by Davis Bunn
Connor had no choice but to say, “All right. Fine. If that’s what you want.”
“What I want?” Estelle turned away. “I should never have come.”
The waitress had clearly been observing them, because as soon as Estelle was out the door, Gloria was standing over Connor and demanding, “What did you tell that poor lady?”
He shook his head. “What she said she wanted to hear.”
* * *
At a quarter to ten that evening, Rick pulled Connor into the kitchen. Connor feared he had gotten something terribly wrong. Instead, Rick told him, “I want you to do something for me.”
“Sure thing.”
“Yesterday was Sylvie’s birthday. She mentioned you two love the same kind of music.”
Connor watched Marcela slip into the kitchen and step in close. She asked Rick, “Did you tell him yet?”
“I asked.”
Connor replied, “Like I said last night, I haven’t touched the keys or sung a note in seven years.”
Marcela asked, “It’s kinda like riding a bike, right?”
“Not at all.”
Rick wasn’t budging, though. “You see the state she’s in. It would mean the world.”
“We won’t count the bad notes against you,” Marcela said. “And neither will she.”
Rick took his silence as agreement, and said, “Marcela and I will handle your tables. Let’s go set you up.”
Marcela patted his arm. “This is going to be great.”
Connor thought it was going to be anything but that. Even so, he followed Rick through the bar area and climbed up onto the stage. Rick told him, “We use this mostly for weddings that take over the whole place.”
That meant the piano was most likely tuned. Unlike his voice. Connor watched as Rick opened a closet built into the alcove and drew out an electronic drum kit, microphone, stand, and mini-amp. Rick shifted them into position and asked, “Will this work?”
“Rick, man . . .”
Rick guided him onto the stool, positioned the mic stand and drum machine, plugged in the cables, then stepped back and said, “It’s all yours.”
Connor watched Rick retreat from the stage, then set his fingers on the keys. He had always taken pride in his hands. Connor’s reach was as powerful as his grip. He had once been able to play with a gentle smoothness, creating the liquid sort of backdrop that his melodies had required.
Now they rested there on the ivory, ten foreigners to a world they had once claimed as their own.
Connor had no idea how he had gotten himself into this. Either he played or he quit. Just get up and walk out and leave the place behind. Connor had seen that unspoken directive in Rick’s gaze. The man had not been making a request.
He said softly, “Test, test.” He adjusted the mic, turned up the amp’s volume, and set the drum machine for a soft swing beat. He had often used a similar machine. The movements came almost naturally, like he had merely been hibernating for seven long years.
He knew Sylvie liked Sinatra. So he started with one of his favorites, the first he had ever reworked into a style that fit his voice.
Come fly with me.
Let’s fly, let’s fly away.
It had been so easy to stop. Playing once in a while had meant Connor wasn’t growing. And he had always aimed high. It was one of his defining traits. When he switched his attention and his energies to acting, the creative draw to music had faded with remarkable swiftness. Initially Connor had assumed he would keep his music as a sideline. Every time he had sat down, though, all he heard was how far he had regressed.
Connor had always pushed himself hard to improve, grow, meet the challenge of drawing in a large audience. He had developed a style to utilize his strengths and mask his weaknesses. He had learned how to arrange the fifties-era ballads into a style more suitable for today’s audiences. He had studied the contemporary singers who had made the songs work for them: Norah Jones, Michael Bublé, Diana Krall, Josh Grogan, to name a few.
All lost.
CHAPTER 14
Connor tried twice to rise from the piano and resume his role as waiter. Both times, though, Marcela ordered him back, saying she could handle everything and he was to stay where he belonged. Thirty minutes in, Sylvie walked over and seated herself at the bar. Aubrey, the bartender, poured her a glass of wine, but Sylvie did not touch it.
An hour and a half later, Connor finished with a melody that had taken Nat King Cole to the top of the Billboard charts. As he cut off the amp and drum machine, Sylvie said, “Come join me.”
