Chapter Twenty Two
Ves'tacha—I haven't left you, not for the reasons you think.
One day when all this is over, you can maybe explain that to me,
but it's not why I've gone. There are some things I need to take
care of. I've left my phone behind because if I hear your voice, I
won't be strong enough to do them—Sasha.
Laurie stared at the note for a long time. There was more to
it than that, a list of instructions about what he was to do with
the thick manila envelope on the table, but he couldn't take them
in. There was a faint scent in the empty house around him, a
sensory trace he couldn't make fit with his present reality. He
leaned his palms on the table top. If he closed his eyes, he was
back in the Fitzroy mansion, but not in his own attic room. He was
putting Clara to bed, making sure she was supplied with water,
bedside light and her favourite rose-mallow cream in case she woke
up in the night with dry skin on her feet. He blinked and the
visions disappeared. He was alone, caught between far poles of
terror and joy. I haven't left you. I've
gone. Christ, only Sasha could contradict
himself like that across two sentences.
Laurie crumpled the note. Then he put it on the table top and
smoothed it urgently flat. “Why haven't you left me?” he demanded
of the empty air, with its weird trace of his sister and
indefinable feel of recent disturbance, like waters violently
stirred up and left to go calm again. “Why not for those reasons?”
On his way back here, Laurie had pulled over at a dirty roadside
truck stop in the desert. The photo on the front page of the
National Enquirer had been his first intimation of how far his
actions had spread. He had paid for his bottled water with shaking
hands. His hair had been a mess, his bloodshot eyes concealed
behind his shades, but still the clerk had given him a once-over,
followed by a wide, sleazy grin. Panic rose up in Laurie's throat.
Yes, only Sasha—I haven't left you but
I've gone.
It was a subtle nuance that could give Laurie no comfort now.
He tucked the note into the pocket of his sweat-damped jeans and
ran upstairs. Nothing was missing from the wardrobe that he could
see. Sasha's laptop wasn't around, but weirdly his set of three
flash drives, keys to the kingdom of his working life, were on the
window seat, scattered as if forgotten. His satchel was still there
too. Maybe gone meant something other than Laurie's deepest fear. Maybe Sasha
had found duties, obligations to discharge in Los Angeles,
not...
The
dressing table drawer where he had kept his passport was unlocked
and empty. Laurie swallowed down a cry, but the next one escaped
like the howl of a terrified fox, and he doubled up, pressing a
hand to his mouth. Oh, no. No. Not this. Despite everything,
despite whatever hellish way Sash had found out his betrayal,
Laurie had thought he would wait.
He
controlled himself. When he could breathe again, he tore back down
the stairs. For five heady minutes on his arrival here he had
thought he was in time. The guards at the gate had waved him
through without a murmur and the security guy in his blue Ford had
only nodded at him, lifting a lazy, bored hand. Laurie shot out
onto the driveway, dearly wishing for a lungful of cool London air.
He crossed the road in ten long strides and got to within two yards
of the Ford before the idiot inside it noticed him. “When did he
leave?” Laurie demanded, while the operative was still scrambling
out onto the pavement. “Why didn't you tell me?”
“When did who leave?”
“The man I employed you to watch. The only man.”
“Mr Petrica? He hasn't left, sir. He had some visitors, the
night-shift guy said, but they came and went without...”
Laurie
turned away, no longer hearing him. The inner beast he'd met so
often lately was dormant and no longer wanted to roar. Laurie
didn't have time to hear about door-to-door salesman or Jehovah's
witnesses, people Sasha would invite in and kindly talk round to
his own loving, secular beliefs if they weren't careful. Now he
looked with freshly tearstung eyes at the gardens all around him,
Laurie couldn't understand why he'd thought one sleepy guy in a car
would be able to keep track of Sasha for one minute. “Okay,” he
said quietly. “The house is empty, though. I won't be needing you
any more.”
He went back inside. For himself, all he wanted to take was
Sasha’s satchel. He could use it to carry the envelope—Sasha’s
least instructions were law to him now, his only guidance—and some
papers of his own, the ones he’d found waiting in his trailer in
the Mojave when he’d crawled back there at dawn. He hadn’t looked
at them, already fairly sure of what they contained. He was
relieved by the prospect of failure and firing right now, if the
game was done... It would free him. Now he could be nothing more
than an arrow in flight. And Sasha would want his bag back when
Laurie found him. When, he repeated silently to himself, climbing back into his
truck, not letting the if
reach surface, not even for a second.
