“Thank you, Cleve,” she said ardently. “You’ll be my only link with them.”
Cleve stood up. “I told Jean I had to go down to the corner drug store,” he said. “I’ve told her that so often she thinks it means the corner beer parlor. I’d better get home and give her a nice surprise. Nothing but coffee on my breath.” He was making an effort, at least, to be kind, to take the awful heaviness out of the atmosphere. She knew he would do as he said for her, and she was moved and grateful.
He took her arm and led her to her car. At the door he told her, “If this is half as hard on Charlie as it is on you, he’s going to crack up fast. You look like hell, Beth.”
“I know,” she said. “I never did anything so awful—so hard—in my life. I feel like I’m going to die of it.”
“Then you’re a fool. Whatever your reasons were, they aren’t worth it.”
“That’s what I have to find out,” she said.
“Sure you won’t tell me?”
“Yes, Cleve.” She held out a hand to him and after a minute he grasped it and squeezed it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “For you both.”
“Thank you. Goodbye, Cleve. And write to me.”
He nodded and then he turned and walked away and she watched him for a second, thinking how much he looked like Vega and what a hell of a mess she had handed him. Subconsciously she realized that her train of thoughts was enough to shatter her mind, her emotions. The load was already too great. She had to turn to something else, she had to move and do things and act ordinary and sensible or she would fly to pieces.
The plane took off three minutes behind time. She felt the ground fall away beneath her and the wide steel wings rise, heard the captain’s voice moments later and saw her seat neighbor light a cigarette—all with a feeling of eerie unreality reinforced by the small morning hour.
“We are circling over Catalina Island,” the pilot announced, “waiting for air traffic to clear over Los Angeles. In about five minutes we will be heading due east.”
Beth looked out of the window and saw a wavy ribbon of orange lights—the shoreline of Catalina Island—and a cluster of white lights winking around the town of Avalon. She was on the side away from the mainland and couldn’t see Los Angeles, but soon afterward the plane turned eastward and they headed inland again. She looked down, looking for landmarks in the night, and after a moment she recognized a few; the Colosseum, the brilliant green-white strips of the freeways, and then Pasadena with the winding pattern of Orange Grove Avenue discernible below. She followed it carefully with her eyes to where she supposed Sierra Bella began, and looked at the bouquet of lights there against the mountains, looked at it more with her heart than her eyes.
She closed her eyes then and for a short painful moment she could see the little town as it would look in tomorrow’s daylight, bright with the colors of early summer, the lavender flowers of the jacaranda trees glowing over the streets, the pink and white oleander with its pointed leaves, the long palmy street up the mountainside to their small house, the sun frosting the purple mountains in the early morning, the sounds of her children tumbling out of bed and shouting for their breakfast, Charlie shaving and grumbling at the mirror.
Beth lighted a cigarette and said softly to herself, “Laura, I’m coming for you. Don’t fail me. Be there, darling, or that’s the end of me. I’ll be destroyed, for I can never come back here.”
Chapter Ten
UNCLE JOHN, GENIAL AND BUSTLING AND WORRIED, PICKED HER up in Chicago. He had to be content with the briefest and barest explanation from her. She was utterly exhausted and all she wanted was to collapse and sleep. She even took sleeping pills when it developed that her bitter self-recriminations would give her no rest. And for two whole days she refused to leave the room.
“I’ll just say this,” she told Uncle John when he pressed her. “I’ve left Charlie. He has the children; they’re all fine. Everything is my fault. It would kill me to have to talk about it now. I’ll try to explain it later. I’m so tired and miserable I just want to be alone.”
So they gave her their hospitality and let her have her way. Uncle John was anxious and he even thought of calling Charlie and demanding the facts. But his wife restrained him. “Let’s at least hear her side of it first,” she said. “She did say it was her fault, after all.”
Beth had no intention of explaining to them what couldn’t be explained. She wrote to Charlie, just a note. She said she would be with Uncle John for a while and she’d let him know any new plans. Cleve wrote to her within a couple of days to say the kids were well but missed her badly, and Charlie had become very taciturn at the office. He had found a woman to care for the children during the day. Beth wondered impatiently what sort of woman she was—whether she was kindly and whether she liked children and whether she fixed them their favorite breakfasts, and what she looked like. There was no mention of Vega in Cleve’s letter.
As soon as she had a little strength, a little sense, she determined to find Laura. The place to start was with Laura’s father. Beth didn’t suppose that Laura was still living with him; they had never gotten along, and Laura, when she left Beth nine years ago, had been an entirely different girl from the one her father thought he had raised. She had found herself and had begun to live for the first time, and Beth guessed that her first move had been to leave her father.
But
