CHAPTER NINE
MICHAELA Snow, Alex Rivers’s publicist, met him in the parking lot of the hospital. “Alex, Alex, Alex,” she said, her heavy arms seeming to move of their own accord to wrap around his neck. “If I didn’t love you, I’d kill you.”
Alex kissed her cheek and embraced her as best he could—she weighed much more than he did, so his arms didn’t make it the whole way around her middle. “You only love me because I make you so much money,” he said.
“You’ve got me there,” she said. She snapped, and a small, thin man tumbled out of the back of her van. He held three brushes threaded between the fingers of one hand, and a sponge dabbed in pancake in the other. “This is Flaubert Halloran,” Michaela said. “Freelance makeup.”
“Flaubert,” the man repeated, in a voice that reminded Alex of the glide of a cat. “Like the writer.” He stuck the wooden ends of the brushes in his mouth like a seamstress’s pins and began to cover the bruise at the corner of Alex’s eye. “Nasty, nasty,” he said.
Michaela kept checking her watch. “Okay, Flo, that’s all.” She pulled Alex’s wrist, dragging him behind her toward the hospital. “I’ve got three major networks, People, Vanity Fair, and the Times expected to show. The story is that this is a charitable kind of thing you do every year, and only a leak to the press—thank you very much—has led to this coverage. Make something up about a long-lost cousin who died of leukemia.”
Alex grinned at her. “Or an illegitimate son?”
Michaela steered him through the glass doors of the hospital. “I’d Picture Perfect 93 murder you,” she said. She handed Alex a sheaf of publicity photos from Taboo and a gaggle of balloons in blue and gold, then shepherded him into an elevator. Michaela reached in to push the button to the seventh floor. “Remember, act shocked to see all the cameras, but recover quickly, and feed them a sob story that will win you another Oscar nomination.” She winked at him and waved, her tiny red nails blinking in the flesh of her palm. “Ciao,” she mouthed.
Act? he thought, his smile fading as the elevator doors closed before him. He was already acting. It had taken nearly every imaginative skill he had to meet Michaela in the parking lot and pretend that this was just like any other PR engagement. For years Alex had studiously avoided hospitals, for years he’d buried his memories of a New Orleans pediatric ward. As he moved through the halls, the familiar ammonia stench and the spartan white walls began to close in around him. He tensed the muscles of his arms, expecting to feel the prick of a needle, the drain of an IV.
He had been born with a hole in his heart, a condition that consigned him to a childhood on the sidelines. The backwoods GP who’d heard the murmur had referred Alex’s mother to Charity in the city, where a specialist could check the severity of the defect, but when she forgot the appointment—more than once—he told her her son would have to play it safe, rather than sorry. Don’t run, Alex had been told. Don’t exert yourself. He could remember watching other kindergartners race across the damp playground. He could remember closing his eyes and picturing his heart—a punctured, red, child’s valentine. When he was five and still couldn’t play outside, he listened to soap operas in the afternoons with his mother, who did not seem to notice or care that he was there. Once on the TV a lady with the bright hair of a fairy had pressed her cheek to a man’s bare chest and murmured, I love you with all my heart. After that, when Alex pictured his heart, he did not just imagine the hole. He also saw the extent of the damage: all the love he’d gathered for and from other people draining out, an unstoppable sieve.
No wonder, Alex had realized, blaming himself for his parents’ indifference in that way young children have of twisting outcomes and events. That was the first time Alex decided to be someone else. Rather than face the flaws in himself, he’d pretend he was a swashbuckling pirate, a mountain climber, the President. He pretended he lived in a normal family, that during dinner his parents asked him, How was your day? instead of hissing in angry Cajun French. And at age eight, when he was pronounced cured, he brought those fantasies to life, preferring someone strong and bright to the frightened boy he had been.
He convinced himself that he was impervious to pain, mettled of superheroic proportions. He could remember holding his palm over a burning candle, feeling the skin welt and take fire, telling himself that anyone who could survive such trying feats would not be affected by his mother’s disinterest, his father’s taunting. He got very good at believing what he forced himself to believe. In fact, thirty years later, Alex had had so much practice at dissembling, he was hard-pressed to remember what would remain if all his careful masks fell away. With the self-control for which he had become famous, Alex shook free of his memories and steeled himself to the situation at hand. This was a hospital, true, but it had nothing to do with him; it meant nothing at all to him. He’d do his job, he’d pretend he liked being there, and he’d get the hell out.
It didn’t surprise Alex that to reach the kids he first had to struggle through a knot of doctors and nurses. He smiled politely, covertly glancing over their bobbing heads to find the quickest route to the patient wards, so that he’d look like he’d been there many times before.
