by Xenia Ruiz
“Look, I understand that you made this vow to yourself, this promise to God. But we’re adults and we don’t have to answer to anyone. It’s not like we’re Luciano and Maya, married to other people. We’re free to do what we want with each other. I’m not going to feel guilty for that.”
She shook her head exasperated, like I was an idiot and could not, would never, understand. “I do feel guilty. Being an adult doesn’t mean you’re free to do what you feel like. We don’t have to answer to just any one. We have to answer to Him.”
The moment that should have brought us closer together was drawing us further apart. In that instant, I knew I would never possess her. She would always belong to someone else. I couldn’t describe the emptiness I felt, but it was like a death. Like a part of me had died, a part of both of us.
* * *
I don’t remember how long we talked, but I wasn’t sure if I said anything that helped ease her mind. I put several instrumental jazz CDs on the stereo, but the music sounded more melancholic than mellow. The snow was not letting up, so we watched the news for an update. White-out conditions had shut down both airports and numerous car accidents were reported on the expressways, including an overturned semi that had killed a family of six. She didn’t need further convincing to stay. She refused to let me pull out the bed from the sofa, though, falling asleep on top of the cushions. Just as I was drifting off to sleep, I vaguely heard a reporter talking about a breaking news story, some school shooting somewhere, and absentmindedly, I flicked off the set and went to bed. I had had enough bad news for one night.
When I awoke, it was still dark outside. I walked to the windows and watched the snow, which was beginning to taper off, leaving behind at least a foot on the ground, roofs, and cars. Periodically, I glanced at Eva on the sofa, curled up in a fetal position, hugging her coat like it was a security blanket. I walked to the linen closet and brought out a comforter and covered her. She didn’t move a muscle or twitch an eye. Whether she was really that dead asleep or she was pretending just to avoid me, I couldn’t tell. High maintenance, I remember thinking about her. Despite everything, I felt an overwhelming need to hang on for the long haul. Somehow we would overcome this bump in the road. After all, all relationships were full of highs and lows, ups and downs. It was only the beginning.
The next morning, Eva was still asleep when I got up. I started breakfast: omelets and coffee. I hadn’t slept well, not only because I knew she was a few feet away and off-limits, but also because I wasn’t feeling very well. A few weeks before, I had discovered a lump, something I didn’t have the first time I had cancer. Even before Eva had suggested I see my doctor, I had finally gone in for my past-due checkup, which included blood tests, a chest X-ray, and an ultrasound. Because I had missed my last follow-up appointment, I didn’t want to begin fearing the worst, so I tried not to think about it at all.
The phone rang and I glanced at the caller ID and saw it was Dr. Desai’s office, but I didn’t pick up. It was Saturday; I knew if she was calling on a weekend, the news could not be good.
The phone woke up Eva and she sat up on the sofa, looking around like she had forgotten where she was.
“Morning,” I called out.
She mumbled incoherently and hurried to the bathroom. After about fifteen minutes, she walked into the kitchen and stood on the opposite side of the counter, holding her coat and purse.
“Good morning,” I repeated, smiling tentatively. I fought back an irresistible urge to reach over and kiss her, but after her reaction last night, I didn’t know how she’d respond.
“Morning,” she said, almost in a whisper. “Uh … I used a new toothbrush in the medicine cabinet. I’ll pay you back.”
“No need. That’s what it’s there for. I always buy extra in case …” I stuttered. “I mean … My niece and nephew sometimes forget to bring theirs …” I stopped talking. “Want some breakfast? I made omelets.”
“I’m allergic to eggs, remember?”
“That’s right. I forgot,” I muttered, wondering how I could fail to remember something like that. In the past, I had always fixed omelets for other women the morning after because it was the quickest breakfast to make. I forgot she was not like the others. “I’ll make something else.”
“Don’t bother. Coffee’s fine.”
