by Jill Barnett
“Don’t do this. After last night, he was going to find out, Laurel.”
He sounded too casual, too flip. Cale was his brother. She remembered the look on Jud’s face in the kitchen in Catalina. She closed the door with a soft click. A simple sound in a situation that was anything but simple. “He said this had nothing to do with me. What did he mean?”
“He thinks I slept with you because you were his girl. He’s always had this idea that I’m competing with him.”
“Are you?”
“No,” he said sharply. “You and I have nothing to do with him.”
“You actually believe that?”
“Yes.” He came toward her.
She held up her hands. “Don’t. Please. This is all my fault.” She felt nauseous. “Didn’t you see his face? Oh God . . . I wanted to break it off with him the other night, but he fell asleep in my lap. After he told me I was the reason he could get through school. I’m a coward. I could have told him I didn’t love him anymore. Instead, I fell asleep and he was already gone when I woke up.”
“You’re not a coward, Laurel. You’re human.”
“Am I? It doesn’t feel very human, what I’ve done. It feels cruel and inhuman. I’ve made this so ugly.” She couldn’t look at him. But there were no answers in the fibers of the apartment carpet, no answers across the room or outside the window, where the sun shone brightly and seemed a ludicrous thing. “I can’t do this. I won’t come between you two.”
“There’s no good way to break off a relationship.” He crossed the room and put his hands on her shoulders. “Look at me. He was going to get hurt either way. We can’t help how we feel.”
“We did it badly, Jud. Really badly.”
“It’s too late. I won’t let go of what I feel for you.”
“What exactly is it that you feel for me?” She thought perhaps he had to choose his words carefully. “You can’t say it?” She searched his face for answers, escape, relief. What she saw was only Jud, the same look on the boat before he said I’m sorry and walked away.
“I can say it, Laurel. You want me to say I love you. What about you?”
“I don’t know what I feel.”
His hands fell away, dropped to his sides, and he looked as if she had hit him.
“I’m sorry, but that’s the truth. I thought I knew what love was. I thought I was in love with Cale. I was wrong. How can I trust what I feel for you?”
“You don’t feel anything for me,” he said flatly. “I feel everything for you.”
He reached out to her but she stepped back.
“I just need time to understand it.”
“How much time?”
“I don’t know. I have to stay away from you, Jud. I have to understand what’s happening to me. I can’t think if you’re here.”
“That should be a big clue, Laurel.” His voice was bitter and sarcastic.
Seconds turned into minutes before she said, “Please give me some time to clear my head.”
He stood there, stewing, hands in his pockets, looking everywhere, then at her. “Okay. I’ll back off One week. No more.” He grabbed his wallet and keys from the end table and walked to the door. He stopped, searching her face for something. “I do love you, Jailbait.”
She started to cry.
“Just remember that, okay?”
“Talk to him, Jud. Go talk to him. Please. I can’t come between you. I can’t.”
“I’ve given you enough promises for one day.”
“He’s your brother.”
“I’ll think about it.” He left just as his brother had, without looking back.
Laurel closed the door, feeling weak and Tilt-A-Whirl queasy, because life could change with the speed of a carnival ride. She took deep breaths between her tears, trying to hold back the guilt and shame, wounded by what she had done. At that moment, she could not have looked in a mirror. Cale’s betrayed expression swam before her eyes, and she ran into the bathroom and threw up.
21
Cale walked through the hallways of his world with no direction and little memory of his actions. Like surgery gone horribly wrong, he was mutilated inside, and nothing, not copious amounts of liquor, not shapely women, not even the escape of sleep could wipe away the fact that Laurel had chosen Jud over him. His wounds ran deep and bloody and his self-worth plummeted. Again he faced failure, and worse, that Laurel didn’t love him. The past flew back to remind him: the women he loved had left him.
He had been living on the edges of solitude for months, maybe years, and his phone calls to her had been an infusion of strength. Without them, without her, who was he? Was there anyone left who would believe in him? It destroyed him cell by cell to think of her and know they wouldn’t be together forever. Even worse, to think of her with Jud. Love was a terrible world to inhabit. Love lulled you into feeling safe, but it was all a fantasy, like some dark comic book story where the villain who threatened to destroy the world was both friend and foe, wore a mask half dark and half light, and time was the only thing holding back the sad truth that betrayal was inevitable.
Each day, concentration became more impossible. Even Dr. Strovich had called him on stupid mistakes and told him it was a good thing his exams were over. Cale had drifted mindlessly through time, until the afternoon he came out of the lab building to find his Judas brother standing on the front steps.
Jud came toward him. “Cale!”
“Go to hell.”
Jud grabbed his shoulder.
Cale swung away from him. “Leave me alone.”
“Wait. Listen to me.”
“No.” He kept walking but Jud dogged his heels.
“I met her first.”
He faced his brother. “What are you talking about?”
“Laurel. I met her first.”
“I didn’t see a flag sticking out of her that said Jud Banning.”Cale trembled with the pain of suppressed, raging anger. He met her first—what the fuck did that matter? Then something inside him, something he thought was dead, began the slow, painful act of dying all over again.
