The Light We See

by J. Lynn Bailey

  “We need to sell the place.” Ingrid moved behind me.

  “It means too much to you,” I said into the darkness.

  “So, we’re just going to hang on to it and watch it wither away? You won’t live here. Mother certainly isn’t coming home. All you’re doing is hanging on to something that doesn’t exist anymore, Cat.” She walked to the other side of the kitchen island. Looked at me. “We have to let go.” She rolled her eyes. “We’re in a twenty-five-million-dollar home in Beverly Hills. You could be comfortable with life.”

  I heard her words, but I didn’t feel any better about the whole situation.

  “Cat,” Ingrid sighed. “I’m okay with selling the house. Maybe it’s you who’s somehow stuck here. Maybe, somehow, it’s your own grief that’s keeping you tied here. You wouldn’t have to worry about Mother’s care anymore. It would be financially taken care of. You could buy a smaller vacation home, somewhere you want to be. What about Myers Flat? You used to love it there when we were kids.”

  “You did, too,” I whispered.

  “I loved it because you loved it.”

  I looked up at Ingrid.

  She shrugged. “Don’t get me wrong; I enjoyed it, but I needed more modern conveniences, like Nordstrom, Cold Stone, and room service at the Four Seasons.”

  Ingrid never came off as materialistic. She just quietly met her needs with the luxuries our life provided.

  “What about you? What will you do? Where will you go?”

  “I’ll be fine, Cat. Stop worrying about me. Typical older sister.” She playfully rolled her eyes and laughed.

  I saw the same laugh from when we had been children. When we hadn’t known life was slowly taking us under, that our realities would soon change, and that we’d grow more cynical and jaded to life, more aware of the real world.

  “Listen,” Ingrid said. “We can stay here as long as you’d like, but remember, we’re only keeping the ghosts at bay. At some point, you’re going to have to deal with this.”

  “I know. But it won’t be tonight.”

  “Come on; let’s go to bed. It’s been a long day.” Ingrid walks over to me and puts her arm around my shoulders, and we make our way upstairs to our old bedroom, in our old house, where no one is sleeping.

  —Catherine

  “What did you say?” I’m taken aback. Stunned. I’ve heard something that I can’t quite grasp. But you look healthy and handsome, and you have these rosy cheeks that make me want to kiss you more.

  This can’t be.

  My body grows shaky and sweaty.

  “I’m sorry I lied to you,” he says, pulling me closer to him.

  This … this was supposed to be an interview. I was supposed to be working on writing a story about a reunion show, a return to television after years spent away of one of the hottest actors in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

  “Cancer?” I ask, just to be sure I heard him correctly. That it wasn’t my head playing tricks on me.

  I’m in Luke’s arms when he says this, “You need to know what falling in love feels like, so you know it when you find it, and you don’t run away. You need to know what love feels like because it is the best possible solution for a broken soul like yours. You’re not mine to love. You’re the gift I received for the time I have left.”

  I sit up in my nakedness, turn to him. “There’s plenty of treatment out there, Luke. Surely, we can find a way to get you the treatment you need. If what you need is money, I have it.” I think about our house in Beverly Hills. Consider Ingrid’s words from last year, that night when I got out of prison. It’s the first time I’ve ever considered such a move.

  Luke laughs and reaches for me, and gently, I fall back to his chest. “It’s terminal, Cat.”

  The only outcome.

  Not a place we seek to find solace or love, but good-byes and tears.

  The end result.

  “But have you looked at every possible treatment? I’m a researcher. I can look into this.”

  Luke kisses the top of my head, and we’re quiet as we lie in the darkness, our naked bodies entwined. “My father used to work in the coal mines when I was a kid. I started to go with him at age thirteen. And every day that we came home from the coal mines, he used to give my mother purple hydrangeas. He said it was his token of appreciation for her. His love. The color purple means several things, but devotion, my father said, was why he did it and also to continue to love my mom and more deeply understand her.” Luke pauses and then continues, “Blue hydrangeas symbolize apology. Pink hydrangeas symbolize heartfelt emotion. White hydrangeas symbolize boastful or bragging.”

