True Love (13 page)

“Rodeo Drive, remember? My treat,” Diedra said with a wink.

Steve groaned. “Dress shopping?” He glanced at Luke. “While they shop, we’ll knock some golf balls around.”

“Suits me,” Luke said.

After more discussion, more food, and two quick phone calls to Indiana so that Luke and Julie could tell their parents they’d arrived safely, the four of them headed for Hollywood. On the way to the car, Luke plucked a bright red hibiscus flower and tucked it behind Julie’s ear.

“Pretty,” he said gazing into her eyes, and she caught the double implication of his compliment.

Hollywood’s Walk of Fame was a long sidewalk teeming with tourists, where star shapes had been set in granite and concrete, each bearing the name of some famous screen personage. At Grauman’s Chinese Theater, signatures were scrawled in the cement, accompanied by handprints. Julie and Luke shouldered their way through throngs of tourists, exclaiming over names they recognized, pausing to ask about names they didn’t. Steve knew a great deal about the silver screen and kept up a running commentary. “He’s better than a tour guide,” Diedra confided.

The names rolled past Julie’s vision, and sometimes she hesitated even to step on a particular slab, as if it might desecrate the person’s memory. The sun beat down on her back and shoulders, but she was so immersed in stargazing that she barely felt its heat. All of a sudden, Luke stopped and pointed down.

There in the concrete was the signature of Marilyn Monroe, her handprints above her name. He whipped off his baseball cap and placed it over his heart. “A moment of reverence, please.”

“You an MM fan?” Steve asked.

“She’s the other woman in his life,” Julie explained. “But I’ve learned to live with it.”

Luke paced around the square bearing Marilyn’s name and handprints. Tourists streamed by them, snapping pictures and exclaiming over other names. “You know what, Julie? I’ll bet your hands are the same size.”

“I’ll bet not.”

“Only one way to find out.”

She glanced at all the foot traffic. “I’ll get stepped on.”

“We’ll protect you,” Steve said. He and Diedra and Luke formed a circle around her.

“Are you kidding?” But a glance at their faces told her they weren’t.

“Come on,” Luke urged. “What can it hurt? Don’t you want to know?”

She sighed, dropped to her knees on the hot concrete, and carefully placed her hands into the mold of Marilyn’s. To her astonishment, it was a perfect fit. “I don’t believe it.”

Luke whooped and his face split into a grin. “I knew it! I knew your hands would be the same size. This is so cool.”

Julie stood. “That’s about all of me that’s the same size.”

Luke seized her around the waist and lifted
her off the ground, laughing. “I have a living duplicate of Marilyn. Does life get much better than this?”

Julie blushed furiously. He was causing a scene and a small crowd was looking on with curiosity. “He’s crazy,” she mouthed apologetically to the onlookers. “Heat stroke.”

Luke bent her backward and kissed her soundly on the mouth. The crowd broke into applause.

“Luke! This is
so
embarrassing,” Julie hissed.

“So what? We’ll never see these people again. Besides, life is short.”

Steve and Diedra stood to one side and laughed. When Julie was finally able to regain her composure, they headed off to other attractions. She pretended to be in a huff, but of course she wasn’t. If anything, she was more in love with Luke than ever. Not because he’d kissed her in public, but because he wasn’t afraid to show his feelings for her to the whole world.

Yet his statement, “Life is short,” haunted her the rest of the day. She’d heard the phrase many times, but when Luke said it, it took on a deeper, more profound meaning.
Life was short
. And only a person who had looked
death in the face could understand how very short it really could be.

The days passed in a whirlwind of activity and blended into one another like colors flowing across the sky at sunset. Julie fell in love with California. Steve took them on some great driving tours. Julie thought the city of Los Angeles too large, too busy, too filled with smog and exhaust fumes. But in the valleys, where farmers grew lush green crops, and in the foothills, where cactus and jagged rock formations looked wild and untamed, and on the beaches, where ocean waves rolled in timeless swirls, she lost her heart. And because she could share it all with Luke, the beauty and grandeur of the state took on an almost hallowed meaning for her.

