Double Trouble

by Selena Kitt

  It was only when we were in the kitchen, in the full, stark fluorescent light, that I saw her face and had to keep myself from gasping out loud. She’d clearly once been an exceptionally beautiful woman, but she’d been severely burned. One side of her face was scarred, and her right eye stared at nothing. It was glass.

  “It’s nice… nice to meet you.” I sat at the chair on the opposite side of the table, kicking myself for my perfunctory greeting. She was going to think I was an idiot. Or that I was an awkward gawker. And I didn’t want to be either. She just studied me through a haze of blue smoke with that one good eye. And I babbled. Like an idiot. “I’m Rob’s… girlfriend. I don’t know if Sarah told you? I’m here to pick her up to take her to the hospital to see Tyler. Do you know… did she tell you what happened?”

  The woman nodded, letting her cigarette rest in the ashtray, still not saying anything.

  “My best friend, Katie, she’s… she lives with Tyler. They’re together. She’s just devastated. He was doing so well, and then… well… it was my fault really. I was the one who went to see Catherine. I thought… it was a big misunderstanding, it turns out. I overheard Rob talking to his assistant about someone getting out of jail, and I just assumed it was Catherine. Turns out it was… um…”

  Oh my God, I was a blathering idiot. Shut up, I told myself, but my mouth wouldn’t seem to stop moving.

  “Anyway, I went to see her, and I guess it just triggered things for her. She must have leaked it to the Enquirer. And then, this morning… did you see the news? They say she killed herself.”

  This last seemed to surprise the woman. Her eyebrows raised as she stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray.

  “Good riddance.” She blew a last plume of smoke out of the side of her mouth. “That girl was always bad news.”

  Maybe we’d found something in common? Although it was a rather morbid connection. Still, I went with it, since it was the only thing she’d responded to so far.

  “She shot me.” I pulled my blouse aside to show her the scar, only partially covered by Esther’s handprint. “And we… I lost a baby. Rob’s baby. We named her Esther.”

  “Esther?” She repeated my daughter’s name, wrinkling her nose in distaste and I almost laughed. Esther had started out as a joke name between us, but it had somehow grown on me. And Rob. And we hadn’t had much time to change our minds, because it had all happened so fast.

  “Anyway, they say Tyler’s out of the woods now.” I changed the subject. Talking about Esther still made me cry and I didn’t want to cry in front of her. “Rob is going to get him into rehab. He’d been clean for a long time before this relapse.”

  “It won’t be the first time.” She snorted, tapping the end of her pack of Marlboros on the table. “Heroin’s hell to kick.”

  “He’ll have the best care available.”

  “I’m sure he will.” She took a long look at my Donna Karin outfit, the gold and diamond pendant Rob had given me around my neck.

  “Are you coming with us?” I blurted. “To the hospital?”

  “I doubt I’d be very welcomed.” She smirked. Tap tap tap. She packed the Marlboros down on the table.

  “Sometimes it’s the worst things that bring people together,” I said, knowing I sounded incredibly Pollyanna. “Family is family, after all.”

  “I don’t know what kind of family you were raised in, sweetheart.” She gave me a long, quelling look. “But mine didn’t care if I lived or died.”

  “That explains a lot.” It was out of my mouth before I could even think. I sat back in my chair, too stunned to say anything else, but the woman laughed. She actually laughed.

  “I suppose it does.” It was the first time she’d looked at me with any real emotion in her eyes. “Look, I haven’t seen my sons in years. My daughter…” She glanced at the hallway. I heard the shower turn off. “She’s been very kind. And I’m grateful.”

  “She loves you,” I said softly, remembering how angry Sarah had been about Rob’s deception, how she’d taken the initiative, extending a hand out to the woman who had given birth to her. “And I think the boys do too. How could they not love their mother?”

  “I didn’t love mine.” She put the pack of cigarettes down on the table. “She started selling me for crack when I was twelve.”

  What could I say to that? The more I listened to her, the more it occurred to me that Rob pulling himself up from the hellhole he’d been born into was an even greater feat than I’d realized.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said quietly.

