by Lee, Nadia
He eyes Iris coolly, although he can’t quite hide his surprise. She isn’t dolled up like all my previous dates. Her unbound hair frames her face, fresh and without makeup except for lipstick. Her shirt is a bit too large, designed to be comfortable rather than seductive, and the ballet slippers on her feet are plain black, nothing fancy. She isn’t wearing a single piece of jewelry.
But she couldn’t be more beautiful or radiant. She draws me like sunlight does a plant. Like a fragrant flower lures bees.
She’s chosen a long-sleeve shirt to cover the bruises from last night—the weather’s too warm for it otherwise—but I can see the edges of a couple at the neckline. I realize I didn’t hurt Jamie enough. His left wrist is still unbroken. So is his nose.
Iris doesn’t try to talk. She sits and studies me through her lashes from time to time. When I look at her, she quickly looks away.
The drive is quiet except for Schubert’s Fantasie. I’m deliberately playing it again to see if Iris will react to it in some way.
I could swear I saw her cry last night, but that was after that subhuman trash attacked her. She might not have noticed the music at all.
But today’s different. Although the attack is still traumatic, it isn’t so fresh that she can not notice the music.
Ivy and I played it ten times the first time we met. Surely it still has some meaning. But this woman isn’t reacting to it in any particular way. She’s tapping her fingers to the tempo, her eyes slightly narrowed, as though she’s appreciating the phrasing of the pianists.
Is Edgar right? Am I chasing a ghost?
Walk away before you lose it all, Tony.
Except what do I have to lose? Money, billions of dollars of it, is nothing if it can’t give you what you want.
The car stops at an intersection, and Iris looks out her window. A harried mother is struggling with a stroller and some glossy shopping bags. She’s carrying way too many things. But when the baby waves its plump arms, she looks down with a blinding smile as though her battle with the stroller and bags no longer matters.
Some people deserve that kind of love. Some don’t. It doesn’t matter what kind of public façade a family tries to create out of shame, out of pride. At the end of the day, the truth will come out, and everyone will know who didn’t belong.
Mother smiled at me like that once. When I was much, much younger. And until seven years ago, my parents at least pretended like they didn’t hate me. In front of other people, anyway. Now, everyone knows I’m a fucked-up child my parents consider a mistake. Edgar and Harry get the respect of our family name. I get the respect my empire commands. But I couldn’t be more apathetic about the company I built. These days, the only thing that makes me care enough to get out of bed and make sure we’re still profitable is the thousands of people we employ…and their families, whose livelihoods depend on the financial health of Vice Enterprises.
The car starts moving again, and I look away, suddenly feeling dirty and unwanted, yet greedy for unconditional acceptance, and ashamed of that greed.
I steal a quick glance. So let’s say I’m crazy and confused and Iris isn’t Ivy. Can she be like Ivy—be the sun, the moon and the stars of my otherwise dark and barren life? Or am I being selfish for even wishing such a thing?
You have enemies, Tony. You have to be more careful.
Edgar, ever the sensible brother, would say that to me. But he hasn’t lived in the darkness like I have. He’s heir to the family fortune and loved by all. Deservedly so. Even though I’d be lying if I said I’d never felt a tinge of envy…or guilt and shame for that petty emotion.
TJ pulls over in front of a diner with a hip retro décor. A bright teal, dark forest green and vivid orange color scheme adds to the cheery atmosphere, and movie posters and LPs from the sixties and seventies cover the walls.
Iris looks surprised. “Here?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. It doesn’t seem like your kind of place,” she says, then flushes like she just realized she said something she shouldn’t have.
“What is my kind of place?”
“Really expensive and glitzy,” she says, wrinkling her nose. “I’m wrong, aren’t I?”
“Expensive and glitzy is fine. If you want, we can head to a place like that.”
She shakes her head emphatically. “No!”
“Good, because I like this place more. It isn’t fancy, but it’s cheerful and bright.” Just what I need at regular intervals.
