Her Perfect Life

by Rebecca Taylor

  “What should I write in it?” she asked him.

  Adam, his head in her lap, looked up at her with his bright blue eyes and smiled. “Tell me a story, Clare. You always make up the best stories. You should write them down.”

  Later, standing beneath the tree, long past when it had gone dark and Clare was expected to be home, Adam kissed her lips for the first time. She could still remember that first soft press of his mouth against hers, the moment they became more than best friends, the moment everything between them changed forever.

  Later that night, after Eileen had finished crying herself to sleep on the other side of their shared bedroom, Clare wrote her first words in her first journal. Mama said Daddy isn’t coming home. The next three pages had poured out of her as she had sat upright, her diary resting on her knees under the covers of her bed, straining to keep her words on the lines with only the soft glow of their night-light to help her.

  Their father had died the very next morning. He was thirty-one.

  Clare closed her first journal and placed it next to her on the white shag rug; she was now seven years older than her father had been when he died, alone, in that hospital room.

  She stared at the hundreds of other journals before her, remembering clearly what was in some, frightened by what revelations were held in others. These books, collectively, held the essence of what Donna Mehan had been dogging her about for years. In these books was the meat of a story Clare was afraid to tell.

  She leaned forward and touched the tops of several spines all at once. She pulled them out, three, four, five. She used both her hands and pulled journal after journal into a heap on the rug in front of her until she had cleaned three shelves worth bare. By the time Roberto arrived for his scheduled weekly private piano performance, Clare was busy stacking the books in piles of ten on her glass coffee table.

  Clare had met Roberto at a private party in Pacific Palisades, hosted by the director of the movie based on Clare’s thirtieth book, She Knew You When. Roberto had told her he and his wife were retiring to San Francisco after a long and successful career as a studio musician who had played backup piano for major artists for more than forty years. “It’s my fingers that are needing to quit, damn arthritis. My heart and my head would keep at it right up until they shoveled the dirt into my grave.”

  It had been months later that she’d called him. She’d been working on What We Lost, annoyed with her inability to find exactly what she was wanting for mood music. When she’d realized what she wanted, needed, was live piano music, she’d called Roberto and asked if his arthritic fingers would be able to manage one session a week. She’d had a very specific playlist. Music from her past, once played in this exact order by someone she loved very much.

  “Shall I play the usual, Ms. Collins?” Roberto asked, his eyebrows raised at the sight of her hauling books from a perfectly useful bookshelf to a cluttered construction of paper in the middle of the room.

  “Of course, please don’t mind me,” she said as she leveled one stack and returned to the pile for two more handfuls.

  “Do you…would you like a hand?” he asked, making his way toward the pile and moving to pick some books up himself.

  “No!” she shouted and held up her hand. “Don’t touch them!”

  Roberto stopped midstoop, then stood up slowly, like a man suddenly realizing he was not in a petting zoo but a bear’s den.

  “I’m sorry,” Clare recovered. “They’re…special. I’m sorry I shouted.”

  Roberto shook his head twice. “No need to explain to me.” He pointed to Clare’s white Steinway and Sons grand piano, Her Majesty, as he often called it, and tilted his head. “I’ll just play?”

  “Please.” Clare sighed, relieved to get back to what she was working on before his interruption. It wasn’t just someone else touching her books, although admittedly that was part of it, the physical act for her, the intimacy with this past, the memories that were opening up to her—her mind was going to that place.

  That place was where her books had all started. A smorgasbord of thoughts, emotions, images, snippets of dialogue, characters were forming in her head—Roberto was, unintentionally, interrupting that flow. She wanted him to play her songs but didn’t want to get sidetracked from the thoughts that were starting to coalesce in her mind. As soon as she had all the books stacked, she grabbed several new notebooks and her pens from the desk.

  Roberto played, and Clare wrote.

  With notes and pens and various journals spread out around her on the shag rug, with Donna Mehan’s sharp critique still stinging, and Adam’s ring on her finger, Clare began working out her next book. With a new, acrid black Sharpie, she wrote out her title across the first of the many notebooks she would use for her notes and character sketches: A Perfect Life.

  When Roberto finished the set of songs, she lifted her head from the pages. “Do you have time today to play the list one more time?”

  He smiled down at her from Her Majesty’s shiny bench and shrugged. “I think I could squeeze you in before my next appointment with my rocker recliner.”

  “Thank you, Roberto.” The music he played for her was always transportive, dredging up memories and moments she never wanted to forget, but today it was helping her resurrect more than memories. It was helping her summon the ghosts she needed to craft this book. When he had run through all but the last two songs again, Clare noticed that she had filled most of her first notebook and her hand was cramping.

  She flipped through her notes with only a vague sense of what she’d put down. As if she’d barely been conscious while writing and was only now waking up. Charlie shifted on the couch and drew her attention, then she glanced at the computer and remembered—her friend request to Kaylee.

