Glitter Baby

Chapter 26

Fleur found Jake by the garage, sitting on the ground just beyond the reach of the floodlights. He was leaning against a stone wall, a basketball propped in his lap, and he looked as though he’d walked through the fires of hell, which wasn’t far from the truth. She knelt beside him. He stared up at her, the shutters drawn and tightly locked, daring her to pity him.

“You’ll never know how much you scared me,” she said. “I forgot about you and your damned metaphors. All that talk about massacres, and the little girl in the shirt with the yellow ducks…I saw you wiping out a village full of innocent civilians. You scared me so bad…It was like I couldn’t trust my own instincts about you. I thought you’d been part of some obscene massacre.”

“I was. The whole frigging war was a massacre.”

“Metaphorically speaking, maybe, but I’m a little more literal-minded.”

“Then you must have been relieved to learn the truth,” he said bitterly. “John Wayne ended his military career in a psychiatric ward pumped full of Thorazine because he couldn’t take the heat.”

There it was. The secret that haunted him. The reason he’d erected such indomitable walls around himself. He was afraid the world would find out he’d broken apart.

“You weren’t John Wayne. You were a twenty-one-year-old kid from Cleveland who hadn’t gotten many breaks in life and was seeing too much.”

“I freaked out, Flower. Don’t you understand that? I was screaming at ceilings.”

“It doesn’t matter. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t write beautiful, sensitive plays that look into people’s hearts and not expect to be torn apart when you see human suffering.”

“A lot of guys saw the same things, but they didn’t freak.”

“A lot of guys weren’t you.”

She reached out for him, but before she could touch him, he stood up and turned his back toward her. “I managed to arouse all your protective instincts, didn’t I?” The words whipped her with their scorn. “I made you feel sorry for me. Believe me, that wasn’t what I wanted to do.”

She stood, too, but this time she didn’t try to touch him. “When you gave me the manuscript, you should have told me I wasn’t supposed to react to it. Did you expect me to respond as though I’d just seen one of your stupid Caliber pictures? I can’t do that. I don’t like watching you drill people full of bullet holes. I liked you a lot better curled up on that cot in the hospital, screaming your heart out because you weren’t able to stop what happened in the village. Your pain made me suffer with you, and if you can’t handle that, then you shouldn’t have given me the book.”

Instead of settling him, her words seemed to make him angrier. “You didn’t understand a damned thing.”

He stalked away, and she didn’t go after him. This was about him, not her. She made her way to the pool and stripped down to her bra and panties. Shivering with cold, she looked into the dark, forbidding water. Then she dived in. The frigid water stole her breath. She swam to the deep end and turned over to float on her back. Cold…suspended…waiting.

She felt a deep, wrenching pity for the boy he’d been, raised without any softness by a mother who was too tired and too angry over the unfairness of her life to give her child the love he’d needed. He’d looked for a father in the men who frequented the neighborhood bars. Sometimes he found one; sometimes he didn’t. She considered the irony of the college scholarship he’d received-not for his fine, sensitive mind, but for a ruthless slam dunk.

As she floated in the icy water, she thought about his marriage to Liz. He’d continued to love her long after their relationship was over. How typical of him. Jake didn’t give his love easily, but once he gave it, he didn’t withdraw it easily, either. He’d been numb with pain when he’d enlisted, and he’d futilely tried to distract himself with war, death, and drugs. He hadn’t cared if he survived, and it frightened her to think about how reckless he’d been. When he hadn’t been able to stop what happened in the village, he’d broken. And despite all those long months in the VA hospital, he’d never really recovered.

As she looked into the night sky, she thought she understood why that was.

“The water’s cold. You’d better get out.” He stood at the side of the pool, his posture neither friendly nor unfriendly. He held a beer in one hand. An orange beach towel dangled from the other.

“I’m not ready.”

He hesitated, then carried the towel and the beer over to a lounge chair.

She studied the racing clouds overhead. “Why did you blame me for the block?”

“The problem started when I met you. Before you came along, everything was fine.”

“Got any ideas about that?”

“A few.”

