Surface Read online

  More advance praise for Stacy Robinson and Surface

  “In her gripping debut, Stacy Robinson introduces a cast of complex characters facing tough choices—and even tougher consequences. With sharp, smart writing, and a palpable undercurrent of tension from start to finish, Surface will captivate readers and give book clubs plenty to talk about.”

  —Michelle Gable, author of A Paris Apartment

  “Stacy Robinson has written a heart twisting story of modern family life told with compassion, keen insight, and a healthy dash of fun. Surface affirms that resilience can counter the most profound personal tragedy, and self-discovery is timeless.”

  —Carol Cassella, national bestselling author of Gemini

  “I can’t remember the last time I devoured a book so eagerly. From the first page, readers will want to dig deeper and deeper beneath the Surface to discover the secrets of the Montgomery family. Magnificent!”

  —Elin Hilderbrand, New York Times bestselling author

  SURFACE

  STACY ROBINSON

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  More advance praise for Stacy Robinson and Surface

  Title Page

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  PART TWO - Los Angeles

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  INTERNET RESOURCES

  A READING GROUP GUIDE

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  Copyright Page

  For my parents—

  who have always encouraged,

  believed, loved, and kvelled.

  You are simply the greatest!

  Please skip the sex scenes.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you, first and foremost, to my husband, Jeff—chief cheerleader, enthusiastic dance partner, best bad joke teller, extraordinary spouse, dad and step-dad—for sharing your beautiful heart with me, and for staying up late.... You are my perfect. A big thank-you and a million and one hugs to my kids, Joe, Anna, and Tucker. Watching you grow into the incredible people you are has been my greatest joy, and your support and patience throughout this process has meant the world.

  To my fabulous agent, David Forrer, whose advice, tenacity and unwavering belief in Surface helped make this book a reality—I am forever indebted to you. Very special thanks also go to my wonderful editor, John Scognamiglio, for taking me on so enthusiastically, and for bringing out the best in my words. I am truly lucky to have worked with both of you, along with all of the great folks at Inkwell Management and Kensington.

  I’d like to express my gratitude to the other talented people who read, offered support, comments, and critiques, and otherwise helped me polish early versions of the manuscript: Michael Mezzo, William Haywood Henderson, and all the fine instructors at Lighthouse Writers Workshop; my brilliant writer friends, Rachel Greenwald, Emily Sinclair, Lauren Sinclair, Melanie Buscher, Alexandra Hill, and Betsy Leighton; and to my Brutally Frank Sisters, Justyn Shwayder and Meghan Zucker, for your shoulders, your wisdom and humor, and most importantly, your love—with an extra added thank-you to Meghan for sharing your invaluable expertise in physical therapy and experience with TBI patients.

  To my wonderful community of family and friends who managed to remain encouraging during this embarrassingly long “birthing” process: thank you for resisting the urge to roll your eyes when asking, for the hundredth time, how the book was coming along (Mom and Dad, Suzie, Ellen, Scott, Jolie, Robert, David, Lisa Searles, Hyla Feder, Ethel McGlynn, Josh Hanfling, my dear BFUs: Julie Kennedy, Mary Obana, Jeanne Arneson, Ann Banchoff, and Danielle Waples, and so many others).

  And to all of the extraordinary teachers I’ve had, especially: David Arnold, Dawn Hood, and Maud Gleason—thank you for instilling a love of words and stories, and for all of your guidance and encouragement. Finally, a big shout-out to my very favorite bookstore, the Tattered Cover, along with the baristas there, for keeping me inspired and caffeinated while I wrote and rewrote, and rewrote in your balconies. I’ll be back.

  The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

  —Marcel Proust

  PROLOGUE

  Nicholas stood in the shadows of the Millers’ pool house watching the familiar pack of girls—so blond and tan and Abercrombie-fresh—as they swayed with the music, their mouths glistening and drunk with the new freedom of summer. He had known most of them since grade school, some even before that. And now they ran their hands over their breasts and across the slow orbit of their hips, eyeing their audience nearby. An invitation to dance, to hook up? He swigged his beer and tucked farther into the darkness. A lot had changed in just one year away.

  His buddies were drinking and tossing lacrosse balls from one end of the landscaped terrace to the other, checking out the view as they did. Nick leaned against the pool-house wall, safe from the lame comments about how chill boarding school must be without parents around to constantly harass you. The hip-hop bass vibrated through his heels and rolled up his legs and spine. A warm gust rippled the pool, dropping a cascade of leaves onto its surface. It was June, and the night air pulsed. Nick swallowed the last of his beer, the lip of the bottle knocking his front tooth hard as he did, and the image of what he’d seen in his parents’ study flashed through his mind again. His mother standing there next to Bricker, the look of surprise in her eyes as he opened the door on their little meeting. The night went silent for him.

