Starstruck (26 page)

He nodded slowly, his hand coming up out of his pocket to brush lightly along the curve of her cheek, his eyes as sad as her own. His lips came down, touching hers briefly, and the pain of longing welled up inside her, overpowering her, consuming her. She blinked, and blinked again. And he was gone.

W
hat Frances had bought for her bedroom was a two-foot by three-foot poster of Steve Scott at his cocky handsomeness, and after Liv had finished exclaiming over it, listening to what had happened in her absence and telling abbreviated enthusiastic accounts of a week in an apartment with Joe and five hundred chicken pox, she thought there ought to be Academy Awards given for performances in real life.

“It’s just jet lag,” she excused herself whenever she dropped the thread of the conversation, whenever the kids asked why she was staring off into space, chewing on her fingernail or wiping a stray tear from her eye.

“Let your mother sleep,” Ellie counseled. “You’ll have plenty of time to talk to her in the morning. I’ll stay over tonight and ride herd on your crew,” she told Liv. “Then you can get some rest.” Before Liv could thank her, Ellie hustled everyone out of the bedroom, leaving
Liv staring up at Joe on the wall, larger than life and twice as seductive. She pulled the pillow over her head and sobbed her heart out.

In the morning she thought,
I've been here before; I know the terrain. I can make it through again.
It was not unlike the feeling she had had after Tom left. The same emptiness, the pain, the moving about as though she had lead weights on her feet and a sack over her head. But, before, she had had anger and the near-hatred of Tom for his faithlessness to sustain her. Now she felt no hatred, no anger, only weariness and a bone-deep sadness as she contemplated months, years, a whole lifetime, without Joe.

One day at a time, she told herself as she got out of bed, rejecting her oldest, most comfortable pair of jeans and a T-shirt as being a cop-out. If she let herself dress like a slob she would feel like a slob. And heaven knew she didn’t need that. She took pains with her hair, twisting it up on the back of her head and braiding it so that she looked sophisticated and proper. If anyone had a right to look proper, she did! She stared hard at the Steve Scott poster and reconsidered her first impulse, which had been to tear it down, rip it to shreds and feed it to the rabbit. There would be the problem of explaining her actions to the children, of course, but more than that, if she left it up she would get desensitized sooner. Like being innoculated against allergies. Exposure to the allergy-causing substance over time, in controlled dosage, was supposed to cure.
Well,
she thought, bending to tie her tennis shoes,
I hope it works because if anyone needs a cure now, it’s me.

“Skunk, isn’t he?” Ellie said flatly as she scrambled some eggs for Liv and thrust them in front of her, commanding, “Eat. I will not allow you to pine away because of that miserable bastard.”

“Ellie!” Liv said, shocked, “He’s your brother!”

“And getting heavier by the minute,” Ellie retorted. “I think I’ll trade him in.” She poured Liv a cup of coffee and refilled her own cup. “Dare I ask what happened?”

“Only if you promise not to put it in a play.”

“I promise. I don’t write tragedies anyway. And by the look of you, that’s what this one is.”

“He did offer to let me move in with him,” Liv said, wondering why she was defending him, for heaven’s sake.

“Big of him,” Ellie snorted. “I suppose he’d let you iron his shirts if you asked him nicely.”

“Well, maybe,” Liv said, a smile twitching her lips. She felt as though her face might crack, as though it had been years since she had smiled although it was really only yesterday. “He’s afraid of marriage, I think,” she said slowly. She didn’t say, “He doesn’t love me,” because, even though he hadn’t actually said it, she thought he really did. He just didn’t think in those terms. Or hadn’t for years, anyway.

“He needs his head examined,” Ellie muttered. She jumped up and rummaged under the sink, dragging out a pail and filling it with water.

“What are you doing?” Liv asked through a mouthful of surprisingly tasty eggs.

“Washing the floor,” Ellie spat, tossing one of Joe’s old undershirts into the hot, foamy water. “I need to do something strenuous, like wringing his neck. And since he isn’t here, this is my only alternative. I’ll pretend I’m drowning him instead.”