“Care to toss them out?”

“Not particularly.”

She pulled her legs under her and began to tread water. “I’ll tell you why you couldn’t write. I was storming the fort. Breaching those walls. You’d built them thick and strong, but this funny nineteen-year-old kid who ate you up with her eyes was tearing them down as fast as you could build them. You were scared to death that once those walls took their first shot, you’d never be able to build them up again.”

“You’re making it more complicated than it was. I couldn’t write after you left because I felt guilty, that’s all, and we both know that wasn’t your fault.”

“No!” She cut through the water until her feet touched bottom. “You didn’t feel guilty. That’s a cop-out.” Her throat was tight. “You didn’t feel guilty because you didn’t have anything to feel guilty about. You made love to me because you wanted me, because you even loved me a little.” A painful lump made it hard to breathe. “You had to have loved me, Jake. I couldn’t have generated all that feeling by myself.”

“You don’t know anything about what I felt.”

She stood shivering in the water, the wet bra clinging to her breasts, the flower necklace stuck to her skin. Suddenly she saw it all so clearly that she wondered why she hadn’t understood it before. “This is about macho. That’s all this is. With Sunday Morning Ec1ipse, your writing had become too self-revealing, and then I came along at the same time and all your warning flashers went off. You didn’t stop writing because of me. You stopped because you were afraid to peel off any more layers. You didn’t want everybody to know that the tough guy on the screen-the tough guy you’d had to be while you were growing up-wasn’t anyplace close to the real man.”

“You sound like a shrink.”

Her teeth had begun to chatter, making her words come out in short, broken bursts. “Even when you joke about your screen image, you’re subtly winking your eye. Like you’re saying-‘Hey, everybody, sure it’s just acting, but we all know I’m still one hell of a man.’”

“That’s bull.”

“You started playing the tough guy when you were a kid. If you hadn’t, you’d have gotten swallowed up by those Cleveland streets. But after a while, you started believing that’s who you really were, this man who could handle anything. A man like Bird Dog.” She climbed up the steps, shivering as the air hit her. “Bird Dog’s exactly who you want to be-someone who’s emotionally dead. Who never feels pain. A man who’s safe.”

“You’re full of crap!” The beer bottle slammed down on the table.

Instead of accepting that he wasn’t invulnerable, he was lashing out against the closest target. Her. She gripped the railing, her shoulders hunched against the cold, her chest tight with anguish. “Bird Dog’s not half the man you are. Can’t you see that? Your breakdown is a sign of your humanity, not your weakness.”

“Bullshit!”

Her teeth were chattering so hard she could barely speak. “If you want to heal yourself, go inside and read your own damned book!”

“Fucking unbelievable, you’re so wrong.”

“Read your book and try to feel a little compassion for that poor, brave kid who’d had his nerves burned raw-”

He jumped up from his chair, his face white with fury. “You missed the whole point! You don’t get it! You didn’t see what’s right in front of you. This isn’t about pity!”

“Read your book!” she cried into the cold night. “Read about the kid who didn’t have a single person in the world who gave a damn about him!”

“Why can’t you understand?” he shouted. “This isn’t about pity! This is about disgust!” He kicked away a chair that stood in his path and sent it crashing into the pool. “I want you to feel disgust so you get out of my fucking life!”

He stormed toward the house, and the gates of the couvent slammed shut on her for the thousandth time. He walked away like they all did, leaving her stranded, cold, and alone. She sank down on the concrete, shivering and numb. The old cedars around the house groaned. She grabbed for the orange beach towel and wrapped herself in it. Then she rested her head on her pillow of ruined clothes and drew up into a ball. Finally she let herself cry until she had no tears left.

Jake stood next to the window in the dark living room and looked down on her crumpled at the side of the pool. She was a beautiful, shining creature of light and goodness, and he’d dragged her into hell. Something swift and sharp tore at the backs of his eyelids. He wanted to take on her pain as his own. But he didn’t go to her-wouldn’t let himself go. He’d given her the book. He’d written it just for her so she’d understand why he couldn’t offer her everything he wanted to, everything that exquisite creature deserved, everything he was too weak-too unworthy-to give.

