Chapter 26
Liza
Days wore on. I wasn’t freezing and hungry or throwing up all the time any longer. I spent most of my days trying to figure out what I’d write to Tommy. I had decided that after I called him, I’d need to write a letter to explain everything. I’d had so many opportunities to come clean with him, and I’d wasted them. I hadn’t wanted him to think less of me, and I’d wanted to protect him. Like an ex-SEAL couldn’t protect himself. It was me being arrogant, just like taking the private loan and thinking I could handle it all myself had been arrogant. It was going to be my fatal flaw.
Every day I started over in my mind with the letter, with everything I’d say to him.
Tommy, it began. Not ‘my darling Tommy’ or ‘dear Tommy’. There’d be enough flowery whining throughout the letter. No reason to begin with self-indulgence.
I would give anything I have—which is very little at this point—to go back in time. Either to the night before your deployment or the night I walked out on you at the pub. The answer to both is the same. I should have chosen a different action. I should have told you that you were worth waiting for no matter how long or how nerve-wracking the deployment seemed to me. I should have told you in St. Martin that I’d never cheat on you or want any man besides you as long as I live. That we would work on rebuilding trust between us, and I knew it would take time. I wouldn’t have reacted like you insulted me or rushed off without telling you the real problem because I was arrogant and wanted to take care of it myself.
There are so many things I regret. Walking away from you is the worst thing I’ve ever done. Worse than seeking a loan from a private lender who turned out to be a loan shark. Worse than having to let all my staff go at the restaurant and shutter the place, effectively giving up on my dream. Because that cost my pride a great deal, and I carry a lot of shame about it. But shame won’t kill me. It’s entirely possible that the Mob will, but that’s beside the point. The point is, that thinking only of myself—my fear and loneliness or my pride and danger—has hurt us both too often. I should have grown up more by now, been smarter and stronger. I should have turned toward you with love and faith instead of turning away to protect myself when we were younger or to hide my secrets a few weeks ago. It may have been weeks or months. I have no way to know how time passes here in the darkness.
I feel your loss continually. I have gone over memories of our time together until they are nearly worn out if that’s possible. My birthday—how did you ever get a hold of a phone at basic training? The Ferris wheel, and that first kiss. The night we said goodbye before your deployment. The first time I saw your face when I came to the pub. It hit me like a speeding car running me down, I swear to God. Your eyes were the same. When I followed you outside and touched your face, that was like an electric shock. If you’d dropped a toaster in the bathtub with me it couldn’t have felt any different. The impact alone of that touch should have killed me.
At the same time, I felt alive for the first time in years. In ten years. I’ll say it. Part of me died when I turned my back on you before your first deployment. It sat in my soul, decayed and vacant. I worked, went out with friends, dated a couple of guys. Never with all my heart in it. Not even the dream of my life, that restaurant, made me truly happy. Even before the interest started going up dramatically, when I was able to make the payments easily and we were getting good reviews and the place was packed and I was serving food from a menu I created—it didn’t satisfy me.
I wondered a thousand times what you’d think of it. I imagined that you walked into the restaurant on a crowded Friday night. You were seated alone. Because it was my dream, so you didn’t have a date. You thought it was beautiful, the whole place. You couldn’t decide what to order because it all sounded amazing. But the special that night was your favorite. It was my boeuf bourgignon. You ordered that with a glass of the house red. In my dream, you don’t just drink beer. You ordered house wine. While you waited, you looked around at every perfect detail from the deep purple ceilings to the old sheet music in frames on the walls. You see that the one hanging beside your booth isn’t some Sinatra classic like you expected. It’s the music and lyrics of Like a G6 which was your favorite song the summer before we broke up. It makes you remember me. You realize everything here reminds you of me. You ask the server who the head chef is. He tells you a name, then tells you it’s Liza Kelly’s restaurant. You have to see me.
