The Girl On The Half Shell (45 page)

I wipe frantically at my tears. “I didn’t find Sammy. I was in the room when he did it. I was with him when he died. And it’s been really, really hard because I’ve been so afraid you hate me.”

Chapter Nineteen

Two words. I have never let them out. I’ve guarded them inside me. It is time to let them out. I can’t hold them in any longer. It is time to let them go. To heal. To confront the pain.

“I’m sorry.”

Silence.

“Did you hear me, Daddy? I’m sorry.”

I curl against my father’s chest and I can’t stop saying it: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry…

I thought I would feel better letting it out. I don’t. It is only different. A different kind of weirdness. The weirdness of letting truth into the room.

Jack and I talk through the night, until it feels like there are no words left inside either of us. I don’t know where we go from here. I don’t know if this helps. It doesn’t feel better yet. It only feels different.

Different. Not better. Not worse. Just a different kind of weirdness.

* * *

We sit on the terrace on a double chaise lounge waiting for the sunrise. Now that I’ve grabbed hold of Jack I can’t seem to let go. We’ve finally started the journey we need to finish together.

At some point last night, Alan quietly slipped from the terrace. Light is spreading across the sky and I stare up at Jack. He looks lost in his thoughts, his magnificent blue eyes locked on some indiscernible spot on the horizon. It feels good to hold my dad. It feels good to be held by him. It feels good that we are together.

I see something on his face, a fleeting emotion that is quickly lost behind the usual arrangement of his features. “What are you thinking, Daddy?”

Jack laughs softly and turns to fix his blue eyes on my blue eyes. “I was thinking of Grandpa Walter. How much he hated me.”

Mom’s dad. And yes, Grandpa Walter always hated Jack. I make a face because it would be pointless to pretend that Grandpa’s dislike wasn’t obvious. It was blatantly obvious. Jack laughs again.

“Today I don’t blame him. Scary thought, today I really get Walter.”

I make a pout and then a smile.

“I love you, Daddy.”

He drops a kiss on my golden brown hair. “I love you too, baby girl.” Jack smiles, stares at the sky and then sighs heavily again. “Our plane leaves at four, Chrissie. We should really get back to the apartment, pack up, and head out.”

I feel cold and shaky. I know what I want to do, I know what I need to do, and clarity is not always a peaceful thing.

“I’m not going home today.” I say it simply, no bullshit, no drama, no equivocation.

I feel Jack tense. “What are you telling me? You are not staying, Chrissie. You may be eighteen but you are still my little girl.”

I ease out of his hold until I am sitting, hugging my legs, my cheeks pressed on my knees. “There are things I’m not finished with here. There are things left for me to do. Things left for us both to do. I will see you in the morning at the apartment. We are going to clean out Mom’s things, and I think it is right that we do it together.”

If I didn’t know Jack, I wouldn’t see the pain whispering through his eyes. It is that subtle a thing. It makes me think of what Alan says he sees in my eyes. I can feel the tears, but I fiercely fight to hold them back.

“You’re not staying here, Chrissie.”

I kiss Jack on the cheek. “I’ll see you in the morning, Daddy. But now you need to go. Alan gave you last night. But I am keeping today for Alan.”

The look in Jack’s eyes nearly makes me crumble. I want to cry so very badly, because I think I know what I am going to do, but I don’t really, and somehow I don’t think I will know until I am there at that moment when life forces me to choose right or left.

Right or left. I stare at Jack. Is it really true that the turns we make don’t matter and that the journey will end as it should, no matter what turns we take?

I don’t think Jack is right about this. I think the turn I make will be the one I can live with, and I don’t have a clue which one that will be.

* * *

I find Alan in the bedroom sitting in a chair at the far side of the room before a window, staring out at the city below. I lean quietly back against the door and just gaze at him. He is bathed in the glow of dawn and still dressed in the clothes from last night.

The bed is exactly how I left it, his side perfectly tucked in and my side with twisted and scrunched up blankets. My side. His side. I fight back the tears. In such a short time, he’s become everything to me: the mirror I stare at myself in and the other perfect half of me.

“You OK?” he whispers.

I nod.

“Jack still here?”

I shake my head. “I sent him back to the apartment.”

Jeez, why am I standing here like a fool against the door?

