Picture Perfect (35 page)

Will had never been so angry in his life.

Four weeks ago when Cassie had shown up on his doorstep, he had seen the evidence of the illustrious Alex Rivers's rage; he had understood the burden she'd been left with. But until now, Will had had no idea just how much of Cassie herself Alex had taken away.

Alex's golden hair was brighter than the Oscar, and Cassie watched his hands flex around the statuette's body. He was looking right at her. “I'd like to thank Herb Silver, and Warner Brothers, and Jack Green and…” Cassie tuned out his actual words, watching instead the lines of his mouth, pink and sculpted, and imagining it coming over hers. “But this award is for my wife, Cassie, who found me the script and convinced me that it was something the public would want to see, as well as something I needed to do. She's with her father tonight because he's ill, and when I spoke to her a few hours ago, she was upset that she couldn't make it back here. Well, I was a little nervous, so I didn't get to say everything I needed to before I hung up the phone. What I wanted to tell her is this:
You could be halfway around the world, Cassie, and you'd still be with me
.” He cleared his vision, now looking at the sea of faces staring up at him. “Thank you,” he said, and all too quickly, he was gone.

Cassie watched him accept his two other Oscars. It was clearly Alex's night, and yet he never failed to mention her. The second time, he told the world he loved her. The third time, he whispered, “Hurry home,” so softly Cassie wondered if anyone else watching had even heard.

When Will pulled her up and propelled her out the door of the bar, she tried to picture what her night might have otherwise been like. She would have worn a froth of a gown—Alex would have seen to that—and every time his name was called he would have turned to her and lifted her out of her seat in his embrace. She could feel his strong arm, the itch of his tuxedo jacket under her fingertips, as she moved through Spago and The Gate with him, circulating the post-Oscar parties. She would hold two statues, still warm from where Alex's hands had wrung their naked necks. Then she would go home and drop the awards onto the carpet and Alex would pour himself into her, hot, frantic, the very essence of success.

But instead Cassie walked into the cold March night, dizzied by the rash display of stars, and remembered her life for what she'd made of it.

Will watched her mouth turn down at the corners. She'd been moping through the whole broadcast, in spite of the fact that slick Alex had told the twenty million people watching that his entire life revolved around his wife. Hell, he'd even admitted she was out of town, although he'd candy-coated the circumstances. He was no fool, he knew she'd be watching. Will would have peevishly said the whole speech was calculated, if he hadn't noticed with his own eyes that Alex had managed to put into words the exact way Cassie had been staring at that television screen.

Alex probably did love her, for whatever that was worth, and Cassie seemed to believe it carried considerable value. But Will thought it might kill him to actually see them together again. She'd probably cling to Alex as if her knees didn't work and Alex would look at her like, well, like Will had been looking at her all night.

“That was something,” Will said noncommittally, unlocking the passenger door of the truck.

“Mmm,” Cassie said. She looked miserable.

“Your husband just cleaned out the Oscars,” Will muttered. “It would make sense for you to show a little emotion.” He grabbed Cassie's shoulders, shaking her lightly. “He misses you. He's crazy about you. What the
hell
is your problem?”

Cassie shrugged, a delicate tremor that worked its way under Will's palms. “I guess I still wish I had been there,” she admitted.

Will exploded. “Four weeks ago you couldn't think of anything but getting away. You showed me the places where he'd kicked you in the ribs and hit you across the neck. Or have you forgotten about that side of your charming husband, just like he probably was hoping you would when you watched tonight, so you'd come crawling back?” He glared at Cassie, who was standing mute, her mouth slightly parted. “Believe me,” he said, “I know better than anyone. You can't have the best of both worlds.”

She stared at him as if she'd never seen him before, and tried to take a step back. But Will would not let go of her. He wanted her to realize that he was right. He wanted Cassie to be able to slice away all the pretty packaging Alex had handed her tonight across the airwaves and see him for what he really was. He wanted her to look at him—Will—the way she had looked at Alex.

Will tightened his grip on Cassie's shoulders and pressed his lips against hers. Frustrated, his mouth ground into hers, his tongue forcing his way until, with the gentleness of a saint, she yielded under his touch. Her arms crept around his waist slowly, a white flag, a selfless surrender that ripped at the edges of his conscience.

He stepped away abruptly, angry at himself for his lack of control, angry at Cassie for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Another man's wife. Pregnant. Stomping to his side of the truck, he swung himself into the cab and turned over the ignition. He flicked on the headlights, spotlighting Cassie. She was frozen in the moment. Her hand was pressed to her mouth; her wedding ring gleamed like a prophecy. From this distance, Will could not be sure if she was wiping away the taste of him, or trying to hold it in.

