by Hannah Ford
It was still there, stuffed into the toe of her shoe. She dug it out and unwrapped it from the surrounding tissue paper. There it was, glimmering in the sunlight that streamed through her bedroom window. Nicole sat on her bed and stared at it, turning the ring over in her hands.
Saying goodbye to it was like saying a final goodbye to him. They’d only been together a short time, an inconsequential amount of time, really. Everyone had pointed that out to her, as if the heart cared a whit about time.
As far as her heart was concerned, Nicole and Red had loved each other for eternity and then some. Yet, intellectually she could explain how false that sensation was. Love required time and patience and attention, it took years to build a real, lasting relationship.
Then why did this feel like agony? If their short time together had been so meaningless and silly, why did she feel like this was going to kill her spirit?
Nicole couldn’t explain her emotions away. She was crying again as she wrapped the ring in newspaper until it was indistinguishable from anything else that might end up in an envelope. The last thing she wanted was for some nosey mail carrier to figure out what was in this plain looking envelope being delivered to the fancy house in Connecticut.
At around four o’clock, Nicole went to the nearest drop box and, without hesitation, pushed her envelope down the dark hole where it joined hundreds if not thousands of other similar pieces of mail.
Now it was truly done with.
***
A day and a half later, Nicole was at her first Yoga class. She’d decided that she needed to get out of the apartment more. Less watching TV and eating ice cream with Danielle, more motivating and getting the blood flowing again.
There was a tiny Yoga studio called Nirvana, just down the street from their apartment, and they had classes on Wednesday night at 7pm, which worked perfectly for her.
The only problem with the class was that she’d been ambitious and signed up for an intermediate session. The main reason she’d chosen this particular class was that it fit her work schedule best. And then she’d assumed that having done a bit of Yoga with friends in college (and considering herself to be young and somewhat fit), she wouldn’t have too much trouble adjusting to the intermediate poses.
She’d been very, very wrong.
From the start of the class, Nicole had known she was in for it. The instructor was this tiny little woman with a severe expression on her face and the attitude of a drill sergeant. Her name was Lilly and she yelled a lot for a Yoga teacher.
“Marianne, straighten your left leg. No straighten it. Okay, I’ll come over and do it for you!”
This was a typical rejoinder. Lilly would adjust arms and legs and make comments the whole time, usually about how lazy or bad everyone was at doing the positions.
Nicole was sweating and shaking from the first asana. By the time they’d gotten to downward dog, she thought she might not make it through the first fifteen minutes. Her legs were shaking. Her arms were shaking.
“Come on, Nicole,” Lilly said, stalking towards her as she spoke. “Elbows straight. Straight. Butt up. Pretend a string is pulling your posterior to the sky.” She walked behind Nicole and pulled her hips skyward. The relief on Nicole’s straining forearms was immediate and she wished Lilly would stay there.
But the teacher quickly moved on to the next sad sack.
Why am I doing this? She asked herself. It had seemed a good idea when she signed up a week ago, a way to take her mind off the empty space in her life. But straining and sweating and shaking, just minutes after getting off the train from a long day’s work—now she thought it was one of the stupidest decisions she’d made.
“And, let’s move into Salamba Sarvangasana, otherwise known as shoulder stand,” Lilly called out.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Nicole muttered, as everyone else instantly rolled into near perfect shoulder stands.
She was sitting there, debating whether or not to just get up and walk out, when she saw him at the door. First he was just a shadow, but even before she saw his face—Nicole knew. She knew Red had come to find her.
He strode purposefully into the studio of women with their toes pointed in the air, and the little strident instructor turned to stare at him. “Excuse me sir, we’ve a class going on.”
Red ignored the instructor.
He was dressed in jeans and a white and blue Armani shirt that managed to show off his incredibly broad shoulders and chest. His dark hair and dark eyes were darker and more intensely beautiful than ever, she thought.
“Nicole, we need to talk,” he said.
The instructor shook her head. “I’m sorry, sir—I really must ask you to leave. Now.”
“Nicole.” Red stared at her unwaveringly.
The women had dropped out of their shoulder stands and were watching the scene now.
Nicole tried to breathe. Tried to think.
Did she want to have this conversation right now? What was he going to tell her?
“She doesn’t have to go with you,” the teacher said, protectively.
Nicole had to give the lady credit, she was a real spitfire. “It’s okay,” Nicole told Lilly, standing up and grabbing her Yoga mat. “I should have signed up for the beginner’s class anyhow.” Smiling with some embarrassment, but mostly relief, Nicole followed Red out to the street.
Outside, it was pleasantly cool, and the sweat began drying on her sore body.
Red looked at her, his eyes pained. “Why?” was all he asked.
She knew what he meant without further explanation. “Because,” she said, “I didn’t think it was right for me to keep your ring. And it wasn’t healthy for me to hold on.”
Red broke off from looking into her eyes, instead choosing to look at the ground. “When I came home and found the envelope with your address on it—for a minute I thought you’d written me a letter and my heart sang.”
