The First Time Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR JOY FIELDING AND

  THE FIRST TIME

  “This is rich stuff.… Fielding has created an adept study of three flawed characters who, after years of playing head games, must learn how to communicate.… Fielding has again pushed a seemingly fragile heroine to the brink, only to have her fight back, tooth and nail.”

  —Booklist

  “Well written and enjoyable.”

  —Quill & Quire

  “After a long string of successful romantic suspense novels, Joy Fielding gives us something different, a human drama that celebrates life and love. Although you will need a box of Kleenex ready, this marvelous story will leave you cheering, even as you examine your own life and priorities.”

  —Romantic Times

  “[An] affecting drama.… Fielding is good at chronicling the messy tangle of family relationships.… A three-tissue finale.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  PRAISE FOR THE PREVIOUS FICTION

  OF NEW YORK TIMES

  BESTSELLING AUTHOR

  JOY FIELDING

  “A winner.”

  —People

  “A page turner … maintains the suspense until the last surprising moment.”

  —Maclean’s

  “Anybody who’s ever been afraid of losing her looks or her husband, or rattling the skeletons in the family closet, will be hopelessly hooked.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A knockout!”

  —The New York Times

  “Fielding masterfully manipulates our expectations.”

  —The Washington Post

  “A drama that hits home.”

  —The Cincinnati Enquirer

  “Fielding handles her material with finesse … sharply drawn, articulate characters.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Dramatic and heartrending … the emotions are almost tangible.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  ALSO BY JOY FIELDING

  Missing Pieces

  Don’t Cry Now

  Tell Me No Secrets

  See Jane Run

  Good Intentions

  The Deep End

  Life Penalty

  The Other Woman

  Kiss Mommy Goodbye

  Copyright © 2000 by Joy Fielding

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Seal Books and colophon are trademarks of

  Random House of Canada Limited.

  THE FIRST TIME

  Seal Books/published by arrangement with Doubleday Canada

  Doubleday Canada edition published 2000

  Seal Books edition published September 2001

  eISBN: 978-0-385-67459-1

  Seal Books are published by Random House of Canada Limited. “Seal Books” and the portrayal of a seal are the property of Random House of Canada Limited.

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website:

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  To Larry Mirkin

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to take this opportunity to thank the following people: Larry Mirkin, for his friendship and warmly critical eye; Dr. Keith Meloff, for giving of his valuable time and sharing his invaluable medical expertise; Beverley Slopen, for her unfailingly generous words and wise counsel; Owen Laster, for his never-ending enthusiasm and unflagging support; Linda Marrow, for her vision, insight, and grace; John Pearce, for never doubting me; and finally, to my husband, Warren, and my daughters, Shannon and Annie, to borrow a phrase from a fan from the Czech Republic—“Thank you—That you exist!”

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  ONE

  She was thinking of ways to kill her husband.

  Martha Hart, called Mattie by everyone but her mother, who regularly insisted Martha was a perfectly lovely name—“You don’t see Martha Stewart changing her name, do you?”—was swimming back and forth across the long, rectangular pool that occupied most of her spacious backyard. Mattie swam every morning from the beginning of May until mid-October, barring lightning or an early Chicago snowfall, fifty minutes, one hundred lengths of precisely executed breaststroke and front crawl, back and forth across the well-heated forty-foot expanse. Usually she was in the water by seven o’clock, so that she could be finished before Jake left for work and Kim for school, but today she’d overslept, or rather, hadn’t slept at all until just minutes before the alarm clock went off. Jake, of course, had experienced no such trouble sleeping and was out of bed and in the shower before she’d had time to open her eyes. “Feeling all right?” he’d asked her, already dressed and out the door in a handsome blur before she was able to formulate a response.

  She could use a butcher knife, Mattie thought now, pushing at the water with clenched fists, slicing the imaginary foot-long blade through the air and into her husband’s heart with each rise and fall of her arms. She reached the end of the pool, using her feet to propel herself off the concrete, and made her way back to the other side, the motion reminding her that a well-timed push down a flight of stairs might be the easier way to dispatch Jake. Or she could poison him, add a sprinkling of arsenic, like freshly grated Parmesan cheese, to his favorite pasta, like the kind they had for dinner last night, before he supposedly went back to the office to work on today’s all-important closing argument for the jury, and she’d found the hotel receipt in his jacket pocket—the jacket he’d asked her to send to the cleaners—that announced his latest infidelity as boldly as a headline in a supermarket tabloid.

