River’s End

hers, then rose. “I’ll wash these.” She started toward the stream, hesitated. “Yes. Yes, I need to know why.”
    While she washed the bowls, Noah took out his tape recorder, snapped in a fresh tape. He had his notepad and pencil ready when she came back.
    He saw the stress. It showed in the way her color faded to a delicate ivory. “Sit down.” He said it gently. “And tell me about your father.”
    “I don’t remember that much about him. I haven’t seen him for twenty years.”
    Noah said nothing. He could have pointed out that she remembered her mother very clearly.
    “He was very handsome,” Olivia said at length. “They looked beautiful together. I remember how they’d dress up for parties, and how I thought everyone’s parents were beautiful and had beautiful clothes and went out to parties, had their pictures in magazines and on TV. It just seemed so natural, so normal. They seemed so natural together.
    “They loved each other. I know that.” She spoke slowly now, a line of concentration between her elegant, dark brows. “They loved me. I can’t be wrong about that. In their movie together, they just . . . shimmered with what they felt for each other. It radiates from them. I remember how it did that, how they did that whenever they were in the same room. Until it started to change.”
    “How did it change?”
    “Anger, mistrust, jealousy. I wouldn’t have had words for it then. But that shimmer was smudged, somehow. They fought. Late at night at first. I’d hear not the words so much but the voices, the tone of them. And it made me feel sick.”
    She lifted her glass, steadied herself. “Sometimes I could hear him pacing the hall outside, saying lines or reciting poetry. Later I read some article on him where he said he often recited poetry to help him calm down before an important scene. He suffered from stage fright.
    “Funny, isn’t it? He always seemed so confident. I think he must have used the same sort of method to calm himself down when they were fighting. Pacing the hall, reciting poetry. Tor man, to man so oft unjust, is always so to women; one sole bond awaits them, treachery is all their trust.’ “ She sighed once. “That’s Byron.”
    “Yes, I know.”
    She smiled again, but her eyes were so horribly sad. “You read poetry, Brady?”
    “I was a journalism major. I read everything.” He feathered his fingers along her cheek. “ ‘Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.’ “
    It touched her. “With or without words, my heart’s survived. It’s my mother’s heart that was broken, and she who didn’t survive what he wanted from her. or needed. And I haven’t spoken of it to anyone except Aunt Jamie, and then only rarely. I don’t know what to say now. He’d pick me up.”
    Her voice cracked, but she tried to control herself. “In one fast swoop so that my stomach would stay on my feet for a minute. It’s a delicious feeling when you’re a child. ‘Livvy, my love,’ he’d call me, and dance with me around the living room. The room where he killed her. And when he’d hold me, I’d feel so safe. When he’d come in to tell me a story—he told such wonderful stories—I’d feel so happy. I was his princess, he’d say. And whenever he had to go away to a shoot. I’d miss him so much my heart would hurt.”
    She pressed a hand to her mouth, as if to hold in the words and the pain. Then made herself drop it. “That night when he came into my room and broke the music box, and shouted at me, it was as if someone had stolen my father, taken him away. It was never, never the same after that night. That whole summer I waited for him to come back, for everything to be the way it was. But he never did. Never. The monster came.”
    Her breath caught, two quick inward gasps. And her hand shook, spilling wine. Instinctively, Noah snagged the glass before it slipped out of her fingers. Even as he said her name she pressed both fists to her rampaging heart.
    “I can’t.” She barely managed to get the words out. Her eyes were huge with pain and shock and staring blindly into his. “I can’t.”
    “It’s all right. Okay.” He dropped his pad, the glass, everything and wrapped his arms around her. Her hands were trapped between them, but he could feel her heart race, he could feel the sharp, whiplash shudders that racked her. “Don’t do this to yourself. Don’t. Let go. If you don’t