A Place For Us Read online

  “Oh, great,” Tilly said. Brook glanced in the rearview mirror and caught her daughter’s unhappy expression.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It’s just—” Tilly hesitated, looking out the window at the fading afternoon. Though the air was frigid, the earlier flurries had left only a dusting of snow on the ground. “Carey’s cool. But Brandon—I don’t know. . . . I think he’s kind of a jerk.”

  Brook was surprised that Tilly had formulated such strong opinions about Liam’s roommate and his older brother. They’d both met the brothers on only two prior occasions: when the family had first dropped Liam off at Moorehouse, the prep school the boys attended in Connecticut, and then again on Columbus Day weekend. Then the two brothers had stayed the night, too, on their way home to Syracuse. If anything, tall, terse, acned Carey had struck Brook as far more of a jerk than his athletic and actually rather charming older brother. Brook wondered if Tilly’s strong feelings didn’t mask an unrecognized attraction. She wasn’t too young to develop a crush, after all.

  “Well, I’m sorry you feel that way,” Brook said. “But it’s a great help to have Brandon drive Liam home. It’s only for one night, sweetie. And you’ll be in bed by the time they get here anyway.”

  Brook and Tilly got cash for Phoebe at the drive-through, then frozen pizzas and the makings for ice cream sundaes. Back at the house, they found Phoebe waiting for them on the teak bench in the kitchen garden. Her cheeks were flushed red from the cold, almost exactly the same color as her shoulder-length mass of curly hair.

  “You must be freezing!” Brook called over to her as she and Tilly climbed out of the car. “You should have gone in. You know where the extra key is.” But even as she said it, Brook realized that Phoebe would never have entered the Bostocks’ unoccupied house by herself. It was just one of those unspoken rules. One of those invisible lines that Brook kept stumbling upon, lines that seemed designed to separate her from so many people in Barnsbury.

  “It’s so pretty out here,” Phoebe said, walking over to the car. She took a bag of groceries from Brook. “I’ve been watching the blue jays fight back the squirrels at the feeder.”

  “The forever war,” Brook said, fumbling in her shoulder bag for her key ring. She looked up the hill to Michael’s studio. The lights were still on. If he didn’t come down in another half hour, she’d have to send Tilly up to get him. It took her a split second to register why she didn’t want to go herself. Why she didn’t want to face him. As she pushed open the kitchen door with her shoulder, she felt a little spasm of pain in the left side of her rib cage, as though she’d pulled a muscle. But it was nothing serious, she told herself.

  • • •

  She was packing her overnight bag when she heard his voice downstairs. He’d come in through the kitchen, where Phoebe and Tilly were making popcorn. The festive, movie-night aroma had drifted up the stairs as she got ready, making her wish all over again that they didn’t have to go to Rhinebeck. That they could just relax in front of the fire with Tilly and the popcorn and wait together for Liam to come home. That everything between Michael and her was the same as it had been when they’d first opened their eyes that morning.

  “Brrr, your feet are cold,” she’d murmured as he’d curled up against her back. He was nearly a foot taller and fifty pounds heavier than Brook. A bit like the custom-made pieces of furniture he created, Michael was solid but elegantly built. When he held her in his arms, she felt like the most delicate and precious thing in the world.

  “How about these?” he’d whispered into her hair as his hands closed around her breasts.

  “Freezing! But I know a trick or two that could help warm them up.”

  “I was hoping you would,” he’d said, pulling her tighter.

  Michael didn’t like to have it acknowledged, but he was a remarkably handsome man. Movie-star, male-model caliber. Heads literally turned when he walked into a room. Tall, broad, dark-haired—he was all the clichés of masculine beauty rolled into one, with the added attraction of being clearly oblivious to the effect he had on others. It had taken Brook a while to realize that he honestly didn’t know what all the fuss was about. Forthright and somewhat shy, he hated the flirty, come-hither way so many women acted around him. He had no patience for small talk—or for most talk—unless it was with Brook or his kids—and that balanced things out between them pretty nicely.