“Laurel was the girl in Catalina. The one I was in the fight over.”
Cale started walking again. “I have newfound respect for the guy who beat the shit out of you.”
“Stop.” Jud came around in front of him, blocking the way. “Go ahead. Hit me.”
Cale’s hands were in rock-tight fists. He wanted to smash Jud’s face in. “I’m not going to give you an easy out.”
“You want to. Come on, hit me.” Jud wouldn’t move.
“Go away, Jud. Run to Laurel. You wanted her badly enough to take her.” He looked Jud in the eye. “Or maybe it isn’t about Laurel any longer. If it ever was.”
“You think I don’t care about her?”
“I have no idea. The conquest is over. You won. I lost. Funny. Isn’t that the way it always is? I want something and you get it.” They were still brothers, bound together by blood and parentage, conceived by the same bodies and born from the same womb. But Laurel wasn’t a basketball game or a sports car. She was his heart. Jud took her, and Cale didn’t think he could ever forgive his brother for that.
“I can’t change how she feels. I’m here because she wanted me to come talk to you.”
Cale laughed caustically. “Oh, that’s sweet. Did she want me to hit you, too?” He shook his head and looked past his brother at nothing. “You just don’t get it, Jud. You never will. Because you’re you—the golden boy—and I’m me, the fuckup.”
Jud didn’t follow him after that. When Cale was a few yards away, he looked back. His brother was standing under a pepper tree near the Norris Library. You bastard...." Cale took a few more steps, then called out, “Run, big brother. Run. So you don’t waste time away from her.”
After that, time, like everything else in his life, lost value. Nightly visions of Laurel rose before him. Sometimes he woke to the scent of cinnamon taffy, the taste of honey, or the clear bell sound of her laughter.
Sometimes during the day and always at night, he would close his eyes. Darkness was easier, an escape, because life without her meant he would have to learn to light his own way.
A bank of opaque fog floated just off the San Pedro coast, silent, still, and eerie when it cloaked the SS Catalina. Laurel sat in a red leather window seat in the hollow, open galley and looked out at nothing but white mist. A deep, plaintive foghorn sounded every few minutes, buoy bells clanged with each swell, and the steamer’s engine rumbled away, leaving the real world and the mainland behind.
It had all started here, in this galley, and the months since played out in her head, scene by scene, an exposé of how she’d gotten to this point, a mental game of “What might have happened if?” Every choice she’d made, right and wrong, was there for her to question. Why did she sleep with Cale? Because she was in love? Because he was in love? Because she wanted him—someone—to love her? Because Jud hadn’t wanted her? The inescapable truth was: she chose to finally sleep with Cale the night she found out Jud was his brother. It was clear now. She’d fallen head over heels in love with Jud the moment he brought her that first glass of wine. Now she wasn’t certain whom she had betrayed more, Cale, Jud, or herself.
No solid answers came to her in those hours. The ship moved into Avalon harbor, where the water was gray-green and the sky dull pewter, the air briny, humid, and as thick as the fog they had passed through earlier. At home on the island, she hoped to find some kind of clarity, some way to rebuild the shambles she had made of three lives. Home was safe and the place to run. Now she ran to the island she had run from a few months ago, which pretty much defined her undecided life—a zigzag of mistakes. But the one constant in her life was her mother, the person who loved her without any demand.
Laurel had been sitting and waiting for over an hour when her mother came home from the shop and she told her about Cale and Jud. Her mom’s reaction was hellish.
Kathryn paced the living room. “I knew something like this would happen, Laurel. You wouldn’t believe me, but I could feel it coming.”
“How could you know? You don’t even know Jud.”
“I knew they would hurt you. They’re Bannings. How could they do anything else to us?” Her mother’s voice changed pitched. “They destroyed our lives.” She was gripping the back of a chair with white-knuckled hands. Her mother cried as she spoke, the kind of crying you can’t stop and sometimes don’t even realize is there, crying that comes from someplace desperate. Clearly what she was feeling burned her up. “Those two brothers will ruin yours. You say you love Jud and not Cale. Well, I say you shouldn’t go near either of them.”
It had been a mistake to come there. “Mom. Please, I’m sorry. You don’t understand. It was me. I’m the one who came between them.”
“You? Hardly. This started years ago.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They killed your father, Laurel.”
Her mother had flipped out. Panic swelled out from her voice. So mad, the crazy way she was reacting, the things she was saying, like some pot boiling over. Her own desperate search for love had driven a spike between them, too. “Mom? You’re not making sense.”
“Wait here.” Kathryn left. She came back in the room, a pale woman carrying an old blue shoe box under her arm, and handed her a yellowed newspaper clipping.
Laurel read it and slowly, horribly, she understood. “Their parents were in the other car?”
“They weren’t just in the other car. Their father was drunk and driving like a madman. He ran a light and slammed into your father’s car. The accident and the reason your father was killed were all Rudy Banning’s fault.”
“You’ve known this? You knew Cale was their son?”