  Luke’s father did the same thing Father did but for different reasons. And maybe I was seeing purple when Father left the hydrangeas on the awful mornings, but maybe they were really blue.

  Luke kisses my head once more as I feel the tears coming. One escapes my eye and falls to his chest.

  “All this to say, Catherine, I’ve lived a really good life, and since you came into the picture, I look at life in a whole new way. And there’s no one else I’d want to be on this journey with than you. Just sorry we didn’t do this sooner because I feel like we missed out on a lot of love. I didn’t expect all of this. You. The story. I think, too, we’re meant to meet people who change our perceptions, our paths, for the better.” He pauses and gently strokes my head. “But we have tonight and our trip, and that’s all I can ask for. That’s all you can ask for.” Luke is quiet for a minute. “If you can’t handle it, I understand. If you want to leave, I wouldn’t blame you, Cat.”

  I turn my body and look up at Luke with his still-rosy cheeks. His laugh lines. The spark in his eye. “I’d rather run,” I start to say and watch his face stay stoic. Then, silence follows my sentence because I’m not sure the truth will come out without tears. “I’d rather run. Allow the heartbreak to start sooner so that the ache won’t last as long.” I swallow. “But the truth is, my home is where you’re at. And God built us to withstand the heartbreak. I know this to be true.” I toy with his chest hair, feel it, run my fingers through it. “So, the question isn’t if I’ll stay; it’s, what will we do with today?”

  Tears stream down my face, as I know the inevitable. Knowing it won’t be a happy ending. Knowing that, no matter what, we won’t get our happily every after—Luke said as much. That treatment won’t work. But it’s more about living in today. Enjoying one another until we can no longer wake up together, where we can longer hold hands or kiss or ride in a car together. Maybe it’s about learning to love amid adversity and forcing ourselves to live in the present moment. I don’t need to ask how long we have together because I’ll learn to live in the moment.

  Luke gently takes my chin and pulls it up until I look at him even though all I can make out is the silhouette of his handsome face.

  “Tears are a good sign, Catherine. I think we can heal and grieve at the same time.”

  The darkness feels light, and his heartbeat is all I want to hear for right now, so I gently kiss his lips and linger there for a moment. Then, I pull away and move my ear back to his chest. “I just want to hear your heartbeat for right now.”

  I feel him smile.

  “Okay,” he says and rests his cheek against my head.

  “I love you, Luke.” Something I’ve never said unless I knew it was forever. Three words I’ve saved for only Mother and Father and my sister. Three words that would have most likely died inside me if I hadn’t shared them with Luke.

  “I know, Catherine. I’ll love you forever.”

  Heartbeat.

  Heartbeat.

  Heartbeat.

  “You know one of the best qualities about you that I’ve learned so far?” I ask.

  “What’s that?”

  “Your ability to trust,” I say.

  “How do you mean?”

  “You’ve never asked me about that night. About what happened. Prison. And yet you allowed me to embark on this journey with you. Why? I mean, d
id you Google me?”

  Luke doesn’t answer immediately. “I Googled you, yes, but I already knew who you were.”

  “Oh, from all the media coverage.”

  He was in LA at the time.

  “No, not from the media coverage. You don’t remember me, do you? We met at Sam’s Bar. Went to the Four Seasons?”

  Oh my God. “Guy never seven.” I sit up in bed and look back at him. Stare him down, praying to God the memories come back, that I’ll remember him. The way his body felt, the way his hands felt. And yet nothing comes back.

  “I’ll take guy number seven,” he says. “Come here.”

  I lie down with him and listen to Luke tell the story.

  “It was Sam’s Bar down on Sunset. This beautiful woman walked into the bar, and I swear, she turned every man’s head as she walked past. She made her way up to another woman, and they exchanged hugs, words. I realized, only after I Googled you, that it was Ingrid. Saw your family picture in the newspaper.” He holds me tighter as I listen.

