“Because Belinda came to my house looking for her husband. The man she knew as James had my San Francisco address on some letters she saw. He had told her he was a land surveyor and that he traveled for his job; that is how he explained his absences from her. He’d been gone longer than expected and she’d been worried. Belinda came to my house the day before the earthquake. She was pregnant, far along. And she saw my wedding photograph on the mantel in the living room. She saw that Martin was the husband she knew as James. We pieced it together, and we found all the documents that prove it in Martin’s desk. I have those documents right here in my bag. And that’s not all. There was someone else before you. He married a girl in Colorado under another, different name. She was set to inherit a cattle ranch. Her mother died suddenly after she and Martin married, and that young wife died a year later in a riding accident.”
My voice is catching in my throat as I think about Annabeth, and that perhaps a similar fate had been awaiting me and Belinda. “Only I don’t think it was an accident,” I continue, tears stinging my own eyes. “I think Martin killed her for the ranch. He sold it when she died and then came to Los Angeles with the money and got hired as a stable hand, where he met you. An heiress.”
What little color remains in Candace’s face suddenly drains.
“Sweet Jesus,” she whispers, as though something monumental and devastating has just been made clear to her.
“What?” I say. “What is it?”
“Father was right,” she whispers, but not to me. She is inside a moment of her own between herself and a parent who I know has recently died.
“About what?” I can’t help asking.
She slowly turns her head back to face me. “My father said all along Martin married me to get my grandmother’s inheritance. I didn’t believe him. I believed Martin loved me, and it hurt to my very soul that my father thought he didn’t. God, what a fool I was. An utter fool!”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” I quickly interject, thinking back to what Belinda told me about how she’d been wooed. “I think Martin knew how to charm women into falling in love with him. I think he had made it his life’s work.”
“But how could I have not seen it? I knew enough about men and what they wanted. I knew what my father’s rich friends’ sons were like underneath their airs and bravado. I knew!”
“I don’t know any rich young men, but I’d wager Martin was not like those wealthy sons. He wasn’t one to put on airs. He put on masks.”
Candace is quiet for a second. “Yes,” she says vacantly, looking past me as if to gaze upon the years before. “Hewasdifferent. I’d forgotten that’s what I had liked best about him.”
“That he was not like your other beaux?”
Candace sighs lightly, remembering a happier time, perhaps. “Yes. He hadn’t come from money. He was just a stable hand, and he worked hard and took good care of my horse. He was quiet and polite and didn’t strut about like a peacock. He was so handsome, but he never acted like he knew he was.”
Now Candace turns her head to face the desert landscape. “Martin was the first man I ever lay with,” she says softly. “Being with him in that way was like... like touching starlight. Like being made of starlight. When I found myself carrying his child and I told him, his first response wasn’t ‘What are you going todo?’ but ‘What can I do for you?’ I said, ‘You can marry me.’ He just smiled and said, ‘It would be my honor.’”
She pauses a moment in happy reverie.
“How old were you?” I ask.
Candace turns back to me. “I was eighteen, old enough. We went before a justice of the peace and didn’t tell anyone for a month. He kept saying we should tell my parents, and I kept saying I wanted to wait for the right time. And he finally said, ‘That time will never come, Candace.’ He was right. We told them and my father exploded like a stick of dynamite. He accused Martin right then of only marrying me for my grandmother’s trust, which I was set to come into on my twenty-first birthday. I told my father he was wrong, that Martin married me because he loved me and his child that I was carrying. They were devastated when I said that. Oh, the looks on their faces. And then my father accused Martin of getting me pregnant on purpose because he’d learned my grandmother’s inheritance only passes to my offspring and not to a spouse. Father told Martin he wouldn’t see a penny of that money, nor any of his money, either. He said he’d disinherit me before he’d see the likes of Martin getting one cent.”
Candace looks off again into the golden horizon.
“I am so sorry that happened to you,” I say. I don’t know what other words to offer her.
“My mother just sat there weeping,” Candace continues in a faraway voice. “Martin said very quietly that we should go, so we did. The whole time we were walking away from them, my father was shouting at me that I had ruined my life, and their lives, and that I wasn’t welcome in that house. I didn’t hear from my parents for a long time. Not even when I lost that baby at six months.”
Candace turns to me and her cheeks are wet. “It was a little boy. So tiny. I don’t know why he came too early. I wanted to shove him back inside me when he slipped out. He was so tiny. So beautiful.”
“I’m so very sorry,” I say, because I am. Because I know. I know what it’s like to hold a miniature life in your hands, one that was knit together inside your own body. And I know what it’s like to feel it grow cold in your embrace. I reach out to hold her hand. In compassion. In solidarity.
“I was so sad after that,” Candace says, a moment later. “I loved that little baby. Martin thought I would grieve less if we had another child. We were living in his little cottage on the stable grounds and I was watching all my old friends in their beautiful clothes having riding parties and laughing and being happy. I didn’t think I could ever smile again. I had only one person who seemed to care about me. Martin. So I believed him that another baby would fill the horrible emptiness inside me. I was overjoyed when I was with child again. I carried my second little boy until the very end, but he never took one breath. Not one.”
I squeeze Candace’s hand to remind her I am there, as she seems to be reliving the moment again, that abysmal moment when she realized another baby she’d labored to bring into the world had already left it. I can hear in her cracking voice this ache that does not lessen with time but rather hides in the shadows, this relentless specter that is always right there, just over your shoulder. One little twist and you’re staring at it again. It is an ache that is as heavy as marble, as cold, as colorless.
“I am so sorry for your losses. Truly, I am,” I say.
In the next moment Candace seems to pull away from theterrible memory. She continues as if distanced from what she is telling me, as though it happened to someone else.
“I fell into an abyss then,” she says tonelessly. “I didn’t care about anything. I didn’t care that we finally had money every month from my grandmother’s trust and could move to a nicer house. I didn’t even care when I became pregnant again, and God help me I didn’t care when I gave birth and this time the child lived. I didn’t care that I had a beautiful little girl. I didn’t care. I didn’t care that Martin often didn’t come home at night. I didn’t care that I smelled other women’s perfume on him.” She looks over at Kat sleeping like an angel across from us. “I was a terrible mother to my little Kitty Kat.”
I stroke her hand. “Surely you weren’t.”
“No. I was. All she wanted from me was love, but I felt like I had nothing to give, so that is what she got.”
