Authors: Sherryl Woods
Ellen shot her an unrepentant grin. “I know. Too bad I let you get the upper hand in recent years. Otherwise, maybe you’d be married by now and I could stop worrying about you.”
“Don’t you dare start on that,” Kate warned as she followed her from the office. She shot a furious look at Zelda on her way to the elevator. For once her secretary seemed amazingly absorbed in her typing.
Ellen had heavily tipped one of the parking valets at the office building to keep her car waiting at the curb. Kate reluctantly climbed in. Now, with no car of her own, she would be totally at Ellen’s mercy. She’d have to listen to every last word of whatever lecture or probing interrogation her sister had in mind.
Ellen drove the few blocks into Beverly Hills and whipped into a parking garage as if she made the trip to Rodeo Drive daily, rather than once a year, if that. She had chosen a restaurant just off the famed shopping street. Not until she and Kate were seated did she say another word. Kate was content to let the silence continue as long as possible.
Ellen ordered a glass of wine. Kate ordered bottled mineral water. She wanted a clear head for whatever was to come. When their drinks arrived, they ordered lunch. Ellen took her first sip of the Chardonnay, set down her glass and faced Kate. “Okay, let’s hear it.”
“Hear what?” Kate evaded. She hadn’t arranged this confrontation. She saw no reason to be the first one to put her cards on the table.
Ellen looked disgusted by the evasiveness. “For a woman who can make any bigwig in Hollywood sound like a cross between Attila the Hun and the Marquis de Sade in a court of law, you show an amazing inability to verbalize your own anger,” she said, her own slow-to-boil temper clearly flaring. “Now, who exactly are you mad at? Me? Mom? Brandon? The whole damned world?”
Kate winced, not so much at Ellen’s furious tone, but at the evident hurt behind it. “I’m not mad at anyone,” she said stiffly.
“Oh?” her sister retorted with obvious skepticism. “I have asked you to have dinner with us at least a dozen times since Mom’s wedding. You’ve found an excuse every time, most of them so flimsy they’re embarrassing.”
Kate refused to meet her sister’s gaze. “I’m very busy. You know that.”
“Right. But you’ve always found time for family before. You were the one who went crazy every single time you couldn’t get Mother on the phone. You dropped everything, insisted I meet you and went tearing over there. Then that time I called you when I was worried about Mother after she and Brandon had a falling out, you showed up within minutes. You even canceled some big tennis match.”
“That was different.”
“How?”
“She’s our mother, for heaven’s sake. And we didn’t know what was going on. Her phone was off the hook for hours that one time. Then when you called, you made it sound as if she were about to leap off the top of a skyscraper. That’s hardly the same as some casual dinner invitation.”
Hurt flared again in Ellen’s eyes. “I’m family, dammit. Didn’t it occur to you that I might need you?”
Kate couldn’t help thinking about David’s withdrawal from Davey at a time when he’d been desperately needed. She recalled her own impatience with that behavior. Wasn’t she guilty of the same thing? Still, even though she felt ashamed of her selfish behavior, she regarded her sister evenly.
“Are you still family?” she said softly, hearing the unspoken torment behind that simple question, but unable to hide any longer the fact that she felt as if she’d been cast adrift.
Ellen looked as if she’d been slapped. “How could you even ask such a thing?”
“Because it seems to me that you have a new family now. You, Mom and Brandon. That’s where you should be spending all your energy, not worrying about me.”
For the first time Kate could ever recall, Ellen looked utterly defeated. “Do you think all of this has been easy on me?” she whispered. “My life’s been turned upside down, the same way yours has. More so, in fact.” She regarded Kate miserably. “Don’t you see? I finally understand why all those years we were growing up I felt that Dad loved you more.”
Astonishment and dismay swept through Kate. “I had no idea,” she said, stunned by her sister’s admission. “Dad always treated us the same.”
“No,” Ellen said angrily. Then she drew in a deep breath. “Oh, he tried. I know that. But I saw the way he looked at you. I could see how proud he was of everything
you
accomplished. It hurt, Katie, especially because I didn’t know why I was never good enough.”
