by Jill Barnett
She was still crying when he shut the door behind him, and she fell into a chair, head back, eyes closed, with Laurel’s words on the phone haunting her. “I won’t come between two brothers. And Mom, I just can’t forgive you for not telling me the truth. I’ll call you in a few weeks and let you know where I am. Good-bye.” With those simple words, her daughter was gone.
The clock chimed the half hour before Kathryn could move. She showered and went to work, sat down at her desk, and called the gallery in Seattle. Two phone calls later, she had the contact who represented Victor Banning and told the man she had one Espinosa to sell. The arrangements were made and she hung up. Easy as that. It was done.
In the storage room, she struggled to pull out an Espinosa painting and spent the rest of the afternoon tightly rewrapping it, before calling the movers to come the next day and crate it for shipping to the mainland. The island hardware store was only a short stop on the way home. Thirty minutes later she stood in her bedroom, where the overhead light shone so bright she could see all the cracks in the plaster of those old stucco walls, all the false gaudiness of the loud yellow color she’d tried to live with. She wasn’t Evie. Her sister’s life didn’t fit her any better than Julia’s had, so Kathryn shoved all the furniture into the center of the room, picked up a roller, and painted her bedroom blue.
Two uniformed men removed a crated canvas from the delivery truck parked behind Victor’s Town Car as Harlan gave them directions to the loft. Victor turned and faced the only blank wall left on which to hang Rachel’s two lost paintings. His heart was pounding and his blood felt hot, almost making him lightheaded, the way he’d been whenever they were together. Time couldn’t erase the bell-like memory of what it felt like to be with Rachel.
They had rendezvoused in a building like this one, with a rattling freight elevator and the bleak skeleton of LA’s industry for miles in all directions. But from inside that reclusive flat, no outside world had existed, because there had been no exterior walls. A square room with no windows, just a bed without a frame on the hardwood floor and an open, spare bath with a steel shower, toilet, and standing sink, all appropriately cell-like. For more than a decade they had fucked in a room with no true light, blue skies, or sunshine to make it clear they had so much to lose.
Rachel had been both his passion and poison. They were two souls driven by lust and power and something neither could name, each struggling to control the other, both unable to walk out and stay away.
“It’s done, Victor.” Her voice had always been emotionless when she said those resolved words, a cool Rachel so unlike the burning body that had been under him only moments before. His heart still pounded in the aftermath of sex. But she laid next to him, turned away, her skin as white as the sheets and walls, the defined bones of her long, lithe spine snaking up to her neck, where she had smelled like Arpege and paint, her hair in sharp contrast and black as the thing between them. He could see the violent imprint of his fingers on her buttocks, and when she sat up and lit a cigarette, red-orange paint showed under her nails, a slash of yellow on her elbow, green on a thumb.
Rachel was the only color against the room’s blank canvas, staring away from him and looking distantly alone. It was there—the wall she erected to keep them apart—but it always crumbled. Smoke pluming from her cigarette dissipated into the air. It struck him that passion was always described in the terminology of fire—white-hot, smoldering, blazing—but fires could be put out.
Rachel leaned over him and pressed the cigarette to his mouth, then stood and slipped her dress over her head.
He hated the taste of tobacco and dropped it into a glass of watered whiskey on the floor. “You’re leaving.”
“Yes.”
“I see. Then you got what you came for.”
“So did you.” She stepped into her heels, looking down at him.
“I suppose I did.” A lie spoken aloud sounded closer to the truth. He was an accomplished liar.
She picked up her purse, dropped her cigarettes and lighter into it. “I wish I could stop this.”
“Only because that would mean I have no power over you. You shouldn’t worry, my dear. It’s human nature to cling to something.”
“I’m clinging to the wrong thing.”
“Then go. But you can’t stay away.”
“Neither can you, Victor.” She opened the door to leave, but turned back. “I don’t love you.”
