In the Night of the Heat (7 page)

“Guide me,” I whispered, and April's hands groped for me again. She led my body's blind, rigid desire to the place where her heat reached its nexus. Suddenly, with a virgin's tremor, I realized I had slipped inside of her. She bore down with her mouth open wide as I filled her, and I was consumed by her endless, grasping embrace. I climbed as high as physics allowed. We rocked and moved together beneath the shower stream, whimpering in chorus.

For all we knew, water and pleasure washed us both clean away.

Later, without saying a word, April climbed nude beneath my sheets. I nestled beside her, spooning her as I enjoyed the treat of her company through the long night. The humiliation I'd felt with Lynda Jewell was nearly forgotten with her healing presence, as if April confirmed only the best parts of me. Like the first time she slept in my bed.

I had drifted off before I was awakened by April's wordless anxieties. She hadn't moved or made a sound, but I knew from her breathing that she wasn't asleep. I gazed toward her in the darkness until I saw a glimmer from her eyes.

Tears?

My heart caught. “Baby?” I said.

“I'm sorry I woke you up,” she said in a tiny voice. Trying to hide the tears.

“What's wrong?”

It took her only seconds to answer, but the wait was years. Maybe I had lost her trust, which can't be replaced. I've rarely felt so helpless as I did waiting for her to tell me my fate.

April sighed a long, fractured sigh. I heard her nose bubble. “Ten…I'm just lying here thinking…and I might not ever have another chance like this. I have to go to South Africa.”

I wondered why it had taken her so long to figure that out.

I wanted to try to talk her out of it, but that would have been selfish. Most people travel less, not more, as they grow older. April was twenty-eight. It was her time.

“I know.”

I thought about Alice, the actress who had left me my house in her will. She'd never had any children, and I was her favorite house-sitter, so she made the job permanent when she died. With April and Chela and Dad around, the house felt less like Alice's and more like mine, but within those walls Alice was rarely far from my mind. Alice was the closest thing I'd had to a relationship—and she was a client, not a true lover. I saw Alice very late into her life, until she was as old as Billy Dee. I was almost young enough to be her grandson.

Maybe if life had promised Alice more of a future, I would have wanted her in mine. I can't say; my thoughts had never dwelled there. But she was my longest-standing client, and my favorite. Every few months, she'd call and send me a ticket to join her in Calcutta, or Tokyo, or Johannesburg, and then she'd kiss me fondly good-bye at the airport, send me home, and vanish for a while. She had a “gentleman friend” the whole time I knew her. Sometimes Alice and I traveled together, and she introduced me as her nephew. Sometimes she left me behind to water her plants and feed her fish. In Alice's memory, I fought to keep those neons and tetras alive. All the original fish had died, but you replace one at a time, so the actual pet is the tank.

Her laugh was golden. I wish I had recorded her stories; she was the most fascinating person I have ever known. I missed her when she was gone. I still do. I remember sitting in Alice's empty house, stir-crazy while I waited for her to come home. Waiting is excruciat
ing work. I told myself only a fool would agree to a long-distance relationship. Not me. Never.

That night, lying in bed beside the first woman who'd helped me understand why a man would want to be married, I remembered my vow:
Never.
I loved South Africa, but my drop-everything-and-leave days were long behind me. I had a role in a series for the first time in a decade. Responsibilities awaited me at home every day.
Never.

“I'll wait for you,” my mouth said, surprising me. “Only six months, right?”

April nestled her face against my bare shoulder, exactly where she'd gently bitten me, and I felt her shaking her head. “I'm not asking you to wait, Ten. I can't. I won't.”

The room was so pitch that I couldn't see her face. In the din of our whispered voices, I suddenly understood our rediscovery in the shower, and the clarity felt like an anvil straight to my gut. April's caresses hadn't meant she was loosening up, or letting me in.

She had just wished me good-bye.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 20

Dad was waiting for me when I came downstairs.

