Silent Words

by Lisa Fenwick

  I pushed my chair back and put my head in my hands. I was supposed to be meeting with the paralegals in an hour, and I’d wanted to make one more review of my notes before handing them over. I only had that afternoon and half of the following day at the office before I flew out for Jamaica, and the firm had a long-standing and very strict policy that nobody contacted attorneys when they were on vacation.

  “Damn!” I said, suddenly, remembering that I’d been working on the case two nights earlier, while Ashley and I had been packing for the trip. There were suitcases and carry-ons in the living room. Both of us had brought work home that night, to make sure we could leave with a clear conscience, knowing things would keep on going in our absence. There was also a folder of travel documents, copies of every receipt and confirmation I’d gotten from anybody I’d be dealing with on the trip. That was something I’d picked up from one of my best law professors—keep a paper copy of absolutely everything and destroy it as soon as it was no longer relevant.

  The Conway case folder could had gotten misplaced by either Ashley or me thinking it was the travel documents. I glanced at my watch. It was just two blocks from my office to my apartment. Plenty of time for me to zip home and check my carry-on to see if there were two folders inside.

  Being a natural optimist, I was in pretty good spirits as I stepped out of the office building. It wasn’t every day I had a reasonably good excuse to take a bonus walk in the middle of the morning, when the streets were relatively uncrowded compared to the beginning and end of the work day, or the lunch rush if I was going out to eat. Besides, it was a decent day out. Still a little chilly, since it was early March, but the sun was shining, and there was no wind whipping down the canyon-like streets between the skyscrapers.

  The sidewalks, the hallways inside my apartment building, were also quieter than I usually found them, with everybody at work instead of at home. I always liked the stillness in the building on the rare occasions I was home during a weekday. I never realized just how much low-level sound bled out of the assorted apartments until I had started law school and sometimes didn’t need to leave for class until 10:30. Nobody was cooking or talking or fighting; no kids were playing; televisions, video games, and sound systems were all silent.

  That was how I knew that Ashley was also home that morning and that she wasn't alone in the apartment before I even got my key out of my pocket. Ashley tended to be enthusiastically vocal during sex, in a way that inspired me to match her. Apparently, she had that same effect on Scott, my best friend. As soon as I recognized what exactly I was hearing, my keys fell from my hand and clattered on the floor.

  As I stooped down to pick them up, my first instinct was to charge in and start throwing fists. By the time I got the keys back into my hand and was unlocking the apartment door, the cold, dispassionate lawyer I’d been training myself to become had taken over, and I knew that nothing good could possibly come of me getting violent.

  I stood at the doorway, numbed and in a state of shock. My rational brain told me to just turn around and walk away, cool off, and confront Ashley about it later. My more animal parts still wanted to get right in and catch them in the act, when there’d be no chance of either of them denying anything. But the mere thought of walking in and seeing—actually seeing—Ashley and my best friend in the act, hit me like a battering ram to the guts, and I almost dropped my keys again as I became queasy and dizzy.

  Anger resurged almost as quickly as I’d stamped it down the first time, and I stood up straight again, ready to knock Scott’s teeth down his throat.

  “No,” I told myself. Sure, I’d be justified in roughing Scott up. If Scott ever tried to press charges, I knew that the courts tended to look very sympathetically on guys in my situation if blows were exchanged. My lawyer’s mind told me that my career would suffer, maybe not much, but some, if it ever got out that Ashley had been cheating on me, whether I got arrested and hauled off to jail for assault or not.

  I wasn’t losing the one thing that I valued so dearly over Ashley, whom I discovered wasn’t even worth keeping, and the career that I had killed myself to build.

  No fucking way!

  I transformed that anger that was trying to urge me to violence into a cold and bitter spite. There was no way I was going to let Ashley and her infidelity take one single minute of my future away from me. I was done with her.