 

A
LEX
R
IVERS
—
THE MOST SOUGHT
-
AFTER ACTOR
/
DIRECTOR IN
H
OLLYWOOD
at the moment, which was a little after four a.m.—sat in the dark in his Bel-Air study. He eyed the three gold statuettes he'd lined up in front of himself like decoys at a shooting gallery. What a night it had been. What a hell of a night.

He had never wished more fervently that he was drunk, but no matter how much champagne he'd consumed in honor of himself that evening, oblivion wasn't coming. He had left the last party a little over an hour ago. When he'd walked out, Melanie was going to snort coke in the bathroom with a costume designer, and Herb was negotiating Alex's rapidly rising salary with a huddle of producers. The snafus plaguing
Macbeth
were suddenly forgotten by the industry; Alex was a golden boy once again. When he paused at the threshold of the door, everyone was saying his name, but nobody even noticed he'd left.

He wondered if Cassie had been watching tonight, then lashed out at himself for even wondering.

This was
his
night. For Christ's sake, how long had he been working toward this? How long had he been in the process of proving himself? He ran his hands over the bald heads of the statues, amazed at the way they seemed to retain the warmth of human touch.

He picked up his first Oscar, weighing it in his palm as he would a baseball. Then his fingers closed around it. “This is for you,
maman
,” he said, and he hurled it across the study with such force that it cut the wallpaper and dented the Sheetrock with its impact.

He picked up the second one, the one for his father, and threw it in the same direction, grunting with satisfaction as his fingers released the smooth metal.

His lips stretched in the imitation of a smile as he walked toward the third Oscar. Save the best for last. He gripped the narrow body, thinking of his dear, devoted wife, and he stretched back his arm.

He couldn't do it. With a strange keening sound at the back of his throat, Alex fell heavily into the desk chair. He ran his fingers over the statuette as if in apology, as if he were feeling the soft curve of Cassie's neck and the blunted edges of her hair. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes when they started to sting; he lowered his head to the desk.

Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Worst Husband. Alex had seen the parallel before where art imitated life, but never had it rocked him to the soul. His acceptance speeches tonight had been carefully written, plotted word by word to catch Cassie, wherever she was, and reel her back to him. He was only beginning to see how much he had really meant the things he said.

He could wake up tomorrow with a hundred movie offers and a going salary of twenty million per film, but it wouldn't be enough. It would never be enough. He would trade it all and live in a cardboard box on the beach if he could rip out of himself the part of him that caused her pain.

In the shifting shadows of his study, Alex Rivers whispered aloud the secret that none of the glittering people still partying on Sunset Boulevard knew: He was a nobody.

Unless. Until.

She made him whole.

When the private line of the telephone rang beside his head, he knew he had conjured her. He picked up the receiver and waited to hear Cassie's voice.

There was no way Alex could know the trouble Cassie had gone to to find a phone. It had meant sneaking past Will, who was pretending to be asleep on the floor but had let her go without a word. It meant taking Will's truck, without permission, to the Catholic church and waking the priest and hoping her white skin could convince him of a fabricated emergency. It meant waiting through several false starts with her heart at the back of her throat until a South Dakota operator finally reached Bel-Air.

“Alex,” she whispered. Her word was an embrace. “Congratulations.”

It had been so long, and he was so shocked that his televised speech had actually brought her to him, that Alex could not speak at all for a moment. Then he hunched his shoulders forward, as if he could cradle Cassie's voice with his own physical presence. “Where are you?” he asked.

She had been expecting this. She didn't want to divulge anything; she only wanted to hear Alex. “I won't tell you,” Cassie said. “I can't. But I'm all right. And I'm very proud of you.”

Alex realized he was drinking in her voice, storing it inside himself to play again and again. “When are you coming back? What made you leave?” He reined in his emotions. “I could find you, you know,” he said carefully. “If I wanted to, I could.”

Cassie took a deep breath. “You could,” she said with a practiced bravado, “but you won't.” She waited for him to contradict her, and when he didn't she told him what he already knew. “I won't come back because
you
want me to, Alex. I'll only come back because
I
want to.”

It was a lie; if he'd broken down and begged her she would have taken the next plane to L.A. She was bluffing, and maybe Alex knew it too, but he also knew how much was at stake. Cassie had never hidden from him before, after all. And if ensuring a happy ending meant playing by her rules, he would do whatever she asked.