  Brook talked and Michael listened. Brook’s outlook was sunny, Michael was no stranger to gloom. But, as far as Brook was concerned, the underlying, unspoken equation of their marriage—the secret to its success really—was that she was rich and he was good-looking. For Brook it was simply a matter of physics, of opposites attracting, of two extremes finding the perfect gravitational balance in each other’s orbit. But that whole rather crude theorem worked only because Brook believed Michael had been drawn to her at first, not to her money, just as she had fallen in love with his diffidence, the down-turning smile—his essence—not really registering how ridiculously handsome he was until later. Until it was too late for her to be put off by the fact that he was so obviously out of her league as far as looks went. But if there actually had been any sort of calculation on his part when he’d first approached her, then everything she believed to be good and true about her world was, well—

  She heard him climbing the stairs and busied herself with the packing.

  “Damn,” he said as he came into the room and saw what she was doing. “I guess we’re still going. I was hoping we’d get snowed in here.”

  “Too bad,” she said, weighing his tone, listening for a false note, before she made herself stop. Oh, for heaven’s sake! Was she actually going to start second-guessing him now?

  “Did you pack for me, too?” he asked as he pulled off the wool hoodie he wore in the studio. He began to strip down. He liked to shower at the end of the day; he used a lot of natural stains and finishes in his work and often came in trailing the scent of turpentine or linseed oil.

  “Yes,” she said, surprised by how normal she sounded. She also felt sad and a little forsaken. This was the first time she could remember ever pretending to Michael that everything was fine when it really wasn’t. He was the first, and usually the only, person she turned to when she felt as uncertain as she did at that moment. “I’m just about ready. I’ll wait for you downstairs. I want to go over some things with Phoebe.”

  “Hey,” he said, walking over to her and pulling her into his arms. “Is everything okay?” She breathed in the smell of him. She should just come right out and tell him what Alice had said. Ask him for an explanation.

  “Well, as a matter of fact—” Her voice sounded a little breathy. Her heart was racing. She realized that she just wouldn’t be able to bear it if she heard the slightest bit of hesitation in his answer. “I was talking to Alice before. She’s getting the jitters.”

  “No big surprise there,” he said, kissing the top of her head. “I won’t be long.”

  • • •

  She knew, of course, that it was exactly the sort of thing Michael hated to hear. The kind of comment that made him look down, shaking his head. That actually made him blush. She’d long been aware that though her husband had an athlete’s natural grace and lack of inhibition, though he was utterly at ease with his sexuality, the instant someone glanced at him sideways or commented on his good looks, he became self-conscious, almost shamefaced.

  But the words seemed to fly out of her mouth of their own volition.

  “Isn’t he just the handsomest guy you’ve ever seen?” she said to Tilly and Phoebe as Michael, hair still damp from the shower and dressed in a wool sport jacket and turtleneck, came into the kitchen.

  He stopped, staring at her, and cocked his head. She’d always thought it was an endearing, kind of puppyish thing for such a big masculine guy to do. But then Alice had told her that’s exactly how Michael had reacted when he’d first learned who she
was. And she realized that the tiny seed of doubt that Alice had so thoughtlessly planted earlier in the day had, against Brook’s will, already started to sprout. She felt Michael’s scrutiny now, his speculation. She knew he was waiting for her to defuse the remark, add some kind of twist, or turn it into a joke.

  But she didn’t.

  2

  “Isn’t he just the handsomest guy you’ve ever seen?” Mrs. Bostock asked Phoebe and Tilly as Mr. Bostock walked into the kitchen all dressed up for the party.

  Phoebe smiled in reply, knowing it was not the kind of question she was supposed to answer. Which was good because, in her mind, Mr. Bostock was a little too old for her to honestly say. But she had noticed the boyhood photo of him that Mrs. Bostock kept on her dresser. In it he had on a red checked jacket and was carrying a gun across his shoulder. His long, dark hair was falling into his eyes, and he had a wicked grin plastered across his face. There was a wildness, a kind of daring, about him then that he didn’t have anymore. In fact, he looked so much like Liam in the photo that, if Phoebe hadn’t known Liam hated everything to do with hunting, she could easily have mistaken Mr. Bostock for his son. And, as far as Phoebe Lansing was concerned, Liam Bostock was the most wonderful-looking person in the world.

