Under the Influence Read online

  Dedication

  This one is for David Schiff,

  a friend for life, whose integrity inspired me

  to create the quiet hero of this novel.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  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

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Joyce Maynard

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1.

  It was late November, and for a week solid the rain hadn’t let up. My son and I had moved out of our old apartment back before school started, but I had left it until now to clear the last of our belongings out of the storage area I’d been renting. With two days left before the end of the month, I decided not to wait any longer for dry weather. Worse things could happen to a person than getting a few boxes wet. As I well knew.

  The fact that we had finally left this town was good news. Not long before, I’d finally paid off the last of my debt to the lawyer who’d represented me in my custody trial more than a dozen years earlier. Now Oliver and I were living in a bigger apartment closer to my new job in Oakland—a place where my son could finally have a little space, with a little work studio for me, too. After a long, hard stretch, the future looked hopeful.

  Money being in short supply, as usual, and with Ollie off at his father’s for the weekend, I was taking care of this last run over to Goodwill with a bunch of things we didn’t need any more. Just about everything was soaked through, and so was I. I had pulled up to a four-way stop, waiting for my turn. All I wanted at that moment was to get out of town, knowing that once I did I would never go back.

  Almost ten years had gone by since the last time I’d laid eyes on Ava Havilland. And then that day, I did.

  There is this phenomenon I’ve noticed in the past: the way that, in a vast landscape containing so much visual information seemingly of no significance, your eyes will be drawn to one small odd thing among all the thousands of others—the thing that calls to you, and suddenly, out of everything else your eyes are taking in and disregarding, they’ll focus on this one spot where something doesn’t make sense, or maybe it spells danger, or it just reminds you of a time and place different from this one. And you can’t look away.

  It’s the thing you don’t expect. That fragment in the landscape out of keeping with the rest. To another pair of eyes it might mean nothing.

  I remember a day I’d taken Oliver to a ball game—one of those endless attempts to construct a happy, normal time with my son within the unnatural confines of a too-rare six-hour visitation. Halfway up the rows of bleachers, in a totally different section of the ballpark—in among the thousands of other fans—I had spotted a man from my Tuesday night AA meeting holding a beer and laughing in a way that made me know it wasn’t his first. A feeling of sadness had come over me—terror, actually—because just the week before, we had celebrated his three-year sobriety. And if he could slip this way, what did that say about me?

  I had looked away that time. Turned to my son instead, made some comment about the pitcher—the kind of observation that a person who knew more about the game might say to her son at a moment like this, a moment when a mother wanted to share the experience of a ball game with her boy and forget about everything else. This would be the kind of mother whose child never had to see her hiding wine bottles under the cereal boxes at the bottom of the recycle bin, or led into the backseat of a police car in handcuffs—the kind of mother who got to see her child every night, not just for six hours, two Saturdays a month. For years, all I wanted was to be that kind of mother.

  This was a long time back. I hadn’t even met the Havillands yet. I hadn’t met Elliot (who, when I did, would have given anything to bring my son and me to a ball game and be a part of our small, struggling family). A lot of things hadn’t happened yet back in those days.

  Now here I was at the wheel of my old Honda Civic, idling at that intersection in an unglamorous part of San Mateo where planes flew so low, taking off from the airport or coming in for a landing, that you sometimes got the feeling they’d skim off the top of your car.

  A black car pulled up alongside mine—not a police car, but it looked like some official vehicle, not a limousine. But it wasn’t the man in front whose face caught my attention. It was the passenger in the backseat. She was looking out the window through the rain, and for a moment her eyes caught mine.

  In the few seconds before the black car pulled away from the intersection, I recognized her, and in the odd way the mind works—instinct not yet having caught up with experience—my first impulse was to cry out as a person would who’d spotted a long-lost friend. For a second there, this great wave of pure, uncomplicated happiness started to wash over me. It was Ava.

  Then I remembered. Ava wasn’t my friend anymore. After all that time, it was still an odd sensation seeing her and not calling out. Not even raising my hand to wave.

  I let it go. Made my face stone. If she recognized me (and something in her eyes, staring out through the glass for those few seconds, suggested that she had; after all, she was looking at me, too), she showed no more inclination than I did to acknowledge all that we knew.

  She’d changed a lot since the last time we’d seen each other. Not just because she was older. (Ava would be sixty-two years old now, I figured. Her birthday was coming up.) She had always been thin, but her face looking out the window now seemed skeletal—skin stretched over bone, and nothing more. She could have been a dead person, only they hadn’t buried her yet. Or a ghost—and in many ways, that’s what she was to me now.

