“Nothing?” she said, her lawyer voice back. “This isn’t nothing, Heather. Are you okay?”
“Of course I am,” Heather said. She must have seen the skeptical looks on our faces, because she sighed and brushed her hair back with one of her elegant hands, a gesture of stress or impatience—I couldn’t tell which. She reached for the ice pack Daniel held against his split lip and said, “Let me see, sweetie.”
“No!” Daniel swung his head away.
“Just for a second,” Heather said in a soothing voice. “Let Mommy see for a second.” She moved the ice pack away, and we could see that Daniel’s upper lip had puffed up, giving him a cute, pouting expression. “No more bleeding—want to go back out to play?” Heather didn’t wait for an answer, already moving around Sarah and putting Daniel down next to the back door.
“That’s it? Aren’t you even going to explain how your kitchen got trashed?” Sarah demanded.
Before Heather could say anything, it was Daniel who spoke. “Daddy says Mommy is clumsy.” He laughed, looking up at the adults with an expectant, chilling smile.
chapter six
SARAH
Heather didn’t react to Daniel—no correction or contradiction. Alison and I exchanged glances, but it was Julie who said, “I don’t think your mom’s clumsy at all—remember, she was a model and models are very graceful.”
Julie always brought up Heather’s modeling. She thought Heather having been a model was very important even though as far as I could tell Heather had never done any significant work. She wasn’t a supermodel, after all, or one of those lingerie angels. She’d never graced the cover of Sports Illustrated or any other magazine as far as I knew. She’d done a bit of modeling in the United States and apparently some modeling in Europe, too, but she didn’t like to talk about her life before Sewickley, so we knew very little.
Still, it wasn’t just about fame for Julie; she was like this with all her friends. She always told people I was a lawyer before mentioning that I’d left the law to stay home with my kids. I certainly felt like a lawyer that afternoon, standing among all that debris while trying not to sound as if I were cross-examining Heather.
I waited until she’d sent Daniel back outside with the kids before pressing her. “What the hell happened in here?”
She crossed her arms over her chest, looking from me to Alison and Julie. “We had an argument; things got a little heated.”
“So you and Viktor threw all these dishes at each other?” Julie asked, sweeping her arms to indicate the last of the rubble still strewn across the floor.
Before Heather could answer, Alison spoke hard and fast: “Viktor did this, didn’t he?”
“He’s been under a lot of stress,” Heather said after a minute, which wasn’t an answer to the question, but answered it anyway.
“Of course, honey, but we’re all under a lot of stress,” Julie said gently. “This is more than stress.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s an anger-management problem.”
There was color high on Heather’s cheekbones, but her voice barely betrayed the emotion and embarrassment she had to be feeling. “It was just a silly argument,” she said. “I didn’t want you to see the mess.”
“Like the bruise on your wrist?” Alison’s voice was low and hard. She looked as upset as I’d ever seen her. “Did he hit you?”
“No, of course not!” Heather said, but her gaze darted away and I don’t think any of us believed her. I wondered what fresh bruises her clothes were hiding. Viktor had obviously been careful not to leave any marks on her face.
Julie gathered the silverware noisily together and started loading it back in the dishwasher, her movements hurried and jerky. “We’ll help you get this cleaned up, it’s no problem.”
“Thank you, really, but I’d rather you didn’t,” Heather said, sounding strained. “Please, let’s just go back outside.”
“Whatever you want,” Julie said, shoving the last of the silverware into the dishwasher before straightening up and glancing out the kitchen window. “Alison, I think Matthew might need you.”
“Oh!” Alison bolted out the back door, clearly panicked that she’d forgotten about her kids, and I followed after her, anxious that Sam might have hit another child while I was inside.
The sun had shifted and the day felt even colder. Back on the courtyard the coffee had gone cold and new leaves had blown onto the table. Julie plucked one out of her coffee cup as Heather gently shook the pot. “There’s more in here,” she announced before emptying the cold dregs from her own cup into a boxwood hedge that edged the patio. We all followed suit, Alison’s toss landing short so a trail of milky coffee trickled across the stone, seeping into the cracks.
“Oh, sorry,” she said, springing up to dab ineffectually at it with a napkin.
“It’s fine,” Heather said. “No big deal.” She refilled our cups with a smile and Julie smiled, too, slipping easily back into the pretense that everything was okay. No one commented that the coffee from the pot was barely warmer than what we’d tossed out. Heather and Julie resumed their conversation about the fashion show as if nothing had interrupted it. I couldn’t do it, not now, not after this. I’d never been good at pretending, and I knew Alison wasn’t either. She’d sat back down at the table to brood over her coffee, lost in thought and absentmindedly biting her nails. I felt a sudden impatience—we needed to stop sitting there and do something.
“There’s help,” I blurted, and the others looked at me, Julie’s expression wary and Alison’s relieved. Heather’s face betrayed nothing at all. She simply stared at me, her face the beautiful blank canvas of a plaster Madonna. It was disconcerting. I cleared my throat, gripping my coffee cup. “There are places to get help,” I said. “You don’t have to put up with this.”
“Put up with what?” Heather said after a long, uncomfortable silence, her eyes fixed on mine. I wished that Julie or Alison would step in and back me up, but then Heather laughed. I was so startled my cup slipped from my hands and coffee splashed over the table. It dripped through the open wrought iron and I pushed back from the table to avoid it, my chair scraping noisily against the stone. “I’m not being abused,” Heather said, still laughing, a high, brittle sound. “This is absurd.”
“I know it’s hard,” Alison said then, and I shot her a grateful look. “But we’re here for you—we want to help you.”
“I don’t need your help,” Heather said quickly. “Look, this is just a misunderstanding. We had a stupid argument and some dishes were thrown. That’s all.”
There were spots of color on her perfect cheekbones, and as she picked up her own coffee cup, I saw that her hands were trembling. She noticed it, too, and set the cup down before folding her arms.
“What if he’d cut you? Or Daniel?” Alison spoke in the same low voice she’d used before.
“He wouldn’t do that,” Heather said. But we’d all stood in that kitchen surrounded by broken glass and none of us was convinced. “Daniel was at school,” she added in an insistent tone. “He didn’t see it.”
“Well, that’s one bright spot,” Julie said in a weak voice.
“What about your nanny?” I said. “Did she see it?”
“She’s not working for us anymore,” Heather said, and I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the weather. Alison looked at me and I could tell we were both thinking the same thing: Viktor didn’t want any witnesses.
Before anyone could comment, Julie’s son, Owen, came running toward us, clutching the front of his pants in a gesture that all of the mothers understood even before he said, “I gotta go to the bathroom!”
“I’ll take him,” Heather said, standing up, clearly glad for the interruption.
“Don’t be silly, I’ll do it.” Julie got to her feet and hustled Owen into the house. Heather didn’t sit back down, using the excuse of checking on Daniel to leave the table.