  Phoebe couldn’t actually remember a time when she didn’t feel that way about Liam. When she didn’t know that she loved him. One of her first memories was playing on the swings with him behind the old elementary school. Phoebe lived right across from the school and thought of the playground as an extension of her own small yard. The Bostocks were new to Barnsbury then, had just finished building their beautiful house on Willard Mountain, and Mrs. Bostock often brought Liam and Tilly down to the playground to, as she’d told Phoebe, “get to know some people in town.”

  Which even Phoebe could have told her was a waste of time. Since the old elementary school had been shuttered, nobody but Phoebe ever really played there anymore. But she’d kept that piece of information to herself, which had allowed her to keep the Bostocks pretty much to herself that first summer.

  She and Liam must have been around seven at the time, because Tilly had just learned how to walk. In fact, she’d somehow toddled over to the swing set without Mrs. Bostock noticing, and Phoebe, unaware of the little girl’s approach and throwing all her weight into a back swing, had knocked Tilly right off her feet. There had been a lot of screaming and some blood. Though Tilly hadn’t been seriously hurt, Phoebe found herself in tears. She felt guilty and responsible. Even then, she didn’t just adore Liam—she was basically falling in love with the whole family.

  “Don’t feel bad,” Liam had told her.

  “I can’t help it.”

  “I won’t let you,” he’d replied, and leaned over and kissed her right on the mouth. It was just a quick peck, the kind Phoebe’s mom gave her when she said good-bye. His lips had been hot, a little chapped, the whole thing lasting no more than an instant, but the imprint he had left on her was permanent. Even during those first years at Deer Mountain when all the boys ran together in a pack, pointedly ignoring the girls, Liam would always break ranks to acknowledge Phoebe. Nodding or waving, with a little smile that she knew was telling her to Wait. Just wait. Her time was coming.

  “I want to stay up until Liam gets home,” Tilly told Phoebe as they loaded the dishwasher after their dinner.

  “You heard what your mom told me,” Phoebe replied, measuring out the dishwasher liquid and starting the machine, then stowing the detergent back under the sink. Phoebe knew the Bostocks’ spacious, elegantly appointed kitchen as well as, if not better than, her own cramped and depressing one. She loved the entire Arts and Crafts–style house, with its golden oak wainscoting, art glass windowpanes, and high, beamed ceilings, but the kitchen was her favorite room. It was larger than her entire downstairs. The custom-made cabinets were cherrywood with pewter pulls shaped like oak leaves. The floor was covered in glazed earthenware tiles. The upper panel in the windows above the sink held a stained-glass depiction of wild birds—cardinals, blue jays, and chickadees—that a local artisan had created especially for the house. Phoebe cherished everything about the kitchen as if it belonged to her, and she was painstaking in its care.

  “She said nine thirty at the latest,” Phoebe added, wiping down the butcher-block counter abutting the sink, using a cloth dampened with mineral oil. She frequently had to remind Mrs. Bostock not to clean it with a wet sponge.

  “She won’t have to know,” Tilly suggested. “We don’t have to tell her.”

  “Yeah, but if she finds out, it’s my butt in a sling.”

  Tilly giggled. The younger girl delighted in Phoebe’s frank way of talking, the colorful expressions lifted—with a little necessary editing—directly from Phoebe’s father. Everybody in town knew that Troy Lansing had a mouth on him and, especially since the divorce, he was not shy about turning it on his ex-wife and daughter. If there was often a note of aggression, a degree of bullying, in the way he spoke to them, Phoebe tried not to let it get to her. As Troy Lansing was the first to tell you, his life was not exactly a bowl of cherries. These days, it was a lot more like a load of crapola.

  “Tell you what, though,” she told Tilly. “Who’s to say you can’t wait up for him in your room? Your mom only said you had to be in bed by nine thirty. No one can tell you when you have to fall asleep, right?”

