Picture Perfect Part 10

He's acting.

She dug her nails into his arms and bit down on his lip until she had enough force to push him away. "Stop it," she ordered. "Just stop it now."

For a moment he froze, his eyes paling to the gray of Arctic ice and then slowly draining of life until all that sat across from Ca.s.sie was a sh.e.l.l. And then something shuddered its way up his body, moving like a blush, bringing color to his skin and settling as a spark in his eyes.

He was Alex again, and he shrugged. "You didn't have to bite me," he said. "I just figured you'd like a firsthand performance, too."

Still cautious, Ca.s.sie curled up at the far side of the back seat. "Who told you where I went?" she accused, her eyes sliding to John in the front.

Alex reached for her hand and laced his fingers with hers. "I know everything about you," he said, smiling.

She was beginning to think that he did. He was back to being the Alex she'd grown accustomed to in the past few days, funny and gentle and comfortable as a worn armchair. Ca.s.sie wondered if this was just another character he'd played along the line, one he kept himself wrapped in most of the time.

She shook her head to clear it. What was she thinking? She had seen Alex with his guard down-when he talked about his parents, when he tried to teach her karate on the shallows of the beach, when he reached for her in his sleep and whispered her name. It was impossible to act all the time; it was ridiculous to think that what she saw was not real. She squeezed his hand. "Sorry," she said. "I don't usually bite."

He turned slightly, patting his side, and she willingly slid closer to him. "But what made you pick Antony, for G.o.d's sake?"

Alex smiled. "You used to love Antony when we were first married,"

he said.

Ca.s.sie opened her mouth to object, but changed her mind. Alex was right. He did know everything about her, and at the present moment she still knew next to nothing, and the only choice she had was to believe him.

They drove for fifteen minutes in silence, and then Ca.s.sie felt Alex kiss the top of her head. "You're probably just nervous about meeting the staff all over again," he said.

Ca.s.sie stared out the window. She knew she was pa.s.sing trees and roads and flowering bushes, but the car was moving so quickly that the world was just puddled in colors; she could pick nothing out individually. "Yes," she said. "That must be it."

THE HOUSE STOOD AT THE END OF A MILE-LONG DRIVEWAY UP A winding hill in Bel-Air, a white mansion with wrought-iron grillwork and a slate roof. The front porch supported a second-story veranda where floor-length lace curtains blew through open French doors. Roses climbed up a trellis on the left side of the house; heliotrope wound its way up the right. In the distance Ca.s.sie could see formal gardens and two smaller houses, little white replicas of the main house. It looked for all the world like a Louisiana plantation.

"My G.o.d," she whispered, hearing the gravel crunch beneath her sneaker as she stepped out of the car. "I can't possibly live here."

Alex took her by the elbow and guided her up the porch steps. John opened the front door, a magnificent oak panel carved with the head of a lion.

The parlor was an overwhelming room with a cathedral ceiling, a double curved staircase, and rose marble floors. Ca.s.sie stared down at her feet, which rested in the reflected pool of light from a multicolored cathedral-style window over the door. Alex's initials spread like a stain over her left shoe and her ankle.

"Ca.s.sie," he said, and her head snapped up. "John has told everybody Picture Perfect 99 about your . . . little problem, and they'll go out of their way to help you today before we go to Scotland."

Ca.s.sie ran her eyes over the line of figures that stood at the bottom of the left-hand staircase like a row of toy soldiers. There was John, of course, who was not only the driver and bodyguard, apparently, but a majordomo of sorts. There was a man with a pastry ap.r.o.n wrapped around his large frame, a young girl in a simple black and white maid's uniform. Another man stood off to the side, as if he was unwilling to be a.s.sociated with the household staff. He stepped forward and offered his hand. "Jack Arbuster," he said, smiling. "Your husband's secretary."

She wondered what in the world Alex needed a secretary for when he already had an agent, a publicist, and a personal a.s.sistant. She thought maybe he was in charge of answering fan mail, or paying the utility bills.

"I need to catch up on a few things before you fly out," Jack said to Alex. He winked at Ca.s.sie apologetically.

Alex put his arm around her waist. "Give me an hour," he said to Jack. "I'll meet you in the library." As Jack walked off, Ca.s.sie followed him with her eyes, trying to see what was around the corner. Tugging her sideways, Alex pulled Ca.s.sie past the maid, the cook, and John.

"Come on," he said. "I'll show you as much as I can, and if worse comes to worst I'll leave you with the blueprints till you can find your way around."