Before your food even arrives, you insist on seeing me. I’m in my office. You barge in while I’m going over the books on Excel, my reading glasses sliding down my nose. I look up and see you, and every single thing falls into place. My restaurant wasn’t real until you saw it, until you came and found me. In this part of the fantasy it can go two ways. It can go like you just come back there to congratulate me and say it’s a great place, and you wish me luck. That’s the only realistic way. Except you and I were never realistic, were we? Being practical was the biggest mistake I ever made with you back then. So the alternate ending, the fantasy part, is that you say you knew it had to be mine, because my fingerprint is on everything from the colors and the music to the pictures on the wall and every line of the menu. You say you had to see me. I say you’re looking well, because it’s true, and because I want you to tell me I look good, too.
I stand up and take off my glasses. My hair is down, which is definitely fantasy because I always wore it pulled up at work. I’m wearing something stunning that also would be out of place in a restaurant office with a case of Styrofoam takeout containers stacked up behind my desk. I round the desk and hold out my hands to you like some bombshell in an old movie. I expect to take your hands, and for you to lean in and kiss my cheek. It isn’t what I want, but I’ll take it.
You shake your head and tell me to give you a hug, because we’re old friends, after all. Despite the fact that we were never friends, old or new. We were only lovers and ex-lovers.
I don’t remember being your friend, I say archly as I put my arms around your neck. You hold me close, nuzzle my neck suggestively and say your memory must be failing. That I should remind you what we were if we weren’t friends. I look up at you, and you kiss me so thoroughly that I forget where I am. Then we put the desk to good use, because who cares about the spreadsheets when I have a chance to be with you?
Why did I ever waste time caring about anything else when I had a chance to be with you, Tommy? I don’t expect you to forgive me. Some mistakes we repeat and that makes them a choice, a bad habit. I know I never deserved you. I know I’ll always love you. I just want you to know I’ve been sorry every damn day, and I will still be sorry all the days after, until there are no more days for me.
You’re in my good dreams, and in all of my regrets. Most of all, you’re in my heart forever.
Liza
That was the version I usually ended up with. Sometimes I spent paragraphs detailing my struggles to pay the ever-increasing interest monthly, the long hours, reducing the staff, cutting down the menu, eliminating fresh flowers and candles on the tables to cut costs. Sometimes I mentioned guys I had dated and tried to have a relationship with. How my hours at the restaurant made it impossible, but even without that excuse, I was never really feeling it. I was always comparing them with him. With Tommy. The gold standard. No one could even come close to him, what I’d felt, what we’d shared.
I had a routine now. When I went to bed for the night—and who knew what was night and what was day? —I would tell myself the story of the time Tommy’s truck broke down, and I stopped to give him a ride. The way he’d flirted with me, and I’d felt like I was the most special person in the world. The way he made me laugh and made me want only him forever. If I could make it so he would look at me that way again, I’d sell what was left of my soul to anyone who wanted it.
When I woke up, I took inventory of how I felt. Was I nauseous? Dizzy? Scared? Exhausted from being scared? Merely uncomfortable and cold? If it was merely uncomfortable, I called
that a good day. If it was anything else, I’d just have to get through it.
Until the day Rocco Lucci woke me himself. When my eyes flipped open, I saw his face. He was squatting down beside my mattress, surveying me. The pouches beneath his bloodshot eyes made him look like an evil basset hound, I decided in that instant. I scrambled back and sat up, gathered my dirty blanket around me.
“No, this won’t do at all,” he clucked his tongue.
“What do you mean?” I said, bewildered and scared.
Lucci didn’t bother to answer me. He stood and motioned for me to follow him. I got to my feet, wondered what I would do about shoes or the fact I needed to pee. I figured he didn’t want to be bothered with questions like that, so I just tried to hurry after him. My legs were weak, and I was a little dizzy. It took me until I reached the open door to realize that the chain was off my ankle. I was free to move around. Except I wasn’t. I had to follow Lucci to wherever he was taking me. Someplace I most definitely didn’t want to go.
