by JA Huss
“Are you finished?” Smith asks, his voice low and calm.
My father just looks at me, frowning. “I hope he’s the one, I really do, Chella. He’s pretty much what you deserve.” He drags his eyes over to Smith who stands up and extends his hand to me. “I know who you are, Mr. Baldwin.”
“Good,” Smith says. “Let’s go, Chella. I don’t think there’s anything left to say.”
I take his hand and draw in a deep breath as I stand up, looking down at my father. “I’m sorry I was never the daughter you felt you deserved. And I hope this new family gives you what you need.”
I don’t say goodbye. It’s not even necessary. I just let Smith lead me through the restaurant. We collect our coats and wait for the valet to bring my car in silence. I let him drive us home. And when we’re sealed up tight inside the dark garage, with nothing but the sound of silence between us, he sighs and says, “I’m so fucking sorry.”
I open my door and get out. Smith does the same.
“Don’t be sorry,” I say as we walk to the door of the house. “This has been coming for a very long time.”
Smith opens the door and places a hand on the small of my back, ushering me inside. He drops my keys on the table where I usually keep them. The lights are all on, like he left in a hurry. And when I walk through to the kitchen, I notice just how much of this place already belongs to him.
“Do you want me to call Bric for you?” Smith asks.
I shake my head and start climbing the stairs.
“Chella,” Smith calls after me.
I just keep climbing.
“Chella?” Smith calls again.
I guess if he had something to say, I might stop and listen. But he’s speechless. And my name isn’t enough to pull me back from this… this darkness.
When I get to the top floor I start taking off my clothes. I hang up the dress, slip on a white bathrobe, and start the water for the tub.
Smith is standing in the doorway of my room. Not in, not out, but between.
“What?” I ask him as I go looking for a bubble bomb in my closet. “Just say what’s on your mind and then get out. I don’t want to talk about it and I don’t want company tonight. Go back to the Club and leave me alone.”
I find what I need and go back into the bathroom. Smith is in that doorway before I can close it up. Whatever. If he wants to gawk at me while I take a bath, who cares?
I drop the bubble bomb in the hot rushing water and stand there watching them form. When I’m satisfied with their progress I drop my robe and step in. It’s hot, but not hot enough to keep me from sinking down and going under.
I let the calm thunder of the water drown out my life on the other side, close my eyes, and relax.
He can’t hurt me. He cannot hurt me.
And he didn’t. I feel so much nothing inside my heart, there’s an echo in there.
I sit up and rub the water out of my eyes so I can open them.
Smith is still standing in the bathroom doorway. We stare at each other for a few seconds and then he says, “Do you know why I liked you so much?”
“When?” I ask. “When did you like me so much?”
“That first night. After I took you home I looked you up on the internet.”
“Oh,” I say, looking away.
“There’s not much about you online. Before you took this job at the gallery, anyway. There’s plenty about you recently. But it’s the stuff that came before that intrigued me.”
“I’m not talking about it.“
“Just listen to me, Chella. OK?”
I shrug and start playing with the thick, frothy white bubbles.
“When I found all the gaps in your childhood I was excited.”
I give him a sidelong glance from the corner of my eye. “Why?”
“Because my childhood is the same way. Did you look me up, Chella? On the internet?”
I nod. “Yes.”
“And what did you find?”
“Not much.” I shrug.
“Don’t you think that’s kinda cool?”
When I glance up at him this time, he’s smiling. “What’s cool about it?”
“That we were both secrets.”
Secrets.
“I don’t know if that’s true about you, but I was a secret. My parents couldn’t have children. They tried for years and years. They considered a surrogate, adoption, all that IVF stuff. And just when they were about to give up, my mother got pregnant. She was forty-three years old.”
I sit up in the tub, unable to curb my curiosity, and stare at him as he talks. He’s still smiling, like all of this is a happy memory.
“And even though they did all the tests and they came back with good news—their child was normal. Perfect—I wasn’t, Chella. I wasn’t even close to perfect.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, looking down at my bubbles again. “You look pretty perfect to me.”
“Well, that’s the thing,” he replies softly. “Perfect on the outside is only half the story, right?”
I swallow hard and nod at him. “What happened? With your parents?”
He’s frowning when I look up. Shoving his hands in his pockets as he leans against the doorjamb. “They sent me away. To special schools.”
“But there’s nothing wrong with you, Smith. Why did they send you away?”
He sighs, but it doesn’t come out like regret. Or sadness. Maybe resignation. “I didn’t talk until I was four. And then no one could understand me. Language was hard. It didn’t make much sense. And even when it did start making sense and the words came out, I stuttered so bad, it didn’t matter. They still couldn’t understand me.”
I draw my legs up and hug them to my chest. “How old were you? When they sent you away?”
“Five,” he says. “As soon as they realized I was damaged. Too damaged to take out in public. Too damaged to show off at parties.”
“That really sucks.” I sigh.
