His face turned a deep shade of purple and his eyes were dark. “I am working at it.” He backed her up against the wall. “What do you know about the kind of hell I go through?”
And still, she couldn’t back down, though her knees were weak and her heart was hammering in her throat. The words had to be said, to be freed, just this once. “I know because I go through it with you.”
He laughed into her face. The sound was cruel, cold. “You’ve got everything. I’m the one who has to sweat it out, I’m the one who has to come up with it, that magic formula that brings in the money and makes people cheer.”
She shook her head. Pain sliced through her temples. “Who the hell told you you had to be Superman?”
“Me.” Harry pounded his chest. “I told me I had to be Superman.” There was pure anguish in his face and for a moment, he seemed to forget she was even there. “I had them, dammit, had them in the palm of my hand.”
He looked down at it as he squeezed it shut and she knew that was what he wanted to do to the powers he was referring to, the great “them.” Squeeze them until they were all lifeless. Dead.
He remembered she was in the room with him, and he hated her. She was part of it, part of his defeat. Perhaps even the cause.
“And now they’re making demands on me. But they’ll come back crawling.” He began to stumble from her room.
She knew he was going in search of more cocaine. She made one last attempt to stop him, to bring him to his senses. “You’re the one who’s crawling, on your knees, in front of the great white goddess. Can’t you see that?”
He turned on his heel. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!” he shrieked.
Hot tears shimmered in her eyes, tears of anger, of frustration and of sorrow for what was gone and dead. “Don’t you think I saw you going into the men’s room?”
He sneered at her. “Where did you want me to go, the ladies room?”
“You know what I’m talking about. Somebody gave you some snow and you took it.”
“That’s what you do with it.”
Grinning, he dipped his hand into his pocket and pulled out a tiny packet. It was all he had left tonight. More. He’d need more by tomorrow. He had to remember to call Garrison. That little leech. Why didn’t he ever get enough for him?
“No!” Because she caught him by surprise, she managed to snatch the packet away from him. “This is what you do with it.”
She ran by him and he knew instantly what was on her mind. It was the only clear thought he had had all evening. She was going to get rid of it. She couldn’t! He needed it, needed it more than he needed to breathe. He tried to reach her, to stop her, but the cocaine had made him slow even though it made him believe he was fast. Harry missed when he grabbed for her.
Johanna flushed the packet down the toilet.
Dazed, he saw it disappear. “You bitch! What have you done?” he screamed. In a frenzy of anger, he hit her across the face with the back of his hand.
The blow knocked her backward. It hurt far beyond what the physical impact would have warranted. The blow filtered throughout her whole body.
It was a death knell.
Harry was beside himself and the room was swimming again. His head felt as if it belonged to someone else. “Where the hell am I going to get more tonight?”
The malevolent look in his eyes had her taking a step backward instinctively.
“I could kill you,” he snarled, doubling his fists up.
“That too would be only a re-enactment.” Her voice was hollow.
She held her hand to her cheek. There was no longer fear in her eyes. Her eyes had gone dead, as had her soul. Harry had done that to her, she thought. This was only the final step.
He began to stalk out, but then stopped by her bed. He picked up a book. She saw him holding it as she came out of the bathroom on legs that didn’t belong to her.
“What’s this?” he asked, his voice dangerously low as he held it up for her to see.
“My diary,” she said dully.
“You’ve written things in there about me.” It wasn’t a question. It was an accusation.
“Yes.” She didn’t add that writing in her diary helped her get by. It was the only way she could. She needed to write, to pour her heart out on paper the way she couldn’t in real life.
He spun around and hurled the book past her head. She ducked in time. “You’re spying on me!”
“What?”
“Like that fuckin’ little painter who wrote down everything about his friends. You’ve been spying on me. Who are you selling this to?”
“Selling this to?” She stared at him, too confused to understand his words.
“Don’t parrot things back at me. Who’s paying you to write this?”
“Nobody. It’s for me,” she cried, rushing to pick it up. But he pushed her out of the way as he snatched it up. “Give it back to me.”
“Nobody,” he held it aloft, out of her reach, “nobody is going to read your distorted little tales, you tramp.”
He cursed at her again before he slammed the door in his wake.
Johanna crumpled to the floor in a heap, too drained, too paralyzed to move. All she could do was silently weep. The beads of her Givenchy gown cut into her face and neck as she lay there, but she couldn’t move. Not for a very, very long time. There was nothing to move for.
She wished for death.
Chapter Eleven
Something, she didn’t know what, forced her up to her knees and then to her feet. The simple journey took what seemed like a lifetime to Johanna. She had no idea how long Harry had been gone, how long she had been laying there, huddled in her two thousand dollar gown, her body in a fetal position, sobbing for what was, what wasn’t and what could have been. It didn’t matter. Time didn’t matter. One moment was like another and nothing mattered any more. Nothing.
Except for her daughter.