“Sit down.” I gestured toward a barstool. Eva remained standing, drinking her coffee, still holding her purse and coat in the crook of her arm. I turned off the stove, came around the island, and sat on the stool in front of her. I took her by the waist but she remained immobile, detached. Morning-afters were always uncomfortable, but she seemed exceptionally embarrassed, like I was some one-night stand she had met on the street.
She set the coffee cup down. “Um … I think we need to take a break.” She rubbed her hands together slowly, interlocking them.
I covered her hands with mine to stop her. I felt my mouth get hard. “What do you mean, ‘take a break’?”
“I think I know why I do this,” she said, slowly pulling her hands from my grasp and interlocking them again. “My mother used to tell us, Maya and me, that the best way to stay out of trouble was to keep our hands folded.”
“What do you mean, ‘take a break’?” I repeated sullenly.
“I mean, take some time to think about what we want—”
“I know what I want. I want you—”
“And if we don’t want the same thing, then—”
I pulled her to me and kissed her. She didn’t respond, so I tried to pry open her lips with my tongue, but she turned her head.
“I know you want me, Eva,” I said into her hair, “why are you fighting it?”
She pushed against me and backed up, walking toward the door. “Yes, I want you. My body wants you. My mind wants you. But my soul and my spirit are fighting it and I can’t … think straight and make a decision when my emotions aren’t in sync, in control.”
“Why do you always have to be in control?” Suddenly I was angry, and I didn’t care anymore. I wanted to shake her, push her out. I couldn’t wait for her to leave. “You know what? Forget it. I can’t compete with your God.”
“My God?” she asked incredulously, looking at me like I was the devil incarnate.
I turned my face, partly in anger, partly in shame, but I was not about to defend my words. She continued backing up until she got to the door.
“Stupid things happen when you’re not in control,” she said.
I followed her. “If we take a break …” I warned her.
“What?” she said, daring me to give her an ultimatum.
“It’s either going to be the beginning of the end or the end, period.”
“Why? Why can’t it be the beginning?”
“Because we’ve gone too far to start at the beginning. ‘You are flesh of my flesh, bone of my bones …’”
She looked at me sharply. “Don’t. Don’t quote scriptures at a time like this.”
“Sorry,” I said, more offended at being reprimanded than regretful for what I said.
“Besides, it’s ‘bone of my bones, flesh …’” She stopped and looked down at her hands and said, “Okay, I’m leaving.” She turned to unlock the door, but it required the key in order to open, in addition to the dead bolt. I grabbed the keys from the key hook but didn’t open the door right away.
“Okay, I guess this is it,” I said. I kissed her forehead. “Bye, Eva.”
My intention was to kiss her quickly, neutrally. But I found myself squeezing her tightly, forgetting the soreness in my chest, grasping for her lips, and hanging on for as long as she’d let me. I wanted her to remember what she would be missing. She responded to my kiss briefly, but pulled back first. There was no lovelorn look on her face, no tears. Her face was stoic, and, finally, I waved the white flag.
“I’ll walk you to the garage,” I said, my voice as cool as ice.
“You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t have to. I w
ant to,” I said tersely, and grabbed my leather bomber jacket from the coat rack. The jacket caught on the hook and I pulled on it a little too hard, sending the whole rack crashing to the ground. I yanked the jacket free and shoved my arms inside. I hoped she didn’t think I was mad at our breaking up, but mad at her specifically for making things more difficult than necessary.
We didn’t say anything as we walked to the elevator, and I was glad. I was tired of talking and debating. I knew I was going to miss her, but I would get over it. At least that’s what I kept telling myself. I thought about how long it would be before I found someone new, and it made me weary.
Shoving my hands into my pockets, I found an old cigarette, but since I didn’t have a lighter I just let it dangle menacingly out of the corner of my mouth. Eva glanced at me but didn’t comment.
