You Love Me

by Caroline Kepnes

  She doesn’t kiss me. “Come on in, Joe.”

  There are rose petals on the California king bed and the bathtub is full of Veuve and she thinks we can go back to that first night we fucked, in the tub full of pissy bubbles and I didn’t want that then, I don’t want that now, and I hate rose petals. I hate overpriced champagne and she doesn’t get me, not the way you do, and that’s when I feel something dig into my back.

  A gun.

  This is not a duel—I don’t have a gun—and Melanda was right—A GIRL IS A GUN—and if anyone should have a weapon it’s me. She stole my child.

  “Ah,” she says, as she makes eye contact with me in the mirror. “So you don’t miss me.”

  “Love, put down the gun.”

  “Just say it. I know you. I feel you not wanting me. You don’t love me. You’re not excited to see me.”

  “You have a fucking gun on me.”

  “Oh please. That doesn’t scare you. Don’t forget, Joe. I know you.”

  She doesn’t know me. She knows things about my past and I am not that man anymore and I slowly turn around and face the woman who made me a father. “Love, it’s a two-way street. Don’t forget that I know you too.”

  She grunts. “Like hell you do.”

  “Love, you don’t want me back. You can’t do what you did to me and then tell me that you ‘love’ me with a bed of fucking rose petals.”

  She grunts. “You’re such a snob. You really are, Joe.”

  “See that. There it is. All of this… I don’t know what it is, but it sure as hell isn’t a grand gesture and you can’t point a fucking gun at me and tell me that you want me back.”

  “I’m just responding to you,” she says. “You started it. You don’t want me.”

  “You paid me to go away. You…” I look around. I want him to be here—he’s my son—but I don’t want him to be here—she has a gun. “He’s not even here, is he?”

  “Who?”

  “My son.”

  “Right,” she says. “Your son. See, it’s usually the girl who uses the guy to get the baby. It’s usually the woman who loves her kid more than her husband. But then, you’re not usual, are you?”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “You fell out of love with me the day I told you I was pregnant.”

  “That’s ridiculous. The baby was just as much a surprise for me as it was for you. Just because I was excited about becoming a father… Love, put down the gun.”

  “No.”

  “Well which is it? Rose petals or bullets?”

  “Say it.”

  “I was in prison.”

  “And I was pregnant. What’s your point?”

  “I told you, Love. The only reason I survived in there—the only reason I didn’t lose my fucking mind—was the fact that we were gonna have a family.”

  “Right,” she says. “You should put that on a card, Joe, ‘I only fell in love with my girlfriend when she was pregnant with my baby and I knew I spread my seed.’ ”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Because it’s true. Because the minute I told you about the baby, even before you got arrested… you didn’t look at me the same way. You didn’t want me. You wanted your baby.”

  “Love, put down the gun.”

  “You notice that every time I tell you the truth, you tell me to put down the gun?”

  It’s true, but she ended all possibility of an honest negotiation when she pulled out that fucking gun and that’s the only fucking “truth” that matters right now. She could shoot me, so I have to stay calm. Gently, Joseph. “Come on, Love. You know that’s not true.”

  “You’re incapable of love, Joe. You couldn’t see your face every time I risked exposure to disease and criminals… spiritually… physically… but every time I went to see you, you didn’t look at me. You looked at my body like I was a fucking piece of Tupperware carrying your lunch.”

  “Put down the…”

  She smiles. Evil. Spoiled. Wrong. “What did you say, Joe?”

  “You’re not remembering things clearly. I was worried about you, all the stress…”

  “Aw,” she says. “You didn’t think I was durable enough for the job, did you?”

  “Yes I fucking did.”

  “Ah,” she says. “So you did think of it as my ‘job’ to carry your offspring into this world. The second you knew about your seed planted inside of me, I stopped being a person to you.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Oh, so what? You go to ‘jail’ and you think you’re so experienced and you just fall out of love with me because I’m out shopping for the baby and meeting with doulas and not obsessing over you twenty-four hours a day?”

