Now She's Gone: A Novel

by Kim Corum

  She glared at me, then away. “I can see that.”

  I nodded. “Where’s your jewelry?”

  “My what?”

  “Your jewelry,” I said and moved in the rocker. “Where is it?”

  “Why?”

  “I want to know,” I said and moved again. The rocker creaked. Oh shit. I held my breath but it broke anyway. It broke right in half and I fell flat on my ass to the floor. Sandy just looked at me, her eyes wide. She tried not to laugh. I tried not to laugh. This was supposed to be a serious discussion! We had some serious shit to talk about! But we couldn’t help it. We cracked up and laughed for a few minutes. It was good. It helped ease the tension.

  She came over and held out her hand. “Come on. Get up.”

  I took her hand and she helped pull me off the floor. “Thanks.”

  “You’re going to have to replace that,” she said. “That’s Kelsey’s rocker.”

  “It’s a piece of shit!”

  She shrugged and eyed me. “I know. She found it in the alley. Thought she could fix it up or something.”

  I stared at the thing. There was no hope for it. “Why don’t you buy some real furniture?” I asked.

  “Why?” she asked. “It’s not my house.”

  I stared at her.

  “Well,” she said. “It’s not.”

  “Then…” I stopped myself. I didn’t really give a shit.

  She was still eyeing me. Her arms were now crossed. “Have you lost weight?”

  I shrugged. “A little.”

  “Don’t,” she said and moved her head to the side. “I don’t like skinny men.”

  “What does my weight have to do with you?” I asked.

  She looked momentarily shocked and snapped, “It doesn’t. I just think you don’t look that great when you lose weight.” She went back over to the couch and flopped down on it, her arms still crossed. “Want something to eat?”

  “What do you have? Peanut butter?” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I kicked myself in the ass. I had no intention of letting her know I’d been in here the other day.

  She didn’t catch on and sighed, “What do you have against peanut butter?”

  I hated peanut butter, always have. It was goopy weird shit that stuck to the roof of your mouth. I don’t know why anyone liked it. “Nothing,” I said and went to the other end of the couch and sat down. “Would you like to go somewhere to eat?”

  She shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe. Would you?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “You’ll have to pay for it. I don’t have any money,” she said and pulled the clip out of her hair and shook it.

  I stared at her. She was always so sexy when she did that. Her hair just came down and framed her face. She looked so damn good. I looked away from her.

  She continued, “I had to put a new alternator on the Ford.”

  I nodded.

  “And I only get paid every two weeks,” she said and rubbed her hair. “Which sucks.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “Are you going to tell me what happened to your jewelry?”

  “It’s in my room.”

  It wasn’t in her room. It was gone. I knew she had pawned it. It didn’t matter, not really. But it pissed me off that she’d pawn her engagement ring.

  “Go get it,” I said.

  She eyed me. “It’s not here. I have it in a safety deposit box. There have been a lot of break-ins.”

  “Sandy, I know you pawned it.”

  “I didn’t pawn it,” she said, then added, “All.”

  I almost growled I was so frustrated. But it was her stuff. If she wanted to give it away, let her do it. Wasn’t anything to me.

  She glared at me. “Look, it’s been kinda hard lately. We had a lot of repairs to do to the house and Kelsey can’t really pay for anything because the mortgage is so much because of the location. So I needed some money. Simple as that. As soon as I get things straight, I’ll go get it back.”

  “Give me the tickets.”

  “What?”

  “Give me the pawn tickets,” I said calmly. “So I can go get it back.”

  “No, it’s my stuff. I’ll get it later.”

  “When did you pawn it?”

  “It’s been a couple of months.”

  Shit! “Well, there goes that,” I muttered.

  “What’s it to you? It’s my stuff.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

  “I didn’t pawn everything,” she muttered. “You’d think I sold my engagement ring or something.”

  Phew. Thank God.

  She stared at me and I could tell she was getting frustrated. She was lying about something. She hated to lie, it made her nervous. She believed in Karma.

  “Listen,” she said. “When I got down here, Kelsey told me they would steal my car and it would be best to sell it. I sold it and I didn’t want to open an account at a bank and kept the money here. I bought a few things for the house and the car.”

  I stared at her.

  “And one day I took off to the beach and came back a couple of hours later and the house had been broken into. They took all my money.”

  All my money, too.

  “I had my jewelry hidden in the freezer. They didn’t find it.”

  “That sucks.”

  “I didn’t have a cent,” she said. “So, I had to pawn some stuff. When I got down to my engagement ring, I went to work.”

  Why hadn’t she just told me that in the first place? Why did she always have to walk around things? I kinda felt sorry for her. “Well,” I said. “That’s too bad.”

  She nodded.

  I couldn’t help it. I said, “Why the hell did you keep all that money in this house? Are you crazy?”

  “I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

  Well, she was right about that. I didn’t understand.

  She sighed loudly and said, “Look, why don’t you just yell at me and get it over with ’cause I am really tired. Some of us have to work, you know?”

  She had such audacity! She’d get onto me for working too much and now I was bugging her and keeping her from working. She was precious. Just precious. “I told you. I’m not here to yell at you.”

