Authors: Kimberly Belle
Victoria’s words push up from somewhere dark and depressing.
Somebody always gets hurt, but nine times out of ten it’s the bad guy.
“You have to know how it looks, Daddy. You have to know.” By now I’m crying openly, the tears sliding unchecked down my cheeks. “This memo means you’re the bad guy.”
His hands freeze in the dirt, but he doesn’t look up. “I’m sorry you feel that way, darlin’. I’m only doing what I have to do.”
My heart heaves and cracks, but he’s still my father, and even though his actions might not deserve it, at the very least I owe him a warning. “Then so am I.”
* * *
I call Victoria from the car. “Check your email,” I say as soon as she picks up, trying not to flinch at the bitter pill pushing at the back of my throat, an acrid mixture of fury and sorrow and self-reproach. “I just sent you something.”
“My Magic 8 Ball told me you would eventually.” I give her a few moments to click around her computer, then she sucks in a breath. “Holy
shit
, Abigail.”
“I know. I
know
. Just promise me no spin. Report the facts, nothing more.”
“I will, but you know others won’t. Once the rumor rags get a hold of it, there’s no telling what will happen.”
“That’s why I’m bringing it to you first. Set the tone, and make sure it’s a fair and impartial one.”
And then I punch the button to end the call, slam my brakes in the middle of Key Bridge and throw up onto the pavement.
* * *
That night, I lie in bed, watching shadows dance on the ceiling. Long after the sky turns black with night, long after the city is dark and quiet and still, sleep refuses me. My body hums with energy.
At some time close to one, I roll over, reach for my phone. Gabe’s voice when he answers is low and gravelly. “Hey.”
“Sorry to wake you, it’s just...” I trail off, suddenly searching for words. When Gabe had called earlier, I didn’t pick up. I was still sorting things through in my own mind, still trying to figure out how the man who had taught me to be good could do something so bad. I wasn’t ready to talk. Now I am, so why can’t I get the words out?
“No. It’s fine. Is... Are you okay?”
“Not really.” I can hear the tears clogging my throat, feel the heartache rising yet again in my chest.
“Do you want to come over?”
“Yeah,” I say, flipping off the covers, trying to pick my clothes out of the shadows on the floor. “I really, really do.”
17
Gabe’s house, I see over the roof of my car, is very much like mine. Same front porch, same low profile, same twin windows on either side of what I know is the living room fireplace. Only, Gabe’s house is mine on steroids. Healthy and robust and bulked up a good two to three sizes, and even in the dark, I can see what looks to be a fresh coat of paint and matching flower boxes spilling over onto a thriving front yard.
I’m winding my way up the brick pathway when the porch light flares, and a barefoot Gabe opens the door. He looks as if he just rolled out of bed, jeans and T-shirt and all. His hair is mussed, his chin and cheeks dark with scruff.
“I’m sorry for what I said about you at your brother’s funeral,” I say, trudging up his front porch stairs. Before I say anything else, I have to get that off my chest. “It was mean and spiteful and unforgivable.”
Gabe shrugs off my apology. “Please. If anyone can understand saying something you later regret, it’s me.”
I want to tell Gabe not to compare my situation to his, since his brother is dead and my father is not, and then I realize that even though my father may still be alive, the man who I thought he was is not. Fresh tears prick at my eyes.
Gabe sees them, and he snags my wrist with a hand, yanks me into him, wraps his arms and his heat around me. It’s only then I notice how icy cold I am, all the way down to the hollowed-out part of my bones. I shiver, and he pulls me tighter. It’s the middle of the night in the freezing cold, and he stands here in his bare feet, holding me as if there’s nowhere else he’d rather be.
“How are you?” he says after a while. “I was worried, especially when you didn’t pick up my call earlier. I thought maybe you were still mad at me.”
I tip my head back, find his gaze in the dim porch light. “For what, telling me the truth about my father?”
He shakes his head. “For being suspicious. I mean, I would have been pissed if I found out you already knew, but I wouldn’t have blamed you. I figured if anything, you were trying to protect your father. How could I fault you for that?”
I hear his words, hear the compliment concealed behind them—Gabe would have understood me lying to him in order to shelter my father from blame—and something unpleasant squeezes me breathless. This situation is just so unbelievably confusing. My father. The memo lighting up the internet sky, thanks to me and Victoria. Gabe, watching me with an expression that makes me want to forget everything but him. It’s as if the universe is pulling me in a million directions.
