Crave for Me

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Crave for Me Page 19

by Rayman Black


  When I hit my second mile, thoughts started slowly flowing back in. I remembered Jeff, and the feeling in my chest that used to always be sharp and hard had softened and mellowed and didn’t hurt so much anymore. I was actually looking forward to seeing him at our folks’ house next week, when we gathered for the twice monthly dinner our mom cooked.

  I thought of Katie with a mix of sadness and anticipation. If it had been me, if it had been my parents saying the kinds of things hers did, I thought I might need some time alone to deal with it before I was ready to handle anyone else. I’ll call her today, I thought. I need to see her. For the moment, I set thoughts of her aside. There was nothing I could do yet.

  My thoughts turned to Daniela and her son, Jorge. To the man named Luis who had lived and breathed and died within feet of me. Was she the woman who ran out of the restaurant, screaming when she saw him lying broken on the ground? Where was Jorge when it happened? He must have been small, maybe four or five. Had he been inside, maybe coloring at a table and blissfully unaware of how drastically his life had changed?

  What could I do for them? How could I help them? I turned and headed for home, puzzling over it all the way. By the time I reached my apartment and the shower, I decided to create a GoFundMe page. I could write out my story - our story - and ask for help to support them. I could post it on social media and see what happened. It might not be much, but it would be something, wouldn’t it?

  I got out of the shower eager to get to work. I plugged in my phone and turned it on silent, then got on my computer. It seemed like a good idea to figure out what I wanted to say before I started trying to build a page from it, so I opened my word processing app. I spent the next thirty-six minutes staring at the blinking cursor, writing and rejecting countless opening lines in my mind.

  I got to my feet and paced my apartment. How would I even begin to tell the story of Luis Reyes, of why I was in that alley in the first place, of the responsibility to reach out and help his wife and child? These were things I had only shared with those who were close to me. It was too big, too scary, to think of putting them in public, open to criticism and contempt. It was the Internet, for God’s sake. No matter how great I wrote it, someone was going to be an asshole about it.

  Then I thought of Katie, of her scared but resolute face on the tiny airplane that was taking us to a place to jump out over the Grand Canyon. She had done that for me. Could I not share my story for someone else?

  I returned to my computer and set my fingers on the keyboard. I began to type, starting with who I was and moving in to introducing my cause. I pretended I was telling it to Katie all over again, and I could almost hear her voice saying how natural it was to feel responsibility for others in a situation like this. That it wasn’t my fault, and there wasn’t anything I could do. She was probably right. It was probably time to forgive the scared fourteen year old kid I used to be for not being a superhero and saving the day. But I wasn’t fourteen anymore, and I could do something about it now.

  It took me two hours to write the first draft. I took a break, eating cold pasta from the fridge and mulling over word choices. How could I make it real without also turning it into some sort of ghoulish fairy tale?

  Eventually, I decided simple was best. It still took a long time to get it just right, but once I had, I went to the crowd funding page and started a new campaign. Building the page took some time, but it was pretty decent when I finally finished it. Now I just needed people to see it, to read our story and take action.

  I wasn’t that big into social media, but I had a few accounts on different platforms, so I started there. I had completely lost track of time by this point, but my stomach was reminding me that the pasta I had was a long time ago. I rummaged in my kitchen, unearthing a can of chicken noodle soup and stray package of crackers. I heated the soup in the microwave and broke the crackers into it, taking the bowl back to the computer with me.

  Because I wasn’t very active, it took awhile to figure out how to post on each platform. I looked around for groups of first responders, figuring people like me would click on the story and maybe be moved to help. In between posts I checked my bank account, trying to figure out how much I could donate to my own cause.

  To my surprise, my story seemed to strike a chord with people. I watched the notifications pile up as people reacted and shared and commented. It was dark outside when the first donation came in.

  “Yes!” I yelled, jumping up and pumping my fist into the air. I had to tell Katie. I knew she would share my excitement.

