CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Immediately upon entering Sam's house, Grace was assailed by an odd feeling that somehow the environment had changed. Perhaps it was the fog, she thought. It was thick over everything, like a gossamer veil. She heard the pounding of the surf, but the ocean wasn't visible.

Sam, who usually met her at the front door, was not there. Felicia, whose presence in the house was tangible, even if it was merely the odor of her cooking, was nowhere around.

"Sam," she called. There was no answer, only an odd echo. Perhaps the strangeness in the house was merely the effect of her own resolution.

Today was the day, the moment she had chosen to put herself finally and irrevocably in the hands of fate. She wondered if she was going against the grain. Had she received a sign that this was the moment? She wasn't sure. Certainly the evidence that both Jackie and the evil Darryl knew her secret was an absolute sign that she had to go through with her confession. Admittedly, their knowledge had forced her decision.

"Where are you, Sam?" she cried, walking to the rear of the house. Even if he were outside, she would not be able to see him. The fog blocked all vision. Seeing no sign of him, she walked up the stairs.

"Sam," she called again, coming into the bedroom. It, too, was deserted, but as she was about to leave, she saw him sitting on the balcony, barely visible in the mist.

"There you are," she said cheerily, coming closer so that she could see his face, which was unshaven, an uncommon occurrence in itself. She noted his dark mood instantly. He was dressed in slacks and a polo shirt, not shorts and a T-shirt, his usual attire for their beach walk.

On his lap was the framed photograph of Anne that he kept on the night table next to his bed. Despite the mist, he wore sunglasses, and it was difficult to see where his eyes were focused. Observing him sapped her courage. Perhaps she had better postpone her confession, she told herself. Something was obviously bothering him.

"Is there something wrong, Sam?" Grace asked.

She waited a long time for him to respond.

"Everything," he muttered, turning his face toward her. Although she could not see his eyes, his expression, his aura, seemed to reflect anger and hostility, which startled her. Her instant reaction was that Darryl had taken his revenge and told him the truth about her.

"Something concerning me?" she asked with alarm and trepidation.

"All about you," he croaked, making it clear, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

"You know then?" she asked. It was hardly a necessary question.

"Yes," he hissed. "I know."

The game was up. His words and demeanor confirmed that fact. The truth of her treachery was exposed. Any opportunity for an explanation from her had been usurped. How he came by the information was hardly relevant at this juncture. He knew.

Yet despite the sick feeling in her heart, she felt oddly relieved. The burden of keeping obscene secrets, of dispensing lies and mentally cross-indexing them, had finally been lifted.

"Well, then, you must think I'm a monster," she sighed.

He nodded, confirming her speculation. There was no ambivalence about his reaction. Even through the mist, his expression of utter contempt and profound disgust were clearly visible.

"Oh, God, I'm so sorry, Sam. I know you won't believe me now," she said. "But I was going to tell you today, the whole awful story. I'm so ashamed."

"There's no need," Sam said, looking into the cloud of invisibility that hid the pounding surf. "No matter how one tries, the indefensible can't be defended. Bottom line: I was a gullible old fool."

She understood his anguish and observed him for a long moment before speaking. As if trying to ignore her presence, he did not turn his face in her direction.

"I know how you must hate me, Sam. All I ask is that you respect my need to explain. I can't hold it in any longer. I hadn't expected to have to do it under these circumstances.... I..." She swallowed hard, determined to find her voice.

"It's pointless."

He lifted the picture of Anne and studied it. Grace noted that it was beaded with moisture. At that moment she was strongly tempted to lash out, to reveal the ultimate secret that would explode the myth of Anne's saintliness. Ironically, the evidence, the letters, were still in the bag that hung from her shoulder.

"What goes around comes around," he sighed. "I got my comeuppance. I would appreciate your leaving as soon as possible."

She felt both the pain and the anger of his dismissal. Her fingers reached for the clasp of her handbag. But they went no further. To inflict such additional pain on someone she loved so deeply would only make her detest herself even more.

