The Venus Fix

Nineteen

Dulcie had gone to sleep, or at least had said that was what she was going to do. I’d poured myself a glass of merlot and sat on the couch in the den channel-surfing, trying to find something on TV to distract me, but there was nothing. Leaving the television on mute, I perused the bookshelves. I kept one shelf of new novels that I hadn’t yet read, but nothing tempted me. All I wanted was to go into my daughter’s bedroom, sit by her side, rub her back, and have her smile up at me, totally trusting and loving, the way she’d done all her life.

Until now.

I finally took a book out-one I knew by feel, even before seeing the worn leather binding.

I sat down on the couch and opened it gingerly. The upper-right edge was frayed and the bottom left corner was torn. In the middle the first page was a single photograph. A black-and-white studio shot of a two-month-old baby girl. Beneath it was a date, written in ink that had faded just enough to make it look as if it were slowly disappearing.

May 16, 1944

I turned to the next page. There were rows of pictures, all of the same child, month after month, as she began to get older, each one dated in the same flowery handwriting.

My grandmother had been meticulous about this album of her only daughter. When I was a little girl, I’d been fascinated by it, and used to love to stare at the pictures of my mother and try to find her face, the beautiful face that I knew by heart, in the photographs of the child.

By the time she was six months old, her eyebrows were strong and perfectly arched, the same shape they would be for the rest of her life. And the blue eyes were already as round and brilliant as they were when they looked at me years later. The proof that this baby was actually my mother had somehow been important to me. That she had been small and now was grown reassured me.

It wasn’t until she was ten that my mother’s lips began to resemble those that had kissed me every night. At twelve, her cheekbones started to show. By the time she was sixteen the resemblance was locked in.

That was the year my mother became one of The Lost Girls-a television series about the misadventures of two orphaned teenagers, taken in by a schoolteacher couple.

The show was an instant hit, and my mother became a star at an age when she was too young to cope. It both made her and destroyed her because the show went off the air when she was nineteen and she hadn’t been successful at anything thereafter. Her acting never graduated to the next level; her marriage to my father, a few years later, didn’t work; eventually she became addicted to pills and alcohol. My father tried to get her help, but she bolted, taking me with her, hiding out in a miserable apartment on the Lower East Side.

We only lasted a year.

A few times she stopped drinking. For five or six days, she’d quit bringing home the men who scared me, start to smile more and even cook dinner. Those days were the best. But she never stayed sober long. Finally one night she took too many pills, washed them down with too much vodka and fell into a coma. At eight years old, I was the one who found her and called my father and asked him to come and save her.

He couldn’t. But he took me home with him and tried to save me. His second wife tried to help him, but it was Nina Butterfield, my mother’s oldest friend, who truly rescued me, who gave me the sheltering arms and unconditional love that kept me going.

I ran my finger over my mother’s long, wavy hair in a photograph taken when she was eighteen. She was lovely, with soft curls and those electric-blue eyes that looked so much like my daughter’s that sometimes I am still overwhelmed by missing my mother when gazing into my daughter’s face.

In that picture, at the height of her success, my mother looked like a real Hollywood actress. I wish I had known her then, at her happiest, when the bell-toned laugh that I had heard only infrequently was the sound she made the most often.

What was I looking for that night in the den? Something that would help me explain to Dulcie why, out of everything in the world, I could not allow her to follow in my own mother’s footsteps.

When the phone rang, I was almost relieved to put the album down and return to the present.

“Morgan?”

The voice was low and the syllables pulled like taffy. It was Noah Jordain.

“What are you doing?” he asked in that slow, southern drawl that brought to mind his fingers on my skin.

“Sitting here feeling sorry for myself.”

“Ruin another meal?”

“Very nice, very nice. No. I had some take-out soup. I bet you had something exotic you just whipped up for yourself in a minute and a half.”

“No, darling, not me, not tonight. I just got home. This is one crazy case. But I don’t want to talk about that now. I miss you.”

The words chilled and warmed me at the same time. He did this to me all the time. Affected me in a way that no one-not even my ex-husband-ever had.

“Morgan?”

“I’m here.”

“You got awfully quiet there. What were you thinking?”

“What awful things you see and I hear every day.”

“By hearing, by listening, you help people.”

“I know.”

“You sound too sad. What’s wrong?”

I told him about Dulcie’s invitation to audition for the TV series. I knew he’d understand. He’d watched us go through this the last time.

“I don’t like to automatically take your side, but she’s definitely too young to go off to Hollywood.”

“Thanks. The problem is how do I convince her of that?”

“Not sure you can.”

“So how long do I have to suffer her stony silence and nasty looks this time? You know how bad it was last time. I want her to fight it out with me, but she’s so stubborn. So much like my mother. She just freezes me out.”

“Need help thawing?” Noah asked.

I laughed.

“You know, it’s been almost three weeks since I’ve laid eyes on you.”

Something about the way his voice moved over the words “laid eyes on you” made me tremble. I felt a pull so strong it was almost painful, and then the sharp stab of fear followed. It always did. The red flag. The alarm. The warning. I wasn’t used to wanting someone. Or opening up. It made me vulnerable in a way I didn’t like.

I pushed myself to respond. “I miss you, too, Noah.” I heard the words louder in my ears than I’d uttered them.

“That’s good to hear, darling. That means you’ll say yes to what I’m going to ask you.”

“Yes.”

“You surprise me, Morgan, you know that? You don’t even know what I’m going to ask.”

“No, but I wanted to see what it would feel like to do that. Just take a chance. So, what did I agree to?”

“Spending this weekend with me if Dulcie is going to be at her father’s.”

“Well, you’re in luck. Or I am. Mitch is picking her up from the theater on Friday night and she’s not coming home until Monday. What are we doing?”

“You surprised me, I’ll surprise you. I’ll tell you on Friday night. But it’s still two days till then. What am I going to do in the meantime?” His voice was playful. “What if we just stay on the phone for the next three hours. Talk until we fall asleep, and then sleep with the phones by our faces,” he said.

“Men do not say things like that. You are entirely too romantic. It makes me suspicious.”

“It does not. It makes you giddy. I can tell from your voice. And men do say things like that. At least this one does.”

I was about to respond when I heard his cell phone ringing in the background. “Damn it, hold on.”

A call on his cell phone was almost always bad news, since he didn’t use it personally.

“That’s Perez. I’m sorry, Morgan, but I have to go. If I can, I’ll call you back later.”

“Take care of yourself,” I said, not quite sure he heard me as he hung up his phone.