This Much Is True (33 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Linc ~ Game over

I
don’t wait for them to finish. I’ve seen enough. Strange, I feel remorse, not anger. I suppose Nika Vostrikova figures into that sentiment somehow. I’m not a saint either; but then I didn’t just brazenly fuck some random guy in a cemetery. The anger comes as I knew it would as I drive away from them. Tally never even knew I was there. She never even looked up when I called out her name before I saw she was with someone. No. She was flinging herself at some guy, like she’d been with him a decade already, and he was her long-lost soulmate.

My mind races. The vision of Tally fucking that guy won’t go away.

I pour a glass of Jack Daniels as soon as I get to the guest house and drink it down like water. I have a personal trainer workout tomorrow. I have to fly back to L.A. in a few hours. I don’t care.

If I hadn’t gone into the Landons’ place with the fervent hope of seeing Tally again, of talking to her, I never would have known about her and Thorn. But no. I had to play the benevolent ex-boyfriend, ensure Tommy was safely inside, hope to get a glimpse of Tally and beg for her forgiveness. Kimberley be damned. If Tally’s mom hadn’t mentioned the cemetery and speculated that is where Tally would have gone, I wouldn’t have ended up there. If I hadn’t gone, if I hadn’t seen for myself how clearly Tally Landon has moved on, I wouldn’t hate her so much now.

“What the hell are you doing?” Charlie asks when he walks in a half-hour later. The bottle is half gone. “Don’t you have a flight back to L.A. soon?”

“Yeah. Can I get a ride to SFI?” I give him steely look. “She’s fucking some guy who looks a lot like Kurt Cobain.”

“Ooooohhhhh. Shit. Rob Thorn?”

“Yeah.” I frown. “Rob Thorn? The guy from Paly that was dating her
sister
?” Charlie winces when I say this.

“How do you know for sure she was with the guy?”

“I
saw
them. Together. At the cemetery. Probably fornicating right over Holly Landon’s grave because they certainly weren’t planting roses.” My words slur and my hands shake as I attempt to pour another.

“Ooooohhhhh. Shit. I…I’m sorry. I don’t…Marla’s mentioned Rob Thorn a few times. Yes, they all graduated from Paly in June. He’s still in New York attending NYU. Tally stays there at his place, but she’s like never there from what Marla said. I thought they were strictly friends. I mean seeing Rob Thorn would be kind of weird for Tally since he used to date her sister.” He looks confused and sad at the same time. “I didn’t realize they were
together
together. I think Marla would have told me.”

“I don’t…I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t really want his name mentioned again in my presence ever again.
Or hers.”
I pick up my cell phone and start dialing.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m calling Nika.”

“Do you really think that’s a good idea, given your state of mind?”

“All the good ideas are gone.”

And they are. I’m done. I’m out. Game over with Tally.

They say there’s a fine line between love and hate. They’re right. I’ve found it.

* * * *

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Tally ~ He saw you

I
notice the flashing red light on the answering machine as soon as Rob and I walk through the door, loaded down with suitcases and my mom’s last-minute care package of stuff. We’ve decided to be straight with everyone. Apparently, Marla’s decided to be straight with us; we just didn’t know it right at the particular moment. I press the message button with this astonishing foreboding, almost like an electric shock before it actually happens. I take a look around Rob’s place. There’s not even a hint that I live here at all.

I look over at Rob, who looks amazing. Handsome. Secure. Rob basks in our love connection while I feel like a hologram about to disappear. I look up in the gilded mirror that Marla and I found at some second-hand store and push back my hair just as Marla’s voice comes to life on the answering machine. And it dawns on me that
I’m barely here.

“She
knows
,” I say to Rob in this hollowed-out voice just before the message plays.

He looks over at me in surprise.
“How?”
His face transforms for an instant to this obvious remorse, but before I can ask him about it, I hear Marla’s voice.