"All right, Sam, I'll leave if you want me to, but first I'd appreciate it if I could tell my side of it."

He shrugged, which she interpreted as a kind of grudging consent. She paused, gathering her thoughts, forgetting how she had originally planned to begin. Above all, she decided, she must find the discipline not to show him tears. Not tears. In her state, tears would cheapen her motives, make her an object to be pitied.

It's over, she told herself. What does it matter? Whatever I say, she vowed, will be the complete, uncensored, unvarnished truth. She owed him that.

"I was financially desperate and I set out to find a rich man," Grace began, her voice wispy at first, growing stronger as she continued. "I know the means I chose were cynical and beyond forgiveness. But it did work. I found what I was looking for, a rich, grieving widower, and I took full advantage of him. My objective was, pure and simple, marriage, and all that went with it, to rescue me from the hole I had slid into."

"All that crap about not wanting anything," Sam muttered. "Then selling Anne's clothes. It makes me want to puke."

"Who can blame you?" Grace said, groping for some more palatable way to explain what she had done. Unfortunately the little speeches she had concocted in her mind earlier seemed inadequate and bumbling.

"Why don't you just leave?"

"Sam, please. Let me unburden myself. Give me that. I know we're finished. Just give me the courtesy..."

"Courtesy? Good God."

He appeared suddenly old, depleted. It was a condition she knew she had caused, and it broke her heart. He shook his head and turned away from her to peer toward the unseen ocean.

"Just let me explain, Sam," she said, turning to face him.

He did not reply.

"All I ask is that you listen. I know it won't redeem me in your eyes, but I need to say it. Grant me that."

He remained silent and immobile, shifting his glance now to Anne's image in the photograph. Again she assumed his silence meant a kind of consent, more like sufferance.

Grace hesitated for a moment, losing her train of thought. She was sure she knew what was going through Sam's mind. The verdict had already been handed down: guilty as charged. What she needed to do was explain the extenuating circumstances.

"I don't know how much you know, Sam, so I guess I have to start from the beginning." She took a deep breath and walked the short distance to the edge of the balcony. Not seeing the ocean, she felt constricted, imprisoned by the fog. Then she turned again and stood before him, confronting the blankness of his dark lenses.

"I just got tired of the struggle, Sam," she began. "I wish I could convey to you what it means to be desperate, financially desperate, not in control of your own destiny, lonely, defeated, totally down on your luck. It is a very horrible feeling. You feel useless, left out, cast aside like garbage, always at the mercy of others. It kills your spirit. It makes you crazy, willing to do anything to regain your dignity. You feel deprived. You see others prospering, in good shape, not scratching around just to survive." She paused and sucked in a deep breath. "You know you're a loser. Everybody around you knows you're a loser. Here you are, a single mother with a teenage daughter going bad, and you just feel powerless, helpless, lost. Why me? you wonder. Why have I been left out? You're a loser, so you have nothing more to lose. I know I'm whining, Sam, but for me life has been one long self-pitying whine. It takes its toll, Sam, makes you do things that never crossed your mind before. Anything to climb out of the hole."

She discovered that she could barely hear the sound of her voice, only that continuing inner whine.

"So here it is, Sam. Warts and all."

She took him through her actions from the moment she was fired by Mrs. Burns. Deliberately, she did not look at his face as she spoke. She wanted nothing to inhibit the fidelity of her revelation. She wanted to give him the whole truth. Nothing but.

She told him how she had haunted funeral parlors, looking for the right target, preferably Jewish. Why Jewish? She tried to explain that as well, citing Mrs. Burns's various dictums and distortions. She told him how she had adopted the disgusting but apparently clever ploy of suggesting to the bereaved widower that she dispose of the deceased's clothes. Could anything have been more cruel, taking advantage of someone's vulnerability in his moment of grief? Worst of all, she confessed that she had never known Anne, had never heard of her, had made it all up from beginning to end.