A host seats us at a table for two in the middle of the restaurant and leaves a couple of laminated menus. I don’t pick mine up, and neither does she.
“They have great French toast,” I say. “And bacon.”
“I’m not that hungry, so if they have a half-portion French toast, I’ll take it. I’m really here to keep you company and buy you brunch.”
“You are?”
“You saved me last night. It’s the least I can do.”
“I didn’t do it for some kind of repayment.” Her money is the last thing I want. But her company…that I can’t refuse. I just wish I’d known she wasn’t hungry. I would’ve suggested something else.
See? Another bit of proof she isn’t Ivy. Ivy enjoyed her food, and she ate more than just granola and coffee in the morning.
“I don’t like owing people,” she says.
“Accepting kindness isn’t owing. Nobody’s following you around with a ledger.”
“Kindness comes with a price tag,” she says softly, the light in her eyes subdued.
“Not this time.” Who’s tried to manipulate her? Then what Jamie Thornton said last night surfaces back into my mind.
He wouldn’t have minded! The fucker said she owes him her life!
Sam is still healthy only because Jamie explained—after a few more broken fingers—that he never received explicit permission from Sam to assault Iris. But I don’t like the precise way Jamie put it—that she owes Sam her life. The only thing he did was deal with her medical care while she was in the hospital. Given the kind of shit he is, I doubt he did it out of altruism.
“Did Sam make you do things you didn’t want to do?” I ask bluntly.
“You mean like sex?” She looks horrified. “No!”
“Not necessarily sex. Anything.”
Lips parted, she stares at me like I’ve grown two horns. Maybe even hooves. But I also catch a flash of anxiety in her gaze. “What are you talking about?”
“I know Sam took you in nine years ago. He told me,” I say, since I can’t tell her about my conversation with Jamie.
“He’s done a lot to help me.” Her voice is almost too quiet, her intonation like a child reading a schoolbook. “Without him, who knows what could’ve happened?”
Our server comes by, interrupting the conversation. Iris gestures at me to order.
“French toast and bacon. Same for her. Grapefruit juice and coffee,” I say.
When the juice arrives, I push it toward Iris. She looks at me, surprised. “For me?”
“Yes.”
“How did you know I like grapefruit juice?”
The question is like a jab to my mind.
“Most people would’ve gotten OJ. Even Byron does when I have him order for me.” Then she quickly adds, “Byron’s my friend. You might’ve seen him when I left Hammers and Strings.”
I hate it that she’s close to Byron because I can’t stand the bastard. He’s too damn perfect—perfect face, perfect manners, perfect pedigree. His family loves him, his friends think he’s a great guy, and women fawn over him until I want to vomit. But it’s a small victory that Perfect Byron doesn’t know what Iris likes.
“This place has the best grapefruit juice. Freshly squeezed. That’s why,” I say, since I can’t tell her the truth—that it was Ivy’s favorite. And because I’m being a crazy fucking bastard, I keep testing to see if there’s even the slightest chance she’s Ivy.
If Edgar were here, he’d kill me for not letting him handle this like
I promised. But it’s like a fresh scab over a wound. Impossible not to pick at it, even knowing I’m going to end up making it bleed again.
Our server brings the food. The toast is cut thick and has a generous amount of fresh berries and powdered sugar, maple syrup on the side. The bacon’s also thick and perfectly cooked—crispy and not overly greasy. Again, this used to be Ivy’s favorite.
I attack the food, monstrously hungry from skipping breakfast. But Iris merely picks at hers, cutting the toast into little pieces and moving them around. She doesn’t eat more than a couple of small bites.
“If you don’t like it, we can get something else,” I say, torn between disappointment and chagrin. Maybe I should’ve let her choose her own food.
“No. It’s fine.”
“You barely ate.”
“I don’t have a lot of appetite.”
“How come?”
“I had a car accident nine years ago. Since then, not much appetite. I eat because I have to, but…” She shrugs.
