One corner of his mouth barely turned up. It was the saddest smile she’d ever seen. It made her think of her father. “I like you, Doctor Lawson. But I’d guess you’re not from LA.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Anybody from here will tell you, there’s no way through the forest. Nobody makes it out alive.”
****
After Wallace left, Ava didn’t call Ian like she’d promised. Because she couldn’t help but feel she’d let him down. She slogged through her afternoon clients and took the bus home, dodging the shiny-red heart balloon someone had left tied to the seat in front of her. It bounced eagerly toward her head every time the bus lurched forward. Like it wanted something from her. When she got off, she loosened the Mylar string and carried it outside where she released it into the gray sky. She walked the rest of the way to the Santa Monica Pier, glancing up every few minutes until the red dot had faded from view. As if it had never existed at all.
Once, in college, Ava had looked for DeAndre Mack’s family. She’d spent a Saturday in the library, scrolling through microfilm from the 1994 LA Times until she spotted the headlines.
“LA Detective Makes Record Drug Bust”
“Agents Seize Five Tons of Cocaine from Artist District Warehouse”
“Shootout Leaves One Dead, Cop Hailed as Hero”
One dead. DeAndre reduced to a number, a brief mention at the end of an article. A non-person. Just another balloon disappeared into the sky. But Ava dug until she’d uncovered an obituary and his mother’s name. By the time she’d worked up the nerve to dial the number she’d found, the man who’d answered told her Carlotta Mack had died that spring. Heart attack. “But what can I do for you, young lady?”
Ava could still hear the curious lilt in his gravelly voice. Or was it judgment? She wasn’t sure. Not then. Not even now. Here. Waiting for Ian on a bench near the boardwalk, where the whole world seemed as simple and predictable as the rolling waves, the spinning Ferris wheel.
She’d replied—“Nothing”—the silence tightening like a rope between them until the man hung up, leaving her alone with the flat dial tone, as lifeless as Carlotta’s heart. She’d been too late.
“Hey, Aves.” Ian’s hands squeezed her shoulders, and she turned to look at him. His shoes were off, dark jeans cuffed, and he sank his toes into the sand. “You didn’t call me.”
“I had a client right after, and we ran late.” Ava wondered when she’d gotten so good at lying to him. And when it had started to feel necessary.
“Late, huh? That’s my girl. I knew you’d get him talking.” He joined her on the bench, leaning in to kiss her like she’d earned it.
“He asked,” she said. Two words that distilled everything between them.
“And what did you tell him?”
“That you were a highly respected colleague.”
He kissed her again, and she hated herself. Not for betraying Wallace. But for being so pliable, so dutiful, so eager to please. She’d become her mother.
“You’re a natural, babe. Should I be worried?”
His adoration, his teasing—it warmed her, no sun in sight—and she gave him a playful shove. “You were right. He’s definitely looking for ideas. But whatever you pitch him, it’s got to be better than good. He wants his next show to be his swan song.”
He jumped up, blue eyes dancing, and pulled her to her feet with an urgency that made her giddy, though she suspected it was Adderall-induced. His bright-idea pill, he called it. “Let’s brainstorm over pizza.”
“A working dinner? How anti-Valentine’s of you.”
****
Ian slumped off of Ava and onto the bed, sweaty and unsatisfied. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay.” She left him there, stepping over the lingerie she’d discarded an hour ago, and retreated to the bathroom, embarrassed. Like it was her fault. And not the Adderall he’d been popping at least once a week, staying up all night to work on the book he wouldn’t show her. “You’ll kill the muse,” he’d said. Which always seemed ironic with him on top of her, struggling to get it up.
She stood naked in the mirror, looking hard at her reflection, trying to imagine how Ian saw her. Maybe it was her fault. She’d gotten too skinny, running every day. Her curves had flattened, hardened to sinew and bone. Like LA had sucked the meat right off her. And she didn’t try the way she used to. The lipstick at the back of the drawer had sat untouched for months. Boring black flats and a ponytail—her standard uniform.
“Ava? Are you mad?”