  “Bullshit,” I snap. “Do you know what I was obsessing over in that fucking hellhole? You, Love. I could feel you turning on me a little bit more every time you visited. I hated the fact that I couldn’t shop for cribs with you or meet the goddamn doulas, but I blamed the system. You, on the other hand, you blame me.”

  I too speak the truth but she holds the gun, so she’s ranting again, raving about how I didn’t love her. This, coming from the woman whose family paid mercenaries to get rid of me as if I am the one in this family with all the problems. She’s the sick one. She’s the one who told me that I didn’t kill RIP Beck or RIP Peach because they were both just using you for their murder-suicide story that began before they even knew you. And the worst part is that I did fall out of love with her. I too was a little less excited every time she visited.

  I wanted to love her. I did. But I couldn’t. It’s the big things—she used our baby as a chess piece—and it’s the little things—she prefers the fake snow at the Grove outdoor shopping mall to real snow—and she’s still ranting and she feeds my son guac and cilantro and I obeyed her wishes. I moved away. I went against the rules of fucking nature to appease her and what does she do to me? She hits me when I’m up—I don’t want to love you, Mary Kay, I just fucking do—and Love points at the sofa.

  “Right there,” she says. “And don’t try to fight me. I am prepared to shoot you. This thing has a really good silencer…” As if I don’t know that she can afford all the best things, as if that isn’t the reason that she’s so demented, because money doesn’t make anyone happy unless they do something good with it. “I practiced,” she says. “I’ve been spending time at a gun range and if you try to fight back…” This, from a woman who stole my son. “I mean it, Joe. I will kill you.”

  “I don’t want to fight you, Love. I came here to make peace.”

  People who have kids like to tell people who don’t have kids that there are things you can’t understand until you become a parent, that parenthood changes you and that you don’t know what love is until you become a mother, a father. It’s an insulting position that makes you realize how loveless so many people actually are. But they are right about one thing. Motherhood does change women. This isn’t Love Quinn. This is LoveSick, armed and dangerous.

  My phone is off and you’re awake by now—I’m sorry, Mary Kay—and Love is pacing, chewing on her fingernails, what’s left of them, and is she on meth?

  “I’m not happy, Joe.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Are you?”

  “Of course I am. You have every reason to be happy. You have Forty. Is he with your parents?”

  “My parents don’t know I’m here, Joe. I’m not a teenager. I don’t tell them every single thing I do.” She cocks her head. “And I don’t know why you’re pretending to care about Forty now. You always wanted a girl and you never wanted a son. Your friend Mary Kay has a daughter, now doesn’t she?”

  It’s a sucker punch and I didn’t see it coming and I can’t keep up with her. The floor is shaking—there are earthquakes in Los Angeles, even when there aren’t—and Oliver was right. That’s what this is really all about. I remain calm. “Love, I’ve always loved Forty. I’m thrilled to have a son. And Mary Kay
has nothing to do with us. I met her because you sent me away. Let’s be reasonable.”

  “Reasonable.”

  “Love…”

  “Joe, you were never reasonable. I mean you say that like I don’t know what you’re capable of.”

  I grit my teeth. Was capable of.

  “Yes, I was postpartum…” She is postpartum. “And I ‘sent you away.’ But you’re you. I thought you’d swim through the moat and throw rocks at my window. I thought you’d fight, that you’d steal him or die trying or blow your brains out.”

  “You know I’d never blow my brains out or put our kid in harm’s way. We put the child first. That’s all I did.”

  “No,” she says. Unreasonable and more spoiled than ever and imagine what she’s doing to my son. “All you did was stalk me on Instagram.”

  “What did you expect me to do? You didn’t block me.”

  “I was trying to be nice.”

  “So you think that’s ‘nice’? You think I should be content to watch videos of my son.”

  “Well, I know you. I know you’re more at ease watching people from afar than really getting close to them.”

  Not anymore. Not since you, Mary Kay. “That’s just not true, Love.”

