CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
DURING March, while the snow at Pine Ridge melted to little patches and drifts caught between the cottonwood trees, Cassie grew accustomed to the reservation. Because it was her safe haven, she did not see it for what it was—a place with more murders per capita than anywhere else in the United States, a people bled dry by poverty and indifference. Instead she chose to notice how beautiful the nutbrown Sioux babies were, how the mud puddles reflected her growing form, how the sun became tangled in the branches of trees, and how the quiet had a noise all its own.
“You coming or not, wasicuη wı´nyan?”
Dorothea’s voice startled Cassie from her position at the window.
She still did not feel comfortable with Dorothea, but she wanted to get out of the house. “I’d love to,” she said, pulling her coat on and struggling with the tight buttons at the stomach. Dorothea was off from the cafeteria today, and because the ground had thawed considerably, she was going to replenish her store of roots and herbs.
In the weeks that Cassie had been staying with the Flying Horses, she had come closer to understanding them. And although Cyrus and Dorothea weren’t actually friendly, they didn’t cut her down, either; in fact, they went out of their way to make introductions when townspeople eyed her curiously. Cassie was beginning to see that things were different here—that a man might wear the same shirt five days in a row because it was his only one; that a mother was more likely to feed a child HoHos and orange soda than fresh grains and milk. She had altered her concept of time—set hours for breakfast and lunch and sleeping—to Indian time, which meant you ate when you were hungry and you rested when you had the need. And she was growing accustomed to the Lakota scarcity of words. She realized now that unlike whites, who chattered to fill up the spaces in conversations, the Lakota simply believed it was perfectly all right to say nothing. So Cassie moved through the woods in companionable quiet beside Dorothea, listening to the wind and the dry grass crunching beneath her feet.
“Waη la´ka he? Do you see that?” Dorothea called. She was pointing to a familiar tree, still bare.
“Cedar?” Cassie said, feeling she was being tested.
Dorothea nodded, impressed. “It’s too early now, but we boil the fruit and leaves and drink the remedy to cure coughs.”
For the next hour and a half, Cassie listened to Dorothea describe an ancient art of healing. Some of the items were still sleeping through the winter: cattail’s down, which was used like gauze; sweet flag for fever and toothache; slippery elm as a laxative; wild verbena for stomachache. Dorothea brushed off the roots of the false red mallow, which would become a salve for sunburns and open wounds. She picked wolfberry, because it soothed Cyrus’s tired eyes. When she sank back against the trunk of a cottonwood, oblivious to the wet earth seeping through her polyester pants, Cassie did the same.
“I didn’t know you were a medicine woman,” Cassie said.
Dorothea shook her head. “I’m not,” she said. “I just know some things.” She shrugged. “Besides, there is a great deal I cannot do anything about. That’s what a medicine man is for. We have Joseph Stands in Sun—Cyrus introduced you to him in town last week. There are some sicknesses that live here”—she pointed to her heart—”and there are some sicknesses that you can’t heal.”
“You mean something like cancer,” Cassie said.
“Hiya´ ,” Dorothea replied, scowling. “That’s just something evil in the body. Marjorie Two Fists went into Rapid City and had the cancer cut out of her breast, and she’s been fine for years. I’m talking about something evil. In the ton. The soul.” She stared fixedly at Cassie. “The People believe that a baby is born either good or bad. And that is that.
You can make changes up until the time of birth, but afterward it can’t be helped. And a bad baby will grow up into a bad man.”
Dorothea’s eyes bored into Cassie, and she turned away. In a society where someone else’s children were a gift that could grace your own household, how could Dorothea fathom a father who demeaned his son?
A mother who forgot he existed? Cassie wanted to tell Dorothea that her husband hadn’t been born bad; that he had simply been convinced of it so many times he began to act the part.
A cold wind settled over the thicket, taking away Cassie’s thoughts.
She looked at Dorothea’s bulging apron. “You and Joseph Stands in Sun must take a lot of business away from the town doctor,” she said.
Dorothea picked at a twig, splitting the bark to reveal a tiny green bud. “Sometimes it is easier for people to come to me than to make the trip all the way to the doctor; some people don’t trust the doctor.”
“Why?”
Dorothea puffed out her cheeks. “Because we have always had medicine men, I guess, but we haven’t always had wasicuη doctors.”
