Circle of Grace, page 30
“Who’s found you?”
Lovey exhaled heavily. “Bo.”
Tess frowned. “What do you mean, Bo’s found you? He knew where you were.”
“No, he didn’t. Not exactly.” Lovey shook her head. “I needed to get away. He was gone on one of his trips, and I—well, I just left.”
“Let me get this straight,” Liz said. “You walked out of the house, got on a plane to Asheville, and didn’t tell your husband where you were going or when you would be back.”
“I left a note in the upstairs bedroom, on the dresser,” Lovey said. “Told him I needed to get away. I didn’t want him to know I had come here to spend the weekend with all of you—he’d never let me stay. He’d come and get me if he had to.” She turned toward Grace. “When your invitation arrived, he absolutely forbade me to go. I’ve never defied him before.”
Grace got up, walked into the bedroom, and returned with the circle journal in her hands. She flipped through the pages, read a couple of Lovey’s entries silently, then turned to face her. “Everything you wrote about you and Bo, your children, your life—it all sounded like the ideal marriage, the perfect home. We thought—”
“You thought what I wanted you to think, I guess.” Lovey held up both hands in a gesture of surrender. “Or maybe it was what I wanted to think. Perhaps I’ve been in denial all these years, fooling myself into believing my life was like what I wrote in the journal.”
Liz straightened up on the couch, and Grace could almost see her assuming the role of therapist, donning the counselor’s cloak like a familiar garment. It suddenly struck her how good Liz must be at her job—available, approachable, understanding, no matter how her past experiences had conspired to shut her away behind patterns of self-protectiveness. This, she thought, was a picture of mental and emotional health—facing one’s demons head-on and overcoming them, resisting the temptation to hide.
“Lovey,” Liz said, “I tease you a lot, but surely you know I care about you. We all do.” Grace nodded vehemently, and out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of Tess doing the same. “Whatever’s going on with you, we’re here to listen—and to help if we can.”
Lovey smiled, and this time Grace saw a flicker of illumination behind her eyes. “I’ve been in counseling the past few weeks,” she said, “and my therapist has helped me begin to come to grips with some issues I’ve been ignoring for years. I believed I had no other choice but to turn a blind eye to the pain and disappointment and go on slogging down the path I chose for myself thirty years ago.”
She picked up the circle journal and ran her fingers over the battered cover. “A long time ago, Grace, you warned me about Bo.”
Grace shifted against the uncomfortable pricking sensation that filled her stomach. How self-righteous she had been, appointing herself the morality police for the rest of the world! She had reacted partially out of her own pain and despair over her father’s unfaithfulness and deception, certainly, but that was no excuse for demeaning a friend.
“Yes,” she said cautiously. “And if you remember what I said at the airport yesterday, I should have kept my mouth shut and my nose out of your business.”
“No,” Lovey countered. “I couldn’t see it then, but I know now you were simply trying to be a friend. You were right. Not about sexual infidelity; Bo’s never done that, to my knowledge. But he’s obsessed with work, with image, with success. I wonder now if he ever loved me at all, or if I was just another trophy.”
She went on then, and as she spun out her story, Grace mused that her confession sounded like the flip side of a fairy tale—football hero marries cheerleader, Prince Charming waltzes into the sunset with his Cinderella. But happily-ever-after was a myth, a fable. Real life went on into the harsh, shadowed world beyond the honeymoon curtain. Even extravagant wealth could not shield a soul from anguish.
On a superficial level, everything Lovey had told them over the years was true—the money, the house, the children, the charities, the travel. But there was a dark underside to this tale of the bright and beautiful. Lovey’s sense of emptiness, of insignificance. The loneliness. The disconnection from her spoiled, overindulged children. The death of desire—or, rather, in Lovey’s case, the barrenness of never having desires of her own at all.
“We had it all,” Lovey was saying. “Fame, wealth, social status.” She sighed. “But status costs an awful lot in busted dreams.”