As both judge and jury listening to her own testimony, she could barely sustain the pain of her own awful revelation and the terrible deception she had perpetrated on this good man, knowing that her story had to be making Sam confirm his foolishness and sheer gullibility and increase his sense of violation and betrayal.

Still she pressed on. She recounted the story of Millicent Farmer in all its appalling detail. "Ring around your finger, dummy," she cried, as if in punctuation.

Then came her justification for the sale of Anne's clothes, which brought her to recount the long, dreary story of Jackie and her involvement with Darryl, the frightening Nazi skinhead, and the episode with the yellow Honda. She spared no detail, telling him about Jackie's flirtation with prostitution. She assumed it was Darryl who had provided him with the information that condemned her, but she did not refer to that. What did it matter how he discovered her deception?

He remained unmoved, frozen. She had no idea if he was absorbing anything she was saying. To her, the important thing was that she was saying it, emptying herself, cutting through the tissue of lies.

She spared no detail of her early life as well, growing up poor in Baltimore, living over the barbershop with her immigrant Italian parents, telling him about her paltry schooling, her foolish marriage, her husband's true background and her unhappy life with him. Of course he wasn't a lawyer in Washington, just a stupid dreamer with more ambition than brains, a bum with impossible dreams. Nor was he gay, another absurd premise that had jumped madly into her head.

She admitted having little knowledge of politics, current events or culture. By his standard, she told him, she was ignorant and unschooled. Not that she was without ambition to learn. She believed she had the capacity to better herself. She knew she was not mentally inferior, but luck and opportunity to advance and grow simply had not come her way. There was shame in it, she admitted. To be ignorant and uninformed was not a virtue. She had only herself to blame.

She hoped he was listening, but if he wasn't, she told herself, it didn't matter. It had to be said out loud. Had she left a single lie unexplained? She was determined to correct the record as accurately as possible. Throughout her confession Sam remained immobile.

She corrected the chronology. She had lied about that as well. Lies, she tried to explain, take on a life of their own. Embark on such a path, you lose all context about yourself. It becomes less a lie, which is such a brutal term, than a fiction. She had created a fiction about herself and the people around her.

"I wanted to make myself appear better in your eyes, Sam," she told him. "I wanted to lift myself into your world."

Lift herself from where? From her level, it was easy to believe that people who had wealth were different, better in every way, smarter, cultured, educated, well-spoken, polished, socially practiced, mannerly, and, above all, more in control of their lives. She knew she could never match that. To compete, she had to recast herself, make herself over, copy others and lie like hell. As she spoke, it amazed her how deeply and honestly she was portraying herself, all portals open, down and dirty, the whole skinny.

"You might not ever understand where I'm coming from or why I did this. Unfortunately, I know why. Having failed at every venture tried, marriage, parenting, job, life itself, I could gamble everything on one last desperate move. Do you understand that, Sam?"

Still he did not reply. She watched his hands, frozen it seemed, around the picture of Anne, the unblemished Anne that lay exalted in his memory.

Was this the moment? she asked herself. Anne's letters were in her purse. What would be the consequences to her now? So what if he would hate her forever? It seemed obvious to her that all hope of reclaiming their relationship was gone.

Again her fingers moved to the clasp of her purse. She had nothing to lose now. At the very least he would learn that Grace wasn't the only fraud in his life, that his beloved sainted Anne betrayed him with far more evil intent for most of the years of his marriage. What could be worse than her disloyalty and unfaithfulness? Let him know that he had been an unloved husband, a victim of a cheating wife who had led a double life and betrayed him at every turn. Let him know that all the agony of his guilt feelings over the years had been based on a false premise.

She had continued to cling to the notion that the revelation of Anne's infidelity would shock him into seeing that even the most revered of human beings were fallible, and that the most blatant acts of dishonesty and betrayal might not be what they seemed.

If Grace was ever to act on this, it was now. She paused and observed him. He refused her even the most casual glance. She reached out for the clasp. He continued to look at Anne's picture. In his mind, Grace supposed, Anne was still safe to worship and revere. In death she could no longer betray him.