“Wasicuη. What does that mean?” Cassie said quickly, recognizing the Lakota word. “It sounds like what you call me. What everyone calls me.”
Dorothea looked surprised, as if an idiot would have picked this up before. “It means ‘white,’ ” she said.
Cassie turned the word over in her mouth, testing its dips and chirps, like a mourning dove’s call. “It’s pretty.”
Dorothea pulled herself to her feet and looked down at Cassie. With typical Sioux bluntness, she said, “It comes from three Lakota words, the ones that translate to ‘fat, greedy person.’ ”
Cassie slogged quietly through the mud, forcing herself to stay silent.
Nobody had asked her here, nobody had to like her. For her whole life, she’d been playing roles where she tried to please and inevitably failed, simply because of who she was: a helpless child, Alex’s wife, a white woman. She wondered if, as Dorothea said, this was something she’d been born to, something defective in her spirit.
She almost walked directly into Dorothea because she didn’t notice that the old woman had stopped moving. “You know,” Dorothea said easily, “when I was a child, I had seven sisters. We lived a little closer to Pine Ridge town. Of course, my parents did not have money for enough food or clothing, much less toys, so all we got to play with were old buttons and Salvation Army teddy bears at Christmas, and things we could make ourselves. My oldest sister taught us how to make gourd dolls out of the squash that grew wild, and rags we could find in trash barrels. We’d wrap the rags around the bulb of the squash like a kerchief, and knot the fabric into arms and legs.
“They were something, those dolls. And what I remember was that each year while my sisters were trying to find a smooth green squash without bumps on its face, I would look for the particolored ones, the ones that streaked yellow and green, half and half.” Dorothea suddenly grasped Cassie’s hand, and Cassie was amazed at the power in her thin brown fingers. “Hybrids are strong, you know. They last longer. And in their own way, they are beautiful, Cassie, haη?”
The women walked carefully, both unwilling to break this gossamer thread that Dorothea had netted between them by speaking, for the first time, Cassie’s given name.
AS ALEX RIVERS KNOTTED HIS BLACK BOW TIE, HE THOUGHT ABOUT Macbeth, the character he’d shelved for a month before resuming production last week. He was starting to understand the makings of the character, much more so than he had when he’d first undertaken the film. There was a terror to Macbeth’s marriage—a realization that the woman standing before him was not the same woman he’d married;
that she had a capacity for acting a way he’d never believed possible.
His personal situation was clearly different, but still familiar. Certainly mistakes had been made, but he’d never figured it would come to this. When he’d come into the house and found Cassie missing, he had been tempted to check the rooms twice, the closets and the attic.
It was hard to accept that she had actually gone. It happened to other people, especially in Hollywood, where weddings were more a confection of publicity than a wellspring of love. But it had never been like that between him and Cassie. He hadn’t believed Cassie could walk out that door, mostly because he couldn’t admit to himself that maybe he needed her more than she needed him.
Alex dragged a comb through his hair and straightened his wingtip collar. In five minutes he’d leave for Melanie Grayson’s place. She was his Lady Macbeth; they’d go together to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion where the Academy Awards ceremony was held. He stared into the mirror, not quite able to place the face that he saw. He knew that the greatest acting job of his life would not be the one for which he might receive an Oscar, but rather the one he would give tonight when in front of thousands he’d have to pretend that he gave a damn whether he won or not.
Herb was waiting downstairs with a white Mercedes limousine. “I tell you, tonight I got heartburn,” he said. He grinned at Alex. “You talk to Cassie?”
“Just got off the phone,” he lied. “She wishes me luck.”
“Agh, luck,” Herb said. “You’re a shoo-in. It’s a shame she couldn’t make it out here, even for the night. But I know what it’s like in those touch-and-go situations, you don’t want to leave them alone for a minute.”
Alex nodded. “She says maybe if I win, her father will make a dramatic recovery.”
“From your lips to God’s ears,” Herb murmured, and then he pushed Alex toward the door. “Let’s get Melanie, and then we schmooze.”
Alex didn’t even get out of the limousine when they pulled into Melanie’s driveway; he figured this was far from a date, and he wasn’t planning on giving the wrong impression. He let Herb escort her from the door to the back seat of the car, where Alex had already poured her a glass of champagne. “You look lovely,” Alex said, knowing it was expected.