  She could shoot him, she thought, squeezing the water as it passed through her fingers, as if squeezing the trigger of a gun, her eyes following the imaginary bullet as it splashed across the pool’s surface toward its unsuspecting target, as her errant husband rose to address the jury. She watched him button his dark blue jacket just seconds before the bullet ripped through it, his dark red blood slowly oozing into the neat diagonal lines of his blue-and-gold striped tie, the boyish little half-smile that emanated as much from his eyes as his lips freezing, fading, then disappearing altogether as he fell, facedown, to the hard floor of the stately old courtroom.

  Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you reached your verdict?

  “Death to the infidel!” Mattie shouted, kicking at the water as if it were a pesky blanket twisted around her ankl
es, her feet feeling unexpectedly heavy, as if newly attached to large cement blocks. For a second, Mattie felt as if her legs were foreign objects, as if they belonged to someone else and had been grafted haphazardly onto her torso, serving no other purpose than to weigh her down. She tried to stand, but the bottoms of her feet couldn’t find the bottom of the pool, although the water level was only five feet high and she was almost eight inches taller. “Damn it,” Mattie muttered, losing the rhythm of her breathing and swallowing a mouthful of chlorine. She gasped loudly, throwing herself toward the side of the pool, her body doubling up and over the edge of the pool to rest against its border of smooth brown stone, as invisible hands continued to pull at her legs, trying to drag her back under. “Serves me right,” she muttered between painful coughing spasms. “Serves me right for having such evil thoughts.”

  She wiped some errant spittle from her mouth, then burst into a fit of hysterical laughter, the laughter mingling with her coughing, one feeding off the other, the unpleasant sounds bouncing off the water, echoing loudly in her ears. Why am I laughing? she wondered, unable to stop.

  “What’s going on?” The voice came from somewhere above her head. “Mom? Mom, are you okay?”

  Mattie brought her hand up across her forehead to shield her eyes from the sun’s harsh rays, focused on her like a flashlight, and stared toward the large cedar deck that extended off the kitchen at the back of her red-brick, two-story home. Her daughter Kim was silhouetted against the autumn sky, the sun’s glare rendering the teenager’s normally outsize features curiously indistinct. It didn’t matter. Mattie knew the lines and contours of her only child’s face and figure as well as her own, maybe better: the huge blue eyes that were darker than her father’s, bigger than her mother’s; the long, straight nose she’d inherited from her dad; the bow-shaped mouth she’d gotten from her mom; the budding breasts that had skipped a generation, moving directly from Mattie’s mother to her child, and that were, even at the tender age of fifteen, already a force to be reckoned with. Kim was tall, like both her parents, and skinny, as her mother had been at her age, although her posture was much better than Mattie’s had been at fifteen, better, in fact, than it was now. Kim didn’t have to be reminded to push her shoulders back or hold her head up high, and as she leaned against the sturdy wood slats of the railing, swaying like a young sapling in a gentle breeze, Mattie marveled at her daughter’s easy confidence, wondering whether she’d played any part in its development at all.

  “Are you all right?” Kim asked again, craning her long, elegant neck toward the pool. Her shoulder-length, naturally blond hair was pulled tightly back against her scalp and twisted into a neat little bun at the top of her head. Her Miss Grundy look, Mattie sometimes teased. “Is someone there with you?”

  “I’m fine,” Mattie said, although her continued coughing rendered the words unintelligible, and she had to repeat them. “I’m fine,” she said again, then laughed out loud.

  “What’s so funny?” Kim giggled, a slight, trepid sound seeking inclusion into whatever it was her mother found so amusing.

  “My foot fell asleep,” Mattie told her, gradually lowering both feet to the bottom of the pool, relieved to find herself standing.

  “While you were swimming?”

  “Yeah. Funny, huh?”

  Kim shrugged, a shrug that said, Not that funny, not laugh-out-loud funny, and leaned further forward, out of the shadow. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine. I just swallowed a mouthful of water.” Mattie coughed again, as if for emphasis. She noticed that Kim was wearing her leather jacket, and for the first time that morning became aware of the late September chill.

  “I’m going to school now,” Kim said, then didn’t move. “What are you up to today?”

  “I have an appointment this afternoon with a client to look at some photographs.”

  “What about this morning?”

  “This morning?”

  “Dad’s giving his summation to the jury this morning,” Kim stated.

  Mattie nodded, not sure where this conversation was headed. She looked toward the large maple tree that loomed majestically over her neighbor’s backyard, at the deep red that was seeping into the green foliage, as if the leaves were slowly bleeding to death, and waited for her daughter to continue.

  “I bet he’d really appreciate it if you were to go to the courthouse to cheer him on. You know, like you do when I’m in a school play. For support and stuff.”

  And stuff, Mattie thought, but didn’t say, choosing to cough instead.

  “Anyway, I’m going now.”

