Here I Go

by Jamie Bennett

  “I thought I’d take the day off,” Cain answered.

  “Like you did on Christmas?” I put my hand over my mouth. The words had come out just like how I’d spoken to my mother on the phone the night before, like I was snarling them. “I’m sorry. That’s good for you to take a day of rest. You were up so late last night.” He hadn’t gotten here until after three. He’d walked into my bedroom wanting to know why I hadn’t come to the gala, why I’d decided to skip it after all the preparation I’d done. I’d told him what had happened and that was when he’d started his apologies and also started blaming other people, and I’d said I was too tired to talk. I’d just wanted to sleep, but that hadn’t happened.

  “We were both up late,” he mentioned to me now. “I heard you leave early this morning, too.”

  I’d gone outside to run up and down the hills and steps, thinking that maybe exercise would help, although it had only seemed to make things worse as I watched my thighs jiggle in my leggings. I’d come home, showered, and put my pajamas back on.

  “Aria,” he said, and stopped for a moment before he shook his head and started again. “Are you really still angry at me about this? I don’t know why your name wasn’t on the list, but I’ll find out. I told them at least three times, Aria McCourt.”

  Miller. “I’m not angry that there was a mistake and I didn’t get in. I’m angry…” I was suddenly bursting with it. “You didn’t come here to get me!”

  “To go to the gala? I sent you a car. It should have been fine.”

  “Obviously, it wasn’t! I didn’t want to go there alone. I kept calling you—”

  “I misplaced my phone. It wasn’t on purpose.” He didn’t get angry back, just colder.

  “And you didn’t bother to use someone else’s to call me until midnight! Didn’t you wonder what had happened to me with the hours passing by and I still wasn’t there?”

  “I got caught up in the party,” he said. “I wasn’t paying attention—”

  “To the fact that your wife was missing. Aria Miller,” I reminded him.

  He was totally silent for a few moments until he told me, “I don’t have an answer for you.”

  “That’s answer enough.”

  We stared at each other until my phone rang, again, with another call from my mother. “Darn her!” I barked out. “I’m not going to talk about it.”

  “About what?”

  I shook my head.

  “Why are you crying like that? Aria?”

  He held out his palm to me but I went upstairs and got back into bed, the squishy one that folded around me like a hug. Cain followed.

  “Aria. I’m sorry about the damn party! There will be more, ok? They do that stupid clucking gala every year.” Not clucking, though. “There’s no need to fuss so much,” he told me angrily, and suddenly sucked in a breath, like he was surprised.

  I turned on the pillow to look at him. “What?”

  “I just…I sounded like someone else when I said that. I reminded myself of someone.” He stepped toward me. “I don’t want you to cry. I really didn’t mean for the night to turn out that way. I know you did a lot to get ready and everything and I’m sorry they wouldn’t let you in. I’m even more sorry that I didn’t call you sooner.”

  “That you forgot about me.”

  “I don’t have an explanation for you that’s going to make it sound better.” He sat down on the bed. “I’ve been to about five of these and it was just the same as all the others. I didn’t forget you, I forgot that things weren’t the same anymore. I forgot that I was supposed to be with someone.”

  “Me! You forgot me!” He certainly wouldn’t have forgotten the other woman who’d been hanging on his arm in the pictures on the steps of the museum, the one who was dressed as a purple orchid, including a headdress. His ex-girlfriend Demetra had looked truly amazing and my plain, navy sheath would have been put to shame.

  After I was nearly removed from the premises by the police officer, I’d walked away down the sidewalk, crying, and hailed myself a cab to go back to Cain’s house. The seam up the back had ripped as I got into the car, but at least that meant I was able to remove the dress when I got here. I’d hung it up in the big closet, way at the back, where I wouldn’t have to look at it ever again.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I guess I get it,” I told him. “I understand how it happened. Once my mama left me at the Greet ‘n Gobble grocery store because she forgot about me. Your mind gets busy with other things that are more important to you.” It just felt awful to understand how little you were in someone’s thoughts. Your husband’s thoughts.

