She knew then that he still did not understand. She said only, as she had earlier, “Time – please give me time.”
He said only, “Time isn’t infinite,” and in the veiled threat she heard his underlying frustration. But she saw, too, as he smoothed back her hair, that he wore his wedding ring again, the ring that he had taken off in fury the night she had left him over a year before.
Meg, seeing her parents wrapped in each other’s arms, said exuberantly, “Come back, Dad! You should take Mom on a date!”
“Good idea,” said Cameron St. Bride with a last hug for his daughter and a last searching glance at Laura, and boarded his private chariot for the other side of the world.
~•~
Email from Cameron St. Bride to Jean McKenzie, executive administrative assistant
TO: Jean McKenzie
FROM: Cameron St. Bride
SUBJECT: Tuesday To-Do
HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL
Jean,
Print the attached – do not read – and place in an envelope in my safe.
Meeting should be over by 8:30. I’ll have the BK agreement faxed to you ASAP. Take to Contracts immediately for processing.
I’ve instructed Johnson to withdraw the divorce petition. Follow up with him this morning to make sure he understands I want it done TODAY. Tell him to confirm. I’ll call him once we’re airborne with further instructions.
My gray pinstripe is at the cleaner’s. Have it delivered this afternoon.
Clear my schedule on the 14th and 17th. I’m spending the weekend in London with my girls.
See you this PM.
CDSB
Attachment: Letter_to_MSB.doc
~•~
Email from Cameron St. Bride to Laura St. Bride
TO: Laura
FROM: Cam
I hope you are as frustrated as I am. This damn meeting! There you are, in London, still asleep, I hope, and here I am, six miles over the Atlantic in the dark.
How about this – before the play starts, we’ll take a few days alone, without the munchkin, and really talk. How about Provence? The worst of the heat will be over soon. You can indulge your passion for antiquities while I plead my case.
If you want an abject apology, you’ll get it. I want you back, Laura. I screwed up last year, and I’ll cheerfully spend the rest of my life making it up to you. I promise you this. I have learned my lesson, and I don’t repeat my mistakes. But you have to give me a chance.
I found this online – you know I must be desperate if I’m sending you poetry! I’ll call you later today. Tell the kid I’ll call her after school, and not to get too full of herself now that she’s 13. My God! I remember when she fit in my two hands. Time’s gone too fast.
Love,
Cam
~•~
When he finished his emails, he put his laptop in his briefcase and stretched out on the cabin sofa. Beneath him, the dark expanse of the sea; ahead of him, a city of shining towers; behind him, the only two people in the world who mattered.
He slept. He had all the time in the world.
~•~
Then a handful of men with dark eyes and dark hearts boarded four airliners, and time ran out.
Laura and Roger escaped to a late lunch at Terry’s restaurant after a morning of working with the director to block out the second act. He took one look at their exhausted faces – blocking was tedious, tiring work – ushered them to the chef’s table in the kitchen, and concocted a tender chicken and grape salad in a delicate vinaigrette so nouveau, a bouquet of herbs so piquant, he said as he placed their artistically arranged plates before them, that even the chickens were swooning in appreciation.
“Yes,” said Laura, “but are they free-range chickens?”
“Darling girl,” said Terry, “have you forgotten where you are? We feed our chickens only the finest of English cuisine. Why, these birds dined on scrap scrod and chips only last week.”
Roger said, “Let me scrape the grease off my arteries. At least, we can be sure that the grapes are free-range… and speaking of ranges, Laura love, did your Texan give up and go back to the colonies?”
“Last night.” She took a bite of the salad. “But he’s coming back next weekend.”
“A dictatorial gentleman. One would think he wasn’t divorcing you,” said Roger, whose matinee-idol looks and Caruso voice belied his equal passion for Manchester United and juicy gossip. “Now, tell all. I’ll pay for this magnificent spread if you’ll ’fess up. Why are you so hell-bent to go to Virginia? I thought you hailed from the Emerald Isle.”
