If You Could See What I See

by Cathy Lamb

  Abigail Chen clapped when I said good night. “Niiiiicce!” she said. “Nice!”

  The production floor became treacherous territory because the employees stood and gawked, as if I’d grown three heads and a fluffy yellow tail. A bunch of them came up to meet Blake.

  Shake his hand.

  Chat.

  Tell him how wonderful I was, as in, “Meggie is the best boss ever. You know her mom’s a sex therapist, right?”

  And, “Meggie’s awesome. I’m glad you’re taking her out to dinner. Don’t piss her off, though. She’s inherited the same temper as her grandma. You know Mount Vesuvius? Or St. Helens? You remember that explosion? She’s like that.”

  The Petrelli sisters said hello, then to each other, as if Blake and I weren’t standing there, “She needs a cruise . . . definitely . . . she and the chief . . . Alaska, I think . . . he looks outdoorsy . . . she’s still pale, maybe a place where they could get some sun? . . . We did like the Greek isles . . .”

  Finally, finally, we were through the production floor.

  I knew my hair was a mess. I didn’t have any makeup on. I was wearing jeans and a dark blue T-shirt. The T-shirt was a smidgen too tight from too many washings. I had on boots.

  I exhaled too loudly when we finally escaped. “I need a beer,” I said.

  “I’ll get you one.”

  “Thank you.” He put his hand on my back and it tingled. I imagined a whole bunch of employees peering out the window at us. I heard a cheer going up. I didn’t look back.

  So embarrassing.

  Blake drove us to an Italian restaurant about thirty minutes away in the country. I could not help but think about sexual tension as we chatted.

  Physical attraction is an electric mystery.

  How do you describe it?

  Why is it that a base, fiery attraction will zing between two people and not between two others? You can look at a man and think he’s good looking, kind, smart, and . . . nada. Nothing. But with some other man, it sizzles like steaks on a barbeque. He may not even be as good looking as the first one. What is that? Why? Is it hormonal? Chemical? Met in a past life? Star signs, as Tory would say?

  Blake and I have that zingy attraction. It’s constantly there when I’m with him. I watch him, he watches me. I take great care not to touch him because I know it would only take one look from him and I’d be divesting myself of all of my clothes and straddling his hips. He feels it, I feel it, we don’t address it. We dance around it, we circle it, we stand back and observe it.

  “So, Meggie, tell me some more about the documentary films you made before coming home. What were the topics?”

  I told him, briefly, without letting my mind dwell on flicking wet sponges or tall buildings in Los Angeles, about the homeless kids here, the orphans in India, the kids’ hopes for an education in Watts, and a village in Alaska.

  “Can I see them?”

  “Sure.” No.

  “When?”

  “Soon.” Never.

  “I’d like to see them. Are you making another film now?”

  “Not an indie film. I’m filming people at our company for our website.”

  He wanted me to tell him about that, so I did, then I switched the subject. “Tell me what you did today.”

  “I thought we were talking about your films.”

  “We were. We’re done.” I could feel that black rat nibbling inside me again. I shivered.

  “I’d like to hear more about them. Why you went into filmmaking, what you loved about it, what interested you, how you picked your topics . . .”

  “My granddad, The Irishman, was dying.” I told him the story. “I loved cameras. I saw life, and people, in a new way when I held one in my hand.”

  “And that was it?”

  “Yes.” I squirmed. “But that’s about all I want to say about filmmaking.” I rubbed my throat. It felt like it was filling with black feathers.

  “Didn’t end well?”

  I laughed. It was bitter. I felt drowned by black and red. “Let’s say it’s not my career anymore.”

  We sat quietly, then he reached out his hand, picked up mine, and kissed it. He kissed my hand. No one had ever done that. I swear that kiss ran all the way up my arm to my heart. “If you ever want to talk about it, I want to hear about it.”

  “I won’t want to talk about it.” My tone was prickly, tight, hard.

  “Okay.” He nodded at me. “Maybe another time.”

  “No. Not another time.”

  I knew he wasn’t happy about my response, yet again, but why lie? I did not want to talk about my film career.

