Picture Perfect (7 page)

He was inches away but she could feel the line of heat between them as if they were touching. Cassie put her arms around him, shivering as she took in more of his pain. “No,” she said. “I don't.”

 

T
HEY MADE POPCORN IN THE MICROWAVE FOR DINNER AND
watched a Monty Python rerun on TV. They played War with a deck of cards they found buried in the broom closet. With a pillowcase draped on his head for a wimple, Alex performed Lady Macbeth's “Out, damned spot!” speech, curtsying low when Cassie laughed and clapped. Her eyes were shining when he jumped down from the cleared coffee table he'd used as a stage. She did not know Alex, but she liked him. Surely that was more than most marriages survived on.

Alex pulled her to her feet. “Tired?”

Cassie nodded, letting him slip his arm around her waist. As they walked down the stairs to the bedroom, she wondered what the sleeping arrangements would be. They were married, so he could sleep anywhere he pleased; but she'd really only had one day to get reacquainted with him, and she supposed he might chivalrously offer to stay in a guest bedroom for the night. She wondered if she wanted him to.

At the door to the master bedroom, Alex stopped walking. Cassie stepped away from him, her arms pressed to her sides. She could not bring herself to look at Alex, whose questions, even in the silence, seemed to fill the hallway.

He tipped her chin up and kissed her gently. “Good night,” he said, and then he turned toward a guest room a few doors down.

Cassie watched him for a moment, then walked into the bedroom and closed the door. She pulled her shirt over her head and stepped out of her shorts, tossing them on the four-poster bed en route to the bathroom. Stripping off her underwear, she stood in front of the mirrors that lined an entire wall beside the sink. She cupped her hands over her breasts and frowned at the small swell of her stomach. She couldn't imagine what had attracted Alex Rivers.

She picked up the bottles and jars that dotted the countertop—facial creams and exfoliating scrubs and clear astringents that seemed to belong in equal proportion to Alex and herself. She had already brushed her hair and washed her face when she realized there was no toothpaste. There were two toothbrushes—one green, one blue—and she didn't know which one was hers, either.

She checked in the cabinets that were recessed into the walls, but all she could find were pale peach towels and two thick terry cloth bathrobes. She wrapped one around herself, rubbing her hands down the heavy brushed cotton. Maybe Alex had toothpaste in
his
bathroom, and surely he'd want his toothbrush.

She didn't know which room he had gone into, and she was about to knock on random doors when she heard him speaking a little farther down the hall. “Life's but a walking shadow.” The door was ajar, and in the reflection of the bathroom mirror she saw Alex standing over the sink, his eyes hollow. “A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,” he murmured, his voice no louder than a whisper. “And then is heard no more.”

Stunned, Cassie clutched the toothbrushes in her hand and leaned against the doorframe to see a little better. This was not Alex. He had transformed himself into a man beaten, a man who saw his life for what it would become—a flash in someone else's memory, then something forgotten.

Cassie fought back the urge to push the door open and wrap her own hope tight around him. She did not know this new stranger, she knew him even less than she knew Alex, but she understood that she had come to help.

She thought about what Alex had said at the police station, the terror in his voice:
You don't know what it was like to lose you
. And she began to see that the famous Alex Rivers came undone just as easily as the next person.

Cassie took one step forward and Alex opened his eyes, seeing her reflection. He was Alex again, and smiling, but in the darker gradients of his eyes she could see the terror and the numbness of Macbeth. She wondered if he had always been like that, if every character became a tiny part of him. She knew that actors, in some part, had to draw and embellish on their own experience, and the thought of so much despair buried somewhere in Alex wrenched her. “Where do you get it? All that pain?”

He stared at her, shaken by her second sight. “From myself.”

She moved first, or maybe he did, but then he was holding her and opening the tie of the robe, running his hands up and down her sides. The toothbrushes fell to the floor and Cassie wound her fingers in his hair, burying her face in the hollow of his shoulder. She inched her hands down his back as if she were feeding a seam, bunching the fabric of his shirt until her hands burned the skin at his waist.

He kissed hungrily, bumping them against walls and doorframes as he pushed his way back toward the master bedroom. Cassie fell against the bed, and he pulled apart the sides of her heavy robe, pinning her arms while the moon danced over her skin. His tongue traced the bend of her jaw, the curves below her breasts, the white lines of her thighs.

