1001 Dark Nights: Bundle Seven

by Shayla Black

  “I was pregnant.”

  I could see the entire diameter of his blue eyes as he looked at me in surprise, jaw slack, expression otherwise empty. Was it surprise? Was I wrong in thinking he already knew? Or was that wishful thinking?

  I swallowed putty, looked into the pouring rain, and ground my teeth until I could breathe enough to speak. “I was going to meet Strat and get an abortion because I didn’t want you to talk me out of it, and I was so damn mad at you. After I called, I tried to get to you. I climbed out of my bedroom window, but my parents caught me in the driveway and sent me away.”

  He shook his head, eyes narrowed as if I’d just dropped a bomb in his brain and he had to make sense of the pieces.

  “Do not pass Go,” I continued. “Right to LAX. A fucking convent in Ireland. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I should have called when I got back. But I was fucked in the head, and I couldn’t deal.”

  He got a white handkerchief out of his pocket, and I snapped it away to wipe my eyes. It didn’t even begin to do the job.

  “Where’s the baby?” he asked, pointing at the elephant in the room.

  “Adopted.”

  “Where?”

  “Jesus, Indiana! How the fuck should I know?”

  He looked out his side window, probably so he wouldn’t have to look at me.

  “My parents came to Ireland during my last trimester to set up the adoption, so the baby’s probably there.”

  Funny how I still thought of it as a baby. He or she had to be Jonathan’s age already.

  Drew looked back at me, all the surprise and distance gone.

  “My mom was really pregnant too, which was just great because she hated me for getting knocked up at the same time. She had her baby in the hospital, then I had mine in the convent, and Dad just took it. I didn’t even hear it cry. A week later, they took me home. Mom had post-partum. Dad acted like the whole thing had been a fun trip and the bad shit never happened. Which, you know, I’ll admit that worked for me.”

  The shadows of the rain fell on the curves of his beautiful face in an overlay of wrinkles and age. Yet he looked twenty again, an overwhelmed artist on the verge of a life of riches and fame. A kid with nothing but mistakes to make. He’d seen a lot. He’d lost his best friend. Faced the death of his father and the surrender of his mother. He’d been strong for his family even when all the perks and goodies of a life in the spotlight tempted him away.

  And I hadn’t given him a thought.

  I’d been so wrapped up in my own problems for eleven years that I hadn’t thought about what he would have wanted. Wasn’t he as much a part of this as I was? Didn’t he have the right to know? To claim what was his?

  Well, there was that.

  “It should have tried to find you. I was thinking about what was easy for me. And even when I saw you in the office… I was still thinking about myself. I’m sorry.”

  I didn’t want him to speak, but that was the problem, wasn’t it? I’d never wanted him to speak. I’d wanted him to go away. In the front seat of his rented Audi, with the rain pounding the glass, that changed. I wanted to know what he thought. I’d suffer the slings and arrows he threw at me if he’d just say what was on his mind.

  He opened his mouth to speak, and I’d admit I flinched a little.

  I wanted him to like me, to want me, to love Cin again and learn to love Margie. I should have felt like a little whiney bitch for that, but I didn’t. I didn’t have the energy to berate myself for wanting to be wanted.

  “And…” he started, and I braced myself, “who were you thinking about when you invited me to a family dinner?”

  It was crazy to laugh, but I did. I wasn’t used to having this fucked up soup in my guts. I was off balance from the pendulum of emotion. Walking on a lubed-up balance beam. Of course I fell, but at least I fell on the side of laughter. If I cried another tear, I was going to have to wring out his hankie.

  “Me!” I said. “I wanted to spend time with you again, and I was totally thinking of myself. But you look different. And we can call you Drew and never even talk about what happened. They won’t know.”

  “But I’ll know.”

  I stopped in the middle of a lateral mood swing. Just froze.

  He wasn’t talking about the baby and whatever right he had or didn’t think he had to it. No. His face wasn’t hurt or victimized. It was rigid with rage.

