Picture Perfect (6 page)

“Cassie,” Alex said, “calm down. I had Jennifer call to let them know you're all right and to tell them you'd be taking off sick for a couple of weeks.”

“And who the hell is
Jennifer
?” Cassie yelled.

“My
assistant
,” Alex said. His voice, low and soothing, ran over her shoulders and her back. He came to stand in front of her, grasping her upper arms and forcing her to look into his eyes. “Take it easy,” he said. “I only want you to get better.”

“I'm
fine
,” Cassie exploded. “I'm perfectly
fine
. I may not be able to remember who I am, Alex, but that doesn't make me an invalid. I'd probably remember a lot more if you weren't so intent on making all my decisions for me and—” Suddenly, her words dropped off. Alex's voice had been soft as rain, and his arms were offered for comfort, but his fingers bit into her skin. Cassie looked down to a spot where a small smear of blood from the side of his injured hand had marked her shirt.

He was staring at her so intently he didn't even know he was hurting her. Cassie felt her cheeks burn. She was accusing him, although she only knew half the facts. She had yelled at him, when all he'd done was try to help. She turned away from Alex, mortified that she had screamed like a banshee in front of him, in front of his agent. What had she been thinking? Of course she'd go to Scotland. She had the rest of her life to teach at UCLA.

Alex brushed her hair back from her forehead. He seemed to be waiting for her to come to her senses. “I'm sorry,” Cassie murmured. “I just wish you'd said something.” She pulled away from him, letting that uneasy shadow fall back into place between them. She smiled through her embarrassment at Herb, then walked onto the patio that led to the beach.

“Whew,” Herb said, standing and stretching his arms overhead. “I don't think I've ever seen Cassie act like that.”

Alex watched his wife walk over the bright sand, the wind covering her footsteps almost as quickly as she made them. He saw her pick up a stone and throw it as far as she could, aiming to shatter the sun. “No,” he said quietly. “Neither have I.”

 

I
T WAS THE SUMMER OF
1975
AND SHE AND
C
ONNOR LAY ON THEIR
backs on the floating dock, rubbing their toes against the rough wood, challenging each other to see who could stare longest at the burning sun. “You're cheating,” she said. “I can see you squinting when you think I'm not looking.”

“Am not,” Connor said indignantly. “You just can't think of any other way to win.”

She was twelve and she was with her best friend, and it was one of those absolutely perfect days on Moosehead Lake, one that moved so slowly you were sure you were stuck in a photograph until, wham, just like that, it was over too soon. “God,” she said. “I'm totally blind.”

“Me too,” said Connor. “All I see is black.”

“Truce?”

“Truce.” Cassie sat up, groping along the dock past her fishing pole and Connor's to find the skinny bones of his wrist. She pulled until she knew he was sitting up too.

She had known Connor for as long as she could remember. He lived next door and his father worked at the bait and tackle shop in town. They had stolen still-hot elephant-ear cookies from her parents' bakery; they had been in the same class since second grade; they had learned to sail together on a battered old Sunfish bought with their pooled paper route money. They had both forsworn marriage, each thinking that with the exception of the other, the opposite sex was a miserable lot; they talked constantly of running away to the Canadian border, just to see if they could actually do it. Their parents said they were each other's flip side, inseparable, two halves of a whole. Cassie liked that idea a lot. It made her think of a picture in their biology textbook of a hermit crab that lived with a sea anemone on its back. The sea anemone, carried by the crab, had a better chance of finding food, and the crab was better protected by the sea anemone's sting and camouflage. Separate, they had to take their chances. Together, they had a whole new chance at survival.

Connor jumped to his feet. “Want to fish?”

“Again?” said Cassie. “No.”

“Want to race back?” He gestured toward the sliver of shore.

“What about our poles?”

Connor dropped to a crouch. “I could teach you to do a backward dive.”

For a second Cassie's eyes gleamed—Connor could do anything when it came to diving. He'd tried to show her once or twice, but she hadn't been a very good student. Still, a
back
dive.

“Okay,” she said. “What do I do?”

