by C. D. Reiss
“Will you go to New York with me today and never come back?”
“I told you. I’ll meet you there.”
He stood, holding his guitar at his side. “Then extraordinary is defined as unexpected and self-defeating.” He put the guitar in the case and snapped it closed. “Also manipulative. Come home now, or I’m not going to be there when you get back.”
“I won’t be blackmailed.”
“You’re used to it.” He waved his hand with that palm up, indicating the entirety of my family. “Maybe it’s the only way to get through to you.”
“Don’t you ask me to leave Jonathan.”
“You can’t help him. I’ve removed your power to do so. Now either I remove myself so you can try to protect him without me or I remove you to protect you. We can’t have both. And Cin? Just to be perfectly clear, we’re not living within driving distance of this house. Ever.”
He meant it. This was a line in the sand. No tide would wash it away.
A fist pounding on the door stopped us.
“Margie!” It was Theresa.
“What?”
“Daddy wants you to go with him to the lawyers.”
It was a strategy meeting about Fiona and Jonathan. The press. The spin.
“In a minute,” I called without moving.
“He said the car is here.”
“I said in a minute!”
“Whatever.” Her footsteps scurried away into nothing.
Drew nodded. “You’d better go.”
“Wait for me,” I said, looking out the window. A cab waited. A long black car was beside it in the driveway, my father at the door.
“Is that your cab?” I asked.
“It’s ours.”
“Just wait.”
“One day,” he said, picking up the case, “you’ll see I’m doing you a favor.”
“I need you. You can’t.”
“Choose. You need your family or me. You can’t have both. Don’t you see? The best thing I can do for you is save you from them or let you do things his way. Us being together isn’t possible. He’ll never let it happen with me knowing about Jonathan.”
He was right. I hated him for it, but not as much as I loved him.
“Fight for me, Drew.”
“I am fighting for you. Maybe one day you’ll see it. I’m fighting harder than I’ve ever fought for anything.”
“I can’t choose.”
He dropped his hands from my face. “You already have.”
* * *
Drew waited at the open door of the cab as the driver put his bags in the trunk. I was at the point of a triangle, equidistant from the cab and the black car.
Drew was really going to make me choose.
After all our years together, he couldn’t wait a few days. But I knew as well as he did that we weren’t talking about days or a week. We were talking about how we chose to live our lives.
Reality be damned, I was still mad.
“Margaret,” my father said from inside the limo.
The man I called the love of my life didn’t make a move one way or the other to convince me I should go with him. He was leaving it up to me.
I didn’t ask myself what I wanted. I didn’t have to. Spite and anger could push buttons rational thought wouldn’t touch. My choice was made out of love, but it felt more like bitterness.
Because… how dare he? Knowing what he knew. Being who he was. How dare he ask me to leave Jonathan?
The cab driver slammed the trunk shut. Drew didn’t move.
“Goodbye, Indy,” I whispered. He didn’t hear me. He’d need to see my actions, not hear my words.
I got into the car, next to my father. The door was shut behind me.
“Where is he going?” Dad asked, referring to Drew.
“Home.”
He nodded. Wordless approval. Fuck him.
“I’m going back to New York tonight,” I said, testing the waters. Maybe if I said it, I’d do it.
“Jonathan just needs a good talking to. He needs something to do with his time besides get moony over a crazy, deluded girl.”
“Who you were sleeping with too apparently?”
Daddy swallowed and looked in a corner for half a second. I’d taken him by surprise. I had the upper hand for a single moment. I didn’t care about his infidelity with a seventeen-year-old. It was old news. I had something older to use in that rare moment.
“I talked to Drew,” I said. “He told me everything.”
Dad smirked, and like that, my moment was over. “I doubt that.”
“I want you to understand, we know what you did to me. What you did to Mom. And especially Jonathan. Especially him.”
“What I did? I gave your mother the son she always wanted and I gave my son a life.”
Was he admitting it? I was taken aback by the idea that he’d cop to the truth, but he didn’t stop there.
“You weren’t keeping him,” Daddy continued. “He had a stable family instead of a fifteen-year-old single mother who didn’t know who the father was.”
“Fuck you.” My growl had sixteen years of hurt and rage behind it.
From his face, my father thought it was cute. “I don’t expect you to thank me. But I did everyone a favor. You. Your mother. Jonathan.”
“They don’t know. It’s not a favor if they’re ignorant.”
He leaned into me and spoke with a conversational tone that made a lie of the seriousness of his words. “That is the favor. And if you tell them, you’ll do more harm than good. You know it’s true. And if I ever believe your boyfriend—or whatever you call him—gets it in his head to contravene the kindness I’ve done, I’ll do whatever I have to do to stop him.”
A threat uttered in a solemn tone can be dismissed as posturing. Daddy wasn’t posturing. He sounded as if he was talking about the weather.
“If you touch him…” I wasn’t as good at making light of a threat. “If anything happens to him, you’re going to be very, very sorry.”
I should have had the upper hand again, but he met my stare with his own unwavering gaze as if I were reciting the lines of a closing argument he’d already prepared for. He was on the offense. Instead of denying the worst or backing out of his threat, he doubled down on how much he could hurt me.
