by Heather Gean
“Thanks…” I finally said. I didn’t want to come out from behind the screen even though I was dressed. I didn’t want to see her face. I waited long enough so that she was completely packed up.
“I will give you a call when I get the dress finished. You’ll be back in two weeks?” After I confirmed that we could meet for a fitting of the dress again in two weeks, Dee left, and I finally came out of hiding. The government has made both of us miserable in one quick mismatch.
~*~
That evening I walked up and down Van’s block for at least half an hour, contemplating whether I should go up and knock on his door. His lights were on, and though it was late, I assumed he was up. I was scared of seeing him and realizing that a huge rift still lay between us. Thunder was rolling above me. The sky had been angrily growling all afternoon. There weren’t many people out. I had passed the same small group at least six or seven times, and they finally joked of my being a prostitute. “You aren’t gonna get any business on this block, honey,” a girl with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth said between puffs. It was then that I knew I had to either go up and see him or catch another taxi back out to the Schroeder mansion.
As I stood just at the edge of the alley where the stairs that led up to Van’s apartment began, the bottom of the clouds finally came pouring down in giant, violent raindrops. I would drown in that storm before I made it back to the parking garage. My cute shoes made running difficult and were the first things that needed to be removed, and I held them in one hand as I clung to the railings of the stairs with the other. As I jogged up the metal stairs, I was careful not to let my bare feet slip on the diamond-patterned metal as it got wetter. My heart pounded from the physical exertion and from the sting of the cold rain hitting my skin. My jog up the five flights of stairs left my muscles aching as I pounded on Van’s door, standing in the inlet that was just large enough to keep the waterfall cascading from the top of the building from landing on my head. When Van opened the door, he looked surprised and concerned all at once.
Van didn’t say a lot. He invited me in with a simple look, and he quickly returned with a towel. I stood just inside his door with the water dripping from me collecting in a puddle on the floor. I didn’t care what all of the romance novels said, getting caught in the rain was not sexy. My hair was plastered to my forehead, neck, and shoulders. Even my eyelashes dripped. I trembled from the cold. Van draped the towel around my shoulders and pulled the edges together in front of my chest. From a foot away I could feel the warmth of his body. I dabbed at myself with the towel, using it more for warmth than for drying, and Van disappeared again. When he returned again he held a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants. He handed the folded items to me.
“You can change in the bathroom,” he said with a motioning of his head. His hands hid in his pockets as if he didn’t know what else to do with them.
In the bathroom, I took a moment to bring the clothes to my face, and as I breathed in the scent I had come to associate with Van, I instantly felt comfortable. I wrung out my clothes in the sink and hung them over the towel rack outside of his shower stall. I tugged on the sweatpants, which hung loosely around my hips, and pulled over my head the T-shirt that was big enough to allow me to look modest even without a bra on. It was a Dante and the Damned tour shirt, and I smiled as I remembered the concert in the woods. I wondered, as I wrung out my wet hair, where Penelope and the musicians were. I turned my back to the mirror and glanced over my shoulder, struggling to read the dates backwards. They should’ve been somewhere between Phoenix and Houston, and the tour would be over in a few weeks. I dried my face again, hoping to bring some of the color back into it. It was a deathly shade of pale, and even my lips seemed to fade straight into it, leaving my dark eyes eerily staring back at me. The rain scenario was definitely not sexy. I ran some warm water from the sink over my face before drying it one last time and leaving the bathroom.
Van had made coffee in the kitchen. He poured it into mismatched mugs as I uncertainly hung back with my arms crossed over my chest. When he offered me a cup, I warmed up. We leaned against the counters and drank our coffee in silence for a long while. I noticed that he had a drop of red paint on the side of his neck, and a smudge of blue paint stretched across his hand, and I wanted to be close enough to wipe them off.
The sound of the rain on the metal roof had reduced itself to a soothing patter. The windows were beaded with water, distorting the light from the street below like stained glass.
“It’s good to see you,” he finally said. Though his voice was quiet it seemed to echo in the large space. “What made you come?”
I looked down at the steam dancing out of the cup in my hands. “I missed you.”
Van meandered over to the canvas positioned on an easel. It was covered with splashes of wet paint; obviously something he had been working on when I interrupted him. It was a mess of colors. “What’s it of?”
He stood with his back to me as he studied it. His hands were in his pockets again, and his head was tilted slightly to one side. His hair had gotten longer since I had seen him last, and it messily sprung out around his head. “Boredom.”
He stooped down to put the lid on a tube of paint then closed off another. He began to clean up, gathering brushes into a cup of water and lining up all the paints. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”
“It’s fine. I was just wasting paint.” He seemed different. It reminded me of the mysterious Van I had known my first week in New York. He didn’t talk much, and that prompted me to talk too much.
“What do you do up here when you aren’t working?”
“I read sometimes. I listen to music.”
“Doesn’t it get lonely?”