  In the old days, when we used to speak every day—more than once a day, as a rule—Ava always had a million things to
tell me, though part of what I loved was how ready she was to hear what I had to say, too. How intensely she paid attention.

  She was always in the middle of some project, and it was always exciting. More than anyone I’d ever known, she possessed this air of purpose and assurance. You knew that when Ava came into the room something was going to happen. Something wonderful.

  The person I caught sight of in the back of the official-looking black car that day looked like someone for whom nothing good would ever happen again, a person whose life was over. Her body just hadn’t taken in the news yet.

  Her hair appeared to have gone gray, though most of it was concealed under an odd red cap of a sort the Ava I’d known would never have owned. It was the kind of hat you might buy at a senior citizens’ craft fair, that some old lady had knitted out of polyester yarn, because that was cheaper than wool. “Polyester,” she said to me once. “Can’t you just tell from the name that the stuff is junk?”

  But this was Ava, all right. Nobody else looked like her. Only the Ava in the car that day no longer sat at the helm of a silver Mercedes Sprinter Van. This Ava no longer presided over the big house on Folger Lane, with the black-bottomed swimming pool and that exotic rose garden, and a gardener on staff to tend it. There was no more Guatemalan maid to pick up her clothes from the cleaners and make sure they were perfectly arranged, by color, in her vast closet, with all the beautiful shoes in their original boxes, and the scarves, and the jewelry that Swift had picked out for her laid out on velvet trays. The woman in the backseat of the black car no longer dispensed gifts of cashmere shawls and socks for the lucky people she counted as her friends, and shepherd’s pie from the backseat for homeless Vietnam veterans, and dog bones for strays. Impossible to imagine Ava without her dogs, but here she was.

  Most unfathomable of all, this was Ava without Swift.

  There had been a time when a day didn’t go by that I didn’t hear her voice. Nearly everything I did was directly inspired by what Ava told me, or didn’t even have to tell me, because I knew already what Ava would think, and whatever that was, that’s what I believed, too. Then came a long, dark time after she cut me out of her world, and the hard reality of that betrayal became—second only to losing custody of my son—the defining fact of my life. Losing Ava’s friendship had left me unable to remember who I might be anymore without her. As strong a force as her presence had created, her absence was stronger yet.

  So it was a surprise to realize, when I caught sight of her through the window of that briefly idling car, that a few weeks had gone by since I’d thought about her. And now that I did, I still registered a stab of sick, sad loss. Not that I wanted to go back to the old days at that house on Folger Lane. Now I only wished I’d never set foot in it.

  2.

  The house. I’ll begin there. Someone else lives in the Havillands’ house now; they’ve taken out the handicapped-accessible ramp and cut down Ava’s camellias to make an additional parking space currently occupied by a silver hybrid SUV, from which I recently observed a pair of blond children emerging, along with a woman who appeared to be a nanny. And as much sorrow as I feel on those rare occasions when I pass the house, I cannot separate it from the other part, which was the way I used to feel every time I pulled into the driveway—the sense that I had landed at long last in a place that felt like home. I could breathe again, and when I did, the air was thick with jasmine.

  I didn’t live in that house. But my heart did. Ironic, saying this after everything that happened, but I felt safe at the Havillands’. No doubt it is a part of my story, and a reason why the place held such particular significance, that in the thirty-eight years before my first visit to Folger Lane, I had seldom if ever known such a feeling.

  Back when Ava and Swift lived in this house, the first ones out of the Mercedes when she pulled up were always the dogs—three rescue dogs of indeterminate breed. (“They’re rescue dogs,” she’d point out to anyone who didn’t already know.) The vehicle had been specially equipped with an electric lift that lowered her state-of-the-art wheelchair to the ground. More often than not, I’d pull up and there would be Ava wheeling toward me in her chair, with her free arm—the one not operating the chair—stretched open wide to greet me.

  “I got you these fantastic leg warmers,” she’d say. Or it could have been a mug, or a beautiful leather-bound journal, or honey made from bees who only frequented lavender fields. She always had some little gift for me: a sweater she’d picked up, in a color I never wore that was suddenly revealed to be perfect for my skin tone; a book she thought I’d love; or a vase holding a bouquet of sweet pea blossoms. I hadn’t even realized that the tread on my sneakers was worn, but Ava had, and knowing my size and the brand I favored (or a better one, more likely), she’d bought me new ones. Who else would buy her friend a pair of shoes? And a pair of striped socks to go with them. She knew I’d love them, and she was right.

  Sammy and Lillian (the two smaller mutts) would be licking my ankles then, and Rocco (the problematic one who always hung back, except when he decided to bite you), would run in circles the way he did when he was excited, which was always, his tail wagging crazily. And Ava, once she had a hand free, would take mine, and we’d burst into the house together as she called out to Swift, “Look who I brought home,” though he’d know, of course.