Grace squeezed her eyes shut and found her lashes wet with tears. A realization was stirring within her, an unwelcome awareness of her own self-centeredness. She had lived so long in shame, had been so concerned with the image she projected to these friends. How much love and laughter and friendship and shared pain had she missed, cloistered away in her shell, afraid to admit her failings and reveal herself? How many years of comfort and solace and connection had she denied herself—and denied them, in turn?
It was almost too late—but not quite.
Tonight was Lovey’s night. They would surround her with understanding and acceptance, wrap her up in affirmation and love.
Tomorrow Grace would break her own long silence. She would open herself, heart and mind and soul. She would trust them.
And for whatever time she had left, she would give love willingly, and accept it freely.
She would become, at last, a true friend.
-35-
THE CONFESSIONAL
Sunday dawned clear, bright, and cool, with the sky overhead a brilliant blue. After an early brunch—another of the Grove Park’s signature feasts—Grace and the others went out to the deserted Sunset Terrace and watched the play of morning sun and shadow across the western mountains.
“I thought maybe we’d take a drive up the Parkway today,” Grace suggested. “Buy some chicken, have a picnic.”
“I hardly think we need a picnic lunch after that breakfast,” Tess said. “I can barely button my jeans as it is. But driving up the Parkway is a great idea. My family and I always used to go up to Craggy Gardens when I was young.”
“Right,” Liz said. “I forgot your parents live here.” She grinned. “Bishop Daddy, Lord High Pooh-Bah of Black Mountain.”
“Bishop Daddy’s retired now.” Tess returned the smile. “They were in Black Mountain, but the diocese office has now relocated in Asheville, over in Chunn’s Cove. Mother and Daddy moved to Deerfield Retirement Village a few years ago.” She frowned briefly. “Just so you’ll know, Grace, my parents usually come to Iowa to visit. I haven’t been in Asheville in years—otherwise we’d have gotten together long before now, even though you couldn’t come to the earlier reunions.”
A fleeting panic stabbed at Grace. She, too, had forgotten that Tess’s parents lived here. For three decades she’d made excuses for not seeing them, and it had never occurred to her what might happen if Tess—or any of the others, for that matter—showed up in Asheville. What would she have said to them? How would she have explained a life that was so radically different from what she had led them to expect?
But scattered all over the country as they were, they hadn’t come. Her deception had not been revealed. By some miracle, she had been able to keep her secret life hidden, to be disclosed in her own time. She breathed a silent sigh of relief, and turned back to the conversation.
“We ought to take jackets,” Tess was saying. “It won’t get really warm up there until midsummer, and it’s always windy.”
A little before ten, Grace retrieved her car from the garage under the Vanderbilt Wing, pulled around to the valet drop-off, and collected the others. They drove through a burger joint to pick up diet Cokes, then headed north on the Parkway.
Everyone seemed in high spirits. They rolled the windows down, ran their hands in the slipstream, laughed, and chatted to one another. The noise of wind and voices came as a relief to Grace. It gave her an opportunity to keep her eyes on the curving road and her mind on what lay ahead.
If her friends questioned why she drove a ten-year-old car when she could afford to treat them to a weekend at the Grove Park, no one mentioned it. Liz and Lovey seemed especially spirited—relieved, no doubt, of the burden of their own secrets. Grace wondered if she would experience that kind of lightheartedness once she had told her story, or if exposing her wounds to the light and having them scrutinized would simply bring a different kind of pain.
She drove on. Here, at the higher elevations, not much was blooming yet. At a bend in the road, trees and foliage dropped away to reveal a broad panorama to the east, mist-hung layers of mountain peaks all the way to a hazy horizon. And then, almost without warning, a tunnel cut into the rock blocked the view and plunged them into darkness.
“We’re nearly there,” she said when they came out on the other side. She cut a glance to the back seat, where Liz and Lovey were poking each other and giggling like adolescent girls. “Do we want to go to the picnic grounds, or on up to the top of Craggy?”