  “Don’t pretend it’s about me,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Just don’t.” I was almost screaming. I sounded crazy. Drunk on feelings.

  “It’s about you.”

  “No, it’s—”

  “Did anyone stand up for you? All this time? Has anyone—”

  I couldn’t hear another word. I yanked the door handle. It slipped with a deep clack. I grunted and pulled it again, even as Drew reached over to close the door.

  Neither the downpour nor the unknown neighborhood slowed me down. I didn’t care about my work shoes or the cold rain that soaked my white shirt. I was sodden before I got three steps away from the car.

  I didn’t expect him to pull away and leave me there. I figured I’d grab a cab or find a payphone while he stayed in the car and followed me. Because who would run out into this shitstorm? What normal person would leave the car running, the headlights on, and jump into a fucking monsoon to grab my arm?

  “Let me—”

  “Shut up!” he shouted, already soaked, hair flat on his scalp, eyelashes webbed with water. His shirt stuck to him, translucent enough to reveal the treble clef over his heart. “For once, shut that mouth and listen. I never forgot you. Never. Not a day went by in that studio without me thinking about you. How you think. How you talk. How you felt when I was inside you.”

  “You shut up! You forgot me, and you should have.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I was nothing.” I jabbed my finger at him. “I was a short-term habit.”

  He continued as if I hadn’t even spoken, water dripping from the angles of his face, along his cheekbones and jaw, meeting at his chin and falling in a constant silver line. “When Strat died, I couldn’t save him. I wanted you there. I needed you. As soon as you called him that night, I should have had the balls to go right to your house and get you. Now that I know what happened, I know it was the biggest mistake of my life. I’ll always regret it.”

  “Then you’re a fool.”

  “I am.”

  In the urban dark of the street, with only the headlights of the Audi illuminating the diagonal sketch marks of rain, I didn’t see him move, but I tasted rain warmed by the heat of his mouth. He was too fast and was kissing me before I knew what was happening.

  He kissed my breath away.

  He kissed my defenses to dust.

  His lips dared me to feel nothing.

  He turned me from solid to liquid.

  One hand cupped my chin, and the other pulled me close from the back of my neck, and fuck him fuck him fuck him because I put my hands on his chest again, to his shoulders, his neck, the back of his head. My fingers dug into his wet hair. I felt close to him again, as I had all the years before, when I held his heart in my hands and someone else threw it away.

  “I’m not abandoning you again,” he said between kisses, running his face over my cheek like the water that spilled over it.

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Please. Let me earn this.”

  I pushed him away. His right eye was crystalline in the headlamps, bathed in light and rain.

  “You’ve lost it, Indiana.”

  “I have. Slowly. Since I saw you this morning.”

  My teeth chattered as I looked him up and down. I didn’t know what to make of him. I didn’t know what to feel.

  “I used you,” I said, speaking the truth to myself as well as him. “I was looking for bad things to do, and you were there. I used you to fuck myself up.”

  “I know.” His treble clef heaved under the wet fabric, a scar from
a dream he’d once had. The footprint of a thing he’d loved and lost.

  “I can see right through your shirt,” I said. “It’s indecent.”

  He pulled me to him, and we ran back to the car. He opened the door for me, and I leaned over inside and popped open the driver’s door. It had barely closed behind him when he stretched across the seat and kissed me again. I put my hand on his wet chest, and he put his up my skirt. I let him, wrangling my body around his, opening my legs for his touch.

  “That’s not the rain,” he said, sliding a finger inside me.

  “God, no,” I groaned. “It’s you.”

  He drew his knuckles over my clit. “Look at me. Open your eyes and look at me.”

  His beard was soaked to dark brown, and droplets of water clung to his lashes. His hair stuck to his forehead.

  “You’re beautiful,” I whispered. Then as he rubbed me again, I groaned, driving my hips forward. “Take me.”

  I reached between his legs and felt him. He sucked a breath through his teeth.

