by Play Dead
“Keep it clean, Ayars.”
“Sorry.”
David sat up. “Do you want to know the real reason I want you to quit?”
She shook her head.
He held her, his hand gently stroking her hair. “Because I don’t want anything bad to happen to you,” he said softly. “And because I want to be with you forever.”
She looked at him hopefully. “Do you mean that?”
“I love you, Laura. I love you more than you can ever know.”
Two months later, she had quit. She had not even thought about smoking since—until now.
A loud knock on the door jarred her back to the present.
“T.C.?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s open.”
He came through the doorway, his face drawn. “Some civilization. No McDonald’s. No Roy Rogers.”
“Anything new?”
Laura watched T.C. shake his head, his movements oddly jittery.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Nothing. I guess I’m just a little tired and hungry.”
“Order some room service.”
“In a little while.”
“Why wait? If you’re hungry—”
The phone rang. T.C. quickly reached over Laura and grabbed the receiver. “Hello?”
Laura tried to read his expression, but T.C. turned away, his face hunched over the receiver like a bookie’s at a pay phone. Minutes passed before T.C. finally said, “Right. I’m on my way.”
“What’s going on?”
“I’ll be back in a little while, Laura.”
“Where are you going? Who was that on the phone?”
He started toward the door. “Just a potential lead. I’ll call you if it turns into anything.”
“I’m going with you.”
“No, I need you here. Someone else might call.”
She grabbed her purse. “The receptionist can take a message.”
“Not good enough.”
“What do you mean? I can’t do any good here.”
“And you certainly can’t do anything but get in my way out there. Look, Laura, I want to get all the facts. I don’t want to have to worry about coddling—”
“Coddling?” she interrupted. “That’s a lot of bullshit, T.C., and you know it.”
“Will you let me finish? One of these Crocodile Dundees sees the new bride and clams up or softens his words.”
“Then I’ll stay in the car.”
“Just listen to me a second. I’m expecting an important call in a little while and I need you here to answer it. I’ll call you as soon as I know something. I promise.”
“But—”
He shook his head and hurried out the door. Laura did not chase him. In Boston, she would never have tolerated such brusque and patronizing treatment by any man or woman. But this was not Boston. T.C. was David’s closest, most trusted friend. If anyone could bring him back safely, T.C. was the man.
ON the other end of the line, the caller listened to T.C. hang up and then waited. The dial tone blared its monotonous trumpet of noise but still the caller stood mesmerized and did not replace the receiver.
It had been done. T.C. had been notified. Everything was moving forward. There was no turning back.
When the phone was finally hung up, the caller fell onto the bed and started to cry.
LAURA sat alone in the hotel room, her mind hazy and confused. The phone did not ring. No one knocked on the door. Time trudged forward at an uneven, unhurried pace. She began to feel more and more isolated from the world, from reality, from David.
Her eyes skittered around the onetime beautiful suite, finally resting on an object they found soothing, familiar, comfortable. A pair of David’s size twelve and a half green high-top sneakers, extra sturdy in the ankle since he had broken his right one while in college, lay sprawled on the carpet. One was tilted over like a capsized canoe; the other stood upright perpendicular to its partner.
She could clearly make out the Svengali label on the right sneaker. On the left, the label was blocked by a sweat sock. Her eyes swerved and found the other sock about a yard away, twisted on the carpet like a man sleeping in a fetal position. David was not the neatest man she had ever met. He used chairs and doorknobs for hangers. The carpet made a perfect bureau for sweatshirts and pants while the bathroom floor tiles served as underwear, sock, and pajama drawers. His personal appearance was compulsively clean, but his apartment looked more like a fire hazard than a human dwelling.
“It’s homey,” he would argue.
“It’s messy,” she’d insist.
Once again, a knock made the images of the past flee from her mind.
Laura glanced at her watch and saw that T.C. had been gone for almost two hours. She could hear the wild birds of the Australian coast cawing outside her window, the sun still potent despite the hour.
“Who is it?” she called out, although she knew it was T.C.
“It’s me.”
T.C.’s voice made her stomach churn painfully. She stood and walked mechanically toward the door. She passed a mirror, caught her reflection out of the corner of her eye, and realized she was wearing one of David’s button-down shirts with her Svengali jeans. She wore his clothes all the time, his Celtic practice sweatshirt on cold Boston nights, his pajama tops as a nightshirt. Odd for a woman who ran a fashion empire. She shook the thought out of her head, puzzled by how her brain could focus on something so inane at a moment like this.
She had another second to wonder if her thoughts were a defense mechanism, blocking out the grim reality, and then she swung open the door.
Her gaze instantly locked onto T.C.’s, but he looked away as if scalded by her eyes. His vision sought the floor to escape her onslaught of hope. T.C.’s face was now completely covered with patches of stubble.
“What is it?” Laura asked.
T.C. did not step forward. He did not speak. He just stood in front of her without movement, trying to summon some inner strength. With great effort he raised his head, his soulful eyes hesitantly meeting Laura’s expectant ones.
