Ghost Writer (Raven Maxim Book 1) (46 page)

Emerald stirred near him. She blinked her eyes and pulled the sheets up, covering her exposed breasts.

“Mmmm,” she moaned, a sleepy smile on her face as she rubbed her eye in an attempt to cure an itch. “I think I could sleep forever.” She chuckled. “So tired…”

“Did I wake you?” He leaned over and kissed her neck, then settled back against the headboard.

“No.” She shook her head and yawned. “I woke up on my own. I think my arm had fallen asleep.” She glanced at the large book across his lap. “What do you have there?” She pointed to it and stretched, then sat up, leaning against the headboard.

“The book of love,” he teased. “I’ve read it cover to cover. That’s how I was able to seduce you.” He winked at her. Light, airy laughter poured from her mouth. “Nah, it’s an old photo album…found it among some stuff I’d packed away when I cleared out my father’s house after he’d had the heart attack that took him outta here. I’d shoved it in my old attic with the kids’ broken toys that I promised to fix and other odds and ends, then found it again the other day. Tried to look at it, but kept finding excuses to not really pay it much attention.”

“Why’s that?” She brushed a few renegade strands of hair back from her face.

“ ’Cause I don’t want to see him.”

They were quiet for a while, and the chill in the room was squelched with warmth from her touch. Slowly, she caressed up and down his arm. The hairs along his skin swayed to her gentleness.

“What if we looked at it together?”

“Like emotional support?” He threw her a look, curving his lips in a nervous smile.

“Yeah.” She nodded. “Something like that.”

He caught a whiff of her sweet perfume when she reached over to check out the book on his thigh. He stared down at the black and white stained photo of his grandfather in his army uniform. “Who’s that?”

“Norman… my grandfather.”

“You have his eyes.”

He nodded in agreement, then flipped the page. There was a photo of Norman, his wife, and their five children. Sloan’s father had been the second youngest. They were all dressed in their Sunday best; the three boys with dark hair slicked back from their broad foreheads, all of their features similar, as if they’d been produced in some doll factory. The two girls, one brunette and one blonde, sat on two small pedestal chairs, their long, frilly white dresses flowing perfectly around their small bodies. All of the children looked rather solemn. Matter of the fact, the entire family did.

“Everyone is dressed so nicely, but looks so sad.” Once again, he and his Love were on the same wavelength, floating along the same vibe.

“Yeah, they do look sad. I liked Norman. He was kinda mean though, but not as mean as my father. He actually seemed to like me. He’d take me out sometimes to a restaurant he liked… I forget what it was called.” He absently massaged his stiff neck. “They served sky-high double-deckers, the bread toasted and the meat sliced thin and juicy. I loved the big portions of fried potatoes sprinkled with salt, vinegar, and pepper, and they had sodas so fizzy, they almost burned goin’ down… so good. Sometimes he’d take me and my brothers to the movies, or out to get a cone, but that restaurant, well…” He grinned as the memories became clearer. “That was just for me and him. He told me I was his favorite grandkid.” That detail had been lost in the recesses of his mind until right that moment.

“Maybe he told all of the grandchildren that.” Emerald took hold of his arm and gave a gentle squeeze.

“Yeah, I hope so, and I kinda don’t hope so.” She seemed to understand what he said. “I think my father was jealous of how he treated me, how he treated all of us, actually. My sister moved out pretty early on but even when she was there, Norman never had much to do with ’er. Matter of fact, he seemed to avoid women altogether… Strange.” Indeed, Norman would barely speak to Grandma when she was alive. Sloan’s father had said he barely dealt with his own daughters, too, but he’d curse out and hit the boys. He shrugged.
I guess his abusive ways had gender bias…

He turned another page, and another. His family looked happy in some of the photos, but in most, they did not. He couldn’t shake that observation and wondered why he’d never noticed it before. He’d looked at that photo album when he was a teenager, but this didn’t seem to register back then. Yet, right then, the pieces of the puzzle began to fit and adhere to one another like static electricity.

“Oh, she’s pretty.” Emerald pointed down at a sizeable black and white headshot of a woman with dark, shoulder length, wavy hair, a small face with high cheek bones, large light eyes and thick lashes. “She looks like Ella Raines… you know, that movie star from the 1940’s.”

“She was in the movie, ‘Tall in the Saddle.”

“Yes!”

“Yeah, I can see the resemblance. That’s my mother…”

She looked back and forth between him and the picture.

“Interesting you would say she looks like Ella Raines,” he said. “That was one of my father’s favorite movies. He was a big John Wayne movie fan, and loved westerns, too. I never thought about that, you know, them looking alike, but you’re right, they favored. I wonder if he’d realized that when he met her…”

“How old were you when she left?”

“Mmmm, I’d say about seven, going on eight.”

“You want to talk about it?” She leaned in closer, her soft hair caressing his jawbone as her energy circled around him, giving him comfort in shark-infested emotional waters. Emerald was a life jacket and a promise for rescue; he just hoped it would all work out before the sharks got a whiff of his spilled blood.

“I don’t know the answer to that question.”

“I can understand that… can accept that.”

“Your mother left you, too… You know how I felt.” He refused to look at her; instead, he simply stared into his mother’s eyes.

“I do know how you feel. It’s confusing. It’s… it’s upsetting,” Emerald pressed her thumb into her palm, digging into that area, massaging up and down. He didn’t miss the slight quake from her body, the way her nerves unraveled as she relived her own pain to help him with his own. “And you feel like whatever answers you’ve received, nothing said to you is good enough because no explanation makes the rejection fully go away. There’s a lot of pain, a hell of a lot.”

He leaned away from her, grabbed a fresh cigarette and lit it. After a moment or two, he smiled through the smoky haze he’d created. “That’s right… that’s a good way to describe it.”