He had perfected the art of hiding soft emotions. “I know. We’re a pair, you and I, because I can’t love anyone,” he’d told her, and for one naked moment, they looked at each other, the truth plain and real despite all their lies.
His doom was to long for a love too destructive, and necessary as air. Not a day had passed since her death that he didn’t crave another day with her. Even now, so many years later, as he stood in the loft surrounded by almost all of her work, part of him was missing. He didn’t regret that he’d told his son the truth—he couldn’t open that door—but he regretted that in doing so, he’d lost Rachel forever.
Reliving history, he stood before that last blank wall until the freight elevator rattled to the top floor. He held the door open as they delivered the painting, uncrated it, and leaned it against the empty wall. Not until the truck’s gears sounded from the street below and the engine droned away did he tear off the wrapping.
Alone, he stared at the canvas with a huge X cut through the middle so the painting collapsed in its center. He couldn’t have named what single emotion ran through him: shock, rage, puzzlement. Reeling and silent, he rushed from the loft, so hot his head and hair felt on fire and he could swear he smelled smoke. He crawled into the backseat. “Take me home, Harlan.” By the time they were on the freeway, Victor had contacted his attorney on the radio phone. “Who sold you the painting?”
“Is something wrong?”
“I’m not certain.”
His attorney came back with the information. “The owner wanted the money to go to a charity. The Jimmy Peyton Memorial Fund.”
“I’ll call you later.” Victor hung up, his breath shallow, a sick feeling in his belly. “Jimmy Peyton and the Fireflies,” he said aloud, a name he hadn’t thought of since the first days of the accident, then never thought of again. Peyton. Peyton. That last girlfriend of Cale’s was Laurel Peyton. Jimmy Peyton and the Fireflies. Laurel Peyton. Couldn’t be. Her family would never let that connection happen. He hadn’t bothered to check her out because the girl was inconsequential. What an irony if her name alone would have been enough to split them apart.
But the damaged painting was clearly vandalized, a visual of their damaged lives. Their damaged selves. The shreds of lies they lived and spoke and told themselves were truths. He rolled down the rear window, because it was so stuffy, stagnant. “Harlan. Turn up the air.” A strange, sharp sensation shot down his right cheek, circled until his face felt numb, then was gone. His mouth tasted metallic.
“What did you say, Mr. Banning?”
“Turn up the air. I can’t breathe.” In his brain he said those words, but what spoke from his mouth was muffled gibberish. Harlan’s name was “Shhhhluban.” The edges of his vision turned white and began to disappear, so he closed his eyes. Everything was hot and spinning.
When he opened his eyes again they had pulled over and Harlan was leaning inside the backseat with a hand on his shoulder. “I can’t understand you, sir.”
Air, he thought. It’s so hot. I need air. But his mouth wouldn’t move.
On a Friday afternoon, Cale received a call from Jud that Victor had had a stroke. It took him over an hour to get from school in LA to the hospital in Santa Ana. Cale went from the nurses’ station straight to ICU, where his grandfather lay hooked up to monitors and an IV. The old man’s face was a grotesque pale mask, half the Victor he knew—sharp bones and angular muscles—the other half slack, as if the muscle and bone were crushed. His skin was gray, his hair matted with sweat, and he wasn’t conscious.
&nb
sp; Jud stood at the window, hands in the pockets of his suit pants, looking at a loss for words, his expression strained. Cale didn’t know if that was because of him or Victor. He hadn’t seen his brother since that day at school when Jud came to him for some kind of absolution. “What happened?”
“They were on the freeway. Harlan said Victor wasn’t making any sense. He was rolling down the windows and talking gibberish. Harlan called his doctor, who told him not to bother with an ambulance and to drive straight here. They need to do more tests once he’s awake. He can’t speak, but the stroke didn’t kill him.”
Cale said nothing. Jud stood at the window. His grandfather lay in the bed. A canyon of pain stood between them.