They tugged at his coat, telling him how much they had loved this movie or that. They all called him Alex, as if sitting in a darkened theater with his image for two hours at a time made them think they’d known him all their lives.
“Thanks,” he murmured. “Yes, thank you.” He managed to make it down the hallway to the pediatric cancer ward, when the cameras rounded the corner. He looked up long enough to register faint disapproval, maybe a trace of surprise, but he recovered and smiled politely and said some children were expecting him.
Michaela hadn’t prepared him for the sight of the kids. One goddamned glance and he was five years old again, shivering in a thin johnny while he waited for the doctors to read him his future. Had he looked like this?
The children peppered the floor in their pajamas, some trailing open robes. Their eyes were too large for their heads. They were carbon copies of each other: thin, haunted, bald; evoking images of concentration Picture Perfect 95 camps. He could not even tell the boys from the girls until they spoke.
“Mr. Rivers,” one little girl lisped. She couldn’t have been more than four, but he was no good at judging these things, and he knelt down so that she could climb onto his back. She smelled of medicine and urine and surrender. “Here,” she said, dropping a wet cracker into the pocket of his tweed jacket. “I saved this one for you.”
He would have thought they were too young to see his films, but nearly every kid there had seen Speed, the one about the test pilot. The boys wanted to know if he’d really gotten to fly that F-14, and one even asked if the actress who played his girlfriend had tasted as good as she looked.
He gave balloons to the smaller children and autographed photos to anyone who asked. When a thirteen-year-old named Sally came closer for hers, he leaned toward her conspiratorially. “You know, the best way to remember the places you’ve been is to kiss a pretty girl wherever you go,” he said, just loud enough for the tape recorders to pick up his words. “Think you can help me?”
She blushed furiously and offered her cheek, but at the moment Alex went to kiss her she turned and landed her lips right on his mouth.
“Wow,” she breathed, holding her fingers over her lips. “I gotta call my ma.”
It had struck Alex at the moment the flashbulbs went off that not only had he given Sally her first kiss, but probably her last. He felt himself starting to sweat as the room swam around him, and he had to take several deep breaths to steady his nerves. Physically, he had gotten better; physically, he had been lucky. But there were all kinds of hidden dangers in childhood, things that reared up and stole your innocence before you were old enough to fight back. He wondered which was worse—a child whose spirit could not outlive a broken body; or, like himself, a man whose apparent health hid a soul that had died years before.
“JESUS CHRIST, JOHN,” ALEX SAID, STRETCHING HIS ARMS OUT OVER the back seat of the Range Rover. “Unless she was running off to meet some other guy, what’s the big secret?”
John looked at him in the rearview mirror. “I don’t know, Mr. Rivers,” he said. “I promised the missus and all.”
Alex leaned forward and grinned. “Ten bucks more a week for you if you give me the town where you dropped her off. Twenty bucks if you come completely clean.”
John chewed his upper lip. “You won’t tell her I said nothing?”
Alex crossed his fingers over his chest. “And hope to die,” he said.
“She went to the movies.”
“That’s the big secret?”
John smiled at him. “She went to your movies. Some festival in Westwood.”
Alex started to laugh. She could have watched anything he’d made—from the rushes to the uncut versions to the screen copies themselves—in the privacy of her own home. But then again, maybe that’s why she didn’t want him to know. Maybe the real show was seeing other people’s reactions to Alex on camera.
“You have a copy of today’s paper, John?” Alex reached for the Times as John handed it through the partition in the Plexiglas. He skimmed through the entertainment section until he reached the movie listings.
Desperado, Antony and Cleopatra, and of course, The Story of His Life. He smiled. If Cassie wanted to see him at work, he could make it that much easier.
He asked John to turn off the radio and he closed his eyes, tuning out the world and in to his senses. Before the film rolled, he always found a quiet corner where he could slip into character. It was a matter of breathing; of concentrating so hard on the pattern and then altering it just slightly to match the way his character would.
Where breathing started, life followed. Antony drank in the air, as if taking in the entire world with one single breath. When he opened his eyes he saw a world of green and gold that had been spread at his feet. He murmured the names of the exits on the highway in a precise British accent. He did not deign to look at John; he would not do so with his servants. He rolled down his window and let the wind gust over his face, blowing his hair back and scalding his eyes. He touched the smooth leather seats and thought of the curves of his queen.
At the apartment, when Alex made no move to get out of the car, John shrugged and ran up the walk to collect Mrs. Rivers. He was used to this sort of thing from his employer. It wasn’t his nature to talk, but sometimes he’d pick up Mr. Rivers and drop off a completely different man.
Cassie was laughing as she stepped into the car. “Move,” she said.
