The One in My Heart (3 page)

He braced one hand under my bottom. With his other hand he touched me again between my legs. Sensations flooded my nerve endings, drowning out everything in my head except a raging need for more.

More of the deftness of his fingers, more of the strength of his hold, more of the thorough penetration of his body into mine.

More of this very grown-up enchantment—a separate reality altogether. I didn’t want it to end. I didn’t want to leave its soft cocoon. I didn’t want to head out to the night, back to my own reality.

Or my actual self.

But already I was crying out, throaty, desperate sounds. Already my sensations were gathering and cresting. I plunged my fingers into his hair, buried my face in his shoulder, and held on as my orgasm steamrolled over me, leaving me trembling in its wake.

Bennett was nearing his own peak, his thrusts hard and forceful. His breath caught. His teeth sank into my shoulder. And suddenly I was coming again, a climax that picked me up like a rogue wave and crashed over me just as violently.

MODERN ENCHANTMENTS WERE BROKEN NOT
by the strike of midnight, but the wallop of ferocious orgasms.

I loved standing in Bennett’s embrace afterward, listening to the sound of his breath slowly returning to normal. I loved the small drop kisses he left on my jaw, my neck, and my shoulder. I loved the way he sighed, cupped my face with one hand, and murmured, his lips brushing the shell of my ear, “Sweetheart, you blew my mind.”

But I already knew our time was at an end.

His scent was that of the night—cool rain and summer foliage. I trailed my fingers up the musculature of his arm. My other hand I laid against his heart, feeling its strong and still-wild beat.

He kissed me on my temple. “Can I get you something? More tiramisu? A smoke?”

I played with his pendant. It was a glasswork semiabstract sea turtle about an inch across—the sort of souvenir one might bring back from Hawaii for a teenager. Not at all what I’d expected.

Which only made me more curious. “You smoke?”

“Officially not anymore, but I have a secret stash—you can’t be a doctor unless you are a hypocrite about your own health.”

I wanted to see that secret stash of cigarettes. I wanted to hear the story behind his pendant. I wanted to know whether he could still make me laugh when the sun was high in the sky.

“I should go,” I said quietly. “You have to work tomorrow. You need your sleep.”

He pulled back and traced a finger along my brow, a tender gesture, yet with a hint of melancholy. “True. You don’t want to be subpoenaed to testify at my malpractice trial because you kept me up all night and caused me to remove the wrong lung from Mrs. Johnson.”

That wrung a small smile from me.

We fell silent. Not an awkward silence, more like the kind that comes when two friends watch a spectacular sunset together. And then he broke away, disposed of the condom, and pulled on his clothes, giving me a view of his taut gluteal muscles.

When he was dressed, he picked up the bathrobe from where it had landed on the floor and handed it back to me—I realized only then that I hadn’t moved at all. “Let me go check on your clothes,” he said.

My clothes were warm and dry. I put them on. We walked out and got back into the Roadster, this time with him driving.

The rain had stopped. The clouds were parting—who knew there was a full moon tonight? Moonlight shimmered on wet leaves and glistened on the dark asphalt path. It limned Bennett’s chiseled features, making my breath catch.

Collette’s house was barely a quarter mile from his. All too soon he pulled into her driveway. “I’ll watch you from here.”

I let myself remain where I was a moment longer than necessary before I leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. “Thanks for showing me a great time.”

“You’re very welcome,” he said. Then, after a pause, “I hope whatever was bothering you earlier won’t look so bad when the sun rises.”

Chapter 2

THE NEXT MORNING, WHEN THE
sun rose, I was already packing. At noon Collette walked in—she’d canceled the vacation she’d planned to tack onto the end of her assignment and returned early, so I could go back to Manhattan. An hour later I was on the train, phone in hand, scrolling through the brief backlog of texts between Bennett and me.

I’d first called him on Monday, five days ago. And he’d texted me that evening.
Biscuit walked and fed. House key back under the sundial. Do you need me again tomorrow?

I’d just spent a couple of difficult hours with Zelda, getting shouted at. I knew it had been the mania talking—Zelda was in a place where she could do no wrong, and anyone who stood in her way became a source of immense frustration. All the same, by the time she finally fell asleep I’d been shaking. Bennett’s offer had brought a surge of relief: At least I didn’t have to think about Biscuit for another day.
If you don’t mind, I’d be ever so grateful.

Consider it done.

We had similar exchanges until Thursday evening—Zelda had come down from her hypomanic state and I needed to go back to Cos Cob anyway for the handover of house and dog back to Collette.
I can take it from here. Thank you for everything.

No problem.

They were the texts of a busy man who took his responsibilities seriously. But I couldn’t have imagined that he would also be…beguiling.

This morning, after I finished packing, I’d taken Biscuit for a long walk. Twice we’d passed his house. It was set back quite a bit from the road, but built on a small incline, so I could still see the second story, with its white walls and green trim.

I didn’t run into him. And he didn’t call or text. A good thing—what happened between us should be an event in stark isolation. The perfection of a leaf preserved in amber.

Last night, after I reached Collette’s front door, I’d turned around to wave good-bye. I expected to see the Roadster reverse and drive away. But it didn’t. As seconds ticked by, it sat in place, a muscular, palpable presence.

I took a step toward him, my mind racing with possibilities. The hell with Mrs. Johnson’s lung. If Bennett turned off the car and came out, I
would
keep him up all night—
and
make him late for his shift.

He reversed and drove away. I stood a long time, my hand braced on a pillar of the porch, watching the direction in which he’d disappeared.

