Once Upon a Day (43 page)

The characters always started out happy and then tragedy struck. Once Lucy saw this, she understood why every script had a first scene that was so peaceful and beautiful it seemed like a paradise. The pattern was even more striking because Lucy knew it was the opposite of the kind of movie Charles used to write, especially the Westerns, where the movie opened with a mess and then used the rest of the film to solve it.

Sometimes the characters made it through the tragedy, but usually only one or two were really happy at the end. And always, there was a man who was ruined by it all. Maybe the man was the father of a boy who had leukemia, and even when the boy got well, the father had already lost his job and self-respect. Maybe the man was the cause of the tragedy, as in the only Western in the stack of scripts, about a man who accidentally shot his best friend and was so eaten up with remorse that he became more dangerous than the bad guys.

Lucy thought they were all autobiographical in theme, but the sixth one, the one Lucy stopped after reading, was the only one she knew was actually about Charles’s life. The script was called
Sins of the Father,
and it was about an eleven-year-old boy whose father is a policeman. The boy, Frederick (Charles’s middle name), adores his dad, Joseph (Charles’s father’s middle name). But the boy doesn’t know that Joe is really a bad cop and a bad man. He spends his
nights in bars and strip clubs, and he accepts protection money from half the drug dealers in town. As in
The View from Main Street,
the son tries to save his father, but this time the threat isn’t a car, but his own corruption. The boy is in the wrong place at the wrong time and ends up being the only witness to a robbery that his father pretends to stop, but is really part of. His dad is killed during an argument about splitting the money, but not before he tells his son to go home, and when Fred keeps clinging to him, his father elbows him in the face, hitting his right eye and sending him sprawling to the ground.

The person ruined by the tragedy in this script wasn’t the father, who started out bad, but his son. Fred starts to change when he lies to everyone and says that his father really did try to stop the robbery and that’s how he was killed. He even lies to his mother about his eye, saying one of the bad guys hit him. “Dad was trying to protect me,” Fred says. “He died trying to protect me.” His mother believes him because she could never think of her husband as anything but perfect. Everyone believes him, but Fred himself starts to go crazy.

Everywhere he goes, he thinks he sees these guys. He’s sure they’re going to come back and kill him and his mother. Whenever she’s late at work, he has visions of her lying on the street, covered in blood, the way his father was. He starts skipping school, and loses all his friends because he can’t go to their houses, and he’s afraid to have them at his, in case the bad guys come and kill them too. By the end of the script, Fred is grown up, but alone in a dive in downtown L.A., still terrified to be involved with anyone for fear something will happen to them. The last scene is Fred talking to himself. “My father was a good man. A good father tries to protect his children, the way my father protected me.”

The impact of this script on Lucy was like everything about this day. On the one hand, she wanted to scream that Charles had never told her about this. Even when the eye doctor asked Charles if his eye had ever been injured, since injuries could cause dropsy like his, he said no, not that he remembered. When Lucy herself asked him
how his father died, he said he’d died in the line of duty. “Did you really see it happen?” Lucy said, remembering the tabloid version. “Yes,” he answered, “but I can’t discuss it. It’s something I’d give anything to be able to forget.”

On the other hand, Lucy wanted to cry, thinking about him as that eleven-year-old boy, and later too, when he found her on September 21. She wanted to cry thinking about all the times he’d begged the police to try harder to find the two men. She even wanted to cry thinking of the way he’d lived with Jimmy and Dorothea for all these years, as if he were so desperate to protect them that he was willing to give up absolutely everything in his own life, from his work to any friends to even the possibility of love.

Charles’s scripts had a compassion for his characters that Lucy hadn’t had for either herself or him. This was what she most wanted to cry about. For nineteen years, she’d blamed herself for her addiction and for losing her family and she’d blamed Charles for taking them. But in the scripts, the tragedy just happened. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Their reactions were their fault, and eventually their downfall, but first there had to be the terrible event that they couldn’t control. The act of fate or God or just bad luck that sent them spinning out of their good lives into something they just couldn’t find their way out of.