“No,” Smith says, shaking his head. “No. It was the perfect answer for me. I was raised by a speech pathologist named Claudia. Claudia Kramer. She was an amazing mother. Like, perfect, you know? She baked cookies and made costumes for Halloween. She didn’t work, didn’t have to. My parents paid her well over a hundred grand a year to take care of me. Help me talk, help me adjust. We lived in this amazing little house up in the mountains near Aspen. I didn’t go to school, I had private tutors. I had the best fucking childhood, Chella. All because my parents threw me away.”
I look away, sadder now than when I first got in this tub.
“My parents still pretended they were my parents, but by the time I was… maybe ten or eleven… I was Smith Kramer in my head. I was very smart, no matter how bad my language skills were. I took the GED at sixteen and my mom, Claudia, she helped me take courses at a local college. I didn’t have much to do up there in the middle of nowhere, so I learned things. I got smarter. But my parents were old by that time. Mr. Baldwin was in his late sixties and Mrs. Baldwin wasn’t far behind.”
“How did you get so rich?” I ask. “If your parents didn’t… bond with you?”
He shrugs. “They had one heir. Me. For better or worse, I was their biological child. So I got it all. Every fucking penny of it. Over sixty billion dollars, Chella.”
“Fuck, Smith. I didn’t know anybody had that kind of money.”
“I lost some of it in taxes. Which was fine, even before I realized there’s no way to lose that kind of money. It grows on its own, Chella. It’s so big, it just grows. And the day it hit me that I’d never run out, no matter how much I spent or how much I lost through carelessness, it made feel sick inside.”
“So,” I whisper, “you decided to give it away.”
He nods. “And like I told your father, it’s not as easy as it sounds. That’s what I do all day. I don’t even think I’ve told this story to Bric or Quin. I don’t think they even know what I do all day. They know I give everything away. They know I only take do
nations and refuse to buy myself things. That’s why Bric lets me live at the Club.”
“You want to know my secrets,” I say in a low voice as I wiggle my toes under the water and stare at the bubbles. “You’re telling me this so I’ll tell you mine.”
“I want you to know I’m OK.”
I look up at him again.
“I’m fine. They hurt me. What they did, how they reacted, it hurt me, Chella. But I had love. I had everything I ever needed and more. I was lucky. I want you to know I realize that.”
I press my lips together as the tears heat up my eyes.
“And I’d like to know if you were loved too. Whatever that secret is, Chella, I don’t care about it. I just need to know if you were loved. If you feel lucky now that it’s over.”
I start sniffling as I shake my head. “I wasn’t loved, Smith. I was used. And even though I understand that his rejection tonight, his repudiation, was for the best—for all of us—I don’t feel lucky. At all.”
I pull the plug and stand up. Smith hands me an oversized fluffy white towel and watches as I wrap it around my body. He hands me another one to put around my wet hair. And then he follows me out of the bathroom, retreats to stand in the bedroom doorway, and watches as I dry off and get dressed in a t-shirt and shorts.
“Where did you go, Chella?” he finally asks when I’m pulling back the covers of my bed, ready for sleep. “Just tell me that. Where did you go when they made you disappear?”
I turn the lights out and climb in bed. Smith is backlit from the light filtering in from downstairs. Just a black shadow surrounded by white.
“I was with my mother,” I say. “She was crazy. Mentally ill in a way I still don’t understand. She was consumed by religion. We lived in… church places. Where the faithful meet for spiritual retreats.”
“Like a cult?” Smith asks, confused.
And yeah, I guess if I had to put a word on it, I’d call it that. But I say, “No, not really. It was all legitimate. They were all affiliated with real organizations.”
“Hmmm,” is all he has to say about that. “Where was your father for all this?”
“DC,” I say. “He let her do whatever she wanted. He doesn’t believe in divorce. And he wasn’t willing to risk his career to make things right. He felt it was… a good compromise. For me.”
“What’s that mean? I don’t understand that last part,” Smith says.
“No,” I say. “Me either.” I turn over in bed, my back to him now. “Goodnight, Smith. Thanks for playing along tonight. I appreciate it.”
“Goodnight, Chella,” he says, after about a minute of silence. And then he pulls my door closed, blocking out the light. Leaving me alone with the dark with my shame.
That’s all I have left now, right?
It’s just me and my shame.
Chapter Twenty-Nine - Smith
Chella leaves early for work the next morning. She’s cheerful and upbeat, like last night never happened.
I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Maybe both.
I spend the day putting together the last batch of charitable donations for the year and then have the Club car take me over to my foundation headquarters to drop everything off.
When I’m done, it’s barely noon. So I go where I always go. The Club.
It’s very busy today, even though the White Room isn’t open to the public. Members are here for lunch and drinks, since Christmas is on Sunday and just about everyone is off work already.
I head upstairs where Quin is sitting in my bar sipping a beer.
“Hey,” he says, when I sit down. “Bric said there was drama last night?”
“Shit,” I say, shaking my head and motioning for the bartender to bring me a Scotch. “Her fucking father is an asshole.”
Quin nods his head. “I can only imagine.”
“Why?” I ask. “Did she tell you about him?” I’m instantly jealous picturing all the intimate conversations Chella might be having with Quin.
He shrugs me off though. “He’s on the news all the time. I can’t stand that asshole. So smug and full of himself.”
“Hmm. Did Chella ever mention her childhood to you?”
