(A/N: I've tweaked some of the tsunami, and for the purpose of this story [and its plate being very full], Olivia doesn't know that Trey is her child. So, let's go!)

Wednesday, September 9, 1998

Juliana

There were no servants in the room when I lost my footing, no housecall man with a black bag. He never had anything good in that bag, anyhow.

Before I could wonder what happened to my left side, I felt as if I was being wrestled to the ground.

I hit the tea table inherited from my mother, Louise Cole, heiress to a shipbuilding fortune. All the pictures frames crashed to the floor, snapshots of a hollow-cheeked boy. Portraits in orange groves, candids on beaches. The laser beam backdrop I hated, but agreed to.

I always felt falsely younger, with such a young soul in the house.

As I curled on my side in frozen moments of his life, I didn't feel any regret. Not at all. What woman never dreams of having a child entirely to herself? I would have done it again, and again- traded my soul in that weathered attaché. Emeralds, diamonds, deepwater pearls, for that unfailing look of trust.

Trust, at least, until Cole knew the truth.

The Lady in Black surrendered to the light, at last. Evergreens parted their liquid branches. Bone became as thin as sheets. There was an army of people coming towards me, like ants trampling open a white peony. Armando took my hand and guided me into tomorrow.

Wednesday, September 9, 1998

Cole

It started with a goldless sundown. I'm not gonna pretend I was having any deep thoughts while I stared at the tide. La Niña's sky was as gray as soot and I was thinking about cigarettes. In my European heyday I had only been a social smoker, but it made me feel like some great fire-breathing illusionist- the fantasy being that I actually had friends.

My arms were folded and I always liked the way my biceps looked when I did this. Feeling like crap, I wanted to give a passerby the ol' Mr. Clean, just to get a long glance in return. But, there was no one around, which probably meant I was just crazy.

I'd almost been lost sea a few weeks before. Pretty fitting for a pirate. At times I wondered if I'd actually died, and was just wandering around some kind of purgatory.

When you almost widow your new wife by saving someone like Francesca Vargas, it's difficult for your spouse to just roll with the aftermath. The panic attacks, the episodes. She takes your son to your mother's to "clear her head." She calls to see how you're doing and then zones out during your answers.

You zone out during your answers.

My jean pocket stirred to life. Getting startled was never a picnic for me lately, but Jesus, Cole, it was only a little electronic chirp. I pulled the phone antenna up with my teeth, flipped it open and answered, "Yo."

That was how I answered the call. THE call. Even after I'd spent a weekend in Cedar Oaks because a firework went off too close to me, I was too cool for my own good.

"Master Cole, it's Tobin."

It was the butler at Deschanel Manor. He was every bit the clichéd time capsule guy you'd imagine. Decanting wine, polishing silver, testing the dust on ledges with his white gloves. I wondered how he'd gotten this number, until I realized Grandmother had given me my first and only cell. "It opens like a quahog!" she said, one of her Rhode Island-isms from her childhood in Newport.

My number was probably taped to her little flowered telephone chair. Hell, my number was probably on every bathroom wall in every continent.

"Hey, um…it's been a while, right?"

He didn't bite on that, not that I expected him to. "I'm afraid I have some terrible news," he continued. "Madam Deschanel has passed away, from a stroke."

Listen…I knew this day would come. You have no idea how aware of it I was. Kids are cruel. They reminded me all the time that Grandmother was old and would die long before all their moms and dads. I felt her decline in my own bones. I promised to steal the Deschanel jewels in preparation for this day. Her death had been a permanent red circle floating over my calendar since I was trafficked into her life.

And still. Still had the sand ripped out from under me.

How often did you read in obituaries that someone had died "surrounded by her loving family?" What would my grandmother's say?

"Oh my God…I can't…thank you, for letting me know."

His voice remained as flat as ever. "The funeral arrangements have been preemptively made for some time, but it would be in your best interest to arrive at the estate tomorrow at noon. The attorney will present the video will."

I nodded uselessly and a random rollerblader waved on the strand. "…I can be in San Simeon by noon. I just need a moment to process all this. Take care."

