Dirty Red

“So, did she-?”

  I brake a little too hard at a red light, and he jerks forward.

  “She shot herself. The bullet grazed her brain, and they were able to save her in time. But, there was too much damage.”

  “God,” he says. "And this is the first time you’re seeing her since…”

  “Since the hospital after it happened.”

  His eyes are wide.

  “Don’t judge me,” I snap, “I was pregnant. I was on bed rest.”

  “You were a selfish, self-centered bitch.”

  I glare at him. “I was afraid.”

  “Of what, Leah? She’s your sister. God, I can’t believe I work for you. I feel sick.”

  I glance at him. He does look pretty disgusted. “I’m making it right,” I say.

  We drive in silence for the next few minutes.

  “Ooh! Jamba Juice. Want one?” I swerve into the parking lot, and to my satisfaction Sam’s head hits the passenger side window with a nice little thud.

  “Sorry,” I smile.

  He rubs his head, seeming to forget his question.

  “I’m going to ask Caleb to come home,” I say as I pull into a spot. I check his face to see his reaction.

  “I don’t want a fruit juice,” he says.

  “Come on, Sam!”

  He shakes his head. “Bad idea. You’re going to get hurt.”

  “Why?”

  Sam sighs. “I don’t think he’s ready. Caleb is the type of man who has an agenda.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Sam scratches his head like he’s uncomfortable.

  “What do you know?” I narrow my eyes at him.

  “I’m a guy. I just know.”

  “You’re gay! You don’t have special insight into straight men.”

  He shakes his head. “You are the single most offensive woman I have ever met, you know that? And, I’m not gay.”

  My mouth pops open. “What are you talking about?”

  He shrugs, embarrassed. “I just told you that so you wouldn’t hit on me.”

  I blink at him. He cannot possibly be serious. “Why would you think I’d want to hit on you? Ew, Sam! I can’t believe this!”

  He sighs. “Are we getting a juice or not?”

  I fling myself out of the car. “I’m not getting you anything. Stay here with the baby.”

  I am so angry, I completely miss the Jamba Juice store and have to backtrack. Men are such worthless liars. I should have known he wasn’t gay. He wears way too much polyester to be gay. And, I haven’t once seen him check out Caleb. Caleb is freaking gorgeous.

  I am sipping my juice and halfway back to the car when I start laughing.

  When we get home, I call Caleb’s cell three times before he finally picks up.

  “When you pick Estella up tonight, I was hoping you could stay a while so we can talk.”

  There is a long pause before he says. “Yes, I need to talk to you, too.” I feel a surge of hope.

  “Okay, it’s all set then. I’ll have Sam stay a little bit later than usual.”

  I hear him sigh into the phone.

  “Fine, Leah. I’ll see you tonight.”

  He hangs up. I don’t even think about the fact that he never hangs up without saying goodbye, until a few minutes later.

  The Past

  Four months after Leah was acquitted, I filed for divorce.

  Olivia

  — That was my first thought.

  Turner

  — That was my second thought.

  Motherfucker

  — That was my third thought. Then I put them all together in a sentence: That motherfucker Turner is going to marry Olivia!

  How long did I have? Did she still love me? Could she forgive me? If I could wrestle her away from that fucking tool, could we actually build something together on the rubble we’d created? Thinking about it set me on edge — made me angry. We’d both told so many lies, sinned against each other — against everyone who got in our way. I’d tried to tell her once. It was during the trial. I’d come to the courthouse early to try to catch her alone. She was wearing my favorite shade of blue — airport blue. It was her birthday.

  “Happy Birthday.”

  She’d looked up. My heart pounded out my feelings, like they did every time she looked at me.

  “I’m surprised you remembered.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Oh, you’ve just been forgetting an awful lot of things over the last couple of years.”

  I half smiled at her jab.

  “I never forgot you…”

  I felt a rush of adrenaline. This was it — I was going to come clean. Then the prosecutor walked in. Truth was put on hold.

