Surviving Valencia

by Holly Tierney-Bedord

  “Adrian, are we going to Madison?”

  “I guess so,” he said.

  “I don’t want to.”

  He grunted again.

  “Tell her we need more notice.”

  “Shhh, go back to sleep,” he said.

  I pulled the covers up around me, so just my nose and eyes were uncovered.

  “Remember how we used to decorate for holidays?” I asked him. My mouth was beneath the blankets and the words were muffled.

  He didn’t answer. I listened to him breathing, listened to the rhythm become steadier and eventually turn to quiet snoring.

  I lay there listening to him for the longest time, and at some point I fell back asleep. When I awoke it was almost noon and he was gone, down in his studio, as usual.

  Chapter 59

  After the night of Krystle’s party, Adrian and I found more and more excuses to be together. It began with us taking our breaks at the same time.

  “I’m going to grab a sub. You hungry? Want to come with?” he would ask me.

  Of course I did.

  For months it was like this. Flirtatious yet out of reach. Inappropriate, but without any real lines being crossed. I was still living with Sam, but we had deteriorated to being just roommates. I mean, mainly. Okay, to Sam, we were still together. But to me we mostly weren’t.

  Then one night after work it finally happened. It was November of 2000 and the store had been terribly busy with nasty, stressed out holiday shoppers. It was late and Adrian and I were out together, brazenly having a drink. We’d had lunch together, but never a drink. Belinda thought he was working late but he had taken off when I did, telling one of the managers that he was coming down with a cold.

  We started talking about a woman we had seen who was shopping with her children. Her little boy, who looked like he was about four, had pulled down his pants and started peeing right into the stroller on his little sister. It was hilarious. Half the store saw it happen. His mother, who had been ignoring her kids and reading one of her unpaid-for books, looked up to see her baby covered in pee, and flipped out. Her target was Wilfred, an old man who had just started working at Border’s and had unfortunately been standing nearby.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she said to Wilfred. “How am I supposed to take them back outside? She’s soaking wet! She’ll freeze to death! Get me the manager!”

  “I didn’t do it,” said Wilfred.

  “I didn’t do it either,” said her little boy.

  “I know you didn’t do it,” the woman said back to Wilfred in a shrill, mocking voice, “but you could have said something when it was happening.”

  Wilfred didn’t know what to do. He was holding some books so he set them down on a table and went to find a manager. All around customers and workers had stopped what they were doing and were focused on this woman and her children. The attention made her even angrier, so she decided to leave. However, she had an armful of books she hadn’t purchased, which started off the alarm. By the time Wilfred came back with a manager, the woman was hysterical and both her kids were screaming.

  “What’s the matter?” asked the manager.

  In what I could only assume was one of those irrational, heat of the moment decisions, the woman pointed at Wilfred and yelled, “That old man peed on my baby! You need to fire him right now! He’s not right.”

  We’d all seen what really happened, but she had to blame someone, had to divert the attention away from herself and her children.

  Adrian and I had left in the midst of all the commotion. It had provided plenty of fuel for flirty, silly scandalmongering all the way from Border’s to the pub where we sat drinking pints of Smithwick’s.

  “That woman’s going to win a lawsuit over this, and Wilfred’s going to end up in jail,” said Adrian.

  “She’ll visit him there, out of guilt, and they’ll fall in love,” I said.

  “They’ll have a conjugal visit, and conceive a baby who pees on everything,” said Adrian.

  Were we talking about love, sex, and babies? I would take such a conversation in whatever form it presented itself. Ridiculousness with Adrian made my heart race more than the most serious talk I could have with Sam.

  “Did you see that little boy’s reindeer sweater? No wonder he peed on his sister! He needed to rebel!” I said.

  “Do you have brothers or sisters?” asked Adrian.

  “No. Do you?” I took another drink. I had recently found myself learning to thoroughly love beer.

  “I have a younger sister. She’s twenty-seven. Or twenty-eight. I’m not sure. I should know this. Um, she must be twenty-seven. So you’re an only child?”