  “No, it’s not that. I honestly believed you’d decided not to come. You seemed so nervous about it and then, I didn’t make it home to bring you.” He grimaced. “That was bad, Aria, I know. I know you needed me to be there with you.”

  I nodded. I had.

  “I get nervous at these things too.”

  I stared at him. “You do? You didn’t seem like it. I saw you,” I explained. “I saw you opening the doors and smiling.”

  “That’s all just bullshit,” Cain told me. “Everyone there was bullshitting about something. That Sebastián wanders around barefoot like he can’t afford shoes and I know how much money Blayden’s giving him. Demetra acts like she—”

  “I don’t want to hear about your girlfriend.”

  He nodded slowly. “Ok. I guess I wouldn’t want to hear about your former boyfriends, either. No, I definitely don’t. But she is my former girlfriend.”

  The one he’d been posing with, dancing with. And I was his wife, the one who’d gone to bed, alone. “I wanted to be the one dancing with you,” I told him. “I thought we could at least get a normal picture of the two of us. Our wedding photo is just terrible.”

  “What wedding photo?”

  I took my phone out of my pajama pants and scrolled through it. “This one.” I showed him the screen, the picture of the two of us a few minutes after the ceremony in the garden behind the welding shop. Cain had picked up his head out of his hands when Aubree had insisted that she get one picture on her phone since there wasn’t a real photographer to record the moment. The outcome of that showed Cain’s eyes tilted toward the sky, like he was asking for guidance. He was frowning, every muscle in his face rigid and set into angry unhappiness. I was staring up at him and looked like I was about to cry. You could almost see my lower lip trembling.

  “I don’t remember taking this. I barely remember that day,” he admitted. “Our wedding day.”

  I nodded. “I felt so awful for you and I didn’t know what to do to make you feel better.”

  “You married me,” he said, but I didn’t understand what he meant.

  “I did, but you didn’t have to go through with it,” I said. “I told you that day that we could wait or not even get married at all. You didn’t have to—” My phone started to ring, my mother calling again. I silenced it.

  “I don’t remember what you were wearing.” He took the phone from me. “Where did you get that dress?”

  “It’s Amory’s. She pulled it out of the attic and let me borrow it. I’m an inch shorter so I wore really high heels to keep it off the ground, and I changed before we went to the reception so I wouldn’t ruin it.”

  He looked stunned. “What reception? There was a reception?”

  “We all went to lunch,” I said. “I asked you if you wanted to come and you told me no, and I said I would cancel it and help you with arrangements for your aunt or just be with you if you needed me. You left.”

  Cain shook his head. “I don’t remember any of that. I drove down there and we stood in that dirt lot and I realized that I didn’t have a ring, and then it started to rain.” He reached and touched my cheek. “It was God-awful, wasn’t it?” That wasn’t actually a question.

  “My friend Eimear tried to make it nice,” I said. “They spent so much of their money to buy flowers and it was better than if we’d had it in th
e law office, even if everyone did get a little wet. At least they got to be there with us.”

  “Jesus.” He expelled a big breath. “I don’t know what I was thinking that whole week. I don’t even remember talking to you.”

  I nodded. We hadn’t been in touch very much.

  “I remember talking to Aunt Liddy about it, though. She was so happy for us.”

  “Was she?” I smiled, even though it felt strange on my face at this moment. “I’m glad she was.”

  “She was thrilled. She said you already felt like family and she was looking forward to the wedding so much. The night before, I went to call her for dinner and I thought she was asleep. She was holding her cross, like maybe she knew it was coming.”

  “Cain…”

  He put his hand over his eyes. “I wish she hadn’t been alone.”

  I sat up and put my arms around him. “She always had you with her. You were her whole heart.” I felt him draw a shaking breath.

