Love in Many Languages

by Jamie Bennett

  “Will you toss that to me?”

  I looked at the t-shirt I held in my hand and offered it to him instead. “Did you put that under my head?”

  He nodded and replaced it on his body. It was a shame. “My brother likes to gun that motor. I think it woke you.” I nodded now. “You have some ants on you.” Gently, very gently, he brushed my arm and my shoulder. “There. Ready to go inside?”

  I nodded again, but I had gotten stiff lying in the same position on the ground for too long. I winced as I tried to get up. “I just need to go slowly,” I explained.

  “Can I help you?” Cooper asked me. He put an arm behind my back, and the other under my knees, and he picked me right up off the ground.

  I drew in a breath. “Did I hurt you?” he asked immediately.

  “No. No, I’m fine.” More than fine. But for some reason, I suddenly felt like I wanted to cry. I put my arms around his neck.

  “Is something hurting you?” he asked again anxiously, and started to carry me back to the house. “Is it time for you to take anything?”

  I rested my head on his shoulder and swallowed down the emotions. “I’m really ok. And I’m not taking anything, not anymore. I didn’t like the way they made me feel and I’m a little scared I’ll turn into an addict, like my mom.”

  “That makes sense.” He went up the steps easily, as if he regularly carried women around their yards. “Are you still needing something to help you with pain, though?”

  “Not really. Not anymore.” He gently set me on my feet so we could open the door and I sighed. I had loved that feeling. “Now I wish I had something that would help me sleep. Maybe my neighbor Sania could give me some herbs.”

  “I thought you two didn’t get along.”

  “She gave me this,” I explained. I walked stiffly across the floor like Frankenstein and picked up the little jar of salve. I smoothed some on my arm and held it out to him to smell.

  He bent and sniffed, then made a face. “Unusual.”

  “But I think it’s working. I hope I don’t scare the people at work tomorrow, anyway.”

  His face turned into a thundercloud. “If they give you any problems…”

  “Oh, no, they won’t! I just mean, I don’t want it to be unpleasant for them, like it was for your brother and Sania when she first saw me.”

  “You’re not in any way unpleasant. Not at all.”

  “I haven’t seen myself since the day I came home from the hospital. I don’t have any mirrors in the house because I gave them to the Humane Society. I mean, I have one in my studio.” I stopped.

  “Have you been in there yet?”

  I shook my head. “I can’t paint or draw, anyway, so I don’t need to.” I sank down on the bed. “There’s a box in there with my grandma’s things and that’s where the mirror is.”

  Cooper nodded slowly. “I see. I can bring it down, if you want.”

  I told him where the box was and listened as he went thumping up and down the stairs, then put it on the floor next to the bed.

  “Thank you. I’ll open it later.” I paused. “How is it…how does the studio look?” I asked.

  “The cleaning crew straightened everything up. It looks fine, I think. I never saw it before that night, but now it’s all very orderly, everything put away.”

  Nothing like my studio, then. I’d had everything everywhere, a happy mess. I closed my eyes for a moment, because I thought I could hear the wood splintering as my easel crashed against the wall.

  “Ione. Are you all right?”

  I opened them. “I’m just remembering.”

  “You’re shaking.”

  “I’m scared,” I told him. “It’s why I can’t sleep very well at night.”

  Cooper sat down next to me on the bed. “It was very scary. I’ve never been more frightened in my life. But it’s over, now. The police will find him.”

  That was part of it. I had started to dream again, and now I had nightmares about him, coming back and waiting in my house, bending over me as I slept so that when I opened my eyes I saw his face.

  I moved closer to Cooper and he put his arm around me. “Thank you for coming over. Thank you for fixing up my house.”

  “You’re welcome. Do you want to lie back down?”

  I shook my head and turned my face into his shoulder, because now I was crying, and I needed to be close to him.

  Chapter 11

  A big sign stretched across the glass wall that separated the reception area from the lobby: WELCOME BACK, IONE! It was full of color and life and they had obviously worked so hard on it, just to have some kind words there when I first walked in. I stood outside the elevator and got a lump in my throat, staring at the sign for a moment before walking slowly up to the glass door to go inside.

  “Ione!” Everyone in the office ran up to say hello. They had been sending flowers and cards, and gifts like baskets of fruit, and I was glad to be able to say thank you in person. After a while Reid told everyone to go back to work and give me a breather, and I went over to my desk in Reception. It hadn’t been as bad as I had thought it would be. It wasn’t like what had happened that morning, when the bus driver who I had known for years didn’t recognize me, or at least pretended that he didn’t.

  I spent a little while looking for things around the desk, and Karis came out to talk again, her face scrunched with concern.

  She put a big thermos down in front of me. “If you get tired, you should go home. It hasn’t been that long since…” She pressed her lips together. “How did you get here? Did you drive?”

  “I tried, but it was too hard. I took the bus.”

  “Oh, I forgot about that!” She shook her head in anger, at herself.

  “Karis, I’m fine. I’ll leave early if I need to. The bus was fine.” She looked unconvinced, so I picked up the phone to check for messages and smiled at her. “I’m happy to be back.”

