4:29 A.M., PST
Anna leaned wearily against the Joe’s Clam sign. Her shoulders sagged; she felt like crying. But even though Ben wasn’t around to see her despair, she refused to give the bastard that satisfaction. She couldn’t quite wrap her mind around what he’d done to her. It was just so calculated.
To think that, just an hour or so ago she’d been feeling sorry for the pathetic way Susan had lost her virginity. Now her own story struck her as even more pitiful. So she hadn’t actually had sex with Ben, so what? She’d believed every lie he’d fed her. At least Susan had had no illusion that she cared about the boy involved or that he cared about her. But Anna had really thought that she and Ben were…
Goddamn him. Goddamn him to hell. What had made him think that she’d fall into bed with him? Or devise his elaborate lure to have her fall for him?
“Gee, do you think it might have been the fact that you practically did it with him on an airplane an hour after you met him?” she asked herself aloud.
She felt nauseated. How, how could she have been so stupid? Something had to be seriously wrong with her. First she fell for Scott Spencer, a guy who didn’t even seem to recognize that she was an anatomically correct female. Then she fell for Ben Birnbaum, a guy who lied his ass off just to get into her faux leopard pants.
Anna looked around the deserted parking lot, which made her New York instincts kick in. Not a good place for a girl to be alone. She knew she had to do something—but what? Call her father? That was laughable. The man couldn’t make it to the airport or to lunch, so it wasn’t very likely that he’d come halfway across the city to fetch her in the middle of the night. Besides, she’d have to explain what she was doing at the marina at four o’clock in the morning. Alone.
She could call a cab. But there was something sordid about taxiing home in her stupid hooker outfit at the end of the world’s worst New Year’s Eve. Still, what option did she have?
And then she remembered her father’s driver. Django. He’d given her his business card. She’d put it in her wallet. So maybe she still…
She rummaged around in her Chanel clutch. There it was. She punched his number into her cell. It rang and rang.
“Yeah?” came a groggy male voice.
“Django? I’m so sorry to wake you. It’s Anna.”
“Anna …” Her name was said as if he were rifling through a mental Rolodex. “Oh, Anna! Hey! Happy New Year. What’s up?”
“I know it’s very late. The thing is … I’m in Marina del Rey. Near Joe’s Clam bar. And … I need a ride home. I know it’s a lot to ask; I can call a taxi if—”
“Anna,” he interrupted.
“Yes?”
“I’m already there.”
Anna sat in the front seat of Django’s old Nissan Sentra as he powered the car down the nearly empty streets, staying alert for drunken revelers. Thankfully, he hadn’t commented on her stupid outfit. Nor had he tried to make small talk or even asked what she was doing alone in the marina at four in the morning. He’d just played one of his jazz CDs and kept his mouth shut, two things for which Anna was very grateful.
They turned off Santa Monica Boulevard onto North Foothill Drive. Anna faced him. “I want to thank you for doing this.”
“Don’t give it no nevermind,” he drawled.
“I hope you don’t have a long drive home from here.”
He turned up her father’s driveway. “Nope. I live close.”
“Oh. That’s good.”
“Right there, actually.” He pointed past the main house to the guest house out back. When Anna was little, her grandmother had let her use that house as a life-size domicile for her dolls. But she hadn’t been inside it in years.
So her father’s chauffeur lived on the premises. It struck her as odd, but she was too tired to care. She rubbed her pounding temples. “I feel like I’ve spent the last twenty hours going the wrong way through the looking glass.”
“Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.” He shut down the car, got out, and came around to open Anna’s door for her. As she swung her legs out, her knee bumped the glove compartment. It sprang open. A jumble of CDs, photos, and papers fell onto her lap and then tumbled to the floor.
“I’m so sorry. I must really be exhausted,” Anna said as she gathered the things up.
“No, I’ll get them—”
“I don’t mind—”
“I said, I’ll get it.”
Something in Django’s tone made Anna step away from the car and let him retrieve the fallen things. But she was still holding the one thing she had settled on her lap, an old photograph. As Django rooted around on the car floor, Anna looked at the picture. It featured a little boy with dark hair, standing by a grand piano. There was a full adult orchestra behind him; a tall, silver-haired conductor stood next to the boy, one arm proudly around him. The boy and the conductor were both in black tie.
