by Fiona Zedde
Again that sigh and a long pause. Unease scuttled over Rémi’s skin.
“I don’t think—we shouldn’t . . .” More words stopped and started, none of them emerging in complete sentences. Rémi swallowed. This wasn’t like her lover at all. Even after what happened last night, Claudia shouldn’t sound so hesitant, so unsure of herself.
Rémi swallowed her rising panic. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“We need to take a break. It wasn’t a good idea to start this. I’m sorry.” The words emerged from the other end of the telephone in a breathless rush.
Rémi’s hand spasmed around the phone. “What?”
Claudia spoke again. Suddenly, Rémi couldn’t see. Her lashes felt wet, and her throat was thick with something she didn’t want to swallow. She blinked. Once. Twice. And her eyes became dry again, but the muscles around them were pulled tight.
“Are you saying you don’t want to see me anymore?” Her voice scraped her throat like sandpaper.
“Yes.”
“Okay.” She closed the phone.
Beside her, Nuria sat heavily in her silence, as if afraid to disturb Rémi with even her breathing. Cold settled over her like a blanket. She rolled onto her side away from her friend and closed her eyes.
“Will you be okay?”
“Yes.” But she felt a tear drip across the bridge of her nose and into the other eye. “I’ll be fine.”
Chapter 38
We need to take a break. It wasn’t a good idea to start this. I’m sorry.
The words echoed in Rémi’s head, loud and jarring as a bell under her pillow. Rémi gave the bike more gas and it growled under her, ratcheting up to ninety miles an hour. Closer and closer to her destination. Instead of turning left onto Tiger Lily Drive, she continued farther up until her bike slowed to a stop in front of the converted church with the enormous red double doors. She punched in the security code at the gate and rode in as the gate swung open onto the quiet driveway.
The lights were on, illuminating the stained glass windows that made up nearly the entire front façade. Rémi pressed the doorbell and stepped back.
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
Dez stood in the doorway in tight jeans, T-shirt, and bare feet. The bones of her face stood out sharply, as if she’d been fasting.
“Who is it, babe?” Victoria’s voice called out from behind her in the house.
“Nobody.” Dez’s lips barely moved.
“Did you tell her to leave me?” Rémi braced herself against the door frame, spreading her arms and sinking her fingers into the wood like an innocent at crucifixion.
Her friend crossed bare arms, a muscle twitching in her jaw. Her eyes held the cold of a winter chill. “Yes. As if she had a choice.” She thrust out her chin at Rémi. “She knows what you’re doing is disgusting.”
“You’re not the only one who deserves happiness, Dez,” she said quietly, despite the pulse galloping in her throat.
“Mama practically raised you.”
“But there’s no blood between us. I love her.”
Dez shoved her back out of the doorway. “Shut up!”
Rémi stumbled and almost fell. Her chest stung from the force of Dez’s push but it was nothing to the agony already tearing her insides apart.
Victoria’s head appeared behind Dez. “Darling, what’s going on?”
“Just getting this filth out of my front yard.”
But Victoria came to the door, stepped into its mouth, and grabbed Dez’s arm. “Stop being unreasonable, she’s your friend. Invite her in so you two can work this out.”
“This bitch isn’t setting foot in my house again.”
“It’s our house now.”
Dez froze then swung to face Victoria. But her wife ignored her.
“Rémi, come in.” Her voice was low with tenderness. In the knee-length copper robe showing plainly that she had nothing on underneath, she reached for Rémi’s hand and drew her into the house. “Please.”
In their living room, Dez avoided touching Rémi. She stood as far from her as possible, as if a disease lingered on her former friend and threatened to infect her.
She stood before the darkened fireplace with her arms laced across her chest. “I’m only going to ask you this one more time. Why are you here?”
“To make you understand.”
“There’s nothing to understand. You’re fucking my mother.” Dez sucked in a breath. “Jesus! Even as I’m saying this I can’t believe it!” She paced the length of the sitting room.
