Next to Me

by AnnaLisa Grant

  “I was sure Dellinger was monitoring every move I made. He was getting crazier and crazier about finding it. I was afraid if I tried to contact you he’d

  know,” Dad explains.

  “Know what? What is it that he’s trying to find? Is that why we’re here?” Landon asks, clearly confused by the familiar conversation my father and I are having.

  “He’s trying to find the last 1913 V Nickel. There were only five made, hence the V, the Roman numeral five. He has the first four and has been on an insane hunt for the last one,” I tell Landon. “They sell at auction for upwards of three million dollars.”

  “So that’s why we’re here? He thinks the American Ambassador to France has this V Nickel?” Landon’s tone and stance have morphed and tell me he’s in action mode. He’s starting to assess the situation and formulate a plan.

  “He may or may not think the Ambassador has it. My orders always include looking for the V Nickel among the other coins he’s after, but…I think he sent Jenna here because he knows,” my father begins.

  “Knows what? Could you two please stop with the cryptic talk,” Landon face tells me he’s tiring quickly of the conversation between my father and me.

  “That I have the V Nickel,” I answer.

  “How do you have it?” Landon asks.

  “I found it years ago. I gave it to…Jenna…for safe keeping. I always intended to use it as a last resort. Sort of a get-out-of-jail-free card,” Dad tells him.

  “Well, then this is simple. If what he wants is the V Nickel, we give it to him.” Landon’s posture has changed and he now seems more relaxed, as if the solution to this unimaginable situation just revealed itself.

  “No,” my father says quickly.

  “Why not, Dad? You just said you gave me the V Nickel for safe keeping. You told me to hold onto it like a winning card. You said I’d know when to play it and now is the time. If I give him the Nickel, maybe he’ll let you go? You can come to Chicago with me. You’d love it there, Dad.” My father crosses the room and opens the curtains and then the balcony doors.

  “I can’t do that,” he says flatly. He’s staring out at the city, all lit up like in a movie. The Eifel Tower is glowing and sparkling. It’s majestic. “Dellinger has too many good contacts. If I don’t have his name to use, I have nothing.”

  “What are you talking about?” I ask, confused.

  “I can’t go back to DC. Oz thinks I’m dead, so I have no stake in the company I helped build. And what would I do in Chicago? Where am I going to make this kind of money? Not just from Dellinger, but…you won’t believe what some people will pay for the things I find. I have more money in a Swiss bank account than I could have ever imagined. So much that I can send you half of it and you’d never have to work another day in your life.” I can’t believe what I’m hearing my father say. He doesn’t want out from under Dellinger’s thumb. He wants this life.

  “You aren’t finding things, you’re stealing them. And I don’t care about your money.” I look at my father, searching for the man I once believed he was. A man so disgusted by the life he was coerced into with Dellinger that he just told me he faked his own death so I wouldn’t get caught in it, too. But…that was never real. I sit on the bench at the end of the bed, broken.

  “That’s why you told me to take the Nickel. As long as it was still out there, Dellinger would keep you around and you’d have a steady job,” I say. Everything is quickly becoming clear. “He never coerced you, did he? Never threatened to pull me in with you. Or maybe he did and you were afraid I’d join you, and then you’d have to share the profits. You just stood there and lied to me. You faked that whole scene in Constitution Gardens for yourself. You jumped at the chance to flaunt your skills and make some great money along the way. You never could resist the opportunity to brag on yourself. How long?” He told me it all started after Mom died because he was desperate for the extra money we needed, but now I don’t believe that for a second.

  He hesitates before answering me, knowing he’s uncovering all the lies. “You were nine.”

  “Mom was in the middle of cancer treatment hell!” Rage is filling me and I feel my blood begin to boil. “Were any of those late night work calls for actual work or were they all for your ego-prodding criminal side job? Do you know how many times I, as a nine-year-old little girl, got up in the night with my mother to hold a bucket next to the bed so she could throw up? That should have been you!” I shout.

