Pretty Scars

by CD Reiss

  “Wait.”

  “What?”

  “Because of the subpoena? Or it just worked out that way?”

  “Both? I don’t know. What I do know, and this is from the papers and my dad’s partners, is that project was financed by a shell company out of the Caymans, and when the developer’s doors closed, the financier was the next liable entity. The first thing to do was find out who owned the shell. ODRSN. Just nonsense letters. Which my dad should have left alone. He should have just dropped it, but that kid was dead and he wasn’t letting Piper-Sands close and walk.”

  “Okay. This is more involved than I thought it would be.”

  “Yeah.” He smiled and took a sip of coffee. “Isn’t everything?”

  “No.” I drank, watching him over the rim of my cup. He had to know I was talking about us, but I wasn’t sure he agreed.

  “Right about then, my father’s firm started losing clients. He never brought his work home. At least, not in a way that upset anyone. When he was home, he was home, you know? He’d talk about work but not unload about work. I was ten. All I wanted was for him to sit in his chair and listen to me play, or throw a Frisbee around, or build snowmen. And he did. He did.”

  Gabriel cleared his throat. “So my dad was the last man standing and he was chasing the money. The attacks… they were subtle at first. Local paper ‘exposes’ double-dealing on a 1979 settlement. Accusations from old clients. Then the lawsuits started. Like a fucking… my dad, of all people, bribing the entire school board? Nah. They had nothing, but they spent every waking moment attacking him. From nowhere, all at once. Stuff that could be refuted with a phone call. It was dirty. So fucking dirty. He spent a ton of money on a PR firm, but it was too late. They just kept coming for him. They wore him down so hard.”

  He turned his back to me and dumped his coffee in the sink, gripping edge of the counter. “I lied to you because I didn’t want to explain. I didn’t want you to think I was… I don’t know. Unstable.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “He committed suicide.”

  I didn’t know whether to get up and comfort him or give him room. I didn’t know if he wanted words or gestures, so I froze, silent and still.

  “Hanged himself in his office. And all that time, he was the same with us. Never brought it home. I should have seen he wasn’t right.”

  “Gabriel. No.”

  “We went broke settling the lawsuits. My mother just wanted it all to go away. Me? I mean, I was mad at myself. I dug all this up later because if I let it go away, I was letting him go away.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  I went to him, but when I put my hand on his back, he recoiled. I tucked my offending hand to my chest.

  “I was in high school when I found out the shell company was behind the attacks.” He put his back to the sink and crossed his arms. He seemed taller, more upright than he ever had. “And who owned that company.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What could I do? We had no money and no proof.” He looked right at me. “We couldn’t go up against one of the richest families in the country.”

  Families. Not men. Not companies. But a family hiding behind a shell company to stop a lawyer from following the money to a child’s death.

  “The Drazens,” he said.

  My name, sticky and unwelcome, hung in the air like a tune you couldn’t get out of your head.

  “It’s not my fault,” I said.

  “No.” He dropped his arms. “It’s not. But that doesn’t change anything.”

  “How do you know? What if you’re wrong?”

  “I’m not.” He slid his jacket off the back of a chair. “I don’t know much, but I know your father as good as killed my father.”

  “You don’t!” My desperation raised the volume of my voice. “You don’t know anything. You need someone to blame because you blame yourself. But no one’s to blame. It’s not anyone’s fault. Sometimes things just happen.”

  “Not to you though.” With his jacket draped over his arm, he headed for the door.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It was all clear the other night.” He opened the door but didn’t go through. “You get people to do things for you because that’s just how your life works. But I’m not going to be a part of it. I’m not going to call that man sir or Mr. Drazen. To be with you, I’d have to submit to him, and I won’t. I’m not playing a game I can’t win.” He went through the door.

  “Wait!”

  The latch clicked behind him.

  Chapter 13

  NEW YORK - 1995

  The club had black walls and mismatched chairs.

  Even three glasses of whiskey into the night, Margie spoke in clear certainties. “If Aiden Klerk’s team says it’s not him, it’s not him.”

  Her boyfriend, Drew, had just finished playing. Their hands were clasped in her lap, but he was turned to a bandmate, talking about the set. Another band was setting up. It was later than I usually stayed out, but I was running on powerful fumes.

  “It’s him,” I said. “I just know it.”

  “He’s dead. You know it. You saw it happen.”

  I had seen him die. It was violent and ugly and I’d made it my life’s work to not relive it.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I just… it’s too much of a coincidence.”

  Margie leaned across the table. A fall of red hair dropped over her shoulder. “What I want to know is why you care so much.”

  “Wouldn’t you? If you thought someone you loved was dead, and then maybe they weren’t? It’s like being haunted.”

  Something in her face went blank, as if her attention had done a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn from my problems to her past. Then, as quickly as it came upon her, the inward gaze turned back around. “What’s going on with Peter? Does he know you hired Klerk?”

  “He suspects.”

  One of her eyes narrowed with suspicion. Her jaw shifted slightly right, then she stood, taking my hand and pulling me away. She drew me through the dark room, past the crowded bar and the front door bouncers, to Second Avenue. A group of black-clad smokers huddled in a doorway and a line formed outside the velvet ropes.