Melanie smoothed down the white satin skirt that clung to her like a snake’s skin. “This old thing?” she said, smirking. They all knew she’d spent an exorbitant amount of money on the ostentatious dress, and that she’d tried to bill it to the Macbeth production. She pointed out that she never would have had to be so careful about her appearance if she hadn’t been seated beside Alex, on whom the cameras would focus at least three times that night.
He stared out the window as the traffic began to grind to a halt several blocks in front of the building. Cassie would never have worn a dress like that. She would have had something original, of course, but simple and beautiful. Just like her.
He found himself getting angrier and angrier at Melanie as the car crept along. Her thigh was pressed too closely to his; her hair was the wrong color; her perfume wasn’t Cassie’s. “You nervous?” she purred, rubbing his forearm.
Alex didn’t answer. He stared down at her hand on the sleeve of his coat as if it were a tarantula.
“Kids, kids,” Herb bellowed from the seat facing them. “Let’s kiss and make up,” he said. “Remember, this is good publicity.”
Alex knew that Herb was right; rumors were flying about the former shutdown in production of Macbeth, so many that Alex was beginning to remember the hell he’d gone through with Antony and Cleopatra.
Maybe he was just doomed when it came to Shakespeare.
“Yeah, Alex,” Melanie breathed, inches away from his face. “Let’s kiss and make up.”
Alex twirled his wedding ring around his finger, a habit he’d taken to lately, as if it were a necessary reminder. If you win, he warned himself, no matter what, do not jump up and embrace her. Herb patted Melanie’s knee. “Leave him alone,” he sighed. “He’s brooding.”
“I know,” Melanie said huskily. “That’s what we all love about him.”
Alex ignored their senseless patter until their limousine was next in line. “Ready for the vultures, darling?” Melanie asked, snapping closed her compact.
Alex stepped into the afternoon sunshine first, squinting and holding his hand up in a half-wave, half-sunshield. He reached into the bowels of the limousine to help Melanie out, watching her turn on a smile with the wattage of a nighttime beacon at a maximum-security prison.
She lightly placed her hand on his arm, and at his low growl, removed it.
There were too many shouts and catcalls to hear the reporters or to notice the flashbulbs and the rolling tape. He walked beside Melanie, nodding and grinning, trying for a facial expression that said he was not too sure of himself, but still confident about his chances.
The man walking in front of him was a producer over at FOX, and although Alex could not remember his name, his stooped gait and liverspotted hairline were familiar. He and his wife were tiny and hunched over, and Alex wondered if that was the burden of age or simply of a long Hollywood marriage. They meandered down the red carpeting so slowly that several times Alex was forced to stop with Melanie and simply stand, smiling like an idiot. The man turned and noticed for the first time that Alex was behind him. He stopped dead in his tracks, holding out a hand. Alex shook it. “Golf balls,” the man said.
“Excuse me?”
“Golf balls. When I saw your movie, I had golf balls in my throat.
That’s how much it moved me.” He reached up and squeezed Alex’s shoulder. “The best of the best tonight, eh?”
Alex had heard that kind of comment before about Life. Everyone had an estranged father or sister or friend, and Alex’s role had encouraged them to make their peace. Alex Rivers, king of mending fences.
Sultan of reconciliation. With the ultimate skeleton in his closet: a wife he had driven away.
As he waited on the red carpeting he heard the word “sweep,” and he knew that people were talking about the potential for The Story of His Life to walk away with an Oscar for each of its eleven nominations, including the golden trio of Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Picture.
Sweep. Sweep. Sweep. The syllable fell onto his ears over and over, lulling Alex into a daydream of what this could have been like, how it would have felt to have Cassie standing close to him, what the reporters would have said when he pulled her into his arms and swept her down the aisle in a Cinderella waltz, as if nothing this night could matter more than her.
THEY HAD BEEN STAYING IN THE SAME ONE-ROOM HOUSE FOR THREE days now, so it was ridiculous to call it a date, but Cassie still felt selfconscious about wearing an old shirt of Cyrus’s and a pair of Dorothea’s chartreuse elastic-waist polyester pants. Will knocked on the front door as if he weren’t temporarily living there. When Cassie opened the door, his gaze took in her neatly braided hair, her oversize clothes. “Well,”
Will said. “Aren’t you pretty as a picture.”
“Give me a break,” Cassie said, bursting into laughter. “I have no waist and I’ve never put anything this color on my body before.”
