Picture Perfect (4 page)

 

W
ILL PULLED ON THE COLLAR OF HIS UNIFORM THE WHOLE DRIVE
back to Reseda. The goddamn shirt was choking him. He wouldn't last a week wearing it. He turned the corner of his block wondering if Jane had remembered her name. He wondered if she'd still be there.

She met him at the door wearing one of his good white shirts, knotted at the waist, and a pair of his running shorts. “Is someone looking for me?” she asked.

Will shook his head and stepped over the threshold of his house. He stood perfectly still in the entrance, surveying the neatly stacked, empty boxes and the proof of his history hanging over the walls where anyone could see.

The fury came so quickly he forgot to hide it away. “Who the hell gave you the right to go through my things?” he yelled, stomping across the carpet into the middle of the living room. He whirled to pin his gaze on Jane and found her crouched against the wall, her hands overhead as if to ward off a blow.

The anger ran out of him. He stood quietly, waiting for the rage to clear out of his vision. He did not say anything.

Jane lowered her arms and stiffly got to her feet, but she wouldn't look Will in the eye. “I thought I'd be helping you,” she said. “I wanted to thank you for everything, and this seemed to be the best way.” Her eyes raked the wall where the little leather pouch hung beside the painted hunting scene. “I could always change things if you don't like them hanging this way.”

“I don't like them hanging at all,” Will said, lifting the moccasins from their spot on the fireplace mantel. He grabbed an empty carton and began tossing the items back inside.

Jane knelt beside the box and tried to organize the fragile pieces so they wouldn't be crushed. She had to do it carefully; she had to make it right. She ran her fingers over the feathers of the small leather pouch. “What is this?”

Will barely glanced at what she was holding. “A medicine bundle,” he said.

“What's in it?”

Will shrugged. “The only people who know are my great-great-grandfather and his shaman, and both of them are dead.”

“It's beautiful,” Jane said.

“It's worthless,” Will tossed back. “It's supposed to keep you safe, but my great-great-grandfather was gored by a buffalo.” He turned to see Jane fingering the bundle, and his face softened as she looked up at him. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I didn't mean to go off like that. I just don't like these things hanging where I can see them all the time.”

“I thought you'd want something to remind you of where you came from,” Jane said.

Will sank to the floor. “That's exactly what I ran
away
from,” he said. He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, looking to change the subject. “How're you feeling?”

She blinked at him, noticing for the first time that he was wearing the blue shirt of a police officer, the LAPD patch over his upper arm. “You're wearing a uniform,” she blurted out.

Will smirked. “You were expecting a headdress?”

Jane stood up and offered her hand to Will, pulling him to his feet. “I remembered how to cook,” she said. “You want dinner?”

She had fried chicken, steamed beans, and baked potatoes. Will carried the platter to the center of the living room floor and chose a breast for each of them, placing the meat onto two plates. He told her about his first day of work, and she told him how she'd gotten lost on her way to the market. The sun bled through the windows and cast Jane and Will into silhouette as they fell into an easy silence.

Will picked at the pieces of the chicken, sucked the meat from the bones. Suddenly, he felt Jane's hand close over his. “Oh, let's do this,” she said, her eyes bright, and he realized he was holding the wishbone.

He pulled and she pulled, the white bones slipping through their greasy fingers, and finally he came away with the bigger piece. Disappointed, Jane leaned back against a stack of boxes. “What did you wish for?”

He had wished for her memory, but he wouldn't tell her. “If you say it, it won't come true,” he said, surprising himself. He smiled at Jane. “My mother used to say that. In fact, she was the last person who pulled a wishbone with me.”

Jane hugged her knees to her chest. “Does she live in South Dakota?”

He almost didn't hear her question, as he was thinking about the fine curve of his mother's jaw and the spark of her copper hair. He pictured her hand and his own curled over the edges of the forked chicken bone, and he wondered if her wishes had ever come true. Will looked up. “My mother died when I was nine, in a car accident with my father.”

“Oh, how awful,” Jane said, and Will was amazed that her voice could hold so much pain for a stranger.

“She was white,” he heard himself saying. “After the accident, I lived with my father's parents on the rez.”

As he started to speak, Jane reached onto the platter and pulled out a pile of bones Will had left. She settled them onto her plate and moved them around with her hands, seemingly unaware of what she was doing. She glanced up at him and smiled. “Go on,” she said. “Tell me how they met.”

Will had told this story many times before, because it tended to wrap itself around a woman's heart so neatly she'd tumble into his bed. “My mother was a schoolteacher in Pine Ridge town, and my father saw her one day when he was getting some feed for his boss at the ranch. And her being white, and him being Lakota, he didn't really understand his attraction, much less what he was going to do about it.” Mesmerized, he watched Jane's hands wrap a strip of sinew from one bone around a second one. “Anyway, they went out a couple of times, and then it came to summer vacation and she decided things were moving along too fast, so she just up and left without telling my father where she was going.”