P
anic.

“’S too bright!”

Fear.

“Shut the light off!”

Flight.

“It’s the sun, you idiot! Sit up and drink this.” Mike McPherson’s voice grated in Joe’s ear, and an arm came around his shoulders, hauling him to a sitting position. There were storm troopers on maneuvers in his head. A
glass was thrust under his nose against his lips and tipped. Obediently he opened his mouth, swallowed, gagged, choked, spat.

“What is that?” he croaked, coughing. “Are you trying to kill me?”

“Don’t ask,” Mike said dryly. “As for killing you, I think you’re doing quite a good enough job trying to kill yourself.” He tipped the glass again and wouldn’t stop until Joe had drained half the liquid in it. Then Mike let him slide back down against the crumpled sheets, where he lay moaning, eyes screwed tightly shut. “There, that should do it.’

“Do what?” Joe wasn’t sure he wanted to know. His consciousness was like a shattered mirror, pieces reflecting tiny impressions, sensations, a glimmering of reality, nothing more. And, like the jagged edges of a broken mirror, they hurt, each one cutting into his brain like a knife.

“Turn you into a reasonable facsimile of yourself,” Mike replied. “And when you can open your eyes, I think I’d like some answers.”

“So would I,” Joe mumbled.
I’d even like some questions.
At the moment his universe didn’t extend beyond the confines of his own throbbing head. His eyeballs seemed to have rusted. Moving them was an excruciating ordeal, as if he hadn’t used them in years. He lifted a heavy hand and touched the lids, wondering if he would have to pry them open. His hand brushed against the softness of his bearded cheek, and his forehead wrinkled, perplexed. A beard? Then a bit of the mirror came into focus and he groaned, remembering.

“I’d leave you to your misery,” Mike said, “but your darling niece is having a swimming party here this afternoon, and I don’t want you wandering out into the middle of it. I don’t think you’re up to it.” Joe could tell he was grinning just from the sound of his voice. “And I doubt if her guests are either.”

“I don’t even know what I’m doing here,” Joe said
plaintively as he experimentally wiggled an eyebrow. Even that hurt. “I can’t remember a thing about it.”

“I know. I brought you.”

“What
…
how
…
” He struggled, trying to fit the pieces together, but they wouldn’t come.

“First I want some answers,” Mike said, and Joe got one eye open long enough
to see concern on his brother-
in-law’s face. “I’ll tell you how you got here when you tell me how you ended up out cold on Linda Lucas’s living-room floor, while I thought you were still in Vienna—or at least Madison—with a very respectable lady.”

It all came back with a crash. The lying awake all night, Liv’s body curled warmly into his own, her “I love you” echoing in his ears for hours, her kisses, his scabs, his offer, her rejection. Then more hours on an airplane than he believed possible, followed by booze he didn’t need, a p
hone call to Linda Lucas and…
His mind reeled. He wanted to vomit. He wanted to cry.

“That bad?” Mike asked, his voice gentler than Joe had ever heard it, no doubt in response to the emotions he saw on Joe’s face.

Ba
d? Worse. Worst. Joe nodded infinitesimally, shutting his eyes again, wishing for more of the blessed oblivion he’d just emerged from. Painful as it was, it couldn’t hurt more than this.

“Want to talk about it?”

“Can’t.” How could he tell anyone what had happened, explain his panic, his fears, the feelings that knowing she loved him had aroused in him. It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t reasonable, he didn’t suppose. But it was real. He’d felt it.

Mike thrust the glass at him. “Finish this and get dressed. I’m taking you down to the boat. That way no one will stumble over you here by mistake.”

“Boat?” The very thought nauseated him.

“Docked,” Mike promised with a grin. “As a refuge, not for a sail. Don’t panic.”

But Joe
k
new the advice had come too late. He already had panicked, and now he had to live with it. He struggled up, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed as though he were a hundred-year-old man. He held his head in his hands. Mike pressed his glasses on him and Joe scowled up at him.

