Next to appear was Mr. Maddox, a lanky bloke with a vague, wavery voice. He shook hands with me but said little. I didn’t take it personally: Aidan had warned me that when he did talk, it was usually about the Democratic Party.
Kevin insisted on carrying my bag to my bedroom, a room that could have been twinned with the spare room in my parents’ house. They could have done a cultural exchange and put a sign saying so outside each door; ferocious curtains, a matching ferocious quilt, and a wardrobe crammed with someone else’s old clothes and about half an inch of space and two hangers for mine. Lucky I was only staying one night. (Taking no chances, Aidan and I had decided not to overdo things on the first visit.)
Then I saw it. On the dressing table: another picture of Aidan and Janie. A “motion” shot; they were turned toward each other and it had been taken half a second before they kissed. This time there was no scrunchy—her hair was held back from her face by Aidan’s hand.
Again I felt queasy, and after eyeballing it for a few minutes, I laid it facedown. No way was I going to sleep in this room watched over by a prekissing photo of Aidan and Janie. A light knock on the door made me jump guiltily and Dianne breezed in with an armload of stuff. “Fresh towels!” Instantly she noticed the toppled picture. “Damn! Oh, Anna! It’s stood there for years, so long I don’t even see it anymore. That was so tactless of me.”
She picked it up, left the room with it, and returned empty-handed.
“Sorry about that,” she said. “Truly.”
This was no Mrs. Danvers situation. She seemed sincerely sorry to have upset me.
“Whenever you’re ready for dinner, come on down.”
The dinner was the whole Thanksgiving nine yards: a massive turkey and millions of spuds and vegetables and wine and champagne and crystal glasses and candles. The atmosphere was very friendly, I was almost a hundred percent sure that Mrs. Maddox hadn’t spat in my soup, everyone was chatting away, and even Old Man Maddox made a joke, and although it was about the Democratic Pah-dy and I didn’t understand it, I laughed obediently.
There was just one thing: not every one of the many photos on the dining-room walls was of Aidan and Janie, but there were enough to keep giving me little shocks. Over the years Janie’s hair had got shorter. Good. Men like woman with long hair. And she’d plumped out a little but she still looked very cheery and pleasant, the kind of woman that other women like.
In the middle of swallowing a mouthful of turkey, I spotted yet another picture that I’d missed earlier and once again my gullet shut down briefly. I took a swig of wine to assist things along and Old Man Maddox asked, “Janie, dear, can you pass the roast potatoes.”
Who?
I looked from side to side, but as the dish of spuds was in front of me and Old Man Maddox was looking my way, I concluded that it must be me he was talking to. Obediently I shunted the bowl along and Kevin gave me a comforting wink and Aidan and Dianne looked horrified and mouthed, “Sorry.”
But two seconds later, Dianne said, “Oh, Aidan, we met Janie’s dad at the hahd-ware stoh, he says to tell you he finally finished the shed and to come by to see it. How long ago was it that you guys stah-ted on it…?”
Then Old Man Maddox piped up. “You might like to know what he was doing at the hahd-ware store?” he asked Aidan. He’d suddenly gone all bright-eyed and amused—it must have been the drink. “Buying paint, that’s what. White paint, by the way. For their place in Bah Hah-ba. He gave it one summer like you asked him to, but we still can’t figure what came over you two guys, painting the place pink.”
Flushed with amusement, he looked from Aidan to me, then panic flickered behind his eyes. She’s not Janie.
After dinner, Aidan and I sat in the den; things were a little tense.
“I don’t belong here, I shouldn’t have come.”
“No, you should! Really, you should. It’ll get easier. I’m so sorry about my dad, he’s a bit…he doesn’t mean it—he’s in a world of his own half the time.”
We sat in silence.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“About the carpet.” It had some funny spiral pattern. “If you stare at it long enough, you feel like your eyes are on springs. It’s like they’re zooming out of my head, then bouncing back in.”
“I feel more like the floor is lifting up toward me, then falling down again.”
We sat in companionable silence, watching the carpet do its thing, and suddenly we were friends again.
“It’ll be okay,” Aidan said. “Just give it time. Please.”
“Okay,” I said. “My parents used to treat Shane like family, too.”
“They loved him?”
“Well…no…actually they hated him. But they still treated him like family.”
The following day we went to the mall because there’s only so much sitting around your new boyfriend’s parents’ house, living in fear of hearing further reminiscences about his ex-girlfriend, you can do. I kept stumbling over conversations like “Remember that holiday on Cape Cod. All of us in the RV? Remember Janie did something or other?”
But once we were in the mall I cheered up because when I’m away from home, even shops that are normally beneath me suddenly become exciting. I visited CVS, Express, and a whole load of other crappy places, Aidan bought me a souvenir of Boston—a snow dome—then said, “Guess we’d better go back.”
So we got in the cah and had just left the pahking lot, when it happened. Even before Aidan made a funny, involuntary noise, I’d noticed the jaw-clenching tension suddenly emanating from him.
I looked out of the window, my eyes scudding from side to side, desperate to see what he’d seen. A woman was walking toward us. But we were moving quite fast, we’d already passed her, and my intuition was yelling, Look around, look around, quickly.
I whipped my head over my shoulder. The woman was walking away from us, wearing jeans and looking (I couldn’t help but notice) quite broad in the butt. Of course, I should have been proud that Aidan was the kind of guy who didn’t discriminate against girls with big bums, but I had other things on my mind. She was quite tall and her hair was straight and dark and hung to her shoulders. Her bag was nice, I’d seen them in Zara. In fact I’d nearly bought one myself but I already had another that was very similar. I kept watching until she disappeared into the lot.