Surviving Valencia (16 page)

I was starting to not care who killed Valencia. Van and Valencia. Whatever. Because it was wrecking my life and costing a lot of money. Consuming all my energy and destroying my happy marriage. And they, apparently, were only my half siblings anyway. What I wanted was to find the psycho sending us hate mail and make him just fuck off. Make him leave us alone. What happened to my happy life with spontaneous for-no-particular-reason diamond necklaces and Lancôme samples arriving weekly? Free samples, reserved for only the best customers! Now I threw them aside, distracted by whatever else I might find hiding in our mailbox. I couldn’t take living like this. Fuck you, Van and Valencia. Especially you, Valencia. With your shiny hair and your long skinny legs. Haunting me my whole life long. Making me feel invisible and worthless.

“…Baby?”

“What Adrian?”

“Are you drinking?”

“Well, yes. So?”

“It’s eight o’clock in the morning.”

“Well I’ve been up since six. So it’s not early to me anymore.”

“Okay?”

“What are you doing up?” I asked him.

He held up his hands. They were covered up to his elbows with paint. “This creative rush came over me, at four o’clock this morning, and I have been working ever since.”

“Oh,” I took another swallow of wine. “I thought you were at the gym or something.”

“Do you want to see what I’ve been doing?”

I stood up, not letting go of my glass of wine. “Sure.”

We went to his studio and he paused at the door, gesturing grandly inside. There on the wall was a huge stretched canvas with a sketch of a nude woman reclining. Not reclining so much as actually sleeping. It was nothing like his usual work. I took a closer look.

“Adrian, is that me?”

“Yeah. What do you think?”

I set down my glass of wine on one of the tables. “Are you going to paint it?”

“Yeah. I’ve just started. It’s got a long way to go.”

“Don’t you usually work from pictures?” I asked him.

“Uh huh. I took several. You were out cold.”

At his desk were printouts everywhere of me, naked and asleep. “Are these from last night?” I asked, feeling a chill run down my spine.

“Yep. This is the one that really captured your essence,” he said, holding up one with my hair half over my face.

“That one doesn’t even look like me.”

“Sure it does.”

“Is this just the way it is, living with an artist?” I asked him. “Like, I need to just accept that this is normal? ‘Cause it’s not normal. It’s weird.” I picked up my glass of wine, wanting to throw it against the canvas. That would have been the perfect thing to do. It would have added buckets of panache to this artistic moment. But I didn’t have the nerve or the energy to clean it up.

“What’s the matter, Baby?” he asked. “I thought you would be flattered.” Adrian’s shoulder slumped defeatedly. He sighed the sigh of a man who was misunderstood, and becoming used to disappointment.

I sat down on the old couch in his studio, resenting him for turning this around so I was the one who now felt guilty. He looked miserable.

“Adrian, it’s not that big of a deal,” I said. “Just forget it.”

He came over to my side and kissed my ear. “Do you know how many women would want something like this to happen to them,” he whispered.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“This is the kind of thing that would have happened to your sister, right?” An icy unpleasantness ran down my spine.

“I don’t think she ever experienced anything quite like this.”

“But is it really so bad?” he asked. I felt that he was trying to be flirtatious. I drew in a breath and took another drink of wine. Maybe I needed to lighten up. “I guess not. You just caught me off guard.”

“So everything’s fine? You’re even a little flattered?”

“Sure. Whatever. I mean, yes, I’m flattered.”

“Good.” He kissed the top of my head. “Mind if I get back to work then?”

“I guess not.” I said, sitting there a moment longer. I finished the rest of my wine and then stood up. “I’m going to go for a walk,” I told him. But he had turned back to his canvas and was too focused to even notice I was leaving.

I never stole for myself, but after I was grounded for the banana incident, I began stealing for the twins more than ever. I was stuck at home for three weeks before school began, having lost my babysitting job since I had no means of transportation. My parents were gone all day and I was bored. Like the bracelet I had seen by the pencil sharpener, perfect situations fell into my lap.

The doorbell rang on my first day of being grounded, and there was the UPS man. I peeked out from behind the curtain by the door, watching as he set the package down and dashed back to his brown truck. Having no doors on their trucks had always scared me. Did UPS men sometimes fall out when they went around a sharp corner? He drove off and I opened the door to retrieve the package. It was for my mother. I tore it open and discovered an array of autumn kitchen decorations. Acorn potholders and dishtowels, a platter covered with brown and orange leaves. Kitschy junk. The kind of junk that, when she occasionally tried to decorate, she gravitated toward.

