It was seven in the morning when they landed in Santa Barbara. Jake turned up the collar on his leather jacket against the early chill, or maybe the prying eyes of a lurking fan. He carried an attaché case in one hand and guided her by the elbow toward the parking lot with the other. They stopped next to a dark maroon Jaguar sedan. He unlocked the door and slung his case, along with her overnight bag, into the back.
“It’ll be a while before we get there,” he said with an unexpected gentleness. “Try to get some sleep.”
The cantilevered glass and concrete house looked almost the same as she remembered it. What a perfect spot for the farewell they still had to play out. “A return to the scene of the crime?” she said as he pulled up in front.
He turned off the ignition. “I don’t know that I’d exactly call it a crime, but we have some ghosts to put to rest, and this seems like the right place to do it.”
She was tired and upset, and she couldn’t help sniping at him. “Too bad you couldn’t find a root beer stand. As long as we’re dealing with the business of lost innocence…”
He ignored her.
While he took a shower, she changed into a swimsuit. After she’d wrapped herself in a warm robe, she went out to test the water in the pool. It wasn’t heated nearly enough to combat the late morning January chill, but she shed her robe anyway and dived in. She gasped from the chill and began to swim laps, but the tension coiled inside her refused to unravel. She got out, pulled an oversized bath towel around her, and lay down on one of the chaises in the sun, where she instantly fell asleep.
Hours later, a small Mexican woman with shiny black hair awakened her and announced that dinner would be ready soon if she’d like to change first. Fleur deliberately avoided the big bathroom with the sunken tub where they’d made love all those years ago, choosing a smaller guest bathroom instead. By the time she’d finished her shower and swept her hair back from her face with a set of combs, her grogginess had disappeared. She pulled on light gray slacks and an open-necked sage-green blouse. Just before she stepped out into the living room, she slipped on the necklace Jake had given her, but then she fastened the button between her breasts so he wouldn’t see she was wearing it.
He was clean-shaven and dressed almost respectably in jeans and a light blue sweater, but the lines of exhaustion around his mouth hadn’t eased. Neither of them had much appetite, and their meal was tense and silent. She couldn’t get past the feeling that everything that had passed between them was about to be resolved, and there wouldn’t be a happy ending. Loving Jake had always been a one-way street.
Eventually the housekeeper appeared with coffee. She set the pot down harder than necessary to protest the injustice that had been done to her meal. Jake dismissed her for the night and sat without moving until he heard the back door close. He pushed himself away from the table and disappeared. When he came back, he was carrying a fat manila envelope. She stared at it, and then she stared at him. “You really did finish your book.”
He shoved his hand through his hair. “I’m going out for a while. You can-if you want, you can read this.”
She took the envelope gingerly. “Are you sure? I know I pushed you into this. Maybe-”
“Don’t sell the serial rights while I’m out.” He tried to smile, but he couldn’t make it. “This one’s just for you, Flower. Nobody else.”
“What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said. I wrote it for you. Only you.”
She didn’t understand. How could he have spent the last three months destroying himself over a manuscript that only she would read? A manuscript he never intended to see published? Once again, she thought of the little girl wearing a shirt with yellow ducks. There could be only one explanation. The contents were too incriminating. She felt nauseous.
He turned away. She heard his footsteps pass through the kitchen. He went out the same back door the housekeeper had used such a short time ago. Fleur took her coffee over to the window and stared out into the lavender evening. He’d written about massacres twice, first a fictionalized version in Sunday Morning Eclipse and now the true story in the pages sealed inside the manila envelope. She thought about the two faces of Jake Koranda. The brutal face of Bird Dog Caliber and the sensitive face of the playwright who explored the human condition with so much insight. She’d always believed Bird Dog was the fake, but now she wondered if she’d gotten it all wrong just as she’d gotten so many other things wrong about him.
It was a long time before she could make herself pick up the manila envelope and pull out the manuscript. She settled into a chair near the windows, turned on the light, and began to read.
Jake dribbled toward the basketball hoop on the side of the garage and went in for a quick dunk, but the leather soles of his boots slipped on the concrete, and the ball hit the rim. For a moment he thought about going back inside for his sneakers, but he couldn’t bear to see her reading.
He tucked the basketball under his arm and wandered to the stone wall that kept the hillside in place. He wished he had a six-pack of Mexican beer, but he wasn’t going back into the house to get it. He wasn’t going anywhere close to her. He couldn’t stand watching her disillusionment for a second time.
He leaned against the rough stones. He should have come up with another way of ending things between them, a way that would have distanced him from her disgust. The pain was too sharp to bear, so he imagined the sounds of the crowd in his head. He envisioned himself in center court at the Philadelphia Spectrum, wearing a Seventy-sixers uniform with the number six on his chest. Doc.
Doc…Doc… He tried to make his mind form the image, but it wouldn’t take shape.
He stood up and carried the ball back around the garage to the hoop. He began to dribble. He was Julius Erving, a little slower than he used to be, but still a giant, still flying…Doc.
Instead of the roar of the crowd, he heard a different sort of music playing in his head.
Inside the house, the hours slipped by and the pile of discarded manuscript pages grew at Fleur’s feet. Her hair slipped from its combs, and her back got a crick from sitting in the same place for so long. As she reached the final page, she could no longer hold back her tears.
When I think of ’Nam, I think of the music that was always playing. Otis…the Stones…Wilson Pickett. Most of all, I think of Creedence Clearwater and their bad moon rising over that badass land. Creedence was playing when they loaded me on the plane in Saigon to go home, and as I filled my lungs with that last breath of monsoon-heavy, dope-steady air, I knew the bad moon had blown me away. Now, fifteen years later, it’s still got me.
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.”