Aftershock

by K. G. MacGregor

  Lily chuckled slightly as the background noise faded. “On the bed, I bet.”

  “You got it. He’s taken over the place.” She gave the dog a pat.

  “Holly thinks I ought to bring him to work with me. If she could

  see him now . . .”

  “Holly . . . she’s your friend from San Diego, right?”

  “Yeah.” Anna rolled her eyes at the frivolous conversation. Why couldn’t they just talk? “I hope I’m not calling too late.”

  “No, it’s okay.”

  “Good. I was worried you might be in bed.”

  “Well, I am, but that’s because my only choices are the bed or the bathtub.”

  Picturing Lily in the motel room, Anna bit her tongue again to keep from asking her to come home. She didn’t want to ask for anything at all—not even if they could get together and talk again—for fear that Lily would say no. “I just . . . I wanted you to know that I was thinking about you. Pretty much all the time.”

  Lily was quiet for several seconds. “Anna, I—”

  “And I’m sorry. I let myself get caught up in all my big plans and lost sight of what really mattered, and that was you.” She took Lily’s silence as a confirmation of her blame. “It’s okay. You don’t have to say anything. I just needed to tell you that. I love you. Good night.” Anna’s heart sank, and she pressed the button to end the call before Lily could protest.

  “Admit it, Lily. You like eating real food once in a while,” Sandy said, gesturing toward Lily’s empty plate.

  “Yours especially. At least I’m driving into work again every day, so I can get a decent lunch downtown.”

  Back at Sandy and Suzanne’s on Saturday night after her first week out of the rehab center, Lily felt good about her progress. She had ridden Suzanne’s bike to an AA meeting each morning, and made amends to Tony and the law clinic staff. On Thursday, she had returned to Judge Anston’s court, this time entering a not guilty plea for a client charged with resisting arrest. The judge had been pleased to see her, and filled with praise that she had completed the program.

  “Have you talked to Anna this week?” Sandy asked.

  “She came by the motel on Monday night. How do you suppose she knew where I was?” She made no secret of her suspicions that Sandy had tipped Anna off.

  “Did you ask her?”

  “No.” Her shoulders slumped. “She asked me to come home.”

  Sandy and Suzanne exchanged looks, and Suzanne spoke. “So what are you doing still at the Waterways Lodge?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think I can’t go back home. I need to start looking for a place to live.”

  “What do you mean you can’t go back home?” Sandy left the dishes on the counter and returned to the table. “Why not?”

  “It doesn’t feel right. It’s like I’m just . . . I don’t know, postponing the inevitable.”

  “What’s inevitable? Don’t you two still love each other?”

  “I do,” she said. “And Anna probably thinks she loves me too. But I don’t think she’s really thought through all of this.”

  “Thought through what?” Suzanne held up her hands in apparent dismay. “She loves you. She wants you to come home. End of story.”

  “End of story until something else comes up,” Lily answered with a snort.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Sandy asked.

  “I can’t get past it, Sandy. I wish I could. I know I was a little out of control, but Anna turned her back on me. She said so herself, that she let her business take priority. She said she was sorry, but if she’d thought about me as a partner, it never would have happened in the first place. I need somebody who’s going to be there for me, no matter how hard it gets—not somebody who’s going to wash her hands of everything that”—her voice turned sarcastic and she rolled her eyes—“interferes with Premier Motors.”

  Sandy looked at her sternly. “From what you told me, you were more than just a little out of control.”

  “That’s not the point. Would you have thrown Suzanne out of the house?”

  “If I ever need my ass kicked, Sandy better be the one to kick it,” Suzanne said sharply. “That’s what I count on her for.”

  “But you know as well as I do that she isn’t going to let you fall on your ass,” Lily said. But the anger in her voice was for Anna, not Suzanne.

  “Anna didn’t let you fall either, Lily,” Sandy said. “She was there for you every step of the way.”

