Travis
The group who sought refuge at the Sanctuary—the shelter where Jenna did volunteer counseling twice a week—was as varied as America itself.
Rich, poor, black, white, young, and old, the women had only one thing in common—spouses and lovers who used their fists to abuse and intimidate.
Now, as Jenna moderated the shelter’s Tuesday night group session, she encouraged Pamela Shields to go on with her story. Pamela, who reminded her so much of Carolyn, was an affluent matron who, a short time ago, had lived in a sumptuous home.
But when she’d finally decided not to tolerate her husband’s assaults any longer, he cut her off financially, leaving her nearly destitute.
“I never realized that nothing was in my name,” Pamela said. “As long as I did what Burke wanted, money was never an issue. If I wanted new clothes or new jewelry, I just told him, and the money was there. It was only … only when I couldn’t go on the way we were that I realized he controlled everything.” Wiping her eyes with a shredded tissue, she sighed raggedly and went on. “He says I’ll have nothing if I try to divorce him. He says he’ll take our children and make sure they see me for the no-good mother I am.”
“Bull!” shouted Polly Shannon, a diminutive blond of fifty. “Just because he says that doesn’t make it so. He has money? Good! The law will make him share it with you. And there’s no way on God’s Earth the law will give him your kids— especially, not if you get it on record that he beats you up.”
“I don’t know …”
“Just look at me,” Polly insisted. “I whipped Kevin’s ass in court. He took so much away from me, but I finally said ‘no more.’ Now he’s in jail—and I’m starting to put my life together again.”
“Not everyone is as strong as you are,” Pamela murmured.
“It’s not about strength,” Jenna said gently. “We’re not in a weightlifting contest here. It’s about what can be done, and how we can help each other to do it.” Why couldn’t they see that? Why did she have to keep repeating it? She loved her work, but there were times when it wearied her, made her feel as if she was fighting a losing battle. This was one of those times. Besides, she had another reason to wish the session was over: tonight, she would see her brother’s face and hear his voice. So would millions of other Americans. Malik was going to be on television, interviewed by Sandra Waters, on her magazine show.
Connie Jenks, a young sound engineer who dressed in high grunge style, raised a hand like a schoolgirl. “Yes, Connie?” said Jenna, although she could have recited what was coming.
“I want to say something,” Connie said. “What it is—what I keep hearing—I mean, it’s like all of you ignore me just because I’m trying to make my marriage work. You act like divorce or jail are the only ways to deal with a man who … has problems. Well, Steve is working on his problems just like we are, and I hope to get back with him once he gets himself straightened out. Which he will. Do you know what he’s been doing? Sending flowers. Twice a week. What about that? Why don’t we talk about that—I mean, about positive things—for a change?”
Jenna managed to sneak a glance at her watch without being caught. “No one is saying problems can’t be worked out,” she told Connie. “But flowers and apologies won’t do it, I promise you. First, he has to admit that he has a problem—his problem, mind you, not something you did or something you made him do. Then he needs to get counseling. Steve’s taken those first steps, and I hope he succeeds. But until you see and hear something very different from what’s been happening for the past three years, it’s best that you take things very, very slowly.”
“You always sound like you know so much about this stuff,” said Polly. “I mean really know. Were you ever with that kind of man?”
Jenna chose her words carefully. “Someone very close to me was. She felt as Pamela does, that her husband had all the power and she had none.” “So how did she handle it?”
“She left him. It was very hard. She took their son and moved to another … state. She changed her name so the husband wouldn’t find her.” “And how did she make out?” Polly demanded. “Is she okay?” “She’s okay. She has a job. It’s working out for her.”
“Another man in her life?”
“No,” Jenna said, feeling the tiniest twinge of regret. “But let’s move on.” She felt uncomfortable talking about herself even when she pretended to be talking about someone else.
