Surviving Valencia (28 page)

“Do you really want to know what happened?” Adrian asked, as he arranged two mugs with bags of chamomile tea on a tray. The tea kettle’s clunking turned to a whistle. He set it on the back burner where it immediately quieted itself. We stood there in a ridiculous silence, mine tense and his determinedly ordinary. Cheerful, almost. He tidied up the countertop, sliding things into place, disposing of a bit of cellophane, sweeping crumbs into the sink with his hand. I half-expected him to begin humming or singing.

“Yes. I need to know,” I said.

“It wasn’t actually that bad,” he said, pouring the tea. “Do you want honey in yours?”

“No. How can you say that it wasn’t that bad?” I rubbed my stomach, shielding the baby from whatever Adrian was about to tell me.

“I knew where he lived. Same old house he lived in with his mother, back in the day. Once he got out of prison, he moved back in. She died six months ago. I found her obituary online so I knew he would be there alone.” He passed me my cup of tea but I shook my head so he set it back on the tray.

“That seems like a careless move, looking her up, I mean,” I said.

“I wasn’t here when I did it,” he said, shrugging.

“You’d be mad if I did it.”

“You wouldn’t know how to cover your tracks. Anyway, I got there and the door was unlocked. I just walked right in. I saw a car in the driveway so I knew he was home. It was a different vehicle than he had back then, but I knew it was his car by the bumper stickers. A bunch of loony conspiracy theory shit. I thought ‘this guy hasn’t changed one bit.’ I walked in and it was dark in there. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I had a gun, a knife… I was afraid I was not going to be able to do it. Then I heard water running in the bathroom. He was in there, taking a bath. The bathroom door was open and it was bright in there, but the rest of the house was dark, and I saw him before he noticed me. I just went for it. He was starting to stand up and reach for his towel and I gave him a shove. He split his head right open on the faucet. Then he drowned. I walked in, did it, and was back on the road ten minutes later. I really don’t think we have a thing to worry about.”

“Wow.” To my surprise, a huge wave of relief washed over me. Our odds of getting caught seemed to have diminished considerably. And just as compelling was the discovery that Adrian kind of wasn’t a murderer. It was more like John Spade slipped and fell.

“Did you leave footprints? Did anyone see you? Did you get blood on you?”

“No.”

“There’s no evidence?”

“None. And we have a great alibi. The little vacation? Everything is fine. It’s better than fine because he got what he deserved for what he did to your brother and sister. And to that private investigator, and all those women. And for what he was going to do to us when he got tired of playing games. Think about it.”

“Why do you think he got interested in you again after so many years?” I asked.

“I have no idea.”

“Do you think he knew that I’m the twins’ sister?”

“I don’t know.”

“So you feel like you can live with this?” I asked him.

He rubbed his neck and nodded.

“You know, now we’ll never know where she is,” I realized.

“Did you ever think you’d know?”

“I guess not.”

He passed me my tea and I sipped it, and we stood there in silence. What he had done would either cement us together for eternity, or divide us in a way that could never be healed. I was not sure which.

“Hel-lo! How’s the mommy to be?” asked Alexa.

I looked at the clock. It was six o’clock in the morning, which meant it was five in Madison. I sat up in bed and moved the phone to my other ear while Adrian continued to doze beside me.

“Hi Alexa. Is everything okay?”

“Sure.” There was a crunching sound like an apple being bitten into, followed by muffled chewing. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“Umm, a little bit. What’s going on?”

“I need to come to Savannah. It’s getting cold here. I need a break so I can focus on my book. I was thinking November. That would be perfect for you two because then you can celebrate Thanksgiving with everyone, and I won’t have to.” She laughed and took another bite.

“You need a break to read?”

“No,” she said, exasperated. “I’m writing a book. Two books, actually. The coffee table book I told you about last time I saw you, and a new book. But neither is going as well as I had hoped. So we need to switch. Okay? Is Adrian there? Put Adrian on.”

I looked over at him. He was still breathing deeply, but looked like he was faking it. I poked his shoulder and set the phone against his face.

“Hmmm?” he asked.

“It’s your sister.”

I got up and went into the bathroom, but I could still hear Adrian’s side of the conversation. His voice was slurred and sleepy: “Why are you calling this early? …November is three days away. …Are you coked up or why are you talking like a maniac? …I am going back to sleep, call me when it’s daytime. …In March. Mid-March. Saint Patrick’s Day, I think. … No we don’t know its name. …I don’t know if pregnant women can fly or not. …Okay, I am going back to sleep now. …Goodbye. …Alexa, call me later. …Bye.”