  Nick felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck as the wind swelled and he strained to remember whether their fingers were touching on the desk, or if he had just imagined it. But all he could picture was the glimmer of her ring as her hand disappeared into her pocket like a hermit crab into its shell. He blinked hard, catching a glimpse of someone pumping the keg, a muscled arm thrusting to an inaudible beat. More leaves blanketed the pool. Why had she seemed so edgy, so totally . . . off? After the forced “dialogue” with his dad a couple nights earlier—which, more accurately, had been a pathetic, excuse-ridden monologue—all Nick wanted was for his parents to go back to being normal again. To not be like his friends’ parents. He swallowed against the surge in his throat and chucked his Coors bottle at the cement.

  Nick stepped forward into the light and felt the muted, satisfying crunch of glass beneath his rubber sole, as Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana” pierced the silence. The party froze fo
r an instant, and by the time someone corrected the aberration in the playlist, he had picked up the jagged neck of the bottle and was pushing through the side gate, while his friends resumed their grinding, and red plastic cups rolled across the grass.

  He walked up the tree-lined parkway toward his home half a mile away. The moon had taken its own shelter in the dusty sky, and only the occasional streetlamp lit the large expanses of lawns and gardens along his path. As he approached his block, he heard the low rev of an engine and saw Bricker’s Porsche emerge from the gates of his house and speed past him on the street. He ran to the center parkway median and fingered the sharp rim of the bottle before hurling it. It fell short and shattered as the car vanished. Concealed in the shadows, Nick circled his block and the one adjacent several times in a figure eight, while the storm lost its resolve and he recovered his own, before passing through the gates himself.

  With a mounting sense of what had happened inside the house after he’d left for the party, he crouched in the darkness, mulling the possibilities and concocting scenarios to explain them away. A lone football straddled the divide between the peonies and freshly mowed lawn. He picked it up and tossed it from palm to palm. No way. Maybe. Maybe not. The moon reappeared from behind a veil of clouds. On an inconclusive probably, he dropped the ball and headed up the long path to the front door.

  Nick entered the house quietly. He heard the shower upstairs and looked both ways down the foyer, the light burning in the guest room catching his attention. He felt a familiar nervousness in his stomach as he approached the room—the same sick tug he tried to dismiss each time the nurse prepared to draw his blood, his own voice telling him that he wasn’t a pussy, that he was seventeen for Chrissakes, and the glaring certainty that it was still going to hurt. From the doorway, Nicholas inspected the bedroom, searching for a sign that he was wrong, that they hadn’t been in there together. But he knew. The room felt hot and close. The night table was off-center, the bedspread and sheets were sloppy. He moved toward the bed and noticed something on the floor not quite blending in with the pattern of the rug. The glint of glass and its contents. He picked up the small vial and stared at the white powder inside.

  Squeezing it in his palm, he began pacing the room. Rewinding time. Honey, I’d like you to meet Andrew Bricker. He just stopped by to drop off some papers for your father. The surge crowded his throat again as he tried to reconcile all he had known to be true with the razor sharpness of this new reality. His mother—the one person who could rouse him from his bouts of frustration with her late-night cinnamon French toast and reassuring words, her protective arms holding him until two a.m. after his seizure, her always upbeat, thoughtful approach to life’s curveballs—doing coke? No way. It had to belong to Bricker. Dicker. Still.

  His father was a keeper of secrets—that had become painfully clear over the last week. Nick sat down on the edge of the bed recalling the same look of nervous surprise in his dad’s eyes when he told him he’d found out the truth, the tremble of that characteristically strong jaw when he’d asked him about the choices he made all those years ago, the serrated edge of his own voice when he called his father out for not being the do-the-right-thing good guy he had always believed him to be. And for holding Nick so tightly to that fiction. Where was that hero he’d always worshipped, his Atticus?

  Clenching his jaw, Nicholas poured the entire contents of the vial onto the glass surface of the night table. He dipped his pinky into the powder and ran his tongue over his finger. Bitterness, numbness. There was enough there, he figured, to get really high. He took a bill out of his wallet and rolled it into a tight cylinder. Then he cut two lines with his credit card and snorted them. He’d done it once before, in spite of his diabetes, and he’d watched a couple buddies do it often enough.

  It stung his nostrils. And then it didn’t. His confusion and angst, so freighted with adolescence, splintered into a thousand shards of light. Nick cut two more lines, fatter this time, and inhaled them, feeling an exquisitely anaesthetizing rush through his body. And then, nothingness.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  Claire Montgomery took a long sip of chardonnay and arched her head back, savoring the cool liquid slide in her throat. Her eye twitched, and somewhere behind her closed lids a faint throbbing set in. She tried to shake it away and placed her glass on the mahogany partners’ desk of the study. The throbbing traveled to her neck. She steadied her hands on the back of a chaise and looked out the window to see the crimson dusk wash over her garden and the distant mountains.

