by C. D. Reiss
“Hey!” A pale guy with long brown hair approached Drew. They shook hands. “You’re all set.”
“What’s going on?” I asked when he left.
Drew didn’t have a chance to answer me. People approached him, one after the other, with questions and clipboards, guiding us closer to the stage, then up the steps. His arm slid from around my shoulders and landed on my hand. I let him lace his fingers in mine, feeling the thrum of excitement that something was going to happen. Something great and fun. Something that wouldn’t make everything all right, but it would make all life’s aches and pains worth it.
We were on the boundary between the backstage and the front, where the band blasted the last of a song and the lights dropped. The crowd cheered and the lights went back on.
“One song,” he said.
“Wait…”
“Then I’ll take you home.”
“You’re playing? Publicly?”
“I’m not hiding any more.”
I hadn’t watched him play from backstage since I was a teenager. The years between dropped away and I was a girl again, learning that my idols were human men. My life faced front. Everything was possible.
“Just one song?” I asked.
“I want to kiss you so bad right now.”
I would have let him kiss me, but he turned back to the stage and the lights blinded me for a moment.
The singer leaned into his mic. “We have a surprise for you assholes. Who remembers Bullets and Blood?”
When the audience screamed, I squeezed Drew’s hand and looked at him. He was looking in the middle distance with a serious expression. My smile was so wide it hurt.
The singer turned to face us as he spoke into the mic. “Back from who the fuck even knows where.” He pointed at Drew.
I let his hand go in the heavy pause and watched him go on stage. Drew turned to me, taking a step backward, and blew me a kiss. In full light, his age was more apparent. It suited him. The fading tattoos on his arms were not a map of regret, but evidence of a life in the process of being lived.
A roadie handed him a guitar, and he went up to a microphone.
“Hello, Santa Monica.” He hit a chord that couldn’t be mistaken for anything but Bullets and Blood, cutting it off mid-squeal. “I’m Indy McCaffrey.”
The crowd went wild, and when he hit his first notes, Drew—once and for all—was Indy again.
16
One song, and it wasn’t Bullets and Blood.
I’d heard the song on the radio in another artist’s voice, with a string quartet, a timpani drum, and gentle guitar riffs. Everyone had heard it. In coffee shops and in cars for five years running, this song was the generation’s anthem to loss and grief.
Indy played it as he’d conceived it, with a growl of rage over what he’d lost and a long, purposeful howl of despair at the end, crumbling into the last words of the refrain.
When I lost you
I lost myself
I’d heard that song a hundred times, but before that night, I hadn’t heard it at all. It was ours. It was our loss. Our loneliness. It was a love song to our choices.
Margie Drazen was never reduced to tears. She was never reduced to anything. Period.
Cinnamon, however, was a silly, soft girl and she cried when she heard truth.
I was blind with tears when he reached me. His hands clutched my arms, and when he leaned down, he blocked the light again, becoming the only thing in my tear-streaked world.
“Margie,” he said. Behind him, the band started another song. “Cin.”
I couldn’t answer to either name. I was shaking and hitching like a fucking baby.
Why did I always break in front of him? I’d kept myself in check for a decade and a half, and there I was, crumbling the day after he showed up again. I was humiliated but I couldn’t stop the gush of raw emotion.
My feet went from under me. I wrapped my arms around his neck and sobbed like a teenager. The hoots and cries dimmed as the sound of the ocean took over. He set me down on the bike.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He handed me a folded plaid hankie. “If I thought you’d be so upset, I wouldn’t have played it.”
I laughed to myself and wiped my face. “Thank you for playing it. You have a way of being the valve on the shit I hold in.”
“I’ve always admired your self-control.”
“It’s a shitty way to live.” I folded the hankie with a last sniff.
He took it then laid his hand on my cheek. I let him. I shouldn’t have, but I let him. I needed the touch of a man I trusted.
“You’re also exhausted and worried.” He took his hand away to grab the helmets. “Let me get you home. You need to rest.”
We mounted the bike, and I leaned my weight against him the whole way home.
* * *
I guided him to the side of the house, and he parked his bike by the back deck. From there, we could see the pool and the garden overlooking the pattern of night lights in the city.
“Nice place,” he said, pulling off his helmet.
When he ran his fingers through his hair to put it back in place, I recognized the gesture as a habit. It didn’t take long for new patterns to lay themselves on top of expectations.
Looking out over the glowing turquoise rectangle of the pool, I shrugged. “I hate it.” I handed him my helmet. “It’s a mausoleum to good taste. That pool? No one’s been in it for over a year.”
“That pool?”
“That pool.” I turned away and took the first step onto the deck. “It’s a nice pool, and every day it gets more depressing.”
I was really letting loose on this poor guy. I should have been paying him three hundred for a fifty-minute hour. At the top of the deck, I realized he wasn’t behind me. A split second later, I heard a splash and the perfect glass surface of the water was shattered. It had to be fifty degrees.
He swam to the surface as I ran down to the pool.