So he swallowed his pride, his fear, and his failure. “Are you really all right?” he asked softly.

Cassie curled the phone cord around her wrist like a bracelet. “I'm okay,” she said. She glanced up to see the priest's silhouette at the rectory door. “I have to go now.”

Alex panicked, gripping the phone more tightly. “You'll call back?” he pressed. “Soon?”

Cassie considered this. “I'll call back,” she conceded, thinking about the baby and what Alex had a right to know. “I'll call when I want you to come for me.”

She wanted him to come. She wanted him
. “Are we talking days? Weeks?” Alex asked. He let a grin dance under his words. “Because after tonight, my schedule's a nightmare.”

Cassie smiled. “I'm sure you can prioritize,” she said. She hesitated before giving Alex a gift to keep through the months that would stretch out ahead. “I miss you,” she whispered, no longer smiling. “I miss you so much.” And she put down the phone before he could hear her fall apart.

Alex stared at his Oscars. The proofs of his success lay toppled on the floor, scarring the wood when they had landed. The last statuette stood beside the telephone. Cassie had severed the connection; all that remained was a dull dial tone. Alex did not notice when he began to cry. For an hour, he held the receiver like an amulet, even when the tuneless voice of an operator told him over and over to hang up and try again.

C
YRUS
had repeated the third grade for eight years, not because of his limited intelligence but because in the 1920s, the reservation's school didn't go any higher. He had a rudimentary knowledge of reading and writing, but math other than addition and subtraction was beyond him and his spelling was phonetic. His specialty was history—not the white man's history, as he told Cassie, that the missionary teachers had tried to cram down their throats with their textbooks, but the way it really was.

Because Dorothea spent so much time at the cafeteria, Cassie was left alone with Cyrus quite often. She had a feeling he liked having the company; he'd put away his knitting and sometimes he whittled when they walked together, but mostly he just made conversation. He told her stories that had been passed down to him from his own father—Indian myths, boyhood tales about Crazy Horse, near-eyewitness accounts of the Battle of Little Bighorn and the tragedy at Wounded Knee.

Yesterday, Cassie had asked Cyrus to take her to
Paha Sapa
, the Black Hills. She knew that fossils had been found nearby, and that there had been controversies about removing them from the sacred lands of the reservation. It wasn't that she was planning to start a huge excavation, which the tribal council would certainly veto, but she was itching to at least find the clues that would lead her to believe there was something below the surface—the pitted rock, the overgrown vegetation. She felt compelled to take advantage of living among the Sioux, scant miles from their ancient burial grounds. For years, her colleagues had been trying to get access to places like this, and had repeatedly been refused.

Today she had borrowed Abel Soap's army-issue jeep and packed a picnic lunch. Just in case, she told herself, she'd tossed in a pick and a spade that Abel had offered her from his junk shed. Cyrus had swung himself into the jeep like a man much younger. “You know,” he said, “Sioux kids believe that the bogeyman lives in the Badlands.”

Cassie had smiled. “I'll take my chances.”

But several hours later, with the strange smooth rock-scape spread in front of them, it was easy to see why impressionable kids would believe such a thing. Unlike the peaks and turrets of most of the Black Hills, the Badlands were flat and low, like a hollow of gigantic boulders that over time had melted into each other. The wind moaned through the sparse pine trees that lined the upper ridge, and swept into the knotty valley like a whirlpool.

“You going down there?” Cyrus asked, coming to stand beside Cassie on the ledge.

Cassie glanced at him. “Why? Are you coming?”

“Hell, no,” Cyrus said. “I can think of better places to die.”

A chill ran down her spine at his words. “What do you mean by that?” she asked, but Cyrus had walked to the back of the jeep and could not hear her.

He returned with her pick and her shovel, and held them out. “You want these?”

Cassie nodded and tucked them into the belt she'd borrowed from Cyrus. She'd taken to wearing other people's clothing since hers no longer fit. She watched Cyrus pull a piece of cold meatloaf out of the hamper and sit cross-legged on the ledge in front of her. Gingerly she reached over the edge with her foot, gripping a rock and feeling for a toehold as she began her descent into the valley. She ran her hands over the stone walls, supple as marble and veined with lichen.

“Should have brought a Ghost Dance shirt,” Cyrus called from somewhere above her. “That way the bad spirits can't get you.”

“That's a good idea,” Cassie said, panting, not having the slightest idea what he was talking about. “And after I find one, I can make a fortune selling them to the doomsday preachers on the Avenue of the Stars.” She slipped her foot down another notch in the natural ladder, nearly twisting her ankle on the rounded surface of the boulders that made up the valley floor.