  Her arms were tanned from hours planting impatiens and peonies despite Michael’s insistence that Rigo, the gardener, lighter of winter fires and sous chef to his wife Maria’s efforts in the kitchen, could manage it much better. Her watch read seven thirty, and the carats on her finger flickered in the descending sunlight. In the background Joni Mitchell lamented the paving of paradise. Claire tried humming along, averting her eyes from the clusters of family photos on the bookshelves. But there was no shaking it away. The whole thing was so ridiculous, so unlike her. She reached for the phone to tell him not to come after all.

  The doorbell rang, and for a second Claire considered ducking under the desk and cupping her hands over her ears. He’d leave, she’d apologize later. Done. Forget the idea of one stolen hour of Oh my God, I matter again, forget the rush and tingle. But a persistent knocking followed the bell, and her thoughts ricocheted to the night at The Palm—to his voice, his scar. And she could hear the pounding in her chest amplified to full acoustic brilliance.

  Taking a deep breath and, for good measure, another healthy slug of the Louis Latour, Claire backed away from the desk and walked out to the foyer. Her capri sandals clapped across the floor and the sweet fragrance of Casablanca lilies filled her nose as she fluffed the arrangement on the table before opening the door.

  Andrew Bricker stood under the marble portico. Whistling. She reached out to shake his hand and he leaned in and kissed her cheek, admiring her through his glasses.

  “Well, don’t you look gorgeous,” he said, the corners of his eyes creasing with his smile.

  She concentrated on keeping her voice calm, her expression casual—donning all her armor to avoid revealing her inner teenager. “It’s nice to see you, too. Been enjoying Denver, I hope?”

  She smoothed her summer dress over her hips and showed Andrew into the study, offering him a chair at the desk. The remnants of daylight were still fading outside the windows, and the glow brought an eerie calm to the house. Andrew removed an envelope and fountain pen from his jacket pocket and sat down, grazing Claire’s bare shoulder as he did.

  “I watched The Thomas Crown Affair last night,” he said, uncapping his pen and flashing her the same bedroom smile that had launched her into this unfamiliar territory. “Nice recommendation.” He paused. “That staircase scene was a real showstopper.”

  Claire tried to ignore the reference in a desperate attempt to forestall a fantasy detour to three-alarm movie sex. Instead she focused on Andrew’s hand as he began writing a note to Michael. She saw the blue-green of his veins roll with his script and heard the scratch of the pen’s silver tip along the paper. Again she felt the peculiar sensation that he was also scratching awake something from deep inside her. As if overcome by an uninhibited and wholly incongruous spirit, Claire placed her fingers on top of Andrew’s, and was instantly disrobed of what little armor she had left.

  CHAPTER 2

  Claire had met Andrew Bricker on a pink-sky night the previous week. She’d been downtown finalizing details for the Art Museum gala she was co-chairing—her nine-month, semi full-time, fully unpaid labor of love. And just a few weeks shy of term, all signs were pointing to a record-breaking event. Drawing on her New York and European art world connections, Claire had gathered the exquisite and the exotic for an auction that would be part of the evening’s festivities. She’d secured underwriting and matching funds; Harry Connick Jr. would be performing. Den
ver’s art patrons and boldfaced names were in for a spectacular night, and with a last-minute half-million-dollar gift from a certain NFL Hall of Famer and a late rush in table sales, Claire was in the mood for some early celebration.

  She gave Maria and Rigo the evening off, then dialed Michael’s cell as she paced the cluttered museum office, jotting notes for the volunteers and staff.

  “Hell-o,” Michael answered, with his usual emphasis on the first syllable.

  “Hell-o, yourself. How do you feel about a festive night on the town with your wife?”

  “Ah, your little project must be going well.”

  Claire kept her smile fixed. “Yes, my little project looks like it’s going to be a huge success, and I’d love a celebratory cocktail.” She punctuated a Post-it note with red exclamation points and placed it on a file folder as she continued. “And maybe a little something else. So whaddya say, honey? Can we sneak off for some fun tonight?”

  Michael cleared his throat and laughed in his clipped Bostonian way. “Sounds interesting, but I’m in the middle of a meeting at The Palm, and I’m afraid I’ve put Mr. Bricker here through the wringer. And I’m not quite finished.” He had mentioned Andrew Bricker before. A young VC player in from New York making the investment rounds. Michael’s lighthearted tone betrayed a thinly veiled enthusiasm for his guest’s business pitch. “Lemme call you back in a few minutes?”

  Claire sat on the edge of a desk and massaged the arches of her bare feet, fighting off a sense of deflation, and wistfully contemplating her early days in New York with Michael and the white-hot passion they’d shared then. How he’d jump at the chance for an unexpected rendezvous, and how he had loved to show her off to his colleagues, bragging about her latest projects at Sotheby’s and her expertise in a world they didn’t understand. But the farther they’d traveled from that time, the more he seemed to have replaced those memories with the weightier issues of business and busy living. She slipped into her slingbacks again and paused to remind herself that there was nothing unique in such marital hills and valleys. She’d had countless conversations with girlfriends about absent, inattentive spouses—especially those whose names regularly appeared in the business section—and she always walked away from those female bonding fests thinking that she and Michael had done it far better than most.