“Jolie, you don’t have to tell me this.”
“No, because I was so stupid,” I insisted. “All this—I should have—I was on the Pill to make sure that I could do things on my terms, have a family, maybe, when I was ready. But what I was taking made my headaches pretty bad. My head hurt so much I couldn’t concentrate in school and driving was hard, so the nurse practitioner was changing me to a different dose. It was in between when I started one and stopped the other one, and we were supposed to use—but Ty didn’t want to wear—I was afraid of losing him so I didn’t make him—I don’t know why I’m saying this. Why am I saying this? I don’t mean that I regret having Nola, ok? I love her more than anything. I don’t know…”
It was silent on the other end of the line. “Hello?” I asked.
“I’m here.” But he sounded very far away.
I sighed, so tired. “I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I bothered you with this when you’re trying to work. Who’s there with you on Valentine’s Day?”
“My assistant hates this holiday too, so she came in to help me out.”
She. I felt a bolt of white-hot anger that surprised me so much I almost dropped the phone. “Oh. That’s nice.”
“Jolie, I’m going to go. I’ll let you know about the cleaners.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Consider it done. Goodbye.”
And he hung up. And I sat there on the couch, and bawled my eyes out.
Chapter 12
My little sister leaned out of our mom’s arms to blow kisses at my car. “Bye, Jolie! Bye, Nola!”
We both waved back. “We love you!” I called. My mom shouldn’t have been holding her—Kayla was too heavy. I looked back at them in my rearview mirror, concerned, and blew another kiss to them.
“I love visiting Grandma Coral!” Nola crowed. “Bye, bye Kayla!”
The two little girls had a great time playing together, first with Maia and her boyfriend supervising on Valentine’s Day, then with me on Sunday as I also kept track of the cleaning people at the apartment. A crew of five had shown up promptly, right at the time that Luca had texted me that they would: “Cleaners coming at 8 AM. Please be there to let them in.” And they had done an amazing job; the apartment had never looked better, even when we had first moved in so many years ago, and certainly never since then (despite my best efforts).
“Cleaners coming at 8 AM. Please be there to let them in.” And that was all he had said to me for the rest of the weekend. I had sent back so many messages that I started to worry that I was going to scare him. But he hadn’t answered me, and then I was so embarrassed, first that I had cried like a baby told him all the terrible details about my birth control failure, then that I had electronically harassed him…it was just all bad.
I had gotten the invoice from the cleaners, which they had already marked as paid. I added that number to the car repair cost, and wrote it, underlined, on a paper I taped to my dashboard. I was keeping track of what I owed to Luca.
I had been thinking of him, a lot. And now my lip started to shake as I drove, like I was going to cry again. I had spent Saturday night with tears dripping onto the flat, hard pillow on the motel bed, with Nola plastered alongside me, my mom and Kayla draped on top of each other and smashed next to Nola. I had mostly waited for the sun to come up.
Nola made a loud yawning sound from the back seat. “I’m sleepy!” she announced. “Why is it all dark?”
“We waited to see Ron, remember? I wanted to talk to him.” When he had walked in earlier that evening, not even commenting on the clean apartment where we were hanging out in peace and safety, I had escorted him into the bedroom and given him an earful. Stuff about his friends never being allowed to visit, ever again, a lot about that. Ron lived in fear and loathing of any official arm of the government, so I also talked about calling the police, and calling Protective Services for both my mom and Kayla, calling the fire marshal, calling the school principal, librarians, the mailman, calling everyone. I would sic them all over him unless he started to step up. His face got madder and madder as I went on and then I stopped threatening and took a deep breath.
“You know I want what’s best for Mom and Kayla, right?” I’d asked him. “I know you love them too. They shouldn’t live the way it was in here, and you shouldn’t either. If you need help, I’ll get it for you. If you need someone to clean, or to come in and hang with Mom, or babysitters for Kayla, or rides to the doctor appointments, you need to let me know. Now. I can’t do anything if I don’t know what the problems are.”
