Just Kiss Me (25 page)

For the next week, she went through the motions of living. She read her script and went over lines with the scriptwriter. She got fitted for wardrobe, beginning with the first scene when she would become Dorothy Parker in a sable coat, cloche hat, and holding an ivory cigarette holder between her fingers.

During the day she was able to lose herself in her role, but at night … the nights sucked. Her mind was free from work and she’d forget. She’d smile and think, “I can’t wait to tell Henry,” or she’d chuckle at the memory of something he’d said or done. The worst were the moments when her heart would pound at the thought of walking into a room and seeing his smile. The smile she’d thought that he saved just for her. Then she’d remember that the smile had been as phony as the rest of him and unmanageable tears would slip from her eyes. Not in torrents, but like her pain, a relentless drip, drip, drip.

She tried to tell herself that she didn’t want to be with a man who didn’t want to be with her. She was better than that. She deserved better than to get played for a fool by Henry and his mother. She’d been played before. For money or fame but never for the blood that flowed through her veins.

She hated Nonnie but, in hindsight, she really wasn’t all that surprised. But Henry—Henry had taken their plan one step further. He’d made her fall in love with him, and she hated him for that. She hated him for making her miss the touch of his hands and the sparkly tingles he spread across her skin. She hated him for the warmth of his chest pressed against her as she slept. She hated that each morning she woke and her heart was still broken.

Most of all, she hated that she missed him.

She spent the next two months filming in New York and kept herself busy. She had to be on the set at six in the morning and it took two hours of make-up, hair, and wardrobe to be transformed into a theater critic for
Vanity Fair
in 1918. During the day, she didn’t have time to be consumed by the elaborate lies of her own mother. She escaped into the role, immersing herself in a wit as sharp as a surgeon’s knife. At night though, it didn’t matter how tired she was when she got to her hotel room, the minute her head hit the pillow, her mind would race with questions that could never be answered by her mother. Why the lie? The truth was so much simpler. Did Mamaw Roz know? Did Uncle Richie? Who’d known that her mother had been Fredrickk Shuler’s lover and not the widow of poor Jeremiah Rochets?

Henry for one, and he’d let her go on and on about the saintly Rochets, lost at sea while saving Cubans. He’d sat there while she’d gone on about how much she would have loved to know her father, and he’d said nothing.

Nonnie for another. Her mother had obviously legally changed her maiden name. Had it been as simple and serendipitous as an article in the
Post and Currier
? When had she concocted the story? Before or after Fredrickk’s death?

And most of all, how could her mother have kept the secret for thirty years? Sometimes, she hadn’t been able to keep days of the week straight, let alone the details of an elaborate lie.

Although when Vivien thought about it, she was fairly sure that Nonnie had fabricated the story and she’d gotten her mother to agree to it. Somehow, she’d managed to get the woman who hated even the whitest of lies, to go along with her scheme. Vivien didn’t know how Nonnie had accomplished it or what sort of leverage she’d used. Someday she’d confront her nemesis and get her answers, but that someday wasn’t today. It wasn’t tomorrow or next week, either.

It wasn’t two months later when she wrapped up filming in New York. Her wounded heart had yet to heal, and she might have made a side trip to Charleston to confront The Mantis, if not for the chance of seeing Henry again. In a way, it was worse than the death of her mother. She missed her mother, but she knew there would never be a chance meeting between them. She couldn’t reach out to her. Couldn’t stalk her on Google or Linked in or search for her public records. Death was final, but this lingering love cut her to the pit of her soul.

It still lingered the two weeks she filmed in Paris and it continued to linger at parties where she smiled and chatted but felt empty inside. It especially lingered at night when she went to bed alone and remembered Henry’s touch on her shoulder and down her arm, and when she remembered that he couldn’t seem to keep his magic hands off her. She remembered falling asleep with her back against his chest and her behind cradled against his pelvis, feeling so safe and protected for the first time in her life.

