Misplaced Innocence (11 page)

The eggs were scrambled and the toast was toasting when Jared finally stirred on the couch.
 

“Morning,” Charisma said from the hall. “Breakfast is almost ready. Help yourself to some tea, or juice.”
 

Jared pushed back the sheet and tugged on his jeans, the worn cotton sliding over his thighs to settle comfortably on his hips. The heady smell of breakfast wafted in the air and made him realize how hungry he was. He smiled as Charisma reappeared from the hallway, dressed in an oversized button down splattered with old paint stains and jean cut-off shorts. “Morning,” he said.

She smiled at him. “I thought you’d want some breakfast. I’m sorry I kept you up so late last night.”

He stretched, the expanse of his muscles playing beneath his t-shirt. “Not a problem. I’m glad Scruffy seems to be doing well this morning.” He looked pointedly at the dog, already snuffling around the kitchen floor, looking for anything that might have been dropped and hoping for an act of God to randomly bestow some of the eggs upon her. She found neither, but never seemed to give up hope.

“Me, too.” Charisma turned back to the kitchen, gently nudging Scruffy out of her way and pulling out plates and silverware. “Tea?” she asked as she poured herself a cup.

The meager breakfast slipped by, the pair sitting at the table and exchanging few words. The silence was comfortable, an enjoyable way to start a fresh morning, but the longer they sat at the table, the faster Charisma’s heart beat. Before long the dishes would be empty and cleared and stacked neatly in the sink and she wouldn’t be able to prolong the inevitable: she would be alone again in the house with a phone that rang when she didn’t want it to and mail that she dreaded getting. She sighed as the silverware stilled and breakfast began to fade into a recent memory. The chairs were scraping against the floor and Charisma was taking a deep breath and preparing to say goodbye to what little security she’d managed to find when the phone rang.

The room tilted at a strange angle and Charisma clutched at the table.
 

Jared watched her lunge toward the table and sway dangerously, watched the color as it fled her face and was replaced by a shocking white, her eyes dark and shadowed against all the paleness. Her tongue darted out to touch colorless lips, her strained knuckles were the same white.

She didn’t move. The phone continued to ring. Finally Jared cleared his throat. “Do you want me to get that?”

“No. No.” The word was a harsh whisper. Charisma commanded herself to move, but she couldn’t. The phone continued to ring, like whoever was on the other end could spend all day waiting for someone to answer the phone.

Jared continued to stare at Charisma, who, as far as he could tell, had hardly moved a muscle since she’d told him not to answer the phone.

“Okay, yes,” she finally managed to say.

Jared crossed the room and swept up the receiver. If he had to listen to the shrill ring one more time, he was pretty sure he would throw the phone across the room. But, like he’d already realized, every time he saw Charisma, she just became more strange. If he was going to keep going to her house and having breakfast with the woman, he was just going to have to come to terms with that and learn to expect strange things like sudden intense fears of inanimate objects. Everyone had their quirks.

He picked the phone up mid-ring, the sharp sound died, but remained shivering in the air. “Hello?” Jared’s voice was deep and shockingly strong after the feeble ring of the phone.
 

There was a crackle on the other end of the line and then a distorted voice, “Who’s this?”

“This is Jared. Who’s this?”

“Where’s Candy?”

“Who?”

Then there was nothing but dial tone in his ear.
 

“Wrong number, I think,” Jared said as he hung the phone up. Charisma had seeped back into one of the kitchen chairs. Her face hadn’t regained any of its color, she didn’t look at Jared.
 

“Oh.” The sound whooshed out of her mouth. She didn’t look convinced.

“Asked for Candy.”

He hadn’t thought it possible, but she actually blanched even further. It was fascinating how many shades of pale she could become.
 

“Oh.” This time the word was even fainter. “I don’t know a Candy.”

The kitchen was still. Jared could hear the gentle ticking of a wall clock coming from one of the other rooms.

He was still watching Charisma, waiting for a miraculous recovery. She was still draped in the chair, studying her shorts intently, and hadn’t even raised her eyes since she had denied knowing a Candy.
 

