On a Night Like This (7 page)

“You’re kidding!
Pescadero
?”

“You saw it?” Blair asked, looking back at Amanda, who had stopped in her tracks, dropped her jaw and was staring bug-eyed at her mother.

“Everyone saw it.
Pescadero
? We just studied
Pescadero
in my film class this semester. Mom, you know the guy who made
Pescadero
?”

“Wrote it. Keep walking. You’re confusing the dog.”

“How do you know him? This is his dog? This is
Pescadero
’s dog?”

“Luke’s dog. What is
Pescadero
anyway?”

“It’s named for the town on the coast. How do you know this guy?”

“Went to school with him. In the good old awful days. He was one of those good old awful boys.”

“And he just appeared? At your doorstep? With Sweetpea?”

“No, he called. The school thought I was lost. He said he’d find me.”

“Mom. Stop. Look at me. This is amazing. If Luke Bellingham wrote
Pescadero
then he’s, like, famous. And we’re walking his dog?”

“Yeah,” Blair said, suddenly pleased. “We’re walking his dog. We should be famous. The famous dog walkers of the famous dog of the famous man.”

“So why was he sorry?” Amanda asked, rolling her eyes. It was a move she had perfected by the time she was seven. Blair had always known her daughter would be wiser than she was in so many ways.

Blair closed her eyes. She stopped walking and stood still, the world spinning around inside her head.
Tell Amanda. You’ve always been honest with her.
But not about something like this. When she opened her eyes, the world was still spinning.

“Sit down,” she said, taking in great gulps of ocean air.

“Here?” Amanda asked.

“Here.” Blair sat on the sand at the edge of the surf. Sweetpea fell into a heap at her feet. Reluctantly Amanda joined them.

People walked by; dogs sniffed Sweetpea and moved on; the clouds pulled past them in the sky. Blair was quiet. Amanda waited. Sweetpea perched her head on her paw, gazing at Blair adoringly.

“Do you think the dog speaks English?” Blair asked. “Like she’ll report back to Mr. Hollywood everything we say?”

“Mom.”

“I’m sick,” Blair said finally. “I had a mole removed from my back and it might be cancer. It is cancer. They already did the tests. I’m screwed. We’re screwed.”

Amanda looked at her mother as if she were speaking a foreign language, one that she was inventing on the spot. So Blair reached out to her, and Amanda smacked Blair’s arm away, hard enough to hurt.

“Amanda!” Blair said, rubbing her arm.

“There are treatments. Right? Like chemo and radiation and all that stuff. Right? It’s just hell for a while and you lose your hair and then everything’s fine. Right?” Amanda’s voice was angry, defiant.

“Maybe. Please, baby. Let me hold you.” Her daughter looked small suddenly, too small to be sitting in such a huge expanse of space—sand and sky and sea, dog and mother and so many words.

“What’s maybe? Tell me what that means.”

“It means that they don’t know. Or they don’t like it. This is one of the bad ones, the ones they’re still trying to lick. Before it licks me.”

And miraculously, Sweetpea got up, moved over to Amanda and plopped down again, this time with her head in Amanda’s lap. Amanda fell over the dog and Blair heard sounds coming from one of them, small and weak sounds.

“My baby,” Blair said, and her heart broke, hard and fast enough to feel it like a rupture in her chest, making her bend over, gasping for breath.

Amanda looked up and whispered, “Mom,” and Blair moved over to pull her daughter into her arms. They cried the same way, the way they always had, taking big heaving gasps of breath with each sob. The dog buried her head between them.

When Blair’s cries subsided, she smoothed Amanda’s hair back from her face, wiped her face with her hand.

“We’ll get through this,” Blair said. “We’ll be OK. We’ll fight it, right? We’re good at that. We’ll fight the damn thing.”

Amanda looked at Blair. “Don’t lie to me about any of this. OK? I’m not a baby. I want to know.”

Blair nodded. “You’re not a baby, sweetheart. I know that.” But she felt like she was still lying, promising her daughter a fight when the doctor had said there were no weapons to use against this monster.

Amanda looked around. “We’re making a scene.”

“Let’s go. The dog is slobbering all over me.”

They stood and headed back toward Casey’s car. The air around Blair seemed changed somehow—it was now so cold that it burned her skin.