  “We’re not done.” He yanked his belt open. “I’m going to fuck you right here, right now. But it’s not the last time. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  I would have promised him beachfront property in Nevada, especially after he took his dick out.

  I wiggled out of my underwear while he reached into his wallet for a condom. Good man. No need to make the same mistake twice. I swung my leg over him, positioning him under me.

  He pressed the head of his cock at my entrance with one hand, and with the other, he took my jaw. “This is not the last time. Say you understand.”

  “I do. I get it. I swear.”

  Was I lying? Maybe. But he was pressed against me, and every nerve ending between my legs vibrated for it.

  “Say it.”

  “This is not the last time.”

  He pushed me down, entering me slowly.

  “Look at me,” he whispered again.

  “You feel so good. It’s hard to keep my eyes open.”

  “Feel it, Margie. Feel it.”

  He pushed me onto him, driving down to the root, every inch a reminder of what we’d had and what we were—a reimagined beginning with a past that ended us.

  Chapter 25

  1983 AFTER IRELAND

  Eighteen, give or take. Mostly take. I could get away with a lot because I looked and sounded like an adult, and in a lot of ways, I was. I didn’t take shit, and I knew my own worth. That went a long way, but I was still as greedy as a child. I craved experiences. New things. Broken. Unraveled. Unwound. I could test the world. See what I could make anew.

  I would have been a sociopath if I hadn’t learned to give a shit when I got back from the cold stone convent in the old country. I’d eaten the shit sandwich I’d been fed, shed my rock groupie skin, and I acted like the oldest of eight.

  The first time my mother put Jonathan into my arms, she looked nervous. She hadn’t wanted me to touch him for the first week. Anyone else could, but not Margie. Maybe because he was the precious only boy of her eight children, but she handed him over as if I’d drop him or something. Or my irresponsible behavior would rub off on him. I didn’t take it personally.

  Post-partum wasn’t properly diagnosed back then, so she was treated like a hysterical female, and I wasn’t treated at all. I felt as if my guts had been ripped out and replaced with sawdust. I didn’t eat. I didn’t talk much. We were both in deep pain and acting as if nothing had ever gone awry.

  Eventually I took Jonathan from the nurse while Mom napped. He was everything. He had a little tuft of red hair and crystal-blue eyes that would eventually turn green. I’d held just about all of my siblings, but there was something about Jonathan. And the smell. Baby smell wasn’t new, but his was different. It was the scent of heaven and earth. He held my finger with his tiny hand, and it didn’t feel as though he did it out of newborn reflex. His grip felt like a plea. A connection. A deal rubbed with the salt of the earth.

  I was going to make it my business to be there for him. To make myself useful if not to my own child, then to the brother born at the same time. I pledged it to him.

  I straightened out so quickly, my family got whiplash. I never spoke to Lynn or Yoni again. I didn’t make friends, but I made a few appropriate acquaintances.

  It wasn’t even hard.

  “Did you breastfeed any of us?” I asked as Mom popped the bottle from Jonathan’s mouth.

  He was three months old, and I was still acclimating to my new life. Or my old life, depending on how you looked at it. It was the life a normal person my age should be living, not the life of someone who’d been whisked away to a foreign country to be tutored by stiff Irish nuns so she could secretly give birth to a baby she would never hold.

  “Heavens, no. Why would I do that?” Mom handed the baby to the nanny to burp.

  Her name was Phyllis, and she held her arms out but looked at me. She and I had set a pattern. Mom left before the baby kicked up his milk, and as soon as she was gone, Phyllis handed him to me. I slung him over my shoulder and patted his back, pressing my cheek to him so I could get a whiff of his baby smell. Best in the world.

  I knew I was making Jonathan a replacement for the baby they gave away, but I couldn’t help it. He smelled so good.

  “I’ll protect you, little brother,” I whispered then put his little hand up against my own as if swearing on a stack of Bibles. “I pledge it.”

  I studied and behaved. I was a model of good and right behavior. I won my parents’ trust back by staying in, helping my sisters with their homework, and finding a deep well of ambition.