  She shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “Why did you leave?”

  “Does it really matter, Bruce?”

  “Yeah, it kinda does. You had no reason to leave.”

  “I didn’t?”

  “Did you?”

  She sighed. “We all have our reasons for things we do. Most people never understand them, but we do.”

  “What was your reason?”

  “It’s none of your business,” she said, looking away. Her bottom lip trembled. She was about to cry. I had seen her do that a thousand times.

  “I took good care of you.”

  “You took too good of care of me!” she screamed and tears rolled down her cheeks. She wiped them away as if they perturbed her.

  “I didn’t know there was such a thing.”

  “You don’t understand. You’ll never understand.” She got up and went to her purse, dug out a pack of cigarettes and lit one.

  “Help me to understand.”

  “I can’t! I can’t, Bruce! I don’t understand it myself!”

  “Why didn’t you just come home?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t! You don’t understand! I couldn’t. I knew what I put you through and I couldn’t face you. I was too ashamed.”

  “Why don’t you cut the shit and just tell me what happened?”

  “Nothing happened,” she said and smoked. “Nothing.”

  “Something happened,” I said. “You just don’t walk away over nothing.”

  We stared at each other. I nodded slightly at her. She nodded back, looked away and sighed loudly.

  “Promise you won’t make fun of me?” she asked quietly.

  “Yeah!” I said, getting even more frustrated.

  She took a deep breath, then a dra
g on her cigarette and as she exhaled she said, “I woke up late at night about a year ago and realized I’d never have it. I’d never be anything other than your wife. I’d never mean anything to anyone else.”

  “You meant something to me.”

  “Again you miss the point.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “No, just listen to me! I finally realized why I’d get so pissed off and frustrated. Remember how I’d get so mad sometimes?” She paused, then continued, “I realized that I’d never fulfill my dreams and the thing was I never really had any dreams. No real dreams.”

  I understood that, oddly enough.

  “I woke up one day and I realized I was getting older and I’d never done anything with my life. I’d basically sat on my ass and let you take care of me.”

  “I wanted to take care of you.” I sighed and looked at her. “And you helped people. You were always volunteering and you worked! You helped your mother out.”

  Her eyes narrowed at me. “Oh, really?”

  I was so busted. It wouldn’t take her a minute to figure out I had been reading her journals.

  “Anyway, that’s not the point,” she said. “What if something happened to you? Then where would I be?”

  I shook my head. Again, the audacity. But I knew she didn’t mean anything by it. That’s just the way her head worked. I took a breath and said, “If anything happened to me, I had everything taken care of, Sandy. I made the arrangements.”

  The tears were on her face again. “‘The arrangements’? Oh, God!”

  “What did I say?!”

  “Nothing,” she muttered. “Maybe I’m just crazy. I don’t know how to explain it, but every once in a while I would get this urge and it would eat me alive.”

  “What urge?”

  “Haven’t you ever felt the urge just to get in your car and drive? Just drive and not stop? I did. Just go, leave and see what’s out there. I did that and I found myself near Miami and I found Kelsey and she said, ‘Stay as long as you like. I’m not here much.’”

  “I’m still a little fuzzy on the urge thing.”

  She rolled her eyes, put her cigarette out and lit another one. “I can’t explain it. It’s just… I never wanted to leave you. The thought of some other woman having you drove me crazy. But then again, the thought of me never knowing another man like I know you, drove me even crazier.”

  I just stared at her.

  “I’d never sleep with anyone else besides you. No man would ever love me besides you. I panicked.”

  I stared at her. Now she was crying. Her bottom lip trembled as she tried, in vain, not to. She hid it, her pain. She always did.

  “Is this what this is about?” I asked. “You want another man to love you?”

  She shrugged and shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “What about Peter?”

  Her head jerked up. “Excuse me?”

  “I know about Peter.”

  She looked away and threw her cigarette into the ashtray.

  “Yeah, Peter, the guy you fucked for over a year. Poor Peter. I guess he wasn’t good enough.”

  She shook her head and said, “I’m sorry.” Then she burst into tears.

  I stared at her, thinking about her reaction. I didn’t know what to say.

  She turned to me and said, “Peter was a fling. That’s all.”

  “He wanted you to run off with him.”

  “Yes, he did,” she said and wiped her eyes.

  “So why didn’t you? He loved you. He was another man.”

  “Bruce, Peter was great and I won’t lie, but he wasn’t like you. He could have never taken care of me the way you did.”

  “How can I take care of you if you run off?”

  She sighed and shook her head. “We might as well stop here. You don’t understand.”

  “You want this. You want that. You won’t take no for an answer. Oh, I get it, Sandy. But what you don’t get is you hurt people.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I just… I just don’t know what to say other than that.”

  “No, I get it,” I said and I did. She was being eaten up by guilt. That’s all. It showed in her face, her mannerisms. “Did you think I’d never find out about him?”

  She shrugged. “I guess I knew you’d find out eventually. But I didn’t leave because of that. I mean, I did. I felt so bad but… I don’t know. I left because of me, of…” She stopped and took a breath.

