The Grift

by Debra Ginsberg

  Madeline clicked off, her anger rising. She paid that woman a lot of money; the least she could do was answer her damn phone once in a while. Maybe that wasn’t entirely fair. At their last session, Marina had told her that she needed to work on healing the inner child of her psyche so that her actual baby would have a welcoming place to grow. If they saw each other too often, Marina had said, they risked diluting the effect of the message and the guidance of the spirits. They needed at least two months’ separation. Most of her clients visited her only once or twice a year (which Madeline suspected was bullshit but had no way of proving), and they had already gone way over the usual limit. Madeline agreed at the time. But it was easy to agree with Marina.

  Madeline was partly worried that Marina was putting distance between them because of Andrew. She didn’t understand his hostility toward Marina. She was sure Marina picked up on it even if Andrew hadn’t said something to her, which she suspected he had. Really, he should thank her. It was only after she started seeing Marina that she got pregnant, after all. But that was only one fear. The other, darker fear was that Marina, like Andrew, was just getting sick of her. Marina had seemed so distracted the last time they’d seen each other. She’d shown up late, for one thing, which she never did, and hadn’t even apologized. Then the whole time she was there, she went on about why she shouldn’t be there. A horrible thought occurred to Madeline now: What if Marina was trying to slowly get rid of her? She had started seeing Marina because she couldn’t get pregnant and now she was and what else needed to be known, aside from whether or not she’d miscarry or whether it was a boy or a girl? Pretty soon Madeline would be out of the woods and the baby would be able to survive outside the womb. Was that what Marina was waiting for?

  Madeline dialed the numbers again but hung up before the sound of the voice mail beep. She had been in this room for so long, staring at the same patch of wall and the same corner of window showing the same triangle of darkening sky. Andrew wouldn’t be home for hours. She could be there and back and he’d never know. She felt fine. She felt good. There was no cramping, no spotting, no sign that anything was wrong. As if to reassure her, the baby gave a small kick to her bladder. What would it really hurt? A visit to Marina’s office could only make her feel better, in fact, help get her out of this funk. Marina would for sure be at her office; she worked all the time. Andrew wouldn’t even have to know.

  Madeline tested herself at every step of the way. She pulled on her yoga pants and a sweatshirt and then sat down on the couch. All fine. She brushed her teeth, put her hair in a ponytail and slowly descended the stairs. Still good. And she was good leaving the house, entering the garage and climbing into her Mercedes. She felt great all the way through Rancho Santa Fe and onto the Coast Highway. It wasn’t until she passed the railroad tracks in Cardiff that she began to feel cramping, dull but insistent. She wondered if she should turn around and head to her doctor’s office, but she gave it another mile and the cramps eased off.

  There was no space in front of Marina’s office, so Madeline had to double back and park in front of the Seaside Market a few blocks away. She was starting to think this was a bad idea. It had been so long since she’d been out in real air that she was feeling light-headed even in the car. But after a few deep yogic breaths Madeline felt fine again and renewed her resolve. Besides, once she got to Marina’s everything would be fine; she could feel it. Madeline walked slowly, unaccustomed to her lopsided weight. The baby felt heavy. A few yards from Marina’s office, a sharp pain in her midsection took her breath away for a moment before it subsided. And then she saw something that surprised her so much that she forgot the pain entirely. Marina was coming out of her office with a man behind her. He was a big, blond guy who looked like he worked outdoors, construction or something. Good-looking, too. They were talking and smiling, and then he reached over to her, gently moved some hair away from her face and leaned down to kiss her on the mouth. So it was a guy, Madeline thought. Marina was ditching her clients and her responsibilities for some beefcake? Madeline didn’t know whether to be outraged or relieved. But Marina looked over before Madeline had a chance to decide, a look of recognition and then horror spreading quickly across her face.

  “Madeline!” she called. “What are you doing here? Oh God, Madeline, what’s going on?”

