“I don’t think,” Naomi replied, “she was stalking me at all. She wanted me out of the way so she could get him back. She wanted him back very much.”
Jake’s ample body shook with his deep laugh. He nearly spilled his drink when he sat up straight for emphasis. “Well, of course she did! Who would want to let go of such a precious catch? Just think, all the prestige, the notoriety, the wealth, the attention! But relationships end all the time. That was not all of it. You are very sweet to think it was only a jealousy thing, Naomi.” His eyes narrowed in curiosity. “Can you really be that naïve, that untainted? No one angles for a star like your man without wanting the whole cake. I find it hard to believe anyone can even see him as a normal person without everything else that comes in that package. The fame, the glamour, the trophies. Catching someone like Jon means harnessing the beast of show business, taking advantage of all that it has to offer, and good luck with the ride! But that’s what they see, and it’s what they want. Don’t tell me you wanted something else?”
She did not reply right away. “I guess I am that naïve, I just fell in love. I didn’t care much about the fame.”
His laugh bellowed through the large room, causing many heads to turn in their direction. “Bless you, child. And I think I will even believe it. But no!” He became very serious again as he returned to his original question. “Whatever you may think, this was not about Jon. It was about you. You were the main target, and I have the feeling it was because you were the embodiment of her dreams.”
Harry found his way to her soon after and asked what Jake had been talking about, a little worry in his voice, but she waved it away.
Exhaustion had been creeping up on her over the past hour, and, incredibly, a crazy hunger for meat, as if her body was telling her what it needed. Garlic bread, too, and pineapple, preferably barbecued, all washed down with a tart white wine.
“Harry, do you think they have some steaks ready yet? I’m starving.”
Fatigued, Naomi leaned her head back against the upholstery and closed her eyes, the noise of the party humming in her head. She felt trapped, caught in a dark, cavernous labyrinth where she was getting more and more lost with every turn she took. The commiserating looks were a burden, the words of pity a constant reminder of her deep-seated guilt, the alertness to her misery a bondage without respite.
By the time Harry returned, the girls had come to sit with her for a while, starry-eyed and breathless to find themselves in the company of so many faces known only from movies or magazines, the glamour still working on them despite Solveigh’s acid comments.
Jon was hovering. He refrained from staying with her all the time so she wouldn’t feel like she was under observation, but he was never far away and seemed tuned in to her, ready to be by her side as soon as she needed him. Even now, his back to her, talking to others, he seemed to be harkening backward. Critically he had watched as Harry brought her food and how she picked at it without really eating anything, her appetite gone again as soon as it was in front of her. He was on the point of turning to her, but Sal was quicker.
“Stop fussing, for God’s sake,” he told her bluntly. “Just feed your face. You look like a bulimic supermodel. All you need is a stash of cocaine to complete the picture. Are you planning to go down the drain like so many other females in Hollywood?”
Naomi felt like throwing the plate at him, but Solveigh added, “I think she likes the way she looks now, as thin as a piece of paper and paler than vanilla pudding. Me, I think she looks like crap, but whatever.”
Out of sheer defiance, Naomi cut off a big piece of steak and stuffed it in her mouth.
“Oh, okay.” Sal leaned on the backside of the couch, staring down at her fork. “I guess the rest should be thrown away. You don’t want to overdo it, dear. Maybe your man likes the tuberculosis look on you.”
“Shut up. Leave me alone, Sal.” She attacked the potato on her plate.
“You’re not getting the invalid treatment from me, honey. Beg all you like. I want to see you up and running before we move out on tour. We can’t be dragging a zombie along.”
“Sal!” Solveigh shot him a scandalized look, but he shrugged at her.
“What? She wanted a tour, and she got it, got her way once again, and now she had better deal with it, shot in the gut or not. We can’t very well cancel all those venues and hotels again.”
“Of course.” The lobster was good, even if it wasn’t quite as tasty as prawns. “Why should I be content with less? I need grand hotel hallways and lobbies for my grand scenes, and you should know that by now.”
Everything, everything, Sal realized ruefully, had changed. No matter how hard they tried and how convincingly they pretended, deep in his heart he felt that the life had gone out of her and she was barely keeping herself together. They could push her into defiance for a little while, but the sadness always resurfaced, and the resignation. Step by slow step, she was drifting away from them, and he wondered if Jon had noticed, if all the good spirit he was displaying just now was nothing more than an act.
He woke just before dawn to find her gone. For an instant, a cold fear gripped him, but then he saw her standing outside by the balustrade, her nightgown stirring in the cool wind.
Naomi did not turn when he stepped up to her but gazed at the ocean silently. A stillness had settled around her like a cloud of mist, as if she had drawn all her pain and sadness together to put distance between herself and the real world.
“I wish I could go back,” she said into the silence of the early morning, “I wish I could go back to that black beach I saw when I was in a coma. It was so peaceful. No fear, no joy, no pain, no music. Everything floated away from me, all my sorrows, all my thoughts, even my love. No desires, no memories.”
He knew then.
“I’m going away.” Slowly she looked up at him. “As hard as I try, I can’t find myself here anymore. It’s as if my soul poured out of me along with all that blood, leaving nothing but a shell that’s pretending to be me.”