  “That’s bullshit. She was out with her new friends.”

  “It’s not bullshit. That first time you called her, she traced it to the Waterways Lodge. Then she went down there every night to keep an eye on you and make sure you were okay.” Sandy was getting louder by the second. “And that weekend we went to Oakland, she came over here freaked out because she didn’t know where you were.”

  Lily was shocked to learn that Anna had kept tabs on her. “She was watching me all that time and didn’t even try to talk to me?”

  “She didn’t want to interfere, Lily. She was trying to get you to help yourself, but she wasn’t going to just sit by and let you fall apart. She was there for you all along. You just didn’t know it.”

  Lily thought back to what Anna had said on the beach about talking to a counselor. She knew from the testimonials she had heard at Redwood Hills that letting a loved one “bottom out” was the impetus for getting many of them into treatment.

  “And when we got back from Oakland, I had to stop her from going to get you. She wanted you to come home that weekend.”

  Myriad emotions ran through Lily—frustration, gratitude, even a little hope—but the one that came out was resentment. “Why did you stop her, Sandy? You saw how miserable I was about going into that place, and the whole time I thought she didn’t care at all. You could have saved me from that.”

  Sandy looked hurt. “Yes, I could have. In fact, I gave her hell about how she treated you until she told me why. And then I realized she was right. It didn’t matter what kind of partner you were, or what kind of friend. What mattered was that you beat this thing.”

  “So this whole time, all of you have been pulling my strings like a puppet. ‘Let’s see if we can get Lily to do this.’ Everyone’s in on the secret but me.”

  “Is that what you think, Lily?” Suzanne asked, her tone indignant. “That this was all some big game for everybody?”

  “No,” she answered meekly. She didn’t have the strength to deal with a pissed-off Suzanne. “Of course not. I just wish I’d had a choice.”

  Sandy patted Lily’s arm. “Lily, I’m sorry I kept things from you. But when we got back from San Jose, you’d already made up your mind to get help, and you were doing it for yourself, not for Anna. Can you honestly say you would have gone into that program if you could have gone home instead?”

  The answer to that question was obvious to everyone.

  Chapter 16

  Lily flipped open her cell phone for the third time, gathering her nerve to make the call. It had been a thought-filled week for her as she studied on the things Sandy had told her about Anna. Through it all, she heard Daryl’s voice in her head, taunting her about how nothing would change, how she was coming back to the same fucked up world she left.

  She could feel herself falling again into a state of agitation. Two months ago she would have reached for a drink, and justified it with her anger. Now she had no choice but to face it down.

  The culprit, as always, was her insecurity. It was easy to blame that trait on her transient childhood in foster care, but she had no excuse for holding on to it at thirty-one. Eleanor Stewart had shown her she was worth caring for her, and Anna had professed her love and devotion in hundreds of ways. Instead of accepting what Anna had given her so freely, she had sabotaged their relationship with unrealistic expectations, convincing herself that Anna couldn’t possibly want her forever.

  From her searching and moral inventory, the fourth step in her recovery,
Lily knew the dangers of letting her insecurities rule her life. She couldn’t magically set aside her intrinsic anxiety about being abandoned, but she could learn to have confidence in knowing that it wouldn’t be the end of her, and that with the help of her higher power, she was strong enough to survive.

  Armed with this modicum of self-assurance, she looked anew at her feelings about how Anna had pulled away and let her fall. It made perfect sense that Anna would seek help once things grew out of control. She didn’t let problems languish the way Lily did. The clandestine watchful eye and now the open plea for her to return home were all consistent with the Anna she knew and loved, while the one she had conjured as selfish and aloof was a stranger.

