Unsteady

by Elizabeth York

  “You saw me see her?”

  “Like I told you, I need forgiveness because in trying to help, I think I made matters worse,” Sister Katherine made the sign of the cross and prayed.

  “Sister,” I spoke quietly when she was done. “While I don’t fully understand it, I will always forgive you when you need it.”

  “That’s good to know,” she sighed, as a funny look crossed her face.

  “If I tell you something do you promise not to tell anyone?”

  “Do I look like a priest?” she joked.

  “Truth time: I am exacerbated when I think of London, but I only feel that way because I think I might die if I allowed myself to feel anything else for her. The adoration I had for her was too intense to fade away, so I buried it under the rage and the charades with other women because that was the only way I was going to survive. I was her stalwart supporter and she sidled away as if I was nothing.”

  There was a pause in the car and I wondered if she was praying for me again. I waited, but she said nothing. I reached over and took the hand that was holding the rosary.

  “The truth is, I love to hate her because I hate that I love her.”

  “That’s no way to live,” she chided.

  “But joining forces with murdering mobsters to drug their daughter is?” I turned it on her and a smile spread across my face. It seemed Ada’s little turnabouts were rubbing off on me.

  “We’re here,” the cab driver spoke up and I looked out the window.

  My family home wasn’t like the big extravagant houses that my dad could have bought without batting an eye. Instead, he kept the narrow brown bricked five story home with the roof access that my mom had completely redone with a garden. I think once she passed, and I was sent away, the rooftop garden was all he had left of her.

  I couldn’t help but feel a little nervous since I hadn’t seen my dad since I was six years old and I didn’t know what to expect.

  His newest wife, Celeste, was younger than I was. I had met her more than a few times, mostly because she was a whore and I was an asshole. Our two personalities usually bonded together with sex, whips, and chains without ever knowing the other ones’ name, but I never blurred those invisible lines of right and wrong with her. It was another one of those boundaries I wouldn’t cross.

  I got out and walked around the cab. I opened the door and helped Sister Katherine out. When she was smiling she was the woman I remembered looking up to as a child, but coming out of the car after her admission, I realized just how old, feeble, and desperate she had become.

  “You came,” a voice shouted from the walkway. I turned to see Sister Mary standing there with her walker. She seemed a thousand years old when I was just a boy and yet here she was again. Just more proof that pernicious people outlive the virtuous.

  “Of course, I came,” I responded with derision as Sister Katherine and I walked toward her.

  “Manners, boy,” Sister Mary narrowed her eyes at me as she pulled a wooden ruler from her pocket. “Don’t make me use this.”

  “Put that away, Mary,” Sister Katherine stood between us. “You should pray for a new anger management class. One that won’t kick you out.”

  I tried not to laugh at the situation. It definitely wasn’t a time for smiles, but the two of them arguing somehow brought humor to this whole thing. It was the nun version of good versus evil.

  “Enough,” Father David spoke up as he stepped out the door. The once black-haired priest now had a strip of gray with a salt and pepper beard to match. Seemed like I had been gone a really long time. “Take that arguing elsewhere. This family is grieving.”

  “Is he?” I asked, as this strange feeling in my stomach forced my smile to fade. I felt empty, but longing for my dad like a boy. It was reminiscent of the day he dropped me off at the school.

  “He’s in there asking for you.”

  I walked in the house, seeing people I didn’t recognize standing in the kitchen. My step mom, Celeste, was wrapping a towel around herself as she entered the room.

  “Swimming while your husband is dying?” I asked her with disdain.

  “It’s my indoor pool as soon as he is gone so why not?”

  “You have no class at all, do you?” I scoffed.

  “Maybe you could fuck some into me,” she acted with hauteur as she tried to flirt. It only antagonized me.

  “Not likely,” a familiar voice echoed behind me. I turned to see Lisa standing there in a purple dress.

  “How?” I stuttered as she came up and wrapped her arms around me. “When?”

  “Sister Katherine, and Father David thought you could use a friend today,” she explained as she hugged me tightly. “We fly back in a few hours.”

  “I’m glad my girls are here,” I leaned over and kissed Lisa on the top of her dark brown hair when Ada came running up and wrapped her arms around my leg.

  “I knew we would have to come get you,” she never failed to put a smile on my face as I reached down, picked her up, and hugged them both. I looked over Lisa’s shoulder to see London in a little black dress coming down the stairs.

  She froze when she saw me and looked at Lisa and Ada. She tightened her grip on a folder in her hand and started to walk past me. I let Lisa and Ada go, turned and bellowed across the house.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “I -um,” she hesitated as Sister Katherine came up the stairs slowly.

  “You Keenan men and your stairs,” she gasped ,as London reached for her and helped her up onto the landing.

  “What are you doing here?” I demanded to know.

  “God put me on this Earth,” Sister Katherine’s sardonic reply only irked me further. I crossed my arms and refused to move. London tried not to meet my eyes, but I noticed she looked over every inch of me as my biceps flexed, straining the sleeve on my shirt. I tightened my jaw and waited. “Logan, she came to pay respects to your father.”