It was the first time Will had come back to Pine Ridge since leaving her a month ago. He’d told his supervisors there had been a death in the family, which bought him a week of bereavement leave. He wanted to believe that nothing short of a funeral would induce him to return to Pine Ridge, but in truth, he only wanted to take Cassie to the Oscars.
The nearest TV was twenty miles away in a bar, and he knew that she’d never have gone herself.
“So,” she said, pulling herself up into Will’s rented truck. “What am I missing in Los Angeles?”
Will shrugged. “You know. A lot of smog, some torrential rains, Hollywood hype.” He glanced at her quickly, hoping she understood he did not mean to include her in the last of that list. In fact, he had been listening closely to those ridiculous entertainment reports, but nothing had been said about the disappearance of Cassie Rivers.
The building was unnamed and unmarked, because everyone knew where and what it was. It was fairly full since it was the closest place off the dry reservation where you could get a drink, and Will hoped that wouldn’t be a problem. He had not told Cassie, but it was known that knifings and rapes were frighteningly common in the parking lot, that the police stayed away instead of asking questions.
Behind the scarred bar hung an old, faded sign, Lel Lakota Kin Iyokipisni, “No Sioux Allowed.” It was sliced through the middle by a tomahawk that was wedged into the rafter behind it.
Cassie was the only white person in the bar, and one of a handful of women. She fluttered nervously behind Will, trying to ignore the stares thrown her way like challenges. She followed him to a corner table where there was an unobstructed view of the television. Her chair was pressed beside the jukebox, and while Loretta Lynn warbled, Cassie held her hands to the lit-up selection box, seeing her fingertips glow pink with the light.
“They’re watching hockey,” Cassie said. It had never occurred to her that anything other than the Academy Awards would be the selection of choice. True perhaps in L.A., but not in Pine Ridge, where the nearest movie theater was an hour away.
Will stared blankly at the fuzzy screen, watching the puck zip across the grayish ice. “Leave it to me,” he said. He stood up and lifted one leg over the back of his chair, like a dismounting cowboy. Walking up to the bar, he leaned his elbows on the sticky wooden counter. “Hau,
ko´la,” he said, trying to catch the bartender’s attention.
The man was very fat and wore his hair in two long black braids wrapped with shoelaces at the ends. He was drying a shot glass. “What can I do you?” he said dispassionately.
“I need a Rolling Rock and a glass of water,” Will said. “And the lady would like to switch the channel.”
“Fuck that,” the bartender said, uncapping a cold bottle on the edge of the bar. “Three bucks.”
Will had been expecting this. He handed the bartender a fifty-dollar bill straight from his pay envelope, the likes of which he would have been willing to bet the man had never seen before in his life. “You put on ABC by nine o’clock,” Will said, “you get to keep the goddamn change.”
When he handed Cassie her water, she was sitting on the edge of her seat. “Will they watch it?” she asked, her voice thin and breathless.
“No problem,” Will said. He tipped the neck of his beer to Cassie’s glass in a toast, thinking that, miraculously, this hellhole corner of South Dakota agreed with her. “Rumor has it you’ve become some Big Indian,” he said.
Cassie flushed. “Thanks,” she said.
Will laughed. “To a lot of Lakota, that’s an insult worthy of a fistfight,” he said. “It wasn’t meant as a compliment.”
Rolling the glass between her palms, Cassie glared up at Will. “At least I’m trying to fit in,” she said pointedly.
Like you never did. The gibe hung in the air in front of them, and although Will had believed that the thick skin he’d cultivated could protect him, he was shocked to see how much the things Cassie hadn’t said could still hurt. His grandfather was half in love with her; his grandmother couldn’t stop talking about her. It stung to know that someone with no Sioux blood running through her veins could carve a niche for herself when he’d never even gained a toehold.
Narrowing his eyes, Will did what had come naturally during all the years he’d lived second-class in Pine Ridge: he struck back. He nodded slowly, as if he’d been considering Cassie’s daily routine for quite some time. “You’ve got the elders wishing all wasicuη were like you. Tagging along with Cyrus; asking the medicine man about berries and roots. Quite the little squaw.”
Cassie lifted her chin, unwilling to defend her actions to the very person who’d brought her there. “What am I supposed to do all day?
