by T A Ford
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked.
“Let me finish,” he said. “We went back to school and tried to keep our heads down. But the men we were indebted to wanted their money. They came after us. On campus. Another shooting that alerted everyone to the trouble we were in. Afterwards the police got involved and the Vegas incident surfaced. Rodney didn’t have money for an attorney. All of his money was going home to you and your mother. My brother is a lawyer. He got the district attorney to cut a deal for us. We gave them everything we knew about the gambling underworld we belonged to. Rodney got kicked out of school right before graduation. I got probation and had to do another year to graduate.”
“Rodney has a diploma. He graduated.”
Cue stared at her. He didn’t want to shatter her image of her brother. What he had to tell her would be hard enough. He smiled. “That’s right. He did.”
“And this gambling never stopped for you?”
“I got help. Therapy. It worked for a while. Then I started drinking again. I don’t know why. It was the final straw for the woman I loved. Bridget left me. I had to file for bankruptcy. My debt was piling up. I got clean again. But only for a short while. Then Rodney invited me to Atlanta. He told me about you.”
“Rodney was right about you. You’re a liar. Aren’t you?”
“Yes. No. We’re both liars. I can’t be a hero Dina. I’m a man who has made some bad mistakes. A man who loves you. I have to be honest.”
“You’re probably lying now. Trying to make me think my brother is a bad person.”
“No, Dina. I’m not lying, and Rodney isn’t the bad person. That’s what I’m telling you. We all make mistakes.”
Dina pulled her knees up to her chest and dropped her head on them. She began to cry. This time he didn’t comfort her. And she wasn’t sure if she cared anymore. She was tired of the empty loneliness she felt after giving her heart and soul to anything in the universe for only the universe to come and take it away.
“Where is my brother?” she sniffed. “Where is he?!”
“Jail.”
“Huh?”
“He was arrested. Some bad investments caught up with him. They arrested him and we can’t get to see him right now.”
“Oh my God!” She put her face in her hand and wept. “Oh my God!”
Cue reached for her. She whipped her hand away from him as if she’d been burnt. “Don’t come close to me. Stay away. Stay over there.”
He nodded and went back to his seat. Crying, Dina slipped back under the covers. She pulled them over her head and cried herself to sleep.
Cue listened to her cry until he couldn’t stand any more of it. He got up, went to the door and put on his coat. He walked out without her usual sweet voice asking for him to stay. Outside, the January frost bit hard. He forgot his gloves, so he had to blow on his hands to keep them warm. Cue paced the porch. He had a plan, and it was a risky one. First, he had to help her see the truth, the good and the bad. Not the truth that protected their love. If she didn’t, nothing he did would stand. And then it dawned on him. If he kept the bargain he made with Maura, she’d be out of his life by the end of next week. Could he let her go?
He had options. He had rented the cabin for two weeks under his brother’s name. No one knew where they were. He could take her and run. Take her away from Georgia. Disappear with her. Crazy thoughts clouded his judgment. Cue looked back to the window. She lay on the sofa bed with the blanket pulled over her head.
He heard a truck arriving. He paused and looked to the road.
“Motherfucker,” he mumbled. His neighbor had arrived.
Cue sighed and walked down the porch steps.
“Hi!” Jess said.
“Hi! What can I do for you?” Cue asked.
“Came in to give you a friendly heads up. Weather will get bleak tomorrow. Did you hear? These roads are going to be out for a bit.”
Cue glanced to the roads and then back to the man. He didn’t think for a minute that this warning was the point of his visit. But he played along.
“You and your lady friend need anything, it might be best you head to town soon and get your shopping done,” Jess said, and looked to the cabin.
“We’re fine. We just want to be left alone.”
“Oh?” Jess said. “Yea, I understand. Sorry, but it’s my job to warn folks. Got three cabins out here that I check in on. You the only one with the extended stay. Two weeks right?”
Cue glanced down to the man’s belt to see his gun clipped on it. He hated living in an open carry state. Jess pretended at being friendly, but something about the man felt off. He stared at him without an expression.
“Well, be warm. Again, if you need anything, my number is near the fridge. I keep it there for all tenants. Sure is a pretty lady. Take care.”
Cue didn’t respond.
Jess got in his truck and stared at Cue for a moment, before nodding at him and then backing away. It wasn’t until he was clearly gone that Cue went back inside and got his gun. Dina didn’t stir when he entered and left. He returned to the porch with the gun and sat in the rocking chair staring at the road. He sat there until he believed the threat was gone. The idea of taking her and just running was an even greater temptation.
He too was suffering from withdrawals. He hadn’t had a drink in over a week. It made him paranoid and anxious. He was struggling.
“DOC?” DINA ASKED.
“Yes?” he answered.
“What if we don’t work out? What if you decide that you don’t want me anymore?” she asked. She reclined on a large pillow in the canoe, staring at her doctor who rowed them toward the middle of the lake. The sky wasn’t clear and pretty as it had been many times before. It was covered in gray clouds. And the cold on the lake penetrated her coat and leggings. She would be warmer in his arms.