“You keep it heated?” he asked as he swam toward me.
“It’s winter.”
He put his arms over the edge. His hair was spiked and uneven. He looked as if he’d just pulled off his helmet and forgotten to run his fingers through it. “But you said no one swims in it.”
I crouched by him. “I like everything to be in order. Just in case.”
“It’s nice. You should come in.” He grabbed my arm as if to pull me down.
“I can’t.”
He let go of my arm. “Why not?”
“Because I’m already fighting guilt for not sitting by Jonathan. If I get in this pool and enjoy it, I’m going to feel worse.” A drop fell from his hairline and down his cheeks. “Are you still wearing your boots?”
“Unfortunately.”
I laughed. “Jesus, Indy. Do you need me to help you out?”
“I got it.”
I gave him room as he got his elbows under him and pulled himself onto land. His boots gushed from the tops and his shirt stuck to his chest. He was that lawyer in the rain I’d kissed so long ago. I didn’t have long to wonder if he’d made the same connection.
When he came toward me, I laid my hand on his chest. I felt his heart through his jacket. I wanted that heart to beat for me, but I couldn’t demand that. Not when I wasn’t sure what mine beat for anymore.
“Do you want to come in and dry off?”
“I have a warm hotel room,” he said. “Besides, I don’t want the temptation. I’m not going to kiss you. Not until I set you free.”
“That’s a tall order, Indy.”
“You’re worth it, and I’m a liar.”
“No, I—”
I was going to tell him that no one was worth the kind of trouble he’d get himself into, but my denial was smothered in a kiss.
Shit. This was trouble.
Not the kiss. The kiss was perfect. It listened. It responded. It wasn’t stolen in a moment of passion, but an equal exchange of affection that turned rejection i
nto acceptance and transformed a calculated debate into a heated exchange.
I loved him and I had no reason to. If I knew why, I could argue against it and win. But without a cause, I couldn’t shoo it away. I couldn’t pat it on the head, tell it I understood, and open the exits. Reason was love’s egress, but love didn’t have the sense to leave when logic opened the door. It bumped around the walls like a blind child in a silent room. Uncomfortable. Unhappy. Unable to get out.
He was made of concentrated heat. He was a vector. A direction without coordinates. I reacted by emptying like a tipped water glass. Every thought shut down. Every feeling hushed. I was a place, a still thing, yielding to his force.
In the empty moment, the blind child in the silent room banged against the walls of my heart.
Emotions were habitually mispackaged, mispronounced, misnamed.
But not this. I knew what it was.
The kiss was trouble because I loved him and I didn’t know how to save him.
17
I’d again invited Indy inside to dry off, but he’d thanked me, kissed my cheek, and taken off with wet boots and hair. The last of my energy left with him. I brushed my teeth and fell asleep with my clothes on, waking with all the anxiety he’d helped release the night before squeezing my chest anew.
Another day gone by.
Another day with Jonathan bleeding into his chest.
Another day carrying the dead weight of a secret.
And yet, Indy made it all different. Not better. Different.
He’d overlaid hope over the bleak landscape of my situation. The hope was uncomfortable. It jabbed me in the soft underbelly of my guilt. I had no business feeling good about him when my son’s life hung by tubes and wires.
Let it go.
As the weight of the hospital elevator floor pressed against my feet, I tried to get my mind back on my responsibilities.
The skill I had in compartmentalizing only worked with crises. Optimism didn’t quite fit inside any of the boxes I was used to creating. The lid wouldn’t close over Indy’s song or the way he said his old name.
Let it go.
I had feelings, and on the rare occasions I let them in the door, they overstayed their welcome.
Define the feelings. Call them by their name.
“Let me go,” I whispered to myself as the elevator stopped.
Set me free.
The doors opened.
Will Santon was there.
“Delta,” I said in my snappiest tone, “your timing’s impeccable.”
“I have to talk to you,” he replied as I brushed by him.
We fell into step down the hall, and I ran down his assignments.
“You’re sorting out my brother’s ex-wife?”
“Sorted.”
“Theresa?”
“She’s fine.”
“My mother keeping it together?”
“Yes.”
As we turned a corner, he ran around me, blocking the way. Will and I always had plenty to discuss, and if there wasn’t enough business, he told me about Hannah, which I could listen to for hours. But this was different.
“What is it?” I said.
“I got dumped last night. I’m a conflict of interest.”
What had he called me at the restaurant? A friend? She either didn’t believe him or she knew better.
“Was that all she said?” I asked.
“Did she need to say more?”
“I’d like to know how many things I have to juggle.”
“What happened in 1999?”
“Nothing. Everything.”
“I can’t help you if you don’t trust me enough to talk to me.”
“Will. You know what you need to know.”
He put up two index fingers as if one wouldn’t make the point. “Listen to me. I’ve covered your tracks without a single question because you told me flat out what I was doing and why. What changed?”
“You’re dating a Fed.”
“Not anymore, I’m not. You think I’m looking for more exposure than I already have?”
