Sleeping Beauty (86 page)

“I couldn't tell anyone,” she said. “I let him do it!” And then the words rushed out, like cord unwinding from a tightly wound ball that had been embedded inside her, its coarseness chafing a sore that never healed. “I was so ashamed, and angry at myself for being weak and . . . bad. He told me I'd led him on and I believed him because why else would he have started it? I felt dirty and sick and ashamed, but I let him do it. Over and over and over. I've tried to understand that—whenever I let myself think about it or I can't avoid it—how I could let him do it, week after week, while I went on with the rest of my life and no one guessed. He came and went and did what he wanted, and I did what he wanted . . . except for responding; I never did that. He hated it; he hated me for not feeling anything. I thought it was like a marriage, what I thought a marriage was like, with one person belonging to another. No, that's not right. I never felt that I belonged to him. It was as if my body wasn't mine, it was his, and the more he used it the more it became his and the less I had any control over what happened to it. He had the control. I had my thoughts and my feelings, they were never his, but he decided what would be done to my body. He told me he'd kill me if I told anyone. He said they wouldn't believe me anyway, and I believed him. He was a grown man, married, he had a child, he worked with my grandfather in our family company, and
my grandfather trusted him. And people admired him. He seemed to walk through life with everybody clearing a path for him, and if there were things or people in the way, they got knocked down and nobody paid much attention. I thought he was invulnerable. I was thirteen and not especially well behaved and my family was always telling me what I was doing wrong.”

Anne paused and slowly loosened her clenched fingers from the rail. “It went on for two years.” She heard Josh draw in a sharp breath. “And then one day I told them. It was my fifteenth birthday; we were at dinner, and I told my grandfather, with all of them listening. I can't remember why I finally did it; I just remember the words coming out and the looks on their faces. Poor Nina and William tried to pretend I hadn't said anything, and Marian tried to put everything off until another day, and Vince and Rita called me a liar. And my father . . . chose . . . Vince. He didn't believe me. My grandfather kept asking me to tell them more, to tell the truth. He wasn't willing to believe he'd heard it the first time. I think he was willing to believe me if I pushed it, but at the time all I saw was that he seemed to be hoping I wouldn't force him to. No one wanted to believe it; it made them too uncomfortable. I left home that night.”

Josh could not hold back any longer. He jumped up and took Anne in his arms. Reflexively, she stiffened. “Wait—” she began. But then something inside her let go, and her body seemed to melt against his. She began to cry. In Josh's arms, her forehead against his shoulder, she sobbed with the despair of the child she had been, and the frozen pain of the woman she had become.

Josh held her, his cheek resting on her hair, one hand cradling her face as if sheltering her from a storm. They stood that way for a long time. Anne's sobs subsided. She drew a few shuddering breaths and then breathed quietly, leaning against Josh, thinking nothing at all. “Oh,” she said at last, and pulled back. “Your jacket . . .”

They both gazed at the soaked lapel of his blazer. “A deluge,” Josh said lightly. “Not serious; in fact, beneficial.”

He took off the jacket and draped it over the railing, then put his arms around Anne again. And as he held her close, she brought her arms up, slowly, and held them around his waist. He had imagined the feel of her slender bones beneath his hands so many times that it was almost familiar, but still, he felt as if he had walked into a dream and was not sure what was substance and what was hope.

“You knew,” Anne said, her voice muffled. “Gail and Leo told you.”

“No,” he said quickly. He held her away so he could look at her. “They did not tell me; I told you that. But Anne, the information was there, especially for someone who spends his life putting pieces of information together. I guessed, and didn't want to believe it, but then I did. I knew Vince; not well, but well enough.”

“So did my family. But they were willing to turn away and leave me with the shame of—” Her eyes filled with tears again. “Oh, God, it never stops. I thought when I told you—”

“Listen to me,” Josh said. He put his hands on her arms and his eyes held hers. “Whose shame is it?”

She frowned. “What?”