Very grudgingly, he had let me know that yes, he did need help. Him running away, up to Washington, had not just been a chance to party, but also had been a cry for help from me. At least that was what he was saying now, and I kind of believed him.
So that was also on a note on my dashboard: a list of all the people I needed to put in place for Ron. And underneath it I had written, “$$?” Because where that was coming from, yes, that was a good question.
“Why don’t you relax a little, Noles?” I asked her. I glanced back in the mirror again and saw a pair of sleepy eyes when another car’s headlights lit up her face. It was just about her bedtime. “You’re so cozy there with your pillow and Pinky to cuddle. Close your eyes and tell yourself a story.”
“Ok.” I listened to her settling herself in, adjusting the pillow, bear, and blanket. “Well, one time Pinky went to school. It was a big, pretty school. It was called Starhurst Academy where Mama works and makes the big kids learn all the stuff. Pinky went with me to pre-k because that will be my school.” I smiled. Her voice got softer and softer as the story went on and finally stopped altogether when she fell asleep.
Now I had to work on staying awake. After two nights of very restless sleep, it wasn’t an easy five-hour trip home. I had to make two stops for drive-through coffee, giant cups of drive-through coffee. And then I had to pee, badly, and had to hold it because I didn’t want to stop and wake up Nola to go in somewhere to hit the bathroom. I drove with the radio on low, hitting my leg every now and then to make myself focus on the road if my mind drifted too much.
It kept drifting back to everything that had happened over the weekend. Hanging out with my mom, and seeing that she wasn’t getting better, even with all the different doctors and therapists that she was supposed to be working with. Talking briefly with Maia, who avoided the topic of college like the plague and only said things about how great Hunter was, how sweet he had been with Nola and Kayla and my mom. He hadn’t said much to me, just shrugging when I asked what he was doing after high school. I wondered more about how I was going to get all this help for Ron, how I was going to schedule it from far away, maximize the governmental assistance that I could find and then pay for all the private help that I’d have to bring in, too.
And my thoughts drifted a lot to Luca. I had really, really screwed up my friendship with him. All the crying I had done on the phone on Saturday morning, all the moaning and wailing, and then telling him about how I’d ended up pregnant? I had been out of my stupid mind. I had probably scared him out of my life for good, and that was a huge, horrible shame. One that made me cry as I drove, every time I thought about it, until I had used up all the napkins that came with the coffee and was using my shirt as a giant Kleenex.
It was a long, long trip back to San Rafael.
When we finally pulled into our parking lot just after midnight, I was desperately tired, and desperate to go to the bathroom. I got Nola out and left our bag in the trunk to deal with in the morning. She was completely asleep and draped on me like a wet noodle as I took the stairs, feeling like it was the millionth time I had trudged up them. In my next life, I would have a ranch house. Nice and flat.
I had out my keys, and as I went to put them in our apartment door, I saw…something. There was something all over the outside of the door, sticky and partially wet. It covered the handle, drying there in a thin layer. It was splattere
d from the top to the bottom, even on the welcome mat that I had laid out in the hallway to make the entrance look more homey. Grimacing, I put the key into the lock and turned the handle by gripping it through the cuff of my sweatshirt. I got Nola to bed and as I ran to the bathroom, I pulled off my top to look at the stain on the sleeve.
What the hell was this? Who could have done—oh, fuck. What if Ty had been lying when he said that he was working it out with the money he owed? What if this was some kind of warning to me, since he had told them that I could give him a bailout? I looked at the mark on the fabric in horror. What was this crap? I threw away the shirt, then I scrubbed my hands in the bathroom sink, hard, imagining acid or poison. But there didn’t appear to be anything wrong with me. Despite now feeling almost nauseously tired, I pulled on thick rubber gloves and grabbed some bleach spray and went to wipe down the door, putting all the rags and paper towels I used in a garbage bag along with the stained welcome mat.