“Baby, no.” Jon tried to reach out to her, but she drew back as if she had already left inwardly. “Where will you go? I’ll go with you.”
“You can’t.” Delivered in a soft voice that killed any argument before it could even be spoken. In the eerie grey light she stood before him, her head bowed, the selkie, returning to her cold abode.
“I feel like I’m dead, Jon, and I don’t even have the solace of that peaceful place. Everyone is staring at me and wants me to be my old self again, but I can’t. I’m not that person anymore.”
“But you are. You will be. I know you will be again, the spark is there, you only need more time, more time to heal. Please, Naomi, give yourself more time. We’ll go away together, we’ll…hell, I don’t know, we’ll go anyplace you want and take all the time you need, but please, don’t leave me!”
She might as well have pushed a blade right through his body with her next words.
“At least this time you’ll know it wasn’t your fault. You’ll be able to rest easier.” She walked past him back into the bedroom, without another glance, without the promise of a touch.
He watched how she took out a small bag and packed her old clothes in it, things she had brought from Halmar but nothing she had bought while they were together. None of her jewels, not even her rings. There was not a lot. It made him think of his own hasty journey, and how he had climbed from that jet in Bergen and walked into the freezing winds of winter, and about that other dawn so many years ago when he had found her gone.
“You know I will not survive this. Naomi, if you go, I’ll not survive.”
For a moment she stood before her trophies, even touched the Oscar briefly, but then left it standing in its place and wandered out to the patio again and sat on the day bed where she had spent so many days recuperating.
The sun had begun its rise behind the hills, touching the trees with tentative rosy fingers and casting the first golden light onto the sea.
“And will you come back to me? Will you come back to our life together or is this the end? Are you ending everything now?”
He sat down beside her and took her hand, afraid she would pull away and take the last trace of hope from him. Her hand lay in his limply, all life gone from it again.
“I don’t know, Jon.”
“You don’t know?” Amid all the fear and pain, he felt a small bud of anger bloom in his chest. “You don’t know? After everything we’ve been through, after all the obstacles we’ve overcome to be together and make this right, you sit here and tell me you don’t know?”
There was no reply. She got up again and began to walk slowly through every room in the house, ending up in the studio. Jon followed her. It made him recall the many times he had imagined her on the morning after the drug raid, when she must have drifted through the house much like this, all by herself, just as lost as she seemed now.
“You are not alone.” he said out loud.
She was standing beside his piano, the sheet with the song he had been working on in her hands, one of the pieces intended for the selkie musical. Her hair was back in a braid, she was in a linen dress and sandals, ready to leave, and to Jon it seemed as if only her body was still present, her soul had left long ago.
“You are not alone like you were back then. I’m here. I didn’t desert you this time, and I’m not going to. You don’t need that black place you were talking about to find healing. My love, I’ll take you away from here and find us a place where we can heal together. To hell with the tour and everything else. We can sell the house and move away and you’ll never, ever have to come to California again. And I promise, with all my heart, that I’ll never ask you to, not even for a day. Please don’t leave me.”
She held up the paper to him. “This is new. You didn’t show me.”
“It is new, yes. I’m still working on the musical we wanted to put on stage. I haven’t given up on life.” It sounded like an accusation, but he didn’t care anymore. It felt as if his well of pain and sadness had dried up. He could just not drag any more out of it to share her misery.
“I’m going to make coffee. I want coffee. If we are going to have this discussion and you want to go, I at least want some coffee to go with all the drama.” Without waiting for her reply, he went to the kitchen and turned on the machine. “So you want to go.” Jon called across the living room to her. “And what do you think will be better then? You’ll have your family hide you away again in some obscure place like before, rending your heart, killing yourself with your longing for me, listening to me sing, and then what, Naomi? Ten years from now you’ll stand outside a venue again in some city and watch me walk by? And sit in a concert and cry your eyes out and then go home and mourn? Is that what makes you really happy? Is that what you really crave?”
To his surprise, she came and stood in the door to listen to his bitter tirade. Jon felt ridiculous in his pajama pants. Angrily he banged down two mugs on the counter top. “Here. Drink some coffee, for God’s sake. Don’t stand there like a stranger. And answer my questions.”
She sat down without comment.
“So tell me, where to this time? Norway is out of the question; you’ve used that one up. And if I know you, it will have to be someplace cold and harsh, right? No gentle breezes for you. You really need the drama and the sorrow to feel good, don’t you? You can’t allow yourself ease and happiness. You think life has to really suck to justify your existence. Well I’ll tell you a secret, Naomi: that’s not how it works.”
That made her look up from her cup and gaze at him in surprise.
Jon opened his mouth to tell her again how sorry he was and how guilty he felt about everything that had happened, but to his astonishment he found he needed to say something else entirely.
“You’re breaking my heart, and you know it. You know I would gladly lay myself down and let the world roll over me to make you happy, and still you want to go. Well, here it is, Naomi: I’m at the end of my rope. I’ve done everything imaginable to make you want to live with me. If all that isn’t good enough, then I’m sorry, because there is no more. This is who I am. Go on and tell me you don’t love me. I want to hear you say it before you walk out of this house for good.”