I snapped the quahog shut. I held my fist to my mouth, passing each knuckle over my lip. I remembered the waxy smell of my knees when they were tucked into my chest, when I was a kid. I remembered my chin in her delicate hand.

Since Cole's Bridge Burning Service had severed our ties, she could've left me with a little something or a ton of nothing.

A part of me wanted to say "I don't need your blood money," but now I had a son. There was a lot of work remaining in the aftermath of the earthquake, and I was doing that construction everyday, lest the occasional psychiatric hospitalization. Coming home to a hotel room. Exhausted, knotted up, concrete pebbles raining from my eyebrows.

But, satisfied with the good my hands could do.

I was lucky to be alive.

Mémé…

She was on a cold metal table at McDermott-Crocket Funeral home, her sunken mouth being stuffed with cotton.

I realized I hadn't taken my Prozac that day, and the tears started to well up. I sniffed and couldn't smell anything. The horizon was squiggling.

No. I couldn't lose it over her. It would be the worst betrayal to Elaine. My grandmother was a calculating criminal. Good people didn't rip a child from his mother because she lived in a studio apartment. Pollutin' their bloodline, Del had hissed at my mother.

I could call someone. AJ obviously needed to know, even though he'd never actually let his mother know that he was alive. He referred to her only as Ana. That said something.

I squeezed the bridge of my nose until it must've looked like I had a third eye. I'd spent far too long thinking that Grandmother was the only person in the world who loved me. The last year couldn't erase that.

"Mémé, a boy at polo made fun of me. He said you drive a stupid old Jag, and I have holes in my face and I'm an orphan."

"First of all, that car has a fully restored engine, which he can get a better look at when I close the hood on his neck. And by the way, I'm an orphan too, darling. You're all I have in this world, and I wouldn't trade you for all the gold in it. And these," she said, taking the dimples in my cheeks, "Are God's thumbprints. He didn't want to let go of this face, to let you out of heaven."

Brutal rain was making dark pits all around me. I don't know when I started running, but the sand barely slowed me down. Rain made people crazy in Southern California, let alone the haunted ones.

I'd never used the grotto as shelter from anything this tangible.

I felt like I was sinking so low, I barely had to duck through the narrow opening. The pounding rain echoed inside the cave. It drizzled gossamer thin into cracks in the walls. I wondered how I could see so much detail, until I saw the fire on the ground.

Olivia's presence was a hit to the solar plexus before she even appeared, and she did what she always did- gasp, surfacing from her own mind. "Cole."

We let out our breath together. There was more auburn and gold in her hair lately, and the fire only amplified it. "Olivia." I never felt any transmission between my brain and lips when it came to her name. It was extracted from me. "I didn't mean to- I-I should go."

"Get in here!" she said, taking my arm. The fire was bright enough that I could see that long blue vein on her temple that flared when she was angry. "Completely drenched, as if that won't bring back anathing unpleasant?"

She had a point. All kinds of things triggered vaulted-up memories of the cruise. "I still take showers, you know."

"Not with your clothes on."

Her shoulders tensed a little at what she'd said, and I was hit with a memory of the second-skin tux restricting my movements on the ship. I swallowed ice. "God, no one is more triggering than you sometimes, Olivia, and you weren't even there. What are you, a hypnotherapist or something?"

"I wish."

I slapped my hand over my eyes. She still didn't remember the night she gave birth. "I'm sorry."

"It's alright." Her hair was swept up elaborately with nothing but a piece of leather with a chopstick through it. She was wearing a flint colored suit with a darker gradient halfway down, that made it look like smoke was rising up her body. My bright yellow shirt was making me feel like a mining canary. I hated how my soaked gel hair was plastered to my forehead, and she seemed to understand this, spiking it out of the way gently. No more than a few seconds could've passed, but my throat went dry from the tenderness. Our arms moved in awkward frames to folded positions.

"So. What did he say to you this time, and why should it even matter?" I asked.

Her forehead was contemplative under her bangs. I always knew when she was thinking about him. It would move from her eyes to mine like Windex on dirt. "I don't always come here to wallow," she said.