Van snapped the last cap on a paint tube and began washing out his brushes in the deep, metal sink positioned near a shelf of art supplies. The sound of the water splashing against the sink basin was loud and obnoxious. When he turned off the faucet, he replied, “I thought about bringing Ishmael out here, but he likes the general freedom of the outdoors.” He tossed the clean brushes to a workshop table, crossed the room to the bookshelf housing his record collection, and stood with his back to me as he attempted to select something to listen to. “Ashley called me today and asked me to be his best man. I guess the wedding is still on?”
“No. We have to finish the counseling sessions before they will tell us the result of our appeal. Until then we have to continue on nicely to prove we aren’t filing out of anger.” Van’s shoulders slumped, but if he sighed I hadn’t heard it. “I’m not going to marry him.”
“I know you aren’t going to…” he said quietly. “He doesn’t love you, Rainy. He doesn’t deserve you.” He paused to pull a record from the shelf, looking at the cover for a few seconds before replacing it. “I’m not saying I deserve you either, but he sure doesn’t.”
My heart skipped beats. I hated how my heart could command my attention like no other part of my body could. When it began to sink it felt like everything else was on the verge of shutting down as well. “So, you’re saying you don’t love me either?”
“It isn’t that.” He turned to me. “I can’t give you the other stuff he can, Rainy. I can love you, and I can hold you and kiss you and entertain you with my dorky hobbies, but I can’t promise you a fortune and I can’t marry you.”
“Money and marriage are overrated.”
“You wanna tell that to your dad?”
“My dad wants me to be happy. If I really didn’t want to marry Ashley, he wouldn’t hold it against me forever.”
“I want to be more than just a fling for you.”
“Van, you are so much more than a fling.” I put my cup of coffee down on the counter and walked over to hold his hands. Some of the blue paint rubbed off on me as I did so. He pulled them away and snaked his arms around me, pressing me against him. He held me so tightly to him that I couldn’t tell which heartbeat was mine.
“I play chess,” he said into my dam
p hair.
“What?”
“You asked what else I do up here. I play chess.” My laughter vibrated against his chest.
“Alone?”
“You would be amazed how much you can learn about chess when you play alone.” I laughed again. “Would you like to play a game with me?”
“I suck at chess. But I never beat you at Scrabble. I feel the need to prove myself.”
“Scrabble it is.”
It was classically dorky, but Van and I had vocabularies that rivaled one another. We stretched out on the floor with giant pillows underneath us. Within an hour we had emptied the entire pot of coffee. “Supafly is not a real word,” I said. I was stomach down on the floor with my elbows propping my upper body up.
“Supafly is a real word. People use it in everyday conversation. Don’t be a vocabulary elitist. Just because Webster doesn’t recognize it doesn’t mean you should discriminate against it.” He was sitting cross-legged on his pillow like some sort of Indian guru.
“When was the last time you used supafly in a conversation?” I asked with an amused grin.
“Just the other day I told the guy from the second floor that his headband was supafly.”
“That’s a lie!”
Van laughed whole-heartedly. “You’re right. I didn’t. But it could have happened.”
“Fine, fine, leave it.”
The letter pool finally ran out, leaving Van and I to add up the points. I came up short by a few. Sometimes there just weren’t enough words.
Chapter 17
Two weeks went by quickly, and it began to seem that I was in New York more than I was at home. I sat in the Schroeder living room with a binder full of wedding plans in my lap. Mrs. Schroeder and Monica were still double-teaming me even though I was generally being docile, and they urged me to finalize my bridal party list. The trouble was that I apparently needed five bridesmaids. Anyone who had much sense knew that if you got that many girls together that there would be trouble of some sort. Liz and Sasha were automatically on the list. I added the twins to the list then penned in Piper as my fifth.
Walker, who was finally back from LA after having run out of money, was slinking around behind the sofa where I sat. “I want to walk out before Penelope,” she said.
“Fine,” I said.
Mrs. Schroeder looked as if she were stifling a rant. “You will walk out wherever we tell you to.”
“Rainy said it was fine,” Walker said defiantly. They hadn’t been on good terms since Walker’s return, and this back-and-forth had been going on all afternoon. It was enough to drive a person insane.
“You have got to learn some limits, Walker. You can’t have everything your way.”
“Why not? You do it all the time.”
“You obviously need to make an appointment with the family therapist again. These outbursts of yours are unacceptable!”
Walker leaned further over the back of the sofa until her face was beside mine. “Do normal families have a family therapist?” she asked me. I did not want to be dragged into their argument. Walker scanned the page listing Ashley’s groomsmen and let out a loud laugh. “And look who the best man is!”
“Walker!” Mrs. Schroeder warned.
“All I’m saying is that I’m not the biggest embarrassment of this family.”
“You have been all over the news, Walker! Monica could not even begin to tackle the heaps of incriminating information that came in during your trysts in LA!”
“I’m a bit harder to sweep under the rug, aren’t I?” she said with a sassy tone in her voice.
“Walker, I will not listen to one more minute of this!” Mrs. Schroeder stormed out of the room with Monica on her heels.
“We’ll finish this later,” Monica said after snatching the binder from me. I sat there, dumbfounded.
Walker laughed spitefully and began to head for the door as well. “Hey, Walker,” I said. She turned back and propped against the doorframe.
“Yeah?”
“Why is it so funny that Van is Ashley’s best man?”