  “It’s freezing!” I cried.

  “Your blood’s too thin.” She unwrapped the scarf around her neck and handed it to me. It was completely inadequate, but I tied it around my neck. “Talk to me. What’s happening with Peter?”

  “Nothing.” A cloud of steam shot out of my mouth when the heat of my denial hit the cold air.

  She looked me up and down. “I’ll put us in pledge.”

  Drazen Pledge was a new thing between the eight of us, but it was somehow already irrefutable. When pledge was called, we had to tell the truth plainly, and nothing said in pledge left the lips of the people present. It could not be refused, making it the perfect way to speak of things we’d never otherwise mention. I’d never been asked a question in pledge, but there was a first time for everything.

  I held up my hand. “Open pledge,” I said through chattering teeth.

  Margie held up hers. “Opened. Talk to me. Peter. What’s going on?”

  “I don’t…” What was going on, really? Faced with the prospect of putting into words what I’d denied was even happening, I was at a loss.

  Margie waited, arms crossed, feet shifting on the cold ground.

  No. I wasn’t at a loss. I was afraid.

  “After I got back from Belize, I thought things were going to change.” I hesitated, remembering Peter’s promises under the blue sky of the southern hemisphere, the beach at his back, eyes red-rimmed and puffy from hunting me down.

  “But?”

  “He was nice. He said he understood he could be a hard man.”

  The smoking huddle broke and the group passed too closely for my taste. They were strangers, but I didn’t want them to hear.

  As if reading my mind, my sister waited.

  “Then it star
ted again,” I said.

  “How?”

  “I was reading The Thorn Birds and it was so good. He was talking to me and I wasn’t paying attention. So the next day, he threw all our books away.”

  “Are you serious?” Her eyes were wide, neck pushing her face forward.

  “Yeah.” I shrugged. “It wasn’t that big a deal at the time. I thought it was just… it wasn’t the same as before. Right? He wasn’t hurting me. I still thought running away had worked. That he’d gotten the message.”

  Her scoff was silent, but the cloud of cold condensation made it unmissable.

  “But lately, since we saw Adam Brate? He’s been…” I drifted off again.

  “Been?”

  Down the block, a car alarm wailed.

  “Can we close pledge?”

  “Hell, no. Carrie. Something’s going on with you. And you know it stays between us.”

  “Can you promise not to go crazy?”

  “No.”

  Inside the club, the headline act went on. I hadn’t noticed the line outside the velvet ropes disappear, but we were more or less alone, just three bouncers standing out of earshot.

  “When we have sex… it’s always been… uh. He’ll slap my butt and it’s fun and I kind of liked it. At first.”

  I gauged her reaction. If she was judging me, she hid it.

  “But after a while… and since the concert, he’s been…” I cleared my throat. “When I told you he was controlling and I wanted to get away, I didn’t tell you the whole truth. He’s mean. He…”

  Puts things inside me.

  Beats me raw in places no one can see.

  “He punishes me and it hurts.” The hurting wasn’t the point. The hurting was because he knew what I’d refused to say out loud—that I loved a dead man. That love would exist in the world once I told Margie. “I shouldn’t have married him. I did it too quick. I was so upset about Gabriel, I rushed just to feel something besides sad all the time. And I think he knows.”

  There. I’d said it.

  Margie looked into the traffic of Second Avenue and said nothing. She said nothing so loudly I wanted to shake her, but I was already shivering so hard I looked like a jackhammer.

  “Margie?”

  She turned to me, swallowing something so thick I saw the muscles of her throat move. Behind her, a limousine stopped in front of the club and the driver got out, carrying a long wool coat. He approached the cluster of security guys.

  “Pledge means we aren’t critical,” she said. “And I’m not. Not of you. But you need to get away from him.”

  “He’s my husband.”

  “Yeah, well. That can be corrected.”

  I didn’t mention Daddy, the fact that Peter worked for him, or the way the Church disallowed divorce. We didn’t do that. Margie knew as that as well as I did.

  Behind her, one of the bouncers walked up to us.

  “Ma’am?” he said to me.

  “Yes?”

  He handed me the black wool coat the limo driver had been holding. “This is for you.”

  “What? From who?”

  The bouncer looked over at the street, scanning for the limo, but it was gone. “They were right there. Sorry.” He stepped back, shrugging. “Put it on. You look cold.”

  “Pretty Girl Syndrome,” Margie said. “Your cross to bear.”

  I slid my arms through the satin-lined sleeves and clutched the collar around my neck. “Can we close pledge?”

  “Stay here with me,” Margie said. “In New York. A week. Get your head together.”

  “But Peter said four days.”

  “I need you. I’ll tell him so. He’s afraid of me.”

  The shivers were in their death throes, shaking my body a few last times before surrendering to the warmth of the coat.

  “I shouldn’t,” I said, knowing I would. My sister knew too.

  “Close pledge,” Margie said, holding up her hand.

  “Closed.” My hand was hidden in the too-long sleeve.

  “Come on.” She headed back to the club. “It’s fucking freezing.”