Anna drew in a quick breath when she recognized the conductor, one of the most famous conductors and composers of the late twentieth century. He was beaming at the boy, who was obviously being wildly applauded by both audience and orchestra.
Anna looked from the photograph to Django, who was still retrieving things from the floor. There was no doubt: Anna could see the boy in the man. It was Django. But when she wordlessly handed him the photo, her eyes betrayed nothing.
Everyone has secrets, she thought. No one ever really knows anyone.
Django stuffed his papers back in the glove compartment and slammed it shut. “Got everything now?”
“Yes. Thank you, Django. More than you know. I had the ultimate squished-bug kind of night.”
Django scratched his stubbly chin. “Would you buy it if I told you that it’s always darkest before the dawn? Or that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel? Course there’s always a possibility that it’s an oncoming train. But still.”
She mustered a smile. “Thank you for trying to cheer me up. Thank you for everything. Really. You’re a gentleman and a scholar.”
He nodded, shoved his hands deep into his pockets, and headed for the guest house. Then spun back to her. “Spain. Chick Corea.”
“Pardon?”
“When I feel like I’m peelin’ myself off the windshield, that’s what I listen to. If you want to borrow the CD, drop by. Anytime. ’Night.” Django doffed his imaginary hat and strode off.
Anna watched him depart, then went to the front door and opened it, thinking how good it would be to get horizontal … alone. And to shower. A really, really hot shower to wash away any memory of Ben Birnbaum.
She stepped into the pitch-black foyer.
A woman screamed.
Anna jumped back instinctively, her arm sweeping against the Ming vase on the small armoire near the door. It crashed to the marble-tiled floor.
The foyer light snapped on. A barefoot blonde in a blue silk robe was carrying a plate of crème brûlée cookies from Spago—Anna knew what they were because her dad sent her a pound of them every year on her birthday—they were his favorite dessert in the world. That Anna found them too rich seemed to be completely lost on him.
“What the hell was that?” Anna’s father came out of his bedroom, shirtless and in pajama bottoms. He made it halfway down the stairs before he took in the tableau in the hallway. “Well. That’s not exactly the way I’d planned to have you two meet.”
“I’m sorry,” the blonde told Anna. “You startled me.”
Anna was more than startled. Not so much that this woman was obviously her father’s significant other (at least for the evening), but rather because instead of what Anna might have expected—some early-twenties, over-the-top Maxim babe with pneumatic body parts that could double as flotation devices—this woman was tall, angular, and very thin. With the same understated blond beauty and patrician features as Anna’s mother.
“It’s okay, Margaret, it’s my daughter,” Jonathan Percy called out as he came the rest of the way downstairs.
“Yes, I gathered that,” the woman said. She put the plate of cookies on the armoire. “Hello. I’m Margaret Cunningham. It’s a pleasure to meet you. Your father has told me so much about you.”
Okay, this was deeply bizarre. The closer Anna got, the more this woman looked like Jane Percy’s doppelganger. But Anna’s good manners automatically kicked in, and she took the woman’s hand. “Happy New Year, Margaret.”
“So, you two.” Her father’s voice was hearty. “Now that we’re all together and no one is going to get robbed, why don’t we take that dessert and all go eat it in the kitchen? I’ll make us some tea.”
Tea? Anna couldn’t believe her father was even making the suggestion. She glanced at Margaret, whose incredulous expression was equally reminiscent of how her mother would react.
“I’m not sure that’s the best of notions right now, Jonathan,” Margaret said.
“I agree.” Anna hurried back up the stairs. “I’m sorry about the vase, Dad, and about the interruption. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”
“Anna, wait.”
“Tomorrow,” Anna called back over her shoulder. “Good night.” “But Anna—”
“Good night.”
Anna made the shower as steamy as she could stand it and scrubbed herself with a loofah. Washed her hair twice. Then soaped herself again. But even with her skin red and raw, she still felt him, still tasted him. Damn Ben. Damn him to hell.
By the time she emerged from the shower, Anna felt woozy. She dried off, donned her favorite Ralph Lauren silk pajamas, and padded back to her room, more than ready to bring this insane day to a close.
