“What do you want from me?” I asked as I closed my eyes and rested my forehead on the doorjamb.
She paused. “I’m hoping you’ll talk to Rick for me because he doesn’t want me to have the baby.”
I opened my eyes. “What do you mean, he doesn’t want you to have it? Does he want you to have an abortion?”
“Yes.”
The anger I felt initially—when I first heard her voice on the other end of the line—began to recede. It was replaced by something else. I’m not sure what exactly because I was distracted by logistics and a long list of questions.
“How far along are you?” I asked.
“About six weeks.”
I sat down again. “Explain this to me, Angela. Do you want to have an abortion?”
“No. I want to have the baby. I tried talking to Rick but he won’t budge. He says he’s not ready for kids and he wants to get his career going first. You know… I think I would find it easier to go through with an abortion if I had a ring on my finger, but he’s not ready for that either.”
“You mean to say…you’d agree to have the abortion if he proposed to you?”
This made no sense to me, and I began to feel as if I might have dodged a bullet when Angela dumped me.
“Yes,” she said, “because at least then I’d know there would be other children. But right now, I’m not sure about our future. He doesn’t seem ready to commit.”
I hate to say I told you so…
Leaning an elbow on the table, I cupped my forehead in a hand. “What do you want me to do about it, Angela?”
Did she actually think I would call Rick and try to talk him into marrying her?
“Could you talk to him for me?” she asked. “Could you get him to let me have this baby?”
I took my hand away from my face. “Let you have it?” Now I was angry. “It’s not up to him,” I said. “It’s your body. He can’t force you to have an abortion if you don’t want to.”
“But he said he wouldn’t be happy if I had the baby. I’m afraid I might lose him if I don’t do what he wants.”
Oh, God. Was she really saying this?
“Then go ahead and lose him,” I said. “If you want to have this baby, kick Rick to the curb because he won’t be there for you either way. And he certainly doesn’t deserve your devotion. I warned you when you left here that he wouldn’t be there, not like I would have been. You know that I would have never forced you into…”
I stopped myself because we couldn’t go back. Even if we could, I wouldn’t want to. It was too late. But I didn’t want to see Angela crushed by Rick’s selfishness, either. I’d loved her once and nothing would ever change that.
I realized she was crying. Part of me wanted to comfort her, to take her into my arms and tell her everything was going to be okay, but I couldn’t do that. We were on opposite sides of the country, and more importantly she was pregnant with my brother’s child.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said. “I can’t raise this baby alone and I’ll die if he leaves me.”
“You won’t die,” I told her. “You’re a strong woman. You’ll be just fine.”
She continued to weep into the phone. “I want to have the baby. I really do.”
“Then tell him that.”
We sat in silence for a long time. I listened to her blow her nose.
At last she spoke. “Okay. I will.”
We chatted for a few more minutes until I sensed that she was feeling better.
Before we hung up, I asked her to keep me posted.
Because I couldn’t simply just forget about this.
Chapter Eighteen
The next night, at exactly the same time, my phone rang again. I quickly muted the television and dove across Bentley as he lay on the sofa beside me.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Jesse. It’s me again. You said to keep you posted.”
I recovered a more comfortable position. “Yeah. How did it go? What did he say?”
She took a deep breath and let it out. “I couldn’t get him to change his mind about the baby but he told me to be patient. He said…maybe we could get engaged at Christmas. But he needs to focus on his career first so I want to give him that.”
I frowned and sat forward on the edge of the sofa. “What are you saying? That you’re going to have the abortion?”
“Yes,” she replied. “He made an appointment for this Friday and Christmas isn’t that far away. I can last until then and maybe next year we can try and have a baby, after he signs some clients of his own.”
“Angela,” I said, “he’s not going to give you a ring this Christmas.” I felt cruel speaking so bluntly but she needed to hear the truth.
“How do you know?”
“Because he’s my brother and I know him.”
“But you don’t know us,” she argued. “You don’t know what we’re like together.”
I shut my eyes and shook my head. “I do remember what you said before you left—that it was intense.”
“That’s right.”
“Is it still intense?” I asked. “Is it like it was when he came home for Christmas and you were sneaking around behind my back? Or has some of the excitement worn off?”
Angela fell silent. “That was different.”
“Of course it was,” I replied. “You were the forbidden fruit. Now you’re not.”
“Jesse!”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I have to call a spade a spade, and the sooner you figure out what Rick’s all about, the better off you’ll be.”
“No. You don’t understand…”
I pinched the bridge of my nose and paused before I spoke.
“Maybe I don’t,” I replied with resignation.
“If you could only talk to him,” she pleaded in a quivering voice. “Because I don’t want to lose him.”
Why was I having this conversation? Why was I getting involved?
“What about the baby?” I asked. “Do you want to lose him, or her?”
She hesitated, then answered firmly. “No, but Rick already made the appointment.”
Ah, Christ. I was in it now. Deep. All the way up to my ears. I couldn’t possibly walk away.