Gabe must read the misery on my face, because without another word, he guides me into his living room, parks me on his designer couch and hands me a glass of amber liquid. Kentucky bourbon, according to the bottle on the coffee table. I take a huge gulp, and then another. The liquid hits my stomach and eases through my veins, warming me up by a good ten degrees, but it doesn’t melt the aching lump that seems to have lodged itself permanently in my throat.
“If you want to talk about it,” he says, his voice warm and soft and inviting, “I’m a good listener.”
It’s all I needed to hear. The day bubbles up in my throat and boils over in a rush of words I can’t hold back. Gabe deposits my glass on the table and pulls me into him, and I tell him everything. About someone breaking into my house and swiping the transcript, and how after today, I suspect it might be someone sent by my father. About our conversation at Mike’s and in the Oval Room hallway and the most recent one, when I confronted him in his backyard. About sending the memo to Victoria, and how I’m heartbroken my father is one of the bad guys from her ominous premonition. About Ben and Chelsea and Maria and the new videos flooding the internet, the latest from just yesterday with a darker, younger, kinkier man, and how Floyd is clicking away in his mother’s basement as we speak, following in her cyber footsteps. About the guilt and the regret and the heartache.
He holds me the entire time, his chest humming occasionally in sympathy or encouragement, his palm drawing long strokes down my back. When I’m finally empty of tears and words, a wave of exhaustion crashes over me, threatens to suck me under, and I think how nice it would be to fall asleep right here, with Gabe’s arms around me and his heart beating strong and steady against my cheek. Gabe was right, I think, drifting off. He really is a good listener.
“Abigail,” he says, and the rumble in his chest pulls me back. “Do you want my take?”
I push off his chest and straighten, mopping up my face with both sleeves. “Yes.”
“Drop it,” he says, his tone gentle and firm at the same time. “Before it harms your relationship with your father any further.”
For the longest moment, I’m stunned silent. After everything that’s happened to bring us here, to a place where beyond a common goal to find Ricky we seem to have found a...I don’t know, what is this, a special friendship? Regardless, I wasn’t expecting him to try to talk me out of helping him. “I—I thought you wanted the truth.”
“I do, and I still plan to get it. I’m just suggesting you think about whether or not your involvement is worth harming your relationship with your father any further. If there’s one thing I learned from Zach’s death, it’s that family is a precious commodity.” He smiles at me then, a smile so genuine and comforting it makes my heart ache. “You have to cherish them while they’re still here, no matter what they’ve done. It’s called unconditional love.”
“Of
course
I love him unconditionally. That’s what makes this so hard.” A new wave of tears gathers in the corners of my eyes, and I shake my head. “But even if I stopped now, it’s too late. It’s already harmed. I don’t trust him, not after that memo, and I can’t just blindly trust that the army or my father or maybe even Ricky had a good reason for the way they handled Zach’s death. And because of all that, I won’t let it go. I can’t.”
Gabe reaches over, tucking a stray chunk of hair behind my ear, brushing a tear away with a butterfly finger, watching me not with pity but with tenderness. The gesture undoes me, more than a little, and my throat tightens at the same time something in my chest whispers and stirs.
Maybe it’s the bourbon that makes me bold. Maybe it’s the intimacy I forced by crying into his chest. Maybe it’s the hole my father’s betrayal carved in my heart, the empty spot in
my
chest, the feeling of missing something so essential I have nothing left to lose. I latch on to the fabric stretched across his torso, fist it into a ball and pull his lips to mine.
The kiss starts out slow and sweet, and I can feel him holding back. He pulls me close but then doesn’t take it any further, not until I wrap my arms around him and urge him on with a long, low moan. It has the intended effect. Gabe leans into me and turns up the heat, pushing me into the couch, covering me with his hard and ready body, pressing down on mine in all the right spots. He deepens the kiss and tugs at my clothes with rapidly building urgency, and I know, just as surely as the earth revolves around the sun, what happens next.
And then he puts on the brakes.
“Abigail,” he whispers against my lips, and my eyes flutter open. “I don’t think...”
Rejection heats my cheeks. Gabe doesn’t finish, but he also doesn’t have to. There are very few words that can come after a start like that, and at a moment like this one. I try to push him off, but Gabe won’t budge. He latches one palm on my waist and the other behind my head, his big body caging mine on the couch cushions.
“Let me rephrase. I want this. You know how much I want this.” And just in case I miss his meaning, he presses down and I feel how much he wants it. “But you’ve had a rough day. Are you absolutely, positively sure this is the right time?”