Still no words were spoken. Laura stared at him, tears welling in her eyes.
“T.C.?” she asked, her face bewildered.
T.C. raised his hand into her line of vision. Her look of bewilderment crumpled into one of sheer anguish.
“Oh, God, no,” she cried. “Please, no.”
T.C. held David’s multicolored swimming trunks and clashing green Celtic shirt.
They were both shredded.
3
GLORIA Ayars closed her briefcase, turned out the lights, and headed down the empty hallway. The company’s other executives had gone home hours ago. But that was okay. They had all paid their dues already. Gloria had not.
She glanced at her watch. The digital numbers read eleven twelve p.m.
“Good night, Miss Ayars,” the security guard called to her.
“Good night, Frank.”
“You’ve really been burning the midnight oil, huh?”
She smiled brightly. “Sure have.”
Gloria walked toward her car. She shook her head, the smile still toying with the corners of her lips. It was still so hard to believe. Gloria had heard the whispers before Laura left on her trip (honeymoon, actually, but that was a secret). Don’t do it, her cohorts had warned her. You’ll ruin your business. But Laura had ignored them and taken the risk. A big risk. She had decided to leave Svengali in Gloria’s hands during her absence—a move that had stunned even Gloria. Has Laura gone crazy, Gloria had wondered, leaving the controls of a multimillion- dollar company in the hands of someone like me?
But now Gloria knew that the answer was no. Laura’s confidence had been well placed.
As she continued to stroll down the sidewalk, men in passing cars slowed down to whistle or, at the very least, roam her body with their eyes. Gloria was used to the ogles of men. She was by no means as beautiful as her sister, but Gloria was still ca
pable of making any man’s blood boil. There was an innocence about her looks—a gentleness to a world that had constantly punched and abused her. Worse still, all that sweet innocence lay locked in a body that could only be defined as a Marilyn Monroe-type sexual dynamo, a body that was all voluptuous curves—a body that, no matter what she wore, screamed rather than hinted sensuality.
She hopped into her car, adjusted the rearview mirror and glanced at her reflection. She smiled again, wondering if she was really looking at the same Gloria Ayars who until very recently had been a heroin addict, a cocaine snorter, a pothead, and an easy lay for any man who had wanted to exploit her. Hard to believe that it was not so long ago that she was jamming needles into her veins and on the verge of making porno films.
As she drove home, Gloria silently thanked Laura for the millionth time for saving her. If it had not been for her younger sister, Gloria would almost certainly be dead by now. Dead or worse. She pushed the thought from her mind and pulled into the Ayarses’ driveway. She parked her car next to her father’s and took out her house key. A minute later, she was in the front foyer.
Not so long ago, Gloria would not have been welcome here. There was time when her father’s face would turn red with rage at just the mention of her name, a time when she would have been thrown out of the house in which she’d been raised.
And she would have deserved it.
She put down her briefcase in the darkened hallway, took off her coat, and put them both in the hall closet.
“Dad?” she called out. There was no answer. She began to walk toward his study. He never went upstairs before midnight; plus, her mother was away in Los Angeles for the week, so lately he had been working even later than normal.
The door to the study was open, the desk lamp illuminating the nearby hallway. She walked into the study and quickly scanned the room. Her father was not there. She turned out the lamp and moved toward the stairs.
“Dad?” she called again, but still no response. His car was in the driveway, so he had to be home. He was probably in bed already. Gloria started up the stairs, moved down the hallway, and stopped abruptly.
What the …?
The light was on in Laura’s old room. Strange. No one had been in that room in years—except Laura during her occasional visits and the maid. Gloria crept down the hall, reached the doorway, and peeked inside.
She suddenly felt very cold.
Her father sat on the edge of Laura’s bed, his back facing the door. His head was slumped into his hands in obvious anguish. The sight shocked Gloria. She had never seen her father look so small, so vulnerable.
“Dad?” she ventured.
She heard a sniffle as he raised his head. He still did not turn and face her. “Gloria, I’m … I’m glad you’re home.”
Glad she was home. Those words. There was a time she would imagine Armageddon easier than imagining her father saying those words to her.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
Dr. James Ayars did not respond right away, his shoulders rising and lowering with each breath. “I have some bad news.”
Gloria had known terror in her thirty years, most self- inflicted. Once, when she had dropped some bad LSD at a West Coast party, her mind had conjured up horrors that almost made her jump out of a tenth-floor window. She remembered that fear now, the way her heart had raced in her chest. And then there was another time—
“Mommy! Mommy!”
“Gloria, get out of here! Get out of here now!”
—when she had known terror, but she had been so young then. A little girl. She remembered nothing about it, except—
Blood. So much blood.
—what she saw in the dreams.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Laura just called from Australia,” he began slowly, his strength ebbing away with each word. “David’s dead. He got caught up in some powerful current and drowned.”
