Picture Perfect Read online

  Even Alex, who Cassie figured was as big a star as they came, wasn't as wrapped up in himself as Ophelia. But she looked so serious, holding her hand out and flexing it just so, that Cassie could only smile. "Can I get you something else?" she said, pointing to the empty juice glass.

  Ophelia walked toward a cabinet and stuck her hand inside, rummaging and coming up with an English muffin. "I'll get it. I know my way around."

  "Good," Cassie said. "Maybe you can give me a tour."

  Ophelia turned away from the toaster, anxiety drawing her features tight. "God, Cass, how long is it going to take? It must be awful."

  Cassie shrugged. "I've got Alex here."

  "Fat lot of helphe'll be," Ophelia muttered.

  Cassie faced the counter and began to cut a strawberry into eight tiny slices. She cut methodically, listening for the click of the blade against the marble with each slice. "Why do you hate each other?" she asked.

  Cassie couldn't be sure if Ophelia didn't want to answer the question, or if she hadn't heard it. "Butter?" Ophelia said. She closed her eyes as if divining its location, and then opened a compartment of the refrigerator. "Ah," she said. She tried to hold the muffin with her bad arm while she spread the butter with the other hand, but the muffin kept slipping out of her grasp.

  "Here," Cassie said. "Let me do it."

  She handed half to Ophelia, who was staring at her forearm as if it were a foreign object. "I can't put any pressure on it yet. It's driving me up the wall. And it itches like hell."

  "How did you get hurt?"

  She shrugged. "It was the end of a perfectly horrible day. I was at this photo shoot forParents magazine, and I'd spent the afternoon holding a series of naked three-month-olds in the air--" She reached her arms in front of her as a demonstration. "Anyway, they were zeroing in on the baby's ass and my hands under its armpits. So this one kid--a boy--starts peeing on me. And I'm wearing that washed silk shirt I got at Versace last month--remember? I showed it to you--and I justknow the stain isn't going to come out." She paused, taking a bite of her muffin. "And then they tell me before I leave that they'll let me know if--if--they decide to use the picture for the next issue. So I step outside and it's raining cats and dogs and I have no umbrella, and next thing I know, I'm lying on the ground in the middle of a mudslide, and my arm is caught underneath me and I'm dying from the pain." She grinned. "I did, however, make a date with the doctor in the emergency room." She turned to Cassie. "Did you know that they don't just make white casts anymore? You have a choice of anything--pink, green, even fuchsia. I thought I'd go with black, you know, because it matches most of my night outfits."

  Cassie leaned against the counter, exhausted from Ophelia's explanation. "Enough about me," Ophelia said. She smiled, and Cassie could see what she meant--her nose was a little bit off center. "How are your bones holding up?"

  "Bones?"

  "God, Cass, all you've been talking about is your field class this semester. I figured it was lodged so deep in your mind that a coma couldn't make you forget. You're going to...let me think...Kenya, I believe, in May, with the seniors."

  "I haven't been to UCLA yet. Alex has to get back toMacbeth , so we decided I'd take a leave of absence and go with him."

  "We decided?" Ophelia shook her head. "You meanhe decided. Younever go on location with Alex. Not during the school year, anyway. You must have knocked out more than your memory, because the Cassie I know couldn't stand to miss two lectures in a row without having apoplexy." Ophelia smiled. "Maybe I should take you to the university today. Lock you in your dusty old office for an hour or two with your research, and then let Alex drag you kicking and screaming to Scotland."

  Cassie felt her hand tighten around the knife she was holding. She had no more reason to believe Alex than she had to believe Ophelia, but she did. Cassie swallowed and placed the knife on the kitchen counter beside the cut strawberry. She ran her finger over a red puddle of juice and seeds; the heart of the fruit, the blood. "Why do you and Alex hate each other?" she asked again.

  Ophelia sighed. "Because Alex and I are too similar to get along. We're at different levels, but we're in the same business. We're both obsessed with work. And we both want you to ourselves."

  Cassie laughed, but the sound seemed to shatter the air around her. "That's ludicrous," she said. "You're my friend. He's my husband. There's plenty of room in my life for both of you."