All this time when Lucy was feeling guilty about her role or angry about Charles’s, she’d never thought that the blame had to be at least shared with the man who’d attacked her, whose unbelievable cruelty on that day had started it all. If that day hadn’t happened, what would her life have been like? She would never know, but she was sure of one thing. She wouldn’t be sitting in this parking lot while her ex-husband, a man she never denied she once loved, was lying in a hospital, seriously ill. She wouldn’t just sit there, knowing her children were inside that hospital now, possibly watching their father die.

Lucy got out of the car just as the sky was starting to turn pink over the mountains. She’d been up all night, but she was still wide
awake. Even her leg didn’t hurt as she walked across the parking lot and inside the door and down the hall to Charles’s room.

If she’d had to think about what she would say to him, she would have turned back. If she’d had to think about how she’d explain it to Al later—because of course she would have to tell him about this—she might have decided it was a bad idea, after all. But she didn’t think of anything other than the family they’d once been, before that horrible day, when she and Charles had still been living the first scene, the paradise of hope.

Outside the door to his room, Lucy was very surprised to see her daughter and some man asleep in each other’s arms on an ugly, waiting-room-style couch. The man was good-looking, but Lucy found herself thinking like a mother, wondering what he was doing touching her little girl. She also wished she could cover Dorothea with a blanket because she had to be cold in that tiny skirt.

Jimmy must be inside with Charles, Lucy thought, trying to stay calm enough to do this. She certainly didn’t want to face him alone.

But when she pushed the door open and went inside, her son wasn’t there. No one was there but Charles, and he was awake. He saw her as soon as she walked in, but still, she might have run the other way if he hadn’t recognized her, if he hadn’t said “Lucy” with so much feeling, it sounded like he was seeing a miracle.

She walked over to him and picked up his hand. It was an older person’s hand: thinner and more wrinkled, with spots of too much pigment and spots of too little. But it was still his hand, and she remembered what it felt like to hold it, to link their fingers together, to trust that they would have all the time in the world to stay like this.

She asked him if he was all right, and he said he was. Then she sat down in the chair next to his bed, and they started talking, awkwardly at first, but more easily when Lucy moved to the topic of Jimmy and Dorothea. Charles was able to tell her who the man was with their daughter. He also told her that he thought Dorothea was in love with this Stephen Spaulding.

“He’s a doctor,” Charles said. “A little troubled, but a good man from what I’ve seen.” He paused. “They told me he saved my life when my heart stopped halfway to Pueblo. He used a technique the cardiologists call a precordial thump. It involves strong blows to the chest, to start the heart again. Dr. Spaulding punched me in the chest so hard he broke my sternum.” Charles almost smiled. “I don’t think he likes me very much.”

“She’s too inexperienced to be serious about anyone,” Lucy said evenly.

“I tend to agree, but it’s not up to us.”

When Charles coughed, Lucy asked if he wanted some water. He said yes, and she poured him a cup from the blue pitcher on the bedside table, and then held it to his lips so he could drink.

“Do they know what’s causing this?” Lucy said, sitting back down, taking his hand again.

“They’re still running tests. The doctor said congestive heart failure, but they have to determine the cause to know what can be done.”

“Are you in pain?”

“Not now.” His voice grew gentle. “Not with you here, sweet.”

She thought about pulling away, but then he said, “I know you’re married. I’m sorry. I had no right to say that.”

She wondered how he knew. She almost said she loved Al very much, but she had a feeling he knew that too. His eyes were so sad, especially the right eye, the smaller, damaged one. She thought of telling him that she’d read the script about his father, but then she remembered he’d never wanted her to know. There was no point in putting him through it now.

They sat in silence for a while, but it wasn’t too uncomfortable. Lucy was glad she’d come here, even before he told her that he wished more than anything he could go back and undo the terrible mistake he made when he left her.

