Please (19 page)

“
Heh?” the cab driver said. His ID said Imran Khan.

“
Please go back.”

“
Goback?”

“
To the Mercer Hotel. Please go back to the hotel.”

“
Mercer Hotel?” Imran asked, driving through another intersection. “No airport?”

“
No airport!” Elizabeth was almost yelling now. “Hotel!” she gestured in the direction they’d come from.

Imran
got the idea, making a wild and probably illegal U-turn at the next signal. Within ten minutes they were back at the hotel. Elizabeth threw some money at the driver and ran back into the building, waiting impatiently behind a vaguely familiar red-headed woman who was leaning on the reception desk talking to the staff.

“
There must be some way you can hold any calls coming to my room. The Penthouse Suite?”

Elizabeth recognized that voice. A cold snake of nervousness slithered through her. Susan. The woman made her so uncomfortable, she almost decided to forget about her cell phone. But Susan finished her conversation and sailed toward the elevators without glancing behind her.

Elizabeth watched her go, starting in surprise when the desk clerk asked, “Can I help you ma’am?”

“
Um, yes,” Elizabeth said. “I just checked out a few minutes ago. I was in room ...”

The smooth faced young man finished her sentence for her.
“You forgot your cell.”

“
That’s right,” Elizabeth answered, a smile of relief lighting up her face.

“
Housekeeping found it.” The clerk reached under the desk and pulled up her small black Nokia. “Your life’s on here, right?” he asked, rhetorically. He put a dramatic hand to his chest. “I’d
die
if I lost mine.”

Elizabeth thanked him and was about to go catch another cab when a strange impulse struck her. Heart beating in her throat, Elizabeth walked toward the elevators, pressing
6 when she got in, alone.

When the elevator reached the top floor, s
he almost chickened out. The way Susan had spoken to her had made her feel like a middle-school class reject. Whether it was her affair with Sebastian that had emboldened her or just the New York City vibe permeating her spirit, Elizabeth didn’t know, but she was going to confront Susan, Academy Award-winning actress or not.

Elizabeth took a deep breath and knocked on the door of
the suite, staring boldly at the spyhole. She wasn’t some meek small-town housewife. She was a woman of the world, one whose name would soon be in the credits for a film, right along with Susan’s.

“
Well, well, well,” Susan said, opening the door wide. She was wearing a black silk kimono and, it was clear from the way her enormous breasts hung, nothing else. “Elizabeth Holmes, I presume?” She laughed at her own joke. “Are you lost?” She smiled, looking at Elizabeth as if she were a cockroach that she wanted to grind under her heel.

Elizabeth opened her mouth to speak, the cool rebuke she had rehearsed in the elevator on the tip of her tongue, when she was distracted by the sound of a door opening within the suite. Behind Susan she caught a glimpse of a young man, with just a towel wrapped around his waist.

Elizabeth inhaled sharply, her hand coming to her throat in shock. She closed her eyes and shook her head to dispel the image she thought she’d seen. It couldn’t be, she thought.

Susan watched her, a malevolent smile spreading across her face. She called back over her shoulder.
“Oh Sebastian, I think there’s someone here to see you.”

Chapter 10

By the time United Air flight 681 landed in Cedar Rapids, Elizabeth
’s face looked almost normal again.

She hadn
’t waited for Sebastian to walk to the door of Susan’s suite to, what? Apologize? Justify himself? Invite her in for a quick three-way with the aging actress before she caught her plane? No, she’d turned on the heel of her boot and run down the eight flights of stairs to the lobby. She hadn’t let herself cry until she was sitting in her window seat on the runway at JFK. She felt bad for the passenger beside her, a grandfatherly man who kept silently handing her tissues, his shaggy eyebrows inviting her to tell him about it. She didn’t. She couldn’t. She wasn’t even sure why she was crying.

Fortunately, the flight from Chicago to Cedar Rapids was better. She had managed to stave
of the ugly trickle of tears that had turned her face into a swollen, pink wodge between JFK and O’Hare by keeping a continual stream of salty, deep-fried snacks going into it while she watched
Some Like It Hot
on her laptop, silently thanking Steve for downloading it for her.

Steve, she thought, heading reluctantly toward the arrivals lounge, which, in the tiny Cedar Rapids
Airport, was the same as the baggage claim. Maybe he would notice her puffy, blood-shot eyes and rosy nostrils. Maybe he would see the almost faded pink bracelets of tender skin at her wrists. She stretched the sleeves of her cotton turtleneck. It was time to put on her happy face.

“
Mommy!” A shrill squeal of delight filled the nondescript gray space of the lounge as Gwen hurtled toward her.

“
Oh, honey,” Elizabeth said, feeling the tears pricking at the corners of her eyes, squatting down to wrap the tiny ball of energy in a fierce hug.

“
Ow, Mommy!” Gwen wriggled in her arms. “Too tight.”

“
Sorry, sweetie.” Elizabeth loosened her embrace. She looked at Gwen and brushed a stray white-blond hair from her face. Elizabeth had only been gone a week, but she’d swear Gwen had grown. The sleeves of her Hello Kitty hoodie didn’t quite meet her wrists. “I just missed you so much.”