There was a couple on the elevator, kissing noisily beneath a sea of down coats and wool outer garments. Eva froze, but after I stepped in, she followed. I recognized the guy. He was a British dude who lived two floors above me, in 6C, and was never at a loss for female company. A couple of months ago, he rang my doorbell in a panic asking to borrow a condom. When I told him I didn’t have any, he thought I was lying. “Dude, I’ll pie you bock,” he cried desperately as if his life depended on it. Judging by the myriad of females he kept, it probably did. Now he glanced at me over his date’s head, a bored expression on his face as she began working on a hickey on his neck. Eva busied herself by putting on her coat and hat, searching for her keys, then buttoning her coat, anything to avoid looking at them, or me.
“Are you going to call me?” the woman asked, her voice muffled as she came up for air.
“’Course I’ll ring you, love.”
“Yeah, like you did last time?”
They looked to be in their mid-twenties. I thought of those days with no regrets. It had been years since I told a woman I would call her but didn’t. I had outgrown that phase of my life and thought I was headed for something more significant with Eva.
“You got a light?” I asked the dude from 6C.
The girl looked over her shoulder and inspected us from top to bottom, her eyes heavy-laden with sex, then she leaned into the guy’s neck, hanging on for dear life. He held out a lighter. I took a deep drag and exhaled loudly with exasperation, relief, and pleasure all rolled up into one.
“Thanks, man.” I could see Eva ignoring all of us, particularly me, staring up at numbers flashing by like she was mesmerized by the complexity of elevator mechanics.
We all got off at the lower-level parking garage and walked toward opposite sections. As soon as I saw Eva to her car, I turned and walked back toward the elevator before the doors closed.
“See you, Adam,” she said.
Without turning around, I waved the cigarette in the air. “Hasta la vista, baby.” It was childish, but I was beyond caring.
As the doors were closing, I heard the guy from 6C shout: “Hey man, hold the lift, will ya?” I stuck my hand in the doors and he jumped on, sighing. “Women. They’re all the same, eh?”
“Yeah,” I said, even though the thought that we had anything in common made me ill. He didn’t know how wrong he was.
CHAPTER 21
EVA
IT HAD BEEN too late to stop. I had gone over the line between right and wrong long before I finally surrendered. Although part of me wanted to stop, the stronger part of me, my powerless flesh, was ready to forge ahead. After Adam and I presumably broke up at the lakefront, I tried to listen to my soul instead of my mind. But the thought of never seeing Adam again had resulted in some emotions I hadn’t expected, and I then realized I was no longer in control. I thought if I held out, he would come around and see things my way. I realized I wanted something more with Adam, something permanent. As the days went by and he failed to call, I panicked. I lasted two weeks before I went to his place. I had planned to seduce him, give him what he wanted—what I wanted—and then walk away from him, forever. In my mind a struggle ensued between good and evil, battling for my soul like politicians vying for a vote. You can stop him. Don’t stop him; you want him, too. You care about him; he cares about you.
The warning signs had been everywhere before I arrived at Adam’s loft, and I had ignored them all. First, my car wouldn’t start; when it finally did, it stopped twice. Then came the winter storm warnings.
Initially, Adam resisted, claiming he didn’t want an unwilling participant. But eventually I was able to convince him, using the old feminine wiles I had learned from my years “in the world,” because I knew that for men, it didn’t really matter when it came to sex whether the woman wanted it or not. In the end, I did something I had begun after my mother’s death—I made believe it was happening to someone else. I pretended I was a spectator, watching a scene unfolding in a movie. I allowed my body to go numb and let Adam finally do what he had wanted as I went through the motions. It minimized the guilt, the blame, all the mixed feelings I was experiencing. It was a long way from Adam’s front door to his bedroom and he hadn’t dragged me kicking and screaming, nor had he carried me. I had been a willing participant. When it was over and I came back to reality, the conviction was much worse.
The entire time I was with Adam, something felt wrong inside, though everything on the outside felt so right. And then he gave me his back, his well-defined back of muscled terrain, with his shoulders hunched with tension and doubt. I knew he cared about me, wanted me, maybe even loved me. When he held me in his arms, I could see it in his eyes as they peered intensely from under his dark eyebrows, so full of emotion, they spoke to me. That moment, heavy in silence, had said it all and, briefly, what I was doing seemed right.