"True. I'm sure you come to look at Gregory's cave paintings."

She stifled a laugh. "I'm sure they'd put the ones in France to shame." She wrapped a blanket around my wet shoulders and pushed me to a seated position by the fire. "First things first," she sighed. "What dragged you in here?"

For a second, all I could feel was the blanket on the nape of my neck. The rain tightened around the grotto, and I just said it. Softly, but surely. "…I, um...just got a call from the butler at the mansion. My grandmother had a stroke. She's gone."

"Oh!" she breathed, clutching her pendant. "I'm so sorry." Her arms went around me and I straightened up, startled. She pulled away before my slumpy arms had a chance to reciprocate, because my first impulse had been to smell her. I felt like my clothes would suddenly be dry when her eyes cut back to me, a glaring continuity error. "This couldn't have come at a worse time."

"Well, that was her timing," I said quickly. "Kinda expected it to happen long before now. Can't get myself all worked up about a kidnapper, anyway."

"Cole, the aloof routine is as see-through as one of Annie's cocktail dresses. Your memories are still precious, still valid, and you know it. You love your Granny."

"I did."

"You do."

"I don't want Mom to feel- "

"She'll understand."

I shot her a look. "You've got a snappy answer for everything, don't you?"

"Well, let's face it, Juliana never could've snatched you without accomplices."

Sometimes, I did wonder where all the fancy dresses Olivia bought with her ten-thousand dollars were now. I pictured them strung between us on a clothesline. "Olivia…we don't have to rehash all this. Not now."

"Don't we? Without Del and I, what would she have done? Maybe become a part of your life by distinction and not by lies, as I should have with Gregory. That's what."

"You had everything to offer him without the Leeza makeover. I wish you could've seen that. Most of all, I wish he could've seen that. So, I think we can agree that part of this is Gregory's fault, as usual. It's funny- he and Madam Puppet Master had a lot in common."

"True. But, it's difficult for me to…it's…."

"…What?"

"Her plan poisoned my life…but like it or not, that woman raised the sort of man who saved it. That's not how karma usually works, is it?"

I remembered the heart-wrenching groans that Olivia's convertible made on the edge of the ravine. My hands doing things to the door I thought only the jaws of life could, to free her.

My hand feeling like it could crush that bottle of Dom Pérignon and Valium, without my palm shedding a drop of blood.

My fear of these moments thrashed against in my ribcage. I had saved her daughter too, hadn't I? No, Caitlin had been saved by the Sisters while I tended to Olivia. A raw spot grew in my chest. "Oliv-…my…actions, had nothing to do with her."

"Perhaps, but the least I can do is grieve the best of Juliana Deschanel, because it's the best of you. It's alright to let the sorrow out. Completely and unashamedly. What better place than here?"

My eyes traced the bare color of her lips. I realized I had extended the blanket around her, too.

Fancy dresses, Cole. That's what my life was exchanged for. Worse yet, bad 70's ones with paisley and sequins. Fancy dresses. I always tried to play those words over and over in my head when waves of attraction for her swept over me, but it did no good.

I knew that Mémé's death would hit me hard, but I was still in shock. It would be like cartoon gravity; I'd only fall once I really realized the ground wasn't there. "Grandmother will have to wait in line for my grief."

Her eyes reflected my sadness back. "Your marriage isn't over."

"Cole, you climb up first! You first!" I remembered Caitlin crying out. Francesca's heels bit into my shoulders as I boosted her to safety, until steam flash-peeled my skin. "Really. I let my ex-girlfriend use me as a human ladder, and then I fell down the ship funnel. Caitlin's having a hard time processing that."

"I know. And through Cait's eyes, I get it. But in a disaster, everyone is just a human being in need of a second chance. The thing that worries me is if you felt you…deserved to be sacrificed."

That was a long, dark road I didn't want to go down. The sleepless nights spent clutching pillows, weeping for my secret son who never filled his little lungs. The son I abandoned for another. "It's just…Olivia, I've been thinking…" I shivered. "Maybe if I had been with you when you went into labor, I could've…"

"No. No," she said, her voice trembling. "Cole, what could you have done? You're weighing yourself down with a hypothetical child. No. You have more than enough stones in your pockets. Let me carry that burden. Besides…I think it's for the best that you didn't witness the birth of either child. You can't even watch Elaine take the giblets out of a chicken."

