“That’s what he called it. ‘Youthful transgression,’ as if it was nothing more than getting caught taking the Aston for a joyride.” He laughed again. “But I had to be certified fit to carry on the family name. Deemed … normal, especially since it was an open secret within my parents’ circle, what had happened with me and Ava. And I went along with it, because I wanted nothing more than to prove I was normal, if only to myself.”
He sighed. “What I said to you—I had no right. It’s not as if I’m any better than those little Concord bastards. I had no—”
I pressed my fingers to his lips, replacing them a moment later with my mouth, swallowing his apology and guilt. Gradually, his arms rose to embrace me, pull me closer until I was draped over him like a comforting blanket. Our lovemaking this time was quiet, washing away a multitude of sins and hurts—a coming together of two people borne of extraordinary circumstances, but who, in the end, were really nothing more than two ordinary people.
Just Jack and Natalia.
How I wished we could remain that way.
Twenty-four
At some point, a drum had joined the duet of trumpet and saxophone—adding a militant, insistent beat at odds with the mournful blues-tinged lullabies that had continued as soundtrack to my fitful sleep. It took more than a few moments of blinking into the darkness—of a final note dissipating into the humid night air while the drumming continued, insistent and urgent—to recognize the tapping’s true origins.
The care I took sliding from beneath Jack’s arm proved unnecessary, as he did nothing more than burrow further into the bedclothes, one hand reaching out then stilling as it latched onto my recently occupied pillow. Sleeping the heavy, motionless sleep of the emotionally drained.
Regardless, I moved hurriedly through the room, pausing only to retrieve Jack’s discarded shirt before closing the bedroom door behind myself. Thrusting my arms through the sleeves, I fastened a few buttons, enough for decency’s sake, but beyond caring about decorum. All I cared about was making that infernal knocking stop. Maintaining the peace and quiet—however temporary or illusory it might be. I eased the suite’s door open a crack, revealing the hotel manager in the sliver of doorway, his features elongated and distorted into something that might have appeared comical, had it not been for the pinched strain clearly evident.
“Yes?”
“Pardon the intrusion, ma’am, but I need to speak with Mr. Roemer.”
“He’s not available.”
Predictably, the man’s gaze took a subtle, yet thorough inventory: the tousled hair, the masculine shirt, the bare legs. To his credit, however, his features remained professionally impassive as he insisted in the clipped drawl so evocative of Remy’s, “I’m afraid, ma’am, that this is a matter of some urgency.”
“With respect to Miss Roemer, I presume?” I asked, my own aristocratic tone making a timely reappearance. Thank God, because it served to keep my voice steady and cool in the face of sudden nerves and an unexpected flare of anger.
While his carefully schooled features never so much as flickered, his chest rose and fell with an obviously relieved breath.
“May I?” he asked, gesturing at the door. “I’ll be but a moment, but I’m sure you understand the need for discretion?” A ghost of a smile crossed his face. “The halls of the Monteleone are well-known to be haunted. Always have to be aware of the walls having ears and telling tales.”
Almost against my will, an answering smile touched my lips, even as a thread of unease began winding its way down my spine. “Of course.”
Long after I’d closed the door on the manager, obviously relieved to have passed the responsibility of his knowledge on to another party, I sat on the bed, studying Jack’s sleeping features. Reluctant as I was to disturb him, I couldn’t help but trace a fingertip over his eyebrows and along the straight, prominent line of his nose before pausing just above the lower lip that relaxed in sleep was surprisingly full, the sharply etched edges of the upper lip providing balance. The two sides of the man clearly illustrated in this one small bit of anatomy if one cared to look closely enough. Even during waking hours, his mouth as a whole tended to appear thinner, more severe, the practice of holding himself in check such a force of habit, it permeated every aspect of his bearing.
