Bleeding Heart

by Liza Gyllenhaal

Genres: Family Life; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Liza Gyllenhaal has charmed readers with her “gripping and deeply perceptive” (Ben Sherwood, Author of Charlie St. Cloud) novels. Now the author of A Place for Us brings us a captivating new story about a woman’s struggle to rebuild her life after scandal destroys her marriage....

After her accountant husband disappears with millions of dollars stolen from his company’s clients, Alice Hyatt flees New York City and moves to her family’s longtime summer home in a small town in western Massachusetts. There she begins to make a new start, reconnecting with old friends and finding peace—and a growing sense of pride—as a landscape architect.

When extremely wealthy newcomer Graham Mackenzie asks her to design an elaborate garden for him, she can’t turn down the opportunity despite misgivings about Mackenzie’s energy company, which specializes in the controversial practice of fracking.

But just as the project nears completion, she learns Mackenzie’s offer is not all that it seems. Once again, Alice finds herself embroiled in someone else’s crimes, this time putting her newfound success—and possibly her life—in jeopardy....

CONVERSATION GUIDE INCLUDED

Release date: November 4, 2014

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 352

Sample

PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF LIZA GYLLENHAAL

ALSO BY LIZA GYLLENHAAL

For W.E.B.

Part One

1

“C heater! Cheater! Cheater!”

I stopped on the pathway leading out to the barn to listen to the male cardinal’s repeated cry. He and the missus lived in the stand of hemlocks behind the house and spent their days alternately foraging under the kitchen bird feeders and reminding me over and over again of my folly. Cheater! Most ornithologists identify the call as cheer, cheer, cheer or birdie, birdie, birdie. But I knew better. The soundstage effect of the snow muffled the bird’s cry, but I still heard the warning clearly. Don’t forget! You must never forget!

Not that I could even if I wanted to. It would be like forgetting that I’d lost an arm or a leg. The source of the pain was gone, but its throbbing absence would always be with me. For, in fact, I had been cheated. Something had been taken from me. Many things, actually. Trust. Security. Identity. The wonderful complacency of marriage and motherhood. Of knowing exactly where I stood in the world. And that the sun would come up again over the sugar maples bordering our old Westchester property. The Hyatt house on the corner. I could still see it all so clearly in my mind’s eye! My daughters, bent dutifully over their cereal bowls at the kitchen table. Richard, flapping open the Wall Street Journal. The row of African violets on the windowsill. All of it gone now. Swept away—no, cruelly severed. Without warning. Or recourse. Or even—and this was the worst of it, really—explanation.

“You got a call from the Mackenzie residence,” Mara said as I came into the office, stamping the snow off my boots. Last night’s unexpected late-winter storm had dumped another six inches on the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts. The thrill of January’s sun-dazzled snowscapes was long gone. It was mid-March, after all. Daffodils were blooming in other parts of the country.

“What?” I asked, shedding my duffle coat and hanging it on the wall rack next to Mara’s oversized parka.

“The Mackenzie residence,” she said again. “That big new place on the mountain. The one you and Mrs. Boyland were talking about last week.”

I’m always a little taken aback when I realize that my self-effacing assistant, Mara, might actually be listening in on my telephone conversations. I guess it’s hard not to overhear each other in the winter when I close off most of the old barn to save on heat, and Mara and I are forced to share the small front office. I know I should probably just shut down Green Acres altogether during the off-season. But a nagging fear that I’ll somehow lose momentum and slip back into the abyss keeps me at my desk. Just as her need to provide for her son, Danny, keeps Mara, a single parent, at hers. Both of us, in the dead of winter, frittering away time on the Internet. And, in my case, talking on the phone, frequently to Gwen Boyland.

“I’m guessing two million when all is said and done,” Gwen had told me the week before. My closest friend in Woodhaven, Gwen takes endless pleasure in talking about money. What things cost. How much people are worth. Lately she’s become obsessed, as have many others in town, with calculating the final tally for the glass and steel monolith on Powell Mountain that’s been under construction for the past two years. Since the recession hit, building in our area has fallen way off. This was one of the few new homes to go up in ages—and certainly the biggest.

