The Beloved

by Gonzalez, J. F.

  “I said I don’t want you to call me again, you cunt! I’ll kick your fucking ass—”

  “Oh, threats now, huh? So we’ve decided to escalate things? How exciting. A word of advice, Cindy. Take a number and wait in line.”

  “I’ll cut to the front of the line, bitch! I’ll—”

  Diana hung up.

  She’d gotten into a fight with Ray that night about going over. Ray ended up forcing her to the bed and tying her up with duct tape to keep her at the apartment. Cindy had almost lost it—it felt like the afternoon she’d lost it at Gary’s day job when he’d filed for full custody of their son. She still only remembered patches of that day; how she’d driven to his day job where he worked as a warehouseman, how she’d screamed at the receptionist to see him, how she’d struggled with the security guard; how she’d fought with the police officers who came to take her away; how she’d screamed at Gary that he was killing her, that by taking her son away he was killing her slowly. The next thing she remembered was waking up at the hospital in the psych ward, her arms strapped into a strait jacket. That had been three months ago and the experience seemed to lessen the shock two months later when Ronnie pulled the same stunt. There had been no reason to go berserk again; she’d already done it.

  But the night Diana called to rub the salt in the wounds had almost tipped her over the edge again, and luckily Ray was there to calm her down and...well, tie her up. That had done the trick, because once Cindy calmed down she could think straight. And when she could think straight she was more reasonable. She’d suggested they call the police that night, and they did.

  The officer who showed up took a statement and said he would talk to Diana. A few hours later another officer came to the house. “She said you’re the one making the harassing calls, Miss.”

  Cindy had taken a deep breath to calm the rage that wanted to explode out of her and explained everything. Yes, she’d lost her mind and done a stupid thing by calling Diana back and yelling at her. She shouldn’t have done it. But Diana had started it, not Cindy. In fact, Cindy had explicitly told Diana not to call her apartment again and she’d called anyway with more harassment. Ray backed her up on this and the cop had listened sympathetically. “Aside from going to the phone company to check your phone records, it’s a case of ‘he said, she said’. If she does it again, hang up on her. If she keeps it up, call the phone company to have your number changed, and then call us. Whatever you do, don’t engage in the behavior with her and don’t call her back. That just makes it worse.”

  Cindy had agreed and promised not to escalate the situation further should it occur again. The officer thanked them and left.

  The phone calls started again the following night. Both times Cindy hung up on her. Ray answered the phone a few more times that night, expecting to get Diana, and reported only a dry clicking noise on the line. Cindy felt proud that night; she was proud she hadn’t let her emotions get the best of her and was able to react to the situation like an adult. After all, she was the better person. Diana was just a cheap whore.

  Two nights later, however, Diana crossed the line.

  “You hang up on me again,” Diana said the minute Cindy answered the phone, “I’ll whip Mary with the riding crop I have.”

  At the mention of physical threat to her daughter, Cindy had frozen. “What did you say?” Her mouth had suddenly gone dry and she felt a sudden sense of dread in the pit of her belly.

  “You heard me and you heard correctly, so I’m not going to repeat it,” Diana said. Her voice dripped with venom, with an edge of superiority.

  “Then I’m hanging up,” Cindy said, starting to replace the receiver in the cradle.

  “I’ll be sure to make a tape recording of your daughter screaming in pain,” Diana said sharply, and Cindy brought the receiver back to her ear to make sure she was really hearing this. “In fact, I’ll not only send you a copy, I’ll be sure to get some money out of it. I hear there’s a market for audiotapes of children being whipped by their parents in pedophile underground. Should we split any profits from such a sale?”

  Cindy saw red. Her body was tense. When she spoke, her voice cracked with the intensity of her fear and blinding anger “If you lay one finger on my daughter I will fucking kill you.”

  “Threats again? I thought we agreed not to cast such idle threats. In fact—”

  “You’re dead.” Cindy hung up the phone and before she knew it she was in the bedroom she shared with Ray, rummaging through his closet searching for his nine. She had just found it and was checking the clip when he came home.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Ray had asked, eyes widening in surprise. His long blonde hair hung in his stubbled face.

