her screenplay himself. He’d promised to give her a shot. Help her all he could.
All she needed … was the material.
“Morgan?” David’s voice jerked her away from the path her thoughts had been wandering. “Did you hear me? I asked, how’s the script coming?”
She blinked at the blank computer screen. The blinking cursor. “Fine. Great. It’s coming great.” So great that she had decided to go exploring this ancient wreck of a house rather than continue the battle with the blank screen. The only key on her keyboard getting a steady workout was the one marked “delete.” She’d been producing garbage since she had arrived here. Garbage.
“You know, it’s only natural you might have some trouble getting started,” David said. “Don’t push yourself. You’ve been through a lot. Your mind needs time to digest it all.”
Morgan shrugged. “That’s not it,” she told him.
“No?”
“Of course not. It’s been six months. I’m completely over it.”
“Completely over losing your parents, your fortune, your home, your education and what you thought was your identity?” He made a clicking noise with his tongue. “I don’t think so.”
“Well, I am. And to tell you the truth, finding out I was adopted explained a lot of things. I mean, you know my parents were never all that … involved.”
“That was the cocaine, hon. Not the adoption. Not you.”
She cleared her throat when it started to tighten up, gave herself a mental kick. “As for the rest of it … I’m going to get it all back, David. Everything I lost. And then some.”
She heard the smile in his voice. “I don’t doubt it a bit.”
“Neither do I,” she said, glancing again at the blank screen, feeling those doubts she’d denied nearly smothering her. Damn, why couldn’t writing a blockbuster script be as easy as she had always thought it would be? She used to watch films with the feeling that she could do better in her sleep.
“So when can I expect the screenplay?” he asked.
Licking her lips, she wished to God she knew. “A masterpiece takes time … and it’s … so unpredictable.”
“I need a fall project. I’m saving a slot for you, Morgan. Three months. I need the material in three months. Can you do that? Write it over the summer and get it to me by September?”
Lifting her chin, swallowing hard, she said, “Yes. I’ll have it finished by September. No problem.”
Big problem.
“Great,” David said. “You’re gonna be fine, Morgan. You can get through this.”
“Of course I can.”
“Do you need anything?”
“No, no, I’m fine.”
“Your funds still holding out?”
She licked her lips, forced the lie out. She’d cleaned out her accounts on David’s advice, before the lawyers and creditors could get hold of her money, and she’d had the cash from the car. But while she had no rent here, there were other expenses. The phone, the electricity and she had to eat. Truth to tell, the money in her checking account was dwindling.
“I’m fine,” she said again.
“Good,” David said softly. “Good. You let me know if there’s anything you need.”
“I will, David.”
He was quiet for a moment. “How about your health?”
Drawing a breath, she sighed. “You know how I hate being thought of as sickly.”
“Did I say you were sickly?”
“No.”
“Well?”
She pursed her lips. “The brisk clean air up here is working wonders on me,” she lied. What could she tell him? The truth? That it was cold and dreary and damp here, and that she resented having to think of a sixty-degree day in late April as a heat wave, when she would be basking in eighty-degree heat beside her parents’ pool, working on her tan by now, if she’d been home?
But it did no good to wish for what she couldn’t have.
“I ought to go, David,” she whispered around the lump in her throat. “If I’m going to have this done by fall, I ought to get at it.”
“Okay, hon. You just call if you need anything.”
“I will, David. Thanks.”
Morgan replaced the old receiver on its hook and gnawed on her lower lip. She turned the rickety wooden chair toward the computer screen, assured herself once again that no one was in it, and finally sat down. She poised her hands over the keyboard, told herself to write something, now, today, or else give up for good and go out and find a job. The problem was, she couldn’t do anything.
Writing was the only thing she had ever wanted to do, and she’d been good once. Or … she thought she had. In school, her essays got raves. The theater group had even produced one of her plays. Everyone loved it. The campus critics, the local press …
But that was when she’d been Morgan De Silva, the brilliant daughter of a famous director and a beloved actress, the girl leading the charmed life and destined for success. Now she was Morgan De Silva, disgraced has-been, penniless, homeless, practically run out of town and staring into the face of a future more bleak than she could have imagined a year ago.
Now … now she just didn’t know if her talent had ever been real, or if it had been her name winning her praise all this time. She didn’t know anything anymore, not who she was, or what she was doing or why the words had just stopped coming. It was as if the well inside her had been a part of the illusion her life had been. As if it had dried up when that illusion had been shattered.
She lowered her hands, having put not one word on the screen. Outside, the wind howled; the lights dimmed, then came back. The old house groaned when the wind blew. Probably, if she was as old as it was, she would groan, too, she thought. And then she wondered just how old that was.
Those journals … there had been no dates inscribed, but it was obvious they’d been written long, long ago. At least a century … and maybe closer to two.
That thought brought her back to the one she’d had earlier, about the journal writer. Dante. Had he lived here, that man who’d been a Gypsy boy, entranced by his outcast aunt? Had he been in this very room, perhaps, pacing before a fire, his quill pen lying untouched on some polished antique desk? Had he courted his muse as impatiently as she did, grown frustrated when the words wouldn’t come?
Drawn as if by an unseen hand, she rose and walked out of the office, through the ghostly front hall and up the wide staircase. She traversed the hallway, ignoring the doors that lined either side. She hadn’t even ventured into most of the rooms up here. There were so many.
But her goal was none of them. Her goal was beyond, up the back stairway into the attic, where spiderwebs held court and dust ruled the day. She knelt as she had before and fished the book of matches from her jeans pocket, then lit the candles in the gaudy candelabra she’d found downstairs. As their soft yellow glow spread, she lovingly opened the hand-tooled chest, took out that first volume, stroked its cover and opened it slowly, careful not to break the brittle pages. Turning to the place where she had left off, she began to read. And once again she lost herself in the words.
2
It was fully thirteen years before I saw Sarafina again. Thirteen full years, during which I had learned many things. I had learned that no matter where we went, we would be driven out eventually. I had learned that no matter how honest we might be, we would be called thieves by strangers