“Now that you’re here, I need to go make some calls.” Jud walked toward the door.
“To Laurel?” He couldn’t stop himself.
“No.” Jud faced him. “I don’t know where she is. She’s left. Her apartment, her school, the restaurant. Her mother says she doesn’t know where she is. Claims Laurel didn’t want to come between us.”
“Too late for that.”
“There’s a lot more to this than you think.” Jud looked like a loser, and it was strange because it was a look that didn’t fit him.
“Did you try Seattle?”
“I have someone looking now. But I think she wants to stay gone.” Jud opened the door. “I’m going to find Harlan.”
Alone, Cale scanned Victor’s chart. Results from the CAT scan were there. The stroke was severe, but he would make it. Cale used a corner of the bed sheet to wipe the saliva from Victor’s mouth. The old man would hate this.
Whether he would be the same was the question. His grandfather had been vital and always willing to make everyone’s life hell. Cale wanted to despise him, but it was easier to hate him when he wasn’t pitiable, unmoving, like one of those stunned gulls from his childhood. Cale touched his hand and the old man opened his eyes, tried to speak, and winced at the guttural sounds.
“Don’t, Victor. I’ll get someone.”
His grandfather gripped his hand and wouldn’t let go, so Cale reached over him and pressed the call button. When they came to take Victor away for tests, the nurse had to pry his grandfather’s fingers loose, then Cale stood in the empty room, his knuckles red and hand throbbing. To his horror, he began to cry. Deep sobs he couldn’t stop. His despair swelled up and out from some lost, empty place; it racked his frame, stole his breath, and possessed him. He sank into the chair by the bed, his face in his hands.
The minutes disappeared until Jud touched his shoulder. Cale needed more time to control himself and when he did, they didn’t speak, a couple of busted veins bleeding in silence. Finally he wiped his eyes, embarrassed. “I don’t know why that happened.”
“I’m sorry about Laurel, Cale.” Jud didn’t understand.
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t care anymore.” The words slipped out of his mouth so fast, as all lies do. Cale knew he would care for a long, long time.
Part III
2002
* * *
When the fight begins within himself a man’s worth something.
—Robert Browning
23
Newport Beach, California
One afternoon a week, Cale Banning escaped his surgical practice for eighteen holes at Harborview Country Club. Taking up golf had been his wife Robyn’s idea, some twenty years ago, back when the long, consecutive hours of surgery drained his concentration, when he came home antsy and on days off hovered distractedly around the family.
“Cale, darling. We know you love us. Your colleagues respect you, your patients trust you, but your intensity is about to eat you alive. For God’s sake go play racquetball, soccer, tennis. Bang the heck out of a golf ball. Do something for you.”
On his birthday she and the boys gave him a set of clubs, and Jud joined forces and handed him an expensive golf membership, telling the boys, “Your dad spent half his childhood searching for injured seagulls. Now he can spend his free time chasing after birdies and eagles.”
This week, like most, he played with Lofty Collins, a cardiologist and med school buddy from USC whose real name was Karl, but “Lofty” had stuck years back because he could send a golf ball off a clubface so high and long it seemed to hang there in midair, waiting for applause before it dropped onto the green.
Collins used his club to point toward the rough. “A hundred bucks says you cut right and end up in the trees.”
“You’re on.” Cale swung, and five minutes later he stood beside a giant eucalyptus tree with no view to the green.
“Hey.” Lofty was laughing. “Looks like you have a clear shot to the trap.”
“Trap, my ass, and stop crowing.” Cale whacked the ball a good three shots from the hole. By four o’clock, he was into Lofty for six hundred bucks.
“I’m going to give you a break, Banning. Double or nothing. You make par and you won’t owe me a thing.”
Cale looked down at the foreign implement in his hand. He had a bagful of clubs, but he would have been better off throwing the ball toward the green. “Screw the money. It’s my game that’s gone to hell.”
