by Allyn Lesley
“What kind of fucking weirdness?” The hot anger in his voice rattles me to the core.
“A picture. Just one. Of a dead fetus.” My eyelids flutter close, seeing the lifeless image once more when a crushing pain grips my heart for the child he and I lost. “Then, a couple days ago, there were scarlet As on the front, right by the door. Thirty-three of them.”
He blows out a hard breath. “All this while I’ve been gone?”
I nod and still say low with fear when the truth settles in my head, “Yes.”
Monica is really behind all of this. She’s so angry about Jon’s affair that she’s doing everything in her power to gain back his attention, his love ...
“I’ll take care of it.” His words and tone sound like they’re walking on a tightrope, a shaky one at that. “Are you okay? Should I come back early?”
It takes me a few minutes to give him the answer he needs to hear, not the one I want to really tell him. “Everything’s fine here.” Jon needs to close this deal he’s told me about. It’s vital to the growth of his company. “I’m fine.”
“Okay.” He doesn’t sound like he buys it, but I hear his name being called in the background. “I’ll see you in a few days.”
“Okay.” My hands brush away the curtains at the window where I see the blooming Aster flowers I replanted. Love. Patience. I’m in love with Jon, but I’m running out of patience with our relationship, if it can be called that. Still peering out at the growing flowers, I pick up the landline when it rings again.
“Leave now or he dies.”
The anonymous caller hangs up, leaving me shaken and wide-awake.
The next morning, though I’m red-eyed from lack of sleep and scared, I begin to make plans. I’d never ask Jon to choose between his wife and myself. I’m the one who intruded on her life so it’s me who should go. My plan is solid by the time he returns from his trip two weeks later.
“Can we talk?” I need to come clean with him. He’s moving around in the bedroom, getting ready to leave for the day. I just come right out and spit out my plans, “I’m going to move out. I have a job. It’s a temporary position for an administrative position that begins in a week. But I’ll finally be able to use my associate’s degree.” I don’t hear anything from the bedroom, but I keep talking. “I’ve been looking at places too. Yesterday, there was one on Craigslist’s for a studio in Long Island City over in Queens, you know, or I may consider a roommate. But I need to move quick.” It’s still close to Manhattan, but I don’t have to pay Manhattan rental prices. The best part is it’s hours from Jon’s current home in Hyde Park. It’ll be hard, but I need the distance between us. “I can take the train in to my new job.” Now I feel like I’m blabbing, but I can’t help it. It’s too quiet in the bedroom. “Jon?”
He comes into the small bathroom with his belt unbuckled and his tie hanging loose around his neck. I don’t recognize the face of the man behind me. He spins me around and lifts me up onto the vanity. “What are you talking about?” His eyes are like the pits of hell, dark, dangerous, and hot.
I’m tired of being his “personal assistant.” The position has effectively erased the possibility of a relationship with my half sister even though she’s made it clear that’s not what she wanted when we were younger. I’ve fallen in love, but I live in fear. Fear of being left for his wife.
I face him with hands on his chest and ask, “Where is this going, Jon?” Where could an affair possibly go?
His mouth twists at my question.
A job, a place of my own will return my dignity and help me regain some self-respect. The issue isn’t him or Monica. It’s me. I’m the intruder, the third wheel. It doesn’t matter that he never spends time at the mansion or acts as if he’s a husband in love with his wife. “I can’t do this.” Not anymore. Months back, I believed this was all I deserved, that all I could get was borrowed time with a man who wasn’t mine. But the longer I’m with Jon, the more I know I deserve more than sneaky kisses and stolen laughter. “You made me want more, Jon. You did that.” I’ve already given him ten months of my life. Another month spent here, and I fear I’ll never have the courage to leave. “At night when you think I’m sleeping, I hear you. I hear your words, Jon. You speak of my inner beauty. You praise my intelligence. You tell me I’m your light.” His jaw goes slack and some of the anger in his eyes cools. I’m in no place to make demands, but I desperately want more. What I want, more than air to breathe, is to hear him tell me he wants me, that he loves me! “This, us, we can’t possibly have a future.” There’s no hope for us, not as we as, not as a man married to one sister but sleeping with another.
I don’t know if he hears the question underlining my statement. But he does seem to view me through new eyes. I try to push off the top of the bathroom sink because there’s not much left to say. We both know I’m right.
“Stop. Please.” He unties my robe, another “just because gift” from him, and my hands fall away as he pushes it off my shoulders. He leans forward and kisses my trembling lips, saying against them, “Once upon a time—”
“I don’t want to hear another sad story, Jon. Not now.” I turn away from him, heart breaking that he’s not hearing me.
He continues again like I never interrupted him with one of his large hands cushioning my cheek. “Once upon a time, a lowly stable hand ran into a little girl with hair the color of wheat.” He runs his hand through my dirty blonde hair. “She had eyes the color of a promising sunrise. He wasn’t himself that afternoon, believing he’d lost everything that mattered. Instead of worrying about her skinned knee, she helped him to his feet and dusted him off. Years later, they met again but under bad circumstances. Fucked up circumstances, really. He watched her dance under twinkling lights and wanted to be the man who could wrap his arms around her.”