  “I don’t want your pity.” Her eyes were hard, cold. But maybe they had to be. I remembered what Jimmy Voss had said about getting hurt—you either run away to lick your wounds or you lash out. Maybe there was a point when you’d experienced so much pain in your life, you started to lash out before anyone could hurt you first.

  “Do you love them?” I couldn’t imagine not loving your child. My parents loved me—maybe a little too much sometimes. And when I thought of Esther, how much love I had for her, this tiny little person I didn’t even know, someone whose eyes I would never even look into, the feeling was so overwhelming it was hard to contain. How could you not love your child?

  “Of course, I do,” she snapped, eyes flashing. I’d struck a nerve. She even softened a little bit as she went on. “I always have. I did… I did the best I knew how to do. I was… I’m sorry for what happened. And some day, maybe I’ll get the chance to tell them that.”

  So, there was a human being in there, I thought, looking at the way she dropped her gaze to the table, her voice falling off a little at the end.

  “It was an accident,” I reminded her. Had she really said all those awful things afterward? I tried to imagine it, holding Rob’s bleeding, broken head as he died in my lap. Would I have blamed the person who shot him, even if it had been my own child? “Rob didn’t mean to pull the trigger.”

  “Is that what he told you?” Leanne frowned, eyes narrowing at me.

  “Rob didn’t mean to do it,” I assured her. “He was just afraid. He thought he was protecting you.”

  “I know what the paper said.” She shook her head, tapping another cigarette out of the pack. “But Rob didn’t shoot Joe. Tyler did.”

  “Joe?” I said the name, remembering it from the article. Joseph was the name of Rob’s father.

  “And that poor excuse for a man wasn’t their father,” she went on, pulling a small blue Bic lighter out of her robe pocket. “All three of my children were Dante’s.”

  “I don’t… I don’t understand.” Nothing made sense.

  I felt like I was trying to stumble through a labyrinth at midnight. Rob had admitted to shooting his father. And Catherine—she had said so to the papers. I tried to remember what she’d said to me during our meeting. Certainly, she’d implied that it was Rob, even if she hadn’t said it directly? I couldn’t remember, not for sure.

  Rob didn’t shoot Joe, Tyler did.

  Tyler. Tyler, who had overdosed after seeing the Enquirer headline. My God. Could it be?

  “It was Catherine who started the whole thing.” Leanne lit her cigarette, the tip glowing orange as she took a long drag.

  “Catherine?” My head felt like it was going to explode.

  “She was Joe’s favorite.” The smile that spread over her face was full of contempt. “He used her for all his parties. She was the perfect little whore. Young and tight—but far cleverer than he gave her credit for. She looked innocent, but she could manipulate a man off a cliff if she wanted to.”

  “Are you telling me… Catherine was… a prostitute?” I whispered.

  Rob had told me his father “liked them young” and had a “stable of girls.” Had Catherine been one of those? Is that why she’d kept the secret for so long? And then a realization hit me like a bucket of ice water. If Catherine had been the one to finally break her silence and spill the story to the papers, it explained her suicide. She didn’t want to live with the knowle
dge of the whole world knowing that she’d been a child prostitute, and if anyone dug deeply enough, they were bound to uncover that fact.

  It was the first time, I think, I had any sincere sympathy for Catherine.

  “She was fifteen by then,” Leanne told me, like she knew what I’d been thinking.

  Fifteen, my God. Just fifteen years old. Had Rob known her then? Of course, he had. Of course. Everything Celeste told me about Rob’s “puppy love” for Catherine made so much sense now. She’d been fifteen. He’d been just twelve.

  “Anyway, she told Joe she was out. She wasn’t going to do it anymore.” Leanne blew smoke out of the side of her mouth. “Said she was leaving, moving out of state with her boyfriend. So, Joe, he decided to lay into me. Said he had a big drug party coming up, lots of new clients. She was a favorite. Truth was, she was his favorite.”

