Whispers

What I heard was the house settling, she thought. Jeez. I’m getting to be a regular spooky old maid.

She made a sandwich and took it upstairs with a cold bottle of beer. She left all the lights burning on the first floor, which she felt would discourage any prowler–if there actually was someone lurking about the property.

Later, she felt foolish for leaving the house so brightly lit. She knew exactly what was wrong with her. Her jumpiness was a symptom of the I-don’t-deserve-all-this-happiness disease, a mental disorder with which she was intimately acquainted. She had come from nowhere, from nothing, and now she had everything. Subconsciously, she was afraid that God would take notice of her and decide that she didn’t deserve what she’d been given. Then the hammer would fall. Everything she had accumulated would be smashed and swept away: the house, the car, the bank accounts…. Her new life seemed like a fantasy, a marvelous fairytale, too good to be true, certainly too good to last.

No. Dammit, no! She had to stop belittling herself and pretending that her accomplishments were only the result of good fortune. Luck had nothing to do with it. Born into a house of despair, nurtured not with milk and kindness but with uncertainty and fear, unloved by her father and merely tolerated by her mother, raised in a home where self-pity and bitterness had driven out all hope, she had of course grown up without a sense of real worth. For years she had struggled with an inferiority complex. But that was behind her now. She had been through therapy. She understood herself. She didn’t dare let those old doubts rise again within her. The house and car and money would not be taken away; she did deserve them. She worked hard, and she had talent. Nobody had given her a job simply because she was a relative or friend; when she’d come to Los Angeles, she hadn’t known anyone. No one had heaped money in her lap just because she was pretty. Drawn by the wealth of the entertainment industry and by the promise of fame, herds of beautiful women arrived every day in L.A. and were usually treated worse than cattle. She had made it to the top for one reason: she was a good writer, a superb craftsman, an imaginative and energetic artist who knew how to create the motion pictures that a lot of people would pay money to see. She earned every dime she was paid, and the gods had no reason to be vindictive.

“So relax,” she said aloud.

No one had tried to get in the kitchen door. That was just her imagination.

She finished the sandwich and beer, then went downstairs and turned out the lights.

She slept soundly.

***

The next day was one of the best days of her life. It was also one of the worst.

Wednesday began well. The sky was cloudless. The air was sweet and clear. The morning light had that peculiar quality found only in Southern California and only on certain days. It was crystalline light, hard yet warm, like the sunbeams in a cubist painting, and it gave you the feeling that at any moment the air would part like a stage curtain to reveal a world beyond the one in which we live.

Hilary Thomas spent the morning in her garden. The walled half-acre behind the two-story neo-Spanish house was adorned with two dozen species of roses–beds and trellises and hedges of roses. There were the Frau Karl Druschki Rose, the Madame Pierre Oger Rose, the rosa muscosa, the Souvenir de la Malmaison Rose, and a wide variety of modern hybrids. The garden blazed with white roses and red roses, orange and yellow and pink and purple and even green roses. Some blooms were the size of saucers, and others were small enough to pass through a wedding ring. The velvety green lawn was speckled with windblown petals of every hue.

Most mornings, Hilary worked with the plants for two or three hours. No matter how agitated she was upon entering the garden, she was always completely relaxed and at peace when she left.

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