  “I have a meeting that will go through lunch. Reid and I made a lot of soup last night.” She patted the thermos.

  “I’ll eat it for sure. Thank you. Really, Karis, I’m ok.”

  She nodded dubiously and walked away, checking over her shoulder at me every few steps, and I tried to find the piece of paper where I had written down the code to get the messages from the answering service.

  And the day went on. Almost everyone in the office eventually cycled through to tell me how glad they were to see me, that they were so happy I was back. Because they were human, they wanted to ask things that I thought Reid had probably told them not to mention, because when they did, they whispered. Did they catch him yet? Did you know him? Are you in pain? Are you traumatized? Scared? Angry? They wanted to hear more than what Reid and Karis had told them, but I didn’t have much to say.

  The mailman came with a pile of envelopes and did a double-take, stopped, and just stared. “Ione, you all right?” I told him that I was fine and I was glad to be back, but he got upset and we had to talk for a while.

  Then the guy who brought the juice delivery came in, and he also wanted to talk about my appearance. The dolly crashed down as he gaped at me. “Holy shit, Ione, who did that to you?”

  “I got beat up,” I explained. “My friend’s boyfriend. They didn’t catch him,” I put in, before he could ask.

  He leaned forward and pointed to my cheek. “He cut you?”

  I ran my finger across the line on my face. Augusta and Karis had also looked at it closely when the bandage came off, then swore that it was healing so, so well, they could barely see it. “A little, I guess. I was unconscious already so I didn’t feel that part.”

  “Damn,” he said. “You were so pretty! Why would he do that to such a pretty girl?”

  “I guess he wanted to hurt me.”

  “I guess so! My uncle was a boxer, but I never seen him so kicked around.”

  “Yeah. I was in the hospital for a while,” I said.

  “I guess so!” he said again. “They tell you if you’re going t
o look normal again, how you were before?”

  “They said the swelling will still go down more, and my nose will go back to how it was because they fixed it. The bruises will take more time to fade, because I was pretty hurt.” The bruises inside, on my bones, on my spleen, would take longer. “They said I could do some kind of treatment for the scar if it doesn’t heal how it should.” I ran my finger back and forth across the line again, a little raised track across my cheekbone.

  “Do the treatment,” the juice guy recommended. “A face like yours, you have to. Otherwise, what a waste.”

  “Maybe.”

  He tilted the dolly and started to roll it back toward the refrigerator in our employee lunchroom. “You have to fix it,” he called over his shoulder, then repeated, “What a waste!”

  I suddenly felt so tired, just so, so tired. I was itchy again, too. I put my left arm on the desk and rested my forehead on it carefully, just to close my eyes for a moment. I didn’t hear the elevator doors like I usually did, and I didn’t hear the swoosh of the glass doors as they opened into our office.

  “Ione?”

  I picked up my head at Cooper’s voice. “Hi. What are you doing here?”

  “I came to see if you wanted to have lunch.”

  “With you?” I asked, still confused.

  “Or I could go find that guy who was questioning me about my company’s financial solvency. I liked him a lot,” Cooper said.

  He meant Dov, the one who kept walking into the glass wall. He hadn’t been by my desk to chat and bring me tea like he usually did. He hadn’t even said hello that morning, I didn’t think.

  “Hey, are you all right?”

  That was a question I was tired of hearing. “I’m not all right,” I told Cooper. “I need to go home.” I stood and found myself wavering and he came quickly around the side of my desk.

  “How did you get here?”

  I sighed, and let my weight rest on Cooper. “The bus.”

  “I’ll drive you home.”

  “I have to tell Karis. Someone has to fill in for me.” I looked at the phone, which started to ring again.

  Cooper picked it up. “Hello?” he said, which was not how we answered the phones. “I’ll have to take a message.” He wrote for a while on a post-it note. “Great, thanks.” He stuck the note on the desk. “Malachi’s car just got towed out of the garage for parking in a disabled spot. I think he deserved it. Let’s go.” He rubbed my back a little, which was when Reid came out of the office he shared with Karis and caught a glimpse of us. He immediately barreled over.

  “I just need to go home,” I tried to explain, but Reid was busy saying he had known it was too early for me to come back, he and Karis hadn’t wanted me to, they were fine without a receptionist, and Malachi was an ass for having parked there again and he wasn’t giving him the message, he thought they should keep his car.

  I leaned on Cooper in the elevator again, which was the best thing I had done in a while, because he put an arm around me and let me stay there, just like he had done when I cried on his shoulder the night before. “How did the rest of the day go, before you got so tired?” he asked me.

  “It was ok.” We walked out onto the street and he opened the door of his car for me. “I was thinking, though, that maybe it was too soon to come back. Not for me, I don’t mean. For everyone else.” I settled down into his car, which felt familiar and safe to me now.

  “What does that mean?”

  “They were all very upset by how I looked.” I stared out the window, and once again, caught my reflection before I deliberately looked past it. “It disturbed them. The mailman got distraught. I had to give him some juice.” And the juice guy had said things too, other things that I didn’t want to think about.

  “Of course they were upset. People who care about you, they don’t want you to be hurt.”

