T. Bunn - Winner Take All

“Of course not.”

“Ms. Brandt went to the trouble to check on the flight schedule. There’s a plane leaving in about an hour and she asks if you can possibly make it. If so, I’m to arrange for a limo to pick you up at the airport and bring you straight here.”

Dale knew Marcus would forbid him to do this. The whole thing stank of Erin’s maneuverings. But the court case would not bring his baby home. He could see it on everyone’s faces, smell it in the air. They were all just going through the motions, dancing to a legal tune that satisfied no one.

“Sir? Mr. Steadman?”

Dale felt burdened by years of unexpected blows. “Give me the travel details.”

When the phone rang, Kirsten had no idea where she was, or why the noise would not stop. Or why, when she began fumbling, the phone was on the wrong side of the bed. “Yes?”

“Hi.”

When Kirsten rolled over in bed, it felt as though her brain spun in the other direction. “Marcus?”

“You were asleep. I’m sorry.”

“What time is it?”

“Almost five.”

She could not get her mind to work. Everything was dark, save for a perpendicular line of light at one end of the room and a horizontal one at the other. “Which five is that?”

“Five o’clock Friday afternoon.” His voice held a hint of laughter now. “You sound absolutely delightful when you’re sleepy.”

“I feel like I was in a coma.” Kirsten slid her feet to the floor. “How did you get this number?”

“You called me.”

“I did?”

“When you got in. You said you were very tired.”

“I don’t remember a thing.”

“Did you have a rough flight?”

“Crowded. A baby cried the whole way. Just a minute.” She walked to the window and swept back the curtains. Her room was low down within the city’s caverns, so her only sunlight was reflected off the building opposite. Traffic noise invaded with the light. As she walked back over she recalled that she had dreamed of sirens and horns all night. “I’m back.”

“Should I call you later?”

“No. I need to get started.”

“Actually, you don’t. I’ve just come back from court. Her lawyer claims Erin has promised to come down Monday.”

“To Raleigh?”

“That’s what she said.”

She needed to be awake for this. She scrubbed her head, willing the blood to start flowing to her brain again. “She won’t come.”

“No. I don’t think she will.”

“It’s wrong to stop this. We’ve got momentum. She’s worried.” When Marcus said nothing, she added, “I know all about keeping secrets from the world. You never bother to hide strengths.”

“What are you saying?”

“You hide weaknesses. You hide things you’re terrified might be discovered.”

Again he was silent. Only this time she realized what it was she had said. It turned her voice feeble as she finished, “I think I should keep looking.”

But Marcus was not ready to let it go. “I’ll never press you, Kirsten.”

“You do, though. You push me harder than anything has in my entire life.”

As usual, he understood her all too well. “I’ll never stop loving you. Never.”

It was not the words which finally awoke her, but the burning. Her eyes, her chest, her throat, the pit of her stomach, all were caught by a web of constricting flames. “I don’t think we should stop pressing her, Marcus.”

He released a long breath. “I’ll speak with Dale tonight and see if he’ll agree to let you keep nosing around.”

Dale waited until the plane was descending into New York’s La Guardia airport to call Marcus’ office, which as hoped was unmanned. He left a terse message and hung up, glad to avoid that encounter.

Inside La Guardia’s baggage claim, Dale ID’d the driver with his name on the sign, let him take his bag, and headed straight for the limo stand by the southeast entrance. Five minutes into the journey, he was already impatient to depart. Despite all the time he had spent in New York, he had never carved out a sense of identity here. Dale had partially adapted by segmenting the place and focusing upon a parcel small enough to claim as his own. People said the upper east side possessed a more neighborhood feel. His initial forays had suggested nothing but cafés and frou-frou boutiques and young people talking nasal English so fast he could not understand them. His own patch ran from Saks in the south to Lincoln Center in the north and the river to the west. Even crossing 65th Street on his morning jogs in Central Park left him feeling as though he had entered the unknown.

His thoughts flickered with the sunlight lancing between the compressed buildings. He recalled the night Erin had told him she was pregnant. His response had been automatic; why not marry and make a second home in Wilmington? Dale could not say which of her assents had astonished him more.

Almost immediately had come signs that things would not work out. Her insistence on a secret ceremony at the city registry had been bitterly disappointing. He had wanted the world to know of his joy; she had sought no publicity at all. Then there had come the planning of their home. On the good days she would sit in his lap or curl up at his feet while he described his plans for her music room and the adjoining thousand-square-foot bayside parlor. The two chambers were interconnected by massive hand-carved sliding doors, in hopes she would give at-home performances. The walls that were not glass had paneling of African rosewood, the same wood used throughout the Met’s auditorium and reputedly the finest acoustic material in the world. Handworked baffles decorated the seventeen-foot-high ceilings. A Bösendorfer grand dominated the music room, with a professional sound system climbing the back wall. Only the finest was good enough for Erin. This was to be her palatial retreat from the rigors of stardom’s road. Yet whenever he tried to share his dream with Erin, she showed a complaisant surprise over his passion. Are you always so focused, so driven, she asked time and again. As though only in such moments did she even bother to notice.

Then Celeste had been born. And his world had been canted on its axis by the discovery that he could love anything more than Erin.

The day they had come home from the hospital, there had been a vital sign so poignant not even Dale in his stupefying overdose of ardor could ignore it. The hospital had refused to release either mother or child until the baby had been named and registered on the birth certificate. Erin had been seated in her wheelchair, still weak from the sixteen-hour delivery. She had turned her face away from his quiet entreaties to help name their child. So Dale had told the hospital staffer to write down the name Celeste, for his two stars.

Now, as the limo turned off Columbus onto the raised Lincoln Center drive, Dale sought to convince himself that it was a sign of age and faulty memory that he could never recall hearing Erin refer to her daughter by name.

Lincoln Center contained seven buildings housing twelve theaters, making it the largest artistic complex in the world. From where he exited the limo, the Met rose directly beyond the plaza’s central fountain, with the City Opera to his left and Avery Fisher Hall to his right. In the right rear corner, beyond the smaller building housing the two nonorchestral theaters, stood the footbridge spanning the subterranean cavern of 65th Street. On its other side rose the Juilliard School of Music and two further halls for small symphonic and chamber concerts. Workers were busy hauling up a new banner that stretched the entire way across the front of Avery Fisher Hall, proclaiming that Erin Brandt would star in the benefit concert for the children’s cancer hospital that Tuesday.