  The woman sneered, a look of disgust on her face. If she had been so sickened by her husband’s proclivities, why hadn’t she stopped him? Reported it? But then I remembered what Rob had said about her addiction. That kind of a monkey wasn’t easy to kick for anyone, and for a woman in her position, she must have felt trapped. Helpless, not only to her own addiction, but to her husband’s as well. Her husband’s addiction to young girls.

  “He wanted me to put pressure on her. But I refused.” Leanne leaned against the table, her gaze on it, not me. So, this woman had stood up to him. She’d wanted Catherine to go, to get out of that life. Maybe, in the end, Rob’s mother had done the right thing.

  “Is that what you and Joe were fighting about?” I asked quietly.

  Rob had said they’d been arguing. I wondered if he’d known they were fighting about Catherine. Had he kept that from me too? That cloak of betrayal was falling over me again. I’d come home to him, opened my heart again, and instead of telling me the truth, he’d lied. Again. He’d lied. And who had he been protecting?

  Catherine?

  “I should have just done what he wanted.” She shrugged, tapping ash into the tray. “But Rob… he had such a crush on her. And God knows, if the girl had a way out, I wanted her to take it. I told her so. Instead of telling her to stay, I told her to go.”

  Rob had such a crush on her.

  So, it was Catherine after all, I realized, with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Rob said he’d known her a long time. He’d known her then. Had he looked for her, too, when he took up the search for his brother and sister? Of course, he had. And he’d been quite successful, because Rob always got what he wanted. He’d found her, and he’d married her.

  I heard Sarah going down the hall to her bedroom. I didn’t call out to her, even to say “hi” or let her know I was there. I couldn’t take my attention off Leanne. She was finally telling me the truth—the full truth, and nothing but—and I wanted to hear it all.

  “She was there?” The realization suddenly rocked me. Leanne’s words had finally reached through to my muddled brain. “When the shooting happened? Catherine was there?”

  Leanne leveled her gaze at me, smoke rising in a plume from the cigarette in her hand.

  “She was the one who gave Tyler the gun.”

  Lies. All lies. Again, Rob had lied, not telling me Catherine had been there, not telling me it was Tyler who had pulled the trigger. Even with me, Rob was still protecting the people he loved.

  My God, did he still love Catherine?

  “What happened?” I barely got the words out.

  “Joe waved his gun around, made all sorts of threats. Nothing new.” She shrugged. “He put it on the kitchen table. We were fighting. I was standing at the sink.”

  “Catherine was sitting at the table. She grabbed the gun.” Her eyes glazed with memory. “I saw it out of the corner of my eye.”

  I heard Sarah’s blow dryer, faint, like it was in another world.

  “I was going to warn him, but by then, he was choking me.” She smiled. She actually smiled. “He wouldn’t have killed me. We fought a lot. The boys were yelling at us to stop. Sarah was crying, hiding in the space between the fridge and the wall. That’s where she always went when we fought.”

  I imagined it, little Sarah crouching in the corner out of fear, the turmoil of the boys fighting, and Catherine… what had she been doing?

  “Catherine handed Tyler the gun.” Leanne answered my question. “He was ten years old. She handed Tyler the gun told him to shoot Joe in the head.”

  “Just like that?” I choked. “And he did it?”

  “No.” Another smile cut through her face like a knife, a twisted, scornful thing. “She screamed at him. ‘Shoot him, Tyler! He’s going to kill your mother! Shoot him now!’ So, he did.”

  Leanne’s voice rose, mimicking that of a young, panicked girl, inciting someone to action. Catherine could manipulate a man off a cliff…

  She had certainly manipulated ten-year-old Tyler right off of one.

  “Oh my God,” I whispered. “So, Tyler killed their father?”

  “I told you, Joe wasn’t their father.” She grimaced. “Joe liked them young, blonde and innocent-looking. Catherine was his thing, not me.”

  “Wait… what? What are you saying?” I knew she’d said it earlier, but it was too much information, too fast. I couldn’t contain and incorporate it all. “Rob, Tyler… Sarah? None of them were his?”

  “Joe knew it.” She shrugged. “Joe only married me for cover.”

