toothy smile. I flicked mindlessly through, between sips of tea, and moved on to album number two. This was more interesting. Pippa with a backpack on her shoulders, in her early twenties. Thailand, Vietnam. I turned the pages rapidly until I arrived at Mexico. And there I saw Juan. Very young. Less handsome in his youth than he was later. His face looked different. Familiar, yet so different. His expression, as he gazed straight into the camera, made me feel like I’d just seen him last week. I thumbed on towards the end, but as I was about to lay the album on the sofa, a big card slipped out. The kind of card Americans do for Christmas, with a family photo stuck to the front. I was about to slide it back in when the smile of the woman in the picture took the air from my lungs. I’d seen that wide smile before. The head thrown back, the laughing eyes. It was Lee, the triplets’ mother! Three small children stared at the lens. Two little girls and a chubby-faced boy. Jen, Kate, and Dan. They couldn’t have been more than six months old.
But what really knocked the wind out of me was the other figure in the photo: Juan. Not smiling, but staring vacantly into the lens.
Blood drained from my limbs; my hands felt numb as I held the card with my shaky fingers. A spasm from my invisible sixth finger made me drop the card.
I picked it off the floor and opened it. The writing was unmistakable, the “I am done with you” writing:
Good luck with your new job, Pippa. We’ll miss you.
Love, Lee, Juan, Danny, Katey, and Jenny. Xxx
Vomit and tea rose up from my esophagus. I swallowed it back down.
I could hardly breathe.
Juan? My Juan? In a cute family photo? Father of the triplets? No wonder Juan’s face as a young man in the photos felt so familiar. He looked like Dan! That’s why Dan and the girls had an old-soulish-have-known-you-in-another-lifetime feeling. Why I had been so attracted to them in the first place. Because they were Juan’s children! How could I have been so blind? Now it made sense… why Juan refused to marry me all that time.
BECAUSE HE WAS ALREADY MARRIED TO LEE!
I pictured the napkin:
I am done with you, please stop trying to contact me I cannot give you what you want. Keep away from me.
Was he still in love with her when she wrote that, all those years later? Had he been leading a double life the whole time? What, exactly, did it mean?
And Pippa? Where the hell did she fit into this cozy ménage?
And Cliffside?
I looked closer at the photo, and my fear was confirmed. The stone walls of Cliffside, unmistakable, the backdrop to this family gathering held immortally on film, in this telltale picture that made me gag.
I heard Pippa’s car roll into the driveway and sat on the sofa, dazed, too shocked to even cry. My whole adult life had been a lie. My relationship with Juan a farce. I felt like a wife of a serial killer who’d had no idea. No idea, because she’d been such a numbskull.
The front door unlocked, and I stared into space, in a trance of disbelief.
“Hello?” It was Pippa, the betrayer, the liar, yelling up the stairwell. “Darling, I’m back. God, it’s mayhem out there. Roads blocked. It’s started raining again.”
I didn’t reply, just closed my eyes and wished my life away. I might as well have let the triplets kill me for all I cared now. Cliffside held a whole new meaning, a whole new feeling. Nothing mattered anymore. I could drink myself to death, and nobody would care. Except Beanie, perhaps. I scooped him up and folded him in my arms and let out a heaving, baying sob.
Forty-Eight
“Darling, what ever’s the matter?”
I looked up and saw Pippa standing there, perplexed. Her pained eyes caught the photo albums spread on the sofa. “Oh, dearie me, you saw the pictures of Juan and now you’re feeling sad?”
I pulled out the family photo card and jerked it before her long-jawed face. “What. Is. This,” I said between gritted teeth. “Why didn’t you tell me, Pippa?” Some friend.
“Oh, God. Where on earth did you find that? I forgot I even had that old thing. Look, darling, I can explain.”
“Really? You can ‘explain’ why you never told me that Juan was married to this woman Lee? I’m assuming he was married, at least… if