“You’re hogging the back seat.” Alex was sitting in the center, and he stared at her but made no effort to shift to one side or the other. Assuming this was some game, she flopped down beside him, landing half on his thigh.
She felt his hand on the back of her neck, gentle and tense at the same time, as if even a caress could serve to remind her how easily he could overpower her. She narrowed her eyes and turned to him. “What in God’s name did they do to you at that hospital?”
His fingers tightened almost to the point of pain, and she cried out softly before she could stop herself. He was looking directly at her but she had the sense he was seeing someone else. Panicked, she clawed at Alex’s wrist. “Cut it out,” she whispered, and before she could ask him again what was the matter, his body pinned her to the seat and his mouth seared over hers in a kiss that was not like Alex at all.
He’s acting.
She dug her nails into his arms and bit down on his lip until she had enough force to push him away. “Stop it,” she ordered. “Just stop it now.”
For a moment he froze, his eyes paling to the gray of Arctic ice and then slowly draining of life until all that sat across from Cassie was a shell. And then something shuddered its way up his body, moving like a blush, bringing color to his skin and settling as a spark in his eyes.
He was Alex again, and he shrugged. “You didn’t have to bite me,” he said. “I just figured you’d like a firsthand performance, too.”
Still cautious, Cassie curled up at the far side of the back seat. “Who told you where I went?” she accused, her eyes sliding to John in the front.
Alex reached for her hand and laced his fingers with hers. “I know everything about you,” he said, smiling.
She was beginning to think that he did. He was back to being the Alex she’d grown accustomed to in the past few days, funny and gentle and comfortable as a worn armchair. Cassie wondered if this was just another character he’d played along the line, one he kept himself wrapped in most of the time.
She shook her head to clear it. What was she thinking? She had seen Alex with his guard down—when he talked about his parents, when he tried to teach her karate on the shallows of the beach, when he reached for her in his sleep and whispered her name. It was impossible to act all the time; it was ridiculous to think that what she saw was not real. She squeezed his hand. “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t usually bite.”
He turned slightly, patting his side, and she willingly slid closer to him. “But what made you pick Antony, for God’s sake?”
Alex smiled. “You used to love Antony when we were first married,”
he said.
Cassie opened her mouth to object, but changed her mind. Alex was right. He did know everything about her, and at the present moment she still knew next to nothing, and the only choice she had was to believe him.
They drove for fifteen minutes in silence, and then Cassie felt Alex kiss the top of her head. “You’re probably just nervous about meeting the staff all over again,” he said.
Cassie stared out the window. She knew she was passing trees and roads and flowering bushes, but the car was moving so quickly that the world was just puddled in colors; she could pick nothing out individually. “Yes,” she said. “That must be it.”
THE HOUSE STOOD AT THE END OF A MILE-LONG DRIVEWAY UP A winding hill in Bel-Air, a white mansion with wrought-iron grillwork and a slate roof. The front porch supported a second-story veranda where floor-length lace curtains blew through open French doors. Roses climbed up a trellis on the left side of the house; heliotrope wound its way up the right. In the distance Cassie could see formal gardens and two smaller houses, little white replicas of the main house. It looked for all the world like a Louisiana plantation.
“My God,” she whispered, hearing the gravel crunch beneath her sneaker as she stepped out of the car. “I can’t possibly live here.”
Alex took her by the elbow and guided her up the porch steps. John opened the front door, a magnificent oak panel carved with the head of a lion.
The parlor was an overwhelming room with a cathedral ceiling, a double curved staircase, and rose marble floors. Cassie stared down at her feet, which rested in the reflected pool of light from a multicolored cathedral-style window over the door. Alex’s initials spread like a stain over her left shoe and her ankle.
“Cassie,” he said, and her head snapped up. “John has told everybody Picture Perfect 99 about your . . . little problem, and they’ll go out of their way to help you today before we go to Scotland.”
Cassie ran her eyes over the line of figures that stood at the bottom of the left-hand staircase like a row of toy soldiers. There was John, of course, who was not only the driver and bodyguard, apparently, but a majordomo of sorts. There was a man with a pastry apron wrapped around his large frame, a young girl in a simple black and white maid’s uniform. Another man stood off to the side, as if he was unwilling to be associated with the household staff. He stepped forward and offered his hand. “Jack Arbuster,” he said, smiling. “Your husband’s secretary.”
She wondered what in the world Alex needed a secretary for when he already had an agent, a publicist, and a personal assistant. She thought maybe he was in charge of answering fan mail, or paying the utility bills.
“I need to catch up on a few things before you fly out,” Jack said to Alex. He winked at Cassie apologetically.
