“They could open that door in a moment. You risk your life.”
“I might have but a very little life left to live, and nothing in my life has made me feel alive as you do—as this moment does. If we live, Basil Le Cherche, I could never go back to where and what I was when I first saw you. I have traveled too far to ever be able to live in the world I once inhabited. You have shown me that. Tell me again that I am beautiful, Le Cherche. Say it again, for now you will meet no resistance when you praise me. Or touch me.”
“You are the most beautiful woman I have ever known,” he said, lowering her beneath him, giving up any control he might have had over his own body, his own mind.
She had barely set the loosened planks back in place and returned to her own space before footsteps descended, guards appeared, and Electra Gates was pulled out of her cell and taken back to confront her captor once again—but it was not the same Electra Gates who had been dragged down only a matter of hours before. She was a more formidable opponent now—a fiercer creature more aware of her own powers. Her own capabilities. Her own joys.
NEAVE
And Then, Ricky Luhrmann
When the divorce from Peter Winthrop was final, Lilly started dating again. Long ago we’d set up a daytime roster of babysitters to help us manage both Annie and Be Your Best, but evenings it was always one of us. Jane and I, both smitten with Annie, were always happy to be left with the little girl while Lilly made her way back into the world of romantic adventure. Maybe that eagerness of ours put my sister on too long a leash.
When she announced that she’d fallen in love again, it was a surprise. It shouldn’t have been. Ricky Luhrmann was fiery, poetic, volatile—traits that made the man a mesmerizing date but should have given her pause about his husband potential. I said as much, which did less than no good. Right from the start he made her ecstatic and he made her suicidal. She’d come home from every date with him looking drugged—so glassy and heated I’d thought she was ill. Asked if she felt all right, she’d laugh. Not a funny ha-ha laugh.
He wrote love letters, which is enough in some cases to clinch the deal. I don’t know why more men don’t take advantage of this simple truth about women. Love letters can turn the most stubborn case around. He told her she had a wild heart, and I said that wasn’t exactly the way I would say it, but I kind of knew what he meant. She did have a wild heart, and the fact that he saw it and loved it delivered her into his hands.
“He says he dreams me,” she murmured one slow afternoon as I tried to interest her in a few shifts in the budget lines. “He says I’m a doorway, a sacred space like all doorways, and he thanks God he found the country I lead to.”
How many good women have been snared and skinned with a little poetry, even bad poetry? Run! I wanted to say, but Ricky was like a scent or taste that shook all the reason out of her head. My sister’s mood made me appalled and envious in roughly equal measure.
“Love is as strong as death, and I want you to know my love is as strong as death,” he’d written to her. “I want to be destroyed by you. I want you to be willing to be destroyed by me.”
This particular piece of poetry must have scared her some, as well as made her feel other things. I know it made me uneasy. She’d folded it up and stuck it in a box that she’d buried in a drawer. Three months after they met they had a terrible fight—something so bad it gave me real hope that she’d break it off. I never knew what caused the argument, but it seemed to be of a sexual nature. When she got home to Annie and me at her apartment that night she was enraged, her wrists darkening and one shoe without its heel. I told her it didn’t look right—any of it.
“I know that,” she said to me. “I let him know that he has to remember I’d leave him in a New York minute if I didn’t like how he was treating me. Maybe I scared him some. I don’t know. I scared myself.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because the second I said I could walk away from him any minute, I knew it wasn’t true.”
“Sure it is, Lilly,” I’d said at the time. I’d seen Lilly walk away from a dozen men twice as rich and good-looking as Ricky Luhrmann. My Lilly could take care of herself. My Lilly could walk away from any man. Couldn’t she?
She said, “Ricky has this troubled place in him. He can’t change that. It’s what he is; maybe it’s things that have happened to him.”
“Oh, come on, Lilly—look at yourself spouting sentimental crap about his troubled past. Look at this thing on your wrist.” I reached out and touched the plummy bruise. The way I felt when I touched it ran up from my fingers and into my head: whatever this “dark place” was, it gave him his hold on her, and she wouldn’t or couldn’t see this. So she was powerless.
