by Maggie Marr
“I can’t blame her for what she did then, but I can certainly blame her for what she knows now and refused to tell us.”
“You better get your facts straight, brother. You lost Rhiannon once, and I’m not certain she’ll come back to you if you chase her away again.”
*
I’d arrived back home after speaking with Amanda to find Rhiannon on my doorstep. She followed me inside, neither of us speaking.
“Is it true?” I asked. I had to know. I needed to know.
She dropped her gaze. Her eyes drifted from the floor to the window. “What part do you want to know about?” she asked.
“I now know I have a half-brother and two half-sisters. I know they are Dad and Anita’s children. He confirmed that. What I don't know is when did you find out about them? Did you meet them and, if so, when?”
Rhiannon walked to the back of the couch. Her hand trailed along the leather. She stopped and turned to me. “Yes, I did meet them, right before your mom died and just before I left to go to Ireland.” She twisted a long lock of her white-blonde hair in her hand.
I was crushed by the knowledge that Rhiannon had kept this secret from me.
“All I remember is we drove to a house north of Los Angeles. There were two young girls about twelve who were sitting on the front porch. Then, from around the corner, came this boy. I remember not liking him, and definitely not wanting to be alone with him. I waited on the front step while Mama went inside. We were there for about half an hour.”
Rhiannon’s gaze bore the weight of her admission. “I knew,” she said. “I knew then they were related to you. I could see it in their faces, their hair, and the way they moved and held their bodies. I knew they were related to your family.”
“And you didn’t say anything or ask your mom about this?”
“How could I? The subject was closed and right after that my parents moved us to Ireland. I wasn’t to see you again. Can you understand how scared I was at that point? How utterly terrified I was of everything that had to do with you and your family? At the same time, I watched my own family completely disintegrate. It was only by piecing together little bits of conversations that I was able to understand why, and even then I barely understood it all. All I could figure out was that my father fell in love, your mother got sick and then she went back to your Dad. The entire thing was so unreal, like a living nightmare that no one talked about.
“You know Papa came back to my mother? He came back and begged Mama to take him back. He wanted to rebuild our family, but it was too late. He’d been gone too long and, by then, Mama was taking care of Joanne and Mama didn’t want anything more to do with him. Then I found out that your father had an entire other family.”
Rhiannon clasped her arms around her body. “It was a really terrible time for me and Maeve. We were so young and I couldn’t understand how any of it was happening. Then my parents told me I had to move. That I had to get away from all the crazy that was swirling around me.”
Tears glistened in her eyes. I didn’t know if they were tears of regret for the past decisions she’d made or tears for now, this moment, where we sat across from one another and realized that this was all simply too much. All of it. We couldn’t overcome this kind of hurt. How many roadblocks did the universe have to throw in our path before we understood that we weren’t meant to be together? We simply weren’t meant to be a couple.
“We can’t do this,” I said. “I can’t do this.” I stood and walked across my living room toward the picture window. There, beyond us, was the never-ending Pacific. The waves constantly churned up the ocean floor, the tides came in and out, and the roaring never ceased. Yet it could look so peaceful when you stared out at the bright blue water, dappled with sun. But beneath the peaceful facade was turmoil much like what Rhiannon and I shared. We could both appear so peaceful, and we could think that we would get beyond our history and be together, that we could be a serene couple, but every time we tried something ugly came to the surface. A past regret, a memory, and poor decisions that still haunted us.
“Sterling, no, please.” Rhiannon pressed her fingertips to her mouth.
“There have been too many lies, Rhiannon. Too much heartbreak. How can we build something beautiful if we constantly have to deal with the ugliness of the past? I can’t do it. Neither of us can.”
Her face was wracked with pain and I could feel the reverberation of the end in my core. A deep horrible pain wrenched my heart. I loved her. I might always love Rhiannon, but we couldn’t be together. Not then, not now, and not ever.
