by Reiss, CD
“But I didn’t. Your father’s uncle died, and he had to figure out how to run Crowne. We made a deal. I trusted him to keep his promises. I left school for one year. He got trained in the London office, and I went with him. Holed up in that drafty old house in St. Luke’s.” She shuddered. “I had the baby there, and the agency whisked it away.”
“We have a brother?” Colton asked.
“Or sister,” Lyric shot back.
“Apparently,” Byron said, as if this seventh child was both threat and curiosity.
They were all focused on the existence of a sibling and not the marriage of Ted and Doreen Crowne.
Our parents were perfect. They’d done everything right. They loved each other fully and had built a life on mutual trust and affection.
“When I cried,” Mom continued, “Ted held me. When I lashed out at him, he didn’t even blink. I didn’t love him when I married him, and that’s the truth.” She waited for us to digest that fucking tidbit. “But by the time we came back to the States, I did. With all my heart I loved him, and still do.” She put her hand on mine. “So what I want you to know? Love grows where the soil is rich. And sometimes… well, you know what fertilizer is made of.”
“Love grows in shit?” Colton asked. “What a fucking story to make that point in.”
My parents couldn’t have been built on a lie. Or circumstance. Or convenience.
That couldn’t be true, and yet… it was. Everything I believed, everything I wanted, everything I’d modeled my future on was a lie.
“Where’s the kid, Mom?” Byron’s even tone demanded an answer.
“I don’t know,” Mom said. “It was a closed adoption. All I know is, they’re set financially for life.”
“So,” I said. “This is what it feels like to be lied to.”
“Sucks, don’t it?” Lyric said.
“It’s not as bad as lying to yourself,” Mom said directly to me, as if she knew something I didn’t about what I told myself.
She did. She knew everything.
32
ELLA
I peeled off the black dress and stood in the middle of my living space in my underwear.
The studio was huge and empty. A hollow repository for meaningless work created as I fell in love with a man incapable of loving me back.
Another wasted effort.
I wasn’t pushing for unattainable goals anymore. From now on, I was staying in my lane.
Once I found my lane, of course.
Logan wasn’t in it. He wasn’t even on the same freeway. My heart had done something stupid and reckless. Something I should have seen coming a mile away. I’d surrendered more than my body or my bed. I’d surrendered my soul to him, and he did exactly what I should have expected. He threw it away because he knew his lane. He knew how wide it was, how fast he could go, and who had to get off at the next exit.
I was tired. So tired. My limbs weighed half a ton and my brain had broken under the constant hammer of self-recrimination.
He didn’t call. Didn’t text.
Not that it mattered. What was he going to say that would change who he was or how he saw me?
Nothing. He’d said from the outset he didn’t want a woman who’d nag or push him to love her more than he was capable of loving. He wanted to be what he was without pressure. I wasn’t that.
Sadness crushed me into a tight ball too small for the bed, too tiny for the space, too rigid for change.
I didn’t want to be this way, and I wasn’t. Ella Papillion didn’t hold pain until it ate her alive. She acted out. Stole the ashes. Changed the hanger tape.
I was an alchemist who turned hurt tangible.
Non. Again.
Fine, Daddy. An alchemist who turned pain into art.
Non. Again.
Still in my underwear, I approached the Big Blank. The red enamel was dry, but the gloss made it look wet and fresh, like a new wound in unblemished skin.
After fishing a razor out of my toolbox, I cut the canvas away from the stretch frame along the edges I could reach. The bottom corners curled away. I flipped it horizontal and finished the job, slashing the last inch of the rectangle so hard, I gouged the wood behind it. The canvas folded in on itself, hiding the primed side and leaving the raw linen side up.
I dragged the fabric across the studio and laid it over the cutting table.
The first thing I thought when I spread my hands on the red blotch was how much I wanted to share my plans for the Big Blank with Logan Crowne.
That was when I started crying.
* * *
Morning.