“You’ve got Annie to think of,” I reminded her. “Lilly. Walk away.”
“He won’t do it again. I’m sure of it. He’s sorry. Annie’s never seen anything but what a kid should see, Neave. I’m making sure of that. She’s fine. And he’ll get to love her. How can you not love Annie?”
“I don’t know, but I imagine it’s possible. And what about whether or not Annie likes him? Doesn’t that matter?”
“We’re working on it. It’ll all work.”
But what I heard was Lilly deciding that it was all going to work and forgetting anything that might contradict that fantasy. Granted, for months after that, Ricky Luhrmann was a model suitor. He made good money working for a contractor who renovated houses, and he liked to spend it. Yellow roses were his signature courting flower. He took my sister dancing, bought bottles of Champagne, and made reservations at the kinds of restaurants that had tablecloths and candles. It was as if he’d opened her skull and gotten a direct sightline on her fantasies. He might spend his days with a tool belt on his hips, but he knew how to wear a smart suit and order a Rob Roy. He could lead a woman across a dance floor and rivet every eye in the place on them. I’m sure he had other talents as well.
By the time he proposed, the memory of the fight, and the darkness about its cause, was far away in Lilly’s mind if not mine. She came to my apartment the morning after she took a ring from him. “He pushed me against the wall,” she said breathlessly, “and I said, ‘Luhrmann, let me loose,’ and he said Not until death do us part, kid, and he kissed me. Hard. Neave, it was like a ball of electricity moving through me. It just has to be right. Otherwise I know it wouldn’t feel like that.” She hadn’t even said the word “yes.” Apparently she hadn’t had to. He’d just handed her the ring, and she’d slipped it on her finger and come to show it to me so I could admire the shine.
“What about Annie?” I asked.
“She’ll wear patent-leather shoes and ten layers of petticoats. She’ll be adorable.”
“I wasn’t asking about her party dress, Lilly.”
“She’ll be so excited! And she loves sleepovers with you and Jane. You can take her for a couple days for our honeymoon, right? And when you and Charles are going out, Janey can take her, right?”
Of course. I shut up then. There was no point in trying to make Lilly Terhune dig at a situation to find its broken or cranky parts. That was my job.
He told her she was going to marry him before the month was out and that is exactly what happened. The wedding was small. I wore a navy suit. Lilly’s dress was a pastel rose silk. Annie wore one of those frothy things that make children look like cupcakes. There was no groom’s side or bride’s side—we huddled together like people trying to stay out of a cold wind.
“How could she do that?” my mother murmured sadly.
“What?” I looked around, genuinely befuddled. My mother approved very deeply of marriage. In her mind it ended the nerve-wracking dating period and settled things. Daddy’s feelings on the subject weren’t so clear. He’d avoided any talk at all of love with his children as being somehow inappropriate. He sat woodenly beside our mother, his expression detached and his thoughts, like they were so often, a mystery.
“It’s not white,” she said. “This is
a wedding.”
“For chrissakes, Mom. She’s been married before. It’s close. Just a whisper away from white.”
“In matters like this, it is not possible to be close. Even if it’s a symbolic gesture. White. Not-white. That’s that.”
I looked at Lilly and Ricky Luhrmann standing side by side in front of us. His hand brushed her hip and the upper part of her body responded, snakelike, in a smooth little twist that brought her almost facing him. His hand moved to her collarbone and he whispered something to her that closed her off completely to everybody in the room but him. It gave me a rattled kind of feeling. I couldn’t name it.
Annie sat at the end of my row. She craned her neck to see something directly behind her. I followed her sightline to a man who looked remarkably like Ricky Luhrmann.
“Who was that man?” I asked her when the vows were done. “The one you were looking at.”
“That’s Max.” She waved discreetly.
“And who’s Max?”