“Sam mentioned the accident. It sounded serious.”
A pained shadow crosses her expressive face. “If he told you, then you know about my parents’ deaths.”
“Vaguely. It came up at the reception yesterday. He and I didn’t get to talk long.” Partly because I can’t stand the old man and his presumptuous ways.
“Hit and run. I was in the car, too. I lived. They didn’t.” She looks briefly down, then away, her eyes unfocused. Hunching her shoulders, she wraps her arms around herself. “I heard they died instantly. No pain,” she says, still not meeting my gaze.
I recognize what she’s feeling because I felt it too. When Katherine died. When Ivy died. Survivor’s guilt.
I want to say something, do something to make Iris feel better, but I don’t know what. I’m not a man who naturally knows how to comfort others. I wish I had even a tenth of Harry’s ability to cheer people up.
So I flounder for a moment and say, “I’m sorry for your loss.” Then I stop, hating how inadequate those five words are. How I loathed them when I heard people say them to me. “I’m sure they’re glad you survived,” I add, then wince inwardly at how empty that sounds.
She studies me, but she isn’t judging me in the least. Her face isn’t showing the contempt and anger that simmer when someone tosses you a bullshit platitude and the only thing stopping you from telling them off is social decorum.
“Thank you,” she says. “You’re right. They would’ve wanted me to live. I’ve been fortunate to have people who were there for me.”
“Like Byron?” Most likely Sam was there first. But I want to understand exactly what’s going on between her and Byron.
She shakes her head. “No, I didn’t meet him until two years ago.”
“But you’re staying at his place.”
“I am, but only until I get a job and can afford an apartment.” She stops. “How did you know it was Byron’s?”
Because his place is featured in magazines, and I’ve heard a few of my female employees talking about it breathlessly, discussing the price, location, décor and more. They admire the luxury home and covet the man.
“The front desk person told me when he was checking to see if I was on the guest list for Byron Pearce or you,” I say.
“Oh.” Iris nods, apparently buying it. “I’m only staying here because it’s more…convenient. It’s really my uncle, Sam, who took care of me. He still does that…a little.”
“So why isn’t he paying for an apartment for you?” I ask, starting to get annoyed with Sam for being cheap. She shouldn’t have to live with Byron.
“Because I already have a place to crash until I get a job and my own place. I’m going to work on a résumé this week and start applying.”
I don’t give a shit—Sam still should’ve gotten her an apartment. “Why a résumé? Aren’t you going to be a musician? You’re easily good enough to turn professional.”
She shakes her head. “No, I can’t. It’s a long story, but I’m applying for office jobs. It’ll be a good first step to become independent and lead my own life, even though Sam doesn’t like it.”
Good ol’ Sam. Trying to exert influence over her life even though he’s too cheap to pay for her own place. I don’t like it. “What does he want you to do?”
“Continue to travel around the world. Europe, Asia—it doesn’t matter where, as long as it’s not here in the States. But six years is long enough, don’t you agree? I’m tired, and I want to be home.”
“Definitely,” I say, hiding my outrage at the revelation. Six years? That’s a damn long time to force someone out of the country. Basically an exile.
And it’s worse than what I had. At least I was in one place long enough to make friends. Not her. Sam ensured it’d be nearly impossible for her to create a network of people she could depend on…
He wants her beholden to him forever.
Is this why she hasn’t been able to get in touch? Is this why she’s pretending she doesn’t know who I am? Is this why—
I stop. Why would she ever contact me when I made it clear the last time we spoke that I didn’t love her enough to let her in? How could she know that all she has to do is crook her finger and I’ll gladly jump into a sea of fire to get to her?
“Iv—Iris,” I say. My voice is too thick. I swallow a quick sip of coffee, which has gone cold during our talk. “If you had someone else you could depend on, other than Sam, would you have reached out?”
“I don’t have anybody else. That’s why Sam had to come through, even though he wasn’t particularly close to my parents.”
