All for a Story (41 page)

“In a way.”

“Applesauce,” she said. “I’ve never known anybody more straitlaced than you.”

“What I mean is that . . . I worry about you, Monica. I know you don’t want me to, and I probably don’t have a right to, but . . . I can’t help it. What happened tonight, well, that’s just part of the danger you’re in.”

Her face lost its flirtatious edge as he spoke, sobering with every word. “I know, Max.”

“Do you know what’s really at stake here?”

“My eternal soul?” The edge of mockery was back. “If it eases your conscience any, I did a lot of thinking myself tonight. And I think I’m ready to come clean.”

He let her words settle for a moment, seeing before him a new creation, fresh as the snowflakes on her shoulder. She had that sense of bewilderment he’d seen on the faces of all those who’d experienced redemption at Sister Aimee’s altar, and he could only hope that somehow, despite his bumbling, the grace of God had become real to her within the walls of the jail cell.

He burst forth with an enthusiastic “Darling!” and took her
up into his arms. She felt close to weightless, and he swung a full circle before finally setting her softly down. “You can’t imagine what it means to me.”

Her laughter came in short breaths. “I knew you’d appreciate my decision. Tony wasn’t nearly as enthusiastic.”

“Tony?” Why would Tony care?

“But I told him it was settled. He wasn’t convinced, but he took my picture anyway, and I want you to run it. I’ll leave it to you, or even Tony, to write the story. I don’t trust myself to be objective. Headline it whatever you want. ‘Monkey Bars’ —that’s clever —or ‘Monkey Unmasked.’ Run it right next to my column if you want. You’re the boss. But I want a byline on my last column. I think I owe that to the girls.”

She was talking at such a rapid pace, one puff of steam after another floating away with each new direction. Max struggled to make sense, feeling like he was experiencing a long stretch of conversation from a movie, waiting for a title card to interrupt with clarification. His heart longed for an answer, longed to know that she fully shared his faith, because he wanted her to share his life. The more she talked, the less he understood, so he started back at the beginning.

“Tony took your picture?”

Startled, she backtracked her thoughts. “Yeah. In the jail itself. So it’s a news story, my arrest, but also works on a more symbolic level, don’t you think? A way to expose Monkey Business and kill her off.”

“I didn’t know you wanted to kill her off.”

“I didn’t, either. But things change.”

Just then the door to the police station opened, and a man and woman emerged, walking in stony silence. The man he recognized, and his hand ached remembering the feel of his face slamming
against it. The woman was quite pretty, with a sweet face pinched in disappointment. He could see, too, from her posture, that what first appeared as an unattractive girth was, in fact, an advanced pregnancy. Monica tracked their every step with her eyes, though they —Charlie and his wife —looked steadily forward.

“I should say something,” Monica said so quietly her words were carried by the steam from her breath.

“Why?”

“She should know. She deserves to know.”

Max took her by the shoulders and turned her to look at him. “She knows.” In his heart, he knew he spoke the truth. “Maybe not about you specifically, but you saw her face. She knows.”

Tears pooled in Monica’s eyes. “I want her to know that I’m sorry.”

“God knows that you’re sorry. He will forgive you. Her? Maybe not.”

The couple had turned left upon reaching the sidewalk, and Monica craned her neck to look behind Max, watching. After a bit, she turned her attention back to him.

“One of those scarlet sins, then?”

“White as snow,” he said. “Just ask him and believe.”

“What about you, Max?”

“Me?”

“Do you think there’s anything I can do to make you forgive me? Erase my past?”

“Monica —”

He interrupted his own dispensation with a kiss, her mouth the only spot of warmth in all the world around him. She responded at first, greeting him with the faintest taste of whiskey. When they parted, amicable and sated, he took her face in his gloved hands and touched his lips briefly to her temple.

“To think,” he said, seeing only her face before him, “I took you to one of the most beautiful churches in our country, and you had to go to prison to have a true experience with God.”

Her eyes clouded. “Max . . .” She brought her hands up to his and pulled them away. “I’m not sure I had a religious experience tonight. I don’t want to disappoint you.”

“As if you could.” He cocked his head to one side, then the other. “Seeing you here, right now. It’s like I’m looking at you for the first time.”

“That’s because I don’t have anything to hide from you anymore.” She gave her arms a flightless flop at her sides. “This is it. This is me.”

“Darling —” he took off his glove and laid his hand against her face, needing to feel the touch of her skin —“understand this. I love you. More, I think, than you can possibly imagine. What I said today, at the train, was thoughtless. Impatient.”

“You deserve better.”

“I deserve nothing. Even so, God loves me. He’s given me everything I need. And that includes you —as you are. Whether you believe it yet or not.”

“That’s just it, Max. I don’t believe, not like you do. I don’t understand; I don’t
feel
.”

“Do you trust me?”

“Yes,” she said, as if her fate depended on it.

“Then we’ll start there. I won’t hurt you, Monica, and I won’t go away. My home is here, and I hope someday my home will be with you.”

The sound of a car’s horn blared between them, and he turned to see an ancient automobile rounding the corner, black smoke billowing behind. No roof, no doors; it seemed to be held together by the rattle of the engine alone. At the wheel, looking just a little
sleepy, Trevor brought it to a sputtering stop at the curb. There had to be a better time to have this conversation. In the morning, maybe, over doughnuts and coffee at Sobek’s. Or even Thursday, with the new issue of
Capitol Chatter
on the stands. He could call her into his office after a celebration of her first byline.

Together, they studied Trevor’s sputtering car. It had only one passenger seat and no backseat at all, thus deciding definitively that Max would not be escorting her home. Just as well. He pictured her room, strewn with everything she owned, her bed covered with a thick, warm quilt. More than anything now, he wanted her home and safe. Trevor could make that happen; he could not.