  We drove in silence for a while. I could tell he was comfortable with the silence, comfortable waiting for me to talk. The best way to get more information out of someone is to simply be quiet. I knew it. I would not play into it. Plus, I was trying to right my world and get rid of the biting black rat.

  I did not let go of his hand, because it was warm and strong.

  The Italian restaurant was candlelit, private, and fancy. I loved it. I ordered dessert first.

  Blake grinned. He ordered us beer.

  “I do this all the time. If I die before the meal ends, I want to make sure I’ve had dessert.”

  “I get it, Meggie. Eat away.”

  He had his salad. I had chocolate mousse, then my salad. He ordered a calzone, I ordered lasagna. The hot bread arrived in a basket. I actually felt myself unwinding, the tight, tight tension in my shoulders giving way.

  “So, give me your life story, Blake.”

  “I was born in Texas.” He set his beer down. “My father died when I was eight.”

  That was terrible. “How crushing. I am so sorry.” I actually felt my eyes well up.

  He shrugged. “Don’t be. He used to beat my mother.”

  My eyes cleared pretty quick.

  “Almost every night he hit her. By the time he died, she’d had a multitude of broken bones and bruises, and I’d had a broken arm, a broken leg, I was missing two back teeth, and my jaw had to be operated on from his abuse. I tried to protect my mother, he punched me. That was our routine. I can’t tell you how many times I was thrown into walls.”

  “I . . .” I struggled to speak. “I . . . I can’t even imagine . . . Oh, Blake—”

  He shrugged again. “He was killed when he was going eighty in his sports car awaiting trial for breaking my jaw. He was drunk, hit a curve wrong and went over a cliff.”

  “That sounds like a good thing.”

  “It was.” His shoulders hunched in. It was almost imperceptible, but I caught it. “My mother didn’t leave him because he threatened to hunt her down and kill her, me, and her mother and sister. I heard him say that to her many times. He had guns. He was violent. He was obsessive and possessive. He would not let my mother go. He wouldn’t even let her get a job. She was terrified. I remember holding her when she could not stop shaking.

  “He was an abysmal excuse for a man, a father, and a husband. I remember looking at him one night, blood flowing out of my nose, thinking that I would never, ever be like him, and I’m not. A year after he died I picked up a paper route. The next year I had my own lawn-mowing business. When I was fourteen, after school and sports, I worked at a restaurant at night and on weekends. My mother worked at the restaurant, too, at night, after a full day as a secretary.

  “Our lives were infinitely better after he died. We had dinner in peace. We didn’t dread hearing his key in the lock. We had money, not a lot, but we had it and could control it. My mother didn’t cry herself to sleep on the couch, bleeding. I wasn’t scared all the time. I didn’t have any more broken bones and I didn’t have to watch him slug my mother.”

  “Blake.” I didn’t know what else to say. I reached, automatically, for his hand. He held on. “How did she meet your stepfather?”

  He smiled and began to unhunch his shoulders. “She changed jobs when I was fourteen and worked for Shep, who was the owner of an oil company. They star
ted dating when I was fifteen, married when I was sixteen. Shep Stevens became the only father I ever knew.”

  “He was a good man then?” I was so hopeful....

  “The best. He still is the best man I’ve ever known. I was able to concentrate on sports and school once Shep came into our lives, because things settled down. Neither my mother nor I felt so desperate anymore. When the roof fell in, Shep paid for it. When my mother became sick with pneumonia for two weeks, he took care of her so I didn’t miss school. When there were activities going on at school, he came so it looked like I had a father like all the other kids. He talked to my teachers, to the other parents. My biological father would come to school drunk and yell. Shep was a respected man. He brought peace, kindness, and stability to our lives.”

  “And he was good to your mother.”

  “Shep was madly in love with my mother. He still is. My mother had me when she was eighteen. She never said, but my guess is that my father shoved himself on her, and she was so humiliated to be pregnant, she married him. By the time she married Shep she was only thirty-four. He was forty-four and had never been married. Underneath the hard, brusque exterior, which he had to have to develop his oil company, the man was caring and loving with my mother and me. He treated me like his son from the first day.”