Alex put his arm around her waist. “Give me an hour,” he said to Jack. “I’ll meet you in the library.” As Jack walked off, Cassie followed him with her eyes, trying to see what was around the corner. Tugging her sideways, Alex pulled Cassie past the maid, the cook, and John.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you as much as I can, and if worse comes to worst I’ll leave you with the blueprints till you can find your way around.”
He took her to a library paneled in cherry and filled with first editions of hundreds of British and American classics, pointing out one entire shelf filled with copies of scholarly journals and magazines that featured articles Cassie herself had written. He led her through a dining room whose table could seat thirty, a projection room with a pristine screen and ten overstuffed couches. In the kitchen, she stuck her head in the stainless steel refrigerator and counted the copper pots that were racked above the marble island, and was given a bite-size apple turnover by the cook as a parting gift.
There were six bathrooms and ten bedrooms, each decorated with pale silk wallpaper and French lace curtains. There were three sitting rooms and a recreation center with pinball machines, a bowling lane, a pool table, and a big-screen TV. There was a whole wing she hadn’t even seen when Alex brought her upstairs to the master bedroom. He opened the double doors to a suite, comfortably furnished with breezy striped sofas and thick Persian rugs. A stereo was recessed into the wall, in addition to a television and a VCR. Flowers were arranged in bowls on several tables, beautiful blooms that brought out the lavender and blue accents of the room and that, Cassie knew, were not native to California.
“We must spend a lot of time up here,” Cassie said, stepping behind Alex through an adjoining door that revealed a tremendous bird’s-eye maple sleigh bed.
Alex smiled at her. “Well,” he said, “we try.”
Cassie stepped up to the bed and traced the whorls in the patterns of wood. “This is bigger than a king-size, isn’t it?”
Alex flopped onto the mattress belly-first. “I had it made up special.
I have this theory about beds—they’re like goldfish bowls. You know how if you keep goldfish in a bowl, they stay the size of your thumb?
Well, when you move them into a pond, like we have out back, they grow ten times that size. So I figure the bigger the bed, the less I’ll be stunting my growth.”
Cassie laughed. “I think you’ve passed puberty.”
Alex grabbed her wrist and pulled her down beside him. “You’ve noticed?”
She rolled toward him, staring at the light beard that already broke the smooth line of his jaw. “Where’s my lab?”
“Out back. The little white building—the second one you come to.
The first one is where John lives.”
Cassie frowned. “He doesn’t stay in the house like Mrs. Alvarez?”
Alex sat up. “We like having the place to ourselves at night,” he said simply.
Cassie walked to the gaping fireplace that stood opposite the bed, then fingered the empty brandy decanter on the mantel. Aurora, she thought, and she felt Alex’s hands on her shoulders. “It’s only for show,”
he whispered, as if he could read her mind.
Cassie spun around. “Go earn your keep,” she said, smiling. “If I’m not back in an hour, send out the National Guard.”
When Alex left, Cassie stood at the open French doors, looking out over the suburbs of L.A. and the blue swells of mountains. A gardener she hadn’t met was rooting through a bed of fragile lilies, and in the driveway John was polishing the rear fender of the Range Rover. She located her laboratory, just to the left of a profusion of flowers planted in the shape of a fleur-de-lis. Beyond the garden was a white limestone path that led down a sloping hill toward something she could not see.
She flew down the opposite staircase, the one she hadn’t walked up, just to see if it felt any different. She walked out the door and tested a rocking chair and the hanging porch swing before running down the limestone path like a child. When she was far enough away from the house to be certain nobody was looking, she spread her arms to the sun and whirled around, laughing and smiling and skipping to beat the band.
There was a landscaped pool with a man-made waterfall that Alex had forgotten to tell Cassie about, and a genuine maze made of thick boxwood hedges. She wandered inside, wondering if she knew her way to the center and out again. The sharp corners of the maze came up quickly as she ran through the narrow aisles, scratching her arms on fresh-cut branches. Dizzy, she let herself sink to the cool grass. She lay on her back, overwhelmed by Alex’s house and Alex’s grounds.
If a bug hadn’t crawled up the inside of her arm, she never would have noticed the stone. She rolled over, which brought her eye-level to the cuttings from the boxwood. Neatly hidden inside the hedge was a small pink slab of rock.
It was not oval, not really; it was too rough-hewn and lopsided for that. Cassie reached under the brambles, feeling the branches tangle around her wrists like bracelets. It was rose quartz, and she had brought it with her all the way from the East Coast. Chiseled crudely on its flattest side were the letters CCM and the year 1976.
She could not remember why she had hidden it under the boxwood in the middle of Alex’s maze. She could not remember if she’d ever told Alex it was there. But she realized it was the first piece of evidence she truly believed; the first thing she’d seen since losing her memory that convinced her she had once belonged here.