Gwen took this as her due, frowning and touching her mother
’s face, her little sticky paw cool and soft. “What’s wrong, Mommy?”

Elizabeth
’s eyes roved over her daughter, drinking her in. Gwen was one of those kids who managed to look like she’d been through a natural disaster minutes after getting dressed in the morning. Her hair, cut to her chin, stood out in wild spikes like Saint-Exupéry’s Petit Prince and there were multicolored smears decorating her Hello Kitty’s formerly white face. “Oh, Gwen. I’m crying because I’m so happy to see you.”

Gwen
’s frown deepened and her hands balled into tiny fists on her non-existent hips. “That doesn’t make any sense,” she said, sternly.

“
Most things that adults do don’t make a lot of sense,” Elizabeth’s mother said, appearing behind Gwen. “Steve’s business trip has been extended,” she said to Elizabeth in a way that told her that she either didn’t believe or didn’t approve of the extension. “And the kids wanted to surprise you, so I didn’t call.”

Elizabeth stood up, inhaling in secret relief.
“And hi to you too, Ma.” She smiled, bending a little to give her mother a one-armed hug. “This is the best surprise. Where’s Keenan?”

Connie
McCannna nodded in the direction of a row of chairs. Keenan’s sandy blond head was bent down, looking at the screen of his PSP, his thumbs working furiously. His right arm was supported by a charcoal triangle of nylon. Elizabeth’s hand flew to her mouth and she gasped. The sling. She had forgotten. God, I am a terrible mother, she thought, rushing to her son’s side.

“
Oh, Keen,” she said, wrapping her arm around his shoulder and kissing his chubby cheek, the only part of him that still reminded her that she had once rocked him in her arms.

“
Hey, Mom,” he said, glancing up briefly. “Just let me kill this guy.”

She watched his intense concentration, the speed at which his thumbs tapped
, and felt a wave of love fill her chest. Then her eyes fell on the sling again. God, she thought, wincing. I should have come home sooner. Remembering Susan’s smirk as she called back to the half-naked Sebastian, she thought, a hell of a lot sooner.

A smile of satisfaction spread over Keenan
’s face as the little screen of his gaming device filled with flames. He turned it off and held it in his sling hand, hugging Elizabeth tight with the other.

“
Oh, my big, brave boy,” Elizabeth said, the tears welling up and spilling down her cheeks. And she thought she’d depleted that reservoir. Apparently not.

Keenan released her and slipped out of her grasp, standing up.
“Come on, Mom. Granny said we could eat at Chuck E. Cheese’s.” He gave her a confused look. “Why are you crying?”

Gwen skipped around her brother.
“Because she’s happy to see us, silly,” she giggled.

Gwen and Keenan rolled their eyes at each other and shrugged.

“Adults are weird,” Keenan said, walking toward the exit.

Gwen skipped after him.
“Totally.”

Elizabeth stood up and put her arm around her mother
’s shoulder, sighing. She picked up her suitcase and the two women followed the children out into the golden light of late afternoon.

“
Magic hour,” Elizabeth said, breathing in the fresh Iowa air, eyes naturally rising to the sky. There was just so much of it in the Midwest. Elizabeth felt at once exposed and freed by the wide expanse of blue, littered with white streaky vapor trails. In a city, man can feel that he is the creator of his own destiny, but not in the rural Midwest, she reflected. It put you in your place.

“
God puts on a better show than anything man can do,” her mother agreed, almost reading her thoughts.

“
Mm.” Elizabeth gave her mother a quick squeeze before yelling out to the kids, “Don’t cross the road without us!”

Back to reality with a thud, she thought, a small smile of chagrin twisting her mouth. There was no grace period when you were a mother, which was probably for the best, she concluded. The less time she had to think, the better.

She looked down at her mother. “Chuck E.Cheese’s, eh?” she said. When she and her brother had been growing up, fast food was restricted to the occasional necessary diner pit stop and the county fair. Franchise fast food was pretty much on par with Satan.

Her mother made a face.
“I had to promise them something. Keenan, especially, was none too pleased to give up a birthday party to drive all the way up here.” She looked at her daughter, her clear green eyes intense. Elizabeth gulped, thinking, She knows. But Connie just patted her affectionately on the back and said, “Come on. If we don’t hoof it, we might have to sit near that infernal arcade.”

Elizabeth laughed, too loud in her relief. She felt like all the events of the past week were playing on a screen on her forehead for everyone to see. She felt like Hester
Prin from Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter
, the flaming A for “adulterer” pinned to her chest. Better get over that, she told herself. She grabbed Gwen’s hand, on autopilot, as the four of them crossed the street to where the car was parked.

“
When does Steve get back?” Elizabeth asked, unlocking the doors of her familiar mint green minivan, marveling at the fact that for a whole week she had been a woman who rode subways and taxis and slim-hipped, beautiful lying bastards.

“
Keenan, keep your hands to yourself,” Connie snapped over her shoulder as she climbed into the passenger seat. “He should be home by the weekend. Unless his trip gets
extended
again.”