“Hey, Tal,
it’s Marla.
Look, Charlie came home with a weird story about you and Rob?”
She sighs.
“
Well, Linc
...
He
knows
. I guess…we all do.”
She lets out her breath slowly. “I don’t know what to say. I’m shocked. It doesn’t make any sense, and I tried to defend you. I went to talk to Linc myself, and that’s when he told me he
saw
you—you and Rob at the cemetery, Tally. He…
saw
you and Rob.” She takes a deep breath. I look over and attempt to gauge Rob’s reaction, but he isn’t even looking at me now.
“
I’m back in L.A. with Charlie. I just don’t completely understand it all, girlfriend. Anyway, give me a call when you get in. I’m sorry we didn’t get to spend any time together. I do love you, Tal, but when are you going to start loving yourself?”

There’s so much sadness and this underlying judgment in Marla’s tone. It feels as if I’ve been stabbed. I clutch at my chest and hit the floor and gasp for air in an attempt to stem this inexplicable pain that burns through all of me from the inside. I reach over and press replay and listen intently to the message again. Only these words stay with me and inexplicably break my heart.
Linc knows. He saw you and Rob at the cemetery, Tally. He saw you.

I should have known sooner. My mom asked me if Linc had caught up to me at the cemetery, but I was preoccupied with angst and guilt and remorse and regret, and all these thoughts of Rob were assailing me from all sides. I waited all the next day for Linc to drop by, unannounced like he always did, but he never came. I should have known. I couldn’t even bring myself to go see Cara. I was too overcome with guilt about all of it. Everyone.

Then Rob called, offering me a ride—a flight back to New York—and suddenly I had a reason to return because Sasha had finally called and offered me the lead solo parts for both this spring and summer with the NYC Ballet’s European tour. The chance of a lifetime. It’s mine.

It’s all so clear.

It’s all there is.

He saw you.

Linc saw me. If he didn’t hate me before, he hates me now. So I do what I’ve always done. I bury it as deep as it will go within minutes.

I saunter over to Rob and kiss him hard. I beg him to take me right there in the barrenness of that forgettable humongous apartment on the red velvet sofa.

“Make me forget. Take me away.”

And he does. Rob does that for me. I have to convince myself that it’s enough because surely this is all there is for me. Surely, this is all there is left for me to hold on to—this star-crossed lover of Holly’s.

Rob.

Rob, who I now beg, borrow, and steal.

Rob can help me forget. Rob can take me away.

* * * *

Part 3 – LOSING

“The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.”
~ John Burroughs

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Link ~ Always about the money

T
he tall, sexy Russian drops a two-inch thick pile of papers on my glass coffee table with a decided smack. Her overt actions stir me from my normal malaise. Naturally, my eyes begin the long brazen sidle up her legs where they rest briefly. Then I become more intrigued when I take in the red fringe at edge of her pleated black-and-white miniskirt that generously offers a sneak peak at her delicate, black thong beneath. My gaze brazenly shifts to her midriff and finally settles upon her finely developed breasts, which look to be sheathed but just barely beneath her open-necked white men’s dress shirt that she’s casually tied at her fine waist. I could span it between my hands—her waist—and wished that I wanted to. How I wish I felt something for this girl and not the other one, but I don’t. No. Not really. Not enough anyway. So I just vaguely stare at Nika Vostrikova because I’m unable or unwilling to feel anything more than this long-held disdain for eternal disillusionment that I am somewhat desperate to hide from her intense gaze. No. I’m not willing to share my private hell—this emotional empty vat of nothingness that appears to be without end that I constantly battle these days.

“She’s still off the grid,” Nika says.

“No kidding.”

Nika gasps in frustration and shakes her head side-to-side. “I
told
you we had to move quickly.”

“I had a
game
. You can’t just
not
show up,” I say with growing impatience.

“Okay. You had a game.
Several
games. An all-star appearance. Trouble in Toronto with your fastball. Seventeen walks in three starts following
that
debacle. Then eight consecutive strike-outs in another. And another. And a no-hitter in the last that effectively saves your season. But I’m telling you, darling Linc, she’s off the grid. These are facts.” She speaks a few choice words in Russian. It’s sexy as hell.