  “Yep. Just one sister?” I asked, passing it back to him.

  “Yeah. Her name is Alexa.”

  “That’s a pretty name.”

  “You’re pretty,” he said. I started laughing because it was such a quaint, simplistic thing to be told. It felt like something a kid would say to another kid. But I was totally pleased, too. We had flirted like crazy, but always with a faint protective edge in place. He had never left himself vulnerable like that. I was not used to communicating with him without the enigmatic veil of coolness that had become our language, and I wasn’t quite sure what to do. Then I stopped laughing, and I said the stupidest thing ever: “If you think I’m pretty, you should have seen my sister.”

  He looked at me for the longest time and touched my face. He did not ask me what I meant, or point out that this contradicted my statement that I was an only child. Then he kissed me. I kissed him back, touching his hair and the back of his neck, memorizing his smell and warmth in case I never got this close to him again. My body filled with love and yearning and need. Everything that had been locked became open and I pulled him closer to me, wanting more. I was afraid he’d pull away from me at any moment. It didn’t seem possible that something so good could be happening to me. I kissed him, tasted him, overwhelmed with the desire to cry, because I already missed him. Even while it was happening, that was what I was thinking: Don’t ever forget what this feels like.

  “I’m going to take care of you,” he whispered in my ear, so softly I later doubted whether I had really heard it at all.

  Chapter 60

  I did get close to Adrian again. All the time, every chance I got, and miraculously, he seemed just as drawn to me as I was to him. In early 2002, a week after Adrian filed for divorce from Belinda, he proposed to me, and in July of 2003 we got married.

  Belinda did not deal very well with any of this. She showed up at Border’s, screaming and making threats. She grabbed a pair of scissors from a cup by one of the cash registers. I thought she was going to stab me. Instead, she cut off her long red hair and threw it at me. It seemed metaphoric, but I never did completely understand what she was trying to say. She did leave her mark on Border’s however; they can’t keep scissors in those cups anymore because of her.

  Sam had moved on and was living with, of all people, Luna-with-the-floppy-arm. They had met through me and I had always suspected they were interested in each other. I learned about the two of them one day, shortly after Adrian asked me to marry him, when I ran into our old friend Dannon. Now that she had porcelain veneers on her teeth, she was living in New York and doing some modeling, along with working at some fancy advertising agency. She was back in town, looking gorgeous, sharing fried milk balls with her equally gorgeous girlfriend at an Indian restaurant on the east side of town. I was there to pick up some carryout food Adrian and I had ordered.

  “Dannon!” I said. She looked great. Her hair was long and platinum blonde. Her skin was flawless. Her eyes were made up with smoky makeup, and she had an aura of sophistication about her.

  “Hi,” she said, barely looking at me. Her exotic, olive-skinned girlfriend was unabashedly tonguing her ear. They thought they were in L.A. or something.

  “How have you been?” I asked her. “What are you doing back in Madison?”

  “Jacinda’s broth
er is getting married,” she said, tilting her head closer to her companion.

  Jacinda held out her hand to me. “Nice to meet you,” she said.

  “I saw our old friend Luna. That’s too bad she stole your boyfriend,” said Dannon. When she said boyfriend, I immediately thought of Adrian.

  “Stole my boyfriend?” I looked at my diamond ring, imagining it sparkling on Luna’s shriveled, limp hand. “What are you talking about?”

  “Luna said she and your boyfriend Sam are together now. That’s too bad for you,” she said. “Too bad. So sad. All of that.” Jacinda giggled.

  I had no idea why Dannon was being mean, but sometimes when people suddenly turn pretty, they don’t quite know how to handle it. I decided she must still be learning the ropes. “It must really sting to lose him to Luna,” Dannon continued.

  I waved my sparkling left hand in Dannon and Jacinda’s faces. “I couldn’t care less about those morons,” I told them. “I’m engaged to someone way more amazing than Sam.”

  Jacinda yawned loudly.

  “I like your veneers,” I told Dannon. I hoped it would come across as cutting, scathing, and might make Jacinda realize that Dannon had not always been such a catch.