“What’s your address?” I asked, reaching for a pen.
“Why?”
“Because I have the next three days off and I’m coming out there.”
“Really?”
“Yes. So cancel the appointment for now, at least until we have a chance to talk about it. Will you do that?”
“Yes, I’ll cancel it.”
Meanwhile, I had no idea what I was doing or what I was going to say to Rick when I arrived. I had no plan, except to book a red-eye flight out that evening.
Chapter Nineteen
As luck would have it, my flight was delayed. A storm cell moved in and all the planes were grounded. Other incoming flights were rerouted and by midnight the airport had turned into a zoo full of angry animals. Passengers missed their connections and were stuck in the terminal all night. People shouted at the airline reps, who couldn’t do much about the weather. As I witnessed the chaos, I was glad I was just a baggage handler.
Travelers had no choice but to sleep on the carpeted floors at the gates inside security while others crowded onto shuttles to the nearest hotels to wait out the storm.
Thankfully I was able to return home after I was rebooked on a flight for the following evening.
* * *
The storm passed and my boss managed to shift the schedule around. He told me to take a few extra days off so I wouldn’t have to turn around and come right home as soon as I arrived in California.
“Have a great time,” he said.
Sure. What a party it’s going to be.
I boarded my flight that night and we took off without any further delays into a luminous sunset that took my breath away. It had been hell getting to that point, but suddenly I felt blessed to have been assigned a window
seat where I could stare in awe at the pink horizon and the tiny white lights of the city below as we gained altitude.
When the sunlight faded to black and I could see nothing but darkness, I put on the headphones and watched a movie.
Then I fell asleep.
I woke after an hour or two, somewhere over the Midwest. The cabin lights flickered on and the pilot spoke to us through the noisy static of the speaker system.
He informed us that we would need to make an unscheduled landing in Salt Lake City because there might be some problems with the equipment. He was conspicuously vague about the nature of the problems and an immediate hush fell over the cabin interior.
Even the flight attendants appeared shaken and alarmed as they moved up and down the aisles, collecting empty plastic cups and crumpled up snack wrappers, while politely asking everyone to fasten their seatbelts and return their seats to the upright position.
The panicked sound of call buttons chiming overhead added to the tension, and the silence among the passengers was especially unnerving as we descended into the clouds and hit a bad patch of turbulence.
The woman in front of me threw up in her airsickness bag. The man beside me gripped the armrests so tightly his knuckles turned white.
Leaning back against the seat, he turned his head toward me. “I wonder what the problem is.” His upper lip glistened with perspiration. His cheeks were pasty gray.
“I guess the pilot’s too busy to explain,” I replied as I turned to look at my reflection in the dark window.
Was this it? Was this how my life was going to end?
We continued to bump and jostle over tight air pockets in the clouds and I wondered if I was I going to die on this insane rescue mission to save my ex-girlfriend from making the worst mistake of her life.
And what would Bentley do if I never came home? Oh, Jesus, I’d put him in a kennel the day before. Would my parents go and collect him? I wanted to call them and ask if they would do that one last thing for me…
Really, God?
On top of everything else, is this really necessary? Can’t you give me a break, just this once, when I’m trying to do something good for someone who stomped on my heart and crushed it like a bug?
In that precise instant, the turbulence came to a halt.
The rest of the descent was smooth and surprisingly ordinary, though it took some time for my raging pulse to decelerate to a normal rhythm.
We landed without any trouble in Salt Lake City, and as we touched down, the passengers broke into a spontaneous round of applause.
I never learned what went wrong with the equipment but we all discussed it tirelessly when we disembarked from the aircraft and had to wait in a long lineup to rebook on other flights.
I spent the rest of the night in the airport, sleeping on the floor at the departure gate, and woke up to learn that my next flight was going to be delayed as well. Evidently a few tornadoes in Oklahoma had thrown departure and arrival schedules into spinning vortexes all across the country.
Now it looked like I wouldn’t land in LA until Friday morning.
I found a payphone and tried to call Angela.
Chapter Twenty
I called every hour and left messages until it was time to board my flight. By the time we landed at LAX, I felt like a giant bag of dirty laundry. Thankfully, I had packed all my belongings in a knapsack so at least I was able to brush my teeth and change my shirt before I got off the plane and climbed into a taxi.
It was my first time in Los Angeles but I was only minutely interested in the view outside the car window because I couldn’t stop thinking about Angela. Maybe she thought I’d changed my mind about coming out here. I hoped my phone messages reached her.
But even if they had, I didn’t know how I was going to solve her problems and make things better. Rick had never listened to me before when I tried to give him advice or when I asked him to do things. He always did whatever he damn well pleased. Whatever worked best for him.
Then what the bloody hell was I doing here? I wondered as we sped along the freeway. What did I hope to accomplish? Was I here simply to provide moral support for Angela? Or did I intend to be her knight in shining armor, as I had been that day in the parking lot when she locked her keys in the car?