  But Phoebe knew perfectly well that once Tilly’s head hit the pillow, she’d be out like a light. When Tilly was younger and Phoebe used to read her a story at bedtime, her charge had usually drifted off to sleep before Phoebe had finished the first paragraph. And, in fact, when she went back upstairs a little after ten to check on Tilly, the younger girl was dead to the world, her arms flung above her head in an attitude of innocent abandon. Phoebe sat down in the armchair beside the bed, her heart filling with a familiar ache as she looked at Tilly—and then let her gaze roam around the prettily decorated bedroom. Sometimes, alone at night in her own dull box of a room, Phoebe pretended that she was actually here, nestled in Tilly’s queen-sized bed with its ruffled pink-striped bed skirts and princess canopy, the walls decorated with posters from popular children’s books—Beatrix Potter, Babar, and Madeline—the collection of American Girl dolls arranged just so on top of the hand-stenciled cedar chest.

  Phoebe loved Tilly as if she were her own sister. But she also envied her—deeply and fiercely—the way she envied the whole Bostock family. For years, this love and envy had flowed together through Phoebe’s heart in one strong, unstoppable stream. That she both loved them and wanted to be them seemed natural to her—simply her lot in life. But that she loved Liam above all others—including herself—was a secret she feared that, if known to the rest of the Bostock family, would upend the careful balancing act she’d undertaken. And so she’d kept the truth buried within her and had been able to move through the household—sitting right next to Liam at the kitchen table, or riding beside him in the car—like a thief carrying stolen goods that could never, rightly, be hers.

  She had never expected more than that. She had never allowed herself to want more than that. It had seemed enough to simply feel the way she did—her love for Liam its own reward. That is, until last June, when everything changed.

  Phoebe went back downstairs, stopping in the powder room adjoining the kitchen to check on her appearance. She’d put a lot of thought and effort into how she wanted to look that night. Her nose was a little too pert, her skin too freckled, to let her believe for a moment that she was beautiful. She was pretty enough, though, in a round-faced, red-haired kind of way. But she didn’t kid herself. Grown men turned to stare after her, not at her smile or her wide green-gray eyes, but because of her full breasts and generous hips, the backside that, even packed tight inside hip-hugging jeans, still managed to jiggle and bounce.

  If Liam noticed Phoebe’s natural endowments, he’d never let on to her. Other boys tried to grope her breasts, but Liam wanted only to talk. And talk. She’d b
een amazed when he first opened up to her, confiding things that she knew he had never shared with another living soul. He’d kissed her a few times, but never more than fleetingly, never with more than the brotherly fondness of that brief buss the summer they first met.

  “You’re the only one who understands,” he’d told her as they lay side by side under the stars, barely touching. “I couldn’t go on without you.”

  But he had gone on. Or had been forced to go. And except for those three brief text messages over the course of the semester, he seemed to be managing okay without her. Though it was hard to tell. After all, she knew now just how convincingly Liam was able to hide his true feelings behind a bluff of humor and kidding.

  It seemed like most of the time they had spent together over the summer was devoted to talking about his problems, his fears, and she cherished that closeness above anything else in the world. But, over the weeks and then months he’d been away, she found herself wanting something else, something more.

  Phoebe eyed herself in the mirror. She thought the mascara she’d so painstakingly applied, together with the lavender cashmere sweater she’d “borrowed” from her mother, made her look special. She ran her hands down her sides, smoothing out the cashmere’s downy folds. Tonight Liam Bostock was going to focus on her.

  • • •

  She must have fallen asleep on the couch in the music room. She woke up slowly. Her sweater twisted around her waist, exposing a lightly freckled swath of stomach and hips. The last thing she remembered, right before she clicked off the television set, was the sound of Jon Stewart tapping his pen repeatedly on the top of his news desk. Now she was aware of a shuffling noise, a door opening and closing.

  “Holy shit!” she heard someone say. A boy. Not Liam. She sat up, tugging at her sweater.