  “London didn’t know my father,” I mocked.

  “I did,” London spoke so softly I nearly missed it. “I met George once a long time ago.”

  “You’re a liar.”

  “Logan,” London’s voice was breathless and her eyes dilated. I watched as emotions crossed her face and she wanted to say something. She bit her lip and looked at her shoes like she used to do when she was really frustrated. Lisa stepped up and hooked her arm in mine.

  “Why don’t you go see your dad,” Lisa whispered, as I nodded and turned to leave. I didn’t say another word to London or Sister Katherine. No matter what they said to me right now, it wouldn’t have mattered. Their words were gasoline to the fire that laced my temper.

  I walked up the stairs and turned down the hall when I came upon his room. There was a nurse inside, so I waited as I heard the heart monitor slowly beating its march to death.

  “Go on in,” Sister Katherine reassured me as she came up the stairs. “He’s waiting for you.”

  I stepped into the ominous room; classical musical played through his computer speakers and the only light was shining from a lamp over on his desk.

  “Sit and talk to a dying man,” my dad asked as his face paled in front of me. The darkness under his eyes and the way his skin laid, I could tell he had been sick for a while. I walked over to the chair and picked up his hand.

  “I’m-,” I started to talk, but he stopped me.

  “Me first,” he stated in a whisper. “I’m not sorry I left you in that school, but I am sorry for a lot of other things.”

  “We could’ve been a family,” I argued.

  “I didn’t want you to turn out like me, but keeping you from me didn’t change that. You’re exactly like me.”

  “I am nothing like you.”

  “A new girl on your arm every weekend, but you can’t remember their names? A job that keeps you moving so you never have time to think about everything you have given up? A woman you loved left, you turned it to hate, and you blame her for every bad thing in
your life. Any of this sound familiar?”

  “No.”

  “Stop that lying right now,” Sister Katherine communicated her anger as she allowed her green eyes to show compassion when she looked at my dad.

  “Your destiny just walked out of this room and you hate her like I hated your mother for leaving me all alone,” my dad hoarsely stated, as his heart rate lowered a few beats and he struggled to breathe. A nurse I hadn’t noticed leaned over and put his oxygen mask back on and then stepped out of the room.

  “Mom died, she didn’t take everything you could ever give her and run.”

  “Neither did London,” Sister Katherine softly stated. My dad and her shared a look and then my dad nodded at her. “London made the choices in life that were best for her from the paths she had to choose from.”

  “She chose wrong!”

  “Logan,” my dad exclaimed, as he pulled his mask down and squeezed my hand.

  “No! There is nothing left to say about her!”

  “Logan, please,” Sister Katherine tried to calm me down. “You don’t know everything.”

  “Logan, I need to explain,” my dad begged as his heart rate went up only to plummet again.

  “No, I know enough to know I’m not doing this with either of you. You can’t possibly understand. Sister Katherine has never loved someone as I loved London. Dad, you lost mom because she died. I know it was unfair, but at least you saw it coming, I didn’t. I came here because logically it was the right thing to do, but I won’t stand here and talk about London. When it comes to her, I wish she had died the day she left because I did.”

  I heard a gasp and turned to see London was holding her coat and the folder she was carrying in one hand while the other covered her mouth. Her eyes grew emotionless just before she turned to run.

  “London,” Sister Katherine called after her.

  “Let her go,” I growled.

  “Child, I have had enough. You are going to sit down, shut up, and you are going to visit with George in a peaceful manner or we will lock you in here till you learn to behave,” Sister Katherine angrily spoke as Father David walked up behind her and helped her barricade the door.

  Chapter Seventeen

  London

  I stood there frozen as his words carved my soul out and crushed it. I knew Logan was vexed. I could tell from the way he looked at me he was angry, but the icy look in his eye as he wished for my destruction stole my breath and tore me apart.

  I turned and ran down the stairs with tears flying from my eyes. I got out the door and ran smack into someone as my purse fell open and everything collapsed on the sidewalk next to the parked cars that lined the street. I dropped to my knees and tried to pick it up, but my eyes could barely see behind the waterfall of tears.

  “I’m so sorry,” I sighed as I sat back on my knees and looked up at Alec, wearing jeans and a t-shirt that said, ‘I snuggle.’ Despite the shirt, he looked ready to kill someone.

  “Who hurt you?”

  “It’s nothing I didn’t deserve,” I softly cried into my hands. Alec lifted the folder that had spilled papers everywhere and looked at them.

  “London,” his voice couldn’t contain the shock as he looked at everything in the folder. I wept louder as he lifted me off the ground and I struggled to breathe.

  “London,” Sister Mary hollered, as I leaned on Alec. Devoid of Logan I was a new kind of empty. I was no longer unsteady, I had collapsed. There was a new hole inside of me that had been ripped open hearing those words leave his lips. I could no longer be swiss cheese. I was nothing.

  Every ounce of hope I ever held onto was fleeing. The worst part of loving someone is the moment that they inevitably hurt you. Those moments that are so harsh your heart would rather sink than swim.

