by A. L. Woods
“California, huh?” he probed. With my eyes still closed, I could conjure him in my memory. He sounded thoroughly unimpressed, maybe even a little vindicated. I had become the person he knew I was all along.
I remained quiet, not willing to confirm or deny my location.
Dougie heaved a sigh, the sound of his fingers working back and forth across his beard in the receiver. “It’s okay, I won’t tell him where you are.” Razor blades lined my throat as the emotion formed a lump there, a ten-pound weight sinking my insides. “Can you, uh…” He blew out an exaggerated breath through his mouth. “Can you try to walk me through your thought process that night?”
The protracted silence resounded until Dougie broke it. “I won’t yell at you. I just need to understand where you were coming from so I can try to explain it to the people you left behind.”
Clenching my molars, I fought the urge to break down. “What would you have done if you were me?”
“The situation warranted space. I would have done the same to think things through…but breaking up with him on New Year’s Eve and then fleeing across the country without so much as a word to your best friend was cruel, Raquel.”
“Cruel?” I laughed humorlessly. “What was cruel was his using information he found on the internet about me to his advantage.”
“So what?” Dougie asked. “That had nothing to do with Penelope, and you know it.”
Even though Dougie kept his tenor balanced and level, I heard the disappointment that laced each word.
“He searched you on the internet. I get it. You feel violated that he betrayed your trust. You’ve got shit you don’t want to be judged for—we all do. But when you do something like this, it reinforces that cycle of shame. Don’t you get that? You are perpetuating everything that you hate.”
I snorted. I didn’t want to, but I did. It came out derisive and bitter. “That’s easy for you to say, Dougie.”
“Raquel, I fucking get it, okay?” he huffed. “Your past is ugly, but you’re not. But when you do something like this? This is the ugly. This keeps you tethered to the things I know you’re above.”
I kicked back the covers, my cavern hot, my breaths coming out in short and labored spurts. “You don’t know fuck all about me.” Sometimes it felt like none of them did, not even Penelope.
He laughed. A deep baritone of a laugh filled the void of silence that I felt permanently suspended in. “I know enough about you, Raquel. I know that the reason you and I didn’t get along right out of the gate was because you thought I was a threat to your relationship with Penelope, but y’know something?” He paused, contemplation filtering between us. “All along, you were the threat. Not me.”
I slapped a hand to my mouth, trying to deaden the whimper that threatened to escape.
“None of what happened to you was ever about you,” Dougie continued. “It’s that old proverb. ‘We don’t get to pick the family that we’re born into, but we get to pick the one we create.’ You are a part of our family. Three thousand miles will not change that. Whether you come home now or never, your family, your real family, is going to be here waiting for you.”
I lowered my head to the knees I’d drawn to my chest, placing my sweat-matted forehead there. Family. The six-letter word I had believed I had always been absent of. And I was, in the traditional sense. Pauline had never and would never be the mother I needed, and I didn’t want her around anymore. Dad and Holly Jane were gone; nothing was going to bring them back. Cash…Cash had never wanted to be my family. I was just another thing for him to own.
“He broke my heart, Dougie. I don’t know how to come back from that.” Going back to a place where he could readily find me…where a mere hour separated us, I couldn’t handle it. The proximity was too close, and I didn’t trust myself to stand my ground on this.
I couldn’t forgive him for this, I wouldn’t. The damage was done, and the betrayal shattered me irrevocably. It would be impossible to come back from this, to look at him the same way.
If he found me, I wouldn’t let him in again. The risk of him hurting me was too great, and I wasn’t a gambling woman. I was tired of being made to look stupid.
“And you broke his,” Dougie said without hesitation. “Two wrongs don’t make a right, but you get a choice, Flannigan. Face the music and write a different life story, or succumb to the demons of your past. The choice is yours.”
I sniffled, his words marinating all over my brain. “How is he?” I probed before I could back out. My chest squeezed, my lungs heaving. I hated myself for asking. This was masochistic, and I didn’t know what I hoped to gain from the answer other than something to cry over later.
Dougie sighed. “What do you want me to tell you? He’s not doing so hot.” I sensed hesitation, as if he was trying to avoid telling me something.
“What does that mean? Is he okay?” Not that I had any right to ask any of this. That was the whole point of, y’know, moving across the country. Moving? Fleeing? Same shit.
“The Heritage Park house burned down.”
Fear struck me, my heart taking off on a gallop. I hadn’t prepared for “not doing so hot” to have such a literal meaning. “What?” I clawed at the fitted sheet with my fingers. “Was anyone hurt?”
“No, thank fuck,” he said, then paused, as if collecting himself. “It happened the night you left.”
My stomach wrenched. “What does that…how?”
“You eat anything good in California?” he asked, pivoting with about as much grace as he would have mustered had I handed him a leotard, tutu, and a pair of too-tight pointe shoes. “Is it hot right now?”
“Dougie, don’t,” I whispered. “I’m not made of glass. Tell me the truth.”
“Ah, Christ.” I could visualize him scrubbing his face with his palm. I felt bad for him. We had saddled him with drama and the role of mediator.