Elizabeth didn
’t so much as ignore the sarcasm in her mother’s voice as glaze over it. The weekend, she thought, calculating mentally. That would give her three days to forget New York and Sebastian and construct an alternate version of her trip. She could do that. She was a writer, after all. Fantasy was her trade.

*

Sebastian’s first email was waiting for her when she got online the next morning. She had finally managed to fall asleep at around 2:00 the night before, having spent several hours trying to distract herself by reading one of the stack of books she had lying on her bedside table. She read the first few pages of one, and then another, and then another, never making it to the end of the first chapter. She even picked up the weighty tome Steve had left behind, but she didn’t manage to make it past the first page of
Orcslayer: The Sword of Justice
, Book One. She snorted derisively as she read the title. She couldn’t believe there was even one entire seven-hundred-page volume of questing and slaying and calling up demons, let alone several.

Finally, she gave up. She switched off the light, la
id her head back on the pillow that smelled of the eco-friendly laundry detergent she bought to assuage her guilt about the fact that the planet was going to hell in a hand-basket, and closed her eyes. She let the images flood her mind. Sebastian after a run, flushed and sweaty and panting. Sebastian on the crisp white sheets of her bed at the Mercer wearing nothing but a knowing smile. Sebastian with a towel wrapped around his waist standing behind Susan, the same expression in both of their eyes. Amusement.

Elizabeth endured the seemingly endless stream of memories, until at some point after 1:47, the last time she looked at her digital alarm clock, the cruel computer of her brain crashed. She slept until her alarm went
off at 7:00, when she awoke feeling as if something impossibly heavy was sitting on her chest, suffocating her.

“
Buddy,” she moaned, pushing the great heap of grinning chocolate lab off her. She could breathe again, but the heavy feeling remained throughout the morning.

She slotted back into the weekday routine as if on autopilot. Helping her mother make breakfast and pack lunches, loading the kids into the minivan, picking up Emily
’s sons, driving to George Washington Elementary, kissing each smooth round cheek and sending them on their way. Mercifully, she didn’t see Nina, who was bound to be running late, as usual. She switched her cell off, just in case, though Nina knew the hours the kids were in school were sacrosanct writing time for Elizabeth.

When she climbed the stairs to the third-floor office Steve had carved out for her under the gabled-roof, and looked out the window, she was relieved to see her mother hard at work in the garden below, preparing it for the first crops of spring. Elizabeth wouldn
’t have to speak to anyone until noon. By then, the concentrated effort of using Abbie’s glaring red comments on her first draft to polish and hone her story would have cleared out any lingering cobwebs of hurt and anger, she thought.

She decided to spend the first half hour of her morning catching up on all the emails she
’d neglected during her trip to New York, instantly regretting her decision when Sebastian’s name leaped out at her from her in-box.

She stared at his name and the title he had given his message, her heart thumping audibly.
“Please,” it said. She hesitated briefly before opening it, breath held in anticipation.

An image filled the screen, and Elizabeth glanced guiltily over her shoulder, even though she knew her mother was outside in the garden. It was a naked male torso. Sebastian
’s torso. Elizabeth would recognize that pattern of dark hair and creamy tan skin anywhere. The picture showed just the top of Sebastian’s tattoo, his firm abs, sculpted chest and shoulders and the bulge of his Adam’s apple. The shoulder angled closest to the camera was bruised. She looked at it more closely. Not bruised. Bitten. With her teeth marks.

Elizabeth looked behind her again before reading the message below the photo. In it was a long and rambling explanation of what she had seen at the hotel the morning she left. Susan was an
old friend. There was nothing between them. She had let Sebastian use her shower, nothing more. He had left to catch his flight to LA out of La Guardia minutes later. There was no one else, only Elizabeth. He loved her more than he had ever loved anyone, would ever love anyone. He missed her hair, her voice, her lips and all her other pink parts. He’d thought of her when he was in the shower this morning, his hand working his wet cock. Elizabeth blushed when she read that part. Was she thinking of him?

She read the email twice before deleting it. Sebastian was a terrible writer, she reflected, critically, one of those people who use
“their” instead of “there” and didn’t know where to put a period, but he certainly was persuasive.

Elizabeth sighed, standing up and looking out the window to where her mother worked, red fleece bright in the rapidly graying morning. A fine mist had started to fall, shrouding the house in the comforting quiet of precipitation. Connie was building raised mounds of earth and spreading dried cocoa nibs and straw between the beds to keep the weeds down.

While she watched her mother work, Elizabeth mulled over Sebastian’s email. He could be telling the truth. His explanation was logical. Elizabeth had checked out of the hotel. Why would he check into another room just to take a shower when his old friend would let him use hers? And she could explain the amused look in Sebastian’s eyes by reasoning that he felt so secure in their relationship that it was obvious that nothing untoward had happened or was about to happen. But the look in Susan’s eyes? That was altogether harder to reconcile with Sebastian’s story. And if something were happening between Susan and Sebastian, that would certainly account for Susan’s antagonistic behavior toward Elizabeth on set.