by Leach, Kiki
“I couldn’t agree more,” she told him. “Any distance from Alexis is perfectly fine with me.”
He smiled and kissed her lips, then turned back to his daughter. “I’m going to carry her upstairs to her bedroom,” he said.
Nikki stayed behind and immediately had the urge to text Vanessa. Realizing she had left her phone upstairs, she tiptoed up behind William, then darted off to his bedroom to grab her phone from the bed. She thought to check the closet to check on Oscar, then felt her phone vibrating with a text message.
Until Next Time.
From Oscar.
It was the smallest gesture he could have ever given, providing the biggest impact. As long as he could reassure her, she was certain that what was happening between them this time was well worth fighting for. Even if the battle she was forced to fight the hardest was between her head, and her heart.
Part Nine
After spending most of her time away from Maurice and in tears that night, Vanessa called up the one and only other person she knew was never bound to give a hard time about the things she had done, stupid decisions she had ever made and more importantly, about the men who almost always seemed to leave her in a state of complete disarray more often than not.
Her stepfather, Alexander.
While waiting for her order of ice cream in a ‘hole in the wall’ parlor not far from Jamaica, Queens, she saw him walking through the door and got up as quickly as she could to meet him half way. As he looked down at the distress in her face and wiped away the flood of tears with his large hands, she collapsed into his arms and breathed in and out against his old blue and white flannel t-shirt as if God had just sent down one of his angels to repair the broken pieces she had shattered into. When her name was called to retrieve her ice cream, Alexander took her back over to her chair and helped her sit down. Then he rushed to the counter and paid the cashier while grabbing her ice cream, as well as one for himself, and took a seat in front of her.
As he inched the cup toward her hand, Vanessa was beginning to wonder why she had even ordered it in the first place. She wasn’t hungry, she had already had a full meal. The last thing she needed was more food that was certainly going to make her sick. She started to wonder if the numb feeling passing through her body, which started the moment Maurice admitted to being the reason her entire world managed to turn upside down, might have been the reason for it. If you’re numb, you can’t feel anything, much less pain or knowing when it’s best to put the spoon, fork or knife to the side.
Alexander dipped his spoon inside of his ice cream and placed his hand on the table. Flipping it over on the back, he reached out for hers and held it tight.
Unable to control the pain any longer, Vanessa took her face in her other hand and began to sob.
“Have you spoken to Mo since you left the house?” he asked.
She immediately shook her head. “He’s been calling, but I keep sending it to voicemail each time.” She dropped her hand from her face and sat back in the chair. Her brain felt muddled, her heart destroyed. All she really wanted to do in that moment was crawl into the nearest bed and never come out of it. “How the hell were we just together a few hours ago? How the hell did I wake up in his arms this morning? How the hell did my life go from semi-tolerable to a complete truckload of shit in just a matter of a few hours – in just a matter of one weekend?”
Alexander swiped his hand across the back of his neck. “You don’t think that this will be something that you’ll be able to move past?”
She folded her arms and sighed.
“He was the one person I could always count on to never, ever lie to me about anything, for any reason. He told me the truth even when it killed him to. Even now, he can’t help in being brutally honest during times when all I want is for him to either hold me or just shut the fuck up. How the hell can he hold something in like this for five years? Even if he thought that there might have been just the smallest chance that I wouldn’t forgive him, he would’ve said something because it’s something I deserved to know--”
“Not if he feared he might lose you, baby girl,” he said. “People who are in love do some crazy, crazy things in order to hold onto what they have.”
“We weren’t together when he did this, Alexander--”
“It doesn’t matter. The boy has been in love with you for as long as he’s kept this lie to himself, and even longer.” He looked aside and chuckled. “He was always a mess when you were younger. Coming around and having dinner at our house when his parent’s had no idea where he was. That boy used to follow you around like a sick puppy in heat. Your mother thought that he’d grow out of it once he discovered other girls, but I knew that he never would. And I knew that no matter who or what came before you, that he would sit around and wait forever for you to finally see in him what he managed to see in you from the very start. It’s been almost twenty years of feeling like that for you, Vanessa. All those years of friendship, all those times he was at your side supporting you, loving you. And each time you accepted it with open arms. There was no way in hell he was going to risk losing that by telling you what he had done. He knows you better than you know yourself, baby girl, and he knows that even if you wouldn’t have meant to do it, even if you didn’t want to do it, you would’ve pushed him away, much like you did other people you felt had done you wrong--”
“Other people who had done me wrong,” she said.
He nodded. “Alright. The bottom line is that boy knew what the outcome would be. And he was so determined to stay in your life that no drug in the world would’ve been able to get that truth out of him, until he was ready. I’m not condoning what he did by any means, and I’m not saying that you should go back home and try to work things out when you’re feeling like this. But from what you told me, it’s clear that he never meant to keep you in the dark maliciously.”