  “I never understood what it meant to have someone love you until I came to live with her. I’ll never forgive myself for the hell I put her through with how I acted.”

  “She forgave you,” I said softly. “She understood.”

  “I hope so.”

  My phone sounded off again, vibrating between us. Cain pulled away and looked down at the screen. “You have to come to the funeral, Aria Louise!” he read aloud. “How dare you act this way?” His eyebrows lowered as he looked at me.

  I took the phone from his hand and threw it across the room, and then stared, shocked at what I’d done.

  “Aria! What in the hell is going on?” he asked me.

  “My uncle died,” I told him. “Mama called me last night when I was on my way to the party.”

  “Oh, Jesus. I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I’m not. I am, but I’m…I’m so…I’m almost glad and that’s so awful, but I’m also so…” I didn’t know what I was.

  I saw Cain’s face change. “Which uncle?”

  “Terrance.” I gulped. “You were right about him. Not that you should have killed him, but that I should have gone to the police. I should have told them what he did. Now he’s dead and my mama is talking about what a great volunteer he was with children!” I rubbed my face on the pink pigs dancing on my sleeve and lay down, turning on my side to look out the window at the grey rain.

  The bed sank more as Cain lay down next to me. He pulled me to his chest. “That’s over, then. The bastard is dead and you should be glad, and no, we’re not going to the funeral. Tell your mother that and if she keeps it up, I’ll tell her.”

  I was glad he was on my side but I certainly didn’t want him entangled with my mama. “I keep thinking about it. I can’t stop remembering.” I closed my eyes. “Who else did he do it to, Cain? What other little girl feels this way right now?”

  “What way?”

  I shook my head, not able to say how awful it was. There weren’t really the right words. “I was too embarrassed because I knew them all, the officers, I mean. If I’d said anything, they would have called the sheriff. I was too ashamed of it to face him or any of them. So I let more little girls get hurt because of my precious feelings.”

  “That’s not what happened.” He rubbed my arm, like I was still a child. “Sometimes things are so bad that you can’t say them.”

  “You told me about your parents,” I said. “That’s the worst thing that could have happened to someone.”

  “Everyone at home already knew,” he answered. “It wasn’t something I could keep from you. I don’t like having secrets from you, anyway.”

  I looked up at him and he used the luvbug pillowcase to wipe my cheeks. What secrets did he mean?

  “No one here knows,” he said. “I don’t think they do. They seem to like that I’m mysterious.” He glared at the rain hitting the window glass.

  “You’re different,” I put in. “You’re the good kind of different.”

  “They just don’t know me. Not like you do.”

  Did I? Cain rested his head on my pillow so that his body was totally wrapped around mine. Like a shield, I thought. I took his arm and tried to pull him even closer.

  “You can’t blame yourself for what that man did, Aria. Not to you and not to anyone else. I’m glad he’s dead and roasting in hell right now.”

  If anyone deserved that fate, Terrance did. “I don’t blame myself for what happened when I was a little girl. I was so trusting. I trusted him and that was why I let him do things to me and I trusted what he said, that I would get us both in terrible trouble if I told. I trusted that no one would believe me and that our family would be ruined. That was what he said to me.” Cain’s arm got taut and I felt his stomach muscles clench. “I probably should have known better.”

  “Someone should have known better than to leave you alone with him.”

  “No. He hid it well and I don’t think they could have known,” I said. “I don’t blame them. But I knew, and even after the first time, I still got in his car, I still went to his house.” I shook a little as I remembered. “I’m still that way, though, making dumb decisions. At the law firm, I let myself get involved in that emotional aff—”

  Cain flipped me over to face him. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t want to hear about it. You were friendly with a superior who tried to take advantage of you, that was what I understood from that story. There was no affair. It was just another asshole of a man who worked the angles to get something from you. He deserved to get fired for it.”