Victoria sat down next to Rémi on the sofa, gathering her legs beneath her and arranging the cotton robe modestly over her thighs. “Calm down, Dez. You reacting like this isn’t making things better.”
“I don’t want this better. I want it gone.” She turned her head, a reptilian motion independent from the rest of her body, and looked at Rémi. “What did I ever do to you to deserve this?”
Rémi braced her legs apart, linked her fingers together and leaned forward. Be cool. Be cool. Maybe if Dez could understand about her and Claudia then she and her lover would get back together. Maybe—“This isn’t about you, Dez.”
Her friend stopped pacing. “You’re right. Because you sure as shit didn’t think about how I would feel.”
“I thought about your feelings. A lot. And I thought about how happy you are with Victoria.” Rémi glanced at the woman by her side, at Victoria’s sympathetic smile, the wild curls and red mouth that her friend had been unable to resist. “You know what that’s like, to want someone so badly that nothing else matters.”
Dez catapulted across the room, fists raised. “Don’t compare—!”
Rémi kept her seat, refusing to flinch.
“Is this your way of keeping Mom in your life forever and finally getting a family of your own?” Dez towered over Rémi, body vibrating with violence.
Rémi forced her voice to remain calm. She hadn’t come here to fight. “Before I would have said that I don’t know. Now, I can tell you no. That’s not at all what’s happening.”
“I hope you realize that nothing is happening now. My mother doesn’t want you anymore. She told me she made that phone call.”
That ache, familiar to Rémi since that early morning call, throbbed even more viciously in her chest.
“Yes, she told me. But I wanted—”
“No. Nothing you want matters here. Leave. Nobody wants you.”
The words hammered at Rémi, striking with painful accuracy at her most vulnerable places. In a daze, she stood up. She nodded once at Dez and Victoria then found her way, step by painful step, out of their house and back to her own. It was the hardest journey of her life.
Chapter 39
Now she knew. Rémi dressed for the club, hidden from herself in the mirrored walk-in closet with the scent of cedar lingering in the air. She pulled on slacks, tucked in the crisp white shirt, buckled her belt, arranged her face away from lines of grief. Then she went to Gillespie’s earlier than she needed to. Her steel watch and her wrist were the same temperature.
Later, much later, Rémi sat in her office—the only place in the club not wired for sound, not infested with cameras. She closed herself into its silence, turned off the speakers feeding her music from the stage, and watched everything below.
A jazz quartet pantomimed music on the stage. The bass player tapping his feet to the rhythm he was helping to create. Sax player blowing his cheeks into balloons while the drummer brought the deepest sound for their singer, a brown-skinned pixie in tight slacks, to rock her hips to. The audience sat enthralled, fingers snapping over the remnants of their dinner.
It was all Rémi’s. The only thing she had left.
In the crowd that moved through the club, swaying back and forth to the music like stalks of wheat in a friendly breeze, a familiar figure intruded. Pale dress. Dark skin. Rémi’s heart in her fist.
Elena walked in front, leading the one behind her toward Rémi’s office. Rém
i didn’t want to notice the proud lift of the small head. The diamond earrings catching light and throwing it on the bare throat and shoulders shimmering above the white tube dress. Her jaw, a firm line of stubbornness below the wine-red mouth pulled tight at its corners. Rémi forced the breath inside her to move more slowly, expanding the rib cage beneath her starched shirt and vest. The air conditioner hummed cool and quiet from the vents above her, ruffling the curls she still hadn’t cut.
Rémi took out her phone. “Elena.”
She watched her manager pull the tiny cell from her pocket.
“I’m on my way to your office,” Elena said. “You have a visitor.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I’m not seeing anyone today. No exceptions.”
Elena’s steps faltered on the stairs only a few feet from the door. She knew about the cameras. Knew that Rémi had to be watching. Her eyes darted up to the tiny camera above the door.
“Ah.” She paused. “Okay. I’ll make sure the rest of the staff knows.”
And she turned to Claudia, opened her mouth to relay the message. Rémi hung up before she could hear Claudia’s voice. She slid the phone into her breast pocket and pressed a button on the remote to slide the bank of monitors back into the recessed cabinet.
