In late afternoon, with Liam asleep and sunlight grazing her bedroom window, Adam and Carla made love.
It was sweet and intense, surer now. With their bodies joined, their eyes searching each other’s, Adam could not imagine wanting another woman. This thought was shadowed by melancholy; with this woman, there was so much he could not say.
Afterward, they lay facing each other, a questioning look replacing the softness in Carla’s eyes. The undertow of his imaginings flooded Adam’s consciousness; the thought of Carla lying with Benjamin Blaine in this same bed was too vivid to escape. As though reading his thoughts, she said softly, “Will he ever stop sleeping with us, I wonder.”
In his surprise, Adam could say nothing. “How long were we going to avoid this?” she asked. “Silence doesn’t make anything go away. Our own families taught us that much.”
Adam felt their closeness slipping away. “So now we’re bringing him back to life,” he said stiffly. “What would you like to talk about?”
“Everything,” Carla’s voice turned cool and level. “Are you really that scared of him? Because what scares me most is avoiding the truth. So let’s start with what neither of you could face telling me—how Ben caused so much hatred that only his death allowed you to return.”
Against his will, the images of that day, vivid as photographs, filled Adam with a visceral anger that turned on Carla. “It’s a very pretty story,” he said curtly. “How much detail would you like?”
His tone and expression caused Carla to cover herself. “This is about Jenny, isn’t it.”
“Yes.”
“I’d already guessed that.” Snatching at her robe, Carla pulled it on and sat at the edge of the bed. “Please don’t spare my feelings, if that’s what you’re doing. The truth can’t be any worse than being punished without knowing why.”
Adam steeled himself. With merciless precision, he told her what Ben had done to Jenny, omitting nothing.
Carla listened in silence, impassive, though her face became paler. Only when he had finished did her eyes shut. “My God, Adam . . .”
The anguish in her voice incited him, a decade of hatred spilling out. “Maybe that’s why the sonofabitch despised Teddy so much. One drunken night with my mother, he shared some special memories of a fellow soldier. But he was too ‘manly’ to face up to it, or to treat Teddy with the compassion he damned well owed him. Instead he turned his sexual enthusiasms on my girlfriend—and, of course, my mother.”
Carla’s eyes snapped open. “That must have been a lovely mother–son conversation,” she said in a harsher tone. “Obviously, I haven’t given your family enough credit for selective candor. So if you’re asking me if we had anal sex, the answer is no. There are only so many mental images I want you to suffer.” She turned from him, her voice muted and despairing. “I finally understand the depth of Ben’s shame—and your hatred. I don’t see how we can ever get past that.”
Carla’s misery was so palpable that Adam felt his anger soften. “Do you even want to try?”
She shook her head. “I’m not sure it’s safe—not after this. It might be better for us both if you turned to Rachel, or anyone who isn’t me. But I wanted us to tell the truth, so I might as well give you mine.” Composing herself, she faced him. “I don’t know whether you’d ever betray me. But given what I’ve been through, you can stake your life on the fact that I’d never betray you.”
Reaching across the bed, Adam touched her arm. “You don’t need . . .”
“I’m not done. The only hope for us is honesty—in or out of bed. I’ve never known a man who didn’t want to be better at sex than the guy before, and with you it’s outright toxic. So let me tell you what that was like with Ben . . .”
“You don’t have to do this.”
“Come off it,” Carla snapped. “You and your father—the one you had when it mattered—competed over everything: sailing, writing, and even women. If we don’t confront that, your competition with a dead man will blow up in our face.” As though to compel his attention, Carla gripped Adam’s wrist. “When we became lovers, Ben was sixty-five years old. It wasn’t hard to grasp why he wanted me, or what that meant to a man who felt time tapping him on the shoulder. I was an elixir that staved off his own mortality.
“For me it was different. Ben was terrified of death; I was afraid of committing to any man. My sponsor in AA put it pretty well: ‘Maybe you don’t believe you deserve a partner who will really be there.’ If so, Benjamin Blaine is the walking definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Carla’s tone softened with self-recognition. “I knew she’d nailed the truth. But I needed to work through my own confusions about men, and I started with him. Ben was so intent on helping me stay sober so he was right for that moment. Maybe for the first time, I mattered to someone for more than my celebrity or my looks.”
Adam tried to imagine her as she was, fighting against addiction and the damage of her own beginnings, strangely like Ben’s own. “Still,” she continued in a rush, “I knew that I should break it off. But no sooner had I decided to than I found out I was pregnant. When I told Ben, tears ran down his face, and I felt how much this meant to him—and to me, the woman who could never have children. Then Ben found out he was dying, and would never know his son.”
Adam spoke without inflection or intonation. “So you stayed with him out of pity, and concern for your unborn child.”
“No,” Carla said firmly. “There was some of that, it’s true. But I’d come to love him, as much as I was capable then. It felt good to be strong enough to care for a man who was dying and afraid, no matter how it looked to the tabloids or the vicious gossips on this island. And if Ben still wanted to make love with me, I wanted him to.” A new tone entered her voice, steely and determined to finish. “Don’t misunderstand me—I’m not an angel of mercy, dispensing sex to the needy. Even at sixty-five and with brain cancer, Benjamin Blaine had more going for him than the handful of Hollywood guys I’d slept with. So it’s hard for me to think he was as sexually equivocal as your mother suggests.”
Though he fought against this, Adam found her rawness painful. “You’re right,” he said tonelessly. “I needed to hear the truth . . .”
“Then you might as well hear all of it. For so many reasons, you are so much more to me than Ben in a younger body. When you’re not tangled up in the past, I can talk to you in ways I could never talk to him—or wanted to. No doubt it’s completely twisted, but Ben got me to a place where I could be with you. That’s what breaks my heart—knowing that you can be strong and sensitive and kind, a partner I might actually believe in. But because of him, you may never get there—at least with me.
“And yet here we are in bed. And there’s just no way that Ben or anyone else has filled me with the craving I feel for you, at once completely satisfied and yet wanting the next time so much that it’s a part of me.” Her voice turned husky, and sudden tears welled in her eyes. “I can imagine going through life needing you, in every way. There’s been no one like that before you, and I’m scared to death there never will be. But God knows what else you’re hiding, or whether you’re capable of getting over Ben. I don’t know if you should even try.”
From the front room came a brief cry, Liam stunned to find himself awake. “A timely reminder,” Carla said. “At least for me. I won’t let old resentments poison my son’s childhood. All too often, a child sees his parents’ misery and blames himself. With you, I’m not sure that Ben’s son could ever escape it. Any more than Jack’s son did.”
Adam felt his chest constrict. “That’s a lot to absorb, Carla.”
Carla’s eyes welled again. “Then go now. And if you honestly find you can’t live with the past, please don’t come back. I’d never blame you for it. But I’m through with this subject, and I can’t go on living with you and Ben. It’s hard enough right now.”
Turning away, she went to Liam. When Adam left, Carla was in the rocking chair, the baby at her breast as she spoke in the quiet voice of a mother.