  I looked into his face. “I still shouldn’t have done it. And I shouldn’t have let Terrance be free all this time, free from guilt and walking around free to hurt other children.” I tried to explain. “I just wanted it to go away. It felt like if I said it, if I talked about it, then it was real. Like when my daddy died, I wouldn’t say that either. I pretended for so long that he was still with us.”

  “I remember. I pushed you on the swing and you told me that you were waiting for him, that he was coming home for dinner.”

  I’d done that for months. I’d stood at the window, watching for his car, and made my mama cry when I’d announced what I was doing.

  “You told me all kinds of things, that your sisters were watching a dirty TV show and that you ate chocolate chips, too.”

  “I don’t remember.” I remembered the stars and I remembered that he’d stayed with me. “I used to climb on the counter to get at all the treats. Mama never found out but she would have killed me if she’d known. She was always so worried about my weight.”

  Cain’s hand squeezed my hip. “What’s wrong with your weight?”

  “You know how I was,” I told him. And I would be back on the sriracha and mayo, starting today. Just because the ballet gala was over didn’t mean that there wouldn’t be some other event where I had to fit in. I sighed.

  “Don’t blame yourself, Aria. Not for anything.”

  “I don’t know. Don’t I deserve it?”

  “You did the best you could,” he told me. “You’d never have hurt anyone on purpose. You don’t have that in you.”

  “I could,” I told him. “If something happened to someone I love, I could.”

  He tucked me against his chest. “I understand that completely.” I felt the breath enter and leave his lungs, I heard the solid thump of his heart. Then I heard him say, “I’m sorry. I’m going to try to make all this up to you.”

  After a while, so comfortable and safe and so tired from the night before, I fell asleep.

  ∞

  “Here you go, Heavenlie with an -ie!” I said, reading her name off the side of the cup. “Sorry for the delay.” I slid the coffee across the counter. “Have a great day!”

  She didn’t answer me and didn’t even really look at me as she grabbed her drink and rushed out of the coffee bar. “Well, that’s too bad,” I said to no one in particular. “It looks like Heavenlie is already having a tough morning.”

  “Aria!”

>   I turned to my boss’s voice. “Yes, Imhotep?”

  “Did you give away coffee again?” he demanded. “Thana told me that you did.”

  I looked over his shoulder at my coworker, Thana, and she gave me the finger. “Um, just a little pour,” I admitted. A man had come in and I could tell that he didn’t have the money, but it was very cold this morning in the wet, drippy way that seemed to be the San Francisco winter. “It really wasn’t even a full cup. But it was pretty much full,” I had to tell him.

  “This is the second time I’ve warned you about that,” my new boss said.

  Yes, that was true, and I’d only been working here for three days. Two warnings in three days wasn’t a great record to have at your new job.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and he told me not to do it again. Absolutely not to, and this warning was much sterner than the one he’d given me on my first day when an older lady had come in and wanted tea but hadn’t had her wallet.

  Imhotep was only a year or two older than I was, and the rest of my coworkers were around my age, too. That was what I had reported to Cassidy when she asked for their details and she’d answered that it was a good sign for me. “You’ll totally become besties with them, Ari! They’ll love you.”

  I remembered that as I approached the other girl working behind the counter with me. She’d given me the finger, true, but she was only doing her job when she’d reported on me for giving away the coffee. I couldn’t blame her for it. “Hey, Thana! How are you today?”

  She didn’t look up from her phone. “Eh.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad. What’s the matter?”

  Now she looked up to stare right into my eyes. “I have a really annoying coworker who always wants to talk to me.”

  “Oh. Ok.” I walked back to the other end of the counter and wiped it with a rag.

  “What?” I heard her ask a customer and I winced. She had a thing or two to learn about manners! It was too bad my mama wasn’t here to whip her into shape.

  “I’d like to speak to the other employee,” a familiar voice answered her, and I turned, already with a smile on my face.

  “Hi!” I greeted Cain. I was so glad to see him that I almost jumped across the counter to hug him. “Did you come to see me working?”