“I was born in Ireland. My mother was married to an Irishman. She and my father were American, though.” During the years of working in Europe, Laura had met people who remembered the scandal of her mother’s death and her father’s trial, and she had become adept at denying any connection with Dominic Abbott and Renée Dane. How strange it felt to talk about them now, to admit to the world that she had family of her own blood. For more than ten years, she’d had no roots beside Meg and Cam. “I grew up outside Williamsburg. My sisters still live there.”
“One gathers there’s some estrangement?” One of the things Laura enjoyed most about her co-star was his bombastic phrasing; he liked to pontificate like the professor of literature he had set out to be before acting got into his blood. Terry teased him that he used twice his fair share of words. “How long since you’ve graced the Old Dominion?”
“A long time.”
“How long?” Terry passed her a bowl of strawberries. “Inquiring minds, you know.”
Laura took a deep breath. “Thirteen years and three months.”
For all their levity, both were intelligent men, and it took them only seconds to do the math. She saw them exchange glances across the table. “So,” said Terry, “a love affair gone sour, a broken heart, and you left holding the baby?”
“And, to spare your family the terrible disgrace, you ran away from home, gave birth in dreadful poverty.” Beneath his melodrama, Roger’s eyes showed understanding. They knew all about unforgiving families, her friends. “Shivered through that first winter when all seemed lost and you thought you might have to sell your body to keep your child in nappies, then you pluckily pulled yourself up by your bootstraps and began your meteoric rise to stardom in triumphant single motherhood fashion?”
His nonsense sliced too close to the bone. Her heart picked up a beat, but she was well-schooled in masking her emotions. She looked at her two friends steadily and helped herself to gorgeous strawberries. “Something like that.”
“And that,” said Terry, “showed him. Well, darling, you should return in glory and take every opportunity to show this cad, this scoundrel, this heartless fiend—”
Terry could be just as ridiculous as Roger.
“—Exactly what he so carelessly tossed away when he broke the tender heart of an innocent maiden. And don’t go forgiving and forgetting, either. When I get tired of Sam Superstar here, I’m switching teams, and I want first dibs on you.”
Roger cocked a beautifully shaped eyebrow at her. “But then it wasn’t single motherhood, was it? You married your cyber-cowboy and lived – well, ever after, at least.”
Even in fun, they were heading down a path best not taken. She said lightly, “You are making the huge assumption that Cam is not the heartless fiend who abandoned me in my hour of need.”
“Oh, please, were we born yesterday?” said Roger. “The Viking and that little minx with the map of Ireland on her face? Don’t try to scam us. No, I’ll wager the progenitor of the delectable Meg is to be found in your dark, hidden past, Cat Courtney. And where does the mysterious fax from your long-lost niece enter in?” At her look, he shrugged. “The delectable Meg is a blabbermouth.”
“Well, my sister seems to have helped my father along to the grave.” Beneath her careless words, she felt a dark red anger welling up. This was not Diana’s first kill, not at all, even if she’d been pushed into this as she had in
to that other death of long ago. “Except a grand jury has no-billed her – I think that means they don’t have the evidence to indict her. And my niece wants me to contact Di – that’s her mother. She tracked me down through Cam.”
For the first time since Cam had handed her the fax, she thought of Julie’s extraordinary detective work. Her niece had seen Cam wearing his CAF jacket – it must have been on the last night of her concert series in June, when he had flown across the Atlantic to tell her that he wanted a divorce. She remembered sitting across from him in the intimate restaurant where he had taken her after her concert, staring fixedly at a stray thread coming loose from the B of the embroidered name on his jacket, while he methodically laid out all the reasons for throwing in the towel on their marriage. Julie had come close enough to see the St. Bride name. We saw him in London… who was we? Who had been with Julie?
