by Jane Heller
I jumped, too, but my feet were like lead. I barely left the canvas.
“It’s fun, Crystal. Come on!” she whooped with unmitigated joy.
I jumped again, higher this time. Boing. Boing. Boing.
“Hey! You’re doing it!” Annie cried as we bounced together. Our bouncing wasn’t in sync, but it wasn’t causing either of us bodily harm.
“This is fun!” I said, turning to face the Creek as I bounced. The water looked cool, clear, inviting. I shared my observations with Annie.
“Oh, yeah. The Creek is great for swimming,” she said between breaths, “especially when you’re all sweaty from jumping.”
We jumped and sweated and squealed like a couple of kids, and then we ran into the house, put on our bathing suits, and went swimming. The water in the Creek was chillier than I had anticipated but it was invigorating, and it was Annie who tired of it before I did.
By the time Terry got home from the office, I had worked up quite an appetite.
“Well, well. Look at you two,” he said, noticing our wet heads.
“Crystal and I played on the trampoline, then went swimming,” Annie reported. “Now I’m going to take her to my school.”
“Nothing doing. It’s lunchtime, sport,” said Terry. “Aren’t you hungry after all the activity?”
“Sure. Are you hungry, Crystal?” Annie asked, gazing up at me.
“Starving. Why not let your Dad and me make lunch for you?”
“Yeah, honey,” Terry agreed. “Crystal and I will get the burgers ready for the grill while you relax, read the Declaration of Independence, maybe.” He winked at her.
“I’ve already read the Declaration of Independence,” she boasted.
“Then how about the Constitution?” he teased.
“I think I’ll just hum a few bars of ‘Hail to the Chief,’” she countered.
We all laughed.
“Why don’t you come right out and say you want to be alone with Crystal, Dad?” Annie asked.
“I want to be alone with Crystal,” Terry said. “For a few minutes.”
“I’m gone,” she said and took off for her room.
As soon as Terry and I were alone, he came charging over to me and wrapped me in his arms.
“Hello, you,” he said after kissing me.
“Hi,” I said. “Everything all right at Sacred Earth Jeep Tours?”
He shook his head. “Jean was there and she had about a hundred media people on her heels. I swear, they’re all hanging out at the office, wanting to know everything about the tour Amanda was on, where she went, what she wore, what she said, and especially where Will took her before she disappeared.”
“My God. Of course they’d show up at your office,” I said. “I didn’t think about that.”
“Neither did I until I got there. But it’s not just the media. It’s the lawyers.”
“The lawyers?”
“Yeah. The bottom fishing types that crawl out when there’s a big case. They’re offering to represent Will if he’s arrested.”
“Please. I think I’m going to be sick.”
Terry hugged me. “Be sick after lunch, okay? I’ve got burgers to feed you.”
He had a point. “I had a wonderful morning with Annie,” I said as we prepared the meat for the grill. “Is she always so…so…good?”
“She’s happy,” he replied. “Happy kids are good kids, for the most part.”
“But she got off to such a rough start in the world,” I said. “It’s amazing that she’s as well-adjusted as she is, or seems to be.”
“She has her moments,” he acknowledged, “but they’re moments. They pass. We work them out.”
They work them out, I thought, remembering the difficult moments Terry and I had during our marriage, how he was never willing to work them out, how he would make a joke when there was a problem or storm out of the apartment in a huff or tell me he didn’t know what I was getting all upset about. What a difference a couple of decades make.
We had a picnic lunch out by the Creek, each of us perched on the rock ledge, our feet dangling in the water, our plates on our laps. Terry and I told Annie stories about college and she told us stories about her elementary school. We laughed a lot, particularly when Annie did a priceless imitation of a substitute teacher who had recently taught her class. So kids are still making fun of their substitute teachers, I mused. Some things don’t change.
Terry was in the middle of an anecdote about one of his old political science professors when we heard the phone ringing.
“I’ll get it!” said Annie as she jumped up and ran inside the house before Terry could even form the words: Let the answering machine pick it up.
Seconds later, she came back outside, looking very satisfied with herself.
“It was for you, Crystal,” she said. “It was Steven.”
“Oh,” I said, getting up quickly. “Yes, it must be close to one o’clock.”
“It’s one-thirty,” Terry informed me after glancing at his watch.
“Then he must have checked in at L’Auberge,” I said. I turned to Annie. “Isn’t he still on the phone?”
She shook her head. “I told him you were in the middle of lunch,” she said. “Dad doesn’t like it when people call here during meal time.”
I smiled. Annie was a cagey one.
“Well,” I said, “I’ll be sure to reprimand Steven when I go inside and call him back. May I be excused?”
I looked at Terry.
“Permission granted,” he said.
I looked at Annie.
“Okay, but I wouldn’t run up the phone bill if I were you,” she said. “Dad doesn’t like that either.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
L’Auberge de Sedona promoted itself as the area’s most romantic hideaway—an exclusive French country inn set along picturesque Oak Creek. Only minutes from Terry’s house, the chichi resort was comprised of several individual cottages, all tucked along the banks of the Creek, all equipped with fireplaces, all sumptuously decorated. There was also a gourmet French restaurant, a more casual outdoor eatery, and a lodge housing a gift/home accessories shop called The Armoire. In short, if you were casting about for the perfect backdrop against which to propose marriage, L’Auberge de Sedona would certainly fit the bill.