Our time, every day.
Me in fuzzy socks and pajamas and him in his suit.
He’d ask me how I wanted my coffee because it constantly changed. He found that charming and him being charmed meant nothing. Charming women were a dime a dozen when he sat at the head of the table at Crowne.
As a woman, I meant nothing. I was a hammer in his toolbox.
Non. Again.
I was a nail.
Company to keep. A body to use. A valve to release the pressure of his dream job.
Guilt-free, because I’d told him I didn’t have feelings.
My fault? My lie? Sure. I’d take that on. Just add it to the luggage. I had plenty of room inside the hole in my heart.
Round and round, my thoughts found new ways to hurt me. When I stopped crying, my father’s voice would say, Non. Again, and the loop would start until I found just the right length blade to stab myself with.
With a straight razor, I sliced the stiff, primed canvas of the Big Blank into a shape I didn’t need a pattern to reproduce. I knew the curve of the armhole and the length of the shoulder without checking. The Papillion sloper was a part of me, crafted into my myelin, burned into my cells with the blowtorch of Daddy’s approval.
I sewed the shoulders and the sides together. The bodice stood up on its own, a legless, headless form in the middle of my floor with a red splotch over the heart.
Ah! Oui, little peanut.
It was too corny to be compelling, but it married my craft to my creativity, and despite what the artist class would think of it as a piece, it was the statement I needed to make to myself.
My past was my own.
My skills had value.
I was enough. Good enough. Talented enough. Free enough.
Loved enough? I was too hurt to know.
Early in the morning, in the middle of this litany of self-recrimination made worse by lack of sleep, my phone buzzed.
In socks and pajamas, I went to the kitchen counter. The phone was glass side down.
Who else could it be at this hour?
Was he in his kitchen, making coffee?
Did he want to know how I wanted mine?
Non. Again.
I wasn’t charmingly unpredictable any more. I was useless, or worse, a liability.
My eyes ached as if they’d been punched, but they were dry. Tapped. Outta juice.
It buzzed again, rattling against the linoleum surface so hard it tugged at the cord. I caught it before it fell off.
—Ella. We should talk—
—I’m sorry I didn’t text sooner. Dad had a heart attack. He’s fine—
Shit.
I had the desire to reach out to him—not to update him on my life but to comfort him through his.
If I prioritized self-preservation, he’d be shut out until I was ready to talk to him.
But I loved him, the fucker.
How much was I willing to take?
I loved him. Like a fucking idiot, I loved him. I wished I knew how much that mattered. Was it as important as sticking to a decision I knew was right? My whole life, I’d acted out when I felt like it, taken dumb risks out of rage or boredom. I hadn’t made a single, important deliberate choice about my path until I decided to walk away from this man.
I wouldn’t impulsively undo this one thing. Not for love. Not now. Not ever.
But I ca
red about him and the family he’d shut me out of, so I called, and he picked right up.
“Ella?”
“How’s Doreen?” I asked.
He didn’t answer right away, as if I’d caught him off guard by starting the conversation in the middle.
“Fine. She’s sleeping. Dad’s going to be okay. It was mild, as these things go, but scary.”
He sounded tired and flat, and a new kind of pain jabbed me. I wasn’t allowed to soothe him the same way.
“You sound like shit,” I said.
“I’m okay. It’s been a long night.”
“Well, get yourself some rest.”
“Ella.”
I sighed and sat on a kitchen chair. I didn’t want to get roped into this, but as soon as he said my name, I knew I’d be lassoed and hogtied. “What, Logan?”
“I’m sorry about last night.”
“It’s fine. You were just being you. I’m the one making it messy.”
Messy was an understatement. This was supposed to be business and I was four seconds to tears all over again.
“So what do you want to do?” he asked.
I wanted to love him, but when I’d told him that the night before, his silence had been clear.
What I wanted wasn’t an option.
“We can get divorced now. Since everyone knows. If you want.”
