by C. D. Reiss
“Neither have yours.”
“You’re still playing,” I said, letting his perception hang unanswered.
“I play for myself. And I write songs under another name. I have a few about you that are still making royalties.”
“They about a woman who changed while you were gone?”
“They’re about a girl.” I let his hands go, but he grasped me gently. “A beautiful young girl I ruined.”
“You misstate the case,” I said. “I ruined you.”
“That goes without saying.”
Slipping my hands out of his, I went back to the safety of my counter.
“You know I loved you,” he said.
“It’s the one thing I never doubted.”
He nodded, looking away. I was mad at him. Mad at myself. So angry with our self-inflicted wounds I couldn’t even think.
And yet, the rage was drowned out by tears of relief. I tried not to blink, but I had to, and they fell down my cheeks. I couldn’t wipe them away before he saw me.
“I’m sorry, Margie.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m so sorry.”
If I didn’t get ahold of myself, he was going to keep apologizing and his regret would make me mad again.
“What did you do after Nashville?” I asked.
“Drank. A lot. Thought about you when I sobered up and then drank again.”
“You could have called.”
“I drank instead. I was…” He squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’ve been sober two years and not a day goes by I don’t have to choose between thinking about you or draining a bottle of NyQuil.”
I laughed. “That’s…”
“It’s disgusting. Trust me.” He was laughing a little too. “But when there’s nothing else in the house?”
“You drink the whole thing?”
“No. I just think of you.”
I wiped my eyes again. “Stupid man.”
The hardest thing I ever did was not hold him. I fought the urge with words of comfort carefully disguised as an insult. Like the man he was and always had been, he understood the intention.
“I was a coward. I should have come back to LA and fought for you. I let you dump me on an answering machine.”
I remembered how the outgoing message had changed between calls. “Did you get the message where I begged you to come?”
He laughed sharply. “Of course not. I got pissed and took off. You did that?”
“Not that it matters. I should have fought for you.”
“You have every right to be mad,” he said.
“I chose my family. You have just as much right. Maybe we should both just get over it.”
He looked at me as if he hadn’t seen me yet. “Are you over it?”
“No.”
“I want another chance.”
My laugh was more derisive than I intended. My insides were taking control of my outsides. That hadn’t been a problem in a long time because my insides had been in a coma.
“Drew,” I said. “Come on.”
“I mean it. And you want it too. You sent someone to find me.”
“Hang on there…”
“And I spent the next year trying to find a way to earn you back. I haven’t come empty-handed.” He slid off the counter and came closer, stopping in the middle of the room when I stiffened. I wasn’t ready to be in the same room with him, much less be seduced by the return of happiest days of my life.
“Look at you,” he said, giving me the look he wanted me to turn on myself. “You’re still everything. Line up a million perfect women and I’d still choose you. Do you see what you do to a room when you walk into it? No, of course you don’t. Now even more than when we met the first two times, you bend the space around you. Look at you.” He repeated the phrase with his eyes locked on mine. “You own yourself and everything around you. You were a princess. Now you’re a queen.”
“Are we back to flattery?” I whispered.
“I wasn’t worthy of you. Now I am. I’m sorry I took so long, but I had a long way to go.”
I looked away, watching my thumbnail worry the edge of the bottle’s label. I never would have allowed someone on the other side of the negotiating table see me fidget.
“This is not a good time,” I said finally.
“What are you afraid of?”
“Right now?”
“Right now.” He sat back on the counter, giving me room to breathe.
“Right now, I’m afraid that my brother is going to bleed into his chest faster than they can give him transfusions. I’m afraid there’s no heart out there for him. I’m afraid that he’s going to die because I didn’t tell the doctors his father had a heart condition. That it’ll be my fault and I’ll live the rest of my life crushed between grief and guilt. And now… right now, I’m afraid I’ll believe you.”
He bent his body at the waist, putting his forearms on his knees, loosely holding his bottle between his fingertips. For the first time, as if it just occurred to me that a lifetime had passed, I looked for a wedding ring. None. Neither a gold band nor a tan line where one used to be.
“You don’t have to believe me. Not yet. But I’m here to set you free. Then you can believe me.”
“Free?”
He nodded slightly, watching my reaction. “You’re a prisoner. Can’t you see that?”
What was freedom like?
It looked like the Palihood house and it smelled like cigarettes and cinnamon. It was our apartment in New York and a job where no one knew my name.
“I still can’t leave my family. That hasn’t changed.”
Nodding, he let the silence get heavy. It was as if the birds stopped chirping so they could hear him and the wind waited for him to speak.
“In Nashville,” he said, “I was given a warning. Stay away from Margaret Drazen or she’d be cut off. I got three broken ribs and a bruised kidney.”
“Who did that to you?”
He shook his head slowly.
“Tell me. Was it Franco? Franco Junior? How old was he? What did he look like?”
It didn’t matter who’d landed the blows. We both knew who’d paid the fists.
“I didn’t care if they killed me,” he said. “But they threatened you. And even if the guys who fucked me up thought it was all about money, I knew better. If I went back to you, you’d never see your son again. It would kill you.”
