Sacred Sins

by C. D. Reiss

  3

  I blamed myself.

  Would Jonathan have tried to kill himself if I’d been acting like his mother? If he knew his real father? Would he have wished so hard for death if I hadn’t kept my secret from him?

  Wasn’t it his secret too? Had I denied him the desire to live? Did he know, in his gut, that everything was wrong?

  Drew and I packed up our shit to take to the Malibu house. There was no rhyme or reason as to why we left the hotel as a base. We didn’t discuss why we’d want to consolidate our presence. We just did it in a silence broken by only the most mundane matters.

  Did you get everything?

  Can I pack the toothbrushes?

  Will the bellman pick up the bags?

  Should I call a car?

  The hotel room didn’t mean anything to me, but when the door closed for the last time, it clanged a little, and it sounded like something hollow had broken.

  The present became the past.

  “Margie?”

  The reality I’d built was the hollow thing, and that closing door had shattered it.

  My heart was encased in a steel fist. It pounded against the crushing pressure, expanding as the fist tightened, pushing against my lungs.

  “Margie!”

  I couldn’t breathe. My heart was engorged with blood. No space for air. My chest hurt. There was too much in there for a rib cage that couldn’t grow.

  I was on my knees and he was in front of me. My biceps hurt where he gripped them. The pain kept me from falling over completely. I could see every hair on his face. Every web in the blue of his eyes.

  “Cin,” he said as if he wasn’t talking to me but to some shared past where I was stronger. “Breathe. It’s okay. It’ll be okay. Breathe with me.”

  He took an exaggerated breath, inhaling through his mouth and exhaling a second later. Nodding, he did it again, and I followed. One after the other.

  “Good,” he said before continuing. Breathing. I’d been doing it since the day I was born, but forgot how. “Okay. Good. Can you stand?”

  “It hurts too much.”

  “You can.”

  “Can’t. It’s my fault.”

  “Hush. Don’t start saying that to yourself or you’ll believe it. It’s not your fault. None of this mess is your fault.”

  “I ran away.” The fist tightened, letting me know it could come back any time I called it.

  “No.” He caressed my face, moving my hair off my cheeks.

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Yes, Drew, yes, I did. I went across the country so I didn’t have to deal with my son and now look what’s happened. He tried to kill himself.” I yanked his hands off me. “His life is so fucked up he took a handful of pills so he’d die.”

  “Can you imagine if you’d stayed?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “What if you’d told him, when he was eleven, that you were his mother? How was that going to be not fucked up?”

  I stood, straightened my clothes, took a deep but unsatisfying breath that filled only the corners of my lungs. “At least I would have been there.”

  Drew got up, one foot at a time, as if he wanted extend the task. “He has sisters already.”

  “None of them could save him.”

  “And you wouldn’t have either. Come on. Let’s be there now.”

  Every core belief I tried not to think about was tied up in his statement. I couldn’t have saved Jonathan. I would have been as fragile as the rest of my sisters. Whatever power I believed I had was because I’d run. I’d saved myself. I’d abandoned him. I’d left him behind to forget him. To gather strength for myself.

  I’d had the choice to be weak or immoral. There had never been a third option.

  Drew didn’t mean any of those things, nor did I believe them.

  That didn’t make them any less true.

  Drew took my hand. “What I’m saying is—”

  “Don’t abandon him again,” I interrupted. “I have to be there because I can.”

  “Be there now.”

  “Right.” I rubbed my face with my free hand. “Why do you put up with me?”

  “Because I love you, and I know what you need.”

  “You. I need you.” I could breathe again. “Sometimes, I forget him. But sometimes, I wish he was mine so hard I feel like it’s true.”

  “Me too,” Drew said. “Me too. Sometimes I wish we were all one unit. But this is what it is, and he’s going to be okay.” He crouched slightly so he could see my face, as if to make sure he didn’t need to repeat it over and over until it became a fact.

  I took a deep breath and decided to believe him.

  * * *

  Drew was the stable one. He was the steadiness of my breath. The ground under me. He didn’t need me as much as I needed him. Did I assume this because he was all I ever had? Or because it suited me?

  As Jonathan’s suicide attempt soaked into the fabric of my family like a dark stain, I closed myself off. I wasn’t allowed to think of him as anything but my youngest brother whose life wasn’t affected by my choices. I had to lock away the guilt where my mother and sisters couldn’t see it. My relief at his survival was deeper and more self-serving than I could let on, and my powerlessness in arranging his emotional recovery was more painful.

  At Jungco’s, a restaurant in Beverly Hills, Drew had dinner with us but stayed outside the circle of concern. He didn’t seem resentful, but thoughtful and quiet, as if he was observing a change and making a decision.

  Taking his hand, I whispered, “Hey.”

  He sipped his club soda. “Hey. You doing all right?”

  “Yeah. I’m fine.”

  “It’s Monday,” he said.

  I cringed and looked at my watch. Our flight to Greece was long gone. “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugged. “This was more important.”

  Clasping his fingers tightly, I shut out the chatter of my siblings and the clink of dishes. “Thank you.”