  I followed her back in, jamming my hands in the coat pockets. I felt a little wad of paper and took it out.

  It was a gum wrapper. Big Red.

  Big Red was a popular gum. Millions of people bought it, chewed it, and kept wrappers in their pockets for later. It didn’t mean anything.

  When we got back into the club and my senses warmed, I smelled cologne on the coat, and past that, a shock of wood, freshly sanded, like the body of a lovingly-made string instrument before it was stained.

  Chapter 14

  UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA - 1993

  Our study group huddled in the reading room, books spread over the long oak table, under green lamps.

  The USC Doheny library reading room set the scene for a hundred movies. Dark wood. A ceiling made for echoes. High, narrow windows. Through the double doors behind the librarians’ desk were five stories of stacks inhabited by tightly-packed utilitarian metal shelves.

  Not that I ever had to go back there. The librarians were always willing to get me what I wanted, even when I said I’d go myself.

  Our Ethics in Psych class was harder than it seemed. Doing the right thing always took a little more than common sense. We had to know precedents set by the courts, and even then the case studies left plenty of room for interpretation.

  “What’s wrong?” Lenny asked after marking up an answer I’d made to a previous year’s question.

  I skimmed his red marks. I hadn’t been careful. I was always careful.

  “Nothing.” I looked behind me.

  It had been barely a week since Gabriel stormed out of my apartment, and I could still feel his presence in my life like a semicircle of glue stuck from a Band-Aid that had been ripped off. I felt him every time a bit of classical music played in a counselor’s office or I saw a group of students carrying their instrument cases around the Thornton School. When I sat in the grass with my friends, I plucked at it and thought of his lips close to mine and the feel of his gentle breaths on my cheek.

  And when we sat in Doheny, I felt him for no reason at all. He was that last, stubborn bit of glue on my skin, capturing an open wound in a parenthesis I wouldn’t rub off.

  How could I miss someone I’d only known for a few days? Was it him I longed for? Or was he held to me by the ties of unfinished business?

  I looked at Rhonda’s paper and clicked my red pen. I was supposed to mark her errors, and finding them would require my full attention. She was close to perfect, always. I went through her long, near-perfect answer so I wouldn’t hold up the group.

  Passing it back, I stretched my neck with my eyes closed, tilting my head right then left.

  Unfinished business. As if I could give him closure with a denial of a belief he held so tightly. My father killed his father. He had his own glue. Nothing I did would rub it away.

  Neck still to one side, I opened my eyes. A man dodged behind a marble pillar and into the stacks. He was tall and broad shouldered with hair to his collar.

  “Excuse me,” I whispered.

  The chair squealed as I rose. My heels clacked on the marble floor. Nodding to the librarian, I ran through the doors to the stacks.

  I didn’t know where I was going or how to get to him, but Gabriel was there, in the library, sharing four walls with me. I wasn’t about to let either the coincidence or the intention pass by.

  We had unfinished business.

  It took only a few minutes to get completely lost. I wandered through Asiatic history, cultural theory, communication, got on a rickety elevator, and went one floor up to the sciences, where I made a left into practical physics, rushed through quantum mechanics, and somewhere in fractal geometry, I stopped. Spun around. Backtracked and realized in calculus that I was too disoriented to find him or anything.

  He’d be gone by now, my chance to explain passed, my opportunity lost.

  I put my hand on a
row of books full of ideas I’d never understand and squeezed my eyes shut in an attempt to hold back tears. I couldn’t go back down to my friends with bloated eyes and snot-stained sleeves. Andrea would demand an explanation, and I couldn’t lie to her. She had a silent way of making me tell her everything. I’d have to tell her why Gabriel had walked out and I wouldn’t, couldn’t tell her how wrong he was.

  Again, I opened my eyes and saw him. Above the edge of the books, on the other side of the stacks, Gabriel’s brown eyes watched me trying to keep it together with a raw fascination. They looked hollowed-out, rimmed in the gray and red lines of sleepless nights. Something feral had taken him. Eaten him from the inside out.

  We froze there, watching each other, afraid to break the moment.

  He took something from his pocket. Only when he offered it to me through the tops of the books did I see what it was. A pack of Big Red. He was trying to get me to come to him, but I wouldn’t.

  “No, thank you.”

  He took a slice of gum and put the wrapper and pack in his pocket.

  “You’re upset,” he said finally.

  “Of course I’m upset.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m lost.”

  “The elevator’s right over there.”

  He didn’t move his body enough to shift his gaze. “Over there” could be anywhere, as if he knew it didn’t matter where I was in relation to the elevator.

  “I’m so mad at you,” I said. “I can’t even think. I can’t do my work. All I want to do is yell at you for being such a…” Not a jerk. Not an asshole, moron, dick, psycho, or any name that implied intentional emotional cruelty.

  “Such a what?”

  What could I say to him when the visible slice of his face looked exhausted and worn?

  “Whatever.”

  “Maybe you’re not mad at me, pretty girl.”

  “What am I mad at then?”

  He looked down as if he couldn’t see me and say what he wanted to say at the same time. “The truth.”

  “That my father destroyed your father over some windows? Please, Gabriel. That makes no sense. Why?”