My mouth opened to apologize for something I hadn’t done, or express a feeling of gratitude tainted with regret that was too complex to define. But nothing came out.
“It’s not an excuse,” he continued. “But I left you alone out of love. And now, I’m coming back for the same reason. You don’t have to give me another chance.” He slid off the counter. “But I’m free. I want you to be free with me.”
His resoluteness wasn’t completely new. It came from the same place as the clarity he brought to negotiations when he saw an injustice being done. But it was a change in balance. He’d made it a part of his identity.
I’d been left by a man who couldn’t handle my family. A man with a hole in his life that could only be filled with music. Whose manhood had been stunted by an abusive father before my own father had scared him into the self-immolation of addiction.
He wasn’t Drew or Indy. He was a third, powerful, unpredictable thing.
“You’re going to set me free?” I said. “How?”
“Not yet. Let me get you back to Jonathan first. He needs you.”
“He does.” When I went for the door, he moved like a cat, blocking the way enough to make a point but not enough to trap me. “It was always about you, Cin.”
Without thinking, I put my hand on his chest. I shouldn’t have been able to feel his heartbeat, but as if the muscle wanted me to know it was there, it beat hard enough to feel. “That’s Margie to you.”
When he moved, a band of light streaked across his rueful smile. “You still love me. You
can refuse me, but you still love me.”
“I have no idea what I feel.”
With a little push, I cleared the way and walked out.
In the dark kitchen, I barely slowed to grab my bag, then I opened the back door. The door, and the stale air of the room, was overcome with palm and smog.
“You wasted lot of time, McCaffrey,” I said with my hand on the knob and one foot out the door.
“And I won’t waste another minute.”
I left, closing the door, and rushed out the driveway gate.
How dare he. My pumps clopped on the neighbor’s paving in patterns of three.
How. Dare. He. How. Dare. He.
I’m Margie Drazen.
How. Dare. He.
The car was waiting. I got in. “Thanks for waiting.”
“My pleasure. Where to?”
“Wilshire and Cañon.”
He tapped the glass on his phone to call in the ride. He was going to take too long. I had to get away from that house.
“Please start driving.”
“Okay, okay.” He shot a glance back. I didn’t know what he saw, but he stopped fucking with his phone and drove.
I relaxed as soon as we made it past the corner.
Not really.
I didn’t relax. I didn’t Zen. What I did wasn’t rainbows and unicorn farts. It was much more sinister. I stopped worrying that he’d catch up and I’d have to continue the fucking conversation. I was trapped in a car on the way back to my life, but everything had changed.
Indy was back.
Drew.
Neither.
Both.
Not the dipshit I’d played strip poker with. Not the musician I’d watched mature into an artist. Not the competent lawyer I’d watched devolve into an overwhelmed drunk.
None of it. All of it.
And how had I changed?
What had I become?
I couldn’t stop cataloguing what I’d done in the years between us.
I was a fixer. I fixed problems. Moved money. Leveraged knowledge. Brought justice and vengeance. I made life bearable for the people I loved. I’d kept my hands clean, but washing them so often had made the knuckles cracked and bloody.
That was a metaphor, but I looked at my hands anyway. They were shaking.
I didn’t know if I loved him anymore, but I sure as hell couldn’t say I didn’t. I’d locked it all away. Hadn’t even peeked in to see if it was still there.
And now?
That love was wearing jeans and black boots. It hadn’t aged. Hadn’t seen what I’d seen. Didn’t know what I knew. It threatened my life and my work but didn’t even speak my language.
My phone rang. I could barely still my hand enough to answer Will’s call, but I needed him. He knew everything that needed knowing.
“Yeah,” I said as the car hit the 405. “What’s up?”
“Possibly relevant,” he said. “I’m not a doctor.”
“Is he—”
“Jon’s the same. But Patalano.”
The gangster with the head wound.
“We unearthed some info,” Will continued. “He’s brain dead.”
I wasn’t a stranger to the organized crime families in Los Angeles. Paulie was a camorra operative in the same cell as Theresa’s current problem, Antonio Spinelli. The web of malfeasance was too tangled for a single conversation, but Will didn’t expect me to cry for Patalano.
“Good,” I said.
“What happened at the meeting with the doctors?” he asked. “Your mother’s been medicated.”
What happened? Was it only a few hours ago that I almost blurted out the truth? That the secret had stayed locked up because it didn’t know how to be free?
“Nothing,” I said.
Everything.
“Sheila’s trying to sue the hospital.”
You should have let Sheila be the fixer.
“Sheila hasn’t practiced law in a decade.”
“My question is, why aren’t you trying to sue them?”
“Delta,” I said, “we make threats from a position of power. Got it?”
“You’re a tiger, you know that? A four-star general.”
You’re a prisoner.
“Your faith in me is inspiring.”
I hung up and took a deep breath. I was trapped in the back seat of a car navigating traffic on the 405. A captive of circumstance.
I could be free.
What would a free woman do?
“Change of plans,” I said to the driver while dialing the next problem on my list. “I need to go to Sequoia Hospital.”
