Don't Be Afraid

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Don't Be Afraid Page 30

by Rebecca Drake


  “Welcome home.”

  Chapter 35

  Amy dropped the photos back onto the table as if they burned.

  “What’s wrong, Mommy?”

  “Nothing, baby. Nothing’s wrong.”

  “I’m not a baby, Mom, remember?” Emma said with the exasperation of a five-year-old.

  “You’re right, sweetie, you’re not a baby.” Amy knelt next to her daughter. “You’re a big girl now and I need your help. I need you to pack your pink suitcase, Em. Do you think you can do that?”

  “Where are we going?”

  “We’re going to Nana’s house.”

  “We are?” Emma sounded delighted. “Right now?”

  “Yes, right now. We need to go really fast. So you pack all your stuffed animals. I’ll get your clothes.”

  “Even my big unicorn?”

  The largest of her stuffed animals, the giant unicorn that her father had indulged her with, the toy that Amy wouldn’t let her take on trips because it was too large.

  “Yep. Even your big unicorn.”

  Amy whipped clothes from her dresser, shoving them into her own suitcase. She grabbed clothes from the closet and added them with their hangers still on. Her hands shook as she yanked open the desk drawers in her office and removed all their important documents: Emma’s birth certificate, her birth certificate, their Social Security numbers. She grabbed her two best cameras, the extra telephoto lens, and then she took the photo of Emma as a newborn off her wall and added it as well.

  The cops were surprised when they stepped outside, each of them pulling a bag behind them, Amy tightly gripping Emma’s free hand.

  “Ma’am, you don’t have to leave. We’ll be watching the house all night,” one of the officers said. He was a tall man with graying hair and gray-blue eyes. He looked like someone’s grandfather, but Amy didn’t trust him. She didn’t trust anyone.

  “He’s been here,” she said. “There’s a manila envelope with some photos on the coffee table. It’s from him. I don’t know how he put them there, I don’t know how he got in, but they’re from him. It needs to go to Detective Juarez. He’ll understand.” She loaded the bags and Emma into the car.

  “Detective Juarez requested round-the-clock protection for you,” the other officer said. “You’ll be safe here.”

  Amy shook her head. “No, we won’t. It’s not safe to stay. I wanted to stay. I really, really wanted to make it work—” She stopped, choked up. “We’re going,” she said after a minute. “I’ll call Detective Juarez tomorrow to explain.”

  Emma hummed a little song in the backseat and Amy watched the house receding in the rearview mirror feeling as if she was watching her dreams for an independent life slipping away. She blinked back tears and locked the car doors before pressing her foot harder on the accelerator. It was only an hour-and-a-half drive to her mother’s house. If they made good time she could be there before midnight.

  Morning and consciousness came together. Mark didn’t know where he was for a moment and then he recognized the midnight blue comforter and saw the Pride flag hanging on the wall and he knew.

  He rolled over and saw Ash asleep next to him, curled up like always, one hand softly cupped near his face. Mark stroked the soft, fine hair, running strands between his fingers, and Ash’s eyes opened and he smiled at him.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey yourself.”

  Ash let him continue stroking, saying nothing and just looking at him. The room was the same as when Mark had last been here, more than six months before. The large, carved four-poster that Ash inherited from an aunt, the shelves filled with books, the numerous pictures on the wall of Ash and his family and friends. The Pride flag from some long-ago parade. The empty cast from a teenage skiing accident. The program signed by Placido Domingo. The Yankees pennant that had hung over his bed as a child.

  Mark saw that the photos had been carefully rearranged to cover the hole left by the removal of one. Soon after they met a friend of Ash’s took their picture at a party. The two of them, side by side, arms loosely wrapped around each other’s waists. Ash beamed at the camera, leaning back slightly against Mark’s shoulder while Mark sat very straight with a more reserved smile.

  Ash had hung it in the center, the place of honor on his wall, and it was gone.

  “I still have it,” he said, seeing Mark’s gaze. “When you first left, I used to study it.”