  “Jenna,” Landon comes to me and takes my hand in his trying to calm me down. If I get much louder our neighbors are sure to call hotel security.

  “No, Landon! He was out there, stealing people’s prized heirlooms and investments and selling them for mad money, on top of being paid to get the things Dellinger was after. All the while we were living in a piece of shit house that was falling apart and my mother was pacing out her pain meds because we supposedly couldn’t afford to get the prescription filled every month. You let her suffer! You let her die!” I allow Landon to physically hold me so I don’t give into my instinct and use all the fighting training my father gave me to beat the shit out of him for what he did to my mother.

  “I tried, ok?” my father rebuts. “I tried for years to be the man your mother wanted me to be, but I couldn’t. I even took precautions, safeguards in the beginning, because I really did take the first jobs because of the money. Your mother’s medical bills were already starting to pile up and I knew she was going to worry about that. But…I wasn’t made for fixing locks and helping people break into their homes when they locked themselves out. I was made for more than that. Dellinger saw that in me. He recognized that I could be doing so much more with my skills.” His pathetic excuse flows off his lips with no effort whatsoever.

  “You make me sick. I will gladly, and quite easily, go back to the days when I thought you were dead because that’s what you are to me. Dead. The man I thought was my father died a long time ago. I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you,” I say now feeling the calm after the raging storm. It’s hard not to feel ridiculous after being fooled so terribly for so long.

  “Did you bring it with you? The Nickel. Do you have it?” he asks, completely oblivious to the damage he’s furthered in me. “I’ll…take it off your hands…so you don’t have to carry this burden anymore.”

  “No, I didn’t bring it with me! But…I’ll tell Dellinger we didn’t find it so you can go on living your tragic excuse for a life.” The worst part about all of this was that he let Mom die thinking she had helped him turn over a new leaf…that he had been living a life on the straight and narrow. I suppose that’s better than living her final days knowing she was married to a big, fat liar.

  “I still need your help. I told Dellinger the Ambassador’s home was a two person job. The coins he’s after are in one location, but the coins I’m after are in another. I can get into both of them. I was just going to use whoever Dellinger sent to distract the extra security there will be tomorrow night. But, since he sent you…”

  “You didn’t know Dellinger was sending Jenna?” Landon asks skeptically.

  Dad doesn’t answer right away, which is answer enough for me. “No.” Liar.

  “You can get the coins from one case while I get them from the other. It’ll make the job a lot faster,” he continues. “Dellinger will get the coins he wants, and I have a buyer ready for mine.” It’s like I’m looking at a complete and total stranger. It doesn’t occur to him for one second that what he’s asking me to do is against everything he and my mother ever taught me about being morally conscious. It appears his instructions to me on the subject were more do as I say, not as I do.

  “You have lost your damn mind if you think I’m going to help you!” I say loudly.

  “This is the biggest payout I’ve ever had and you’re not going to screw this up for me. You have to help me. I’m your father,” he says sternly. He steps forward aggressively and Landon puts his hand against my father’s chest to st
op him.

  “Not anymore you’re not.” I grab my purse and sling it across my body as I swing the hotel room door open and fly out into the hall.

  I luck out and the elevator doors are opening as I approach. A woman exits and I practically throw myself in. I press the lobby button a dozen times, willing the doors to close before Landon or my father finds me. I storm out of the elevator before the doors are completely open and push my way through the front doors and out onto the sidewalk.

  The sky is dark but there’s a glow from the Eifel Tower and other night life in this amazing city. I walk for a few blocks, not knowing where I’m going. I stop when I realize my heart has stopped racing from anger and lean against an iron gate surrounding a nearby home, or maybe it’s a hotel. Everything is so beautiful here. I wish I could really enjoy being in Paris, France, but I can’t. Even if I don’t change my flight to leave tomorrow, there’s no way I could truly enjoy myself here. My experience in France has been tainted, like everything I thought my life was before.