They talked until two. Or rather, Sylvie talked and Connor listened. Whenever she ran out of steam, she would ask him to play again. He sang a couple more tunes, then rejoined her. Sylvie rose from time to time, closing down the restaurant and bidding the staff a good night. Then she returned and started back where she had left off. Easy and natural. Like they had been enjoying such conversations for years.
She talked mostly about her father. “Pop was a true vagabond artist.”
Connor asked, “What does that mean, ‘true’?”
Sylvie revealed a special smile in response to Connor’s question. “You are the first person in years to ask me that. Most people want to know about the ‘vagabond’ part. What they’re really asking is, how was it for me to live on the road. And the answer is, wonderful and terrible in equal measure. I went to eleven different schools in twelve years. I dressed mostly out of Goodwill hampers. The boys who came flocking around were not the sort that interested me. The girls thought I was weird. Their parents suspected I was a bad influence. I spent most of my time alone.”
Connor found it was the easiest thing in the world to reach over and take her hand. He said softly, “True.”
“All the wonderful parts of my life start with that word. My father was true to his dream. He painted scenes from the Pacific coastline. I was born just north of the Mexican border. My earliest memories were of playing in the Baja desert. When I was nine, he sold an entire collection of paintings to a gallery. He earned enough to take us north. So far north. We lived for two years in the Alaskan wilderness. Then we traveled back down south, staying six months in one place, a year or so in another.” Sylvie gazed back over a wealth of memories, the smile as gentle as her voice. “Pop was a man of quiet happiness. My earliest memories are of the ratty camper, the only home I ever knew before we landed here in Miramar. We’d travel until he found somewhere he wanted to paint. When he hunted out a spot off the beaten track, somewhere with good light and a fair breeze. When he’d put on those albums, I knew we’d found another home.”
She spoke of the man with a soft yearning, a hunger so tender it made Connor’s eyes burn. He had never imagined what it would be like to have a woman speak his name with such gentle passion. “What about your mother?”
Sylvie pulled her hand away. “She left us when I was twelve. That’s all you need to know about Estelle.”
Connor did not know what to say, or how to recapture the feeling. He thought about the woman lying alone in the guesthouse, too frightened to come meet the daughter she had abandoned.
Sylvie’s voice hardened with her gaze. “Estelle started these one-sided battles when Pop made enough money for us to head north. My mother had always assumed when the money came in, we would buy a home and settle down. My father refused to even discuss it. He would hide himself away in another painting, disappear with his oils and his palette for days on end. When my mother tried to convince me to go away with her, I took off with Pop. We hiked for six days in the Canadian Rockies, and when we came back she was gone. I received, oh, four or five letters. Each time I wrote back and told her if she wanted to talk to me, she could come home. Mom’s last letter said that was the problem, she needed the home Pop never gave her. Three weeks later we moved, and I never heard from her again.”
Connor nodded quietly, then asked, “Will you show me your father’s work?”
In reply, Sylvie walked to the front door
and locked out the night. She took his hand and walked him around the paintings on the restaurant’s walls, as though it was important for Connor to meet Gareth in his daughter’s intimate company.
Gareth Cassick was a troubadour in oils. He painted with too much heart to ever be called great, but there was a colorful wonder, a quiet fervor, that sang through his every brushstroke. Gareth Cassick captured little of the landscape’s precision. Nor did he try. His aim was to paint its reflection within his own heart. These images fashioned the likeness of a man who loved the Pacific coastlands with every fiber of his being.
Five of his oils adorned the restaurant’s walls. One was of an Alaskan ice floe with iron cliffs as a backdrop. Another depicted a bear fishing the broad mouth of a river in a snowstorm. In the third, a commercial trawler plowed a golden furrow through a placid sunset. But it was the fourth and fifth that captured Connor.