  Ava always fed me when I came over to Folger Lane, and I always devoured what she offered me. Somewhere along the line, over the years—without noticing, even—I’d lost the taste for food. Lost the taste for life, or close to it. That’s what the Havillands gave back to me. I felt it every time I made my way up the smooth slate path to their open door, when the wave of good smells would hit me. Soup on the stove. Roast chicken in the oven. A bowl of floating gardenias in every room. And drifting in from outside, the smoke from Swift’s Cuban cigar.

  Laughter then. Swift’s big, hearty explosion of it, like a macaw in the jungle, announcing his readiness to mate. “I’m making a wild guess it’s Helen,” he’d call out.

  Just hearing a man like Swift speak my name made me feel important. For the first time in my life, possibly.

  3.

  Swift didn’t go to an office anymore. He hadn’t done that for years. He’d run a series of start-ups in Silicon Valley—the most recent, something to do with making it possible for high-end business travelers to procure last-minute restaurant reservations—which had made so much money that he’d quit. At the point when I met them, he and Ava were in the process of creating a nonprofit called BARK that would find homes for abandoned dogs and provide funding for spay and neuter services. For now, he ran their foundation out of the pool house, where he also oversaw their investments. He was on the phone a lot, talking to potential BARK donors from his standing desk, in that big voice of his. But whenever Ava came home, he stopped everything and burst into the house, and then his hands were all over her.

  “I’ll tell you why Swift can relate so well to animals,” Ava said to me early on. “Because he is one, himself. The man lives for sex. It’s as simple as that. He can’t keep his hands off me.” Her voice, delivering this observation, suggested amusement more than irritation. Often, speaking of Swift, Ava adopted this tone, as if her husband were like a flea who’d landed on her, but one she easily flicked off. Still, I never questioned that she adored him.

  And in fact, though she remained central in his universe, Swift had a number of other obsessions: his 1949 Vincent Black Lightning motorcycle (bought, after a long search, because he’d loved the Richard Thompson song and had to own one himself), the school he sponsored in Nicaragua for street children, his private qigong classes, his fencing lessons, his study of Chinese medicine and African drumming, and a seemingly endless parade of young Reiki practitioners and energy workers and yoga instructors who presented themselves at the house throughout the day for one-on-one sessions. Ava might have appeared to be the one in greater need of bodywork, but more often than not, when someone showed up at the door—ge
nerally a woman, probably a beautiful one, carrying a mat, or a massage table, or some odd and unidentifiable piece of equipment, it would turn out she was there to work with Swift.

  The house on Folger Lane was the place where everything happened. Swift and Ava had a second home on the shores of Lake Tahoe, which they visited now and then, but other than that, and Swift’s occasional trips to promote their foundation, they didn’t travel. They didn’t like to be apart from each other, Swift said. Or, Ava added, away from the dogs.

  There was a well-loved son—his, not hers—but Cooper was off at business school on the East Coast now, and even when he came home, he usually stayed with his mother, though anyone who visited the house on Folger Lane could see, from the number of photographs lining the walls of Swift’s library (of Cooper and his fraternity buddies heli-skiing in British Columbia, or horsing around on a beach in Hawaii with his girlfriend, Virginia, or with his father, hefting an oversize beer stein at a 49ers game) that Swift adored his son.

  Ava’s children were the dogs, she told me. And perhaps, I used to feel, it was the fact that she had no children that accounted for my friend’s extraordinary generosity toward the people and animals she loved. It was understood that dogs held the primary position in her affections, but she had this uncanny ability to recognize when a person needed rescuing, too.

  Not just me, though I came to occupy a unique position with Ava, but also strangers. I could be out with her someplace, having lunch at some little restaurant (her treat, naturally) and she’d see a man in the parking lot, sifting through the trash, and a minute later she’d be talking to the waitress, handing her a twenty-dollar bill and asking her to bring the man a hamburger and fries and a root beer float. If there was a homeless person standing by the side of the road with a sign, and that person had a dog, Ava always pulled over to give him a handful of the organic dog treats she kept in a large tub in the back of her van.

  She’d made friends with a man named Bud who worked at a flower shop where we stopped in for the roses and gardenias—masses of them—that she liked to keep in a bowl next to her bed. Then we didn’t see Bud for a while, and she found out he’d been diagnosed with cancer, and she was at the hospital that same afternoon with books and flowers and an iPod loaded with the soundtracks to Guys and Dolls and Oklahoma, because she knew how much he loved show tunes.