  I turn around and walk back to the hotel and make a bee-line for the bar. They must have been trying to make it easier for American guests with only a rude sense of the French language when they named it Le Bar. Perhaps it’s an inside joke about how Americans think they’re speaking French by add Le to the front of everything.

  “Que puis-je obtenir pour vous?” the bartender asks as I take one of the empty seats at the counter. I give him a tight lipped smile and shake my head while shrugging my shoulders. He smiles and translates his question for me. “What can I get for you?”

  “Oh, right, of course. I’ll have a gin and tonic, double gin,” I say.

  He places my order in front of me on a small white napkin and gives me a nod and a smile.

  “I can charge this to my room, right?”

  “Of course, m’dame.”

  “Perfect. Keep them coming,” I tell him as I take my room key from my back pocket and slap it on the bar. If I’m going to drink my sorrows away, Henry Dellinger is going to pay for it.

  Drink after drink, the only thing I think I can do is ask myself two questions: How did this happen? How did this become my life?

  If only Mom hadn’t died. Stupid cancer. She would have found out about Dad. She was just too sick when he picked up with Dellinger to know…and he knew that. He played her. He took advantage of her illness and fed his own selfish desires while she lay dying in their bed.

  “Asshole,” I say to myself out loud. The bartender looks around and I shake my head at him. “Not you. Sorry.”

  “Well, I hope you’re not talking about me.” Landon sits next to me at the bar and immediately orders a Jack and Coke.

  “No. Not you either,” I say.

  “You’ve had me worried sick. I asked the guy at the front desk if he had seen you. He said you walked out of the hotel so I went to find you. I thought you might have walked to the Tower. I’ve been looking for you for hours. Now I feel stupid for not having come down here first,” he says. He takes his wallet out to pay for his drink but I stop him.

  “No, no, no. Drinks are on me. Well, they’re really on Dellinger, so…drink up!” I pick up my glass and clank it with his, sloshing my gin and tonic around a bit too hard. Some of it spills on the bar. “Oh, no. What a waste of good alcohol,” I slur.

  “You’re drunk,” Landon says.

  “I’m not drunk. I am fully aware of what is going on right now,” I say in

  a half-inebriated attempt at convincing both of us.

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yep! I am fully aware that my father is a selfish bastard and that my entire life was a jacked up lie. How’s that for being aware?” I take the last swallow of my drink and Phillip, my new bartender friend, brings me another.

  “How many of these have you had?” Landon asks before he lets me take a sip of the new drink Phillip has presented me.

  “Well, let’s see…what time is it now?”

  “It’s 12:30 am,” Landon tells me.”

  “Aha, but that’s the funny part. It’s not! See, it’s 12:30 am here, but my body thinks it’s 6:30 pm yesterday. So, really, I guess I did start drinking a little early for me.” Landon lets go of my drink and I take a long sip.

  “Everyone’s family is jacked up, Jenna,” he says.

  “Jacked up is putting it lightly. But what would you know, Mr. All-American, mom stays home and bakes apple pies?” Landon’s police officer of the year father and picture perfect mother could hardly have anything that resembled a jacked up family. I rest my chin in the palm of my hand and wait for Landon to give me some watered down story about what he thinks is jacked up about his family.

  “Because I lied to you.”

  “Yay! More lies!” I raise my hands like I’m cheering with pom-poms and flop them onto the bar. “I can’t wait to hear this.”

  “You know what…you are drunk and I don’t want to tell you when you’re like this. I honestly am not sure if you’re going to remember it or not.” I can see Landon almost physically close himself up. I’ve never seen him do that.

  I put my drink down and do my best to give him my attention. He’s right…I’m pretty buzzed right now, but not so much so that I can’t have a conversation with him. I’m just super honest when I’ve had a few drinks in me. So, this might be an interesting conversation, but a conversation nonetheless.

  “No, I want to know. What was the lie?” I ask with all the seriousness I can gather.

  Landon hesitates, not totally sure he wants to do this, but I take his hand

  in mine and look into his eyes so he knows that I’m really here.