Cassie opened her eyes, dazed by the image of his body over hers. Alex pressed his lips to her stomach. “Beautiful,” he said.

He's acting
.

As it had earlier that day, the thought came out of nowhere, and when it took root in her mind she began to struggle. But Alex's weight was on her, pressing. He cradled her face in his hands and kissed her so honestly she thought she would shatter. And then she remembered the spell he had woven between them that afternoon; the emptiness that had opened like a raw wound in her own stomach when she heard him speak as Macbeth.

The moment they came together, Cassie understood why they belonged to each other. He filled her, and she took away his scars. Cassie wrapped her arms around Alex's neck, surprised by the tears that leaked from the edges of her eyes. She turned her face to the open window, breathing in the sweet mix of herself and Alex and endless ocean.

She was drifting off to sleep when Alex's voice slipped over her. “You don't have to get your memory back, Cass. I know who you are.”

“Oh?” she said, smiling. She drew Alex's arm around her. “Who am I?”

She felt Alex's peace curl against her like a benediction. He pulled her back against his front, into the place where she just fit. “You're my other half,” he said.

I
N
another time and place, Will Flying Horse would have been a Dreamer.

He was eleven when his eyes opened in the middle of the night, seeing and not seeing at the same time. It was summertime, and outside the cicadas sang in the quiet of the half moon. But Will's head screamed with the thunder, and when his grandparents rushed to the side of his bed, they could see violent blue bolts of lightning reflected in his pupils. Cyrus Flying Horse reached across the glowing blanket of his grandson's bed to grasp his wife's hand. “
Wakan
,” he murmured. “Sacred.”

Although many things had changed for the Sioux over the years, certain habits died hard. Cyrus was a man who had been born on a reservation, who had seen the development of television and automobiles, and who, a month later, would watch a man walk on the moon. But he also remembered the things his father had told him about the Sioux who had visions. To dream of the thunder was powerful. If the dream was ignored, one could be struck dead by lightning.

Which was why, one morning in 1969, Will Flying Horse's grandfather took him to see the shaman, Joseph Stands in Sun, about becoming a Dreamer.

Joseph Stands in Sun was older than the earth, or so it was rumored. He sat outside with Cyrus and Will on a long, low bench that ran the entire length of his log cabin. As he spoke, he whittled, and Will watched the wood as it first took the shape of a dog, then an eagle, then a beautiful girl, changing with every brush of the shaman's hands. “In the days of my grandfather,” Joseph said, “a boy like you would search for a vision when he was ready to be treated like a man. And if he dreamed of the thunder, he would become a
Heyoka.
” Joseph peered down at Will, and for the first time Will noticed that the man's eyes were different from any other eyes he'd ever seen. There were no irises at all. Just black, fathomless pupils. “Do you know this, boy?”

Will nodded; it was all his grandfather had talked about on the walk over to the shaman's cabin. A hundred years earlier, the Heyokas had been tribal clowns, men who were expected to behave strangely. Some moved only backward, some spoke in a different tongue. They dressed in rags and slept without blankets in the winter, wrapped themselves in thick buffalo skins in the summer. They would dip their hands in boiling water and pull them out unscarred, proving they were more powerful than other men. Sometimes they received a vision from the spirits, warning of danger or another's death. As Heyokas, they had the power to prevent it; but because they were Heyokas, they'd receive nothing for themselves in return for their efforts. Will had listened patiently to his grandfather, and the whole time he kept thinking he was damned glad it was 1969.

“Well,” said Joseph Stands in Sun, “you cannot be a Heyoka; this is the twentieth century. But you will have your thunder dream.”

Three nights later, Will sat naked in a sweat lodge across from Joseph Stands in Sun. He had seen the lodges before; sometimes teenagers built them and smoked peyote in the cramped, curved quarters, getting high enough to run bareassed through the fields and dive into freezing streams. But Will himself had never been inside one. From time to time Joseph poked at the glowing stones that were used to create heat. Mostly he sang and chanted, syllables that swelled and burst like bottle rockets inches before Will's eyes.

As dawn was sneaking across the plain, Joseph took Will to the top of a flat butte. Will would rather have been anywhere else than on a rock ledge, naked, but he knew better than to disgrace his grandfather or Joseph Stands in Sun. Respect your elders: it was the way he'd been taught. Shaking, Will did as he had been told. He faced the sun with his arms outstretched, keeping perfectly still and trying to ignore the grass that whispered around Joseph's legs as he walked away. He stood for hours until the sun began to sink again, and then his legs gave out beneath him. He curled onto his side and began to cry. He felt the butte tremble, the sky melt.

