The night had turned sultry, that sticky kind of heat that foretells a summer storm. I peeled off my clothes and headed into the shower. Five minutes later and many degrees cooler, I was in bed.
I lay there, eyes wide open, sheet thrown back, rigid as a soldier at attention, staring into the semidarkness at the vague shapes of the old blue-painted ceiling beams with the yellow spaces of plaster between them, Scramble rustled around on my pillow, clucking softly and occasionally touching my hair with her beak. I was glad of her company.
Sleep was impossible. I was too worried, too distracted, too lonely. I flung myself out of bed and sat by the open window, leaning on the wooden ledge. I felt the sun’s warmth still locked there and rested my head on my arms, listening to the distant rumble of thunder and the soft background sigh of the sea, thinking how fortunate I was to live in such a beautiful place. I reminded myself that I had Patrick to thank for that.
I suppose I’m what you might call a nester, partly because as a child I never really had a home. Due to Dad’s financial ups and downs, we were always on the move; one month I’d be a country cowgirl on a ranch, the next I was an urban schoolgirl striving to make instant best friends. We lived in so many different apartments I lost count. I yearned for a place to call my own.
My mother had simply picked up and left one day without taking six-year-old me with her. She’d dubbed my father, scathingly, Mr. Charm, and it was true, he was Mr. Charm, but oh, how I loved him. I’d hang on to his hand and on to his every word, gazing proudly up at my handsome daddy, who to his credit, and unlike my runaway mother, always showed up for PTA meetings, charming every mother there, beaming his “shy” smile while looking searchingly into their eyes. Looking for what? I wondered. It was a long time before I found out it was “would the answer be yes? Or no?”
After Mom left, somehow too, it was always me looking after Dad, instead of the other way around, making sure he got to appointments on time; that he’d booked the sitter; that there was milk for the breakfast cereal.
“You have to make a left turn here,” I’d remind him from the backseat of the car, because even at age six I realized he had zero sense of direction. “I have to be at school by eight,” I’d say, or “What shall we have for supper tonight, Daddy?” I knew if I didn’t remind him he’d forget all about it and it would be take-out pizza one more time. Even a little kid can get awfully sick of pizza.
Anyhow, Mr. Charm or not, I adored him, and of course, he was the standard by which I measured every other man. I found out too late he wasn’t the best yardstick to go by.
When I met Patrick I was at a vulnerable point in my life, but then somehow I always was. Vulnerable, that is. I’m sure a therapist would tell me it all stemmed from my childhood, it’s simple common sense; though of course common sense has never stopped me from falling for the wrong man.
I was just emerging from a two-year odyssey with a movie actor (odyssey was the only way to describe that long, hard haul) when I’d arrived at this conclusion. The “actor” was a wanna-be actor when I met him, then he started to climb the ladder: a small part in a small film; then another, larger part; soon he was escorting young actresses to premieres and parties and showing up in People magazine and the tabloids. Even blinded by love, I guessed where it was heading—absolutely nowhere—and called an end to it.
With a pang of genuine grief, I decided there was no such thing as “true love.” It was a myth invented for novels and movies, perpetrated by poets who wrote sonnets about it, and by writers of popular songs. True love did not exist. It was gone from my life forever. And then I met Patrick Laforêt and plunged in, Eyes Wide Open, Head Over Heels. All the clichés. All Over Again.