Sacred Sins

by C. D. Reiss

  She didn’t know. She spent too long thinking about her answer.

  Too much had happened already. I couldn’t untangle it all.

  With nothing else to say to my sister, I walked away to find Drew.

  “I won’t be undermined,” Sheila called out. “In five years, I’ll be running this show. It could have been you, but you took off to New York. So it’s me.”

  “Take it, Sheila. But do the job.”

  “You can’t just stroll back in here and start breaking shit,” she said.

  “I can break shit from New York too.”

  She stormed off to the house, trying to look as if she was together, but I’d stepped on her toes and bruised her ego. She was too emotional for this job.

  * * *

  I went to find Drew. I needed to share space with him. Feel his presence near me. I could deal with the tangled insanity of my family if he was close. My father had been in a relationship with a girl one third his age. My mother had had an abortion to either spite him or shield the family. I didn’t know who or what to protect. My normal life? My son? My brother? The sisters who were bound to be affected?

  I was falling down a rabbit hole and only Drew could catch me. He was the North Star. The skies spun, but he was still and steady. The point of connection between myself and the rest of the world.

  He wasn’t by the pool or watching television. I was on the way up to our room when the heavy wooden door to my father’s study slid open.

  Drew came out. My father was leaning against the edge of his desk.

  “Hey,” I said. “I was look—”

  I couldn’t finish. Not with Drew’s eyes wide with terror, dry with a drain of emotion.

  In the study, Declan Drazen didn’t move to follow or greet me.

  “What happened?” I whispered.

  “Nothing, sweetheart,” Drew said.

  He needed to be attended. If I let him simmer, he’d say things he shouldn’t. I put my hand on his arm and tried to look him in the eye, but he turned away.

  I looked at my father. “Daddy?”

  “We can’t talk man to man, Margaret?”

  “He wants me to make an honest woman out of you,” Drew lied. “I told him you’re too honest as it is.”

  Daddy laughed and stood away from the desk. “Indeed you are.” He shifted some things across it. “Indeed you are. I’d like to talk to you for a minute. About your sister.”

  Go, Drew said without saying a word. Permission was in his expression and posture. I love you. I’m fine. He kissed my cheek and went down the hall.

  “He’s quite the character,” my father said.

  “Don’t underestimate him. It’s a mistake.”

  “Easy one to make.”

  I followed Daddy into his office. He closed the wooden pocket doors. The back wall was solid glass overlooking the garden, and the bookcases were filled with expensive first edition novels we’d learned nothing from.

  “I appreciate your help with your sister,” he said just as the gardener shut off the gas blower.

  I wakened to how loud it had been in contrast to the quiet I was about to get used to. “My pleasure.”

  I waited for the but.

  “But I have people on it.”

  “I’m cheaper and I give a shit.”

  He smirked and flicked a speck of broken glass off his sleeve. “You never had to work.”

  “I like working.”

  “You should work for us.”

  “Us?”

  “This family. On the business side.”

  Move back to LA and work with my family. Might as well leave Drew right away. Save the trouble of a protracted breakup. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Something else you should think about.” He leaned on his desk. I wondered if he did it to make himself shorter. At six-four, he was intimidating when he stood straight.

  I sat down to show him I wasn’t intimidated, even if I was. “Okay?”

  “That man. With the tattoos?”

  “The one you were just talking to?”

  “He concerns me.”

  “Why?”

  He gave a little huff and crossed his arms.

  “Dad. I want the truth.”

  “The truth.”

  “Why he worries you.”

  He shook his head as if I were an errant child. “Last Christmas, he took me aside. He was drunk, or at least halfway there.”

  I made an effort to keep my limbs and face relaxed, but there was nothing I could do to keep the nerves at the surface of my skin from tingling.

  “I assumed he was asking for your hand, but alas, he’ll never do that.”

  “What did he say?” I asked tersely.

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “I will. But I have the feeling I’ll need corroboration.”

  “He said, ‘You need to be aware that your daughter and I know.’”

  The tingling went up my neck. “Know what?”

  “I asked him the same question, and he repeated, ‘We know.’”

  My cheeks got hot.

  “Do you have any idea what he’s talking about, Margaret?”

  I lied without even thinking. “He found out how Grandpa O’Drassen made his money and how you’ve built on it.”

  “Should I worry?”

  This was a rhetorical question. Daddy didn’t worry. He took care of business.

  “Probably not. He chased money behind a client who wasn’t paid royalties. The licensee had transactions through DRN Consulting. Which is yours. It passed through a real estate deal and came out clean on the other side.”

  I’d described a standard money laundering operation and Daddy didn’t even blink. He certainly didn’t deny it, but he didn’t admit it either. His stoicism could grate on a girl’s nerves. Hard work and good decisions my ass. The kind of money we had came from decades of duplicitous dealing.

  “Turns out,” I said, “Grandpa had the same kind of business with the Carloni crime family.”

  “They never proved it.”

  “That doesn’t make him innocent.”

  “In America, it does.” He pushed away from the desk, standing to his full height. “Keep his curiosity to a low roar. I don’t want to have to fix him.”

