by Beth Flynn
"Because my sister does," he told her. "She asked me to make it for her a few years ago. I thought she was going to take it with her and I found it hanging there after she left." After a moment of hesitation, he asked, "Do you?" A few seconds passed. "Believe in God?"
She looked down at her feet, answering without looking at him, "I haven't believed in God for a long time." She could discount her prayer at the Glades Motel since she was convinced that Anthony had saved her. Not God. At least that’s what her bruised and bitter heart told her.
"Do you like it?" he asked, breaking into her thoughts.
She thought his voice sounded hopeful. Like he wanted her to like it. Needed her to like it.
“Very much,” she answered honestly. “You said your sister asked you to make it. I saw something similar in the living room, but I think I like this one better.”
The dimple was back, deeper than she thought possible.
“C’mon,” he told her. “I’ll show you my shop.” He led her outside.
An hour later they were back in the house. The storm had knocked out the power, and they were settled on his couch surrounded by candles. Anthony could’ve flipped a switch to the backup generator but chose the quiet and serene ambiance of candlelight instead. He had his long legs stretched out on the coffee table with Christy nestled into his side. For a split second, he let himself think about the woman who’d tried to have moments like this with him. Veronique. She was the only reason he had candles in his home. She’d shown up with them along with romantic notions of long, luxurious bubble baths, dinner by candlelight and beds covered in rose petals. He thought it was nonsense and the idea of spending any time with Veronique that wasn’t steeped in basic, guttural sex, didn’t appeal to him. Not even a little. And even that was no longer appealing.
“Why do you hate Van so much?” Anthony blurted out.
Up until now, their conversation had been lighthearted and casual. They discussed world events, politics, music, and even favorite television shows. They’d both steered clear of anything too personal. But Anthony decided that he wanted to know everything about Christy Chapman. And Van seemed like a good place to start. After all, he was the reason they were together now.
She pulled back and looked up at him. “Why did you hate me so much?”
“Touché,” he replied, nodding. “You go first.”
“I didn’t always hate Van. I never loved him, but I didn’t hate him either. He wasn’t what you’d expect of a traditional father. I’m not sure that I even know what that would be, but I’m certain it wasn’t what Richard and I got from Van and Vivian.”
“Have you always called them by their first names?” he questioned. He grasped her observation about not understanding the definition of traditional parenting. He’d only caught a glimpse of it for the two years he’d lived with his Uncle Robert, and Aunt Carolyn. And with Aunt Carolyn’s waning health he wasn’t sure if how they lived was considered normal, but it was the closest he’d ever seen.
“No. I called them Mom and Dad until I was about twelve. But even then, Litzy was more of a parent to me than either one of them. Van was always gone, and Vivian was always absent.”
“What’s the difference?” he interrupted.
“I rarely if ever saw Van. The most I ever spent with him at one time would be the obligatory family vacation and it usually involved business. Believe it or not I have some happy memories of those few trips. It was a rare opportunity to pretend we were normal. Anyway, we always vacationed with another family that Van knew through his business connections. As far as Vivian being absent, I mean emotionally as well as physically. She stayed locked in her room for days and only let the servants in to restock her private bar and deliver her prescription drugs.”
“You didn’t answer my original question,” he said, cocking his head to one side. “When did they stop being Mom and Dad?”
She stiffened as she tucked her legs beneath her and sat up straighter. “We were on a cruise. The last vacation we ever took as a family.” She looked away, unable to meet Anthony’s eyes. “We were there with another family. They had a seventeen-year-old daughter. I remember admiring her and trying to impress her. She was five years older than me, but seemed so mature and worldly. I wanted to be just like her. Richard was about nineteen, and he only showed up because Van insisted. We had to put on a show for the other family that Van was trying to impress.”
She exhaled loudly and said, “To make a long story short, I spilled something all over myself and ran back to the cabin to change, and I walked in on Van. He was having sex with the daughter of his prospective business associate.”
“Raping her?” Anthony asked, his face a scowl.
“No. He wasn’t forcing himself on her at all. She was on top of him, completely nude with her eyes closed. Of course, I was young enough to think that the look I saw on her face was pain, but I guessed it wasn’t. She was enjoying it, and when she opened her eyes and met mine, she said something nasty to me.”
Anthony nodded in understanding.
“I was shattered and I remember having an instant longing for my mother. I suddenly understood Vivian’s pain, and I wanted to reach out and tell her I got it and that I could forgive her for neglecting me. I fantasized she would cry and hold me tightly and tell me how sorry she was for burying her heartache beneath the drugs and alcohol. As I looked for her on the ship, I had visions of them divorcing, and Vivian, Litzy and me living together in our own house without Van. Richard had already moved out and was blowing through the last trust allotment he would ever get. It would be just the three of us living happily ever after.”
“Did you tell her?” he asked, quietly.
“Yes,” Christy replied, her voice even. “I found her in the nail salon. I patiently waited for her to finish and when we were in the hallway, I hemmed and hawed at first but finally blurted out what I’d seen. I waited for the tears, the embrace, the coming together of our souls.” Her voice was bitter. “But what I got was a reprimand for not knocking before I went in to the cabin and that I better keep what I saw to myself. The business deal was important to Van and Bobbi Bowen.”