My breath hitches in my throat. “Jon.”
He strips out of his clothing. Then he’s right back at my center that pulses with need for him. He’s tender and slow when he kisses me as if we have all the time in the world. “Please?” He’s at my entrance, asking me for permission.
“Yes.” I accept his hard length into my hot center, groaning at the immense pleasure of our joining.
“Don’t leave me. Stay. Stay with me. Stay with this boy with no name,” he pleads, pulling out. “You’re my air. I don’t exist if you’re not by my side. I’ll go back to being a nameless boy if you’re not with me.” Tears are all I have to give him at his surprising revelation. “I should’ve told you sooner, shown you how much you mean to me, Katherine.” He’s right back, pushing inside of me with strength and care as tears fall freely from his eyes onto my breasts. “I love you, baby girl.”
I lose it at his confession, falling over the cliff and crying with him. Too overcome, all I can do is nod. A groan of ecstasy comes from the depths of my soul as I come apart.
“I thought I knew what love was, but I didn’t. Not until you.” He pushes forward again. “Not until I met you again, Katherine Smith.” He pulls out breathtakingly slow. “Your arms are strong enough to pick me up and tender enough to lie within on days when I feel like I’ll never be anyone but a boy with no name.”
I suck in a deep breath, swept away by Jon. I’m physically spent, but he holds me up, supporting me with his strong embrace.
“I want my forever with you, and even then, that’s not long enough for me.”
I kiss him into silence, unable to take anymore.
“I love every single thing about you. Stay. Stay with me,” he begs again.
I wrap my arms around his neck, keeping him buried within me, and we fall over the cliff rapturously ... together.
Eleven
There’s a loud bang on the front door, waking me up from my sleep. When I reach the door, I’m robbed of words at the sight of Monica standing before me. Across from me, she’s fully made up, no dark hair out of place and in a black dress, which flaunts her slim curves. I feel childish in my Ironman pajamas, one o
f Jon’s favorite superheroes.
“Pack your things up. Your ‘personal assistant’ days are over,” she says, air quoting and spitting her distaste at my feet. She raises her head, facing me with a smile that radiates from her inner being, then steps closer to the door. “Your employer’s been shot. I just got the call.”
“What!” I clutch onto the door for support so my legs don’t give out from under me.
Her smile becomes even more effervescent, if that’s possible. “I received the exciting news an hour ago. I’m on my way to the morgue right now to identify the body.”
Tears trickle from my eyes and stain my cheeks. I just spoke with Jon last night and everything was fine. He even promised this was his last out-of-town trip for a long time and he’d be home in time to celebrate his thirty-third birthday today.
She lowers her voice, looking me square in the eyes. “I knew who that bastard was the minute I met him again on Fifth Avenue. Hard to hide that red hair of his. Same nobody who knocked me up and tried to make me feel irrelevant about his full scholarship to Harvard and NYU and early graduation from high school. His low-class seed should’ve never been planted in my womb. That botched abortion I had to have to save my name took away my ability to ever have children with someone who truly deserves me. Jonathan Drazen robbed me!” I stagger back from the rabid animosity. “And to top it off, he brings you here. Flaunting his affair in my face … at my home!” She’s shaking in her rage. “A fucking irrelevant bitch and a stable boy. You two deserve each other.”
I open my mouth to say something, apologize for causing her pain unintentionally and to beg for answers.
“Another trip down a flight of stairs can always be arranged.”
Her chilly threat snatches the air out of my lungs, and I fall to my knees.
“Now pack your shit and leave my home!” Her gaze, filled with hate, speaks louder and more clear than the words she’s just uttered. “I won’t hesitate to call the police if you’re not gone in fifteen minutes.” She’s a flurry of black dress when she whirls away, my heart destroyed without a single care. My mind is confused about where I’m to go.
“This is your stop,” the Lyft driver tells me, snapping me out of my memory and back to the passenger seat of his compact car.
I step outside and face the early morning. A muggy kind of heat that makes my clothing stick to my body and sweat pour from me in a matter of minutes follows me as I climb the steps of one of Manhattan’s oldest places of worship. The imposing architecture, which almost kisses the powder blue sky, does very little to block out the scorching sun. I finally reach the top of the stone steps and pull hard on the overly large doorknob.
As soon as I enter, there’s a big, glossy picture of Jon in a dark gray suit seated on a desk at Drazen Inc.’s headquarters on Fifth Avenue. I don’t see the smile on his lips that I saw often in the cottage. He looks as I met him on the patio at his wedding reception: dark, imposing, dangerous. I hurry past the picture of the man the newspaper announced a week ago died inside a car driven too fast and wrapped around a street lamppost.
Each pew I go past is packed with notable faces such as former and current mayors from New York City to men and women who look like they’re conquerors in their respective fields. I don’t need a seat anyway because I don’t plan on staying. I join the back of the line to wait my turn for a chance to see him one last time.
