a moderate ladies’ wear line that Thomas Landon Senior ran from the manufacturing hub in North Carolina. But Tom struck out on his own, moving to New York after getting an MBA at Harvard. By the time I met him, he had just made a name for himself with his own company, Luxe.
Amanda didn’t understand why I came home that night scoffing at everything from the fingerbowls to the fancy French menu. She couldn’t comprehend my resistance.
Not that I really resisted. I went out with him again. And again. A part of me secretly enjoyed the raised eyebrows and whispers that broke out at the sight of me, young, blond and wide-eyed on Tom’s arm. I guess everyone assumed I was simply soothing whatever ills lingered after Tom’s divorce from Gillian, his first wife and the mother of his daughter, Francesca. But that was just it. There were no wounds to heal. Tom accepted his lot as divorcé and weekend dad with the same pragmatism that guided his business deals. Out with the old and in with the new. And since I had all the glitter and good wine and food that went along with being “the new,” I didn’t allow myself to wonder at his apparent lack of feeling for the woman he had left not a year earlier, the child he traveled to see for a few short hours on the weekend. I simply accepted his devotion to me like a kind of amused spectator. I threw my past up into his face, my underachieving alcoholic father, my bipolar mother, my pack of redneck brothers. It was as if Tom didn’t hear me. Or didn’t care.
Which was why when he declared, on our fourth date, that he would one day make me his wife, I laughed mercilessly. But my insides clamored with a mixture of fear and maybe even longing. I hadn’t heard this sort of confident declaration from a man since I was sixteen and Luke, my then-boyfriend, told me he would love me till the day he died. Which I suppose was true, since not two weeks after I dumped him he did die, in a drunk-driving accident. But I wondered what it was that made Tom so certain about me when I wasn’t sure of anything. My life. My career prospects. I felt challenged by his faith in me, challenged to be the cool, confident woman he saw staring at him across that candlelit table. I suppose the fact that I succeeded can be measured by the gap between the hard-living rock-and-roll groupie I once aspired to be to the careful, perfect wife I became.
Tom always wanted the perfect wife. I just wish he could have loved her a little more.
I wish I could have loved her a little more.
6
Zoe
Is it hot in here or is it just me?
“She looks, um, good,” I said to Sage once we were seated at the back of White’s Funeral Home on East 71st.
Sage gave me a look, and I knew exactly why. I hate when people say that at wakes and funerals. Who looks good when they’re dead? But the truth was, Maggie did look good. At least better than the last time I saw her. I couldn’t get the image of her sightless eyes and pale skin out of my head. I guess that’s what wakes were for, I thought, remembering the last one I’d been to for Myles’s father. But that had been a whole different thing. One of those sprawling affairs on Long Island, sprawling mostly because Myles’s father was not only a father of five and brother to six, but a Suffolk County cop, killed in the line of duty. You can imagine how big that wake was. It even made the papers. People came from miles around, in such numbers that they had to limit the viewing hours just so Myles and his family could have some time to grieve in peace. And grieve they did. I’d never seen Mrs. Callahan so broken up. And Myles’s sisters. I had always been so close to them, especially Erica, the only one who was still single and close to my age. I didn’t even know what to say to Erica—to any of them. Myles had been so sweet, so good, trying to stay strong, keep it all together while everyone else fell apart. I knew he was grieving, had held him tight when he finally did cry the night after they buried Mr. C.
Which was why this sophisticated and utterly dry-eyed event had me wondering. If it wasn’t for Maggie’s mother, sobbing silently in the corner with Maggie’s brothers, I would have wondered if anyone here even cared that Maggie had been cut off in the prime of her life. I looked over at Tom, standing up front near the entrance, smiling and greeting people just as merrily as he had during the first dinner party on Memorial Day weekend. Only it was his wife’s wake. I turned to Sage again. “Don’t you think it’s kinda strange how unfazed Tom seems to be?”
Sage flicked her gaze over to Tom. “People grieve in different ways,” she said.
That was true, I thought, looking at Sage now and wondering what she was feeling. She knew Tom and Maggie better than I did. But she wasn’t one to cry either. Her toughness was legendary. It was rumored that she’d barely shed a tear when her kid sister died. I hadn’t known Sage at the time, having moved with my mother to Babylon in my sophomore year of high school, but I had heard the stories, from Nick mostly. Hope had been eleven when she died, and Sage was fourteen, which was pretty young to keep things so bottled up.
“The whole thing just seems weird to me,” I said, remembering how calmly Tom had responded when I had gotten back to the house. Like he was following some guidebook: What To Do In The Event Of Your Wife’s Death. I had run back to the house, and in one breathless burst told him about finding Maggie on the beach. I didn’t say “dead.” I couldn’t. Tom had picked up the telephone and dialed 9-1-1. I think he might even have given the sauce a stir before he threw on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and headed down to the beach. Of course, I hadn’t seen his reaction to the sight of his wife. He had insisted I stay at the house and wait for the police to show up so that I could direct them. Though I felt like someone should go with him, I was glad not to be the one. I was spooked enough by the memory of Maggie’s sightless eyes looking up at me, her pale white flesh glowing in the darkness. By the time I led the Marine Bureau cop who showed up down to the beach a short while later, Tom was still under control. I nearly lost it, especially later at the house, when the questioning by the homicide detective began. All of us had to talk to the police—Tom, Nick, Sage and me. I was a bit freaked out by it, especially when I was asked where I had been, what I had been doing. If I had seen anyone else on the beach. I guess Tom got the same questions, and I imagine he answered them with more aplomb than I had managed.
I was startled by the questions, mostly because I had thought of Maggie’s death as an accident.
“They always ask those questions,” Sage had said on the way back to the city early the next morning. “You’ve seen Law and Order.”
“Yeah, but that’s because they’re investigating murder on that show.”
Then Sage calmly explained that accidental deaths or deaths that occur at home are always investigated by the police as a matter of course. I had to take her word for it, Sage was a bit of an authority on accidental death scenes, seeing as her sister’s death had been an accident, too.
If all those questions opened up the doubts in my mind about Tom’s behavior that night, damp from God-knows-what and chopping garlic with barely restrained fury, apparently the police hadn’t been fazed. In fact, that was the thing. Nothing seemed to faze them, I thought, remembering the weary face of the homicide detective who had questioned me, jotting down notes as if I were giving him one of Maggie’s famous recipes rather than filling in the blanks about how she might have wound up floating in the tide. Accidental death by drowning was what the medical examiner came back with. I wish the medical examiner were here to witness this, I thought, watching as a pretty brunette sidled up to Tom, latching herself to his arm.
“Who the hell is that?” I whispered to Sage, nudging her away from the program she had begun to read.
Sage looked up, her green eyes bland as she settled on the brunette in question, then withering once she turned to me. “That’s Francesca, Tom’s daughter.”
“Oh.”