“Promise me you’ll bring me back here someday,” she said to him one starry night when they were alone by Steve’s courtyard fountain.

“You mean leave Indiana?” His eyes danced mischievously.

“I could be persuaded.” She dipped her hand into the cool water, where golden fish swam lazily beneath lily pads.

“But remember the smell of autumn—of
woodsmoke, and how the leaves change colors. Can you leave all that for this?”

Memories of chilly nights and football games and the thrill of the year’s first snowfall came to her. She felt a twinge of homesickness. “But don’t forget there aren’t any flowers half the year. And you know how much I like flowers.”

“Well, I like it here too.” His voice sounded low and soft in the velvet night. “It’s hard to think about going home.”

“Then don’t think about it. We’ve got two more weeks.”

He leaned back against the bowl of the fountain, rested his elbows on the lip, and gazed up at the glittering stars. “Sometimes, the past six months seem like a bad dream. Like they never happened to me. I wish I didn’t have to go for testing ever again.”

A chill coursed through her as the memories flooded back. “The testing’s routine. The results were fine last time and they’ll be fine next time too. I’m telling you, Luke, it’s over. You’ve licked Hodgkin’s.” Suddenly, a new fear seized her, and she leaned toward him. “You are feeling all right, aren’t you?”

“Me? I feel great. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean
to alarm you. I was just thinking out loud, that’s all.”

She sighed with relief. “Good. We’ve been so busy and you’ve seemed so energetic—what with working out every day—that sometimes I forget … you know … about your health.”

“I forget about it too.” He stood and drew her up into his arms. “And I didn’t mean to bring you down by talking about it.”

“No problem.” She rested her head on his broad, hard chest and heard the rhythm of his heart.

“Will you promise me something?”

The rumble of his voice tickled her ear. “I’ll promise you anything,” she answered.

“Promise that with or without me, you’ll come back here someday.”

She pulled back and gazed up at him, at his strong jawline, at his dark eyes, now even darker with only stars to light his face. “Sorry … I can’t promise you that. Without you, I won’t want to come back here. This place is wonderful, but only because you’re here with me.”

He kissed her then, drawing her mouth to his, and suddenly it felt as if all the stars in the
sky above had sprinkled themselves upon her. “Luke …,” she whispered.

“My love,” he whispered back.

Julie and Diedra shopped for dresses on Rodeo Drive for the upcoming wedding. Julie couldn’t believe the prices, or the rows of limousines parked in front of the stores. “I never knew there were so many rich people in the world,” she told Diedra as they sat in a trendy restaurant having lunch.

“Out here, you get a warped perspective of wealth and material things. Don’t let it dazzle you.”

“I won’t. But if Luke gets to play for the NFL someday, he’ll be rich.”

“Is that what he wants to do?”

“Yes—although his illness sort of sidetracked him. But now that he’s well, I think he’ll start wanting the things he used to want again.”

“Does he talk about it much? About how having gotten cancer makes him feel?”

“We’re both angry about it. It isn’t fair, you know.”

Diedra set her fork down. “Life’s never fair. Sometimes we’re lucky enough to find someone
to love and who loves us, but ‘fairly’ isn’t the way God runs the world.”

Julie nodded. “Still, Luke gets down. I think he’s afraid his cancer will come back. I tell him he’s well, but still he gets depressed about it.”

“You should let him talk to you,” Diedra said, sipping her water. “I remember how much my mother needed to talk to me about her dying.”

“But Luke’s not dying.”

“It doesn’t matter—he still needs to get out his feelings, and because he loves you, you’re the one who needs to help him talk about them.”

“It’s depressing for me too. I don’t want him to talk about dying.”

“I’d never tell you what to do, Julie, but think about it. Think about listening, really listening to his heart.”