  “Thanks,” said Dannon. “Well, nice catching up with you. I think your little baggy of food is ready.” She pointed to the cash register where the clerk stood by a brown paper sack of food, arms crossed, waiting for me to pay.

  “Oh. Thanks. Bye.” I walked away.

  “Nice meeting you,” called Jacinda, sarcastically.

  So, I thought, carrying my food to the car, there was proof that even being engaged to Adrian couldn’t make everyone like me. Maybe it couldn’t make anyone like me. But before him I would have been in tears over a conversation like that. Now I was able to turn on the radio and, by the time I pulled out of the parking lot, nearly forget it even happened.

  Pathetically, I invited Dannon and Jacinda to my wedding. Sam and Luna, too, so I could show them how much I had moved on. I even sent an invitation to Marnie Hopkins, from high school. None of them came. They didn’t even send back the RSVP cards.

  Adrian’s guest list was so long and mine was so short. I guess I got a little desperate.

  Chapter 61

  On November first, Adrian got up early to drive down to Jacksonville to meet with a client. I decided this was my opportunity to get some answers to the questions I hadn’t wanted to face.

  I made myself a cup of tea and sat on the porch sipping it, wrapped in a thin blanket with the bright sun warming my face. Wrappers from the previous night’s trick-or-treaters blew across our front yard, but I was not motivated to clean them up. Aside from the steady drumming of my fingers on the armrest of the wicker chair I was sitting on, all was calm and quiet. I finished my tea and went inside, calling Adrian to assure myself that he was far from home.

  “I’m about a half hour from Jacksonville,” he told me. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m fine. Everything’s fine here.”

  “I should be home by eight or nine. Want to watch a movie tonight?” he asked me.

  “Sure, that sounds nice.”

  I told him I was going to do some sewing and we said our goodbyes. I set down the phone, took a deep breath, and prepared to get down to business.

  I went into his studio, poking around in the closet, coming up with nothing out of the ordinary. Then I moved on to a tall file cabinet. It was filled with folders labeled with the names of clients in the top three drawers and other artists who inspired him in the bottom two drawers. I got a stepstool and pulled open the top drawer, slowly leafing through each file. There were snapshots and slides of the work he had done for them, invoices, notes on things like the client’s spouse or kid’s names so he could look like a personable guy who remembered details. I made my way through each file folder, examining each slip of paper, not sure what I was looking for. As I went along, I came to the woman in the photos John Spade had sent, the early photos that had implied Adrian was having an affair, and the reminder of her made my stomach do a little flip. There was nothing unusual in her file, no telling notes or extra attention paid to her. It seemed she really had been nothing more than any average client.

  I finished up with clients and kneeled on the floor, pulling open the fourth drawer down, the one that housed the first section of artists. I was getting a little bored, starting to think I was wasting my time, and was being less careful now. My stomach growled and I considered scrapping this whole project and going out for a really good lunch. There was nothing of importance in the top drawer to I sat on the floor and pulled open the bottom file drawer, thumbing through the folders. As I neared the final few, an out-of-place folder slowed my pace. It was labeled as Kandinksy Samples.

  I looked inside and instead of loose magazine articles or photocopies I found a single manila envelope. I pulled it out and held it in my hands for a moment, biting my lip like Valencia used to do. It was a habit of hers I had copied to the point of catching it, and now and then it came back when I least expected it.

  I carefully bent back the metal closure and opened the flap. The envelope smelled like cigarettes and mustiness. I hesitated, listening, and then convinced I truly was alone in the silent, sunny studio, I carefully tilted the envelope and let its contents slide out onto the floor. Postcards featuring the artwork of Wassily Kandinsky spilled out upon the floor.

  I sighed, defeated. I gathered up the colorful squares and shoved them back into the envelope. I replaced it, skimmed through the remaining folders, and closed the file cabinet. I had really thought that envelope was going to be the answer to all my questions. I should have known Adrian would not be careless enough to leave any traces of his thoughts or his past.