“What does that mean—moy dah-rah-GOHY?” I ask.

She laughs at my garbling of her native language and gets this wicked little smile.

“Someday, I will tell you, not today.” Nika
gleams
at me then.
It’s possible. She does it.
She gleams at me and flaunts her incredible body in this not so subtle way with the slightest of dancer movements she’s been making in just standing over me. She catches her lower lip between her lovely white, straight-edge teeth and I immediately think of Tally and how she used to do that, too. Misery swirls around me.
Again.

“I’m just telling you how it is. And if you want me to keep looking for more info—keep tabs on her—”

“Let me guess,” I say with a touch of sarcasm. “You need more money.”

“Yes. Nothing comes for free.” Nika smiles—this elegant bewitching smile at me.

I surprise myself by returning it. I haven’t smiled in months, not since my spontaneous trip to San Fran and the unexpected encounter with Tally right before New Year’s. It renders Nika Vostrikova momentarily speechless.

She stares back at me hard.
Weighs it. Assesses me.
I brazenly gaze back at her. A part of me is somehow a little mesmerized by this golden goddess that stands up to me and appears so willing, just like old times. She showed up in L.A. at my apartment doorstep just yesterday. We’d spoken by phone at least a hundred times over the past eighteen months since I first hired her to keep tabs on Tally. But she’d stayed in Seattle, did freelance work for Kimberley after I made phone introductions, while I just played baseball and tried to maintain some kind of focus. Nika. She was wicked, smart, and sexy. I remembered all of this about her from our brief encounters at Stanford. Nika Vostrikova. Trouble. Intrigue. Fun. Nika Vostrikova. The girl is beautiful in every way, but one; she isn’t Tally. Would never be Tally.

For past eighteen months, I’ve lived for her somewhat infrequent communiqué about Tally—Nika’s faxes and texts and phone calls—I waited and wished for them in every hotel from every town the team stayed in between the West Coast and the East Coast. I waited impatiently for Nika’s updates about Tally only to be assailed by the stark truth of reaching yet another dead-end when I heard from her.

Nika knew my cell number. She even knew my stats. Yet I still knew next to nothing about her.

Until yesterday, I didn’t even really recall her face. It’d been a while.

And after meeting Tally, I didn’t see anyone else. All this time, I didn’t care that I didn’t really remember Nika.

Now, I do.

I have remained ever focused on two things: pitching a baseball at a high rate of speed and keeping tabs on Tally, or whatever the fuck she was calling herself these days, because it appeared that Tally Landon had made a conscious effort to drop out of sight. “Off the grid,” Nika had said numerous times this season. One thing was going exceptionally well, and the Angels had awarded me the big contract I’d been hoping for at the end of last season, but at about the same time I gave up most of my soul for baseball, I had seen Tally with Rob Thorn. Fury coursed through me like a lit fuse that couldn’t be extinguished. It spiraled ever downward toward its singular purpose, in exploding, no matter what I did to try and stop it. Anger at Tally flourished and grew. I had a plan. She just needed to wait for me but she didn’t wait.
She chose to move on. From me.

Eighteen months of celibacy for nothing. Even now. For what? What was I waiting for?

Anger. It fueled me, spurred me on to find her, and finally tell her what I thought of her immature, stupid move to drop out of my life so completely. I never stopped to examine the incongruence of this particular endeavor.
How could I actually be pissed off at a girl that I actually loved and effectively sent away in the first place? Did it matter?
I’d given her over a year and didn’t try to reach and talk to her, but then I’d seen her with Rob Thorn, clearly having moved on.

Soon after, she’d vanished.
Off the grid. Nothing.

Marla claims that she doesn’t know where Tally was. Her best friend outright refuses to talk about Tally with me. She and Charlie live together in L.A. near my place, while I continue to try and stay focused on baseball and salvage what’s left of my less-than-stellar season. I still struggle to understand and reconcile why I care so much about a girl who invariably broke my heart by being with Rob Thorn. Especially now, when this Russian goddess stands before me and appears so ready and willing for the taking.