“You can’t answer me?” she asked.
“I don’t know the answer. I wasn’t supposed to love you this much. That was never the plan,” he said.
“You aren’t a good person, are you Doc?” she asked. “A good doctor and a good person wouldn’t be cruel enough to make a woman love him then tell her constantly why she shouldn’t. A good man wouldn’t take responsibility for everyone’s mistakes to push a woman who loves him away.”
“I’m not a good person, no. Your illness makes you think I am.”
“Am I ill? I have a developmental issue, but not an illness.”
“Do you think Asperger’s made you stab yourself? Or was it something else?” he asked.
“I’m not crazy.”
Cue kept rowing. “How would you know? What have you ever done without me or Rodney to prove it? When have you ever done anything on your own?”
“I went to college. I pledged a sorority, so that proves I can make friends. I got my new job by myself. I took dance lessons by myself. I did that. I stood on my own two feet. I didn’t need either of you to do it.”
“But you need me now. I had to rescue you. I had to save you. Would you have done anything for yourself in that place if I hadn’t come?”
She closed her eyes and realized how alone she would always be. The people in her life weren’t protecting her. They were tolerating her. She was the one that pushed sex with Doc. She was the one that said “I love you” first. She was the one that forced him to go public.
“Now you understand,” he said.
She opened her eyes. Doc wasn’t rowing her across the lake anymore. It was her. Dina’s doppelgänger kept rowing them further and further from shore. “It’s just us. You, yourself, and I. We only have each other. We can’t rely on any of them. They are liars. They are pretenders. Broken, like everything else in the world. And they call you crazy,” her twin laughed. “What if we are the sane ones? Huh? What if this entire world is upside down and we are the only ones that can see it?”
“I love him,” she told herself.
The copy of her stopped rowing. She looked at her as if she were
the saddest and most pathetic thing in the world. “Do you love him? Or do you just need him to make you feel like you’re loved? Because there’s a world out there full of Docs. Can’t you find another?”
Dina opened her eyes. The cabin was dark. But the darkness inside let her see the moonlight and snow falling outside of the windows. The cabin would soon be covered in winter. She sat up slowly. It didn’t take her long to find Cue. He was asleep on the sofa across from the sofa bed. He had a blanket thrown over him. There was a gun on the floor. It might have fallen from his hand when he slept. It took a minute for the dream to feel less real. But the pain in her heart kept clawing to escape. She clutched her chest and bit down on her tongue to keep a sob from rising in her throat. She did love Doc. That love was real. That love couldn’t be easily replaced, no matter how many other men were out there in the world. Dina glanced to Cue once again. He wouldn’t even sleep with her anymore. He wouldn’t touch her. And he only talked to her like a therapist would. The magic was gone.
It was over.
She drew back the covers and left her sofa bed without a sound. She felt disgusting. Since she arrived, she had showered, but nothing truly cleansing, and her hair was uncombed. “No wonder he doesn’t love you,” she mumbled aloud. On her way to the bathroom the pill bottle of her medicine caught her eye. She picked it up and went to the bathroom.
Rodney was in jail. Her sweet brother was locked away with mean criminals. And she could do nothing to save him. All this time she had feared her incarceration in a looney bin. But the end was far worse. What would life be like for Rodney in that place? Would she ever see him again? In tears, she stood before the mirror. The tears came with the pain. She couldn’t figure out how to stop either. At least when she was on the pills she didn’t feel anything. She didn’t think anything. She didn’t say anything. Her brother was in jail. Her mother and father were dead. She was all alone now that Doc didn’t want her.
With a shaky hand she opened the bottle. She dumped over thirty pills into her palm and then forced them into her mouth. She could sense her mother’s presence.
“Swallow it Shadow. Swallow and go to sleep like I did,” her mother said.
When she was little her mother used to call her Shadow because she was always following her around.
“Go on, swallow,” her mother whispered.
“Don’t swallow Dina,” her father begged as he stood behind her and she could see him in the mirror. “It’s okay. I’m here. I’m always here. I never left.”
Confused, she froze. Her mother’s and father’s voices competed for space in her head. As the pills began to dissolve in her mouth, she gagged and spit the load into the toilet. All of them. She hated her life. But she hated her weakness even more. Dina wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and faced herself in the mirror. Her father was gone. Her mother’s voice was no longer in her head. It was what Doc would call a moment of clarity. Angry, she went to the shower and turned it on to full blast and stepped directly into the water. She stood there and cried. But it was a fresh cry. A new cry. She didn’t want to die. She wanted to live. Not for Rodney, not for Doc. She wanted to live for herself.
Cue woke. He glanced over to the sofa bed. Dina wasn’t in it. He could hear the shower running to the back of the cabin. He went through the house, and then tried the door to the shower. It was locked.
“Dina? Open the door. Open it.”