O
At a newsstand, Jenna picked up her latest ration of tabloids, although recently she’d found it easier to track Malik through the business pages of respect- able newspapers and magazines, where she’d read of the leveraged buyout of a British automaker and the purchase of a German movie-theater empire.
A different kind of story caught her eye. An unemployed Syrian had killed his estranged wife and fled with their children, apparently back to the Middle East. It was a terrifying reminder of how deadly a determined man could be. Even an ordinary man without the kind of power Ali possessed. Jenna didn’t want to think about it—no more of that tonight. She hurried home, slipped a blank tape into the VCR, and settled in her favorite chair.
The phone rang. Jenna hesitated for a moment, then picked up the receiver with a sigh. The caller was Toni Ferrante who, after years of intermittent therapy and emotional struggle, had divorced her husband. “I’m sorry to call you at home,” she said. “I know this number is supposed to be for emergencies. But, Jenna, I don’t know how long I can go on like this.” Her voice broke, and Jenna could hear her pain. “I thought to myself: ‘Maybe this weekend I’ll finally tell the boys I’m gay. And maybe they’ll try to understand because they love me.’ But today, they came home from school talking about fags and dykes in the crudest, ugliest way. And I knew I’d just been trying to kid myself. They won’t understand if I tell them I’m one of those dykes. They’ll hate me.”
Jenna said nothing.
“Tell me I’m wrong, Jenna. Please.”
Jenna sighed. “I can’t, Toni. You’re an intelligent woman. You know the boys will be angry. Maybe they’ll even think they hate you for a while. But …”
“But what? They’ll get past that? They’ll love me the way they do now?” “You know better than that. Nothing stays the same. But what’s the alter- native? You’re miserable now.”
“I know you’re disappointed in me, Jenna.”
“This isn’t about pleasing me. It’s your life, Toni. I just want to help you live it the best way you know how.”
“And honesty is the best way.” “You said that, I didn’t.”
There was a long silence. “I’ll see,” Toni said heavily. “I’ll just have to see if I can find the courage.”
“I’d be happy to schedule a family counseling session if you need one,” Jenna offered. But she hung up feeling like a hypocrite. How could she urge Toni to be honest when she’d been lying to her own son for years?
O
Even Sandra Waters seemed impressed as she strolled, the camera following her, along the decks of the Jihan. “She measures three hundred feet from stem to stern,” Sandra said. “The price tag? Forty million dollars. Another thirty million for decorating. Put it all together and you have what may be the most luxurious private vessel the world has ever seen—a floating pleasure palace with its own movie theater and film library, a beauty salon, and a helicopter landing pad.”
File footage showed the yacht at sea. ‘‘With fifty luxury cabins and a crew of sixty, the Jihan can cruise eighty-five hundred miles—once across the Pacific and twice across the Atlantic—without refueling. Her converters produce almost ten thousand gallons of fresh water a day from seawater. Her six king-size refrigerators carry a three-month supply of food.”
The video returned to Sandra, entering a cabin. ‘‘But perhaps the most dramatic features of this vessel,” she said with the enthusiasm of a real estate agent, “are the bathrooms. This one,” she pointed out, “shaped like a scallop shell, is carved and polished
from a single block of onyx. The fixtures are twenty-four-karat gold. And this one,” she continued after a jump cut, “features a huge white onyx bathtub, Chinese jade fixtures, and its own twin waterfalls.”
Waters opened the door of an even more extravagant suite. “Here we have an elmwood latticework ceiling and electronically operated secret doors. A hot tub. Eight-foot circular bed. A salon that replicates a suite at the Plaza Athenee. And more and more and more. It all belongs to this man, the owner of this humble little vessel—Malik Badir.”
“Good evening, Sandra,” Malik said a bit self-consciously, rising to greet his interviewer. “Welcome aboard the Jihan.”
Maybe it was the lighting, but to Jenna, he looked tired, dark shadows under his eyes. Yet, there was still the familiar smile, the well-remembered swagger, as he answered Waters’s questions.