Jared looked for something to say that would lift the heaviness that had suddenly settled around Charisma, but couldn’t find anything. He took a furtive glance at Scruffy, hoping she had come down with something so he could be distracted from the current situation.
 

She hadn’t.

And it occurred to him that there never had been anything wrong with Scruffy. That whatever the apparent worry and distress had been about, it certainly hadn’t been about the wellbeing of her pet.
 

It was pretty obvious that it had something to do with whatever had just happened in the kitchen. And judging from the way Charisma was focused on the fraying hem of her shorts, she wasn’t going to be volunteering any information about it any time soon.

Comfortable with this new realization, Jared leaned back against the counter, blocking Charisma’s view of the phone. “Are you sure you don’t know a Candy?”

There was an acridity to his words that made Charisma raise her eyes. “I don’t know what you mean,” she insisted. But her words were dull and flat and did little to convince Jared that there wasn’t something else going on.

“What I mean is,” he began, but his patience was quickly unraveling, “that you called me up in the middle of the night to tell me your dog was, of all things, sneezing and rolling around on the ground while moaning in pain, and to ask if I could come take a look at her. When I show up, your dog is looking about as healthy as an animal can look, and you are looking like you’ve seen a ghost. And the next thing I know I am getting suckered into eating bad cookies and staying the night on a lumpy couch. What I mean is that you clearly know something about whoever this Candy person is and I’m getting the impression that it can’t be something good. And if you’re going to insist that I come over, and that the possibility remains that I may be beaten over the head with cooking ware, well then, I think I deserve to know a little bit about this Candy person.”

A long pause followed his schpiel. So long, in fact, that he wondered if she was pretending he had said nothing at all. Then, in the same voice she had used when she had said she didn’t know a Candy, she said, “I’m Candy.”

If she hadn’t looked so earnest, if she hadn’t looked so depleted, he would have laughed. If there was one thing she didn’t look like, it was a Candy. Her oversized shirt, paint splattered shorts, pale skin and dark hair didn’t bring to mind the blonde, gum-snapping, bubbling image Candy evoked.

She was back to studying her clothing. “Excuse me?” he asked.

“You know,” she said, and this time her voice was loud, hard, “I said, I’m Candy. I’m Candy, and that person,” she pointed her finger toward Jared, as if he weren’t there at all and the phone was still clearly in her sights, “shouldn’t know where I am, shouldn’t know my number, shouldn’t know that there is a me I don’t call Candy, and I do not know what to do about it!” She raked a hand through her hair, pulling at the silky strands so hard that Jared was sure it must hurt.

“I see,” he said only because he could find nothing else to say.

But he needn’t have worried because once he got her started there seemed to be no stopping her story. She stood up, the chair scraping on the linoleum and teetering before settling back on all four legs. Charisma began to pace. “I did everything I was supposed to do! I just wanted an education, and it paid the bills! If I had known.... And then I left everything. Everything and everyone to try and get away from it. I changed my name. I changed my hair. I moved to the middle of freaking nowhere and even now I can’t get away from it.” She paused by the sink, her hands resting on the cold metal edge. Even from across the room Jared could see the raised veins and the ridge of her knuckles as she clung to it. “I just don’t know what else to do. I don’t know where else to go.”

There was an empty, yawning sadness to her voice that made Jared want to draw her near. He had the sudden urge to push back the hair from her face and cup her chin in his hand, to pull her close and assure her that everything would be okay.

The only problem was, he still had no idea what she was talking about or whether or not everything really was going to be okay.

“I see,” he lamely repeated. Then, as if his verbal repertoire weren’t already in danger of being permanently damaged, he said, “You’re Candy.”

She sighed. “I’m Candy.”

“You’re not Charisma.”

“No, I am Charisma. I am just also Candy.” She shrugged, as if that would explain everything and Jared was struck by the sharpness of her shoulder blades beneath the soft, worn material of the button-down.

Jared propelled himself toward the kitchen table, nudging one of the chairs away and settling down. He stretched his long legs, crossing one over the other. This would clearly not be a quick synopsis. “Well, then, why don’t you go ahead and tell me about Candy?”

