Bittersweet (27 page)

All he knew was that he needed to talk to her, more and more frequently. He couldn't imagine not talking to her every day now. And India was thinking exactly the same thing as she lay in the bathtub, and wondered where it was going. And what was she going to do when she got back to Westport? She couldn't call him constantly. Doug would see it on the bill, and wonder what she was doing.

She had no idea what she was doing with Paul, or why. And yet she knew she needed him now. He was like a drug she had become addicted to, without realizing how it had happened. But it had. They needed each other. More than either of them was willing to admit, or knew. But little by little, over time, and from a great distance, they were moving slowly toward each other. And then what, she asked herself, as she closed her eyes. What in God's name were they doing? But as she opened them again, she realized it was just one more question to which she had no answer.

And on the
Sea Star
, thinking about her, and realizing how relieved he was that she was all right, Paul put his hands in his pockets with a thoughtful expression, and walked slowly back to his cabin.

I
NDIA CONTINUED
to work with the police that week, filling in the details of the story. She took more photographs of the perpetrators, and some heartbreaking ones of the children. In the end, there were thirty-nine children involved, and most of them were in hospitals and shelters and foster homes. Only one, who had been kidnapped two years before, had been returned to her parents. The others had all been abandoned, or sold, or given away, or even bartered. They were truly the lost children, and India couldn't imagine, after what they'd been through, how they would ever recover.

Every night she poured out the horror stories she'd seen to Paul, and that led to talk of other things, their values, their fears, their childhoods. Like hers, his parents were both gone, and he was an only child. His father had been a moderate success, but in most ways nothing like him. Paul had been driven to succeed, by demons of his own, to achieve in excess of everyone around him. And when India talked of her father and
his work, it was obvious to Paul that she thought him a hero. But she was also well aware of what his constant absences had cost her. They had never been a real family, because he was always gone, which made her own family life now seem all that much more important. It was the hold that Doug had on her, she now realized, and why she didn't want to lose him. It was why she did everything he said, and followed all his orders, met all his expectations. She didn't want her children to have a life without their father. And although her own mother had worked, her job had never been important to her. It was her father who had been the central figure of their life, and whose absence, when he died, had nearly destroyed them. But she also recognized that the strain his lifestyle and his work had put on them had challenged her parents' marriage. Her mother had never thought him quite the hero that she did, and a lot of the time she was very angry at him. And India knew that his long absences had caused her mother a lot of heartache. It was why she was so nervous now about following in his footsteps, and why she had allowed Doug to force her to abandon a life, and a career, that meant so much to her. But just as her father had never been able to give up the drug of his work, and the passion he had for it, although she herself had sublimated it for so long, she had come back to it, and discovered all too easily in the past few days, how much she loved it. And she knew, as she took photographs of the children's ravaged faces and eyes and lives, that somehow she was making a difference. In exposing their pain to the world, through her camera and her own eyes, she was making sure that
it could not so easily happen again. She was making people feel the agony of those children. It was precisely what her father had done with his work, and why he had won the Pulitzer. He deserved it.

It was her last night in London. She had finally finished the story, and she was leaving in the morning. She hadn't seen Paul while she'd been there, but in a way, she felt as though they'd spent the week together. They had discovered things about each other she had never said before, or dreamed about herself, or remotely guessed about him. He had been astonishingly open with her, about his dreams, his most private thoughts, and his years with Serena. And the portrait he painted of her taught India a great deal, not only about her, but about Paul, and what his needs were.

Serena had been powerful in so many ways, she had pushed and driven him further toward his immense success, and supported him when he had doubts about it. She had been a driving force, always right behind him. But she had rarely leaned on him herself, was leery of needing him too much, and although she'd been his closest friend, she was afraid of being too close to him or anyone, though Paul didn't seem to mind it. They had been partners, but she had never nurtured him or anyone the way India did with everyone around her. Paul had discovered in his new friend a never-ending source of warmth and tenderness and comfort. And the gentle hand she held out to him was one he trusted. In every possible way, the two women couldn't have been more different. And India's kindness to him was what seemed to keep him afloat now, just as his ever-present
strength for her seemed to have become essential to her survival. The question was, for both of them, where did they go now?