Reluctant sympathy made Kate’s heart ache, but she couldn’t cope with Ellen’s old wounds now. Her own were still too fresh. She knew she had to get away before she made an absolute fool of herself by bursting into tears—for herself and for her sister and the past that had come between them. She threw her napkin onto the table and stood up. “I’m sorry, Ellen. I can’t talk about this anymore right now.”
“Kate,” Ellen pleaded.
“Not now. I’m sorry,” she said, squeezing her sister’s hand, hoping Ellen could find some way to understand, some way to forgive her.
She fled, leaving Ellen staring after her, her eyes shimmering with unshed tears.
Outside, Kate muttered a curse over the lack of a car, then decided it was just as well. Maybe on the walk back to Century City the solitude and exercise would clear her head. She knew that she had hurt Ellen, but she hadn’t been able to stop herself. All of the pain of feeling like an outsider had boiled over under her sister’s attempt at kindness.
Kate didn’t want Ellen’s pity. She didn’t want anyone’s pity. She just wanted a family of her own again. Knowing that Ellen might have subconsciously felt that way for years only made the anguish greater.
When she stormed back into the office, not one bit calmer than she had been when she’d left the restaurant, Zelda was on the phone. She quickly hung up and followed Kate into her office.
“I hope you’re satisfied,” Zelda said, staring at her indignantly. “That was your sister. You left her in tears.”
Kate regarded Zelda coldly. “My personal life is none of your concern.”
Her secretary’s eyes widened at the sharply spoken reminder, but at least she clamped her mouth shut, whirled and walked out.
Terrific, Kate thought. Now Zelda was mad at her, too. How many people could she manage to alienate in one day? And what else could possibly go wrong? When her phone buzzed, she snatched it up and growled a greeting.
“Uh-oh,” David said. “Did I catch you at a bad time?”
She drew in a deep breath. She was disgustingly glad to hear his voice, even though she should be furious with him. He’d promised to call the week before about arranging that studio tour for Davey. He hadn’t. Even so, she wasn’t up to challenging him about it right now.
“Sorry,” she said wearily. “It’s been a bad day.”
“Tough case?” he inquired sympathetically.
Kate almost laughed. If she told him the real reason for her foul mood, he’d question whether she had any business at all setting up rules and regulations for anyone’s family life.
“No,” she responded finally. “Just a family matter.”
“No problem with the honeymoon couple, I hope.”
“No. They’re fine as far as I know. Look, I really don’t want to talk about this,” she said dismissively. “Did you have a reason for calling?”
“I did, but it seems my timing’s a little off. I was hoping to lure you out to the studio. My schedule’s pretty jammed up. That’s why I haven’t gotten back to you before now. I was thinking maybe tomorrow or the next day. Davey’s been bugging me ever since we left your house. Frankly, I think he’s more anxious to see you again than he is to see my sets. I had to promise to call you today. I figured if I didn’t, he’d have you filing more papers.”
Kate chafed at the dutiful note in his voice. He sounded harassed. When he added, “If you can’t make it, I’ll understand,” she knew he wouldn’t just understand, he’d be grateful for the cop-out.
“Ah, but will Davey?” Kate said wryly.
Even though David sounded as if he’d be just as happy if she turned him down, Kate couldn’t help the anticipation that swept through her. She glanced at her calendar. Both days were crammed with appointments. However, she considered Davey’s case a priority. At least, that’s what she told herself when she said, “I think I can clear Wednesday afternoon if we make it late.”
She heard the pages of his appointment book flip.
“How late?” he asked.
“Four-thirty. I know that’ll put us smack in the middle of rush hour when we finish up, but I don’t think I can get out to the valley before then.”
“I guess that would work,” he said slowly. After another beat, he added, “We could have dinner afterward, so you won’t have to worry about the traffic heading home.”
Kate caught the slight hesitation in his voice, the evident strain. Clearly he had mixed feelings about this entire invitation. She wondered if he would send Davey back home alone the minute he’d seen the sets if she didn’t intervene and agree to prolong the evening by joining them for dinner.
To be perfectly truthful, though, she wanted to accept for her own sake, as much as Davey’s. The lure of those feelings of contentment she’d experienced over the weekend was too powerful to resist. Especially today, she longed to feel that kind of connection to another human being again.
