Hill Side

She waltzed toward the Concierge’s desk of the Inter-Continental Hotel and slowly removed the large sunglasses that she wore, partly to conceal her identity and partly for effect. She still maintained an "old Hollywood" flair to her style. She cleared her voice and said in her unmistakable southern drawl, "Excuse me. I’m looking for Lloyd Carmichael and was told he was in the lounge, but I can’t seem to find it."
The Concierge looked up, hearing the apologetic tone in her voice. He saw a lovely, tall woman standing in front of him. She was striking. He pointed in the direction of the lounge. "That would be the Amstel Bar and Brasserie," he said in a voice thick with a Dutch accent. "I could take you there if you like."
The woman with hair the color of golden wheat smiled. "That’s quite alright," she said, heading in the direction where the man had pointed. "I’m sure I can find it..."
When she came to the entrance of the bar, she saw him sitting at a table, alone. He was drinking scotch and looking out at the Amstel River.
Slowly, she walked toward him. The closer she got to him, the more her heart hurt for him. "Hey, Good Lookin’!" she called softly.
He sat there for a moment, as if he’d not heard her.
When he spoke, she could hear a genuine happiness in his voice. "Why Elsie Mae Crumholtz!" he said, turning around. "I’d know that voice anywhere." He took her in slowly, noticing how kind the years had been to her. "You are a sight for sore eyes, Baby!"
She tossed her purse on the table and walked into the arms he had opened to her. "You always were a sly-talking devil!" she exclaimed, and laughed in her own way that was almost as intoxicating as Laura’s.
Their lips lightly touched as she took his face in her hands and looked deeply into his eyes.
She whispered sternly to him, "You look like hell, Luke!"
Luke pulled the chair out for her to take a seat. "Now, don’t try and flatter me all at once!" he said. "It’s not that I’m unhappy to see you, Sweetheart, but what are you doing here?"
Tiffany took her gloves off and laid them on top of her purse. "Robert called me from Paris and said he didn’t think you should be here alone. He thought you could use a friend."
Luke picked up his scotch and took a drink. Good ole’ Robert, always looking out for him.
"The embers are burnin’ low, Baby!" he said. "I’m tired...very, very tired!"
Tiffany took the drink from his hands and put it on the other side of the table away from him.
"I can see that," she said softly.
Luke reached for the drink, but Tiffany took his hands in hers. He took them to his lips and kissed them. God, it was good to see her! He couldn’t believe she’d come all this way. "How’s Sean?"
"He stays busy teaching cadets at the FBI Academy in Quantico," she said. "It’s been good for him."
Luke studied his old friend, asking. "And you?"
"I stay busy with my charity work," she said. "I’ve just taken over overseeing the Performing Arts Theater in our community. I love it."
Luke nodded as she spoke, letting her words sink in and register in his brain. "I can see you doing that!"
Tiffany changed the subject. "Robert says the news is good on this LS-49 lead you two have been following," she said. "It sounds very promising."
He looked out at the river again and said with very little emotion in his voice, "It could be."
"Hey," Tiffany said, shaking his arm a little bit to keep him in the moment. "Where’s my buddy?"
Luke looked at her. She was one he could always talk to. "On a fast train to no where, Darlin’!"
Tiffany shook her head, saying. "I don’t believe that! You’ve always been one of the strongest men I’ve ever known."
Luke winced a little at the compliment. "The one person who keeps me balanced and centered is slipping farther and farther away from me. I can’t seem to reach her."Tiffany pulled her chair up closer to his. "Listen to me, Luke," she said. "You and Laura have always had this uncanny ability to connect beyond the normal perimeters of time or space. Don’t you give up on that."
Luke smiled at her. "Baby, you know I’m no quitter," he said, sighing. "But it’s lonely in this hell."
Tiffany stared at him for a moment. It’s a helpless feeling to see a friend in pain and not be able to ease it. The only consolation in all of this was that Luke hadn’t broken like he had in ‘82.