She listened while he tried to explain why he’d never returned to California, but all the while she was thinking that no amount of
explaining would make those years any easier. Nothing could give her back what she’d already lost.

“I know you’ll never be able to forgive me,” he finally said. “I’m only saying this so you’ll understand that I will never forgive myself.”

“Well, maybe you should.” Lucy couldn’t believe what she’d just said, but the bigger surprise was she really thought this. “Jimmy is having a lot of problems, and I think maybe we have to get past our mistakes, to help him. Dorothea too. She’s going to need us to be there for her as she tries to figure out how to live her own life.”

Charles didn’t respond, but he squeezed her hand.

“I wonder if she really is in love with this doctor. She never mentioned him.”

A moment later, Jimmy walked in, looking tousled and sleepy, until he saw Lucy sitting next to Charles. That seemed to wake him right up.

“Is everything all right?” he said, too quickly. Lucy thought he was probably figuring Charles had to be drawing his last breath for her to be there.

She smiled at her son. “Your father and I were just talking about Dorothea. Do you know anything about the man she’s seeing?”

“Oh,” he said. “You mean Stephen. I know he’s nice to Thea.” Jimmy yawned and came closer to them. The next thing Lucy knew he was reaching down, hugging his father. “I’ve missed you,” he said hoarsely. “Dammit, I’ve missed you, old man.”

Lucy took this as her cue to leave, but she told Charles she’d see him again later, and she knew it was true. Even if she didn’t want to see him, she’d have to see him for their sakes. And maybe it wouldn’t be so bad for her either. Maybe the more she saw him, the less powerful he would become, until he was just a man again. Maybe the past would become nothing more than the years that would have gone by anyway, and Dorothea and Jimmy not the babies she’d lost, but the adults they would have inevitably become.

When she left the room, Dorothea and Stephen weren’t on the couch anymore. She headed down the hall, thinking she would buy
them breakfast and have a chance to get to know this man in Dorothea’s life. But when she got to the cafeteria, she found them sitting at a table in the corner, talking so intently that she decided not to interrupt. Before she turned back, she heard Stephen’s voice—serious, maybe a little sad, but unmistakably caring—as he took her daughter’s hand: “I have to tell you about a day.”

Simon & Schuster continues to be a home for me, and for that I am deeply grateful to four women: Greer Hendricks, Judith Curr, Carolyn Reidy, and my dear friend, the goddess Lisa Keim. Thanks to everyone on the Atria team, especially Suzanne O’Neill, Nancy Tonik, Melissa Quinones, Angela Stamnes, and Justin Lorber. I am also enormously appreciative of the hardworking S&S sales force, with special thanks to all the wonderful people at the warehouse at Riverside, especially Barb Roach, Liz Monaghan, Gail Hitchcock and Karyn Basso; and all those who have graciously hosted me at the trade shows, especially my buddies Terry Warnick, Tim Hepp, and George Keating.

As always, my heartfelt thanks to Megan Underwood Beatie and Lynn Goldberg of Goldberg McDuffie Communications, for their enthusiastic support. To all the booksellers who have championed my novels and all the readers who have written me with their thoughts. To the friends and family who have stood by me during
the writing of
Once Upon a Day,
including Sara Gordon, Alix Ravin, Jennifer Ammon, Mary Gay Shipley, Michaela Spampinato, Ed Ward, Elise Juska, Joe Drabyak, Kristin Callaghan, Elly Williams, Jim George, Sue Wanska, Ann Cahall; Jim, Jeff and Jamie Crotinger, and my best girls, Emily and Laurie Ward. To all the Tucker clan, especially Melladi, Patrick, and Leon O’Rourke; Andrea Hensley; Terry Jones, Jamie Freas, and Luke Pruden—I wish I could take care of you in this difficult time. In memoriam, Howard and Minnie Tucker; you will always be missed.

And finally, a huge hug of love and thanks to Melisse Shapiro, Kevin Howell, Marly Rusoff, and Scott and Miles Tucker. You have each meant more to this book and me than (my) words can say.