Deeper Illusions

by Jocoby, Annie

  “Well, I’m not leaving,” she said. “And it’ll be such a nicer home with furniture in it, and a full fridge.” Ryan and I had just gone to the store and stocked up on everything that we needed and more, and the furniture guys were going to be here the next day.

  Quietly, while Nat was in the other room, I said to Ryan “This probably seems familiar to you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know. You, Nick and Alexis. Hamptons House.”

  “Ha ha. That was different, and you know that.”

  “Yeah. But why do I get the feeling that she wants that kind of situation here?”

  “Guess again. Believe it or not, to my knowledge, Nat doesn’t get into women.”

  “That’s a shock. She’s always been so touchy-feely with me.”

  “That’s just the way that she is.”

  “Ok, then, I stand corrected.” Then I said “I need to go to the library today. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Fine. Leave me here alone with Stalky McStalker,” he said, with a smile.

  I nodded. “I’ll be home in a few hours,” I said. “I’m assuming you’re okay with Dalilah?”

  “Of course. Oh, and pick up some Chinese on the way home, huh? Orange chicken and egg rolls. And bring enough for Nat.”

  I nodded my head, and, as I turned around to leave, I saw him picking up Dalilah and looking at her with wonder in his eyes. She purposefully put her hand on his nose, and said “dada.” He just shook his head.

  I headed to the library, and quickly picked up a few books. Then I headed over to Maggie’s group home, turning off my phone. I remembered that Ryan put a tagger on my phone. He usually doesn’t use it for me, except when he had a feeling that I was in danger.

  I hoped against hope that I wasn’t giving off the danger vibe this morning.

  I got to the group home, which was a transitional living home for people who had been released from mental hospitals. Maggie was scheduled to live here for a few more months. She was supposed to be released after a year, but she had a mild relapse because her drugs were miscalculated, so she had to stay an extra six months.

  The home was rambling, built during the turn of the century, with 10 bedrooms. Each of the bedrooms housed two people. The people in this house shared the common areas of the living room and kitchen, and there were three therapists living there full-time.

  I entered her room, knocking on the open door.

  “Iris!” she said. “What a nice surprise!” Then she gave me a big hug. “How’s my favorite daughter-in-law?”

  “Great. Couldn’t be better.” Which was actually true. After all I went through, having this nice lull was a slice of heaven.

  We chatted for awhile, catching up with each other’s lives. “I can’t wait to get out of here and live out on my own,” she was saying. “Ryan and Sarah are going to set me up in a nice condo downtown.”

  I nodded. Then I told her “Uh, Ryan and I have a daughter together.”

  She clapped her hands delightedly. “Do you have pictures?”

  I showed her the pictures on my phone. She looked at me quizzically. “She looks so big. How come Ryan hasn’t told me about her?” She looked very hurt.

  Oh, how to explain all of that to her? “Actually, Maggie, he uh, he uh, just found out about her.”

  “Oh. Ryan told me that you two were divorced. I actually didn’t know that you were back. So, I guess that you had his daughter and didn’t tell him about it?”

  “Something like that.” I immediately felt terrible. Maggie and I had always gotten along. Now she was looking at me suspiciously. “I’ve had a lot of things happen to me lately, and I just kinda went crazy for awhile,” I said, then instantly regretted my choice of words. How could I refer to myself as crazy, when Maggie was a schizophrenic?

  She just shrugged. “Who am I to judge? But I have a feeling that you are here for a reason.”

  “Yes. Our daughter is unusual.”

  “In what way?”

  “She started saying words yesterday, and seems to know what these words are. She’s just over four months old. So, I was wondering about Ryan. He’s so modest, but I was wondering if that was something that he did as well.”