  “Why?”

  “Because I never felt good enough for you,” she said.

  That shocked me a little. “Are you serious?”

  She stood and paced a little, then stopped. “I never felt good enough for anything, Bruce. And when I got you and we got married, I felt like I didn’t deserve it. Maybe I was just looking for a way to fuck it up or something. Maybe I just wanted to see if I could make it on my own. It’s obvious I can’t, not really.”

  Self-esteem. She never really had any and she still didn’t. She was so smart and pretty. She was probably the best looking woman in town but she just didn’t see it. Her own beauty couldn’t help her. Neither could her brains.

  “Do you know how much I worried about you?” I asked, staring her dead in the eye. “I was sick. I was sick with worry for you! And for what? To find out you didn’t give a shit about me and you never did!”

  “I did! I do!”

  “Then why didn’t you at least leave a note? One phone call to let me know you was okay.”

  “Because I wanted to leave. No matter how great our life was, there was always this feeling that it was going to end! I couldn’t take it anymore! I had to find out if I could make it on my own, without you!”

  “You could have talked to me! We couldn’t have worked this out!”

  She looked away and muttered, “Whatever. I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

  “I wouldn’t understand?!” I yelled, getting angry. “I wouldn’t understand! How dare you say that to me?!”

  She cringed. I’d backed her into a corner. She muttered, “I just felt so bad, Bruce. I felt like I should be doing something, not just letting you do it all. That’s all.”

  She was too much, too confused. I was getting tired. “Listen, this is bullshit and you know it. I’m just here to get my papers signed. Then I’ll leave you to your fabulous life.”

  She wiped her nose off with the back of hand and said, “I’m sorry I didn’t appreciate what I had more.”

  “Well, I appreciate you saying that,” I said. “I appreciate you recognizing the fact that I was out working like a dog to give you everything so you could hate it! It was never good enough for you!”

  “It was good enough! You don’t understand! I didn’t hate it! You don’t understand!”

  “What! What the fuck don’t I understand!”

  “That’s not what I’m saying! What I’m saying is I had to know! I didn’t know!”

  I was suddenly so angry at her. There are varying degrees of love. Sometimes I felt so much I thought I’d burst. Other times, less, maybe a slight annoyance. Right now I felt none. No love for her. She was just another woman in the world. Another person. Nothing to me. Just someone pissing me off.

  I said, “No, what you’re saying and you can pussyfoot around on this all you like, but what you’re saying is that our life wasn’t good enough for you. What you’re saying is that a simple divorce wouldn’t do. You had to disappear.”

  “I didn’t want a divorce.”

  “What?”

  “I just wanted to try, Bruce. It was stupid, I know, but I thought if we didn’t divorce and I had a little time to make it here, then we could get back together.”

  I stared at her. “That’s the most fucked-up thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “It’s the truth. I knew you’d never let me come here on my own if we were still married and I didn’t really want to lose you.”

  “Then why not leave a note?”

  “I don’t know! I wasn’t
thinking! I just had this vision and I thought once I got here and got settled I’d call and we could talk and then nothing worked out how it was supposed to and I was ashamed! I was so ashamed and I couldn’t stand to hear one more ‘I told you so’ from you.”

  And there she was, ladies and gentlemen, turning it right back around on me. It was somehow all my fault. But then she surprised me.

  “I was stupid. Dumb. I didn’t appreciate what I had and I knew you wouldn’t want me back after I did all this. And I just couldn’t force myself to deal with it. And the longer I waited, the harder it was to call or write. And I couldn’t face you. Knowing I hurt you and knowing how awful I’d been, I couldn’t face you.”

  The house was silent. I could hear the nearby ocean.

  She muttered, “I’ve always loved you and I know you don’t believe me, but I always have.”

  I suddenly felt all the anger drain out of my body and all the love I had for her fill it back up. I knew then and there I’d never stop loving her. She could sign the damned divorce papers and walk out of my life for good, but she’d always be close to me. I was nobody until I met her and she made me somebody. She made me love and I had never loved before her, not really.

  I turned and stared at her. What was it about her? Her? What was so special? Wasn’t she just a woman, another human being? She was so screwed up in so many ways. She had to have things her way. Her way or the highway.

  I couldn’t figure her out and I never would. That’s why I could never stop loving her. She was a mystery. She kept me guessing. Holding on to see what she’d do next. If she had started acting like everyone else once we’d married, I would have been bored with her and we’d probably already have been divorced. She made me think. She made me guess her next move and I’d always, always be wrong. And then she’d laugh at me for trying.

  “I tried every way I knew to get you to see, Bruce,” she mumbled. “I dropped hints, I even asked you once about us separating for a little while. And you just laughed it off, thinking I was joking.”

  She was right. I had. I laughed because she had shocked me with it and I didn’t want to give her any ideas that something like that would be okay with me. I couldn’t believe she’d even brought it up. And when she didn’t mention it again, I made myself forget about it. The thought of her leaving, even then, scared me. I wanted her with me at all times. I was selfish like that.