  Ophelia leaned back against the center island, lifting her face to the skylight overhead. "Tell that to Alex," she said. "From day one, he's been trying to swallow you whole."

  AS IF HE HAD BEEN EAVESDROPPING, ALEX CAME BACK FROM AN ERRAND later that morning with a box full of bones. He pretended to stagger under its weight, walking toward Cassie. She sat at the kitchen table, leafing through photo albums, her eyes riveted to a faded picture of a blond boy. He was lean and sinewy, just at the edge of growing up, and his arm was looped over Cassie's neck. She was thirteen, but there was none of that awkward teenage break between boys and girls distancing them. In fact, from the way the picture had been taken, it was difficult to tell where one of them stopped and the other began.

  Cassie did not look up, did not notice the wooden box with its scientific packing labels. "Alex," she said, "where does Connor live now? Why don't I keep in touch with him?"

  "I don't know. He's the only thing you've ever refused to talk about."

  Cassie touched her finger to a fine line of flyaway hair coming off Connor's cheek. "It must have been a fight. One of those stupid kids' fights that you feel rotten about for years, but are still too embarrassed about to make right."

  Alex pried open the box. "I doubt that. You're a fanatic for picking up the pieces." He tossed several small bone chips into the air, heavy and yellowed, and Cassie caught them like a practiced juggler. "And here," he said, "are some pieces for you to pick up."

  Alex spilled the contents of the box onto the dining room table, obliterating the facing pages of the open photo album. "Don't say I never bring you anything," he said, grinning.

  Cassie brushed away the soft cotton wool and newspaper used for transport, running her fingertips over the fifty or so fragments of bone. Each was labeled with India ink, left-sloping European handwriting marking the grave, the site, the date of discovery. "Oh, Alex," she murmured. "Where did you get this?"

  "Cambridge, England," he said. "By way of Cornwall, according to the laboratory I bought it from."

  "Youbought me a skull?"

  Alex ran a hand through his hair. "You don't know what I had to go through to get them to let me take it home. I had to tell this Dr. Bother--"

  "Dr.Botner ?"

  "Whoever--I had to make a huge 'contribution,' tell him who you were, and convince him that I was certain you'd wind up sending it back as a museum exhibit, instead of keeping it as a conversation piece in some actor's home." He absently picked up a piece of cotton wool and strung it apart like taffy. "And to keep it asecret , I had to negotiate this over the telephone in the six minutes you weren't at my side."

  Cassie stared at him. "You did this yesterday?"

  Alex shrugged. "I bought it when I was in Scotland. But I rushed the shipment yesterday. I didn't know how long it would take you to feel like yourself again, and I wanted it to seem like home."

  Cassie smiled, and as always, he wondered why photographers always rushed to capture his image rather than hers. If his features reflected anything, it was the light given off by Cassie. "Of course," she pointed out, "any other woman would have been satisfied with roses."

  Alex watched Cassie's hands automatically begin to sort the pieces of the skull in size order. "I wouldn't trade you for the world," he said.

  Cassie had been unwrapping the mandible. She paused, staring down at her hands. Then she stood and leaned forward to kiss Alex. "I must be the luckiest person in California," she said.

  Alex let himself fall into her, grasping at her words and the electric feel of her skin against his. He did not know
what to say to her; he never knew what to say; he was used to speaking what others had written. He wished he'd learned long ago how to put into words the feeling that if she was gone, if she ever left, he would cease to exist. But he couldn't tell her, so he did what he always did: he slipped into character, the first one that came, willing to do anything other than face the limits of himself.

  He broke away and changed the mood: light comedy, now a clown. Glancing down at the scatter of bones, Alex raised his eyebrows. "You're luckier thanhe was," he said.

  He left Cassie separating her bones into five lines, plus the mandible, and went downstairs to get the second half of her present: the Durofix and pillars of plasticine, the sandbox she'd use to support pieces of the skull while putting it together. He'd taken all this from her laboratory at the house.