Chapter 22
Rhiannon
Sterling held me in his arms beneath the stars. His body pressed against mine. We lay on the flannel blanket that had comforted us late into the nights of summer. Mama hadn’t been home in nearly a week and while our housekeeper stayed with us there was a deep hole caused by her absence. Our parents were so torn with their own drama they rarely noticed our absence. “She’s going to die.” His eyes nearly glowed in the darkness.
My heart beat faster at hearing Sterling’s words. Joanne was going to die? They’d only just returned from their family trip. When they left, Joanne had looked vibrant and strong but when they returned she looked weak, and fatigue clung in dark circles around her eyes. She’d spent what little energy she had on the trip with her family. Mama said, when Joanne finally lay down on the giant bed in her bedroom and had settled, she felt as though she would never stand again. A chill raced up my spine. I couldn’t imagine losing my own mother.
“Sterling, maybe she’ll get better, maybe she’ll—”
“No,” Sterling said. He closed his eyes. “She won’t. She’s leaving us and she’s leaving us soon.” His lips thinned. A silver trickle of a tear fell from his eyes and down over his cheeks. He brushed the tear away and I wrapped my arms around him. I pulled him close. His sobs choked out against my neck. My shoulder grew wet with his tears. The time passed and I rubbed his back, not knowing what else I could possibly do. There was nothing to be said. Not one word could fix this loss.
He pulled his face from my neck. There was so much pain and so much loss in his eyes. My heart swelled for him. I wanted to see Sterling smile, to take away this burden, this pain, this moment that I knew was the worst moment of his life.
He leaned forward and I felt the soft press of his lips on mine. My heart exploded and a deep thick want circled in my belly as Sterling’s kisses deepened and unfurled. His tongue brushed against the seam of my lips and my mouth opened to him. A tentative kiss as Sterling’s tongue explored my mouth. His arms wrapped around me and pulled me closer. He was hard and I could feel his hardness against me. He pressed closer. His kisses were long and languid and filled with promises. Long forever kisses that caused me melt into him, hoping that the pain in his mind could be erased for just this moment. Just for now.
*
The sun brightened the sky when I opened my eyes. Mama stood at my feet, her hands on her hips. Her face expressed determination. I looked from her to Sterling, who was asleep beside me. The flannel blanket on top of us shielded my unclothed body from Mama’s gaze but she knew. My shorts were tossed beside us, my shirt tossed to the side. I wore only a pair of panties. Sterling was more naked than I.
“We need to get back. Sterling needs to go home. There isn’t much time.”
Sterling’s eyes fluttered at hearing his name. He looked at me and stretched his arms over his head, a smile on his face until he turned his head and saw Mama. He jerked upward, nearly pulling the blanket from me. I clutched the fabric and pulled it tight to my chest.
“Gayle, we—”
“I know exactly what happened. Come to the house. We’ll discuss it later. Sterling, you have to get home, and you have to get home now.” Her eyes softened. “Your mother needs you.”
His gaze fell on me and he closed his eyes. He didn’t want to go, to face the inevitable, to see the end. This loss. He tilted his chin to his chest and his bottom lip q
uivered. I pressed my hand to his shoulder. He looked at me and I pressed a kiss to his lips. There were no words. Today would be the most horrible day of his life.
Big hot tears fell from my eyes. Tears that I couldn’t stop, nor did I care to. Why, when I’d finally surrendered to the idea of being with Sterling, to settling in Los Angeles, to becoming part of a family again, to overcoming my fears, had all that I thought was mine slipped from my grasp?
The painting I’d nearly finished in the magical light of Montecito at Elizabeth Montgomery’s guesthouse sat before me on my easel. There he was. Standing in front of me. My rendition of Sterling. Not exactly as he was now, and not exactly as he’d been then, but something in the middle. A picture that captured the boy I’d originally fallen in love with and the man I’d grown to love even more. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t have him, but I could paint through my pain. I could use these feelings to show the emotions in my work. The painting in front of me was nearly finished and it revealed happiness and a brilliant love that glistened in Sterling’s eyes.