Julie pondered Diedra’s advice long and hard, and two days later, when Steve and Diedra were called in for a planning session on their upcoming film project, Luke suggested he and Julie strike out on their own.

“Where are we going?” she asked as he started up Diedra’s sports car. She had lent it to them for the day.

“You’ll think I’m nuts, but more than anything, I want to visit Marilyn Monroe’s grave.”

Julie gulped, then said cheerfully, “If that’s what you want to do, let’s go.”

“It’s what I want to do.” Luke put the car into gear and they drove off into the hot Los Angeles morning.

J
ulie juggled a map of Los Angeles while Luke piloted the car out onto the expressways. “Do we know where we’re going?” she asked.

“I think so,” he said. “I asked Steve for directions before he left.”

The overhead sun blazed down and the wind blew over the open convertible, tangling Julie’s hair.

“You’re beautiful,” Luke yelled above the roar of the engine. With his free hand, he touched her blond hair, struck golden by the rays of the sun.

“You’re prejudiced,” she countered.

He got off the expressway and drove down a busy thoroughfare. Eventually, he turned and stopped the car near a small, neatly kept church. He opened her door and led her
through the church’s parking lot, along the side of the building, through a wrought-iron gate, and into a small cemetery. The grounds were neat and well maintained, with walkways that led in orderly directions.

“Are you sure this is it?” she asked. Somehow, she had expected Marilyn Monroe to be buried in some soaring mausoleum of marble and whitewashed granite, not off some side street in the middle of a business district.

“I’m sure,” Luke told her. He stopped in front of an above-ground crypt.

Carved in the stone, along with the dates of her birth and death, was Marilyn’s name. The letters looked stark and surreal to Julie, and she felt goose bumps rise along her arms. She thought of all the posters she’d seen of the famous movie star, even movies she’d watched with Luke starring Marilyn, yet those images seemed far less real than her name etched in granite—perhaps because, Julie mused, behind the wall of the enclosure lay her mortal body.

Julie touched the letters gingerly. “These are different from the letters in the sidewalk,” she said.

“These are final,” Luke observed. “When you see somebody’s signature, you expect them to be alive. But these are carved out for a
person. The person doesn’t have any control over these.”

“Why did she get buried here? Her grave seems so ordinary for someone so popular.”

“Joe DiMaggio, one of her ex-husbands, arranged this. He decided that since her life had been so public, her death and burial should be private. He loved her, even though they were divorced.”

Julie honestly didn’t want to be discussing death with Luke, but she recalled Diedra’s urging her to listen if Luke ever wanted to discuss his feelings. And she realized that his need to see Marilyn Monroe’s grave was somehow connected to his feelings about what was happening to him. “I wonder if he still loves her.”

“It’s hard to say. I do know that after she died, a red rose was put on her crypt every day. Every day for twenty-five years.”

“Wow … that’s awesome.” Julie thought about how much she loved receiving flowers from Luke. “Too bad Marilyn couldn’t let the sender know what it meant to her.”

“Julie, do you think when people die they can communicate with the people they love who are still alive?”

She considered his question, then said, “I
don’t think so, Luke. I think death takes people out of this world forever and that there’s no way back. But I do believe in heaven, a place where souls go and where people meet again after death. Don’t you believe that?”

His eyes clouded. “Sometimes I believe it. But other times, I’m afraid it’s not true and that death is the end of ourselves. That we just stop existing. And we’re gone forever.”

She shook her head. “I’d rather not believe that way. If that’s true, then why do we ever get to live? Why even
bother
to live? I like to think everybody gets to meet up again in heaven.”

“I hope you’re right.”

She could tell he was troubled by questions he couldn’t express, by mysteries he couldn’t understand. She wanted to help him, but didn’t know how. She didn’t want to think about death and eternity, and she didn’t want him thinking about it either. Regardless of what Diedra said, he was too young to talk about dying, and according to his doctors, his cancer was in remission, so she couldn’t see the necessity.