Again her fingers stopped moving. No, she could not bring herself to do this. She had hurt him enough. Her gift to him would be this act of non-revelation. This would be her own special act of love, allowing him to preserve forever his illusion of Anne's fidelity and devotion.

"How was I to know, Sam," she cried, suddenly, "that I was to get entangled emotionally?" She wanted to say "fall in love with you," but she couldn't utter the words, knowing that they would sound phony, hollow, self-serving. More than ever she was certain that she loved him, loved him completely, truly. She wanted, needed to reach out and embrace him. But her fear of rejection was too powerful for her to attempt such an act.

"I know I don't deserve forgiveness. I betrayed you. I made myself out to be something I wasn't. I lied. I cheated you."

From his reaction thus far she had no idea what he was thinking.

"Don't you have anything to say, Sam?" she asked finally in frustration, waiting through a long silence, hoping for a reply. Finally he stirred and shook his head.

"Please go, Grace," he whispered. "Don't put me through any more of this."

She studied him for a moment. He didn't lift his eyes toward her. Finally she turned and started to the door of the balcony; then she turned again to face him.

"All I really wanted, Sam," she whispered, "was protection for me and my daughter. My falling in love with you was an unexpected gift."

The words had erupted beyond her will to stop them. He offered no reaction. It wasn't money. Not money alone that she sought, she told herself. Love and protection! That's what it was. Was that so much to ask?

With effort, her legs unsteady, she began to move through the door that led to the bedroom. She stopped for a moment and glanced again toward Sam. He did not lift his head to meet her gaze. Instead he continued to look at the photograph of his late wife.

Then she moved quickly through the patio door, her eyes glazed with tears. She could let them come now.

But as she descended the stairs, she recognized a familiar and frightening sound. It held a strong imprint in her mind. Unmistakably, it was the ominous purr of Darryl's "hog."

Confused by its proximity, especially since she believed that he had already accomplished his objective, had made good on his threat to destroy Grace's relationship with Sam, she abruptly stopped crying and ran down the stairs.

The fog was lifting, although a brightening haze continued to inhibit visibility. Through it, she saw the vague outline of her own car, and beside it Darryl's bike. He was lifting his leg over the seat and removing his helmet. Behind him on the bike, on the so-called "bitch pad," also removing her helmet, was Jackie. Jackie! She couldn't believe what she saw, Jackie in matching biker's clothes and helmet.

Grace was completely bewildered and, for the moment, paralyzed by the sight. She felt blind anger festering inside her as Darryl and Jackie approached, two swaggering apparitions bent on evil intent. In her mind they had become the devil's messengers, and she girded herself to resist them.

Peripherally, she caught a glimpse of Sam standing and watching them from the balcony. The sound of the oncoming motorcycle so close to the house had apparently caught his attention.

"Surprise, Mama," Darryl said, lumbering toward her in his biker's uniform, the leather jacket with its metal swastikas jingling as he walked, the tight jeans showing his arrogant genital bulge and his black high-heeled cowboy boots reminding her of the goose-stepping Nazis she had seen in old movies. Behind him, doing a kind of female imitation of the swagger, was Jackie, unsmiling and mean-faced, aping her mentor.

"What the hell is happening here?" Grace shouted angrily, although the sight she was witnessing left no room for doubt.

"You should never have threatened Darryl, Mom," Jackie said, acting the part of a tough broad, glancing toward Darryl for approval. "I got a clue for you, Mom: That car belongs to him. I saw his registration. He had every right to sell it to me. And we've come for the money. In cash."

Grace studied her daughter. It was obvious to her that she had, whatever the fine points and legalities, lost the last vestige of parental control over Jackie. The issue of the car was hardly worth refuting. Even if Darryl did own the car, he was exploiting Jackie for money. If she was too stupid to see it, then so be it. At that moment she had no mental energy left for argument.

"That's it, then?" Grace said, with an air of finality.