She would never forget the gut-wrenching scream that pierced the night when they were told that Laura was presumed dead. Luke had sounded like an animal whose heart had been ripped from its chest. His pain had been that palpable. He damn-near tore the Haunted Star apart as his rage over Laura’s loss consumed him. He became a madman - throwing lamps against the wall, turning over furniture, breaking mirrors until the physical fatigue overtook him and he sat empty and spent.....God. The memory of it made her shutter. She had been one of the few people who Luke would see, and even those within his inner circle couldn’t pull him from his despondency. Luke stayed that way for a long time, and even when signs of life did re-surface in him, he wasn’t the same. She didn’t see the old Luke again until that day in ‘83 when Laura appeared out of nowhere just as when she had vanished. In that moment, his soul woke up. Tiffany had never seen a love as powerful or as profound as the one that Luke and Laura shared.
"She’s alive Luke," Tiffany said. "As long as there’s that, there is hope!"
Luke closed his eyes for a moment, and Tiffany thought she saw hints of tears behind his lids. He wiped his hands over his face and cleared his throat. "Hope never felt so hopeless, Tif!" he exclaimed.
Tiffany rubbed her hand up and down his back, trying to wipe some of his pain away. She put her arm around him and laid her head against his shoulder. "You are my special friend, Luke. What can I do to help you?"
Luke touched his head against hers, saying, "You’re here, Baby! That means a lot."
"I want to see her," Tiffany said.
Luke sat up straight and shook his head. "No," he said. "You don’t."
Tiffany was surprised by his response. "You and Laura are my best and dearest friends," she said. "I want to hold her hand and tell her I love her! I want her to feel my presence! I want her to know that I’m here!"
"Trust me, Baby," he said. "She won’t know you’re here, and you don’t want to see her like this.
It’s haunting the way she just sits and stares," he informed. "Let the weekend after we were re-married, when you and Sean came up, be the way you remember her - vital and laughing. That’s what she would want."
Tiffany’s eyes teared. She had been beside herself that they had been unable to make it to the wedding, but they had managed to fly in for the weekend afterward. Both Luke and Laura looked as happy as they had on that autumn day 25 years ago. Laura was as beautiful as she had always been but it was a deeper - more profound beauty and grace she possessed. She was a mother - a grandmother even, with another one on the way, but she still maintained her youthful wonder and sweetness. The most amazing thing was the way the two of them still looked at one another. The love and passion between them was as alive as it had been in the beginning. She had played in many movies in her lifetime, but no love story had ever compared to the one her two friends shared. Laura had been the best girlfriend that Tiffany ever had. The best part of that entire weekend was the night that Sean had scheduled to take Mac to dinner to discuss a seminar he was going to attend at Quantico in the winter. Luke and Laura picked Tiffany up from the Metro Court and met Robert at The Versailles Room. The old gang was together once again. She had never laughed as hard as she did that night as they re-lived memories of the Ice-Princess summer. One of her greatest blessings had been crossing paths with them all on that island. While their lives had scattered over the years that followed, they remained in constant touch and always knew how to reach one another. It was a bond that would never be broken.
Tiffany had come when the bitch, Helena Cassadine, had tortured her friends by making them believe that Lucky had died. She had stayed up all night with Luke at his club after Laura had suffered the breakdown. There had been nothing to do except be there for them both. And, no matter where Robert was in the world, he managed to keep in touch with them all. Tiffany had met Laura and Lulu in Europe and taken her to a spa in Switzerland where they had a fabulous girls day. It had made her feel good to pamper Laura in the aftermath of that nightmare. She had taken Lulu for a day of shopping and cocoa, even though Lulu had been too young to remember it fully. God, how she loved that child! Spending that day with Lulu gave her a moment of motherhood that she had been denied with Sean. Tiffany had come when Nikolas surfaced, and they both needed her emotional support in different ways, which she was able to give to each of them.
She had flown in for her friends’ re-marriage and stayed for a month after Laura’s psychotic break. Luke had lost himself again, and even the children he shared with Laura hadn’t been able to keep him emotionally afloat. Luke was lost without Laura. It was that plain and that simple. She kept him grounded. Without her presence, he seemed hellbent on self-destructing. When Luke took off to parts unknown for whatever healing he tried to find through his escapades, Tiffany returned home to her life with Sean. Then, she had flown in when her friends’ first-born son had gotten married and felt the bittersweet memories wash over her when she recalled the joyously excited phone call she had received when "they" learned that they were pregnant with Lucky! It didn’t seem possible that Luke and Laura’s children were grown and the age Laura was when she and Tiffany had first met. Where had the years gone?
