An Illusion of Trust (Sequel to The Brevity of Roses) Read online

  “Right, but … I don’t know. Jalal and Judith didn’t exactly hit it off.”

  “As I understand it,” Azadeh says, “that was because Judith dominated Meredith, and Jalal felt she was a bad influence. In other words, he was jealous … not that he would have seen it that way. Plus, Judith freaked him out by making passes at him.”

  I cancel the sip I was about to take and thunk my cup back on the table. “Judith hit on Jalal?”

  Azadeh nods. “But that was long ago. She changed. By the time Meredith died, they were all close friends. Word gets around instantly in this community. The minute Judith heard about the accident, she rushed to the house and when she realized Jalal couldn’t function, she took charge. She’s the one who called Seattle to notify us.”

  For a moment, we sit in silence. I can only imagine the events of a day Aza will never forget, the day that nearly killed her brother as well as his wife. But if Jalal made peace with Judith, why would he disapprove of her as our decorator if not because she reminds him of Meredith? I check the time on my phone and stand. “I’d better go. I promise I’ll be back as soon as I can. If you need me—”

  “Adam will be fine. Go. Enjoy yourself.” Azadeh pushes me toward the door.

  Jalal meets me on the steps. “Are we leaving now?”

  “We?”

  “Am I not allowed to see what Judith the Designer has in mind?” He turns and starts back down.

  I follow. “But what if Adam wakes up and neither of us is here?”

  “Aza raised two kids of her own. She can handle Adam.”

  “But—”

  “Renee …”

  “I thought you needed to be here to supervise your workers.”

  “Where are we having lunch?”

  When I don’t answer right away, he stops walking to stare at me. Like it or not, he’s going with me. “At Judith’s,” I tell him.

  “Good,” he says, “I can say hello to Hank … if she hasn’t divorced him. Or eaten him.”

  Hank turns out to be a big man, taller than Jalal, white-haired and robust. He grabs Jalal’s hand and then wraps him in a bear hug as soon as we step in the front door. “It’s good to see you. Just great. We’ve missed you. I’m glad to hear you’re moving back.” He gives Jalal another clap on the back and lets him go as he turns to me. “And who’s this little beauty?”

  “This is Renee, my wife.”

  Hank wraps my hand in his big paws and gives me an exaggerated wink. “Henry Jackson Langley at your service, darling, but I’d be mighty pleased if you called me Hank.”

  Apparently, one flirt married another. Really though, I feel zero threat from Hank. Jalal’s smile hasn’t faltered and doesn’t even when the click of pumps behind Hank signals Judith’s approach, but I note Jalal’s slight flinch when Hank steps aside, revealing her. Ever the gentleman, Jalal covers his reaction by raising his eyebrows and smiling wider as though he couldn’t be more delighted to see her.

  “You look wonderful,” he says and gives her what appears to be a genuine hug.

  Judith returns the gesture and adds a wink. “You look pretty damned good yourself, Jalal.”

  Hank beams at them. I’m too nervous to know if I’m correctly interpreting all the smiles and hugs and facial expressions, and before I can figure it out, Judith takes my hand and leads the way into the living room. A bottle of wine and another of Pellegrino sits on the coffee table. When we’re seated, Hank pours wine in three glasses and water in one. He hands the water to Judith, wine to Jalal and me, and takes the last for himself. Because it was another thing his mother drank through all her pregnancies, wine, in extreme moderation, is not on Jalal’s forbidden list. I’m thankful to Nasrin for many things.

  I’m curious, but Jalal doesn’t seem to question why Judith isn’t drinking wine with us. In Meredith’s journal, she described Judith as the leader of the Wanton Women and Wine Society, the trio who became her friends. Apparently, giving up wine is one of the changes Judith made. And, at her age, I expect she’s dropped the wanton part too.

  “I’ll show you my ideas after lunch,” Judith tells me, “but I’ll give you a hint now.” She leans forward to look me in the eye. “You seem like the French bordello type. I’m thinking pink silk and black lace.”

  A mixture of shock and rage ties my tongue. I can only stare at her. Jalal sets his glass down so fast it clinks against the wine bottle. He snatches my hands, pulling my attention away from Judith.