“I wasn’t trying to mislead you or upset you,” she told him. She’d never seen Red look this way. Even when he was throwing dishes and glasses, he’d looked frightening. But now he was just…drained. Almost like a fighter who’d been beaten, staggering around the ring with nothing left to give.
“I know you weren’t trying to hurt me,” Red said softly. Now he looked at her again, and when their eyes met, the old shock hit her full blast—the feeling of being known and knowing someone totally.
“I didn’t want us to end like this,” she told him. She was holding her Yoga mat like she was grabbing onto a life raft, like it would somehow save her from this ocean of pain and despair she felt.
“Opening the envelope and seeing the engagement ring sitting there, wrapped in paper, and nothing with it. Not even a note. I’d rather you threw it down a sewer.”
“I’d never throw away something you have me.”
“You did throw away something I gave you,” he replied. His jaw trembled slightly.
“That’s not true,” she whispered.
“Isn’t it, though? I gave you everything. I was going to give you half of everything I’ve built, my fortune, my business—all of it.”
“I didn’t ask for anything.”
He waved her excuse away like he’d swatted a fly. “I don’t even care about the money. But I gave you my trust, Nicole.”
She shook her head. “I can’t do this, Red. You can’t just come back into my life and dump everything on me.” She started to walk away from him.
For a moment he didn’t follow her, and then he came running and grabbed her arm, spinning her towards him. His face was closer to hers now, and she could read every conflicting emotion in his expression. “I’m sorry I lost it that night at my house,” he said. “I wanted to tell you…” his voice faded.
“Why can’t you explain it?”
“Because, it’s too painful.”
“Can’t you at least try?” she said.
He laughed and put his hands on his hips, looked around at the people walking obliviously
past them on the street. “Just another day in the city,” he laughed. “This city has seen it all.”
“Don’t avoid my question, Red.”
“I’m not.” He exhaled deeply. “It’s something that I try to pretend isn’t there. Something that won’t ever go away, no matter how much I wish it would.”
“What won’t go away?”
“Who I am. My penchant for pushing people away who get to close to me.” He smiled bitterly. “I’m well aware of my tendencies, but that doesn’t make it easier.”
“You wanted to push me away that night,” she said.
He nodded. “Yes.”
“It started when you told me I was naughty.”
Red flinched slightly. “Yes. That’s probably true. Having you in my home was something that triggered something…something dark.”
“Why?”
He laughed. “I have a feeling you won’t stop asking ‘why’ until I tell you everything.” Red stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Let me take you out for a bite to eat.”
“I don’t know,” she said, shifting from one foot to the other.
“Let’s grab a beer then. It’s too difficult to talk like this.”
She’d never seen Red Jameson beg before, and it was unnerving. He was making himself vulnerable for her—she had an idea of how difficult that was for him.
Finally, she assented. “Sure, one beer.”
He grinned, almost looking like his old self. “How about that little pub on the corner?” he asked.
It was called The Cask ’n Flagon and Nicole had never been there before. Inside, it was dingy and mostly empty, which was strange for that time of night. But then they sat down at a booth and the server came to their table and Nicole instantly knew why nobody was there.
The server, a young woman with bad skin and a bad attitude, barely even looked at them. She slapped down two menus and walked off without even asking if they wanted a drink, or saying hello.
“Someone’s having a bad day,” Nicole murmured, as the server stalked off.
Red chuckled. “Aren’t we all?”
Nicole tapped her fingers on the tabletop nervously. Red seemed to relax in his chair, comfortable now that the two of them had some time to speak.
The moody waitress came back and took their order. A couple of beers and nothing else; she wasn’t impressed and left in a hurry.
“You said having me in the house triggered something,” Nicole reminded him.
The smile faded from his lips and his eyes grew cold. “Yes.”
“I don’t understand why.”
He shifted in his seat. She could tell he truly didn’t want to talk about it, the conversation was making him anxious—and nothing ever made Red anxious.
“It sounds silly,” he began, hesitant. “But when I was a kid—“
The waitress stomped back to their table and plopped down the two glasses of beer. “Should I start a tab?”
Red checked with Nicole, which she’d never seen him do.
She shook her head. “Just these, I think.”
The waitress rolled her eyes. “That’ll be ten dollars and fifty cents.”
Red immediately paid with a twenty. “Keep the change.”
She didn’t even thank him, just took the bill and clomped off again.
“What happened when you were a kid?”
He held his beer and examined it, turning the glass this way and that, tilting it, finally he drank deeply, licked his lips. “My childhood wasn’t so easy,” he said, finally. “I don’t want to make it overly dramatic, though. Plenty have it worse.”
“Why was it hard?” She asked. She could see his body language changing drastically.
He was closing in on himself, shutting down. His eyes stared off into the distance—a thousand yard stare. His arms were crossed, he turned slightly away from her. “My father and mother divorced when I was three and my younger brother was just under a year old. Dad moved about sixty miles away, and we saw him rarely. Weekends at first, then once a month, and soon it was less than once a year.”
She tried to picture Red as a child, needing the care and guidance of a parent. Somehow she couldn’t imagine it, as though he’d always been a capable adult. “So you lived with your mother and brother?”
