As Sick as Our Secrets

by A B Whelan

  To build up my courage and get the tools I needed to protect myself, I ended up signing up for a self-defense class—where I met Ashley. When my low self-esteem reached its all-time high, I was back at the Amtrak station once again.

  Today, I’m more distracted than usual. I think about the girl Ashley told me about. I can’t help but draw connections between her kidnapping case, the purse in the trunk, and my husband’s secret journal. As much as I can’t visualize Richard as a violent predator, the mere thought of him being interested in kinky stuff sickens me. Moreover, the realization that Ashley likes it rough, too, makes my stomach turn. After all I went through in Dubai, I can’t believe people choose to be tortured for pleasure. I wish I understood what makes a human want to hurt another for enjoyment. What is it? Animal instincts? Survival of the fittest? The fight for dominance securing the passage of the strongest genes? I don’t know the answer, and I find it hard to digest that all over the world, innocent children are sold into sex against their will while other people choose to be sodomized for fun.

  After I freed my friend from bondage yesterday, my idyllic picture of her was shattered. But who am I to judge? I’ve been lying to her since I’ve known her.

  As I patiently wait for two o’clock, which is when I’m supposed to meet Ashley, I remember how late Richard came home from work last night. My breathing accelerates. I lean my head back, the wood planks pressing against my spine as I dig into my memories.

  The clock chimed eight thirty as Margit set the roast on the table, a notably late time for us to eat dinner. Richard’s thoughts seemed to paddle to faraway waters as he refused to acknowledge my presence in the room. I poked at my food as I watched him, millions of possibilities running through my head. He appeared as he always does, expressionless and controlled. And it was there, sitting in that eerie silence and feeling like a stranger in my own house, that I decided I couldn’t go on like this any longer.

  “Richard!” I called out to him at the other end of the table.

  He merely raised his eyes while keeping his head tilted down.

  “Remember our last conversation a few days ago, about me working in the office?”

  I notice his chest expand with a deep breath. His eyes blinked, long and irritated.

  “I want you to find me a position in the foundation, or I want a baby,” I continued when he failed to respond.

  He put his fork and knife together, indicating he was done eating. “Honey, as I told you earlier, every position at the foundation is filled. We are a nonprofit organization. I can’t magically create a position for my wife. That would shine a negative light on me and on the company as a whole.” You’ve been embezzling millions from the foundation as “operational costs,” but I guess that isn’t considered a “negative light,” right? I grunt to myself.

  “Fine. Then I want a baby.”

  He snapped his napkin onto the table and rose from his chair, his dark eyes fixed on me. My heart raced as I watched him walking toward me with a surge of madness in his eyes. I knew that look. My mother knew it well too.

  I braced myself for the first strike. Not out of habit but ignited by childhood memories. Richard has never laid a hand on me.

  I leaned back as he turned my chair away from the table, took my hand into his, and put his weight on one knee in front of me like a man ready to propose.

  “Livi,” he began in a soft voice. “I know this life I provide for you can be overwhelming at times. But please, try to enjoy it. Change your hairstyle. Try a new exercise program. Go shopping. Anything that makes you happy.”

  I ripped my hand out of his grasp. “Being a mother would make me happy.”

  His expression darkened. “You know how dangerous this world is for a child. Our society is plagued with murderers, kidnappers, and child molesters. You really want to bring a child into this twisted world?”

  I sprang to my feet. “No! I want to bring a child into our life. She would be loved and protected.”

  “How can you ask this of me, Olivia?” he asked as he stood up, and like a chained dog, he began slowly pacing back and forth in front of me. “Every day I’m drowning in domestic abuse cases. The things I’ve seen…” He stopped to offer me a penetrating look. “I will not subject my children to this kind of brutality.”

  “You don’t have to. I’ll be here to take care of them.”

  “My decision is final.”

  “What about my decision?”

  Silence. His cold, steely eyes penetrating my soul made me shiver. I tapped my thighs as the final punctuation to our conversation and began walking away from this unproductive, habitual discussion. From the doorway, I turned back, feeling abandoned and powerless. “I think it’d be better if you slept in the guest room tonight,” I whispered and shut the door behind me.