  Mark waited, not saying anything, his stomach hurting because he wanted to ask why but was afraid of the answer.

  “I couldn’t understand why you’d left. We were happy. We were going to share this place. I couldn’t understand what went wrong. But then I looked at the picture and I saw it in your face. In your eyes. You didn’t want that picture or this life with me. I was your secret—that was all.”

  Mark kept stroking his hair, letting him talk, feeling the pain of that separation spilling from both of them.

  “I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I was afraid. I’d barely come out to myself. When you said ‘move in together,’ it was just too much. I wanted it, but I couldn’t handle it.”

  “And now you can?”

  There was a bitter note in his voice. Mark didn’t blame him. “Yes.”

  “Why? What’s changed?”

  He wanted to say “everything.” He was not the same person he’d been six months ago. Going home had changed him. The case had changed him. Trying to hide who he was had changed him.

  “I miss you,” he said instead. “I’ve missed you every day that I’ve been gone. I need you. I need us. I’m tired of hiding this part of my life.”

  Ash didn’t say anything, but he sat up in bed and reached for the T-shirt that had been left in a ball on the floor last night. He pulled it on and stepped over to a large plush armchair to get his jeans.

  Dressed, he crossed his arms across his chest and looked at Mark. “What about your family?”

  “What about them?”

  “Have you told them?”

  “No.”

  Ash sighed and headed out of the room. Mark scrambled out of bed and went after him, leaving his own clothes behind. Ash was in the small kitchen making coffee, slamming open the fridge to get the beans, grinding them with a set look to his face, pouring them in the expensive Italian coffee machine that he’d bought at an overpriced cooking store around the corner.

  They’d argued about it, but in a teasing, happy way, conscious that they were sounding like an established couple to argue about a purchase. Mark had told him that he could have gotten a better deal somewhere else, Ash arguing that the best coffee comes from the best preparation.

  “Can I have a cup, too?” Mark asked. He was shivering in nothing but his boxer shorts. Ash snarled something unintelligible in response, but he got another mug out of the cupboard.

  “I’m going to tell them,” Mark said. “I just haven’t yet.”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  “Well, I was lying before—to myself as well as to you.”

  Ash watched the coffee brewing with his back to Mark. “Why should I believe you this time?” he said. He sounded angry, but there was a plaintiveness in his voice that moved Mark to cross the room to him. Ash stiffened when he touched his back, but didn’t pull away.

  “I’m sorry,” Mark said. He let his arm drop and wrap around the smaller man’s waist and he pulled Ash back against his chest. The other man didn’t resist him, but he was stiff in his arms.

  “I will tell them,” he said. “But I need to know what to say.”

  Ash pulled free and turned around, leaning against the counter with his arms crossed. “How about, ‘I’m gay.’ ”

  Mark smiled, relieved to be able to find some humor in this. His stomach unknotted a little. “Yeah, I’d planned on that. But I was talking about whether I could tell them about us.”

  There was a long silence except for the drip of the coffee maker. When it stopped, Ash poured two mugs and added cream to one. He handed
it to Mark.

  “Is there an us?” he said, looking from his mug into Mark’s eyes.

  “I want there to be,” Mark said. “I don’t want to be with anyone else.”

  “I slept with someone else,” Ash said, aiming for casual but his voice climbed higher, betraying him. He gave Mark a wide berth and headed into the living room and the large, brown sofa, curling up on one end.

  Mark followed, allowing the pain of that statement to hurt him the way he knew that Ash wanted it to. He sat down on the opposite end.

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “Are you with him?”

  Ash laughed then, the light sound that Mark had missed. “You’re so old-fashioned,” he said. “No, I’m not with him. I’m not having his baby so we decided to forego the shotgun wedding.”

  “Okay, smartass. I meant are you still seeing him?”

  Ash shook his head, still smiling. “It was just one night. I was missing you and he looked like you.”