The last sentence was an exit ramp. A lifeline. A softball pitch to a home-run hitter.
“What if I don’t want?”
“What would you want then?”
He was supposed to say he wanted me. All of me. Married. Together. Just the way I was. All the messiness and recklessness I had to offer.
“I don’t know.”
“We’re a mess,” I said, dropping onto the bed.
“Yeah. You should get some sleep. You sound tired.”
“That’s the pot calling the kettle silver.”
He gave me one laugh, then a breath. “You modernized a cliché.”
“I did.”
“Well done, star.”
My body relaxed, and my eyes stopped throbbing enough to close. “Yay, me.”
“Yay, you.”
“You can call me if you need me.”
“So can you.”
“Okay.” I was already breathing more slowly. The dull thickness of sleep pushed against the corners of my consciousness.
“I miss you,” he said. “Already.”
Like the tide coming in, oblivion rose and rose, scrambling my words and thoughts into a kind of truth.
“I miss me too.”
33
ELLA
Logan and I were on opposite sides of a dinghy in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight. The boat was sinking and we were looking for holes, but there were none on either side. It was sealed tight and sinking anyway. Just as I thought to look away from my end to check for a hole under the center bench, a chime rang so loudly, I thought God was calling.
The phone was on the pillow, right by my ear. I fumbled for it, clearing my eyes to see who was calling.
Amilcar. I answered to the sound of people laughing, shouting, and music.
“Hello?”
“You sleeping?”
“Was.” Out the window, the western sky was the deep dark blue of sunset. “What’s going on?”
You and Logan are having an amicable breakup.
I covered my eyes. Crying in front of Amilcar wasn’t going to go over well.
“She’s sleeping!” he called to the room.
“Damn!” Liddy said. I heard him take the phone. “Lady of leisure.”
Not for much longer.
“You know how it is.”
“I do, Fance.”
My old name. Before star. Before everything.
“She coming or not?” A woman’s voice from the room. Maybe Irma.
“Where?” I asked, getting my elbows under me. My brain was awake, but my legs hadn’t gotten the memo.
“My place on Echo. The GAC is on, baby. We’re ready-set.”
“When?”
Amilcar grabbed the phone. “Bring your ass over here before this knucklehead opens his mouth on cellular.”
He was always the paranoid one, and rightly so.
“Okay,” I said, finally awake enough to put my feet on the floor. “Coming.”
* * *
I’d had the cab stop at the liquor store on the way. I picked up a bottle of vodka and a bag of lemons, then ran back in for ice.
They always needed more ice.
The little house hummed with music and the laughter and chatter of a few dozen people.
Did I know everyone? Or were there new people?
I walked up to the porch with my loot, and through the door, hoping for no more than a celebration. But I got more than that. I was greeted with exultation and embraces from friends who had known me when I didn’t even know myself.
I was home.
* * *
“This pendejo”—Liddy filled the wet shot glasses from the pitcher with one hand and flicked the other in Amilcar’s direction—“had a bug so deep in his ass like, ‘We have to show Fance, man. She always has these ideas.’ And I was like, ‘Nah-nah, leave her alone.’”
We snapped up the glasses of lemon drop.
“And I did so, what are you complaining about?” Amilcar said.
“To complaining!” I cried.
Seven—maybe six—maybe a dozen and a half glasses clicked mine. The drink slid down my throat as I swayed. There was a puddle on the table, and the room shifted back and forth like a dinghy on the ocean.
“Fuck, I missed you guys.” I side-hugged Irma, who was sitting next to me. “And I’m so happy you’re still wrecking shit. We need to toast.” I grabbed a glass Liddy had filled. “To fucking the system.”
“Slow down.” Amilcar took my glass and downed it, slapping it back on the table. “Your husband can pick you up or no?”
Irma thought she was getting one over on me by filling my glass with water.
Whatever, I was thirsty.
