Once Upon a Day (10 page)

She stood up and went to her brother. “You’re a good person.” She took his hand between hers. “I will never believe otherwise.”

“Because you don’t remember,” Jimmy said. “You only want to believe that.”

When Dorothea turned around, Stephen checked her eyes. The pupils were still enormous. But her voice was surprisingly confident. “Then I will remember,” she said. She looked at Stephen. “It can be done, can it not?”

Shit, he had no idea. He was pretty sure the answer was no, but he heard himself saying yes. And when both Jimmy and Dorothea seemed to perk up, he blurted out something he was almost positive was crap. He told Dorothea that she could remember anything she wanted to.

Later, after Nancy had come back for Jimmy—and noticed how much calmer her patient seemed, willing to make eye contact for the first time, a really encouraging improvement—and Dorothea had agreed to return tomorrow, to help her brother again, Dorothea turned to Stephen on the way to the parking lot. First she thanked him, as always, and then she said, “So, how is this remembering accomplished?”

L
UCY
D
OBBINS HAD
a beautiful house in one of the most desirable areas of Malibu. She had Al, who was more devoted to her now than when they’d married twelve years ago. She had her health and she still had her good looks, or so people always told her. They marveled that she was so thin without working out, that her hair was still fiery red, not a strand of gray in sight. She marveled that anyone would care about such things when there were so many more important things in the world.

By more important things, Lucy meant the tragedies and losses that, for the past nineteen years, she’d defined to be the real truth of life. Her own life, yes, but everyone else’s also, whether they knew it yet or not. She’d volunteered at the domestic counseling center for more than a decade, and she’d learned that there were even worse things than what had happened to her. She’d met women whose children had died, for instance. Their ability to go on was something that always amazed her. At least there was still hope in her
case, no matter how much that hope had faded with each disappointment.

Whenever the sadness threatened to overtake her, Al would convince her to use Charles’s money to book another trip. Bermuda, Paris, Amsterdam, Rome. Lima, Mexico City, Jerusalem, Montreal. They had been all over the world, and everywhere they went, Lucy peered into the faces of children. It wasn’t completely foolish. The last few detectives had all agreed that the United States was very unlikely at this point.

Did your ex-husband ever talk about wanting to visit any foreign countries? Does he have any relatives overseas? Old friends? Colleagues?

Unfortunately, her answers were no help. Charles had traveled when he had to for a project, but he’d never mentioned any place he actually wanted to go. He had no relatives overseas or anywhere else, other than his mother, Margaret Keenan, who’d lived with them in California until she too had disappeared. Charles didn’t have any friends overseas because he didn’t have any friends at all. In the last two years they were together, he’d cut himself off from everyone. His colleagues had no idea what had happened to him, Lucy was sure of this, because his colleagues had been her colleagues. They’d both been in the business—he was a writer and director, she was an actress—when he disappeared.

“Disappeared” was the word Lucy had used from the first phone call to the police to the last time she’d hired a new detective, though she knew it wasn’t exactly right. If someone disappears they might have been murdered or kidnapped or killed in a car accident. They don’t tell you that they are leaving, the way Charles did. They certainly don’t tell you that you’ll never see them again.

What kind of person would say such a thing anyway?

Vindictive, immature and retributive. Someone with a black-and-white sense of morality and a grossly inflated view of himself.

This was the description from a psychologist one of the detectives had consulted to create a personality profile of Charles, to help
them determine where he might have gone. Lucy never understood how her answers had generated these traits for her ex-husband, nor could she say how accurate they were anymore. None of it led them to Charles, of course. The profile was as useless as all the psychics she’d seen and all the ads she’d placed in newspapers from Maine to Seattle, from Florida to Arizona, and every place in between.

A grossly inflated view of himself? Maybe, but what struck Lucy more and more was how inflated her own view of him had become over the years. When they met, she thought he was powerful, but now he was almost godlike to her. Sometimes she even let herself give in to the urge to pray to him for mercy. Other times, she would wake up from another nightmare and go out into the garden and scream into the night sky, “Haven’t I been punished enough, Charles? How can you keep doing this to me?”

That she deserved some punishment, Lucy never doubted. Her memory of the day it happened was as fresh now as it was nineteen years ago, because she’d spent so many hours, week after week, year after year reliving it all in her mind. She knew she was sticking her finger in a wound, torturing herself with feelings of blame, but what difference did it make? The therapists she’d seen were wrong. Her guilt wasn’t standing in the way of her life; it was her life now.

Tragedy, loss and especially guilt: these were the real truths of the world, and Lucy knew it. God help the person who didn’t understand this, she thought. God help them if they have to find out the hard way that the life they’re taking for granted is as fragile as a naked heart.

T
HEY HAD MET
at a party, twenty-seven years ago. He was thirty-five, not old by any means, but a lot older than she was—and about twelve million dollars more successful. Twelve million 1976 dollars, that is. He was just coming off a series of Westerns that had done so well at the box office, he’d become known in Hollywood as the man who’d single-handedly brought the genre back to life. The party was at his house in Beverly Hills, to celebrate his latest,
A Silver Dollar and a Gun.

Lucy was only nineteen then. (So young! Yet not young enough to forgive herself for what happened. Never young enough for that.) She’d arrived in L.A. fresh from a bad year spent in Nashville, trying to break into country, and before that, a childhood spent in a tiny town in the southeastern part of Missouri, only a few miles from the Arkansas border. A hick from the sticks, when you got right down to it. Only in L.A. for a few months when she snuck into that party with her roommate, Janice. So impressed with the
heavy silverware at the famous director’s home that, in the first ten minutes she was there, she slipped a spoon into her purse.

