later…
Val pulled his motorcycle to a stop at the road that led to Tamar’s house. It was different than the last time he had seen it. It was now a road, not a camouflaged deer track. The driveway was freshly asphalted. A plain whitewashed post boasted a large, shiny silver mailbox with STEELE stenciled on in in bold black letters. There was a plastic box for the Washingtonian and another box for the local paper.
It disoriented him. For a moment, he doubted his own bulletproof, iron-riveted memory, but just for a moment. He’d been intensely aware of the exact latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of Tamar’s physical presence on earth since he learned of her existence. He could not be mistaken about this. He gunned the motor again with a muttered curse.
He was just afraid, after these endless weeks of enigmatic silence. Afraid to speculate what the silence meant. So fucking afraid, he could barely eat. Or breathe, for that matter.
It was Tamar’s way to let a man sweat, but it seemed particularly cruel to him now, after lingering for weeks near death, to be left alone to doubt, to wonder. Should he reach out to her? Was it better to wait?
But he could not wait forever. It was killing him. He had to know.
And besides, he knew Tamar. She liked strength. Needed it. He had to be strong. Fear was weakening him, so he had to be fearless.
Hah. A stiff challenge. But he would try with everything he had.
Doubts nagged and stung him. She had never actually said that she loved him, except for that time that he remembered like a dream after she’d cuffed and drugged him at the agriturismo. And that may have been just a chemical fantasy. Questionable at every level.
He’d hoped that trying to save her and Rachel would have been a point in his favor but evidently not. She had ignored his very existence ever since.
He jerked to a stop at the electronic gate. There was a vidcam mounted above it. He buzzed the button and waited for a response.
This simple gate was nothing like the high-tech camouflaged facsimile of the falling-down barn that had stood here before. She’d ripped out all of her space age security, and put the plain, simple basics in their place. In other words, she’d lowered her defenses.
He wondered what that meant about her change in mood. He hoped it was good news for him. He was afraid to speculate.
No one was responding to his buzz, but he was going in anyway.
He was ready to face anything, even a loaded gun. Nothing could be worse than this blank emptiness. The boredom and pain of convalescence, then the intensive debriefing and subsequent negotiations with PSS. Then the quiet, endless days, one after the other, alone and dazed in his apartment in Rome. Slumped in a chair, staring at shadows moving on the wall for hours. Unable to eat, sleep, move.
Everything he tried to do felt like useless playacting, empty of all significance. No connection to anything that counted. How could there be? What counted had been ripped out of him.
What counted was walking around, living and breathing a half a world away from him. His heart, walking around outside his body. Ignoring him.
The intercom finally beeped. “Who is it?”
It was a female voice, but not Tamar’s. “Is this the home of Tamar Steele?” he asked.
A cautious pause, and someone said, “Who wants to know?”
“Valery Janos. Is she home?” He stepped up to the camera, stared into it, and let whoever was looking at the monitor inside get a good, long look.
The gate clicked and hummed open. He accelerated on through, and headed up the long, winding road that led up to the crest of a mountain that plunged steeply down to the Pacific Ocean. The hillside was dark with towering conifers and draped with a ragged mantle of mist. The broad, shining beach was lashed with surges of white foam. Dramatically beautiful, as befitted the home of a woman like Tamar.
The closer he got to her, the more his chest ached.
Had it just been his wishful fantasy projected onto her, that dawn interlude in the hotel room in San Vito? He had seen something in her eyes that had changed the nature of his existence. His soul had awakened, and so had his heart, his brain, and other parts he didn’t even know how to name. They had risen from a deathlike sleep, and now they would give him no peace.
Had it been real, that half-remembered ‘I love you’?
The garage was open when he pulled up. A young woman with a mop of curly red hair stood in the opening, holding a squirming baby in her arms. Margot McCloud. The name floated back to him. Davy’s wife. She was not smiling.
Val could politely initiate a conversation in ten different languages, but he just stood there, swallowing over the dry lump in his throat. “Is she here?” he asked when he could finally speak.
Margot jiggled her baby, studying him solemnly. “Yes. She’s working. In her studio.”
His stomach sank. “So she doesn’t know that I’m here yet?”
Margot shook her head. Her red curls floated and swirled in the air. “Not yet. She blasts music into her headphones when she works. Come on in.”
He followed her through a security room filled with cutting edge surveillance equipment and noticed that most of it was deactivated. Snarls of disconnected electrical wire were everywhere.
At the top of the stairs, he looked around, fascinated. Tamar’s living space was exactly as he would have expected. Minimalist, severe, and yet subtly opulent. The lines were clean, the grain in the blond wood paneling swirled voluptuously. There were incredible vistas outside each of the huge triangular windows. He had never seen it, but he felt as if he recognized it. Like her, it was uncompromising, stark, and beautiful.
He passed a room crowded with an uncharacteristic clutter of color: toys, books, mobiles, pictures. A small form hurled itself out the door and smacked into his legs.
“Val! Val!” Rachel crowed, clutching at his thigh.
He was gratified at the warmth of her welcome, and the sudden upwelling of tenderness he felt for the little girl took him by surprise. He picked her up and hid his face against her curly head for a few seconds, until the shaky, misty feeling passed. “Hello, little sweet,” he whispered.
A stocky older woman with a black and white bun stopped at the threshold, staring at him with wide-eyed curiosity. Had to be Rosalia.
“Rachel and I are old friends, Senhora,” he explained in Portuguese, kissing the top of Rachel’s head.
Rosalia was charmed. “Ah! So you are this Val that they tell me about, eh?” She shot Margot a delighted look and winked broadly. “Good, then! Go up and talk to her. She is too sad. She needs cheering up from a handsome young man like you.”
That remained to be seen, he reflected bleakly. He passed Rachel to Rosalia, soothing her protests with a promise to come back and play later. A promise he desperately hoped he would be able to keep.
“Come on. I’ll show you the way,” Margot said.
He followed Margot down the hallway, leaving Rachel’s loud squawks of disapproval