I laughed out loud for the first time in a while. I paused to watch her smile, and saw my living son's smile in hers. "I miss Trey."

"Me, too," she sighed. "He's what brought me here tonight. He's the only thing that keeps things amicable between Gregory and me. The earthquake cemented that fact. But, he isn't ours. It's just pretend."

"Hey, hey…" I said, rubbing her back slowly. "No, it isn't. Listen...the wake and funeral will probably be Friday into Saturday. When Caitlin comes back, why don't you take care of Trey? You and Gregory can bond over him again." Because I can't have you in my 12-bedroom house while I'm pathetically emotional, I finished in silence.

"That's very kind of you," she said, her irises eclipsed by her pupils as the fire weakened. "But I…I need to support…A-AJ in San Simeon this week-end. I know his feelings about this will be as complicated as yours."

"I'll, um…I'll be supportive of him too, as best I can," I sighed. "It's the least I can do, after he jumped out of a helicopter to pull me out of the bad Metallica video I was floating in."

It was still kinda hard to say AJ saved my life out loud. Olivia raised an eyebrow, knowing this, but left it alone. "We both owe him a lot. As hard as it will be for him to revisit that time in his life, he will, for you."

"You don't think he'll sneak off to some mysterious business meeting?"

"I'm sure he'll embrace the chance to regale you with Deschanel history without his mother interrupting."

I kneaded my lids, my eyeballs throbbing beneath them. "God...awkward bonding central. This is gonna be sw-eet. Going home and being called 'Master Cole' again, having scotch glasses whisked away before I'm even done. Being alone during the will reading."

"Why?"

"I don't expect Caitlin to rush to San Simeon tomorrow morning. That's when I have to be there."

"AJ should be at the reading, too."

"I'm not too sure about my standings, but I'm pretty sure her presumed-dead son was scratched out."

"She could've kept him in the will out of blind hope, for all we know. So…your father and I will accompany you tomorrow, Caitlin and Trey will join us later and…Gregory-will-attend-the-reading-for legal-counsel," she added, talking like a chipmunk.

"What? There's no way he's going to agree to that! Not for Grandmother, not for AJ and definitely not for me."

"He will for me, and his morbid curiosity. All he has to do is toss Annie the checkbook, and he's free to let his weakness get the best of him."

I sighed, turning my dimples inside out with the force. "H'alright." Inaction wasn't Gregory's thing either, I guess. One of the few things we had in common. "God, this is surreal."

"I know." The grotto was silent for a bit, except for the crackling fire. Had more living taken place within these walls, or dying? More promises made, or promises broken? "Tell me a story about your grandmother," she said.

"I don't have a flashlight to put under my chin," I grumbled.

"Come on, please?" Her eyes pushed me on. Hopeless. I was a dinghy spinning around in that whirlpool of blue.

"OK, story, story, God, I don't know…I threw up in her hands once."

"That's the first thing that popped in your head?" she giggled.

"I don't know, it just did. The saddest part is, she wanted me to aim for them. She was like, 'this is the clown's mouth, darling, bien viser,'" I said, acting it out with cupped hands. "Better there than on some chaise lounge from the Vanderbilts, I guess."

"That's a universal parenting thing, you'll see, catching a technicolor belch. You'll get there with Trey."

I laughed, and mine bounced off hers. I kept reminiscing, spurred on by the laughter. Sometimes it was a disease with Olivia and me.

"I used to bring her bouquets of peonies from the garden. They were always swarming with ants," I chuckled. "The fact that I didn't fit into that world had a way of showing, but she just put a trap under the vase and soldiered on."

"The ants are what opens them up, the peonies," Olivia said. "She wasn't the type of mother to AJ that she was to you- a nanny did all the grunt work with him. You opened her."