When I find him. When.
***
Five
hours later, in the reverberant silence of a 747 midway across the
Atlantic, he remembered to open Doug’s envelope. Its contents made
him want to cry and laugh at the same time. Yes, in the light of
recent events, Ivory Gate could no longer allow its name to be
associated with that of Mr Fitzroy. He should understand that there
was no homophobic prejudice implied in the decision: Ivory Gate
encouraged diversity, and if Mr Fitzroy felt otherwise, he should
address his complaint to the lawyers whose names were appended, et
cetera. Laurie, his fingertips numb and clumsy, flipped to the end
and had a look, and felt like a pigeon with a rocket-launcher
trained on him: he’d be nothing but a handful of feathers after one
missile from that lot. It didn’t matter. He had no intention of
disputing, suing, seeking any kind of redress—just
escape.
The only trouble was the final paragraph. Mr Fitzroy should
still bear in mind that his services were retained throughout the
production of any future Blood Moon
release. Mr Brett had no doubt that, once the
present media storm had died down, a forgiving public would once
more welcome Devlin Steele into the franchise fold.
He’d been fired and hammered down at the same time.
Blood Moon 4 might never
be made. It could stay on Brett’s back boiler indefinitely, and
Laurie wouldn’t dare take a long-term contract with any other
production just in case. The theatres would be closed to him, even
if he hadn’t already shattered his chances by throwing over Romeo
for Hollywood.
All this should have meant something to him. What was he, if
not an actor? Folding the papers away, Laurie stared at the
seat-back, the safety instructions that always felt like too little
too late once you were in flight. He took the shell of Devlin
Steele, that flawed, cracked thing no efforts of his could make
whole, and he set it aside. Beneath it was the half-formed shape of
Romeo, and under that Bertram. Laurie shuddered, moving deeper.
Before that he'd been Flare
Path's Teddy Graham, whose dashing skin in
its RAF uniform he'd loved. Melchior in Spring Awakening, and just for two
emergency nights in a mercifully dark theatre, Hedda
Gabler...
Sasha, there in the audience for all of these skins,
applauding them or waiting in the wings for them, waiting at home
to help him take them off. To unshell him. Laurie closed his eyes.
He put the papers in the seat pocket in front of him. A shorter
reach than he was used to—he hadn't flown business class in a long
time, but he'd grabbed the first Heathrow-bound seat available,
after establishing that the earlier flights were quite booked up,
and no, there could be no exceptions. That had been a tough pill to
swallow. How many hours was Sasha ahead of him already? Laurie had
even tried don't you know who I
am, but the blue-blood beast in him was
dead, it seemed, not merely dormant, and the demand had come out so
sorry and wry that the girl on the desk had broken into
laughter—yes, she did, and in fact she was a big fan, but still the
flight was full.
The seat
was hard, the airline cushion a token gesture only. Laurie caressed
Sasha's satchel. Empty, it was soft enough to fold in half and tuck
behind his neck. He could turn a little way sideways, far enough to
rest his face on the soft leather. He closed his eyes. Sasha took
the satchel with him everywhere: over time, it had acquired a faint
trace of his scent—rainy earth, and his citrus cologne. Laurie
could only trace back the shells and his skins as far as two years
ago—as far as Sasha. Beneath that was a layer of him that didn't
want to move. When he tried, mentally tugging at a corner, he
flinched in pain.
He was
real. The child he'd been in his father's house, the chameleon his
talents had made of him—these things fell away. He was dreadfully
hung over. There had been no sign of Nicole or Wes on the set when
he had run away, as if having done their worst they had evaporated
like genies in a fairy tale. He was all alone, face to face with
himself in the dark, the remains of the chemicals in his system
rendering him lucid even as they put him to sleep. His final layer
was Sasha. Laurie slid a finger into the pocket of his jeans,
pressing the paper of the note. If Stefan's world devoured Sasha,
if Laurie had lost him the old-fashioned way through sheer
stupidity and faithlessness, Laurie would be nothing but a flayed
and empty remnant, a thing without a surface or a soul. “I'm so
scared,” he said aloud, and the little old lady in the seat next to
him, who clearly had no access to the TV, internet or newspapers,
patted his hand as if he'd been six years old. “There,” she said.
“It's just a bit of turbulence. You're not afraid of that, are
you—a grown-up boy like you?”