  In the master bathroom, I took out a full sheet of birth control pills, every pill rattling in its small plastic dome even though two weeks had passed since my cycle had started. From the moment I decided not to take my pills, my head-pounding, stomach-turning mornings have become worse. I was never someone who’d cheat and lie her way through life. I’m not my father. I don’t want to be, but Richard gave me no choice. Convincing myself that I was doing the right thing was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

  I learned that in life, sometimes the smallest things can change a person’s moral compass. Mine changed when Richard took me to Saks Fifth Avenue on Wilshire Boulevard to buy me a bank-account-breaking, runway-style dress, by a designer with an exotic name I couldn’t memorize, for the foundation’s upcoming Christmas party. There was this little girl—beautiful chestnut hair, sparkling green eyes—who was in the store with her mother, holding an American Girl doll and trying on pretty dresses. I wanted what they had so badly. Bad enough to defy my husband’s will and create an opportunity for our own child to be conceived. Richard is a rigid, habitual man, but I hoped that one glance into his child’s eyes would melt his heart and change the way he looked at me. Babies have a way of bringing out the soft side in us. An instinct as old as time itself. A law of nature to protect the young. And even though I’ve read about how I should flush the hormones out of my body before I try to get pregnant, I had to risk it all.

  I couldn’t wait to have another heartbeat inside of me. Some mothers say that they feel the moment of conception—the most magical feeling in the world. The kind of magic I needed in my life. I wondered how creating life would feel to me, and slowly, thoughts of caring for my own child consumed my mind. I became convinced that a baby would help me crawl out of my emotional hole and make me feel important, needed, wanted.

  But so much has changed since yesterday.

  I remember taking a long look at my face in the bathroom mirror, thinking that I couldn’t bring a child into this broken marriage—especially by deceiving my husband, because that means I’d deceive myself as well. It hurts to admit your own mistakes. It’s the kind of pain that turns the world from a colorful place into shades of gray, like ashes or an overcast sky.

  Weighed down with a sudden emptiness and despair, I filled a glass with water from the faucet, popped out a birth control pill, and swallowed it.

  Richard took my request to heart and slept in the guest room. At least he didn’t see me sitting on the edge of the bathtub, crying.

  A homeless man with baked skin and dark, patchy stubble, wearing a Star Wars ski hat, a dirty army jacket, and oil-stained jeans, plops himself next to me on the bench, jerking me out of my flashback. He sets his small, sunken eyes on me. I recognize that look because I’ve known hunger too. I dig up a protein bar in my purse—my midday snack—and hand it to the man. He looks at me crookedly, as though I have offended him, but he takes the bar from my hand anyway. No “thank you.” No “fuck you.” He just puts it in the pocket of his jacket and looks away.

  I spot more marginalized people loitering behind us, in front of the glass door of the station. I put my hand on the can of pepper spray I carry in my purse in a
special compartment. I learned at the self-defense class that a weapon is only useful if it can be accessed instantly at the moment of need. It takes me two seconds to pull out the canister and fire; I’ve been practicing.

  I watch these petty-criminal-looking individuals chuckling through tobacco-stained, broken teeth. The contrast between them and my husband is striking. My assumption that he is a sexual deviant now seems completely absurd. Richard has nothing to do with that drug-abusing girl’s disappearance. My husband has class and character. He’d never pick up a girl from the street, especially since sex is not something of high importance to him. He has higher callings. He likes to look at drawings of girls in bondage, and I admit that’s unusual, but it’s not altogether morbid. My father’s closet was filled with cheap porn on VHS tapes. He was a deviant, not Richard.

  Keeping my hand on the pepper spray, I leave my bench and walk back to the gas station to change back into my “Mrs. Campbell” clothes. It’s been twenty minutes since Ashley called, so it’s time for me to call her back with an answer. We are going to meet at some café named Nature’s Brew near South Park. I leave my car at the gas station and take a taxi to our meeting point.