  “What—?”

  Daddy left the room before I could ask what he’d meant by that.

  * * *

  The house was huge enough to lose eight children in the dozens of corners a kid could hide in. A grown man who’d had a conversation with seven layers of meaning could hide just as easily.

  I found Theresa before I found Drew. She was in the side drive with a Prada knapsack and fresh eyeliner.

  “Theresa!”

  She ignored me.

  I’d spent ten minutes skulking around, looking for my boyfriend, and I was in no mood to be ignored. I caught up to her as she set her hand on the door of her Audi, and I grabbed her arm. As if she’d known I was there the whole time, she spun around, shaking me off.

  “Theresa.”

  “Leave me alone!”

  “No. I need to know if you’re all right.”

  “I’m fine. I hate him and I hate Mom and I hate Jonathan.”

  Ice ran through my veins. “Don’t you ever say that.”

  “It’s true.” She set her jaw and blinked away tears, showing more control than I’d seen in some adults.

  “Let me give you a piece of advice.”

  “I don’t need a Dear Margie session.” She tried to open the door, but I leaned on it and held up my right hand.

  “Open pledge.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” I said.

  “I refuse.”

  “You’re not allowed to refuse. That’s the rule.”

  She held up her right hand, but the rest of her body challenged the submission. Leaning on one hip, eyes rolling, jaw misaligned, she was a cartoon of adolescent resistance.

  “Pledge open,” she said through her teeth.<
br />
  We put our hands down and she crossed her arms.

  “That little outburst?” I said. “In the kitchen?”

  “It was a stupid vase.”

  “Fuck the vase, Tee. I’m talking about the tantrum.”

  “Is there a question coming?”

  “I’m not going to ask you what you were trying to achieve. I know the answer.”

  “You’re not supposed to open pledge to lecture me.”

  I stepped closer. I wasn’t above threatening her if that was what it took to get through. She averted her gaze, going from defiant to petulant.

  “Never, ever act weak in front of Daddy. He’ll eat you alive.” She started to object, but silenced herself when I held up my hand. “You acted weak. Acting weak is a tactic to get the opposition to underestimate you. That’s the only excuse to use it, and it wasn’t yours. For as long as you live in this house, you keep your pearls on a string and the clasp in the back. Do you understand me?”

  She moved her gaze back to me, but not in defiance. She tried to see through the wall I’d built around myself. I didn’t know how to let her see that I was sane. She’d have to find the cracks herself.

  “Is that what you do?”

  It wasn’t what I did, but it was what she needed. “Stand straight. Keep your chin up. Act like you’re above it.”

  “Never let them see you sweat?”

  “Unless you want to have your choices made for you.”

  “I have to get out of here,” she said. “My own career. My own life. Like you.”

  She thought I had my own life? I’d done a good song and dance. Wait until they all saw what Margie Drazen having her own life really meant.

  “You will have your own life,” I said. “But only if you keep your shit straight.”

  “Okay, Margie. Okay. I’ll keep it together. I promise.” She held up her hand.

  I mirrored her. “Pledge closed.”

  “Closed.” She grabbed the door handle. “I’d hug you, but I’m still mad at you.”

  I stepped back. “Way to hold a grudge, sister.”

  * * *

  Normalization is the most profound and useful of human survival instincts. We become numb to pain and pleasure at the same rate. Repeat something unique and it becomes ordinary. Pain turns to irritation turns to tedium through the magic of normalization.

  Maybe normal was what we were. Maybe normal was Drew and me living in the same apartment, being in love, fucking on the regular. Maybe normal was having meals together, kissing each other before we went work, watching TV on the couch.

  Normal was me that Christmas, looking for Drew. Finding him in the Drazen wine cellar, where—years before— we’d realized Jonathan was mine. Taking the bottle out of his hands was my normal—the long-suffering mate of a man too attached to his drink.

  In a Beverly Hills hotel, I walked him the suite door. I didn’t know if he was trying to follow the swerves and swirls in the carpet pattern, or if he was in a constant battle with the rotation of the earth. Right, left, right, left, crossing one leg over the other in a dance that would’ve been impressive if it didn’t make me wonder if he’d fall on his face.

  He took his key out of his pocket and tried to slip it in the door. He missed once, he missed twice. Before a frustrating and embarrassing third attempt, I snapped the card out of his hand, slid it into the slot, and got us into our suite.

  When he wanted to fuck, things really stopped being normal.

  “Stay still,” I said as I pulled his shirt over his head.

  He tried to get at mine, but I slapped his hands away. That simple movement made him lose his balance, and he tipped to the left, crossed his right foot over, put his hand on the dresser, and managed to keep himself relatively upright.

  I went for his pants. He slapped my hand away. I was sober, so it wasn’t such a big deal for me. It was almost normal.

  “Do you want me to help you get undressed or not?”

  He unbuttoned his fly. “You don’t need to treat me like a child.”

  I folded my arms. “Stop drinking like a frat boy.”

  He continued as if I hadn’t said anything, getting his own damn pants off. “Not like… your fucking family. I can’t watch them do this to themselves… no more holidays here. Not another fucking holiday with your fucking family.”