  “I watched you all night. Dance, sip on club soda after a beer. Watched you laugh. Felt a little like a creeper.” He laughs. “Before I followed you out to make sure you’d make it to your car all right, I grabbed a receipt with your name on it that you’d left on the bar. If anything, at least I’d have your name to remember you by. But it was when you went to your car that you realized you’d locked your keys in your car. Ingrid had gone home by then, and cell phones weren’t even a thing back then.”

  I remember the keys and remember being locked out.

  I remember having sex with a man in a hotel room. He felt familiar and like home and comfortable, but I blamed it on the alcohol. Blamed it on my feelings at the time. I couldn’t see that what I had in front of me was just what I needed all along.

  But Luke felt the magic.

  “You ran away that morning, Cat. Why?”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “Why’d you run?”

  “I didn’t run. I left.”

  “No, you ran. I was awake, Cat. I thought you were going to the bathroom. But instead, you grabbed your clothes, went into the bathroom, came out, and left before I could say anything.”

  Again, he waits for an answer I won’t give.

  “I got dressed as quickly as I could. Ran outside the room. The hallways at the Four Seasons are long and you were gone. You ran.”

  Back then, we didn’t have social media. Facebook and Twitter and Instagram weren’t part of our daily vocabulary.

  “Luke,” I whisper, “I wasn’t running from you.”

  “Who were you running from then?”

  “Me.”

  The wind kicks up outside. A wind chime sings, light and airy.

  I take a big breath in. “I used men like a drug. I used their bodies to fix my own. I needed them to want mine. Needed an escape to busy my mind from the wreckage my father caused at home.” I stop. Listen to his heart in my ear. I rise and fall with his breaths in and out. “Somehow, I thought if I could just numb or fix the hole inside me and fill it with something, I’d feel whole again. And every time, it just didn’t work.”

  “Your father was mean to you?”

  This is the first time Luke’s ever asked about Father.

  “The exact opposite. He wasn’t. But he was to my mother. Several quiet nights after countless dinner parties, he’d berate her about what went wrong. Then, as time progressed, it turned physical. When I look back on it, I should have seen how his rage was building, but I didn’t. I should have seen it coming. I think my mother always knew he’d get her in the end.”

  “But he didn’t,” Luke says.

  “No, he didn’t.”

  Luke’s arms tighten around me. His heartbeats calm me. His breathing keeps me levelheaded.

  I take a big breath in before I tell Luke this part. I exhale. “My mother buffered us from a lot, but after that day in January, I’d never known true sadness like I did that day and the years that followed. Prison was the easy part. Living was harder. Until I met you.” I gently laugh. “I mean, until I saw you again.”

  Luke traces my bare back with his fingertips as my naked body lies against his.

  “Luke?”

  “Yeah?”

  I want to tell him the whole truth about what happened that night, just so one other person knows. Just so he knows Mother was brave enough. I will take the fall for what happened that morning for the rest of my life. But I need him to know that Mother was brave enough to finally take a stand. That it wasn’t me.

  “I didn’t fend off my dad. I didn’t kill him. My mother did.”

  The wind chimes blow, and finally—finally—the hole inside me that the wind blows through begins to close a little.

  I listen to his heartbeat again. Fall in line with his breathing.

  I try hard to remember that night with Luke as guy number seven. I was never into movie stars or holding them on pedestals. It all didn’t matter to me. I’d been around them my entire life. With the exception of Molly Ringwald. I still hold her up on a pedestal, and I probably always will.

  And the only thing I can remember is the way he touched my back. It was gentle and hard, all at the same time. I don’t remember his eyes because I never looked at them. I don’t remember what he said because I didn’t care. All I cared about was getting what I needed.

  But now, I wish I did remember because that would be three more hours with Luke that I could look back on and keep with me when he’s no longer here. When I can no longer hear his heartbeat, no longer measure his breaths.

  “One day, you’ll stop running, Cat.”

  “I think I already have.”