“She knew and she didn’t care,” Anthony said. It was a statement, not a question.
“Yes, she knew and I figured out later that she was relieved that Van had a…” She paused looking for the right word. “A hobby,” she sneered.
"So, Van is into young girls?" Anthony asked.
"Not necessarily." She shook her head. "There have been a few whose parents he had to buy off, but it's because they were convenient. It's not like he purposely sought them out. But if they were within arm’s reach, he'd definitely go for it. I know Litzy had to keep him at bay for years. He was still chasing after her when she was in her late twenties, early thirties."
“I’m sorry,” he said as he pulled her close and kissed the top of her head. And he realized he meant it.
“Your turn,” she said without looking at him. “Why did you instantly hate me? And don’t tell me you didn’t,” she scolded as she sat back to look at him.
He gave her a sheepish grin. She reached out and took a long strand of his hair in her hands. She absentmindedly started braiding it as he spoke. He told her about his childhood. The nomadic life he’d lived with his parents and how they wandered from state to state. About his father never holding a job for long, and when he did, he usually messed it up by getting drunk and ruining things with his employer. He shared how his father taught him everything there was to know about cars and how even before his mother had died, he’d become an expert thief.
She listened as he gave sad details about his life before his mother and eventually his father died. How he ultimately went to live with his aunt and uncle, meeting his sister, and his final decision to leave his only family and head for South Florida.
“But your sister,” she interrupted. “You’d just found out Nisha was your sister and you still left. Weren’t you worried about her?” she aske
d, her blue eyes wide.
“I wasn’t worried about her. My sister is a fighter, and I saw that in the two years I spent on the reservation. Besides, I knew I would eventually find my way back to her.” He paused and lifted her chin with one finger. “She’s a survivor. Like you.”
“Sometimes we don’t have a choice,” she told him as she fiddled with his braid, not meeting his eyes. “Life has sharp hooks and it will rip you to pieces if you let it.” She looked quickly back at him and added, “You haven’t answered my question yet.”
“Ah…yeah. Why did I hate you? Let’s just say that you epitomized almost every upper-class, snobby, wealthy woman of privilege I’d ever met.”
“White women?” she asked.
“Yeah, I hadn’t met many, if any, wealthy women with dark skin.”
“They were that awful?” she asked, her tone mildly curious.
He explained how he’d found work on a landscape crew when he arrived in Miami and they only catered to the wealthy. He observed as they neglected their children, cheated on their husbands, popped their pills, and flaunted their wealth and their privilege.
She tilted her head sideways. “There has got to be more to this than you observing some spoiled wives from afar.”
“Yeah, I guess there is.”
She waited expectantly.
“I was seduced by more than one woman. I don’t know if my young age or skin color was a novelty, but it didn’t matter. I was a horny kid. I would be asked inside to kill a bug or some other stupid excuse.” He laughed, but it held no humor. “It eventually became more than killing a bug.”
“And?”
“And it happened more often than you’d think,” he replied blandly.
“Seems like every young guy’s dream,” she said, her voice not accusatory, but questioning.
“It was, Christy, but I realized that it also made me feel important. You’d have to understand how some of the people my father worked for treated us before you could even begin to understand how I felt validated by the way some of these women acted toward me. I had something they wanted, and a few of them made me think they cared about me. That I was special to them.”
“Until?” she asked, fearing the answer.
“Until I found out that it was all a game and the woman with the most points won.”
She shook her head, not understanding.
“They were playing me. There were three of them, all friends in the same neighborhood, all inviting me to their beds. And they were keeping track of every little thing. Racking up points for how many times they made me come or how many times I made them come. They’d lose points if I didn’t go down on them. Got extra points if they got me to shower with them.”
“And you did all this while you were supposed to be mowing their lawn?” she asked. “Didn’t the other guys know you were, um…missing?”
“No. Because it went beyond when I was working at their homes. They would tell me when they would have the house to themselves or what hotel to meet them at and what time. They made sure I had extra money in my pocket for cab fare for our secret meetings.”
“So what, Anthony? They used you. I get it, but so what? You hated me because some stupid rich women used you?” She couldn’t help the incredulous tone of her voice.
He stared at her hard. “You’re right. Getting laid on a regular basis shouldn’t have been a tough pill to swallow, especially for a teenager who dreamed about sex day and night. And when I found out, I didn’t care all that much. I convinced myself that I was the one doing all the using. I reveled in it and figured I could play the game until a new novelty came along for them.”
“Then why the anger and hatred if you turned the tables emotionally?” Christy asked.