Lie on the couch and watch my waist disappear? Besides, it’s like Girl Scouts—surviving in the forest overnight and all that. It’s good to know. Suppose I got stuck in the woods and twisted my ankle—”
“Suppose there were woods in L.A., and that all the twenty-fourhour pharmacies were closed?” Will snorted and took a long pull of his beer, finishing it. “You are planning on going back, aren’t you?”
Cassie’s face closed in on itself, and for an awful moment Will thought she was going to cry. Out of nowhere, he remembered being in second grade, when a new kid had entered the school. Horace was only one-quarter Indian, and Will had made friends with him, figuring that he owed it to someone who took him out of the scapegoat position.
It worked: the same bullies who’d stepped on his sandwiches at lunch and broken his pencils were now asking him to pitch their baseball games and inviting him over on weekends. Will could remember the warm feeling that grew from his stomach when he understood he was being accepted, and before he knew it he was acting like them. He didn’t even realize it until one day after school he hid behind a copse of trees, waiting for Horace to round the bend, and with all the other kids he threw stones and twigs until Horace ran.
But not before Will had seen his face. He was looking straight at Will, at nobody else, like he was plainly saying, Not you too.
Will shook his head to clear it, unsure what that had to do with Cassie, except for the horrible feeling that had seized him when he realized just how much he’d hurt someone who’d done absolutely nothing to him. “Hey,” he said, trying to lighten the mood. He nodded in the direction of the television. “You’re going to miss your show.”
As he had asked, the bartender had switched the channel fifteen minutes before the broadcast of the Academy Awards. Will didn’t have a clue what was on beforehand; he figured it was some stupid sitcom.
But looming over his head was Alex Rivers’s face, and sitting beside him on a couch was Cassie herself.
“The Barbara Walters interview,” Cassie murmured. She was holding her cocktail napkin so tight her knuckles blanched and the wet paper ripped down the middle. Then she started to laugh hysterically. “He was supposed to be on second. Not last. Second.”
A thousand things were cutting through her mind: What if he’d known he was scheduled third all along? Would they never have had that argument? Would she not have had to run away at all? She stared at the familiar curtains of her living room, at the storm whipping through the azalea bushes outside. She took in the bouquet of lilies that some set dresser on Barbara Walters’s crew had placed on the coffee table where there was usually a big book of New Yorker magazine covers.
But most of all she looked at Alex, who was sitting right next to this shadow of herself, looking fresh and clean shaven and just as he did every morning when he came out of the bathroom and took her breath away. On the television, his hands strummed restlessly over her shoulder. He was telling the world that Alex Rivers and his wife watched Saturday morning cartoons in bed.
Oh God, Alex. Cassie fought back the urge to let the tears well into her eyes, to stand up and touch her fingers to the TV set as if she could stroke warm flesh. Until she saw him again, she had not realized what she had been missing.
Then she heard her own voice. Cassie blinked, forcing herself to turn from Alex’s reactions to her own mouth forming the words. She shifted uncomfortably in her chair, thinking how odd her voice sounded, not like hers at all. “I expected him to be a hotshot celebrity pushing around his weight to show who was in control,” Cassie heard herself say, “and I’m sorry to say that at first, he didn’t disappoint me.” She saw Alex’s eyes flash at the turn of her sentence, which really did make him sound like a fool. Even though it had happened weeks ago, Cassie flinched.
She wondered if the rest of the world could see that quick anger just below the surface; if they noticed that she leaned a little to the left, away from her injured side; if they recognized the ghost of a bruise beneath the gauzy sleeve of her blouse.
They cut most of the interview when Cassie talked. In fact, Barbara Walters ended with Happily Ever After, asking Alex, “Why Cassie?”
And Alex stared right at the camera and said, “She was made for me.”
Cut, clip in the quick kiss he’d given her at the end of the interview, which some editor had frozen so that Alex’s lips were fused to hers eternally even as Barbara Walters started her wrap-up to the commercial.
Will glanced at Cassie. She was staring at the Pampers ad as if she did not understand the mechanics of how Alex had disappeared from the screen and was still wondering how to get him to come back.
He stood up and walked to the bar, ordering another beer. “And chips or something,” Will added. “It’s going to be a hell of a long night.”
“I CAN’T BELIEVE HE BROUGHT SOMEONE ELSE.”
Cassie had been saying that since the montage at the beginning of the Academy Awards, where Melanie something or other had stepped out of the same limousine as Alex. She had drunk her second glass of water in its entirety before Alex had even made it through the doors of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. “That bitch,” she whispered, all the while tracking Alex, only Alex.