On the second day, an eagle flew over his head from the east. Will watched it circle, moving so slowly that for entire minutes it seemed to be suspended just an arm's length away. “Help me,” he whispered, and the eagle flew through him. “You have chosen a life that is difficult,” it cried, and then it disappeared.

It might have been hours that passed; it might have been days. Will was so hungry and faint he had to force air in and out of his lungs. In the moments his mind was clear, he cursed his grandfather for believing in this kind of crap; he cursed himself for being so easily led. He thought of school baseball tryouts that past spring, of the
Playboy
he had hidden under his mattress, of the tingling smell of his mother's Pond's cold cream. He thought of anything that seemed leagues apart from the Sioux way of life.

We are coming, we are coming
. The words whistled over the plain, wrapping themselves around Will's neck and drawing him to his feet. Directly overhead was a dark, roiling cloud. Exhausted, starving, delirious, he threw back his head and opened his arms, willing a sacrifice.

When the thunder began in his head, he realized he was no longer on the ground. High above, and peering down, Will saw the girl. She was small and thin and she was running in a snowstorm. From time to time the blizzard winds would sweep around her, blocking her from Will's view. He thought she was running away from someone or something, but then he saw her stop. She stood at the heart of the storm, arms outstretched. All the time, she had been trying to find the center.

“Help her,” Will said, and he heard the words echoed a hundred times around him. He was standing on the ground again. He knew he would remember none of this. He knew that even as a man, this would be the nightmare that tugged at his consciousness in the heavy minutes after waking.

When the sky shattered and the rain came, Will screamed into the wind. Eyes wide, he watched lightning crack the night in two, splitting his world into equal halves that rocked, broken shells, at his feet.

 

E
VEN THE SUN LOVED
A
LEX
. C
ASSIE TOUCHED HER FINGERS TO HIS
jaw, mesmerized by the fact that the one sliver of morning light in the bedroom had managed to fall directly over his sleeping form. His skin was dark, shadowed by beard, marked just below his chin with a tiny curved scar. Cassie tried to remember how he had hurt himself. She watched his eyes shift beneath his lids and wondered if he was dreaming of her.

She curled herself out of the bed, careful not to wake him. Smiling, she hugged her arms around herself, thinking that she was quite rightfully the envy of every woman in America. If she had had any doubts about the validity of her marriage to Alex, they were gone now. Two people could not make love like that without a history. Cassie laughed. If her heart stopped beating that very second, she could say she'd lived a fine life.

It is a good day to die
. The words stopped her, and a shiver ran down her body before she realized they had not been spoken out loud. Recovering, she padded into the bathroom and stared into the mirror, touching her fingers to her swollen lower lip.

A lecture. It had been the opening line to a lecture she'd heard by a colleague at UCLA. Cassie let her hands drop to the marble sink basin, sighing with relief as she realized she was not facing an omen, but a genuine memory. It was a course on Native American culture, and that phrase was part of the ritual prayer spoken by tribal warriors of the plains before riding off to do battle. Cassie remembered telling the professor he sure knew how to draw a crowd.

She wondered what Will was doing now. It was Thursday morning; he'd probably be on his way to work. He had left her his phone numbers. Maybe later she'd call him at the station, tell him she lived in a castle in Malibu, mention she was flying to Scotland.

Cassie brushed her teeth and dragged a comb through her hair, careful to place each item back on the counter quietly so that Alex wouldn't stir. She tiptoed back into the bedroom and sat on a chair in the corner.

Alex was snoring lightly. She watched his chest rise and fall a few times, then stood up and walked to the closet across the room that held all of his clothes. She pulled open the door and drew in her breath.

Alex's closet was twenty times neater than her own. On the floor, on little shoe trees, were lines of sneakers and Italian loafers and black patent leather formal dress shoes. A hanging closet organizer proudly displayed folded sweaters, Shetland and Norwegian on one side and cotton on the other. His shirts stood stiffly on cedar hangers. A lingerie chest tucked into the corner of the walk-in closet was lined with neatly folded silk boxers and socks—arranged in separate drawers by their uses.

“My God,” Cassie whispered. She ran a fingertip over the line of shirts, listening to the music of the hangers batting each other. Neatness was to be expected, especially if one had a good housekeeper. Something, though, something else made this closet cross the line between fastidious and obsessive.