  She sat upright and stretched out the kinks that had roped across her back and up her neck from sitting hunched over on the floor for too long, then stood up and moved to her desk. She glanced back at Roberto, all his concentration and efforts focused on his fingers and the keys in front of him as he began the final song. Clare sat down and shook her mouse to life, placing each of her noise-cancelling earbuds in her ears to now drown out the piano—she felt heavy, and she recognized the feeling. It was the grief come back. She found a track of music she had recently purchased, nothing from her past—she needed to wake back up to the here and now.

  With two clicks of her mouse, she learned that Kaylee and Sara Smith were now Facebook friends. What’s more, Kaylee had sent Sara a direct message. She hesitated. Did Kaylee suspect it was really Clare? She envisioned some sort of horrible message: I know it’s you, Clare. Oh and by the way, so does everyone else. You’re not fooling anyone, “Sara,” so how about you cut the crap? Or are you just too famous now?

  Clare sighed. Kaylee had always been a very sweet girl; it was hard to imagine this now mother of two suddenly morphing into a mean-girl bitch. She was always friends with everyone. Clare clicked open the message.

  Hi Sara,

  Thanks for reaching out! I see you are friends with lots of people from Cleaver High. Are you an alum? I’m sorry I don’t remember you off the top of my head, which is weird, but twenty years is a long time! But if you are an alum, and didn’t already know, I’m coordinating the class of ’98 twenty-year reunion. It will be in Casper, of course, in May. Click the link I’m adding at the bottom of this message to go to our official page—hope to see you there! Best, Kaylee Collins-Hensel

  Clare clicked the link for the reunion page and sat back in her chair. Kaylee maybe didn’t know it was her, but she had to suspect. I don’t remember you off the top of my head, which is weird. Of course it was weird. They had gone to a high school with less than three hundred people in their graduating class—everyone knew everyone. If Clare Kaczanowski (a.k.a., Collins) was the only one missing, and no one really remembered Sara Smith, it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes—

  S
omething touched her shoulder—she screamed.

  Chapter 8

  Simon

  Two years before Clare’s death

  If he was honest with himself, and he suspected that maybe he hadn’t been in a very long time, he hated living in this place.

  He stared down into the green, swampy-smelling pool that no one ever used and considered a list of things that could possibly be wrong. The pump was running; he could hear it humming softly through the open doors of the low-slung equipment shed. The chemicals had just been checked last week. There was no way a week of nonuse left the water looking like this unless it was something more serious, like a cracked pipe.

  With his hands on his hips, Simon sighed, suddenly aware of the tension that had been building all day, ever since sneaking out of bed before Clare to read Donna’s review.

  He stared at the sky above him, gray and overcast. The wind blowing in from the ocean picked up speed and smelled like a storm. He walked away from the pool. It wasn’t like he possessed even the most basic of mechanical skills; what was he going to do about it? Once he was back inside, he’d call their pool guy, see how quickly they could get out here.

  Their house had been built on a vacant five-acre lot, naturally secluded on a jut of cliff. Three sides of the property were surrounded by steep, rocky drops that overlooked both the crash of the Pacific Ocean and Muir Beach. Should any of their closest neighbors—not that they knew any of them—happen to decide to drop in, they would either have to scale the three hundred wooden steps leading from the beach below or announce themselves at the fifteen-foot-high security gate protecting the fourth side of the property.

  With bare feet and his pants rolled at the ankle so they wouldn’t get wet messing around with the pool, Simon crossed the stamped concrete pool deck to the grass yard that led out to the three-foot black wrought-iron fence, the one barrier between him, the cliff, and the Pacific. When the house was first built, they hadn’t even bothered with the fence. When the contractor mentioned putting it in, Clare had scoffed.

  “What for?”

  “Well, it’s pretty dangerous,” he advised them with a nervous glance over his shoulder. “A child, or adult, for that matter, in the dark, let’s say, could easily wander too far. Those cliffs are sheer. There’s nothing to stop them going right over.”

  “We don’t have small children,” Clare announced like a declaration. “And we are likely the only adults who will ever be here—adults who are smart enough to not fall off a cliff,” she chided. “Right, Simon?”

  “Um…of course,” he agreed, which was pretty much all you could do with Clare once she had made up her mind about anything. What had she meant about being the only adults? Like ever? This huge house and pool, the outside deck, surely there would be people over—parties?

  “Besides,” she added, striding right over to the cliff’s edge and throwing her arms wide. “I like to stand here… It’s one of the reasons I specifically chose this property.” She whirled around to face them, her heels right at the rocky lip, making Simon’s stomach queasy with fear. If she lost her balance, fell back even half a step—she’d be gone. “I don’t like the idea of anything between me and this ocean. I like the feeling, the power of it.”

  The contractor had raised his eyebrows and shrugged as if to say, It’s your homeowners insurance, not my problem which of you, or your drunken friends, goes careening over the edge to their certain death. It wasn’t until Simon brought Charlie home four months ago that Clare had called the contractor back and explained their new circumstance.

  Because she couldn’t bear the thought of Charlie getting hurt.

  Simon stood at the fence now, his hands gripping the cold wrought-iron bars. The crash of the sea nearly drowned out the tinkling notes of piano spilling from Clare’s open window high behind him.