  “I’m going to kill that bitch,” Cindy had said, and it was the last thing she remembered saying with any sense of clarity. Ray told her later that when she walked by him he had taken a swing at her, his fist slamming into the side of her head. She’d fallen against the wall of the living room and the gun clattered out of her hand. He’d retrieved it and hidden it in a more secure location by the time she regained consciousness. When she woke up, she’d cried as she told him Diana threatened to hurt Mary.

  She had been pouring this story out to him, crying uncontrollably, when there was a knock at their door.

  It was the police. They were investigating a claim from Ronnie Baker that Cindy had threatened his girlfriend and was making harassing telephone calls. Cindy had screamed at them from where she was sitting on the sofa, a wet washrag pressed against her temple to quell the rising lump from Ray’s blow. “That fucking bitch threatened to whip my daughter and tape it to sell to perverts! Why aren’t you pounding at their fucking door!”

  She didn’t know how Ray managed to keep the cops from hauling both their asses to jail that night, but he had. Between her screaming and crying, and Ray trying to get her to shut up, and the cops wanting to poke their nosy asses in their business, it was a wonder she was sitting in her car right now. The cops insisted on taking a look around the house, and as they conducted a search Ray sat on the sofa next to her. “Just be cool,” he’d whispered. “Let me get rid of them.” She’d shut up, pure emotion over the vile ugliness of what happened getting to her. While one cop searched the apartment the other questioned them, asking how Cindy had hit her head. It took them five attempts to convince him she’d fallen in the kitchen, and when his partner came back the officers told them that, a) they didn’t believe Cindy had fallen down and hit her head and, b) if they got a call like this again they’d both be residents of Lancaster County Jail for the evening. Ray had thanked the officers and seen them out the door. It wasn’t until an hour after they’d left when she realized how much Ray had really saved her. If he hadn’t hit her as she’d been trying to leave with his gun, she would have walked right into the cops on her way out and she’d really be in trouble. Diana had set it all up.

  And for that she was going to pay.

  It had been three days since the cops came to her apartment, and Diana hadn’t called since then. Cindy hadn’t spoken to her, and as far as she knew the woman was aware of her pre-scheduled visit with Mary tomorrow. No way was she going to call to remind her, though. And forget talking to Ronnie. That asshole was never around anyway. What the fuck was wrong with him lately?

  Thinking about Ronnie led her mind to consider how she should approach telling him about how Diana threatened their daughter. In the days following Diana’s phone call, she called Laura three times a day, asking if Mary was okay. Laura had been puzzled. “Mary is fine, Cindy. What’s gotten into you?”

  “She’s really doing okay over there?” Cindy had asked at one point, stifling back tears. She could tell Laura knew she was crying, but she didn’t care. “Ronnie’s taking real good care of her and Diana isn’t...you know...”

  “Mary is fine,” Laura had said. “Ronnie is taking good care of her, and Diana has been wonderful with her. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  Ci
ndy hung up before she could blurt out what had happened between her and Diana, and now as she sat in her car watching her daughter play she felt better about Mary’s well-being...at least for now. The girl didn’t look abused or neglected in the least. She watched as Mary laughed, jumping up and down, her auburn hair flying as her playmate said something, then the two of them ran into the backyard, laughing. Lily trailed along after them but Cindy ignored her. She smiled. It felt good to see her little girl laughing and playing like that. It felt good to see her child playing and happy, without a care in the world, the way it should be when you were a child. And as she watched Mary play a sudden pang came to Cindy and she stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray and leaned back in the front seat, looking out at Ronnie Baker’s new home, her eyes pooling with tears.

