The Truth About Air & Water (Truth in Lies #2) (37 page)

Then, she starts pulling at the neckline of her white dress, which causes me to say, “you’re really beautiful. It’s not a pick-up line. The way you move…you’re so graceful…just like a dancer. I don’t know how I ever thought you were a nurse. Although you’re being a pretty good nurse right now.”

“
Friends
, Elvis.” She draws an imaginary line between us. “Come on. Let’s-be-friends. It’ll be fun. Let’s
really
confuse the paparazzi by just being
famous friends
. ‘Cause, I’m a pretty famous dancer, you know.” She laughs. “SFB…San Francisco Ballet is up and coming. It’s not New York but it will do. For now,” she says softly. “And there’s always the Bolshoi this summer with Sasha. She wants me to come see her. Bring Cara. For the summer.”

“Who’s Sasha?”

“This really gets confusing, doesn’t it? All these people you don’t remember. Sasha was my director at New York City Ballet. She’s one of the reasons I came back to San Francisco. Then, she married Michael. He’s a doctor, and now they’re in Moscow.”

“Nobody will tell me about Moscow. Have you ever been?”

She looks uneasy again. “We don’t talk about Moscow. That’s actually when I first met Sam…after Moscow. We don’t talk—”

“About Moscow,” I finish the sentence for her.

Silence.

A long one.

“We should probably talk about Moscow,” she says with a heavy sigh. “Everything kind of leads to Moscow. Eventually.”

“Only if you want to. We don’t have to.”

She slides into the chair opposite mine and twists up her hair and holds it on top of her head with one hand. “The Giants got you for a song because of Moscow. The Angels left you high and dry after you got arrested.”

“Wait
what
? I got
arrested
? I’m a badass?”

“Not a badass, Elvis, a hometown hero, actually.” She nods as if giving herself permission to proceed. “You were in Moscow with the Angels for an exhibition game with Nika. Not a fan of hers by the way. I was in Moscow as part of NYC Ballet’s exchange program dancing with the Bolshoi Ballet. I’d had some trouble before with crazed fans in Paris. Little things. Someone broke into my hotel room. Another followed me home. Moscow was different, vaguely worse for some reason in my mind.” She sighs. “But I was determined to overcome my fears and not let them rule my life anymore. I was actually the badass, Elvis.” She smiles but then it fades just as fast. “So. I was walking,
alone
, back to the hotel after a luncheon thing with the other dancers when I passed this guy on the street. It was just like those movies you see. A questionable part of town. A girl walking alone. Too far from her hotel. All of those indelible facts ran through my mind in those few split seconds before this guy turned around, grabbed me, and pulled me into this alleyway. Nicholai Balanchine.” She winces upon saying his name. “He attacked me at knife-point, and things went from there.”

These haunted shadows flit across her features. She lets go of her hair and stares off into space for a long twenty seconds.

“Tally, we don’t have to talk about Moscow,” I say feeling uneasy. “We
don’t
. Kimberley said
not
to bring it up. She told me she’d tell me about all of it someday. We
don’t
have to do this.”

“No. It’s okay. I’ve got this. I should be the one to tell you. All of it.” She takes a deep breath and studies me. “I got away from him.
Somehow.
I pushed him hard enough and he landed on some rebar, which lanced straight through him, pinned him down like a butterfly. He wasn’t dead. Not then. And I was terrified, injured, bleeding profusely. I just wanted to get away, get to my hotel, assess the damage of what he’d done to me, so I made my way to the street. And there you were. The first car I stopped was a taxi and you were the passenger. Moscow, this huge city, and you were there. Cosmic, right? You took me to the hospital. You saved my life. You and Dr. Michael Markov. Actually, Sasha met Michael because of me. Love. You find it in such strange places sometimes.” She smiles for a few seconds. “Anyway, emergency surgery. Drugs. Never enough. Pain. Yes, lots of pain. And many lies told by me to better cope with the scene unfolding in front of me.”

She gets up from the chair and crosses her arms and stares out the window. “You told me you were marrying Nika, and that I couldn’t have any more children, possibly in the same sentence, at least it felt that way.” She gets this sad twisted smile. “I kind of lost it after that. So, I left.
You.
Moscow. But then, Balanchine died and I hadn’t given them a statement, and you didn’t have an alibi for that alley scene, and the Moscow Police didn’t care. You were arrested. They threatened you with these trumped-up murder charges and the Los Angeles Angels baseball team was none too happy about all the negative press involving their superstar pitcher.”

She looks at me intently. “I didn’t know you were in trouble because of me. Ten days after your arrest, Marla and Charlie tracked me down here in San Fran. I returned to Moscow, gave a statement, and they finally released you, and me, I guess, for seven hundred thousand convincing reasons. A hundred of mine; six hundred grand of my ex’s, Rob Thorn. At the time, Rob led me to believe that he had paid the ransom for your release. I felt I owed him, so I went back to him. Yet, it turned out that you reimbursed him. So, technically, I still owe you six hundred grand. Damn. I’m in some serious debt as it is,” she teases softly. “How am I going to pay you back? I’ll figure it out; I promise.” She frowns and gets this brittle smile. “I guess your father wasn’t completely wrong about your money as it relates to me. So, yeah, we don’t talk about Moscow, like ever.”