  “And some of them, I think, were happy,” I continued.

  “Who the hell was happy about this?” He sounded furious.

  “No, not happy, exactly. More like…pleased. No, like…there’s a German word for enjoying when someone else has problems. Schadenfreude.”

  Cooper was frowning. “Shady Frodo. I know what that means. That’s terrible that people acted that way to you.”

  “No, it’s human,” I said. “I understand.”

  “I think you understand too much. You said that you understood why Rat acted the way he did at your house, the little weasel.”

  I twisted in the seat to look at Cooper. “What happened, exactly, with Fox at the hospital? What made you so angry at him?”

  “He acted very poorly.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “He wasn’t at all concerned about you.” That didn’t sound so bad, but then Cooper exploded. “He didn’t care that you almost died, that you were so injured, that you needed him. He talked about how worried he was about his safety, what if he had been in the house too and he had gotten hurt? And he talked about having a plastic surgeon consult, because they had to ‘fix’ you.”

  That was what the delivery guy had said today. I nodded.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” Cooper continued. “We told him to get the hell out, and then he had the nerve to ask us for money so he could go to a hotel because there was blood on the floors and the walls of the house. Your blood.” He blew an angry breath. “It didn’t seem to matter to him what that had meant for you, rather than what it meant for him. That’s why I don’t like him.”

  “Oh.”

  “He’s selfish. Reid told me that he lived off you for years, not paying rent, using your house as his party palace.”

  “He did help around the house some. But I see your point. I can understand why you’d be angry with him.”

  “But you’re not?” Cooper’s voice rose in disbelief.

  “Well, that’s Fox. He’s very concerned about himself. That was why he was using Corrie that way. I thought about it a lot, and I realized that it didn’t occur to him that he was using her, it didn’t bother him, because he was only looking at it from his own perspective. That she could help him, somehow.” That she was a person, with a heart, hadn’t registered or been important to him.

  “Corrie.” Cooper bit out her name.

  “Are you angry at her, too?”

  “You’re not,” he said. “Even in the hospital, you were saying that it wasn’t Corrie’s fault.”

  “I did? I don’t remember telling you that.”

  “It was when the police were there. They were trying to get information out of you and you kept telling them not to be angry at Corrie. You were trying to say that she wasn’t the one to blame.”

  “It’s true. She tried to stop him. I remember that part. She told him to leave me alone.” And someone had been screaming, but I still wasn’t sure if it had been Corrie or if it had been me.

  “She didn’t call the police, Ione.” His voice throbbed with fury. “She didn’t call an ambulance. She left you there, bleeding. What if I hadn’t—” He stopped again. “It could have turned out differently if I hadn’t come. Maybe she didn’t deal the blows, but she didn’t stop them.”

  “She was afraid of him.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t forgive her like that. She should have done something. Anything. After you had opened your house to her, found her and tried to help her, she led him to you. As far as I’m concerned, she should be arrested, too.”

  My head was pounding. Cooper was probably right, and I had been wrong about Corrie, also. “But they haven’t found her. Maybe he hurt her. Maybe she needs help right now, like I did.” I rubbed my temples and closed my eyes.

  He looked over at me. “I’m going to talk about something else.”

  I opened my eyes to look at him and I put my hand on his on the steering wheel. “No, you should get it out. It’s better for you to talk,” I reminded him. “Remember? Having an open heart?”

  “You, too. You told me last night that you were scared, but you would
n’t tell me why.” He let go of the wheel to hold my hand. “I can guess, but it might feel better to talk about it, right?”

  “I don’t know how to say it, because I don’t know what it is, exactly,” I said, and my voice rasped a little. “I’m scared sometimes of him. I didn’t dream after it first happened, but now I’ve started again, and I have nightmares about him. There’s that, but also more, but I don’t know what it is because I can’t seem to figure things out. I feel like there’s a cloud over people, and me, and I can’t see anyone clearly.” I just wanted to be able to see things like I used to.

  “I think that cloud will clear.” He pressed my hand. “I know it will, but you need more time.”

  I looked at the window again, staring past my reflection, at the hot city pavement passing under the wheels of the car, and I held on to Cooper’s hand as hard as I could.

  ∞

  Opening a box with one hand was harder than it looked.

  Getting it dragged inside had been a project enough, because after giving it a try with one arm, I had ended up putting my butt against it to move it that way. I had slid it backwards as I pushed with my legs until I had walked it inside. Now I sat still for a moment and let the air conditioning cool me, wafting across the ointment, before I tried to attack the heavy-duty cardboard and industrial staples again.

  “Ione?” a voice called from outside, then Augusta’s auburn hair appeared in the small window at the top of the door. “Good God, are you always oiled up and naked?” The locks clicked open with her keys. “We have to come inside, we’re melting out here.”

  I pulled on my old button-down. “I’m wearing underwear,” I informed her as I undid the chain and quickly punched in the alarm code. I had taped a paper with the code on it to the wall above the keypad, which both Karis and Cooper had told me was a bad idea, but I had to do something. The security company had already called more than 10 times with false alarms because I couldn’t find where I had written it down.