“Until then,” Max said with a grand gesture. “Your chariot awaits.”

Monica drew him down to speak close to his ear. “You know, if you’re going to stay in this town, you might want to get an automobile.”

“You manage just fine without one.”

“There’s always a man to give me a ride.”

“Remember your mission. No flirting with men in cars, remember? You still have the rest of the week to play along.”

“That’s just for this week. Get a car, and I’ll flirt with you forever.”

She pulled him to her and kissed him before jaunting off to Trevor’s automobile without any bit of a glance back to see that he had followed.

“Mr. Manarola called me and said you might need a ride home.” Trevor’s voice fell short of being fully given over to that of a man.

“Thanks,” Monica said, clambering into the seat.

Trevor leaned forward. “How about you, Mr. Moore?”

There might be room on the bench seat, with Monica nestled in warmth between them, but the falling snow offered a cocooning silence, enough to keep his thoughts safely tucked beneath his hat.

He saw her then as he had that first day, her eyes large and brown, white flakes of snow reflected on their surfaces. She’d called him Griffin. The name of an invisible man. And as he watched her settling into Trevor’s idling car, he longed for it to be true. To be invisible. To disappear within this storm. To climb in, unseen beside her, and wrap himself around her, ready to appear when her heart searched for him again.

“No, thanks,” he said with a friendly slap on the front panel of the car. “I’ll walk.”

“Suit yourself,” Trevor said, and with a great sputtering display, they lurched away from the curb. The hour was late, leaving the street empty. Trevor steered the car in a wide U-turn but stopped midway as Monica hopped out and ran back to Max, right into him, actually, laying her palms flat against his chest, feeling for his heart.

“I just need to know,” she said, the snow nearly thick enough now to make a lace curtain between them. “When you say you love me, do you mean it? Do you really, really mean it?”

“Yes,” he said, without hesitation. If she could accept his love without condition, give her heart to him, this bumbling, imperfect man, could they not together give it over to one more worthy? “Can I ask you a question?”

“Anything.”

“When you say you don’t love me, do you mean that?”

She sparkled with snow and mischief. “I don’t think so. That might have been the Monkey talking.”

HE’D BEEN SITTING on the other side of the desk. Staring, not speaking, while the clock ticked away another five minutes. Dana sat perfectly still in her wooden chair, knowing the slightest movement would send an echoing creak into the musty, solid silence.

“Do you know who I am?” He spoke without removing the thin cigarette holder from between his lips, and it bobbed with each word.

“Celeste said you make movies.”

“That I do.” His voice was deep; his words, clipped.

Celeste had called him a kraut —German. Which meant nothing to Dana except that they had been the enemy in the war. He seemed too old to have been a soldier. His hair, short and iron-gray, sprang stick-straw straight above a tan, angular face. Werner Ostermann, according to the name on the brass plate on his desk, and on the door, and on the small scrap of paper folded neatly in her pocket. “And you want to make a movie about me.”

“That I do.” He gave no verbal elaboration, only bored his gaze deeper.

Instinctively, she reached for her hair to stroke the long tresses, seeking the comfort she’d always found in their weight, but her fingers found only the soft, curling fringe peeking below her hat. Slowly, she returned her hand to her lap, pleased at having done so without eliciting the tiniest noise from the chair. “I suppose I don’t know how that is possible.”

His mouth spread into a wide grin and he removed the cigarette holder, balancing it across a shallow dish on the corner of the paper-strewn desk. One dropped cinder, and the entire small office would go up in flames.

“Nothing more than a thousand pictures shining on a screen. And each picture tells a story.”

“I don’t have a story.”

“I disagree.”

She wanted to argue. After all, she’d been to a movie. Three, in fact, just since her arrival in California. One about a man who met Jesus and raced chariots. Another about a woman who rode white horses in the circus, and the last about a hideous monster lurking in the shadows of a castle. That one she couldn’t watch, except through a thin slit between her fingers as she covered her eyes. Celeste had been squealing beside her.
Dana! Dana! You’re missing the best part!

“I’ve done nothing for anybody to see,” she said, fighting hard to keep her voice above a whisper. “What could you possibly put on film?”

He held his hands in front of his face, angling them against each other until he’d created an open square through which he looked at her with one open eye and said, “Take off your hat.”

“My hat?” she questioned, but she obeyed.

He stretched his arms out further. “I can see the entire story in your eyes. With a camera and some music, I could make a movie
just right here. But —” he dropped his hands —“only I would understand it, and art must be shared.”

She turned the hat over and over in her hands. “I’m not art.”

“No. But Celeste is. Your story. Her face.”

He slammed his hand on top of the desk as if delivering a verdict. Dana flinched at the gesture, nearly dropping her hat. It really was a beautiful thing —a bell-shaped dome, flipped rim, and a wide blue ribbon punctuated by a perfect silk flower. She put it back on her head, not bothering to try for the perfect angle the way Celeste did, and sat up straight.

“Why do you need me, then? You know the story. I hear it was in all the papers.”

He picked up a handful of folded newspapers and held them aloft. “These tell me nothing. They have no heart.”

“Neither do I.” She said it with convincing flatness, or so she thought.

Ostermann burst out with a short, bitter laugh. “So dramatic. Perhaps you are the one to be the actress in the film?”

He was joking with her, of course. Something she was still training her ear to detect.

“What do you want to know? They said I killed a child. They put me in prison. And then they let me out, and I came here. All that time between —sixteen years, Mr. Ostermann; nearly half my life —nothing happened. I went nowhere, saw no one, did nothing. Who would come to the theater to see an empty screen?”