“Let’s go to the top,” Liz suggested. “If it’s too chilly, we’ll come back down to the picnic area.”
Grace bypassed the picnic entrance, and a few minutes later turned left into the parking lot at Craggy Gardens. Here the mountain vista stretched out on both sides of the Parkway, a breathtaking scope of the Blue Ridge.
Craggy was not a cultivated garden, by any stretch of the imagination, but a high, rocky outcropping overrun with multicolored rhododendron. At peak season this area would be jammed with sightseers, the trails teeming with hikers. Cars and campers and motorcycles would clog the Parkway and slow traffic to a crawl. A few—the stout of heart—might even assault the ridge on mountain bikes.
Today, however, the crag was utterly deserted. The rhododendron bushes would be magnificent in another six weeks or so, but at the moment the abundant buds that covered the bushes were still tight, hard, and green.
“Ah, good,” said Tess as she helped Grace take a blanket from the trunk of the car. “We’ve got the place all to ourselves.”
They climbed a small knoll and settled themselves on a grassy slope overlooking the eastern view. Far below, embraced by a half-moon of dark pines, the watershed glittered in the late-morning sun, a diamond necklace adorning the throat of the mountains.
Silence settled over them. No one moved. Wind rustled in the trees, a shushing sound, and in counterpoint, birdsong rang out clear on the crystal air.
Grace sensed a subtle shift inside her, a feeling she didn’t quite understand. There was something different about this place. A presence, a sanctity. She felt as if she had stumbled into a majestic open-air cathedral—waiting, anticipating some glorious moving of spirit, longing to hear the declaration of forgiveness and restoration that would liberate her soul.
Confession, however, came before reconciliation. What words would be sufficient to unlock the door she had kept bolted for so many years?
How to begin?
But before she had formulated a coherent sentence, Tess began to speak.
“I think it’s my turn,” Tess said. “Time to tell you some things about my life.”
She had been thinking about this all weekend. Liz and Lovey had both confided things about their lives they hadn’t told in the circle journal. Grace had yet to disclose the reason she had gathered them all together, but as she seemed a bit nervous and preoccupied, Tess was relatively certain she was planning to do it yet today.
Tess had told Hal that she did not intend to reveal herself as C. J. Kenning, the award-winning writer. It would seem like bragging, she feared, and she didn’t want to come across as the Big Important Person. Her accomplishments, she reasoned, might make them feel worse about their own lives. But the more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that withholding the truth had its roots in pride, not humility. It was a flimsy rationalization at best, and the very fact that she had considered it testified to her own unacknowledged arrogance.
These were her friends. They had taken the risk to be forthright about their own struggles and pain. Did she really think that she was superior because she had a fulfilling marriage, an amazing daughter, a successful writing career?
Deep down, she knew better. Her marriage had endured and flourished not because Tess had been an exemplary wife, but because Hal had been extraordinarily patient while she searched for her life’s direction. Claire had been a blessing from another woman’s womb, and from the beginning had outstripped her mother both in wisdom and in compassion. Even her creative successes Tess could not wholly claim. Whatever talent she possessed came from another source entirely, and the cultivating of that talent had occurred despite her ambition rather than because of it.
It was all gift, grace, benediction. Unearned and undeserved. All of it.
They were waiting, looking at her expectantly. She inhaled a deep draft of the cool, crisp mountain air and smiled.
“It’s Sunday,” she said, “and somehow this place feels like a sanctuary to me, a temple.”
Liz arched an eyebrow. “Seems I remember you boycotting the church.”
“That was a long time ago,” Tess said. “I’ve changed a bit in the past thirty years. The church has changed.” She grinned at Liz. “Not as much as I’d like, maybe, but enough to lure me back.”