"Figured we'd pick you up, and if we couldn't get your consent to come with us to the bank, we might get Sammy Jew boy up there to come up with the bread."

Darryl looked up at Sam and waved. It was a familiar wave, complete with an uplifted finger.

"Face it, Mom. I'm tired of the bullshit. I know you tried your best. But your best just won't hack it with me. I've moved in with Darryl."

Grace sighed. She saw in her daughter's hard face no remorse, no contrition, no regrets. So be it, she thought again.

"How does that grab you, Mama?" Darryl said, cupping his crotch as if to underline the statement. "You got visiting rights, though.

"Guess we'll just have to have a nice little talk with old cut prick up there. I'm sure he'd love to know about how you got the dough, selling his poor dead bitch's threads. Maybe there's even more to tell about you he don't know. Maybe you got lots more to hide from the kike."

Grace felt a strange sensation, an odd sense of vindication. She had assumed that Darryl had been the informer, which only proved how misguided assumptions were more the rule than the exception. It wasn't Darryl at all. Maybe Sam himself had her investigated. What did it matter now? she told herself. She looked up at Sam, shook her head, then turned to Darryl and Jackie and shrugged, showing her indifference to their threat.

"Be my guest," Grace said, watching their faces as they exchanged confused glances. Then she turned and moved quickly toward her car. The ironic sense of victory passed quickly and she felt herself engulfed by a rising tide of explosive rage. She felt compelled to act, do something, anything.

It was only when she drew nearer to her car and saw Darryl's bike parked beside it, his vaunted Evo, his miraculous hog with its pulled back buckhorns and bitch pad glistening in the moist and eerie light of the fog, that an idea of action struck her. In this light the bike looked like an evil, arrogant monster. Here was her epiphany. She had, at last, come face-to-face with her destiny. It was a compulsion beyond logic or reason, her appointment with the enemy. There could be no retreat. She must wrestle this evil force to the death.

Mounting the monster, she forced herself to remember the mechanics of the "kicker." Jason had taught her that years ago. It came to her in a flash of memory, and she turned the ignition key and placed her foot on the kicker and jumped, hearing the telltale gasp. She jumped again, then again. Finally she hit it right and it burst into life.

She heard Darryl's angry curses and Jackie's screams as the bike shot forward across the driveway onto the strip of shrubs that separated the property from the beach. Looking up as she sped past the house, she saw Sam's vague outline as he stood on the balcony. She couldn't see his face.

As she sped into the fog, navigating by instinct parallel to the ocean, she sensed that she was taming the beast, controlling it at last. She felt free, unshackled, liberated, sailing effortlessly through time and space, hurtling to an ending.

The wind and saltwater bit her face and soaked her hair as she revved up the accelerator, hoping that the greater speed would crush the monster and release her mind of its ghosts and terrors, unburden her heart, chase the demons that had conspired against her and, by some miracle, propel her to another less painful dimension.

After a few minutes, she made a sharp U-turn and headed into the fog, sensing that she was moving again toward Sam's house. She peered into the brightening mist but saw only a white slate of nothingness. That, she assured herself, was where she needed to be, hurtling into the blankness of oblivion.

Slowing, she stopped the bike, let it idle and listened to the pounding of the surf. In the distance she could see the enemy now. Jackie and Darryl, gripped by their fantasies of anger and greed. And Sam, dear Sam, unable or unwilling to distinguish between real truth and betrayal.

They were all there now, flaying their arms. Vaguely, she heard their voices but could not make out what they were saying. Nor did it matter.

In the end it all came down to misconceptions, distorted ideas, inaccurate perceptions, misinterpreted words, phony expectations, conflicting desires, competing game plans, bloated optimism, miscalculations, misunderstandings, inadequate explanations and the mysterious intrusions of luck and chance. People were maddeningly imperfect. Was the battle really worth it in the end?

She revved up the bike, hearing the angry growl and cough of the engine, then headed forward, certain now that she was moving toward her nothingness, her real destiny.