“Stratford was a drug addict. What’s Andrew’s poison? Drink? You’re going to blame me if anything happens to him, too?”
“Test me, Daddy. Just try to test me.”
He sat back, looked out the window. No one I’d ever threatened had ever seemed less defensive. Whatever I expected, he did the opposite. I could learn from him. I could learn a lot.
So could Jonathan. Given the right grooming, my son could turn into my father.
That would be my fault too.
“You’re under stress.” His play at compassion proved my point. Whenever I expected him to turn left, he veered right. “It’s been a hard trip, and we’re putting a lot on you.”
“Don’t placate me.”
He fixed his collar and flicked a spot of dust off his cuff.
I could still go back. Never see any of them again. Start a family from scratch. Just Drew and me. Weren’t my promises to him at least as important as my promises to Jonathan?
They weren’t.
If I was going to do what I’d said, then I was doing it one hundred percent.
The car pulled up behind the lawyers’ building on Wilshire. Valets scurried across the red brick drive to open the doors.
I was under stress. And they were putting a lot on me. All true. But I got out of the car determined not to be soothed or manipulated. I got out with a plan.
The doorman held open the glass door, but I didn’t go through.
When my father met me on the other side of the car, I spoke quietly but firmly, standing my ground until I was done. “Here’s the deal. I stay, but on my terms.”
Dad folded his hands in front of him. “Out with it.”
“Your chi
ldren are getting older and you’re losing control. Stuff’s going to start slipping. I know where our money comes from, and Carrie’s starting to find out from that man you made her marry. Sheila’s incurious, but she’s not stupid. You’re five years from going to prison or losing everything. I’m going to keep that from happening.”
“How?”
“You’re going to carefully lose it all.”
He tilted his head as if my moving to a lateral subject had gotten his attention. “Carefully? How does one carefully lose everything?”
“One makes shitty bets and uses the losses to hide assets.”
He nodded in appreciation. “You learned a lot in New York.”
“From now on,” I continued, “I know every pie we’ve got our fingers in. I manage the money, and I keep the secrets. You leave Drew alone, and you stop trying to make Jonathan the fucking scion.”
“You want the keys to the kingdom?”
“I demand them.”
The doorman let go of the handle, swinging our reflection into the rectangle of glass.
“You’ve turned from a worthless whore into a formidable woman,” he said as if it was high praise. “I guess I have Andrew to thank for that.”
“No. This is all on you.”
I walked to the doors so he wouldn’t see me shaking. I wasn’t sure if I’d avoided being manipulated or if I’d walked into a trap.
* * *
Drew was gone.
I gave him long enough to fly, land, and walk in the door. I called our co-op. I got his voice on the machine.
You’ve reached the McDrazens. We’re either out or ignoring you. Leave a message after the tone. If this is a legal emergency, beep us and we’ll call you back.
“Drew,” I said. “Indy. If you’re there, pick up. We have to talk.” I waited. He didn’t pick up. “Indiana Andrew McCaffrey. I am not fucking with you. This is it. If you can’t coexist with the people who raised me, then maybe this is over. But you should be man enough to pick up the phone.” Nothing. “Fine. It’s for the best.”
I put the receiver down and stared at it. Got ready for bed. Tried to read a book.
What had I done?
Made a deal with the devil. Taken on a criminal empire to protect my son. Given my life with both hands, convinced it was my decision.
It was never my decision. I had been built to lie and manipulate. It was in my genes. I’d avoided it by force of will, but when Jonathan tried to take his own life, my will was broken and the real me spilled out.
At one in the morning, I called again.
The message was new.
You’ve reached Margaret Drazen. Leave her a message after the tone. To reach Andrew McCaffrey, please call Franklin, Devon, and Milch during business hours.
I hung up without leaving a message. He was there. Right there. Probably listening with a bottle of something amber in his hand.
I opened the patio doors and let the salt air and crashing waves give me advice. The wind told me to ignore him and let him call me when he was ready. The waves advised an immediate one-way plane ticket. Neither had a middle way.
At eight eastern, I called his office at Franklin, Devon, and Milch to find that he’d taken the week off. They said he was coming back. I knew better.
I called our place again. Listened to his voice. The tone. The seconds of silence.
“Drew,” I said into the tape, going onto the patio where the wind flipped my hair and the tide beat a rhythm against the shore. “You have to be back by now. If you’re packing, you need to stop and pick up the phone. Please. I’m begging you. I don’t beg. You know I’ve never begged in my life.” I bent myself in two as if I were on a crashing plane. “Please. Let’s figure it out. You can live here with me. You can make music like you should be. We can be together and I can protect Jonathan. Please. Talk to me. I’m lost here. I don’t know what I’ll become if you go. Please don’t leave me.”
I waited, but he didn’t pick up. So I begged again, breathed, waited.
The machine ran out of tape and cut me off.
That was the end.
4
LOS ANGELES - 2013
Some things get better with time. Old wounds and cheese, for instance. Trees. Coral reefs. Coal turned to diamonds and dinosaur shit turned to oil.