  Then, I realize, this trip could never be about forevers; it’s about good-byes.

  “Walker was my agent. My first agent. Took me under his wing, like a son. Gave me great advice. Want to know what it was?” Luke looks over at me from the driver’s side as Fleetwood Mac’s “Gypsy” softly plays over the radio. “Don’t smoke a cigarette with the enemy; he’ll learn your secrets.”

  I think on it. “Like, don’t trust anyone?”

  Luke shrugs. “That’s what I gathered.”

  “And did it work?”

  “It did. There’re a lot of people in Hollywood who make promises that they know they can’t keep. Walker wasn’t one of them.”

  “Why are we going to see him?”

  We pass houses that are similar in size to the one I grew up in. Filled with empty space and lies.

  We pull up to a black gate, and in front of the gate is a keypad. Luke pulls out his phone and types whatever he sees on his phone.

  The gate opens.

  We pull through the gate, and the road ahead is lined with trees. Big pine trees. The road twists and turns, and we finally see the only big house ahead.

  With a circular driveway and a fountain out front, the only thing I wonder is where they park their cars.

  We always pulled in the driveway; that’s just where we parked at our house. But there aren’t any cars in the driveway, which tells me either they have parking somewhere else or there’s no one home.

  Luke pulls up front, and we get out of the car.

  “Nice place,” I say, shutting the car door behind me.

  Luke puts his hand on the small of my back, and it reminds me of the way he put his hands on my backside as I slowly rocked on top of him last night on three separate occasions.

  “Don’t put your hand there,” I say and push his hand away, smiling.

  “Why not?” Luke looks at me.

  “That’s where you put your hand when we made love. Walking into a stranger’s house, I don’t want to be red-faced and in heat.”

  Luke laughs and drops his hand to my ass. “How about here?” he whispers in my ear.

  I close my eyes with the memory of him taking my ass in his hands and pulling me against him as my back lay flat against the wall. “There either.”

  “Oh, now, you remember me.”

/>   I playfully slap his arm.

  “Before, I was just guy number seven.”

  Luke kisses me on the cheek a little longer than he should, and I want to soak up his kiss for an eternity. Always feel his lips against me, even when he’s gone. Luke just came into my life, and yet I can’t imagine not having him in my life.

  “Well, lucky you, now, you have a name and a face.” I smile back at him as we reach the massive front doors of Walker’s house.

  Luke rings the doorbell, and inside, I hear the faint ring, followed by an echo.

  A man comes to the door and opens it. “Mr. McCay, Miss, Walker is expecting you. Please, come in.”

  Luke holds his hand out so that I can go first.

  Luke falls in line behind me as the man who answered the door shuts it and takes the lead.

  “What’s your name, man? I didn’t get it,” Luke asks as we follow him.

  “Dean,” he says. “The pleasure is all mine, Mr. McCay. Please, this way.”

  We follow Dean down a hallway and to the right. The home is made of rich browns. The floors, the walls. And everything is so big.

  Off to the right is a sitting room with a wall of windows that looks over the valley. A swimming pool sits outside.

  A tall man stands outside, watching two little ones in the pool.

  “Grandpa! Grandpa! Watch this one!” a little voice says.

  Dean walks out the door that leads to the outside and whispers to Walker.

  Walker turns, and his whole demeanor changes. He breaks out in a big smile, turns back to the woman sitting by the pool, and yells, “Honey! Luke and his friend are here!”

  “Oh! Have him come outside and meet the kids when you’re done,” she calls back from underneath her visor.

  Walker comes inside in a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, shorts, and Toms shoes. White hair and leathery honey-colored skin tell me he wasn’t raised here in Pauls Valley. That he’s a transplant, most likely from a place like Arizona or Southern California.

  He stops, placing his hands on his hips. His big, toothy smile is a focal point. “Luke McCay, holy shit.”

  Luke walks to Walker, and they embrace.

  “Been a while,” Luke says, pulling away. He motions to me. “Walker, I’d like you to meet Catherine. A friend of mine.”