12
It took more than a deep breath to get my head on straight, but not much more. The orderly patterns of thought that drove my existence were a habit. Emotions had never been strong enough to move the levers. They tried, but they’d been overruled so many times that love was a motion denied and fear had already been led out the side door in ankle cuffs.
Drew was back. I’d been in a room with him. A room in the Palihood studio. Now. Not 1982. Now. After everything.
The only thing stranger than the coexistence of Drew and the date was the bubbling stew of feelings rattling the lid I kept on them. I’d assumed they were sealed away and whatever warmth I had left was worthless sentiment.
Maybe I was wrong.
Maybe I’d misunderstood everything.
Or maybe sentiment was no more than a lie wrapped around something too real to handle.
As the cab was getting onto Olympic, I got a text from Will. It was a thumbs-up, and I knew exactly what it meant. Paulie Patalano was a match for Jonathan Drazen. The internet told the rest of the story. The mobster was brain-dead. The shooter had been killed in an explosion. My son’s life was in another man’s chest, two floors above him.
I went to the hotel room first. The curtains were pulled back so we could look at the landing pad on the hospital roof behind the darkening eastern sky.
Sheila was on the couch, feet tucked under her, flipping through a magazine. “Nice for you to show up.”
“How’s Mom?” I asked, pointing toward the master bedroom.
“Sleeping.” She tossed aside the magazine. “They gave her a shot so she’d be too thick to testify in our lawsuit later.”
“Paranoia suits you.”
“If you weren’t so naïve, I wouldn’t have to be so paranoid.”
She reached under the stack of newspapers on the coffee table and came out with a red folder. She handed it to me.
“What’s this?”
“The UNOS organ candidate list.”
I opened it. Gibberish. Well-defined, organized, anonymized gibberish. I closed the folder. “Where did you get this?”
“You’re not the only one with people.”
“Look at you,” I said, dropping the folder back on the table. “With the confidential, top secret list. Impressive.”
“Not so much. They determine who gets the organ based on immediate need and proximity to the donor. I can’t tell if it’s bad. I don’t know if he’s first or last.”
“Still. Nice work.”
“Thank you.” She slid the envelope under her magazine. “Wouldn’t hurt to pull the plug on the mobster on six.”
“Margie!” Mom’s voice came from the bedroom. “Is that you?”
“Joking,” Sheila said.
“I know.”
But she hadn’t been joking. Not really.
“Coming, Mom!” I bent over my sister so I could speak softly. “I know your filters get thin under stress. But letting them see you angry isn’t a strength. It’s a vulnerability.” I headed for the bedroom door.
“Who’s them?” she hissed.
“Everyone who isn’t named Drazen.”
I pushed into the bedroom and closed the door. The curtains were drawn, and my mother was on the edge of the bed with half her hair out of a bun.
“Hey, Mom,” I said. “How are you doing?”
“What time is it?�
�
There was a digital clock right in her line of sight.
“Five thirty,” I said.
“In the morning?”
“Afternoon.”
“I feel like I’ve been asleep all night.”
There wasn’t much light left in the day, but I opened the curtains as if I had a point to prove. “I was going to call down for dinner. Did you want something?”
“Any news about Jonathan? Did they find a heart for him?”
Maybe?
“No.” I swung a chair to sit across from her. “Mom. At the meeting with the doctors.”
“They said some scary things.” She ignored what I’d said.
“I never meant to imply you were anything but a good wife.”
“I know.”
“I was out of my head.”
“Do you think he’s going to die?” She swung to a lateral subject. Was she trying to save me from the shame of my delusions? Or trying to save herself from the truth?
No, no, I didn’t. He was too real to me. Jonathan was the weight of my past and the albatross around the neck of my future. That fucker was hope and light and every rainbow I’d turned away from because I had other things on my mind. Life without him would be carefree and joyless at the same time, so he was going to live. Period.
Dad said I was having a hysterical delusion. Maybe he was right. The prognosis was shit. I could spray-paint it twenty-four-karat gold, but it was still a pile of shit.
“We have to hope a heart shows up,” I said. “That’s all there is to it.”
My mother had been married to my father nearly fifty years. She’d raised eight children, but from some angles, she looked younger than me. Not in years. She carried her extra decade and a half in the lines on her forehead, but her guileless expression made a trick of her experience. It lied to me as ardently as my mother lied to herself.
“When I had him,” she said, looking at her hands, “he looked so blue. And he was quiet as a ghost. I never had a baby who didn’t cry when it was born. Deck told me not to worry when the nurses took him away. Two days he was gone. I thought he must be dead. I begged your father to tell me I’d lost him, but he swore the doctors were working and the nuns were praying.” When she brought her gaze up, tears lined her eyes with evening-lit glass. “And when he came back, he was so perfect and pink… and he was crying so hard until he was in my arms. It was a miracle. He’s a miracle.” She squeezed my hand, a new hope in her face. “I know you’re worried. We’re all worried, but you? You take on so much for us. So I want you to believe me when I say he’ll make it through this, even if it takes a hundred miracles.”