I arrived at the inn in my burgundy rental car at two o’clock that Saturday afternoon. I did not bring any luggage with me, having decided that I should see how things went between Steven and me before committing to a sleepover date with him. It was bad enough, I thought, that I had cheated on Steven with Terry; I couldn’t very well cheat on Terry with Steven. I left my bags in Terry’s guest room, telling him and Annie that I intended to return later that evening. They were great sports about the situation.
“Sure. Eat and run,” Terry said.
“Yeah. Leave us with all the dirty lunch dishes,” Annie chimed in.
I knew they were teasing me, but I went off to L’Auberge feeling a tad conflicted.
Steven had given me directions to his cottage when we’d spoken on the phone, so I knew precisely where it was located on the property. Still, before I could get to it, I had to make my way through the hordes of media types who were camped out at L’Auberge’s entrance. They were not permitted to roam the grounds, according to the security guard I spoke to, but they were there anyway, hungry for a glimpse and/or comment from Harrison Reid. Eventually, I bypassed everybody and found the cottage.
“Steven!” I said with great enthusiasm as he opened the door. “How are you?”
Not a very original opener, I know, but I had expected that my presence alone would elicit an embrace of some significance, an embrace befitting lovers who had been apart for a period of time.
“I’m fine,” Steven said hurriedly as he brushed my cheek with his lips. “Let me just finish this call and I’ll be right with you. Okay, Crystal?”
“No problem,” I said. “Pretend I’m not here.”
; Isn’t this nice, I thought sourly. The guy flies nearly three thousand miles to convince me to marry him, and he can’t get off the fucking phone. Steven was on a business call, even thought it was a weekend. I could tell by the fact that he was saying things like: “Pursuant to Paragraph D in the contract…”
While he droned on about settlements and payout schedules and other matters of no possible consequence to me, I checked out his cottage, which was quite spacious—a bedroom complete with a wrought iron canopy bed, a sitting area in front of the fireplace, a large porch overlooking the Creek. The cottage was also, as advertised, quite romantic, but the longer Steven stayed on the phone, the more unromantic I felt.
“Steven,” I whispered, tugging on his arm. “Wind it up, can’t you?”
He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and whispered back, “I’m really sorry, Crystal. It’ll only be another five minutes, I promise.”
I sat on the overstuffed love seat by the fireplace and waited. I was about ten minutes into the waiting when it dawned on me that Steven’s treatment of me—making me twiddle my thumbs while he conducted business, placing his job ahead of our relationship, acting like an asshole—was exactly the same treatment that I’d been dishing out to him for the past three years.
My God, he’s only doing to you what you’ve always done to him, I realized, thinking back to all the times I’d instructed Rona to put him on “Hold” when he called or to tell him I was too busy to talk or to just get rid of him. He’s making it clear that his career comes first, which is the very reason you chose him, Crystal Goldstein. You chose him because he was consumed with his work, which freed you to be equally consumed with yours. You chose him because he left you alone to drown yourself in your clients’ lives. You chose him because he didn’t require that you love him.
I let these little epiphanies sink in, as painful as they were, sink in, sink in, sink in. I allowed myself to face the fact that if I hadn’t walked in on Steven and Stephanie that night in his apartment, hadn’t provoked his declaration of love for me, hadn’t rocked the boat by leaving New York so abruptly, he and I would still be coasting along just as before, getting together for a meal or a movie now and then, slotting each other in. We would continue to be partners, companions, consorts, probably into our old age, probably for the rest of our lives. We would be the kind of people who are forever maintaining that compatibility is preferable to passion, the kind of people who never argue, the kind of people other people pity.
No, I thought with stunning clarity. Not anymore. Not for me.
Steven concluded his telephone conversation and came and sat down next to me on the love seat. He looked very handsome, I noticed, his pale green eyes matching almost exactly the color of his Ralph Lauren shirt, his dark brown hair newly shorn for the trip. Yes, he was an attractive man, there was no doubt about it. Bright, energetic, successful, too. A “good catch,” all things considered. A catch I was about to throw back.
“Now,” he said, extending his arm around my shoulders. “Before we talk about us, I want to hear all about Amanda Reid. What an adventure your trip has turned out to be, Crystal!”
You don’t know the half of it, I thought, flashing back to my night of sin.
“I’ll bet you have as much information about the case as I do,” I said. “I’m sure the New York papers were full of the story yesterday.”
“Absolutely. It’s O.J. all over again. Everybody’s debating whether the Indian guy killed her or she had some sort of supernatural experience and disappeared. I guess people equate Sedona with the Bermuda Triangle or something. You come out here and you take your chances.”
Steven laughed. I didn’t.
“The Indian guy didn’t kill her,” I said. “I don’t think anyone did.”
“Ah, so you subscribe to the Bermuda Triangle theory,” Steven chuckled. “You believe that Amanda Reid just vanished from the radar screen, right?”