But not one part of the night’s short-lived passion was enough to suppress my affront to God. He had provided me with several ways to escape temptation and I had gone around them all. I had defied Him and disregarded the judgment to come, which I knew would eventually follow.
When Luciano rang the doorbell, I thought, Don’t do it, Maya, even though I had. I said a prayer for her, that she wouldn’t go to a motel with him, that she would change her mind and go home to Alex. The thought of both of us falling into temptation was too much for me.
Driving home, I couldn’t stop the tears, and the more I tried to block them, the more I cried. I hadn’t cried in years. When I tried to think of the last time I cried—really cried—I drew a blank. After Anthony and Victor had cheated and moved out, and when the boys left for college, I didn’t cry, perhaps because I knew all of their departures were for the best. At one point, I had to park and pull myself together, mentally beating myself up for being so weak.
* * *
At home, King was frantic from abandonment and hunger. I had never left him alone at night, and he raced back and forth when I let him out of his kennel, wagging his nub like a wind-up toy.
“I’m sorry, boy. Mommy’s sorry.”
I ignored the voice mail indicator light, knowing that the usual people were wondering where I had spent the night—I was in no mood to explain myself to anyone. I couldn’t even face my only Judge.
I felt too guilty and upset to pray, so I jumped into the shower and scrubbed my body hard with the loofah brush, imagining pieces of my soul going down the drain along with the epidermis of my skin. Unable to look at myself in the mirror, I caught sight of my toothbrush and remembered the extra one in Adam’s medicine cabinet. I wondered how many women had been in that same bed, had rolled around in the same sheets; I was probably just one of many. After all these years, how could I have been so stupid? I thought he had probably lied about not being with a woman for almost two years. In one night, my five years of virtue had disintegrated. How easily we can be deceived when we allow ourselves to be deceived, I thought.
Unable to stop my racing thoughts, I turned on the computer to check my e-mail. The first message was from the “Verse of the Day” website. Immediately, my eyes widened with shame. I thought twice about deleting it, then clicked
on the message and read Psalm 32:4–5: For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover my iniquity. I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord”—and you forgave the guilt of my sin.
Almost automatically, I covered my eyes with both hands and began my confession, asking God for forgiveness. I crawled into bed and pulled my Bible from the bookends on the nightstand and turned to Psalm 32. I read and read until my eyes hurt.
When the phone rang, I awoke to find it was already noon. I was irritable from crying, and from my own anger and guilt. To top it off, my head was killing me, so I knew it was going to be a bad day. Through my pain and irritation, I squinted at the caller ID and saw it was Maya. If I didn’t talk to her, she’d keep calling.
“Where have you been?!” she screamed in my ear. The accusatory tone in her voice made me even angrier.
“Maya, don’t start—”
“Did you check your voice mail? Why was your cell phone off? Where were you?!”
“I’m not in the mood. Call me later—”
“Eva!” she said sharply. “Listen to me. Eli and Tony are in the hospital.”
“What?” My voice sounded far away, my ears suddenly clogging up.
“They’re at Marion Memorial Hospital.”
“Where is that?” I asked quietly, not yet understanding, not wanting to.
“In Marion, Illinois, a couple of miles south of Carter. There was a shooting on campus last night. It’s all over the news.”
I couldn’t speak, my voice was trapped somewhere deep in the well of my throat.
“Simone and I are on our way over to pick you up. Get ready so we can drive down there.” She quickly gave me the phone number for the hospital.
It took almost half an hour to get through to a nurse who knew what was going on. She was reluctant to give much information over the phone, but admitted that Eli and Tony were in serious and critical condition, respectively. Somewhere between the time I was placed on hold and hung up the phone, a peacefulness shrouded me. My night of sin with Adam was quickly overshadowed by concern for my sons. I tried to think positively, convince myself that they were alright, with only superficial wounds. I packed an overnight bag, trying to forget that the nurse had said they were in serious and critical condition, not wanting to read any more into their meanings.