And as I worked, disgusted and freaked out by cleaning something potentially scary for the second time that weekend, I realized what it was. I knew exactly what had been sprayed there: it was semen. Someone had come, all over my door. I froze with shock and absolute horror at the thought that some man had stood in front of the apartment I shared with my daughter and done this, and judging by the mess on the door, probably more than once. I stared at my hands in the rubber gloves, holding the bleach spray and rag. Then I dropped everything, picked up the garbage bag, and threw up into it.
∞
“Ms. Fraser? Russell is picking his nose again.”
I sighed. “Russell, we’ve talked about this. Tissue is your friend! Go wash your hands. And Ashlyn, you don’t need to be the police of Russell’s nose.”
Police. I gulped. I had called them very early that morning, after I had spent a very sleepless night on the couch with the front door barricaded, just in case. It had been against every one of my instincts to make that call, but I’d thought I had to. Just like documenting the little bully at Nola’s school, I had to make an official report, in case…just in case.
Two officers had arrived to talk to me. The sight of them in their uniforms had almost made me go into palpitations, it scared me so much, but I managed to tell them about the door. I had cleaned it all up, but they seemed to believe that something had been there. And I told them about Nola’s bike, too. They wrote it all down, but I knew there wasn’t a lot they could do. Especially since the property manager had apparently gone in and cleaned out the broken bike from the storage area without me knowing about it, and had thrown out all my school papers while he was at it. I discovered that when I went to show the officers the damage there.
“My ex-boyfriend, um, he associates with some bad people,” I said quietly, so Nola wouldn’t overhear. “I’m afraid…” My throat had closed and I had stopped being able to talk. I was so afraid, not for me, but for her. By mistake, I gripped her hand hard enough that she had said ow, and pulled away from me.
So the police had been nice, and they had listened, but they seemed to classify what had happened as more of a prank than anything else. More like when some of the football players at my high school had thrown eggs at the vice-principal’s house, rather than criminals threatening me. I made things worse when I mentioned the tire problem I’d had, which now seemed ridiculously suspicious to me. And I really shouldn’t have talked about the clear glass marbles that we kept finding at the top of the stairs and in front of our apartment door, and which I now thought were there to make us fall and trip. The one cop actually shook his head in disbelief when I said that.
They clearly very much doubted that the substance on my door was what I’d said it had been, and since the cut padlock on the storage area had been tossed, they kept asking if maybe I had left it open by accident? And why hadn’t I reported it before? They had suggested that I go somewhere for a few days, if I was very nervous. Which I was, but where were Nola and I going to go? And we would have to come back—I had a lease with a few more months on it.
“Ms. Fraser?”
“Yes, Desiree?” I turned my attention resolutely to my second grade class. I had to do my job, that was for sure. We definitely needed the money now, to get us out of the apartment and possibly to pay off Ty’s debt if it was still outstanding. I had been looking into doing some gig work, too. I could drive a rideshare at night, when Nola was asleep, and I could leave her with Eva on the first floor. Maybe I could…no, focus! “Let’s break this down and figure it out,” I told my student, and looked at the word she was pointing to in her book.
I made Nola wait, locked in the car, when we got home that evening while I checked the apartment. Then I ran back down to get her because I had been terrified the whole time that something was happening to her in the parking lot while I was upstairs. Everything was fine, no one was around either place. I locked us into the apartment and secured the door, and kept my phone in my pocket, ready to dial 911. I moved around the kitchen making dinner, trying to think and plan, lost in thought.
“Mama!”
I leapt up and dropped the strainer I was holding. Cooked pasta spilled out across the kitchen floor. “Nola! You scared me! Look what happened to our dinner!”
I had practically yelled it. Her little face crumpled up.
“Noles, I’m sorry.” I held out my arms. “I’m sorry I got so mad.” She flung herself at me and I picked her up. “I got startled when you called to me so loudly. What do you need?”
“Someone is knocking,” she said, sniffling. “Someone is knocking but you didn’t hear.”