“You just like to win. Or you don’t like to lose. Tell you what. I’ll bet on my good game against your lousy one. I eagle this hole and you have to agree to look at that patient of mine.”
“I leave my scheduling up to Sharon.”
“Bullshit.”
“Call Madison. He’s a good surgeon.”
“I don’t want Brad Madison on this one. I want you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re the best, asshole.”
“I’m the best asshole?” Cale eyed the fairway. “I’ve had a lot of practice.”
“Glad to see you haven’t lost your sense of humor. Just your guts.”
It wasn’t about the game any longer, not about two friends giving each other a hard time. Cale faced Lofty. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“You’ve changed since Robyn died.”
“We were married for almost thirty years. Yes. I miss my wife.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it. The fire in you is gone.”
“There must be some unwritten law that people who haven’t lost a spouse will tell those who have how they should feel, act, and recover.”
“I’m a good enough friend to ignore that, and point out you were one of the best cardiothoracic surgeons around. I never thought I’d see someone with your ability to save lives actively choose not to.”
“Ask my patients about their lives. I haven’t lost anyone in a long time.”
“Not since Robyn died.”
“Yeah, well, medicine turned out to be a waste of time for her.” The air was a calm seventy-eight degrees, no breeze, no marine layer, no fog. All blue sky and sunshine. In a world without his wife? It just felt all wrong. “I choose my surgeries. Everyone chooses their surgeries.”
“Robyn was proud of your work.”
“If you weren’t one of my oldest friends, Karl, I’d put my fist through your nose so even Evanston couldn’t reconstruct it.” Cale swung and watched his golf ball sail off to the right. “I’m in the trap.”
“I think you’ve been there for a long time, buddy.”
“I’m one hell of a surgeon.” He sounded embarrassingly defensive.
“Yes. You were one hell of a surgeon.”
“Okay, okay.” Cale held up his hand. “You’re a hardheaded bastard. Send the records over. I’ll take a look at them. Now, will you shut up?”
“Sure.” Lofty lined up his shot, drew back.
“What’s the patient’s name?”
“King.” Collins resettled into his stance and eyed the green. “Her name is King.”
Santa Ana, California
Annalisa King loved her father, but sometimes he wasn’t an easy man to love. Like now, as she drove along the freeway with her cell phone to her right ear, listening to him go on a
nd on.
“You have talent, Annalisa. You are my daughter,” he said for the thousandth time in the last year, his voice loud over the cellular waves and his accent getting stronger. “I tell you this before. You work with me, in a few years I will give you your own restaurant. Annalisa’s. Can you not see your name on the awning? See the windows etched with the A?”
“I don’t want my own restaurant.”
“You think you are too good to be a chef?”
“You know that’s not true.”
“It is in your blood. You throw your talent in the can.”
“Trash, Dad. In the trash.”
“Trash can. It is the same thing. You change the subject. Just like your mother. Designing kitchens. You are both crazy.”
“King Design has a solid reputation. Mom designed all your restaurants.”
“You must listen to me, ma petite jeune.”
She wanted to say, “I’m not your little girl anymore! And you can’t tell me what to do.” But he was still talking, pushing, pushing, pushing to get his way. He could not forgive her for choosing her own career over the one he wanted for her. In his mind, she was choosing her mother over him.
He finally stopped talking and she had no idea what answer he was waiting for. “Love you, Dad. Lots of traffic. Gotta hang up. We’ll talk later. Bye.” She turned off her cell phone and tossed it into her open briefcase on the passenger seat. But his words, created solely to make her feel guilty, echoed like a hard-rock beat in her head, so she rolled down the window and turned up the radio.
Fifteen minutes later she stood in an elevator speeding upward ten floors to the top of the BanCo Building. Dizzy, she braced her hand on the wall. A little sweat broke out on her brow line the way it did when you had a low-grade fever. That’s what nerves did to you.