“Do you hurt? I mean, are you in pain?” Amanda asked quietly.

“No,” Blair told her honestly. “I’m tired a lot. That’s all. So, I don’t really believe it, you know. Even now, walking on the beach, telling my daughter that I’ve got cancer, I think Luke Bellingham’s making a movie about someone else’s life, or that I’m in someone else’s nightmare. Because none of it feels true. So, I’m not telling you lies; I’m just trying to catch up to the truth myself.”

Amanda put her arm around her mother and pulled her close. They walked like that, quietly, until they reached the car and headed home.

Luke Bellingham was sitting on the front step of their cottage. He stood when they approached, then got knocked down by a racing Sweetpea. He scrambled to stand up again and offered Amanda his hand.

“Luke Bellingham,” he said.

“I know,” she said, shaking his hand. “I like your dog.”

“Thanks. You look like your mother did when she was your age.”

Blair watched the scene: handsome man wowing vulnerable girl, suitor wooing girlfriend’s daughter, golden boy/man reminding the lost soul what she never had and never would have.

“You have no idea what I looked like in high school,” Blair interrupted. “You never even saw me in high school. The other night you thought I was blond and tall. Today you think I was a redhead. And even if we like your dog, we don’t need you coming around our house like you’re trying to renew an old relationship. Well, that old relationship never existed.”

Blair stormed past Luke and stomped up the stairs to the cottage. She slammed the door behind her.

And then she fell onto the couch under the front window and buried her head in her hands.
I’m dying,
she thought.
I just told my daughter I’m dying.

By the time Blair dressed for work—in her white chef’s jacket and checked pants, wearing her beloved red high-top sneakers—Amanda was off to her job at the café, and Luke and Sweetpea were long gone.
Back to the woods,
she hoped.
Wherever that is.
Montana? Wyoming? Far away from the Haight and her heart. Far away from Amanda, who had gone gaga at first glimpse. Who was angry at her mother for pissing off Mr. Hollywood. Easier than being angry at her mother for dying.

Blair heard the phone ring, let the answering machine pick up, didn’t even wait for the message.
I’m outta here,
she thought, glad to be going to work, where she was always too busy to think.

She walked the ten blocks to the restaurant, early enough to be the first one there. Leon, the pastry chef, had left a note along with the pies and cakes he had created that day:
Blair, it doesn’t matter that I’m nineteen. It only matters that I’m crazy about you. Yours, Leon.

Leon had never met Blair. He came in the morning, early, and spent hours concocting his delicacies for the evening dessert. He left hours before Blair arrived and somehow he had begun the tradition of leaving her love notes with his raspberry tarts and his lemon soufflés. Blair wrote back every so often, leaving her notes in the bin of flour, telling him all the reasons he shouldn’t love her.

Men kept inventing her. Leon and Luke.

She started her work routine, setting up the materials for her sauces and side dishes, checking the fish and meat delivery, putting everything in place for the fun and games to begin.

She was going to try something new today—a tuna tartare, too fancy for this little café, but she had seen the recipe in
Gourmet,
imagined its taste in her mouth, adapted the recipe for something spicier. And Daniel had OK’d the order for sashimi-grade ahi with the promise that she give him the first plate.

She found the tuna, wrapped and marked:
For Blair: Make it worth it. Daniel.
She smiled—Daniel loved what he had created, a food maniac who lay in bed at night dreaming up new versions of the same old thing. Funny, she hadn’t thought about food for a while now. Since her last doctor’s appointment? Or had she lost her appetite somewhere along the way and not stopped to notice? She was certainly losing weight—she had cinched her belt tighter today just to keep up her pants.

She unwrapped the tuna and smiled—it was beautiful, worth eating raw, worth wowing Daniel. Which was secretly still her ambition—to make the guy proud of her. She cleared her work space and gathered together the herbs and spices she’d use for the dish. She turned around to find her cleaver in its drawer behind her, and the room seemed to close in on her, space becoming narrower and tighter, light disappearing from the edges of her vision until her vision itself was gone and then she wasn’t standing anymore. She was curled on her side on the cold tile floor and then suddenly her arms and legs were thrashing about, on their own, as if they weren’t connected to her body at all. Her torso jerked forward and down, so that her head smacked hard on the tiles. She felt her legs convulse, kicking at something that wasn’t there, her arms pumping the air as if fighting with someone. And then she blacked out.