“I started hating them when I realized that when they did happen to see me working at their houses, they acted like they didn’t know me. The anger built slowly and was sealed when one of them treated me rudely in front of her daughter. I’d been in her bed the day before and I was mowing her lawn the next. Her teenage daughter had friends out by the pool and one of them offered me a cold soda. The woman walked outside and told me the water hose was on the side of the house if I wanted a drink. I guess I thought I heard her wrong because I took the soda that was offered. She gave me a disgusted look and pointed toward the hose bib and said, ‘It’s right there, boy.’ She knocked the drink out of my hand and walked back into the house.”
He laughed bitterly. "About a week later, I was working at a house and the same woman happened to be at a pool party next door. The woman whose home I was at was goaded into making a spectacle of me, and the woman who I'd been sleeping with, Fran Burlingame, joined in. I'd turned her down after the soda incident so she jumped on board to try and humiliate me."
"Burlingame. I know that name," Christy told him. "If it's the family I'm thinking of, a grandfather or great grandfather patented some kind of medical device. I can't remember."
"I don't know where her wealth came from. Only that she didn't earn it or deserve it," Anthony replied hastily.
Christy nodded knowingly. “You could get past being used because you felt you were using them too, but you couldn’t get past the lack of respect. They couldn’t even call you Anthony. They called you boy.” Christy’s eyes looked sad.
“Yeah. I never really thought about why before, but that’s exactly what it was and after that, I started looking for it. And I found it more than you’d think. I obviously didn’t sleep with every woman, white or otherwise, that came along, but I watched. I observed and often I was looked down on because of my race. I was certain you were looking at me that way the day you saw me in your driveway.”
“But you were wrong, Anthony. I wasn’t looking down on you. You made me nervous and I guess I was trying to be brave, but I can see why you thought it might’ve been something else.”
She was looking at his chin, and slowly raised her eyes to meet his.
He saw the sincerity in them and said, “And you don’t know how glad I am that I was wrong about you, Owani.”
She scrunched up her face. “Owani?”
“You asked me not to call you Princess, so I’m calling you Owani,” he told her.
“Is it a Cherokee word?” she asked dreamily.
“No. It’s not even a real word,” he laughed. “When we were kids my sister invented a game. She made a board with tokens and everything. She didn’t have any friends before I came along and so she found comfort in the fantasy world she created. Owani is one of the words she made up.”
Christy’s eyes widened. “Does it mean princess?” she asked.
“No,” he answered.
She rolled her eyes but not in a disrespectful way. She was being playful. “Let me guess. It’s a fantasy world and there are usually witches, goblins, dragons and ogres in fantasy worlds. Which one am I?”
“I’ll tell you another time,” he teased. “Owani.”
She smiled and he pulled her in for a kiss when a sharp crack of lightning caused her to jump.
“Where in the world do we go from here?” she asked, pulling back and looking at him. She looked concerned.
An heiress and a criminal, he thought. Not exactly a match made in heaven and by normal standards, one that could only end in doom.
“Let’s worry about it tomorrow,” he said as he pulled her close. She laid her head on his chest and felt the weight of his chin as it rested on her temple.
They both languished in the warmth of each other’s touch, secretly thinking about how their worlds intersected and how long it would be before something or someone tried to rip them apart. The unspoken concern hung in the air, and they both knew the answer. It would only be a matter of time.
Chapter Twenty-One
Naples, Florida 1978
Several more days passed before they finally discovered Van and Vivian’s whereabouts. During that time, they lived a rather normal existence in Anthony’s home. Christy was surprised when he gave her a complet
e tour of the house, including his hidden safe room. He’d left her alone a few times while he checked on his businesses and the camp. He told her that he expected her to go straight to the hidden room if anyone approached the house. No exceptions. She was to lock herself in and page him. So far, she hadn’t needed to use the room. Nobody showed up the few times he’d left. And she was beyond excited when he returned from one of his excursions with art supplies. During one of their many conversations, she casually mentioned that she found comfort in painting. She admitted to not being very good since she hadn't painted in years, but Litzy had once suggested she give it a try. Christy found that painting helped her cope with her insecurities. Anthony didn’t press her about her fears. He knew she was afraid of thunderstorms and he didn’t pry further.
They fell into a comfortable routine. She spent a lot of her time on the phone, still trying to locate Van and Vivian. Anthony had shown her the safe where he kept the spare phones, and she used the untraceable line more than once to check in with Detective Cochran. She found out that the police couldn’t substantiate the threats to her family, and Nadine and her children were back in their home.
“I can’t say the same for you, Christy,” the detective had told her. “Apparently, your brother and his estranged family don’t appear to hold any interest, but when we questioned the men that are looking for Van, they expressed curiosity about you.”
“So, you’ve identified the people who are looking for Van?” she asked, pretending not to know the answer already. The day after the hurricane threat, X had informed Anthony that Van owed money to two other men. One was a big-time shark with some serious thugs on his payroll who hid behind his pawn shops and meted out loans from the back room. The other one was a bit more serious. A bookie who’d fronted Van a considerable amount of money. He was the one who'd set up the wiretap on the phone at her apartment. X still hadn’t been able to link the two men in business suits who, according to Christy’s landlord, had shown up at her apartment—possibly the same two men who’d shown up when Lourdes was cleaning, claiming to work for Van.