Tameless

by Gilmore, Jess

  “I’m trying to save you from—”

  “I don’t need saving.”

  “I think you do.”

  “Fuck you, Scott.”

  “Oh nice. Come on, Dawn. Let’s be adults about this.”

  I laughed. Couldn’t help it. It just came out in a burst, loudly, drawing the attention of the people sitting two tables away from me. “Adults? After what you just said?” I lowered my voice. “Maybe you should have decided to be an adult before you went to my parents like you were still in middle school. And you know what? You might as well be in middle school, because even though you have a good job and your own place, that’s all just an outward appearance. Inside, you’re still a teenager.”

  A woman wearing a mall staff t-shirt came around picking up trays with trash on them. She looked at me, smiled, and I forced one back.

  Scott was silent for a moment, then said, “Ouch. That’s pretty harsh.”

  “It’s the truth. And I’m not sorry for saying it. The only thing I’m sorry about is that I didn’t recognize it sooner. I think of all the time I wasted with you…” I let my voice trail off, not finishing the sentence. I’d said what I needed to say. Yes, I wanted to say more, unleash the emotional wrath he was responsible for creating in me.

  There was no way I would have ever treated him this way before yesterday. I didn’t have any ill will toward him until yesterday. I suppose I could have felt a little guilty for saying what I said and for how I said it, but he’d brought it on himself. I had every right to vent at him.

  But I suddenly decided it wasn’t worth it. He wasn’t worth it. I was right about him. He was emotionally stunted, stuck in the teen years, unable to grow and mature like a man, unable to face a relationship like an adult. That’s why we’d been drifting so aimlessly, so devoid of passion and purpose in our relationship. I faulted myself for letting him lead the way, or not lead, to be accurate.

  The last couple of weeks had been a revelation on so many fronts, not only personally but professionally. While Scott was clearly holding me back and imposing a limit on my enjoyment of life, I was guilty for letting it happen. No more.

  “I have to go,” I said. “And I’m serious—don’t contact me.”

  He said nothing.

  I hung up.

  Chapter 26 – Wes

  I got home and found her waiting for me at my apartment door. I didn’t see her car in the parking lot, and hadn’t noticed her until I was at the top of the steps because she was sitting down, her arms tightly wrapped around her knees that were pulled up to her chest. Her head was down, but I recognized that hair. She looked up when she heard my footsteps.

  “Hey,” she said, and it came out more like: Heeeeey. Slowly, like some kind of weird drawl. Her facial expression was blank, the red circles under her eyes the only indicator that she’d been crying. At least she still had some emotion left in her.

  I didn’t move any closer to her. “What are you doing here?”

  Meghan tried to get up, but tipped over, catching herself with one hand. She stayed seated, not saying anything.

  “You can’t be here,” I said.

  “But, Wes—”

  “No.” I walked closer to her. “No buts. Leave.”

  I noticed the trembling. I saw it in her hands first, then her legs. She was sweating, way more than she should have been for just sitting there, and it wasn’t even very hot outside.

  I knew then what she wanted. Money. She was in withdrawal, probably out of cash, and in desperate need of getting a fix of…something. Whatever she was on these days.

  “Help me out, Wes.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just reached down and put my hands under her arms. God, she was light. She’s lost so much weight that her body no longer had much of a shape to it. Just a skeleton with minimal flesh. She felt hard, bony as I picked her up. She managed to sling her arms around my neck.

  She mumbled, “I stopped using five days ago. I need…I…” Her voice trailed off.

  I didn’t know if she was going to say she needed help or she needed drugs. I didn’t say anything. I just kept moving so I could do what needed to be done.

  The last thing I wanted was for any of my neighbors to see this. I’d been clean for a long time, nobody knew about my past, and there was no way I was going to let this girl bring any of that stigma back to me.

  I walked down the stairs with Meghan in my arms. “Where’s your car?”

  She pointed. “Right there. I can’t drive, Wes.”

  “I know, but it can’t be in a reserved space. I’ll move it.”

  “Can we go up to your place?” she asked, starting to cry.

  “Nope. I’m taking you to the hospital.”

  I set her down in the grass next to the sidewalk and she began to shake. I saw her eyes roll back in her head. Her arms and legs curled into impossible looking contortions. She was having a seizure. I’d seen this before, back in my days in rehab. But that was a controlled environment, with medical professionals always at the ready. Here, it was just me and Meghan.

  We were on a large patch of grass, nothing hard nearby for her to hurt herself on. I moved back from her, got my phone out of my pocket and dialed 911. They walked me through a few basic steps—the first of which was to make sure she was breathing, and she was—while we waited on the ambulance. By the time it arrived, the seizure had subsided.

  A fire truck had showed up, along with a police car, standard 911 response. Fire left when they saw the EMS people had the situation under control. The police officer stayed, jotting down some notes. I gave him her information, what little I knew about her, which was just her name and age. It was obvious there was no intent to charge her with anything. In fact, the cop looked bored and annoyed by such a routine call.