  You might think I was somehow browbeaten into good behavior. That I resented it. That I lost a wild part of myself to meet the expectations of others.

  But it didn’t feel like that. I felt wonderful. I helped Carrie and Sheila with their homework while Dad was off doing business and Mom was in her room. I wiped chocolate off Fiona’s hands when she found the baker’s cocoa in the back of the cabinet and ate the whole box.

  I did everything but feed Jonathan. Mom insisted on feeding Jonathan until he started walking, then she abdicated, like with everything else. She was a figurehead, and oddly, I was okay with that. I loved her arm’s-length parenting because she gave me room to fill my days with something meaningful to me.

  Daddy was not an affectionate person, but after he spanked me for getting knocked up, he was never closer than half a room away. Even when I struggled in the back of the limo on the way to my flight to Ireland, he left the manhandling to an Italian bodyguard. He watched from the seats across with his jacket in his lap.

  “One day,” he’d said as Franco held me down, “one day you’ll see this is for your own good.”

  I stuck my middle finger out at him.

  “Who’s the father?” he asked. “Who did this to you?”

  I got my hand from under Franco’s arm and stuck up my other middle finger.

  “I’m going to find out.”

  All he’d have to do was dig around the groupie scene and he’d know, but he was so far removed from it, and I’d kept it so far away from my regular life, that I had hope he’d leave Strat and Indiana alone.

  He sat next to me during the whole flight over. Just him, and he scared me. He checked me into the convent and left. They sent letters Sister Maureen made me answer. I said nice things, but I was shut down until he and Mom showed up three months before the baby was due.

  “You look good,” Mom had said. She was farther along than I was.

  I felt gross being next to her like that. “So do you. How do you feel?”

  “Better than ever.” She smiled and rested her hand on her belly. She loved being pregnant. I didn’t know how she felt about raising children, but she loved carrying them. “We found a family for your baby. They live here. It’s a good home.”

  “Thank you.”

  I hadn’t fought that part of it. I didn’t want to be a mother at that point, a
nd I had no choice anyway. I was sure they’d done all the diligence in the world.

  “Your friends miss you. They come by to let us know.”

  “Who came?”

  She rattled off a few girls I knew from the Suffragette Society and Jenn from the Chess Strategy Club, then she looked at Dad.

  He sat in the corner with an ankle crossed over his knee, staring at me. The movement of his head was barely perceptible, but he gave her a definite no to whatever she was asking. Mom was a lion when it came to everything except Dad. So she acted as though no one else had come, smiling as if our family dynamic was as normal as peas and carrots.

  I went into labor three days early.

  Dad was there when I gave birth, not Mom. I hadn’t expected him to be in the room. I tried to ignore him, and once the pain got really bad, I could pretend he wasn’t there. The midwife handed him the baby still slimy with goop.

  “Is it a boy or a girl?” I’d asked, trying to catch my breath.

  He didn’t answer. No one answered. Sister Maura just shushed me, and Dad took it away. By the time I delivered the placenta, I knew they’d never tell me a thing.

  I’d flown home alone. My sisters had greeted me like a long-lost child. Even my mother had been overcome with happiness when I walked in the door.

  Dad seemed cautious. He treated me as if I were a museum artifact behind a velvet rope.

  When I got into Wellesley, he congratulated me with a handshake and a genuine smile, but he never touched me again.

  I had to hang up a lot of my family duties when I went to Stanford Law, but I was always there. I called teachers when Fiona didn’t understand her homework, chewed out Father Alfonso when he fire-and-brimstoned Deirdre, and tried to keep Jonathan inside the lines as he proved, time after time, that he could push every boundary with a cocky smile.

  By the time I was studying for my bar, I felt as if the eighties were behind me. My parents had done their best, and I had a good life ahead. Sometimes I even felt gratitude.

  Chapter 26

  1982 – THE NIGHT OF THE QUAALUDE