Cassie rolled onto her back and held the rock on her chest. She stared into the sun until this beautiful world Alex had offered her went black, and then she whispered Connor’s name.
ON NOVEMBER 1, 1976, A LITTLE AFTER SEVEN IN THE MORNING, Connor’s father walked into the kitchen where he and his mother were eating cream of wheat and killed them both with a 12-gauge shotgun.
Between the time it took Cassie to call the police about the shots and to run through the path in the woods to Connor’s house, Mr. Murtaugh had managed to turn the gun on himself.
Connor’s father had blown himself clear into the living room, but Mrs. Murtaugh lay on the floor. The back of her head was gone. Connor had fallen nearly on top of her, and there was a tremendous hole where his chest had been.
With a calm born of shock, Cassie sat down beside Connor and pulled him into her lap. She touched her fingers to his lips, still warm. She thought about kissing him, like she had the night before at the graveyard, but could not bring herself to do it. The police and the paramedics dragged Cassie away from Connor’s body. She sat in a corner of the kitchen with a rough wool blanket wrapped around her shoulders, answering the same questions over and over. No, she had not been present at the scene of the crime. No, she hadn’t seen Mr. Murtaugh this morning. No, no, no.
Everyone knew how close Cassie and Connor had been, and she was excused from school until after the funeral, but that didn’t keep her from hearing the whispers. They said he pulled the trigger on himself with his own toe. Couldn’t get himself a job, and turned to the bottle. Killed an innocent boy like that, in the prime of his life. At least the problems in her own house she could see coming. Connor’s family had been rotting beneath its candy surface, festering where no one could see.
The day of the funeral it snowed. Connor didn’t have a will, so his body was disposed of the way his parents’ bodies had been; he was cremated. The ashes were blown over Moosehead Lake. Cassie watched as the urn holding Mrs. Murtaugh was opened, then the one holding her husband. When they spread Connor’s ashes, Cassie started to scream.
No one could stop her; not even when her father clamped a gloved hand over her mouth did the sound diminish in intensity. It wasn’t right that for the rest of forever Connor and his father would be mixed together. She wanted them to do it over. She wanted them to give Connor to her.
She felt snow freeze her eyes wide open when what was left of Connor was given to the wind. A breath of gray, insubstantial and shifting like smoke, screened the sky and disappeared just as quickly. It was as if Connor had been a figment of Cassie’s imagination. As if he had never existed at all.
She slipped away from the other people paying their respects and,
still wearing her good dress and her snow boots, started to run around Moosehead Lake. It was tremendous, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to get very far, but by the time she sank to her knees in the snow, gasping, she was a mile away from the site of the funeral. She let the snow melt through the thin fabric of her skirt, cold enough to paralyze.
She dug with her fingers into the frozen ground until her nails were cracked and bleeding.
She realized that although she had tried for years to ease her mother’s pain, she would never be able to ease Connor’s. So she would do the next best thing: she would hurt for him. She carried the piece of rose quartz home with her and sat in the garage near her father’s tool chest, using a hammer and an awl to make the headstone Connor hadn’t been given. She worked until her hands cramped. Then she curled her arms around her knees and rocked herself back and forth, wondering why, since both their hearts had been ripped out, she wasn’t dying too.
FRIDAY EVENING, WILL FLYING HORSE WAS SITTING ON HIS NEW green couch watching a game show and eating a partially cooked TV dinner when the electricity went out. “Shit,” he said, watching the blinking clock on his VCR fade into nothing. He set his plate beside him on the couch and tried to remember where the fuse box was.
It wasn’t as bad as it could have been; it was dinnertime, so there was enough light outside to see his way into the basement. The strange thing was that none of the breakers had been tripped. He walked back upstairs and stepped onto the front porch of his house. In the windows next door and across the street he could see a kitchen light burning steady; a mute dog jogging across a TV. It was just him.
He called the electric company, but could only record his address and problem on a voice-mail system. God only knew how long it would take for workers to get the message. So he started pulling candles out of his kitchen cabinets, ugly red egg-shaped ones that a former girlfriend had bought him one year for his birthday. He carried four of them into the living room and lit them with a book of matches he had in his pocket.
As the sun went down, a shadow crept across him. The fringes of the medicine bundle above his head stirred, restless in the quiet. Will listened to the rhythm of his own pulse. There was nothing to do but wait.
ELIZABETH, THE MAID, CARRIED INTO THE BEDROOM A SUITCASE THAT was bigger than she was. “Will you need a hanging bag, too?”
Cassie didn’t know. “I guess I will,” she said, and the maid immediately turned to leave. “Wait,” she called. She furrowed her brow. “I can’t find the closets.”