She caught her half smile in the glow of the night-light as he groveled. This part, only this part, made the Adderall worth it.
“Of course not.” She slipped back in bed and curled against his chest. “Let’s try again in the morning.”
When Ian finally fell asleep, Ava rolled away from him and reached for her phone. She typed suicide forest into the search bar and scrolled through the images, page after page, with quiet desperation. She wondered if Wallace had ever done the same. And why she kept expecting to see her father’s face.
THE DOWNTOWN STAR
“Murdered Love Doctor’s Mistress Identified as High-Priced San Francisco Escort!”
The mysterious red-haired beauty at the center of the Love Doctored cheating scandal has been unmasked as Cleopatra James, an employee of Spellbound Services International, a San Francisco-based escort service. According to Cleopatra’s profile, she is a university student with an irresistible combination of girl-next-door innocence and the sensuality of a temptress. Her profile describes her preferred client and gives a glimpse of what she may have seen in Ian Culpepper, the now-deceased doctor of love: intelligent, witty, spontaneous, romantic, and mature. Though it remains unclear as to whether Dr. Culpepper knew of his mistress’s double life or perhaps even paid for her services, one thing is certain: the entire world is watching her now. A spokesperson from Spellbound Services International declined to comment on the story, citing the privacy of their employees and clients.
Chapter
Fifteen
Tuesday
February 21, 2018
Today, they will bury my ex-husband. What a strange thought, a morbid one. But there it is, front and center, the instant I jar awake at the turn-click of Luke’s keys in the door. From my bed, I see the rain cry tears down the window. It’s dark out—well past midnight—but the drops catch the streetlights as they fall.
Luke kicks off his shoes, drops his duffel bag on the chair, and slides in next to me, still dressed. His body is cool against mine, his hair damp from the rain. But I let him wrap me in his arms anyway. His heart drums against my back, and I turn to face him.
“Hi,” I whisper, finding his lips with mine and tugging him closer. The first time Luke kissed me, he wasn’t Ian. And the simple fact of it wedged between us like the sharp end of an axe. But now, it’s what draws me in, what holds me there, magnetized. He is not Ian. It could be my favorite thing about him. “How was work?”
Luke lays back, sighs. I wonder if he’s parceling out which parts to tell me. And which to leave out. “A knife washed up on Carmel Beach. Some old guy’s dog found it.”
“The murder weapon?”
“Don’t know. Dad took it to the lab for testing. I doubt it though. I mean, what’re the odds?”
I let my head loll back to the window, where the rain looks black, slick as oil. The Hydra lashes in my gut, and I almost wince. “Slim to none, I’d say. How did the old guy even figure to call the cops?”
“Gumshoe detective. You know the type. He says he saw someone toss something from the jetty on Saturday. He thought it was suspicious.”
“He sounds like a busybody.”
Moving back toward Luke, I slip my hand beneath his T-shirt to distract us both. Myself with the swells and dips of his chest. Him with my teasing
fingertips. But instead, he lays his hand over mine, stilling it. “Dad said the guy might’ve planted the knife there himself. For attention or something.”
“That seems like a stretch.”
“That’s what I said. But, I guess we’ll wait and see. Now . . .” He sets my hand free again and finishes the thought on my neck. No words, just his mouth, hot and insistent. And I lose myself there. I picture myself on the beach, with the white-haired man and his dogs at my side, all of us squinting at the jetty. At some other person—someone not me—and the object in her hand that reflects the sunlight as it’s swallowed by the ocean below.
****
Ian and Kate will be buried side by side in twin mahogany coffins at Whispering Cypress Memorial. Of course, they will. Husband and wife for eternity. What did you expect, Ava? A plot for yourself in between them?
But it’s Julie I’m thinking of most. Her lonely grave at the top of the hill in Piedmont Cemetery, where on a clear day you can see as far as the Golden Gate Bridge. Ian had taken me there once, and I’d laid a sunflower on the sparse grass that was only beginning to fill in. I’d felt like an impostor. And a thief. Especially when he dropped to his knee to uproot a small cluster of weeds from beside the smooth granite. Later, I’d gone on my own too, mostly to remind myself Ian belonged to me. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, right? But that was then.
