Too Close

by Hilary Norman

  But then he realized that the look in Holly’s grey eyes was not of fear, or pain, or even of hatred.

  The look in her eyes was of triumph.

  ‘Oh, Nick,’ she said, very softly.

  He thought he was going to throw up. He looked at the door, then back at her. More than anything on earth, he wanted to be out of there, away from her.

  He tried to speak, but no words came out.

  ‘Oh, Nick,’ Holly said again, still lying absolutely still.

  He took a deep, shuddering breath, held, for a moment, onto the wall, needing support, and the worst of the nausea went away. He took another breath.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ His voice was throaty, strange. ‘Do you need a doctor?’

  Holly shook her head, yet still she didn’t move.

  Nick’s terror came flooding back.

  ‘Oh, Christ, I have hurt you.’ He fell on his knees beside her.

  ‘Holly, where’s the pain? What have I done?’

  ‘Nothing I didn’t want you to,’ she whispered.

  ‘Holly, try and get up.’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  And then, with a slow, flowing, almost theatrical movement, she held out her arms to him, and Nick realized, with a fresh jolt of shock, that even after all that had just happened, she still wanted him.

  ‘Oh, God,’ he said, and got back to his feet, trembling again. ‘Oh, God, Holly, you are so sick.’

  He turned his back on her and went back to the door.

  ‘Don’t go,’ he heard her say, still from the floor.

  He turned the handle.

  ‘Please,’ Holly said.

  He opened the door.

  ‘Stay,’ she said, ‘or I’ll make you sorry.’

  He ran.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  That was the long and dreadful night during which I made my decision to leave New York and come to California.

  Fear drove me. Nothing more compelling or honourable than that. I was just so damned afraid. Of what I had done to Holly. Of what I might have done to her if I hadn’t stopped when I did. Of what might happen the next time I saw her. Which I would, no matter what care I took, if I stayed in that city.

  I was scared of the cops, too. Liza Montgomery had made it clear enough, when I’d sought her opinion on getting a court order to keep Holly away from me, that I had next to no chance of getting a judge to look at my situation with sympathy – and that was before I’d laid hands on Holly, for God’s sake. The DA’s office might have dropped those possession charges, but I already had an arrest record and a verbal warning to stay out of trouble for several years at least. If, just fourteen months later, Holly decided to accuse me of assault – and I hated even to imagine what embellishments she might add to her personal version of events – then there was every chance I’d end up in jail.

  I didn’t want to go to jail.

  I didn’t want to stay in the same city as Holly Bourne.

  The arrangements, simple and inadequate as they were, still took time. Almost thirty-six hours passed before I was able to get on my flight to Los Angeles. I sweated while I broke yet another lease, while I packed up my things, made my airline reservations, organized freight for those canvases too precious to me to leave behind, and resigned from my three jobs.

  I shared my plans with no one, not Jake, not even my parents. I don’t think I slept more than a half-hour in total before I got on the plane. I was waiting for a knock on the door. From the police with an arrest warrant. From Richard or Eleanor Bourne. Or Holly herself.

  No one came. Not in those last hours in Manhattan, nor at La Guardia while I was waiting to board my flight. Not in my first weeks or months in Venice. And finally, as time passed, I stopped being afraid altogether of the cops, or even of Holly Bourne.

  The fear only comes back when I think about Nina finding out.

  My wife has herself a real hero.

  I could have coped with telling Nina that I was a damned fool for ever having let Holly back into my life once I’d left Bethesda. I could have coped with telling her about all the stuff that happened after Holly followed me to New York. I could have told her about the sex, the anger, Holly’s machinations, my trouble with the police. I could even have told her that it was cowardice that brought me to California.

  But I could not tell her about the violence.

  Nor could I tell her that, for at least a few seconds of the time that I was hitting Holly Bourne, it felt like the right thing – like the only thing – to do.

  There is no way I ever want to tell her that.

  AUGUST

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Phoebe has been off the respirator and conscious now for several days, thank God. Out of danger. But she hasn’t spoken since the fall. Not a single word. Between her silence and her two broken arms, that makes her almost completely helpless.

  The doctors assure us over and over again that there’s been no permanent brain damage, that there’s no reason why Phoebe shouldn’t talk again, given a little time. But time is passing, and I know that neither Nina nor William really believes their assurances, and so the continuing spectre of some awful, still undiagnosed injury looms over us all like a terrifying, depressing fog.

  There is some good news, wonderful news. Our sweet baby girl is clear of respiratory problems and jaundice, and has gained just enough weight to satisfy Sam Ellington, her paediatrician, that she’s almost ready to come home with us.

  I’ve already painted Sam holding Zoë, because he’s a big, broad, black guy who looks more like the Refrigerator than a doctor, but he has these angel-tender hands, and he’s helped save our daughter, and he touches me immensely. I haven’t yet attempted even a sketch of Nina breastfeeding Zoë, though observing this as I regularly do seems to me the most perfectly beautiful experience of my life. I think maybe I’m reluctant to try to paint it in case I fail to capture what I feel. It’s so much more than I dreamed it would be. It’s purest warmth and safety. It’s giving, and taking, and giving back more. It’s a perfect, elemental circle, it’s love and life, the whole shebang, everything that counts or matters. And it takes us both away, for a blessed while, from our continuing fears and anxieties over Phoebe.