The weight of the day falls around me like a lead blanket. My father’s name on the memo. His expression when I confronted him in the garden. The sound of my heart breaking in two.
Talk about an anticlimax.
I blink up at Gabe, thinking how much I want him, and with an ache that pounds in the middle of my chest, bitter and sweet at the same time because he’s right. Maybe not now. Maybe not for all the right reasons.
I shake my head, and the disappointment I see reflected on his face matches mine. “Rain check?”
Gabe presses his forehead to mine and nods, and his voice is just the right combination of strained and eager when he says, “Please, God, yes.”
18
That Friday, at precisely six o’clock, I ring my brother’s doorbell, praying it’s not Mike but Betsy who answers. My brother and I are not exactly on the best of terms. He’s furious about the memo, about Victoria breaking the story, about it turning his neat and tidy life into front-page news. And I’m still livid about his reaction, which was basically to pound down my door and condemn me, and in loud and rather colorful language, for all of it. Long story short, Mike sides with Dad. Unconditionally. I am a traitor and a snake and a fool. I am the worst kind of daughter. Our reunion tonight is going to be beyond awkward.
But no matter how much I want to avoid seeing Mike, I want to take Rose trick-or-treating more. For kids, Halloween is the most sacred of holidays, and the fact that she wants to spend the evening with me and only me makes braving another round of my brother’s vitriol well worth the cost.
The double oak doors open to reveal Rose in a green fairy costume, glittery wings flapping at her back. She’s flanked by a barking Ginger, who looks more like a maniacal insect than a dog, thanks to antennae that hang lopsided over one eye.
“Trick or treat,” I sing, opening my wool cape with the back of an arm and bending in a deep curtsy. Rose’s eyes widen at the sight of my costume, and she giggles behind a tiny hand.
According to Party City, this particular ensemble is called “Renaissance Maiden,” but so far the only thing it’s been is annoying. A full-length, multi-layered skirt. Puffy sleeves with finger loops and bat wings. A corset that digs into my ribs and a headpiece with long, netted drape. But on a bright note, at least I’m not a slutty nurse.
Mike appears behind Rose, his face set in a perma-scowl. She plucks a plastic pumpkin container off the foyer floor and skips to the door, bouncing up and down and screaming, “Let’s
go
! Let’s
go
!”
I hold out my hand for hers, but Mike stops us. No, he stops
me
. “She can’t go out like that, Abby. Jesus. What is the matter with you?” He snatches a navy peacoat off a chair by the door and punches the air with it.
“Nothing’s the matter with
me
,” I say pointedly, swiping the coat from his outstretched hand. Mike is the king of passive-aggressive jabs, but he and I lived under the same roof long enough for me to have picked up a trick or two. “You, however, might want to remove that giant stick from your A-S-S.” I soften my tone and turn to Rose. “But your father’s right. It’s cold out, and you need a coat.”
Rose looks down at her costume, essentially flimsy green chiffon over thin white tights. “But Tinker Bell doesn’t wear a coat.”
“Then Tinker Bell doesn’t go trick-or-treating,” Mike says, in an and-that’s-final-young-lady tone.
Rose doesn’t move, except to jut her bottom lip out a little farther.
But now I’m in even more of a hurry to get out of here, and Mike to have me gone. While I prod Rose into wearing the wings on the outside of her coat, he gives me a short and short-fused discussion of logistics. At the end of the driveway, Rose and I are to turn left and follow the road toward the golf course. On the way, we will stop at all the lit houses on the right side of the street, leaving the left side for the trip back. And no matter what, I must, must, must have her home by eight o’clock sharp. His instructions are classic Mike. Even when he’s not in control, he tries to be.
“Okay, Tink,” I say as soon as he’s done. “You got your pumpkin basket?”
She holds it high so I can see.
“Your pixie dust?”
She shakes her head, giggling behind her free hand.
“Let’s go get that candy!”
Outside, a quiet twilight is settling over the neighborhood, bathing the streets in a hazy, purple glow. There are few people out this early, mostly parents with young children with bedtimes as early as Rose’s. I grasp her tiny hand in mine as we cross the street, kicking up leaves and pulling to a stop at the first house we come to.
“Do you want me to come with you?” I ask. “Or would you rather I wait here?”
Rose eyes the house, an imposing structure of brownish-gray stucco under a canopy of giant trees. There’s a smoke machine somewhere by the door, spewing a white mist over the entire front porch. Fake tombstones litter the yard, planted askew amid skeleton hands and feet clawing their escape from the grass.