He remembered the night he’d walked in on her when she and Kissy were watching Butch Cassidy. Redford wouldn’t have ended up lying on a cot curled up like a fetus. The Doc wouldn’t have cracked up. And neither would Bird Dog. How could she love a man who’d ended up as he had?

He turned away from the window. He shouldn’t have brought her here, shouldn’t have let her back into his life, shouldn’t love her so goddamned much. If he’d learned anything by now, he’d learned that he wasn’t cut out for love. Love tore down the defenses he needed to get through the day. Because she was so strong herself, she didn’t want to accept that he was weak. The other guys hadn’t cracked up, but he had.

She’d scattered the manuscript pages around the chair where she’d been reading, and in his mind he could see her sitting there, those long legs tucked up under her, that big, beautiful face creased in concentration. He walked over to the chair and knelt down to stack the pages. He was going to build a fire and burn them before he went to bed. They were like live grenades lying around, and he couldn’t sleep until he’d destroyed them, because if anyone but Flower ever found out what was in them, he might as well put a pistol to his head and blow out his brains.

He walked back over to the window. She was quiet now. Maybe she’d fallen asleep. He hoped so.

He returned to the chair where she’d been sitting, and his eyes fell on the top page. He picked it up and studied the layout, the quality of the type, the fact that he’d run the right margin too close to the edge. He took in all those separate, unimportant facts, and then he began to read.

CHAPTER ONE

Everything in ’Nam was booby-trapped. A pack of cigarettes, a lighter, a candy bar wrapper-all those things could blow up in your face. But we didn’t expect anything other than another small, dead body when we saw the baby lying at the side of the road outside Quang Tri. Who could have imagined that anyone would booby-trap the body of a baby? It was the ultimate rape of innocence…

Sometime during the night Jake carried her inside. He bumped her head trying to get her through the guest room door and cursed, but when he laid her down and whispered good night, she heard a horrible tenderness that made her pretend she’d fallen back to sleep.

Emotionally dishonest. That’s what she’d told Kissy about him, and she’d been right. She’d had enough pain in her life, and she was bailing out. Loving a man who batted around her heart like one of his basketballs had grown too awful to bear.

Early the next morning, she found him asleep on one of the couches, his mouth slightly open, his arm dipping into the puddle of manuscript pages scattered on the floor beneath him. She located the key to his Jag and threw everything into her overnight case as quietly as she could. His truck was parked in the garage, so she wasn’t leaving him stranded.

The car started right away. As she slipped it into reverse and backed around in the drive, the morning sun struck her in the eyes. They were still swollen from the night before. She reached into her purse for sunglasses. The driveway was steep and rutted. Jake and his insecurities. He’d made the approach to the house nearly impassable, all so he could guard his precious, stupid privacy.

She started to crawl down the drive. A movement in the rearview mirror caught her attention. It was Jake running toward the car. His shirttail had come undone, his hair stood up on one side of his head, and he looked as if he wanted to murder someone. She couldn’t hear what he was yelling. Probably just as well.

She hit the accelerator, took the next curve too fast, and felt the car bottom out on one of the ruts. She overcompensated by jerking the steering wheel to the right. The Jag swerved. Before she could straighten, the front wheel was hanging over a ditch.

She turned off the ignition and rested her arms on top of the steering wheel, waiting for Jake and his anger, or Jake and his wisecracks, or Jake and whatever other facade he’d decide to throw up between them. Why couldn’t he let her go? Why couldn’t they finally take the easy way out?

The driver’s door swung open, but she didn’t move. His breathing sounded as ragged as hers had on that Fourth of July night six months ago. She pushed the sunglasses higher on her nose.

“You didn’t take your necklace.” His voice was higher-pitched than normal. He cleared his throat. “I want you to have your necklace, Flower.”

The morning glory pendant slipped into her lap. She felt the warmth of the metal from where he’d clutched it in his hand. She stared straight ahead through the windshield. “Thank you.”