It looked promising: in the first major award of the evening, Jack Green had won Best Supporting Actor, and had metaphorically toasted Alex with a wave of his little gold statuette. From there on, for two and a half hours, the name of the film would come up every now and then—cinematography, editing, sound mixing. Will had lost count of the number of Oscars actually won about an hour ago, when he’d finished his sixth and final beer. He didn’t know how Cassie was still sitting up, much less staying awake.
He put his head down on the table in front of her. “Wake me in the last fifteen minutes if he wins anything big,” Will said.
Cassie nodded, swallowed. She ran her finger through the salt at the bottom of the peanut bowl. “You know why they’re called Oscars?” she said some time later, to no one in particular. “A secretary who worked at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said it reminded her of her uncle Oscar. Isn’t that the stupidest thing . . . that you’ve ever heard?”
Because he heard the hitch in her voice, Will squinted open one eye.
Tears were running down Cassie’s cheeks; for all her ramrod-straight posture she was falling apart. He pushed his chair around the sawdusted floor until it touched the side of Cassie’s, and he pulled her into his arms. “It’s okay,” he said, wondering how long he’d been asleep, if Alex had already lost, if he’d just missed it.
“It’s not okay,” Cassie said against Will’s shoulder. “It’s never been okay. I ought to be sitting in the second row there. I ought to be the one whose face comes into the viewfinder every time the camera runs across his row.”
“Look at the bright side,” Will said. “You’d probably be fast asleep by now.”
“But I’d be fast asleep there,” Cassie said. “It’s the most important night of his life and I’m a thousand miles away.”
But you’re not, Will wanted to say. You’re here with me. He looked at her so intently that she stopped crying and simply stared back.
And then they announced the nominations for Best Actor.
As easily as she would step out of the front seat of a car, Cassie disengaged herself from Will. She shrugged off his arm and leaned her elbows on the table, inches closer to her husband. When the television replayed a short scene from The Story of His Life, Alex’s reflection shimmered in a pool of condensation caught on the table between Cassie’s flattened palms.
And the Oscar for Best Actor goes to . . .
Cassie stopped breathing. The televised light bathed her face, making its planes and angles shine.
Alex Rivers.
Cassie’s eyes gleamed, and with a palpable hunger she watched Alex walk up the aisle to the podium to accept the little statue. Will wondered if she realized that she was reaching toward the television with her right hand, as if she’d be able to touch him.
He didn’t give a damn about Alex Rivers’s Oscar, but he could not tear his gaze from Cassie. He’d thought she looked good when he first brought the truck around at his grandparents’, but before his eyes she had turned into a creature of grace and glow. When Alex was on that screen, she came alive.
Will had never been so angry in his life.
Four weeks ago when Cassie had shown up on his doorstep, he had seen the evidence of the illustrious Alex Rivers’s rage; he had understood the burden she’d been left with. But until now, Will had had no idea just how much of Cassie herself Alex had taken away.
Alex’s golden hair was brighter than the Oscar, and Cassie watched his hands flex around the statuette’s body. He was looking right at her.
“I’d like to thank Herb Silver, and Warner Brothers, and Jack Green and . . .” Cassie tuned out his actual words, watching instead the lines of his mouth, pink and sculpted, and imagining it coming over hers.
“But this award is for my wife, Cassie, who found me the script and convinced me that it was something the public would want to see, as well as something I needed to do. She’s with her father tonight because he’s ill, and when I spoke to her a few hours ago, she was upset that she couldn’t make it back here. Well, I was a little nervous, so I didn’t get to say everything I needed to before I hung up the phone. What I wanted to tell her is this: You could be halfway around the world, Cassie, and you’d still be with me.” He cleared his vision, now looking at the sea of faces staring up at him. “Thank you,” he said, and all too quickly, he was gone.
Cassie watched him accept his two other Oscars. It was clearly Alex’s night, and yet he never failed to mention her. The second time, he told the world he loved her. The third time, he whispered, “Hurry home,” so softly Cassie wondered if anyone else watching had even heard.
