Keeper of the Keys

Miserere, but I’ll take life anyhow, she told herself, and popped Andrea Bocelli into the CD player.

Kat called her home phone for messages. Nothing from Leigh. She called information and had them dial Ray Jackson’s house. No answer there, either. Grimly purposeful, she called his office, but was told he was on a conference call and couldn’t be disturbed.

Frustrated, Kat decided to drive to Topanga to meet this mystery man Leigh had married, right after she made her last check-in at work.

Did Leigh miss her? Leigh had never made friends easily. Kat remembered opening the front door of the Franklin Street house one day and finding a sack and a card that said, “To my amiga.” Inside was a tiny framed painting of two little girls, standing at the shoreline, backs to the camera.

Leigh gave presents like that, things she worked on in secret, never on birthdays or at Christmas.

Was there a right moment back then for Kat to change history instead of just letting wrong things happen?

After leaving college, Tom had discovered the lovely work prospects available to a political science major. He worked for a year at a ketchup factory. Coming home for months slathered in the sauce, looking like a murder victim or perpetrator, he finally quit, then operated a forklift at a container company. Evenings and weekends, he dabbled in community theater, using his muscular young maleness to earn him many supporting roles.

As he got better, he got a couple of big parts and found an agent, who, one fine day, finagled him a part in a movie. Kat dragged Leigh along to see him, dressed in a red jacket, hold a door open for Dennis Quaid, speaking an actual line: “Right here, sir!” They giggled and teased him all night about landing a major motion picture and what a fine actor he had become. “Right here, sir!” they said, and “Right here! Sir!” until all three of them were incoherent with their own idiocy. Leigh thought it was hilarious that he had been bitten by the movie bug.

He got parts in some big plays and some fair write-ups in the Times and then one night-

Kat was barely twenty-six and a half, Leigh twenty-six, and Tom twenty-five. He came out of a performance of Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers at the Ahmanson, grinning, gathering up the bundle of flowers someone handed him. While they waited for him, he cheerfully signed a few autographs, flirting and kind to his fans, and Leigh hung back with a funny look on her face.

“Uh-oh,” Kat said, watching her friend.

“Have you ever looked at your brother, really?”

“Not the way you’re looking at him.”

“He’s turned into-”

“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”

“He’s beautiful.”

So Leigh and Tommy finally got together. They had known each other for so long as kids-Tommy, Kat’s silly kid brother-that their relationship blasted off fast. They double-dated with Kat and her then boyfriend, and she spent as much time as always with the two of them. After two months of increasing heat Leigh moved into Tom’s bachelor domain on Balboa Island in Newport.

Of course, there was a problem. Leigh’s father, James Hubbel, didn’t like Tommy. Vain and poor, he called actors in general. Not marriage material, he would advise Leigh in private, away from Tom.

“I do it for fun,” Tom said once at a family dinner with the Hubbels, oblivious to Mr. Hubbel at the head of the table, shaking his head with dismay. “What I really want is to go to Fiji or the Marquesas, find some peaceful spot, and set up a farm.”

“How practical,” Mr. Hubbel said. He was smiling, not in a good way.

Tom said, “No, Jim”-another provocation-“I’ve looked into this. You pay the government to lease lagoon space, hire a guy who knows how to seed the oysters, and you’ve got pearls. A whole world market. Or you could grow vanilla beans.”

For a long time, Leigh thought Tom said these things to be provocative, and only as time went along did she pick up that, yes, he meant every word.

“What if I don’t want to go to live on an island?” Leigh and Tom were swinging on the front porch glider at his apartment house on Balboa. They had just finished eating barbecue, and were preparing themselves for a walk on the beach by drinking beer. Kat sat on the steps painting her toenails.

Tom kissed Leigh, then nuzzled her hair, saying, “That’s okay. There’s always a plan B.”

“What is it?”

“No idea. Whatever you want.”

“You don’t even have a savings account.”

“Money goes and flows too fast these days.” He waved toward the glowing sunset. “We’re doing all right, aren’t we?”

But they weren’t. Leigh tired of the parties and Tom’s erratic, and to her, aimless existence. Between jobs, between auditions, he played volleyball on the beach or visited with his buddies while she slogged away, installing cabinets on construction jobs, the only steady paycheck.