Maybe I should do what even Charlie has begun to chant: “Forget the girl, Linc
.
Get your head in the game.”

But which game? Baseball? Or life?

Even my shrink at three hundred dollars an hour—Hollywood’s standard going rate—had encouraged me to move on with my life. “At the very least, get laid, Linc,” Dr. Leitner had proclaimed at last Tuesday’s session. “You seriously need to develop a focus on something else, besides your baseball career and this woman.” It was the most Leitner had strung together in two consecutive and fully-coherent sentences in our seven sessions together. It’s true. I’m going crazy because I’m too focused on Tally and not as focused as I should be on baseball.

Apparently, this little detail regarding my lack of focus did not go unnoticed even by one of my biggest fans in baseball, Nika Vostrikova.

I study the lovely Russian girl standing just above me some more. “Remind me again. Why are you here
in
person
? You’re a long way from Seattle and after all this time?”

Nika laughs as she retrieves a single sheet of paper from the stack she dispensed with earlier. “Do you know this guy?”

I glance down at the grainy black and white photograph. “Rob Thorn. How did you get
this
?” I ask, bewildered.

“Yes. It’s Rob Thorn.” She looks at me quizzically for a long moment. “It’s a DOT shot just out of Manhattan. From over a year ago. I just found it.”

“How did you
get
it?”

“You don’t want to know,” Nika says in a low voice.

I scrutinize the photograph and scan every detail of Tally’s face. It’s her. With Thorn. His dark blond hair is rocker length. He still has the Kurt Cobain look-alike thing going on, although he looks out of sorts, unsure of himself in the photograph. I search for applicable labels. A loser. A dork. All these stereotypes come to mind but fleet just as quickly because it doesn’t do much to diminish the intimate look the two people in the photo share. I feel sick to my stomach all at once, somehow knowing that Nika has noticed their look, too. I run my hands through my hair and glance back up at the Russian girl again. She has this expectant look as if she’s just waiting for me to figure it all out.

“What?” I finally ask and feel instantly afraid of her answer.

She makes this impatient sound and blows the air out between her teeth. “She’s fucking him.”

“I
know.
” I struggle for air. My chest compresses and I try to hide it from Nika, who watches me even more closely now.

“When did you
know
that?” Nika looks unsettled. I didn’t think anything could shock her but she displays all the signs.

“A while ago.”

“
When?”
She seems to struggle with enunciating that single word.

“At the end of December. Right before New Year’s. I was in San Francisco and I saw them together. What? Eight months ago.”

A red tinge crawls up her neckline. She looks devastated by this piece of news. She spews a few choices words in Russian and starts pacing the room in sudden agitation.

“What of it? I pay you to keep tabs on her. I have my reasons as to why, you know.”

“You went to see her,” Nika says accusingly. More Russian words tumble from her mouth.

I’m confused by her unrestrained anger. “What is going on with you?”

“Nothing. It’s just…
surprising
that he would be with her.
Then.
At that particular…time...” Her voice trails off. She seems to recover enough to rummage freely through my freezer. She finds the frozen Stoli and holds it up in triumph before pouring herself a generous amount in one of my favorite shot glasses. I watch her in this captive fascination.
Nika Vostrikova is pissed.
It’s kind of a turn-on, when it’s not directed at me. She fills one shot glass and then another and sashays over to me with them.

“She is with him,” she says as if to convince herself. “There are others.”

“Other
guys
?” I ask, sounding completely defeated, even as I down the cold vodka she’s handed me.

“No,” she says, looking surprisingly unhappy. “Other photographs of the two of them.
Together
.”

Nika grabs a sheaf of photographs and drops them in my lap one by one.
Evidence.
Photograph after photograph shows the two of them together. Tally holding hands with this guy outside of some hotel. In another on a bridge. Another at Central Park. Still another at the Met. Smiling. Laughing. Happy?
Tally
?
This guy? What the hell?

