Like me and Max. Like Kate Blackwell.
Gabe had grown up in a family at war, a family pulled to pieces by bitterness and envy. When he spoke about his father, Lexi immediately thought of her aunt Eve, trapped in the past, enslaved by it.
Max and I are enslaved by it, too. But not Gabe. He’s broken free.
He’s like us, but he’s not one of us.
All of a sudden, like switching on a light, she realized why she’d hated Gabe for so long. It was so obvious, she laughed out loud.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.”
I envy you. That’s what’s funny. I envy you your freedom, your goodness, your happy marriage. I envy your ability to care for others. Those kids with AIDS. The slum families you and Dia housed. You can feel. Your heart is still open.
My heart closed when I was eight years old.
That night, Lexi lay wide-awake in her tent, thinking. There was something there between her and Gabe. She hadn’t imagined it. It was real.
Part of her ached to get up, crawl into Gabe’s tent, and make love to him. Just to know what that would feel like, to be held and wanted and made love to by someone good, someone whole. But a bigger part of her knew that she could never do it. Gabe belonged to another woman. He also belonged to another world.
By the time Gabe awoke the next morning, Lexi had left the camp. Eighteen hours later, she was back in New York.
The next week Templeton Estates were offered a 5 percent stake in the Elizabeth Center development, at highly advantageous terms.
They turned down the offer.
TWENTY-THREE
MAX WEBSTER WAS ON HIS HONEYMOON.
He and Annabel, his young English bride, were walking on Table Mountain. Annabel raced ahead, her long honey-streaked hair dancing in the wind. Her feet were lost in a carpet of flowers. Above her head, the sun shone a dazzling azure blue.
Max shouted: “Be careful! Don’t get too close to the edge!” But the wind whipped away his words. Annabel danced on. She was singing an old folk tune Max’s mother used to sing to him in the bath when he was a little boy. Uncanny. How does she know that song? Max tried to hum along, then realized he had forgotten the melody.
The other walkers had gone now. They were alone, and the distance between them was growing. Annabel was right by the edge of the cliff.
Max was screaming. “Come back! It’s not safe!”
“What did you say?”
Thank God. She heard me. Annabel stopped and turned around so Max could see her face. Except it wasn’t her face. It was Lexi’s, swaying back and forth over the abyss like a reckless child.
Max rushed toward her. “Lexi, come back. I love you. I’m sorry.” He reached out his hand to pull her to safety, but he was too late. Her fingers slid through his and she staggered backward. She was falling.
Max leaped after her. They were in each other’s arms in midair, the ground rushing up to meet them. Lexi’s features began to morph grotesquely, like melting plastic. She was turning into Eve.
“You killed Keith. You murdered your father. You didn’t really believe you’d get away with it, did you?”
But, Mother, I did it for you. Everything has been for you. Mother!
“Max.” Annabel Webster shook her husband awake. “Max! You’re dreaming. Wake up, darling. It’s all right. It’s only a nightmare. It isn’t real.”
She held him in her arms till he calmed down, like a baby. This was the third time this week. Whatever pills Dr. Barrington was prescribing, they evidently weren’t working. When he stopped shaking, she said: “Honey, you need to talk to someone. This isn’t normal.”
Max mopped his brow with the bedclothes and slumped back against the pillow. “I’m all right. I’m a little stressed at work, that’s all. It’ll pass. Go back to sleep.”
The marriage had been Eve’s idea. Everything was always Eve’s idea.
She was berating Max over one of their weekly lunches. “You need an heir. Someone to take over the business and undo all of your mistakes. Someone who can make Kruger-Brent great again.”
“I’m trying, Mother,” Max said weakly.
“You’re failing. Get married.”
Max knew he was a poor chairman. He knew that Kruger-Brent’s once bright light was fading, spluttering out slowly like a dying star. It didn’t help having his mother second-guessing his every decision, bullying him into taking one direction then blaming him when the hoped-for profits failed to materialize.
It was Eve who had insisted that they sell their holdings in the Ukraine: “If there was oil in those fields, they’d have found it by now. Alternative energy, that’s the future. Are you completely stupid?”
Max dutifully sold Kruger-Brent’s five thousand acres to Exxon, investing the money from the sale in a wind farm in Israel. Six months later, Exxon struck oil. A year after that, the wind farm filed for bankruptcy. Eve blamed Max.
“You never drilled that land properly. What do you expect if you do a half-assed job? This is business Max, not some childish game. God help me, you’re your father’s son.”
Eve brought up Keith’s name more and more often these days. It was almost as if she’d transferred the hatred and rage she once felt for her husband onto her son. Max had destroyed Keith Webster, but the monster Keith had created lived on in Eve. Max had done everything his mother wanted. Killed Keith. Betrayed Lexi. Won back Kruger-Brent. But every trophy he brought her was like gasoline poured on the flames of Eve’s hatred. He could feed the fire. But he could never put it out.
Meanwhile, Lexi’s star continued its inexorable rise. No one remembered the sex scandal that had driven her out of Kruger-Brent. When people saw Lexi Templeton today, they thought of glamour, of resilience, of success. No one at Kruger-Brent said it to Max’s face. But the whispers behind his back were deafening:
We made a mistake. We should never have gotten rid of her. Lexi’s the winner in the family, not Max. We backed the wrong horse.
By the time he met Annabel, Max was drinking heavily. He was thirty-five but looked ten years older. His looks were fading. Like everything else about me. Annabel Savary was fifteen years Max’s junior, beautiful and everything he was not: sensible, happy, healthy and uncomplicated. The product of a blissfully happy marriage-her father was an English lord, her mother an American socialite-Annabel was in New York doing an internship at Christie’s when Max met her at an auction. He was outbid on the Constable he was after. But he left the auction room that day with a far more valuable prize.
Annabel Savary loved Max Webster in the same way that she had once loved her pony, Trigger. Everybody told Annabel that Trigger was too old and bad-tempered to be broken in. But the nine-year-old refused to give up. Trigger was a beautiful pony, intelligent, strong, fast as a bullet. With patience, and after suffering numerous bites, kicks and other signs of Trigger’s displeasure, Annabel transformed him into a sweet-natured, loving animal. By the time he died, when Annabel was eighteen, Trigger had won a boatload of “first” rosettes and was famed across Derbyshire for his devotion to his young mistress.
Annabel was as certain that Max could change as Max was certain that he could not. He knew he should let her go. She has no idea how fucked up I am. But Eve wouldn’t hear of it. She thoroughly approved of Annabel, believing her to be too young and naive to pose any threat to her influence.
“Marry her quickly, before she changes her mind. Get her pregnant.”