  One of the EMS guys approached me. “Can’t let you ride along in the ambulance, but we’re leaving now if you want to follow us.”

  I just looked at him.

  “Your girlfriend’s going to be okay, though,” he said.

  My eyes darted back to his. “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “Oh, just going by what she said. You following?”

  I looked back at the ambulance. “No.”

  . . . . .

  There were two things that always gave me peace and cleared my head. Photography was one, but I’d spent the whole day working with cameras at OLIVIMAX studios, so I chose the second: surfing.

  The sun was setting, casting a golden light over the water and sand. The beach was clearing out, except for a few remaining die-hards including two other surfers. I rode the waves for about thirty minutes, finding myself uncomfortably incapable of getting something off my mind. I wasn’t going to be able to let it go, so I had to do something about it.

  An hour later, after taking a shower and heading back out, I was almost there. Dawn called, asking where I was. I felt bad for not being up front with her, but I had no idea where this would lead and what the fallout might be, so I didn’t want her to worry in advance. I’d tell her later. She told me she was on the way to my apartment. I wished I’d given her a key.

  “You can go in through the sliding glass door around back.”

  “How do I get the gate open?” she asked.

  There was a six-foot wood fence around my patio. “You don’t. Just climb over it.”

  “You’re kidding, I hope.”

  “I’m not.”

  She sighed. “Well, what if someone thinks I’m breaking into your place and calls the police?”

  “No one’s going to see you. All the miniature palms will block their view. And even if they do see you, no one’s going to call the police.”

  “Right, because it’s not like you don’t have crazy girls showing up at your place.”

  That stung. But she had no idea just how crazy it had been this evening. “Dawn, it’s fine. I’ll be home around nine at the latest.”

  I drove for another ten minutes. Just as I was pulling up to my destination
, Dawn texted: Just completed my first breaking and entering.

  I wrote back: Congratulations. They get easier the more you do them. Especially when the victim tells you how to get in. See you soon.

  Dawn replied: I’m ordering food. See you when you get here, VICTIM.

  I switched my phone to mute, got out of the car, and walked to the front door. The house was just as I remembered it, but there was a different car in the driveway.

  I knocked. Heard footsteps. Heard the unlocking of the door. And it opened.

  Her eyebrows raised up on her forehead, just as her mouth opened slightly. “Wes.” That’s all she said. Just my name.

  “Sorry to show up like this, but—”

  “Please,” she said. “Come in. It’s good to see you.”

  As I entered the house, she opened her arms for a hug.

  It had been so many years since I’d last seen Dawn’s Aunt Jackie. She’d always been into health food and exercise and it had paid off—she looked exactly the same as she did the last time I saw her.

  “I know why you’re here,” she said. “Let’s sit outside.”

  I followed her to her back porch. Her house was on the highest point in the neighborhood, complete with a view of most of the other houses’ rooftops, and hills in the background.

  As we sat through the sunset, Aunt Jackie told me Dawn’s mother had called her late that afternoon and had given her a ration of shit for knowing that Dawn and I had been seeing each other, and for not telling her parents.

  “Like it’s my job to inform them of everything,” Jackie said, shaking her head. Then, “Oh, I’m so rude. I was so preoccupied when I saw you that I forgot to offer you something to drink. I have tea, fresh lemonade—made it right from that tree over there.” She pointed.

  “Lemonade would be great.”

  “I’ll make it two. Be right back.”

  She was only gone for about three minutes, which gave me time to relax a little, prepare myself for what I was about to hear. I had no idea what it was. On the drive over here, I went through dozens of possibilities and scenarios, trying to figure out what this mysterious piece of information was. I had eventually turned up the music to drown out my mind’s fruitless search for an answer with no clues.

  Aunt Jackie returned with our drinks, sat, and said, “I never tell a person’s secrets. They tell me, I lock it away. Dawn has always said telling me something is like putting it in a vault.” She smiled. “I’ve always prided myself on being a person someone can come to with a problem and not have to worry that it will get out.”

  I watched her face turn from a pleasant, soft, smile to a harsh, tight-lipped frown. I took a sip of the homemade lemonade. The slight sweetness combined with the sour bite to it was strangely perfect for this situation.

  “So I’m not proud of this,” she said. “Any of it. I hate the fact that my sister trusted me with this knowing I’d never tell anyone, and I hate the fact that she’s now blaming me for not telling her what I knew about Dawn.”

  The suspense was starting to make my stomach churn, but I didn’t want to hurry her. She was obviously hurt by this, too. “Sometimes you can’t win.”

  Aunt Jackie shook her head. “Lots of times you can’t win.” She sipped from her glass. “What I’m going to tell you is going to piss you off. Fair warning. And now that this is coming out, there’s a good chance it’s going to cause a major rift between Dawn and her parents, considering how she feels about you.”

  “I’m ready.” I was more than ready, I was on the verge of begging her to get on with it.

  She reclined in the lawn chair and told me the secret she’d been holding on to for all these years.