  The floor felt cool, and since this was one room where Frisky was not usually allowed, it felt clean. I was never in here by myself and it reminded me a little of being in Van’s room after he was gone. I stretched out on my back with my fingers woven beneath my head, like a kid lolling in a summer field. I breathed in the smells of the studio, torn between liking the intensity and finding it nauseating.

  I closed my eyes and when I opened them, I noticed the middle drawer of the file cabinet was still open an inch or two, and a yellow line on the underside of it was catching my eye. I sat up and I pulled the drawer open a little farther, and discovered that there was a manila folder taped to the underside of the drawer. Time seemed to grind to a halt. I sat up and checked the other drawers, one at a time since the file cabinet did not allow for more than one drawer to be open more than a couple of inches without locking the others out of commission, to keep it from toppling forward. I could not see under the bottom drawer, but I ran my hand carefully over its surface and it was smooth. There was nothing else.

  Then I did something awful, considering I was pregnant: I went into the kitchen, found my cigarettes, and smoked one. So what I reasoned. My mom smoked when she was pregnant with all of us. So I had another. Then I washed my hands and calmly went back to the studio, reopened the middle drawer, and peeled away the tape, freeing the envelope.

  This is probably going to be porn, I told myself. But I did not believe that. And it was not porn.

  The envelope was sealed shut so I tore it open. There was no way to preserve it.

  Inside there were newspaper clippings about Van and Valencia. Stacks of articles. Headlines from papers in the Cities and the Hudson Star-Observer, their senior pictures filling up the whole front pages.

  Local Twins Perish in Icy Automobile Accident

  Prom Queen Still Missing

  Car from Loden Deaths Found in Mississippi River

  Valencia Loden Presumed Dead

  Loden Twins’ Funeral Today

  Local Students Speak about Loden Twins

  And then their obituaries, neatly clipped out and placed inside a separate, unsealed envelope for safekeeping.

  I’d had no idea this had been news in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. I looked at Va
lencia’s senior picture. She looked like a model. She was why this was news. I took my find to the kitchen and lit another cigarette. I was shaking and it calmed me down.

  I removed the obituaries from the envelope and placed them on the table in front of me.

  As far as I knew, my parents had not saved any clippings from the accident. They would have hidden them from me if they had, anyhow. I’d had some of my own, cut from our local paper and saved through the years, but nearly everything I was seeing here was brand-new to me, and fascinating.

  Valencia loved animals and donated over $2000 to the Humane Society in her short lifetime, it said in her obituary. Really? Valencia, my Valencia, did that? I thought of all the money I made working for Grandma Betty, and how I had hoarded it away to buy a car.

  No wonder Valencia could inspire Adrian to change his entire life path, I thought, lighting my fourth cigarette.

  How had he explained these to Belinda, I wondered. An entire folder filled with clippings about two dead people.

  Apparently she hadn’t been as snoopy as me.

  I balanced my cigarette on the edge of a plate and continued sorting through the pile. Beneath the yellowing newspaper pages was a copy of the Border’s newsletter with the article about me. I hadn’t been expecting that there would be anything about me. There were other things in there I didn’t even remember, like an article I wrote in college about ways for students to save money around campus, and a picture of me in high school, winning an award for one of my clay pots.

  Finding that there had been a focus, however minor, on me too, softened me a little.

  Had it been interest in me, though? Or interest in Valencia’s sister?

  They weren’t the same thing.

  When there was nothing left to discover, when I had read and reread everything for the tenth time, I flushed the ashes and cigarette butts down the toilet, washed the plate, scrubbed my hands, coated them in flowery hand lotion, and brushed my teeth. I got a new manila envelope and shipping tape from the craft closet in the laundry room and after carefully replacing the contents of the envelope, I taped the new one neatly in place on the underside of the file drawer. Finally, I burned the one I had ripped open, carefully, over the kitchen sink, in little pieces as to not set off the smoke detector. I opened the windows and lit some candles to make up for the stench of cigarettes and melted tape. Frisky watched me and whined.