  I moved out of the house I shared with Leah and back into my condo. I paced the halls, I drank Scotch. I waited.

  Waited for what? For her to come to me? For me to go to her?

  I walked to my sock drawer — infamous protector of engagement rings and other mementos — and ran my fingers along the bottom. The minute my fingers found it, I felt a surge of something. I rubbed the pad of my thumb across the slightly green surface of the ‘kissing’ penny. I looked at it for a full minute, conjuring up images of the many times it had been traded for kisses. It was a trinket, a cheap trick that had once worked, but it had evolved into so much more than that.

  I put on my sweats and went for a run. Running helped me think. I went over everything in my head as I turned toward the beach, dodging a little girl and her mother as they walked along hand in hand. I smiled. The little girl had long, black hair and startling blue eyes — she looked like Olivia. Was that what our daughter would have looked like? I stopped jogging and bent over, hands on knees. It didn’t have to be a ‘would have’ situation. We could still have our daughter. I slipped my hand in my pocket and pulled out the kissing penny. I started jogging to my car.

  There was no time like the present. If Turner got in the way, I’d just toss him off the balcony.

  I was one mile from Olivia’s condo when I got the call.

  It was a number I didn’t recognize. I hit talk.

  “Caleb Drake?”

  “Yes?” My words were clipped. I made a left onto Ocean and pressed down on the gas.

  “There’s been an … incident with your wife.”

  “My wife?” God, what has she done now? I thought about the feud she was currently having with the neighbors about their dog and wondered if she’d done something stupid.

  “My name is Doctor Letche, I’m calling from West Boca Medical Center. Mr. Drake, your wife was admitted here a few hours ago.”

  I hit the brake, swung the wheel around until my tires made a screeching sound, and gunned the car in the opposite direction. An SUV swerved around me and laid on the horn.

  “Is she all right?”

  The doctor cleared his throat. “She swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. Your housekeeper found her and dialed 911. She’s stable right now, but we’d like for you to come in.”

  I stopped at a light and ran my hand through my hair. This was my fault. I knew she took the separation hard, but suicide. It didn’t even seem like her.

  “Of course — I’m on my way.”

  I hung up. I hung up and I punched the steering wheel. Some things were not meant to be.

  When I arrived at the hospital, Leah was awake and asking for me. I walked into her room, and my heart stopped. She was lying propped up by pillows, her hair a rat's nest and her skin so pale it almost looked translucent. Her eyes were closed so I had a moment to rearrange my face before she saw me.

  When I took a few steps into the room, she opened her eyes. As soon as she saw me, she started crying. I sat on the edge of her bed and she latched onto me, sobbing with such passion I could feel her tears soak through my shirt. I held her like that for a long time.

  “Leah,” I said finally, pulling her from my chest and settling her back onto the pillows. “Why?”

  Her face was slimy and re
d. Dark half–moons camped around her eyes. She looked away.

  “You left me.”

  Three words. I felt so much guilt I could barely swallow.

  “Caleb, please come home. I’m pregnant.”

  I closed my eyes.

  No!

  No!

  no…

  Chapter Thirty-SixPresent

  I send Sam upstairs with Estella and wait for Caleb.

  Flick

  Flick

  Flick

  Things have to go my way tonight. He knocks instead of using a key. That’s a bad sign. When I open the door, his face is grim. He won’t look at me.

  “Hello, Caleb,” I say.

  He waits for me to invite him in and then heads upstairs to see Estella. I follow him to the nursery. Sam nods at him in greeting, and Caleb takes the baby from him. She smiles as soon as she sees him and shakes her fists. I feel a little jealous that he gets smiles so easily.

  Caleb kisses both her cheeks and then under her chin, which makes her giggle. He repeats this again and again until she’s laughing so hard, both Sam and I smile.

