Ashes of Life

by Erica Lucke Dean

  “What is it, Maddie? Are you okay? You look like you’re gonna be sick.”

  Guilt stole my voice, and I shook my head, tucking the phone against my chest and holding it tight.

  “What’s wrong? Let me see.” She reached for the phone, but I wouldn’t let go.

  I’d done this. I’d wanted my family back so badly, I didn’t care who I’d hurt. If I hadn’t pushed them back together, they wouldn’t have been in the car that day.

  “Come on, lemme see.” She shook her hand at me, waiting for me to place the phone in her palm, but I held tight.

  I swallowed down the lump in my throat. “It’s just the pictures. They make me sad, but I still want to look through them.”

  “Oh.” Her hand dropped to her side. “Okay.”

  The phone chimed with a message, and both Alex and I froze. It took a moment for me to realize it had been my phone, not Dad’s. “Uh, that’s me.” I pulled my phone from my pocket and opened the new message from Brody.

  Brody: WTF, Maddie?

  I stared at the message before tapping out a reply.

  Maddie: What?

  Brody: You snitched.

  Shit! Brody was clearly pissed. He’d managed to avoid me the whole day at school, so I couldn’t imagine what he meant.

  Maddie: When?

  Brody: Think about it.

  “Everything okay?” I felt Alex watching me like a zoo exhibit.

  “Uh, I need to make a phone call. Be right back.” I scooted out of her room and down the hall into mine. As soon as I’d closed the door behind me, I hit the autodial for Brody. He answered on the first ring.

  His voice startled me as he shouted through the line. “You fucking told your stepmom about Saturday night?”

  Shit, shit, shit. “No.”

  “No? Then how’d she find out?”

  “I woke up Sunday morning with her standing over me.” I left out the part about her finding the unused condom and Mom’s lingerie. “It’s not like she couldn’t tell by smelling me.”

  “Well, thanks to you, my dad’s on my ass about… fuck, about everything.” I could practically hear him pulling out his perfect hair as he paced. “I should have known better than to get involved with a little girl. Jesus, Maddie, you couldn’t have been more careful?”

  “I’m not a little girl. And how did your dad find out, anyway?”

  “Your stepmom went to see my dad today. She fucking threatened to have me arrested if I came near you again. Can you believe that shit? As if I’d go anywhere near you now.”

  “She did what? And what do you mean you wouldn’t go near me now? I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  He laughed, but the empty sound of it gave me chills. “You didn’t do anything right, either. Maybe I just need to stick to my own crowd for a while. It was fun, but we’re done.”

  “Brody, wait! Is this your bullshit way of dumping me and blaming me for it?” My voice echoed against my bare walls, but he’d already hung up. “Are you kidding me? Seriously. Are. You. Kidding. Me?” I stared at the blank screen on my phone before tucking it back into my pocket and storming down the hall to my dad’s room.

  Alex had curled into a ball on top of his clothes clutching his phone the same way I had before I’d abandoned it for Brody’s tirade. “Did you see this?” She held out the phone to me, but I couldn’t care less about whatever it was she wanted to show me.

  “Did you talk to Mr. Allen about me?”

  “What?” She lifted her head and wiped at the tears streaking her face. “What are you talking about?”

  “Did you tell Mr. Allen about me and Brody?” I enunciated each word clearly, so she wouldn’t misunderstand me.

  “I… yes. I did.” She sat all the way up, still clutching Dad’s phone. “I don’t like him. Or his dad for that matter. I don’t want you seeing him anymore.”

  “You’re not my mom. You can’t tell me who I can and can’t see! And who gave you the right to tell Brody’s dad about my personal business? I’m like, horrified and embarrassed that he knows.”

  “He’s Brody’s dad. He has every right to hear what Brody’s been up to, particularly if it’s illegal, and giving liquor to a minor is definitely illegal.”

  “Oh. My. God!” I wanted to break something, preferably over her head. “Do you not get it?”