I wanted him to give it to me straight, no bullshit, no lemon wedge chaser. Just the truth, no matter how bitter or acerbic it was.
“Those fucking clowns,” he muttered. “They torched it.”
My free hand clawed at the bedsheet. “What fucking clowns?” Somehow, without him saying a word of confirmation, I knew. I could feel it inside me. It pushed through the space my heartbreak and anger consumed, rearing its ugly little head.
I forced myself to say the name. “Cash?”
Dougie sniffed. “Yeah, and the other one who looks like Satan’s human incarnate with a good haircut and too-sharp cheekbones.”
I exhaled, my blood steeling. “Dom.” He would get tangled up in this.
“Yeah.”
I didn’t know what to say. It was as if my mind had just endured a blue screen of death. After what had happened between Cash and me, I didn’t believe that anything was above him. But somehow this, this had felt too drastic, too extreme.
His retribution could have killed someone—and maybe that had been his hope.
The familiar deluge of guilt swept in like a storm from above, its wrath brutal on my cerebral cortex. This was my fault. If I had just stayed away from Sean like my instincts had told me months ago, none of this would have happened. He would never have found himself on Cash’s radar; the house would still be upright. I let my eyes grow leaden as I tried to concentrate on slowing down my breathing and getting control of my racing heart that threatened to lurch from behind the cage of my chest.
“You still there?” Dougie hedged nervously.
“Yeah.” I swallowed. “I’m still here.”
“They’ll be going away for a long time,” he offered. “If that makes you feel better.”
“It doesn’t.”
“I hope you don’t feel bad for them.” There was a question in the statement.
“Of course not. I’m sorry that happened to him.” Because of me, I wanted to add. Despite what had happened between us, he didn’t deserve that.
Dougie was silent for a beat of a minute. “You can’t even say his name, can you?
”
“Not without crying,” I whispered, tucking a lock of dirty hair behind my ear, the oil leaving a film on my fingers. I was suddenly ashamed of the state I’d physically allowed myself to get to. What kind of message was I sending to my brain? Destructive coping mechanisms make a person feel better? They didn’t. I felt like shit. My head was killing me, my heartbreak was getting worse with each passing day, and I didn’t feel any closer to mending that wound today than I did four weeks ago when I’d boarded the Amtrak.
“It will get easier with time.”
“That’s why I can’t come back,” I said softly. “I just can’t.”
Dougie heaved another sigh, a deep and breathy thing that sounded like wind in the receiver. Finally, he spoke, “I know.”
“I know she’s mad, and I know he hates me, but take care of them.”
“Look, just…” he tentatively started, like he was choosing his next words wisely. “Just think about what I said, Raquel. You take the time that you need, but know that you can’t stay away from us forever. We all need you just as much as you need us.”
I nodded wordlessly, even though he couldn’t see me. Somehow, I wasn’t sure how, it felt like he could feel me.
“I gotta go calm Penelope down. She’s taking it out on the kitchen cabinets. This pregnancy is doing a number on her.”
“Okay,” I murmured, thinking back to how she had behaved on New Year’s Eve. My worry assailed me, another tick on the tally of all the ways I had abandoned my best friend in her time of need. “Take care.”
“No,” he said gruffly. “You take care. You do whatever you need to do to heal. I’ll hold down the fort until then.”
“Thanks, Dougie.”
“Talk soon, Flannigan.”
The line went dead. I lowered the phone back in its cradle, my body falling backward. Resting on my side for a minute, I rolled onto my back and stared up at the ceiling. I closed my eyes and replayed everything that just happened. Penelope hated me, but to my surprise, it hadn’t felt like Dougie had. It felt like he had almost empathized with me a little, even if he didn’t agree with my choices.
I spent the rest of the morning lying on my side, staring at a small chip of paint on the motel room wall, my mind running through the last few weeks and what Penelope had asked of me—to come back home.
The thing was, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t go back.
Not when I knew the source of my heartbreak would be there to greet me.
CHAPTER NINE
March
Time is one of those things that despite clocks, calendars, and those fancy agendas that people tote around with them—you can’t measure it. Some days, weeks, months, hours and minutes just seem to drag by. Even though there’s another X to mark their conclusion, time is immeasurable. It’s elusive. You can’t catch it, you can’t control it. We’re all at the mercy of it.
I shifted the bedsheets from around my waist to swing my legs over the edge of the bed. This was how all my days started. I’d stare at the floor until I could will myself to rise. Bargain with my psyche and mental health. Put one foot in front of the other. Push through the suck. Fight through the pain.
I would like to tell you I was okay, that things were fine.
But that would be a lie.
One of the Ten Commandments says, “thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor”–but I guess God never factored in that sometimes the biggest lies we told weren’t to other people, but to ourselves.
“You’re fine,” I grunted. The statement was trite, two words that were my anathema.
I convinced myself to stand upright and plod to the bathroom, averting my gaze from the mirror over the sink. I didn’t need to see myself to know what would look back at me. I could feel it. The hollowed-out grooves in my cheekbones, the shock of overgrown, almost black hair that looked like a mophead, the beard I’d given up on. Tugging the shower curtain back, I turned on the shower knob, the stream sputtering out.