  William’s mistrust of me seems not to have diminished at all. Lord knows he didn’t care much for me before Lawrence Dinkin came to call on us, but though he’s made no actual accusations (William is no fool, he knows how Nina would react), I get the distinct feeling that, in the absence of any other contenders, I am my father-in-law’s number one suspect.

  I’ve tried talking to Nina about it. I’ve been to enough AA meetings with her over the last couple of years to know that trying to keep anxieties from her is neither good for her, nor what she wants. But where this nonsense with her father is concerned, Nina doesn’t want to know.

  ‘You’re imagining things,’ she told me only yesterday morning in the hospital when I broached the subject again after William had refused to talk to Nina about Phoebe while I was in the room.

  ‘I imagined what just happened?’

  We were in that same waiting room we’d used when Dinkin had paid his visit. I have grown to detest that room, as I have come to hate the sight and sounds and smells of People’s Hospital.

  ‘Dad’s a little over-sensitive about privacy, that’s all,’ Nina said. ‘He’s always been the same with—’

  ‘With outsiders?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ she protested quickly. ‘He just got used to it being only the three of us.’ She looked at my expression – I guess it must have been a little on the wounded side. I was certainly angry at William, but trying to damp it down for Nina’s sake. ‘I think maybe it’s taken him longer than it ought to let someone else in,’ she added, unconvincingly.

  ‘I’m your husband, Nina.’

  ‘And Zoë’s father,’ she added.

  ‘Who Zoë’s grandfather doesn’t trust,’ I said.

  ‘Nick, please, don’t do this to me,’ N
ina said.

  ‘Do what?’ I asked, though I knew exactly what she meant.

  ‘Don’t put me in the middle like this.’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t cope with any more right now.’

  Guilt stabbed me, as it so often does these days. Of course she couldn’t take any more. She had more than enough bad stuff going on without me adding to her burden. I told her I was sorry, told her she could forget all about it. I pretended to agree with her that I believed William would come around, would in time have as much faith in me as Nina did.

  And Phoebe did. If only she could tell him.

  The bitch of it is, of course, that William Ford’s instincts about me aren’t that far off track, are they? I don’t mean about harming Phoebe. I’d sooner cut off both my own arms than have had this happen to her. I adore my sister-in-law. Nina knows that, and so does Phoebe.

  But then they don’t know what I did to Holly.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Holly knows. Holly will never forget. Not a single moment of it.

  And yet she still loves him.

  Strange, perhaps. Considering what he did to her. The way he walked out on her.

  But then Nick always has been misguided.

  She thought, after he ran out on her that night – after he’d hit her and left her bleeding on the floor – that she would call the cops, do what she had told him she would. Make him sorry.

  But time passed, and she went on lying there on the black carpet – not because she was too hurt to stand up, but because she found she needed to stay there, where Nick had left her, needed to replay the scene that had just ended, to relive it in her mind, over and over again.

  The physical contact, the closeness of that last struggle between them. The smell and feel and taste of him. The shocking exhilaration of being slapped by him. The victorious awareness that she had made him wild enough to do that.

  She spent most of that night lying there on the floor, fell asleep in that same spot, right there where they’d shared their last embrace. She dreamed of her brother during those hours – the same, terrible, depleting dream she always had – and when she did, finally, wake up from that wretched sleep and struggle to her feet, all the passion and triumph had vanished and she was cold and aching, and more deeply depressed than she could ever remember feeling since Eric’s death.

  Holly still remembers that feeling: that sudden, terrifying, paralysing realization that she truly had lost Nick. That he had really gone. And when, a week later, she discovered that he had, indeed, left New York City and that no one seemed to know (or was telling her) where he had gone to; and when, another week on, she went home for her Christmas birthday, and Kate and Ethan Miller said they had no idea where Nick was spending the holidays, that feeling of terror, trapped deep inside her heart and mind, grew even more intense, more agonizing. She didn’t let anyone else see what she was enduring. She had to go on with her Holly-about-to-take-law-school-by-storm façade, she had to go on being the perfect daughter of whom her parents were so proud, however torturous it was.

  She just about held it together until, on January 2nd, she escaped back to New York.

  She sat very still and quietly on the flight from Dulles to La Guardia, and then she did the same on the cab ride into Manhattan. And she let the doorman at her building carry her bags up to the tenth floor for her, and gave him five bucks, and then she closed and locked her front door and waited until she heard the sounds of the elevator taking him back down to the lobby.

  And then she let go.

  When she came back to herself, she saw that she had ripped the stuffing out of the seats of her straight black wooden chairs, and that she had smashed her two matte black end tables almost to matchwood, and that her hands were bloody and bruised.

  But she felt better.

  Better enough to go on.