When she came to, without any notion of how much time had passed, she thought first about the tuna, unwrapped, unrefrigerated, unmarinated.
Daniel will kill me.
And finally she realized she must be on her way to her own self-made death, here on the floor, chilled and numb. She knew she was wet, that she had peed and was lying in her own puddle. She was suddenly a sick woman, a dying woman, a woman who passes out in the middle of the day while trying to make tuna tartare.

She couldn’t get up. Her legs were numb and her arms were weak. She tried calling out, but her mouth was dry and parched. If any time had passed, why hadn’t Daniel arrived? And then she shuddered at the thought of Daniel finding her—he was so clean, so fussy, so elegant—he would hate the messiness of this spillage on his floor.

So she pulled herself across the floor to the edge of the counter and worked her arms up one of the cabinets until she could reach the telephone cord and then yanked at it, miserable, swatting and missing. Before she fell back to the floor, she tried once more and this time caught the cord and pulled the phone with her to the floor. It toppled over her, banging hard against her shoulder, then clattered to the floor. She picked it up. And then thought:
Who do I call?

Amanda was at the café—she didn’t want to call and scare her. She couldn’t call Daniel, didn’t want to be here when Daniel arrived. She didn’t want to be anywhere but home, in her bed. Casey! She dialed his number, fumbling the phone and picking it up in time to hear his recording: “You know what to do and when to do it.” She hung up. She didn’t have friends the way other women had friends. She had her daughter, her boss and a hippie landlord.

She could call 911. She could tell them to come find her under the rotting tuna. But as much as she hated dying, she hated dramatic ambulance-wailing scenes.

Luke. Luke Bellingham, Hollywood star. Savior of dying women. She didn’t need to fall in love with him after he saved her. She just needed a ride to the hospital.

She dialed information. Luke Bellingham. He’d be unlisted, she was sure. But the operator was telling her his number and she was dialing it with the one hand that still seemed to be working.

“Hello?”

“Luke. It’s me. Blair.”

She stopped to catch her breath and then remembered the last time they had talked, when she told him to disappear forever.

“Don’t say anything,” she said. “I need your help.”

“You OK?”

“No. I’m on the floor. At the restaurant. Where I work. I fell. Or passed out.”

“Give me the address. I’ll be there.”

She didn’t remember the ride to the hospital or the first few hours of doctors and tests and rolling around on gurneys through white-tiled hallways. When she woke up, Luke was sitting in a chair beside her hospital bed. He had a magazine in his lap, but he wasn’t reading it. He was watching her.

Blair licked her lips, trying for moisture, which didn’t seem to come. Luke stood up and reached for a glass by her bedside. He placed a straw in her lips and she sipped at the cool water.

“Amanda,” she finally whispered.

“I left a message on the door of the cottage,” Luke said. “I told her to call my cell phone.”

“Thank you,” Blair whispered, and she knew she was crying, though she wasn’t making any sound.

Luke sat on the bed at her side.

“Who can I call?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Your friends. Boyfriend. Who can take care of you?”

Blair shook her head, fighting back more tears. Luke waited, watching her. He put his hand on her shoulder and she closed her eyes.

“Call Daniel,” she finally said. “At the restaurant. My boss. Tell him what happened.”

“Will he come here?” Luke asked gently.

Again Blair shook her head. “I don’t want him here.”

She felt Luke’s hand on her cheek.

“You shouldn’t be alone,” he said.

“I know,” Blair said, moving away from him, turning her body away from him in her bed. “I have my daughter.”

“I can help,” Luke said.

She didn’t say anything. She stared at the curtain in the room, separating her from some other sick person, maybe another dying person. She heard voices, muffled voices, from behind the curtain. Someone was crying. She closed her eyes, wishing herself anywhere else but here.

“Why would you help?” Blair asked gently.

“I don’t know,” Luke said. “Maybe I really have been in the woods too long.”

Blair opened her eyes and turned toward him. She waited—she could see that he was working something through his mind and that he still had more to say.