He took her to a library paneled in cherry and filled with first editions of hundreds of British and American cla.s.sics, pointing out one entire shelf filled with copies of scholarly journals and magazines that featured articles Ca.s.sie herself had written. He led her through a dining room whose table could seat thirty, a projection room with a pristine screen and ten overstuffed couches. In the kitchen, she stuck her head in the stainless steel refrigerator and counted the copper pots that were racked above the marble island, and was given a bite-size apple turnover by the cook as a parting gift.

There were six bathrooms and ten bedrooms, each decorated with pale silk wallpaper and French lace curtains. There were three sitting rooms and a recreation center with pinball machines, a bowling lane, a pool table, and a big-screen TV. There was a whole wing she hadn't even seen when Alex brought her upstairs to the master bedroom. He opened the double doors to a suite, comfortably furnished with breezy striped sofas and thick Persian rugs. A stereo was recessed into the wall, in addition to a television and a VCR. Flowers were arranged in bowls on several tables, beautiful blooms that brought out the lavender and blue accents of the room and that, Ca.s.sie knew, were not native to California.

"We must spend a lot of time up here," Ca.s.sie said, stepping behind Alex through an adjoining door that revealed a tremendous bird's-eye maple sleigh bed.

Alex smiled at her. "Well," he said, "we try."

Ca.s.sie stepped up to the bed and traced the whorls in the patterns of wood. "This is bigger than a king-size, isn't it?"

Alex flopped onto the mattress belly-first. "I had it made up special.

I have this theory about beds-they're like goldfish bowls. You know how if you keep goldfish in a bowl, they stay the size of your thumb?

Well, when you move them into a pond, like we have out back, they grow ten times that size. So I figure the bigger the bed, the less I'll be stunting my growth."

Ca.s.sie laughed. "I think you've pa.s.sed p.u.b.erty."

Alex grabbed her wrist and pulled her down beside him. "You've noticed?"

She rolled toward him, staring at the light beard that already broke the smooth line of his jaw. "Where's my lab?"

"Out back. The little white building-the second one you come to.

The first one is where John lives."

Ca.s.sie frowned. "He doesn't stay in the house like Mrs. Alvarez?"

Alex sat up. "We like having the place to ourselves at night," he said simply.

Ca.s.sie walked to the gaping fireplace that stood opposite the bed, then fingered the empty brandy decanter on the mantel. Aurora, she thought, and she felt Alex's hands on her shoulders. "It's only for show,"

he whispered, as if he could read her mind.

Ca.s.sie spun around. "Go earn your keep," she said, smiling. "If I'm not back in an hour, send out the National Guard."

When Alex left, Ca.s.sie stood at the open French doors, looking out over the suburbs of L.A. and the blue swells of mountains. A gardener she hadn't met was rooting through a bed of fragile lilies, and in the driveway John was polishing the rear fender of the Range Rover. She located her laboratory, just to the left of a profusion of flowers planted in the shape of a fleur-de-lis. Beyond the garden was a white limestone path that led down a sloping hill toward something she could not see.

She flew down the opposite staircase, the one she hadn't walked up, just to see if it felt any different. She walked out the door and tested a rocking chair and the hanging porch swing before running down the limestone path like a child. When she was far enough away from the house to be certain n.o.body was looking, she spread her arms to the sun and whirled around, laughing and smiling and skipping to beat the band.

There was a landscaped pool with a man-made waterfall that Alex had forgotten to tell Ca.s.sie about, and a genuine maze made of thick boxwood hedges. She wandered inside, wondering if she knew her way to the center and out again. The sharp corners of the maze came up quickly as she ran through the narrow aisles, scratching her arms on fresh-cut branches. Dizzy, she let herself sink to the cool gra.s.s. She lay on her back, overwhelmed by Alex's house and Alex's grounds.

If a bug hadn't crawled up the inside of her arm, she never would have noticed the stone. She rolled over, which brought her eye-level to the cuttings from the boxwood. Neatly hidden inside the hedge was a small pink slab of rock.

It was not oval, not really; it was too rough-hewn and lopsided for that. Ca.s.sie reached under the brambles, feeling the branches tangle around her wrists like bracelets. It was rose quartz, and she had brought it with her all the way from the East Coast. Chiseled crudely on its flattest side were the letters CCM and the year 1976.

She could not remember why she had hidden it under the boxwood in the middle of Alex's maze. She could not remember if she'd ever told Alex it was there. But she realized it was the first piece of evidence she truly believed; the first thing she'd seen since losing her memory that convinced her she had once belonged here.

Ca.s.sie rolled onto her back and held the rock on her chest. She stared into the sun until this beautiful world Alex had offered her went black, and then she whispered Connor's name.