Naomi blinked at him, for the first time that morning with something like a spark of life in her eyes. Jon felt the strong urge to grip her by the shoulders and shake her hard and then drag her back upstairs to their bed and drive all those dark thoughts out of her for good.
“Jon, how am I supposed to live with the shame and guilt of those deaths?”
“Who said you had to live with the guilt?” He nearly shouted it, exhausted to death by the recurring discussion and the reminder of his own failings. So many nights when she had been asleep he had mulled over Stewart and Sophie’s deaths and his role in them, so many times he and Sal had discussed it, but the conclusion had always been the same. There was no guilt. He was not guilty.
“You’re not guilty of one damn thing, Naomi. And I’m tired of repeating that.” He needed more coffee, and he really wanted a cigarette, but there were none close by. “Or maybe yes, you are guilty. You are guilty of making me suffer like hell over and over again with your doubts and fears and silences. And I’ve had it.” The moment the words left his lips he was sorry. She had paled considerably during his speech, and now she lowered her head again so he could not see her face.
“You were shot,” Jon went on, a little calmer. “And I bear the guilt for that without you having to tell me. For some reason or other I did not manage to break up with my last girlfriend in such a way that she could get over it. My fault. But not yours, Naomi.” He leaned forward, his hands on the table right in front of her, furious at himself for his ranting, furious at her for the hurt she was delivering again. “Do you really think,” he said in a cold, dead voice, “do you really think any woman in the world could make me stay with her if I didn’t want to? Even you, my dear, not even you could make me stay if I didn’t love you beyond all reason. With the choices I have, why should I care about any one woman for longer than I have to? I didn’t leave Sophie because of you, Naomi. I left her because I was not in love with her at all. And I left her because a better adventure was waiting for me.” He drew a deep breath. “You. Because, my love, you are the adventure of my life. That is all. The beginning and the end of it.”
Without another word he left her there, in the kitchen, and returned to the bedroom to dress. If he had to stand in the door and watch her go, he didn’t want to do it in pajamas; he needed some dignity at a moment like this.
From outside he could hear the voices of her guards, then the deep rumbling of the Rolls as it was brought out of the garage, and suddenly, despite all his harsh and dire words, he felt the desolate fear of returning downstairs and finding her gone. All her things, her lovely gowns, the shawls and jewels, none of these were missing, she had just left them behind, shed them like a glittering skin she did not need where she was bound.
The entrance stood wide open when he returned downstairs. Naomi was outside at the bottom of the stairs, talking to Amparo, the light of the morning framing her and shining through her skirt. Jon debated going down to her to plead with her again, but then he decided he would not treat himself to another painful spectacle. Slowly he walked away and closed the studio door behind him. The music. In the end, the music had always rescued him in his darkest moments.
Like this, just like this.
She had walked out of the house that morning too. A car had been waiting for her and she had vanished from his life.
His thoughts wandered to the tour looming before him like a giant snow-covered mountain, the booking for the Shubert where they had wanted to stage the musical, the house in New York, and Joshua.
Wasted. Jon did not know how to deal with these matters yet. Tired, he decided that he would have to go and close the front door, since she probably wouldn’t have returned from the car to do it.
&
nbsp; He opened to the door to the living room.
Naomi gave him the ghost of a smile.
“I’m hungry for an omelet. Will you make me one?” she said softly.
If you enjoyed
THE DISTANT SHORE,
be sure to catch
Book II of The Stone Trilogy,
UNDER THE SAME SUN
Coming in Fall 2012
An excerpt follows.
chapter 2
He’d been holding the apple in his hand the entire time it took the bus to cross London. Beside them, the river was a golden band shimmering in the late afternoon sun, with a few ships collecting ripples in their trail like lace on a satin gown.
Quite successfully, he’d ignored the chatter of the others as they commented on the sights and on how excited they were to be back in England, back on the road, and made plans for the next day when they would have time to explore.
His fingers gripped the apple like a good-luck charm, the promise that all would be well, something to dispel the loneliness.
Jon had felt that loneliness like a terrible ache on the bus ride to the venue, like a deep silence settling into his heart. Alone in his hotel room that morning, he’d stared at the curtains blowing in the morning breeze, the other side of the bed empty and cold, untouched. He listened to the sound of the birds in the park across the street, remembering when they had been in London together for the first time. It had been a day much like this one, maybe a little cooler. He remembered opening his eyes and seeing her black locks on the pillow, a pale shoulder partly covered by the sheet, and he knew it was the day he would propose. How nervous he had been, afraid she would refuse! But she had agreed, and after breakfast he’d taken her out and bought her a ring. The elation of the moment when he’d put it on her finger had come back to him when he’d retraced that walk this morning. He had stood outside Tiffany’s, still closed, and felt the crazy urge to bend down and run his hand over the pavement, trying to find a memory of her footsteps there. Furtively he had looked around, but no one had taken any notice of him. The stream of early-morning pedestrians had parted around him, ignoring him as if he were no more than a garbage can that had been put in the wrong place.
The Distant Shore (Stone Trilogy) Page 39