  The café looks like an upscale, hip place frequented mostly by university students. If Skyler could afford to refuel on caffeine here, I guess blowing guys in alleyways is good money. Since I’ve never met Skyler, I remain at the door while Ashley sweeps the shop for her. I watch her talking to the barista and the servers. Based on her body language, she is giving them Skyler’s description. One of the servers points to the corner where a vacant two-person table stands near the restrooms. I assume his gesture means that it’s Skyler’s regular table.

  A car barrels past behind me, emitting earsplitting German rap music. I move deeper into the shop, allowing the mouthwatering aromas to envelope me. I’m reading the menu above the bar to see what looks good when a strong sensation hits me that someone is watching me. I turn to look at the street behind me, the chill lingering in my spine. From the corner of my eye, I spot a body slip behind the two buildings outside, but I can’t make out any details about the person. I can’t even tell if it was a man or a woman. It shouldn’t concern me, but it does, because this is not the first time I’ve felt as though I was being watched. The thought that Richard hired a snoop to follow me crosses my mind, but I don’t welcome it. He’d never lower himself to do such a thing.

  Ashley’s disappointed face indicates the verdict. No one has seen Skyler for days.

  I suggest we stop at the Starbucks location we have as an alternate hangout spot for Skyler, but Ashley thinks it’s a waste of time. Instead, we drive to the girl’s last known address in a part of South Park I’d never venture into alone.

  “I hope Richard isn’t mad at me for dragging you away from work twice in two days,” Ashley says, driving slowly at our destination to find the right house.

  “Don’t worry about it. The perks of working for your own company, right?” Lately it’s getting harder to lie to Ashley. This charade is becoming tiresome.

  We park the car in front of a vanilla-colored single-story house. Despite my suggestion to not leave her rare-edition Jaguar SUV unattended in this neighborhood, she invites me to walk with her. I get out of the car and look at the line of chain link fences that stretch along every yard of the entire block. This part of L.A.—South Main Street by South Park—was built when the city gave out building permits with few concerns for future city beautification plans.

  A guy in baggy khaki shorts and a white tank top walks toward us with a drooling, scarred pit bull on a short leash—or the dog is walking him, I can’t decide. On the other side of the street, an elderly Hispanic man pushes a cart offering tamales, corn, and fruit cups. Hardcore rap echoes through the otherwise vacant street, but I can’t make out the words (I’m not good at English slang), nor can I pinpoint the origin.

  On the way to the front door, we walk between alternating patches of river and lava rock. The endless sea of rock and tree mulch in the street is most likely the result of the severe Southern California drought. I wonder if homeowners receive any kind of funding from the city for ripping out baked, weed-filled lawns they weren’t watering in the first place. Since the rocks soak up and emit heat, folks here must be sweating like pigs in summer.

  Three steps up a chipped brick staircase lead to the door. Bees buzz over the flowers of an overgrown bush on our left that covers the only street-facing window of this small house. In sunny California, the bees never rest.

  Ashley knocks on the bright green door as I try to rearrange my face into a more relaxed expression. I’m trying to forget that I grew up in similar neighborhoods in Sweden.

  I hear footsteps—high heels knocking on tile. The door opens, and a tall, slim woman in a pink tank top and tight leather pants appears in front of us. Her eyes are unfocused and hazed, showing signs of her need for a quick fix.

  “Can I help you?” she says tersely, leaning forward. Her fake boobs are propped high on her chest with an undersized pink pushup bra. Her bangs fall in waves over her eyes in 1980s style, and the rest of her dull hair is in a loose bun on the top of her head. I would look ridiculous in this getup, but it works for her.

  “Hi,” Ashley says. “We’re looking for Skyler. Is she home?”

  The woman takes a deep breath and lowers her brows, her previously uninterested caked face now an irritated mask.

  “Who are you?” she asks. I can tell we bore her.

  “My name is Ashley Hayes, and this is Olivia Campbell. I’m Skyler’s psychologist. She didn’t show up for her last appointment, and I’m trying to find her. I’m worried about her.”

