The Lyle is a stately country home with sweeping lawns and a circular gravel driveway out front. Statues of armless women line the approach. Dieter parks the car and we head into hushed, softly lit interiors. There are fresh flowers everywhere and the scent of sandalwood and jasmine on the air, and it looks more like a spa than a clinic. The sleek woman at the front desk calls up to my mother’s room, and we wait.
“Darling, there you are.”
I turn to the opening elevator and my mother embraces me. She’s wearing a soft jersey tracksuit and I can feel her ribs beneath my fingers. All that green juice and yoga? I wonder, unable to prevent the snarky thought from intruding. As I glance at the hollowness of her cheeks, though, I have the feeling that the weight loss isn’t deliberate.
“You must be Mr. Vanderbroeck,” she says to Dieter, holding out her hand. “A pleasure to meet you.” Her voice is breathy and self-assured. I’m surprised she knows who Dieter is, and I suppose that it means that she and my father have been talking. The thought ratchets up my irritation. Why haven’t I had a phone call?
“Let’s have some tea, shall we?” she says, and orders from the front desk.
But when I head toward the glassed-in courtyard where the chairs and tables are, she says, “No, out here, I want to smoke.” She takes us through to a patio where the wind is gusting, and turns to Dieter. “There’s a sofa in the lobby if you’d like to wait there.”
I wrap my arms around my body, trying to keep warm. “No, Mum, I want him to stay.”
She looks at me in surprise.
“He’s been everywhere with me. The courthouse. The Slade. He was the one who told me that Dad had been re-arrested.” I can taste the accusation on my tongue: he told me, not you.
Her smile is brittle. “Fine.”
Dieter’s got his inscrutable expression on, the one I saw on his face the first day we met. He looks at the patio, then at my bare legs and says, “I’ll be back in a minute.” He turns and heads inside.
We sit, and I examine my mother while she smokes, trying to see her as Dieter must see her: slender, peroxided, put-together. She’s in her mid-forties and attractive, but there’s a beaten-down cast to her.
“Are you all right, Mum?”
She exhales smoke out of the corner of her mouth and grinds the remains of the cigarette into the ashtray. Her eyes give me a once-over. Hesitating, she says, “I’m all right, darling. But I have something to tell you. Best get it out.”
I wait, feeling a pressing desire to look over my shoulder for the waitress. I need something to do with my hands.
“Your father and I prefer to keep our personal...difficulties to ourselves. No need to drag you into them.”
“Mum. The walls aren’t soundproof. I’ve heard you fighting.” I’ve woken up to the sound of my mother’s slurred voice, small objects shattering, my father seething. For the last few years I’ve had the impression that my father is having an affair, but I don’t know if I overheard the accusation, or dreamt it.
“No,” she says, her eyes dropping to the tabletop. “I don’t suppose they are. Well, there’s just me to tell you this, and it may not come as a surprise: we’re divorcing.”
Dieter comes back, and I feel him drape his coat about my shoulders. He’s overheard the last part of what my mother has said and his hand lingers on my shoulder.
“Oh,” I say. “Well, that’s... How do you feel about it?” I try to summon up some feelings myself but I feel the same way I did sitting outside the courtroom. Like none of this is a surprise.
She glances past me, frowning at Dieter and then at his hand on my shoulder. He doesn’t sit down with us, instead walking around the table and
going to the edge of the patio to take in the view. I don’t want him to give us privacy. I want him to sit next to me and make me feel safe.
My mother examines Dieter’s back closely, taking in his height, his confident stance. “It’s just the two of you in that house together, isn’t it?” she asks, her eyes narrowed.
I glare at her. “Well, who else would there be, what with Dad in jail and you in rehab? The tooth fairy? Mary Poppins?”
Her expression turns waspish. “Don’t be smart, Adrienne.”
The tea arrives and we spend a few tense minutes arranging cups and pouring it out. My mother’s hands shake a little, rattling her teacup in its saucer, and she lets it go and reaches for another cigarette instead. “It seems hysterical you even having a bodyguard. What was your father thinking?”
Angry words bubble up in my throat, but I swallow them down. If I rise to the bait and defend Dieter and why I need him she’ll be able to read things into my words that I don’t want her to hear. And if she’s so worried about my virtue—which went years ago—why doesn’t she come home?
“I don’t know. Ask him.”
The rest of our conversation is about the case and my mother tries to decide which of the charges she thinks are true. I give one-word responses. I’m so tired of thinking about it.
Not long after that she says that it’s time for a counseling session, and we say a terse goodbye and share another bony embrace. Dieter gets a nod, but not a smile, and within forty-five minutes of arriving at the Lyle we’re getting back into the car.