“Todd told me they had to tear out all the marble in the bathrooms because the owner thought it was too pink,” I’d said to Gwen. Todd Franey, who works for Green Acres during the summer, picks up odd construction jobs the rest of the year and had been a dogsbody for the tile installer. A sweet-natured local boy, he was dumbstruck over the waste of money and materials. “He told me the marble had all been custom cut, so the owner had to eat the cost. It must have been thousands of dollars.”

“I happen to know it was almost twenty thousand,” Gwen had said. Before she took over as executive director of the Woodhaven Historical Society, Gwen worked as a real estate broker, and she still maintains a wide-ranging network of contacts in that world. “That’s a drop in the bucket for someone like Graham Mackenzie. The man has got to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”

“Todd said he’s putting in some kind of fancy landing pad,” I’d told her.

“Oh, folks are going to love that!” Gwen said. “The griping I’ve heard about that damned helicopter!”

I’d heard the sound myself from time to time, though only as a distant irritant. But I knew that people who lived closer to Powell Mountain swore the noise of Mackenzie’s swirling blades overhead was interrupting their sleep patterns and destroying their sense of rural repose. When I’d summered in Woodhaven with my family as a girl, Powell Mountain, which rises eleven hundred feet over the northern edge of town, was a wilderness of hemlocks and birches, limestone outcroppings, deer paths, and cascading brooks. It wasn’t until after 9/11, when the Berkshires were hit by a sudden growth spurt, that anyone seriously considered building there. After all, it would take a ridiculous amount of money to clear the heavily wooded mountainside, cut in switchbacks, and lay down the necessary power and water lines. But by the time I moved up to Woodhaven from Westchester five years ago, a half dozen millionaires—all loosely affiliated through business dealings—had divvied up the 125-acre property and started erecting enormous trophy homes. Graham Mackenzie was building his place on the last and biggest parcel. It was on the very top of the mountain and had panoramic views of three states.

“Where did he get all his money?” I asked.

“I’ve been Googling him. He’s very big in hydrofracking. His MKZEnergy is the third-largest natural gas producer in the country. The stock price has been almost doubling every year for the last four years.”

“I’d ask you why this matters,” I said, “but I’m afraid I already know.” My dear friend is not a gold digger in any traditional sense of the word. She doesn’t yearn to be draped in minks or to be sunbathing on a yacht in Monte Carlo. Her ambitions are far more focused and hardheaded than that. At this point, I think Gwen would do just about anything to raise the funds necessary to restore Bridgewater House. Built in 1751, it’s the oldest standing residence in Woodhaven, and its renovation is the main reason Gwen was hired as the full-time executive director of the Woodhaven Historical Society. Since the announcement of the start of the capital campaign last summer to return the structure to its former glory, Gwen has been relentlessly running down every loose piece of change in the area.

“It makes me crazy that I can’t make inroads into that millionaires’ row up there,” Gwen said. “They throw all their money at Tanglewood and at Shakespeare & Company and totally ignore this historic gem nestled right here in the heart—”

“I’ve already heard your sales pitch,” I reminded her. “Save it for Mackenzie. But I wouldn’t put much hope in someone who rips apart the earth for a living.”

“Oh, right, unlike Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick and those other robber barons.”

But no matter how Gwen tried to justify it, I was still uncomfortable with what felt to me like her growing desperation about meeting the Bridgewater fund-raising goal. I knew all too well what the campaign meant to her career. Though she tried to put a good face on it, her midlife shift into the not-for-profit sector had resulted from a series of dead-end jobs in the for-profit one. This in many ways was Gwen’s last chance to turn her luck around. We’re both in our late forties now. We’d both been forced to make drastic reductions in our lifestyles and expectations over the past several years. Our options were narrowing. But I believed I was coming to terms with the setbacks I’d experienced. Bitterness welled up in the back of my throat only occasionally now, and the old outrage that had once dominated my waking hours had finally slackened. Green Acres had turned a decent profit for three years running, and I believed I was finally starting to get my life back on track. I wasn’t so sure about Gwen.