What would it be like, I wondered, to let him remain this way for a while longer? Limbs relaxed and sprawled across the expanse of the king-sized bed, each breath deep and easy. Hair disheveled and falling over his brow, emphasizing the sharp patrician angles of his bone structure, marred only by an irregular purplish bruise spread high across one cheekbone. Ruefully, I rubbed at the still-tender spot on the back of my head, recalling how tightly he’d held on. Refusing to let go, allowing the rage to run its course and absorbing all my fury.
I wanted nothing more than to crawl beneath the covers and allow his body to warm mine. To sink into blissful unawareness if only to enjoy the delicious feeling of waking in bed beside another. Experience the magic of sharing those first, quiet moments, that truest self, with someone else. A desire so intense it was as if I could see it, shimmering, drawing me closer still with seductive whispers and promises of soothing the ache that went so much deeper than mere physical want.
If I chose not to wake him—chose not to say anything—we could continue, for just a while longer, to exist in this idyllic state. What harm could come of it, after all?
What harm, really?
My surroundings faded, replaced by sharp winds and the mind-numbing bleakness I’d experienced not so long ago—the city spread out before me, the fairy lights teasing and beckoning me to join them. Too easily, I could recall the temptation, the desire to let go—what it had taken to throw my hands up and back away. To run from the illusion of peace and tranquility, so high above the noisy, frantic earth. To save myself, even if I wasn’t entirely certain how.
The one thing I had that Ava lacked. The sense of self-preservation. Among all the dark moments I’d endured, to be able to say no. Eighty-four stories up, when all appeared lost with no chance of ever reclaiming the girl I’d once been, I had still been able to recognize that regardless of everything that had happened, somewhere deep within, there still burned a tiny flicker of hope. Enough to allow me to experience fear. To draw me back from the edge.
Did Ava have anything like that? My arms wrapped around my legs, chin resting on upraised knees, I pondered Jack’s sleeping form.
No. She didn’t. She’d spent a lifetime relying on Jack, and more peripherally, Dante, and the other men who flitted in and out of her life to provide her with that hope. And in their constant effort to reassure her that she mattered, to give her life meaning, they’d also provided her with a buffer against reality.
Jack’s confession had gone a long way toward explaining why he’d chosen to shoulder so much of this particular burden, and if there remained a slight niggling sense there was more still to the story, it was for the moment, inconsequential. The choice had long since been made, the patterns set. Until now. He said he was done. And for a myriad of reasons, including one or two selfish ones of my own that I didn’t care to examine too closely, I hoped, after this adventure reached whatever conclusion it was destined for, it would truly be over.
We stared at each other in the shadowed room, his gaze sleepy and relaxed, a small smile playing about the edges of his mouth as he lazily trailed a finger up my calf. Capturing his hand in mine, I leaned down, pressing my mouth to his fingers.
“We have to talk.”
• • •
“I do hope, Mr. Roemer, that you’ll accept my sincerest apologies—”
“It’s fine. You did your best,” Jack cut the manager off, each syllable clipped and harsh, betraying the frustration lacing his magnanimous words. “Is the car on its way?”
“Yes sir. It’s being brought round directly.”
A few steps away, I nursed the coffee the manager had oh-so-solicitously served us, darkly amused by the power and influen
ce obscene amounts of money could wield. How easily I’d forgotten the miracles it could make happen. Once apprised of the situation, the first thing Jack had done was phone down for a car—never mind that the close of business hours had long since passed. Less than thirty minutes later, we were packed, dressed, and downstairs waiting for its imminent arrival, driven over, apparently, by the owner himself of New Orleans’ leading rental agency. For all I knew, it could well be the man’s personal car.
“And you’re certain that’s all she said?”
“Yes sir, according to the desk clerk, those were her exact words—that she was going to catch a bus.” The manager was relaying the same information he’d delivered to me—Jack making absolutely certain that it was true. That the fragile bubble had burst and our stolen time together was well and truly over.
“Struck me as mighty odd, she’d say such a thing, considering she left in the car she arrived here in. First thing I checked, after I found out she’d up and gone—seeing whether her car was still here or not. And no offense, sir, but Miss Ava’s never seemed like one to take something as common as a bus.”