My heart clenches and my stomach is as unsettled as it was when Monica shared the news of Jon’s death. My eyesight blurs with tears that won’t fall. I look up to see I’m next to be able to view the casket, and that’s when I think I hear the whispers off to my right. I keep looking forward, guessing the sources for the low commotion.
I almost stop breathing at the sight in front of me.
He’s so still.
I reach the front but can’t go closer to the casket. His suit is crisp and boasts of luxury as he’d worn all his clothing in life. But he’s so pale. His red hair is neat and slicked back. I find the courage to go closer and graze his patrician nose, then his lips with my fingers. My heart begins to hammer once again. My stomach somersaults, and my equilibrium is disrupted. An uncontrollable wail leaves me because everywhere I touch him is cold and stiff, not warm and soft as it once was.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Monica flings my hand from her husband’s face. I turn but can’t see below her wide-brimmed hat or beyond her darkly tinted sunglasses covering her eyes when she finally tips her head back.
“Leave. Now.” Maria’s on my other side, gritting her hate for me through her teeth.
Low chattering starts again. This time I’m not imagining it. The talk I hear grows louder as the three of us stand idle in front of the casket.
“Who is that?” I overhear a feminine voice ask.
When I peep over one of my shoulders, several women are definitely talking behind their hands and are wearing curious stares. I don’t have to worry about what they’re saying because eventually their words drift my way.
“I heard that was his mistress,” someone nears me says.
“Did you hear she was forced to have a threesome with them? Poor Mon. What that woman suffered through.”
Tears gather at the back of my eyes again at the vicious lie. The rumors, the gossip, and the innuendos all make me want to disappear, but surrounded as I am, there’s no way these two women will allow me to leave with my self-respect intact and my dignity not in shreds as they believe I deserve.
“I wonder if she has someone I can pass my number on to.”
The man audaciously winks my way, then uses his hands as a phone, mouthing call me.
“You’ll regret you stepped in here with your knock-off designer shoes in that cheap polyester suit, you low-life whore.” Monica grips me right above my elbow. Pain shoots out when she yanks me closer to her body. “Now get out of here before you regret being born ... even more.”
The lewd jeers behind me, the convoluted lies ... I snap. “I heard you. In the library.” I remember every word, have every scent memorized, and if I hear that mysterious man’s voice, I can identify it even while blindfolded. I may not know the name of the man, but I’m confident what I heard incriminates Monica in some kind of plot. Deep down, I know the truth even if I’ll never be able to prove it. “That’s the last time you put your hand on me. You had something to do with this, and you pushed me down those stairs. And if you ever threaten me again, I’ll be the first person at the police station.”
Color drains from her face. Her eyes are the size of saucers when she removes her glasses with her pale, shaky hands.
“Now, move your two-bit whoring self out of my way.” All the years of mistreatment, untruths that caused me to doubt my self-worth, the name calling ... Rage powers through my heart, and I’m one more breath from calling her out publicly. She wisely does as I ask. “You and your no-good mother have been clear from the start. You want nothing to do with me. That’s fine.” Beside me, Marie’s a ball of nervous energy, fidgeting her fingers against the fabric of her dress. “I didn’t intrude on your life, sister. Your heartless mother here sold my services to save her sorry behind.”
One of her hands is in the air about to land against the side of my face.
Through my brave lips, I say, “I dare you. It’ll be the last time you use that hand again, Monica.”
“Mrs. Drazen, don’t make a scene. There are people watching.” The man’s words are aimed at Monica, but he’s staring at me.
She seems to come back to herself, lowering her hand then pushing her glasses back over her black eyes. “Then do your job and get her the hell out of here!” She stares at me for a long time then says, “If I never see your face again, it’ll still be too soon.”
“Likewise.” I turn away from the last of my family and follow behind the man with my head down. Then I remember Jon’s words.
Walk with your head held high. There’s nothing to be ashamed of.
So I do. I r
aise my chin higher, lifting my head up while the whispers trail me, haunting me as I’m shown to the side door of the church. I don’t leave through it, choosing to walk another path, through the door I entered before.
I refuse to feel cheap or to be treated as if I’m trash. Good, bad, or indifferent, Jon loved me. Me. And I’m worth walking through any door I choose, and I won’t ever choose the side door.
Twelve
Time moves slowly but it does move on. I go through the mundane like waking up, eating, and going to bed. I fill the rest of the hours with going to work. With each new sunrise that greets my replanted Asters in my new but small garden, a new Katie emerges. There’s a new zest in my step since my run-in with Monica and Marie. Standing up to them reinvigorated me. I surprised myself that day, but I no longer feel like an encroacher, someone who only has to take what’s dished out and served by others.
I walk in my kitchenette toward the stove to turn on the kettle. I don’t have much but my rental studio apartment is mine. The emergency money left by Jon in the cottage’s safe helped finance the apartment, but everything inside shows off my personality, my growing style, and things I’m learning that I like.
My verbal scuffle with Monica was an important step in my personal growth. But it was only a first step. One night when the mundane became overwhelming and I ended up crying rivers of tears watching a historical show featuring a hero who resembled Jon, I knew I needed an intervention. Not only to help me process my grief but one who could work with me to sort through my issues about my parents, my half sister and self-image.