I came out of the bathroom and put the phone back where it belonged. Then I got back in bed beside Adrian, but without touching him. He did not reach for me. It had turned out that if I pushed him away enough times, he eventually stopped trying.

“Are we going to Madison?” I asked.

He just grunted.

“Adrian, are we going to Madison?”

“I guess so,” he said.

“I don’t want to.”

He grunted again.

“Tell her we need more notice.”

“Shhh, go back to sleep,” he said.

I pulled the covers up around me, so just my nose and eyes were uncovered.

“Remember how we used to decorate for holidays?” I asked him. My mouth was beneath the blankets and the words were muffled.

He didn’t answer. I listened to him breathing, listened to the rhythm become steadier and eventually turn to quiet snoring.

I lay there listening to him for the longest time, and at some point I fell back asleep. When I awoke it was almost noon and he was gone, down in his studio, as usual.

After the night of Krystle’s party, Adrian and I found more and more excuses to be together. It began with us taking our breaks at the same time.

“I’m going to grab a sub. You hungry? Want to come with?” he would ask me.

Of course I did.

For months it was like this. Flirtatious yet out of reach. Inappropriate, but without any real lines being crossed. I was still living with Sam, but we had deteriorated to being just roommates. I mean, mainly. Okay, to Sam, we were still together. But to me we mostly weren’t.

Then one night after work it finally happened. It was November of 2000 and the store had been terribly busy with nasty, stressed out holiday shoppers. It was late and Adrian and I were out together, brazenly having a drink. We’d had lunch together, but never a drink. Belinda thought he was working late but he had taken off when I did, telling one of the managers that he was coming down with a cold.

We started talking about a woman we had seen who was shopping with her children. Her little boy, who looked like he was about four, had pulled down his pants and started peeing right into the stroller on his little sister. It was hilarious. Half the store saw it happen. His mother, who had been ignoring her kids and reading one of her unpaid-for books, looked up to see her baby covered in pee, and flipped out. Her target was Wilfred, an old man who had just started working at Border’s and had unfortunately been standing nearby.

“What’s the
matter
with you?” she said to Wilfred. “How am I supposed to take them back outside? She’s soaking wet! She’ll freeze to death! Get me the manager!”

“I didn’t do it,” said Wilfred.

“I didn’t do it either,” said her little boy.

“I
know
you didn’t do it,” the woman said back to Wilfred in a shrill, mocking voice, “but you could have
said
something when it was happening.”

Wilfred didn’t know what to do. He was holding some books so he set them down on a table and went to find a manager. All around customers and workers had stopped what they were doing and were focused on this woman and her children. The attention made her even angrier, so she decided to leave. However, she had an armful of books she hadn’t purchased, which started off the alarm. By the time Wilfred came back with a manager, the woman was hysterical and both her kids were screaming.

“What’s the matter?” asked the manager.

In what I could only assume was one of those irrational, heat of the moment decisions, the woman pointed at Wilfred and yelled, “That old man peed on my baby! You need to fire him right now! He’s not right.”

We’d all seen what really happened, but she had to blame someone, had to divert the attention away from herself and her children.

Adrian and I had left in the midst of all the commotion. It had provided plenty of fuel for flirty, silly scandalmongering all the way from Border’s to the pub where we sat drinking pints of Smithwick’s.

“That woman’s going to win a lawsuit over this, and Wilfred’s going to end up in jail,” said Adrian.

“She’ll visit him there, out of guilt, and they’ll fall in love,” I said.

“They’ll have a conjugal visit, and conceive a baby who pees on everything,” said Adrian.

Were we talking about love, sex, and babies? I would take such a conversation in whatever form it presented itself. Ridiculousness with Adrian made my heart race more than the most serious talk I could have with Sam.

“Did you
see
that little boy’s reindeer sweater? No wonder he peed on his sister! He needed to rebel!” I said.

“Do
you
have brothers or sisters?” asked Adrian.

“No. Do you?” I took another drink. I had recently found myself learning to thoroughly love beer.

“I have a younger sister. She’s twenty-seven. Or twenty-eight. I’m not sure. I should know this. Um, she must be twenty-seven. So you’re an only child?”

“Yep. Just one sister?” I asked, passing it back to him.

“Yeah. Her name is Alexa.”

“That’s a pretty name.”

“You’re pretty,” he said. I started laughing because it was such a quaint, simplistic thing to be told. It felt like something a kid would say to another kid. But I was totally pleased, too. We had flirted like crazy, but always with a faint protective edge in place. He had never left himself vulnerable like that. I was not used to communicating with him without the enigmatic veil of coolness that had become our language, and I wasn’t quite sure what to do. Then I stopped laughing, and I said the stupidest thing ever: “If you think I’m pretty, you should have seen my sister.”

