Brendan grabbed the blade out of his desk drawer and pulled up the sleeve on his left arm. He was clumsier with his right hand so the left arm had been pretty much left alone. He drifted into the zone and started cutting, letting the blood run freely down his arm, absently watching the paths it took as it dripped onto the carpet.
He could barely focus when he heard the knock on his door. The joint was burned out in the ashtray and the room reeked of smoke. When he looked up and saw his mother standing in his room he could tell by the look on her face she hadn’t been prepared for what she saw. To her credit though, she stayed calm and merely played the game.
Glancing over toward the cognac she smirked. “So, that’s where it went. I was looking for that.”
He didn’t even try to hide his contempt. “I’ll bet you were.”
She looked at the haze in the room and back at the bottle perched on the desk. “I’d have to say that’s the pot calling the kettle black, Brendan.”
He ignored her comment. “I see you’ve regained your composure.”
Ginny stood with her arms crossed against her chest. “I see you’ve lost yours.” Surveying the damage Brendan had done to his skin, a small cry escaped from her throat. “Mind if I sit down?”
When he failed to respond she took a spot at the end of his bed.
He looked down at the file folder she was carrying and then at the birth certificates still lying on the floor. “Come to retrieve what’s yours?”
“No. I’ve come to give you what’s yours.” She laid the file folder on the bed next to her. He noticed the gesture and nodded but otherwise made no sound whatsoever. He just waited.
Ginny took a deep breath and started out. “A lot of this isn’t going to make much sense to you, and I’d rather hoped we could do this when we both had a clear head, but I doubt you’re willing to wait for the stars to align.”
“Now’s good with me.”
“The facts are the facts and they’re pretty straightforward, but the whys behind them are a little more complicated and I don’t expect you to understand them.” She laughed derisively. “I don’t even understand them sometimes.”
He watched her look around the room again. Everything was in its place, except for a fifth of cognac, an ashtray full of marijuana remains, and blood on her eighty-dollar-a-yard carpet. For the first time she noticed the other scars.
“Not your first time?”
Brendan was stone-faced. Let her look. Let her take a good, hard fuckin’ look.
When he didn’t respond she took another deep breath. “When I was seventeen I got pregnant. My parents forced me to go live with my aunt in Atlanta for the duration of the pregnancy. They wanted me to get an abortion, but I refused. My aunt helped me find a family through a private attorney that wanted to adopt and so we went through the whole process. I got to meet them, and it was all set to…to work out.”
Ginny touched the top of her forehead with the tips of her fingers. She looked at the cognac sitting on the desk and swallowed.
“Go ahead. Worked for me.” He extended the bottle toward her and she took it with shaking hands. After a long drink he took it back defiantly and swigged off of it himself, wiping his mouth in an exaggerated motion with the back of his hand.
“Must you be vulgar?”
“Must you beat around the bush?”
Ginny looked at him a good long time before answering. “You think you’re so smart, don’t you? You don’t know anything.”
“Try me.”
He watched her chest heave up and down as she tried to swallow enough air to get the whole story out. “When I was in my eighth month I went into labor unexpectedly. It was too early. They couldn’t stop the process. Then there were…complications. There was a lot of blood. The placenta separated too early, and the baby–he died inside of me. I never even got to hear him cry.”
Brendan swallowed as he watched a fresh tear fall down Ginny’s cheek. “When was that? What year?”
“Nineteen seventy-nine.”
Brendan nodded.
“The next day I was still in the hospital–still in shock–and I started bleeding again, heavily. The doctors had a lot of trouble getting it to stop. Whatever they finally did worked but I was sick for a long time. I got an infection and eventually it cleared but…I didn’t marry your father until I was in my twenties. We’d been married several years before I figured out that I was no longer…able to have children.”
“So now my life is a soap opera?”
Ginny stared at him with cold eyes. “Do you think this is easy for me? You arrogant little bastard–you’re just like your–”
“Like what mom? Like who, exactly?” He picked up the original birth certificate and waved it around. “Am I just like ‘John Doe’? According to this I don’t even have a father.”
Ginny took the bottle back from him and took another long drink. She kept talking as if he hadn’t said a word. “When we decided to adopt there weren’t very many healthy white babies available. The young girl who had you was only fourteen at the time. She…” She kept licking her lips and swallowing, trying to get the words out.
“She’d been raped, and nearly aborted you. It was a very painful situation for her. She was so young–so traumatized. She didn’t want to meet us, and she never even held you. We got you when you were three days old.”
“Who held me for those first three days?”
“No one. You were sick. You were too small and you weren’t breathing very well, so they kept you in an oxygenated incubator until you improved enough to come home with us. It didn’t take long. You were small but very strong and you fought for every breath. I sat by that incubator day and night praying for you to survive long enough for me to hold you just once. When they finally put you in my arms you were kicking so fiercely I was glad I wasn’t the one who’d had to carry you on the inside.”
Brendan smiled.
“You haven’t stopped fighting since.”