“Sloan, society tells us the woman is supposed to stay, be the nurturer and raise the children. Society tells us that single parent households run by women are common, and the opposite, what you and I had, is strange. That makes you feel a little abnormal… or at least I did. It was as if you didn’t have enough to deal with, so that was added to the mix, like an extra slap in the face in case the first two hundred didn’t sting enough… And kids can be cruel.”

He gave her hand a gentle tap before setting his cigarette into the ashtray. “Is it too early to have a cocktail?” His glance was met with a tilted grin.

“Yes, but if you stuck to the rules all the time, you wouldn’t be where you are in life.”

“‘And it was Emerald St. Claire that drove me into alcoholism…’ That’s what I’ll say in an interview when I explain the craziness of my next book release.”

The woman cracked up, banging her head into the headboard, teeth showing in a full on grin that made him proud. He flicked on the radio, catching Chris Rea serenading, “Fool If You Think It’s Over.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time I was driven to drink.” He took another toke of his cigarette, laid it down, and turned the pages of the album. One after another, he scanned the pictures of him and his family. In one, his sister lay on their living room floor with a checkerboard in front of her. Another showed his mother looking at least six months pregnant. There were several shots of his father, who looked big and intimidating in all of them, until he’d gotten ill. Then, the big man started to look broken down like a tree branch that had been struck by lightning. And that delighted Sloan.

“I wrote a book that was never published.” He gingerly held his cigarette in one hand and turned the pages with the other. Cigarette smoke surrounded them. Emerald wrapped her arms around him and nestled her head on his chest.

“What was it about?”

“Clones. A crazy scientist made clones of Hitler and Stalin, brought them back to life, and had them conduct a series of hate crimes against humanity.”

“I could see why you backed away from that getting into the public’s hands. Not exactly politically correct banter,” Emerald jested.

“Well, it wasn’t exactly as bad as it sounds. See, it was the scientist’s attempt to show people the ugliness of racism in society. Her act of placing these people in modern day civilization reflected this intention, but her plan backfired because the monsters ended up murdering hundreds of people and then killed her, too, once she set out to destroy them.”

“Ahhhh, I should’ve known there was some sort of twist…and I like that the scientist was a woman. You don’t see that every day.”

“Yeah, that’s how I envisioned it. I might submit it to be published… I might just do that after all.”

“Interesting discussion but this was kinda out of the blue. What made you bring that up in the middle of showing me photos of your family?”

“Because it coincided… it has everything to do with my mother…” Emerald scanned his face with a searching, questioning gaze. “See,” he said, taking another toke of his cigarette. “As a kid, I had a real vivid imagination. I’d make up stories, I lied a lot, too.” He chuckled. “I would try to get the attention I wasn’t gettin’ at home by making up tales. Anyway, I saw this movie called, ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’ I was sitting there watching the old classic, the first one, in my dorm room. I rarely thought about my mother, Emerald, so it was kinda strange for me to do so, but I was high at the time, I guess my inhabitations were lowered…”

He paused, gathering his thoughts. “Anyway, I was watchin’ it, and thought, ‘What if someone took over my mother’s body, a body snatcher, some clone scientist or an alien and made her do bad things…”

“Like leave her family.”

“Yeah,” he said, blowing out rings of smoke. “Like leave ’er family. And then I thought, what if both of my parents were clones of bad people and living out some fucked up legacy… a plot to ruin the American first family, take over the country, even the world? I was sitting there thinking that would explain why I had such a shitty dad; why my sister ran off; why my brothers, especially Benjamin, is such a jackass; and why I’ve been so unwilling to believe what plays out right in front of me, and I’ve been like that for most of my life. Like… I’d rather believe in the Loch Ness Monster than in a woman birthing four kids and dashing off. I’d rather write stories about three-legged people with titanium-plated brains than face the truth that human beings are fucked up more times than not. I was lying to myself. The truth wasn’t what I wanted… I needed the lie.”

“What was the lie, Sloan?” Emerald kissed the side of his face, kept her eye on him for a moment, then returned her attention to the gorgeous headshot of his mother. Sloan looked down at it, his eyes welling with tears.

“The lie was that…sometimes shit just happens and you never find out why. You never get an ending. You’re just left out there, dangling… and it hurts… because you want answers. You never told your ex-wife or grandkids that you had a private investigator look for her, and they came up empty…and a part of you was glad through all the disappointment. Ya blame your father ’cause he was a shitty husband. You blame yourself, too, because maybe you were a rotten kid. And then you look back on your life and realize you aren’t certain you’ve ever been really loved until you had kids of your own.

“They are the only two people who you know for a fact love you. But then you run off from reality again, to a place you’ve never been, where you can be alone, but you’re surrounded by ghosts—your
own
ghosts. They are your own private hauntings that exist solely in your own mind.

“And from all that fear, those cold sweats, that running scared, you get lucky and find a third person who loves you, too…” He turned to her. “And she helped you face the truth. The truth is like a nauseating serum in a cup. It’s filled with crushed glass, bile, and razor blades. All those rough edges and prickly things aren’t going to change. Why? Because they’re the truth, and the truth never waivers and doesn’t care how much you hate it.

“But when someone loves you, they help you get it down… help you accept it.” He took her hand and squeezed it. “You became
my
truth, my medicine. You never watered yourself down, Emerald. You stayed real… but you convinced me this is what I needed, or I’d never be okay. I’d never heal.” A tear streamed down his cheek as he closed the photo album and shoved it off his lap. He grabbed her gently by the back of the head and pressed his lips to the top of her head, crowning her with a kiss.

“Thank you for helping to make me well, Nurse St. Claire…”

I’m Not Boo Boo the Fool and I’m Not One of Your Little Friends…