  “Okay, sweetie. Have a good day.”

  “You too. Give Dad a kiss for me for good luck.”

  “Have a good day,” Mattie repeated, watching Kim disappear inside the house. Alone again, she closed her eyes, allowing her body to sink below the water’s smooth surface. Water immediately covered her mouth and filled her ears, silencing the white noise of nature, blocking out the casual sounds of morning. No longer were dogs barking in neighboring yards, birds singing in nearby trees, cars honking their impatience on the street. Everything was quiet, peaceful, and still. There were no more faithless husbands, no more inquiring teenage minds.

  How does she do it? Mattie wondered. What kind of radar did the child possess? Mattie hadn’t said anything to Kim about her discovery of Jake’s most recent betrayal. Nor had she said anything to anyone else, not to any of her friends, not to her mother, not to Jake. She almost laughed. When was the last time she’d confided anything in her mother? And as for Jake, she wasn’t ready to confront him yet. She needed time to think things through, to gather her thoughts, as a squirrel stores away nuts for winter, to make sure she was well fortified for whatever course of action she chose to follow in the long, cold months ahead.

  Mattie opened her eyes under the water, pushed her chin-length, dark blond hair away from her face. That’s right, girl, she told herself. It’s time to open your eyes. The time for hesitating’s through, she heard Jim Morrison wail from somewhere deep inside her head. Come on, baby, light my fire. Was that what she was waiting for—for someone to light a fire under her? How many hotel receipts did she have to find before she finally did something about it? It was time to take action. It was time to admit certain indisputable facts about her marriage. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, at this time I would like to submit this hotel receipt into evidence. “Damn you anyway, Jason Hart,” Mattie sputtered, gasping for air as her head broke through the surface of the water, her husband’s given name feeling strange and awkward in her mouth. She hadn’t called him anything but Jake since their first introduction sixteen years ago.

  Light my fire. Light my fire. Light my fire.

  “Mattie, I’d like you to meet Jake Hart,” her friend Lisa had said. “He’s that friend of Todd’s I was telling you about.”

  “Jake,” Mattie repeated, liking the sound. “Is that short for Jackson?”

  “Actually, it’s short for Jason, but nobody ever calls me that.”

  “Nice to meet you, Jake.” Mattie glanced around the main room of the Loyola University library, half expecting one of the more studious-minded patrons to jump up and ssh them into silence.

  “And what about ‘Mattie’? Short for Matilda?”

  “Martha,” she admitted, sheepishly. How could her mother have saddled her with such an old-fashioned, unattractive name, more suited to one of her beloved dogs than her only daughter? “But please call me Mattie.”

  “I’d like to … call you, that is.”

  Mattie nodded, her eyes focused on the young man’s mouth, on the wide upper lip that protruded over the thinner one on the bottom. It was a very sensual mouth, she thought, already projecting ahead to what it would be like to kiss that mouth, to feel those lips brush lightly against her own. “I’m sorry,” she heard herself stammer. “What did you say?”

  “I said that I understand you’re majoring in art history.”

 
Again she nodded, forcing her gaze to his blue eyes, roughly the same shade as her own, except that his lashes were longer, she noted, something that didn’t strike her as altogether fair. Was it fair that one man could have such long lashes and such a sensual mouth?

  “And what exactly is it that art historians do?”

  “Beats me,” Mattie heard herself say, her voice a touch too loud, so that this time someone did say “Ssh!”

  “You feel like going somewhere for a cup of coffee?” He took her arm and led her out of the library without waiting for her reply, as if there were never any doubt what her reply would be. As there was no doubt later when he asked her if she wanted to go to the movies that night, and then later, when he invited her back to the apartment he shared with several of his law school classmates, and later still, when he invited her into his bed. And then it was too late. Within two short months of that first introduction, two months after she enthusiastically surrendered to the seductive fullness of his lashes and the unspoken gentleness of his overbite, she discovered she was pregnant, this on the very day he’d decided they were moving too fast, that they needed to slow down, cool down, call the whole thing off, at least temporarily. “I’m pregnant,” she offered numbly, unable to say more.

  They talked about abortion; they talked about adoption; ultimately they stopped talking and got married. Or got married and stopped talking, Mattie thought now, emerging from the water into the brisk fall air and grabbing at the large magenta towel folded neatly on the white canvas deck chair, sprinkled liberally with fallen leaves. She used one end of the towel to dry the ends of her hair, wrapping the rest of it tightly around her body, like a straitjacket. Jake had never really wanted to get married, Mattie understood now—as she’d understood then, although they’d both pretended, at least in the beginning, that their marriage would have been inevitable. After a short break, he’d have realized how much he loved her and come back to her.