  “I think I’m going to cry.” I sniffled, grabbed a napkin, and inelegantly wiped my nose.

  “Shep took me fishing a lot. Hunting, too. He asked me on one of those fishing trips if he could ask my mother to marry him. He told me he loved her, loved me, and would love it if we could become a family. I told him yes before he finished talking. It was the greatest day of my whole life. He told me later that he had wanted to marry my mother within a week of hiring her, but she’d told him she would never marry again and Shep knew she wasn’t ready after what she’d been through. He told me it was important for me to know that, because he didn’t want me to think, man to man—those were his words—that he hadn’t treated my mother respectfully.”

  He shook his head, his hard face softening. “I’ll never forget that. Anyhow, I blew the proposal for him, though. I was so excited when we returned from fishing I ran into the house, hugged my mom, and whispered, ‘Say yes, Mom, please say yes. I’ll do anything you say if you say yes.’ ”

  “Ahhh . . . And she did.”

  “Yes. I then had a dad who loved my mom, loved me, wanted to go fishing and hunting and do son and father stuff. What more could I ask for?”

  “Nothing.” I wiped my nose again. I can be a messy sap.

  “That’s what I thought, too. After they were married, he moved us into his home, which was a beautiful home on a hill. He bought my mother a new car. Her car broke down continually. Shep told me that he had offered to buy my mother a car a month after he met her, but she had refused to accept a gift that was that expensive. After the wedding he drove her car off, brought home a brand-new car, and said, ‘Can’t say no now, Yvette.’ My mother quit her waitressing job at his insistence. Shep paid her well, but she’d kept the waitressing job because she’d been broke, we’d been broke, and she saved all the money she could. She said poverty had scared her to death.

  “Shep bought me a car, too, and insisted I quit my restaurant job during the week so I could concentrate on sports and school. I was allowed to work only fourteen hours on the weekend. He came to all of my games along with my mother, who had missed a lot of them because of her waitressing job. Shep had played college football, so he coached me. He helped me with my homework. He taught me how to be a man.”

  “And after high school?”

  “I went to West Point and played quarterback. I was later in Special Forces, then retired and became involved with law enforcement.”

  “Your childhood had a lot to do with those choices, didn’t it?”

  “You bet. I had a lot of anger as a kid. I was in fights, and I did not mind swinging hard. Soon, no one would fight me. I never wanted to be helpless again. I hated that I couldn’t defend my mother, that I had to watch her being hit. I know what it’s like to be on the weak end of life and I know what it’s like to know you can defend yourself and the people around you. I prefer to defend.”

  “In your work as a police chief you must run into the same situations of domestic violence that you endured as a kid.”

  “I do. I have a program here to deal with it. Our officers are trained. We do all we can to protect abused women and children.” He told me more about the program.

  “Blake Crighton, you are one stud of a man.”

  He grinned at me. Ah, that grin will kill me one day. So inviting and friendly and manly.

  “Thank you, Meggie O’Rourke. And you are one gorgeous, smart woman.”

  I couldn’t deal with that comment, so I played with my silverware then asked, “Where do Shep and Yvette live now?”

  “They live in Maui. I visit every year. It’s a hardship, of course. I have to surf, swim, snorkel, that type of torturous thing.”

  I laughed. “That’s a splendid love story. Your mother deserves him.”

  “She certainly does. She’s an outstanding lady who literally took the blows for me from my dad again and again.”

  I wondered what Yvette would be like as a mother-in-law.

  I thought of my own ex-mother-in-law and swallowed hard.

  Last time I’d seen her she called me “Meggie Bitch.”

  Later that night I scrambled out of Blake’s truck, none too gracefully, when he dropped me off at Lace, Satin, and Baubles to pick up my car.

  “Thanks, Blake, for dinner.” I stood outside his truck, my escape route wide open.

  “You’re welcome. Please say yes again.”

  I smiled, couldn’t help it. “I’ll think about it.”