Elizabeth smiled. She walked through the suite and the bedroom into the short hallway that led to the green marble bathroom. When she leaned her shoulder against the wall, Cassie was amazed to see the wallpaper spring open to reveal a hidden closet. “Yours,” Elizabeth said, and then she did the same thing on the other side. “Mr. Rivers’s.”
She walked out of the room, leaving Cassie to stare at the rows of sweaters and blouses and furs that belonged to her. The closet was bigger than the housekeeper’s quarters at the apartment. Cassie had never seen so many clothes in one place.
She began to pull things she thought she should pack from the drawers—comfortable turtlenecks and cotton cardigans, underwear and extra bras and a small quilted bag for her makeup. She wanted to take a pair of loafers from the bottom of the stack of shoe boxes, but she thought she might be able to get to them without removing the boxes on top. She slid the box out halfway, trying to wedge the loafers under the lid, but the support gave out and the contents of her closet came tumbling down.
Surrounded by a mess of lingerie and high heels and bush jackets, she almost missed finding the tiny compartment. She’d pushed against it and its latch sprang free. It was another hidey-hole that worked on the same principle as her closet. It was tiny, no bigger than a breadbox.
Cassie wondered if that was where she kept her jewelry.
Inside was a stack of paperback romances, the glitzy kind that showed a half-dressed woman bent under a pirate on the front cover, the kind an anthropologist would never be caught dead reading. Cassie laughed out loud. Was this her big secret? What did Alex keep in his compartment? Hustler?
She picked up a handful and leafed through the titles. Save Me Again. The Fire and the Flower. Love’s Burning Flames. Maybe Alex made her hide them. It wouldn’t do for the public to find out that the wife of America’s leading man read these things in her spare time.
A box was trapped in the corner behind the stack of books. Cassie identified it by sight, its pink cover open, one of its two foil-wrapped tests still cradled inside. First Response. For use the first day of your missed period.
She glanced outside the closet, into the stunning green bathroom.
She could clearly see herself bent over the vanity of the sink, waiting the requisite three minutes. She recalled the way the small pink circle had crept its way upward from the swab of the test kit. Pink, Pregnant. White, Not Pregnant. She had cried into the sink, her hands on the fourteen-karat fixtures, surprised by how cold real gold could be.
Cassie sank down onto the pile of fallen clothes, clothes Alex had bought her, clothes that matched all the trappings of a life like this.
She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, trying to push away the image of the graveyard at St. Sebastian’s, and what had driven her there.
IT WAS THE NIGHT ALEX WAS SCHEDULED TO FLY TO SCOTLAND FOR on-location shooting, and he was in one of his moods. She had learned to gauge him by his eyes: the darker they turned, the further away she stayed. It had been months since the last time. She should have known. At dinner, Alex kept drumming his knife along the edge of the table. It made a dull, thudding noise against the tablecloth and Cassie’s heart took up its rhythm. “How did it go today?” she asked.
Alex clattered the knife against the edge of his plate. “It is over budget; it is being directed by a moron; it is barely a week into production.” He ran his hands through his hair. “Thank you so much for bringing it up.”
Cassie sat back in her seat and concentrated on keeping her mouth shut and eating with the minimal amount of noise. She had found out today about the baby and she wanted to tell Alex before he left, but maybe this wasn’t the time. She had to catch him at the right moment. She had to be able to make him see that it wasn’t lousy timing; it was going to change their lives. It was going to give them a second chance.
Alex pushed back his chair. “I have to pack. I’ve got less than an hour.” Cassie glanced at his plate, full of food he’d pushed around but barely eaten.
“I’ll make a sandwich for you to take on the road,” she said, but Alex had already left the room.
In the three years since it had begun, Cassie had become very good at staying out of Alex’s way. After all, it was a big house, and with the staff gone for the night no one would think it strange if she went down to her lab at three in the morning, or decided to finish a book in the library until the sun came up. But her instincts weren’t sharp that night; she had spent too much time during the day drawing rosy images of a little boy with Alex’s silver eyes. She walked to the bedroom and sat in the middle of the bed, where she could watch Alex pack. Looking at him would be like getting a glimpse of her baby. “Do you want me to get together your shaving kit?” Alex shook his head. She reached for a sweater he’d tossed into the bedroom. “I’ll fold for you,” she offered, and she started, arm over arm, but Alex’s hand caught her wrist.