The smile faded quickly from Brendan’s lips as he realized he was the bastard son of an unknown rapist, as opposed to the unknown son of a plain old bastard. He wanted to laugh. Which was worse? “Well, I can see now why you weren’t exactly anxious to get that out in the open.”
“I wanted to wait until you were old enough to handle it. Then you hit sixteen and became… some kind of an alien. I’ve been waiting for you to normalize ever since.”
“And?”
“And I’m not so sure that now was the right time either but what’s done is done, right?”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“Oh, that’s rich Brendan! You’re sitting here stoned, stealing our booze and drinking it in front of me, tattooed, pierced and cutting yourself with a razor blade while I watch your blood drip down your arms and you want–what? A vote of confidence that you’re ready to handle what is perhaps some of the most painful news of your entire life? Get real, ok?”
“No thanks. Reality sucks.”
“Yeah. It does. And the sooner you learn that the better.”
“No problem. I’m already there.”
“Good, then we’re done?” Ginny started to get up.
“Wait.”
She sat back down.
“What do you know about her?”
“Nothing. Like I told you, it was a closed adoption. All I know about her is what’s in that paperwork. It’s yours now. You can have it all.”
“Which birth certificate is the real one?”
“They’re both real Brendan, but once we adopted you legally everything was changed.” She pointed to the original. “That’s not your name anymore. You are legally Brendan Cooper Evans. Unless you decide to do something about it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means, Brendan, that you are eighteen years old now. You’re free to change your name or do whatever you want legally and your father and I can’t do anything about it.”
“Don’t call him that.
”
“Don’t be juvenile Brendan. We have been there for you every day since day one. You think the woman who gave birth to you but couldn’t bear to hold you deserves preferential treatment here? You think that’s what makes you a parent? DNA? Think again.”
Ginny rose from the bed and crossed the room to the door, taking the cognac with her. She stopped at the doorway and turned. “So, now you can get your passport. Are you going to tell me where you’re going?”
“Europe. But beyond that I don’t really care.”
She nodded silently and left the room, closing the door behind her. Brendan rolled another joint and let the rest of the night fade into a muted cloud of white-ish gray.
Some time in the middle of the night he felt the ledge calling to him. He got up and went outside, taking his journal with him. He looked out toward Sarah’s building and imagined her sitting there in the darkness, watching him.
He was falling for her, and it scared him. There was something about her that felt so different. A draw that came from some deep, untapped well and satisfied a thirst he hadn’t known existed. It pulled him almost against his will. What he couldn’t figure out was if the need was really for her, or just a balm to protect him against the pain of losing Tess. The second made pursuit unfair. The first was absolutely terrifying. He’d never needed anything beyond his ability to resist.
At first he sat, but when he got too restless he stood. When he couldn’t stand anymore he walked, back and forth. Fear of falling had long been replaced by a fear of never falling. It was a strange fear, but he had it all the same.
It was quite the bizarre set of coincidences lining up in front of him. Nate working with his dad and then finding one of his airplanes, meeting Sarah, Sarah watching him without knowing it was him…
A shiver ran through him and his stomach once again protested the brandy / cognac combination. His need was getting the best of him on more than one level. He felt sick and not even a joint sounded good to him. He’d tried to blame genetics for his drug and alcohol use, but now he knew the truth: that there was something even more sinister lurking in his gene pool: something–and someone–that no one seemed to know anything about.
The adoption piece explained a lot, but left so many unanswered questions in its place, twisting it all into a convoluted mess. Now, more than ever, he needed to find out who he was, and what he was really made of. If he was the son of a rapist, then what other evil tendencies lurked inside him? Genetically, did that make him any better than Tess’s stepfather? He heaved at the thought of what he’d done to Tess; what some unknown man had done to his mother.
He lost the entire contents of his stomach several times over the edge of the bricks, then gripped his arm at the site of last night’s cut until it turned his shirt bright red. He wanted to slice it clean through and bleed himself clean of every violent act; every unknown sin. He longed for the angels Tess spoke of, to carry him away too, and it all dissolved in to a crumpled, fetal mess of tears.
Through the haze of darkness he looked out toward Sarah’s building as a light in one of its windows formed a silhouette. His insides ached with a longing he couldn’t name and he reached out toward her and lost his balance. He felt his body falling and he didn’t care. Suddenly he felt two strong arms gripping him on either side, and he hoped they would carry him to her, but they set him back on the ledge instead.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Like a duck on the pond.
On the surface everything looks calm,
but beneath the water those little feet are churning a mile a minute.”
- The Replacements
When Paige looked up from the stack of printouts, Frank was standing in front of her. “Can I help you?” She took off her glasses and rubbed her temples.
“Let’s go to lunch.”
“For what?”
Frank smiled. “It’s a little American tradition we have around here. People stop working and eat together, sometimes around noon. We call that lunch.”
“I’m aware of the procedure, Frank. What’s the occasion?”
“Well, the fact that you’ve once again graced our office with your presence, of course!”
“Cut to the chase Frank. What do you want?”