The sweaters. Not only were they segregated by material and folded neatly, they were arranged in color order. Like a rainbow. Even the patterned sweaters seemed to have been placed by predominant color.

She should have laughed. After all, this was odd to the point of being funny. This was something to joke about.

But instead Cassie felt tears squeeze from the corners of her eyes. She knelt before the rows of shoes, crying in near silence, pulling a sweater from its appropriate spot and holding it to her mouth to muffle the sounds she made. She bent over, her stomach knotting, and she told herself she was losing her mind.

It was the stress of the last few days, she thought as she wiped her cheeks. Cassie walked back to the bathroom and closed the door. She ran the water until it was so cold it numbed her wrists, and then she splashed some onto her face, hoping to start over.

 

F
OR DAYS
,
THEY HAD BEEN TALKING ABOUT THE BLIZZARD
. I
T WAS
going to hit sometime after three on Friday. It was going to be the storm of the century. Fill your bathtubs with water, the weatherman said. Buy batteries and firewood. Find your flashlights.

The only thing that could have been better, Cassie decided, would be if the blizzard hit on Sunday, so school would be canceled the next day.

Cassie walked into the kitchen. She had been at Connor's all afternoon but had promised her mother she'd return before the first flakes fell. Cassie's mother was terrified of snow. She had grown up in Georgia and had never seen snow until she moved to Maine when she got married. Rather than being efficient about a winter storm—like Connor's mother, who had taken out candles and bought extra gallons of milk to store in the drifts—Aurora Barrett sat at the kitchen table with wide eyes, listening to the weather reports on her transistor radio and waiting to be buried alive.

The one thing Aurora did like about nor'easters was that they provided a chance to accuse her husband of everything that had gone wrong in her life. Cassie had grown up understanding that her mother hated Maine, that she hadn't wanted to move there, that she didn't want to be a baker's wife. She still dreamed of a house with lawns that rolled down to the river, of a latticed bench veiled by cherry trees, of the melting southern sun. While Cassie watched, tucked in the shadows, her mother would rail at Ben and ask just how temporary ten long years in the same godforsaken place could be.

Most of the time her father would just stand there, letting Aurora's anger blow over him. Technically, it
was
his fault: he'd promised Aurora that as soon as it paid to sell the bakery with a tidy profit, they'd move back to her neck of the woods. But the bakery lost money every year, and the truth was, deep down, her father had no intention of leaving New England. Ben had given only one piece of advice to Cassie as she was growing up.
Before you decide what you want to be
, he said,
know where you want to be
.

It did not snow that night until Cassie went to sleep, and when she woke in the morning the world had changed. Outside, a white lawn rolled right up to her bedroom window, and hills and drifts had smoothed the landscape so completely she almost lost her sense of direction. She grabbed an apple and stuffed it in her pocket; then she sat at the kitchen table to pull her boots on.

She heard the argument clearly, although it came from her parents' room upstairs. “Sell the bakery,” her mother threatened. “Or I can't tell you what I'll be driven to do.”

Cassie's father snorted. “What could you possibly be driven to that you don't do already?” Cassie jumped as a blast of wind whitened the window before her. “Why don't you just go home?”

Go home
. Cassie's eyes widened. For a long while there was silence, save the shrieks and moans of the storm. Then she heard her mother's exit line. “I'm not feeling well now. Not well at all.” And after that came the unmistakable ting of the bourbon decanter Aurora kept on her vanity being opened. The more she drank, the less Cassie's father could tolerate her. It was a vicious cycle.

“Jesus Christ,” Cassie's father said tightly, and then he thundered down the stairs. He was dressed as she was, ready to brave the blizzard. He glanced at Cassie and touched her cheek, almost an apology. “Take care of her, will you, Cass?” he said, but before she could answer, he left.

Cassie finished lacing up her boots and cooked an egg, soft-boiled, just the way her mother liked. She carried it up on a plate with a piece of toast, figuring if her mother had something else in her stomach, it might not be so bad today.

When Cassie cracked the door open, Aurora was lying across the bed, her arm flung over her eyes. “Oh, Cassie,” she whispered. “Honey, please. The
light
.”

Cassie obediently stepped inside, shutting the door behind her. She smelled the cloying sweetness of the bourbon hovering at the edges of the room, mingling with traces of her father's rage.