The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes (23 page)

“At first,” Laney said, “I was only thinking of getting away from Bennett. But then I realized that if he thought I was dead, he might back off. Of course, for that to work, everyone had to think so. Even you.”

“You know how smart Bennett is. He would have been watching the house. Maybe even tapped the phones. He liked to do that, plant microphones and cameras. And if he realized I was alive, he’d come after you.”

“So your plan was, what, lay low forever? That doesn’t make any sense.”
She shrugged. “You’re the writer. You plan things. I was improvising.”
“Improvising.”
“It’s what actresses do, love.”
“So you were just going to let me think—”
“Only until I could find a safe way to get in touch with you. A day or two at the most. I knew it would be terrible for you, I just didn’t see any choice. But then you were gone. And I figured, well, if Bennett thinks I’m dead, maybe that’s useful. Maybe it will give me a chance to get close to him. So I dressed as a cleaning lady, became a woman named Lila Bannister, and went to the house for one of your guns. Then I started looking for him. And for you.”
Daniel stared at the ceiling. His mind screening footage of the car chase, of her limping away. “I see how you’re alive, but why was Bennett chasing you in the first place? Who is he? How do you know him?”
Laney laughed humorlessly. “Yeah, right.”
“I mean it.”
“I don’t want to go through it all again, okay? I don’t want to fight. It was a long time ago.”
Daniel stiffened, stomach going sick.
What was a long time ago?
Every time he got one answer, two new questions popped up.
Then he realized. He had known all of this. He must have. It’s just that it was gone, along with the rest of his memories.
“Besides, it’s not like you don’t have things in your past,” Laney continued, voice rising. “What was the name of that skank you used to sleep with? The one who got pregnant and told you and
four
other guys that they were the father, asked for money. What was her name, huh?”
“I don’t know,” Daniel said. He rubbed at his eyes.
“Yeah, I bet. So don’t you—”
“Laney.”
“I never thought he’d come back into our lives. I thought that was behind—”
“I need to tell you something.” He took her hands.
How are you going to explain this? It’s one thing to tell Sophie you don’t remember her. But this is your wife.
“You know that woman you asked about?”
Laney’s shoulders tightened. “What about—”
“I don’t remember her name. I don’t actually remember her at all. In fact,” he tried to laugh, but the sound was wrong, “I don’t remember most of my life.”
“What? What are you—are you being philosophical again? Because now isn’t the time to go all Sartre on me.”
“No. Literally. I don’t remember. I have some kind of amnesia.”
She stared at him. He met her gaze. After a long moment, she said, “What are you talking about?”
“I’m still figuring it out myself. Things are coming back, a lot of them. But most of my past, it’s . . . I can’t remember it.” Haltingly, he took her through the last week of his life. Waking in panic and pain, half-dead on the wrong side of the country. The pursuit, the endless drive, the loneliness, the dreams. The revelations about their life—okay, yeah, he downplayed the complete shock to discover they were married—and the discovery that she was dead. His grief and anger and attempts at revenge.
Laney listened, her face neutral. She seemed to be consciously withholding judgment, as if someone were telling a joke that might be offensive and she was waiting for the punch line to see which way it landed. Her reserve made him talk faster, wedging words between words, embroidering his statements, spinning the tale as best he knew how, trying to paint for her the state of his life, the edge of madness he’d haunted, the constant uncertainty.
Finally she broke in. “You don’t remember anything.”
“Like I said, it’s coming back. Some of it. And I’m hoping that now that we’re together . . .” He broke off, realizing how lame that sounded.
“You’re not joking.”
“No.”
“This isn’t some weird game.”
“No.”
“Last Christmas, when I roasted a chicken and we lay in the backyard looking at the stars. You don’t remember.”
“No.”
“Our wedding day, on the beach in Maine.”
Slowly, he shook his head.
“The day we met.”
“I’m—I’m sorry. It’s not something I chose, believe me.”
She turned away. “Do you remember me at all?”
“I . . .” He took a deep breath. Guilt and shame had been constant companions for the past week, but now they found new ways to twist within him. “I know that I love you. I have certain things, images, little . . . vignettes, I guess, that come to me. I don’t control them. But I can tell how precious you are to me.”
She made a sound that might have been intended as a laugh.
“I realize how that . . . especially . . . I mean, you know.” He gestured at the twisted bedding.
“That’s what you were trying to say in the elevator.”
“Laney, I’m so sorry. If I could turn this off, get rid of it, I would. It’s been tearing me apart ever since I woke up on that beach and realized I didn’t know how I got there.” He reached out to touch her, stopped before his fingers made contact. Held them there for a moment, and then lowered his hand. “I know this much,” he said quietly. “Even when I didn’t remember anything at all, I knew you were out there. I knew that I had to get back to you. I followed a television show, a fantasy, across the country. I chased you before I knew your
name