  “Well…my dad is a cop and my mom did stay home. What I didn’t tell you was that my mom stayed home because she had to. She wasn’t allowed to work. My dad controlled everything she did. Where she went. What she wore. What she ate and drank. When she woke up and went to sleep. How much money she spent, if he even let her spend any. And…” Landon pauses, deciding how straight forward to be about what he’s about to say. “If she messed up…he beat the shit out of her.”

  “Oh, my God, Landon, that’s awful. I’m so sorry.” I grab his hand and squeeze it with both of mine.

  “Don’t be sorry. It was my life. All I knew. When I got to be 11 or 12, the day after a beating, I would pretend to go to school. I’d walk toward the bus stop but then I’d hide behind Mrs. McGrew’s trees until I saw my dad leave for work. Then I’d go home and take care of my mom. Some days she couldn’t walk. I’m sure he at least cracked her ribs on more than one occasion.” He takes a long drink of his Jack and Coke. I wish I knew what to say. My dad was a selfish liar, but he would never have physically hurt my mom.

  “I had so many tardies and absences that eventually the school called my dad. That’s when he beat the shit out of me, and how I got this scar.” He points to the scar above his right eye that I noticed the night of our first date. “He came at me and I was going to fight back. I wasn’t going to cower on the floor like some frail lamb. He gave me one good right hook and I went spinning down, hitting my face on the corner of the coffee table. Mom took me to the doctor to get stitches. She was good at lying about her injuries, so she knew just what to tell them. After that, Mom wouldn’t let me stay home to help her.”

  “Did she ever call the police?” I ask. It seems obvious to me, but I’ve never been in that situation before.

  “Once, when I was 13. Mom got her worst beating that night for

  embarrassing Dad in front of his cop buddies. But, as he said, it was her fault in the first place for making chicken for dinner when what he really wanted was steak.”

  “What about the dance studio, and your sister?” I ask.

  “Mom used to own a dance studio. My dad convinced her to give it up, but she really did teach me how to dance. My sister…” he sighs. “My sister is married to a dickhead just like my father, and her daughters will probably do the same. So, yeah…”

  Landon’s eyes are dark and sad and
all I want to do is make that go away. I cup his face with my hand and try to comfort him somehow.

  “I don’t need your pity, Jenna. I didn’t tell you that so you would feel sorry for me or so you would think that your family life was great by comparison. I told you so you would know that I understand in some way about feeling like your life was a lie.” He takes the last gulp of his drink and puts the glass back on the bar with a little more force than he has before.

  “I don’t pity you, Landon. I love you, and hearing that you had to go through something like that is just about the worst thing I’ve ever heard,” I say to him. “But…I bet your mom is really proud of the man you’ve become.”

  “That’s the other thing. What I told you about delivering the letters for my buddies who died was true. Except…I found all of their families without any trouble. It was my family that was the problem. Well, my mom. I got back into town after I had been discharged and went to see my mom. Dad retired not long before I came back and was home, which I wasn’t expecting. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about me or what I had survived. I asked where mom was and he told me he didn’t know. A year prior, he came home from work and she was gone. I hadn’t heard from her in a while, but that wasn’t unusual. It takes months to get written letters to deployed troops, and internet service is spotty, if anything.

  “I went to her best friend’s house and asked her where Mom was, but she wouldn’t tell me. All she would say is that my mom loved me and wanted the best for me and that Mom made her promise she wouldn’t tell me where she went. Mom always hated that Amy and I grew up seeing what we did, and she wanted better for us. I went to Amy to try and help her, but she wouldn’t leave. I told her how Mom got up the courage to go and she could too, but it didn’t matter. She’s stuck and he’s beat her down so much that she doesn’t have the will to even try. I’ve spent the last six years looking for my mother. The more jobs I got, the more resources I had to expand my search for her. My dad died last year and all I’ve wanted is to find her so she can know she doesn’t have to hide anymore.”