She brought her hand up to her face and dropped her eyes to the space between them on the table. “He only mentioned it because I told him about Adrian and the baby first. Which Alexis still doesn’t know about. And I don’t want her to know about this thing with Mo either yet, so I’d appreciate it if--”
“Of course,” he told her.
“Thanks…. I started to see this pile of guilt in his eyes and I didn’t know where the hell it had come from. And then he mentioned Page Six and Olivia and I just saw red.” She pressed her chin down against her chest and breathed in and out while taking in all the sounds around her. “I’ve never loved anybody with my whole heart before,” she said. “Every time I thought that person might have been Nathan, I just want to sit back and laugh until the tears start coming because what I felt for him back then just doesn’t compare. What he did with Sheila, it doesn’t compare. I would rather walk in on them ten times over than to have to deal with this shit right now.”
She flicked the cup of her ice cream and watched it spin to the center of the table. By then, the cream had turned into pure liquid.
“I’m not going to tell you how you should feel about this,” said Alexander. “And I’m not going to give you a timeframe of when I think you should forgive him, because it’s not my place to tell you that you should. But I want you to think back on the conversation that we had when Nathan first blew back into town – actually before. When I was standing in your kitchen and telling you the difference between a first love and a true love. You remember that?”
“Yeah.”
“You’ve firmly pushed Maurice into the latter category.”
“I know that, which is why it hurts so damn badly.”
“And I know that. But baby girl, nobody said loving was easy. If it were, so many people wouldn’t try to fall out of it so quickly, and others wouldn’t try so damn hard to make it work. Like I said, I’m not going to give you a timeframe, and I’m not going to tell you to forgive him. But if you ever find someone to accept you through the flaws and the pain and especially through the anger and during the times you both feel like walking
out, you work like hell to hold onto it.”
Vanessa wanted to hold on like hell. God, did she want to hold on until that hold could no longer breathe.
The only problem was that she wasn’t sure if she knew how to anymore.
Alexander looked down at his watch.
“Your mother is going to start asking questions if she doesn’t hear from me soon,” he said. “I told her I was running an errand, I never told her where.”
“Sorry,” she told him. “I didn’t mean to drag you all the way out here. Hell, I didn’t want to be this far out myself, but I just had to get out of the city for a while. I couldn’t risk running into somebody that I knew personally. Thank you for coming as soon as I called.”
“When any of my girls are in trouble, I’m always right there no matter what.” He reached out his hand to pat the side of her face and took her chin between his fingers. “This is going to sound like it’s coming from your mother, but this too shall pass, baby girl. And it will.”
“Any way I can get my hands on a magic wand and speed that shit up?”
He smiled at her and took her hands in his again.
****
A few hours later, Vanessa returned home to a quiet house.
She dropped her keys on the table and removed her jacket, placing it in the chair beside the door.
“Mo?” she called out.
Seconds crept by as she continued to hear nothing, and she began to panic.
“Maurice?”
The only returning sound was the echo of her own shaky voice.
She thought he might have just been ignoring her and headed for the kitchen first. She stopped when she looked beneath the door and saw that the lights were off, and decided to head upstairs instead.
As she placed her hand at the top of the railing and reached the last step, it suddenly felt as if a large unbridled hand had reached out to smack her hard in the face. The feeling almost sent her tumbling right back down to where she began. And that’s when she knew.
That’s when she knew.
“Maurice?” she called out his name one last time, hopeful despite knowing the truth.
The tears started rushing her face before she even had a chance to stop them.
When she finally crossed over that last step and turned a corner, she found herself standing directly in the doorway of his room. His bed was made, all sides still tucked in, which meant he had no plans to sleep in it that night. Since their relationship began, he had spent very little time there as it was, but this time felt different. This time felt final in so many ways that before almost seemed like tests of the inevitable.
Her eyes searched every part of his room, from the walls to his dresser to his nightstand. And that’s when she noticed a white envelope sitting on his pillow at the top of the bed.
Moving inside, she yanked it up fast.
On the front it simply said ‘For V’.
What little was left of her heart began to sink like an anchor to the bottom of an ocean.
Slowly, she lifted the paper from inside the envelope and turned it to the side.
A key fell out and dropped to the floor. When she reached down to pick it up, she realized that it was the key to their house.
His key.
Maurice had returned his key to their house – their house.
Quickly, she opened all sides of the envelope and saw only one word scribbled at the center of it.
Always.
Almost immediately, she felt her body give out and dropped the paper as well as the key back to the floor. It clinked against the wood, but she had no reaction and collapsed onto the bed. Reaching out for his pillow, she wrapped her arms around every part of it as if it were him holding her and she sobbed until her entire body ached, quaked and rattled the bed.
She never wanted him gone for good. No matter what she said, no matter what she felt. No matter how angry she had gotten. She never wanted him gone.
And now he was.
And she wasn’t sure how she would ever manage to survive it.