She felt unsteady, disjointed, like a child taking its first step. On legs that felt as if they belonged to someone else, Johanna moved haltingly, touching walls, furniture, not so much for physical support as for emotional support. The rooms all felt so large, so formless. The suite appeared to be a vast unknown. For a moment, she couldn’t remember which of the four bedrooms Jocelyn was in. The suite was used for entertaining visiting dignitaries and millionaires with money to burn. Right now, her lips twisting bitterly, it housed Harry.
No one had any sense of discrimination these days, she thought, detached.
Easing the door to Jocelyn’s bedroom open, Johanna stood on the threshold and looked into the dark room. She just wanted to see Jocelyn, to hear the easy breathing of innocent sleep, to touch base with the only good thing left in her life.
The odor that accosted her was distinct. The stale, bittersweet smell of marijuana. She knew it well enough. It had been Harry’s mainstay until someone had introduced him to cocaine.
Johanna’s heart stopped. Her baby? Her baby! Oh God, no.
NO!
She wanted to scream, to rant, to shake Jocelyn awake and hear the denial from her own lips. Johanna’s mind raced frantically as she dragged her hand through her hair. Hairpins dangled on errant waves of hair, then fell to the floor, unnoticed.
Maybe Megan had smoked it in Jocelyn’s room. Megan. Megan, that was it. But if it were Megan, then the smell would be in her bedroom, not Jocelyn’s. She wouldn’t blatantly walk through the suite, smoking. Even she had some kind of sense.
But even if it were Megan, it would be Jocelyn too, because Jocelyn aped everything that Megan did.
Tears formed and slid down her cheeks, catching on pearl pink beads before they disappeared.
She had lost, lost everything. Johanna braced herself against the door frame, for a moment too weak to move, too stunned to think, trapped like a fly in amber, real, yet unreal. She felt as if someone had physically hit her. She clutched her stomach, afraid that she would be sick. She had never felt so isolated, so al
one in her life.
There was only one thing left to do.
Johanna straightened suddenly, like a soldier whose honor had been stripped from him, a soldier left with only one recourse with which to gain honor back. Honor and peace. Everlasting peace.
As if in a dream, Johanna moved through the shadows of the suite to her own room. The silence mocked her.
The only question that remained was how to do it.
She would kill herself.
There was no gun, so the fastest way was withheld from her. Harry had left, taking every last bit of cocaine with him. She knew all his hiding places now. He had never been very clever about it, afraid he wouldn’t find it when he needed it.
She pushed her tear-stained hair from her face. She couldn’t do that. Even if Harry hadn’t taken it all, she realized that, even in the depths of her despair, she wouldn’t have taken drugs to end it all. It would have shown their ultimate triumph over her. And it wasn’t drugs that had triumphed over her, but the underside of life, bringing with it shattering despair. She wished now that she had taken that prescription for sleeping pills her doctor had tried to press on her before she left. He had said she was beginning to show signs of fatigue and his way of dealing with problems was to throw pills at it.
But pills were drugs done up in fancy ribbons, she told herself, her mind sliding into the darkest bottom of depression. It felt so black. She couldn’t live with this blackness eating away at her. The pain it created was unbearable. There was nothing to live for. Harry was lost, Paul was gone and Jocelyn, she had lost her too. She had lost her to Harry’s way of life, to the Megans of the world.
“What’s the point?” she cried out into the empty room. “What the hell’s the damn point of it all?”
She felt like breaking things, slashing them.
Slashing.
A razor.
She had a razor in the medicine cabinet. Two slashes and it would all be over. She remembered reading somewhere about a woman who committed suicide in a bathtub because the pain was lessened that way. Two slashes in a hot tub and she could just let life dribble away, no pain, no regrets, only a cocooning warmth beckoning to her, enveloping her in its arms.
In a trance, Johanna walked into the bathroom. The door clicked shut behind her and she pressed the lock. She stripped off her gown, kicking it into a corner. The diamond earrings and matching necklace he had once given her were thrown on top. She wanted nothing to do with Harry’s money. It had been the lure of money that had done this to him.
Focusing her mind on only one thing, she took out the razor from the medicine cabinet and placed it on the lip of the sink. Slowly, she began to run the bath water. Steam began to fill the small, rose tiled room. It clouded the mirror.
Mechanically, from some ingrained habit that had been with her before her memory had formed, Johanna cleared off the fog from the glass with the palm of her hand. The woman who stared back at her had haunted eyes. Eyes like her mother’s had been.
“What are you doing, Mommy?” she had asked, coming into a bathroom just like this, only half way around the world and a quarter of a century ago.
Her mother had jumped and pulled her hands behind her back. “Nothing, darling, nothing at all. Just go out and play.”
And she had.
She hadn’t seen the blood dripping down from her mother’s wrists onto the bare floor, hadn’t returned in time to see her alive again. She could have saved her if she had only seen. But she hadn’t.
Her mother had had cancer and wanted the dignity to decide where and when she was going to die, not become some pin cushion for doctors, wrenching her family’s heart out as they watched her waste away day after day. She hadn’t wanted to drain them of their emotion or their money.
She had only succeeded in one goal.