Please let it have been Di, please not Richard. She couldn’t bear to think that he had sat out in the great dark unknown audience, listening to her sing of love lost and mourned.
Maybe Julie had been on a school trip. She was old enough.
Roger’s fork clattered to the table.
“What in the name of God is that?”
At his abrupt change of tone, sharp disbelief wiping out the foppish banter, Laura looked up and saw that he was staring transfixed at something beyond Terry’s shoulder. She followed his line of sight to the group gathering around the television screen on one of the shelves in the great kitchen, all staring at the picture on the screen. A picture that made no sense, since it showed a – smokestack? – against the Manhattan skyline.
Their exquisite lunch lay forgotten on the table. They joined the group around the television, and soon diners from the main room clustered around, all staring at the unthinkable live broadcast from CNN, the great glass-and-steel mountain breaking the New York skyline, the opaque black veils of smoke flooding upward against the morning sky. Roger held up his hand to quiet the chatter, and they heard news anchors reporting the inconceivable – that, on a severe blue morning, an airplane had run into one of the towers of the World Trade Center.
“How does a plane run into a building?” Terry’s boss said. “It’s perfect weather there.”
“A bloody big plane,” said one of Terry’s fellow chefs. “Look at the size of that hole.”
The news camera zoomed in on the gaping black wound in the side of the building, outlining the remnants of an enormous wingspan. Above the impact zone, ripples appeared next to the steel beams, and seconds passed before she realized what she was seeing – people leaning out broken windows, trapped as the fire climbed higher.
Impossible to shield the mind against that horror; impossible not to imagine that hell raging inside. Impossible not to put herself at a window, begging for air that did not fog the eyes and sear the lungs.
Cam had taken her to the World Trade Center the year before, the week before Christmas, when they still thought they might have a chance. Nutcracker at Lincoln Center, Meg thrilled to be wearing her first evening dress and heels, she in the loose black silk dress that she had been superstitiously afraid to buy, the photographer snapping her in silhouette while Cam and Meg went off during the entr’acte, then the surprise of dinner in the sky—
No.
She pulled Terry’s sleeve. “Terry?” He glanced at her almost without recognition, and she was shocked to see tears in his eyes. “What’s the restaurant at the top of the towers?”
“Windows on the World,” he said tersely.
“Which one is it in?”
“That one,” he said, and his shoulders began to shake. “The one that’s burning all to hell.”
Her heart leaped into her throat. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure,” and now tears were spilling down his face. “I worked there for a couple of years before I came back to London.”
“Oh, no.” Panic bubbled up inside her, sending fear to her throat and a hideous adrenaline spilling throughout her body. No, think, think, think! Focus! A breakfast meeting – it was straight up two now, and New York was five hours behind. Nine o’clock – was his meeting over? Where was Cam?
Oh, please God, I’ll never ask for another thing. Let him be all right. I’ll be his wife again. This time, I’ll love him. Please let him—
She fumbled in her bag for her satellite phone. Then, for the rest of her life, she remembered that second as she turned back, her hand rising to her mouth in horror as her eyes processed the unimaginable. She heard the wordless shouts of the others, coming from a distance, as the world watched the great silver bird fly gracefully, mercilessly, into the other tower.
Billowing fire, and a second great mountain erupted into the sky.
She numbly pressed the speed dial over and over, unable to break through the busy signal, hoping against hope that Cameron St. Bride would answer and tell her she was worrying for nothing. He had not signed the check for breakfast at 8:35 a.m. He had not waited, staring out over the vast expanse of the river flowing into the Atlantic, while the concierge faxed the signed agreement to the Plano office. He had not received a call from his brother at 8:43 a.m. as he and his group waited for the express elevator. He had not handed his briefcase to his corporate counsel, waving away the last elevator ever to descend from the sky – all because he did not want to cut off the call.
He had not stood at the northern window three minutes later, talking to his brother, witness to the 767 aimed like a dagger at the heart of the building.
