by Amber Rides
“Not interested.”
I reached for the cell phone and the wallet, and Brandy danced back teasingly.
“Not funny,” I growled.
“I’m not being funny. We really need to talk.”
She brought her arms down, and I grabbed my stuff, then pushed my way past her without looking back. I dialed for a cab as I walked outside.
I need to sort this shit out before it gets out of control.
“Any more out of control,” I amended out loud.
I wondered what the cops had told Melissa about me. Nothing flattering, for sure. I wondered if she still cared.
“You’re starting to piss me off, baby.”
Brandy’s voice, right beside my ear, made me jump.
“Stop following me,” I commanded.
“Or what?” she taunted. “You’ll hit me like you hit that hot little piece of blonde tail?”
“I didn’t touch her.”
Brandy smirked. “There’s a first. Cutter Lane, denying that he touched a woman.”
I rounded on her. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, Brandy.”
“Don’t I?” she replied. “Who turned you in to the cops?”
My heart and my head both fucking hurt at the reminder, but I wasn’t admitting that to Brandy.
“It was a misunderstanding.”
“The girl…” Brandy said. “She’s the same one I saw outside your apartment, right?”
“Don’t fucking talk about her,” I snapped.
“Speaking of fucking…” She raised a suggestive eyebrow.
“I hope you’re kidding.” I gave her face an assessing once over. “You’re not kidding. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Let me drive you home.”
“No way.”
My cab pulled up just then. I flung the door open thankfully, and got halfway in before Brandy’s voice stopped me.
“I’ll press charges.”
I spun to face her. “For what?”
She smiled a thoroughly unpleasant smile. “I’ll give you a choice. You can man up, and I won’t cry rape. Or you can be your usual, fucktard self and I’ll spin this my way. Let’s do a bit of math. Combine your history – no, wait - our history with that nasty, just-expired restraining order, and spice it up with the very fresh allegations brought against you by a certain blonde…I’m pretty sure how it will come out.”
My skin crawled. If there was one thing I knew about my bitch of an ex, it was that she cared about two thing above all else. Money first and her reputation second. I didn’t have any of the former, and if she was willing to sacrifice the latter just to talk to me...
“The police station is right there,” Brandy added.
I shot the cabbie an apologetic look.
“You’re making the right choice.” Brandy’s manicured hand closed over top of my cell phone.
I flinched away from her. “I said I’d come with you. I didn’t say touch me.”
“Fine. But if you keep squeezing the thing like that, you’re going to crush it. Let’s go.”
She spun on a heeled foot, and laughed her grating laugh. The smell of her perfume, swirling around me, make me want to vomit.
MELISSA
When the door to the not-interrogation room swung open, my angry tirade died on my lips.
“Mom! What are you doing here?”
“Saving you from yourself,” she replied.
Her voice had a cool, dry tone. Her way of letting me know - for twenty-one years - that she was displeased. She placed a clipboard on the table, facing me.
“Have a look,” she suggested.
It was a photo of a man’s face, covered in bruises and abrasions. One eye was swollen shut, and the other wasn’t much better.
“Why are you showing me this?” I demanded, fearing the answer.
“Believe me, it was against my better judgment,” she replied. “But the detectives told me they were going to show you anyway, and I thought it might be nicer coming from someone with a friendlier agenda. Five years ago, Cutter Lane – still going by Cutter Prescott, then – assaulted the man in that picture. To within an inch of his life. Mr. Prescott pleaded guilty and spent ten months in jail. If he’d been any much more past eighteen…I’m sure it would’ve been a longer stint.”
“No.” I didn’t know if I was denying the truth of what she said, or if I was disagreeing with her conclusion.
She nodded, then took the clipboard and flipped to the next picture. Smoke poured from a one story house, and a crowd stood outside, gawking.
“That’s a little over three years ago,” my mom explained. “Cutter was convicted of arson. Luckily, no one was hurt, and only one room in the house was damaged. He spent another year in prison. He’s currently serving twelve months of house arrest. And he has five more years left on his probation after that.”
My stomach twisted. I didn’t want to believe her. Part of me thought she might be using this as an excuse to keep me away from him, to punish me for my “sister’s” mistakes. I had to ask. I had to know if she had an agenda.
“Mom…”
She cut me off with a sigh. “Missy, I know what you’re going to ask. And I want you to think about it. Even if I’m telling you all of this for selfish reasons…It doesn’t change what he’s done. Cutter Lane is not a nice man. Sooner or later, his past will catch up with him. Something. Somewhere. Sometime. That is the judge in me, assessing him objectively. Everything about him screams repeat offender.”
“If you’re being objective, shouldn’t you be assuming he’s capable of reform?”
“No. That would be false optimism, Missy. I’m taking years of experience, and putting them to good use. And I know the boy’s father. He’s a snake in the courtroom, but the boy had every opportunity. Private schools, good money…Yet he still winds up in jail for assault.”
“Cutter didn’t assault me, Mom.”
“Whatever happened between you…I can see that you don’t want him to be punished. I trust you. And I want you to trust me. I spoke with him myself, Missy. He’s perfectly willing to walk away.”