  The sad Alex I’d walked in on disappeared, and the bitch I remembered took her place. “Oh, I think I get it just fine. It’s you who seem to be confused. You’re grounded until the weekend, and after that, I don’t want you anywhere near Brody Allen. He’s a disrespectful little shit.”

  I wanted to strangle her with my dad’s dirty boxers. “Well, thanks to you, that shit wants nothing to do with me.”

  “Good. Problem solved.”

  “I hate you!” An animal scream forced its way out of my throat, and I turned on my heels and stormed out, slamming the door behind me.

  Truce officially over.

  Chapter 14

  Alex

  I spent the rest of the week failing as a parental figure while Maddie singed holes through my soul with her blistering stare. She despised everything about me, from the way I scrambled eggs to the way I drew breath in her airspace. Exhaustion, both physical and mental, weighed me down. While it had been comforting to know I wasn’t the only one in the house anymore, I couldn’t relax until I knew she’d fallen asleep. Visions of her sneaking out plagued my thoughts each night until I drifted off into fitful pockets of sleep well after two a.m.

  By the time Saturday morning rolled around, I felt as if it were my sentence being lifted, not hers. After giving the Thompsons a quick rundown of the rules of the new regime, I left Maddie in their care for the weekend and headed straight for my own personal oasis and the biggest damn cup of caffeine Natalie could pour.

  “Well, just so you know, I wouldn’t put much stock in what Mike Allen has to say. He’s obviously an asshole, and apparently, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Natalie leaned against the counter and brushed muffin crumbs from her apron.

  “I guess. I can’t help wondering, though. Maddie has all but beaten me over the head with the idea that her parents were sneaking around behind my back.” After everything that had happened, my unwavering belief in David had begun to falter. Bits of circumstantial evidence against him that had started out like microscopic holes in the ice were suddenly branching out like spidery cracks along the surface. I wanted to ignore the voices in my head, but over the past week, they’d gotten louder.

  “She’s a kid. Of course she wanted her parents to get back together. That’s practically the universal wish of all kids with divorced parents. She wouldn’t exactly have the fast track to the truth, though. And you’re both too close to the situation. You’re still grieving.”

  I grabbed onto Natalie’s line of reasoning like a life raft. “Yeah, you’re probably right. It’s just…” As badly as I wanted to tell her, I couldn’t get the words out. As long as I kept the secret to myself, didn’t say it out loud, it didn’t feel real.

  “What?”

  I shook my head, hoping to dispel the images from my brain. I’d hidden the evidence under a pile of folded laundry, but out of sight was most definitely not out of mind. Some things couldn’t be unseen. “I just wish going to see that jerk had been the low point in my day.”

  “What could be worse than spending an afternoon talking to Mike ‘asshat’ Allen?”

  I barked out a hollow laugh.

  “Well? Don’t keep me in suspense.”

  I nodded, giving myself permission to rip the proverbial Band-Aid off the open wound in my heart. If anyone could help me make sense of everything, it would be Natalie. I knew I might not like her methods, but in the end, she was the unlikely voice of reason keeping me somewha
t sane. “I was doing what you said, going through David’s things. I cleaned out the hamper. Sorted and washed his laundry.” I didn’t tell her about practically huffing his dirty clothes. She’d never let me live that down. I certainly couldn’t tell her about the hours spent searching through the pictures of him and Sarah from before we’d even met like some sort of schoolgirl stalker. “Maddie had been looking through his phone and, well, I don’t know if she did it on purpose or not, but when she gave it back to me, his calendar was up. I figured I should see if he’d made plans for Valentine’s Day—reservations I needed to cancel, you know?”

  A fresh wave of sadness swept over Natalie’s features, and she pulled me into an awkward one-armed hug with the counter between us painfully digging into my ribs. “Oh, sweetie. I’m sorry. I know this must be hard. This would have been your first Valentine’s Day as a married couple.”

  “There wasn’t anything there—no Valentine’s plans. I guess he never had time to…” I wiped away a few stray tears. “I did find an interesting entry for today’s date. He’d blocked out several hours for Sarah.”