  This was not his home.

  It was his first honest thought in a long time, and it scared him. Simon took a deep breath of the cold sea air. It made his lungs constrict, and he coughed the salty, wet air back out. She had never, not once, even asked his opinion on anything with regard to their home.

  This place, a secluded and sleepy seaside enclave forty minutes north of San Francisco, this plot of land, chosen by Clare without consulting him, even the design of the house, also all Clare’s idea. Everything about this place originated from what she wanted, where she wanted to be, how she wanted to live. One day, four years ago, she had made the executive decision to completely change their lives.

  He had come home from his office and ridden the elevator up to their fourth-floor apartment in SoHo, and Clare had simply announced what she had done.

  “I’ve purchased some land. I’m going to build a house.”

  She was standing in the kitchen, glass of white wine in hand, slouchy wool socks, and her pajama shorts. Her long auburn hair was piled on top of her head in a sloppy bun, and he knew right away she had been writing all day. Clare never bothered getting dressed when she was writing.

  He let his computer bag slide from his shoulder to the wood floor. “What?” he asked, still half thinking about the two foreign deals, German and French rights that had come in that morning. He’d been planning on surprising her, but she had surprised him first. “Land?” He shook his head. “I’m not following.”

  “My book signing last month, in San Francisco?”

  He nodded, yes, he remembered. San Francisco had been the last stop of the book tour.

  “Well, and you know how I spent a few days there after…as a break?”

  More nodding, yes, he had flown back to New York for a meeting he had on the Monday or something. He had to get home, and she had stayed. “Yes.”

  “Well, I don’t know if you remember, but at the end of the tour, I was coming out of my own skin and needed some headspace. Some physical space.”

  Simon was now shaking his head. “You never told me that.”

  Clare waved this statement away. “Anyway, I got to talking to this guy in the hotel bar. We had this…connection, I guess. And it turned out he was a real estate agent. After we’d been talking for about an hour, I asked him, please take me anywhere, away from cities, people. Take me somewhere I can just be, just think.”

  “Wait.” Simon put up both his hands and took a deep breath. “You asked, what, just any guy to take you…anywhere? And didn’t tell me or anyone where you were going? You didn’t even know yourself where this guy might take you.”

  Her shoulders sank, and she gave him her annoyed look. “Are you listening to what I’m trying to tell you, or are you trying to micromanage my past? I’m telling you now where I went.”

  “But what good would that be had this guy been some crazed lunatic that hauled you off to some basement for the rest of your life?”

  “What the hell are you talking about? He was a Realtor. He drove me to Muir Beach. He parked the car near a cliff and showed me how to find the beach access.”

  “Lucky for you…for us both!”

  “He was a perfectly nice man!”

  “How can you take risks like that? You’re Clare Collins! He could have been anyone!”

  She stared at him, raised her wineglass to her mouth, and took several large swallows of the Silver Oak special reserve he could see she had opened to celebrate her news. When she lowered the glass, she also lowered her tone. “Simon, my husband, I have bought some land overlooking the Pacific Ocean, with beach access to a lovely strip of sand. I have fallen in love with a place and have decided to make it mine. I am looking at architectural designs for a home. I am celebrating these facts this evening with a very nice bottle of wine. Please join me.” She walked back to the counter and poured wine into the second glass she had waiting and ready for him for when he got home.

  “Additionally, while finding this bit of heaven on earth, I managed to not get abducted, raped, ransomed, or sold into a huma
n trafficking ring, despite being Clare Collins.” She raised her glass to him. “So, we also can celebrate that good news.” She brought the glass to him.

  “Please, I don’t want to fight—not tonight. I’ve been so happy all day thinking about this.” She smiled and kissed his lips. “Let’s have a good night.”

  He took the glass and a drink from it, trying his best to return her smile. He hated making her unhappy. When Clare was unhappy, the stormy silence could stretch for days, weeks even. He took a deep breath and sighed it out. “You just caught me by surprise.”

  She gave him a wicked grin. He could tell she was already half drunk. It was very likely the Silver Oak was not the first bottle opened in celebration. “Of course I did.” She shifted into her coy expression. “Surprises are what I do best. I have to keep you on your toes. Wouldn’t want you getting bored, trading me in for one of your new, young, up-and-coming girl-authors.” She pinched his belly gently.

  When Clare had first brought him out to this very spot that was to become the edge of his new home, Simon had experienced a creeping panic that grew with every mile that separated him from the life he had known and this isolated existence. Back then he had held out a small hope that she would grow tired of the idea. A phase. A project to distract her from the pressures of being Clare Collins, but with every step she took, finalizing a design, hiring the contractor, breaking ground, Simon’s hope that she would eventually give up the idea diminished. Brick after brick, one gallon of cement at a time, Clare built the daily existence she wanted. An existence three thousand miles due west from where Simon wanted his life.

  He was a New York man, born and bred. He missed the noise, the pulse, the people. Nights out, the subway, the smells—constant activity, the hustle. This life he had now, it was like being trapped on a deserted, albeit luxurious, island.