Despair swept through Gloria. It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be. Not David. Not the only man her sister had ever loved. Not the only man who had ever treated Gloria like a person, the only true friend she had ever had.
She broke down then and ran to her father on frail legs, the tears already starting to pour down her face.
It just couldn’t be.
T.C. sat next to Laura on the plane. She had barely spoken since he had delivered the news, asking only one question: “When can I see the body?”
T.C. had hoped she would not ask that question. “There’s no need,” he had said gently.
“But I want—”
“No, you don’t.”
T.C. had taken care of the rest of the details quickly. He knew that David had no real family to contact. His only living relative was Stan, his piece-of-shit brother whom none of them had seen for more than a decade and who would probably applaud David’s death. No need to contact that scumbag. T.C. had also been busy making sure the press did not hassle Laura too much. He knew that once Laura returned to Boston, the press vultures would be all over her, wanting to know the tiniest tidbit of how it felt to have your heart ripped out of your chest. He decided the best thing would be to hide Laura in Serita’s apartment for a little while, but T.C. knew from past experience that the press could be denied for only so long.
He turned toward her. He had been searching his brain, desperately trying to think of a way of easing some of her pain. His eyes watched her, concentrated on her every movement as if they would give him a clue as to what he should do. It was a useless exercise and T.C. knew it.
Damn you for doing this to her, David. Damn you.
He also knew what Laura was thinking under the haze of anguish because he was one of the few people who knew the truth about David and his affliction. He had witnessed its awesome effects firsthand. He had seen it nearly kill his best friend.
But Laura had put that all in the past, thank God. Somehow, she had sought and eventually destroyed the evil specter that had tormented David Baskin for a good portion of his life. But still, they were haunted by the fear that the specter would one day return. Was the specter truly dead, they wondered, or like some Godzilla sequel was he just hiding, regaining his strength, preparing to one day attack with a vengeance that would destroy David once and for all?
And the more immediate question that T.C. knew Laura was asking herself: Had the creature paralyzed David’s body in a wave of unbearable agony while he tried to handle the treacherous waters? If she had stayed with him, could she have done something to protect her beloved David from the cruel creature within?
T.C. reached out and patted her hand. He wanted to tell her to stop thinking such thoughts. He wanted to tell her that David had not had another attack. He wanted to tell her that there was nothing Laura could have done to change what had happened.
But of course, he could not tell Laura any of those things. She would never just accept his word. She would demand to know how he knew so much about David’s drowning.
And that was something he could never tell her.
DR. James Ayars had seriously considered canceling all his appointments for the day. It was something he had not done in more than twenty years, not allowing himself to become ill during that entire time period. He had always prided himself on being punctual. Every Monday through Friday—save his three weeks of vacation each year—began with hospital rounds at seven thirty in the morning, followed by his first office appointment at nine, his last one at four thirty, another quick visit to the patients in the hospital, and then back to his home on the outskirts of Boston. If a day was to be missed for personal reasons, he gave his patients and staff at least two months’ notice.
There had been very few deviations from this routine during the last two decades, but the phone call he had received from Laura yesterday was as much a cause for deviation as anything he had experienced during that time. It had left him saddened, confused, so much so that even a man as disciplined as he considered not going in to work. He had just wanted to s
tay in bed and deal with the harsh blows.
In the end, he had realized that staying at home would serve no purpose. It would only leave him time to brood when what he needed was to keep his mind and soul busy. He had called Gloria’s psychiatrist—even with her enormous improvement, Gloria still needed therapy—and told her what had happened. Her psychiatrist had wanted to see Gloria right away.
He pushed his chair away from his desk. There were patients waiting. Mr. Campbell was waiting in room five and Mrs. Salton was in three.
The phone buzzed.
“Dr. Ayars?” the box cawed.
“Yes?”
“Your wife is on line two.”
“Thank you.” He swallowed away his fear, picked up the receiver, and pressed the flashing light. “Mary?”
“Hello, James.”
“Where the hell are you?” he asked. “I was trying to reach you all night. I thought you were staying at the Four Seasons.”
“They were having some sort of wild convention. Noise all night long, so I moved over to the Hyatt.”
James closed his eyes and rubbed them. He did not mention that there had been no listing under her name at the Hyatt either. “I have some rather bad news.”
There was a pause. “Oh?”
“It’s about David.”
“What’s happened?”
“He’s dead.”
“Oh, my God! How? Was it … was it suicide?” Predictable enough response, James thought. “He drowned off the Australian coast.”
“But he was such a good swimmer.”
“I guess he misjudged the current.”
“Or … ?”
“Or what?”
“How awful,” she continued. “How’s Laura handling it?”
“I don’t think it’s fully hit her yet. David’s friend T.C. is there with her. He’s handling all the arrangements.”
“She’s going to be devastated, James. We have to help her through this.”
“Of course we will.”
“She’ll snap out of it,” Mary said hopefully. “She’s always been a very strong girl.”