  “Well, here’s what is true. You found your little librarian and you think you get to have your nice little life and still spy on us?”

  “I never wanted to be a spy. I wanted to be a dad. I am his dad.”

  “You drifted,” she says. “You didn’t see us at the zoo last week…” I was with you and Nomi and it’s not my fault that stories disappear. “You watch less and less, as if we’re not entertaining enough for you, as if you don’t need us anymore. I know, Joe. I always look at the list of viewers and do you know what it was like to look at that list and see your name less and less?”

  FUCKING INSTAGRAM AND NO ONE SHOULD LOOK AT THAT FUCKING LIST. “Love, Instagram isn’t real.”

  “Well, time is real, Joe. And you invested more and more of your time with your new little wannabe family, which says a lot about how much you ‘love’ your little ‘savior.’ ”

  “And what about you? You don’t have a moat. You’re not a helpless fucking princess. You didn’t call me up and say Hey, what happened to you? What do you want me to say? How can we make this work?”

  But she isn’t my co-parent. “Well, look at that,” she says. “Love and happiness agree with you, Joe.”

  “I’m not happy,” I lie.

  She laughs. “Are you kidding? You are so happy. Most men… if you took away their son and the woman they supposedly love, the only woman alive who really knows them…”

  “You did that, Love. You sent me away, Love.”

  “And you left,” she says. “Do you even care what it’s been like for me?”

  “Of course I care.” But I don’t care. Not anymore. I love you, not her.

  She picks at the barrel of her gun. “Well, I got jury duty.”

  “I thought your dad always got you out of that?”

  “This time I went,” she says. “Like some everyday person with no connections, you know, like a librarian.” She has the gun and the money so she gets to play dirty and I stay silent. “I left Forty with Tressa and drove to the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center. They make you park a mile away and I had to walk all the way from Disney Hall but I got there…” I wish you were here, Mary Kay, because as my cofounder of the Empathy Bordello you would see what I see, a profoundly lonely woman with no one to talk to, no one to listen to her describe her day. “I brought my chargers, LäraBars…” She winks at me and my blood pressure spikes. I told her RIP Beck ate LäraBars and I miss the man I am with you. “So then I got selected…” She flips her hair like she got a part in a movie. “I went upstairs and I saw this poor guy in these dress pants that are five inches too short with his lawyer, who was terrible…”

  “Love, we both know that the Injustice System is rigged.”

  Her eyes narrow. “Seriously, Bainbridge Boy, can I just tell my story?”

  I nod. I have to remember. Love is unloved. Lonely. Los Angeles.

  “We got numbers assigned and I was number one…” Oh that’s right, she’s an actress. “The judge asked me all these personal questions about my history and he goes around the room asking everyone and everyone’s telling their story and I just… I feel so close to these people, like we were in this together, like a family, you know?”

  No, I don’t know. “I get it. That’s a lot to take in.”

  “They sent us home and I went out with some of the jurors because we were all so shook…” I don’t like the word shook. It’s a fake word, and this is fake news. “And we wound up at this lounge downtown and it was a really late night…” Her voice drifts in a way that reminds me that Love is perverted. “Anyway I went back the next day but I didn’t get picked to be on the jury. I started reaching out to my new friends and they all just… blew me off. Every single one of them.”

  She’s so lonely and you would feel bad for her too, Mary Kay, even though she’s making it impossible for me to comfort her right now. The gun. The gun. “I’m sorry, Love. I am.”

  “I miss my brother, Joe. I miss having my people. I thought those people could be my people…” Los Angeles is the opposite of Friends and my heart hurts for Love, it does, but I don’t want Love. I want you. “Anyway,” she says. “I told Tressa and Mom and Dad that I got picked. For the past few weeks, I’ve been here, ‘sequestered.’ ”

  Living in a casino would drive anyone crazy and I tell Love that we can get her some help and she shakes me off. “No,” she says. “I don’t need help. I know why I didn’t get picked for the jury and I know why everyone blew me off. See, the judge asked us if we could be impartial in spite of our experiences. Most people said no. I said yes. I know how to love people who do terrible things. It’s who I am. It’s how I was born.”

