Flashed

by Zoey Castile

  “What are you doing here?” A deep baritone shouts.

  I have one foot in the kitchen and one outside as I catch the blur of someone darting behind the door. Adrenaline zooms in my veins and my heart tries to jump out of my throat. “I’m sorry—I—I’m Lena. Are you Pat?”

  “Don’t call me that—” I can hear the frustration in his voice. He makes a deep guttural sound on the other side of the door. The glass of water he dropped is shattered on the floor, and I can see the liquid trickling this way. “It’s Patrick. You’re not supposed to be here yet.”

  “Sorry, Scarlett said—”

  “I don’t care what Scarlett said. Your one job is to only come in here during the times I specified.”

  I don’t dare move from where I’m standing. But I know that he’s just around the door. Maybe it’s the adrenaline or maybe it’s that he scared the crap out of me, but I say, “I thought my one job was to clean.”

  There’s that deep grumble again. I’m pretty sure my car made the same sound while I was trying to get it up that damn hill.

  “If you’re going to be here, you have to follow the rules.”

  I bite my tongue. That’s what my mother would have done. How many times did some wealthy boss talk to her like she was the grease splattered on the stove? How many times did she put on an accent because she knew it would appease the housewives she spent time cleaning up after? Servile. Humble. “Always be humble,” she would tell me. In my heart, I know my mother was right about some things. But there’s a difference between being humble and knowing your worth.

  “Then I won’t be here,” I say and pull the door shut.

  Tears flood my eyes. Angry, miserable, regrettable tears. I hate crying. I hate it more than anything. Between losing both my parents in the last fifteen years, I’ve shed enough of them. Hell, I was so angry at Sonia that I cried after a few rounds of beers with my roommates while we watched Thor: Ragnarok. “Llorona,” my dad used to call me—crybaby.

  I swallow that ache in my throat and ignore the faint “wait” that Patrick mutters. I pretend I didn’t hear him. I don’t even see Scarlett until I’ve bumped into her.

  “Whoa, where’s the fire?” she asks. Then she gets a look at me and I’m so mad at myself for crying that I cry even harder. “What happened?”

  Somehow, I manage a broken, “I. Just. Quit.”

  Scarlett stomps her feet and balls her fists as she goes into the house. The sight of her, so small and mad, warms my heart and gets a snotty wheeze out of me. I don’t follow her, but I hover at the open door.

  “Patrick Anthony Donatello—”

  “Don’t middle name me, Scarlett.”

  “What did you say to that poor girl to have her running out before she even starts?”

  I can’t see much of him but a bare right shoulder. Golden-blond hair. Maybe I walked in on him while he was naked and he was embarrassed? I would be. But then he comes around the kitchen island, his back to me, and I see the long gym shorts. He walks out of my line of sight, but I can still hear them talk. Someone is sweeping the glass away.

  “I thought we had an agreement,” Scarlett says.

  “We did. Clearly listening isn’t one of the things she’s quick to learn.”

  I suck in a breath, straining to stay put. I remind myself that I need this job. I also remind myself that I gave up my room and have bills to pay, and if that wasn’t enough, I have nowhere to go.

  “I told her to come here at five. She’s punctual. She’s responsible. You’re the one looking for excuses because you just want to be miserable and alone. It isn’t good for you, Pat.”

  He sighs loudly. I don’t know what’s going on between them but there’s the shuffle of feet. Glass going into a garbage can. “I just—this is new for me.”

  “I know. But you have to try, okay? Just try. And don’t be a giant dick.”

  He does that growling thing again, and I don’t know whether or not to be a little turned on by it. Not, my mind scolds me.

  “Fine. Tell her I’m sorry and ask her to stay.”

  I can practically hear Scarlett shake her head. “Tell her yourself. She’s outside. Probably listening. Right, Lena?”

  I gasp and freeze like a mouse caught feasting in the middle of the night. “Uh—yeah. Hi.”

  “I’m sorry, Lena. Please stay.”

  Yeah, I need the job. But am I desperate enough to put myself around someone with so much—baggage? Anger?—I’m not sure what the right word is for him. There’s something there that gets under my skin because when he says “stay” I can hear a deep hurt in his words.

  “You can’t scare me again,” I say with a warning.

  “You scared me first,” he says, then a muttered, “ouch.”