Tiffany had opened her home to Lulu for two weeks the summer that she had turned 16. As part of her birthday gift, Tiffany had taken her to New York City for a weekend. They had shopped and eaten and gone to the theater and had their hair done at an exclusive salon in Manhattan. They had stayed up all night watching old movies, eating popcorn and doing their nails. It was a magical weekend for them both, and Luke appreciated that Tiffany had given his daughter a birthday experience that her mother would have given her had she been present in the moment. He had appreciated that loving gesture for his daughter more than she would ever know.
Of course, she had blessed Luke out over the phone when he returned from Vegas two years prior and informed her that he had married the duplicitous Tracy Quartermaine. Tiffany had been furious with him, even though Luke had explained that it was all part of a scam. It was criminal to even call it a marriage because it was laughable. She didn’t know when her anger over it subsided and turned to compassionate pity for him? Luke would rage if he knew she pitied him, but it’s what she felt. He was more lost now than he had ever been without Laura. Tracy Quartermaine was nothing more than a diversionary tactic, and she certainly was no threat to Laura.
So, Tiffany dropped all discussion of Tracy, and trusted her friend to do what he had to in order to survive the moments, until he got his life back again. Right now, Luke was just as vacant as Laura was.
"You need to stop doing this to yourself!" she said.
"Stop doing what, Baby?"
"Punishing yourself for not being able to fix this on your own."
Luke laughed. "You and Robert!" he said in exasperation. "It’s a bitch when you can’t even fool your friends!"
Tiffany smiled. "Seems like a comfort to me."
Luke moved his head back and forth as he was thought. "Well...that too, but it’s more frustrating for me."
Tiffany began to laugh. She touched one finger to her nose and pointed the other finger at him.
"That’s because you don’t like people being able to get inside. There are a couple of us who can, you know?" she looked him up and down as she said it. "Certainly not to the level that Laura can, but we’ve still found our way in, and it drives you crazy!"
"You got that right Elsie Mae!"
"Well, you might as well stop fighting it!" she said. "I think Robert and I have proven we’re in this for the long haul."
Luke’s expression softened. They weren’t just friends; they were family. "That you have!" he agreed.
Tiffany folded her hands and rested her chin against them, thinking for a moment. "Luke," she said. "Do you remember the Nurses Ball a few years back, when Miguel sang that beautiful song? I think it was called ‘The Power to Believe’. I’m hearing that song in my mind right now."
Luke wasn’t certain where she was going with this train of thought? He loved Tiffany but sometimes her thoughts shifted tracks.
"Okay," he said, then added. "I seem to recall it was slow and depressing."
Tiffany shook her head. "No," she disagreed. "It was hope rising out of pain." She began to hum the song, then sang the line of most importance: "Do you believe that love can heal a broken dream...." Luke appreciated what she was trying to do. "If that were true, Darlin’, Laura would have been healed years ago!"
"You listen to me, Luke Spencer!" she said firmly. "I’m not a betting woman, but I’ve got an odds-on favorite that Luke’s Angel is going to win this race, and don’t you forget it!" Tiffany picked up her gloves and purse. "Pick me up at 8," she said. "I’m in suite P4, and I’m going to let you treat me to a fabulous dinner tonight!" She leaned forward and pecked him on the cheek. "Dress formal, Darlin’!" but she didn’t wait for him to reply. She simply walked away as graciously as she had appeared.
Luke smiled to himself as she walked away. Tiffany Hill. Grande Dame of the Obscure B-Movies. She was a rare combination of Lucille Ball and Gracie Allen; Friend Extra-ordinaire! She brought life and laughter to every situation she was in. Luke always knew that she was a one-of-a-kind individual. Yet, it just occurred to him that she was here to keep vigil with him, as she had done many times before over the years for as long as he needed her. There was a comfort in the silence between them. No words needed to be spoken to fill in the lines that others struggled to find the meaning in. Tiffany knew him just as Robert did.
Luke picked up the watered-down scotch that had been left on the table and stared back out at the Amstel River. He pulled from the archives of his memory bank the moment that Tiffany had recalled for him. Vaguely, he could hear the voice of Miguel softly singing that song as he tried to find within himself, once again, the power to believe...

http://youtu.be/u9t7aEsMIhA [The Power to Believe/General Hospital Nurses’ Ball/1995