“I said I’d do it,” he muttered. Something was eating away at Alex from the inside, something that had been part of him long before she’d ever met him. It was what made him the consummate actor, although nobody else in the world knew it. They saw the pain, but after Alex had cloaked it in another character’s actions. Only Cassie had looked at him when his open eyes went blind; only Cassie had pressed her hands to his chest and felt the skin stretched over a heart swollen with rage. She loved him more than anything in the world. Even more than herself—
hadn’t she proved that? She knew that even if she couldn’t heal him this time, the next time he hurt she would be able to. That’s why Alex had come to her. She was the only person who could make it better. But it was a double bind. She was the only one close enough to Alex to help, but that also brought her underfoot. It wasn’t his fault that she got in the way. When it happened, she could only blame herself, forgive him. Alex sank down beside her on the bed. “I don’t want to go to fucking Scot- land,” he said, his voice rough. “I want to take some time off. I want this goddamn Oscar broadcast to be over and I want to drop off the face of the earth.” “So do it,” Cassie urged, rubbing the muscles in his shoulders. “Put Macbeth on hold, and come with me to Kenya.”
Alex snorted. “And what the hell will I do while you play in your sandbox?”
Cassie flinched. “Read screenplays,” she suggested. “Get a tan.” Alex began throwing clothes in the suitcases that he’d laid open on the floor.
“Today I found out about the pre-Oscar interview we taped with Barbara Walters.” He sighed. “She’s putting me on with some comedian and Noah Fallon.” Cassie stared at him blankly. “For Christ’s sake, Noah Fallon. He’s up for Best Actor too.” Alex sat on the floor, his knees drawn up to his chest.
“She’s airing me second. Fucking second. Fallon’s going last.” Cassie smiled at him. “At least you’re in the broadcast,” she said. Alex turned away from her. “In the past three years, when Barbara Walters’s Oscar special features a nominee in the third slot, that nominee has won. It’s like a goddamn barometer of how the Academy’s votes will go.” Unsure of what to say, Cassie slipped off the bed and wrapped her arms around him. “I’m not going to win,” Alex said, his words falling softly onto her shoulder.
“You’ll win,” she whispered fiercely. “You’re going to win.” In the way that it usually happened, Alex changed in the space of a heartbeat. He stood, grabbing Cassie by her wrists and shaking her so hard her hair fell down around her face and her neck snapped back. “How do you know?” he demanded, his breath hot against her cheek. “How do you know?”
Words caught in Cassie’s throat, the ones she always wanted to defend herself with that never slipped past her clenched jaw. Alex shook her again, and then pushed her to the floor so she was at his feet. She tripped over the luggage as she fell, and struck her head against the closet door, feeling a wound open that did not hurt nearly as much as the shame that ran through her. She had just enough time to see Alex’s foot coming at her, and instead of curling into a ball as she usually did, she rolled so he caught her square on her back, the pain running up her spine but sparing her stomach. “My baby,” she breathed, and then her hands flew to her mouth and she prayed that Alex hadn’t heard. But he was already facing away from her, his head in his hands. He knelt down at her side, cradling her the way he always did when the anger had subsided, his hands running over her with the tenderness that was a Siamese twin to his rage. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I didn’t mean to.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said, because she knew her lines, but for the first time she didn’t believe her own words. Anger started to seep from a crack deep inside her that had been patched over too often to hold fast. Goddamn you, she thought.
She knew Alex needed her, but she also realized she could not stay. She couldn’t risk the safety of this child made by her and Alex. She would do for her baby what in three years she had not done for herself. When John buzzed in over the intercom, Alex left Cassie’s side and threw all his clothes, suits included, into the suitcases. He dragged the luggage outside the door and then leaned over to kiss her. “I love you,” he said, the words swollen. He laid his hand over hers where it rested on her stomach. She waited until she heard the car crunch out of the driveway and then she grabbed her jacket and walked out of Alex’s house. The world swam, and she had to concentrate with every footstep to convince herself she was doing what had to be done. She told herself that if she went away now while Alex was out of town, maybe it wouldn’t hurt him quite as much. She walked down the street with no destination in mind. She would have gone to Ophelia’s but that was the first place Alex would look when he found her missing; and there was nobody else she could turn to. It was Cassie’s word against Alex’s gold-plated media image, and like her Greek prophetess namesake, no one would believe her when she spoke the truth. SHE HAD BEEN SO CLOSE. CASSIE’S FISTS WERE BALLED INTO HER LAP, she was crying, and she realized that she had betrayed herself by losing her memory. Otherwise, she would have been able to stay one step ahead of Alex.
He had been supportive and considerate, probably because she hadn’t started shrieking accusations to the press the minute she’d laid eyes on him at the police station. Not that she ever would do such a thing;
Alex should have understood that much. She didn’t mean to hurt him—
she had never wanted to—she only wanted to protect herself. She’d never thought that the two were mutually exclusive.
However, Alex did, so he had found her. But the life he had spread before her like a winning hand was not what it had seemed. She’d live in Alex’s magnificent castles, smile into his smoky eyes while the cameras flashed, spend the hollow parts of the night blossoming under his touch, and still, it could happen again.
