And there were times, too, when she simply narrated for herself what was happening around her, things that sounded as if they could have come from another era. Right now, for instance, she told herself she was sitting here with Kurt Pearce, that she and Kurt Pearce were having a conversation. That Richard was off at his studio, and she needed to give Cecily a call later. A description that would have made perfect sense in 1988.
Except Kurt would be an adolescent, not this enormous man sitting opposite her, his legs reaching halfway across the floor. Jake wouldn’t have been standing against the wall, arms folded across his chest in an attempt to look like a bodyguard.
Kurt seemed sober, lucid. He spoke quietly, his voice impossibly deep. “I don’t know how much I can tell you. I don’t know if you’re going to try something.”
“Try something!” Fiona said, and then stopped herself. She shouldn’t get emotional.
“I always thought she was way too harsh on you. You did the best you could. And you’re making an effort. I get it.”
He seemed so young. This whole time, she’d hated him for being closer to her own age than to Claire’s—and he was just a kid, a hippie doofus.
He said, “Look, I wish it had worked out differently. I messed up pretty bad for a while. But everyone’s fine. We’re all doing okay. Hey, what happened to your hand?”
“Are they here in Paris?”
“I can tell you everyone’s safe and healthy. But beyond that—it’s not my place to tell you stuff. I’m lucky to be back in their lives. I’m lucky Claire allows that.”
It was all Fiona hoped for, herself—to be allowed back in. She hadn’t messed up as badly as Kurt—she hadn’t been arrested, at least—but maybe she’d messed up for longer. And maybe it was harder to forgive your mother than a man. She’d always figured that her own failings would make more and more sense to Claire as she grew up—that an adult would understand an affair (such a garden-variety mistake!) in a way a child couldn’t have. Shouldn’t Claire know the messiness of the human heart by now?
She had too many questions for Kurt, and no good starting point. And she couldn’t give away that she’d spied on him, been in this apartment yesterday. She said, “I understand you’re married.”
He looked back and forth between Fiona and Jake, and then he said, “Yeah, she’s a good match. It’s healthy.”
“Well, I’m happy for you. I’ve always wanted the best for you, and I just wish—” She wouldn’t be able to express how much fondness she’d always felt for him, or at least for his memory, at the same time that she loathed him with all her being for taking her daughter away. She said, “You’re clear of the, the group, right? The Hosanna people?”
Kurt laughed. “You can call them a cult. That’s what they are. Yeah, I was happy to put an ocean between us.”
“So you soured on them.”
“Hey, can I get you a beer?” Fiona shook her head. “Can I get you a beer?” he said to Jake, and thank God Jake said no. He wouldn’t have looked nearly as effective with a bottle in his hand. Kurt got up and fetched himself one, sat back down.
“She soured. I was never that big on them, but I was in love.”
“How does being in love mean you have to join a cult?”
“It was what she wanted! She—at the beginning, she cared more about them than about me, that was obvious. If I made her choose, I knew who she’d choose, and it wasn’t me.”
Fiona glanced at Jake, but he was still just standing there. This made no sense. “You were the one who lived in Boulder,” Fiona said. “You were the one who—you found the cult.”
“Nope. Nope, nope, nope. She met this guy in the kitchen of the restaurant where she was working, and at least I knew it wasn’t romantic, because he had this terrible skin and he was sort of emaciated, but he invited her out to a party at the compound, and she brought me along. I thought the whole thing was ridiculous. Tambourines and drums, right? There’s this girl named Fish, I swear to God, who just latches on to Claire and talks to her all night. They give me this tea that’s laced with something. They weren’t into drinking, but man, would they lace your tea. And we end up crashing on the floor. It seemed like a laid-back place, until they got their claws in. And Claire wanted to go back, night after night. She was about to lose her apartment at the end of the month, and I’d offered to let her move in with me, but then Fish told her there was a room we could both stay in. It really—I mean, they got to me, too, after a while, don’t get me wrong, they have a way of doing that, but Claire’s the one who pulled me down the rabbit hole. I’m not just trying to make myself look good here.”
Fiona found that she believed Kurt, but still she wanted to scream that he was lying, that her daughter would never fall for something like that, because the people who got suckered by cults were the ones who’d never really had a family to begin with, the ones who, under other circumstances, might have joined a gang. Or at least that was the thing you told yourself to explain why bad stuff happened to someone else’s kid, but your kid would be okay. But a battered woman, she could understand. A woman so under the sway of a domineering man that she had no choice but to go along with it. Although she’d never wished that on Claire, wasn’t it the story that let Fiona herself off the hook?
Fiona said, “And you gave them all your savings?”
“I didn’t really have savings. And actually they helped me close out my credit cards. I only owed a couple thousand dollars, but they paid it all off so I could shut them down. Which, at the time—I was like, I’ll take it.”
The bill for Claire’s MasterCard had continued to show up in Fiona’s in-box, and she’d kept paying the annual fee this whole time, hoping sooner or later Claire would charge something, giving a clue where she was. She never had.
Fiona was ready to ask it now. “Why did they pick her? How did they know it would work? Because you could try that on a hundred people, and ninety-nine would walk away.”
Kurt shrugged. “I guess they have practice. Listen, if we get all psychological about it, she was already drawn to an older man, right? She was looking for parent figures.”
Fiona had wanted him to say it out loud, so she could hate him. She said, “Damian was a big part of her life. Look, you were a child of divorce, too, and back when it was less common. It doesn’t mean you walk around damaged.”
Kurt stood. He stretched and put his palm flat on the ceiling. He said, “I can’t judge, but one of the first things she ever told me, in Boulder, was that the day she was born was the worst day of your life. She told me you said that to her.”
“That’s not true.”