Connor positioned her beside him on the floating dock so that they stood with their backs to the water, their toes balanced right on the edge. Then he bent at the knees and executed a perfect dive, slicing the water with his hands before his body followed like the silver slip of a knife. He surfaced beside the dock and wiped mucus from his nose. “You do it.”

Cassie sucked in her breath. She bent a little, hopped, and slipped on the wet dock. The only thing she remembered for a long while after that was the horrible sound her skull made as it cracked against something hard and unforgiving.

Connor was already in the water when she blacked out, and he slung an arm across her chest and scissor-kicked his way back to the shore. He dragged her across the sand, Cassie's heels cutting dark wet furrows in their wake.

When her eyes blinked open, something was blocking her view of the sun, something black and looming.
Cassie
. She rubbed her hand against the back of her head.

Connor was staring at her as if she'd come back from the dead, instead of just passed out for a minute or two. “You okay?” he said. “You know who I am?”

Cassie snorted; she couldn't help it. As if she could ever forget Connor. “Yeah,” she said. “You're my other half.”

Connor stared down at her, his face so white she knew she had given him a good scare. For a moment neither of them said a word. Connor found his voice first. “Come on,” he said. “Let's get some ice for you.”

They swung open the screen door of Cassie's house, leaving damp footprints and a shadow of sand on their way into the kitchen. “It would have been a perfect dive,” Cassie tossed over her shoulder. “Next time, I think—” She stopped at the doorway so abruptly Connor slammed against her back, and unconsciously, she leaned toward him. Her mother was slumped across the kitchen floor, soaked in a pile of her own vomit.

Setting her lips in a tight line, Cassie knelt beside her mother with a wet dishrag, wiping her cheek and her mouth and the collar of her shirt. From the corner of her eye, she saw Connor silently retrieve the bottle of gin that had rolled underneath the radiator. Her mother was supposed to be at the bakery, since it was only three o'clock. There must have been another fight. Which meant she didn't know when, or whether, to expect her father home.

“Ma?” Cassie whispered. “Ma, come on. Get up.” She looped her mother's arm around her neck and hefted the dead weight in a dragging fireman's carry. With Connor watching from the doorway, she draped her mother across the living room couch and covered her with a light quilt.

“Cass?” Her mother's voice was soft and breathy, a dead ringer for Marilyn Monroe's. She reached blindly to find her daughter's hand. “My good girl.”

Cassie tucked her mother's hand under the quilt and wandered back into the kitchen, wondering what she could scrounge up for dinner. If she had a meal set when—if—her father got home, then he wouldn't get angry, and if he didn't get angry her mother would be less likely to drink herself out cold again. She could make everything okay.

Connor stood in the kitchen packing ice into a plastic baggie. “Get over here,” he said. “The last thing
you
need is for your head to swell some more.”

She sat down on a chair and let Connor hold the pack to the curve of her neck. It wasn't like Connor hadn't seen this before—he knew
everything
about her—but even the first time, he had just offered his help and kept quiet. He hadn't looked at her with those moon eyes that she knew meant pity.

Ice water ran down the hollow between Cassie's shoulder blades, and in spite of Connor's first aid, a headache was beginning to kick through her. She stared out the window at the floating dock, which looked so far away she could hardly believe she had been there minutes before. Cassie sighed. The problem with absolutely perfect summer days was that they were bright bull's-eye targets for something to go outright wrong.

 

S
HE WOKE UP TO THE COOL STING OF ALOE BEING RUBBED ALONG
her calves. “You're going to pay for this later,” Alex said. “You're so red it hurts me to look at you.”

Cassie jerked her leg away and tried to roll over, feeling uncomfortable with the intimate slip of Alex's palms over her own skin. She winced at the pain when she tried to bend her knee. “I didn't mean to fall asleep.”

Alex glanced at his watch. “I didn't mean to let you sleep for six hours, either,” he said. “After Herb left, I sort of got tied up on the phone.”

Cassie sat up and shifted degrees away from Alex. She watched the sun cut a ribbon across the ocean. An older woman came strolling down the beach with two weimaraners. “Alex!” she called, waving. “Cassie! Are you feeling all right?”

