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“You’re here every day, aren’t you? I’d call that pretty unselfish. It’s more than I’ve managed to do. And I’m his mother.”
“You had a big job. You couldn’t just leave it.”
“I could have, and I should have. But what’s done is done. The irony is that now that I’ve actually resigned, I don’t care at all. Isn’t it bizarre how it takes awful, horrendous things like this to make one see what’s important in life?”
Summer nodded. Alexia didn’t take her eyes off Michael.
“Teddy thinks he must have found Andrew’s body and reburied it, when he was excavating the pagoda. He kept it quiet to protect me.” She stifled a sob. “That was the ‘secret’ he was hinting at to you. My son crashed that bike believing that I’d murdered Andrew Beesley.”
“We don’t know that, Alexia.”
“It was bad enough, Roxie thinking the worst of me for all those years. But at least I’ll have a chance to put things right with her, eventually. Michael might never wake up. I might never be able to tell him the truth.”
Summer put her arms around Alexia. She could feel every one of her ribs, like bars on a xylophone.
“He will wake up. I’m sure of it. I’ll leave you for a while.”
Alone with her son, Alexia began to talk. She thought she’d feel awkward and foolish, but now that she was here, she found the silence comforting. Michael’s presence was enough.
“So many secrets, my darling. So many lies. And I started it all! I thought I could run from the past, from my mistakes. But there’s no escape.”
The machine at Michael’s side inflated his lungs with air then emptied them again, its gentle, rhythmic whooshing filling the silence, like waves lapping against the shore.
“I’m so desperately, desperately sorry, Michael. Please forgive me.”
Michael De Vere had no answer to give his mother.
He simply lay there, motionless as a corpse.
Part Four
Chapter Thirty-four
Spring came slowly on the Cape. While the rest of Massachusetts burst forth in a riot of color and warmth and life the moment February turned to March, winter clung to the Cape and islands like a wizened old man clinging to life. Long after the last of the snow had melted, Martha’s Vineyard was still being whipped by bitter Canadian winds. Any primrose or daffodil foolish enough to allow its head to peek above the soil was dashed into oblivion for its presumptuousness, and islanders continued wearing their gloves, scarves, and mufflers as they went about their errands in town. When the long-awaited warmer days finally arrived in early May, the mood among the locals was euphoric.
Alexia De Vere felt particularly privileged to witness the late changing of the season. Unlike her friend Lucy Meyer, Alexia hadn’t minded the prolonged winter. Somehow the bitter weather and heavy blanket of snow had felt like an extra layer of protection from the cruel world that lay beyond the island’s shores, the world Alexia was escaping from, hiding from like a prisoner on the run. At the same time, spring’s new beginning seemed to echo the sense of renewal she felt inside.
Physically she’d made a remarkable recovery from Gilbert Drake’s attempt on her life. Her ribs had healed completely. A small, half-inch scar where the bullet had pierced her side was the only reminder that the incident had ever happened. For a woman her age, she was very, very lucky. But it was the emotional shifts that affected her the most profoundly. Huge, important chapters in Alexia’s life had come to an end. Her political career was over. So was her marriage, at least in the form she had always known it. Teddy was still in custody in Oxford, awaiting sentencing—cutbacks in the British courts meant there was a huge backlog of cases and Crown v. De Vere was unlikely to be heard before late summer.
Relations between Alexia and Teddy were cordial, even warm. They wrote letters to each other about the weather and the garden and Teddy’s prison routines, never mentioning Andrew Beesley or Billy Hamlin or any other “difficult” subject. There was nothing to say anyway—nothing that would help. Reverting to their old way of being seemed the easiest and safest course of action. Alexia had long since decided that she was going to stand by Teddy. He had kept her secrets faithfully for forty-odd years. Now it was her turn to return the favor. Being away had helped her to detach emotionally, to push thoughts of Billy Hamlin and Andrew Beesley and everything that had happened out of her mind and to focus on the present. She tried not to think about the past or the future, although she knew that Teddy would go to prison for a long, long time and the thought scared her.
From now on, I’ll have to be my own rock. Rebuild my own life. Start afresh. I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again.
The hardest part was the children. Michael had now been moved to a specialized critical care unit in London. The doctors had been as kind as they could be to Alexia, but she knew what the move meant: Michael would never get better. There was no more hope. At some point she knew she would have to face reality and turn off the life support machines. But not now. Not yet. She wasn’t ready. And there were also Summer Meyer’s feelings to consider.
Meanwhile a shroud of mental health professionals had descended over Roxie’s life, shutting Alexia out completely. Apparently Roxie was staying at an “assisted living” facility somewhere in the west of England. But Alexia was expressly forbidden to visit or even to know her exact whereabouts, on psychiatrist’s orders.
I gave birth to her! Alexia wanted to scream. I love her. Who the hell are you to tell me I can’t see my own child? But she knew that Roxie was not a child, and that Roxie herself was the one who’d insisted on banishing her. Perhaps a period of separation was best for Roxie’s recovery. But it still hurt, a raw wound that bled and bled and that no amount of distance, or time, would ever fully heal.
Meanwhile the radio silence from the people in Alexia’s old political life was deafening. She hadn’t spoken to Henry Whitman since the day she resigned, and not one of her cabinet colleagues or former constituency staff had called to see how she was doing. Edward, dear Edward, had sent a couple of gossipy e-mails. But that was it. After twenty years of devotion to the Tory Party, such utter abandonment ought to have hurt desperately. But it didn’t. On the contrary, it felt liberating. Walking the deserted, windswept beaches and cranberry bogs of Martha’s Vineyard, sometimes alone, sometimes with Lucy, Alexia could smell her future in the crisp, wintery air.
Perhaps, despite what she’d said to Michael, she really could leave the past behind this time. Reinvent herself and start again, far away.
This time around, the past seemed willing to let her go.
Lucy Meyer watched Alexia as she pored over her computer screen. It was only a few months ago that Lucy thought she’d lost her friend for good. That some crazy taxi driver’s bullet was going to rob her of one of the most important people in her life. But Alexia had survived. She’d recovered and she’d come out here, where Lucy could keep an eye on her. “You’re not going to tell me, are you?” Lucy mumbled through a mouthful of cake crumbs.
“Tell you what?” Alexia didn’t look up.