“Everything OK between you and Jack?”

I shrug. “Things are OK. Sort of good, actually. We’ve still got a lot to work through.”

I wish I hadn’t said that Jack and I still have a lot to work through. For some reason I now know what I have to do. Taking in a deep breath, I move across the room until I’m sitting on my knees in the space between his legs.

There is something on his face that makes me anxious and afraid. “Are you OK?” I ask.

He runs a hand through his hair and he shrugs. “I thought I was going to go out there and just find that you’d gone. No goodbye. Just gone with Jack.”

“I could never do that.”

Suddenly he pulls me into his arms and he is kissing me, kissing me passionately, all across my face, across my tears and cheeks and lips. The fierceness hits me like a tsunami, because I can feel panic and need and love in how he kisses me.

“I love you,” I whisper against the warm flesh of his neck.

“Don’t leave,” he whispers against my lips as I am carried to the bed.

I lock my mouth to his as we frantically shed our clothes, a desperate almost frenzied passion inside of me. Alan’s breath begins to quicken in response, but he tries to whisper something.

I stop him with my kisses and the twisting urgency of my body. I don’t want to talk. I want to pull him inside of me and to feel that completeness, that total loss of emptiness that I only feel with Alan.

“Love me and be good to me, Alan,” I murmur against his skin, and I know he understands what I am asking.

He lifts me and slowly lowers me onto to him, filling me completely. I moan incoherently as I let him move and guide me.

He tilts his pelvis, guiding my hips with his hands as he moves himself in and out of me. I can’t imagine not being here with Alan. We feel so right together.

I want to consume this slowly, but I can feel my body building and building, climbing higher even as I resist it. I can’t stop myself and I explode around him. He cries out in turn.

We lie as we finish, me draped across his flesh, neither of us saying anything. He holds me and I hold him, and I realize that the tears moistening my cheeks are not only from my eyes.

“I don’t want to talk about anything,” I whisper.

“Then we won’t talk.”

I rub my cheek against his chest. I kiss the flesh above the pulse in his neck. I love him so.

* * *

You can’t hold the minutes back, no matter how hard you try to. The minutes go only faster when you do not want to let them go. I want to stay here in this perfect quiet with Alan, but Sunday morning is here and I can’t do a damn thing about it.

I roll over in Alan’s arms. I look at the clock. 9 a.m. Jack and I settled on 10 a.m. after heated negations for the ritual of packing up Lena’s things and finally saying goodbye to Mom. I have a little time. Not much. I really should get moving. I can shower after the packing. It will save me a little time now, but not enough. No amount of time will ever be enough, and I still don’t know what I am going to do after saying goodbye to Lena.

I turn my face into my pillow to hide my tears. I’m going to lose him. Alan won’t want to be with me if I go back to Santa Barbara. Oh, he’ll try. He’ll do all those be-kind-type of things. There will be the phone calls and maybe a letter or a present. But that won’t last long because the real world exists whether we want it to or not, and the real world made us over from the start.

The bed shifts under his weight as Alan turns me slowly in his arms so I can face him. My head is nestled on his arm. His eyes are black and searching.

I gaze at his beautiful face. It is emotionless, compassionately so, and I hate that he can give nothing away if he wants to. His eyes stare into mine, hardly blinking, calm and smiling, merely because he wants them to. Reaching up, I caress his cheek and run the tip of my fingers across the perfect structure of his jaw. I want to remember each line on his face exactly how he looks at this moment.

Time moves in, hovers and slips away. I can’t stop it.

I rummage on the floor for Alan’s shirt and pull it over my head. I climb from the bed. “I’ve got to go, Alan.”

I start to gather my clothes, and carelessly I shove them into my duffel, carefully avoiding Alan’s eyes. I can feel him watching and I wish he’d just say something, because the faster I get through this the sooner the pain will go away.

“Do you want me to go with you?” he asks.

I shake my head. “No. I’m meeting Jack at the apartment. We’re packing up my mother’s things today.”

Alan sits up. A torturous and heavy pause in the room hits me like a punch. “And then?”

“I catch a plane and go home to Santa Barbara.”

More heavy silence. The lump in my throat is strangling and I can’t look at him because if I do I don’t know what I will do.