  “We should talk,” I say, standing in the doorway. I feel like an outsider when he’s in the room with Estella.

  He nods without looking at me, makes her giggle one more time from his kisses, and hands her back to Sam. She immediately starts to cry.

  I hear Sam say “Traitor” as we leave the room and head downstairs. Caleb looks once over his shoulder, as if he’s tempted to go back.

  “You can see her after…” I say.

  I had the kettle on before he got here; it is just starting to whistle as we walk into the kitchen. I set about making him tea while he sits on a barstool with his hands clasped in front of his mouth. The fact that his leg is bouncing is not lost on me. I dunk a tea bag into the mug of hot water and avoid his eyes. I am transferring the tea bag to the trash, when he says —

  “You went to see Olivia?”

  My hand freezes, tea drips on the tile and onto my pants.

  “Yes.”

  Now I know why his leg is bouncing.

  “You forced me to do it.” I step on the lever that opens the trashcan and drop the tea bag in. I can feel his eyes on me.

  He cocks his head. “You really believe that, don’t you?”

  I don’t know what he’s talking about. I fiddle with my thumbnail.

  “Did she call you?” That tattletale bitch, I think bitterly. And then in an almost panic — What else did she tell him?

  “You had no right, Leah.”

  “I had every right. You bought her a house!”

  “That was before you,” he says calmly.

  “And you never thought to tell me? Really? I am your wife! She came back when you had your amnesia and lied to you! You couldn’t tell me that you bought that woman a house?”

  He looks away.

  “It’s more complicated than that,” he says. “I was making plans with her.”

  Complicated? Complicated seems like too good of a word for Olivia. I definitely don’t want to know about the plans he made with her, either. He needs to see the truth. I need to make him see the truth.

  “I found out on my own, Caleb. How she lied to you when you had the amnesia.”

  He cocks his eyebrow at me. Maybe if I tell him the truth, he will finally see how loyal I am, how much I love him. “I paid her to leave town. Did she tell you that during my trial? She was willing to sell you out for a couple hundred bucks.”

  I once watched a natural dam break on television. I remember seeing a scenic picture of a river surrounded by trees. All of a sudden, the trees disappeared — sucked away by the collapse of the riverbank. A swell of angry water rushed around the corner, wiping out everything in its path. It was sudden, and it was violent.

  I see the dam break in Caleb’s eyes.

  Human eyes are the sign language of the brain. If you watch them carefully, you can see the truth played out, raw and unguarded. When you are the bastard child of a prostitute and you need to know what your adoptive parents are thinking, you learn how to read eyes. You can see a lie prod the truth, a hurt be swept into a cranial recess, happiness as a wide luminescent light. You can see the crushing of a soul beneath a terrible loss. What I see in Caleb’s eyes is a leftover hurt; hurt with mold growing on it. Hurt so profound that blood and tears and regret cannot possibly do it justice.

  What does she have that I don’t have? She owns the deed to his house and to his hurt. I am so jealous of his hurt that I throw my head back and open my mouth to scream in rage. He won’t hear me. No matter how loudly I scream his name, he will not hear me. He only hears her.

  “She wouldn’t do that,” he says.

  “She did. She is a deceiver. She is not what you think.”

  “You did that to her apartment,” he says. His eyes are wide, bleary.

  I look away, ashamed. But, no, I am not ashamed. I fought for what I wanted.

  “Why her, Caleb?”

  He looks at me blandly. I don’t expect him to answer. When his voice breaks the tense air between us, I stop breathing to hear him.

  “I didn’t choose her,” his voice breaks. “Love is illogical. You fall into it like a manhole. Then you’re just stuck. You die in love more than you live in love.”

  I don’t want to hear his poetic analogies. I want to know why he loves her. I finger the gold hoop earrings I’m wearing. I bought them after I met her at the diner. They don’t have the same effect on me. Where they made her look exotic, I look like I’m playing dress-up. I yank them from my ears and toss them away from me.