“You look like an owl,” Mike told him. “The beard does wonders. I couldn’t imagine it when Linda called, but I think I kind of like it.”

“She called you?” Joe was beginning to get an idea of how he’d got here now. He remembered going to Linda’s drunk, done in from jet lag, chicken pox, and the thought of a future without Liv. But then everything went blank.

“Oh yes,” Mike agreed. “Most interesting phone call of the day. Frantic female voice squealing, ‘Joe Harrington’s full of hair and scabs, and he’s just passed out on my living-room floor!’
” Mike laughed. “Talk about intriguing. Hurry up, will you? I’ll wait in the kitchen. Don’t take forever.”

Why not, Joe wondered as he hauled himself to his feet, weaving unsteadily as he tried to stick one foot into his pants. What else did he have to do with his forever? What good was a forever without Liv?

L
iv thought she could write a book just filled with the
clichés
she was collecting that were supposed to help her get over her affair with Joe Harrington. The most often heard was “Time heals all,” and if she heard it one more time she thought that nothing would heal the person she murdered for having said it. People tiptoed around her at work as though she was the bereaved widow of a fifty-year marriage. They all cast her sympathetic glances when they thought she wasn’t looking and began talking loudly about their geraniums or grandchildren or how the Brewers were doing and the Cubs weren’t, so that they wouldn’t inadvertently say anything that would upset her more. She thought she would
go insane. But short of calling a press conference and announcing that it was no big deal, that Joe Harrington habitually walked out of women’s lives and she had had no right to expect him not to walk out of hers, she didn’t know what to do.

“It’ll be a nine-day wonder,” Frances promised her, smiling confidently over her knitting.

Liv looked up from the feature she was writing on pick-your-own apple orchards for the mid-September Sunday edition and scowled. “It’s already going on fourteen,” she reminded her friend.

Frances looked at her as though she disapproved of the truth, but then brightened considerably. “Well, it certainly has made Tom sit up and take notice. You have to admit that.”

Liv did. Tom, having taken an offer to move his practice to Phoenix, was dropping by regularly now. Ostensibly he was there to spend time with the kids before leaving, but he spent most of his visits lurking in the kitchen, watching Liv stir the spaghetti sauce or make pudding, and saying things like “You’d love Phoenix this time of year.” He never mentioned Joe to her, though Ben had said that his father had expressed pleasure when he learned that Joe Harrington seemed to have forgotten that Madison—and Liv—existed anymore.

Liv, for her part, was wishing she could forget him. She didn’t cry herself to sleep at night anymore, and she could stare at her Steve Scott poster for upwards of four minutes without having her pulse race. But her feelings for Joe were nowhere near as dead as she wished they were, nowhere near as dead as her feelings for Tom.

Tom could come and go as he pleased for all she cared. She scarcely
even
noticed. And all his hints about them all moving to Phoenix and starting over together—Trudy now having gone the way of the previous eight or ten other women in his life—went in one ear and out the other. She sat next to him at Noel’s championship baseball game and never felt a thing. Except regret that Joe had not been there.

She had held out a tiny, flickering hope, scarcely even admitting it to herself, that he might be there. He had known how important the game was to Noel. But she had spent more time watching the stands than the game, and she knew, positively and completely, that while the game had come and gone, Joe had not.

But it wasn’t until Frances bustled in with her gossip magazine the following Friday that Liv’s hopes well and truly died. Frances kept the magazine away from her, reading it like a teenager with a dirty book, stashing it between the covers of the weekly
TV
guide, but her gasps and duckings couldn’t be ignored. When she went out to lunch with George, Liv’s curiosity could be contained no longer.

How far I’ve sunk, she thought as she rummaged furtively through Frances’s desk drawer. And how much further she fell when she opened it to see a splashy two-page article on the latest Steve Scott film, now in the works, and pictures of a smiling Luther Nelson, his arms around the two co-stars, Joe Harrington and Veronique Moreau.