehow lose momentum and slip back into the abyss keeps me at my desk. Just as her need to provide for her son, Danny, keeps Mara, a single parent, at hers. Both of us, in the dead of winter, frittering away time on the Internet. And, in my case, talking on the phone, frequently to Gwen Boyland.

  “I’m guessing two million when all is said and done,” Gwen had told me the week before. My closest friend in Woodhaven, Gwen takes endless pleasure in talking about money. What things cost. How much people are worth. Lately she’s become obsessed, as have many others in town, with calculating the final tally for the glass and steel monolith on Powell Mountain that’s been under construction for the past two years. Since the recession hit, building in our area has fallen way off. This was one of the few new homes to go up in ages—and certainly the biggest.

  “Todd told me they had to tear out all the marble in the bathrooms because the owner thought it was too pink,” I’d said to Gwen. Todd Franey, who works for Green Acres during the summer, picks up odd construction jobs the rest of the year and had been a dogsbody for the tile installer. A sweet-natured local boy, he was dumbstruck over the waste of money and materials. “He told me the marble had all been custom cut, so the owner had to eat the cost. It must have been thousands of dollars.”

  “I happen to know it was almost twenty thousand,” Gwen had said. Before she took over as executive director of the Woodhaven Historical Society, Gwen worked as a real estate broker, and she still maintains a wide-ranging network of contacts in that world. “That’s a drop in the bucket for someone like Graham Mackenzie. The man has got to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”

  “Todd said he’s putting in some kind of fancy landing pad,” I’d told her.

  “Oh, folks are going to love that!” Gwen said. “The griping I’ve heard about that damned helicopter!”

  I’d heard the sound myself from time to time, though only as a distant irritant. But I knew that people who lived closer to Powell Mountain swore the noise of Mackenzie’s swirling blades overhead was interrupting their sleep patterns and destroying their sense of rural repose. When I’d summered in Woodhaven with my family as a girl, Powell Mountain, which rises eleven hundred feet over the northern edge of town, was a wilderness of hemlocks and birches, limestone outcroppings, deer paths, and cascading brooks. It wasn’t until after 9/11, when the Berkshires were hit by a sudden growth spurt, that anyone seriously considered building there. After all, it would take a ridiculous amount of money to clear the heavily wooded mountainside, cut in switchbacks, and lay down the necessary power and water lines. But by the time I moved up to Woodhaven from Westchester five years ago, a half dozen millionaires—all loosely affiliated through business dealings—had divvied up the 125-acre property and started erecting enormous trophy homes. Graham Mackenzie was building his place on the last and biggest parcel. It was on the very top of the mountain and had panoramic views of three states.

  “Where did he get all his money?” I asked.

  “I’ve been Googling him. He’s very big in hydrofracking. His MKZEnergy is the third-largest natural gas producer in the country. The stock price has been almost doubling every year for the last four years.”

  “I’d ask you why this matters,” I said, “but I’m afraid I already know.” My dear friend is not a gold digger in any traditional sense of the word. She doesn’t yearn to be draped in minks or to be sunbathing on a yacht in Monte Carlo. Her ambitions are far more focused and hardheaded than that. At this point, I think Gwen would do just about anything to raise the funds necessary to restore Bridgewater House. Built in 1751, it’s the oldest standing residence in Woodhaven, and its renovation is the main reason Gwen was hired as the full-time executive director of the Woodhaven Historical Society. Since the announcement of the start of the capital campaign last summer to return the structure to its former glory, Gwen has been relentlessly running down every loose piece of change in the area.

  “It makes me crazy that I can’t make inroads into that millionaires’ row up there,” Gwen said. “They throw all their money at Tanglewood and at Shakespeare & Company and totally ignore this historic gem nestled right here in the heart—”

  “I’ve alr
eady heard your sales pitch,” I reminded her. “Save it for Mackenzie. But I wouldn’t put much hope in someone who rips apart the earth for a living.”

  “Oh, right, unlike Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick and those other robber barons.”

  But no matter how Gwen tried to justify it, I was still uncomfortable with what felt to me like her growing desperation about meeting the Bridgewater fund-raising goal. I knew all too well what the campaign meant to her career. Though she tried to put a good face on it, her midlife shift into the not-for-profit sector had resulted from a series of dead-end jobs in the for-profit one. This in many ways was Gwen’s last chance to turn her luck around. We’re both in our late forties now. We’d both been forced to make drastic reductions in our lifestyles and expectations over the past several years. Our options were narrowing. But I believed I was coming to terms with the setbacks I’d experienced. Bitterness welled up in the back of my throat only occasionally now, and the old outrage that had once dominated my waking hours had finally slackened. Green Acres had turned a decent profit for three years running, and I believed I was finally starting to get my life back on track. I wasn’t so sure about Gwen.

  “And what did the Mackenzie residence want?” I asked Mara as I sat down at my desk and swiveled my chair in her direction. Though I’d suggested she set up her workstation next to mine in front of the large sunny windows that looked out on the herb garden and greenhouse, Mara had elected to stay in the back of the room near the sliding doors that opened to the rest of the barn. She’d angled her desk so that the back of her computer was facing me, blocking her body and the screen from view. It seemed to me that Mara made a concerted effort to avoid any kind of attention. Though she’d been working for me for more than a year now, I knew very little about her personal life except for the fact that she was raising an adorable toddler on her own. In the beginning, I found her guarded to the point of being rude. But just as I’d become dependent on her quiet efficiency, I’d grown used to her curt and wary manner.