A shipment of wine from the day before had come up over a dozen bottles short. That had to be dealt with before she turned the business of paperwork back over to Elena. Rémi picked up the invoice and her pen. The phone over her heart vibrated in three short bursts, paused then vibrated again. She ignored it, reaching instead for the cordless on her desk.
A knock came at her office door.
“Yes?”
Monique walked in with a tray of food held before her like an offering. She had taken off the long-sleeved white shirt that went under the cropped tuxedo top of her waitress’s uniform. Her breasts plumped above the low neckline, and her belly button played hide-and-seek with the cloth for every step she took. When she turned to close the door behind her, Rémi shook her head.
“Don’t bother,” she said.
Monique stopped, her breasts hovering just above the tray. “You haven’t eaten today.”
“And I don’t plan on it.” The food on the tray—penne pasta, red peppers and fat curls of pink shrimp glistening with olive oil—made Rémi’s throat clench with revulsion. “Take it away. I’m not interested.”
Monique opened her mouth to say something else, but Rémi shook her head again. “Leave.”
The waitress’s eyes fell briefly to the floor. She waited a few seconds, perhaps hoping for Rémi to change her mind, before she turned, making her way through the open door. Rémi didn’t look up when she heard it close.
Hours later, with the sun chasing any lingering traces of the night’s coolness from the air, Rémi pushed open the door to her condo. Hushed quiet. The air conditioner’s toothless bite at the back of her neck. Keys by the door. Helmet on the shelf. Then a beer in her hand. The bottle’s cold sweat against her palm. Rémi stood in the middle of the kitchen, breathing in the silence that before had been a balm to her spirit, the perfect antidote after a night of work or a day of pleasure. And now was not. Rémi breathed deeply and felt the tight band of misery around her chest. In the quiet. In the desolation. She knew. She knew what it was like not to have Claudia in her life. It hurt.
Chapter 40
It was worse knowing. The thought plagued Rémi while she played manager during Elena’s periodic absences, dealt with time sheets and deliveries and people requesting vacation days. It was worse.
At least twice a week she and Yvette talked on the phone, her sister giving her the dirt about the goings on at school now that she was back in Rhode Island and enrolled for the summer semester. The girls were boring, her sister said. And the boys even more so. As she rambled on about Brown and the teachers she was dealing with, occasionally pausing to allow Rémi a grunt or a comment, Rémi allowed her mind to wander to another university campus not too far from where she sat. On one of these occasions, Yvette paused her riot of words.
“You should call her. I’m sure she misses you. It’s obvious you miss her.”
“It’s more complicated than that,” Rémi said. She doesn’t want me in her life in that way anymore. If she asks me to go back to the way things were before, I’ll fall apart.
Yvette didn’t press her, only segued smoothly into a less prickly topic until Rémi was lulled once again into the mindless rhythm of their mostly one-sided conversation.
Alone in her office, with the emptiness of daylight enfolding the bar on all sides, Rémi leafed through a pile of receipts she’d wrestled from Elena. Her mind was a focused blade as she studied the numbers. But try as she might, she could find nothing wrong with them. Anderson seemed to have lost interest in sabotaging her business. Their days of finding rats in the kitchen and moles in the office seemed to be over, and Rémi hadn’t had a sign of the man since his visit three weeks ago. Still, she waited for the other shoe to drop.
At her elbow, the office phone rang. She almost slammed it back down when she heard the voice on the other end of the line.
“I was just thinking about you,” Rémi said.
Anderson laughed. “I’m flattered.”
“Don’t be,” she snarled. “What do you want?”
“You.” The mockery remained in his voice. “I’d like you come to my office for a chat.”
“I have nothing to talk with you about.”
“How about your mother? Do you have anything to say to her?”
Rémi felt the question all the way down her spine. Her toes clenched in their boots. “Where is she?”
“Here. In my office.”
Rémi hung up and grabbed her jacket.
