The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [212]
“Then I will leave you in peace.” Solovsky bowed to her and Missie. “I will not forget,” he added as he strode through the door, and Missie had no doubt he would not.
She turned to look at Azaylee, still standing there twisting her hands together and staring at her, and she knew she had heard. And then she saw the look in her eyes, the same look she had had when O’Hara had been mown down by the machine-gun bullets, when she had screamed and screamed as if she would never stop. Only this time she knew Azaylee was screaming inside, and this time she did not know how they were going to bring her back.
Hollywood
The carefully tended gardens of the big house on Lexington Drive looked peaceful under the golden summer sunshine: Birds sang, cicadas fretted, and the pool glittered invitingly, but somehow, no one had the heart to accept its invitation.
From his vantage point at the end of the terrace with the dogs sprawled beside him in the shade, Zev watched Missie serving iced tea, wishing he could turn the clock back a year and that Grigori Solovsky had never been to New York. They had just returned from visiting Azaylee at the Rancho Velo Clinic, up the coast a way in Ventura County. It was the first time in a month that the doctor had permitted them to see her. She had walked slowly toward them clinging to the nurse’s arm and they stared at her, horrified.
They had cut her lovely blond hair to facilitate the use of electrodes on her head in some new form of treatment they swore by, and it stood out like an angel’s halo. Her face was so shrunken and pinched all that seemed left were the eyes, as velvety golden and inhuman as the pansy flowers they had always been compared with. Her scrawny body and rake-thin limbs looked barely capable of supporting her.
“She won’t eat,” the doctor told Missie. “There’s no reason for it. She is not physically ill. But she just refuses nourishment.”
“She wants to die,” Missie said flatly. “She wants to be with her father.”
“We are drip-feeding her, of course. It will keep her alive, but if she doesn’t start to eat soon….” He shrugged graphically, and they all knew what he meant.
Azaylee glanced distantly at them and their false eager smiles faded as they realized she didn’t recognize them. Suddenly she clutched Missie’s hand and said, “Have you brought him, like I asked you? Have you brought Alexei to see me?” Tears stood in her beautiful eyes. “Milochka,” she whispered, “tell me that Papa is safe after all. Tell me he will come for me soon.”
And then she retreated again into a no-man’s-land of dark despair, locked behind her blank gaze with the tears still streaming down her cheeks—and theirs.
Zev stared down the terrace, troubled, as Missie suddenly put her head in her hands and began to weep. He could think of nothing to say that would comfort her. Not for the first time, he wished they had children of their own, but it seemed it was not to be.
“I can’t stand it any longer,” Rosa exploded, leaping to her feet and stalking the terrace angrily. “Every time you see her, she’s worse. They are killing her with their treatments in that fancy clinic. Bring her home, Missie. If she’s going to die crazy at least let her do it here, where we love her.”
Of course, Zev thought with a faint smile, Rosa, with her practical mind, had got right to the heart of the matter. After picking up the intercom, he told his chauffeur to have the car ready in five minutes.
“But where are you going?” Missie asked tearfully.
He kissed her and said, “I’m going to bring her home, of course.”
Ignoring the doctor’s warnings, he wrapped Azaylee in a shawl and held her in his arms all the way back. But in his heart he thought he was bringing her home to die. Her room had been prepared but he refused to let them shut her away. “Let her stay here with us,” he ordered. “Let her be aware that life is continuing normally around her. She will sit at the table with us even though she may not eat. She will rest on the terrace, walk in the gardens. Rosa is right, she