  Nick’s leaving did her a favour. That was what she told herself when she surfaced from the darkness. She had emerged from this kind of blackness once before, with Nick’s help, with his outstretched hand of friendship. But this time, there would be no Nick to help her – but that was okay, too, she told herself, promised herself, because she was going to grow stronger and more capable without him, was going to stand alone, fight her battles alone.

  Holly forced herself to examine, for a little while, the events that had brought her to such a low ebb, that had turned such a pure love into obsession. The introspection brought her few answers, but at least, she thought, with a degree of satisfaction, she had made herself recognize and accept that that was what had become of her love: that it was obsession that had taken her over and almost ruined her.

  Almost.

  Nick’s going away was the best thing that could have happened. Holly repeated that to herself several times each day, turning it into a kind of mantra. His presence in Manhattan had sapped her independent forces, diverted her energies, diminished her. Now that he had vanished from the face of the earth, she could be herself again, be Holly Bourne, up-and-coming.

  That was the start of the period of her life when Holly began to feel – began to genuinely believe – that she had freed herself from Nick Miller’s spell. The period when her love of what she was learning, the awareness of what she was striving for at law school, took over from the wilder, more destructive side of her personality. When the vast, swirling ocean of jurisprudence, the great bog of corporation law and the magnificent imbroglio of criminal justice began, slowly, but with the most thrilling precision, to crystallize for Holly Bourne. Student and lover of law. Above all men. Even Nick Miller.

  And then, about three years into her new life, Holly went home on another visit, ran into Ethan Miller in the street, and he let slip that Nick was living in California.

  That news, the sudden location of the object of her obsession, shook Holly up badly, wrecked her concentration, whacked her newfound clarity out of focus for a couple of weeks, but then things seemed to settle back down again. So what if Nick hadn’t vanished off the planet after all? she told herself severely. So what if he had washed up on the other side of America? It was still another world. Not her world.

  But then she learned about the existence of Nina Ford.

  And a matter of months after that, in April of 1995, she learned that Nick had married her.

  After that, it was all ruined. It was like being sucked down into a blind, endless spiral, all the protective layers – the studying, the successes, the making of friends – the comparative normality – melting away as if they had been part of a single absurd delusion that Holly Bourne really could contemplate life without Nick Miller. And from then on all her thoughts, waking and sleeping, all her energies, all her concentration, began to focus on Nick again.

  On his betrayal.

  And on getting him back.

  She knew when she stole the danger signs from the house in Haight Ashbury and sent his wife the fax, that there was a chance Nina might escape completely or that she might sustain only minor injuries. It was a gamble, but almost risk-free from her own point of view. And the gamble failed. Though, of course, even if she had succeeded in removing Nina from Nick’s life, Holly knows that would only have been a first step.

  After all, Nina living or dying is not what’s important here and now. Nick coming back to Holly is what matters. And, not being a fool, Holly knows that Nick will never do that, not without a push or twenty.

  Holly knows what she wants now.

  She has learned a few things along the way.

  What she wants is for Nick to need her.

  Need is almost more important than love.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Nina and Nick took Zoë to visit Phoebe before they left People’s Hospital to go home to Antonia Street to start their new life together as a family.

  William was there in Phoebe’s room, as he was most of the time (standing guard, Nick was almost beginning to feel, lest the evil son-in-law crept in alone and pressed a pillow over her face), and Phoebe managed one of her
strange, vague, disturbingly absent smiles when she saw them walk in, but that was all. Nina laid Zoë very gently on Phoebe’s stomach, and not for the first time, Nick found himself silently praying that this might be the breakthrough they all longed for; as if the simple sensation of touching her baby niece might heal whatever mysteries were keeping Phoebe from wholly returning to them.

  There was no healing. Instead, Phoebe started to cry. Tears bloomed in her eyes and fell down her ghostly cheeks, and her nose ran, and Nina tugged two tissues out of the Kleenex box on the bedside table and gently dabbed at her sister’s face, and then she, too, was weeping.

  ‘It’s all right,’ William told both his daughters. ‘It’ll be all right.’

  Zoë, who had been sleepy and compliant until then, wriggled and whimpered and Nick bent down and laid his hands either side of her, ready to pluck her up if she rolled or showed any sign of kicking.

  ‘I’ll take her,’ William said, swiftly, and bent, too.

  Nina looked up sharply, her eyes still wet. ‘No, Dad,’ she said. ‘Nick can manage.’

  Nick was just picking up his daughter, when there was a knock, and Sam Ellington poked his head around the door.

  ‘Nick,’ he said, softly, awkwardly. ‘Someone to see you.’

  ‘Who is it?’ Nick felt Zoë’s body warmth snug against his chest, cradled the soft spot on her head protectively with his right palm.

  ‘I think you should come outside,’ the paediatrician said. ‘Let mama have a cuddle with Zoë.’

  ‘Nicholas Miller?’

  Two men waited in the hall outside Phoebe’s room.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Inspector Abbott, SFPD, Narcotics Division.’ One of the men, stocky, with dark too-slick hair and sweat above his upper lip, flashed a badge.

  ‘Inspector Riley.’ The other man was taller, slighter and fair, his hair razor-cut. Both men wore dark suits.