  The pleasure this gave Mark was so immediate and so sweet that he felt for a moment like his heart might stop just from the feeling. They sipped their coffee for a few moments in silence. Ash gradually let his feet slide over until they were resting against Mark’s side. It was something else they’d shared. He was always nudging Mark to rub his feet, trying to manipulate him into giving foot rubs, and being a general pain in the ass about it.

  For a moment, Mark wished that he could go back and that nothing else had taken place. That he could choose again, to stay here, to stay within this apartment, within this love, and never have to have experienced all the pain of the last six months.

  All at once he remembered something. “I slept with someone, too.”

  Ash gaped at him. “Really?”

  “Yeah, really. You don’t have to sound so shocked.”

  “I can’t help it. I thought you were trying to go straight.”

  Mark didn’t say anything, but he could feel his face turning red.

  Ash started to laugh. “No!”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh my God. Well, I guess I have to ask. Are you still with her?”

  “Shut up.”

  But Ash had given in to a fit of giggles. “Is she carrying your love child?”

  Mark picked up a velvet throw pillow and tossed it at him. Ash deflected it, laughing so hard he was snorting. “I can see the tabloid piece, ‘My Gay Love-Child.’ ”

  Mark pounced on him and wrestled him onto his back. “Shut. Up,” he said, punctuating the words with kisses.

  “Hmm . . . what will you give me?”

  “This.” And Mark kissed him once. “And this.” And then over again.

  Chapter 36

  Say what you would about Dorothy Busby, and Amy had said plenty, her mother didn’t bat an eyelash when she showed up at ten minutes to twelve carrying Emma in her arms. She just opened the door to her immaculate colonial home and stepped aside.

  For the first day, Amy did little but sleep. She stayed in the guest room at the end of the hall on the second floor while Emma had her old room. She was dimly aware of the two of them laughing together when she woke sometime late that morning, but she barely had the strength to use the bathroom and drink some water before returning to the soft comfort of the queen-sized bed and falling back into a deep, but troubled sleep.

  She woke for the second time late in the afternoon. Her mother seemed to realize that what she needed was nurturing, for she quietly offered her a dinner of soup and bread and didn’t press her for any information beyond asking if she’d spoken to the police.

  She spent the next morning reconnecting with her childhood home, examining the photos that lined the hallways and revisiting the memories each of them held. Here she was with her brother Michael at the beach. Here they were huddled together around a campfire. Here was a formal portrait that her mother had insisted on the summer she turned twelve and was pudgy with impending adolescence.

  She wandered into her parents’ bedroom and remembered the security of crawling between her parents when she’d had a bad dream. Amy’s father had been dead for more than five years, but this was another room that Dorothy Busby kept the same. His highboy still stood against one wall with his gold cufflinks on the surface next to a photo of a young Dorothy.

  Amy fingered the cufflinks and lifted the lid of the old cigar box next to them. There were no cigars left inside, just the faint odor of tobacco lingered, but there was something. A key.

  Small, silver—not a house key, Amy decided. What then? She searched his drawers and saw nothing that had a lock. Then she looked high on the closet shelves and found a metal box.

  The key turned smoothly in its lock. Inside was a pale blue hand towel folded into thirds. She drew back a corner and recoiled from what lay inside. A shiny, charcoal gray handgun.

  She’d actually fired a handgun once. Long ago as part of a personal safety class for high school girls that went a little too far in most of the parents’ opinions. It had been dropped the following semester and so had the teacher, a heavyset mannish woman who’d talked a lot about taking back the world from men. She’d been the sort of woman her father had disparagingly labeled “butch.”

  Amy never knew her father owned a gun. She ran a finger lightly down the muzzle, wondering what her mother had thought of this purchase.

  It was strange that she hadn’t thought of it before, but until Sheila’s murder, Amy lived in a world virtually insulated from crime. She’d heard about things, of course. The robbery over in Norwalk in which an elderly couple had been tied up and badly frightened. The stick-up at the convenience store. There had been rumors of the date rape of a senior when she was a freshman in high school and she remembered watching the girl in the hallways at the school and how everyone had whispered about her as if what had happened to her was shameful.