Annie scooched over closer to me. She was almost but not quite whispering. “Ricky says no talking about him.”
“I see. Is he a friend of your mommy’s?”
“Ricky told mommy he’s a son of a bitch,” she whispered. “Max does go-search. He goes on the sea, and he searches.”
“What does he search for?”
“He said ‘Son of a bitch,’” she giggled. “He looks for snarks.”
“He searches for snarks? Honey, I think Ricky’s brother might be pulling your leg.”
Annie looked momentarily stricken, then thoughtful. “No, Aunt Neave.” The little girl shook her head vigorously from side to side. “He’s nice.”
“So you and Max are friends?” I asked, speaking confidentially after looking around to make sure no one was paying any attention to us.
“I can’t be his friend because Ricky says we can’t. But I think we are anyhow. He came to our house and Mommy and Ricky yelled.” I nodded and kept quiet, waiting for more. She rooted around in the folds of her dress and came up with a tiny boat. “Grandma says no toys allowed because weddings are serious,” she whispered. “But I brought my boat.”
“I won’t tell.”
“Max gave it to me.” She craned her neck again to get a view of my mother and reassure herself that she couldn’t be seen, and then she sailed the boat across her lap. “While they were yelling in the kitchen. Max and me ate cake in the living room.”
“Annie.”
My tone was serious enough to make the little girl alert, mildly apprehensive. She set the boat at rest on a fold of skirt and looked up at me.
“Annie, are you happy that your mom is getting married?”
She shrugged, more evasive than noncommittal. She said, “I like my boat.”
“I do too. Do you like your mom getting married?”
Annie craned her neck around to catch Max’s eye. He lifted a finger and crooked it at her; she crooked a corresponding finger back at him. She settled back in the seat and sailed the boat across a fold of skirt. “Mommy says I can’t be alone with Max.”
“Why not, Annie?”
Annie heard the alert uptick in my tone and she tipped her face away so she didn’t have to look at me when she answered. “Can we make a pie when I stay with you?”
Yes. We would make pie. I repeated my question. Annie shrugged.
Back at the reception at our house I climbed the stairs to our old room to help Lilly change from her wedding gown into the next of her day’s outfits. I started in on the thirty-eight pearl buttons running down her back, one by one. “So Ricky has a brother,” I said to her. “And he has go-searches.”
“Max. But Ricky hates him.” Lilly’s third glass of Champagne had pinked her cheeks and compromised her skills at self-editing. “And it’s research. He does ocean-current tracking or something. He and Ricky aren’t exactly part of each other’s lives, so you won’t be seeing much of him, believe me. I insisted that Ricky introduce him to Annie and me before we got married because I had this stupid idea that family was family and hating each other was no reason not to introduce a brother to a fiancée and ask him to your wedding. I set up this one little dinner with him and Ricky acted like I’d asked him to eat a live grenade.”
“Why don’t they like each other?”
“Sometimes people just don’t like each other, Neave.”
“People don’t like each other for reasons.”
“It isn’t worth digging some things up and poking them.”
“Lilly, why would you tell Annie to never be alone with Max?”
“I don’t remember saying that.”
She’d twisted away from me with the same half drop of the shoulder that her daughter had used earlier. “Liar, liar,” I said. “Pants on fire.”
“The truth is, I don’t know. Ricky just said that he wouldn’t trust his brother with anything precious to him. I don’t know what he meant. But the way he said it … I got nervous for a minute, and I might have said that to Annie.”
“Why wouldn’t Ricky trust his brother?”
“I didn’t ask him,” my sister said, and I knew she was actually, amazingly, telling me the truth. Lilly didn’t ask questions that could have bad answers. “It looked like we were never going to see Max again. No reason to know details. Right?”
“Lilly…”
“Not today, Neave. Not now.” My sister lifted her glass and drained it. She smiled at me. “Right now the world is a wonderful place, and I’ve got nothing to worry about except how long I’ve got to wait for you to get me another glass of this stuff.”