“Don't laugh,” Cyrus said. “There really were shirts that the People believed kept you invincible. My great-grandfather had one. They were sort of a fad in the 1880s, part of a new dance that was supposed to bring back the dead warriors and the buffalo, a whole new world without the white man.” Cyrus stood up and leaned over the lip of the valley. “You gonna eat the meatloaf?” he yelled.

“No,” Cassie said. She shaded her hand with her eyes. He was twenty feet above her, looking down, as if his interest could guarantee her safety. “You go ahead.”

“Well, anyway, my great-grandfather brought the Ghost Dance from a Paiute medicine man back to the Sioux. And he had this shirt with him, painted with the sun, the moon, the stars, and magpies. Dorothea has it packed away somewhere. As long as you were wearing that shirt, no harm could come to you.”

“Like a rabbit's foot,” Cassie said, digging with her pick at a little notch in the rock. Even if she did find something, she thought to herself, it would probably be a mastodon, not an ancient human.

“Yeah,” Cyrus said, “except it didn't work like it was supposed to. The white army thought if it was such big medicine, the Sioux had to be planning some kind of attack against them. So they told the People they couldn't do the Ghost Dance.”

Cassie felt the sun heat the crown of her head, and she was reminded of her first days in Tanzania with Alex, when she had believed that nothing could go wrong; that truly, they were invincible. Who was she to judge a Ghost Dance shirt? Love, at least at the beginning, could be just as powerful a charm.

“You know of Sitting Bull?” Cyrus said. “That's how he died. He was living the old ways, ghost-dancing at Standing Rock, and the government agents got the tribal police to arrest him for it. His own
people
.” He shook his head. “When he fought back, they started to shoot. Sitting Bull was killed, and most of the Sioux with him were too.”

Cassie turned her face up when Cyrus started to laugh; it was the last sound she'd expected to hear on the heels of his story. Her pick was suspended midswing. “Now, picture this,” Cyrus said. “Everyone's looking around, trying to make sense of what's happened, and suddenly a horse shows up and starts weaving around in a circle.”

“Sitting Bull's?” Cassie asked, transfixed.

Cyrus nodded. “Before he came to the reservation, Sitting Bull traveled with Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show, and this circus pony had been a parting gift. So when the shots that killed Sitting Bull rang out, this horse comes out of nowhere and goes into his routine. Seems that was the way they had started the show.”

Cassie's hand had dropped to her side. She found herself listening only to Cyrus, to his story and to the cry of a hawk somewhere in the distance. She slowly stuck her pick inside the belt loop, beginning the ascent out of the bleached valley.

Up top, she sank down beside Cyrus, rubbing her arms, trying to remember even one anecdote her mother might have told her that hinted she came from stronger stock than her own parents. But all she could recall were stories of a southern graciousness that Cassie later learned did not exist, and the wheeze of her mother's slurred voice falling off in midsentence. “Your grandfather told you this?” Cassie asked.

Cyrus nodded proudly. “Like I've told Will. And you.”

Cassie winced at a stitch in her side. Her body was not what it used to be. This child was already making demands. She smiled past the pain and hauled herself to her feet. “We can go now.”

Cyrus peered at her carefully. “Did you find anything?” he said, surveying her empty pockets, the untouched spade.

In the past, for Cassie, anthropology had meant physically taking something away, but now the thought of chipping at the Black Hills made her feel a little sick. She was starting to wonder if the excavation of a culture had to involve laying open the earth. She imagined Cyrus's great-grandfather spinning in his Ghost Dance shirt; Sitting Bull bleeding on the cold ground while only a circus pony pranced in his honor; Will perched on a pine-board floor learning his history through his grandfather's voice. There was some phrase the Sioux used as a sort of benediction when they ended a ritual. Dorothea tossed it out the way she herself would casually say “God bless you” to sneeze. Cassie frowned, furrowing her brow, until the words came to her:
Mitakuye oyasín
. “All my relatives.”

Cassie closed her eyes and pulled tight the edges of Cyrus's tales; she pictured again that dancing horse. “Yes,” she said. “I found exactly what I came for.”

 

A
LEX THOUGHT THE MAN RESEMBLED A FERRET
. H
E HAD SHINY LITTLE
brown eyes and a pointed nose that looked pert on Cassie but rodentlike on Ben Barrett. He was telling the
Hard Copy
reporter that he had never even had a common cold, much less been on his deathbed in some Augusta hospital like
that liar Alex Rivers
was saying.