Undressing, I made quick work with a bar of soap. I hated being in here almost as much as I hated being in my bed. How was it that I felt her presence everywhere? Why was it that despite it being almost two months, I still expected to find her in my house? I just wanted to close my eyes and not find her tattooed on the back of my lids. It was bad enough to have her permanently etched in my heart, but did I need her coloring every thought I had, too?
Love was rife with pain. Two four-letter words that seemed to fuse so beautifully with one another that it made me sick.
Rinsing myself, I cut off the water. I stood there until the steam evaporated and the beads of water that pebbled across my skin dried. Getting out of the shower was almost as hard as getting out of bed some days. Removing myself from every space she once existed in was equivalent to getting my balls socked daily.
I was fucking pathetic. Pining for a woman who I believed never really loved me back. She told me she loved me for the first time in this very shower, and when she said it, I trusted her. Those three words mainlined themselves into the ventricles that made up my heart. I had wanted to hear them so badly that I never considered the conditions and limitations of her love.
My love didn’t come with any stipulations. It was unconditional and limitless. Hers, on the other hand, left me buried under a mountain of fine print that required a magnifying glass to read.
And maybe that’s what got me fucked in the end. I had had every intention of some day confessing to her what I’d done. When we were old, when she was still as beautiful to me, with her skin leathered and sagged, as she was right now. Tucked up together on a porch, wrapped up in an oversized blanket, I’d tell her of the time I instinctively knew she needed me, and I’d answered the call because I didn’t want her to be alone.
She might have tsked at me, but it wouldn’t have resulted in the blanket pooling at her feet and having to watch her walk away.
Watching someone walk away with your heart in tow was a hell unlike any other. Death itself seemed like it would be easier, because you could mourn the loss of someone’s physical, earthly presence. But heartbreak was merciless and unsympathetic to the constructs of time. It was impossible to mourn someone who still existed somewhere in the world, far away from you.
I didn’t mean to rip the shower liner back with such brute force. My anger had an inconvenient tendency to rear itself during the most inconvenient of times. So, it should have served as no surprise to me that much like Raquel had, the bar that held up the shower liner screamed a massive “Fuck you!” to me as it fell to the floor with a deafening thud that vibrated through me.
It was just a shower curtain.
A shower liner that should have never existed, because it was stupid that a contractor hadn’t bothered to take the time to create a spa-like oasis in his own house the way he did on his projects for others. He always invested the time and care into everything and everyone else.
But never himself.
The shower liner had to go. No, actually, this entire bathroom needed to go. I stepped out of the tub, dry as a hot summer day, and stalked to my bedroom. I got dressed and flipped my phone open to punch a quick text message to Dougie.
Not coming in today.
His response was immediate.
U OK?
This was ad nauseam. Autopilot had me replying with my favorite statement.
I’m fine.
And I was fine. Or I would be. Just as soon as I gutted the bathroom.
The salt from my sweat lined itself in every dip and cranny of my body. The beads trapped against my hairline, long strands matted to my forehead. Lifting my arms, I reveled in the pulse that ticked in my muscles as the heavy end of the sledgehammer cut through the air on a whistle and cracked against the corner of the countertop. Ceramic shrapnel ricocheted from the brutality of the collision, flying across the room.
Destroying things felt good when you hit rock bottom. I didn’t have time to think about anything beyond the repetitive motion of my swin
g.
I barely had time to consider that there were three sets of eyes in varying shades of brown staring at me from the hallway.
I didn’t stop. Not for them.
My sisters didn’t deserve my undivided attention. I still hadn’t spoken to them since the night of the fire. I’d made Dougie call Maria to communicate my theory about the culprit behind the Heritage Park house. She met us at my place, and I breezed right by her into the garage, handing her the box that contained Raquel’s manuscript and the footprints impressed on the sheets before storming right back into the house, locking the door then collapsing in bed.
I ignored her and Dougie’s incessant knocks.
Several hours later, Detective Romaro called to inform me they had made some arrests. I watched the rest of the updates on the six-o’clock news—but made a point of showing up to the arraignment hearing.
They charged Tobias Arthur Peake, 29, of South Boston with one count of second-degree arson. His arraignment was held two days later. I wasn’t missing that for anything.
It took everything in me to remain seated when he entered a nolo contendere plea.
No contest. He acknowledged the prosecutor—a hulk of a man that Dougie reported Maria referred to as “The Shark”—had enough evidence to prove he had in fact, done it, but he was going to drag this out in a way that felt very on point with his character.
Dominic James Carter Espinosa, 29, of Cheltenham also found himself charged with accessory after the fact; he, too, entered a nolo contendere plea. Unlike Cash, who had shown up in khakis and an olive-colored golf shirt that were both too big for his frame, Dom donned a black suit, tie, and dress shirt that hugged his lean figure. His hair was combed back in his signature pompadour, nary a strand out of place. Onyx eyes met mine when he spared a wayward glance to the gallery behind him. What struck me as odd was the listlessness in his face.
Compared to Cash, who did everything in his power to fight the fear that I saw burn like the fire he had started in his eyes, Dom looked nonchalant, like this whole thing was a gross waste of time.