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“The place in the painting?” he asked, hoping more questions would keep it going.
“The ranch. I wish the ranch was real.”
He was talking. He was actually talking. Jackson had to steady himself to go on. “The ranch... from the show?” Jeremy nodded. “You mean in Texas?” Another nod. Jackson held his breath for a moment before he finally asked, “Why?”
The boy shrugged, and Jackson resigned himself to the end of the conversation, but still counting it a win because the boy had actually communicated. But then Jeremy spoke again. “Because then we could go live there. For real. Not just you pretending.”
Jackson had never felt this before, this sensation that everything, absolutely everything, depended on what he said next. A crucial scene where he had to deliver a killer line had never, ever mattered as much as this did.
“Well, that place”—he gestured at the painting—“is real. It doesn’t always look like that, with the flowers, but it’s real. In fact, it’s not far from where your aunt Trista lives.”
For the first time Jeremy turned to look at him. “It is?”
He nodded, since the boy was looking at him now. “In fact, I’ve been thinking we should go see her. She’s really sad, missing your uncle David. You know how bad that feels. Maybe we could all make each other feel better.”
“She still remembers him?”
It had been two years longer for Trista, but there wasn’t a doubt in Jackson’s mind she had adored her husband with everything in her. “Yes. She thinks about him every day.”
Jeremy looked down, apparently fascinated by a bit of sand clinging to his knee. Finally, barely above a whisper, he asked, “Will I remember Mom?”
It was like a knife to the gut for Jackson. He had no idea this was bothering the boy. He slid off the couch and swung around to kneel in front of his son.
“You will never, ever forget her, Jeremy. It’s just that someday you’ll be able to think about her and it won’t hurt as much as it does now.”
“Does it hurt you?”
“More than anything in my life.”
Except the thought that I’m losing you too.
He hoped that this, the most his son had spoken since the day he’d had to tell him Mom wasn’t ever coming home, marked a turning point.
As it turned out, in a way, it had.
His son shut down even more. Completely.
And Jackson Thorpe, the man who pretended in front of cameras to be the guy with all the answers, the ruler of a small kingdom in the state that had once been its own country, had no answer for this.
*
He woke witha start. Realized he was on the floor. Couldn’t remember how he got there. He raised his head. Blinked, trying to see in the darkness of the room. When he recognized where he was, on the floor in the living room at home, in front of the couch, it all came rushing back. The waiting for the nosy onesto give up before putting Jeremy in the car and leaving Miles’s place for home, although it didn’t feel like that anymore. Getting there, and Jeremy assuming the same position he had at the beach, staring at seemingly nothing. Himself, determined to get the boy talking again, like he had in those moments in front of that painting.
Determined, and failing.
He sat up hurriedly, but carefully; he didn’t want to make a noise that might wake the boy sleeping on the couch.
There had been a time when, waking up on the floor, he would have assumed he’d passed out drunk. But no more. That month-long binge after Leah died was both the first and last of his life. Thanks to his sister, who had flown to California to confront him after his best friend, Tucker, had called her in concern. She’d arrived at the house to find him face down in the bathroom after having nearly puked his guts out. Knowing him all too well, she took video of the scene, then of Jeremy huddled in a corner of his room, saying he “tried to take care of Daddy,” and finished it off with his own vicious rant as he woke up, realized she was there and what she was doing.
She’d made him watch the video, and when he looked into his son’s eyes, saw how broken he looked, he knew he’d reached the end of this little experiment that hadn’t worked, anyway. A few hours of oblivion was not worth that look on an already broken-hearted five-year-old’s face. And he went back to his old habits, which involved nothing more than an occasional drink on special occasions.
He sat there silently, propped up against the coffee table, looking at the boy curled up in an almost fetal position, hands clenched even in sleep around the knitted blanket Jackson had put over him last night. The throw his mother had made for him, with the image of his favorite creature, a roadrunner, worked into it. He stared at the whimsical design, remembering how itwas that very thing about Leah, her sense of whimsy, that had kept him sane and at least somewhat balanced when the rocket that wasStonewallhad first taken off.
After Tris had brutally awakened him to the additional damage he was doing to an already devastated child, he’d done everything he could think of. He’d taken more time off to be with Jeremy, with the producers’ understanding, even as it screwed up their schedule for the rest of the year. He’d found a doctor with a stellar reputation for dealing with bereavement in children and followed every suggestion the woman gave after her sessions with his son. Nothing had helped.
In a crazy way Jeremy’s desperate state had muffled his own grief over losing Leah; he was so terrified he was going to lose their child, too, that he doubted his brain had fully processed the actual loss.
When he’d gone back to work, he’d frequently had the boy visit on the days they were filming exteriors because he seemed to like it when they were outside with the animals—cows, horses, and a couple of well-trained acting dogs. Jeremy had gone, but silently. He’d petted the horses, the dogs, even a calf or two. Then he’d hidden out in Jackson’s trailer, refusing to come out, huddling on the bunk in the back so much like he’d been in that video that it made Jackson more than a little queasy.