“You keep saying you were ashamed, you are ashamed, you live with the shame of it. But why should it be yours? He's the one who did it. The ugliness is his, the monstrousness is his—you knew that; you called him a monster—the shame is his. You have none; you've never had any. Vince has, but not you. Anne, you have nothing to be ashamed of. You've never had anything to be ashamed of.”

Anne was still frowning. Why had she never said that to herself? It sounded so simple . . . and if it were true . . . But why wouldn't it be true? In Josh's deep, matter-of-fact voice, it sounded obvious, something she should have recognized years ago. “I don't know,” she said slowly.

“You do. You do know. You were too young to see it when you left home; you'd been terrorized for too long. You believed what he told you, that it was your fault, and you thought you'd been tainted by being with him so that you
weren't a good girl anymore; you weren't lovable. None of that was true, but somehow, even under all your professionalism, you never stopped being frightened, so distance didn't help you see what had happened to you. You let shame become a part of you, like a splinter that never worked its way out. But it isn't part of you, Anne; it was put in you by others, and by your own fears and helplessness, and you can pull it out.”

Anne smiled faintly. “So simple.”

“It may not be. But you can do it. You've done a lot that was harder.”

“Maybe.” She felt the strength of Josh's hands on her arms, and after a few minutes she began to feel something else, a kind of lightness within her that she did not recognize. It made everything seem new, as if she stood on a mountain trail and the sun, shining at a different angle, showed the landscape as she had not seen it before. She felt she was waiting for something, without fear. And she knew she was beginning to believe him.

The lights of Edfu had gone out; the tour boats were dark. It was almost midnight. The steward returned with a fresh pot of coffee and left, pushing the dinner table before him as he went out. The door swung shut behind him.

Josh held Anne to him again, his cheek resting on her hair. Oh, she thought, surprised because nothing in her shrank from his touch. She rested against him, her lips feeling his heartbeat through the fine cotton of his shirt. It was a good place to be, and she let lightness fill her, and buoyancy, and in a minute she recognized that what she felt was hope.

She raised her head to look at him. And when he saw her eyes, he bent to kiss her, his mouth meeting hers with an easy naturalness that took him by surprise. He had not known how it would happen that she would be able to accept him without being trapped in the past. If she had passed that hurdle, they could—

But Anne's muscles had tightened and a silent scream rose in her throat. A mouth covering hers, smothering her, robbing her of herself. . . . She twisted away, yanking free of
Josh, and stepped backward, her teeth clenched to hold back the scream. She was trembling so violently she could barely stand. She looked at the deck; she could not look at Josh.

“It's too late.” The words were wrenched from her. “I'm sorry, Josh; I'm sorry; it's too late.” He put his arm around her and she shied away, feeling she was crumbling inside. “Oh, God, why can't I be free of this?”

“You will,” Josh said firmly. He was filled with doubts, and for the first time felt the beginnings of despair, but he did not let Anne see it. He kept his voice firm, and his hand was firmly around her arm as he ignored the sag of her body and led her back to the love seat. “You will because we're going to make it happen. There's a lot more involved than our making love; there's a life at stake; the life we're going to make together. I want us to get married and have children and build something a lot more solid than anything either of us has ever had. And that's worth fighting for.”

“We should have met when we were ten,” she said seriously. “We could have grown up together and nothing would have stood between us.”

“Nothing stands between us now that we can't deal with,” Josh said quietly. “Listen to me. Stop being a lawyer who always analyzes, and a woman who relies on her wits and her intelligence; trust your emotions for a change, and just listen. I love you, Anne. I love you for what you are and what you were, the things you do now and the things that happened to you a long time ago. I love all of you, not just the prettiest parts or the easiest parts.” He laid his hand along her cheek. “Dearest, lovely Anne. There's so much I want to do for you. But I want you to do for me, too. I want us to be to each other everything we've always thought we could be alone. We've been alone long enough; you've been busy running away from the past and I've been hanging out in it, and now we're done with that. We're going to make a life together, and a life isn't a place or a time—it's not a law firm or an apartment guarded by a doorman or thousands of years of history—it's someone, or more than someone, a whole family if we're lucky, to welcome us and make a space for us to nest. It's having someone who will always greet us
with open arms. It's a door that will always be open to us. I want that from you. And I want to give that to you, so you'll never have to shut doors inside yourself again.”