“I-I had it made especially for you.” He cleared his throat again. “This guy I know. I did a pencil drawing for him.”

“It’s beautiful.” She spoke politely, as if she’d just received it. Still she wouldn’t look at him.

His feet shifted in the gravel. “I don’t want you to go, Flower. All that stuff last night…” His voice sounded hoarse, as if he were getting a cold. “I’m sorry.”

She wouldn’t cry, but the effort cost her, and her words sounded as broken as her heart. “I can’t-I can’t take any more. Let me go.”

He drew a ragged breath. “I did what you said. I read the book. You…You were right. I-I’ve been locked up inside myself too long. Afraid. But when I went to get you by the pool last night…All of a sudden I knew I was a hell of a lot more afraid of losing you than I was of anything that happened fifteen years ago.”

She finally turned to look at him, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes. She pulled off her sunglasses and heard him clear his throat again and suddenly realized he was crying.

“Jake?”

“Don’t look at me.”

She turned away, but then his hands were on her arms, and he was pulling her from the car. He squeezed her to his chest so tightly she could barely breathe. “Don’t leave me.” He choked out the words. “I’ve been alone for so long…all my life. Don’t leave me. Jesus, I love you so much. Please, Flower.”

She felt him crumbling. All the protective layers he’d built around himself were breaking away. She finally had what she wanted-Jake Koranda with his emotions stripped raw. Jake letting her see what he’d never shown to anyone else. And it broke her heart.

She covered his tears with her mouth, swallowed them, made them disappear. She tried to heal him with her touch. She wanted to make him whole again, as whole as she was. “It’s all right, cowboy,” she whispered. “It’s all right. I love you. Just don’t shut me out anymore. I can take anything but that.”

He gazed down at her, his eyes red-rimmed, all the cockiness stripped away. “What about you? How long are you going to keep shutting me out? When are you going to let me in?”

“I don’t know what you-” She stopped herself and rested her cheek against his jaw. His smokescreens were no different from her own. All her life, she’d tried to find her personal value in the opinions of others-the nuns at the couvent, Belinda, Alexi. And now it was her business. Yes, she wanted her agency to succeed, but if it failed, she wouldn’t be any less a person. There was nothing wrong with her. She’d been just as much a victim of her misconceptions as Jake.

Try to feel some compassion for the kid you were, she’d told him. Maybe it was time she took her own advice and felt a little compassion for the frightened child she’d been.

“Jake?”

He muttered something into her neck.

“You’ll have to help me,” she said.

He slipped his fingers in her hair, and they kissed long enough to lose track of time. When they finally moved apart, he said, “I love you, Flower. Let’s get this car out of here and drive down to the water. I want to look at the ocean and hold you close and tell you everything I’ve wanted to say for a long time. And I think you have some things to tell me, too.”

She thought of everything she needed to tell him. About the couvent and Alexi, about Belinda and Errol Flynn, about her lost years and her ambitions. She nodded.

They got the car back on the road. Jake drove, and as they began their slow crawl down the drive, he picked up her hand and kissed her fingertips. She smiled, and then she gently pulled away. Her purse held a compact with a pocket mirror. She flipped it open and began to study her face.

What she saw was unsettling and disturbing, but she didn’t turn away as she’d been doing for so many years. Instead she stared at her reflection and tried to take in her features with her heart instead of her brain.

Her face was part of her. It might be too big to fit her personal definition of beauty, but she saw intelligence in her reflection, sensitivity in her eyes, humor in her wide mouth. It was a good face. Well-balanced. It belonged to her, and that made it good. “Jake?”

“Hmmm?”

“I really am pretty, aren’t I?”

He looked at her and grinned, a wisecrack ready to slip from his mouth. But then he saw her expression, and his grin disappeared. “I think you’re the prettiest woman I’ve ever seen,” he said simply.

She sighed and settled back into her seat, a satisfied smile on her face.

The motorcycle rider waited until the Jag disappeared around the bend before he came out from behind the scrub. He lifted his helmet, took in the road. Then he headed up the rutted drive to the cantilevered house.