Jane neatly laid five bones in parallel lines against the edge of her plate. “I'm listening,” she said.

“Well, it sounds stupid, but my father said he was riding fence and he just
knew
. So he left in the middle of the day, on this borrowed horse, and he set out sort of north-northwest without any idea where he was headed.”

Jane looked up, her hands stilling. “Did he find her?”

Will nodded. “About thirty-five miles away at a diner, where she was waiting for a friend to pick her up and drive her home to Seattle. My father pulled her in front of him on the horse and wrapped an extra saddle blanket around them.”

Will had listened to this story so many times as a child that even now, he imagined the words in his mother's voice instead of his own.
“Years ago, this is how my people fell in love,” your father told me, and he wrapped that blanket so close we were sharing one heartbeat. “I would have come to you at night, and we would sit outside in this cocoon, and with all the stars as witnesses I would tell you that I loved you.”

“My God,” Jane sighed. “That is the most
romantic
thing I've ever heard.” She pulled a new handful of bones from the tray between them. “Did your mother go back with him?”

Will laughed. “No, she went to Seattle. But she wrote him letters all summer and they got married a year later.”

Jane smiled and wiped her hands on a napkin. “How come people don't do things like that nowadays? You grope around in the back of a sedan in high school and you think you're in love. Nobody gets swept off their feet anymore.” Shaking her head, she stood up to clear the plates. She picked up the near-empty serving platter and then dropped it, hearing its ring and the splatter of grease.

On her plate she'd re-created the skeleton of the chicken.

The bones were carefully structured, in some cases even bound together at the joints. The wings were folded neatly against the rib cage; the powerful legs were bent as if running.

She put her hand to her forehead as a wealth of terms and images flooded her mind: the slender arm bone of a ramapithecus, a string of molars and cranial fragments, green tents in Ethiopia that covered tables laden with hundreds of catalogued bones. Physical anthropology. She'd spent entire months in Kenya and Budapest and Greece on excavations, tracking the history of man. It had been such a tremendous part of her life, she was shocked even a blow to the head could make her forget it.

She lightly touched the femur of the reconstructed chicken. “Will,” she said, and when she lifted her face her eyes were shining. “I know what I do.”

W
ILL
liked Jane better before she remembered she was an anthropologist. She kept trying to explain her science to him. Anthropology, she said, was the study of how people fit into their world. That much he understood, but most of the other things she said sounded like a foreign language. On the drive to the police station Monday evening, she'd outlined the best methods for skeletal excavation. When Watkins questioned her for a notice he'd insert in the
Times
, she'd told him that until someone came to claim her, she'd be happy to help in forensics. And now, the following morning, while Will was working his way through a bowl of Cheerios, she was trying to explain the evolution of man.

She was drawing lines across her napkin, labeling each branch with names. Will was beginning to see why her husband hadn't shown up. “I can't follow this,” he said. “I can't even do math this early.”

Jane ignored him. When she finished, she sighed and leaned back in her chair. “God, it feels so good to
know
something.”

Will thought there were probably other things more worth knowing, but he didn't say this. He pointed to a spot on the napkin. “Why'd they become extinct?”

Jane frowned. “They weren't able to adapt to the world,” she said.

Will snorted. “Yeah, well, half the time neither can I,” he said. He picked up his hat, getting ready to leave.

Jane's eyes brightened as she turned to him. “I wonder if I've discovered something really important, like the Lucy skeleton, or that Stone Age man in the Tyrolean Alps.”

Will smiled. He thought of her crouched over a site in the red sand of a desert, doing what made her happy. “Feel free to dig in the backyard,” he said.

 

T
HAT
T
UESDAY MORNING
,
THE
LAPD
RAN
J
ANE
'
S PICTURE IN THE
L.A. Times
with a small blurb requesting information about her, and Jane remembered discovering the hand.

After Will had left, Jane took herself to the local public library. It was a small branch library, but it did have a neat little section of textbooks on anthropology and archaeology. She found the most recent book, hunched over the polished table, and began to read.

Familiar words jarred images in her mind. She saw herself in the British countryside, kneeling beside an open pit in which lay the tangled remains of an ancient Iron Age battle. She could remember brushing earth from the bones; feeling for the pits on a sternum made by lances and arrowheads, or the cleanly severed vertebrae that cried decapitation. She had been someone's assistant then, she remembered, labeling specimens with India ink, carrying trays of bones to dry in the sun.