Quin shoots me a look I can only assume is suspicious. “If she did, I wouldn’t tell you what she said. It’s one thing for Bric to tell me you called her in the middle of their date, it’s another to ask me to spill about our time together.”
He’s right. I know he’s right. We don’t talk about it for a reason. We keep the jealousy at bay by living three completely separate lives with the woman we choose to share.
“Sorry,” I say, backing down. “I’m just trying to understand her better. And she’s going to be alone on Christmas. Did you get her a gift?”
“Of course.” Quin laughs. “You didn’t?”
The bartender comes with my drink so I use that time to think. “I’m trying to think of something she’d like.”
“She’s a woman, Smith. She likes attention. Real attention. So give her that and you’ll make her happy.”
“Is that what you got her?” I ask.
“We’re on a different level these days. You don’t need to worry about what I got her.”
“I wonder if she’s getting us something?”
“Why do you think she went shopping alone the other day, dumbass?”
“Where’s Bric?” I ask, changing the subject. “What’s going on with the Club this weekend?”
“Parties, brother. All weekend long. You gonna attend any?”
I almost snort my drink. “No. I’m with Chella until Saturday night. Why would I?”
Quin shrugs. “I’m going.”
He always does. That’s not news.
“So next week?” Quin asks. “You think she’s ready?”
“I’m ready,” I say, then regret it. “But yeah, I think she is. I’ll know more tonight.”
“You don’t sound very excited,” Quin says, eyeing me. More suspicion. “You have something to say about it?”
“No.” I don’t. “And I am excited. It’s been a long fucking time since we had someone together like that.”
“I’m really looking forward to it,” Quin says. “I can’t fucking wait. What night should we aim for?”
“Monday?” I say. “Why not start the week out right?”
“So my night.” Quin ponders this. “I’ll think of something special and let you know.” He stands up, downs the rest of his beer, grabs one last French fry from his almost empty plate, and says, “I gotta wrap some shit up at work. See ya later.”
I wave him off and stare down at the bar. Lucinda is here again, and when I look around, I don’t see her husband.
“Hey,” Bric says, coming up the steps into the bar and walking over to my table. “How’d it go last night? With the father?” He takes a seat across from me.
“Shit,” I say, before taking a long sip of my drink. “That man is a complete asshole.”
Bric laughs. “I figured that. But no trouble?”
“No,” I say, thinking about how amicable Chella was last night. She didn’t stand up to him. Not even a little bit. And I can’t figure out if she’s just not interested and possibly happy he’s leaving her behind to start a new life, or… she’s so sad she’s locking it up inside. I just don’t know her well enough to figure that out. “He came to tell her he was getting remarried and she’s not going to be a part of his new life.”
“What the fuck?” Bric says. “Who does something like that?”
“That guy,” I say, sipping my Scotch. “Anyway, I’m gonna get her a Christmas present. What’d you get her?”
“I’m not telling you,” Bric says, smiling. He knows I suck at this shit. I’m not a relationship kind of guy. And yeah, I got Rochelle presents all the time. But I never put any thought into them. I just spent money on her. She wasn’t like Chella at all. Nice things were new for her when she met us. Chella is steeped in nice things. Nice things aren’t the same thing as l
ove and friendship, I know that better than anyone. And I’d like her to feel my gift is a sign of our love and friendship.
Do I love her? It’s a dangerous question considering what’s about to happen next week.
“But I will say, it’s nothing Earth-shattering. Just a present.”
I nod as we look at each other. “You should maybe put some more thought into it. I think she deserves that much.”
“You like her,” Bric says. “I get it. I’m not gonna interfere, Smith. If she makes you happy, I’m happy to step aside. I don’t know if Quin will, he’s having fun with her as far as I can tell. You might’ve misjudged him when you assigned him as Number Two.”
“Yeah, maybe. But he’s still in love with Rochelle, don’t you think?”
Bric shrugs. “He hasn’t talked about her all week to me. You?”
“Same,” I reluctantly admit.
“Does Chella want to continue this arrangement?” Bric asks.
“I think so.” And I do think that. If she didn’t want to experience all four of us together, she’d have seen everything I did last night for what it was. A declaration. But she missed it. She missed all of it. Maybe it was just the shock of her father’s message? Or maybe she doesn’t feel the same way about me? Doesn’t matter in the end because she just missed it.
“Well,” Bric says, “if you want my opinion, I think she’s got a problem, Smith.”
“What kind of problem?”
“Maybe problem is the wrong word,” he amends. “Maybe she’s just very curious. Or very horny. Or maybe she’s just into the gang-bang thing. I don’t know her well enough to figure that out yet. But she’s into it. You feel it, right? She likes this stuff. I mean, she went along on Wednesday night. We double-teamed her and she was ready for more last night. If her father hadn’t shown up, we’d have done it again.”
He’s right. She wants this. She’s known it was the objective since we started. And she’s still here, playing the game with us. Allowing herself to be a pawn on the chessboard.
“She needs it, Smith. For whatever reason, she needs it. So give it to her, let her think about it. And then if you still like her enough to back out of this arrangement, do it. I won’t stand in your way.”