  But, I can be what he needs. He just needs to give me the chance to prove it.

  “You need to come home.”

  He drops his head. I want to scream — LOOK AT ME!

  When he does, his eyes are raw.

  “I filed the papers, Leah. It’s over.”

  Papers?

  I say the word. It whispers from my lips — burns them. “Papers?”

  My marriage is worth more than something as thin and insubstantial as papers. You cannot end something with that vile word. Caleb is a man used to getting his way. Not now. I will fight him on this.

  “We can go to counseling. For Estella.”

  Caleb shakes his head. “You need someone to be able to love you the way you deserve to be loved. I’m so sorry — ” He clenches his jaw, looks at me almost pleadingly, like he needs me to understand. “I can’t give you that. God, I wish I could, Leah. I’ve tried.”

  I think about that, I do. I think about the time I caught him looking at Olivia like she was the only fucking thing that mattered on the whole fucking planet, and the time he kept her ice cream/finger in the freezer for two years. What type of love was that? Obsessive? What had she done to get his brain wired to her circuit board? I am so out of breath after I am done thinking these things that I spin for the doors that sit off the kitchen and shove them open. The air outside is thick and still. It feels like jello, and I feel like every bone in my heart is breaking. I pace the patio, and in seconds, I can feel my shirt sticking to my back. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Caleb follow me outside. He has his hands in his pockets, and he’s biting his upper lip.

  I rifle through my bag of tricks. I look at his face: hard, determined, sorry. I don’t want his sorry. I want what Olivia has. I want to be enough for him.

  Honesty is sticky, and I hate it. It always has consequences that fuck up your life … God, I’d rather just wade around the truth and find a lie I can live with. That’s what I call compromise. Knowing that my husband loves someone else and living with it … that’s a truth you don’t look in the eye, and now he was forcing me to.

  I stop pacing and stand in front of him with my hands squared on my hips.

  “I won’t sign the papers. I’ll fight you.”

  I want to slap him when he narrows his eyes and shakes his head at me.

  “Why do you want that for yourself, Leah?”

  What
I want for myself is the family I put together through blood, sweat and toil. I want it all to mean something. I won, fair and square. The bitch had him between her fist, and I took him back. Why is my fucking prize trying to divorce me? I collect myself, all the shredded angry pieces, and I rope them back together so I can take control. Vicious doesn’t work with Caleb. You can reason with him. He has stout British honor and American practicality.

  “I want what you swore to give me. You said you’d never hurt me! You said you’d love me for better or worse!”

  “I did. I didn’t know…” He covers his face with his hands. I’m not sure if I want him to go on. His accent, his goddamn accent.

  “You didn’t know what, Caleb? That you were still hung up on your first love?”

  His head comes up. I’ve caught his attention.

  “I found the ring. After you had the accident. Why did you buy me a ring if you still loved her?”

  His face is ashen. I keep going.

  “It’s not real. Those feelings that you have are for someone and something that no longer exist. I am real. Estella is real. Be with us.”

  Still he says nothing.

  I take a minute to sob. Where does he come off thinking that he has the answer to happiness? I thought I had the answer, and look where it got me. Caleb once told me that love was a desire and desire was an emptiness. I remind him of this. He looks shocked, like he can’t believe I was capable of even understanding those words. Maybe I’ve played stupid with him long enough.

  “It’s not that simple, Leah.”

  “You do the best you can, with what you have. You can’t leave us. We are your truth.” I slam my fist into my palm.

  He swears, laces his hands behind his neck and looks at the sky. I don’t feel bad for using the guilt card. The guilt card is solid. It always pays out with interest. When he looks back at me, he’s not wearing the contrite face I was hoping for.

  “You and I don’t know how to play the truth game.” He blows air through his nose.

  I would have let that comment slip by in abeyance, but I can sense an underlying meaning beneath his words, and I am compelled to dig.

  “What are you talking about?”