And that’s the ugly truth of a marriage. Whoever gets him last, gets him forever.
I watch the funeral through the lens of the Nikon, hunkered down in the front seat of my car. And I’m not the only one. A half-dozen reporters circle the road near the burial plot like vultures coveting a carcass. Occasionally, a lone bird, brave with greed, makes an approach, only to be shooed away by private security.
They’re here for one reason. Cleopatra James. Not my fresh-faced Cleo, pedaling her bicycle down Ocean Avenue. But the other. I’d visited the Spellbound Services website that morning and found her profile. Face blurred, body clad in racy lingerie, she’d posed on her knees in white sheets. Listed beneath her photo, her “specialties”: Discrete relationships. Mature clients. Looking at her, the blatant curves of her hips, her breasts, I’d felt betrayed all over again. By Ian. By her.
When the eulogy begins, I concede Cleo is a no-show. But David is there. Tara too. Ned Gotleib and his wife. And Dan Jarvis, the professor I’d outright lied to at the vigil. Though really I only watch Maddie. She clings to Sheila like a monkey. Little arms, little legs, wrapped around her grandmother. Little feet in black patent Mary Janes, dug in to Sheila’s hips, little chin mashed into Sheila’s shoulder. One little hand latched to her stuffed bear as it dangles against Sheila’s back.
And the eyes Ian gave her—two little blue marbles—fixed on me. Or so it seems. The psychologist in me calls it dissociation. The criminal, indictment. And the girl in me knows that look as a bottomless well of grief.
But Maddie’s blank stare, no matter how I label it, is to blame for my carelessness. Because I don’t see Ricky until he’s stumbling up the manicured lawn, red-faced and raving, in the middle of Ian’s eulogy.
I crack the window, mid-tirade.
“Great doctor, my ass!” He careens toward the edge of the crowd and pushes his way toward the hole in the ground where Ian and Kate will lie together. “My wife listened to that sorry sack. And guess where she is now?”
Sheila tightens her grip on Maddie, looping a protective arm around her head. She side-steps away from Ricky as he reaches the raised coffins, covered in cascades of hydrangea, white as ocean foam.
“Rotting in the ground just like him, that’s where.”
I briefly redirect my lens to the stock-still minister as he waves to a security guard stanchioned at the periphery. Then, I return again to Madison, her eyes of marble unblinking, unfazed.
She’s seen worse. What else has she seen? What does she remember?
Back to Ricky, cornered like a wild animal, snarling at the lip of the grave. He withdraws his pocketknife, wielding it like a sword, and the mourners gasp along with me. The vultures and their flashbulbs move in a wake.
The whole scene is so garish I instantly conjure Ian’s voice—A show about couples on the brink. It’s a good start, Ava. But, the producers want more, something that will make us stand out from the rest. Think bigger. Louder. A bit more . . . what’s the word? Garish.
“I have every right to be here. I’m a goddamned truth-teller. And these people need to know the truth about this scumbag. The self-proclaimed Love Doctor.”
He tosses his head back and lets a bitter laugh fly as security closes in around him. “You’re Kate’s mom, right? Poor, pitiful Kate. Hot little number though, wasn’t she?”
Sheila flinches but not Madison. And I start to feel queasy, to wonder why I came here. Ricky takes another clumsy step backward, bumping up against Ian’s coffin. Later, they’ll lower it into the dark soil below and cover it with dirt. Roots will wind among flesh. In a year or so, he’ll be mostly teeth and bones. And in another fifty, his Zegna suit and Ferragamo dress shoes will have outlasted everything else.
“Your precious Love Doctor couldn’t keep it in his pants. Not in this marriage or the last one. Maybe that’s why he was so quick on the trigger, accusing everybody else. Accusing me. When really it was him who needed the famous Fidelity Five. Yep, that’s right. Before Doctor Kate was his wife, she was his mistress.”