  “She is joking, Renee.”

  “Well, of course she’s joking,” Hank says.

  “Oh, Jalal,” Judith says, “you didn’t warn her about my twisted sense of humor?”

  At that, I accept that Judith meant no offense. She wasn’t judging me. I turn back to her. “Jalal would love the black lace,” I say, “but I’m not crazy about pink. Scarlet suits me better, don’t you think?”

  Hank prides himself King of the Grill and proves it by treating us to a delicious lunch of grilled lamb and vegetables on the patio. Then, while Hank and Jalal share another bottle of wine and Judith and I drink sparkling water, we talk.

  “Do you ever hear from Carol and Donna?” Jalal asks Judith. He turns to me and explains. “They were Meredith and Judith’s friends.”

  I nod as if to thank him for the explanation, but I’d recognized the names from Meredith’s journal. Judith hasn’t yet answered, and all eyes are on her as we wait.

  “Not … for a while,” she says. “Donna and Leo moved to Miami and then divorced. And last I heard, Carol was man-hunting in San Diego.”

  Jalal only nods. He knows as well as I do that Judith left much unsaid in her three-second pause. Unlike him, I won’t rest until I know what.

  “I loved your short story collection that came out last year,” Judith says. “What are you writing now?”

  Jalal shrugs. “Poems … a story or two.”

  Judith seems to consider that for a moment and then shakes her head. “You’re too happy to write now. You poetic types thrive on misery.”

  My breath catches at her daring to make light of Jalal’s grief over Meredith’s death.

  He laughs. “That is too true,” he says, “but I have no desire to trade in my happiness.” He smiles at me across the table.

  “How do you like being a father?” Hank asks.

  Tears spring to Jalal’s eyes. He swallows hard. “It … leaves me speechless,” he says, finally.

  Hank stands and lays a hand on Jalal’s shoulder. “And well it should, boy. Well it should.” He claps his big hands and then rubs them together. “Come on, Judy, show us what you have planned for their boudoir.”

  “Did I detect a little surprise when you first saw Judith today?” I’m driving us back to the house because Jalal and Hank killed a third bottle of wine while Judith gave her presentation.

  “Yes,” he says.

  I wait, but he sits with his eyes closed and says nothing more. “Why, Jalal?”

  “What?”

  “Why were you surprised?” He’s not drunk, just buzzed, and I want to keep him talking because I’m afraid he’s thinking of Meredith.

  He opens his eyes and sits up straighter. “She used to dye her hair dark. I was shocked to see she let it go white.”

  “It looks good.”

  “It does. She looks … softer now.”

  “I wish you’d prepared me for her sense of humor.”

  Jalal groans. “I apologize for that.” He pats my thigh. “You handled it well, though.”

  “Not at first. I thought she—”

  “I know what you thought, and I wish you could stop feeling that way about yourself, Renee.”

  I wish it too, but I’ll always be the daughter of an alcoholic, drug-addicted prostitute, abandoned by my father at the age of four and again at sixteen, and deserted by my mother for good by her suicide three months before my eighteenth birthday. And even though for years, Jalal mistakenly believed his father hated him, he’ll never understand how it feels
to be me.

  “Judith knows nothing about you unless you told her,” he says. “I have had little contact with her since I moved away from here.”

  “But she recognized me the first time I saw her. She knew about Adam.”

  He shrugs. “I have a public career. Evidently, she followed that. And some people check Wikipedia, you know.”

  Ouch. He’ll never let me forget that I once told him I’d checked him out through the Internet. Somehow, I’ve never thought to see what information might have been added about me. “Oh my god!” I whip my face toward his so quickly, everything blurs for a moment. “Pictures of Adam aren’t public are they? I don’t want that. I won’t allow it.”

  “Watch the road!” Jalal grabs the wheel in time to avoid the parked car I was about to sideswipe. “Pull over.”

  “You’re not driving,” I tell him. I steer to the curb anyway because my hands are shaking.