  Besides the revelations from Sandy and Suzanne, Lily found even more reasons from her AA program to re-examine what she wanted with Anna. Despite her progress with overcoming alcohol, her life—which still included lonely walks on the beach and a tiny room at the Waterways Lodge—remained unmanageable. Her path became clear at Thursday’s step meeting, where they had spoken of making amends with those who had been wronged by the alcoholic’s behavior. The leader of the group had implored them to be honest with themselves, and in that moment, Lily realized all the ways she had wronged Anna with her drinking. She had hidden things from her for weeks, and even let her take the blame when things had spiraled out of control. Though she had blurted out a lame apology when they first saw each other, she had never faced the music for the shameful night Anna had been hurt.

  At the beach, instead of thanking Anna for taking action to help her, she had lashed out in anger. By forcing her to help herself, Anna had saved her every bit as much as Eleanor Stewart had when she stepped forward to give her a home. The question wasn’t so much if she could forgive Anna, but if Anna could forgive her.

  She pressed the button for Anna’s cell phone and was startled when it went to voicemail right away. She disconnected and dialed the number for the house. After four rings, that one too rolled over to voicemail and she hung up. Anna didn’t usually work on Sundays, but nothing about their lives was normal these days. Though she dialed directly into Anna’s office, the weekend receptionist answered.

  “May I speak to Anna Kaklis please?” she asked, injecting a formal tone so her voice wouldn’t be recognized. She didn’t want people at Premier Motors gossiping about the call.

  “I’m sorry. She’s out of town. May I take a message?”

  Lily bristled uncontrollably to think Anna might be off again with her new friends. “When do you expect her?”

  “She’s in Detroit for the auto show. I believe . . .” There was a long pause. “The schedule has her back at work on Tuesday.”

  Lily hung up and sighed with relief to know where Anna was, or rather, where she wasn’t.

  Anxious to get out of the motel room, she skipped down the stairs to the storage closet where they let her keep her bike. With Anna in Detroit for two more days, this was her first chance to go back to their Brentwood home. She had a right to be there, she told herself, even if it was just to pick up her mail, which she hadn’t collected in months.

  The ride through heavy traffic took her an hour and a half, and she was especially relieved when she pulled off busy Sepulveda Boulevard. She smiled as soon as the Spanish-style home came into view.

  Lily pushed the bike around back, parking it inside the gate next to the garage. The pool was sparkling, a sign that the pool service had been by in the last couple of days, and the landscaping was freshly clipped and groomed. She dug out her key and walked back out to the side door to enter through the family room.

  She was surprised by the strong emotional response she got from being inside the house. It was full of clues about how Anna had lived her life over these past few weeks. The table next to the couch was stacked high with Car & Driver, which meant Anna was behind on her reading.

  She spotted her mail in a cardboard box on her desk. A quick perusal told her there were no unpaid bills. Apparently, Anna had taken care of them, just as she had after the funeral. She chuckled with irony to realize Anna had paid her credit card bill, which included over forty nights at the Waterways Lodge.

  Uneasily, Lily mounted the stairs to the master bedroom suite. Oddly, she felt a bit like a trespasser, even a voyeur looking in on Anna’s private life. Their room was unchanged from when she had left, neat and clean from the housekeeper’s recent visit. She couldn’t help but smile as her eyes came upon the framed picture on the nightstand, the one from Yosemite. It was touching to see that Anna had brought the photo up from the family room to her bedside. What lay beside the photo moved her profoundly—a book she recognized from the library at Redwood Hills, the story of a woman who had guided her husband into recovery after years of alcohol abuse, and how their love had flourished from the shared ordeal. Maybe Anna understood more about her recovery than she had thought. If she could read that woman’s horror-filled memoir and still think they had a chance . . .

  The last four days hadn’t been the respite Anna had sought from the worry and sadness that were now her constant companions. The annual event in Detroit was usually one of the highlights of her year. But even the most stunning innovations in automotive engineering had failed to interest her this time. Instead, she found herself imagining the emptiness of a life without Lily. She thought about her at every turn, wondering if she was still at the lodge, and if she had thought any more about the plea for her to come home.