  That could’ve been me in there, she thought, her chest growing heavy with the sudden hurt. If I hadn’t been such an idiot, if I hadn’t been so stupid and gone fucking around with Gary and left Ronnie we would still be together. I’d be living there with him and Mary. It would be me in that kitchen watching my daughter play in my own backyard. Oh God, I just want it all back. I want my family back, I want Ronnie back and I want my little girl back. I just want everything back the way it was. I wish I had never gone and fucked things up the way I did.

  And thinking about everything brought all the anger and despair and rage back and she felt her head clouding up with pain again. The itch to quell it was strong, and she extracted another cigarette from the breast pocket of her denim shirt and lit it with the dashboard lighter, taking the smoke deep into her lungs. It calmed her down but it wasn’t enough. Her cheeks were damp with tears and her chest hurt from holding her sadness in. She was angry and she was sad and she didn’t know what to do. Part of her just wanted to break down and cry, while another part wanted to rush over to the house and hug Mary and beg her to come live with her. Yet another part of her wanted to kick the living shit out of Diana and burn down the fucking house Ronnie built for her. Cindy’s emotions swarmed like a cyclone, creating a vertigo of pain, and when she could stand it no longer she started the car, put it in gear, and headed down the street and out of the subdivision, tears stinging her eyes as she drove.

  HE’D BEEN WALKING on eggshells for two weeks and still the thaw did not come.

  Allen Steele wondered when it would end.

  Dora was never around when he arrived home from work now. She went to her mother’s a lot, taking the kids with her. The first few days Allen returned to an empty home, he called Judy’s house. His mother-in-law had answered, and the first time he spoke to her since the incident her tone became icy when she heard his voice. She’d passed the phone over to her daughter and Dora had simply said, “The kids and I are eating at mom’s. We won’t be home for dinner.”

  He’d been eating dinner at home alone a lot the past few weeks.

  Allen sat at the kitchen table and stared out the window. It was already after nine p.m., and it was dark. Fall was definitely in the air. The days had been unseasonably warm but the nights were cool, bringing a nice breeze. In another week or so the leaves would start changing. Allen always loved fall, and had been looking forward to this autumn when he could take the kids out and play at the park near their development, maybe rummage around in the leaves with the sting of winter in the air. But with a sinking sense of sadness, he knew that wasn’t going to happen. Things were coming to a close at the Steele residence in more ways than one.

  Dora had refused to speak to him the morning following their daughter’s dream. Allen had made an attempt, of course. “You know that what she was saying last night isn’t true,” Allen began.

  “Do you think I’m stupid?” Dora had looked at him with a piercing stare. The kids were upstairs. He and Dora were downstairs in the kitchen; Dora was getting the kids’ breakfast ready, Allen was pouring the coffee he’d just brewed into his mug. “I saw the look on your face, Allen. I know what you look like when you’ve been caught by surprise. You had that look last night when Jessie said you were screwing Barbara. So don’t tell me she was making it up, because I don’t buy it. Until yesterday she’d never even heard of Barbara, but I have. You’ve talked about her enough, I knew who Jessie was talking about. So how could she know?”

  “I don’t know.” Dora had looked at him, her face crumbling, and turned away.

  The past few weeks had been unbearable and the kids sensed it. He’d called Barbara into his office the day after their affair was discovered and told her what happened. Barbara had been horrified and automatically began worrying if her husband, Jeff, would find out. Allen didn’t care if Jeff found out; he told Barbara to do whatever she had to do to keep what had gone on between them a secret. He was going to do his best to shore things up at home and he advised her that it would be best for them to call everything off. Barbara not only agreed, she informed him she was going to start looking for another job. Allen understood and told her he would write her a letter of recommendation. He’d done so a few days later, and as of today Barbara had been to at least one interview he knew of. Their relationship at work had gone from friendly to very professional with none of the chitchat they’d engaged in before.

  At home, things had gone from bad to worse.

  Sensing Dora didn’t want him to sleep in their bed, he’d taken to sleeping downstairs on the sofa. The kids didn’t know—they were put to bed well before he and Dora turned in anyway, and he and Dora continued their usual evening routines, only now they didn’t talk. The few times Allen tried to bring it up, Dora told him she didn’t want to talk about it. She just wasn’t ready for it. Allen had nodded, torn up inside over what to do and hating himself more and more for allowing himself to be swept up in the affair with Barbara in the first place.