  Natalie gasped, and her hand flew to her mouth.

  “I know. I was scheduled to be out of town this week. I cancelled all my travel dates when… well, I cancelled everything, but when I searched through his phone…” Everything about the memory made me feel as though I’d somehow invaded his privacy and stumbled upon some seedy secret my new husband had kept from me. I wanted to be sick. “He was planning to meet her, Natalie. On the Saturday before Valentine’s Day, my husband had a date with his ex-wife.”

  “Holy shit!” Natalie swore through the hand covering her mouth. Then she dropped it and waved it as if doing so would scatter the truth like dust motes through the air. “But… maybe it was innocent. I mean, they did have a kid together. It could have been something totally harmless, right?”

  “I thought of that too, so I checked the rest of his calendar. I found several hours blocked out on the day they died, of course, but Natalie, there were more. And almost all of them fell on days I was out of town. It’s like he had this whole other life going on right under my nose, and I had no idea.” A cracking sensation spread out from my sternum and through my limbs. I was Humpty Dumpty, and David’s iPhone was the wall. All it took was one push to break me.

  She stepped around the counter and pulled me into a tight hug as if she knew I needed someone to hold me together. “I’m so sorry, sweetie. I-I don’t even know what to say.”

  After several moments of standing there wordlessly, Natalie released her stranglehold on me and managed to elbow my cup as she stepped back. Lukewarm coffee splattered the front of my sweater. “Oh, shit. Sorry.” She grabbed a damp rag and started toweling off my boobs.

  The absurdity of the situation hit me as I wiped the trail of tears from my face. A bout of unexpected laughter caught me off guard. “Step away from the goods before you start something you can’t finish. I am a lonely widow woman, after all.”

  Natalie froze with her hands still fondling my breasts, and her mouth dropped open—as if she’d forgotten I knew how to make a joke—then she yanked her hands away and threw her head back and laughed. “Sorry. I got carried away there for a minute.”

  Another shift in mood passed over me like an eclipse, sucking the lightness out of everything again. “I don’t know what to think.” My voice came out as barely a whisper, and I jumped back onto my stool. The air around us had grown heavy as my predicament pressed down on me like a lead blanket. “Was my husband cheating on me? With his ex-wife?”

  Natalie hopped onto the stool next to me. “If he was, he was the biggest idiot on the planet. You’re beautiful, and smart, and he was damn lucky to have you. Hell, I’ve already groped your boobs. I’d sleep with you if I swung that way.”

  I knew she was trying to make me smile, and I wanted to. I really did. But I couldn’t help wondering if people told Sarah the same thing when he’d left her.

  “Okay, that’s enough sadness for one day.” Natalie snapped her fingers as if she had the power to change moods with her will. “You know what… I have just the thing to cheer you up, and forget about saying no.”

  “I’m afraid to ask.” I wiped more unshed tears from my eyes.

  “You should be.” She laughed. “But after the week you’ve had, I think it’s high time we went out and got shitfaced.”

  “Drunk?” I could only imagine the horrified expression on my face. “You want me to go out and get drunk?”

  “Sure.” She shrugged. “I’m sure you’ve done it before. You went to college, right? Isn’t that typical Saturday night stuff for the university crowd?”

  Had I ever gotten drunk in college? I didn’t remember a single time I’d done anything so reckless. At least, not back then. I wasn’t that girl. I didn’t do reckless. I didn’t drown my sorrows in booze. “I wouldn’t know. I spend my Saturday nights glued to a screen playing video games with computer nerds on either side of me.”

  “Oh, sweetheart… you’ve been deprived. We are definitely gonna get smashed tonight. I’m even closing early, so we can get a head start. You know what they say… a night out is good for the soul.” She had a strange way of looking at things, but desperation wasn’t a good look on me. Maybe Natalie was right.