I looked over at the second canvas. I’d been working on it for the last week and it was much darker than the first. Again, it was not the Sterling of my youth or my adulthood, but a creation of him as he’d appeared the last time I saw him. His face was grim, the solid line of his lips was unhappy, but he was not angry. It was the same face I’d seen when he’d lost his mother, and the face I’d seen just a week before when he’d turned away from my love, from the future I’d finally determined we would build together. The face revealed imminent grief, sure loss, and resigned finality.
This face was hard for me to look upon. Each time I stroked my brush against the canvas my heart shattered. I did not want this face staring back at me, but I was compelled to bring this vision to life.
“That’s a very sad-looking Sterling,” Maeve said.
“It’s how I remember him,” I said. I continued to press my brush into the paint. I didn’t want company. I didn’t want to spend time with Maeve or Mama or especially Papa. They’d each dropped by in turn and tried to pull from me some semblance of a story of what had happened between Sterling and me. I’d remained silent. My family, at least my parents, didn’t deserve to know the details. They’d planted the seeds of this dissolution years before and they could feel nothing but glee over the fact that Sterling and I were no more. Why share my pain with them when they would be happy about an ending that had ripped me to shreds?
“I never wanted you and Sterling to end,” Maeve said. She stood beside me. Her intensity and sincerity and her ability to say what she felt in the face of my introversion and silence was a blessing. I set the brush down and turned to her.
“I always thought you made a good couple,” Maeve said. “It was our parents—theirs and ours—that were the idiots. Why should you two pay for that?”
I wasn’t yet ready to discuss this, not even with Maeve. She rubbed her hands down the front of her jeans and sat down on the love seat not far from me.
“I’m not leaving,” Maeve said. “You’ve been in here, alone, long enough. I know you have your work and I know you like your silence and seclusion, but at some point it becomes unhealthy. Look at Dad. You think being closeted away in Dublin, alone, has helped his ability to deal with people?”
A small smile cracked my face at Maeve’s assessment of our father. No, he was becoming a dour and brittle man. He had little patience for anything but his books and his writing. “Is he still here? I would have thought Mama would have thrown him out by now.”
“Throwing him out isn’t the accurate assessment of what’s going on in that house.” Maeve raised one eyebrow and looked at me. “They’re trying to be discreet, but the house is old and the floorboards make a lot of noise.”
“No!” I said.
“Yes. Since the night you came home after your blowout with Sterling.”
“But that’s like seven days? They’ve never been in the same place together for that long. I thought he was staying in a hotel.”
“Nope, he’s here. They’re here. And, really, to be honest, parents who have been separated but are now having a renaissance affair really shouldn’t have their adult children in the house.”
“What hypocrites!” I said in disgust. “I mean, Papa has the affair and Mama forgives him and yet they want to judge and banish Sterling before he’s even done anything wrong.”
“We all live in a world of our own creation. You know that. We lived in ours away from Los Angeles for a very long time.”
I closed my eyes. “What if I’d never left?” What if I’d decided to stay after Joanne died and been here this whole time? Would Sterling and I have found a way to remain together? Or would we have broken apart—the inevitable conclusion to our family history?
“Don’t do that,” Maeve said. “You cannot rewrite the past. We both know that.”
My sister had suffered her own pain in love and yes, she did understand how the past could not be rewritten no matter how much you might long to do so.
“I say we need a little sister time, and then we should find Amanda. You know the three of us haven’t done much together since I got here. We used to be inseparable, well, until that summer when Sterling discovered you had boobs.”
I pressed my lips together and shot her a dour look.
“Too soon? Right? For jokes?” She pulled the corners of her lips upward into a smile. “Come on, I know your heart is broken and there is absolutely nothing that will fix that except time. Believe me, I know.”