  When my dad went to work with Dawn’s dad, when they’d started that tech company, our parents became very close. They spent weekends together, celebrated holidays with each other, went on cruises and overseas trips, everything. It was almost as though they were family.

  That’s how they came to agree that if anything happened to my parents, I’d go live with them, and if anything happened to Dawn’s parents, she’d come live with us.

  Dawn’s parents had kept up their part of the deal when my parents died. But there was more to it than that.

  It turns out my father was a risk-taker with money. He’d hardly saved any, even when the company started to take off and my parents’ wealth quadrupled in size in the span of just two years. My father invested in a lot of little start-ups, losing most of the money, which was typical for the industry.

  What wasn’t typical was a married couple with a son to go without life insurance.

  Dawn’s father and my father came to an agreement. Her father would hold a certain amount of my dad’s stock, keeping it off-limits. Apparently, that’s the only way my father saw himself having something to live off when and if the business crashed.

  I was too young to know my dad, so I have no idea what it was that drove him to be loose with his money. But that’s just how it was, and his intentions in the long run were good.

  A few years after my parents were killed in the car accident, the business did start to falter. Buyouts were proposed and rejected. Dawn’s father was intent on making it work, with him holding all of the power.

  And in order to do that, he needed cash. Lots of it. Fast. Pumping money into the business was like doing CPR on someone who had been deceased far too long to be revived. The business failed.

  The vast majority of the money he’d used was the money that had been set aside in stocks for my parents, and in the event that something happened to them, the money was supposed to go to me in two stages—some when I turned eighteen, to help with college, and the rest when I turned twenty-one.

  There was no legal document stating any of this. The arrangement existed between two couples who trusted each other like family.

  The stupid decision my parents made was nothing in comparison to the betrayal Dawn’s dad had committed, an act that changed the course of my life without me having the slightest idea.

  I’d never thought about my parents’ money before. All I was told was that they didn’t have life insurance and that was that. I was seventeen at the time this conversation came up.

  And by that point, Dawn’s father had begun his desperate attempt at saving the business, stealing the money my parents had intended for me.

  And here I was now, finally hearing it all for the first time.

  I wasn’t angry in the least bit. I was more stunned than anything else. I briefly thought how that money might have changed my life, allowing me to live comfortably on my own, making it easier to go to college….

  Then again, I might’ve blown it all on drugs.

  There was no way of knowing. And as I came to that conclusion, I felt an odd sense of comfort with the fact that it didn’t matter that I hadn’t received a penny of that money. What mattered was the betrayal. That’s something I wouldn’t have believed as a teenager, but I was older now, I’d been through a lot, and I knew it was true.

  “How much?” I asked.

  She hesitated, cocked her head to the side a little, and her eyes narrowed as her mouth formed a straight line, as if she were trying to signal me something: You don’t want to know and I don’t want to tell you.

  “I can handle it,” I said.

  She looked down at her hands clasped tightly together. “Close to a million.”

  Okay, so maybe I couldn’t handle hearing it. The air rushed out of my lungs. I sat forward, looking down at my shoes. This is the part where I could have—maybe should have—become angry, but…I didn’t. It was just shock. Pure shock. And the thought kept coming back to me about what I might’ve done with that money, all the wrong things, almost certaintly.

  “I’m sorry to be the one telling you all of this,” Aunt Jackie was saying.

  I snapped out of my reverie, coming back to the real world. “No need to be sorry. Thanks, Jackie. I’m glad you told me.”

  She took a deep breath and sighed.r />
  I said, “I can’t imagine what it was like holding that in all those years.”

  She just shook her head. “I feel so bad for Dawn.”

  “Speaking of that,” I said, “please don’t tell her I was here. I’m going to have to think how, or if, I’m going to tell her all of this.”

  Aunt Jackie sat up in her chair. “She knows, Wes. I told her an hour ago.”

  Chapter 27 – Dawn

  I got the phone call from Aunt Jackie while I was driving to Wes’s apartment. Luckily, I was almost there. If I hadn’t been so close, there was no way I would have been able to keep driving. The tears would have blurred my vision and I would have had to pull over on the side of the road.

  I found a spot in the parking lot and stayed in my car for a good twenty minutes, processing what I’d just learned.

  My parents—the two people who raised me to respect other people and their rights and property, the two people who hammered into me their insistence that I always do the right thing—were basically thieves.

  The two people who were most important in my life had taught me lessons they themselves didn’t follow. They were dishonest, disloyal, deceiving. There was no other way to look at it.

  That was Wes’s money, and they took it out of pure greed and desperation. And to think my father’s plan was to use that money to save a failing business that ended up failing anyway…what a waste.

  Sitting in my car, getting the crying under control somewhat, I debated whether I should even go into Wes’s apartment before he got there. Under normal circumstances, I would have just gone right in without a second thought. Now, though, things felt different.

  I would have to tell him what I knew. There was no way I could hold that kind of information from him. I had no idea how he would react to it, but I couldn’t worry about those possibilities right now. All I could think of was how painful it was going to be watching his reaction.