In an effort to understand her confused feelings, she read books about breakups and articles on betrayal on the Internet. She took the advice she read to heart and practiced the art of loving herself more than loving a man who didn’t exist. By the time she returned home in mid-August, her heart didn’t ache quite so much and she didn’t think about Henry all day long. Her tears had dried, and each day she could feel herself loving Henry a little less. Any day now, she expected to feel absolutely nothing.

The second half of the movie was to be shot at Paramount Studio, and Vivien planned to use the much-needed break in filming to sleep. She was exhausted and jet-lagged and she’d caught a flu bug that made her feel a little queasy at night.

“I got you some oranges and Airborne,” Sarah said as she walked into Vivien’s room and plopped the sack on the bed by her right hip.

“Oranges are for colds and you have to take Airborne
before
you get sick.” She rolled onto her back and looked up into her assistant’s frowning face. “But thank you.”

“I made an appointment with your doctor. Get dressed.”

“Now?” She was too tired to go anywhere. “I’m not that sick.” She secretly wondered if she was more depressed than sick. That made her think of her mother and worry about her own mental health. Worrying gave her anxiety, which in turn made her stomach tumble.

“Chop chop. Pull yourself together.”

Chop chop? Sarah had turned into a drill sergeant, and pulling herself together meant Vivien pulled on a pair of baggy sweatpants and a hoody.

“You’re going to die in the heat,” Sarah warned as she pulled out the driveway in Vivien’s Beemer.

Sarah was right but Vivien wasn’t about to admit it. She hadn’t told her assistant about Henry, not after Vivien had lectured her on man skanks and heartbreak. She was never going to admit to Sarah that she hadn’t taken her own advice. She didn’t know if Henry was a man skank, but he was a heartbreaking A-hole and she told herself she was well rid of him.
You’re wonderful
, all her breakup books told her.
You deserve someone just as wonderful
.

When Vivien and Sarah arrived at the medical complex, they entered through a side door. A freight elevator took them up two floors where Vivien had her blood drawn and she peed in a cup.

“Have you ever noticed that doctor’s offices smell like medicine and have hideous wallpaper?” Sarah asked.

“No.” She glanced about the room and took in the vine wallpaper bordered with purple and green grapes. “It looks like Macaroni Grill in here.”

“So two thousand and two.” Sarah handed Vivien
US
magazine. “Someone got a shot of you on the set in New York.”

Vivien didn’t care and lay back on the paper-covered bed. She was either depressed or had some kind of cancer. The kind that made her sleep a lot. Sleeping cancer.

Her doctor came in and sat on one of the ubiquitous round stools that rolled around on wheels. He opened her chart and looked up. “You don’t have the flu.”

“That’s good,” she said as she rose to her elbows.

He stood and grabbed one of those special doctor flashlights from the wall. He shoved a small black cone on the end and grabbed a tongue depressor. “When was your last period?”

“Period?” She thought back and sat up all the way. “July maybe.”

“Say ahhh.”

“Ahhh.”

He removed the tongue depressor and tossed it in a flip-top trash can. “Could it have been the end of May?”

She held still as he looked up her nose. “No. I’m pretty sure it was in July because I was in Paris.”

He checked each ear then tossed the little cone in the trash can. “You’re pregnant.”

The lid shut and Vivien thought she heard him say she was pregnant. “What?”

“Eleven weeks.”

Sarah gasped. “Holy shit!”

“That’s not possible. I …” She couldn’t be pregnant. Eleven weeks? That was almost three months. She’d know if she was pregnant. Wouldn’t she? She thought of her periods, and yeah she’d missed two and the one in July had been very light. She hadn’t given it much thought because her cycle was always wacky, especially when she was under a lot of stress. She’d only had sex with one person and he’d worn a condom … except that one time when it broke, but what were the chances? It couldn’t be true. The doctor must have given her a bad test. One of those false positive scenarios. “I don’t believe it.” Yeah, because the thought that she might be pregnant with Henry’s baby was impossible to wrap her brain around.