One was of an abalone shell about a foot and a half tall, nestled in the sand, with a wave’s froth lapping the upper boundary. The heart of the shell was painted as a sunset. The colors were one step off gaudy, and no doubt the art critics would have called it maudlin. Connor stared at it and felt as though he greeted the painter himself. Perhaps it was how Sylvie stood there beside him, not speaking, not pressing, content to give him all night if he wished. Finally he moved to the fifth, and by far the finest of them all.
The moon rose over indigo hills. The mountains were shaped like a pair of night-clad hands. They sheltered a collection of lights at their heart. The fingers flowed into the sand, and then the ocean. A mist gathered above the effervescent land. Only the moon shone clear.
Sylvie said, “This was the first painting Pop made of Miramar. We arrived here a few weeks before my sixteenth birthday. Pop had become friends with guys working nets on a trawler. They took us out for a night run. On the way into harbor, I told Pop I didn’t want to go back on the road. I wanted Miramar to be my home. For the rest of my life. If he left, it would be without me.”
Connor took a slow breath. Home.
“He never said, but I’ve always thought this painting was his way of telling me that he had finally found a place where his bones could rest easy.”
* * *
Connor walked back to his room through a dense and chilling fog. But it was nothing compared to the daze he felt. As Sylvie had walked him to the door and bid him good night, she had invited him to share in a sunrise walk. Her invitation had been expressed with a shyness that had touched Connor. Now, as he climbed Miramar’s main street, he had the sense of being offered a rite of passage. The evening had woken something inside him. It was such a strange sensation, he could not even name it.
He knew full well he was attracted to Sylvie. A blind man in a coma could see that much. What Connor could not understand was, why now?
Falling for a woman was the absolute last thing that should happen to him now. And it was not because of Kali, his soon-to-be ex-fiancée. If Connor had gained anything from traveling to Miramar, it was the absolute certainty that ending that marriage before it started was the right thing to do.
His footsteps scraped on the pavement, the sound overloud in the silent night. The fog was so thick he could not see much beyond the next streetlight. Time and again, he returned to the same inescapable fact. How could he be right for any woman, or know which was right for him, until he had a handle on who he really was?
One day, he would very much like to have a woman like Sylvie Cassick say she loved him. A woman whose physical beauty was so natural, it emerged spontaneously from her heart, as instinctive as a blooming rose.
Sylvie was a woman who cared so deeply, even strangers wanted to embrace her. Even a broken wretch from the world of film and lies gravitated to her. Even a Hollywood actor who did not have the first idea of who he truly was, a vagabond who could only say that he was lost. Connor was a wandering idiot who had run from all his dreams, simply because they had come true.
Love a woman like Sylvie Cassick? Hopefully. Yes. Someday. When he deserved it.
Love this woman now? The idea was not just absurd, it was dangerous. For both of them.
The fog was so thick Connor almost missed turning into the guesthouse. Then a corner of the sign emerged from the gloom. He crossed the parking lot, let himself into the room, and shut his door against all the vague yearnings that had chased him through the night.
He had not come all this way just to break another woman’s heart.
CHAPTER 15
When Sylvie finally slipped into bed, she was not the least bit sleepy. This was another of the migraine’s aftereffects. She would be back on a regular schedule tomorrow or the next day. She lay in bed, wide-awake, and rewound the conversation with Connor. Now and then, a refrain from one of the songs Connor had sung for her swam through her mind, and she smiled at the ceiling. His voice was deep and silky smooth. He showed a richness that extended through his entire range. He was rusty, and he made mistakes, and every time he stopped playing, he returned to the bar with the hollow sadness in his eyes. But none of it mattered. Not really.
To call theirs a conversation was entirely wrong. The only time Connor opened his mouth was to either sing or ask a question. Several times, she’d started to inquire about him, but she had stopped. Her words had remained unspoken. Connor’s haunted look halted her. The night was simply too fine to make him confess his secrets. There would be other times for that . . . if she wanted.