“Fuck him!” The water felt good, but only made me want more. “That stick up his ass? It’s, like, all the way in.” My glass was full, so I drank. “That’s why he stands so straight. True story.”
“Mija,” Irma said, “you tied it up too fast. You got to give him time. Five years at least.”
“Fance is a five-day kinda girl,” Amilcar said. “Then he’s out. Now, me? Five minutes, and I know it’s off or on.”
“You guys! I have to say something! You don’t know, and it’s like… big big big and suuuuper secret. Guerilla secret. Like, I’ll have to kill you and be mad forever, okay?”
Not waiting for a response, I pushed the glasses away and leaned my arms on the table without giving a single shit that I was getting the sleeves wet.
I made eye contact with each of my old friends, trusting them the way I did in high school. “There’s a contract. A trade. It’s not a marriage. Logan Crowne and I are… fake.”
As if I was a TV on Super Bowl Sunday, they all reacted to a touchdown. Raising arms. High-fives. Shouts of “shit,” and “yes,” with Amilcar crying, “I told you,” with his hand out.
“Pay up,” Amilcar said.
Liddy reached into his wallet, head shaking.
“You took bets?”
They didn’t seem to care that I’d lied or held back a secret, and I didn’t know whether to be hurt or happy.
“Girl.” Amilcar folded the twenty. “Who are you? You’re not the type to run off with some dude. Not no-risk Fance. No way.”
“Why would you say that?” I was offended. Maybe they didn’t know me, and that was why they didn’t mind that I’d lied.
“You stayed at that dumb job you hated for how long? Because you were afraid of not inheriting it or something? Meanwhile you coulda worked anywhere?”
“Had me though,” Irma said.
“I figured for love you’d loosen up.” Liddy poured the
last of the lemon drop.
“That cost you twenty.” Amilcar grabbed a glass.
The doorbell rang, and Liddy went to get it.
“Logan thinks I’m wild and crazy,” I whined for reasons my addled brain couldn’t add up. I felt as if I was getting drunker even though I’d been cut off. “Cossa my nose and I guess art or I dunno.”
“Please,” Amilcar said, pouring water into my glass again. “Save it. You’re an old lady inside.”
“Was it a good deal?” Irma asked. “You got the fuck you money?”
“I got the fuck you money, and the fuck me man.”
They laughed, and I toasted with my water. I didn’t think I could explain about the divorce coming sooner than we’d agreed. I didn’t feel articulate enough and I couldn’t find a starting point. Was it high school? Or his father’s ultimatum? Should I even mention that part? It wasn’t my story to tell; it was Logan’s.
“This guy yours?” Liddy asked.
He was talking about the guy he’d brought in. Tall, strong Logan standing by the refrigerator with his arms crossed. Or maybe I was tipsy enough to mistake some random guy with cheeks and jaw as overgrown as an abandoned lot for my husband, who I’d never seen unshaven for a minute the whole time we were living together.
“Nope,” I said. “That guy right there? No. Uh-uh.”
“Sit.” Amilcar kicked a chair toward the man with the beard, who opened his jacket before spinning around and straddling it with his arms on the back.
The wrists. The hands. Could still be my fake husband.
“Thank you,” he said.
Sure sounded like him. And the way he looked at me across the table? Only Logan Crowne could sober me up with his eyes.
“I slowed down enough.” I flicked a glass toward the man with the scruffy chin and wide hands. “I got something to say and I wanna drink to it.”
“Oh, shit,” Liddy said, snapping up the vodka bottle and pouring.
“You’re driving her home, right?” Amilcar asked.
“I’ll get her home.”
I lifted my glass and picked up a lemon wedge. “To Logan Crowne. Who tried to get me to change my name, but wouldn’t change.”
We clicked. I downed the vodka and sucked the lemon. Everyone did the same, except Logan, who waited, watching me before he followed suit, cringing at the bite of cheap vodka. No lemon for him. Just the stare, holding me in place.