“Amanda probably isn’t speaking to me either,” I said.
“I know for a fact that Amanda does not harbor the same sort of anger as Sterling. But she loves you in a way similar to the way I love you. Not in that icky lovey-dovey ‘oh my God you could break my heart again’ way like Sterling.” Maeve’s gaze settled on me. “So no, she wants to see you and is worried about you and I’ve fought her off for seven days. Sis. She wanted to come over the first day she heard about you and Sterling.”
My body flinched. A horrible pain cascaded through my chest at hearing Maeve say “you and Sterling.” There was no me and Sterling anymore. He’d put an end to that. He’d been clear in the finality of his statements. I’d finally given him my heart and he’d said no. His love wasn’t infinite. Love could not conquer all. Love was a finite and I was certain the chance of it ever finding my heart again were remote at best.
Sterling
“You’re kidding. This is the place that Dad’s son is playing?” The dive bar was lined with choppers outside the front door. The crowd that milled inside the roadhouse was thick with black leather and tattoos and beards. Not my scene.
“If you mean by ‘Dad’s son’ our brother, then, yes, this is the place. I called and confirmed.”
“Seriously, Amanda, I don’t think this is safe. I mean, look at this place.”
“Sterling, are you scared?”
I shook my head. “No, Amanda, I’m not scared as much as I don’t care to know this person. I don’t want to meet a half-brother that is the result of our father’s infidelity. I’m good with not ever meeting him or his sisters. The only reason I’m here is that I was not about to let you come on your own. Apart from everything else, Ryan would kill me.”
“Why do you feel that way? We’ve lost Mom. Dad is a complete narcissist. How can you not want to meet him? To see him? Like it or not, he is part of our family.” Seeing that she would not get a response from me, she let it go.
While neither Amanda nor I were actors, we’d spent the majority of our years promoting the Legend brand, with the result that thousands of pictures of us at premieres and parties and events had been circulated over the years. We weren’t interested in being recognized so we skirted the crowd, both of us keeping our heads down.
“Billie is meeting us,” Amanda said.
“Seriously? We don’t even know if he’s any good.”
“Excuse me, but did you hear the same song I did? He’s good. Billie
thinks so, too. I sent her the song. She wanted to see him live. She knows what’s up.”
“You told her?”
“Look, I’m not keeping Daddy’s secrets anymore. This was his mistake; Rhett and his sisters are the result. They weren’t the cause. They did nothing wrong. Why would I harbor some sort of misdirected grudge against them when they’ve done nothing but stay in the shadows just as Daddy wanted? No way. I will not live by Daddy’s rules anymore. He can hide his past all he wants, but I’m not hiding it for him.”
“Seriously, Amanda, engagement has changed you.”
She glared me.
“In a good way, I mean. You never would have said any of that before meeting Ryan.”
“It’s not because of Ryan. It’s because I have my own business and I am beginning to understand who I am. Daddy’s stardom impacted who I became, but it doesn’t have to dictate the rest of my life. I mean, for God’s sake, Sterling, the Legend facade was something we had to maintain growing up, but not now. Now I can be and say and do whatever the hell I want and not answer to anyone but myself. And Ryan.”
She stopped at the edge of the bar and scanned the dark room. Across the room a tall leggy blonde waved to us. “There she is! Of course she has the best seat in the place.”
We wove through the crowd toward the horseshoe-shaped booth at the edge of the stage. Billie jumped up and clasped Amanda in a tight squeeze. “Oh, my God, let me see that ring!” She squealed. “I can’t wait for this wedding!” She looked at Amanda’s eyes. “It’s GORG! But, of course it would be. And to hell with the wedding. I can’t wait for the bachelorette!”
Billie gave Amanda a final squeeze and then turned to me. “Sterling, it’s so good to see you!” She reached up and gave me a careful hug. Once upon a time and long ago we’d gone on a couple of dates. Dates that, while fun, proved to both of us we were much better as friends.