It was almost three weeks after my shower with April, our last night in my bed. She was gone so fast, it all seemed like a dream. Being barred at the security gate on Sunday while April walked toward a plane to the other side of the world felt like a sentence. We could hardly look each other in the eye, as if we'd had a blowout instead of merely divergent lives.

For days I'd been expecting bad news. Perhaps because when you hurt, it is hard to believe the rest of the world could possibly be in good order. I'd been cracking my father's door open at night to make sure I could hear his long, strained breaths in the dark. My stomach was hurting even before I saw the look on Dad's face, but his frown made the pain sharper.

“You hear?” Dad said.

“Chela?” I said, my first guess. It was almost 8 A.M. Chela was supposed to be up for school, but life doesn't happen the way it's
supposed to. I steeled myself to hear that Chela was hurt, or had run away. Chela felt temporary, too.

Dad shook his head and motioned toward the living room. “TV,” he said, truncating his sentence as usual. “T.D. Jackson.”

Dad wheeled himself to the spot beside Marcela, who was planted on the sofa with a bowl of popcorn in her lap while she watched the wide-screen with fascinated eyes. I didn't have to hear the CNN announcer's voice to know what had happened. An aerial shot showed the facade of T.D. Jackson's gated Mediterranean house in Pacific Palisades surrounded by LAPD vehicles, the scene draped in telltale yellow tape.

BREAKING NEWS
, the screen read.
T.D. JACKSON FOUND DEAD
.

A stentorian announcer filled in the rest: “…details emerging in the death of T.D. Jackson, who was found dead at his desk this morning after an apparent gunshot…”

“April get off okay?” Marcela asked me gently, realizing I was in the room.

I nodded, but I barely heard her. My encounter with T.D. Jackson made the news report so personal that it felt like watching my own house on TV. Between that and the mention of April's name, the pain in my stomach bloated into a boulder. I didn't know the man—and there was a good chance he'd killed those two people—but I felt a stab of grief.

I heard myself whisper, “Shit,” before I ever realized I'd spoken.

I remembered T.D.'s manic, reddened eyes imploring mine while he grasped my hand, and that image morphed into April's stone-jawed profile as she turned away from me at LAX.
Your fault,
my Evil Voice said, and this time I couldn't disagree.

Dad glanced at me meaningfully. I'd told him about T.D.'s request. “Reap whatchu sow…” Dad said. His idea of comforting words.

The announcer went on: “…unnamed sources within the police department are speculating that Jackson, recently acquitted in the double murder of his ex-wife and her fiancé, might have shot
himself
at his desk, in a state of apparent depression about both financial and legal affairs…”

I remembered T.D.'s eyes. Financial problems? The strain of another trial, especially if money was a problem? No more movies or television…T.D. Jackson couldn't sustain his preferred lifestyle signing autographs, trust me. Sitting at his desk, playing with his gun…

Was it a revolver? How about a little Russian Roulette? Another line of coke, spin the wheel, thumb back the hammer, and…

Maybe. Hell, I could see it. How much ego damage could someone like T.D. take before he broke? What if the Tau event was the last hurrah before the hammer came down…?

But something inside me couldn't believe it. Sociopathic monsters like T.D. Jackson don't kill themselves until they're cornered by SWAT. If police had found a gun on the scene, someone had planted it. T.D. Jackson had been murdered, just like he was afraid he would be.

“Man was
loco
,” Marcela said. “Killing himself! He will go to Hell.”

Dad made a
humphing
sound. Fifteen years as the commander of Hollywood division, and another fifteen on the police force, had taught him to wait and see. I sat on the sofa beside Marcela, and the newscaster recapped for me: T.D.'s body had been found by his housekeeper at six that morning, and she'd called police right away. There were no signs of forced entry.

“Messed up, right?” a voice said behind me, and I realized Chela was up. Late-start Monday meant she didn't to have to get to school until ten. My set call was late, too.