Remember when I said that anything could trigger cruise memories? From the way I felt about Olivia right then- so quietly content I got afraid that something would happen to her- adrenaline heat filled my veins. Ants. The people on the Neptune looked just like a bunch of scrambling ants.

"The uh…fire's cashing out. Kinda hard to see," I said. The lack of light began to make my heart pump faster, my eyes straining, my twitching muscles thinking for themselves. I cleared my throat and it hit the grotto walls with the acoustics of a cathedral. The very first time I saw Olivia, I told her I had come here to drown.

"Oh, great, I'm out of kindling…Cole?" My slip into the abyss was completely visible. Olivia put her hand on the crook of my arm, and the rhythm against the thin skin must've jumped out at her. "What is it?"

"Just starting to get a little…claustrophobic," I said, my face slick and hot.

"You're an adventurer, Cole!" Mémé had always said, but adventurers didn't scour the globe pretending to want jewels and really wanting the warm bodies they dangled from. They didn't do a line of coke in Saint-Tropez to forget that they were abandoned at a hospital, they didn't look in the mirror and shave their faces raw because no man had ever taught them how. Adventurers knew how to survive on their own.

I looked up at the grotto entrance and it was blocked.

"Oh God, oh man, fuck! A mudslide, a r-rockslide covered it, we're trapped!" I stammered, grabbing her hand and stumbling up the rocks. "The tide will come in and kill us!"

Olivia's voice was calm, but sounded a million miles away, in another lifetime. "Cole, you're having a panic attack, look at me, we're okay. I can see the rain falling outside the entrance!"

"I have to get you out of here!"

"Cole, trust me!"

I wouldn't turn around. I lunged for the cave opening and hit my head on the jagged archway, seeing blue stars.

I was back on the ship again, back in the sour ocean water, using Phillip Vargas's body to stay afloat, my forehead pressed to the top of a cold steel air pocket that was closing by the second. I was battered, burned and far from a Navy Seal at that point, and was preparing for my life to be measured by how long I could keep my exhausted lungs still. The last wisp of air on my lips before the water sealed me in was "Olivia."

When it had come down to the nitty gritty, that's what I said.

I fell back to September. She was holding my wrist so the steam-scarred palm touched the rain outside. "See? It's alright. Just trust me."

I crouched through into the open air and fell to my hands, letting the rain enfold me. My eyes burned like hell. I turned to see her beside me, gemologist close, outside the safety of the grotto as the rain intensified again. She tried to blink the water out of her eyes, maybe some mist in them too. There was a sober version of her eyes from that first night we met, a high voltage blue that made it seem unsafe for her to be near lightning. I figured out then why it was called "taking" a lover. It was so damned hard to give them back, especially when you didn't even know who to give them back to.

Fancy dresses.

It never worked.

We drifted. Her shoulders rising and falling quickly under the storm, she slowly kissed my mouth. I didn't flinch. The kiss was so warm compared to the rain, and my tongue responded desperately. All of me did. Thunder rolled over the shore as I held Olivia's wet hair, face, and kissed her neck. I was about to flood my hands with her breasts, just to feel her heart beating through them. I came to again, and pulled back sharply.

"I'm so sorry," I said, stumbling back. "F-for freaking out." Did the kiss count as freaking out, too? I wasn't sure. She'd laid it on me with intention, with ache, with greedy sounds, but I had acted like I'd been waiting for it for years.

There I was, running again. "Cole, wait!"

It would take me most of the night to shower, dry myself off all over again, and fall asleep for a single kiss re-living hour.

As I stared at the ceiling at five in the morning, I remembered my Aunt Theda's voice. "Ana's boy once courted this tedious English thing from Essex- you know, their version of New Jersey? She helped the staff set the table at supper. That was her way of making a fine impression, can you believe it?"

The overlapping and crashing and twisting of all these lives started to make my head throb. The "thing"now owned the Deschanel jewels and was going back to the manor with AJ/with the enemy Richards/with Elaine's baby/with three lovers/back back back into the Deschanel web and Mémé the spider was tangled in it, dead.

(A/N: All the Pain Money Can Buy is Fastball's 1998 LP)