He called late the night before she left, and he sounded lonelier than usual. “Will you call me when you go back?” Paul asked. She never had before. It had always been Paul who called her. But even he realized that it would be awkward to call her regularly in Westport.

“I'm not sure I can,” she said honestly, thinking about it, as she lay comfortably on her bed, in her cozy room at Claridge's. “I'm not sure Doug would understand it. I'm not even sure I do.” She smiled, wishing he would clarify it for her. But he couldn't. He was still far too steeped in his memories of his wife, to know what he wanted from India, if anything. What they both cherished from each other was their friendship. And even if Paul no longer was, India was after all still married.

“Can I call you there? Often, I mean …like now …?” he asked. They had both come to rely on their daily phone calls. After speaking to the children every night, she looked forward to their long conversations. But back in Westport, it would be different.

“I think so. You can call me during the day.” The time difference would work well for them, as long as he was still in Europe. And then she sighed, thinking of Doug, and what she owed him. “I guess I should feel guilty about talking to you. I wouldn't want Doug doing the same thing …talking to some woman….”

“But you wouldn't treat him the way he's treated you either, would you?” In fact, they both knew she hadn't.
She had always been loving, supportive, kind, reasonable, and understanding. She had more than lived up to her half of the bargain, the “deal” Doug constantly spoke of. It was Doug who had let her down, by refusing to meet her needs or understand her feelings, and giving her so little warmth and comfort.

“He's not a bad man, Paul. … I was very happy for a long time. Maybe I just grew up or something. We were so busy for so long, with all the kids, or at least I was, I guess I stopped paying attention to what he was giving me, or wasn't. It never occurred to me to say, ‘Hey …wait … I need more than this … or ask him if he loved me. And now, it feels like it's too late. He's gotten away with giving me so little for so long, that he doesn't understand that I want more, for myself, and from him. He thinks I'm crazy.”

“You're not crazy, India. Far from it,” Paul reassured her. “Do you think you can get it back, to get what you want out of it again?”

“I don't know.” It was what she had asked herself over and over. “I just don't know. I don't think he hears me.

“He's a fool if he doesn't.” Paul knew that very clearly. She was a woman well worth keeping.

“Did you and Serena ever have problems like this?” He said funny things about her sometimes, about how demanding and difficult she had been, but he didn't seem to mind it.

“Not really. She didn't put up with much. When I stepped on her toes, she let me have it. And when I didn't give her enough, she told me. Serena made her needs very clear, and her expectations, and she set very
clear limits. I guess that made it easy. I always knew where I stood with her. She taught me a lot about relationships. I made a real mess of it the first time. Kind of like Doug, probably even a little worse. I was so busy establishing myself and making money, I let the relationship go right down the tubes and never saw it. And I walked all over my wife while I did it. I told you, she still hates me. And I'm not so sure I blame her.” And then he laughed into the phone, thinking about it. “I think Serena trained me. I was pretty dumb before that.”

But if he had been, he no longer was. India knew by then that he was not only extremely sensitive, but also unusually perceptive and able to express his perceptions. And no matter what she explained to him, he always seemed to “get it.”

“The only trouble is,” he went on, “I can't imagine doing all that again, without Serena. It wasn't generic. It worked because of her, because of who she was, her powers and her magic. I don't think I could ever love another woman.” They were hard words to hear, but India believed him. “There will never be another person in my life like her.” Nor would he try to find one. He had decided that on the
Sea Star.

“That may be true right now,” India said cautiously, thinking of him as he lay in his cabin, “but you don't know what the future will bring. You're not old enough to give all that up. Maybe in time, you'll feel differently and someone will come along who is important to you.” She wasn't pleading her own case, so much as pleading for him. It was impossible to think that, at fifty-seven,
that aspect of his life was over. He was too young, too vital, too decent, and at the moment much too lonely.