  He kissed me gently, with a longing I thought I understood. I thought he yearned for time and attention, and maybe he did. But in the weeks that followed, I figured out the ache behind his kiss was for a family he was giving up on building.

  Right then though, in the back room of Jungco’s, with my parents and three sisters surrounding me, I didn’t see it.

  I should have known him better.

  I should have known myself better.

  When the kiss ended and I opened my eyes, Drew was looking over my shoulder with hard concern. I followed his gaze to my father, who was talking to the waiter.

  “What?” I asked Drew. “Did he say something?”

  “He doesn’t have to.”

  We all went back to the house. Drew didn’t speak of it again. We made love under the sheets with the curtains drawn as if we could ever make a space that was fully ours.

  * * *

  My parents and I left early the next morning to move Jonathan to Westonwood for psychiatric evaluation. Fiona was already there. Jonathan was being admitted. Twenty-five percent of us were institutionalized.

  Jonathan wasn’t on speaking terms with anyone. He was going to be fine. Physically, he was in good enough shape to fail at suicide. Emotionally, we couldn’t tell if he was planning to succeed at another try.

  The admitting room was done in raw teak and dusty blue, which contrasted against his red hair. He slouched in his chair as if he were melting in the heat of insolence. By living through a bottle of pills he’d been given a reprieve, and so had I.

  Our parents and Frances, the administrator, had left with some paperwork, and I was alone with him.

  “They must be negotiating a bulk discount,” Jonathan said, breaking his silence.

  “You’ll have someone here to watch out for you.”

  “Fiona?” He shook his head. “She’s the one who needs watching.”

  I sat across from him, leaning as close as I dared. “
Jon. What happened?”

  “Fuck this. That’s what happened. Fuck all of it. Do you know what he did? Our father?”

  “This is about that girl. Rachel?”

  He tapped the wooden arm of the chair, alternating his right thumb and pinkie. He didn’t look like a careless teenager. He looked like an adolescent lion bursting into fierce adulthood. “You keep thinking that. Sure. It was over a girl. If that’s the story everyone’s going to believe, then fine.”

  “It’s normal to be upset when someone you love dies.”

  “I know that. And thanks. Yeah, I’m upset. But when I thought about him.” He stopped tapping long enough to jerk his thumb toward the door and the people behind it. “I loved her. But he set me up with her to make a man out of me. Or keep me close. Or keep her close. Or I was Humbert’s cover.”

  I smiled and looked at my hands when he quoted Nabokov. Funny how we all parsed our father’s tactics but never actually understood them.

  “I snapped,” he continued, regaining his fingers’ rhythm. “I feel stupid. Now I’m going to have to explain it a hundred times.” He bent his neck until he was looking at the ceiling. “And right now? In that other room? He’s setting it up so no one believes me. One day, Margie. One day I’m going to get him back for this.”

  “Jon.”

  “Don’t. Please, Jesus, Margie. Just don’t.”

  “I’m not going to try to talk you out of revenge, or retaliation, or whatever you’re thinking.”

  He sat up straight. I was jarred when Strat’s green eyes looked right into mine. He was intense, this boy. He was a mighty force who had turned his power back on himself. Given the wrong set of circumstances at too young an age, he’d do it again.

  “What then?” His question was a challenge.

  “Your time will come. I want you to live for it. Survive for it.”

  “You’re going to help me?”

  The question knocked the sister out cold so the mother could speak without thinking. “Yes.”

  “I’m not living with him.”

  “Yes, you are. When you get out of here, you’re going to be good. And you’re going to wait.”

  He shoved his body against the back of the chair as if he wanted to straighten it out. “How long?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The ball of energy wouldn’t be contained. He stood. Paced to the bookcases and back. He’d become a man while I wasn’t looking, with wiry muscles around a taut male frame. He was bigger across the shoulders than Strat. His torso was longer. And unlike his biological father, he was prone to despair.

  “You’re the only one I trust,” he said. “You’re the only one who can stand up to him. You’re the only one.”

  I was.

  I knew it.

  My mother was too weak. Our sisters too distracted. I was the only one who loved Jon enough to self-destruct, even if he didn’t know why.

  * * *

  Drew and I were in the attached guest house beside the rose garden. Two stories with two bedrooms were fully furnished to accommodate any taste. The kitchen had new china and silverware. The sheets were changed even if no one was there. It was a glut of space that would make a New Yorker cringe.

  I found Drew in the bedroom. He hung up the phone when he saw me.

  “How is he?” he asked.

  “Intense. Pissed at himself. Pissed at Dad. He’s pissed and intense.”

  “Reasonably.”

  “It’s reasonable as long as he doesn’t take it out on himself again.”

  Drew tossed his guitar case on the bed and unlatched it. “And how are you?”

  He pulled the acoustic out of the case. He took it everywhere. When he didn’t drink to escape, he noodled on the guitar. Some of my fondest memories took place in our apartment as I worked on briefs with him strumming in the background.

  “I’m okay.” I sat in the window seat with my back to the garden. I wanted him to play, but he sat with his instrument on his knee.