  “Well fuck the jurors, Love, because if you ask me, that’s a beautiful thing about you. You have an open heart. It’s no reason to be sad.”

  “Do you think I don’t know what you did to my brother?”

  My nerves go haywire and no. “I did nothing to your brother.”

  “You were in Vegas with him. You dragged him to the desert.”

  “Love, you don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “I knew it, Joe… in my gut. And I kept waiting for myself to fall out of love with you because if those girls… Well I didn’t know them. But Forty was my brother. He was my twin.”

  “I didn’t kill your brother.”

  “No,” she says. “But you didn’t save him either.”

  “Love, come on. No one could have ‘saved’ him…” He was beyond redemption. “You make it sound like I was with him, like I could have stopped him from jaywalking, like I could have stopped that car. I didn’t want him to die…” Of course I wanted to fucking kill him. He was blackmailing me, erasing me from all the work I did. And yes, I almost did it in Vegas, I wanted to end his life. But I didn’t, just like I didn’t kill Melanda or Phil. Wanting is not a crime.

  “Julie Santos,” she says. “I think of that woman every day.”

  The name is Saint Julie and I nod. “It’s not her fault. It’s not my fault. Love, you’re right. Twins have a bond and nothing can get in the way of that and no one knew him like you. So no one misses him like you and I can’t change that, but I can help.”

  “No,” she says. “You can’t help. We’re the same. You lost your son but you’re up there bopping around like the happiest guy on earth…”

  “You saw a couple fucking pictures and I didn’t even post them.”

  “But you’re in them, Joe. You don’t care about us because you can’t care.”

  “Yes I do.”

  “No, Joe. See, my brother killed my dog and I still loved him. But you… You lose your son and what do you do? You run off and find yourself a new family. There’s something wrong with both of us, Joe. It’s a fact.”r />
  “No, there isn’t, Love. We’re not defective. We’re survivors. That’s a good thing.”

  But she just points the gun at me. “Get up and turn around,” she commands, and she is the shark inside my shark and she unlocks the safety and I look out the window at the City of Commerce and I won’t let her win, not when I’m finally happy, not when I finally have everything I want. I can’t do this to you. I tell her that L.A. brings out the worst in her, in everyone, that I’m better because I left and that she could be better too.

  But she just laughs. “Oh, Joe. I’m not gonna live in your guesthouse.”

  “Love, listen to me. I miss Forty every second of every day and you know I can’t be happy if you’re not happy.”

  I started in the truth and swam into a lie and she knows I don’t love her and she says she knows I wanted to leave L.A. “You didn’t leave because of the contract. You left because you were afraid to be a father. You know me. You knew I was never gonna sign on to that Bainbridge plan. You might not realize it, but that’s why you came up with that dream. To push me away. And I understand it, I do. You didn’t come back to find us because deep down, you know that I’m just like you. Bad beyond repair.”

  Those are dangerous words and when a toaster is bad beyond repair you don’t break out the screwdriver. You don’t try and fix it. You throw it in a dumpster. And there are dumpsters in this building, in this casino. “I’m here now, Love.”

  “Right,” she says. “Just like me.”

  We don’t belong in the same boat and I know where this boat is going: down. I have to paddle. I have to fight. “Love, we’re not bad people.”

  She won’t look at me. She won’t give me an oar. “You’re here because you love them, not me, but I won’t let them wind up like my brother, Joe. Like those girls. I can’t do that. I won’t.”

  She raises the gun and her finger squeezes the trigger. The explosion is silent, deadly. The circuit breaks. The lights go out all at once and I fall into a black hole.

  42

  The black hole succumbs to white light and white light reveals white walls and all the beeping tells me that I’m not in heaven. I’m in a hospital and the beeping is incessant and where are you? Where am I? There was a gun. Love had a gun.