He heard nothing. Not a movement. Just the running water. He knew better than to wait. He threw his shoulder against the door and it shook. He slammed his shoulder up against the door and forced it open. Dina was startled and stepped back from his intrusion. Cue found her wet wrapped in a towel. Her thick hair dripped on her shoulder. Her eyes stretched as if he were some kind of crazed invader. He was about to apologize for scaring her. She had scared him so bad he couldn’t help himself. He imagined the worst. And then his gaze switched to the sink. The pill bottle was inside of it and empty. He glanced to the toilet and saw pills on the seat. Inside were almost all of the pills. “What did you do?”
She glared at him.
“Dina? What happened?”
She refused to answer him. He took her by the arms. “Did you try to flush them or take them? Did you? Tell me?”
She stared at him with solid resistance. Cue pulled her into his arms and held her. Dina kept her hand up to her towel to keep it together and her other arm down at her waist. He felt so much relief that she was okay he realized what an idiot he was to leave her meds out.
“It’s okay. We’re okay,” he said. He used the robe on the back of the door hook and put it around her. She dropped her towel and eased her arms through it. He walked her back to the sofa bed.
He was about to put her in bed and realized that it would be stressful for her to lay over the same soiled sheets. He sat in her a lounge chair near the bed and stripped it of the linens, and then went to the laundry to get fresh ones. He moved fast. Dina sat there staring straight ahead and not speaking. She did glance over at him when she saw him making things clean for her. He knew that she was appreciative of the effort. When he asked her to get back in bed, she did so. He pulled the cover over her and tucked her in. When he leaned over to kiss her brow, she turned away. She refused to even look at him.
He had no choice but to back away. There was always a plan B in his arsenal. He wanted to wait until their last night together. After finding her despondent and all of the pills in the toilet, he knew she was slipping away from him. What he did next would possibly have no effect on her decline. But he had hope in her resilience.
Cue walked to the bedroom that he kept closed and locked. He opened it and started to drag out boxes and bags. She didn’t move. She didn’t bother to lift her head. He decided on a spot that was close enough to her but far enough away to keep from disturbing her. And he went to work.
Putting together a plastic tree wasn’t difficult. The challenge had been to find one to purchase so far from Christmas. He actually had to have a guy pull one from the warehouse in Walmart. Buying the ornaments was even harder.
It wasn’t until Cue began to string the lights that she responded. Despite her need to withdraw, her curiosity surfaced. He pretended not to notice when she stood and walked over in her robe.
“Christmas was my mother’s favorite holiday,” she said. “Mine too.”
He handed her a plastic container of bulbs.
“My dad and Rodney would do the house lights, but me and Mom would do the tree. My specialty was the bulbs and garland. Momma was in charge of the lights and star. You always run the lights first. She had to use a three-step ladder to do it. And she would sing. Mama was the best singer. Every soulful Christmas song. When Daddy would hear her from outside, he’d come back in just to watch her. She was that good. She could really, really melt your heart when she sang.”
Dina hooked some bulbs. She lined them up perfectly on the sofa bed for the plucking and in colors. Cue continued to string the lights.
“When mama became sick too sick to care about anything but the devil who was coming for us, I would pray for Christmas to come soon. It was her holiday. I should have just gone and got a tree and brought Christmas early.”
He stepped back and let her put the ornaments on the tree.
“You don’t start at the top. It’s how you create mistakes. And colors should not go next to each other. No red ornaments. You should know that.”
Dina went to work on the tree. She told him about the history of Christmas. She shared how much the pagan practices overshadowed the holiday and distorted the Christian faith. He smiled and listened as she worked with her usual perfectionism. When she was done, the tree only needed the star, something he hadn’t been able to find during his search.
“What do you think?” he asked her.
“It’s missing the star,” she said.
“I know what we can do to add to the Christmas spirit,” he said, and went back into the room. He came out with four boxes tha
t he had wrapped.
“Presents?”
“Wouldn’t be Christmas if we didn’t have anything.”
“It’s not Christmas,” she said. “The tree doesn’t even have a star.”
“Tonight it is,” he replied. He put the presents under the tree. Dina went back to the sofa bed and got under the covers. She laid on her side and stared at the tree. Cue decided to play Christmas songs. He connected to his bluetooth speaker and found a channel on Pandora. The first song was “Let it Snow,” by Boys to Men. He sat down in the recliner and stared at the tree. Dina did not turn to talk to him. She didn’t give him any explanation about what he found in the bathroom. She drifted to sleep staring at the tree and he could swear he saw peace on her face. It wasn’t until he was sure that she rested he went to sleep as well. He was ready to face whatever came next.
Chapter Twenty-Two
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Dina spent the day in bed. She cried mostly. Cue tried to coax her to eat, but she refused. It was the tree. The more she wanted to admire and love it, the more she welcomed memories of her family. Life without both her parents had been dark. No matter their faults, they belonged to her and she needed them. If her father hadn’t died it, was possible her mother wouldn’t have fallen so deep into her psychosis. At least that is what she believed. They were gone. Rodney was in jail. She had no one.