Walker rolled her eyes. “It’s one of the Schroeder family secrets. Since you’re almost family, I guess I’ll fill you in. Van is my dad’s son. He had an affair with someone that worked for the family. It was a big scandal.” She said it casually, as if she was telling me about some stray dog that used to come around, and she had no idea how she had just smashed me up inside. “Funny, isn’t it?” I couldn’t breathe, let alone laugh.
I couldn’t stay in that house. I got one of the drivers to take me into the City. Ashley was still at the office, but I wanted to talk to him about everything I had just been told. I needed to calm down before I talked to Van about it, since it was a sensitive situation, but I had no trouble ranting to Ashley. Nothing seemed to be able to get me into that office building fast enough. When I got to Ashley’s floor his secretary had already gone home and most of the cubicles were empty. I couldn’t even be sure that he was in his office since he could have been working on any of the dozens of floors in the building. I went straight back and knocked on his office door.
Since the door was closed, I assumed he was inside. I knocked multiple times, making up little rhythms as I went along. Just before I gave up, the door opened a few inches. “Um, hey?” Ashley said uncertainly. I may as well have punched him in the stomach.
“Hey… Are you okay?” His tie was crooked. His red face was looking at me through a tiny slit. He took a deep breath. “We really need to talk.”
“Now isn’t a good time,” he said. I got annoyed, put my hand against the door, and attempted pushed it open a few more inches, but Ashley had his foot against the other side to keep it from opening very far.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.
One side of his shirt wasn’t completely tucked in. He wasn’t wearing a belt. A horrible feeling washed over me as I began to piece together what had been going on behind that door. When he shifted his weight in an attempt to tuck in his shirt tail, I pushed on the door one more time, and it swung open. Dee was sitting awkwardly against Ashley’s desk, running a hand innocently through her hair while facing the back wall, trying to look as if nothing had been going on.
“Un-fucking-believable.” I turned to go.
“Wait… Rainy? Rainy!”
“No, it’s fine. I just wanted to let you know that I know Van is your brother.” I reached the elevator doors and pressed the button a few times.
“Rainy, wait, let’s talk about this.” He couldn’t let me leave with that kind of information in the angry mood I was in, so he followed me, and he stood with one hand propped against the wall outside the elevator.
“I don’t have anything else to say.”
“It isn’t what you think…”
“Oh, c’mon, Ashley. It’s exactly what I think. And it’s fine. I don’t care. We aren’t actually in a relationship.”
“But I can tell you’re pissed.”
“I’m pissed because I had to find out the big family secret from your little sister.” I pressed the button a few more times. Where the hell was the elevator?
“Why is that such a big deal to you?”
I groaned in frustration and hit my fist against the down button. “Because I’ve been seeing him.” Ashley looked confused, and I wanted to punch him for it. “I’ve been dating Van.” He didn’t say anything; he just blinked a few times as if I had stunned him. The elevator door slid open, accompanied by a loud ding that reminded me of the bell to signal the beginning of a boxing match. I was going down swinging.
~*~
Back in Memphis, things around the museum were buzzing. The movers had been carrying in paintings, sculptures, and abstract forms of art all morning. Wes was complaining about the difficulty of my layout and had wasted half an hour trying unsuccessfully to convince me to change it at the last minute. Artists had been in and out of my cubicle signing release forms. I had been half-expecting and half-dreading to see Van. I assum
ed he would show up eventually, and that knowledge had been wrenching at my nerves all morning.
Van and I never fully confronted his paternity. Before I had left the City for the evening, I had one of Ashley’s cars swing by there before taking me to the airport since it wasn’t much of a secret anymore. When he answered the door he looked as if he had been asleep. His hair was swooped to one side and sticking straight up at the top, and he looked more unshaven than usual. He could probably tell from the way I denied his invitation to come in that I hadn’t dropped by for a friendly visit. I didn’t ask him why he hadn’t told me because the complexity of his situation gave him a million reasons not to tell me. I relayed the news to him quickly because I didn’t have a lot of time. “I know you’re Ashley’s brother.” The horrible sickness that washed over him partly made me sorry that I hadn’t told him on the phone but at the same time made me glad I hadn’t. I pulled him into a hug, and though his arms were around me, he was emotionally somewhere else. This time it was me who felt the need to apologize. Our relationship had developed many complications within those few months, and we had become a series of revelations and apologies. Neither of us wanted to be that way, it just happened.
My lunch break couldn’t come soon enough. I met Sasha and Liz downtown, but it wasn’t exactly for an overpriced salad and meaningful conversation. This meeting was almost entirely business.
“The suspense is killing me,” Liz said when she slid into the booth. Sasha, who possessed much more patience than Liz, simply sat down and opened up her menu. “Are you pregnant? Leaving the country?” I reflexively answered no to both of Liz’s questions, and they threw me off track. Sasha shot Liz a slightly annoyed sideways glance then went back to her menu, dismissing it as she did most things.
“You have twisted expectations for me,” I said to her. Sasha ordered a drink for herself and one for Liz, who wasn’t paying attention to the waiter. She went back to scanning her menu. She was especially quiet.
“You shouldn’t make me guess.”