“And what did the Mackenzie residence want?” I asked Mara as I sat down at my desk and swiveled my chair in her direction. Though I’d suggested she set up her workstation next to mine in front of the large sunny windows that looked out on the herb garden and greenhouse, Mara had elected to stay in the back of the room near the sliding doors that opened to the rest of the barn. She’d angled her desk so that the back of her computer was facing me, blocking her body and the screen from view. It seemed to me that Mara made a concerted effort to avoid any kind of attention. Though she’d been working for me for more than a year now, I knew very little about her personal life except for the fact that she was raising an adorable toddler on her own. In the beginning, I found her guarded to the point of being rude. But just as I’d become dependent on her quiet efficiency, I’d grown used to her curt and wary manner.

“Don’t know,” she said, getting up and walking across the room to hand me a yellow sticky note upon which she’d written in her loopy schoolgirl hand a local number and “Eleanor—housekeeper.” “You’re supposed to call back.”

I made a cup of tea and sorted through the mail, which was mostly catalogs from nursery wholesalers and garden supply companies. My mind was on the message, though. And what it probably meant. Why else would someone contact a landscaping firm? Like everyone else in Woodhaven, I’d watched Mackenzie’s house taking shape on the mountaintop, the late-afternoon sun blazing across its row of windows. Most people thought it was a monstrosity, but I found its clean, forceful lines intriguing. It was way too big, of course, more fortress than home. But I also recognized that it was modern in the best sense of the word—unexpected and visually compelling. There were very few vantage points in Woodhaven where, looking north, you could miss catching sight of the sprawling edifice. I’d wondered in passing what sort of landscaping Mackenzie had in mind. It wasn’t going to be easy. That kind of bold, in-your-face architecture demanded an equally aggressive garden design. Specimen trees and shrubs. Grasses, perhaps. Lots of stonework.

I played with the sticky note, curling the glued edge inward with my index finger. It was harmless enough to tinker with ideas, but I knew I could never work for someone like Mackenzie—someone who despoiled the land for profit. When my life had imploded seven years ago this past September, the world around me turned to ash. For months on end, nothing gave me pleasure. It was only after I left Westchester and moved up to Woodhaven that my depression slowly started to lift. The old white clapboard Colonial that had been my family’s summerhouse for generations became my refuge, the long-neglected gardens my salvation.

Working almost nonstop those first few months, I uprooted the brambles that had imprisoned my grandmother’s peonies. I pruned back and rejuvenated my mother’s roses. I restored the fencing around my father’s old vegetable garden and dug up and replanted whatever herbs had not been colonized by weeds. My daughters and friends believed that I began to find new purpose in life when I went back to school to get my horticultural degree and then started Green Acres. But the truth was I’d already found it. By then I’d lost all faith in human beings. It was the boundless, selfless beauty of the natural world that led me back to the land of the living.

“I said you’d return her call this morning,” Mara said, interrupting my thoughts. I glanced up at the wall clock. It was a little past noon.

“You did?” It was unlike Mara to make such a promise. Early on, we’d settled on a clear-cut division of labor. I handled sales, client contact, and design. She took care of the billing and scheduling. Though I’d hired her as my assistant, I soon realized that she was more than my equal in terms of organization and efficiency. I’d learned to say she worked with—not for—me. We were both careful about observing each other’s boundaries. I would never take it upon myself to speak for her, and this was the first time that I could remember her doing so for me.

“Yeah, well . . . ,” Mara said from behind her computer terminal, “I got the feeling the housekeeper really wants to talk to you.”

“But I can’t work for this Mackenzie person. Do you know what hydrofracking is?”

Mara leaned around her desk, her gray-green eyes taking me in with an intensity that I often found disconcerting. Mara was hardly out of her teens, but she had the world-weary, unyielding stare of someone several decades older.

“Sure,” she said. “I know what it is.”

“And you don’t think it’s a danger to the environment?”