“Shit.” The purple bruise stood out livid and angry against skin faded to an anxious pallor. He stared through the lobby windows, seemingly looking past Royal Street and off into some imagined distance. “How the hell did she find out?”
“Beg pardon, sir?”
“Never mind.” He shook his head, his gaze capturing mine for a brief moment. I answered his unspoken request, stepping close and putting a reassuring hand to his back as he shook out the map he held. “Can you help me figure out the best route to Montgomery?”
“Certainly.”
Less than fifteen minutes later, our luggage was stored in the spacious trunk of the baby blue Lincoln with suicide doors that had rolled to a stop before the hotel doors, a hastily packed picnic basket placed on the backseat within easy reach. With any luck, the only things we’d have to stop for were gasoline and cold drinks.
With the lights of New Orleans dwindling behind us, I finally spoke. “Why Montgomery?”
“Because she can.” He slammed his hand against the steering wheel, eliciting a sharp blare as his palm connected with the horn. Luckily, at this hour, there was no one to hear beyond drowsing birds and whatever prowled the silent waters of Lake Pontchartrain.
I stared out into the blue-black night, watching as the clouds thickened, backlit into silver, fairytale masses by the full moon. The knowledge that I’d been right—that there remained still more to this story—brought with it no relief. Not with the way we were racing through swamps and bayous toward yet another destination. I breathed deeply of the humid air, thick with the sickly-sweetness of decaying vegetation and the sharp bitterness of Jack’s cigarette.
“She has no idea how lucky she is.”
“Has no one ever chased you?”
I automatically began to respond no, but before the word had even fully formed, recognized it for a lie. “Once. A very long time ago.” Unrealized dreams of adventure and Paris and boundless young love crystallized for a brief, wondrous moment before just as quickly dissipating and floating out to join the mass of clouds. “I didn’t recognize it or appreciate it for the gift it was,” I admitted quietly.
“But you do now.”
“Yes.”
“See, that’s the difference between the two of you. You’re capable of learning from your experiences. While she just keeps repeating them because it’s the only thing she knows. The only thing she’s capable of.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m not sure I do either.” He pulled deeply from his cigarette, the tip glowing a fierce red in the darkness. “It’s just that, after Switzerland, she was … different,” he said, exhaling a narrow plume of smoke through the partially cracked window. “Worse in a lot of ways. Her little rituals and quirks became … more. Things she was compelled to do. Repeating them over and over. And it extended to the bigger things in her life. Like she was trying to get it right for lack of a better description. If it wasn’t perfect—to her way of thinking, at least—she’d destroy that attempt and start over.”
Immediately, I envisioned those silver lipstick cases, lined up with uniform precision, the pristine white and silver expanse of her bedroom. The once spotless walls and tiles and photographs marred by a violent, fiery red. The illusion of cool perfection destroyed.
“How long was she there?”
“Nearly three years.” The red tip of the cigarette arced out the window as he tossed it with an impatient flick of his fingers. “Conveniently keeping her locked away until she turned eighteen.”
“Then what?”
“They couldn’t keep her any longer. And she turned up in New York, first husband—a French movie producer in his fifties who was going to make her a star—in tow.” He spared me a quick glance. “At the time, I didn’t see the differences. I was too deep into my own life—getting ready to graduate, go off to Stanford. Different coast, different world … putting what had happened even further behind me.” He sighed. “Frankly, I’d been relieved she stayed away for so long. Even convinced myself that she’d forged a new existence for herself, going to school, socializing—doing the same thing I’d done.”
“What was expected.”
“Exactly.” He snorted. “That’s how self-absorbed I was—that I could believe Ava would ever conform. Then I found out.”
“About what happened?”
“Yes.” His fingers opened and closed around the steering wheel. “Once I got to college, she started sending postcards—one every day. At first, they just recounted every time we’d been … together—in exacting detail. Then they evolved into describing exactly what had been done to her in Switzerland. And at the end of every postcard asking why I hadn’t helped.”