. I was trying to get home. And home is you.”
She knit her fingers together, palms up—
this is the church, this is the steeple, open it up, see all the people
—and spoke to them. “You need a doctor. It could be a brain tumor, or an aneurism—”
“No,” he said. He told her about the MRI clinic, the radiology tech shrugging, saying,
Man, you want to see a doc, up to you, but this is your brain, and there ain’t nothing wrong with it. Physically, at least.
“It could be something else. Something that doesn’t show up on an MRI.”
“I don’t think so.”
“What do you know about medicine? I mean, if it’s not physical, then how did this happen?”
“I’m only guessing.”
“Okay.”
“I think maybe my brain was trying to protect itself.”
“From what?”
“From . . . dying.”
“Dying? What do you mean?” She turned suddenly, her eyes gas-burner blue.
He looked away.
“Daniel?”
“I don’t know for sure. I think maybe I was.” He sighed. “Maybe I was trying to kill myself.”
“
What?
”
“I don’t know—”
“Trying to
kill yourself
? What are you talking about?”
“Well, I mean, it’s . . .” He tried for a sheepish grin, failed miserably, turned away again. “It’s my best guess of how this all started. My amnesia. I thought you were dead, and so I tried to kill myself.”
“What?”
“I don’t know, all right? I don’t
remember
. All I know is that I thought you were dead, and next thing I can put together, I woke up on the beach where we got married. So I figure that I was . . .” He shrugged. “Lost. Miserable. And I ran from L.A., and kept running until I made it to the beach. I had a gun with me, and I’m guessing maybe I planned to use it on myself, but then decided to swim into the ocean instead. That seemed more fitting, somehow, and—”
“Asshole!”
Daniel blinked. “What?”
“Was that supposed to be romantic, all Romeo and Juliet? Did you stop to think for half a second what that would do to me? Did you?”
“Well, I don’t remember. But seeing as how you were dead at the time, I’m going to guess not.”
Laney looked like she wanted to keep yelling, but his words threw her. She shook her head. Laughed emptily. “Yeah.”
“I’ve been feeling this terrible guilt, I mean, just unbearable guilt and shame. Ever since I woke up. And these dreams. One in particular that keeps coming back, where I’m standing in front of this dark tunnel, and there’s something horrible about it, something I can’t take back. Which would make sense if I tried to kill myself, wouldn’t it?”
“A tunnel?” Something flickered across her face.
“Yeah. Somewhere made out of concrete, and there’s a tunnel.” “And that’s all you remember?”
“Of the dream? Yeah.”
She nodded slowly. “So you don’t remember anything about Bennett.”
“No.”
“Nothing from the last couple of weeks?”
“No.”
“Nothing? At all?”
He cocked his head. “Is there something—”
“No, I’m just getting used to this.” Laney looked like she might continue, but then she closed her mouth, gave him an empathetic wince. “It must be scary.”
He nodded. They sat for a moment. Daniel said, “So who is he?”
“He’s . . . a nightmare. My nightmare.”
“What does that mean?”
She stared at her hands again. It took an effort of will not to fire questions at her, to just wait for her to be ready.
“I started modeling when I was fourteen. Small stuff, local. Ads for the kids’ clothing store in the mall, that kind of thing. But when I was seventeen I went to this casting call for Abercrombie. There were a couple of hundred girls there, and that was just in Chicago. Somehow they picked me. It was a national campaign, in all their stores. Suddenly I was a capital-M Model. I got an agent, and she got a lot of calls. My dad didn’t know what to do about it, but I was almost eighteen, and he knew he could only put it off for a couple of months, so he gave in. I spent that year flying all over the place. Making ridiculous money. Seventeen, and I made more for a week’s work than Dad brought home in a year at the garage. I thought life was one big adventure. Beautiful clothes, famous people, fabulous parties. And at one of them, I met this guy.”
“Bennett.”
“He wasn’t like anyone else. The world was a game to him. He had an angle on everything. He knew things about people, funny things, embarrassing things.”
“He’s a con man?”
She laughed humorlessly. “And Michelangelo did some painting. Bennett destroys people. He cons, he blackmails, he toys with them. Finds out their secrets. He always said, ‘Everybody sins. I’m just there to see it.’ ”
“What was your sin?”
“Stupidity.” A loose curl of hair had fallen across her face, and she brushed it back. “I was seventeen. Seventeen-year-old girls are stupid. They like boys who ride motorcycles. He was mysterious. Charming. Smart.”
“So what . . .” His words stalled. Did he want the answer to this question? “What happened?”
“You have to understand, my life had gone surreal. Other girls were trying on prom dresses, going to football games. I was posing for ads in
Vanity Fair
and
Esquire.
At the time I thought it was great, but I look back now, and I think,
Oh, you stupid, stupid child
. I mean, those ads. Boobs forward, head tilted, lips open, tongue on teeth,” she struck the pose, “the point is sex. That’s what the industry is about. Models don’t sell clothes, they sell the fantasy of sex. And so the fact that I was still a virgin seemed, I don’t know. Immature. False. I thought of my virginity as something I wanted to get rid of. I knew it wasn’t love, but it felt glamorous. Most girls lose it in the back of a car; for me it was the penthouse at the Four Seasons.”