She handed me the empty glass. She smiled a wide and authentic and mildly drunken smile. Lilly Terhune felt perfectly safe in the world, and this little matter of a brotherly rift was irrelevant to her present and future happiness. This is another way Lilly and I differed. The only place and time on Earth I had ever felt entirely safe was in front of Mrs. Daniels’s fire with a book in one hand and a cookie in the other: a child’s place and time. And now we weren’t children.
“Trade you.” I made my tone playful, light, and I held up her empty glass. “Another glass for more info on this brother.”
She shook her head like an animal that’s had something it dislikes pushed in its nose. “What do you care about his brother?” she demanded. “You’ve got this habit of caring about everything. I don’t know how you drag yourself from day to day lugging it around with you.” She swished her skirt. “All I know is there was a little sister who died when she was really small. Some kind of accident, and that seemed to be the start of all the bad feeling. Ricky doesn’t like to talk about it, because it was bad and it was somehow Max’s doing, whatever it was. She had some flower name. Daffodil. Daisy. But I figured Ricky said what he did about keeping Annie away from him because of whatever happened to the little sister. So. How about that drink?”
“I’ve changed my mind. You’ve had enough to drink.” I set her glass down and moved to help her slip off the shimmering wedding dress.
“You don’t know about people from looking at them,” she continued. “The guy looks like such a solid citizen, but Ricky says when they were kids, Max was a terror with the girls.”
“What does ‘terror’ mean?”
“Look, I only know what Ricky was willing to say. He said once that Max got a girl’s dress slammed in a car door and dragged her—” She stopped. “Who knows what really happened.” She made a quick turn to make the skirt blossom out again and raised her chin, dismissing all dark considerations. “Come on. What do you think this skirt’s got in it? Fifteen yards? I’m gonna knock ’em dead.” She smiled as she headed for the stairs. “There is nothing in this world like a dramatic entrance.” She looked at my face and sighed, irritated. “Come on, Neave—you’ve got to keep what’s long ago and far away right where it is—far away. The past is over.”
“The past isn’t over. It isn’t even the past.”
She stopped right smack in front of me, and pulled
me into her arms. “I love you, Neavie. Always have. Always will.”
I snorted at her and pulled away, but as I followed her down the stairs, her skirt a line of shining runnels all tumbling toward Ricky Luhrmann, my throat closed. Something in our lives was over now, forever, and the new place where we lived felt more dangerous. We were almost side by side when we got back to the party, but I doubt anyone actually saw me. Lilly looked as if a hundred lightbulbs had all been flipped on inside her. I scanned the room to find the brother and spotted him already heading for a door. I trotted along to place myself by his side and stuck my hand out. “I’m Neave. Awkward that we didn’t meet until now, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Nice to meet you.” He had a cool, firm, solid-citizen handshake.
“Also odd I didn’t know you existed until today.” He kept standing there, not bothered by the silence, not acting like it was his job to make friends. “So what have you heard about me, Max Luhrmann?”
“That you’re more intelligent than your sister. More awkward. Not social. Apparently as a child you used to hide in closets. You have a particular relationship with a childhood book called … I don’t know. Something about sea travel and sadism.… You’re interested in naval history?”
“Not much. If Ricky’s the source of any information about me, you might question it.”
“You don’t like Ricky?” he asked in the same kind of tone you’d use if you were asking how somebody felt about lamb chops.
“I don’t really know Ricky very well. But I hear that you don’t like him. Or he doesn’t like you. Or something like that.”
“A bold statement from a woman who didn’t know I existed until twenty minutes ago.”
“A ridiculous rebuttal from a man who tells little children that he hunts for something called a snark.”
“I do. A snark is a dense packet of water that moves through water of lesser density and often different temperature. Sonar can’t penetrate it, so it’s of interest to the navy.” I looked blank. He added, “Submarines hide behind them.”
“Oh.” I considered. “Mr. Luhrmann, you don’t seem much like your brother.”
The Romance Reader's Guide to Life Page 16