“You’re pregnant.” He showed her the test results, but her brain still refused to believe what her eyes saw was true.

“No. It’s impossible,” she scoffed, but just to make sure, she made Sarah run into Walgreens and grab a pregnancy test on the way home. Sarah, being the always prepared assistant, bought three. All different brands just to be certain.

“Doctors make mistakes,” she said as they watched the three white and blue sticks. “I heard about a man who went in for prostate surgery and got his leg amputated instead.”

“I think that’s an urban myth, like Bloody Mary.”

“Or the Slender Man.”

Sarah laughed. “That one is so lame.”

Vivien lifted her gaze from the sticks and chuckled. “When I was a kid, I believed that if you ate Pop Rocks and drank cola at the same time, you’d explode.”

“Oh that one is true. I knew a guy whose cat exploded.” Vivien might have pressed for more information on the possibility of a cat explosion, but Sarah’s big gasp stopped her. “I see a pink line on this one. Oh my God, boss woman, here comes another pink line.”

“Let me see that.” The second line was so faint it didn’t count.

“This one has a blue plus.”

Vivien looked at the second test to make sure. She grabbed it from Sarah’s hand as her face went numb. “It could be faulty,” she said, but the third test was digital and the screen lite up with the words: pregnant, 5+ weeks.

“You’re preggo,” Sarah announced as she waved the white and blue stick around as if it needed to dry.

“This can’t be happening to me.” Vivien sat down in a kitchen chair. “I don’t believe it.”

“I’ll make an appointment with your vagina doc. You’re in denial.”

Vivien liked denial. It made her life easier, and she decided to pitch a tent and stay firmly camped out in denial. She quite happily lived in the land of denial until the day her OBGYN squirted clear goo on her stomach and the outline of a baby popped up on the ultrasound screen. She saw arms and legs and a beating heart.

“It’s a boy,” Sarah gasped. “And my God, look at that thing.”

“You’re looking at the umbilical cord,” the doctor told her. “We won’t be able to determine the sex for a few months.”

“Oh.”

Pregnant. She was pregnant with Henry’s baby. What the heck was she going to do? She had no idea, but when she was all alone later, she remembered her conversation with Henry about the choice he and Tracy Lynn had made a long time ago. He’d said he felt more guilt than anything else. Then as now, there were only two choices and she had to make one.

She sat down with a legal pad and made a pros and cons list:

When she was through, Vivien had a whole list on the con side and nothing on the pro. Not one thing. She thought of the tiny white outline on the ultrasound. She thought of how impossible it was to have a baby at this time in her life.

She reached for the phone.

HENRY REACHED FOR
the key on top of the door frame and unlocked the door of Vivien’s pink row house. Everything had been restored to the satisfaction of Charleston’s Historical Society. The house was ready to be put on the market. He walked through one last time and was flooded with memories. The garden reminded him of the afternoon he’d found her digging in the mud, of her drinking tea in the kitchen, and of her green eyes looking across the table at him. She’d complained about the stench of his lucky coat after he’d run outside in the rain to get it for her.

In the parlor, he recalled her narrowing gaze as she looked at the renovation work and her calling him a sneaky bastard for taking advantage of Macy Jane. He remembered the day she’d walked in the parlor wearing red shoes and blouse. He remembered having sex and breaking a condom. He remembered every word and touch, but three months after she’d disappeared from his life, the memory no longer felt like a knife slicing his heart. Now it was just a dull, manageable ache.

Henry backed out of the French doors and put the key in the pocket of his jeans. He needed to drop it off at the realtor’s office on his way home, but first he made a quick stop at the Kangaroo Express for a fill-up and a six-pack. He grabbed a king-sized Twix and headed to the checkout. Third in line, he called Hoyt to talk about a dilapidated tobacco barn he’d found in Marion County. It was in rough shape, but still salvageable. “I got it for two grand,” he said as the woman at the front of the line paid for a Rock Star and a pack of Camels. “But we have to do the demo and haul it away ourselves.”