When Will pulled her up and propelled her out the door of the bar, she tried to picture what her night might have otherwise been like. She would have worn a froth of a gown—Alex would have seen to that—and every time his name was called he would have turned to her and lifted her out of her seat in his embrace. She could feel his strong arm, the itch of his tuxedo jacket under her fingertips, as she moved through Spago and The Gate with him, circulating the post-Oscar parties. She would hold two statues, still warm from where Alex’s hands had wrung their naked necks. Then she would go home and drop the awards onto the carpet and Alex would pour himself into her, hot, frantic, the very essence of success.
But instead Cassie walked into the cold March night, dizzied by the rash display of stars, and remembered her life for what she’d made of it.
Will watched her mouth turn down at the corners. She’d been moping through the whole broadcast, in spite of the fact that slick Alex had told the twenty million people watching that his entire life revolved around his wife. Hell, he’d even admitted she was out of town, although he’d candy-coated the circumstances. He was no fool, he knew she’d be watching. Will would have peevishly said the whole speech was calculated, if he hadn’t noticed with his own eyes that Alex had managed to put into words the exact way Cassie had been staring at that television screen.
Alex probably did love her, for whatever that was worth, and Cassie seemed to believe it carried considerable value. But Will thought it might kill him to actually see them together again. She’d probably cling to Alex as if her knees didn’t work and Alex would look at her like, well, like Will had been looking at her all night.
“That was something,” Will said noncommittally, unlocking the passenger door of the truck.
“Mmm,” Cassie said. She looked miserable.
“Your husband just cleaned out the Oscars,” Will muttered. “It would make sense for you to show a little emotion.” He grabbed Cassie’s shoulders, shaking her lightly. “He misses you. He’s crazy about you.
What the hell is your problem?”
Cassie shrugged, a delicate tremor that worked its way under Will’s palms. “I guess I still wish I had been there,” she admitted.
Will exploded. “Four weeks ago you couldn’t think of anything but getting away. You showed me the places where he’d kicked you in the ribs and hit you across the neck. Or have you forgotten about that side of your charming husband, just like he probably was hoping you would when you watched tonight, so you’d come crawling back?” He glared at Cassie, who was standing mute, her mouth slightly parted. “Believe me,” he said, “I know better than anyone. You can’t have the best of both worlds.”
She stared at him as if she’d never seen him before, and tried to take a step back. But Will would not let go of her. He wanted her to realize that he was right. He wanted Cassie to be able to slice away all the pretty packaging Alex had handed her tonight across the airwaves and see him for what he really was. He wanted her to look at him—Will—
the way she had looked at Alex.
Will tightened his grip on Cassie’s shoulders and pressed his lips against hers. Frustrated, his mouth ground into hers, his tongue forcing his way until, with the gentleness of a saint, she yielded under his touch.
Her arms crept around his waist slowly, a white flag, a selfless surrender that ripped at the edges of his conscience.
He stepped away abruptly, angry at himself for his lack of control, angry at Cassie for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Another man’s wife. Pregnant. Stomping to his side of the truck, he swung himself into the cab and turned over the ignition. He flicked on the headlights, spotlighting Cassie. She was frozen in the moment. Her hand was pressed to her mouth; her wedding ring gleamed like a prophecy. From this distance, Will could not be sure if she was wiping away the taste of him, or trying to hold it in.
ALEX RIVERS—THE MOST SOUGHT-AFTER ACTOR/DIRECTOR IN HOLywood at the moment, which was a little after four a.m.—sat in the dark in his Bel-Air study. He eyed the three gold statuettes he’d lined up in front of himself like decoys at a shooting gallery. What a night it had been. What a hell of a night.
He had never wished more fervently that he was drunk, but no matter how much champagne he’d consumed in honor of himself that evening, oblivion wasn’t coming. He had left the last party a little over an hour ago. When he’d walked out, Melanie was going to snort coke in the bathroom with a costume designer, and Herb was negotiating Alex’s rapidly rising salary with a huddle of producers. The snafus plaguing Macbeth were suddenly forgotten by the industry; Alex was a golden boy once again. When he paused at the threshold of the door, everyone was saying his name, but nobody even noticed he’d left.
He wondered if Cassie had been watching tonight, then lashed out at himself for even wondering.
This was his night. For Christ’s sake, how long had he been working toward this? How long had he been in the process of proving himself?
He ran his hands over the bald heads of the statues, amazed at the way they seemed to retain the warmth of human touch.
He picked up his first Oscar, weighing it in his palm as he would a baseball. Then his fingers closed around it. “This is for you, maman,”
he said, and he hurled it across the study with such force that it cut the wallpaper and dented the Sheetrock with its impact.