Anne was concentrating on his voice, deep and very close. At first she had hung on each word; then the words had blended together and wrapped themselves around her like the music of an orchestra that soars until it seems to come from within each listener. They became part of her; they flowed through her. She was buoyed by the warmth and rhythm of his voice, and by the steady touch of his hand along her face. She closed her eyes and listened.

“There are so many things I want us to do together,” he said. “Places to see together, even if we've seen them separately, books to read together, plays to see, people to meet. We'll finish the Tamarack house together and spend a lot of time there. We'll hike our favorite trails and we'll discover new ones together; we'll go skiing and bicycling and sailing, and I've never gone fishing, but maybe we'll do that, too. We have to start right away; there's so much to do.” He went on, his voice a murmur, talking about the home they would make together in Los Angeles, the gardens and the home they would make together in Tamarack, the hours they would spend together. He talked about their separate work, which would always fill a big part of their lives, and the curiosities and wonders and beauties of the world. “And we'll share them. I haven't wanted to share most of them with anyone until now, but at this minute I can't think of anything I want to experience alone.”

Casually, he slipped his arm around her. It was like an extension of his voice, warm and embracing, and without thinking about it, without even opening her eyes, Anne settled herself into it, resting easily against him.

“There's a trip I want us to take very soon, from Geneva to Paris,” Josh said. His voice was like a reverie now, and Anne felt herself become part of his dream. “Just outside Geneva, we drive through a spectacular series of canyons at the edge of the Jura Mountains. We can do it on a fine day or we can wait until there's a snowstorm. It's like a dream, then: clouds swirl from the depths of the canyons to high
above us, and all around, the rock formations are a magical silver and black that seem to float in the mist.”

He paused. There was no sound. Their boat was like a softly lit room in the vast blackness of the desert and the Nile. Clusters of pale stars winked in a hazy sky; the moon hovered over the town as if caught by a minaret. Anne nestled in the strong clasp of Josh's arm. And then she felt his long fingers stroking her hair and the side of her face, at first very softly, then more firmly. She opened her eyes, but then she closed them again and gave herself up to those slow, rhythmic strokes, like the caress of warm rain. “Then the road levels out,” Josh said in that even murmur that seemed to flow from the warmth of his fingers, “and we drive through wine country, low rolling hills, dark green fading to pale green and then blue-gray at the horizon, with small houses clustered like flocks of white birds that came to rest in the middle of the fields.”

Anne saw it in her mind. She felt the timeless serenity of it as she felt the peacefulness of the place where they sat, the small, private boat, the quiet Nile so still beneath them, the slumbering town on the shore. And Josh, steady and protective, holding her close, his hand slowly caressing her forehead, the smooth skin beside her eye, her high cheekbone and the faint hollow below it, and the long line of her neck. From his fingertips, warmth spread through her body like wine and honey; she felt languorous and content.

He was talking about other places, and Anne saw the scenes he described. She could feel the rough stone of ancient monuments beneath her palms, she breathed the fragrance of wild thyme and mint and oregano, and she felt the heat of the sun beat upon them as they walked together through fields of wildflowers that bowed before them as they passed. They were so close in that vision, and the world pressed in upon them with such blazing splendor, that Anne felt herself open to it. The sights and sounds and scents of Egypt that had swept her up combined now with those visions of other places, and she felt a surge of wanting. She remembered wanting like this on their hike to the lake, but this was more, so much more. She felt open to everything
there was to discover. And she felt herself open to Josh, wanting more of him than she had ever known.