“He has a place in Manhattan,” Nika says softly. “It took a while to figure it all out because his dad holds the deed. She’s been there for a while. I checked it out for myself, and then came upon the Otis searches, as well.” She’s frowning as if trying to put it all together for herself.

“You check elevator security files, Nika?”

“Do you know how many security cameras there are in New York? And, the secrets they give up?” She gets this twisted smile. She’s still pissed off about something. Her hands tremble as she grips the shot glass.

“I don’t want to know.”

She shrugs. It looks forced as she seems to strive for control. “They have a fondness for fast food. Well, he eats and she watches,” she says.

I grimace at the memory of Tally and her weird love affair with food. She seems to have moved on to a guy who feeds into this particular obsession. No pun intended there. I practically wallow in the despair as it proceeds to roll in on me within a few minutes, while Nika seems to pause, assessing the effects of her news on me.

I knew this. No surprise here.
I was just hoping it was a one-time thing but I knew better, didn’t I?

Eventually, I look up at her in exasperation. She slightly sways, perhaps ensuring she has my full attention and I hate her more than Tally for a few brief seconds.

“What?”

“After these photos in Manhattan over a year ago, there’s nothing. Months of nothing. No car. So no DOT photographs. Very strange.” Nika shrugs ever so slightly and I get the distinct feeling that it’s more for its effect on me than anything else.

Once again, I am automatically captivated by her very presence, caught like a voyeur. I stare at the sexy movement her beautiful shoulders make as she casually moves them up and down. The desired effect serves both of us on some level when her blouse slides off to one side. Nika secretly smiles while I’m instantly reminded of Tally.
Again.
I am caught in the memory of the first night we met when Tally’s blouse did the same thing. I close my eyes, disturbed by the memory and the act of remembering when I’m clearly supposed to be concentrated on forgetting her, according to my shrink.

For a few minutes, I am only vaguely aware of the Russian who stands over me and way too close in proximity as it relates to client-to-hacker privileges or whatever we are to each other. It’s a relationship I still refuse to define or pursue. She is a friend. I serve as the same.
Friends with benefits
Tally once accused me. She was right then. The crude thought has me opening my eyes again as Nika taps my knee with hers. This girl demands my full attention be upon her, whether I want to give it to her or not.

It’s been a long while for me. Because of Tally. I’d been holding out for Tally.
Why? Why is that? It’s not like she’s been holding out for me.

“So I went back and did some more digging in the school records. Palo Alto High School? Your high school? Hers?
His?
This guy. Rob Thorn.” She leans down and stabs the photograph with a long red fingernail. “He dated her sister. Her twin.” I start to nod while Nika seems to pause for full effect. “Holly Landon. That one was pregnant at the time of her death. Medical records indicate she was at least ten weeks along. They had a hotel reservation in Vegas for that spring, May first, I believe, and had filled out the online application for a marriage license in the state of Nevada. Robert Garrett Thorn. He’s from new money. VC money. Venture capitalist funds? Daddy’s a big time investor in San Francisco. The family lives in Sea Cliff. He’s a trust fund baby and a prodigy. He was expected to go to Stanford, but ended up at NYU, studying business, much to his father’s dismay. The Thorns have donated millions to the dad’s alma mater Stanford. NYU seems to be a rebellious act for their one and only son. The family business is real estate in and around Silicon Valley as well as venture capital investments. He’s worth millions. His dad is worth even more. No wonder they can afford to stay off the grid. And that is who your Tally Landon is spending her free time with now, I believe. Even when I input her real name, she’s not showing up—
anywhere
. She hasn’t for a while now. It’s very strange.” She gets this vexed look and cocks her head to one side, affecting deep thought. Her golden-blond hair falls along one side of her body, long and sleek, like the rest of her. “My guess is she doesn’t want to be found and he’s helping her,” Nika says softly.