  “You can look for yourself when we get home,” he says, “but no photos of Adam—or you—are public unless you put them online. Judith recognized you because I emailed to tell her I had remarried and included one of our wedding photos. I also called Hank when Adam was born. So, evidently, when Judith saw you with Adam, she presumed his identity. All right?”

  I smile. “You’re very talkative when you’re drunk.”

  He motions for me to drive on and then closes his eyes again. “I am not drunk.”

  Four

  Azadeh and I sit on the park bench watching Kristen and Jalal play with Adam. He runs, shrieking with delight, as they pretend to be tigers on the prowl. “How does Kristen like her new school?” I ask her.

  “I think she’s adjusting well. She’s made a friend. I haven’t met her yet, but from what Kristen tells me, Brittany sounds all right.”

  “Did you like school?”

  “Me?” She grins. “I loved it. I was a little nerdy, to tell the truth.”

  “So you went to college?” Nothing about her expression indicates she heard the question, and her silence leaves me wondering whether I should repeat it or just assume she doesn’t want to answer. I wait.

  “I did for a while,” she says. “Then I married Sam and a degree no longer seemed important.” She telegraphs the folly of that with a brief lift of her brows.

  “You should take some classes now,” I tell her. “It would give you something to do.”

  Aza frowns. “Aren’t I going to be helping you with Adam and the baby?”

  “Of course you are, but not twenty-four seven. You’ll still have your own life.”

  “Shake it off, little man,” Jalal cries.

  We look across the green in time to see him scoop Adam up from a fall. I move to get up, but Aza grabs my arm. “He’s fine,” she says. Seconds later, laughing again, Adam runs from his growling creatures. “You have to learn to relax or you’ll never make it through his childhood.”

  “You sound like Jalal. It’s hard, though.”

  “Yes,” she says. “I’m still having trouble accepting that childhood has ended for mine.”

  “Kristen’s only fifteen.”

  As if she intends to speak, Azadeh’s lips part but then only hesitate before slowly forming a wan smile. She reaches over and lays a hand on my mounded middle. “In three months you’ll have a new one to fuss over. That will be nice.”

  I clasp Aza’s hand. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  Aza studies my face for a moment and then squeezes my hand before pulling hers away. She turns her face to the sun. “Are you getting cold? Maybe we should tell—”

  “Azadeh …”

  For a moment, she toes a stone on the ground and then she sighs. “I couldn’t bear to tell Jalal … or anyone except Shadi.” Her bottom lip quivers, so she clamps it between her teeth for a moment and then whispers, “She had a miscarriage.”

  For a second, I want to believe Aza is talking about Shadi, but her eyes are locked on Kristen. That doesn’t make her an adult, I want to tell Aza, but I don’t because that isn’t the issue. Kristen is neither adult nor child in her mother’s eyes. She’s become a stranger. Aza moved them to Coelho hoping to get to know her daughter again. I lay a hand on my belly, now less anxious for my due date to arrive. Giving birth is only the beginning of the pain of motherhood.

  Adam, who ate cheese crackers and raisins on the drive from the park, is ready for his nap as soon as we get back to the house, so I lay with him until he falls asleep on Azadeh’s bed. She and Jalal have lunch on the table by the time I rejoin them. Kristen, for a change, has decided to eat with us. Spending time with Jalal always seems to draw her out of her perpetual funk. Even though I usually think it’s silly that his family treats Jalal like he’s delicate china, I agree Aza was right not to tell him the whole truth about Kristen. It’s not a problem he could solve, a mistake he could reverse, and telling him would have seemed a betrayal to Kristen. She doesn’t know how lucky she is to have a mother like Aza.

  “You should spend the day with Jennie tomorrow,” Jalal says.

  What the hell? I stare at him. He is definitely reading my mind. “Yeah,” I say. “I might do that.”

  “I like her,” Kristen says, “she’s funny … like you.”

  “Like me?” I ask.

  “Yeah, kind of smart-mouthed funny. Sarcastic.”

  “Ahem,” Jalal says and grins. “I stand vindicated.”

  “Is that how you describe me—your sarcastic wife?”

  “He prepared Maman for meeting you the first time by saying you were like a porcupine with a soft heart,” Azadeh says.