I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that I couldn’t let Rick bully a person or manipulate her into doing something she didn’t want to do.
Not this time.
* * *
There was no answer when I knocked on the door to Rick and Angela’s apartment. This came as no surprise because I’d called ahead from the airport and was forced to leave another message on their answering machine.
I didn’t have much money on me so I decided to hunker down in the corridor, rest my head on my knapsack and close my eyes until one of them returned home.
I slept for a long time. The trip across the country must have exhausted me more than I realized because when Rick kicked my foot—hard—for the umpteenth time, I startled awake, groggy and lightheaded. I squinted up at him in a daze.
“What are you doing here?” he asked with a frown.
He was dressed in a black suit with a blue tie and he carried a brown paper bag that looked and smelled like it might be full of Chinese food.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Almost seven,” he replied. “And you didn’t answer my question. What the hell are you doing here? Did Angela call you?”
“Yeah.” I rose stiffly to my feet.
He shook his head and dug into his pocket for the apartment keys. “I told her not to do that.”
He unlocked the door and I followed him inside. While he set the bag of food on the table, I glanced around at the worn sofa, cluttered desk and metal bookshelf, and peered toward the kitchen, which was even smaller than mine.
“This is only temporary,” Rick explained, “until I can afford a better place. I’ve only been working a couple of months.”
“I’m not criticizing,” I said. I glanced toward what I assumed was the bedroom door. “Angela’s not here? Do you know where she is?”
“I haven’t got a clue,” Rick replied. “We had a huge fight last night so I left and slept on the couch at a friend’s house.” He shrugged out of his suit jacket, draped it on the back of a chair at the table and drew his tie out from under his crisp white shirt collar. He folded it on top of his jacket and began to rip open the paper bag containing his dinner.
“Now that I think about it,” he added, “it’s probably your fault we had the fight in the first place. And she didn’t tell me you were coming.”
“What did you fight about?” I asked, still standing by the door and finally sliding my backpack off my shoulder. I let it drop heavily to the floor.
Rick motioned me over. “Do you want some of this? There’s plenty.”
I hadn’t eaten all day and the smell of the beef fried rice, chicken balls and egg rolls caused my mouth to water.
“Sure.” I approached the table while Rick went to fetch plates and a couple of serving spoons.
“Chopsticks are in the bag,” he said.
I helped him open the containers and we sat down to eat.
“So what did you and Angela fight about?” I asked a second time, growing concerned that she might have kept the appointment that morning after all.
His eyes lifted. “That’s not really any of your business, is it?”
“I think it is,” I replied, “since she used to be my girlfriend and she was pretty upset when she called me.”
Rick picked up an egg roll, swirled it around the pool of plum sauce on his plate, and took a large bite. “I assume she told you then.”
Losing my appetite all of a sudden, I sat back. “Yeah, she told me everything. Why else would I fly all the way out here?”
Rick pointed his chopsticks at me. “Then it is your fault. Because everything was going just fine until last night, when she told me she changed her mind about what we decided and t
hat she’d cancelled the appointment.”
I felt a great rush of relief to hear that she had stuck to her guns. I only wished I’d been there to back her up.
“So she didn’t go through with it?” I asked.
“Not that I know of,” he replied.
I wondered how he could have risen from bed that morning and gone to work all day, not knowing for sure. But that was Rick.
He scooped more rice out of the Styrofoam container and refilled his plate. “Let me guess,” he said. “You offered to come out here and fix everything. You probably even told her you’d marry her.”
“No,” I said flatly. “That’s not what I told her.”
“But that’s what you’re hoping, isn’t it? That you’ll get her back?”
“No,” I repeated more firmly. “I only came to help her figure out what she’s going to do. She sounded like she needed a friend.”
Rick rolled his eyes and scoffed. “Yeah, right. You keep telling yourself that.”
“What is your problem?” I asked. “Why are you acting like I’m the selfish one here?”
“Selfish? Jesus! All I’ve done is give, give, give to that girl, but nothing’s ever enough. Don’t get me wrong, when she first came out here she was a lot of fun, but then she got all clingy and demanding, and all of a sudden, she wanted to get married. After five months! Honestly, I think she tried to trap me with this pregnancy. If it’s even real. I have my doubts.”
I had to pause a moment and consider what he was telling me, because I remembered how Angela had behaved when Rick flew home on New Year’s Day. She didn’t eat or speak to anyone. She hadn’t seemed rational.
Certainly, through the years, Rick had sent more than a few girls into an emotional vortex of insanity, but maybe he wasn’t always completely to blame for their highs and lows.
But had Angela truly been lying about the pregnancy? I didn’t believe she would go that far… But what did I know? At the time, I hadn’t even realized she was cheating on me with my own brother.
“Can I use your washroom?” I asked, because I needed to think this through. I needed to see Angela and talk to her face-to-face before I passed judgment.
The Color of a Dream Page 5