~*~

“This is Candy.” Charisma pushed the photograph toward Jared. A pretty, young girl smiled back at the camera. Her smile was big and bright, her hair so blonde it was almost white. Her lipstick was deep red and made her teeth look even whiter. Everything about this person was different. Everything except those big doe eyes with long lashes. He would have never known it was Charisma. He would have never even imagined that there was a way his Charisma could ever be like this Candy. He admonished himself as soon as the thought had crossed his mind. He certainly had no claim to Charisma, no reason he should be calling her his.

Except, he’d noticed, recently Jenny Doorman and Mary Anne had been a lot less tempting. In fact, Jared hadn’t been thinking about big pale eyes and curvy shapes barely hidden underneath too-tight jeans.

Instead he’d been thinking about big brown eyes, clothing too-big for a petite body, and a rare, but beautiful, smile.

If ever there had been a mistake, this was it.

“I finished high school early. Things weren’t great at home, you know. It was just my mom. She worked hard, but you know, she was never home, there were always men....” She trailed off and he didn’t pursue it. “That’s not really the point. Well, I guess it is. The one she was seeing when I was in high school,” there was an awkward pause and Jared felt a sinking in his stomach, felt his heart go out to the big doe-eyed blonde Charisma called Candy, “Well, he didn’t treat me like I was in high school. And I knew I couldn’t stay there any more. She told me if I left I was on my own.

“But I’d gotten into the art school at Rutgers. I really wanted to go. Art was what I’d always wanted to do. I’d spent so long on my portfolio. In-state tuition, you know? I wanted it so badly and I was so close.
 

“Nothing pays as well or as quickly as dancing. It was so easy to get into. I just did it to pay the bills. I started out serving drinks and everyone liked me. She shrugged her shoulders again. “It was just, you know, one thing led to another and I was dancing. And it wasn’t even a big deal because I knew if I could just get myself through school and find someone to sell my artwork to, it would be worth it.”

She stopped for a breath.
 
He waited for her to continue.

“But it is New Jersey,” there was a bitter laugh he had never expected to hear from her. “Sometimes there are people you shouldn’t be involved with. For some reason they seem to gravitate to places like strip clubs.” The words were hard, like she was judging herself. “My senior year I got involved with the owner. He was just your regular run of the mill wannabe New Jersey politician who made a little extra owning exotic dance clubs. But he had this gorgeous smile and this way of making you feel like you were the only person in the world.” She raised her shoulders once more. “I don’t know. You know, I thought everything would be okay. You know. I was different, he was different, it was special.” She raised her big eyes and they met his for the first time. “I just didn’t think it would be like this, you know?”

He didn’t know how to respond. He was still waiting to find out what “this” was.

“We were practically living together. Practically because he stayed over when it was convenient for him, and he paid for the apartment. I don’t know if there was someone else at his home. I guess I’m not,” she paused to correct herself, “I wasn’t, the kind of girl you wanted to be associated with if you were looking to move up the social ladder.” He caught a glance of her eyes, large, still wounded.

“It was so close to graduation; I didn’t really need to work any more because he was taking care of the bills. But I thought maybe I would save a little extra, have a little buffer there for myself. I think it gave him a little thrill that I was a dancer. You know how men are. I didn’t know until later, but he’d managed to steal some money from the mafia. The strip club had just been a front.” She raised a hand to her face and ran it over her eyes, as though she could wipe away the memory.
 

“I was there when something happened that I shouldn’t have seen. And then he disappeared. Off the face of the earth, and they thought I knew where he went, or I had their money. They thought I had been special and different, too, but I hadn’t been. He’d left me holding the bag, so to speak. I knew I couldn’t stay.
 

“I moved. Got a job illustrating. When the flowers started showing up at my apartment I thought they were from some secret admirer, maybe one of my new neighbors who was too shy to say anything about it. At first, when the letters started coming I thought they had been a mistake. I kept looking for a way to make it not be real. But then I started getting the phone calls. Those phone calls, they started out just like that. The breathing. The silence. Then with asking for Candy. They got even worse. You wouldn’t believe what he would say. I didn’t know what to do. I moved. I left my name and number unlisted. I tried to file complaints. I moved again.