  “You what?”

  Kristen and Aza laugh, but Jalal’s grin fades, and he shakes his head. “I … I never—”

  I smack the tabletop. “Why the hell would you tell her I had a soft heart?”

  Coke sputters out of Kristen’s mouth and she says, “God, I love you guys.”

  Kristen’s smile sets Aza’s face aglow.

  After lunch, Jalal takes me downstairs to show me the progress on the renovations. We enter through the front door because he changed plans again and the kitchen is torn up. It drives me crazy that he won’t discuss the costs of the remodeling with me. He calls it our money, but he controls it. Does he think of me as a child or not trust me?

  I follow Jalal up the front staircase. The whine of a power saw comes from the back of the house. “What are you doing to the kitchen now?”

  “I decided against breaking through the sitting room wall, so we are extending the kitchen into a play area slash family room.”

  “We are? So you’re turning it into a great room after all.”

  “It will be perfect for the children. The new room has its own mudroom and exit directly to the outdoor play area—yet to be constructed.”

  “Outdoors! I thought we were going to move in next week.”

  He stops at the first landing and says, “The yard has nothing to do with moving in. And the great room will be ready in ten days … two weeks at most.”

  “Jalal …”

  “We will be moved in before Christmas. I promise.”

  When we reach the upper hallway, he surprises me by turning left instead of right. “I thought you were showing me the master bedroom.”

  “Patience.” He opens the door to the room at the end of the hall, the baby’s room, and steps aside so I can enter first.

  The ultrasound showed we’re having a girl, so the nursery is decorated in creams and pinks, balanced by cherry wood pieces. This is the first time I’ve seen it all put together. Azadeh and Kristen arranged the furniture and added some finishing touches after the painters cleared out. In the daylight, diffused through voile curtains, all shapes are softened, muted. It’s a sweet dream room. With one hand, I touch the ivory silk canopy over the crib; with the other, I stroke my belly. I’m anxious, once again, to meet my new child.

  Jalal steps up close behind and wraps his arms around me, clasping his hands over mine. “Aza didn’t know where you wanted to han
g the pictures, so she left those for you.”

  Does he understand how safe I feel when he holds me?

  After a few moments, he says, “Shall we proceed?”

  We pass through the connecting bathroom into Adam’s room. Directly across the room is another door, the one he promised, leading into our room. A straight shot, indeed. I feel a little guilty about the arrangement of rooms. Shouldn’t a newborn’s room be the closest to its parents’? My hand returns to my belly. I love this baby. I want this baby. But it isn’t real to me yet. Like the nursery, the baby is wrapped in a dream. A promise not yet fulfilled.

  Adam’s room is livelier than the nursery. It’s all primary colors, tastefully done, with beautiful, solid cherry furnishings. Of course, he won’t always want to sleep in this room next to ours. By the time he’s Kristen’s age, he’ll probably want the room farthest away. Why do I let myself think these thoughts? They always make me cry. I wipe my tears away, hoping Jalal hasn’t noticed them. Adam’s room was his project and he’ll misunderstand my tears.

  “You don’t like it?” he asks.

  He noticed. “It’s great, Jalal. He’ll love it.” It’s my turn to hold him close. “They grow up too fast.”

  He laughs. I love the sound of it, amplified in my ear pressed against his chest. “Adam is only sixteen months old,” he says. “We have a while to go before he moves out.”

  I release Jalal and cross the room to the windows. Adam’s room faces east, but the row of eucalyptus trees along that side of the property will block most of the morning sun. Fear clutches my heart when I look down at the flagstones of the side patio below. What if Adam fell out this window? “Jalal—”

  “Childproof locks,” he says, “and guards for when the windows are open.”

  “I don’t see—”

  “Scheduled for installation next Monday, sweet love.”

  “Thank you.”

  “He is my son too, you know. I want to keep him just as safe as you do.”

  No. The denial pops into my mind, but I’m not sure why. Of course Jalal is concerned about Adam’s safety. Why would I doubt that? This pregnancy is making me a little insane. “Okay,” I say, “I’m ready to see our passion pit.”