  “Of course. Ryan and Sarah both have off the charts IQs. They’re both prodigies, too. Ryan was painting by the time he was two, and Sarah started playing the piano at the age of 3. Both of them were fluent speakers by their first birthday, and they both read entire books by their second birthday – Ryan read The Wind in the Willows before he turned two, and Sarah had finished Charlotte’s Web before she had her second birthday. By the time Ryan was five, he was reading A Tale of Two Cities.”

  A Tale of Two Cities? I had trouble getting through that dense tome in high school. “I see. I suppose he was reading Dostoyevsky by age 6?”

  “Age 7, actually. He read The Brothers Karamazov that year, and actually understood it all.”

  “So, Dalilah isn’t really unusual in the Gallagher family?”

  She shook her head. “They get their artistic bent from my side. They get their utter brilliance from their father.”

  “So, what should I expect from her?”

  “She’s going to be a handful, I’ll tell you that. But Ryan should know how to handle her. We kept him in school, in his own grades. That was what he wanted. He didn’t want to skip any grades. But he always went to the very top schools, so they had excellent programs for him and others like him. There were quite a few pupils in his school that matched his brilliance, so he never felt like he was all that unusual.”

  I thought of my own high school. There was a gifted program, but probably nothing like what Ryan went through. I also imagined that his school was the type of school where the lessons were demanding for all the kids. I knew that Dalilah would also be going to the very best private school, so she should be challenged sufficiently.

  We chatted some more. As I started to leave, Maggie gave me a hug, and said “Please bring my granddaughter to me the next time you come?”

  I nodded. “I will. Please don’t tell Ryan I visited you today. As I said, I only came here because I have the feeling that Ryan never would’ve told me this. He is never one to toot his own horn.”

  “Truer words were never spoken. I’m very glad you’re back, by the way. I started to worry about my son after you divorced him.”

  “We aren’t divorced. I mean, we were, but I lied on the petition, so it’s pretty much void. All I have to do is file a motion with the judge to have it thrown out. I need to do that soon.”

  “At any rate, I’m very glad that you’re back with him. He loves you so much.”

  “And I, him.”

  When I got home, bearing the Chinese food that Ryan requested, I saw Ryan sitting on one of the orange crates, his head in his hands. Dalilah was in her bassinette next to him, saying random words. Nat and Christopher were also there in the dining room. Nat looked at me worriedly, and Ryan immediately got up from his perch, and wrapped his arms around me.

  Uh-oh. I turned off my phone, so now he’s worried.

  “Oh, thank god,” he said.

  “What? I’ve just been gone for a few hours.”

  He just held me and said nothing. I looked at Nat, who was biting a thumbnail, a worried expression on her face. I made a gesture to her to explain what was going on.

  “Ryan talked to his dad while you were gone,” she said.

  “Is he ok?”

  “He’s fine. But he’s been in touch with Andrew. He knows that you’ve told people that he was the one who attacked you.”

  “And?”

  “And he wants to kill you.”

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  I was feeling like I was Pauline now in The Perils of Pauline. Or Indiana Jones. Something was always happening to me, so that my life was always being threatened somehow. Will she die from her Rochelle attack? Find out in the next installment. Then will she die from being a junkie in a drug house? You’ll hav
e to wait until next week. Then will she die at the hands of her obviously insane rapist? Duh, duh, duh!

  I pushed Ryan away from me, and said “Is that all you’re worried about?”

  “What do you mean, is that all I’m worried about? A retired government assassin has your number, of course I’m worried about that,” Ryan said. “And you should be, too.”

  “How did your father find out about this?”

  “Let’s just say that he heard it from his associates. Andrew has become unhinged.”

  “Imagine that. A man who used to kill people for a living, becoming unhinged.”

  “Why are you taking this so lightly?” Ryan demanded.

  “I guess because I’m getting used to this type of thing happening to me anymore. There’s always something that’s threatening me. Some bogey man. I’m tired of looking over my shoulder constantly for one person or another. Just finish me off, already.”

  Ryan looked stricken, then picked up Dalilah and handed her to me. She looked me right in the eye, grabbed my hair, and said “Mama.”