Johanna and her younger sisters had been shattered by her mother’s death. Johanna could never bring herself to use the word “suicide.” She had been shattered by despair and consumed with anger. She had never totally forgiven her mother for leaving her behind, for not staying and trying anything that science had to offer, searching for a cure. She had never forgiven her for not trying to stay alive. For her.
Ever so slowly, Johanna raised her head and looked back into the mirror, mists fading from her eyes. Was this what Jocelyn was going to think? To feel? Would Jocelyn someday be standing in a bathroom like this one, with the same deadness inside of her, treading the same path? Was she just continuing a cycle that Jocelyn would feel compelled to follow, because her mother had seen no use in fighting, in going on? Would this feeling of defeat be perpetuated by her if she gave in now?
Horrified, Johanna threw down the razor. It clattered down to the tile as she covered her face with her hands. Tears fell, tears of anger, not at herself but at everything that had brought her to this place, to this moment, to this empty hopelessness.
What had she almost allowed Harry to do to her?
She let out a wrenching sob of despair and turned off the water in the tub. She opened the drain and watched the water swirl out.
So the tub was emptied, so would her emptiness go.
Johanna clenched her hands until she felt her nails dig into her flesh. She wanted to live, damn it. If Harry was killing her off by inches, making her feel useless, worthless, then Harry was her cancer, just like her mother had had cancer. Except that she was going to cut it out. Cut it out and live.
It was as if something mystical had happened in that steam-filled bathroom, as if a hand had touched her shoulder and cleared her mind. She was still Johanna Lindsey inside, still the same woman she had always been. But she had woken up to her surroundings. She had just been sleeping, benumbed by a stronger drug than Harry was taking.
No more. She was not going to let herself be a prisoner of love, or of past dreams, or of anything else. She was going to be free of it, no matter what it took.
She was going to take charge of her own life.
Johanna shuddered as she picked up the razor from the floor. What she had almost done came back to her in vivid terms. Suddenly, she saw her mother, her blue bathrobe sprawled out in a half circle around her, discolored with blood, her own blood. She had looked so alive, yet so lifeless.
It wasn’t going to happen to her. She was going to fight, goddammit, fight to regain her right to be happy.
She walked back into her room and turned on the light. She wanted light, no more shadows, no more darkness. Sitting down on her bed, she picked up her phone and called a familiar number.
A muffled male voice answered. “Hello?”
“Daddy? Daddy, it’s me, Johanna.”
There was a slight pause as Jim Lindsey collected himself. “Joey?”
She closed her eyes, pulling in strength from his voice. Her father had always been so strong. “Yes.”
He sat up, immediately alerted by the strange tone in her voice. It was breathless, as if she had been running a long way.
And she had, she had been running from death.
“Joey, is anything wrong?”
“No,” she quickly assured him, “everything is all right. Now. I just wanted to call you, to tell you that I love you.”
“Joey, tell me what’s wrong.”
She couldn’t tell him what she had almost done. It wouldn’t be fair. He had lived through so much. He had been the tower of strength for three frightened little girls, hiding his own grief and being both mother and father to them for all these years. In the last part of his life, he deserved only the best. She vowed not to give him any reason to grieve. It was a vow she now knew she could keep. That in itself gave her hope.
“Nothing. I just miss being in the States, miss seeing you.
“You’re welcome to come here any time you want, Joey, you know that. I never get enough of seeing you and my only granddaughter.”
Johanna smiled. It was so wonderful hearing his calm, deep voice. He had chased away so many fears for her as a child. He had never been impatient,
never short with her. His work as a pharmacist in the small town they had lived in had been demanding. But no matter how busy he was, no matter how tired, he always had time for her, time for Mary and for Laura. He was the kind of father she would have wished for Jocelyn.
“I might be home sooner than you think,” she told him.
He caught something in her tone, but let it pass. Johanna would tell him in her own time. Although the most cheerful of his three children, she was also stubborn and couldn’t be hurried. It was her spirit he had always been proudest of.
“How’s Harry doing?”
“The same.” She let her voice go flat. “I think it’s over, Dad.”
She knew it was, but thought to begin gently with her father. Jim Lindsey was old-fashioned and believed in marriages lasting until the end of time, like his own had. He had never remarried after her mother had died. He said he would always have a wife.
“Are you sure?”
She shifted, waiting for the discomfort, for the sorrow to seep in. It didn’t.
“Pretty much.”
He knew how much Johanna had loved Harry. He had never fully approved, had felt there was something dark within the man his daughter had chosen, something self-centered that didn’t make enough room in his life for Johanna, but he had said nothing. His daughter’s happiness was everything to him. But now it was different. Now he was free to tell her what he thought.
“About time.”
“What?” The shock of her father’s answer brought her around like nothing else could.
“I never told you.”
“What?”
“That I didn’t like him.”
“No,” she found that she could smile now, “you never did.”
Inexplicably, she wanted to cry, to laugh, to hug her father. A door had opened somewhere, a door to her cell. She was free.
There was time enough for details later. Now he needed to know only one thing. “When are you coming home?”
She pressed her lips together, thinking. “I’m not sure yet, but I’ll let you know.”
“I’ll wait to hear your call. And Joey—“
“Yes?”
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