  Had her father purchased this gun because he felt threatened in some way? She vaguely remembered some discussion about a hostile employee. Or was it just something he thought a man should have? She wouldn’t be surprised to discover that her brother knew about it, but she hadn’t been told.

  She lifted it up, felt the power in the heft in her hand. Checked, just like she’d been taught all those years ago, and sure enough the safety was on, but she popped out the clip and saw that it was fully loaded.

  Slow footsteps sounded on the stairs and Amy hurriedly tucked the towel back around the gun, locked the box and shoved it back in the closet. She’d just returned the key to the cigar box when her mother entered the bedroom, carrying a basket of laundry.

  “Oh!” She put a hand to her chest and let the laundry basket drop with a plop. “What are you doing in here?”

  “Just remembering Daddy.”

  Her mother smiled and came to the dresser Amy leaned against. She opened the top drawer. “Do you know that I still keep his handkerchiefs here,” she said, lifting one of the snow white squares monogrammed with his initials. “I just couldn’t bear to part with them. Silly.”

  “It’s sweet.”

  “Why don’t you go downstairs and settle in on the couch. I’ll make you something to eat.”

  Emma was sitting at the kitchen table in her pajamas watching cartoons when her mother came down for breakfast, a bowl of some sugary, artificially colored cereal in front of her.

  “Hmm . . . that looks nutritious,” Amy said, kissing her daughter’s cheek before heading for the coffeemaker.

  “It won’t hurt her,” Dorothy Busby said. She was mixing something with her hands in a large ceramic bowl. Amy poured a mug of coffee and doctored it with skim milk and sugar, leaning against the granite countertop to watch her mother. Despite the early hour, the older woman was already neatly dressed in slacks and a light sweater, her short, iron-gray hair pulled back and fastened with a tortoiseshell barrette at the nape of her neck. Little pearl studs in her ears, matinee-length pearls around her neck and the faint scent of Chanel No. 5 completed her look.

  A
flowered apron covered her clothes and she’d carefully folded back the sleeves of her sweater to do her work. Her platinum wedding set was sitting in a small silver dish above the sink, the same spot where she always put them when she was working. It was the only time she ever had them off.

  “What’s that?” Amy said.

  “Stuffing. Can you get me the whole chicken in the fridge?”

  Amy brought it to her. “What’s the occasion?”

  “Just a family dinner. I’m celebrating having my girls with me.”

  “Nana’s taking me shopping,” Emma announced.

  “Go get dressed, then we’ll decide what we’re going to do.”

  “She’s going to buy me a present!”

  “We’ll see.” Amy waited until Emma ran upstairs before talking to her mother. “It’s not a good idea. She just got out of the hospital. It’s bad enough that she’s playing with Riley. If she gets around all the scents in the stores, she could have another attack.”

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, Amy. The dog’s outside, poor thing, and all I’m talking about is a simple shopping trip.”

  “Let’s stay here, okay. We could take Emma to the park.”

  Her mother seemed slightly mollified. “Do you have any other outfits for her? Those jeans are pretty worn at the knee.”

  “She likes it and that’s the style, Mom. Besides, it’s comfortable.”

  Dorothy sighed. “How is she going to learn to act like a lady if you won’t teach her?”

  Amy had a sudden vision of herself as a young girl, tearing down the hill on her bike, shrieking at the top of her lungs. “The whole neighborhood could hear you!” her mother had scolded when she came home. “That’s not ladylike behavior.”

  “I don’t want her to be a lady,” she said to her mother. “I want her to be a little girl.”

  “You know what I mean, Amy.”

  “I know exactly what you mean, but some things are more important than others.”

  Dorothy didn’t say more, but she turned her back on her daughter, cleaning the kitchen with short, sharp movements.

  Amy left her there and did a nebulizer with Emma, watching her daughter sucking in the green air behind the mask, looking, as she always did with this treatment, so much more frail than she acted.

 

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