  I needed to get back to the office and get back to work. I needed to get that Conway file. From the sound of it, Ashley and Scott were still rather busy and wouldn’t be finishing up any time soon. I ducked into the apartment. The suitcases for the trip were set just beside the door. I unzipped my carry-on and saw two folders inside. I quickly grabbed the one for the Conway case and turned to leave.

  That was when I saw Scott’s phone on the coffee table. The angle of the sunlight coming through the apartment windows glanced off the face of it in such a way that I could see a trace on the screen where the same pattern had been swiped over and over. I remembered a basic criminal investigation class from law school. I picked up the phone and ran my fingers along the Z-like shape worn into the screen, and the phone unlocked. I opened the text messaging app and saw a lengthy conversation with Ashley.

  Just the few exchanges I’d read got me worked up enough that I almost went into the bedroom. I took two steps in that direction before I stopped myself, slipped the phone into my jacket pocket, and left the apartment.

  ◆◆◆

  I put Scott’s phone on mute and dropped it into one of my desk drawers and went to my meeting with the paralegals that would be handling the Conway research while I was gone. I felt silly going to the meeting, knowing that I had no intention of going anywhere, especially with her.

  Lunch time, I usually brown-bagged it at my desk, or walked to one of the local delis, depending on how ambitious I’d been feeling when I got up for work in the morning. Because of the time Ashley and I had been spending packing for the trip, I hadn’t had time that morning to pack a lunch.

  Instead of going out to get something to eat, I took Scott’s phone and went out behind the office building, into the narrow alleyway with the dumpsters and recycling bins. Judging by the number and frequency of calls Ashley had made to the phone, Scott had discovered it was missing and had her call it to try and find it.

  I was able to read the ongoing text exchange between Ashley and Scott. By scrolling back through as many messages as the phone retained, I could tell the affair had been going on for quite some time. One of them simply said, “Happy anniversary, lover.”

  Ashley and I had been engaged for a few weeks now. I wanted to know every detail. That was why I took the phone and why I did my own investigative work myself. Ashley had agreed to marry me while she was actively sleeping with Scott behind my back. The texts made it abundantly clear to me that this wasn’t just some desperate fling she’d fallen into while I was absent from the relationship working on the Cruckson case.

  It also explained how often she had “other things” going on a lot of the time when I had a free evening or some weekend time to spend with her. I hadn’t pried about what those other things were, because I didn’t believe that she should have to drop everything just because I had a few hours I could break away from work to spend with her. I trusted her and even proposed to her, scared of her leaving me.

  What a fool!

  The Cruckson case had literally swallowed my life for months, and I was exhausted when I wasn’t at work. Our intimate life had suffered immensely during that time. This started before that case. I couldn’t believe that I'd loved this woman so much that I was making excuses for her. What was wrong with me?

  The eve of me taking her away for a ten-day retreat to Jamaica, she’d sent Scott a message saying, “I’m going to miss you so much for the next two weeks! Hurry over, I need you to top me up before I leave.”

  My eyes became blurry, reading that message repeatedly. It took quite a while to compose myself after reading it before I could
go back inside and make my way up to my office. I spent my first hour back at my desk cancelling all of the plans for the trip to Jamaica, with the exception of my flight. That I re-booked. In lieu of Jamaica with Ashley, I set myself up with a solo trip to the Greek isle of Rhodes, a place that I’d always wanted to go. I would go, just without her.

  I needed a break. First I was thinking about canceling the whole thing and just coming back to work. Why should I cancel my plans? No, I needed a break after this, and then I’d go on holiday and come back and be ready to work my arse off. Just like I’d done once before.

  Scott must have reported his phone as lost or stolen and had it remotely disabled. This kept me from going back and looking at his messages to Ashley again. I kept convincing myself to make sure my desk was still completely clear so I could fly off the next day for my own vacation. I was planning on telling Ashley after work that I knew about the affair and that I expected her to have all of her trash moved out of the apartment while I was gone.