ON NOVEMBER 1, 1976, A LITTLE AFTER SEVEN IN THE MORNING, Connor's father walked into the kitchen where he and his mother were eating cream of wheat and killed them both with a 12-gauge shotgun.

Between the time it took Ca.s.sie to call the police about the shots and to run through the path in the woods to Connor's house, Mr. Murtaugh had managed to turn the gun on himself.

Connor's father had blown himself clear into the living room, but Mrs. Murtaugh lay on the floor. The back of her head was gone. Connor had fallen nearly on top of her, and there was a tremendous hole where his chest had been.

With a calm born of shock, Ca.s.sie sat down beside Connor and pulled him into her lap. She touched her fingers to his lips, still warm. She thought about kissing him, like she had the night before at the graveyard, but could not bring herself to do it. The police and the paramedics dragged Ca.s.sie away from Connor's body. She sat in a corner of the kitchen with a rough wool blanket wrapped around her shoulders, answering the same questions over and over. No, she had not been present at the scene of the crime. No, she hadn't seen Mr. Murtaugh this morning. No, no, no.

Everyone knew how close Ca.s.sie and Connor had been, and she was excused from school until after the funeral, but that didn't keep her from hearing the whispers. They said he pulled the trigger on himself with his own toe. Couldn't get himself a job, and turned to the bottle. Killed an innocent boy like that, in the prime of his life. At least the problems in her own house she could see coming. Connor's family had been rotting beneath its candy surface, festering where no one could see.

The day of the funeral it snowed. Connor didn't have a will, so his body was disposed of the way his parents' bodies had been; he was cremated. The ashes were blown over Moosehead Lake. Ca.s.sie watched as the urn holding Mrs. Murtaugh was opened, then the one holding her husband. When they spread Connor's ashes, Ca.s.sie started to scream.

No one could stop her; not even when her father clamped a gloved hand over her mouth did the sound diminish in intensity. It wasn't right that for the rest of forever Connor and his father would be mixed together. She wanted them to do it over. She wanted them to give Connor to her.

She felt snow freeze her eyes wide open when what was left of Connor was given to the wind. A breath of gray, insubstantial and shifting like smoke, screened the sky and disappeared just as quickly. It was as if Connor had been a figment of Ca.s.sie's imagination. As if he had never existed at all.

She slipped away from the other people paying their respects and, still wearing her good dress and her snow boots, started to run around Moosehead Lake. It was tremendous, and she knew she wouldn't be able to get very far, but by the time she sank to her knees in the snow, gasping, she was a mile away from the site of the funeral. She let the snow melt through the thin fabric of her skirt, cold enough to paralyze.

She dug with her fingers into the frozen ground until her nails were cracked and bleeding.

She realized that although she had tried for years to ease her mother's pain, she would never be able to ease Connor's. So she would do the next best thing: she would hurt for him. She carried the piece of rose quartz home with her and sat in the garage near her father's tool chest, using a hammer and an awl to make the headstone Connor hadn't been given. She worked until her hands cramped. Then she curled her arms around her knees and rocked herself back and forth, wondering why, since both their hearts had been ripped out, she wasn't dying too.

FRIDAY EVENING, WILL FLYING HORSE WAS SITTING ON HIS NEW green couch watching a game show and eating a partially cooked TV dinner when the electricity went out. "s.h.i.t," he said, watching the blinking clock on his VCR fade into nothing. He set his plate beside him on the couch and tried to remember where the fuse box was.

It wasn't as bad as it could have been; it was dinnertime, so there was enough light outside to see his way into the bas.e.m.e.nt. The strange thing was that none of the breakers had been tripped. He walked back upstairs and stepped onto the front porch of his house. In the windows next door and across the street he could see a kitchen light burning steady; a mute dog jogging across a TV. It was just him.

He called the electric company, but could only record his address and problem on a voice-mail system. G.o.d only knew how long it would take for workers to get the message. So he started pulling candles out of his kitchen cabinets, ugly red egg-shaped ones that a former girlfriend had bought him one year for his birthday. He carried four of them into the living room and lit them with a book of matches he had in his pocket.

As the sun went down, a shadow crept across him. The fringes of the medicine bundle above his head stirred, restless in the quiet. Will listened to the rhythm of his own pulse. There was nothing to do but wait.

ELIZABETH, THE MAID, CARRIED INTO THE BEDROOM A SUITCASE THAT was bigger than she was. "Will you need a hanging bag, too?"

Ca.s.sie didn't know. "I guess I will," she said, and the maid immediately turned to leave. "Wait," she called. She furrowed her brow. "I can't find the closets."