One Month Later
Part Ten
As the alarm blared loudly in her ear, Vanessa threw a hand out from beneath her blanket and viciously shoved the clock to the floor. It was bad enough that for the last thirty days, she was stuck waking up in that same bed completely alone. That feeling was made even worse on this particular Wednesday morning thanks to her mother ordering her into the office two hours earlier than usual for a previously unplanned emergency meeting.
Over the last few weeks, sales for the magazine were starting to fall well below the normal rate and no one could understand why or pinpoint exactly when the problems first began. Many insisted that it was thanks to lackluster, less shiny and polished covers featuring unknown models and little known actors/actresses in and around New York, as well as what some called ‘insignificant’ and ‘irrelevant’ content within the pages.
At least one person attributed it to their missing editorial consultant, Harold Kramer, who had taken a month long vacation to the Bahamas just after leaving the Hamptons.
While the rest were convinced that it was due to the lack of enthusiasm around the office in general, which had in part been plagued by Vanessa’s carelessness and sudden ‘ho-hum’ attitude.
Since the night she got home from meeting with Alexander and found out that Maurice had officially moved out of the home they shared together, with not a single word shared between them since their fight, she had been in a pretty tight funk and unwilling to break out from it for any reason whatsoever. Aside from her sister, closest friends (and Sheila), as well as her assistant Samantha, no one else knew anything of their breakup, let alone the reason behind it.
And as miserable as she was becoming, to the point that she barely wanted to spend time alone with herself, she was perfectly fine with keeping it that way.
After brushing her teeth and getting dressed so fast that she hadn’t realized her shirt was on backwards, she flipped it around to the correct side, grabbed her coffee and headed out the door.
Arriving to the building thirty minutes later than planned, she knew exactly who and what to expect the moment she stepped inside her office.
And she was right.
“Girl, where in the HELL have you been?” Alexis shrieked as she jumped up from the chair sitting in front of Vanessa’s desk.
She had barely made it through the door before her mother’s voice slammed inside her ears, and removed her sunglasses, throwing them inside her purse.
“And good morning to you to,” she droned.
Alexis stared down at her watch and tapped the face of it. “We were supposed to start that damn meeting half an hour ago, and once again, you’re coming in late and appearing as unprofessional as ever. Put your things down and let’s go.”
Vanessa placed her cup of coffee on the table, then hastily flung her briefcase, purse and jacket onto her couch.
“There,” she said. She raised her arms high and opened her hands wide. “Happy?”
As she turned to walk back out the door, Alexis quickly slid up beside her and snatched her arm back, damn near pulling it from the socket.
She looked hard into Vanessa’s vacant brown eyes and shook her head. “The Devil is inside of you someplace,” she said. “As we speak, he’s right there deep inside of you and making himself at home. You better rebuke Satan before you walk your ass out of this door.”
Vanessa jerked her arm back and grimaced. “What the hell are you talking about? You sound like that crazy cat lady who lives in front of The Bean!”
“You have been acting like a damn zombie for far too damn long now, Vanessa Rae. I can see that something is NOT right with you and hasn’t been since we all got back from the Hamptons. I have been trying to keep my peace about it thinking that you would snap the hell out of it, but I’ve had enough of. That Monday morning you first came back to work--”
“I was tired, Mother, just like I am right now. Other than being fatigue
d and swamped with the magazine as well as my life outside of it, I’m fine. And I don’t have the Devil inside of me. Let’s go.”
“Vanessa!”
“You know, you keep bitching at me about that meeting and yet you’re the one standing here making us even later than before I walked in.”
Vanessa headed for the door again, but Alexis once again yanked her back and tossed her across the room.
She slammed the door shut and placed her hand alongside her hips as Vanessa tried to find her balance.
“You are NOT leaving this office,” Alexis hollered, “until you tell me what the hell is going on with you! For the last few weeks your sister has been trying like hell to convince me that you and Maurice are fine. She did the exact same thing with Rodney, and we’ve seen how it’s turned out. Now it’s so bad that she’s got the girls coming out here to stay with her because he can’t be bothered anymore, spending all his free time with that other woman and their child. Humph.”
“Well, you sure as shit don’t have to worry about Mo getting me knocked up.” Vanessa paced in front of her desk. “We’re going through a rough patch right now and taking a break.”
She closed her eyes in disappointment. “Oh, damn it, girl. Does this have to do with Adrian? Did he find out from someone else before you told him -- ?”
“Mother, just…” She pressed her hands together and leaned back on her desk. “We’re taking a break from our relationship right now, okay? That’s really all you need to know.”
“I need to know a hell of a lot more than that if you’re going to keep walking up in here looking and acting like this until whatever rough patch you two are going through is flourishing again! This is worse than the five years you spent mopin’ over that sorry fool Nathan. Other people in the building are starting to send me emails asking what the hell is going on with you because it’s gotten so bad.”