I felt my heart brighten. “Hey!” I said. I gave her arm a squeeze. As usual, Chela was dressed down in military-style drabness, hidden inside an oversized jacket and baggy jeans. “Yeah, pretty messed up.”

“The media wouldn't leave T.D. alone,” Chela said. “What did people expect?”

Chela dropped a heavy manila envelope to the sofa cushion beside me. “Just came,” she said. “All those messenger dudes they send are total hotties. He didn't want to let me sign for you, but I said I was your daughter.”

That pulled a smile out of me. Chela never referred to herself as my daughter, and nothing left Chela's mouth without a reason. She was telling me that even though she knew it hurt to let April go, I still had her. But Chela would never bring up April's name unless I did.

The new
Homeland
pages were in the package. I'd gotten a script on the set Wednesday, and there was a rewrite first thing on Monday. Another rewrite might be waiting for me on set today. Of course, I never had more than two or three lines, and I can learn that much in ten minutes. It didn't really matter much. I'd heard a rumor that my part might be expanded—I might actually get a story arc, be more than a line of dialogue, a drop-and-roll or a reaction shot—but it hadn't happened yet.

While the television droned on, and Marcela caught Chela up on the details of T.D. Jackson's death, I flipped through the script's yellow-colored pages to make sure my paltry lines were intact. That week's episode, entitled “Mole,” was actually one of the better ones: An FBI agent who'd been a mole for a terrorist organization was discovered stealing computer files from a fellow agent, and the episode ended with a blazing firefight. It took some looking to find my lines, and but I noticed the changes right away. Huzzah! I no longer had three lines: I had four!

Now there was a child character called Jalil in the script who called Sanford “sir,” hanging out with him while he waited for his mother to pick him up from work. They'd cast a
son
for me? That was major. That was huge. The writers were turning me into an actual human! Marcus Sanford, my character, was mostly fall guy, eye candy, and comic relief to the gruff series regulars—never mind that I was the only one in the cast who'd spent any time at an actual police academy. Hell, I'd come close to graduating. In a different life, I would have been on the scene at T.D. Jackson's house instead of watching it on TV. Almost wished I was.

When I saw Chela heading for the door with a bagel, I put the script down. “Ready…for school?” Dad called to her before I could. When I was a kid, Dad was so lost in thoughts and paperwork that he barely noticed me. Call me childish, but Dad's attentiveness to Chela irked me sometimes.

“We have a chem quiz, but it's not my thing,” Chela shrugged. “Hydrogen peroxide? Like I'm ever gonna need to know
that
in life.” Chela was casually brilliant, but I felt sorry for her teachers.

“What's up with that homecoming dance?” I said, remembering. “When is it? Don't you need a dress?” I was no expert on homecoming dance fashion, but I was eager to support Chela's experiment with childhood.

“Homecoming?” Marcela said with an intrigued grin. “What memories, eh?
Terrifico!
”

Chela gave me a dirty look for bringing it up in front of witnesses. “No it's not
terrifico
. I'm not going.”

“Why not?” I said. “You said this kid…what's his name? That chess guy asked you.”

“Exactly. It's next Saturday, and I'm not going.”

Marcela stirred as if to say something else, but I patted her knee. The full frontal assault never worked with Chela. I had more than a week.

“Nobody's gonna force you,” I said.

“Got
that
right,” Chela muttered.

A familiar woman's voice made me look back at the TV. Framed in the center of my screen stood T.D. Jackson's cousin, Melanie Wilde. I'll say this for Melanie: She knew how to pull herself together in a crisis. There was no mistaking the grief in her glassy eyes, but her businesslike clothes and hair were a perfect suit of armor. An interviewer asked the obligatory How-do-you-feel riff that April had confessed she hated most about her job, and Melanie snapped off answers like she was leading a press conference.

“Again, according to unnamed sources, drugs were found at the scene, and police are speculating…” the interviewer began, and Melanie cut her off.