  “Well, now that we’ve got that sorted out, you can go back to your hovel, Groucharella. Lena and I are having dinner and you’re not invited.”

  Scarlett closes the door and I take a deep breath. “Are you okay?”

  “I am.” I begin walking away from the house to the steel firepit. “I’ll be fine. I don’t usually cry. I just got so mad.”

  Scarlett sighs, exhaustion and something like worry crosses her features. “I understand. I’m sorry, too. I’m the one hiring you, technically. His attitude is not part of the job and if he does give you a hard time, send me a text or call me.”

  “Maybe there’s some other way for me and Patrick to communicate.”

  “You can leave each other notes on the fridge—”

  I laugh. “Or we can text. Unless he’s one of those people who hates technology for no reason.”

  “Believe me, he loves his little toys.” She gives my shoulder a tap with her fist. We head over to a shed and drag two Adirondack chairs to the firepit. “I hope you like pizza and wine because that’s what we’re having for dinner tonight. I can answer any questions you might have about the area or what to do on your downtime this summer. Whatever you need.”

  “What happened to him?” I ask. I can’t help but glance over my shoulder to the glass house reflecting the sun like a rough-cut gem.

  “Except that.” Scarlett takes a seat and grips the armrests. “It’s not my story to tell. Just know that the Pat I knew was full of life. He was the life of the party. All I will say is that he went through something that changed him. I still have hope that he’ll come through it a better man.”

  “He could start by getting rid of his boxes.” It’s a shitty thing to say because can’t I relate? The last fifteen years haven’t been a fairy tale. Or maybe they have been since everything goes wrong at first, plus there’s the evil stepmother. Isn’t it about time I get to the good part? “But I get it. If he doesn’t mind, maybe that’s something I can do. I’m not an interior designer but I can put my in-progress art degree to some sort of use.”

  “That would be great! Yes, definitely.” She gets up and dusts her hands. “I’m going to bring out the wine. What do you want on your pizza?”

  “Mushrooms and extra cheese,” I say.

  “Do you know how to build a fire?” She eyes the empty pit in front of us and then me, a wry smile lights up her face.

  “I might be from the city, but I can light a match,” I say, a little too much confidence in my words considering I have, in fact, never built a fire before. Scarlett leaves me to my devices and I go to the garage where there’s a row of neatly stacked chopped wood. I wonder who does the chopping if Pat—Patrick—never leaves the house. I would put my money on Scarlett. But the wood has cobwebs on the top layer. I brush them away and haul a stack in my arms. Thank goodness for CrossFit.

  I drop the wood and stare at it. I pull out my phone and find instructions. I can do this. I just have to do what I’ve always done. Keep my head down and figure out the job. This paycheck will help dig me out of debt and pay for school. I can even see Ari for Christmas.

  Nothing, not even a recluse millionaire jerk, is going to get in my way.

  PAT

  She ha
s no idea what she’s doing.

  Lena. I can’t even bring myself to say it out loud in case I like the sound of her name coming from my lips.

  She’s stacking the logs on top of each other, not letting any room for the fire to catch. Then she tries using a match. A single match. Go down there and help you ijit, something inside of me says. But there’s a knot right at the center of my chest. I press my palm over it where my ribs meet. Ribs that were broken six months ago. My heart rate picks up and I peel myself away from the sight of Lena trying (and failing) to build a fire. I glance back at the window one last time and she’s restacking the logs, her toned arms flexing in the slim black tank top.

  Don’t look at her, I reprimand myself.

  I go straight to the home gym. There’s every kind of machine I could think of. There are no mirrors or windows here. I start with running on the treadmill for fifteen minutes. I kick up the incline and the speed until my heart feels like it’ll run faster than my legs. I wipe the sweat from my face and jump off and to the weighted cables. I adjust the weights and swap out the grips and pull. Pull. Pull.

  “Find something you can control,” the doctor said. “Find something that makes you feel good.”

  “Nothing can make me feel good,” I snapped. “Look at me. Fucking look at me!”

  “I am looking at you, Patrick. Are you?”

  That was the last time I saw a shrink, but I think of her words often. Does ripping my muscles to shreds make me feel good? It used to. Nothing gave me as much pleasure as working up a sweat at the gym and under the covers. I used to like a lot of things. I used to be a different person. I never would have been the kind of guy who yelled at Lena that way. I made her cry.