Unless he was letting me go. Maybe he had decided to let me go after all.
I walked out into the icy wind and climbed into a waiting car with darkened windows. I had to sit up front with the driver, probably because I stank. I fastened my seatbelt, but I kept thinking—why can’t I have shoes? Is it because they think I’ll run? I’m too weak to run. I wanted to ask the driver questions, but I knew he wouldn’t talk any more than my guard had. So I looked around, the bright sky hurting my eyes that were used to squinting in the darkness. I saw people and buildings and heard noises. The car, the radio, all sounds I’d been away from in the burning silence of my warehouse cell. I concentrated on the radio and heard the traffic report, the weather, and the date. It had been nearly a month since I’d been in St. Martin. It seemed longer in a lot of ways, like years. But the horrible nothingness of my imprisonment stretched out like it should have taken less time—a week, perhaps, because it was bleak. I tried to process the sights and sounds, light and noise after three weeks and more of dark and silence and deathly chill. The car was warm. The heated seat was on. I could feel warmth creeping into me, tension uncoiling in my body. My shoulders dropped a little at the comfort of being warm enough. I stretched my fingers, rolled my shoulders and neck. It made me feel more human, less like an animal in a filthy cage.
We stopped outside a nondescript apartment building. The driver got out, opened my door and pointed that I should enter. I hesitated. He took me by the arm and jerked me out of my warm seat, marched me into the building. I looked back and saw that Lucci was staying in the car where it was warm. The cold pavement was rough and freezing on my feet, and the icy air hurt my lungs when I took a breath. We rode an elevator up, and the driver unlocked a door and pushed me into the apartment. I staggered to stay on my feet. The door shut behind me. I heard a key in a lock. Apartments locked from the inside as well, I thought. Didn’t they? I looked behind me at the door with its lone, plain doorknob, no deadbolt, no button or dial on the knob to lock and unlock the mechanism. I was locked in.
We.
We were locked in.
Because I wasn’t alone. I scrabbled back against the door, panicked. There in front of me on a sectional couch were five women. All of them wore satin pajamas. It made me want to laugh hysterically, like it was some Playboy photo shoot or like a millionaire was going to walk in and choose from his harem for the afternoon. One was filing her nails. Another was painting the toenails of a third. All of them were pretty, all of them with long, shiny hair and fake eyelashes or eyelash extensions. I was locked in an apartment with a harem of attractive women clad in black satin pajamas. It was warm in there. No clutter—no phones or chargers or magazines, no tablets—could be seen anywhere.
“You must be the new girl,” A redhead stood up and came toward me.
I couldn’t answer her. It was all so strange. I didn’t know what to think. Actually, I did know.
I was locked in the stable. The stable of nice girls Rocco Lucci kept. Pimped out. Trafficked to anyone who could pay. I started to shake violently, worse than I had since the first night I was in the warehouse and thought they might kill me. These women—these girls, because they were probably under twenty-three years old—weren’t going to harm me. It was what they represented—the fact that I was still a captive, albeit in a warmer, nicer place. I was here to become one of them.
“I’m Ashley,” the red-haired girl said to me, shaking her head. “Come with me. You’re gonna need a shower.”
I managed to follow her through the living room and past a kitchen, down a hall to the bathroom. The other girls were staring after me. I knew how I must look and smell. I wondered if they’d come here in a similar way, scared out of their minds and filthy after weeks in a dark, freezing warehouse. Or if they’d come voluntarily to pay off their debt or the debt some man in their life had gotten into. A father or a brother or a boyfriend—someone else who couldn’t pay. It would be better to choose this, I thought, to go willingly to bail out someone you love or to see it as a road out of debt. Not that I was under any false impression that Lucci would let any girls out of the stable as long as they were making him money. But I could see being that young and thinking this was temporary, a way out of trouble instead of a way into more trouble.