“You can’t be serious, Chrissie. You’re not leaving.”

The room is filled with Alan’s panic and his need. It moves across my flesh like a chilled nightwalker.

“I have to go, Alan. I’m not ready to be everything you want me to be.”

“I don’t want you to be anything other than you are,” he whispers, his voice raw. He crosses the room and stops my hands in their frantic efforts of packing. “You’re not leaving, Chrissie.” His thumb traces my lower lip. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” I whisper, almost unable to push the words out of me. “But I have to go home.”

I step away from him and gather my clothes to wear. I lift his shirt to my face and breathe it in deeply. “Can I keep this shirt?”

“Why?”

“I love the smell of you. I want to smell you until I can’t anymore. In a perfect movie lovers would never end they would slowly fade away. I want to smell you until I can’t smell you anymore.”

He closes his eyes. Oh shit, that was a really shitty thing to say, but I didn’t mean it and I wish I hadn’t said it.

“You can keep the fucking shirt, Chrissie.”

My scalp prickles as every nerve in my body is suddenly blasted by a chill. The earth falls away beneath me. Oh no, this is not how I want this to go between us. What have I done? I don’t want us to part angry.

Alan pulls on his jeans and crosses the room to light a cigarette. Finally, he runs a hand through his hair and doesn’t look at me. “I’m sorry. You may have the shirt, Chrissie. My reaction to the shirt thing has nothing to do with you. It is an enormous irritant. The shirt thing. But I shouldn’t be rude to you. Sorry.”

My eyes open to their roundest and it takes everything I have not to cry. That was unkind, Alan. Why do you have to be such a shit at times? A shit who lets me know that girls taking souvenirs after climbing from your bed is a frequent event; a shit who on purpose reduces me to meaningless, when my words were only an accident; a shit because…

“You can stay, Chrissie. You can stay with me in New York. We can get married. Whatever you want. I’ll quit now before the tour starts. I don’t want you to leave.”

I have to get out of the room quickly. Anymore and I’m going to crumble and stay. “I can’t stay, Alan. And you don’t really want to marry me.”

That spikes his anger. “Don’t tell me what I want.”

Oh jeez, another stupid blunder. I’m going to ruin us if I don’t get out of here quickly. I sink my teeth into my lower lip and continue to dress. The words clog in my throat and they are too painful to speak. I hear them in my head: Oh Alan, I’ve got my own shit to fix.

“I can’t stay,” I repeat.

“If you leave we are over.”

Oh god, I see it and I don’t want to. Alan loves me, but right now Alan loving me is more a thing about him than me. He doesn’t want me to leave because he’s afraid to be alone. That’s the fear and desperation I see in his eyes and it is the wrong reason to stay.

We both have so much messed up shit we need to work through. It would be wrong for us both if I stayed. But I don’t remember me before Alan and I don’t know if I really want to.

I reach for my purse. He flinches as though I hit him.

“At least let me take you home,” he says in despair.

“No. I think I want to walk today. Can you have Colin deliver my things to the apartment?”

“You can’t walk home, Chrissie. There are at least two dozen photographers at the curb waiting to pounce on you. Don’t be unreasonable about this.”

How could I have forgotten about the tabloids?

“Then I’ll go with Colin alone. Can you call him for me? I want to go to the garage alone.”

I rush quickly from the bedroom. I head for the foyer. I listen. I am so relieved that Alan doesn’t follow me. I press the elevator button and the doors open. I couldn’t leave if he followed me, but that he didn’t really hurts me.

I lean back into the icy metal wall and stare at the square mirror images of myself. Oh, please doors close! Close quickly! Then I realize I haven’t pushed the garage button. I hit it and I am numb. The metal moves, taking me away.

Oh god—I’ve left him
. Alan Manzone asked me to marry him and I’ve walked away. The only guy I’ve ever loved. The only guy who will ever understand me. The second the door slammed closed I knew it with certainty: Alan is the love of my life. Crippling pain slices through me and I am not at all sure I’ve made the right decision.

The love of my life…and I walked away. What have I done? The pain is indescribable, but I can’t surrender to my grief. I’ve got to pack up my mother’s things with Jack, catch a plane, and somehow return to Santa Barbara and fix my perfectly fucked up life.