Bethany Hagen - Landry Park

It was too wet to argue. I climbed in the car.

For a moment, my leg was pressed against his. He nonchalantly slid over to give me more room in the seat. Goose bumps raised along my arms, and not only from the sudden chill of being wet in an air-conditioned car.

He pressed a button. “Back to Landry Park, please,” he told the driver. He caught my look. “I was just over at your house to call on you, but then your mother told me you sometimes go to the university in the afternoon.”

“Yes.” I ducked my head, worried he’d see the thousands of questions I had for him written on my face.

“But clearly you are not there, you are here in my car.”

“Yes.”

He settled into the seat and folded his arms, giving me an amused stare. “Don’t just say yes to everything I say. That is not how a conversation works.”

“Sorry,” I said, and looked out the window. So many strange thoughts and ideas burned at my throat, but I didn’t know how to give voice to them, how to ask a person I barely knew—but shared such intimate moments with—about his real motivations. Was he privately kind and publicly cavalier? Or just as subject to his own sudden whims as I was?

He threw up his hands. “Madeline! It is impossible to get anything out of you!”

“Sorry,” I said again.

“You’re shivering,” he observed. “How rude of me not to notice.” He slid closer again, so that his knee was nudged against the wet skirt of my dress. He shrugged off the cardigan he wore over his button-down shirt and tie and draped it over my shoulders. I could feel the warmth of his fingers through the wet fabric of the dress, branding my skin. He smoothed the thin sweater against my neck and shoulders.

“Warmer?” he asked quietly.

His hands still rested on the sweater, on my collarbone. “Yes.”

“Good.”

He was still so close, so close to me. Dancing in crowded ballrooms being the exception, I had never been this near to a man I wasn’t related to, and certainly not in a wet and clinging dress. I wished I could name what effect David had on me, what it was that both made me nervous and vaguely irritated and made me think strange and bold thoughts about the way his lips were shaped and the way his waist narrowed into his hips.

His fingers trailed from the sweater to the hollow of my neck, where he took my necklace between his fingers. He lifted the heavy cameo away from my chest, studying the black and white silhouette of Genevieve Landry, the atomic symbol rendered in pearl at the bottom. “This is beautiful.”

“It was my grandmother’s.”

“She looks so sad.”

I thought of her portrait in the gallery and of the forlorn expression both she and my uncle shared. Someone told me once that my grandfather never let her leave the house, not even to visit family. After a while, she’d faded away, like a rose left too long in a vase.

I coughed and looked out the window. He—reluctantly it seemed—pulled his hand back and reached for a tumbler of gin sitting near his seat.

“How are you enjoying Kansas City so far?” I asked politely, pretending that my neck wasn’t still tingling from his fingers.

“Oh, it’s fine.” He waved a hand at the window. “Lovely houses, birthplace of the gentry, et cetera, et cetera.”

“You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”

“About the city? I am not. But the people—there are some that I will truly regret leaving when I take up my post in the Rockies.” His words were relaxed, but his fingers betrayed him, tapping quickly against his glass.

Who was he talking about? There was no doubt that I wanted him to be talking about me, if the hammering in my chest was any indication, but he could also be talking about Cara or even some other girl I knew nothing about.

Or maybe he was simply being polite, and I was behaving very stupidly right now.

He took a drink and then offered his glass to me, as if he was used to such casually intimate gestures. As if we were.

I shook my head. He resumed gazing out the window, his head braced on his hand. “Yes, I will miss the people here quite a bit. I hope to see much more of them before I leave. I hope to see much more of you, Madeline.”

I felt like I had been plunged in ice water. I searched desperately for something to say—anything—that would demonstrate, to him and to myself, how completely unaffected I was by this.

“And Cara?” I knew as soon as I said it that no answer he could rejoin with would give me any pleasure, but it was as if every unhappy thought about David and Cara had crowded into my brain, making it impossible to think about anything else. He wasn’t allowed to make offhand comments that made me fight for composure when he spent his evenings brushing cheeks with Cara on the dance floor.

He glanced over at me without moving his head.

I gazed back without answering. I had significant practice at being silent.

“Yes, I will be sad to leave Cara, too,” he finally said. “Tell me, have they found her attacker or does your father just plan on arresting all the Rootless in Kansas City until there are none left?”

I tensed. Yes, I had criticized my father’s actions, had witnessed their direct result at the Public Hospital, but having a stranger disparage my family was completely different and it made me defensive. “You know about the vandals at Landry Park. It’s hardly surprising that it would further my father’s desire to find the attacker at any cost.”

“At any cost,” he repeated softly. “Spoken like a true Landry.”

“Well, I am a Landry first and foremost—”

“And what, a Madeline second? Don’t you ever want to be something other than a vessel for your family’s legacy? I thought you felt trapped by that place, by all the stupid rules set down by your father. What changed?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” I told him, my voice cold. “You aren’t going to inherit an estate and the responsibility that comes with it. My father has a duty to his fellow landowners and to this city to keep the people safe—”

“But no duty to the Rootless,” David interrupted. “Right? They do not need safekeeping because they are not really people.”

“You know that I don’t believe that.”

“No, Madeline, I don’t know what you believe. Apparently, I don’t know anything about you except that you care about your house and your family more than anything else. We are here, by the way.”

And with that, he reached across me to open the door, his entire torso in my lap. I breathed in sharply at the contact, and David jerked upright. “Keep the sweater,” he said. “I’m sick of it anyway.”

I stepped into the rain and the car sped away, the tires hissing on the wet drive.

A week passed. I kept waiting for David to seek me out, like he had before, to gallantly apologize or even to bait me into another fight—I would have welcomed either. What I couldn’t stand was this vacuum of contact, this week without a single dinner party or dance or anything . David preoccupied me more than finding out the truth about Cara’s attack or convincing my father to allow me to study—and it infuriated me to no end that he had infected my mind in such a way.

One of the servants poured me another glass of tea, while another mimosa arrived for Mother on a silver tray. I realized she had been speaking to me.

“Pardon?” I asked.

Mother tilted her face up to the sun, the light catching hints of silver in her dark hair. “I just love lunch out on the terrace. Don’t you?”

I did normally. Solar-powered coolers pushed away the worst of the crushing pressure of the storm on the horizon, so I could enjoy the wild colors of the flower garden and the rustling of the nearby apple orchard in peace. A light fruit smell drifted toward us. And in the dead space between my graduation and the deadline for applying for the university, I could devote more time to reading whatever I chose, though I kept coming back to Arthurian legends, wondering what David was reading. Which, of course, invariably led to agonizing meditations on our disastrous car ride last week.