  He had no idea how irritating his family was. His aunts, uncles, and cousins were so nice. I wanted to punch each and every one of them in the face. If any of them ever had an edge, it had been smoothed over by sweet, genteel Scandinavian manners. The only relief had been his brother-in-law who belonged to a motorcycle club. He could at least carry on a conversation about something besides the weather or the best route between the house and church.

  What kind of person complained about that? What kind of person complained about a family being normal?

  Drew stepped out of his pants and left them on the floor. He had a bone to pick, and I knew this guy. Drunk or sober, he was gonna pick that shit clean.

  “None of you can say a fucking thing to each other without meaning twenty other things, and you expect me to decipher which of those twenty things I’m supposed actually respond to?”

  “You confuse inference and implication.”

  “I may have had one too many, but don’t throw your high horse bullshit around right now.”

  “Maybe you should go to bed.”

  “And that kid, that sharp little brat, being raised in that fucking family. Your fucking father…”

  “Stay away from him and you’ll be fine.”

  “Your father knows, and he thinks you don’t know. And he looks at me like I’m a fucking pushover. Like I gave you away. Like I pawned you off, or worse, that I couldn’t control you.”

  “That was sixteen years ago!”

  “It was yesterday. It was yesterday I fucked a girl so young that her parents could send her away.”

  He didn’t usually get to the point so quickly, and that was always the point. His guilt for loving me when I was so young. I kept telling them it was all right. I kept telling him he’d more than made up for it. But it’s that nice person guilt. He was raised by nice people, to be a nice guy and not do things that aren’t nice, like fuck young girls.

  He rubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes like a little boy, and I wondered if I was the one who’d fucked somebody too young for me.

  I took him by the wrists and pulled him down. “Drew, you need to go to sleep. Tomorrow you can tell me what you and my father were talking about.”

  “I hate your family.”

  “I know. But don’t you ever, ever hate Jonathan.” I made my voice so saccharine sweet, I could’ve been presenting him with a birthday cake. “Because I’ll leave you so fast your dick will snap off.”

  He didn’t sober up as much as get a little clarity. It didn’t last.

  “I don’t hate Jonathan.” He almost said it without slurring.

  “Good.” I cupped his face. “Because I love you.”

  He patted my shoulder, brushing by me to make his way to the bedroom. I hadn’t wanted to fuck when we came in and I still didn’t want to. But I was left in the hotel room feeling as if we had unfinished business. Something that was supposed to happen before he went into the bathroom and closed the door.

  When I heard the click of the door and the shower running, I knew what was missing, but it was too late to ask for it, and I’d never had to before.

  He hadn’t said he loved me back.

  That was not normal.

  The situation called for an hour on low simmer, covered. Remove cover at bedtime, stir. Raise heat. Bring to boil. Salt to taste. Serve.

  Instead, my phone rang. It was Sheila. She was exhausting, but I picked up the phone anyway.

  “Everything’s fine,” I said without offering a greeting. I didn’t want to fight with her. She could drive the entire Drazen operation in the ground or become queen. I didn’t care.

  The shower sput
tered out. I wanted a chance to catch Drew before he boiled over.

  “You heard?”

  “Heard what? I’m here.”

  “Where?”

  We’d crossed signals and if I told her “where,” the crossed lines would turn into a knot of misunderstanding.

  “Nowhere. What did you call to tell me?”

  “If you know already, I’m not repeating it.”

  Releasing a cloud of steam, Drew opened the door with a towel around his waist and old tattoos covering his chest. The towel was low enough to expose the V still at his hips, and the tattoos were vivid enough to remind me of the sexy fucker with the guitar-string callouses on his fingers.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I was…”

  I pointed at the phone and mouthed “Sheila” with rolled eyes. He’d react poorly to my being on the phone with my family minutes after we’d fought about them.

  Because they took over. They encroached. They expected me to jump at the drop of a hat and I filled expectations like a force of nature filling a vacuum.

  “Margie?” Sheila was getting impatient. “Are you there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Never mind,” Drew said, whipping off his towel. “Forget I said anything.”

  “No… I…” Between my sister with her gossip and my man about to put clothes on, I had only one choice.

  “I have to go,” I said to Sheila.

  “I’ll see you there.”

  “Don’t get off,” he said. “I mean, for what? So another one of them can call you in fifteen minutes?”

  “Wait…” I held my hand up to him. “See me where?”

  “Or this.” Drew got his pants on. “So you can meet—”

  “The hospital,” she said.

  “With another one of them to not say anything—”

  “The hospital?”

  As soon as I said that, Drew shut up as if I’d dropped an anvil on his head.

  “You didn’t know?” Sheila said.

  For the love of Jesus Christ on a unicycle, I wanted to punch her in the face. Drew stepped into his pants without resentment or unspoken accusation.

  “Obviously not,” I said, meeting his eyes across the room. The bitterness between us was utterly gone, but the exhaustion remained.

  “Jonathan,” Sheila said. “He tried to commit suicide.”