Silently, she yanks on my hand, and I follow her past a ghost, its eyes glowing a bright, evil red, hanging from a tree by the stone walkway. Quite frankly, I can’t say that I blame her for preferring an escort.
After the first house, our rhythm is established. I begin by punching the doorbell while Rose bounces on the mat in anticipation. Once the door swings wide, she squeals, “trick or treat!” loudly enough for all of Maryland to hear and then spends a few minutes eyeballing a giant bowl of candy. Once she’s satisfied she’s found the very best treat, I prod a “thank you” out of her and we head to the next house. We do this three more times, and then she stops in the middle of the road.
“This is the scary dark part,” Rose informs me, except with her articulation, it comes out sounding more like “scawy dahk paht.”
Regardless, I see her point. To our left is a wilderness of shrubs and tall weeds, and to our right, a partially built home, its doors and windows yawning black holes on a tall wooden frame. The road ahead is the length of half a football field with no streetlights, fine for now, in this in-between stretch of dusky twilight. On the way back, however, it will be blanketed in pitch-black darkness.
We cross through it and Rose grows quiet, and I can see she’s nervous. I distract her with light, mindless chatter.
“Tinker Bell is my favorite Disney character, did you know that? And you, my dear, make a very fine Tinker Bell. You saw the movie, right?”
Rose stops her wide-eyed staring at the tree line and nods.
“Well, then. Do you remember what you have to do to prove you believe in fairies?”
Her lips lift in a tiny smile. “Clap.”
“That’s right!” I clap my hands in front of me. “Let’s clap, so the real Tinker Bell knows we believe in her.”
Rose drapes the plastic pumpkin strap over her wrist and claps her pudgy hands. Together, the two of us giggle and clap until we’re well past the scary dark part.
“See?” I point to the road behind us, now bathed in dark shadows. “Not scary at all.”
Rose grins and reaches for my hand.
By the time we make it to the end of the street forty minutes later, the sidewalks are overflowing with both children and adults, and Rose’s plastic pumpkin is brimming with designer candy. Rose and I collapse onto a low stone wall to split a Snickers bar, while a constant stream of costumed children runs past us toward the golf course.
“What’s down there?” I ask Rose, pointing after them.
She shrugs, hardly pausing in her chewing to check. When she’s done inhaling her candy, I wipe her mouth with my skirt and suggest we go check.
Less than ten seconds later, Rose and I gasp when we see what all the fuss was about. An entire double lot, every inch of grass and stone and concrete covered with about a thousand Halloween-themed yard inflatables. We are hypnotized by its tackiness. We join the group of children we just watched stream past us, gaping and squealing in delight at the spectacle.
We spend some time moving through the blowups and studying each one up close. Grinning jack-o’-lanterns and an animated black cat and a host of spookier types—skulls, ghouls and monsters who, cast as plastic inflatable creatures, are not scary at all. Frankenstein has an impish grin, the grim reaper looks positively cuddly, and the giant bloody eyeball is simply laughable. Rose is mesmerized by every single one.
“It’s Cinderella’s
castle
!” she squeals and takes off running, weaving her way through a group of animated witches toward a pink princess castle on the edge of the lot.
I’m rounding the corner to follow when I notice a man ducking behind a skeleton poised at an organ. He doesn’t fit the bill of the yard filled with children in costume, their watchful parents and the slew of mingling neighbors, sipping what I suspect to be adult beverages from red plastic cups. This man, by contrast, is alone and trying very hard not to be conspicuous. An uneasy tingle clenches my insides.
Instinctively, I move to where Rose is standing, snatch up her hand and hold on tight. Out of the corner of my eye, I keep a careful watch on the man. He pauses, too, pretending to inspect a dancing Garfield on a witch’s broom.
For a moment I’m uncertain. Am I imagining things? Am I paranoid? Maybe he’s the father of one of the fifty kids running around the lot. But why, then, is he not chasing after a child?
And then I recognize his coat, a beige Members Only jacket with a grease stain on the right-hand cuff, and my heart rides into my throat. I’ve seen it, and on him, before. I look again, and now I’m positive. It is the pumpkin-inspecting man from Handyman Market.
I keep a careful distance. Close enough to not show fear, far enough to be prudent. How long has he been following me? How many times have I not noticed him? I think back to the first time I saw him, a week or so ago, and a jolt of fire explodes up my torso, straightening my spine and bathing everything around me in a red haze. I don’t know who he is, what he thinks he’s accomplishing by trailing me and my four-year-old niece—my niece!—around a neighborhood, but I do know one thing.