  By the end of the workday, I was perilously close to losing control again. I cut out a bit earlier than I’d originally intended to, because I knew that my concentration was completely shot and that if one more person interrupted me, I was going to bite their head off. It really bothered me that I was losing patience with people that had absolutely nothing to do with my anger at Ashley, so I finally just up and left before I damaged a relationship with a coworker.

  Instead of going back to my apartment, I walked in the opposite direction until I found a quiet bar. I intended to just have one drink to steady myself before going home to deal with Ashley. That turned into a second drink to drown my sorrows a little bit. A third drink because why not. I ended up talking to somebody else at the bar, a guy about my age named Carl who’d been through something similar. It sounded like Carl got through it all right, and I knew that I needed to sober up before going home.

  “Hey, let’s get out of here,” I told him. “Let me get you dinner at Phoebe’s.”

  “I don’t think I’m the right clientele for that place. I’m certainly not dressed for it.”

  “It’s not that stuck up of a joint. You’ll be fine. Just don’t talk to the maître d’. Once we make it past him, you’re in.”

  Carl considered the offer while downing the last swallows of his beer and said, “You’re on. Let’s go.”

  Over dinner, Carl told me about how he found out his girlfriend had been stepping out on him, how he felt, and what he did.

  “You always hear about the woman going psycho, right?” Carl asked. “Throwing the dude’s clothes out on the lawn and setting them all on fire or trashing his car. Well, I tell you what. I thought about doing all that, but you know, any guy gets all upset like that, he gets himself real legal problems, so I had to get back at her in more subtle ways.”

  “Yeah?” I asked, pouring us each another glass of wine. By the time we got to that part of Carl’s story, we’d finished one bottle and were into another. “What did you do?”

  Carl went on a long tale of slow, simmering revenge against his girlfriend and the buddy that she’d been seeing. Since sobering up wasn’t happening, I was only catching pieces of the story. The bit about getting a friend that worked at a restaurant to give him a couple dead rats that had been caught in a trap caught my attention for a while, but it went on way too long. I kept drinking to pass the time while Carl went on and on.

  By the time the check finally came, it took everything I had to not stumble out of the restaurant. Carl hadn’t eased my mind at all. I was confused. I wanted to be a much better man about Ashley’s affair than the stranger I’d just treated to a long, rambling dinner. At the same time, the simmering rage that I’d been trying to keep at bay all day was threatening to boil over inside of me again, fueled by more alcohol than I’d had in a long, long time.

  I knew that I was in no shape to walk home, so I asked the waiter to call me a taxi. I couldn’t walk in a straight line. As I stood out in front of the restaurant, the booze started hitting me really hard, and I barely managed to slip into the alley before my stomach emptied itself. The effort of vomiting left me even more light-headed and unsteady than before.

  There was no way I’d make it more than a block by foot, so I took my phone out of my pocket to set up another ride. It took me almost a dozen tries to tap in my passcode to unlock the phone, to find two calls and a dozen texts from Ashley, starting not long after I should have gotten home from work. I read the increasingly frantic thread of texts, desperately wondering where I was, and listened to the two calls. Ashley didn’t say that she was afraid I’d somehow found out about her and Scott, that somehow they must have figured out where Scott’s phone went, but I could tell that they had done the math.

  I called her, and as soon as she picked up the phone, I spat, “You whore. You’ve been sleeping with him for a year.”

  That was when I realized that my phone was the wrong way around and I didn’t understand what she was saying, but I shouted, “Of course, I finally caught you!”

  I hung up and then erased the two voicemails from my phone. I then remembered about Carl but decided that he must have left at the same time or earlier.

  Who paid the check?

  When the driver pulled up to Phoebe’s, I almost fell flat on my face approaching the vehicle. The driver got out and crouched down next to me.

  “Whoa, man!” he said. “You’ve been hitting it way too hard.”

  “Yeah? Been a day. Take me home.”

