As Bright as Heaven(96)

I’m not aware that tears have gathered in my eyes until he reaches into his vest pocket and offers me a handkerchief.

I blot my eyes and I smell the closeness of his skin on the fabric. “I still don’t understand why you saved my letters.”

He leans forward and takes my hand. “Because every time you penned a letter to me, you wrote to the man I had been, the man you thought I still was. Every time I read or reread one of your letters, I was given a glimpse of the person I used to be. You made me believe I was still in there somewhere, past all the regret and the wounds and the self-loathing. There were many times I wanted to give up, times I wanted to point a gun to my head and just be done with it, but I’d see your letters in my rucksack and I’d find the will to live another day. All these years that I’ve been roaming about, doing odd jobs here and there and waiting to see if my world was ever going to turn right side up again, it was your letters that gave me the hope that one day it would. Your letters saved my life, Maggie. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you. I’d be dead.”

“But . . . but I stopped writing.” My voice is tight in my throat and feels leaden. I do not feel like anyone’s savior.

“It didn’t matter. All those years that you did were enough for me. And after your letters stopped coming, I found myself wanting to live so that I could come home and show you that you hadn’t been a fool for writing a man who never wrote back.”

I was in love with you, my heart whispers. That is why I kept writing. And why I finally stopped.

He squeezes my hand before letting go. “I’m glad you came over, Maggie. I wanted to find the right time and place to tell you all this. I wish . . .” His voice falls away.

“You wish what?”

He smiles and shrugs. “I wish I had come home sooner.”

“I wish you had, too.”

For the first time ever, the eight years that separate Jamie and me seem like nothing more than a day. Unspoken words hang between us. He leans forward slightly, and I want to think it’s the posture of a man about to kiss the woman who saved his life.

And then Roland Sutcliff throws open the front door to the accounting office, jangling a bell to announce his entrance and breaking the spell.





CHAPTER 59



Willa


Lila enters her dressing room wearing a silky black robe trimmed with glittering gold lace. Her ever-present cigarette holder is in one hand, and a cocktail glass is in the other. A man wearing a pin-striped suit, with gelled hair and a pencil mustache, is laughing behind her, spilling his own drink on his polished shoes.

When she sees me, Lila puts up a hand to the man’s chest. “We’ll have to do this later, Frankie.”

“What?” the man says as he stumbles against her raised arm.

“You heard me. Later.” She is looking only at me.

The man named Frankie unloads a string of curses.

She turns to him and tells him to shut the hell up or there won’t be a later. He sighs and ambles off, his shoulder hugging the wall as he disappears down the hall. Lila shuts the door and pivots to face me.

“What are you doing here, love?” she says.

It’s a Sunday. I don’t sing on Sundays. “I want to work tonight.”

She crosses the room to stand by me, folding her arms and leaning her backside against her dressing table. The top of the table is covered with lipsticks and pots of rouge and eye color, bottles of perfume and tins of scented talcum. One of the tubes of lipstick falls over. “Does Albert know you’re in my dressing room?”

“No.”

“How’d you get here?”

“I took a taxi.”

“A taxi dropped you off here?” she says, her perfectly painted eyebrows raised.

“A block away. I’m not stupid.”

She cocks her head, and her perky bob falls away from the left side of her face like fringe on a curtain.

“What are you doing here, Willa?” She never uses my real name even though I told her what it is. She always calls me Polly, or love, or doll.

“I told you. I want to work tonight.”

“That’s not going to happen. Look, Albert likes you, but he doesn’t like surprises. You here right now is a surprise. You say you’re not stupid. I’m telling you, the smartest thing you can do is go back home and come back on Friday like you’re supposed to.”

I want to sweep my hand across her table. I can feel the muscles in my arm tensing with the desire to send everything clattering to the floor.

“Like I’m supposed to.” I echo her words, but she said them gently and they come out of my mouth hard and angry. I’m tired of people telling me what they’re going to do no matter how I feel about it.

“Hey, we all have to live by someone’s rules,” Lila says, as if reading my thoughts. “You work here, you live by Albert’s rules. I don’t know who at home you’re mad at, but you can’t be here right now. Every time you come to the club, Albert takes a risk. You know that, don’t you? He takes extra precautions on the nights you’re here.”

I don’t know what she means and she can see that I don’t.

“You’re young,” she says by way of explanation. “You’re still a child.”