She paused and looked around at them. “Lovey, you and Liz have opened up this weekend, and your honesty is, in part, what motivates me to tell the truth about myself. When I wrote in the journal I was, shall we say, selective about what I included. Even on the flight to Asheville, I rationalized that omitting certain facts about my life would be best for all concerned. But yesterday, and last night, as Liz and Lovey bared their souls, I realized that I’ve missed out on so much because I haven’t let you know me. Really know me—the person I’ve become over the past thirty years.”
“Let me guess,” Liz said, a note of mockery in her voice, “you’re a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist writing under a different name because you’d prefer to be a hermit.”
The comment was clearly sarcastic, a typical Liz joke, but the audacious grin faded when she caught sight of Tess’s expression.
“Well, not a Pulitzer,” Tess said quietly.
“You mean you’ve actually been writing?” Liz gaped at her. “Publishing?”
“Yes,” Tess admitted. “But you were right. I do write under a different name.” She shifted, stretching her legs out across the blanket. “It all began with a little novel about adoption called The Chosen Child.”
“What?” Grace’s eyes widened. “You’re C. J. Kenning?”
“That’s right.”
“Hold on a sec,” Liz interrupted. She turned toward Grace. “You’ve heard of her? You know who she is?”
“Everybody knows who she is,” Grace said. “The Chosen Child was a magnificent book—intelligent, imaginative, an instant classic. It was a Newbery winner, and if I’m not mistaken, C. J. Kenning’s writing has been awarded several Horn Books, and practically every other honor in children’s literature. Most of her books are best sellers even before they hit the stores. But she’s a mystery woman—never does public appearances.” Grace blinked. “And all the time, it was you.”
Tess gazed at her. Grace seemed to be fighting for breath, her eyes bright and watery. “You’ve read The Chosen Child?”
Grace nodded. “Five or six times, at least. It’s brilliant. It kept me from—” She stopped suddenly, as if afraid she had said too much.
Tess felt herself beginning to blush. Of course Grace would understand what a Newbery meant. She was a librarian, an avid reader. She would keep up with what was going on in the world of books. But Grace had no children—her only pregnancy had ended in miscarriage. Why would a childless woman read such a novel—not once, but many times?
“Wait a minute.” Lovey frowned. “How come we didn’t know this? Last time we saw you, you told us that you had determined you weren’t cut out to be a writer. And in the circle journal you said—”
“I know.” Tess waved a hand. “At the time, it was all too painfully true. But if you’ll just give me a chance, I’ll tell you the whole story from the beginning.”
“Well, let’s hear it, then.” Liz took a great gulp of her diet soda and leaned back on her elbows.
“My first year at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop was extremely intimidating,” Tess began. “I had big dreams, but no idea how to fulfill them. I desperately wanted to be invisible, to fade into the woodwork. But Hal believed in me. He taught me, helped build my confidence—”
“I’ll bet he did,” Liz said with a salacious grin.
Tess chuckled and arched an eyebrow. “No, this was before we fell in love and got married. He always maintained I was talented, and he finally convinced me. After graduation I published a few stories here and there, taught some introductory fiction classes. But it took a major crisis to bring me face-to-face with my dissatisfaction.”
“You couldn’t get pregnant,” Lovey supplied.
“Right. And I realized my inability to have a baby mirrored—in physical terms—my creative barrenness. I determined to use that pain productively, and began work on a novel that I was sure would shake the literary world to its core. A book about the pain of a woman who could not conceive. I titled it Rachel’s Wilderness—”
“Never heard of it,” Grace said, then lowered her eyes quickly.
“It’s all right.” Tess bit her lip. “No one else did either. No one but the critics, that is. They called it—let’s see—self-absorbed, contrived. Maudlin, predictable, pseudo-literary angst. A brutal assault with a blunt knife.”
“Ouch.” Liz winced.
“It was devastating,” Tess agreed. “And the worst of it was that, in the middle of the book—or rather, right near the end of the writing—we adopted Claire. She was four, and took an enormous amount of energy. I wasn’t a very good mother. I was much too absorbed with the novel. Obsessed, really. And then after the reviews came out, I went into a pretty significant depression.