“No, but I believe she’s still alive.” To be more accurate, it was Sergei who believed she was still alive, but I kept that little detail to myself.
Steven asked me a zillion more questions about Amanda—what she was like, what the people in her entourage were like, etc.—and I told him what I knew. I wondered when he would drop the subject and ask me to marry him. That was why he’d come to Sedona, wasn’t it?
“Oh. I meant to ask you,” he said finally. I braced myself. “Where on earth are you staying now?”
“Staying?” So he wasn’t proposing.
“Since you checked out of Tranquility. I think I spoke to a child when I called you earlier.” He laughed. “I know we’re at that age when everybody sounds young to us, but this person was young. Eight or nine, maybe.”
“Ten, actually.”
“Ten?”
“Listen, Steven. I should have mentioned this before, but it turns out that my ex-husband owns the tour company. He was the one who took Amanda, me, and the rest of the group up to the vortex sites.”
“He took you where?”
“He took us sight-seeing,” I said, trying to keep things simple.
Steven shook his head disbelievingly. “You’re saying that the man who introduced Amanda Reid to the Indian guy—that’s what the newspapers indicated, that this Jeep Tour operator put her in touch with the Indian—is your ex-husband?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“What an incredible coincidence.”
“Incredible.”
“Particularly since you haven’t seen him in years.”
“Or spoken to him. Not since our divorce.”
“Incredible,” Steven repeated.
“His name is Terry—Terry Hollenbeck—and he and his daughter, Annie, live down the road from here. When the media descended on Tranquility, he was nice enough to invite me to stay in his guest room.”
Steven nodded as he processed these unexpected developments. “So it was his little girl who answered the phone when I called.”
“Yes. I’m staying with Terry and Annie until the police don’t need me to hang around Sedona anymore. After that, I’ll fly back to New York.”
He nodded again, this time as if he fully understood the situation. “I think I see what’s going on,” he said. “You’re staying with your ex-husband because I had that ill-advised fling with my ex-wife. You’re punishing me, paying me back, playing tit for tat. Isn’t that what we’re dealing with here?”
I smiled. “No, Steven. I’m not playing tit for tat. I’m not playing games, period. The truth is, running into Terry has made me more forgiving of your relationship with Stephanie.”
“It has?”
“Sure. You tried to explain that you and Stephanie have a history together. Well, now I’ve realized that Terry and I have a history together, too, a past that can’t be erased.”
Steven scowled. “The guy’s single, I’m assuming.”
“Yes. He’s single.”
“How do you feel about him? After all these years, I mean.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Should I be worried about this?”
I took a deep breath. “My feelings for Terry—whatever they are—have nothing to do with us, Steven.”
He looked relieved. “That’s good news. For a minute, I was thinking that there might not be an ‘us’ anymore.”
Okay, I thought. Here it is, Crystal. Your opening. Your chance to bail out. Your opportunity to break it to Steven that you’re not going to marry him or even see him anymore. Your moment to explain that you’re not about to settle for a man you don’t love.
I cleared my throat, intending to speak. Suddenly, the cottage seemed extremely claustrophobic. I had the urge to bolt.
“Steven, there are some lovely paths that meander between the cottages,” I said, rising quickly from the love seat. “Could we pick up this conversation outside, while we take a walk together?”
“W
hy not?” he said, glancing at his watch. “My client won’t be calling me for another fifteen minutes. You and I should be all talked out and back at the cottage by then, right?”
“Right,” I said. “With any luck.”
We strolled along the little paths that wound their way around the rear of the property. The surroundings were breathtaking in their natural beauty—the gardens, the Creek, even the trees, which heralded fall’s arrival with their leaves, some of which had turned from green to gold, others from gold to crimson.
“Steven,” I began as we ambled past the cottage adjacent to his. “I came to a conclusion today. Just a little while ago, as a matter of fact.”
“Did you?” he said hopefully.
“Yes,” I said. “I came to the conclusion that we’re good people who deserve better.”
“Better? How?”
“Well, for starters, we deserve a partner who will pay attention to us. Not all the time. Not every minute. When it counts.”
“How do we know when it counts?” Steven looked genuinely baffled at first. Then he nodded. “I get it. You’re not angry that I was with Stephanie. You’re angry that I was on the phone when you—”
“This isn’t about one phone call,” I cut him off. “This is about all the phone calls. You and I have had a more meaningful relationship with our long distance carriers than we’ve had with each other.”
“That’s not true.”
“Yes, it is. Steven, I’m not pointing the finger at you. I’m guilty, too. We’ve both allowed this charade to go on far longer than it should have. We haven’t loved each other. Not really. We’ve loved the fact that we’ve left each other alone, that we haven’t conflicted with each other’s schedules. That was fine for a while. It isn’t fine now.”
“It isn’t?” The man was a shrewd, street-smart lawyer, but he was clueless when it came to his personal life. Just as I had been.
“Not for me,” I said. “If you and I got married, it would be more of the same—you’d work, I’d work, and we’d see each other two weeks from Saturday. That’s not a life—that’s an appointment book.”
His face fell. “You’re telling me it’s over between us.”