  Logan had hurt me repeatedly in the last couple weeks, but it was warranted. I brought this on myself, but to what end? When would I be punished enough that I could have a conversation with him without feeling like duct tape and super glue would have to be used to mend the pieces of me? If I could go back in time I would have found another way to make it work. Everything would have been different, but it’s too late now.

  “Wait,” the woman who obviously had some kind of relationship with Logan yelled as she came running toward the street. “Wait, let me apologize.”

  “London, come back,” Sister Mary pleaded as Alec picked me up like a bride and I shook my head to the brown-haired woman. I couldn’t pretend I was okay anymore. I was being mendacious to them while lying to myself by keeping everything bottled up.

  “I’ve got her,” Alec assured everyone as I looked over his shoulder and saw Logan watching from the window. His impenetrable eyes and inscrutable countenance showed me nothing and it made everything worse. I turned away; I couldn’t bear to see him.

  “You want to leave?” Alec asked, and I nodded as I tried to stop the tears. I turned my head so I didn’t drench Alec and saw Michael standing across from the house. I sobered up my emotions as best as I could as Alec carried me over to a black Land Rover and opened the door.

  “Move,” he ordered to the man in the back seat. Then he put me in the back and slid in with me. “Get rid of him,” Alec issued the order as the men climbed out of the front with their guns and headed in the direction of where I saw Michael. Alec continued holding onto me as though I was fragile. “Are you hurt?”

  “I’ll be okay. I just need my sister,” I sniffled against him as the men came back shaking their heads and one shrugged. They got back inside the vehicle and we drove toward my hotel. Once we were there I gathered up all my things and headed to the airport.

  After several hours of waiting, my dad called in some favors since my passport had never been recovered and I finally found a way home. I flew on an airline with a pilot named Nate who sang American Bandstand songs every hour. It made me miss Logan, and the silence we got to have when he flew. When I finally arrived back at JFK it was nearly dawn.

  I walked out of the airport and grabbed a cab from someone being dropped off and headed toward my sister’s apartment. When I got there she wasn’t there, so I took another cab and headed to her office.

  I walked inside the District Attorney’s office and took the elevator up. I stepped out in an ocean of cubicles as people moved in all directions. They moved fluidly showing all the hours they had to put in together.

  “London?” Brooklyn called my name from across the room. The fret she wore on her face said everything. I should have changed clothes, or showered. I should have told her I was coming, but I didn’t want to say anything until I got this out.

  “Brook,” I sniffled as I walked up to her. “I have to tell you something, and you have to promise not to say anything till I’m done.”

  “Are you okay?” she questioned, as she led me into her office. She yelled at someone to call a judge and tell them she would be late and to hold all her calls. “What’s going on?” she asked as she shut the door and walked over to her large mahogany desk.

  “I’m gonna tell you a story,” I told her as her sad aging chair squeaked when she sat down. “I’ve never told anyone the truth about some stuff and I need to.”

  “Whatever it is, I’m here,” she offered comfort, as I sat in the chair across from her and she reached over taking my hand in hers.

  “I need you to know what happened to me. One person knows the truth, but they have kept my secret for years as I begged them to do. Once you know, you can’t tell anyone. Especially not dad.”

  “I promise,” she gave me the go ahead and I took a deep breath as I handed her the folder I brought back from London. I watched with trepidation as she looked through it all.

  “London, where the hell did this come from? Who am I about to murder?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  London - The beginning of the end

  “Sister Mary,” I whispered, as I raised my hand. “May I be excused to go to the ladies’ room?”

  “Class is about to be dismis
sed, can you not wait?” She sternly asked.

  “No ma’am,” I offered up my sweetest of faces in a plea to let me go. I looked up at the clock and saw I only had minutes.

  “Hurry up, and take your things so you may go to your next class,” She narrowed her brown eyes at me. She always thought everyone was up to something. She would have made an interesting detective had anyone tolerated her insane need to know everything.

  I gathered up my books and put them in my bag. Then I got up and walked out of the room. I walked a little faster down the hall as I came near the library. I ditched my backpack behind the stacks and ran down the stairs. I continued into the kitchen and stole two of the sack lunches they made on the days when the sun was radiant.

  I snuck out the back door and ran for the old wood stack. There used to be a sink hole beneath it, but the rising waters had flushed out the hole and left a place to hide when I needed it. I reached inside and pulled out the paper that was waiting for me.

  I opened it up and followed the map and directions that were written out for me as I traveled around the water and went toward a housing area on the western side of the lake. There was a light on inside a tree house in someone’s back yard, and that was where the map was pointing. I rushed over and climbed the screwed-on ladder and opened the hatch to climb inside the door.

  Inside was a dress, a gorgeous, silver a-line dress with a round neck top. It looked like something a princess would wear as the straps were lace flowers, and it laced up like a corset in the back.

  “I hope it fits,” Logan spoke, as I turned to see the smile on his face as he dried his hair from swimming laps in the lake. He loved to cut class to swim, but it always got him in trouble.

  “What is this for?” I asked as I passed him his lunch.

  “For you,” he sarcastically spoke, as he walked over and sat on a bean bag chair that was across the little tree house from me. “I want you to wear it.”