Alex smiled at her. “She's fine,” he yelled. “Have a nice walk, Ella.”

“Ella?” Cassie murmured. “Ella Whittaker?” Her eyes widened, trying to catch a glimpse of the statuesque woman who, fifty years back, had been a pinup girl and a screen legend. “The Ella Whittaker who starred in—”

“The Ella Whittaker who lives two doors down,” Alex said, grinning. “God, you've got to get your memory back soon, or you're going to scour the Colony asking for autographs.”

For several minutes he did not speak, and Cassie could feel the quiet settle around them. She wanted to say something to Alex, anything, but she didn't know what sorts of things they talked about.

As she turned toward the violet line of the horizon, Alex's voice curled over her, light as silk. “I
was
going to tell you about UCLA. God, I never would have
met
you if you weren't working there, so I owe them a lot. I really didn't do it deliberately. I just forgot.” He reached for her hand and brought it to his lips. His eyes were the sloe-black of smoke. “Forgive me?”

He's acting
. The thought rushed through Cassie's mind so violently she pulled her hand free and turned away, shaking.
How do I know when he's acting
?

“Cassie?”

She blinked at him, held in his gaze, and by bits and degrees she softened. She couldn't think about UCLA, about who was wrong and who was right, not just now. He was hypnotizing her; she knew this as well as she knew that she had been made for him, as well as she knew that any doubts she had about Alex would mirror her own faulty judgment.

Cassie began to hear and feel the unexpected: a tangle of sweet Mexican violins, a wet wind from an everglade, the song of one hundred hearts beating. She thought to run, some instinct telling her this was the beginning of the end, but she could no sooner move than turn back time. The world as she knew it was falling away, and the only place left for her to go was toward Alex.

“Forgive me?” he repeated.

Cassie heard the sound of her own voice, heard the words she couldn't remember thinking. “Of course,” she said. “Don't I always?”

A wave rolled over Cassie's ankles, frigid and authentic. The magic broke, and then it was just the two of them, she and Alex, and that was starting to seem all right. “I came prepared with a bribe,” Alex said. “I made it myself.” He was smiling at her, and she smiled back hesitantly, thinking,
He understands. He knows he has me in the palm of his hand
. He pulled up the front of his shirt to reveal a neatly wrapped square package tucked into the waist of his jeans. “Here.”

Cassie reached for the tinfoil, trying not to look at the smooth, sculptured muscles of his chest. She unwrapped it. “You made me Rice Krispies Marshmallow Treats? Are they my favorite?”

“No,” Alex laughed. “In fact, you hate marshmallows, but it's the only thing I know how to cook and I thought for
sure
you'd remember that and take pity on me.” He tugged it out of her hand and took a bite. “I grew up on these,” he said, his mouth full.

Cassie turned to him, her eyes gleaming. “Alex,” she said. “Where did I grow up?”
Maine
. She knew even before he spoke the word what the answer would be. “And who was Connor?”

Alex's eyes widened, so she could see the ring of gold around the edge of his irises. “Your best friend. How do you—did you remember all this?”

She grinned, excited. “I was dreaming the whole time I was asleep,” she said. “I remembered a lot of things. Moosehead Lake, and Connor, and…and my mother. Do we ever go there? Do I talk to my parents a lot?”

Alex swallowed. “Your mom's dead, and, well, when I first met you, you told me the reason you went to college in California was to get as far away from Maine as you possibly could.”

Cassie nodded, as if she had expected this. She wondered how much Alex knew about her parents. She wondered if she'd ever been brave enough to tell him. “Where are your parents?”

Alex rolled away from her, turning to face the ocean. She watched his profile set, and she had a sudden memory—this was the way he looked minutes before he filmed a scene, when his own personality drained away and was replaced by the character he was playing. “They're in New Orleans,” Alex said. “We don't see much of them, either.” He rubbed his palm against the back of his neck and closed his eyes. Cassie wondered what he was seeing, what made him curl into himself. To her surprise, a sharp ache stung her chest, and she knew right away she had felt it so that he wouldn't have to. When Alex looked up at her, old ghosts still shifted in his eyes. “You really don't remember me, do you?” he said quietly.