“And what's more,” Ben Barrett, his father-in-law, sputtered, “I haven't heard from my little girl at all this year.” Something had been edited here, so that when the camera cut back to Ben he was bleary-eyed. He nodded his head. “He's covering something up, ayuh.”

Alex took a deep breath and settled himself as deeply as possible into Michaela's office couch. Several feet in front of him Herb paced back and forth, riffling through every tabloid on the supermarket stand, all of which had different suggestions for what had happened to Cassie, ranging from kidnapping to murder at Alex's hand.

It wouldn't have been a big deal—Alex had won slander suits before—but Cassie
had
been gone for two months, and this was her own father. The more the rumors flew, the more the magazines questioned Alex's calm and Alex's silence. One of the tabloids had even gotten a statement from the latest private investigator Alex had hired—something noncommittal, but Alex had fired him immediately for talking.

Cassie had called him that one time, but Alex hadn't told anyone. It had taken the edge off his fear for her safety, yet it had not altered his plan of action. He still had detectives digging for information. Cassie had said she would call again, and maybe she would, but if in the meantime Alex discovered her whereabouts, he'd be on his way. After all, if she had the right to leave, he had just as valid a right to convince her to come back.

Michaela was the one who had initially spread the excuse of Cassie being with her sick father, and at the time, under the pressure of the Oscars, it had seemed like a good story. After the first couple of detectives couldn't turn up any clue to Cassie's whereabouts, Alex had even started to believe his own lie.

The videotape of the
Hard Copy
show fizzled to a series of black and white stripes, and Michaela heaved herself out of her chair and shut off the VCR. “Well,” she said. “The proverbial shit has hit the fan.”

Alex rubbed his finger along his upper lip, trying not to feel as if he was on trial. Herb leaned toward him, so close that when he yelled Alex could see the spittle catch at the ends of his mustache. “Do you know what this could do to you?”

“Herb,” Alex said calmly, “I just won three Oscars. People aren't going to forget that so fast.”

Herb glared at Alex, shaking his head. “What they remember is the bad, the sensational. Like whether the Best Actor cut his wife up into little pieces and buried her in the basement.”

Alex stiffened. “Give me a break,” he said. But his mind was already racing. Herb and Michaela would stand beside him, but they would demand the truth. They would want to know why they had been kept in the dark.

He was going to have to give a flawless performance in front of the two people he'd trusted enough to see him with his guard down.

Michaela settled into the wing chair across from him as if she had all the time in the world. Overhead, the ceiling fan whistled. “Okay,” she said, drumming her fingers on her stomach. “What the fuck is going on?”

Alex lowered his eyes, unwilling to give them the whole truth, but using instead the shock value of the statement they would never expect to hear. “Cassie left me,” he murmured, and he let the ache he kept tight under wrap work its way to the surface all over again.

 

T
HE BENT
-
WILLOW FRAMES OF THE SWEAT LODGE REMINDED
C
ASSIE
of a woolly mammoth. There was something about the curved bars of wood that made them look like ribs, as if a creature had sloughed its way to the middle of the plain to die. She sat down on the cold ground, opened the notebook she'd bought a month before, and pulled a pencil stub from her coat pocket. Flipping to a blank page, she surveyed the sketches she'd done to pass the time when she had first arrived: skull dimensions, 3-D images of the hand, a multilayered mock-up of an Australopithecine man she wanted to use as a handout in one of her courses. But in the weeks she'd spent on the reservation, her drawings had changed. She wasn't sketching skeletal figures from her research anymore. Here was a picture she'd done of Dorothea, asleep in the rocker; and one of a buffalo herd that she'd re-created from Cyrus's stories; and another, a memory left from a dream in which she'd seen the face of her baby.

Maybe it was the stripped-down atmosphere of Pine Ridge that had changed her sketching style. In L.A., there was so much glitter surrounding you that cutting back to the basics was refreshing. But here, where there was little but the Spartan stretch of land and sky, every word you spoke and relationship you wove and picture you drew embellished itself into a thing of substance.

Cassie tucked the pencil behind her ear and critically assessed her mammoth, then glanced at the rough willow frame that had inspired it. How strange it felt to look at things and—instead of reducing them to their skeletal elements, as she'd been trained—to see so much more than what had been laid before her.

She was so engrossed in her mammoth sketch that she did not hear the footsteps behind her. “If that's a
ta-tá
^•
ka
,” Cyrus said, “you've got it all wrong.”