Touching Stars (2 page)

She raised her hand to welcome Jared and Noah. “‘Just us’ is plenty good enough for a special breakfast.”

As they walked to join the others, she thought that this would be the last time for a long time that they would eat breakfast as a family. Tomorrow Eric would eat it with them. Not quite family, at least not
her
family. Not any longer.

Two parents, no longer married. Three sons shared. And a history of trying so hard to make things work out. First the marriage, then the divorce, and now the recovery.

“I’m glad Dad’s coming,” Dillon said.

“I know you are.” She patted his shoulder. But she didn’t lie and say that she was glad, as well.

Ariel Kensington was a star on the rise, but she wasn’t a traditional beauty. Her blue eyes were just a hair too widely spaced, and her chin had a pronounced point that worked better on Reese Witherspoon. Off camera, Ariel’s head almost seemed out of proportion to her body, as if on some heavenly assembly line the angels had run out of the proper model and found a substitute one size larger. The head was covered with black curls that refused to acknowledge that straight hair was the style of the day. Somehow all these flaws gave her a more powerful presence on camera. And the size of the head fit the size of the smile, which lit up any room she entered. Eric had met Ariel two years before, at a dinner at Washington’s National Press Club, and a week later they had become lovers.

Now she was his chauffeur. She was taking him to the inn where his sons waited and his ex-wife was probably wondering what she was getting into.

“You could still come to L.A. and stay with me.” Ariel switched lanes on I-81 heading south to Toms Brook. “My place is a postage stamp, but we could manage.”

Eric realized he had been staring at Ariel’s profile. Maybe he was trying to memorize it in case he was ever falling through space again. In those moments and the many beyond, he had tried and failed to conjure up an adequate picture of her in his head.

He turned away. “We’ve been over this. This is better.”

She didn’t argue. Both of them knew their relationship hadn’t progressed enough for 24/7 intimacy. Neither had asked for any kind of commitment, nor, he imagined, had Ariel thought about the next step any more than he had. He had tried marriage, found wedded bliss was one of the few things he did badly, and decided not to fail again. Ariel was married to the next step on the career ladder.

“Do you know every sentence you utter has an edge to it?” She glanced at him. “That’s new.”

“You thought maybe I hadn’t changed?”

“I just wonder if you know how angry you sound all the time. How will your boys react?”

“I’m not angry at them. I’m not angry at you.”

“Eric, on the list of things you’re angry about, what’s at the top?”

“Is this an interview?”

“Maybe that’s one of the things you’re angry about. That everybody wants to know how you feel. Everybody wants—or at least
wanted
—an interview when you came back.”

“You must have considered psychology before you chose journalism.”

“Oh, I did, sweetie.
Dr. Kensington
had a real ring to it. Problem was, I wanted to know what made people tick, but I didn’t want to take the time to make them tick faster or slower. I wanted to move on to the next story.”

One of the things Eric liked most about Ariel was her honesty. It served her well on the job, too. She was gathering a reputation as a straight shooter. People often requested her when they were forced to talk to the press. She was as honest as a television journalist could be.

He decided to be just as honest. “I’m angry that this is all such a huge waste of resources.”

“Fill me in.”

“I’ve got energy, intellect, insight into world problems. I know how to use people to help me get to the bottom of things.” He paused. “Or at least I used to.”

“And now you’ve been sidelined.”

That was it, of course. Sidelined. Benched. Hog-tied. Eric Fortman, charismatic, powerful, dashing television journalist. So weak, so beaten, that right now he couldn’t face reporting Little League baseball scores.

“Tell me about your family,” Ariel said after the silence had stretched thin.

“You’ve never asked for a lot of details.”

“I’ve never been ten miles away and counting.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Basics again, for starters.”

“Jared’s eighteen, smart enough to get a scholarship to MIT in the fall. A top athlete, charming—”

“Like his daddy.”

“Not like me. He’s quieter. Jared is just who he is. He never tries to prove himself.”

“Watch yourself, you’re giving away insecurities.” She smiled and lit up her rental car with the brilliance of it.

He looked away and gazed out the window. Some fool in a black Cadillac Escalade was trying to pass on the right and getting nowhere fast. Nobody used a gas pedal like Ariel.

“Noah’s more of an enigma,” he said, after watching fields and trees and the occasional cow whiz by his window. The Escalade had dropped behind, as had several eighteen-wheelers. “He’s…let’s see…sixteen. Funny. The class clown. Very personable, the kid who picks up strays and helps his mother with the dishes. He likes art, and he’s won some competitions. I’ve never quite figured him out.”

“Do they look like you?”

“Jared a little.” He paused. “And I guess Dillon will.”

“Dillon’s the youngest?”

“Yeah.” He stopped and did a silent count. “Almost fourteen, I guess. The rebel.”

“Every family needs one. Sounds like the other two had all the good stuff sewed up. Does he drive your ex crazy?”

“Gayle? Are you kidding? Dillon’s her baby. She’d cut up his meat and spoon-feed it to him if he let her.” But even as he said this, Eric knew it wasn’t true. That was the vision he wanted to hold of his ex-wife, but it didn’t begin to give her the credit she deserved.

“How do you get along with them?”

A simple question. A trick question. “Most of the time I’m not around.”

“And when you are?”

“We get along fine.”

“Even you and the rebel?”

“I haven’t spent as much time with Dillon.”

“Oh.”

He heard a world of questions in that syllable. He had no answers, but he did have excuses. He listed them. “He was too young to do a lot of the things I wanted to do with the other two. And when I do spend time with the three of them, Dillon spends most of it fighting with his brothers. It’s not very pleasant for anybody.”

“Consequently he gets left behind,” she said.