“Maybe,” she said. “But so are a lot of other things.” Despite her impassive expression, her tone was subtly wheedling. For whatever reason, she wanted me to return the phone call. She wanted me to meet with Mackenzie.

Then she added: “Don’t you kind of wonder what that place looks like on the inside?”

“Is that what this is all about?” I said with a laugh. “Crass curiosity?” Mara’s answering grin—such a rare sight!—reminded me of how young she still was. Young and struggling to keep her head above water. She rotated the same jeans and sweatshirts week after week. I suspected that any extra money she made went directly into caring for Danny. That Mara would be eager to learn about the interior trappings of some millionaire’s house touched and saddened me. She acted so tough and self-sufficient. But, of course, like the rest of us, it was just an act.

“I guess it would be unprofessional of me not to return the call,” I said.

I was doing this for Mara, I told myself. But in fact, my pulse quickened as I reached for the phone. I had to admit that I was curious, too. And something else. Something more complicated. Green Acres was still basically a start-up. There were half a dozen bigger and far better established landscaping firms in the area. Mackenzie was probably seeing them all. But, still, he’d heard of me. I was on the list. Word was getting around. The fact that he was even considering Green Acres allowed me to feel something I don’t often get to experience these days: pride.

Though I still would never work for the son of a bitch.

2

I used to be such a nice person. Personable, obliging. My husband, Richard, once jokingly told me after a particularly dull dinner with a business associate of his that I “suffered fools too gladly.” He was right, of course. And prescient in ways I couldn’t possibly have imagined at the time. But the truth is, for most of my life, I liked being liked. I’d been raised to be polite and well mannered. But I think it was also in my DNA. So it still surprises me how much my personality was altered by what happened. How quickly my anger can flare these days! I think that many of the people who once formed Richard’s and my circle in Westchester would hardly recognize me now. I’ve become so demanding. I won’t tolerate sloppiness, and I hate being kept waiting. Which is why I almost didn’t meet Graham Mackenzie after all.

“He’ll be with you in just a minute,” Mackenzie’s housekeeper, Eleanor, had assured me as we crossed the enormous sun-filled space that appeared to serve as Mackenzie’s combined dining area and living room. If Mara was expecting opulent Trump-style furnishings and outsized pieces of art, she was going to be disappointed. Someone with restrained, if extremely expensive, taste had decorated what I could see of the downstairs. A small herd of dove gray Italian leather sectionals grazed on a Tibetan carpet the size of a meadow. Eleanor, who didn’t divulge her last name, appeared to be equally understated. If she had any misgivings about being a black woman who was required to wear a uniform, she didn’t show it. In fact, she seemed to take a proprietary pleasure in welcoming me to Mackenzie’s home.

“Can I bring you some coffee or tea?” she asked as she led me to the far end of the room, with its wall of windows overlooking Woodhaven, the valley, and the hills rolling back to the Catskills in the distance. The whole front section of the house was cantilevered out over the side of the mountain, making me feel as though I was suspended in midair with the world literally at my feet.

“No, thanks, I’m fine,” I said. After Eleanor excused herself, I was left on my own to revel in the prospect below. The countryside was still covered in snow, though I noticed that several of the ponds in the area were starting to thaw. The late-afternoon sun glinted off the dam that regulated Heron Lake west of town. From where I stood, the distant meandering course of the Housatonic River looked like a hose looping through a garden.

On my way up the mountain earlier I had, on impulse, lowered the car window to take in a few deep breaths of the chill March air. I’d felt so cooped up over the winter! I couldn’t wait to dig my fingers into the soil again. It’s hard to explain to those who used to know me best, but probably my deepest sense of connection these days is with nature. I’m most alive when I’m outdoors. I think my two daughters view it as some kind of retreat on my part—a need to distance myself from people. But, in fact, it feels to me as though I’m actually in touch with something larger, more embracing—and, yes, more important—than humanity.