“Yes. And my mother was…” he paused and searched for adequate words. “She was very strange.”
“Strange,” Nicole repeated. Her stomach felt tense, her shoulders tightened with nervousness as he continued. She picked up her beer and drank a large gulp, feeling some awful revelation was coming her way.
“I didn’t know as a young boy what was wrong. Only when I got older, much older—I started to realize that she wasn’t normal. And when I finally moved out and went to college, really got out in the world, I began to see just how screwed up my childhood was.”
Nicole sipped her beer again. “Did she abuse you?” she asked suddenly.
He shrugged. “I guess. I don’t think of it in those terms.”
“She hit you…or…something else?”
“A lot of it was emotional. Most of it,” he said. “She got in moods. Sometimes good moods, but very often it was bad moods. And they could last weeks, even months. When she was in one of her bad times, every day she would tell me that I was ungrateful, stupid, ugly, a monster who was ruining her life.”
Nicole put a hand over her mouth. “No, Red.”
He shrugged. “It was pretty bad. It would be horrible for months on end and then she’d sort of snap out of it. I would be relieved to have some peace for as long as the good times lasted, but I never knew what would set her off. One day, out of nowhere, it would happen. She’d get angry again, something would rub her the wrong way, and I was back to dealing with the insults and the yelling for weeks and months, until she cycled out of it.”
“What about your brother?” Nicole asked.
Red smiled sadly. “Jeb’s a nice guy. If you met him you’d think he’s a really upstanding guy, a family care practitioner, very smart and logical and polite. But he’s deeply broken, I’m afraid. Never married, barely ever even had a relationship. The one serious girlfriend he had when he was in his early twenties—my mother ordered him to break it off. Jeb said he was going to marry this girl, but eventually he caved to my mom’s demands. They’re very close, Jeb and mom.”
Nicole was watching him closely as he relayed this information. If you didn’t know him, you might think he was just talking about his family in a sort of casual way, like people do sometimes.
But it wasn’t the case.
Something in Red’s demeanor told her that he was deeply troubled by it all—and that telling her these things was incredibly difficult for him, yet he was doing it anyway. Doing it for her.
She knew to tread carefully here. She was no therapist, but Nicole sensed that saying the wrong thing could send him spiraling into a dark place. “That night we were together in your home, did I remind you of her?”
“Of my mother?”
Nicole nodded mutely.
For a moment he just stared at her, as if in total shock. And then he burst into laughter. “No,” he said, still laughing. “No, you are very different. Thank god.”
One or two of the regulars at the bar had turned to see what all the commotion was. They slowly turned back to the TV set and their conversations.
“Well, I don’t understand why you reacted that way to me,” Nicole told him.
He threw up his hands. “I’m trying to explain the best I can. I don’t totally understand it. If I did, I wouldn’t act that way.”
“But you think it’s because of your childhood?”
“My mother was unpredictable and cruel. But the worst part didn’t start until I got into my teen years. Puberty. It’s a tough time for any kid, but she made it into something hellish.” Red’s face grew dark and his expression contorted, as he seemed to fall into the memories of his past. “I remember one day, she found some old tissues in my waste basket in m
y room. You know, I’d started masturbating like any teenager. Looking at magazines, fantasizing about girls in my class. And my mom found those tissues one day and came into the kitchen where I was eating. She dumped the wastebasket on me from behind.”
“Oh my god,” Nicole uttered.
Red’s hands curled into fists. “She started telling me I was disgusting and perverted. She said I should be locked up for doing that in the apartment with her right in the next room.”
“That’s so wrong. So, so wrong. And humiliating.”
“You could say that. And it got worse when I finally started to date girls. I tried to hide it from her, but she had a nose for things like that. She’d sniff out when I was doing certain things. And sometimes, if she was in one of her moods, she’d follow me around the apartment, telling me all the perverted stuff I was doing to those ‘sluts,’ as she called them.”
“That’s sick.”
“Of course, I wasn’t actually doing the things she accused me of. I was kissing girls, holding hands, maybe a copping a feel here and there. But she put other ideas in my head,” he growled.
Nicole gulped, hardly able to keep the shock and horror from her face. She hadn’t expected this outpouring from him, hadn’t even imagined that he was hiding this kind of history beneath his polished, brash exterior. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “What your mother did to you was wrong.”
“Thanks for saying that,” he said in a clipped voice. Then he downed the rest of his beer. His eyes were watery, but he seemed calmer now, less of a live wire.
“Is that why you…do what you do? With women?”
He pushed the empty beer glass away from himself. “I’m sure it’s not a coincidence. But it is what it is. I stopped trying to fight my peculiar urges a long time ago.”
Nicole didn’t know what she thought or felt about Red’s confession. She was sympathetic to what he’d gone through, but part of her was also wondering what kind of husband Red could make, given his traumatic upbringing.
“I did live with a woman before, and it was pretty awful,” he said. “I was a cold, dismissive person to her. And I suppose you saw a glimpse of that when you came back with me to the house. I didn’t think I’d do that with you,” he said, shaking his head in confusion. “I thought things would be different.”