  “There,” Ryan said. “There’s your reason for living.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “You and Dalilah both are my reason for living. That’s not the point. It just seems that somebody is going to get me. It’s like that movie Final Destination – I cheated death once, now it’s gonna stalk me.”

  “Well, there’s something that I need for you to do. I need you to resume target practice. You need to get handier with your .45. I’ll go with you, of course. I’ll teach you how to handle your pistol. Then we need to get you a concealed carry permit.”

  “What, we’re gonna take Dalilah there? She’ll freak out.”

  “Nat has offered to watch her while we do this.”

  I looked at Nat, and she nodded. “I still like you, Iris, and I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

  “I suppose that there isn’t any way you’ll take no for an answer on this?”

  Ryan just shook his head.

  I sighed. “Here we go again. Well, I suppose it can’t do any harm. It’s not like hiring some random guy to protect me. And I suppose if I’m going to be married to you – and I will be, I promise you I’m not going to leave again – I probably should know how to defend myself. It seems that will be a necessity from here on out.”

  “I’m sorry, beautiful, that it is a necessity. God knows, I have lived an f’d up life. It’s caught up to you, and I can’t tell you how sorry I am about that. But you need to be safe, and I can’t be with you every minute of every day. Much as I would like to be. And I know that hiring another bodyguard would never go over with you. So you, my beautiful, need to be able to defend yourself.”

  I nodded. “Ok, then, let’s go target shooting.”

  So that Saturday we got to the target range, which was a typical target range, with stalls and figures of men some fifty feet away. Ryan and I had our headphones on, and Ryan was showing me how to hit the targets. He cocked his pistol towards the figures, and bam! bam! bam! – he hit three bulls-eyes in a row.

  “Now you try it.”

  I nervously cocked my gun, and tried to aim at the figure, but missed it entirely, the bullet landing somewhere to the right of the cardboard cut-out.

  “I’m sorry, I guess I really don’t know how to aim. That bad man taught me how to load the pistol and everything, but we really didn’t get into aiming it. By the way, how did you get so good at this?”

  “Lots of practice. You have to remember, I hung out with druggies and dealers for quite a few years in my early days. You have to be handy with a weapon when you’re hanging with that crowd. Now, this is your very first time trying to target shoot, so you’re just going to have to be patient with yourself.”

  Then he got behind me. “Here, you have to have the right stance. Feet shoulder-width apart. Now lean forward, and close your left eye. Concentrate. Now squeeze the trigger.”

  I did, and the bullets landed on the cardboard cut-out, still missing the figure entirely.

  “That’s better, beautiful. Keep practicing.”

  We practiced at the target range the entire day. Ryan was very handy with his gun, and, by the end of the day, I at least was shooting the figures about 50% of the time. I never did hit a bulls-eye, but Ryan was feeling more confident about my abilities by the end of the day.

  The next step was getting a concealed carry permit. I first had to complete a firearms safety training course, which was a two-week expedited course that I would be attending for an hour a day. I completed that course, and made an application to the state. I received my certificate to carry, so I was able to carry my pistol with me everywhere I went. Through it all, Ryan and I went to the target range every day for two hours after he got off work, and, by the end of the two weeks, I was hitting the figures up to 75% of the time.

  Meanwhile, Dalilah was amazing me more and more. She was learning new words every single day. She was parroting different words that she heard, and she appeared to have some type of cognizance about what they meant. Nat came in handy, actually, as she watched Dalilah while Ryan and I were busy at the target range. Ryan appeared to be surprised by Dalilah's progress, as well, but he was quite a bit less shocked than myself. He wouldn’t ever tell me that he, himself, was a prodigy, of course.

  “Dalilah is going to be a handful to raise. At least, for me. She’s going to have more knowledge than me before she’s five years old, at this rate,” I said.

  “Don’t be silly, beautiful. Dalilah is extremely intelligent, of course, but so are you.”