Elizabeth smiled. She walked through the suite and the bedroom into the short hallway that led to the green marble bathroom. When she leaned her shoulder against the wall, Ca.s.sie was amazed to see the wallpaper spring open to reveal a hidden closet. "Yours," Elizabeth said, and then she did the same thing on the other side. "Mr. Rivers's."

She walked out of the room, leaving Ca.s.sie to stare at the rows of sweaters and blouses and furs that belonged to her. The closet was bigger than the housekeeper's quarters at the apartment. Ca.s.sie had never seen so many clothes in one place.

She began to pull things she thought she should pack from the drawers-comfortable turtlenecks and cotton cardigans, underwear and extra bras and a small quilted bag for her makeup. She wanted to take a pair of loafers from the bottom of the stack of shoe boxes, but she thought she might be able to get to them without removing the boxes on top. She slid the box out halfway, trying to wedge the loafers under the lid, but the support gave out and the contents of her closet came tumbling down.

Surrounded by a mess of lingerie and high heels and bush jackets, she almost missed finding the tiny compartment. She'd pushed against it and its latch sprang free. It was another hidey-hole that worked on the same principle as her closet. It was tiny, no bigger than a breadbox.

Ca.s.sie wondered if that was where she kept her jewelry.

Inside was a stack of paperback romances, the glitzy kind that showed a half-dressed woman bent under a pirate on the front cover, the kind an anthropologist would never be caught dead reading. Ca.s.sie laughed out loud. Was this her big secret? What did Alex keep in his compartment? Hustler?

She picked up a handful and leafed through the t.i.tles. Save Me Again. The Fire and the Flower. Love's Burning Flames. Maybe Alex made her hide them. It wouldn't do for the public to find out that the wife of America's leading man read these things in her spare time.

A box was trapped in the corner behind the stack of books. Ca.s.sie identified it by sight, its pink cover open, one of its two foil-wrapped tests still cradled inside. First Response. For use the first day of your missed period.

She glanced outside the closet, into the stunning green bathroom.

She could clearly see herself bent over the vanity of the sink, waiting the requisite three minutes. She recalled the way the small pink circle had crept its way upward from the swab of the test kit. Pink, Pregnant.

White, Not Pregnant. She had cried into the sink, her hands on the fourteen-karat fixtures, surprised by how cold real gold could be.

Ca.s.sie sank down onto the pile of fallen clothes, clothes Alex had bought her, clothes that matched all the trappings of a life like this.

She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, trying to push away the image of the graveyard at St. Sebastian's, and what had driven her there.

I T WAS THE NIGHT A LEX WAS SCHEDULED TO FLY TO S COTLAND FOR.

on-location shooting, and he was in one of his moods. She had learned to gauge him by his eyes: the darker they turned, the further away she stayed. It had been months since the last time. She should have known. At dinner, Alex kept drumming his knife along the edge of the table. It made a dull, thudding noise against the tablecloth and Ca.s.sie's heart took up its rhythm. "How did it go today?" she asked.

Alex clattered the knife against the edge of his plate. "It is over budget; it is being directed by a moron; it is barely a week into production." He ran his hands through his hair. "Thank you so much for bringing it up."

Ca.s.sie sat back in her seat and concentrated on keeping her mouth shut and eating with the minimal amount of noise. She had found out today about the baby and she wanted to tell Alex before he left, but maybe this wasn't the time. She had to catch him at the right moment. She had to be able to make him see that it wasn't lousy timing; it was going to change their lives. It was going to give them a second chance.

Alex pushed back his chair. "I have to pack. I've got less than an hour." Ca.s.sie glanced at his plate, full of food he'd pushed around but barely eaten.

"I'll make a sandwich for you to take on the road," she said, but Alex had already left the room.

In the three years since it had begun, Ca.s.sie had become very good at staying out of Alex's way. After all, it was a big house, and with the staff gone for the night no one would think it strange if she went down to her lab at three in the morning, or decided to finish a book in the library until the sun came up. But her instincts weren't sharp that night; she had spent too much time during the day drawing rosy images of a little boy with Alex's silver eyes. She walked to the bedroom and sat in the middle of the bed, where she could watch Alex pack. Looking at him would be like getting a glimpse of her baby. "Do you want me to get together your shaving kit?" Alex shook his head. She reached for a sweater he'd tossed into the bedroom. "I'll fold for you," she offered, and she started, arm over arm, but Alex's hand caught her wrist.