  “Cover?” I whispered.

  “For his… appetites.” She looked at me like I was an idiot, and I felt like one. “It was a marriage made in heaven. He didn’t want to sleep with me and I didn’t want to sleep with him. And he had plenty of money and could take care of me and my children.”

  “And he had the drugs,” I reminded her, unable to keep the sarcasm from my voice.

  “Yes, those too.” She didn’t look ashamed of it. In fact, she looked amused. “Like I said, a marriage made in heaven. And Joe didn’t care that I was sleeping with Dante.”

  “Who was Dante?” I remembered, she’d said the name before in our conversation. It felt like a million years ago.

  “Dante was their father.” Again, she gave me that look like I was dense. Maybe I was. I hadn’t put two and two together until then. “Dante Marotta.”

  She waited, on purpose, watching my face. She waited for me to do the math in my head, but I didn’t have to. It was an election year. I’d just seen his name in the paper. Right next to Catherine’s, but it had been a different article. I remembered the picture of a big, swarthy Italian wearing a suit and a smile.

  “Dante Marotta—the state prosecutor?” I asked, incredulous.

  “He is now.” She gave a short laugh. “Back then he was just a dealer and head of the prostitution ring Joe ran for him.”

  I sat there in stunned silence, watching her smoke her cigarette, remembering Rob telling me about a big, scary looking Italian, a man rumored to have mafia connections who used to come to their house. A man they were all afraid of. Everyone except his mother. In fact, Rob had said, “I kind of think she was in love with him…”

  Did her children know that Dante Marotta was their real father? Is that why Rob had lied—was he afraid of the repercussions if the truth ever surfaced? I had a million questions running through my mind, but I didn’t ask her any of them. I couldn’t handle any more truth and I knew it. I think she knew it too, because she didn’t say anything else.

  “Hey, Sabrina.” Sarah came into the kitchen, smiling at me.

  “Hi, Sarah.” I glanced up, feeling dazed, surprised I could still speak. “You ready?”

  “Yep.” She slung her purse over her shoulder. “I see you met Mom.”

  “Yes, we were just chatting,” Leanne said, giving me a grim smile. Did Sarah know what her mother had just told me? Did anyone else know it? Why had she told me? But I didn’t ask any of those questions. I was afraid of the answers.

  “How’s Katie?” Sarah asked, slipping on her shoes.

  “She was
on her way to see him when I left,” I told her. I’d almost forgotten why I was there, that we were on our way to see Tyler at the hospital.

  “Okay, let’s go,” Sarah announced, heading toward the door. I stood, following her, still not quite sure that I wasn’t dreaming.

  “Bye, Mom!” Sarah called from the door. “Don’t forget, I left a casserole in the fridge for you.”

  “Thanks.” Leanne smiled and waved at us, one hand, open and closing her fist like a child. “Hey… will you tell him…?”

  Sarah hesitated, waiting, the door propped open, waiting for her to finish her sentence.

  “Never mind,” Leanne replied, waving us out as she stabbed her cigarette violently into the ashtray. “Go on.”

  “Bye, Mom,” Sarah said softly, closing the door behind us.

  I looked at Sarah and realized she didn’t know. Rob had protected her from the truth, just like he’d been protecting me. He’d been protecting Tyler when he took the rap for killing Joe. He’d been protecting both of his siblings when he’d kept the truth from me. Even now, he was still trying to protect them. To protect me.

  But I had a feeling he couldn’t protect any of us anymore.

  Chapter Ten

  Tyler was gone by the time we got to the hospital. Sarah and I stood there, aghast, both of us grabbing our phones at the same time, but I already had a text from Katie. I saw her name pop up when I took my phone out of my pocket. Her text made me gasp out loud.

  Tyler checked out AMA. Going home to see if he’s there.

  “He checked out AMA,” I whispered to Sarah as we got onto the elevator. The nurses were all staring at us and now I knew why they’d been so short when I asked for Tyler’s room number.

  Sarah nodded, but she was already listening to somebody talking to her on the phone.