“How about your…friends?”
“They were young and moved on. We weren’t in the same place mentally or physically. Young friendships don’t survive everything.” She looks almost wistful, but then straightens her spine, pulls her shoulders back. “It’s okay, though. I can always make new friends. The flip side of being young, right?”
Suddenly I can’t stand that she’s talking about her past relationships like that. It’s like she’s given up on them. On us. It’s so unfair. I never got a chance to tell her I made the decision to be brave, to let her in. “You should’ve reached out anyway. Young or not, they would’ve come back,” I say, doing my best to not sound bitter. But from the slightly confused and defensive look on her face, I’ve failed.
“They wouldn’t have. I was in a coma for a year after the accident…and a mess when I woke up. By the time I recovered, it’d been years. It was just too late.”
“It’s never too late, Iris.”
“It was for me. My memory was patchy when I woke up. And what I did remember, I couldn’t trust completely. Sam sometimes had to correct me.”
“Really?” What did he correct? What the hell did he do when she was so vulnerable?
“Yeah. For example, I thought I’d graduated early, but Sam told me I didn’t—even though I could have—because I wanted to graduate with my friends.”
“Did he have any evidence for what he was saying? Pictures? A diploma?”
“There was a yearbook. From my class. I was a popular kid. It had lots of messages from friends.” Her smile is bittersweet.
Sam’s lying. He has to be. People can falsify passports. How hard would it be to fake a yearbook?
He had to have been using his position to manipulate her. How simple would it be to make a confused and grief-stricken young woman depend on you? Look to you for guidance and “truth”? And then feed her lies, knowing she’d accept them without examining them too closely?
“How about now? Are you all right now?” I ask, and hold my breath.
“I remember most of what I need to remember. All the important people in my life. Schools, friends. You know.”
What about me? I want to probe her head, see if there’s even the slightest hint of me in her past. Or was I so unimportant she forgot me completely? “How can you be sure you haven’t forgotten anything…essential?”
“Becaus
e of what my doctor told me. I had the same question, but he said all the really relevant stuff should be there…although he couldn’t guarantee it, of course. He compared my memory to a glass bowl. The injury that put me into the coma broke it into pieces, but my body didn’t want to let it stay broken. So it put the pieces back together.”
“Perfectly?”
“Ha. No. There are still holes, and certain events are out of order in my mind. Like the high school graduation thing.”
I gesture at her to continue, needing to know exactly what she’s suffered, what she’s lost, why I went from someone she loved to someone not important enough to remember.
“Anyway, the doctor said my body wasn’t able to ‘fix the bowl’ perfectly, but it re-created the bowl even if some pieces were missing or out of place. But as far as my body’s concerned, a misshapen bowl with a few insignificant missing bits is better than nothing. And I have to agree. I mean, I’m alive.”
She is. She so is. And I’m nowhere in her mind.
I reach for my coffee and down the rest of the cold, bitter brew. I have to be going insane. I keep reacting like I’m talking to Ivy. But if I give myself a moment to think logically, it’s obvious she isn’t. Her parents died nine years ago. Ivy’s parents died eighteen years ago. It’s clear Iris has never been to a conservatory, much less Curtis. If she had, she would’ve remembered such a milestone.
Still, I keep thinking about those memory gaps like a drowning man grasping for a rope. Sam was there the entire time to “correct” her. Did he correct me out of her mind? Could he even do that?
But why would he? There was no reason. Although he and I were never close, I was away for so long that we didn’t have any bad blood, either. Certainly nothing so bad that he’d do that to me.
“How are your hands?” she asks suddenly.
“What?”
She gestures at the little cuts that have scabbed over.
“They’re fine.” Nothing, in fact, compared to the wound bleeding inside me.
She fiddles with her napkin, shredding a corner. Another of Ivy’s old habits. I forcibly remind myself a lot of people do that when they’re nervous or thinking.