"I said I'd do it," he muttered. Something was eating away at Alex from the inside, something that had been part of him long before she'd ever met him. It was what made him the consummate actor, although n.o.body else in the world knew it. They saw the pain, but after Alex had cloaked it in another character's actions. Only Ca.s.sie had looked at him when his open eyes went blind; only Ca.s.sie had pressed her hands to his chest and felt the skin stretched over a heart swollen with rage. She loved him more than anything in the world. Even more than herself- hadn't she proved that? She knew that even if she couldn't heal him this time, the next time he hurt she would be able to. That's why Alex had come to her. She was the only person who could make it better. But it was a double bind. She was the only one close enough to Alex to help, but that also brought her underfoot. It wasn't his fault that she got in the way. When it happened, she could only blame herself, forgive him. Alex sank down beside her on the bed. "I don't want to go to f.u.c.king Scot- land," he said, his voice rough. "I want to take some time off. I want this G.o.dd.a.m.n Oscar broadcast to be over and I want to drop off the face of the earth." "So do it," Ca.s.sie urged, rubbing the muscles in his shoulders. "Put Macbeth on hold, and come with me to Kenya."

Alex snorted. "And what the h.e.l.l will I do while you play in your sandbox?"

Ca.s.sie flinched. "Read screenplays," she suggested. "Get a tan." Alex began throwing clothes in the suitcases that he'd laid open on the floor.

"Today I found out about the pre-Oscar interview we taped with Barbara Walters." He sighed. "She's putting me on with some comedian and Noah Fallon." Ca.s.sie stared at him blankly. "For Christ's sake, Noah Fallon. He's up for Best Actor too." Alex sat on the floor, his knees drawn up to his chest.

"She's airing me second. f.u.c.king second. Fallon's going last." Ca.s.sie smiled at him. "At least you're in the broadcast," she said. Alex turned away from her. "In the past three years, when Barbara Walters's Oscar special features a nominee in the third slot, that nominee has won. It's like a G.o.dd.a.m.n barometer of how the Academy's votes will go." Unsure of what to say, Ca.s.sie slipped off the bed and wrapped her arms around him. "I'm not going to win," Alex said, his words falling softly onto her shoulder.

"You'll win," she whispered fiercely. "You're going to win." In the way that it usually happened, Alex changed in the s.p.a.ce of a heartbeat. He stood, grabbing Ca.s.sie by her wrists and shaking her so hard her hair fell down around her face and her neck snapped back. "How do you know?" he demanded, his breath hot against her cheek. "How do you know?"

Words caught in Ca.s.sie's throat, the ones she always wanted to defend herself with that never slipped past her clenched jaw. Alex shook her again, and then pushed her to the floor so she was at his feet. She tripped over the luggage as she fell, and struck her head against the closet door, feeling a wound open that did not hurt nearly as much as the shame that ran through her. She had just enough time to see Alex's foot coming at her, and instead of curling into a ball as she usually did, she rolled so he caught her square on her back, the pain running up her spine but sparing her stomach. "My baby," she breathed, and then her hands flew to her mouth and she prayed that Alex hadn't heard. But he was already facing away from her, his head in his hands. He knelt down at her side, cradling her the way he always did when the anger had subsided, his hands running over her with the tenderness that was a Siamese twin to his rage. "I'm sorry," he whispered. "I didn't mean to."

"It's not your fault," she said, because she knew her lines, but for the first time she didn't believe her own words. Anger started to seep from a crack deep inside her that had been patched over too often to hold fast. G.o.dd.a.m.n you, she thought.

She knew Alex needed her, but she also realized she could not stay. She couldn't risk the safety of this child made by her and Alex. She would do for her baby what in three years she had not done for herself. When John buzzed in over the intercom, Alex left Ca.s.sie's side and threw all his clothes, suits included, into the suitcases. He dragged the luggage outside the door and then leaned over to kiss her. "I love you," he said, the words swollen. He laid his hand over hers where it rested on her stomach. She waited until she heard the car crunch out of the driveway and then she grabbed her jacket and walked out of Alex's house. The world swam, and she had to concentrate with every footstep to convince herself she was doing what had to be done. She told herself that if she went away now while Alex was out of town, maybe it wouldn't hurt him quite as much. She walked down the street with no destination in mind. She would have gone to Ophelia's but that was the first place Alex would look when he found her missing; and there was n.o.body else she could turn to. It was Ca.s.sie's word against Alex's gold-plated media image, and like her Greek prophetess namesake, no one would believe her when she spoke the truth. S HE HAD BEEN SO CLOSE. Ca.s.sIE'S FISTS WERE BALLED INTO HER LAP, she was crying, and she realized that she had betrayed herself by losing her memory. Otherwise, she would have been able to stay one step ahead of Alex.