Jane flipped the page and that's when she saw the hand. It was exactly as it had been when she'd found it in Tanzania, fossilized into a stratum of sedimentary rock, tightly grasping a chisel made of stone. Hundreds of anthropologists had combed Tanzania looking for evidence of the stone-tool industry they thought primitive man had the level of intellect to conceive. Following the lead of her colleagues, she had gone down one year to reopen a forgotten excavation site.

She hadn't been looking when she found the hand. She'd just sort of turned around, and there it was, shoulder level, as if it had been reaching for her. It was an extraordinary find; delicate bones were rarely preserved. For fossilization to occur, skeletons had to remain undisturbed by animals and swirling waters and shifts of the earth, and if any pieces of a skeleton were lost, they tended to be the extremities.

Even as she was working, she had known this would be her break into the field. She had found what everyone had been searching for. She had carefully labeled the chisel, the hundreds of digits of bone, had cleaned them and preserved them with a synthetic resin.

Jane turned back to the book and read the caption beside the photograph of the hand.
Dated to over 2.8 million years, this hominid hand and chisel are the oldest known proof of stone-tool industry [Barrett et al., 1990]
.

Barrett. Was that her last name? Or had she only been someone's assistant, someone who had taken the credit for her own discovery? She skimmed through the index of the book, but there was no other reference to Barrett. None of the other books even carried a picture of the hand; it was too recent a find.

Shaking slightly, she walked to the reference desk and waited for the librarian to look up from her computer. “Hello,” she said, flashing her most winning smile. “I was wondering if you could help me.”

 

S
HE FOUND
W
ILL BENT OVER A DESK THAT SEEMED TOO SMALL FOR
him, sorting through paperwork. “Police reports,” he said. “I hate this shit.” He swept them to the side of the desk with his arm and gestured to a chair nearby. “You see your picture yet?” Will held up the newspaper.

Jane grabbed the paper out of his hands and scanned the copy. “God,” she muttered. “They make me sound like a foundling.” She threw the newspaper back onto Will's desk. “And have you been swamped with calls?”

Will shook his head. “Be patient,” he said. “It's not even lunchtime yet.” He wheeled his chair back and crossed his ankles on his desk. “Besides,” he added, “I'm getting used to having you as a housekeeper.”

“Well, you'd better start looking for a replacement.” She tossed him the Xerox copy of the page in the book she'd read that morning. “That's my hand.”

Will peered at the blurry picture and whistled. “You look damn good for your age.”

Jane snatched the paper back and smoothed it on the edge of the desk. “I discovered that hand in Africa,” she said. “I might very well be ‘Barrett.'”

Will raised his eyebrows. “
You
discovered
this
?” He shook his head in disbelief. “Barrett, huh?”

She shrugged. “I'm not really sure, yet. That could just be the lead scientist who was excavating the site.” She pointed to the reference. “I could be ‘et al.' I bullied a librarian into getting me more information,” she said, beaming. “I should know who I am by tomorrow afternoon.”

Will smiled at her. He wondered what he would do when she left him to go back to her life. He wondered how empty his house would feel with just one person in it, whether she'd call him from time to time. “Well,” he said, “I guess I should start calling you Barrett.”

She stopped and turned her face up to his. “To tell you the truth,” she said, “I've gotten used to Jane.”

 

A
N EARLY RISER
, H
ERB
S
ILVER HAD TAKEN HIS BREAKFAST POOLSIDE
at six a.m.: tomato juice, grapefruit, and a Cuban cigar. Squinting up at the sun, he had opened the Tuesday
Times
and stared at the picture of the woman on page 3 until his cigar fell, unnoticed, from the corner of his mouth into the shallow end. “Holy shit,” he said, reaching for the cellular phone in his bathrobe pocket. “Holy fucking shit.”

 

T
HEY WOULDN
'
T HAVE STOPPED FILMING FOR ANY OF THE OTHER
actors on the film, but he was one of the executive producers as well as the leading man, and any money wasted would come out of his own pocket. He wiped his arm across his forehead, grimacing as a streak of makeup came off on the sleeve of the velvet doublet. It was twenty fucking degrees in Scotland, but the set designer had ordered a hundred torches to line the great hall of the castle where they were filming
Macbeth
. Consequently, he couldn't make it through a single take before his own sweat blinded him.

Jennifer, his mousy little assistant, was standing with the portable phone next to a spare suit of armor. Taking the phone, he walked a discreet distance away from her and the
People
reporter who was covering the filming. “Herb,” he said, still in accent, “this better be damn good.”

He knew his agent wouldn't call him on location unless it was a dire emergency, an Academy Award nomination, or a part that would boost his career even higher. But he'd already received an Oscar nomination this year and he'd been choosing his own roles for ages. His fingers gripped the receiver a little tighter, waiting for the transatlantic static to clear.