“How
Les Misérables
of you,” Charles’s mother had said, when she took Lucy’s wrist in her hand and very softly—they were dozens of people around the table—asked her to return the spoon and follow her upstairs.

As his mother led her to one of the empty guest rooms, Lucy didn’t say anything to defend herself. There was no point, she thought. Might as well save all her pleading for the police.

She was only nineteen, but in some ways, she was already very old. She’d almost starved in Nashville, and when she was reduced to eating popcorn and fried flour month after month, when she was about to be thrown into the street because she couldn’t meet her rent, she’d let her landlord pay her for sex. Only a few times, but it was enough to change her view of herself forever. Back in Missouri, when her uncle would get drunk and yell at her for dressing/talking/looking like a slut, she’d had innocence on her side. She’d never even had a real boyfriend; she was saving herself for the wonderful future her mother had always talked about. As far back as she could remember, when she was so little she could barely stand, her mother would kneel down and peer into her face and tell her, “You are special, my Lucy, remember that. Mark my words, you are going to grow up and leave this town and become something great. Maybe you’ll even live by the ocean someday.”

Lucy never had a father, but her mother adored her. She treated Lucy like a winning lottery ticket, the glittering prize that made up for everything in her otherwise tough life working long shifts on the line at the paint factory. But when Lucy was ten, her mother got sick and died, leaving her to an aunt and uncle who’d already raised six children. Lucy was no prize to them. They didn’t want another mouth to feed, and sometimes they didn’t feed her for several days. They would go on trips to the Ozarks in their RV and leave Lucy to herself. Even when they were home, they only gave her attention when they were telling her what not to do—don’t leave this
house, don’t eat that, don’t use the phone—unless her uncle was drunk, when he would turn his attention to Lucy and accuse her of things she didn’t even understand. It was during one of these nights, when Lucy was a junior in high school, that she ran away and hitchhiked to Nashville, to become a country singer. Everyone said she had a good voice. Even when her mother was so sick she couldn’t leave the bed, she said hearing Lucy sing made her know everything would be all right.

After her failure in Nashville, she couldn’t go back to Missouri, not after what she’d done. She got lucky when she ran into a group of kids heading for L.A. She loved that she’d be near the ocean, just like her mother always dreamed. Once she was there, she claimed she was an actress just like everybody did.

She got lucky again when, after four nights of sleeping on the beach alone—because the kids she’d ridden with turned out to have family or friends in the area, and places to stay—she met Janice. She’d gone into a coffee shop to use their bathroom. The manager told her no, not without buying something, but Janice felt sorry for her and snuck her in the back way. When Lucy admitted she had no place to live, Janice took her in. “You can pay me your half of the rent later, after you get a job,” Janice said, and then proceeded to find Lucy work as a waitress at another Venice restaurant.

They lived in a tiny cottage about four blocks from the beach. The floors were so warped they had to put magazines under one leg of the TV stand; the kitchen sink had rusted from a constant leak, and the bathroom was home to a family of cockroaches that kept coming back even though Lucy and Janice always managed to squish at least two before the rest escaped into the crack between the tub and the wall. Janice liked to joke that they’d be moving somewhere far more glamorous as soon as they got a chance to jump on the casting couch. “I’d do it in a minute,” Janice would say. “The number of lines for the part depends on the size of the director’s dick. If he’s over nine, then I’ll go under nine, but otherwise, I need a real supporting role. I’m not a total whore, you know!”

Lucy would laugh with Janice, but inside she vowed she would never do anything like that again. Nothing was worth the awful feeling she had with Mr. Smitty—Smutty, as some of the tenants called him—in Nashville. Sometimes when she closed her eyes, she still saw him groping her and breathing on her and climbing on top of her. He seemed to like it when she cried out, which she usually did. She was skinny and small. He didn’t take his time. He’d hurt her.

But now she was starting over. Her new life in L.A. Except here she was, sitting on the bed in an empty guest room, waiting for the police to haul her off to jail.

When the door suddenly opened and Charles Keenan himself walked in, she flashed to a scene in one of his movies. “I’ll give you another chance, outlaw. You leave now and don’t darken my door again, and I won’t kill you for the cattle thief you are.” What was it called?
The Last Train?

Janice had pointed him out downstairs, but up close he looked much taller and scarier. He was wearing a suit rather than the casual California clothes everyone else at the party wore. And he had very strange eyes: blue gray, with one eye, the left one, noticeably larger than the right. The closer he came, the more she noticed it. It was ridiculous, but she felt that one eye could see right down into her soul.

He didn’t speak as he came toward her. She wanted to ask him what he was doing, but she couldn’t find her voice. She watched with a growing sense of horror as he sat down on the bed and started untying his shoes.

She had no idea whether Keenan was considered attractive. Probably, but even if he wasn’t, he could have all the dates he wanted. Lucy herself had seen three model types hanging on him downstairs. So what was he doing up here with her?

He sat very still for a moment before slipping off the shoes. The way he placed them carefully at the side of the bed reminded her of Smitty. Something very mechanical about it. No passion like
she’d seen in the movies, where a man wants a woman so much that the whereabouts of his clothes afterward is the last thing on his mind.

Finally, he twisted his body around to face her. He still hadn’t spoken. The look on his face was so confident, like he had an absolute right.