In the past, even Alex’s promises hadn’t prevented a reoccurrence.
She didn’t have a choice. She wished he could see that as clearly as she did.
He would be coming into the bedroom any minute to pack for the Friday night red-eye flight, but she was not going to Scotland. Cassie stood up, grabbing an old canvas tote bag with the name of a public television station written across it. She threw as many pieces of clothing as she could inside and then grabbed a handful of underwear and shoved it into the gaps. She pulled a baseball cap scrawled with the name of Alex’s production company low on her head and she walked out the door of the bedroom.
It was not a prison, at least not in the usual sense of the word, so the people Cassie passed on the way out did not think of stopping her and asking where she was going. She walked by the pool and the maze and the flower gardens. She went out a back gate of the scrolled iron fence and cut across a neighbor’s lush yard, trespassing until she came to a street.
She walked faster and faster, wary of being followed. After a while, she started to run. Her footsteps grew heavier, but she forced herself to keep going. And hours later, when she thought she was safe, she sank to her knees, and she made herself remember.
1989-1993 PETRELS, hearty Arctic birds, live on the highest parts of the cliffs. From their proud perches they can swoop down on the birds that are not nearly as overweening, calling out songs of their magnificence which carry over the freezing seas.
Once, there lived a petrel who was so arrogant he could not find a mate among his flock. He decided that he would marry a human, and conjured a spell to give himself the form of a man. He sewed together the thickest sealskins to make a stunning parka, and he preened until he was remarkably handsome. Of course, his eyes were still the eyes of a petrel, so he made himself dark glasses to finish his disguise, and looking like this, he set his kayak into the water to find a wife. At the same time, a widower lived on a quiet shore with his daughter Sedna, a girl so beautiful that word of her form and features spread far beyond the tribe. Many men came to woo her, but Sedna would not marry. None of their pleas could break through her pride to reach her heart. One day a handsome man arrived in a splendid sealskin parka. He did not drag his kayak onto the beach, but hovered at the edge of the breaking waves and called to Sedna. He started to sing to her. “Come, love,” he chanted, “to the land of the birds, where you will never be hungry, where you will rest on soft bear skins, where you will have feathers to clothe you and ivory necklaces, where your lamps will always be full of oil and your pot full of meat.”
The song wrapped itself around Sedna’s soul and drew her closer to the kayak. She sailed with the stranger over the sea, away from her home and her father. For a while she was happy. The petrel made their home on a rocky cliff and caught fish for her daily, and Sedna was so enchanted with her husband that she never thought to truly look around her. But one day the petrel’s glasses slipped off his nose and Sedna looked into his eyes. She glanced away and saw a home built not of thick pelts but of rotting fish skins. She slept not on a bear skin but on the tough hide of a walrus. She felt the icy needles of the ocean spray and knew she had married a man who was not what she had thought he was. Sedna cried with grief, and although the petrel loved her, he could not stop her tears. A year passed, and Sedna’s father came to visit. When he reached the cliff where she lived, the petrel was out hunting for fish, and Sedna begged her father to take her back home. They ran back down to his kayak and set out into the sea. They had not been paddling long when the petrel came back to his nest. He shouted for Sedna, but his cry of pain was swallowed by the howl of wind and sea. Other petrels found him and told him where Sedna was. He spread his arms, his wingspan blotting out the sun, and flew toward the boat that held Sedna and her father. As he watched them paddle even more furiously, the petrel grew angry. He beat his wings into the wind, creating currents, forcing a surge of icy waves. A storm raged up at his cries, and the sea became so frenzied the boat rocked from side to side. Sedna’s father realized the bird was so powerful that even the ocean was furious at the loss of the petrel’s wife. He knew that to save himself, he had to sacrifice his daughter.
He threw Sedna into the frigid water. She sputtered and splashed, her skin blue with the cold. She managed to grab at the side of the boat tightly with her fingers, but her father, terrified by the thunderous beating of the petrel’s wings above his head, hit at her hands with the kayak paddle. Sedna’s fingertips broke off and fell into the sea, where they turned into whales and dove away. Resur- facing, Sedna caught hold of the gunwhale again, but her father struck out a second time. The middle digits of her fingers shattered like ice and fell into the water to become the seals. One more time she managed to reach the boat, but her father batted at her hands until the third joints broke off and became walruses, and Sedna sank heavy to the bottom of the sea. Sedna became a mighty spirit who controls the sea creatures that were born of her fingers. Sometimes she whips together storms and crashes kayaks against the rocks. Sometimes she causes famines by luring the seals away from the hunters. Never does she break the surface of the water, where she might again encounter the petrel.
—Eskimo Indian legend