Ashley left me in the bathroom. With shaking hands, I peeled off my clothes. I saw my reflection in the mirror and nearly jumped back, I was so startled. I was pale and pasty, with dark rings under my eyes. My lips were dry and chapped, my nails bitten off. My hands were chapped from cold and they hurt. I had lost weight, probably ten pounds or more, but my stomach was pooching out a little. This is what happened when I quit doing abs exercises every day, I thought with an eye roll. Like that was important. Although Lucci had pointed out that at my age I might end up being a drug mule instead. I might want to consider which lifestyle was worse and start doing some sit-ups if I wanted to fit in with the pajama party out in the living room. Still, it was sobering to see what I looked like after weeks as a hostage. Horrible. I looked horrible.
I used the bathroom and washed my hands. I hadn’t actually washed my hands with soap in weeks. I scrubbed, relishing the hot water. After I turned on the shower, I gathered the washcloth and body wash and shampoo, a fresh razor, and climbed under the stream of hot water. I scorched myself as much as I could stand, scrubbing away weeks of filth and every terrible, frightened memory. I had more, worse memories to come considering where I had landed and been locked in. But as long as I was in the shower, I was safe for the moment. That was what I told myself. That I was grateful for light and water and soap and shampoo. I showered thoroughly and scrubbed my hair twice. I shaved and then I conditioned my hair. I felt slightly more alive, more myself once I had scraped off the grime and detritus of my captivity.
I checked to see if my legs were smooth. Finding a stubbly patch, I ran the razor up my shin with practiced ease. Then it hit me that this wasn’t over. I hadn’t been rescued. I’d fallen out of the frying pan and straight into the fire. My teeth chattered and my hand shook. I slid the razor sideways by accident. A line of bright blood welled along the shallow cut. The razor clattered to the floor of the shower. I wailed and crumpled to my knees. Collapsed on the wet acrylic floor of the shower, I clutched my head and sobbed. Wailing, keening, wishing I were anywhere but here. Even back at the warehouse when I waited in constant fear, that was better than this. The crippling uncertainty was better than knowing the hell that faced me. As long as I waited for Lucci there was the slim chance of freedom, that he’d lose interest and let me go. Now I was about to become profitable again.
My mind reeled, racing from one terrible possibility to another. Rape. Abuse. Injuries. Diseases. If I fought back, I’d be punished—either by the client or by Lucci’s men undoubtedly. If they drugged me to keep me from fighting, I’d be helpless, perhaps aware of what was done to me but unable to protest, which was in its way an even worse, too awful to contemplate. I cried until my throat ached and the
water ran cold, coursing down my bare back and over my hair. I didn’t have the will to wipe my eyes or blow my nose. I choked and hiccupped and gulped for air, my despair consuming me.
Chapter 27
Tommy
I was so wired, all my senses on high alert. The PI had called to let us know he’d located the man I’d described from the pub. In Chicago. This was connected, I knew it. I just had to get my hands on this bastard and make him tell me where she was and what he’d done to her.
Connor’s old buddy, the PI, advised me to stay out of it and let him find out what information he could. He was concerned that emotions would run high. I assured him I was an ex-SEAL and cold as ice. So, essentially, I lied to him. The fury in my blood rode close to the skin now. I kept cracking my knuckles on the flight back home to the Windy City. It was all in shades of gray and dirty white, biting wind and the occasional icy droplets of sleet greeted us. When we were through the airport and rendezvoused with the detective, I was eager to get on our way.
He and Connor were exchanging pleasantries in a way, catching up, asking about each other’s wives and kids. I wanted to grab the PI’s keys and take off in his car, I was so impatient with them. They were wasting time, time that Liza could be in the clutches of someone dangerous. I bounced on the balls of my feet like a fighter waiting to climb between the ropes into the ring.
“Settle down, bro,” Connor said. I slid him a glare that told him I wasn’t in the mood for him to give me good-natured brotherly advice on my demeanor. I tipped my chin down.
Tommy’s Baby Page 13