With the sun firmly in the sky’s center and the lunch crowd going about its frantic business, Rémi was surprised to find Anderson’s place open. On the way into the building, she thought she saw Wynne, a sly shadow, huddled next to a boy playing a handheld video game. René? But she looked again and the vision disappeared. No one stopped her progress through the nearly empty club and to his office at the rear of the building. The two bulky men, smoking and chatting easily with each other in French as they stood guard on either side of the door, barely glanced at her as she strode past and flung the door open.
“Where is she?”
Rémi stopped short, prepared to see Anderson behind his desk or even holding a knife to her mother’s neck as she hung suspended from the ceiling in chains. Instead he sat, civilized and calm, on the sofa facing . . . no one. The office was clothed in darkness, the shades drawn over the windows and with only a small banker’s lamp glowing a deep blue to provide light.
“Where’s my mother?” She slammed the door shut behind her.
“Not here. I lied.” There was something in Anderson’s face, a cool irrationality that froze the blood in Rémi’s veins. “She called me. She’s coming down here to rescue you.” He stood up. “You, who split her apart coming out the way that Auguste”—he spat the name as if he couldn’t get if off his tongue fast enough—“split her going in.”
Rémi didn’t bother to hide her confusion. She braced her hands on her hips, shaking her head. “What is this really about? Really. I’m tired of playing cat and mouse with you. I’m finished.”
“You’re finished when I say you are.” He pulled a gun out of his coat pocket, pointed the silenced 9mm Beretta in Rémi’s direction.
Fuck. The blood froze under Rémi’s skin. Not this bullshit again. Anderson reached over, too casually, and pressed a button on the small table near the couch. As soon as he sat back, one of his bodyguards walked into the office, wrenched Rémi’s arms behind her back, and slipped handcuffs—tight—around her wrists. She staggered as he released her. Without uttering a word, the muscle-bound blond left the office, closing the door firmly behind him. She twitched in the cuffs, feeling metal cut even deeper into her wrists.
“You dickless motherfucker,�
� she snarled, although her heart slammed out of control in her chest. “Does it make you feel good to tie up an unarmed woman?” She loosened her shoulders, tried to steady her breathing. “Is that how you prove to yourself that you’re a real man?”
“I don’t have to prove anything to anyone, Rémi.” On his lips, her name became a curse. “Not to you or that father of yours who couldn’t care for the precious things he had.”
“That’s what this whole thing has been about? My father?” Deflated, she sagged in her binds and dropped to her knees. “This is so fucked.” Even now Auguste was poisoning her life. She turned slitted eyes to Anderson. “What did he do to you that he didn’t do to me? Do you think that you’re special somehow? Auguste fucked everyone over.”
“What are you talking about? You were his prize. The one he always talked about in those damn interviews.”
Anderson’s look was maniacal. Gone was the urbane, vaguely sinister man who’d made Rémi’s insides crawl with fear. Now he just looked crazy.
“Wrong daughter,” she growled.
“No, I don’t think so. You have every look of Auguste.” Spit flew from his mouth, and his face contorted with real hatred. The gun in his hand shook as he stood up and stepped closer to Rémi. “And all his petty cruelties and ego too, I’m sure. That’s why he thought so well of you.”
Rémi jerked with revulsion at the idea. Her and Auguste being the same? Never. “You don’t know a damn thing about me!”
“I don’t need to know you to see the kind of person you are. You live a life of waste and idleness. You and your friends screw your way through Miami as if the city was your personal harem. And for most people you’re nothing more than a meal ticket. No one can love a creature like you.”
Rémi’s chin wrenched up. The backs of her eyes stung. She sprang up and, before he could react, knocked the gun out of Anderson’s grasp with her shoulder, swung her cuffed arms from behind her back and up above her head. Around his neck. The chains of the handcuffs yanked at the skin below his Adam’s apple. Anderson choked, gasped, tried to jerk away, clawing at her arms. But she held him fast. Rémi pulled the cuffs tighter around his neck. She heard him fight for air. She felt the breath struggling to get past her fisted hands. And she didn’t care.