If God were merciful, he had not sent a text message to her phone: Fire trapped love you. He had not called her flat because he did not know that rehearsal had run late and she had lingered at lunch. He had not fought to control the fear and panic in his voice as he told her, I am so sorry for everything, Laura. Forgive me. I did love you. I never stopped. I can’t tell you how much I regret – I’m sorry about Francie. I should never have—
He had not then choked from the smoke. The screams and cries of those trapped with him had not transmitted in perfect digital fidelity. The sound as he collapsed to the floor had not clearly bounced off the satellite and come to rest forever on her voice mail.
On their daughter’s birthday, their time ran out.
Amid the snowstorm of free-floating paper, the cameras caught people falling from the sky, limbs held tightly against their bodies, arms and legs splayed out to brace against the approaching ground, hands clasped on their last journey. Men and women whose only crime had been to go to work, keep an appointment, attend a meeting – lost souls who preferred a last rush of cool, clear air against their faces to the flames of hell.
Not Cam, though, not Cam. For all his faults, not Cam. Please, please, please, not Cam.
Then the explosive clouds, cries of disbelief because they could not trust their eyes. Though mountains may fall…. Buildings did not fall; they stood forever, urban peaks against the heavens. But now a mountain fell, the second tower hit, buckling from its mortal wound, in a mushroom cloud that foreshadowed the end of the world. She stood between her two friends, their arms wrapped around her, her fingers endlessly working the redial – your call cannot be completed – and she sent up mindless prayers to the God she had neglected too often in the years since she had last seen Richard Ashmore. Oh, please, please, please, please….
For twenty-nine minutes, she lived beyond hope, beyond despair. That second mountain could not, would not, fall. That pledge to love again could not, would not, go unheard. That man who had held her only a few hours ago could not—
For twenty-nine minutes, fate tossed her that rope.
Then the north tower fell to its knees and began to slide into the abyss, the great antenna descending into the obscuring ash of history.
And hills turn to dust….
It fell, eleven inexorable seconds of descent from the sky it had once conquered, the last act in a day that had redefined horror. Captains and kings, bond traders and secretaries and waiters, all fell from the
sky in the merciless and egalitarian obliteration of millions of tons of stone and steel.
Across a vast sea, under a peaceful sky, Laura St. Bride watched as the man she had married and never loved enough, all his creativity and power, his charm and his infidelities, his kindness and generosity and manipulation – all that he had been, all that he would ever be – ceased to exist.
From dust we came, to dust we shall return.
~•~
Only his wedding ring survived, found in the rubble months later.
~•~
As so many other women did that day, Laura kept on breathing, kept on putting one foot in front of the other, for the sake of her child. The man in the tower was not only a husband but a father; she was not only his wife but the mother of his child. She dug deep inside herself to find the strength to tell Meg that her adored father was missing, presumed dead at the hands of men unknown for a cause he abhorred. In the flat that still held his presence, the day did not seem quite real to her, like one of those violent action movies that he so enjoyed and she took pains to avoid.
Impossible that he would never come back for the shirt he had overlooked, unbelievable that he would never again fiddle with the temperamental thermostat. Unthinkable, and not to be accepted, that he would never again take her in his arms and ask for another chance.
She wrapped herself in his shirt and knew that she was alone, as alone as the night she had met him.
And, in the middle of one of the great cities of the world, isolated. The international telephone lines were all jammed, and her computer kept losing its Internet connection. Her satellite phone became her only lifeline to the United States.
It rang all evening as she fielded frantic calls from Texas, as Cam’s brother Mark tried to find out if he had made it out alive and was now wandering the New York war zone, dazed and hurt. The St. Bride Data counsel, who had escaped down seventy-eight flights of stairs from the sky lobby, searched the hospitals and kept her updated through Mark. The corporate pilot, marooned at Teterboro by the ground stop of all aviation, called her to ask if she had heard from Cam.
All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) Page 4