  Madeline was completely confused by the look of fear on Marina’s face. That man standing next to her looked freaked out as well and Madeline couldn’t understand why they were both staring at her like that. She looked down, following the direction of their eyes. And that was when Madeline saw all the blood.

  Chapter 13

  It was the middle of the lunch rush and the overworked staff at Darling’s wasn’t keeping up. Eddie sat at a corner table not reading the newspaper in front of him and waiting for his long-overdue burger. He was hungry and had to be back at work in less than half an hour. If it took much longer he wouldn’t even have time to wolf down his overpriced meat patty. Goddamn story of his life was what it was.

  “Hey, ’scuse me,” Eddie called to a waitress who he knew was not his server. The girl didn’t bother answering as she brushed by him with two coffees in one hand and a plate of chicken salad in the other. Her attitude pissed him off, so he reached out and grabbed the edge of her apron and gave it a gentle tug. She stopped short then, jerking the coffees so that a little spilled over both edges and splashed on his table. “Hey, hon, can you tell me where my lunch has got to? I’m kinda on a timetable here.” He followed this with a smile, flashing his dimples as usual, but now the waitress was pissed.

  “Sir, could you not grab me, please? I’ll get your waitress for you if you can wait a minute.”

  “That’s kinda the problem. I have been waiting a minute. I’ve been waiting many, many minutes.”

  “I’ll get your waitress,” she said, scowling, and Eddie knew she wouldn’t. Skinny little bitch; who the hell did she think she was? Goddamn women and their bullshit. He was just so sick of it. He didn’t know why he came here anyway; the food wasn’t that great and the service sucked. He’d be better off at the goddamn Burger King drive-through. Eddie folded his arms and leaned back in the hard wooden chair that was already starting to hurt his back. No sense getting angry; it wasn’t going to solve anything. And nobody had forced him to eat at Darling’s, where only people who didn’t have to work could afford to wait this long for a meal. He came here because this was where he had sat the day he’d met Marina for the first time and so now it had become a habit. Eddie was nothing if not a creature of habit. And those habits were what had gotten him into the ridiculous fucked-up situation that he was in now.

  Eddie ran his hand through his hair and sighed in frustration. He didn’t know how things had gotten this out of control. It was sheer bad luck—again, the story of his life. He wasn’t a bad guy. He’d made some errors in judgment, that’s all. Like what happened to him when he was a kid. His life hadn’t even started at eighteen years old and there he was, busted for selling weed to a cop. It was entrapment, really, but who had the money for a lawyer? His parents certainly hadn’t given a shit. Two years in the federal pen for that. They made an example of him even though he was super small-time and he hadn’t hurt anybody. He was just a kid, for crying out loud.

  It could have gone way south after that. He could have gotten into more trouble, could have let that unspeakably bad experience ruin his whole life, but he hadn’t. He worked hard, raised two kids, was good to his wife for the most part. He was a good boss, too. His employees liked him and a few of the younger guys even came to him for advice about their personal lives. Which was why Eddie couldn’t help feeling that he had done nothing to bring on this mess his life was in now. He felt like he was in the middle of a giant knot and every time he moved he just made it tighter. What made it worse was that it was such a clichéd situation, the stuff of any low-rent soap opera.

  First, there was Cassie. Eddie wasn’t yet willing to admit that his entire involvement
with her had been a mistake, just the last part, which was bad enough. He’d seen the writing on the wall a long time ago and he had done the right thing then. They’d had that huge argument after he went to see Marina. As he’d known she would, Cassie had expected Marina to tell him to ditch his wife and take up with her. It was a ridiculous notion on Cassie’s part, but he realized now that hope and despair were two sides of the same coin, and no matter which side it landed on when it flipped, either one could make you believe in the impossible. So when Eddie told her that all he’d gotten from her psychic was a warning that his poor diet was leading to a muddy aura and that his planets or whatever showed a tendency to weak circulation, Cassie got annoyed first, then she turned on the waterworks. This irritated Eddie more than anything. He hated when women started in with the tears. Tears meant desperation, and desperation was definitely not sexy.