  Yes, but she’s a genius, and she gets that from you, not me.

  This was also a stressful time. I was constantly looking over my shoulder, and Ryan was with me all the time, except when he was working. When he was working, I had to say that I was grateful for Nat’s company. I don’t think that she was exactly handy with a gun, but I still felt a little bit protected. Just having somebody else around the house who was an adult was helpful for me. Never mind the fact that this particular adult was in love with my husband, and probably, secretly, wanted to off me herself. But Nat and I always got along, so it was kinda fun having her around. And, Nat was right – the house did look gorgeous now that we had all of our furniture in there. It was exactly like I had pictured it would be, so both Nat and I were much more comfortable in the house.

  We were like sister wives, except that she never actually got to have sex with the husband.

  I was the only one who did that.

  And I did that often. My sex life with Ryan was going gangbusters. We were apart for so long, and, for so long, I was not able to be intimate with him at all. But, once I broke down the barriers in the Porsche that day, we pretty much had been going at it ever since. We made up for lost time, making love for hours every evening while Dalilah slept in the next room. I had the baby monitor on at all times, of course, and there were times that I to interrupt the fun to attend to her, but it really wasn’t a problem. We couldn’t get enough of each other. We were like an addiction for each other.

  I didn’t know what Nat thought about it all. She had moved into the lower level when I arrived, and she hung out there, watching television and tending to her son while Ryan and I were in our bedroom, making love for hours on end. This was an odd situation, of course, and I wondered when, or if, she would just give up and return to her life in New York with Nate and her job at Goldman Sachs.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  I might have been, once again, marked for death, but life had to go on.

  And go on, it did.

  We had dinner with Nick and Alexis one night, meeting at a steak house for dinner, with plans to have drinks afterwards. I actually hired a sitter for that particular occasion, not expecting Nat to watch Dalilah. I didn’t really know how to explain how a child who was less than six months old was stringing together words. I figured that I should probably just tell the sitter beforehand.

  “Mama and daddy go out?” Dalilah a
sked, watching us getting ready for our dinner.

  “Yes, baby, mama and daddy are going out.” I was feeling a pang leaving her with a strange person. This would be the first time that I would be leaving her with somebody unfamiliar. I had actually found Janelle through a nanny service, so I felt comforted knowing that I wasn’t leaving Dalilah with some punk teenager who didn’t know what the hell was going on. I was that punk teenager once, but that particular gig ended when the ladies for whom I babysat came home too drunk to take me home, and I ended up being driven home by one of the random guys they picked up at the bar. Once my mom found about that, it was all she wrote. All she fucking wrote. Still, that was one of my favorite jobs – I put the kids to sleep around 9, and read Sweet Valley High books for the rest of the evening.

  Talk about easy money.

  But Dalilah would be much more challenging than that.

  Her green eyes got big. As she grew, she resembled Ryan more and more. I really didn’t see me in her all that much, although Ryan disagreed. “She looks just like you when she crinkles up her nose. You do that all the time,” he said.

  “NO,” she said. “You stay here.”

  “Now, Dalilah, mama and daddy are going to see Uncle Nick and Aunt Alexis. You remember them, now, don’t you?”

  She made a face, but sat down in her play pen and played with her Etch-A-Sketch. She was learning how to work the controls pretty well, and she was creating little houses, flowers and animals with it.

  The baby-sitter, Janelle, arrived at 6:30. “Oh, what a beautiful little girl,” she said, rushing to the playpen. “How old is she again?”

  “Around six months,” I said.

  At that, Dalilah said, looking right at Janelle, “Mama and daddy go out. You watch me?”

  Janelle got an astounded look on her face.

  “Yeah, about that,” Ryan said. “Our daughter is special. Here,” he said, giving Janelle some basic books. “These will keep her occupied for awhile.”

  “She reads?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Just basic books, like Goodnight Moon, but, yes, she can read a little.”