Free The Stork Club by Iris Rainer Dart Page B

night.
    She didn't dare turn on the bathroom light. Suppose they came driving up and spotted a light on where they'd left darkness? She'd have to find her way to the toilet in the . . . Jesus. What was that on the floor? No.
Who
was it? By the moonlight pouring in the bathroom window she could see now that it was Shelly, curled up in front of the marble bathtub, an empty pill bottle next to him. Dead. Limp. Gone. Dead. Shelly.
    A sick, horrifying numbness filled her, and she sank to her knees and put her head on his dead body. As if from a distance, she could hear her own voice begging the lifeless body of Shelly to tell her why he did this. How could he take himself away from her? Hating him, she beat on his skinny unresponsive frame and screamed his name as all of her pulsed with the horror of this loss. Shelly, her love. Dead.
    Laying her head on his chest, she wailed, a cry that made her head pound. But then she realized the sound wasn't in her head. It was a heartbeat. A heartbeat! Alive.
    "Shelly." She sat up, grabbed his arms, pulled him into a sitting position and shook him. "Shelly, you're alive," she screamed into his slack-jawed face, knowing she was supposed to do something to him, like breathe into his mouth, but she wasn't sure how. She had to find someone who knew what to do, so gently she placed his head back on the floor, ran into the darkened bedroom, slapped around until she found a switch to turn on the light, then grabbed the phone and dialed 911.
    When she'd given the necessary information to theoperator and was about to run back into the bathroom again to try to rouse Shelly, she looked on the bedside table, and there, with nothing else around it, in a silver frame, was an old photograph of her. She remembered the day Shelly snapped it. They had gone to ride the carousel at the Santa Monica Pier. She was wearing shorts and a shirt, sporting the first suntan of her life, and holding her arms up in a gesture of pure joy, but still she winced when she saw it. Because to her she looked like a frizzy-haired witch. But Shelly had framed it, and kept it by his bed. Ruthie marched into the bathroom.
    "You're gonna live, schmuck," she announced to Shelly's inert body. "I'm here to tell you," she said, kneeling beside him and taking him in her arms, "that anyone who can stand to look at that picture of me every day can live through a stomach pump. For me, Shel. You have to live. For me."
    He was in the hospital for two days, and Ruthie stayed there too. She slept in a chair both nights and covered herself with a blanket that a sympathetic nurse brought in for her. Shelly refused to say anything until she took him out of the hospital and back to her condo where she put him in her decorated-by-a-decorator bedroom. And naturally his first words were a joke when he looked around, winced, and remarked, "Either that wallpaper goes or I do." Then he fell asleep.
    An odd comfort filled Ruthie as she lay on her new living room sofa, knowing he was nearby. Later, when she brought him some tea, he stared out the window and said, "Davis decided to go back to his wife. She met him in New York, and they were together and he said he wants her back. Told me I had to get my stuff out of his place by the end of the . . ." His voice lost control and he put his face in the pillow.
    "Shel, don't!" Ruthie said, sitting down next to him. "You'll get over him. You'll start to work again. You'll work on my projects with me, and we'll have fun again, and soon you'll meet someone else."
    "You shouldn't have found me," he told her. "It was a waste of your time. Eventually I'll just do it again. I don't want to be without him. I don't want to go back to work. I want to stay home and—"
    "Have babies?" Ruthie said. There was anger in it, and a little bit of a joke, but Shelly looked at her seriously.
    "Yeah," he said. "I would like that."
    Ruthie laughed. "You're right. I should have let you bump yourself off. You're a wacko." She stood,