  “Well, that’s Skyler,” the woman says in a deep, hoarse voice. I watch the big mole next to her upper lip rise and fall with each syllable.

  She lifts her hand at us. “Can I get you guys a drink?” The plastic bangles disguised as gold jingle on her arm as she waves us in.

  Ashley looks at her watch and then at me. I shrug.

  “No, we’re good, thanks,” Ashley says, stepping inside the house. I follow her.

  The woman must be in hurry because by the time I close the door behind us, she is in the kitchen, on the other side of the room we just entered. A long, wood-paneled half-wall splits the small room into two smaller areas. I look over the kitchen countertop, where stacks of plastic containers with cereal, dried beans, and nuts obscure my view. Rows of medicine bottles and food supplements fill the space between them.

  The sharp sound of glasses clinking in the kitchen vibrates in the room. It’s dim in here, and I take my sunglasses off. Now I can clearly see dust particles floating, almost suspended in the air, illuminated by a few slim beams of light that pierce into the house between the dirty blinds, creating a murky, mystical veil around us. The air is foul: burnt coffee, cigarettes, cheap aftershave, and rotten trash. I bend down to check out a picture collage with a thick layer of dust on the frame that’s leaning against the wall. The low-resolution, home-printed photos are of Skyler and a guy with dark hair in intimate poses, hugging and kissing. The woman in the house isn’t in any of the pictures.

  “Did you know that Skyler was seeing a psychologist?” Ashley asks our host.

  The clinging of silverware and glasses intensifies, as if she had dropped something.

  Ashley looks behind the paneled wall at the woman. “Are you okay?”

  Holding a short glass with two-fingers of amber liquid in her hand, she fixes her eyes on the counter instead of looking at us. “Why was she seeing a shrink?”

  “I can’t disclose that, but I’m very concerned about her.”

  She lifts a hand to her ear and starts playing with her oversized ear hoop. “Really?”

  We are wasting our time. This woman probably doesn’t even remember what she had for breakfast, if she had anything at all.

  She swallows her drink with one breath and slams the empty glass on the tile counter. “I hope she’s having a good time where
ver she is. If not, I know she can take care of herself.” She bursts through the bead curtain and enters the living room where we stand. She shows no interest in talking to us as she stops at a small table and opens a wooden box, taking out pieces of jewelry and stuffing them in her pocket.

  “We need to talk to her.” I sense the irritation in Ashley voice.

  The woman walks by us without a glance and starts opening drawers on the bureau by the TV and engages in a hasty search through their contents.

  I touch Ashley’s arm, indicating it’s time to go.

  Ashley stares at the crazy woman for a moment without blinking, then nods toward the door. She puts her hand on the doorknob when the door pushes back with force, sending Ashley backward and out of balance. The guy who was with Skyler in the framed photos enters the room. Upon seeing us, his eyes enlarge in surprise. In real life, he isn’t quite as handsome as in the pictures. His Dumbo-like ears stand away from his head, and his hair is dirty and messy—not in the sexy, devil-may-care way but more on the neglected side.

  “Who are you?” he says kindly to us before his eyes move to the woman, and his pupils dilate. “Bonnie, what are you doing here?” he yells at her, pushing his way by Ashley and me.

  “Did you know that our Skyler is missing?” Bonnie says slyly as she takes a stand with her right arm akimbo and her back bent. One word comes to my mind: hyena.

  Ashley steps between them, offering her hand to the man. “Hi, I’m Ashley, and this is Olivia. We are here to see Skyler.”

  He acknowledges Ashley with a small nod of his head, but his eyes are set on the woman who apparently shouldn’t be here. She also seems agitated as she brushes her bangs aside and rubs her skinny neck, bulging with a net of capillaries, as she slowly backs up.

  “Bonnie, you need to go.” The guy starts toward her. His black leather work boots stomp against the squeaking floorboard as he advances on her. She spins around and tries to bolt, but the guy’s massive hands grip her arm.

  She bends forward, and one of her breasts slips out of her bra. “Get your hands off me!” she screams, jerking her body from him like a rag doll.