  Shit. Katie. I looked at the clock, noting the late hour. I groaned, closing my eyes. I had completely forgotten to call Katie today. Much more time had passed than I had meant to. I picked up the phone, expecting to see missed calls and texts. Instead, I saw a blank, black screen.

  The battery was dead. I swore aloud, picking it up. The cord fell down and I realized that in my haste to begin my work, I must not have fully seated the plug. I tried again, carefully fitting the phone and cord together. I waited a few moments, then powered up the device. Only a single text came in. It was from Katie.

  Want to talk?

  I wondered how long ago it was that she sent it. Had she been waiting for me to reply all day? I hated the thought of that, hated to idea of her thinking I was ignoring her or didn’t care. I glanced at the clock again and decided against calling her. It was possible she was asleep, and if she was, I didn’t want to wake her. I started tapping out a text reply, telling her about my day and asking her to call me when she got it. When I was almost finished, an incoming text alert popped up. I tapped on it, smiling when I saw it was from Katie. She must have been thinking about me the same time I was thinking about her. My smile faded as I read what she wrote.

  I know why you’ve been avoiding me all day, and I don’t really blame you. I would be having second thoughts about our relationship if I were you, too. I just wanted to say that I’m sorry for what my family did to you. It was wrong of them to make you feel like they did, even if they might have a point about our relationship. Maybe we did make a mistake and we don’t know what we’re doing, and all that we thought we would try was just shadows and moonbeams and Vegas. Maybe this never could have worked in the real world. I think it might be best if we look into that annulment. I’m going to talk to a couple of lawyers. One of them might be in contact with you soon. I really loved our time, Chris.

  I wanted to throw my phone across the room. I wanted to throw my computer, too, and anything else I could land my hands on and heft. Instead, I stood very still and tried to breathe through the ache in my chest. Unbidden, memories of the last time I had allowed a woman access to my heart rose inside me. This time I wasn’t strong enough to push them away.

  I remembered Angela as she had been seven years ago. She was young and pretty and sweet, and we had met through a friend of hers who was dating a friend of mine from high school. We hit it off right away and dated for three years. We never moved in together, but we may as well have. She spent most of her nights at my apartment, partly because she was a college girl who lived on campus and she didn’t get along well with her dorm mate.

  Two months before the end, Angela told me she was pregnant. She was so pale, so calm, as she told me all the reasons why she had decided to have an abortion. I felt sucker punched. Not only was I reeling from the failure of our birth control in the first place, but now she was telling me we weren’t going to have a baby, after all. Like this was just a blip on the radar, soon over and not to be mentioned again.

  I remembered getting angry, demanding to know why I didn’t have a say in what we did, why I wasn’t allowed even a moment to absorb the idea that she and I had created a child. She shook her head and refused to hear me. She had made up her mind and that was it. There were too many things she wanted to do with her life, and having a child at twenty-three wasn’t in her plans. There was no discussion.

  I drove her to the clinic for the appointment she scheduled. I gav
e her the money she needed for the fee. I waited in the parking lot until a volunteer wheeled her out in a wheelchair, and I took her home to my apartment. I held her when she cried and made sure she stayed hydrated. Three days later, she returned to class as if nothing had happened. She tried to return to me the same way.

  But something had changed between us. I hadn’t thought about kids before that, hadn’t considered whether I wanted them or what kind of father I might be. I was too busy learning to be a fireman to think of much else. But now that the chance had been there, and the chance had been lost, without so much as a passing glance to what I felt, I found I actually valued the idea of a family much more highly than I previously expected. I lasted two months before I knew I couldn’t be with her anymore. She seemed to know it, too, because the very day I planned to talk to her about it, I came back to my apartment to find her sitting at the table with a box full of the odds and ends she had left in my place. She left, and we never spoke again.