My eyes snapped to her face. “You talked to him?”
“On a few occasions. Everyone has a price.”
The rest of her words caught up to me. “What price? Did you pay him to go?”
“I tried to,” my mother admitted. “But all he wanted was the same thing he’s always wanted. To be absolved of responsibility.”
“Bullshit.”
“I don’t have a reason to lie. And besides that…I’m using my connections to speed up his release.”
“What?” I couldn’t keep the surprise from my voice.
“I am helping him, so that you believe what I’m telling you.”
A small voice in the back of my mind wanted to rail against her statement. But I immediately pictured Cutter out at the country club, raising the fence and painting. Community service. He’d told me that’s what it was, but my mind had automatically gone to something more charitable.
Still, something didn’t seem right.
“If he really did those things, he had a good reason,” I said softly.
“Listen to me, Missy. A man like him can find any excuse to justify his violent behavior. I don’t condone vigilante justice. And a cheating girlfriend does not an arsonist make,” she replied.
Something clicked. The man who Cutter’s sister married, who’d once drugged her and stood by while his friends raped her. Brandy, and Cutter’s best friend and the terrible thing he’d done when she’d cheated on him. I knew instinctively that the assault victim was Cutter’s brother-in-law, and that house he burned belonged to Brandy or Billy.
And my mom knew, too.
“You put him in jail,” I stated.
“Where he deserved to be.”
I shook my head, and stood up. “I need to see him.”
“No.”
“I made him a promise, and I need to keep it.”
“You�
�ve always been too stubborn for your own good.”
If I hadn’t been so emotionally exhausted, I might’ve laughed at the irony of her so closely echoing Cutter’s sentiment.
“I have to leave,” I said instead.
She grabbed my arm, and shoved her cell phone into my face. Cutter’s voice, angry and disdainful, flowed from its speaker into the room.
“If I want Melissa, I’ll just take her and her tight pussy whenever I please. I’ll make her beg for it. She means nothing to me.”
“What the hell is that?” I demanded
“That,” my mother said icily. “Is that man you’re defending.”
I looked from the phone to her face, my heart crumbling.
“I have to go,” I gasped.
But as I shoved past her and fled the police station, and hailed a taxi, I knew I couldn’t go home.
I needed answers that only one person could give me.
When the cabbie pulled up to Julie’s house – a perfect two-story with tidy hedges and a swing set in the backyard – I suddenly became tongue-tied.
How many times had I been there, eating strawberries at her breakfast bar, or watching movies with the kids? We weren’t close, but we were family. Christmases. Baptisms.
How the hell does she justify living the two-point-five-kid, stay-at-home-mom dream, when she knows her oldest child was being raised by her own mother?
I could hear the squeak of the swings, so I automatically made my way to the back. I found my youngest niece (who was actually my half-sister, if you wanted to get technical about things) pumping her chubby little legs and laughing like crazy.
She squealed when she saw me, prompting her mom to come hurrying to the porch.
“Hi, Julie,” I greeted with as much enthusiasm as I could muster.
My sister’s face, usually a careful mask of pleasantness, pinched up when she spotted me. I couldn’t help but stare.
We looked alike. Everyone said so. And knowing the reason why made me scrutinize her all the more carefully. I saw it in her eyes. The shape and color was the same as my own, and the pale lashes that needed mascara just to be visible. Her hair was like mine, too, though it was safe to assume that at thirty-seven, some of the blonde wasn’t natural.
“What did I get from him?” I blurted.
She didn’t answer me right away.
“Nat,” she said instead. “Come over here and give me a hug.”
Her daughter jumped from the swing obediently and threw herself into her mom’s arms. For a second, Julie held her like a shield between us, then she whispered something into her hair and Nat ran into the house.
“When you were little like that, you would never have come to me the first time I asked,” Julie stated.
“You mean the first time mom asked,” I replied.
“When anyone asked.”
“And?”
“And that…You got from him.”
“I don’t even know what that is.”
“Your little bit of defiance,” Julie clarified. “I was obedient from the get-go. I couldn’t even blink without asking mom.”
“You didn’t seem to mind getting pregnant without asking her,” I retorted.
Julie cringed, then smoothed her hair and said, too lightly, “Go big, or go home, right?”
I wasn’t buying into her jokes. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“I wanted to, Mel.”
But I wasn’t buying into her sincerity, either. “But you asked mom’s permission and she said no?”
“You get that sarcasm from him, too.” Julie smiled.
“Who was he, Julie?”
“It would kill mom, if she knew we were talking about it,” she replied evasively.
I yanked on my ponytail, hating the way she was dodging around the real issue.
“You’re just like her, aren’t you?” I said, unable to curb the bitterness in my voice. “You just want to sweep a twenty-year old mistake under the rug and pretend like it never happened. Like I never happened.”
Julie’s face crumpled like I’d hit her. “I’m nothing like her. And I know you’re not, either. If she’d given me any choice…”
“Tell me, then,” I prodded.
“Wait here, okay?”
She disappeared into the house for a minute, then reappeared with two tall glasses of something chilled, and handed one to me. I took a cautious sip. It tasted like iced tea. With a kick. Julie gulped back half own her drink in one go.