Daniel’s skin crawled.
You evil, evil fucker. You let her give something she couldn’t get back, just for fun. I already wanted you for what you did to Sophie, to our lives. Now . . .

“And the next day.” She paused. “The very next day, Bennett tells me about this guy running for Congress. A man with family money. He says the guy likes,” she made air quotes, “ ‘young pussy,’ and that I was going to help blackmail him.”

Daniel’s thoughts were sewage, stinking and black.
“He’d hidden cameras in the hotel. Pictures of me naked, of us . . . doing things. He said he’d send them to my father, my brother, post them in my high school.” She shook her head. “Now, I think,
Who cares?
My dad wouldn’t have liked it, but teenagers have sex, and the world still turns. It wouldn’t have killed him. It wouldn’t even have killed my career. But that’s now. Imagine being seventeen. Everyone pointing. Imagine trying to go to church with your family, and everyone in the congregation glancing sideways, all of them picturing you naked, and not just naked, but . . .” She stopped. “Stupid. Vanity. But that’s how Bennett works.”
Daniel moved to wrap his arms around her from behind. “So you did it.”
“Yes. I . . .” A shiver ran beneath her skin. “I did. I felt like throwing up, but I did it. Bennett got what he wanted, and I got free. I left Chicago and came to Los Angeles, the best place in the world to reinvent yourself. I came here and I said, ‘You’re no longer Elaine Sedlacek, model and victim and Stupid Girl. You’re Laney Thayer. You’re an aspiring actress with a reason to make it. You’re going to become a star, and eventually you’re going to meet a real man and fall in love, and you never need to think about Bennett again.’ ”
He closed his eyes. Her back was hot against his chest, and the smell of her was in his nostrils. “When did he come back?”
“Two weeks ago. In a way, I’m surprised he waited this long. He already knew my sins, after all. Maybe he saw me as an investment, waited for the money to get bigger. Anyway, when he did come back, it was the tape of seventeen-year-old me and the married congressman.”
“He said he’d release it.”
“Maybe my career would have weathered it—maybe—but maybe not. For every Drew Barrymore the public forgives, there are a hundred women whose names no one remembers. Plus, he’d blackmailed the politician, and there was no way to prove that I hadn’t been in on that. But really, it wasn’t those things. It was you. I didn’t want to put you through that. The embarrassment of it. Of people watching your wife . . .” She spun the ring on her finger. “And all he wanted was money.”
“So you bought the necklace to pay him off.” It burned him to think of rewarding this fucker who had taken so much from her. Maybe it was the simplest way to handle things, but Bennett deserved to be hit with a car, not paid off.
“He wanted that one specifically. And ten grand in cash.” She paused, looked at him quizzically. “I don’t know why he didn’t just want the whole thing in cash.”
“Taking out that much draws a lot of attention. Most banks don’t have half a million just sitting in the back room. Plus, with that much, it’s easy to include a bunch of sequential serial numbers, which the FBI might be able to track— What?” She had an odd look on her face.
“That’s almost exactly what you said before.”
“Before?” He caught on. “You asked me that before.” She nodded, and he said, “So what was that? A test?”
“I’m just getting used to it. It’s kind of interesting, though, don’t you think? That you would answer almost exactly the same way? I remember because when you said that about half a million in the back room, I flashed to the image, you know, fluorescent lights, a big metal door, stacks of cash on shelves. It’s like those words were in you. Waiting.”
“Yeah. My head is a wondrous place,” he said. A silence fell. The glass door to the balcony was open, and a breeze rippled the sheer curtains. “Can I ask you something?”
“Anything.”
“Did you tell me? About Bennett?”
“Of
course
.” She turned to face him. Her eyes were steady and close. “I told you years ago. All of it.”
“How did . . .” He realized he was frightened of the answer, but had to ask the question anyway. “How did I react?”
“You asked me to marry you.”
“I did?”
“That’s how we ended up getting married on a beach in Maine. We’d been dating about a year then, but that was our first real trip together. You’d been busy, writing for
Brothers Blue
—” she caught herself, explained, “it was a cop drama, great show but misunderstood, got canceled halfway through the first season—and we were in this place on the coast. Lying in bed, talking, you could hear the waves in the background, and I felt . . . safe. So I told you. And when I was done, you asked me to marry you, and I said yes, and you said you meant right away.” Her eyes in a happy distance. “So we paid a Unitarian minister five hundred dollars to marry us on the beach the next afternoon. You gave him your camera to take a couple of pictures, and then you said, ‘Thanks, we appreciate it, now get the hell out of here so I can do my wife.’ ”
Daniel was a writer, but he would have been hard-pressed to name the feeling that rolled through him. The warmth and love and trust, the sense of coming home and loving the view, all mingled with relief—after a week of shame and the very real suspicion he had done something terrible, to realize that of this, at least, he was innocent, that was hard to roll into one word.
But maybe bliss.