  “Not a chance. I’m not having you puke all over my car, or worse.”

  “I won’t. I don’t have anything left to hurl up.”

  “That’s not the end I’m worried about. You need to get yourself another ride. I’m cancelling this one.”

  “No!” I yelled. “No, you’re not!” I flailed at the driver but was way too far gone and uncoordinated to do anything. The driver easily stepped out of range, got in his car, and drove off.

  “Zero stars! Zero!” I yelled after the car.

  “Sir. Sir. I’m going to have to ask you to move it on down the road.” It was the maître d from Phoebe’s. “We can’t have you making this kind of a scene in front of our entrance.”

  “Well, you had no problem selling me the wine that got me to make this scene,” I slurred.

  “And we shouldn’t have. But you also shouldn’t have ordered it, sir.”

  I replied with a blue streak of profanity.

  “Sir, if you don’t move along, we will call the police.”

  “Right, right, right,” I said, stumbling up to my feet. “Well, you sold me the last bottle of wine I’m ever going to drink at your pathetic little shithouse of a restaurant.”

  “We’ll survive,” the maître d said, gesturing to the couple of bussers that were discreetly standing just inside the restaurant, ready to come out if I lashed out.

  “Worst meal ever,” I said over my shoulder as I stumbled back into the alley. “Negative million stars. Would not puke up again.” Thirty feet in, I fell again, unconscious.

  I woke up an hour later, from the discomfort of having passed out in a heap in a really awkward position against a dumpster and from having soiled myself. The smell immediately assailed my nostrils, and I leaned over onto my side to empty what little bit I had left in my stomach. I reached into my pocket for my phone, and wondered how it had gotten a red case, and why the wallpaper was different, and my passcode didn’t work, and it had been downgraded by two generations.

  It took a while for it to register through the combination of drowsiness from my short sleep and me still being quite drunk that I had Scott’s phone in my hand. That set off a cascade of memory of what my day had been. I put Scott’s phone back into my pocket, I had no idea why I took it or even was holding on to it, but I did it for some reason. She was a crap fiancée, and he was a shitty friend.

  I reached into my pocket for my phone and found more text messages and three more calls from Ashley. I tried to read the texts,
but my eyes refused to focus, so I went to my voicemail. I reeled from wall to wall of the alley as I tried to listen to the messages and walk at the same time.

  In the middle of the second message, I stumbled out of the alley onto the street behind Phoebe’s. I immediately ran into a man that looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s twin brother. “Watch it, dumbass!” I shouted right into the guy’s face.

  “You watch it!” the guy said back.

  I looked him up and down. I was clearly not dressed for the neighborhood.

  “Why don’t you go back over to Tremont or Jersey City or wherever you crawled here from? This is Manhattan.”

  The man shoved me backwards. “Why don’t you go home? You’re drunk.”

  “I'm a better man drunk than you are sober.”

  “I doubt that,” the man said, trying to pass me and continue on his way. The little bit of sleep had sobered me up a little bit. The wide, sweeping punch I threw at the man from behind connected to the side of his head.

  “Okay,” the man said. “Okay. We’re going to do this?”

  What the heck was wrong with me?

  “Yeah, we’re going to do this,” I said, launching another punch. Since he was expecting it, and I needed to vent, because I felt as if I was going insane. The man easily leaned out of range then came back with a powerful blow to my own, mirroring the one I had initially landed on him. The man hit me with an open-handed slap to the side of the head, square on the ear. My vision briefly went black, and it felt like I’d taken an ice pick to the ear. I collapsed to the ground but was too stubborn to stay there.

  “No way. We’re done,” the man said, still holding a fighting stance. “You just stay down.”

  The man took a step back, but I lunged at him, which earned me a second hard slap to the other side of my head. The impact spun me almost completely around, but I somehow kept my feet under me. With a violent, piercing pain in both ears, barely able to see, and feeling like the world was bucking underneath my feet, I managed to lurch into the man.