“These would be
perfect
for your apartment,” I whispered.

In my mind, Van and Valencia were no longer in college, but living here in Hudson in an apartment. I had picked out which one: a two story, white, boxy building a mile or so down the road. When I’d had a bike, I often rode past it. Sometimes they had cookouts with their friends and invited me. I fit in just fine and everyone was really nice.

I put the kitchen junk back in the box, arranging it neatly and taping it shut again. I had to find a new place to bury presents. I couldn’t use our backyard anymore because my father had begun to notice something was going on. He had thought it was a mole and had poured poison all over, and the bunnies and squirrels I loved had all died.

I took the box and my mother’s little gardening shovel and put them in a duffel bag. There was a wooded park between our house and the public swimming pool; I would bury their presents there. I had to hurry though, because it would be just like one of my parents to check up on me.

That park turned out to be the perfect spot, and during the next several months I went there to bury over a dozen gifts. Being grounded gave me extra time to devote to taking care of the twins. There was a baseball for Van that I took from school, and a suede purse for Valencia I bravely swiped from a teacher’s desk. There was even a small picture of a majestic mountain range beneath a purple sunset that I stole right off the wall of our neighbor’s house one sunny afternoon while she hung her laundry on her clothesline.

I added items whenever I had the chance, covering them with leaves and mulch, smoothing the ground with my hands, until late October when the ground became too hard to dig.

I had tried for thirty minutes that night in October, the wind gusting at my back and my eyes watering. A VHS tape of
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
rested beside me, the perfect movie for Van and Valencia to watch with their friends while they played scrabble and ate pizza. I had taken it from the carelessly unsecured locker next to mine. When my mother’s little shovel began to bend more than the earth, I gave up. I covered the movie with rocks and twigs the best I could.

“I’ll bring you more in the spring,” I promised them, my words being carried away with the rustling leaves.

Being a homeowner makes people care about things they never thought they’d care about. Fences, for instance. The fancy, tri-fold brochure in front of me was a surprisingly good read. There were white picket fences and cast iron fences, beautiful gates with lovely morning glories wrapping around them, and a whole pullout section devoted just to coordinating fountains.

“I love them all,” I told Adrian. “You pick.”

“Well, cast iron with sharp pokers on the top is probably the safest.”

“Then cast iron it is. But wait. How will that look with our house?”

“I don’t know. Good, I guess. This house here looks like ours and it looks alright with Classic Secure Cast Iron Deluxe,” he said.

“I wonder how long it will take to install. These construction projects can drag on. Maybe we should get out of town while they do it.”

“It says here they have the whole fence up within seventy-two hours of placing the call. Oh wait, there is an asterisk and the letters are getting smaller:
Seventy-two hours if you choose a style they have in stock.
”

“That’s encouraging. Let’s get it.”

“I’ll make the call,” he said, rising with the brochure then bending back down to kiss me. I think we both really believed we were fixing things.

Next, we were headed to the pound to buy the meanest dog we could find.

We went not to the shelter in Savannah, but an hour and a half southwest of us. It was a place we’d read about in the newspaper a year or so earlier one morning while doing the crossword puzzle and eating bagels at an outdoor cafe. A sad, weepy story of abused animals saved from violent, cruel lives. At that time I never dreamed I’d own a dog, much less a dog rescued from fighting rings. Yet here we were, back at home, now a family of three. We named our Rottweiler-Pitbull mix Frisky and bought him a cute pink collar to soften his impression on our curious neighbors.

“Come here, Frisky,” I said, waving a giant rawhide bone. He missed my hand by a fraction of an inch. I threw a block of moldy cheese on the back porch and when he lunged for it I slammed the door behind him.

“Adrian,” I called.

“What, Honey?” He appeared, holding some dishtowels he was folding.

“I’m not so sure about the puppy.”

“What’s the problem?”

“He terrifies me.”

“Baby, he’s supposed to make you feel
safe
. The poor guy has had a rough time of it so far. We’re his ticket to peace and happiness, and he is ours,” said Adrian, shaking his head impatiently and opening the back door. “Here boy, come on Frisky,” he called.

Plunk plunk plunk
came Frisky’s big paws, his head bobbing left and right in goofy delight. He was excellent at playing the part of good dog when Adrian was around. I wanted to hate him, but was convinced his psychic dog skills would make it obvious to him, so I decided I would avoid him instead.

“I will be upstairs taking a bath,” I announced. My clothes were covered with white, crusty dog slobber. I turned and made my way through the living room with Frisky following behind me.