“Dinner would be great,” she said. “Now tell me which studio and soundstage. Should I pick up Davey on the way?”
“If you don’t mind, that would really help me out,” he said, then gave her directions. “I’ll be looking forward to it.”
“Me, too,” Kate said, realizing as she hung up just how much.
Trying to substitute Davey and David for the family she felt she’d lost was a very bad idea, especially since David clearly had misgivings about a simple tour of his set and dinner. She recognized the dangers with every fiber of her being. And yet, at this moment, the prospect of seeing the two of them again definitely brightened an otherwise dreary, depressing day.
* * *
From the moment they walked through the door of the huge soundstage on the lot in Burbank late on Wednesday, Kate felt as if she’d wandered into another world. Beside her, Davey’s eyes were wide with awe. David, regarding everything with a critical possessive eye, looked as if he was perfectly at home.
“Wow!” Davey said. “Dad, this is totally hot.”
That pretty much summed up Kate’s own reaction to a landscape so barren, so otherworldly that she expected to be greeted by an alien at any second. “Definitely hot,” she echoed.
David glanced at Kate, a smile tugging at his lips. “Do you suppose that means cool?”
“Or awesome,” Kate responded.
“I wish they’d hand out translations of current slang at PTA meetings.”
“Just go by the look in his eyes,” she suggested. “Can’t you see how impressed he is by all this?”
David’s gaze clashed with hers and sent a little frisson of awareness tripping through her. “And you?”
“I’m a little awed myself,” she admitted. “And a little worried. Are you sure you’re of this world? You make this look very real, as if you might have been to this place on your last vacation.”
“Just research and imagination, I’m afraid.” He held out his hand. Kate took it. “Let’s go take a look at the spacecraft. I had a field day with all the gadgetry. Even wrangled a trip to NASA headquarters to see what’s actually in use in our current spacecraft. There’s nothing in here that’s beyond the range of scientific possibility.”
As Davey raced on ahead of them, David called out, “Careful of the wires.”
The floor was crisscrossed with cables, and the air was filled with the sounds of hammering and shouts as construction crews put the finishing touches on the sets inside the cavernous soundstage. Technicians were running checks on the hot spotlights, creating pools of glaring light.
Despite the unfamiliar surroundings, with her hand clasped firmly in David’s, Kate felt the same tantalizing sense of belonging again. She was able to shove her worries aside, at least for a time. Perhaps there was something to be said for living in a fantasy world, even one as alien as the one David had created.
As they stepped through the doorway into a shiny, metallic room filled with blinking lights and an intimidating array of controls and levers, she suddenly wished they could launch this stage prop into another dimension where the demands of the real world no longer had a hold over any of them.
David tugged the door closed behind them, and for just an instant, Kate thought her wish might be granted. Then she saw how soberly he was regarding them.
“Now, look, you two,” he warned. “I want to remind you that everything you’re seeing today is top secret, okay? The producer wants all of this to make a big splash a few weeks from now when production begins. No leaks.”
“I promise, Dad,” Davey said solemnly. “Can I push these buttons?”
“Go for it,” David agreed with a laugh.
Suddenly they were inundated with shrieking buzzers and clanging bells. The strobe lights flashed with blinding intensity. The noisier and brighter it got, the happier Davey looked.
“It’s like being inside a computer game,” he announced excitedly.
“Just wait until you see the special effects,” David told him. “The man doing them is the best in the business.” He watched as Davey touched every surface, fingered every button, then asked, “Think your pals will like it when they see it on-screen?”
Though his tone was casual, Kate detected a hint of insecurity in his eyes. Whether he was willing to admit it or not, he wanted Davey’s approval every bit as much as Davey sought his. Her heart ached over the distance between them, an emotional gap that never should have happened between father and son.
Just as it never should have happened between sisters, she thought sadly.
“They’ll love it,” Davey declared. “Do you think someday I could maybe bring them here?”
“After we’ve finished shooting the movie,” David suggested. “How’s that?” He glanced at Kate and seemed to reach a decision of some sort. “You’ll have a birthday around that time. Maybe we could have the party here.”
Davey could barely contain his excitement. “You promise?”