  “What will people think? It’s only been a month since my husband died. What about Maddie?” No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop thinking about her, and about the moment we’d almost had. In the midst of our intertwined tragedies, we’d finally clicked. And then the whole Brody thing had come to a head, and she’d gone off on me again.

  A glimmer of anger flashed in Natalie’s eyes. “I think people can mind their own damn business. If your husband had been where he belonged, he might still be alive.”

  I opened my mouth, but she put up a finger to stop me. Was I the only person out of the loop? The only one who didn’t know David and Sarah were destined to be together for eternity. ’Til death do they part? Maddie had been so sure they were getting back together.

  She turned her heated stare on me. “Don’t even go there. You already said this was the first weekend she’s off grounding, and the kid is spending it with her friend. And before you come up with another weak excuse, I know you, Alex. You made sure they’d watch her like a road crew convict, right?” I nodded, and she went on. “So you have no excuse. We’re going. And that’s final.”

  “I can’t believe you talked me into wearing this.” I looked down at the shimmering blue minidress clinging to my every curve as I tottered on a pair of dangerous, strappy heels. A woman I recognized but couldn’t place did a double take as she passed by me in her simple black sheath and pearls, and a wave of guilt threatened to knock me off my feet. “I look ridiculous. I should be wearing black.” Preferably black sweats and fuzzy socks while curled up on my very own sofa watching Lifetime TV for women.

  Natalie scoffed. I wanted to believe she cared about my feelings, and I knew she did in her own weird way, even if it didn’t seem like it sometimes. And yet I only had myself to blame. I’d let her drag me out without the giant W stitched across my chest. “Wearing black is so two centuries ago. You look hot.”

  “It’s February. I’m dressed for summer… in Paris.” I glanced around the room, hoping I wouldn’t see anyone else I recognized. Or more importantly, I prayed they wouldn’t see me.

  “We’d be all the rage in Paris. Let’s pretend we’re there.” Natalie fiddled with her blond updo and danced off toward the bar, muttering in a pathetic French accent. “Come on, mon cheri… let’s get our drink on!”

  A plate of greasy onion rings and two drinks later, I no longer cared what I was wearing. As inappropriate as her methods were, I appreciated the effort. Wallowing in self-pity was almost impossible with Natalie around.

  “Holy shit!” Natalie grabbed ahold of the ba
ck of my dress, tugging me until she had her lips at my ear. “Don’t look now, but there’s a hot doctor in the house.”

  I spun around to see Ben striding in our direction.

  “Ben…” My jaw dropped open, and I quickly closed it. He looked different—good—dressed in dark denim and a slightly rumpled navy button-down. And he seemed as surprised to see me as I was to see him.

  “Alex?” His eyes flitted between Natalie and me.

  “Funny running into you here.” I snuck a glance at Natalie’s not-so-angelic face before giving her a full-on glare. I knew what game she was playing, and I did my best not to buy into it.

  “You look dashing, Doc. Glad you could make it,” Natalie stage-whispered, directing her mischievous grin from me to Ben.

  Ben fidgeted. “Yeah, uh, thanks for the heads-up there, Nat.”

  After Ben’s comment, she dropped the pretense and laughed. “Hey, whatever works, right?”

  I gave up trying to melt Natalie with my stare and turned to face Ben, a forced smile stretching my lips. I could do this. We were friends. Friends hung out together all the time. “We might as well make the best of it. Right, friend?”

  Ben reached up to grip the back of his neck. He didn’t seem all that enthusiastic about the whole friend thing. “Sounds like a plan. Can I, uh, buy you a drink?” Natalie cleared her throat, and Ben blushed. “Both of you, I mean.”

  “Hell yeah, you can buy us a drink. It’s about time you asked.” Natalie slapped him on the shoulder and scooted over so there was an empty stool between us. “Hop on.” She patted the seat.

  Ben’s sweet mint and hospital sanitizer scent surrounded me as he slid between us, careful not to brush against me. He took his seat and waved the bartender over to order a round of appletinis for us and an imported beer for himself.