It was not to be. She had a visitor: her father, now clad in jeans and a T-shirt. He was waiting for her on the antique chaise longue by the picture window.
“Anna, we have to talk.”
Anna nearly groaned. “Dad—”
“Jonathan,” he corrected.
“Whatever. It’s almost five o’clock in the morning.”
“We need to hash this out.”
“Can’t it wait until tomorrow—later today—please?”
“I don’t think it can.”
Anna tried to keep her voice from wavering. “I’m just not up for a talk right now. I’ve had a really long day. And a really awful night.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Me too. Which is why all I want to do is—”
“I won’t be able to sleep with all this tension between us. There are things that need to be said.”
Oh, poor baby. He wouldn’t be able to sleep. Suddenly Anna couldn’t take it anymore. Every awful moment of the past twenty-four hours came bubbling up in her like some kind of bilious sulfur spring.
“Maybe there are things that need to be said, Dad. But you could have said them when you picked me up at the airport. Oh, wait, you didn’t show up for that. Well, when you met me for lunch, then. Oops. Didn’t show up for that one, either. Or when I came home this afternoon and found you passed out in the gazebo—”
“I understand that you’re angry.”
“I’m also exhausted. I don’t think either condition is conducive to a father-daughter bonding moment.”
“It’s awfully harsh of you to judge before you know the facts.”
“What I just said are the facts. You stood me up, Dad.”
As she pulled down the silk comforter on her bed, she mentally added: Oh, by the way, Dad—I got dumped tonight by a boy who pretended that he thought I was a precious diamond and then threw me away like so much cubic zirconia when I wouldn’t put out. And it hurts. It really hurts.
Not that she’d ever tell him that part. But what would it be like to have a father who cared enough to ask her what had made the night so horrible? Or to feel close enough to him to want to tell him? Was it really too much to ask for?
“From your point of view, I stood you up,” her father agreed. “But you never bothered to ask me what happened or why—”
“You’re supposed to be the father here.” She got into bed.
“Have you thought at all about what it’s like for me to suddenly have you back in my life?”
Anna felt as if she’d been punched in the gut. “I thought you invited me. I’ll go back to New York in the morning, if that’s what you want.”
“No, that’s not what I want. Why are you making this so difficult?”
Anna pressed her lips together in a thin line. “Just forget it.”
“No. Jeez, you’re just as touchy as your mother. What I’m trying to say—if you could manage to remove that chip from your shoulder for just a second—is that I’m glad you came.”
Meaningless. His words were just so empty and meaningless. Anna folded her arms and dead-eyed him. For a long moment neither spoke.
Finally her father spread his hands. “Anna, did you expect me to morph into Superdad overnight?”
Anna jutted her chin upward. “No. I don’t expect anything from you at all.”
“There’s that attitude again. Just like your mother.”
“Well, evidently you like her enough to pick her double as your playmate!” Anna exploded.
Jonathan furrowed his eyebrows. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m sure the fact that Margaret looks just like Mom isn’t lost on you.”
He looked shocked. “Anna, she doesn’t look anything like your mother.”
“You’re joking. Of course she does.”
Her father shook his head. “Honestly, Anna, you’re so exhausted that either you’re hallucinating or delusional.”
“Fine. I’m wrong. You’re right. She looks like a hobbit. She looks like the Velveteen Rabbit. She looks like J. Alfred Prufrock—take your pick. Glad that’s settled. And now I am going to sleep.” She pulled the covers up to her chin, desperate for this day to finally—finally!—come to an end.
Her father regarded her for a moment. His eyes went hazy. “I didn’t want it to be like this. This isn’t how I …”
He sighed. Then he came over to the bed and gently tucked the comforter around her. It took Anna back to a time long ago, when her parents were still married to each other. On the rare night that her father came home while she was still awake, he’d come to her room to make sure she was tucked in and her reading lamp was out. He’d kiss her forehead and then go check on Susan. Anna recalled how cherished she’d felt, how loved. And for that moment all was right with the world.
The long-forgotten memory made a place behind Anna’s eyes ache. With that ache came the title of a Robert Frost poem, the first she’d ever memorized: “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”