  What a stupid thing to do! Having an affair with Barbara was something he hadn’t pursued consciously, and he’d never had an affair before. He didn’t think he was the type of guy who slept around; he’d always regarded men who cheated on their wives to be the lowest of the low, and now he had done that very thing. He had sinned gravely. And he didn’t think he could ever forgive himself for that, even if Dora eventually did.

  He did some searching on the Internet about infidelity at work during breaks and lunches, and found a few good sites devoted to helping men cope with the aftermath of having cheated on their spouse. Allen found solace in the fact that he wasn’t alone, and was trying to work himself up to confronting Dora about what had happened between them and doing something to salvage their marriage. He wanted to make it work. He would do anything to get their marriage back on solid ground.

  He sighed and was just about to get up and head for the living room when he heard the door to the kitchen open. He turned around.

  It was Dora.

  “Dora!” he said, momentarily stunned. “I—”

  “You sound like you did when I found out you were fucking Barbara,” Dora said, stepping in the kitchen. She kept her gaze on him, her eyes burning slits. “What’s the matter? Did I catch you at a bad time? Do you have the little whore here?”

  “Dora, don’t be stupid!” Allen’s heart raced. The kids weren’t with her; she’d obviously left them with her mother’s, which meant she had planned this. The look in her eyes, her body language and demeanor, all suggested that she had finally worked herself up to confronting Allen about the affair. If a fight was what she wanted, he wasn’t going to give it to her. But if she wanted to talk, he would be more than willing. “Dora we have to talk.”

  “Talk? Why do we have to talk? Why don’t we just go upstairs and fuck? You surely never talked much with Barbara.”

  Allen opened his mouth to respond but didn’t know what to say.

  “What’s the matter, don’t want to fuck me?”

  “Dora, for Christ’s sake, I don’t want to argue with you—”

  “Who’s arguing?” She had stepped up to the kitchen table and now she sauntered around it, keeping her hands in her coat pockets in a
nonchalant stance. “I’m not here to argue, Allen.”

  “Then what are you here for?”

  “I’m here,” she said, smiling, “to deal with what you did.”

  “Okay.” I’m here to deal with what you did. Sounds like she wants to talk. “Let’s talk.”

  Dora raised her hand. “First thing first. I’ve been doing some thinking, and...well, I’m sure you’ve broken things off with Barb already, right?”

  Allen felt himself collapsing, but not out of fear. He felt the walls were coming down, that he was finally getting through to Dora. “Yes,” he said, feeling vulnerable now and just wanting to pull Dora close to him and hold her, tell her he was sorry and he loved her. “Yes we’ve broken it off and she’s looking for another job. That was her idea. She actually had an interview this week and we both feel terrible about this, Dora. I never intended for this to happen and neither did she.”

  “Mmm.” Dora mused, nodding. She regarded Allen with that same look, but it appeared to have softened somewhat. “First affair for her then, too?”

  “Yes,” Allen said, feeling nervous and stammering. “I...I’ve never done anything like this before and I feel so...so ashamed!”

  “I know,” Dora said, making no move at consoling him. She was watching him, seeming to take delight in his emotional suffering. “I’m sure she feels horrible, doesn’t she?”

  “Absolutely!”

  “And I take it you’ll be deleting her address and phone number from your Palm Pilot? If you haven’t already, that is.”

  “You bet,” he said. His Palm Pilot was in his briefcase, which was on the kitchen table. He pulled it over and took the Palm out. “In fact I’m doing it right now.”

  “Here, why don’t you let me?” Dora held out her left hand, smiling. She kept the right hand in her coat pocket.

  That look on her face, Allen thought. Something about that look, that tone of voice. Hesitantly, figuring she was going to slam the Palm Pilot into the wall, but at this point not caring, he slowly handed the device over.