  “You’ll think about it?” He laughed, low, gravelly. We were at a place where we could laugh.

  “Yes, thanks again.”

  I am running a lingerie business. I am not so young anymore. I have been through a whole bunch of crap. I used to make documentaries. I am planning a Fashion Story. I deal with a hundred problems a day. I am capable and competent when it comes to work.

  I am a mental wreck who sees and feels violence and depravity in my head, day and night. When I am left alone too long with my own thoughts they trip me into rage, blame, and shame. I am chased by relentless guilt and am trying to tear myself out of a swamp of depression. I see black rats and have clawing nightmares and bone-chilling daymares. It is only recently that I feel I have a couple of fingers on a cliff and I’m not going to fall off again.

  I am not normal.

  Blake is normal.

  I liked him a lot, and that wouldn’t do. I thought about him way too much, and that wouldn’t do, either. What I wanted from him were uncomplicated naked tumbles. No commitment, no emotional entanglements. I was definitely having problems staying away from the latter.

  “Bye, Blake.”

  I saw disappointment in his eyes. I knew he was hoping I’d lean in and kiss him. That physical attraction was crackling between us like two solar flares crashing together.

  But I couldn’t. Oh, I couldn’t.

  “Bye, Meggie.”

  I shut the door. I walk-jogged to my car. I felt like an idiot. I knew he would follow me home to make sure I arrived safely because he said he was going to.

  I waved when I turned right and he turned left on our street.

  In my tree house I flopped on my bed and looked through the skylight at the shadows of the maple tree leaves dancing beneath the whiteness of the stars.

  My body arched up thinking about him. I wanted that delectable body on mine, but I did not want another man prancing through my life bringing another soul-smashing disaster. I had only recently found my soul. It was battered, bruised, and on life support.

  14

  My name is Roz Buterchof and I been workin’ here for twenty-five years on the production end. Your grandma hired me, Meggie, and I been loyal to her ever since. You wanna ta
lk to me about my bras on a video? My favorite bras? I work in a bra shop and now I gotta talk about them? Okay. Whatever. You the boss now, Meggie.

  Bras are for the knockers. That’s what my grandma Mimi told me when I was thirteen and that’s what I always think. All women have different knockers. What bra was I wearin’ during a momentous event in my life? A beige one. Borin’ beige. Pink bow in the center. Startin’ to get my own knockers, that I was.

  The police came to my house when I was twelve. I was wearin’ the beige bra and I remember the police because, see, they came to tell me and my brother, Jesse, you know Jesse, Meggie? He’s good now. Your grandma threw him in rehab twenty years ago, now he’s a carpenter. Anyhow, our parents were arrested and thrown in the slammer for stealin’ a whole bunch of money from their boss. I was twelve. Jesse was ten. I think that’s why Jesse started to drink when he was older, had to drown out that pain. Sometimes you gotta look behind the addictions, you know?

  So our grandma Mimi came and got us. She had our dad when she was darn near forty, unheard of in those days, and her health ain’t too good, but she comes and gets us and we pack up the house and leave, tails between our legs ’cause of our parents’ crimes. I have to leave my best friend, Sammy. He and I played together all the time. Didn’t have a chance to say no good-bye.

  I learned about life then, yep, I did. Life can change like that, don’t you know. One second you have this, the next second you don’t got it. Life is like bras. Sometimes you buy a new bra and it fits perfect, sometimes you get it home and it’s pretty, oh yeah, it’s pretty, but it ain’t comfortable. Sometimes you buy a bra for a dress for a special occasion, but the special occasion don’t end up special none at all. Sometimes you wear an old bra, and you have a magical day, you weren’t expectin’ that at all. Sometimes the bra holds you up good, sometimes it don’t. Sometimes it’s too tight on the knockers, sometimes too loose.

  So we move and live with my grandma, half blind and uses a cane, and I wear the beige bra and she don’t never let me have nothin’ but borin’ beige bras, says the devil will make me do bad things with men if I have another color. Well, I get out on my own and I get bras of all colors, but it don’t do me no good and she was right, it got me findin’ trouble.