“Consequently, yes.”

“Jockeying for position, I’m sure. I’d wonder who
I
was if Jared and Noah were my brothers.”

“Why are you so interested?”

She sent him another of those smiles. “I’m interested in you, Eric. You don’t have that figured out?”

Something eased a little inside him. And only when it did was he willing to admit how tense he had been. “It’s not easy going home to them.”

“Home?”

“Their home. And let’s face it, it was mine for a while.”

“A long time ago, right?”

“A lifetime.”

“And the ex-wife? What about her?”

“Gayle’s great. We get along, or at least we get along as well as two people who used to sleep together ever can. We don’t fight. She doesn’t ask for anything I don’t want to give.”

“She sounds like a paragon. Are you sure you’re not still in love with her?”

“That would be a twelve-year mistake, wouldn’t it? Something of a record.”

Ariel slowed so that she could move into the right lane. He saw the sign for the Toms Brook exit just ahead of them. In a moment she had taken it, slowing dramatically as she did.

He gave directions, and she listened, then followed them. They were smack in the middle of rural Virginia now, magnolias bursting into bloom, grass growing tall along the roadside, daisies climbing from drainage ditches. Mountains dominated the horizon. Manageable mountains. Nothing like Afghanistan’s High Hindu Kush, or the Kafar Jar Ghar mountain range in Zabul province, where he had tried and failed disastrously to chase down Taliban leaders.

“There’s a part of me,” Eric said, “that wishes I were coming back here as a beloved husband and father, a conquering hero to be fussed over, honored and adored. That’s pathetic, isn’t it?”

“Pretty natural, I’d say.”

“Gayle and I have a model divorce, but this is going to test things. I’ll be on their turf. At their mercy.” He managed a weak smile.

“Sweetie, relax. You’ve already been to Iraq and Afghanistan, and this ain’t neither.”

“That’s true. Nobody in Toms Brook wants to kill me. Nobody’s going to hold a sword over my head just to entertain his friends.”

“You’re safe, Eric. Those people are far away.
These
people want to help you recover.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, wondering which vision he would see when he did. The stifling mud-and-stone house north of Dai Chopan? Or the peaceful old inn by the river that he and Gayle had lovingly restored, one room at a time.

“I would go nuts here.” Ariel made a turn onto Route 11. “The country gives me the creeps. Who do these people talk to?”

“They know each other better than you know the man in the condo next to yours. They invent reasons to get together. It’s a good life.”

She snorted. “So good you couldn’t wait to get away.”

“That good,” he admitted. “I was licking wounds when Gayle and I bought the inn. She had an inheritance. I thought I’d had it with the news biz. Turns out I was wrong.”

“Wounds?”

He wanted to tell her. Maybe because, after everything else, his past was almost humorously tame.

“I was forced to give up a story I was working on to a colleague. I told her there were some problems, that I was still researching and checking facts. But she rushed it into production, and when some of the information proved to be bogus, she blamed it on me. My name was still attached, and she was higher up the chain. They moved me to a nothing job at a nothing station, and I quit.”

She was silent for a while, apparently absorbing everything he’d said. Then she glanced at him. “You were having an affair with her, weren’t you?”

“How’d you figure that out?”

“Because why else would you put up with that kind of treatment? You knew if you squawked, the affair would come to light and your wife would find out.”

“I’m not particularly proud of it. Gayle and I were separated at the time, and I probably told myself I deserved better. It was just one of those things that happened. Too many drinks after work trying to unwind. The affair didn’t mean anything. Too many late nights in the same places. She was married, too. I thought that made me invulnerable.”

“Fooled you, didn’t she?”

“Made a fool of me, more likely.”

“Did your wife find out anyway?”

“After we began talking divorce, somebody told her.”

“Final nail in the coffin?”

“I think it just made the divorce a little more inevitable. When we bought the inn she thought it was a forever deal. I guess I saw it as an investment while I figured out what to do next. Then I was offered a job reporting from Bosnia. Almost out of the blue. A chance to be in the middle of the action instead of the middle of sawdust and breakfast-menu rehearsals and diapers.”

“I can understand why you went.”

“So could Gayle. And I could understand why she didn’t want to go. Her father was in the foreign service. Gayle moved a lot. For some people it becomes a way of life. For Gayle it became a desire for roots.”

“You two never thought about this before you married?”

“We thought we’d find a balance.”

“Yin and yang, huh? I’ve never seen it work.”

He wondered about that as they zipped past frame and brick houses set back from the road and through the small town center of Toms Brook, which was more of an address than a destination. No stoplight slowed their progress.

Maybe his marriage to Gayle could have worked if he had been someone else, someone better. Eric rarely beat himself up. He spent less time considering past actions than he spent trimming nose hairs. But in those troublesome bursts of navel-gazing, he had come to the realization that he rarely put anyone else’s needs ahead of his own. Three days when he had believed each breath might be his last had firmed up that conclusion.

And of course in the weeks since he’d been held hostage, he’d had more than a little time to consider
everything
about his life.

Ariel slowed and turned off the larger road to a narrow lane. “Okay, where do we go from here?”

He directed her, but they were silent otherwise. Ariel was assertive and pragmatic. Three days ago she had flown to D.C. to meet his plane after his long flight from Germany and taken him to the hospital for the mandatory inpatient physical performed by a doctor the network had chosen. She had helped him fill out stacks of paperwork, fended off friends both in and out of the media, and finally, last night, checked him into a suite at the Mayflower under her brother’s name, then waited with him until the sleeping pill the doctor had prescribed kicked in. Early this morning she’d picked him up for the trip to the valley. No one could have done it with less fuss and more finesse.