  When she was gone, I swore to myself that I wouldn’t allow another woman to walk on my heart that way, to disregard me in so fundamental a way. I struggled now with an anger so deep it stunned me to realize it. Was Katie going to be just like Angela? Was she going to decide what was good for us, for me, without the benefit of my input? Was I going to lose another dream?

  23

  Katie

  I found the address Samantha gave me with no problem, but I didn’t see her yet. I went inside and ordered a coffee, taking it out on the patio to wait. I picked one of the small, wrought iron tables by the sidewalk so I could sit in the spring sunshine. It was brisk enough to require my electric blue cardigan, but the sun was warm. It felt good on my face. I closed my eyes and tipped my head back, enjoying the soft breeze on my skin and the rich scent of coffee it carried.

  “Should I come back later?” I heard my sister ask. “I would hate to interrupt your nap.”

  I opened my eyes and saw my older sister smiling at me. It startled me how much we looked alike, with our fair skin and green eyes. We shared the same cheekbones, the same thin nose. She wore her hair in a golden blonde now, and she had some new lines around her eyes that hadn’t been there before. Other than that, she looked just like I remembered.

  “Holy shit,” I said, rising to my feet to embrace her. “It’s like looking into a mirror. I’ve been so busy staring at Terri these last three years, I forgot what it was like to look at you.”

  As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wished I could take them back. I felt awkward, like I had trampled some unwritten rule. I watched her face. Would she be upset at my blithe reference to her exile?

  To my surprise, she just laughed, taking the chair next to mine. “Yeah, Terri definitely takes after Dad’s side of the family more than we do, doesn’t she? God, it’s good to see you.”

  I breathed a sigh and smiled at her. “It’s good to see you, Samantha. You look good.” I studied her face. “You look happy.”

  “Maybe because I am happy,” she said. “It’s a good thing. You should try it.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, I’ll get right on that,” I said. We slipped right back into bantering, like no time had passed. And yet there was the unspoken weight of her marriage and our fractured family sitting between us, keeping us strangers with a shared history.

  Quiet fell between us, charged with everything unsaid. I drank my coffee, then sat with the cup in my hands, turning it around and around. This was getting ridiculous. Three years of silence already, and we were really just going to sit here and not speak?

  I took a deep breath. “It’s awkward, right? Because you married Mike and pissed off Dad, and no one else was allowed to talk to you. Only I should have talked to you, anyway, because you’re my sister. I’m sorry. No, don’t interrupt. I am sorry, and I should be sorry. But we’re here now, after all this time, and I don’t want us to just chit chat and be polite to one another. I can’t think of anything more dreadful.”

  Samantha laid a hand on mine, cutting off my flow of words. “You don’t have to be sorry,” she said quietly. “I know how Dad can be, and I know that you didn’t have a lot of choice in it. It’s his own fault that he wouldn’t - and won’t - see how wrong he is. Mike would never steal from -”

  “I don’t want to talk about Dad,” I cut in. “Please. Or I guess we can talk about him later, but for now I just want to hear about you. What have you been doing for three years? What is your life like? Tell me everything.”

  She laughed. “There isn’t really a lot to tell,” she said. “I got married, but you already knew that part. We went to France for our honeymoon, and oh, Katie, it’s so beautiful there!” She talked animatedly about their two week vacation in the south of France, touring vineyards and spending time at the sea. Her eyes sparkled when she talked, and she waved her hands to emphasize her words.

  I watched her speak, watched her sparkle, and I marveled. My sister had always been sure of herself, but I could see that her confidence had grown in the last three years. She had grown into herself, become comfortable in her own skin in a way she hadn’t been before. Was that simply a part of getting older and gaining more experience, or did her marriage to Mike have an influence on her?

  “Anyway, we’ve been so busy almost since we got back that we haven’t had another vacation since, but we’re planning a trip to Alaska in a couple of months. Two weeks hiking and camping in the wilderness doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to me, but Mike’s had his heart set on doing this kind of thing since he was a kid, so I’m organizing it for our anniversary. The tour company I talked to said they try to make it as comfortable as possible.” She grinned. “Do you think that means they’ll bring a portable bathtub?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “And you can have the primitive delight of heating your own water by the bucketful for it. What have you been so busy with?”