“You weren’t involved. Warren Chilton raped my sister and promised to do it again. He was found hanging from a tree on the Westonwood grounds. Not by his neck. No, no. In a web of knots he couldn’t undo because he was paralyzed and full of Nortyl.”
“The despair drug?”
“I hear it makes you happy until you take too much, which he did. He tried to hang himself, screwed up, and damaged his spinal cord. That’s what happened. The end. I thought it was poetic justice, myself.”
Will scanned my face for the truth. I wanted to tell him everything, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t the only person who had to worry about the statute of limitations.
Dr. Thorensen appeared over Will’s shoulder, spotting me. “Ms. Drazen. I’m sorry to interrupt.”
“It’s fine. How is he?”
“Can we talk for a moment?”
I swallowed, put the panic inside its panic-sized box, closed the lid, and followed the doctor down the hall.
* * *
Dr. Brad Thorensen had a small office. I stood in the middle of it when he closed the door and he still had to excuse himself to get past me.
“Sit.” He indicated the chair across his desk.
I sat with my hands in my lap.
“You’re, ah, concerned about the size of the office?”
Had to give him credit for being intuitive.
“I thought you ran thoracic.”
“Cardiac.”
“I mean you no offense, but we can afford the best.”
After the imbalance of the morning, being straightforward felt good.
“Yeah.” He leaned back in his squeaky chair. “I could have a small office near my patients or a big office on the eighth floor.”
“A wise choice. How is he?”
“I’ll get to that.” He sat up straight with the change of subject. “Yesterday at our meeting, you mentioned the possibility that there might be some uncertainty surrounding your brother’s paternity.”
Shit.
This was what emotions did. They fucked you up. They made you say things you shouldn’t. They took a normal brain and rewired it like a drunk electrician.
There was no use denying it, but there was also no use elaborating. “I did.”
“It’s too late, in a sense, to do anything about the fact that we didn’t already know. The damage is done. But if you were right, in order to head off any potential future problems, I looked up Stratford Gilliam.”
My throat closed at the sound of his name on strange lips.
“Luckily, an old Rolling Stone had the information I needed to locate his death and medical records.”
If you’d asked me if there was any sound in the room, I would have said no, it was quiet. But my heart stopped beating, and the wind stopped rattling the window, and the birds outside flew instead of sang. The vents shut down and the squeaky gurneys and burping phones all went mute.
“What I can tell you, from page one, is Mr. Gilliam’s blood type was O. Your brother is AB. He can’t be the father. It doesn’t work that way.”
My swallow made the loud guck of a clogged sink opening.
“Also, aortic valve stenosis is genetic, but so recessive it can pass ten generations without showing up. So you can rest easy.”
I could rest easy.
Why again?
“Strat’s not Jonathan’s father.”
“He is not.”
“I’m…”
His mother?
“Glad.”
His sister?
What else was I wrong about?
I had to get out of that room. It was too small to fit everything I’d misunderstood.
“I’m sorry I got agitated in the meeting,” I said, standing.
“It’s fine. You’re all stressed. I understand. We just have to make him comfortable until a heart comes down the pike.”
I put my hand on the desk to feel s
omething solid. “How long does he have if there’s no heart?”
“Hard to say.”
“How long, in your opinion?”
He didn’t want to tell me, and I didn’t blame him. Not that it mattered what he wanted. I needed to know.
“The condition of the muscle is getting worse. His organs aren’t getting enough oxygen.”
“How long?” I didn’t waver. I sounded as strong and decisive as I intended. “Doctor. My mother is breaking down every hour that goes by. We’re going to need to make plans for her in the event that he dies. Something besides pumping her full of sedatives.”
With his hands folded in front of him, he regarded my face and expression and decided to believe me. I steeled myself for the answer.
“Days.”
The steel rattled but held. It wouldn’t for long.
“What about that mobster who got shot? “ I asked. “Isn’t he upstairs?”
Doctors had a way of hiding their reactions to crazy suggestions, and Thorensen was no different. I couldn’t scrape hope or disappointment from the bottom of that barrel.
“It’s up to the family, and we have a lot of people on the list waiting for a heart.” He waved as if swatting away the bad line of inquiry. “It’s best not to get attached to any one donor. Okay?”
“Yes. Of course you’re right.”
He stood. Meeting over. Good. I had things to do.
* * *
I’d prayed for freedom and I got it.
I was free of guilt. Strat wasn’t Jonathan’s father, nor was the heart condition an issue. The secret my life revolved around was irrelevant to the proceedings.
That is, if the secret was even a secret and not a wild fantasy cooked up in the Drazen wine cellar by a couple of lawyers with nothing better to do.
What if it was all fake?
My mouth went dry. My veins went brittle. All the moisture in my body turned to steam and floated away, taking my entire self-image with it.
What if I’d let Drew go to protect a boy who wasn’t mine? What if I’d made every life decision based on a lie?
What if my father had done the same?
Taking the stairs down to the first floor, where I could find water, I called Will on our secure line. He picked up in a crowded place with echoes.