“The
police
are way off base. The
police
never gave credence to T.D.'s safety concerns. The
police
have sympathized only with T.D.'s deceased ex-wife and her very influential family. So excuse me if I'm not too impressed with any bogus theory claiming my cousin shot himself. I've known T.D. since the day he was born, and of all the things he was ever accused of, suicide is the most unlikely. But don't you worry: The
police
were never able to apprehend the murderer of Chantelle Hankins Jackson—never made a serious effort because they were so busy hounding T.D.—but we
will
find out who killed my cousin. Bet on it.”

Her eyes bored right into me. I imagined myself in the over-bright hallway of my old dormitory, Clayton Hall, opening the door for Melanie as she carried in a basket of T.D.'s laundry piled so high she could barely see over it.
Success is a family project.
Her face had always glowed at the mention of his name—now that glow had turned to fire.

I looked away. It's hard for me to watch a woman suffer.

“She'll come back to you again,” Marcela said suddenly. “You'll see.”

“What?” I said, startled to have my thoughts made public.

“April.” Marcela said her name softly enough to make it sting. “She'll be back.”

I blinked. Two whole minutes had gone by, and I hadn't thought about April once. My stomach remembered its ache right away, of course. But two minutes was a start.

 

Years ago, right after his heart attack, Dad told me a little about my mother's death. I think he was afraid he was going to die, and he didn't want to take all of his stories with him.

Mom had been undergoing radiation treatments, and he recalled taking her to the oncologist's office to hear her newest test results, where he saw blank face after blank face. The oncologist came into the room discussing options and plans, but he couldn't hide the truth in his eyes. That was how Dad knew. My mother had just had a baby boy six months before, right in time to die.
You'd think a cancer doctor would've learned how to give people bad news
, Dad said that day in his hospital room, shaking his head with the memory—all the while watching his doorway, terrified he would see That Look on his cardiologist's face when he finally came to call.

That was how I felt Monday morning when I arrived on the set of
Homeland
. Work was where I went to escape my troubles, but my troubles had beaten the traffic and were waiting there to greet me.

A soundstage looks like a warehouse, some of them as big as airplane hangars. The sets are nestled in corners brightened with lights and imagination, carved inside the gray drab of wires, cables, and industry. On
Homeland
, much like
24
and
NUM
₃
ERS
, the conceit was to show field FBI agents coordinating with the egghead researchers back at the office to break up terrorist plots, with family interactions to give it heart. One of the show's consultants was a former FBI researcher, so the home-office set was elaborate—the commander's office, the rows of cubicles, the meeting rooms (with banks of big monitors meant to be visual for television, but definitely
nothing
like the true-life FBI), the break room (which is where I usually turned up at the coffee machine), and even a bathroom set, where agents had private conversations. There was a training hall with a gun range and a dojo, connected to the group showers.

Who knew there was so much hooking-up going on in the FBI? Realism was not our strong suit, but the show's ratings were great. We took single thematic threads and ran them through the home, the field, the office, and the judo mat. It worked.

There were almost two separate casts; the stars in the field, the rest of us at the office. I'd expected T.D. Jackson's murder to give us something to talk about in common, a bridge over the divide between the name actors and the rest of us who were still scrambling for an ounce of recognition and a paycheck, whose residuals alone weren't enough to pay for the mortgage, a cruise, and a time-share every month.

Instead of chatter, there was a hush. My senses told me it started as soon as I walked in. Quiet in a place the size of an airplane hangar looms large enough to become sinister. I could feel eyes from every
corner, but whenever I turned to find a face, the eyes were suddenly gone.

Shit,
I thought. I figured my lines had been cut that week, as they sometimes were, and nobody bothered to tell me before I hauled my ass all the way over to the Fox lot. In my head, I started to map out the rest of my day. Maybe I would drive by Len's office and tell him about my disastrous visit with Lynda Jewell. Plot out a defensive plan.