  Somehow, Anna had to strike the balance between patience and perseverance. She wanted to give Lily the time and space to heal, but not enough to allow her to think she didn’t care anymore.

  “Would you like something to drink before we land?” the flight attendant asked gently. From her nearly untouched dinner, he had apparently sensed her somber mood.

  “No, thank you.” She turned back to the window, searching the fading red desert below for signs of civilization. They would be in LA soon.

  Bored with the auto show and preoccupied with thoughts of Lily, she had changed her travel plans to return a day before schedule. She smiled as she thought of her penchant for coming home early, mostly engineered to surprise Lily. There would be no reward waiting this time.

  At least Chester would be there. She planned to call as soon as they landed to ask Holly to bring him to the house. It would be a very long night indeed without the pooch to keep her company.

  And once she settled into bed, she would call Lily again.

  Distracted by her mail, Lily lost track of time, realizing with irritation that she would have to ride back to the lodge in the dark. She considered leaving Anna a note, but her presence would be obvious from the empty box on her desk, and the paper in the trash can. When she got back to her motel room, she would leave a message on Anna’s cell phone. Stashing a couple of cards from her mother’s friends into her small backpack, she headed out the side door, and then through the gate to retrieve her bike.

  Again in the backyard, Lily was overwhelmed with homesickness as she looked first at the pool then at the hot tub. She and Anna had spent many relaxing evenings out here, not to mention many romantic moments.

  It suddenly occurred to her that she didn’t have to go home in the dark tonight. Anna wasn’t due home until tomorrow night, and she didn’t have to be at the law clinic until noon the next day. She could stay the night and ride home early in the morning. It would even be against the traffic flow, which was safer anyway.

  She let herself back into the house and went into the bathroom off the family room. There she deposited her backpack and traded her clothes for one of the guest towels. The backyard was dark and private, visible only to someone nosy enough to pierce the dense crape myrtle hedge that grew five feet high around the property. Wrapped in her towel, she waited in a nearby chair at the far end of the pool while the water heated in the spa. When the steam began to rise, she cast her towel aside and slipped into the tub.

  As she relaxed, she thought back to the last time she was out h
ere with Anna, the night they returned from Joshua Tree. Though she hadn’t realized it at the time, she and Anna were holding on by a thread. The last time they had been really happy together was at Yosemite, before her drinking had gotten out of control. If Sandy was right that she turned to alcohol in times of stress or depression, something about Yosemite must have set her off.

  Carolyn and Vicki being pregnant . . . Anna saying that kids were a commitment, and she didn’t want any. And Anna teasing that she wasn’t a lesbian. That conversation had been playful, but the bottom line was clear: Anna wasn’t ready to commit to a life together, and while Lily had vowed to herself not to ruin things by putting pressure on Anna too soon, she had fallen instead into a pattern of escape and self-pity, made worse by the death of her mother.

  She settled deeper into the tub, determined to move past the dismal place in her head. The churning water was soothing, the lull of the pump peaceful, and she relished it until her skin began to wrinkle . Stretching across the deck, she threw the on-off levers for the heater and pump that were mounted discreetly under a nearby bush.

  Out of nowhere, headlights appeared in the driveway, freezing her in place, half in, half out of the circular tub.

  “Go ahead, Ms. Kaklis. I’ll bring your bag in,” a man’s voice said. From the businesslike tone, she guessed it was a chauffeur.

  Fuck! That meant Anna was home. Lily was too surprised to move, and not sure where she would go if she did. She couldn’t just waltz through the back door naked.

  “Thank you, Henry.”

  Yes, that was definitely Anna, she realized. She saw the light go on in the family room, one she had intentionally turned out so as not to illuminate the patio. She could barely make out Anna’s figure through the French doors.

  Lily gauged her options. There was no way to avoid a faceto-face encounter, unless she waited for Anna to go upstairs so she could rush inside. At least that way she could get her clothes back on.