The Lioness(67)

“Sometimes.”

“Sometimes?”

“When I’m alone.”

“That sounds sad.”

“Sad? Why sad?”

“You should be using it at parties to encourage some old-school Hollywood bacchanalia. You need a diving board for the real madness, and you have one.”

“I don’t want real madness.”

“When I was in high school,” said Margie, “I had a teacher who told the girls we should always walk like we were on a diving board.”

“Because it would make you walk with real confidence?” Billy asked. “Three or four athletic steps, arms swinging, and then, boom, you’re up in the air?”

Margie shook her head. “No, I think it was just the opposite. We’d walk demurely. Little steps in straight lines.”

“The things adults tell us,” Katie said.

Her brother nodded. She knew that he, too, was thinking of their mother and father. But, mostly, their mother. “David says hi,” he told her, and she understood the synaptic connection. Mom and Dad. Central Park West. David Hill.

She was happy for Billy that David had moved west. She thought that as his life was transformed by the divorce, it was good he had his best friend from childhood with him.

“Say hi back. Say hi for me. How’s he doing?”

“He’s excited about the gallery. It’s looking good.”

When she’d heard that David was opening a gallery, she’d been perplexed. What the hell did he know about art? She always assumed he would follow his father’s lead and do something that involved international relations: the State Department or the Foreign Service or, maybe, the CIA. But Billy explained that David had studied art history at college and had an entrepreneurial eye. The gallery was never going to be trying to sell a Fabritius or Vermeer, but would instead be looking for the next Warhol. It would hang on its walls lots of hip modern stuff that would work well in the beach houses in Malibu. That was David’s plan. But even that had left her a little dubious. Her father had bought a Mark Rothko painting from a show at—of all places—Macy’s in 1942, and David’s parents had looked at it hanging in the Stepanov living room and been incapable of mustering even a semblance of enthusiasm. Surrealism wasn’t in the Hill family’s genes, she supposed, and a government bureaucrat wasn’t likely to wax poetic over something so abstract.

“I’m glad,” she said politely. “He was always my favorite of your friends when we were growing up.” This was true.

“You had a crush on him,” Billy said.

“How in the world would you know?”

“Because you were always following us around. You didn’t follow around my other friends.”

She smiled. “I did.”

“Why?” asked Margie. “What was it about David?”

“Have you two met?” asked Katie.

The woman nodded, and Katie felt a slight pique: Billy had introduced Margie to his childhood pal before he had introduced Margie to her. She tried to let it go. “He was nice to me and he was cute,” she replied. “A lot of Billy’s friends were cute, but not a lot of them were nice to me.”

Billy gently ran his fingers over the back of Margie’s hand. “That’s all it takes when you’re the progeny of Roman and Glenda Stepanov,” he told her. “Someone’s nice to you? You fall for them. Katie and I are both beaten puppies that way.”

“I am not a beaten puppy,” she insisted.

“And you’re not either,” Margie reassured him.

Billy grinned, but it was derisive and self-mocking. “Well, my sister and I are who we are because of that pair. Tell me something,” he said to Katie. She waited. “I know David loved seeing you when I brought him by. He loved catching up.”

“And?”

“Just curious: do you still think he’s nice and cute?”

“Yes. Sure.”

“You two should go on a date. I mean, you’re not seeing anyone.”

“Are you fixing me up?”

“I guess.”

She shrugged and thought, why not? They could have lunch at Billy’s. It hadn’t worked out with actors. Maybe it would with a man who’d known her when she was still Katie Stepanov, and had been a friend to her brother and her when they’d needed a friend—and a little kindness—most.



* * *



.?.?.

They answered her cries. Or, perhaps, they were coming to the hut anyway.

Two of them entered, one with a flashlight, and the beam cast flickering shadows that made her think of bad dreams and the childhood monsters that crawled out from under the bed. She was still weeping, and she asked them what was happening, to please, please tell her, but they remained silent, and she stopped asking questions when one of them untied her, helped her to stand, and walked her outside. It was not quite dark, but almost, and she saw the bright pinprick that was Venus against a deep purple sky and the first bold, bright stars to the east. The majestic profile of an acacia tree looked like a painting, and she might have stood there, struck silent by its beauty, if this had been just another night in the Serengeti.

The one who’d untied her instructed her to sit on the ground in the center of the boma, and then he started to round up stray sticks and branches and toss them into a pile in front of her. From a small dead tree, a kind she didn’t recognize, he tore off skeletal twigs and added them to the mound too. When it was the size of a mother warthog, he lugged a jerry can from the back of one of the Land Rovers, sprinkled some fuel onto the heap, and set it on fire. She had been cold, and the warmth from the fire felt good on her face and arms. She rubbed at her wrists and her ankles, where she had been tied.