ZELDA AND I LIVED ON
the Upper West Side, a stone’s throw from Central Park, in a narrow, four-story stone-and-stucco town house. Some people believed the house to be part of my late father’s inheritance, and he’d never disabused anyone of the idea. But he’d bought it for a pittance in the early eighties, when Manhattan’s real estate market hit rock-bottom. Second-best investment he’d ever made, he used to say, after the Andy Warhol original that he’d picked up for two thousand dollars and a used dining room set.

Inside it was comfortable and slightly shabby, full of books, records, and Middle-earth memorabilia. Zelda thought the place resembled a hobbit hole. To me it looked more like Wallace and Gromit’s house—old-fashioned, but with a sense of whimsy.

Zelda sat in the living room, a pair of jeans in her lap, a heaping laundry basket on the coffee table before her. Her fully grey hair, usually in a stylish layered cut that reached her shoulders, was tied up in a messy ponytail. “Hello, darling,” she murmured, as I bent down to kiss her on her cheek.

Those two words formed part of my oldest memory: that of the first time we met.
Eva, this is your new mother
, my father had said. My new mother’s eyes had twinkled with curiosity and a zest for life. She’d brought me a teddy bear dressed up like a Buckingham Palace guardsman. And when she’d crouched down, offered me her hand to shake, and said,
Hello, darling
, in her cut-crystal English accent, she’d instantly become the love of my life.

I sat down next to Zelda and pulled a couple of T-shirts out of the laundry basket.

“I’m back.”

A few beats passed before she answered, “How are you?”

I could never know how difficult it was for her to respond—could only guess by the vast difference between her usual bubbly self and this subdued…prisoner. “Fine, busy as usual.”

To keep up the appearance of a normal conversation, I prattled about what I still had to do to get ready for the fall semester. By the time I ran through my checklist, she’d finally finished folding the pair of jeans in her lap and was staring at the laundry basket, willing herself to reach out and take another item.

The undertow of hopelessness, the most insidious part of depression, sometimes made the simplest tasks seem as daunting as setting out across the Sahara Desert with no compass and no supplies. I couldn’t bear to watch her struggle. Mumbling something, I went to the kitchen and filled two glasses of water. But when I came back she’d succeeded—she had a pair of my pajama bottoms in her hands.

Tears filled my eyes—from immense pride…and a raging sense of injustice. Zelda had always worked diligently to manage her illness—she saw her therapist twice a week and took her meds faithfully. But sometimes she developed adverse reactions to those meds; sometimes other prescription drugs disrupted their effectiveness.

I went back to the kitchen and wiped away my tears before I returned to the living room. “Don’t discount that victory,” I told her as I sat down.

“Oh, darling,” she said after a minute, “every day without snogging random strangers is a victory.”

I almost chuckled. She’d told me that when she was eighteen, in a fit of mania, she’d kissed three different boys at a pub one night, and had to be dragged home by her girlfriends.

Yet the mania, for all its evils, made Zelda feel great—confident, energetic, practically invincible. Depression, on the other hand, turned her into a husk filled with nothing but despair and self-loathing.

Depression scared me.

When I was in fifth grade, a classmate’s older brother committed suicide—he’d been suffering from a crushing depression and one day he couldn’t take it anymore. I had nightmares for weeks. I never wanted to believe Zelda would give up. But whenever her illness reawakened, the same old fear would sink its claws into my spine. And I’d once more turn into the little girl who was petrified that something terrible would happen to her wonderful new mother.

Zelda was staring at the laundry basket again. This time she did not pull anything out.

Tears came back into my eyes. I sped up and finished sorting everything. “All done. I’ll go put them up.”

“Darling,” she murmured as I reached the hallway.

I poked my head back into the living room. “Yes?”

She sat with her profile to me, the lines at the corners of her eyes deeply etched. “‘I wish it need not have happened in my time.’”

What Frodo had said when he found out that the One Ring had come to him.

I first heard Zelda speak those words not long after my classmate’s brother committed suicide. I’d gone to my room, closed the door, and sat on the floor for a long time, shaking. Then I flipped through
The Fellowship of the Ring
until I found the line, lugged the book downstairs, and read Gandalf’s response to her.

After that, it became something of a ritual between us.

I put aside the clothes I was carrying, went back to her, and took her hands in mine. “‘So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’”

I RETURNED MOST OF ZELDA
’
S
clothes to her closet, and put the rest in her chest of drawers.

The top of the chest of drawers was thick with framed photographs. Zelda and I in the first picture we ever took together, at Central Park Zoo, my arms around a resigned-looking small white goat. Zelda holding aloft her Grammy for songwriting, surrounded by her musician friends. Zelda and I at the New Zealand premiere of
The Return of the King
, both of us laughing uproariously. Zelda with her cousins, hiking the southwest coast of England. Zelda and Mrs. Asquith, her godmother, the two of them holding up floral teacups with wildly exaggerated expressions of primness and decorum.

I loved looking through this pictorial record of Zelda’s existence, of her living a full life despite all the obstacles that had been thrown her way. But today my attention was immediately drawn to a photo at the very back, the biggest and most elaborately framed of them all.

The one I’d told Bennett about: of me in a ball gown and a diamond tiara.

My father, Hoyt Canterbury, was born to old money, but that money ran out before he could do anything about it. My mother was the product of a quiet, unexceptional suburb, but she had a moment in the late disco era when she became an “it” girl, a fixture on the Manhattan social circuit, her style copied, her pictures splashed across glossy magazines.

The one who had the most family connections, however, was Zelda, whose bloodline was mingled with those of half a dozen aristocratic families. But the way she explained it, she’d never been more than a poor relation—not that some of the earls and viscounts she was related to weren’t just as impoverished.