  “Listen,” he’d told her, “I think you put way too much stock in that psychic. It was a very nice gift and I appreciate it, Cassie, I really do. But you have to know this stuff is all bullshit, right?” He’d thought he sounded very reasonable, very believable. Of course, he’d left out the part about being so immediately and totally turned on by Marina that he could barely concentrate on what she was saying at all.

  Cassie kept pushing his buttons, crying the whole time, and that had been pretty much it for Eddie. They were finally at the finish line. So, as difficult as it was, Eddie cut it off right there. He gave her the standard speech about how she was a wonderful person who deserved so much better than what she was getting from him. She was young and beautiful, with her whole life in front of her, and it had never been just about the sex. And as much as it hurt him to say it…

  She took it well; much better, in fact, than he’d have thought. It was as if she’d known it was coming. They’d made love then, because good-bye sex was the hottest, sweetest there was, and then it really was good-bye. And that should have been it.

  Eddie’s waitress, who looked about ready to explode (she’d obviously been tipped off by the other one), appeared in front of him and slammed down his burger without so much as a good word. Eddie could tell that the plate had been sitting under the heat lamps for too long. The meat looked dry and overdone and the fries were limp and greasy. But Eddie didn’t care. He wasn’t even hungry anymore. Thinking about what had happened after he’d left Cassie that day and how it had been possibly the most colossal mistake of his life had made his appetite vanish.

  He’d left well enough alone for months. He’d even finished the damn kitchen cabinets and had taken a vacation with the family over the summer, which he’d been promising his wife for years—an entire week in Las Vegas. Yes, it was ungodly hot in the desert in the middle of summer, but the rates were good and you didn’t ever have to leave the comfort of the hotel pool if you didn’t want to. The kids had a good time and his wife got her spa days. Eddie felt like a good husband. But then, as another year was closing in on him, he found himself wandering into Cassie’s salon. Had it even taken a full twenty-four hours for them to wind up in bed again? Eddie didn’t think so. It was just one time. Just once. They’d both been so clear about that.

  Eddie cursed his own stupidity. The only reason he’d gone in there was because he was unbelievably frustrated over Marina. Yes, Marina, the psychic in whom he didn’t believe, had become the object of every fantasy his mind could create. She was a cool customer, Marina was, and rebuffed him like no woman ever had. Mind you, she didn’t mind taking his money. Turned out he paid handsomely for the pleasure of her company. Could have gotten the most expensive hooker in Vegas for what he’d paid her. And, of course, Marina’s coldness had only made him hotter for her. He thought—he thought he might even be in love with her. That was what had driven him to Cassie. Call it ego, a need to have a woman want him in the way he wanted Marina. Call it sexual frustration. Call it what it was—plain crazy. Because his reward for that little indiscretion was a gigantic pile of shit.

  Cassie was pregnant. At least, she claimed she was. It was the oldest fucking trick in the book. And now he had to deal with her because if he didn’t, it was as good as telling her to call his wife to have a nice chat. Eddie wasn’t sure he even believed Cassie was pregnant and, if she was, that it was even his baby. Not that he was going to wait and find out. He knew how this was going to play out. The threat of pregnancy and her being unsure of what she was going to do was enough to keep Eddie on the line, and Cassie knew it. He’d have to hang in long enough for her to abort or tell him that it was a false alarm, and then he’d have to get out all over again. Nobody to blame but himself for this.

  The kicker, though, and why Eddie now found his hands forming fists in front of his uneaten burger, was that none of this had helped him stop thinking about Marina. If anything, he thought about her more. Even at the height of their affair he hadn’t devoted this much mental energy to Cassie. It was—he hated to even think it—bordering on obsession. He had to figure out a way of getting close to her, because he knew it wasn’t going to stop until he did. He’d tried to rationalize it, to tell himself that he only wanted her because she didn’t want him, or that it was just because she was so exotic and sexy. But he was certain there was something about Marina—something deep below her surface—that knew him better than he knew himself. It wasn’t anything to do with psychic voodoo, since Eddie didn’t believe for a second that Marina was the real thing where that was concerned. She made a good living telling people fairy tales, and that was fine. What drew Eddie to Marina had nothing to do with that. It was something he couldn’t name and didn’t even want to understand.