“Shannon told me his last name was Banning after you brought him to meet me. I tried to find you. I went to the house at the cove and found his brother instead.”
“Do they know?”
“No.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Would it have changed how you felt?”
The small black type on the yellowed page began to blur. Light-headed, she took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “I don’t know.” By some strange destiny, she’d brought her father’s death and that relentless, black morass of pain back into their lives. Her mother’s face was almost unrecognizable, her eyes those of an insomniac, her skin bloodless. She had lost weight, her chin was too pointed, and her mouth as thin as someone a decade older. Standing before Laurel was one more broken person.
So this is love.
22
Jud kept his word and didn’t go back for a week. On the seventh day, he was at her place at eight in the morning, determined to make her understand that this was real. After taking what he wanted, he would now have to fight for her. The morning he’d left her, he bought a ring. Every day since, the velvet box stayed in the pocket of his suit jacket or sport coat—the inside pocket, just inches from his heart. He walked up the steps looking downward, mentally practicing his words as he had been for days. He knocked on the door and turned, his hands in his pockets, until no one answered. He pounded on the door. “Laurel! Laurel! Open up!” He stepped back.
In the front window hung a small black-and-white For Rent sign. It was suddenly difficult to breathe; a sinking realization paralyzed him, and his only thought was he was a fool—one who now regretted ever giving Laurel even one more day.
After an interminable minute, he hopped over the railing and pressed his hands and face to the glass. The furniture was there, but the stereo was gone, and the knit throw on the sofa back, her mother’s pottery, and the photos. The strongest sense of panic he’d ever experienced came over him. His hand shook as he wrote down the rental number, then drove for the nearest telephone. Her number was disconnected. At the rental number there was no answer.
The sweat of fear with its metallic smell poured from his head and body. He ran to his car and drove to find her. When he needed air, he had to heave great breaths, and driving in a straight line took two hands on the wheel. He went to her school, because the restaurant wasn’t open yet. They told him she had left. No transfer. No forwarding. He waited outside the restaurant until someone let him in. Laurel had telephoned two days ago, apologized, and said she wouldn’t be back. Every hour he called the rental number until that night when he reached her landlord and was told Laurel Peyton had given up her deposit and said only that she was leaving.
At midnight he fell into bed, drained and desperate, and slept the quiescent, dreamless sleep of a man who couldn’t face his transgressions. The next morning, Jud took the first seaplane to the island.
Kathryn sat in a corner chair, a box of Kleenex in her lap, an old blue shoe box open at her feet, a cup of cold tea in her hand. No amount of sugar could smother the bitter taste of lemon. Outside, the early-morning world seemed empty of humanity and fooled you into thinking there was a safe place to hide. She wondered if Laurel could find a hiding place.
The sight of Jud Banning walking up to her door came as no surprise. His appearance seemed the appropriate black moment, considering the last forty-eight hours. Her daughter had run away from all of them, even Kathryn, especially Kathryn.
Behind him, the sky still held smudges of pink from the morning’s sunrise. The Westminster clock on the table chimed eight times, each note just a second off from his knocks. She opened the door. “I knew one of you would come,” she said in lieu of niceties like hello. “I was right to be worried that day.”
“I’m looking for Laurel.”
“She’s not here.”
“Where is she?”
“She called me two days ago to tell me that she had to get away from everyone.” The sound she made should have been a bitter laugh, but it sounded like glass breaking. “She even had to get away from me.”
“I have to find her. I love your daughter.”
“So did your brother. I think you are both using her. It’s not love, but a bad case of w
ho wins.”
“Is that what she told you?”
“She told me what Cale said when he found you two together. There is something between the two of you.”
“My brother was wrong.”
“Still, she’s now caught between you both and doesn’t want to be there.”
“It’s not like that. You have to understand. She has to understand.”
“Go away and leave us alone.” She started to close the door.
“Wait! Please. I know she’s probably in Seattle.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I need to explain to her. I can’t lose her.”
He couldn’t lose her? She wondered if he even realized what he’d just said. Winning and losing and destroying. She opened the door wider. “Come inside.” He was silent, looking out of place. She handed him the box of clippings and watched him read the top one, watched the same pale, blood-draining realization come over him that had come over Laurel. One ruined life for another. “If you love my daughter more than yourself, Jud Banning, you’ll walk away. You’ll love her enough to allow her to put together the pieces of her life, a life that doesn’t include anyone named Banning. Your family has done enough harm to us.”
“Does she know?”
“She does now. She didn’t last week.”
“Then that’s all the more reason I need to talk to her. I’m sorry about your husband. But this was my father, not Cale, not me. We are just as much victims of that accident.”
“Stay out of my daughter’s life.”
“You want to punish me, but you’re punishing Laurel, too.”
“If she loved you, she wouldn’t have left you. And I don’t want to punish anyone. I want to protect her.”
“She doesn’t need protection from me. I would never hurt her.”
“You already have.” Her voice cracked. “Go. Just leave.” All she could do was hold out her hand to keep him away. Here, inside her home, he was even stealing the air she needed to breathe. “Please. Get out of my house.”