The Lioness(66)

God, she thought, splaying her fingers because some were falling asleep, I am oozing fluids everywhere. And that didn’t even count the sweat.

This safari had been her big idea. Now it had fallen apart—Fallen apart? That was like saying Jack Kennedy’s visit to Dallas had had a few hiccups—and when they all died, it was on her for bringing them here.

She wished she were being too hard on herself. She tried to convince herself that their deaths would be no more her fault than if the plane had crashed on its final approach to the airport in Nairobi. But she also understood that none of this self-flagellation mattered, because dead was dead and it was the only thing in the world you had no hope of changing.

Finally, she could stand it no longer and so she cried out. “Let us go!” she wailed. “Please! Let us go! Someone, please, tell me what’s happening!”

And then she said the same thing softly—Let us go. Tell me what’s happening—the words this time lost in her sobs.



* * *



.?.?.

Billy and this new woman in his life, Margie, were sitting with her at the wrought-iron table under the umbrella on the east side of her swimming pool. Katie thought Margie was smart and pretty and hoped that things would work out for her brother and her. But she had no idea. She hadn’t realized that Billy’s first marriage was crumbling until he had dropped the bombshell on her last year that he had moved out and he and Amelia were resolving the custody arrangements.

Custody arrangements.

God, what a concept. She was poor Marc’s aunt and hadn’t even known that his parents’ marriage was in trouble until it was over.

“Sometimes, I miss living back east,” Margie was saying, and she swirled the ice in her glass.

“Would you like more iced tea?” Katie asked her.

“No, but it’s delicious.”

“It’s from a cannister. It’s powder. The best thing about it is that it’s sugar free but tastes like sweet tea,” she said. She wasn’t sure why she was telling them that the tea was instant. She’d discovered sweet tea on a movie set in Atlanta, and she associated the drink now with southern hospitality. Confessing that she hadn’t even bothered to steep some real tea and chill the beverage before her guests arrived seemed the exact opposite of hospitality. But then she knew: her mother would have lied and told Margie some story about the work that either she or the latest Irish girl had done to prepare tea that was exquisite and special. Katie was being (one of her mother’s favorite words) contrary because she didn’t want to be her mother.

“One summer, Katie ate nothing but sugar-free iced tea from a cannister and peanuts,” Billy told this new woman in his life. “Whole damn summer, that was it.”

“How would you know?” she asked him, shaking her head at the story. “You were in college!”

“Mother told me.”

Katie rolled her eyes. “I was getting fat.”

“Mother told me that, too.”

She was wearing a straw hat, and she hit him with it. He feigned terror and shielded his face as he groaned, “I’m just telling you what she said!”

“Did it work?” Margie asked.

“I lost weight, yes.”

“You should tell the Hollywood Reporter or Teen Screen: it could be the Katie Barstow Miracle Diet,” said Billy’s new girlfriend, and for a moment Katie imagined suggesting the idea to Reggie. Sugar-free iced tea from a cannister or a jar, and all the peanuts you wanted. The weight would just melt away. Reggie would think she was kidding and laugh at the idea good-naturedly, and then suggest a healthier alternative, if she really wanted him to pursue this. She recalled how when Teen Screen had reached out to him for baby pictures of his client, she’d told him to check in with her mother back in New York. Katie had never expected that Glenda would send Reggie a snapshot of her in the pumpkin. She was sure it would be one from her first Broadway show. Or maybe that dinner at Sardi’s when she was thirteen and her father let her have a glass of champagne, and she’d stared, mesmerized, at the opaline phosphorescence of the bubbles in the flute. Will I ever be this happy again? she had wondered, and for a long second, she had been scared. But the second had passed. Thank God. Those weren’t baby pictures, but her mother had boasted often how pretty she looked in them, and how very much mother and daughter resembled each other. Had her mother sent the pumpkin pic because it really was a baby photo and she was following instructions, or had she sent it to torture her? Did she really believe that horseshit she’d told the magazine writer about their joyful, eccentric, theatrical evening trick-or-treating together with Billy on the wrong night?

“Part of Katie’s team is Reggie Stout,” Billy was telling Margie. “Owns a small but very powerful PR firm. So, what do you think, sis: should Reggie pitch the glossies the Katie Barstow Miracle Diet?”

Sis. Since when did Billy call her “sis”? She put her hat back on her head and watched a keg-chested seagull swagger along the coralline lip of the swimming pool. The house was at the edge of a cliff, and in the distance today—across the dry brown scrub that marked the valley—you could see Los Angeles, a little pink in the haze.

“I was kidding,” Margie said before she had to answer.

“I was too,” said Billy. He was gazing out into the valley and then asked, “Do you ever use the diving board?”