“—newspaper this morning, and there she—” he heard.

“What?” he shouted, forgetting the cast and crew around him. “I can't hear a thing you're saying!”

Herb's voice came clearly into his ear. “Your wife's picture was on page three of the
L.A. Times
. She was picked up by the police and she doesn't remember her name.”

“Oh Jesus,” he said, his pulse racing. “What happened to her? Is she all right?”

“I just read this two minutes ago,” Herb said. “She looks okay in the picture. I called you right away.”

He sighed into the telephone. “Don't do anything. I'll be home by”—he checked his watch—“six tomorrow morning, your time.” When he spoke again his voice broke. “I've got to be the first one she sees,” he said.

He hung up on his agent without saying goodbye and started barking instructions to Jennifer. He called over her shoulder to his coproducer. “Joe, we've got to stop filming for at least a week.”

“But—”

“Fuck the budget.” He started toward his trailer, but then turned and touched Jennifer's shoulder. She was already bent over the telephone making plane reservations, her hair falling around her like a curtain. When she looked up he held her gaze, and she saw something in his striking eyes that very few people ever had: a quiet desperation. “Please,” he murmured. “If you have to, move heaven and earth.”

It took Jennifer a moment to shake herself back to reality, and even after he'd been gone for several seconds she could still feel the heat where his hand had held her shoulder; the weight of his plea. She picked up the phone again and began to dial. What Alex Rivers needed, Alex Rivers would get.

 

A
T SEVEN A.M. ON
W
EDNESDAY, THE TELEPHONE BEGAN TO RING
. Will ran from the bathroom into the kitchen, wrapping a towel around his waist. “Yeah?”

“It's Watkins. I just got a call from the station. Three guesses who's showed up.”

Will sank down to the kitchen floor and let the bottom drop out of his world. “We'll be there in a half hour,” he said.

“Will?” He heard Watkins's voice as if from a long distance. “You really know how to pick 'em.”

He knew he had to wake Jane and tell her that her husband had come to claim her; he knew he had to say the reassuring things that she'd expect him to say during the ride to the Academy, but he didn't think he could do it. The feelings Jane brought out in him went deeper than a matter of a fateful coincidence. He liked knowing that she tried to cover her freckles with baby powder. He liked the way she had of talking with her hands. He loved seeing her in his bed. He told himself that he would simply put on the mask of indifference he'd worn for the past twenty years, and that within a week his life would be back to normal. He told himself that this was what was meant to be all along. And at the same time, he saw Jane running from the cemetery gate beneath the owl's cry, and he knew that even when she was gone she would be his responsibility.

She was sleeping on her side, her arm curled over her stomach. “Jane,” he said, touching her shoulder. He leaned closer and shook her lightly, shocked to notice that the pillow and blanket no longer smelled like him, but like her. “Jane, get up.”

She blinked at him and rolled over. “Is it time?” she asked, and he nodded.

He made coffee while she was showering, in case she wanted something in her stomach before they left, but she wanted to go right away. He sat beside her in the pickup and drove in silence, letting all the words he should have been saying clutter the space around him.
I'll miss you
, he had planned to tell her.
Call if you get a chance. If anything happens, well, you know where I am
.

Jane stared glassy-eyed at the freeway, her hands clenched in her lap. She did not speak until they turned into the parking lot of the police station. At first, her voice was so quiet that Will thought he had heard her incorrectly. “Do you think he'll like me?”

Will had expected her to wonder aloud about whether she'd remember her husband the minute she laid eyes on him, or to speculate about where her home was. He had not expected this.

He didn't have a chance to answer. A flock of reporters pushed their way toward the truck, snapping flash cameras and calling out questions that tangled with each other in a knot of noise. Jane shrank back against the seat. “Come on,” Will said, sliding his arm around her shoulders. He pulled her toward the driver's-side door. “Just stick close to me.”

Who the hell was she? Even if she was this Barrett person, this anthropologist, and even if she'd discovered that hand, this kind of press coverage seemed to be a little overboard. Will guided Jane up the steps and into the main lobby of the station, feeling her warm breath make a circle against his collarbone.

Standing beside Captain Watkins was Alex Rivers.

Will dropped his arm from Jane's shoulders. Alex
goddamn
Rivers. All these reporters, all these cameras had nothing to do with Jane at all.

The corner of Will's mouth tipped up. Jane was married to the number-one movie star in America. And she'd completely forgotten.

 

T
HE FIRST THING SHE NOTICED WAS THAT
W
ILL HAD STEPPED AWAY
from her. For a moment she was certain she wouldn't be able to stand on her own. She was afraid to look up and face all those people, but something was keeping her on her feet and she needed to see what it was.