Body Copy - Michael Craven [90]
They sat in front of the TV, fresh bottle of white, both of them on a small sofa.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen this,” he said.
“Well, it’ll be my first time, so I expect some quality commentary.”
“I’ll do my best.”
What transpired over the next thirty minutes was nothing short of hilarious. For Nina, anyway. She kept replaying the section of the video that focused on his falls, and she seemed to laugh harder and harder at each near-death spill Tremaine took.
Tremaine gave Nina a look.
“I’m only laughing because I’m sitting next to living proof that you survived,” she said.
283
Michael Craven
“Fair enough,” he said.
“You were in pretty good shape back then,” she said.
“How about now?”
“Room for improvement, but not bad.”
Then, Nina Aldeen looked right at Donald Tremaine and said, “Thanks for taking the case, thanks for figur-ing it out. I’m glad I know the truth. I feel like I helped do something good.”
“You did.”
He looked at her, saw in her face that, yes, she had done something good. She helped to find that lost piece of the puzzle—the killer, the truth—that had created a deeper rip in her family than just the fact that there had been a murder. And, in that same discovery, she’d gotten out of her head a little bit, and one step closer to recovering from her divorce.
But, Tremaine thought, what other good things had she done?
When was the last time he’d told anyone about Mandy Rice getting shot and killed? And when was the last time he’d put the details of his own divorce through a different filter, looked at them with a different perspective?
Tremaine said, “You know, Nina, you did something good for me, too.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“And what was that?”
“Well . . .” he said. And there was the pressure in his chest, the heat on his face. The guilt he felt about Mandy and his failed marriage to Susan somehow still ramming 284
B O D Y C O P Y
around inside him. “It felt good for me to talk about some of the things we talked about during this. Why I quit the tour. Your divorce, divorce in general. It was good for me to talk about those things. To think about them. You know?”
“Yeah, I know.”
Tremaine wanted to talk more, he felt comfortable enough with Nina to let just a little more out. “Some of that confusion will always be with me, but I’m a little closer to being okay with it.”
Nina said, “Sometimes a missing puzzle piece isn’t really missing, it’s just being ignored. And the way you find it, and deal with it, is to look at it, and think about it, and talk about it.”
Tremaine nodded. He continued to look at her. But not just at her appearance—no, at her everything. And in that moment, he got a quick, incandescent feeling of hope. He knew, in that tiny section of time, that he could, that he would, someday get back in the relationship game.
Someday. Yeah, someday.
It made him uncomfortable, uneasy. But somehow it was good. He knew for sure that it was good. Yes, in that moment, he was on a wave, but it wasn’t a wave he could control. It wasn’t a wave that he could slice and carve and shape. It wasn’t a wave that he could maneuver on and manipulate. It was a wave that took him wherever it wanted to go.
He remembered now Nina first arriving at his house, looking up at him standing on the roof of his trailer, hand shielding her eyes. He remembered her walking on the 285
Michael Craven
beach at night, sitting across from him at the Lobster, waving to him from the steps of Gale/Parker. And as he examined those memories, he was glad, he was grateful, that he’d been able to help her.
Or was it the other way around?
286
C H A P T E R 4 1
A week later, Tremaine was up on the roof of his trailer reading a draft of Nina Aldeen’s book, Split Up. Re-markable. Sad, angry, strong, inspiring, just like a book like this should be.
He had planned to start the book on his flight to Australia the next day, but he couldn’t wait, the big manuscript sitting on a table in the trailer was just too tempting. He knocked out about a hundred pages, then stood up and looked at the surf.