“Oh, my God,” I breathed. Shoving the armrest back up between the seatbacks, I slid across the wide front seat, resting my hand on the rigid muscles of his thigh. Trying to transmit comfort. Absolution. “It wasn’t your fault, Jack. It wasn’t. It’s obvious she was never well. You were just a boy. You didn’t even know where they’d taken her, let alone what had been done.”
“I know,” he sighed. “In my right mind, I know that. But those damned postcards … she taunted me with them, especially after she began changing the message at the end from asking why I hadn’t helped, to saying I needed to help her. Needed to fix things. Make them perfect.”
Twisting the knife just a bit further. I was torn between sympathy for such a sick woman and fury that she’d insisted on dragging Jack into her twisted machinations.
“What about her husband?”
“He was a means to an end—only lasted eight months. And her parents had more or less disowned her. She’d come into her own money when she turned eighteen, so they basically washed their hands of anything to do with her.” He paused and added, “Unless, of course, the family reputation was at stake.”
“Which left only you.”
“Afraid so.”
“You could have washed your hands of her as well and no one would have blamed you in the slightest. Why didn’t you?”
Miles passed, the silence weighty and oppressive, compelling him to lean forward and turn on the radio, spinning the dial past crackling static and hard driving rock-and-roll and the twangy, too-strident strains of lovelorn country ballads until he found some faraway station he liked. Beneath quiet piano, muted sax and trumpet, and the hushed, intimate vocals that melded into an aching, plaintive jazz ballad his equally hushed, “Because if I’d only said no, none of it would have ever happened,” could barely be heard.
“Oh, Jack.” A sinking helplessness wound through me at his heartbreaking confession. So many years spent with this burden—a burden that should never have been his. “Oh … Jack,” I repeated, incapable of more. Taking his hand in mine, I leaned my head against his shoulder, allowing night and music and the steady drone of rubber against asphalt to shroud us within its protec
tive cocoon. It wasn’t the idyllic escape of our luxurious hotel room, but for now, it would do.
Twenty-five
“There’s more, you know.”
We were parked at a rest stop off the highway, dawn beginning to shed watery light across the landscape, painting it in muted shades of grays and blues. A diner glowed at the far end of the expansive parking lot, a nimbus of neon and fluorescence cutting through the early morning gloom, inviting the weary to come and rest, but we’d eschewed the inevitable droning chatter and the scrape and clatter of silverware and ceramic plates in favor of sitting on the Lincoln’s broad trunk. The contents of the hotel picnic basket spread between us on a cloth, anchored by condensation-drenched Coca-Colas that Jack had purchased at the service station end of the rest stop when he had the car filled up for the last leg of the journey.
Considering the hurry with which we’d departed New Orleans, we appeared to be slowing the closer we got to Montgomery. There still remained urgency and tension: in his white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel, in the rigid muscles of shoulder and thigh, where I rested against him for the majority of the drive, but our pace had undeniably slowed the closer we drew to Montgomery, until finally, he’d pulled into the rest stop. Ostensibly, for gas, but to my mind, it was almost as if he viewed it as his final line of defense—a point of no return. It was as if here, choice remained an option.
“There always is,” I said quietly.
Cellophane crackled loudly as he unwrapped a fresh box of Marlboros, followed by the distinctive metallic snick of his lighter. When the expected sweet-acrid smell of burning tobacco didn’t follow, I turned my head to find him staring off into the distance, the unlit cigarette dangling between two fingers.
Rolling the curved glass bottle between my palms I spoke slowly. “But this is your story. To keep or to tell. You’ve already revealed a great deal—certainly enough for me to understand why we’re here. To understand … us. If you need to keep the rest close—keep it hidden away or protected—” My thumb played around the bottle’s mouth, an infinite series of tiny circles. “I’m certainly in no position to judge.”
Between Here and Gone Page 26