My heart seizes, and the camera falls to my lap. I stare at my hands, afraid to look up. Afraid Maddie won’t be the only one gawking at me.
“I know his ex-wife. We had a deal to expose the lying bastard but—”
I reposition the camera just in time to watch Ricky lose his balance and tumble down, wind-milling his arms in desperation. Almost as if I’d pushed him myself. The knife falls from his hand, as he grabs at the metal contraption where the coffins rest. They sway a bit, and for a moment, I imagine the irony of Ricky crushed beneath the box where dead Ian rests.
But instead he’s covered by uniformed security officers, his legs writhing under them, like an insect on an ant mound. And the vultures move in, taking an endless stream of photographs.
As soon as I hear the sirens approaching, panic flames in my chest, licking up my throat and searing it raw. I glance down the road to the first squad car. Is that Cooper?
I duck, filling the car with the sound of my own ragged breathing, weighting it beneath worries heavy as millstones.
Ricky will be arrested.
Ricky will be questioned.
Ricky will talk. About me.
The urge to escape presses on my chest until it’s unbearable. I start the car.
When I raise my head and look through my lens, Ricky’s right there up the road, between Cooper and Donnelly, the other officer from my alleged Saturday break-in. There’s a nasty bruise forming on Ricky’s temple, and his face is spotted with dirt and grass. He spits more of the same from his mouth, and I can’t look away, even though I should.
Our eyes are drawn to each other like a cord, cinching tight. Strangling both of us. “That’s her! Ava! Tell them!”
I mash the accelerator, harder than I intend, tires squealing against the concrete, spitting out gravel.
I’ve done nothing wrong.
I’ve done nothing wrong.
I’ve done—
A blur of movement across the road startles me. Time tricks me—it’s too fast and I’m too slow—and I slam the brakes. The wheels spin out, and the car comes to a stop. Then, I hear Sheila’s throaty panic. See her awkward run in heels, each step stabbing the earth and sinking in deep.
“Maddie! Get off the road!”
Maddie stands there in front of the car, rigid as a small tree trunk. She’s dropped her bear into a nearby puddle, his head half-submerged in muddy water that’s splattered her tights.
I’m not sure what to do, so I
do nothing. I wait till Sheila scoops her up, glaring at me, as if to say it’s all my fault. Which it is. Till my breathing sounds less like a woman underwater.
I know I need to leave. And now. The cops are in my rearview, pushing Ricky’s belly up against the squad car, his feet spread-eagle.
As I ease my car forward and check the mirror once more, Maddie’s head swivels back to the road. To me. Her cheeks are pink from the cold. The rest of her, ghost white. I shiver, as if she really is a ghost sent to haunt me.
She raises her hand, her little skeleton fingers, and waves.
Chapter
Sixteen
Nerves jangling, I drive back to the office and head up the stairs. I’ve canceled my afternoon clients, but it feels wrong to go home now. I’m too keyed up, too exposed, and the house is too empty. And I’d only sit there and wonder about Ricky. What he’s saying and not saying and how long until they come for me, the jilted ex-wife with an axe to grind.
So I fall into my desk chair instead, open my laptop, and try to distract myself with yesterday’s session notes. But with each tap of the keys, I only imagine Jack Donovan combing through them for evidence. His eagle eyes reading between the lines.
Name: Cleo Campbell
Session Date: 2/20/18
Client presented on time, oriented in all spheres. Mood was distraught, tearful, but client denied suicidal ideation. Discussed issues of grief and loss. Client continues to be hyperfocused on others’ judgments of her, possibly due to complicated relationship with father. Challenged client’s cognitive distortions (i.e., catastrophizing). Recommended book on grief, The Year of Magical Thinking. Next session scheduled for 2/22.
Jack would notice the session dates, that I’d seen Cleo outside of our regular schedule, that she’d been distraught. He’d ask how much I knew about her and when and how. And why. “Why did you provide therapy to a client involved in an intimate relationship with your ex-husband?”
Doctors of Darkness Boxed Set Page 83