I’d missed gardening these past four months with almost the same kind of ache I used to feel when Richard was away on business trips. There was an emptiness in my life right now—just as there had once been an empty space in our bed. As the minutes went by, though, my reflective mood slowly morphed into annoyance. I glanced at my watch and realized that I’d been waiting almost three-quarters of an hour. What the hell was taking Mackenzie so long? I’d seen enough of the house to be able to report back to Mara. And even if Mackenzie deigned to offer me the job, I wasn’t going to take it. So what was the point of waiting around for the man to put in an appearance?

I did, however, feel I owed Eleanor the courtesy of telling her I was leaving. I walked back across the living room trying to remember which corridor—three different ones fed off the two-story entranceway—she had taken when she left me earlier. I heard a voice behind a door to the right of the entrance and stopped in front of it. I couldn’t make out what was being said, but the hostile tone was clear enough. This wasn’t soft-spoken Eleanor. It was an alpha male in full bullying mode.

I realized to whom I was listening, of course, even before the door opened—forcing me to stumble backward—and Mackenzie appeared. He was well over six feet tall, with a substantial belly, a dramatic mane of receding silvery hair, and a flushed, pockmarked complexion. His eyes were a pale, glaucous blue that looked almost milky in contrast with the high color of his skin.

“What the hell are you doing?” he said.

“Nothing,” I told him, straightening to my full five feet four inches. I was furious that he’d thought I was eavesdropping. “I was looking for Eleanor. Please let her know I couldn’t wait any longer.”

“Ah—” he said, exhaling. “You’re the landscape designer?”

“Yes, I’m Alice Hyatt. I own Green Acres. And I had an appointment with you,” I added, attempting to move around him, “about an hour ago.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, extending both arms to block my departure. “I was on an important business call that ran long. Listen, you’re here now—so you might as well stay. Give me a chance to make it up to you?” He added, smiling, “I promise you won’t regret it.”

The smile lit up his face and transformed his whole physical presence. A few moments ago, he’d been rigid with anger. Now he leaned toward me, literally bent on winning me over.

“No,” I said, deciding we’d already wasted enough of each other’s time. “I might as well tell you I’m here under false pretenses.”

“Oh?”

“I only came because a coworker wanted to know what you’ve done with the inside of this place.”

“Really?” he said, starting to laugh. Then he kept on laughing—a rolling roar that filled the hallway. “I love it! Is everybody talking about it? Do they all hate it? I bet they think it’s too big and modern.”

“It’s not universally admired,” I admitted.

“Ah, well, fuck them,” he said pleasantly enough. “Come on, let’s have a drink. You can tell me what you have against working for me.” He took off down the hall, and I had no choice but to follow him. No, that’s not true. I could easily have walked in the other direction and out the front door, but the fact is that Graham Mackenzie’s frankness disarmed me. I’d prepared myself for the kind of buttoned-up, self-satisfied CEO that I used to run into when I accompanied my husband to business functions. Mackenzie, clearly, was cut from different cloth. Besides, I was ready for a drink myself.

We came to a stop in front of the windows and that million-dollar view again. It was nearly five o’clock. A voluminous cloud bank drifted over the sun, smearing bright reds and pinks and oranges across the darkening horizon. I took the glass of wine he offered and a seat on one of the couches facing the windows. He folded himself into an Eames chair angled in my direction and crossed his long legs on the leather ottoman.

“So?” he said. “What’s the problem? Is it the incline? I’ve already heard that it’s going to be a challenge. But most of your colleagues think it’s doable.”

“I take it you’re seeing everybody? Halderson’s? Maggione?”

“And Coldwater, too. I also looked into some of the bigger outfits in Connecticut, but, I don’t know, I feel like I just keep seeing the same ideas. Don’t get me wrong—everyone’s work is great. Very professional. But it all looks the same. And then I remembered the enormous limestone outcropping at Sal’s place. I was there for a fund-raiser last summer, and saw that some crazy person had turned that incredible eyesore into this wonderful wall of ferns and dangling trillium and little waterfalls.”