“You don’t owe me anything.” I sit here in total shock at her story. What she went through sounds like a horror movie and yet she attempts to smile, to laugh it off. “So. You can’t have any more children. I’m so sorry,” I say gently.

She looks taken aback. “That’s all you got out of my little story about Moscow?” She looks unsure as how to handle my sympathy. “No,” she finally says in a low voice. “They still say it’s unlikely I can get pregnant again. One ovary—yada, yada, yada. Scar tissue. Impossible odds. Shall I go on about the girl stuff?” She smiles again but it doesn’t diminish the grief reflected in her eyes.

“I’m so sorry.” I grab her hand and squeeze it tight trying to relieve her of some of the pain. “At least, we have Cara. And she’s more than enough.” I smile.

“Stop this.” She jumps out of her chair in one swirling motion and begins pacing. “Stop this,” she says again. “
Please
.” She practically moans the word.

“Stop what?”

“This
thing
you’re doing…saying things like that. You wanted a
son
. I couldn’t give you one. It’s important to you. Quit acting like it doesn’t matter. It
matters
to you!”

“I wanted a son? Tally,
every guy
wants a son. But we have Cara so it
doesn’t matter
. Wait. Did I…did I make you feel bad because you couldn’t have any more kids? That we couldn’t have a son?”

She stares at me as a single tear rolls down her face. “Yes. Not intentionally or cruelly, but
yes
, you did. It tore me up when you admitted this to Pastor Dan.”

“Who’s Pastor Dan?”

“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter anymore. Quit doing this to me. Stop saying things like that as if you remember me at all. You’re confusing me.” She looks stricken and I begin to hear her wheezing. But in the next ten seconds, she’s at the front door undoing the locks as fast as she can. She wrenches the door, and points toward my car parked at the curb. “Please. Just go.”

Now
this
is a turning point.

“Tally,” I say gently as I slowly walk over to her. “We can’t change the past but we can embrace the present. We can start over.” I stand in the open doorway and look at her intently. “We can figure this out between us.”

“No. We can’t. Stop it,” she says irritably. “You need to go, Linc.
Now.
”

“What if I don’t want to?” I ask.

“It’s not about what you want. It’s about what
I
want. And right now, I want you to go home to your big ol’ house in the land of Sea Cliff, get a good night’s rest, pack your bags, move to Fresno and not confuse me anymore. I have
Sam
. And Cara. And this thing with you is all too much.” She takes a shaky breath.

We stand there for a few minutes and share our misery.

“What time do you leave for Fresno?” She asks.

“I’ve got to buy a car, sign some IR release forms with the Giants, finish things up with the house, call Kimberley and Brad.” I sigh. “I’ll be on the road by noon, if I’m lucky. What are the odds?”

“May the odds be forever in your favor.”
The Hunger Games
reference should serve as levity but neither one of us laughs. She tries again. “You need to go. You’re leaving for Fresno. You have baseball. You have to focus on that. You know it; I know it.” Now, she gets this impenetrable stony look on her face. “Now is not the time for us…I have
Sam
.”

Sam has become her secret weapon in the last six minutes. Every time she says his name I flinch.

“I don’t like Sam,” I say irritably.

“You don’t
get
to like Sam or
not
like Sam. That’s my business.
My affair
.” She catches her lower lip between her teeth seeming to regret what she’s just said to me. But then, she stands up straighter and starts her little speech all over again. “You can’t afford to lose your
focus
. It’s like you said, you lose baseball; you lose everything and I’m not going to be the one who causes you to do that.”

She’s right of course. What can I offer her? I’m playing baseball practically every damn day until September beginning now. I’ll be in Fresno and up and down the West Coast with the Grizzlies all summer.
If I’m lucky.
If I don’t somehow blow it all together.
Fresno.
I may as well be in Texas or New York or Toronto.
When would I see her? What can I give her?
And if I lose baseball because I can’t throw a fast ball or a slider, well, I lose everything.
I wash out.

“Okay,” I say, feeling the ebb of another panic attack coming on. “But how do you want to work this? With Cara. With us.”

“Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.” She leans against the open door and closes her eyes. I step closer to her and they flutter open. “Go. Now.”

“Tally.” I run my hands through my hair in frustration because I can already feel her pulling away even though she’s standing right in front of me.

“I’ll call you.” She gets this sly half-smile.

“No, you won’t.”

“I’ll call you. Now go, Lincoln Presley,” she says with a heavy sigh. “You need to go right the fuck now.”

The defiant queen has returned and I already know she’s not going to back down.

And somehow I know if I push her too far, it will be the end of us.

And so I leave.

I sit in the rental car for a long time. Long enough to watch her turn off all the lights inside the house. Long enough to watch the early morning fog roll in and turn the dark night into a grey dawn silently marking the first day of February.

At last, I recover.

Defeated, I start the car and drive away.

Within blocks of leaving, I’m thirsty again.

And all I know for certain is that it’s going to be a long season.
Without water.