Leigh confided in Kat, “I can’t stand the way he just hangs around! He offered to get a real job the other day, but I know how that would go. He’d hate me in the end.”

“He wouldn’t,” Kat had replied. “Oh, Leigh, I wish you had never hooked up with him. He’s so crazy about you. He’ll do anything you want, just so he has you.”

“I don’t think Tommy knows what it means to be grown up,” Leigh had said, screwing in some private final screw.

“You liked that about him.”

“I turn thirty next month,” she said.

Then she had met Ray Jackson. Leigh moved back to her folks’ house and dated both of them for a month. She told Kat she was breaking up with Tom before she told Tom. “Ray’s solid, creative, smart, driven. He’s like me. We’re both productive people. Creative.”

“You said that as if Tommy isn’t?”

Leigh flung a look at her full of heartache, angst, and decision. “Tom’s adorable, but he doesn’t care enough about what really matters. He’s not for me. Ray’s serious about life and so am I.”

“Tom loves you!”

“So does Ray.”

“But-” But what could Kat say? “Don’t hurt him.”

But the talk-or argument, whatever you wanted to call it-didn’t go well. Leigh told Kat some of the things she had to say when Tommy wouldn’t understand. They were cruel things, Kat thought.

Kat worried, but she thought her brother would move on to another pretty girl as he always had in the past.

But Tom did not.

Acting like a man who had been hit by a truck and left to die on the road, Tom begged Leigh to come back to him and staged progressively more desperate scenes until Leigh demanded that he go permanently away.

And so he did. Leigh and Kat had a fight the next day. Things were said, more cruel things, this time brought on by grief and guilt.

And Kat thought, I have to stop now, stop thinking anymore about Tommy, about what I did to Tommy.

She dropped off her notes at the office and got back on the freeway, heading north now, embracing the rush hour like a penance.

Almost thirty minutes after Kat had arrived at the Jackson house in Topanga Canyon, at about five-thirty, a Porsche Boxster drove up, blue, waxed, carapace gleaming like a huge tropical beetle’s in the sun, windows shadowy. Rather than pull into the garage, the car pulled up beside Kat’s. A man got out.

Tall, taut. Probably six feet two. Dark, groomed, no recession marring a noble brow.

These fine details etched themselves on her mind. A veteran dater, she noticed his clothes, faded jeans topped with a designer shirt, quite formal, silk.

And wow. Very good-looking behind the shades. He and Leigh would make a pretty pair. Kat was disappointed to see that he was alone.

Ray Jackson did not appear happy. He stood by her car like a highway patrolman getting ready to ask for her license. She rolled her window down.

“What’s going on?” he said.

“Hi. I’m-uh-an old friend of Leigh’s.”

“You are?” He considered her, but not for long. The heat made his silk shirt wilt. “Oh, yeah, the one that’s been calling. And calling.”

“But you never answer.”

“We have caller ID. I answer calls from people I know. It’s hot. You should come in.” He turned abruptly, heading for the front door.

She rolled up her window, adjusted a silver shade over the dashboard to fend off the fading sun, and followed him.

They introduced themselves, and she walked behind him through the security routine into the marble entryway.

She looked around. “Will she be home soon?”

“That would be nice,” Jackson said. He took off the sunglasses, folded them carefully, placed them on the polished table. “You should have mentioned you’d be stopping by.”

“I tried to. I would have, if you had ever answered your phone.” He waited for her next move, and she really didn’t have one.

“I knew Leigh for years,” she said. She didn’t say, You stole her from my brother. Did Ray Jackson know that? Maybe not.

“Apparently not so much recently.”

“No.”

“Why have you been calling? Why are you here at my house all of a sudden?”

She felt herself blushing and did not have an easy answer. “My sister saw an article about a project you’re working on and we got to wondering about Leigh. I just want to see her. Am I completely out of luck tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Too bad.”

“I’m sorry.” He was relaxing a little.

“Can I leave her a note?”

“If you want.”

“I just wanted to get it over with. Jacki talks me into these things-”

“Get what over with?”

Startled, she realized she had spoken out loud. “Seeing Leigh. We have old business between us. I decided to deal with it in an adult fashion, by confronting my demons.”

“You calling my wife a demon?”