Bells of Avalon (21 page)

Chapter Twenty-Three

New York City, New York

1966

Daniel sat on his bed.  He felt weak, weaker than he dared tell Celia. As he looked around the empty room, a cold sweat broke over his body in spite of the chill. His breath was staggered as he took the stairs down to the third floor. Celia was dressed in a silver smock and taping a box closed when he walked in. He slunk into a chair, watching her body swing to the music from the record player. Her eyes brightened when she saw him. She shuffled into the next room to turn down the volume.              

“You want a chow mein sandwich or something? I gotta get rid of everything in the fridge.”

“No thanks.”

“You gotta eat something,” she chirped.

“Yeah, you
gotta eat
something,” Kevin mimicked as he skipped across the hardwood floor in bare feet. He bowed his back, looking up to his mother and placing his tiny hands on his bottom. “Can I have some cheese flings?”

“Only a few.”

She plopped a half-empty bag into his waiting arms. The boy trotted toward him, shoving a cheese puff into his mouth.

“Daniel, you can have some if you want,” the boy said holding out a single puff in his hand. The sight made his already weak stomach turn, but he smiled and pulled the boy into his lap, “No thanks, buddy.”

“Daniel, are you coming with us?”

“Sure am, Kev.”

“Daddy said he’d teach me to fish, would you come with us?”

On cue, Pete walked into the room, balancing a duffle bag on his shoulder. “Sure he will, Kev.”

“And then you can show me how to work the puzzle?” Kevin asked, looking up to Daniel.

“Sure thing, we’ll figure it out—run and get it and we’ll take a look,” he barely got out the words. His head began to spin as the boy slid off his lap.

“Doin ok?” Pete asked.

“Maybe,” he said and eased forward in the chair. Pete eyed him suspiciously until Celia reemerged with a few blouses draped over one hand and a sandwich in the other.  He was grateful when Celia and Pete began to bicker over the more mundane details of the trip. He took the opportunity to slip down the hallway and check on the boy. He found him pilfering through his toy box recklessly.

“What’s wrong, Kev?”

“Can’t find the puzzle—it’s gone!”

“I’m sure it’s not gone,” Daniel said gently, kneeling beside him. 

“It is! It’s gone!” he yelled and began to cry.

“Hush, Kev. Where’d you last have it?”

“At the park—with Mama.”

The boy looked up through anxious sniffling jerks of his nose.

“Well, what do you say I make you another one when we get to where we’re going?”

“No, I like that one. I don’t want to leave it here…you can’t make me,” he cried.

“Well it might still be at the park.”

“I don’t want to leave without it,” he shrieked. Daniel rolled his eyes, and found a last bit of strength to lift the boy in his arms along with the half-eaten bag of cheese flips.  The boy cried cranky, overwrought tears against his shoulder as Celia arrived. He handed the child off to her, but it only seemed to worsen his mood.

“Go away, I want my toy,” he screamed against his mother’s ear, pressing against her body with his tiny arms.

“Kevin, what on earth has gotten into you?”

“I want my toy!”

Celia turned to Daniel.

“What the hell is he talking about?”

“His puzzle—the one I made him. I’ll run down to the square real quick to see if I can find it,” Daniel said.

“C’mon, Dan. It’s just a toy.”

“It’s my toy!” Kevin interrupted.

“It’ll just take a minute,” he said, already buttoning his coat.

“Are you sure?” she asked, her hand lightly touching his cheek. 

“Yeah, I’ll be right back.” He smiled. 

“Well hurry back, the temperature’s dropping.”

He nodded, smoothing a tuft of Kevin’s hair.

“See, baby, Daniel’s going to look for your toy,” Celia murmured. He stopped crying and yawned against his mother’s shoulder.

Daniel braced his weight against a tree until he caught his breath, the burning pain in his chest subsiding for the moment. He found the wooden toy half-buried in a turret of snow, picked it up, and shook the excess snow from the bevels of its shape. He started back, but his legs began to shake. He lowered his body to a bench as the scrolling pain across his chest grew, making it even more difficult to breathe. The fever returned and burned all through his body, but broke into another series of cold sweats. The wood puzzle fell to the snow, where it would remain. Daniel looked to the stars growing out of the early blue night sky. His eyes closed for a moment. When they opened again, the stars were bright and mature—the sky black. 
Princess Mary, she lived in a tree, and sailed across the seven seas. Captain Jack sank and so will you, if you don’t take a ricka bamboo.
Was that how it had went? Princess Mary in a Juniper tree
?  Yes,
Marinel Gallagher’s thick accent replied. He laughed, his eyes drooping once again. A diffused fiber of light lit up behind his eyes. He reached out his hand, smelling the cotton-vanilla scent of her cold cream, saw the shiny length of her long dark hair. Then there was Katie. She smiled, her hair slicked wet against her head as she stood breast-deep in the surf with her son in her arms. He reached for them, but the image became smaller and smaller until there was only ambient, blank light. His eyes fluttered open to the harsh beauty of the silver stars. Suddenly he was a boy again, walking the shores of Catalina Island—lost and alone. He pushed the cold away until he was back in the glow of the sun and sand.  He reached again but Katie was gone. He now held the child against his chest, but it wasn’t his son. It was a boy with a shock of blonde hair and a strict little chin. He smiled and pulled the child to his chest. The coldness of his skin melted away as the warm ocean water lapped at his body...and it was then that he knew—that God was kind.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Los Angeles, California

1967

She’d once said she would never leave the Palisades. She’d fallen short of that promise, but that was ok—California had waited for her. She bought the Fiske Street house two years, seven months, and twenty-three days after the Meltsners dumped her there. Then again, it might have been twenty-five …she couldn’t remember now. Katie wondered how many other ingénues had been left to die in rentals like the one on Fiske Street. But she hadn’t died.  Ornan Meltsner had, however—or so she’d read in the letter Tilda mailed from a convalescence home in Port St. Lucie.