“You launched the Jihan a year ago. I’ve heard that the christening party lasted a full week. True?”
“Oh, yes. In fact, I’m not sure that some of the guests aren’t still here.” “And your date for the party was—”
“Yes.” There was no need to mention the name of the recently divorced and very famous film star Malik had been seeing at the time; everyone watching knew the story.
“Are you two still …”
“Oh, we see each other often. We’re friends—maybe best friends.” “But you have other … friends.”
Malik smiled. “Thank God it’s not against the law to enjoy the company of beautiful women. Otherwise, I could be arrested for this visit with you, Sandra.”
Sandra Waters positively simpered before catching herself. “But there’s no one special person in your life?”
“Many special people. But what you’re asking, I think, Sandra, is whether I’m on the verge of marrying someone. I’m sorry to say no.” He did look genuinely sad. “I have no plans in that direction. No one, really, could replace my beloved wife.”
The newswoman respectfully recounted the story of Genevieve’s accident. “Then there was another brush with tragedy,” she said to Malik. “You were shot in a kidnap attempt on your daughter. You lost an arm.”
Jenna gasped. She hadn’t really noticed the way Malik’s jacket fell; it looked casually draped over his shoulders. Now she saw that the left sleeve was simply empty.
“… told me the wound wasn’t dangerous,” her brother was saying, ‘‘although the bone was smashed. But then there were complications, infection. Nothing to do but lop it off.”
My God, thought Jenna, how could this happen? Why didn’t I know? “Would you say that your success, your vast wealth, has been a mixed blessing?” asked Sandra Waters, reaching out to touch Malik’s good arm. Jenna would have given one of her own arms to trade places with her at that moment.
Malik merely shrugged.
“And now there’s another difficulty in your life,” Waters went on. “I’m sure you know what I mean. Rumors are rampant that you’re about to be charged with violating French espionage laws for your part in the sale of Mirage jets to a third-world nation—the aircraft then being resold to the kingdom of al-Remal?”
Jenna hadn’t heard of this, either.
“A misunderstanding,” said Malik, “which will soon be cleared up.” “Just a misunderstanding?”
“Of course.”
“Would you care to elaborate?”
“No. But trust me, it will be cleared up soon.”
Jenna was watching so intently that she hadn’t noticed Karim entering the room.
“Do you know him?” he asked, a bit too casually. “Malik Badir?” “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. Just the way you looked. I thought maybe he was someone you’d met.”
“Does he seem like someone I’d be likely to meet?” “I don’t know. Just asking.”
O
For two days, Jenna worried about her brother’s legal problems. She had to know more, more than he was willing to say on television. Finally, she decided to call Laila, just this once. She had heard from her niece twice since their last meeting, then nothing. Jenna couldn’t blame her, not after she had broken off their budding relationship with lame-sounding excuses. Besides, Laila must have a hundred better things to do than call a woman she scarcely knew.
Laila, still at the Pierre, didn’t seem surprised by Jenna s call. How have you been?” she asked.
“Fine, fine. And you? Are you enjoying Columbia?” “Yeah. A lot.”
“Let’s see … you must be a junior now.” “Senior.”
“Ah. And your father,” said Jenna as casually as she could. “I don’t want to pry, but there have been stories …”
“You mean the Sandra Waters thing?” “Well … yes.”
“That’s nothing to worry about. Nothing he can’t handle. He has a lot of enemies, you know. They started this whole business. But he’ll get it all straight- ened out. He told me he would.”
Jenna could almost hear Malik—confident, even arrogant. A far cry from the young man who’d fled al-Remal to save his life and that of his daughter. And yet, she thought, Sandra Waters had been right. There was so much his money couldn’t buy. Genevieve was dead. And Laila—would she not have been happier, safer, with a simpler life, a simpler father?
The call ended with mutual promises to be in touch, but Jenna could tell that Laila’s thoughts were elsewhere—on a boyfriend, perhaps? She tried to picture Malik’s attitude toward his little girl’s growing up. Would the aging rebellious son approve of the same tendencies in his daughter? She had to smile at the thought.