  By the time he returned, Cassie had already laid out several pieces of bone, end to end, and Alex could see how they would easily fit together. "The packing label says he's from the Dark Ages," Cassie said. "I've named him Lancelot." She reached into the box Alex held, pulling out the Durofix and laying a thin line of the glue along one edge of bone. Setting it sideways in the sandbox, she affixed the second piece, then built up a buttress of sand to hold the pieces until the fixative dried. "I'm going to put the vault together, and then do the face separately if I can. While they're drying I can set the condyles of the mandible into the glenoid cavities to see if the teeth occlude correctly before I permanently set the face."

  Alex shook his head. "And they say people can't understandShakespeare ."

  Cassie smiled, but did not look up from her work. "Well, no one has to understand what I'm saying. He's my audience"--she ran a finger along Lancelot's jawbone--"and his hearing is completely shot to hell."

  She worked for an hour, fitting pieces together in a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Alex sat across from her, absolutely stunned.

  Cassie peered at him. "Haven't you ever watched me do this before?" When Alex shook his head, she grinned. "Do you want to help?"

  For a second his eyes gleamed, but then he gently picked up a minute piece of the ancient face and ran his thumb over the spiked edge. "I wouldn't have any idea what to do," he said. "I'd be more of a pain in the ass than anything else."

  "It's easy." Cassie's small hands guided his to a second piece, and she fitted the edges together in a way that made perfect sense. "You can glue these two for me." He stared at the image of her fingers wrapped over his, her palms holding his own, then at the chips of bone. No one would ever think of connecting him with Cassie when they were apart, but once they'd been brought together, they, too, appeared to be an ideal match.

  Cassie mistook his silence for confusion. "Give it a try," she said. "It's like a model. You must have done models as a kid."

  As a kid, Alex had spent most of his time alone, daydreaming and exploring his way around the rural outskirts of New Orleans. He preferred to stay hidden, and for hours at a time he'd climb cherry trees to read books he'd pinched from the public library:Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, The Joy of Sex .

  Alex's parents hated each other but cared too much about what other people thought to get a divorce. His mother turned away from him because he looked too much like his father; his father turned away from him because Alex was not the sort of son Andrew Riveaux had dreamed of: one who willingly waded the bayou with him, hunting grouse; one who could shoot a perfect round of trap and hold his whiskey afterward with the boys.

  On Alex's twelfth birthday, Andrew Riveaux bought his son a complicated wooden model of a Conestoga wagon, the kind that had crossed the Oregon Trail Alex was learning about in school. "I'll help you with that, boy," his father said, and Alex believed that this promise of time spent together was even better than the present.

  Alex opened the box and carefully laid out the smooth wooden parts, the metal rings that would brace the covering of the wagon. "Not so fast," his father said, slapping away his hands. "You got to earn the parts."

  The wagon was built in accordance with the number of times Alex acted, in his father's eyes, like a man. He shot his first goose, carrying it home by its quivering feet and stopping twice to throw up his breakfast, and in return his father helped him structure the box of the wagon. He sailed a pirogue through the black vines of the bayou after dark, using his sense of smell for direction, and found the shack of the old witch woman his father bought rotgut whiskey from, which won him the model's front seat and the hitch for the horses. He fell out of a tree and broke his leg clear through the skin and did not shed one tear, and that same night his father sat on the edge of his bed to help his trembling fingers stick spokes into four wagon wheels.

  Sometime when he was thirteen, he finished the model. It was delicate and perfect, inch for inch a miniature of history. Alex finally glued the muslin wagon cover in place and one hour later took the model out to the woods behind his house and smashed it to pieces with a fallen branch.

  "Alex.Alex ." He jumped at the sound of Cassie's voice. Her eyes were wide, and she was waving a paper towel in front of him. "Here," she said. "You're bleeding all over yourself."

  He looked down at his lap, seeing the fragments of crushed bone and the cut running down the side of his thumb. "Jesus," he said. "I'm sorry."

  Cassie shrugged, holding the damp towel to his hand, applying pressure. "They're fragile. I should have told you that." She smiled hesitantly. "Guess you aren't aware of your own strength."

  Alex turned away. Cassie had completed the face; it stared up at him through empty eyes from a bed of sand. He sat silently while Cassie put together the back of the skull. Almost all of the pieces were there, and he watched her neatly placing four fragments around the spot where the bone he had broken would have fit.