“I’m going to tell you this story once, okay? And it’s going to be quick. In fifteen minutes, Nat’s video will be over, and Ginnie and Stephen will be done school and expecting me to meet them on the corner, and I have to be there.”
Fifteen minutes, I thought angrily. Twenty years, she’s had a chance to talk to me, and when I ask, she gives me fifteen minutes.
But I couldn’t say no.
I took another sip of the sweet liquid in my cup. It pooled in my stomach and helped me relax, just a little bit.
“Fine.”
Julie’s face was pale, and when she replied, it was in a near-whisper. “It’s only because it hurts me to talk about it, Mel.”
“Fine,” I said again, this time a little more gently.
“Mom’s hand was in everything I did. From the classes I picked at school, to the boys I dated, to the clothes I wore. When I was sixteen, I met Andrew. He was nineteen. Funny. Smart. He made me laugh. I loved him. For the first time in my life, I did something just because I wanted to.” She paused, swallowed the rest of her drink, and went on. “When we found out I was pregnant, Andrew was thrilled. He proposed. I said yes. And then Mom found out. She forbade it. She tried to pay him off, and he said no. She tried to drive us apart, feeding me half-truths about him. Each time he rose above it and proved her wrong. Which made me love him even more. So she had Andrew arrested, and thrown in jail because I was a minor.”
I didn’t have a hard time imagining it. It was eerily similar to my own situation. Everything with my mother was black and white. She wouldn’t even have blinked while doing it.
Is that why she let Cutter go? I wondered suddenly. Because scare tactics and jail didn’t have the desired affect with Julie?
“I begged her to pull strings and have him released,” Julie told me. “And eventually, she agreed. On her terms. If I would leave him, and terminate the pregnancy.”
Sickness overwhelmed the warmth in my stomach. Quickly, I tossed back a few mouthfuls of my drink.
“I went along with it, at least until they let Andrew out. I lied about having an abortion, and the second he was free…” she trailed off. “We ran away.”
“What did she do?” I asked quietly.
“She hired a private detective to find me. She sent a letter with him, so he wouldn’t know why he was looking for me. She told me she didn’t have to come after me, because karma would. I laughed about it. I wasn’t the one trying to stop a marriage and terminate someone else’s pregnancy. I kept laughing, right up until Andrew died.” Julie blinked away tears and took a deep breath. “I was six months along, and not even seventeen yet. It was an accident on the way to work, and – What was I supposed to do? I was scared, and alone, and I had nowhere else to go. I came home, and they took you from me. I signed the paperwork. I went back to school. No one had a clue what had happened. Mom and Dad had told everyone I was spending a year in Europe on an exchange program.”
I could picture that, too. My dad going along with it because that’s what he always did, and Julie stepping aside dutifully.
“I cut myself off from them the second I turned eighteen,” she added. “It was too hard for me to be around them, pretending like you were theirs. I thought it was going to kill me. I moved out, took a job doing the only thing I was ever good – cheerleading – and pretended I was fine. When you were four, I tried to come back for you. I met Mark, and I told him everything. He wanted you, too. But Mom threatened to bring in every big-gun lawyer she knew. She t
hreatened to destroy our reputation. She reminded me that my career had an expiry date looming, and that Mark wasn’t making any money, either. We would bankrupt ourselves, fighting for you. Most importantly, she pointed out to me that you didn’t really know me at all, and that more than anything…It would hurt you.”
I understood, at least a little bit. “You assumed Mom was right, because she’s always right.”
Julie nodded. “Exactly.”
“But why not tell me later?”
“I made it clear to Mark from the beginning that I didn’t want kids. I didn’t feel right about it,” she replied. “It was my plan to tell you when you were old enough to understand, and I didn’t want you to feel second best, or think I’d replaced you with another child. But when you were twelve, I found out I was expecting. And believe it or not, it was the toughest time in my life. Harder than when I lost Andrew. Harder than when I realized you were better off with Mom and Dad than you would be with me.”
I tried not to be hurt by that, but when she put a gentle hand on my knee and squeezed, I couldn’t quite hold back the tears.
“It sounds selfish,” Julie said. “But it was all about you. The guilt almost killed me. What married, nearly-thirty-year-old woman gets pregnant accidentally? And why was I being punished with twins? I don’t know if you remember, but I spent most of the pregnancy in the hospital.”
I nodded. “I wasn’t allowed to visit you. Mom thought it would be too stressful.”
“Mom didn’t want you to see where I was,” she corrected. “She told everyone it was because of the twins. A high-risk pregnancy. But I was under suicide watch. For the whole nine months, and three months after. I wasn’t even allowed to be alone with Ginnie and Stephen. It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t being punished. And by the time I did, you were an adult. A well-adjusted one.”
The alarm on her phone beeped just then, and Nat came running out of the house. She had slipped on a pair of rubber boots, and they thumped comically on the deck as she approached.
“Ready, Mama?”
Julie gave her hair an affectionate tousle.
“Five minutes, okay, sweet pea?” she said, then turned back to me. “Do you want to come with us? Or stay for dinner?”