  “You’re okay,” he repeated, turning the tuning knobs. “Why don’t I believe you?”

  “Because you’re normal.”

  He laughed with a strum. I was glad he had a guitar in his lap and music at his fingers. Maybe he’d be amenable to what I was about to suggest.

  “Can you play the thing you played when I had the flu?” I asked.

  “Sure.” He twisted some knobs, and after a few test strums, he played a melody without words. I’d never seen him write it down, but he plucked out the tune from memory. I was blanketed in the sanctuary of his love.

  “Thank you.” I put my feet on the seat. “ Jonathan hates Daddy.”

  “All boys hate their father at that age.”

  His comment was true but rote. It applied to normal people in average circumstances.

  “I promised him something,” I said.

  “What was it?”

  “That—when he’s ready—I’ll help him go up against my father.”

  The rhythm of the music slowed as if Drew was distracted, then picked up again. “That’s dangerous.”

  “It’s fine. I think I can soften it if I’m here to watch them.”

  I braced for a reaction, but he kept his eyes on the strings. Neither denials nor rejections were forthcoming. Naively, I took that as consideration of my suggestion that we stay in Los Angeles. Wisely, I changed the subject.

  “What did he say?” I asked. “Yesterday. When you were in my father’s office?”

  “I think you need to ask what I said.”

  “What did you say?”

  He tapped the body of the guitar and looked at me. “I’m sorry.”

  “You said you were sorry? For what?”

  “I’m apologizing to you.” A minor chord rang from the strings. He’d shown me the difference between major and minor chords, and it was one of the only things he’d ever taught me about music that I could hear.

  “Why?”

  “You told me not to be emotional with him. You warned me. It really did give him the upper hand.”

  I busied myself with the curtains, opening them to the back patio. The sun shot through the glass. The ocean slammed into the shore below.

  “I told him,” Drew whispered in a space between sounds.

  “Told him what?”

  “That I know.”

  I knew exactly what he was talking about. There was a finality to it, yet I couldn’t accept it with just three words. “Know what?”

  “That he stole your child.”

  Another minor chord hit loudly.

  I put my hand over my mouth, speaking through it. “What did he say?”

  “He asked if it was mine.”

  “And you said?”

  “It wasn’t. But that I would have raised him as mine. And I would have loved him and you just the same.”

  The song changed. It was no longer a comfort when I was sick or hurting. He’d changed it into something threatening.

  My hand shook against my chin. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Yeah. Probably. You warned me, but I couldn’t take it. Watching you get hurt over and over. I figured if he knew, it would pull the rug from under him, but it was like nothing. It was like I gave him ammunition. I’ve dealt with some of the most powerful guys in the music industry and their shark lawyers. I’ve never felt so in over my head.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He neither confirmed nor denied. Like the CI-fucking-A. He did say that of the two of us, he was glad Strat was… how did he put it? Out of the picture.”

  That sunk in. My father didn’t give out information like that without a purpose. “Oh, my God.”

  “He said he was very particular about who his daughters were with and you’d gotten away from him earlier than he’d expected. He said you taught him a lesson about when to intervene. He’d been too late with you apparently. And that was why extraordinary action had to be taken. Those were his words. Extraordinary action.”

 
He plucked his strings in the rhythm of the words “extraordinary action.”

  “You have to go back to New York,” I said.

  “Yes, we do.”

  I kneeled in front of him. “No. Just you for now. I have to clear this up.”

  “I’m not going without you.”

  “Indy.”

  “Cin.” He called me by the name I’d claimed when we met. “I’m not abandoning you here.”

  “I’ll meet you back home.”

  He didn’t answer, just moved his fingers over the strings. I hadn’t forgotten that I wanted to stay. On the contrary, the knowledge that I had to pushed against my ability to hear him.

  “Home,” he said, gently slapping the body of the guitar. “Have you thought maybe this is your home? And it will be until you cut yourself off from these people?”

  “You’re my home.”

  He cupped my face like he had when I’d fallen apart in the hotel hallway. “Cinnamon, you’re the love of my life. I can’t imagine being without you. But he said Strat had no business touching a girl your age and he got what he deserved.”

  “He’s one to talk.”

  “He’s right. I’ve been watching this whole thing from the outside, knowing how long I’ve loved you. Sometimes I look at you here and I see that girl and I think how fucked up it all was.”

  “It was the eighties,” I said. “And you aren’t that much older.”

  He ran his thumb along my cheek without laughing it off.

  If I couldn’t comfort him with stock answers, I’d comfort him with confidence. “I won’t let him hurt you. I’ll kill him.”

  “What about you? What about your hurt?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I can’t live thinking I stole your life.”

  I held his hand against my face. “I gave it to you. With both hands and a bow on top.”

  “I know.”

  That was it? I know? I dropped my hands away and leaned back, still kneeling. “What’s the point of this conversation, Drew?”

  “Ah, she’s back.” Quick strum. “Welcome. I don’t know the point. I’m laying my cards out. Pair of deuces. Every penny in the middle of the table. Down to my underpants. It’s time for extraordinary action.”

  “Define extraordinary.” I stood.