When the warranty deed was in her hand, her legal name typed on the head, she’d nearly cried. She was an orphan and, although naturalized an American in 1952, a foreigner with
no family to speak of
. None of that seemed to matter with a home to her name and enough money in her bank account to whether whatever came her way. She kept the small, Spanish-styled home even after she’d bought the apartment in the city. It seemed wrong to sell it, frightening even. Behind the tailored clothes and sapphire earrings, sometimes she still felt like a child from the dodgy part of London—who’d been forced to rely on the whim of strangers. Sometimes the house on Fiske Street felt like the only gap between her and the child she’d once been. But now, holding that gap didn’t seem so important. The property had grown in value through the years. When she and Max made the decision to move back to California, it felt like the right time to sell. The house was too small for them, in any case. Max had starting hinting at children more often lately. To which she mostly smiled and pretended not to hear—but she would hear, when the time was right.

She slowly drove the winding, shrub-lined, road until she found Max sitting on the curb in front of the swirling wrought iron gate. He wore perfectly-pressed pants and a polo shirt, the sun shining off his glossy blonde hair. Things were better since they’d shrugged off the bad luck of New York. She realized now, the city had always been part of the problem. Here in Los Angeles, Max could be the Prince Valiant studio player he was born to be. He was pleased as punch to take whatever crumbs that fell from Mark Damon and Robert Wagner’s plates for as long as he could. He told her it was all he’d ever wanted to begin with. She parked the car along the curve, smiling. She pulled the papers from the glove box and looked over the short form deed in the sunlight. This time the names Maximilian and Cloda Kitterage were typed at the top in blocky black font.

“You want the good news or the bad?” he asked when she joined him at the curb.

“The good, I guess.”

“Well, I guess there isn’t any good news. The gate is locked and the man never came by with the keys. But hey, I bet we could scale the gate and jump in the pool if you’re up for an adventure.”

“How long have you been waiting?” she asked.

“Long enough to scare the neighbors. What do you say we get a hotel and grab some lunch? We’ll try again in the morning.”

“Not so fast,” she said and pulled a ring of keys from her purse. 

“Hey, how’d you get those?”

“Oh, I have my means. Tad and I go way back,” she smiled.

“Is that so? I don’t know if I like it: the blonde starlet and the dashing realtor.”

“Better than the out-of-work leading man, I suppose.”

“Oh, baby, that hurt.” he put a hand across his chest. “But no longer accurate, I’m afraid.”

“You got it?”

“Of course.”

“Well congratulations, sir. How does it feel to be back in the blackboard jungle?”

“I don’t know yet, ask me in a few years and I’ll tell you.”

“Fair enough,” she said and gave him the keys.

They bought take-out and Mexican beer in lieu of sit-down service. They ate amongst the boxes, barely enough to fill the smallest part of the main living area. The New York-bred compulsion to use as little space as possible had yet to wear off. She didn’t know how they would ever collect enough furniture to fill such a massive area. Later, she started unpacking their upstairs bedroom. The curtain treatments alone would cost a fortune, she noted as she counted the arched windows circling the canopy-style bed. She went to the largest one and looked out at the bucolic view of stone pathways, palm leaves and wood ferns. The small swimming pool was surrounded by Spanish clover, and she watched the sunlight dance along the tiny crests of blue water. She felt her husband behind her. He placed both hands on her shoulders, and she rested the back of her head against his chest.

“How does it feel to be a Holmby Hills girl?”

Max’s easy words didn’t register right away. She watched the water for a few more seconds before her body tensed and she turned sharply toward him.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing, it’s just aces is all—Holmby Hills, did you ever think?” he smiled.

She laughed under her breath, and looked sadly back to the water. 

“Never.”

Since she’d moved back to their apartment in New York, Max had become more attentive, more sensing of when her moods shifted. It was one of the things that had made her fall slowly and easily back in love with him. But this time, she wished he weren’t so observant. He sighed, ever the peacemaker.

“Hey look—Christmas in April,” he declared. She turned. In his hand was a small box wrapped in shiny paper with baby candy-canes. A powdering of dust filled the creases of the paper. A tattered red ribbon clung barely to the box.

“What’s this?” she asked, taking it from his hand.

“I’m not sure. Probably from one of the boxes the movers packed up from your hotel last year,” he said. They heard the phone ring from downstairs.

“That’ll be the dashing Tad--
I’ll take it
,” he said.

Katie rolled her eyes and smiled as her husband clomped down the stairs. She heard him answer the phone in his golden, publicity voice and blandly unwrapped the box.  Underneath the candy-cane wrapping was a blue velvet box. She opened it with a small creak and pulled the necklace from inside. Her eyes widened and she felt the rush of blood to her ears. The same net of grapevine brambles leading down to the most unusual stone she’d seen then and since. She swayed the chain and watched the California sun tease out the flaked bursts of blue and green from the black depths of the opal. Her husband’s voice seemed a million miles away as she stared at the pendant swinging back and forth, back and forth. She felt a giddy, amazed smile cross her lips. There were no words.
Mom, I wish you’d stop wearing that thing; it stuns people dumb, makes them ask stupid questions.
She looked inside the box, but found nothing else. The inside of the wrapping paper was blank and void as well. She looked again at the stone and smiled. If it had been a movie, he would have left a note. But Daniel had had his fill of movie endings, and she knew that better than anyone else could. She was the last.

The End