“Testy today, aren’t we? I was thinking a deli sandwich, how about you?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Well now, that’s not humanly possible. Chelsea said you’ve been here since six-thirty and you’ve only left that chair to use the bathroom. She’s brought you three cups of coffee and you haven’t eaten a thing. So unless you’re hiding Power Bars in your purse I figure I’ve got a pretty good argument working.”
“Would you like to know how many ounces I peed each time or are you content to just log my number of trips to the ladies room?”
“Why so edgy?” He put one hand on the desk and the other on her shoulder. She cringed inwardly. The man made her want to puke. “A girl’s got to eat. Kevin’s going to think I’m not treating you right.”
“Frank, can I be honest with you?”
“Please.”
“I don’t think your wife would appreciate our having lunch together for no good reason.”
“I have a lot of very good reasons.” Frank’s smile reminded her of a seriously disturbed clown face from a horror movie she’d seen once.
“Then why don’t you call Kelly the stewardess? I’ve got work to do.” She pushed away from the desk, grabbed her purse and walked out of the office. “Chelsea, I’ve got some work to finish in my own office today. Have the printouts on the desk in there sent over and I’ll look at them again in the morning.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Out in the fresh air Paige breathed a huge sigh of relief. Being near him was suffocating. She sat down on a landscaped wall outside the ring of buildings and dangled her feet over the sidewalk, thinking about what the view must be like from the balcony at Frank’s place.
Brendan seemed so intent on pushing the envelope. He walked the ledge but never took the leap into stupidity. Pushing her luck had only ever gotten her into trouble. New York was too dangerous to push on. If you pushed, the city pushed back. It wasn’t worth it, but then neither was spending day after day working for people like Frank. What she needed was a vacation–a real one this time.
__________
Not even dinner at her favorite Italian restaurant was enough to get Paige’s mind off of work. It was really starting to wear on her.
“Why don’t we take a vacation?” Nate was twirling spaghetti onto a speared meatball as he spoke.
Paige cocked one eyebrow up. “Have you been reading my diary?”
“You have a diary?” Nate’s eyebrows went up.
“No, but if I did that’s what it would say. After today, I’m beginning to think I really missed the boat in Switzerland.”
Nate put his fork and knife down. “Switzerland is land locked.”
“Would you be serious for once!” Paige huffed.
“Here–you’ve got sauce on your chin.” Nate reached over with his napkin and took a swipe at her.
She leaned out of his reach and grabbed for her own napkin. “I’ve got it, thanks.”
Nate narrowed his eyes, but just kept smiling. “So, where do you want to go?”
“Someplace where there are no computers, no cell phone service and–“
He whipped out his cell phone and held it up in the air, pretending to look for a signal. “Let me just call the Verizon guy. I’ll try and get a list of places they haven’t hit yet.”
“Are you going to listen to me or not?” She smiled and took a sip of her wine. The waiter swooped in silently to fill her water glass. “Good service.”
“Here or at your ideal vacation spot?”
“Both.” She put her elbows on the table. “I’ve honestly never been anywhere except the Midwest–and Switzerland, but that trip was kind of a bust, unless you count the view from Frank’s conference room and…well, tha
t one bridge.” She looked down, embarrassed to have brought up a sore subject. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that”
“That’s ok. We’re over it, right?”
When she nodded, he took her hand across the table. “If you could go anywhere, where would you want to go?”
“I don’t even know how to answer that. I mean, there are places I want to see before I die, you know? Like the Vatican, the Eiffel Tower, the Cote D’Azur, and Venice and Greece and…”
He pulled out a pretend notepad and pencil and took notes in the air, tallying the imaginary stops on their itinerary. “We’d better leave soon, then.”
“Stop teasing Nate! I’m serious. I don’t want to see them all at once, and that’s not even really what I mean.”
“I guess I’m not following you then.”
“Those are places I want to travel to. There’s a difference.”
“A difference between traveling and taking a vacation you mean?”
“Exactly!”
He nodded. “Ok, so what’s your idea of an ideal vacation?”
Paige closed her eyes and took a deep breath in. A smile spread across her face as she imagined the scene. “White sand” she kept smiling. “Blue water-“
She peeked across the table and watched understanding dawn on Nate’s face.
“And a big bed high up on a cliff overlooking the water so that you wake up feeling like you’re sleeping on top of the ocean.”
He blew out all his breath. “Wow. I think I’m aroused. I’ll just make a few calls…” he started to reach for his phone again.
She opened her eyes and slapped the top of his hand. “I was just teasing about that last part.”
“No, really. I gotta find that place.” He pulled his phone back out and pretended to be dialing numbers.
“Like it even exists outside my imagination.”
“Hey–money buys just about anything these days, didn’t you ever watch Fantasy Island?”
“Well, I’d settle for white sand and blue water.”
He grinned. “Let me guess–and a lounge chair and a pink umbrella in your drink and maybe a cabana boy to rub suntan oil on you all day long, right?”
Letters From The Ledge Page 17