I felt my face flush with pleasure. Though Sal Lombardi, a Green Acres client who was one of Mackenzie’s neighbors down the mountain, had been far more impressed with the fairly standard perennial border I designed to complement his newly installed Olympic pool, I felt the wall garden Mackenzie had admired was, in fact, my most creative and successful effort to date.

“So I called him,” Mackenzie said, “and asked him who the fuck had come up with that.”

I raised my hand.

“Bingo! I did a little digging around—forgive the pun—and found out that you’re the new kid on the block. Scrappy. And opinionated as hell, Sal told me. Which I like.”

I was tempted to smile. It felt good to be singled out by someone who could afford to buy whatever took his fancy. At the same time I knew he was playing me. It was clear that Mackenzie was a deal-maker, and he was trying to close on something he wanted. I was enjoying our conversation, but I knew I had to be careful not to antagonize him.

“It’s not the incline,” I said. “That would be a challenge, but it comes with the territory around here. Have you ever been to Naumkeag in Stockbridge?”

“Love the place. And the whole Margaret Choate–Fletcher Steele collaboration. I want that, too, by the way. Someone who’s open to ideas. Who’ll be willing to listen to me and work with me.”

“You’re aware that it took Fletcher Steele more than three decades to put in the gardens at Naumkeag and, even then, he never felt they were really finished?”

“What great garden ever is?” Mackenzie said, taking me in over the rim of his wineglass. “But I don’t have that kind of time. I’ll want the whole thing designed and installed by the end of June.”

“That’s a tall order. I’m sure it can be done,” I said, hesitating before I took the plunge. “But not by me.”

“Okay, let’s hear it. What’s the problem?”

“I’m opposed to fracking,” I told him.

He looked at me for a moment without saying anything. But I sensed some kind of disconnect. He could have been looking through me. His opaque gaze made it difficult to know for certain where he was focusing.

“So?” he asked. “What’s that got to do with this?”

“You make your living destroying the land,” I told him. “I make mine trying to beautify it.”

“Oh, what total bullshit!” he said, though his tone remained cordial, even amused. “That sounds to me like something you rehearsed on the way over. What do you really know about hydrofracking besides what you read in the New York Times and listen to on NPR?”

“That’s a little condescending, don’t you think?”

“Come on—I asked you a question.”

“Okay. I know it’s bad for the environment.”

“So is driving a car. And I don’t think you walked up here.”

“Yes, but my Subaru doesn’t pollute the groundwater and sicken livestock.”

“Neither does hydrofracking when it’s done right. Which is how my company does it. In fact, I can make a very strong case that fracking—when handled correctly—actually has the potential to help save this planet from global warming. But I didn’t invite you here to debate the pros and cons of clean-air energy. I wanted to talk to you about this property. About this project. I’m looking for something on par with Naumkeag and the rest—but contemporary and truly innovative. That’s why I built this house, frankly. From the beginning I saw it as primarily the backdrop for the landscape design. I realize this is going to sound grandiose, but the fact is I want you to create the most beautiful garden in the Berkshires for me.”

He had gotten up from the sofa and was pacing in front of the windows, which had blackened with nightfall and now mirrored his movements.

“I don’t care what it costs. I’m willing to pay whatever it takes. But what I’m hoping for is something totally unexpected and unique. Like what you did for Sal. Only on a much grander scale. Don’t worry about being able to handle it. Bring me a plan that I love—and I’ll make sure you get the resources you need to make it a reality.”

“I just don’t think so,” I said. “Listen, I’m sure you can make a very persuasive case for fracking, but I’m never going to buy it. And I’ve reached a point in my life where things like this matter.”

“What? Things like principles?” he said, shaking his head before he abruptly crossed the room to retrieve the wine bottle.

“Yes, principles,” I replied, nodding when he held the bottle up in the air in front of me. He refilled my glass.

“You know,” he said, sitting back down, “I often find that when people start talking about their principles, it’s an indication that they’re just not all that up on their facts. It’s easy to see things in absolutes when you don’t know the details. No important issue I can think of is that clear-cut. Good or bad. What I do for a living has al