Taking the Lead(44)

       
         
       
        

Stop it, Ricki, just stop, I told myself. The news sites pick sensationalistic stuff on purpose. Maybe it has zero basis in reality.

"I'll check it out," Paul said, rolling back into place in the computer chair. "I'm sure it's nothing."

He didn't sound sure, though.

He was kissing her on the neck! I shook my head to clear it. It's just a photo, I told myself. Photos can lie. It doesn't prove anything.

But that was the thing. Photos could have a kind of truth of their own. That's why the paparazzi existed.

I tried to put it out of my mind and go back to looking through the photos that my grandfather, or someone, had found worthy of locking away in a safe. I remained standing at the edge of my desk, flipping the photos over, one after the other, as if as soon as I got to the end of the collection, I would walk back over to the safe and put them back. There weren't that many more. Most of them would have seemed completely innocent if you only saw one of them, but piled together like this, all these ones of my grandfather with different people, it made you wonder.

And then my breath caught. An artful photo, done with dramatic lighting from underneath, showed a woman in complicated ropes suspended from the eagle statue, some of the ropes leading through the eagle's beak, some through the ring on its chest, and some around the claws. Ropes crisscrossed her torso and the thigh of her bent leg.

My mother. I could see more rope wound around her neck.

I wasn't sure when I sat down. I had a vague memory of Paul helping me, but maybe I made that up later when I realized I was in the chair, the photo in my hand. I'd stared at it so long the image had started to burn into my eyes, so even when I closed them a purple and red negative swam behind my eyelids. Paul was nowhere to be seen. The safe was closed and everything else that we'd removed from it must have been back inside. The office door was closed.

My mother looked radiant in the photo. She wasn't even naked: she was wearing what could have been a dark bathing suit or body suit, making the light-colored ropes crisscrossing it stand out. She had a wide smile on the face, her arms outstretched and palms up like a dancer or circus acrobat. She looked like she was flying.

There was a knock on the door. I went to open it, assuming it was Paul coming back, and found myself completely unprepared to see the basset-hound face of my father. I froze and so did he. It was too late for me to put on a chipper mask for myself, or even to hide the photograph I was carrying. The combination of seeing Axel and then my mother captured on film like that had been a one-two punch that left me reeling. I looked at the picture in my hand, then at him, a cresting wave of painful emotion filling my eyes with tears and making them sting. 

"Oh, baby. I'm so sorry," he said, which meant nothing really but it was enough to send that wave crashing down to drown me. I fell into his arms, rage-crying with helplessness.





CHAPTER THIRTEEN


WINDOWPANE


RICKI

My tears didn't last long. I forced myself to stop, thinking don't be so weak! I didn't even know why I was crying, exactly. Which made me think of something Axel had said about it being okay to just feel. Have a feeling, Ricki. It's okay.

The next feeling I had, though, was a fresh wave of upset over the Sun-Lee photo.

The camera is the worst torture device ever invented, I thought. Dad patted me on the shoulder. "There, there."

Whenever he came back from rehab he felt like a stranger at first. I shrugged away, trying to get myself together, trying to remember how to do this. Ask a polite but neutral question, right? "How was the drive?"

"Perfectly fine as always, Ricki." He was wearing a peach-colored polo shirt and I could see he'd dripped coffee right where the bulge of his belly made it wrinkle. "I didn't realize any of those photographs had survived."

I turned it to face him, almost afraid to hear the answers to the questions I wanted to ask. But I had to ask. "When was this taken? Where?"

"The eagle used to be downstairs in the main room. These curtains on either side-they look black in the photo? Those are the red ones we still have."

Thank goodness. This wasn't a photo from the movie set. My mother apparently enjoyed rope bondage at other times, too. "This was at a party?"

"No, no, a camera would have been a scandal unto itself." He plucked the picture out of my fingers and examined it.

"Who tied the ropes?"

He sighed. "Ricki, if you want to hear the whole story of this photograph I would be happy to tell it to you. But can we have a little food and some coffee? I haven't had a decent cup of coffee in over a month."

He'd be happy to tell me? That was not what I'd been expecting. Dad had always been evasive about both my mother and about bondage before. But maybe rehab had helped. Maybe knowing his father had put me in charge of the club helped, too. "I'll have the staff bring us something."

"Why don't we go to the kitchen?"

Okay, maybe he hadn't changed very much. "Dad, sit." I pointed to the chair where Schmitt had sat when we'd met.

He sat. When I was done talking to the staff I took the chair Gwen had been in, leaving us both facing the eagle statue. I waited expectantly while he turned the photo this way and that, catching the light. The eagle loomed.

He eventually spoke. "This was shortly after we got back from our honeymoon. The photographer had some renown in the fashion and art world, but he did fetish photography on the side, under a fake name."

It was certainly an artful photo. The only thing pornographic about it was the fact that it was a woman tied up and that implied something. "She looks so happy."

"She was happy. Roesel, the photographer, was a rigger. Tied all the ropes himself, and then suspended her. If you look here-" His finger traced a faint line toward the top of the image. "You can see the support ropes that are anchored off to the side."

"And she liked that?"

"She said it was like flying." He put the photo down and looked around, as if hoping that would make Mina and a sandwich magically materialize.

"Please tell me you didn't take this eagle with you to Italy," I said, needing to be sure.

"What? Oh no, dear. The farthest this eagle has flown since this photo is to this office. God, no." He put his hand over his eyes and I knew he was thinking what I had thought: that this was the piece of equipment my mother had died on. Thankfully not.



       
         
       
        

"Okay, but why is there a rope around her neck?"

He looked at the photo again. "Purely symbolic. You can see it's slack."

"You sound very defensive."

"And you sound very accusatory." He crossed his arms.

No one could make me angrier than my father. Not assholes at work, not Axel, nobody. "Well maybe the story you should be telling me isn't about this photo but about how my mother died."

"You told me you didn't remember her!" he said, as if that absolved him of saying anything-as if it were my fault that he hadn't already told me.

"I was a child who wanted her daddy to cry less and to pay more attention to her, so she told you what you wanted to hear." I wanted to smack him. "It's Gwen who doesn't remember her. And why does that matter, anyway? If I don't remember her I'm not allowed to know how she died?"

"What else did you find with that photo?"

"What else did you tell that Tinseltown Tab reporter that you never told me?" If he could answer a question with a question, so could I.

"What reporter?"

There was a knock at the door: the coffee and food. I got up to let them in and picked up the copy of TTT from my desk at the same time. I wheeled the cart over and handed the magazine to him.

He looked longingly at the coffeepot.

"You can have some coffee after you read this and explain it."

"Goodness me, when did you grow up to be so bossy?"

Crown on my fucking head. I looked down my nose at him. "Read."

He stopped arguing and started reading.

Once he had been reading for a little while, I decided to pour the coffee. I poured for both of us and added a drop of milk the way he liked it. And a spoonful of vanilla sugar. The spoon clinked against the mug.

He looked up. "I have no idea where this story came from."

"Are you saying the reporter made up the quotes from you?"

He folded the paper up and plopped it down on the table between us. "Well, no. I mean, they sound like things I've said."

"To whom? When?"

"I don't know. But I will say this: everything I say in there is true."

"Why don't you say it to me, then?" I pushed the coffee mug in his direction.

He took it and burned himself on the first sip he was so eager to drink it. When his tongue had recovered from the scalding, though, he started to talk. "Understand, Ricki, I wasn't keeping any of this from you. But when you were little, you were too young, and I never knew the right time to bring it up."

"Well, it's the twentieth anniversary," I said. "I'd say now's well past the right time."