O
Chance. Serendipity. That was all it was.
Jenna almost canceled out of the conference, even though she was one of the presenters. She simply had too much work to do, she told herself, to fly off for a long weekend in Puerto Rico.
It was Karim who finally convinced her to go. “All the kids I know, their parents take vacations,” he said. “You never take one. You need some R and R, Mom, even if it’s just hanging out on a beach with some other shrinks.” It wasn’t a self-serving argument aimed at getting an unsupervised weekend. Karim would be spending the time with the Hamids at the professor’s cottage on the Cape.
“Maybe you’re right,” she admitted. Lately, even with her work and her worries about Malik—or perhaps exactly because of those things—she had felt as if her life was stagnating. A tropical beach sounded good.
As she settled into a comfortable business-class seat on the early-morning American Airlines flight to San Juan, she debated whether to review the paper she would be presenting. Let it go, Jenna. You know the material like the back of your hand. Just relax and enjoy. Her duties at the conference would require, at most, half a day. The rest of the time would be hers.
Her moment of pleasant anticipation was broken by a deep, gravelly voice, answered by a woman’s laugh. She opened her eyes. The flight attendant was fairly fluttering around the man she was ushering into the seat next to Jenna’s. He was lean and deeply tanned, with rather weary-looking gray eyes and blond hair lightly streaked with gray.
“Can I get you a magazine?” the young woman asked breathlessly. “Something to drink?”
“Aw, darlin’, I promised my mama never to drink before noon. But then, I promised Mama all kinds of things. How ’bout a Bloody Mary once we’re in the air?”
The flight attendant laughed again, as if this were the wittiest human speech she had ever heard.
Really, Jenna thought, how obvious could a woman get?
‘‘Travis Haynes, ma’am,” drawled her seatmate, turning towards Jenna, waiting for her to supply her own name.
‘‘Jenna Sorrel.” She said it as unencouragingly as possible. Mr. Haynes seemed not to notice. “Pretty name,” he said.
As soon as the Fasten Seat Belts sign winked off, the flight attendant was there with his drink. “Could I have your autograph, pretty please?” she pleaded, batting her eyes in a way that Jenna had thought existed only in television sitcoms.
> Travis Haynes signed a napkin. “Maybe this lady would like something, too,” he suggested pointedly.
“No, thank you,” said Jenna.
“Thank you, Mr. Haynes,” the young woman gushed as she departed. “An old-time stew,” Travis commented to Jenna. “It’s kind of like a Harley-Davidson. You might not want to drive one, but it’s sorta nice to know they still make ’em.”
Jenna had to smile despite herself. Coming from some men, the remark would have been offensive. Travis Haynes made it sound innocent and—well, funny. Who was this man with the most obvious kind of charm and a south- ern accent so thick that, at first, she could hardly understand him?
“She certainly seems to think highly of you,” she pointed out.
“Occupational hazard,” Travis replied.
“What occupation would that be?” Did she really want to know?
“Oh, I get up on stage and grunt and groan, and some people call it country singin’. I reckon not everybody has heard of me, though. That’s okay,” he assured her, although she had certainly not apologized for her ignorance. “I have a way of dropping out of the public eye just when I have a chance of making myself a household name.”
“Really? Why do you suppose that is?” Jenna was professionally curious. Besides, she found the man’s self-deprecating manner oddly appealing, a pleasant change from the average Bostonian. Here, evidently, was the species Americans called a “good ol’ boy.”
“Damned if I know. But my agent sure as hell has some ideas. None of ’em are too flattering, though.”
“Such as?”
“Oh, she used to say I was a damn fool and let it go at that. Now she’s into some kind of ‘therapy’”—he made the word sound like witchcraft—“and she says I have a fear of success.”
“And do you believe that?” Jenna asked, wondering if the agent was sim- ply an agent or perhaps something more.
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