The Villa(75)

Something bigger.

It’s the memory of Pierce that sends her back to that little desk under the window, that has her pen moving yet again. The real story of that summer, all the ugly bits, but the beautiful parts, too. That night with Pierce and Noel, the first time she heard Aestas.

Mari even lets Johnnie have his goodness, because he did have some, after all. It was there inside him that day by the pond, when he told Mari her hair was gorgeous and he smiled his crooked smile.

She writes and writes until she gets to the last night, the night that ended everything.

Mari has spent nearly twenty years not thinking about that night, but she lets herself remember it all now.

She was sitting at her desk, finishing Lilith Rising, the storm raging outside, and from somewhere downstairs, Pierce was calling her name.

She’d ignored it. The end of the book was too close; she was too close, and what could Pierce possibly want?

The heavy sounds, those meaty thwacks, her annoyance, her If he and Johnnie are fighting again, I swear to god …

And then finishing the book. Writing The End.

She had wanted to share that moment of accomplishment with Pierce, despite all of it, so she’d gone downstairs and walked straight into a nightmare.

Pierce, his beautiful brown hair soaked with blood, the back of his head a ruin.

Johnnie, standing over him with something gray and heavy in his hand, his face splattered with blood, with Pierce’s blood, his eyes almost like an animal’s, blank, uncomprehending.

Everything that followed was a blur. Screaming, running, yelling for Lara, for the police, for Noel, for anyone to help them, as Johnnie just let the heavy sculpture in his hands shatter against the stone floor, before collapsing heavily next to it, his upper body swaying.

In the end, she hadn’t been able to tell the truth, the whole truth, so help her God. She had left out seeing Johnnie there, the weapon in his hands, because, almost absurdly, she’d wanted to at least give him some kind of chance. Wanted him to have to explain why he’d done it, how it had all happened.

That was the part that still tortured her the most. Had Pierce been calling for her because Johnnie had already hit him? Had he just sensed that this fight would be different from the last? What had started it, and how had it progressed to Pierce lying dead in that hallway? If she hadn’t been so focused on finishing her book—the book that had changed her life—would Pierce still be alive?

She’d never know. Johnnie never told, and within six months of his sentencing, he’d hanged himself in his cell.

Mari stares at the blank page in front of her.

She starts to write.

She doesn’t tell the story how it happened. She tells another story, maybe a darker one, one in which she’s the one wielding the statue, she’s the one crushing Pierce’s skull. That’s better, isn’t it? Grander, more important, less.… pointless.

Mari writes and writes, feeling the way she did that night as she finished Lilith Rising, a way she’s never felt again. There have been other books, of course. Four in total, none as good as Lilith Rising, none she’d wanted to share with the world, but this story pours out of her.

When it’s done—when this other Mari in another life has put pieces of the bloody statue in a sleeping Johnnie’s hands and sworn this other Lara to secrecy—Mari expects to stop. Instead, she keeps going.

When Noel died in that plane crash in 1980, Mari hadn’t seen him in three years, and that had just been a quick hello at one of her book signings. Now, she gives them this final meeting in a dark restaurant on a snowy night in New York.

Tears stream down her face as she conjures him up, remembering the way he moved, the way he talked, the way he might have been in those last few months before he died.

They kiss goodbye in the story, just like they never got to do in real life.

And Lara, flighty, mercurial Lara, she makes the moral heart of it all. The one who won’t accept what happened so easily, who, in the end, has the noblest core of any of them.

As for Mari herself … well, she sends her off alone into the cold, because there are times when it feels like that’s precisely what’s happened to her. She has a life she loves, a life she very much doesn’t want to lose, and one much happier than what she implies for this Other Mari. She and Lara had stayed close, had visited each other’s houses nearly every chance they got, until Lara decided to have a little too much fun one night and climbed into her Jacuzzi bath when her blood was full of champagne and Quaaludes.

But there are times when Mari feels like she’s spent her entire life fending for herself, so it seems like a fitting end to this, her own version of her story.

When she’s done, she reads it back over and, for the first time since 1974, she feels something like peace.

She didn’t kill Pierce. Johnnie Dorchester did, in some kind of drug-fueled rage—a sad and stupid ending for both men, and one she’s never quite been able to reconcile.

But if she hadn’t insisted on staying, if she’d let Pierce leave when he wanted to, if she’d gone to him when he called for her …

And she can’t escape the thought that has haunted her as surely as her memories: If Pierce had lived, would there be a Lilith Rising? Would there be an Aestas?

Weren’t those works—wasn’t her life, and Lara’s, too—born from Pierce’s blood?