He picked up the second one, the one for his father, and threw it in the same direction, grunting with satisfaction as his fingers released the smooth metal.
His lips stretched in the imitation of a smile as he walked toward the third Oscar. Save the best for last. He gripped the narrow body, thinking of his dear, devoted wife, and he stretched back his arm.
He couldn’t do it. With a strange keening sound at the back of his throat, Alex fell heavily into the desk chair. He ran his fingers over the statuette as if in apology, as if he were feeling the soft curve of Cassie’s neck and the blunted edges of her hair. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes when they started to sting; he lowered his head to the desk.
Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Worst Husband. Alex had seen the parallel before where art imitated life, but never had it rocked him to the soul. His acceptance speeches tonight had been carefully written, plotted word by word to catch Cassie, wherever she was, and reel her back to him. He was only beginning to see how much he had really meant the things he said.
He could wake up tomorrow with a hundred movie offers and a going salary of twenty million per film, but it wouldn’t be enough. It would never be enough. He would trade it all and live in a cardboard box on the beach if he could rip out of himself the part of him that caused her pain.
In the shifting shadows of his study, Alex Rivers whispered aloud the secret that none of the glittering people still partying on Sunset Boulevard knew: He was a nobody.
Unless. Until.
She made him whole.
When the private line of the telephone rang beside his head, he knew he had conjured her. He picked up the receiver and waited to hear Cassie’s voice.
There was no way Alex could know the trouble Cassie had gone to to find a phone. It had meant sneaking past Will, who was pretending to be asleep on the floor but had let her go without a word. It meant taking Will’s truck, without permission, to the Catholic church and waking the priest and hoping her white skin could convince him of a fabricated emergency. It meant waiting through several false starts with her heart at the back of her throat until a South Dakota operator finally reached Bel-Air.
“Alex,” she whispered. Her word was an embrace. “Congratulations.”
It had been so long, and he was so shocked that his televised speech had actually brought her to him, that Alex could not speak at all for a moment. Then he hunched his shoulders forward, as if he could cradle Cassie’s voice with his own physical presence. “Where are you?” he asked.
She had been expecting this. She didn’t want to divulge anything;
she only wanted to hear Alex. “I won’t tell you,” Cassie said. “I can’t.
But I’m all right. And I’m very proud of you.”
Alex realized he was drinking in her voice, storing it inside himself to play again and again. “When are you coming back? What made you leave?” He reined in his emotions. “I could find you, you know,” he said carefully. “If I wanted to, I could.”
Cassie took a deep breath. “You could,” she said with a practiced bravado, “but you won’t.” She waited for him to contradict her, and when he didn’t she told him what he already knew. “I won’t come back because you want me to, Alex. I’ll only come back because I want to.”
It was a lie; if he’d broken down and begged her she would have taken the next plane to L.A. She was bluffing, and maybe Alex knew it too, but he also knew how much was at stake. Cassie had never hidden from him before, after all. And if ensuring a happy ending meant playing by her rules, he would do whatever she asked. So he swallowed his pride, his fear, and his failure. “Are you really all right?” he asked softly.
Cassie curled the phone cord around her wrist like a bracelet. “I’m okay,” she said. She glanced up to see the priest’s silhouette at the rectory door. “I have to go now.”
Alex panicked, gripping the phone more tightly. “You’ll call back?”
he pressed. “Soon?”
Cassie considered this. “I’ll call back,” she conceded, thinking about the baby and what Alex had a right to know. “I’ll call when I want you to come for me.”
She wanted him to come. She wanted him. “Are we talking days? Weeks?”
Alex asked. He let a grin dance under his words. “Because after tonight, my schedule’s a nightmare.”
Cassie smiled. “I’m sure you can prioritize,” she said. She hesitated before giving Alex a gift to keep through the months that would stretch out ahead. “I miss you,” she whispered, no longer smiling. “I miss you so much.” And she put down the phone before he could hear her fall apart.
Alex stared at his Oscars. The proofs of his success lay toppled on the floor, scarring the wood when they had landed. The last statuette stood beside the telephone. Cassie had severed the connection; all that remained was a dull dial tone. Alex did not notice when he began to cry. For an hour, he held the receiver like an amulet, even when the tuneless voice of an operator told him over and over to hang up and try again.