  He stood up, mumbling something even he did not understand. All he knew was that he had to get out of that room before Cassie finished. He wouldn't be able to see the skull anymore as a sum of all those parts; instead his eyes would be drawn to what was missing, to what he had ruined.

  "WE'RE GOING TO ROB A GRAVEYARD, " CASSIE HAD ANNOUNCED, "ON Halloween." It was two weeks away, and it was the perfect dare, and Connor never turned those down. She had been trying to find something to get Connor's mind off his worries--his father had lost his job and had taken to spending his days in the garage with a fifth of scotch, and it was becoming increasingly clear that Connor wouldn't be able to afford college, although he was desperate to become a veterinarian. Cassie had seen the spark in his eyes, and she knew she'd hooked him.

  So now, Halloween night, they were sneaking out at midnight. They had done their research: seniors at school told them that the police sat up every year at St. Joseph's but the pet cemetery off Mayfair Place was unguarded.

  They stole down the street like cats, keeping to the shadows and holding their knapsacks away from their bodies so that the trowels and picks didn't bang together. They walked past evidence of the night that had already ended: trees strung with toilet paper, rural mailboxes dripping with eggs. Cassie walked ahead, and Connor watched her footsteps in the moonlight, careful to step exactly where she had.

  The pet cemetery was a small gated area bordered by silvery pines. Everyone in town had buried something here--a cat, a guinea pig, a goldfish--although many of the graves were unmarked. By silent agreement, Connor and Cassie moved toward one of the few headstones in the cemetery. It heralded the resting place of Rufus, an unpopular mastiff that had been the only creature to escape the sharp side of old lady Monahan's tongue. Rufus had been dead for six years, and Mrs. Monahan for three, so Cassie didn't really think they'd be offending anyone by digging up the dog's bones.

  "You ready?" Connor was looking around nervously, but he already had his pick in hand. Cassie nodded. She pulled out her tools and waited for Connor to strike the first blow.

  The dog was buried so deep that Cassie wondered if there'd been a coffin. The Monahans had been the richest family on the lake, after all, and Rufus was their only chi
ld. She scraped at the soft earth with her hands, shoveling out what Connor loosed.

  He was standing four feet into the pit, his legs braced on the sides of the dug walls for fear of stepping right on Rufus when he least expected it. He leaned over and chipped the edge of his trowel against something unforgiving. "Holy shit," he said.

  Cassie wiped the sweat out of her eyes. "You find it?"

  Connor swallowed. He had turned a shade of gray. Cassie reached out a hand to pull him up, and when he was on level ground again, he fell to his knees to vomit. He wiped his hand across his mouth.

  Cassie stood with her hands on her hips. "For God's sake, Connor," she said. "How're you ever going to sew a dog's intestines back together if you can't even handle seeing them already dead?" Shaking her head, she leaped into the pit, wincing a little when her sneaker struck bone. She leaned over and started pulling the thin white curves up, one by one, tossing them inches from Connor's feet. In a way she was surprised. She'd been thinking of the skeleton as one big piece, like in the cartoons, not something that time could break into fragments.

  Finally, she reached through the dirt and pulled out the dog's skull. Bits of hair still covered the crown. "Awesome," she breathed, rolling it out of the pit toward Connor.

  He was sitting with his back to the grave, his eyes shut tightly. "You ready to go?" he said, his voice scratchy and rough.

  Cassie felt a grin split her face. "Jeez, Connor," she said. "If I didn't know you better I'd think you were scared shitless."

  Connor stood up in one fluid motion, turning and grasping Cassie's arms with a strength just beneath the point of pain. He shook her so hard her head snapped back. "I amnot scared," he said.

  Cassie narrowed her eyes. Connor never treated her like this. He never hurt her. He was the only one who didn't. Angry tears burned under her lids. "Coward," she whispered, saying anything that would strike his heart and make him sting as badly as she did.

  They stayed like that until time stopped, and all Cassie could feel was the cut of Connor's fingernails in her skin and the heat of his gaze as it swept her face. A tear streaked out of the corner of her eye, and Connor let go of one of her shoulders to wipe it away.