Time fermented value into the worthless and transformed the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Time also broke down memory into component parts. I could remember Drew’s singing but not his speaking voice. I remembered his scent, his smile, and sometimes his taste. I remembered more from our first months together than anything that happened after we moved in together.
Mostly, Jonathan reminded me of Palihood and the two men I couldn’t choose between. For a while, he was the connective tissue between who I became and what I’d lost. He was passionate about everything. Curious about history and business, fanatical about art. He loved music and painting deeply, but decided he was a patron, not a participant.
I watched him but never told him what he was to me. As long as he was all right, I wasn’t even tempted. He graduated from Stanford, went to Wharton for his MBA, played baseball, had girlfriends, and when he discovered the Drazen Group was broke—a lie my father and I had created to put the family under the radar—he pitched a way to get us back into the black.
He seemed okay, so I was okay. The status quo was a magical place where time cracked memory into a few fleeting thoughts, wearing down their edges until they were frictionless ball bearings in the wheels of life.
There were always problems. Love was never easy for any of us. The Drazens were trouble, but nothing I couldn’t manage. Until Jonathan grew up and took over some of our real estate holdings, there wasn’t much on paper, so we weren’t an appealing target for investigation or media coverage.
One Christmas Eve, soused and relaxed, Jonathan sat with me on the deck of Sheila’s house, overlooking the wine-dark winter sea. It was late. Everyone was in bed or lounging in their own corner. I had a blanket wrapped around me, and we had a bottle of scotch on the table between us. His sock feet leaned on the railing.
“I think I see Santa,” I said, pointing at a plane streaking across the sky.
“If I have kids,” he said, “I’m not doing the Santa bullshit. It’s all lies.”
He was almost thirty-one and had a reputation as a guy who went on a sex binge after his divorce as if he wanted to fuck the memory of his wife off his dick.
“You’re having kids?”
“Of course I’m having kids. What did you think?”
“I don’t know. Guess I thought you’d find a woman to do that with.”
The standard jabs usually ended in the standard excuses about time and how there was plenty of it.
This time, he twisted in his chair to face me and held up his hand. “Open pledge.”
Thinking he was going to tell me a secret about a special someone, I put up my hand without question. “Pledge open.”
“Why aren’t you married?”
I nearly choked on my own spit. “Jonathan. Are you serious?”
“There’s nothing wrong with you.” He indicated the body under the blanket, landing on my face. “You’re nice looking. Smart. If you were gay, that would be fine, but you’re not. So what’s the deal?”
My arms stretched tighter around me, making the blanket taut. We were in pledge. Only the absolute truth would do. Had I known he was going to broach this particular subject, I would have avoided putting up my hand. “I date sometimes. But I’m not easy. I’m not…” Dateable? Marry-able? Emotionally attractive? “I don’t defer and I don’t like small talk. I like getting to the point.”
“Fuck or don’t?”
“Sometimes. And that hasn’t turned up anyone worth my time. Also, I don’t really care if I get married or even date. It’s not a priority and men can sense that.”
“What about that guy?” He spun his hand in a circle as if he could draw a specific memory from
the air like cotton candy.
“Which guy?”
“The one from when I was a kid.”
As warm as it was under the blanket, my guts went cold. I barely thought about Drew anymore, but when I did, his presence came from my own head—not someone else’s mouth. “He couldn’t handle it.”
“Handle what? You?”
“You’re being a real pain in the ass.”
“I know.” He didn’t take it back or clarify. He untwisted himself and put his feet back on the railing.
“Us,” I said. “He couldn’t handle us. The family. Dad had him on eggshells half the time, and the other half he drank himself into a state of inconsequence.”
“Did you love him?”
“Jesus Christ, Jon, really?”
“I take that as a yes?”
“Why are you so curious?”
He shrugged and picked his scotch off the table. “I’m self-involved. I want to know if I’ll ever forget Jessica. That’s all.”
“You will.” Talking about his problems made me realize how tense I’d been when I was the topic of conversation. “Can we close pledge?”
He looked at the bottom of his drink. “Do you know what happened to him?”
“Damnit, Jon.”
“You don’t have to tell me. Pledge closed.” He put up his hand then reached for the bottle. “I didn’t know the subject was painful.”
It wasn’t. Not usually. Not even on Christmas, looking out over the blackness of the horizon. It wasn’t pain. It wasn’t regret. It was a dull, humming grief that was as ambient as ocean waves.
“He was a musician,” I said. “He could be anywhere.”
“He taught me how to smoke.”
“He did not.”
“Totally did. Disgusting habit. We both choked. But if I ever wanted to know about something I couldn’t ask Dad, he was my man.”
Wiggling out of the blanket, I picked up my glass and held it out. “Can you pour me, please?”
He poured two fingers and waited with the bottle up while I drank it, burning away the ice in my guts, then he poured me more before putting the bottle down and gazing over the sea.
“Fuck him,” I said. “He left us all.”
He nodded, looking into his drink. His profile was a roadmap of his ancestry. Strat’s nose and the sharply-cut Drazen jawline.