  He needed some reason to see her again outside of her office. If he could just get her in the open—on his own turf…It wouldn’t be easy, and Eddie had himself all twisted up trying to think of how to do it. He’d already been warned off once, back at the beginning of November. He’d come in for a reading and they’d both run the usual line of bullshit with each other. At the end of the session she’d told him that it was enough, that she only saw her clients once or twice a year at most, and those were the serious ones. She didn’t believe that Eddie was coming to her for psychic counsel. Lay off, she’d told him. Save your money.

  But he hadn’t. And the next time he’d come around there was some big macho bouncer type hanging out outside her office. Eddie didn’t like the look of the guy at all. The thought crossed his mind that the guy was laying it to Marina and that made Eddie furious. How many times had she told him that she never dated her clients? And he had to be a client, because why else would he be sitting there like he was waiting for a reading? Eddie got as far as the door that time.

  “How you doing?” he’d asked the guy.

  “Good,” the guy said. “How are you doing?”

  “Good,” Eddie said. “Is she in?” He gestured toward Marina’s door with his thumb.

  “Not yet,” the guy said. “I’m waiting for her. I’m a little early. Do you have an appointment?”

  “Yeah. Or no, not really. She knows me, though.” Eddie was irritated that he had to explain himself to this asshole. But before he could say anything else, Marina appeared, all business.

  “Gideon, hi,” she said to the bouncer guy, and then to Eddie, “We’re not going to do this again, are we, Ed?”

  Eddie didn’t want to remember the rest of the embarrassing details. Like how the guy had asked if there was a problem and how Eddie had told him to mind his own business and how that interchange seemed to really annoy Marina, who had then asked the guy—Gideon—to give them a moment, and when he did, told Eddie that she thought she’d made it pretty clear that he didn’t need to be there.

  The next time he came by, he didn’t even get out of his truck—just parked it across the street and sat there. He was formulating an opening line when he saw a woman go into Marina’s office, which meant there was nothing to do but watch the traffic and plot his next move. You got to see all kinds of people in this part of town: the wealthy, the day la
borers, and the down-and-outers. He’d never really noticed just how wide a range there was. There was one guy, for example, in a shiny silver midlife-crisis Porsche who kept driving around the block looking for a place to park. The third or fourth time the car cruised by, Eddie started to feel suspicious and paranoid. It was pretty clear that the guy wasn’t looking for a parking spot, because there were plenty of spaces. No, he was watching. Eddie strained to get a look at the driver when the car slowed in front of Marina’s office, but he couldn’t get a clear enough angle to see details. On the next loop he would take down the license plate number, Eddie decided, but he never got the chance. A tap on the passenger-side window made him jump, and when he looked over, he saw that it was Gideon coming up out of nowhere. So she had a bodyguard, Eddie thought. Ridiculous. He drove off before the guy could get into it with him. Decades after being released from prison, Eddie still had that knee-jerk fear of being busted, even if what he was doing was perfectly legal.

  Now here he was, sitting at Darling’s, a place that, if he was really being honest, he hated, trying to think of a way to get to her. It had to be some sort of grand gesture, something to make her come around. He felt irritated and maybe even a little hurt that Marina had that guy hanging around, doing whatever he was doing. It felt almost as if she was cheating on him, as crazy as even Eddie knew that sounded. He had to do something to get back into her good graces, even though he sort of resented her for making him…beg seemed like the only word for it. But first he was going to have to pay a visit to Cassie, the huge albatross now hanging around his neck. Eddie didn’t have to look at his watch to know that in addition to everything else, he was also going to be late getting back to work. He flagged down his waitress with a big sweep of his arm. The hell with being polite.