I ran into the bedroom holding her. “Stay in here and don’t come out unless I call you,” I ordered. Then I went back to the front door. “Who’s there?”
“It’s your lunch delivery.”
Really? “Luca?”
“Is there another man bringing you lunch? Am I going to have to fight someone?”
I opened the door. And then I physically held myself back from throwing my arms around his neck and hugging the life out of him. Just looking at him felt kind of like a hug, or like I let go of a breath I didn’t know I had been holding. “Hi.”
“Hi.” He held up another soft-sided cooler. “Can I come in?”
“Of course.” I walked back to the bedroom and told Nola to come out and say hi, then I locked the door and used the wedge I’d gotten at the hardware store at lunch to make sure no one else was coming in. When I looked up, Luca was watching.
Nola was thrilled to see him. “Sono Nola, piacere!”
“Piacere mio, Nola. Ben fatto!” he told her.
“I practiced it and I taught Kayla. But her name isn’t Nola, so she said it different,” she explained.
They sat on the couch together. “Tell me what else you did with Kayla,” Luca suggested. I listened to them talk, mostly in English but with some Italian too, as I put the lunches in the fridge. These were in metal containers, no animals. “Reusable steel for the older kids,” he called, when he saw me looking at one. “We didn’t think they’d appreciate sharks and teddy bear boxes.”
“I appreciate teddy bears a lot,” Nola told him, and went to get Pinky.
“Did I come at dinnertime?” he asked me. “Am I getting in the way?”
“That’s dinner, down here,” I said, and bent to start picking up the pasta. “I had a little spill. Thank you for bringing me the food.” I hadn’t even considered that he would do it again.
Luca came over and knelt down to help me. “I’m a day late for the work week.” He sat back. “I wanted to see you. It felt like we hadn’t talked in a long time. How have you been?”
He sounded so weird and formal, even sitting there picking up noodles off my floor. “I’m fine. Busy, because a lot is going on at Starhurst right now, issues with the former athletic director. Who’s a fucking pervert,” I couldn’t stop myself from saying. “Anyway. How are you?”
“Ok,” he said, “I’m ok. How are your parents? I got your messages that th
e cleaning people did a good job.”
I sat back too, my hands full of noodles. “They were amazing. I can’t thank you enough. I was really in over my head and I went a little nuts last weekend. I’m so sorry about everything I said to you on the phone and I’m sorry I wouldn’t leave you alone, calling and writing to you so much. It must have felt like I was Vesa or something.” I could feel my face getting hot with embarrassment. “I’m really sorry. I don’t want to mess up our friendship. I don’t blame you for needing space from psycho me.”
He didn’t answer at first, just kept picking pasta off the linoleum and putting it back in the strainer. “No, it wasn’t that. I got busy. My dad is back in the hospital.”
“Oh, Luca! I’m so sorry!” I reached out for his hand.
“We’re not sure he’ll ever come home again. My mom is, uh, not doing very well. I’ve been at their house or at the hospital since Saturday night.” I held his hand tightly. He lowered himself to sit on the floor next to me. “I’m tired.”
“You didn’t have to take the time bring me lunch.” Then I did hug him, pulling him to me with hands that were sticky with pasta starch. “But I’m glad you did. I’m sorry about your dad, I really am, and I want to help you if I can.”
He hugged me back, and put his chin down on my head. I closed my eyes and rested against his chest. God, it felt good. I hoped he was getting as much out of it as I was.
I opened my eyes when I heard Nola pad back into the kitchen. “I brought Pinky,” she announced. She didn’t seem to find it odd that we were sitting and hugging on the floor amidst the noodles, but plopped herself down in my lap to join in and put the bear against Luca. “Here, you can hold her,” she told him generously.
“Grazie.”
“Prego,” Nola answered.
We sat for a while, all three of us. Nola told Luca about her school day, about more monkey bar issues. “Mommy helped me at Grandma Coral's playground. A little,” she qualified.
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