That was the real reason, of course, why she wasn’t sleeping. She was trying to decide whether she wanted to have this move further. On any level.
Which made her invitation for a dawn walk all the more astonishing. She had not been out for a sunrise stroll with anyone since Bradley broke her heart.
She wondered about the great tragic mystery that had brought Connor here. Almost everyone who arrived in Miramar came with baggage. The stories were often sordid and made for spicy gossip. Sylvie did not mind a man with a past. She liked adventure. She liked the aroma of danger. She loved the idea of dancing a lifelong tango with a man whose history was as jagged as her own.
The one thing Sylvie valued most was honesty. The rarest of wines was nothing compared to this. Candor was a distilled elixir that seasoned the finest day and turned even the hard hours into a delicate feast.
Honesty. Frankness. Integrity. It was a shame that so few men understood what those words meant.
She found herself recalling the day she had driven up to the home where the man she had thought was the love of her life lived. She had sat in her car for almost an hour, watching Bradley play Frisbee with two lovely children and a barking dog. The memory still astonished her. How could a man fool her so completely? And why had he done it? The realizations that had wrecked her hopes for love and a family still rankled. How could she have not even suspected that the man lived a double life?
Sylvie rolled over and shut her eyes. She was no closer to answering those questions, and probably never would be. One thing, however, was certain. She was going to have to ask Connor to reveal himself. Not only because she needed to know his secrets, but more than anything, she wanted to see if Connor would tell her the truth.
CHAPTER 16
Despite the short night, Connor rose from his bed before the alarm went off. He was jerked from sleep and five seconds later from the bed itself, drawn upright by the realization that today was the day. As soon as he returned from his walk with Sylvie, Connor was going to contact Los Angeles.
He made a coffee and drank it, standing at the counter of his little kitchenette. He dressed and descended the hill to find Sylvie waiting for him in front of Castaways. She smiled a welcome that appeared strained in the dawn. The mist had retreated somewhat, leaving a glistening blanket over every surface. Together they walked in silence down the winding hill and joined the beachfront lane.
The path was mostly ground asphalt; but where the rocky shoreline took sudden dips, the passage was linked by rough-hewn wooden planks. The walk was almos
t two and a half miles long, running from the southern to the northern cliffs that defined Miramar’s boundaries. The trail dipped and weaved, a lyrical line drawn between earth and sea.
The morning’s ocean and sky were both fashioned from the same cold steel. They walked to the northern point without speaking a word, and met no one. Even the gulls gave way at their approach. The central coast revealed its link to the Pacific north this morning. Connor recalled the Carolina fogs he had known growing up, great billowing swaths that settled an expectant hush over the world. This was something else entirely. The air was biting, the wind a soft blade against his exposed skin. A massive swell crashed somewhere out beyond his field of vision, blasting froth across the shoreline.
Sylvie was wrapped in a pearl-gray jacket zipped up to her chin, with a matching woolen cap. She walked with the lithe motions of a dancer, scarcely seeming to touch the earth. When they reached the northern cliffs and turned back, she said, “A penny for your thoughts.”
“I was remembering a chef in my parents’ restaurant.” Connor had no idea where that had come from. For a guy who rarely gave time to his past, he found it remarkably good to share with her. And easy. He felt like he could tell her anything. “I haven’t thought of him in years.”
“Tell me.”
“I started running errands and doing odd jobs around the place when I was eleven. The head cook was this guy, Leonard. My dad nicknamed him ‘Spock,’ you know—”
“The Star Trek guy played by Leonard Nimoy. Sure.”
“He actually looked like Spock’s evil twin, minus the pointy ears. He was a convicted murderer—two counts of manslaughter, did twenty years. He was out on parole. Man, could that guy ever cook.” He smiled at the memories drifting in the mist. “He loved Louisiana French cuisine, the heavy sauces, the dishes that took all day to prepare, but he basically could do anything. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of spices.”