I know who sent him.
I dig my phone from my pocket and stab at the screen until I’ve found the right number. My father picks up with a distracted, “Wolff.”
“Call him off, Dad.”
“I’m gonna need a little more to go on here, darlin’. Call who off?”
“Your tail.” I look over and there he is, watching from behind a juggling Snoopy. I give him a look that tells him I’m onto him, right before Rose grabs my skirt and drags me over to the next blowup. “The stocky guy with the comb-over. Tell him to back the hell off.”
“Darlin’, he’s not—”
“Did you send him into my house, too?” Rose lurches to the next blowup, and I follow closely behind. “Did he pinch my copy of the medic’s transcript, because—”
“Abigail.” Dad’s voice snaps an order, and it’s for me to shut up and listen. “I need you to stop moving around so much. Grab on to Rose and stand still until I tell you otherwise. Can you do that for me?”
Something dense and deadly has slid into my father’s voice, something that sucks the steam right out of me and sends a million tiny pinpricks of fear crawling like electrodes over my skin. Because his words aside—he knows I’m with Rose, and that we’re moving around—I know my father well enough to know what that warning in his voice means.
It means it’s not my father’s tail.
I whip my head around, searching for the man in the crowd, but now either he’s ducked behind a blowup, or he’s gone. After my obvious taunt, my money’s on the former. Why did I have to provoke him? Why couldn’t I have just kept pretending he wasn’t there?
My father’s voice booms down the line. “Abigail, you still with me, darlin’? Talk to me.”
I open my mouth to answer when Rose takes off running across the yard. “Rose!” I scream, but she doesn’t look back. Two seconds later she’s swallowed up into the crowd.
For a single, hysterical second, I’m frozen.
“Rose!” I scan the crowd for a little green fairy in a navy peacoat, but there are too many people, too many blowups blocking my view. I spin around, my heart lurching into my throat. Nothing. I zigzag through the blowups, screeching her name over and over. “Rose!”
A couple of mothers recognize my look of frantic terror for what it is, and they huddle around me, peppering me with questions. What does she look like? What’s she wearing? How old?
I stop long enough to give them a hasty description, then take off through the blowups again.
“Rose!”
What if he has her?
The thought slices through my mind, and tears prick at my eyes. I picture him snatching her up, one hand clamped over her mouth, and carrying her kicking and screaming to some beat-up van. Surely Mike’s given her the stranger-danger talk, but
Jesus
! What if he’s got her?
Oh, God. My breathing accelerates, my stomach plummets, and my vision begins to swim. I’m walking the edge of an anxiety attack. The shakes are rolling up my muscles, and I can’t seem to get enough air.
“Rose!”
“What’s wrong?” a little voice says from right behind me.
Relief turns my bones to slush. I spin around, fall to my knees and pull Rose into a titanic hug. “Omigod, I thought I lost you. I thought—”
She tries to wriggle out of my arms. “Leggo. You’re squishing my wings.”
I’m also scaring her. Her eyes are wide, and there’s a distraught edge to her voice. I loosen my hold and haul a couple of deep breaths, trying to get a handle on my hysteria, but I still don’t know who the man is or where he went. I haven’t seen him since he disappeared behind Snoopy.
Even though I can still feel him watching me.
I feel around in my pockets for my cell phone, thinking I’ll call my father or maybe even 9-1-1, but it’s not there. I must have dropped it in my frantic search for Rose. The thought of combing the yard while the Members Only man smirks behind a blowup makes me feel both vulnerable and foolish for losing it in the first place, and I resign myself to forking over the cash for a new one.
Because beyond finding my cell, what I really want more than anything is to get the hell out of here.
In the span of a couple of shaky breaths, I run through my options. First and foremost, I can’t enlist Mike’s help. Our relationship is on shaky enough ground as it is. What will he say when I tell him I may have put his daughter in real, physical danger? I can’t take her back the way we came, either, not without leading my tail right back to my brother’s house. And I don’t even want to think about what could happen when we come to the scary dark part.
As far as I can tell, there’s only one option, but it will have to be subtle.
I snatch Rose’s hand, pull her in the direction of the front door and stab the bell with a shaking finger. After the extravaganza in the front yard, I’m a little surprised at the well-dressed, fortysomething man who answers. He doesn’t look like the type to coat every inch of his property in plastic blowup toys, but then again, who am I to say? I haven’t exactly been the best judge of character lately.