“I know I couldn't do it,” he said firmly. But she knew that time might tell a different story.

“You don't have to think about that now,” India said gently. It was too soon for him to even think about another woman. And yet he was calling India every day, and they had become fast friends. And always somewhere, in the time they spent talking to each other, there was a hint of something else, something more, and despite the neutrality they claimed, they nonetheless reacted to each other as man and woman. But Paul insisted to himself, when he thought about it, that he wasn't in love with India, or pursuing her as a woman. They were friends, and he wanted to help her out of a difficult situation. He never said it quite so bluntly to her, but he thought her marriage was a disaster, and Doug a bastard. She was being exploited and ignored and used, and he was convinced that Doug didn't even care about her. If he did, he would have let her pursue her career, even helped her to do it. He would have cherished her, and supported her, and at least told her he loved her. Instead, he blackmailed and threatened her, and locked her up in an airless little box, for his own convenience. Paul had nothing but contempt for him. But in spite of that, he didn't want to put India in jeopardy when she went back, and he promised to be cautious when he called her.

“Can't you just tell him we're friends? That I'm sort of an adopted, self-appointed older brother?” She laughed at the suggestion, and Paul's naïveté. What
man would understand that? And she knew that Doug viewed her as his possession. He didn't want another man using what was his, even if only for conversation and comfort.

“I know he wouldn't understand it.” And neither did she, because the undercurrent of what she felt from Paul was not what she knew she would have felt from a brother. There was far more to it than that, and she knew it. But Paul was in no way ready to face that. If nothing else, out of loyalty to Serena.

He had told her that week that he'd been having dreams about his wife, about being on the plane with her, crashing with her, and saving himself. And she was accusing him, in the dreams, of not trying to help her, and surviving when she hadn't. She blamed him, he said, for not going down with her. The psychological implications of the dreams were easy to decipher.

“Is that how you feel?” India had asked him. “That it's your fault she died?”

“I blame myself for not dying with her,” he said in a choked voice, and India knew he was crying.

“It's not your fault, Paul. You know that. It wasn't meant to happen.” He had a massive case of survivor guilt, for outliving her, which was part of why he was hiding on the
Sea Star.
But India knew, as he did, that sooner or later Paul would have to face it. Sooner or later, he'd have to go back to the world. But it was still too soon. She had only been gone for three months, and he just wasn't ready. But eventually he'd have to go back. He couldn't hide forever. “Give it time,” she always said gently.

“I'm never going to get over this, India,” he said stubbornly. “I know it.”

“You will, if you want to. What do you think Serena would say?”

“She'd kick my ass.” He laughed as he said it. “If she were in my shoes, she'd have sold the boat by now, bought a flat in London, a house in Paris, and be giving parties. She always told me not to count on her playing the grieving widow, if I died, so not to bother having a heart attack because I worked too hard. She said she would find it incredibly boring. I know she didn't mean all that, but she would have handled this much better than I have. I think she was probably stronger than I am.

But India knew he was strong too, he was just deeply attached to his wife, and the bonds were not easy to sever, not that he had to. She kept trying to tell him to take Serena with him, the good parts of her, the memories, the joys, the wit, the wisdom, the excitement they had shared, the happiness she'd given him. But he had not yet found a way to do that. And in the meantime, with India, he could find a warm place to hide, a hand to hold, and a gentle soul to give him comfort. In the past week alone, he had come to need her more than he would have admitted. And the thought of not being able to call her whenever he wanted to now was beginning to upset him. And knowing she was in enemy territory, he was going to be worried about her. But the enemy he feared for her was, in fact, her husband. And Paul was nothing. A voice on the phone. A man she had met a few times the previous summer. He was in no way prepared
to be more than that to her. But whatever it was they had, or had found together, he wanted.