“Adrian, call him. Call the dog. Please. He’s following me.” I thought I heard the mailman on the front porch and I froze.

“Come on in here,” he called from the kitchen. “Both of you.”

I listened as the mailman retreated down the stairs and called out a greeting to one of our neighbors. So far Frisky, who didn’t even know enough to bark at the mailman, was proving himself to be a useless addition to our lives. I would have pointed this out to Adrian, but I wanted the chance to peek at the mail without him knowing it had arrived, so I kept silent and went back into the kitchen with Frisky following closely behind me.

“Would you look at this dog. There are splashes of slobber everywhere he goes.” I pointed to the slippery, smeared splotches all over our floor.

“You’re not even giving him a chance. You and Frisky are going to have to learn to get along.”

“Adrian…” I began, not in any mood for one of his reasonable parent-child lectures. They were a part of our relationship I had never much considered, but now that I was being lumped in the child category with an animal, something was registering as wrong with it.

“I will admit, we might need to get a dog trainer,” he said. “But until Frisky gets settled, we need to do everything we can to help him adjust. Right?” He smiled at me, placing the stack of dishtowels in their drawer.

Right?

I shrugged. I didn’t know anymore. I didn’t know anything.

“Right?” He closed the drawer and raised an eyebrow at me. The juxtaposition of hot male artist and animal loving household chore doer was every woman’s pornographic fantasy. And here he was, all mine.

Was he my pornographic fantasy? Well no. Not usually. I could not remember the last time I had thought about him when I didn’t have to.

But that was normal. For married people. Right?

Right?

I’m sure he did not think about me either. I mean, what would be the point? I’m right here in front of him. It’s like living in Paris and thinking, “I want to go to Paris.” It wouldn’t make sense.

Just because you don’t fantasize about visiting Paris, it doesn’t mean you don’t love Paris. Or that you would want to move away from Paris. It’s just, if you live in Paris, you might as well fantasize about visiting Istanbul.

“So do you think you could try to get along with our dog?”

I nodded.

“Good,” he said. He sprayed some cleaner on a rag and wiped up some crumbs by the toaster.

Frisky whined. “Entertain me,” he was saying, having fully adjusted to his spoiled life when four hours ago he’d been living in a cement cell.

“So anyway, I really am going to take a bath now,” I said, sighing and walking away. Frisky stayed put and I decided I would not detour out to see what was in the mailbox. I thought of my mother’s old saying “If you go looking for trouble you will always find it.” I went straight up the stairs and didn’t look back.

So what was I to do? Adrian was
so
adorable,
so
tidy. Well sometimes. Other times he was a slob. I liked both sides of him. I ran my bath water, again wishing for a friend. A psychic, perhaps? That seemed like a good idea, actually. I added more hot water, mulling it over.

“Honey, mind if I come in?” asked Adrian, opening the door and coming in with a stack of towels.

“Not at all,” I answered since he was already in and organizing them on their shelf.

“You like these green ones to be over here, right?”

“Sure. That looks good. You’re doing so many chores today. I love it! What’s gotten into you?”

“I’m feeling really good about the fence, the dog, us.” He bent over the bathtub and kissed my forehead. “Love you, Sweetie.”

“I love you too,” I said back. I had noticed lately I only said it in response to him saying it first. He smiled as he was leaving and closed the door behind him with a comforting click, assuring Frisky would not be coming in. I settled back, sinking down into the hot water.

I’d apologized for overreacting about the whole naked picture thing. I came to realize that it was actually very romantic. Like he said, I should have just been flattered.

Any woman would want Adrian, but he was mine.

Any woman would want him.

I knew that much was true.

The next day we signed up Frisky for school.

“I can get him into this class in Mechanicsville today!” Adrian told me, setting down the phone and holding up the paper to show me the advertisement.

“That sounds perfect for Frisky,” I told him.

The second they left, my cell phone rang. Having never taken the time to assign ring tones, I assumed it was Adrian. I feared he was getting attacked by Frisky, and I flipped it open without even looking.

“Hi Baby, what’s up?” I said.

“It’s me. Jeb,” said a raspy voice.

“Oh Jeb. Sorry. I thought you were my husband. How are you?”

“We need to get together.”

The problem with the Golden Dragon is that after you go there you need to take a shower. With its garlicky shrimp aroma, it is not the best place for a discreet rendezvous.

“What have you got for me?” I asked.

“I’d rather talk in person.”

“Could we meet someplace else?” I asked.

There was a long pause. “No,” he said.

“Fine. See you in fifteen.”