He looked at me for the longest time and touched my face. He did not ask me what I meant, or point out that this contradicted my statement that I was an only child. Then he kissed me. I kissed him back, touching his hair and the back of his neck, memorizing his smell and warmth in case I never got this close to him again. My body filled with love and yearning and need. Everything that had been locked became open and I pulled him closer to me, wanting more. I was afraid he’d pull away from me at any moment. It didn’t seem possible that something so good could be happening to me. I kissed him, tasted him, overwhelmed with the desire to cry, because I already missed him. Even while it was happening, that was what I was thinking:
Don’t ever forget what this feels like.

“I’m going to take care of you,” he whispered in my ear, so softly I later doubted whether I had really heard it at all.

I did get close to Adrian again. All the time, every chance I got, and miraculously, he seemed just as drawn to me as I was to him. In early 2002, a week after Adrian filed for divorce from Belinda, he proposed to me, and in July of 2003 we got married.

Belinda did not deal very well with any of this. She showed up at Border’s, screaming and making threats. She grabbed a pair of scissors from a cup by one of the cash registers. I thought she was going to stab me. Instead, she cut off her long red hair and threw it at me. It seemed metaphoric, but I never did completely understand what she was trying to say. She did leave her mark on Border’s however; they can’t keep scissors in those cups anymore because of her.

Sam had moved on and was living with, of all people, Luna-with-the-floppy-arm. They had met through me and I had always suspected they were interested in each other. I learned about the two of them one day, shortly after Adrian asked me to marry him, when I ran into our old friend Dannon. Now that she had porcelain veneers on her teeth, she was living in New York and doing some modeling, along with working at some fancy advertising agency. She was back in town, looking gorgeous, sharing fried milk balls with her equally gorgeous girlfriend at an Indian restaurant on the east side of town. I was there to pick up some carryout food Adrian and I had ordered.

“Dannon!” I said. She looked great. Her hair was long and platinum blonde. Her skin was flawless. Her eyes were made up with smoky makeup, and she had an aura of sophistication about her.

“Hi,” she said, barely looking at me. Her exotic, olive-skinned girlfriend was unabashedly tonguing her ear. They thought they were in L.A. or something.

“How have you been?” I asked her. “What are you doing back in Madison?”

“Jacinda’s brother is getting married,” she said, tilting her head closer to her companion.

Jacinda held out her hand to me. “Nice to meet you,” she said.

“I saw our old friend Luna. That’s too bad she stole your boyfriend,” said Dannon. When she said boyfriend, I immediately thought of Adrian.

“Stole my boyfriend?” I looked at my diamond ring, imagining it sparkling on Luna’s shriveled, limp hand. “What are you talking about?”

“Luna said she and your boyfriend Sam are together now. That’s too bad for you,” she said.
“Too
bad.
So
sad. All of that.” Jacinda giggled.

I had no idea why Dannon was being mean, but sometimes when people suddenly turn pretty, they don’t quite know how to handle it. I decided she must still be learning the ropes. “It must really sting to lose him to
Luna
,” Dannon continued.

I waved my sparkling left hand in Dannon and Jacinda’s faces. “I couldn’t care less about those morons,” I told them. “I’m engaged to someone
way
more amazing than Sam.”

Jacinda yawned loudly.

“I like your veneers,” I told Dannon. I hoped it would come across as cutting, scathing, and might make Jacinda realize that Dannon had not always been such a catch.

“Thanks,” said Dannon. “Well, nice catching up with you. I think your little baggy of food is ready.” She pointed to the cash register where the clerk stood by a brown paper sack of food, arms crossed, waiting for me to pay.

“Oh. Thanks. Bye.” I walked away.

“Nice meeting you,” called Jacinda, sarcastically.

So, I thought, carrying my food to the car, there was proof that even being engaged to Adrian couldn’t make everyone like me. Maybe it couldn’t make anyone like me. But before him I would have been in tears over a conversation like that. Now I was able to turn on the radio and, by the time I pulled out of the parking lot, nearly forget it even happened.

Pathetically, I invited Dannon and Jacinda to my wedding. Sam and Luna, too, so I could show them how much I had moved on. I even sent an invitation to Marnie Hopkins, from high school. None of them came. They didn’t even send back the RSVP cards.

Adrian’s guest list was so long and mine was so short. I guess I got a little desperate.