  Samantha looked uncomfortable, but she answered, “Mike and I started our own flooring company in Worcester,” she said. She raised her chin slightly. “It’s been his career for twenty years, and I knew a lot about the paperwork side from helping Dad. We’ve got six employees now, and enough work that I can take my husband away for a couple of weeks of roughing it without worrying about the mortgage when we get back. We’re doing well.”

  It was my turn to lay a supportive hand on hers. “You don’t owe me an explanation,” I told her. “I’m glad you’re doing well, and I’m happy for you. And for Mike,” I added belatedly.

  Samantha narrowed her eyes. “I tried to tell you before, and I’m going to tell you again now. And I swear to God, Katie, someone in this family is going to listen to me.” She fixed her eyes on me and spoke slowly, enunciating each word clearly. “Mike did not take that money from Dad. He didn’t even know the money was missing until no one from my family showed up for the wedding. We’ve tried to talk to Dad about it, but he won’t listen. Well, you know how he gets, he makes up his mind and there’s no talking to him, but we tried, anyway.” She let out a bitter laugh. “But it was like everyone turned their backs on us. On me.” She was quiet for a moment, remembering. Then she shook her head and smiled at me. “But that’s not the point. The point is, Mike had nothing to do with that money going missing. We think it was that guy Dad hired a couple weeks before, remember him? He left right before the wedding. In all the confusion that last week, it would have been easy to pick up a deposit bag and just walk away. You know how Dad never locked the office door.”

  I sat back, shocked by her revelation. I thought it over, sipping my coffee just for something to do. It made sense, what she said. I did remember the guy she was talking about. He had been very quiet, the kind of guy who kept to himself and didn’t volunteer information. It wasn’t unusual for guys to come and go with little or no warning. My dad paid his workers well and treated them fairly, but laying flooring was still very physical work and there was a high turnover. It was also true that my father was notoriously leaving the door to the office unlocked, eve
n when he had been paid a large amount of cash for a job.

  “But why would Dad blame Mike?” I asked. “That’s the part that doesn’t make sense to me.”

  Samantha blushed and wouldn’t meet my eyes when she said, “I think that might have had something to do with him walking in on me and Mike having sex in the basement a week before we got married.”

  “Samantha!” I said, truly shocked. It would never occur to me to do anything remotely sexy at our parents’ house.

  “Oh, don’t be a prude,” she said, laughing at me. “No one was supposed to be home, and I had already moved out of my apartment, remember? Most of my stuff was already at Mike’s house, but Mom thought it was breaking tradition for me to live there before the wedding.” She waved her hand, dismissing it. “Anyway, we weren’t quiet about it, and, well -” She looked at me with a shameless grin. “I like talking dirty.”

  I laughed and closed my eyes. “Oh, God, and Dad walked in?”

  Samantha nodded. “Yeah, it was embarrassing for all of us. But I didn’t know it would be enough to make Dad decide Mike was a thief and a liar, or that cutting me out of the family for marrying him was a good idea.”

  I nodded, bitterly sympathetic. “It doesn’t seem like he’s changed his mind too much,” I said. “I don’t mean about you. I mean about me. He’s decided I don’t know what I’m doing, either. Who knows? Maybe he’s right.”

  Samantha held up a hand. “Hold on. What are you talking about?”

  I sighed. “Listen, you can’t freak out, okay? I’ve had more than enough of that kind of thing lately.” I waited until she nodded her agreement. “I got married in Las Vegas on Friday.”

  “Wait, this past Friday? You’re kidding.” She sat back, clearly surprised.

  “Yeah, this past Friday. No, I’m not kidding. And to be honest, Samantha, despite what everyone seems to immediately think, I don’t think it was all that crazy.”

 

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