  I drop the weights and they make a pinging, slamming echo in the room. I grab my phone from the pocket of my sweats and flip through the numbers in the contacts. I had to get a new number after the accident, so if I call my friends, they won’t even know it’s me. That might mean they’d actually pick up. I sit on a bench and lie back, a metal bar with a hundred pounds worth of plates on either side rests behind me. I used to be able to bench more but my left arm still gives me trouble. It’s nothing compared to the people who were hurt. It’s nothing compared to Jack.

  I thumb the screen until I see Aiden’s name. Fallon. Rick. I shut my eyes and think of the last time I saw them before the accident.

  We were in my hotel suite waiting for my Los Angeles movie premiere. The makeup crew and stylists had just left. Miriam, my agent, was on her phone yelling at someone about a picture of me that had gone viral. I’ll admit, it wasn’t my finest moment—public displays of nudity would get most people arrested, especially if you’re in the middle of the Metropolitan Museum of Art trying your best to imitate the sculptures in the Greek exhibit. At least it wasn’t when there were families around. It was after-hours during some charity for the whales. I care about the whales as much as the next guy but hey. I was bored and all the recent attention was getting to me, inflating me like fucking Snoopy at the Thanksgiving Day Parade.

  “I like that picture actually,” Aiden had said. He was going through the suits on the rack that had been sent over. It was the first time I’d seen any of them since I took one weekend off the promotion tour. We’d gone on vacation for his birthday when he showed us the rings he was looking at for his fiancée, then girlfriend, Faith. I was the first one to tell him not to do it because they’d only been together for eleven months, but the other boys waved me off. “With that shamrock tattoo on your ass, you look like a six-foot-tall leprechaun.”

  “I’m six three!” I shouted.

  Fallon almost snorted in his drink. Rick was flirting with some of the women that were there. I don’t remember who those girls were, but someone called them in. Was it me? My agent? I just remember saying that I wanted to start the party right, and someone made women appear. For a few months it felt like the world was my magic lamp, granting whatever wish I asked for. I asked for something and it materialized at my feet, at my hands. I never questioned it and I should have.

  Everything came too easily and that’s why it went wrong just as fast.

  “Shouldn’t we get going?” Jack had said. He looked polished as hell but kept fiddling with his tie. He sat quietly on the leather couch sipping one drink. He was never like me. He was the good Donatello kid.

  “Relax, little bro,” I said.

  “You guys are related?” One of the girls asked. I don’t remember her name.

  A second one curled up on the couch beside Jack and he went from still to petrified. He tried to get out from under the hand she rested on his chest, but the girl didn’t seem to notice he was uncomfortable. “You don’t look alike.”

  “I look like our mom,” I said to her. “He takes after our Da. Italian stock.”

  They seemed to like this little detail.

  “Where’s the tequila?” someone asked.

  “No tequila here,” I said. “Just whiskey.”

  The first girl flipped her brown waves over her shoulder and grabbed the bottle of whiskey from the table. This is where the memory always gets splotchy. I remember Fallon saying something like, “Perhaps you don’t want to be doing belly button shots before you have to walk a straight line on a red carpet.”

  But I shoved my tongue on that girl’s belly button and suctioned my lips around her soft brown skin and I drank like I was being fed from the cornucopia of the gods.

  “You’re going to get your suit dirty, mate,” Rick said.

  “Your turn, Jack,” I said and stood.

  My brother shook his head and said, “I’m good.”

  “Now, Jack.”

  “It’ll be fun,” the second brunette encouraged him with a wink.

  “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want,” Aiden said.

  “The fuck, Aiden?” I said, my tongue loose. Someone should have done me the favor and chopped it the fuck off. “Like none of you have never done things you didn’t want to do. Fucked old ladies, got played by a twenty-year-old, and you got robbed by your house mom.”

  “Patrick!” Jack yelled at me. Jack never yelled. But suddenly everyone was yelling. The girls were screaming and recording themselves as they made an exit out of the suite. I don’t remember them doing that, but I remember watching the footage of Rick shoving me into the bathroom. I might have five inches on him but he’s strong as fuck.

  “What are you doing?” I shouted. “Come on, can’t you take a joke?”

  Rick’s face was as red as the suit he was wearing. His blond beard was threaded with white but it was hardly noticeable unless you were facing him in close quarters like I was.

  “You weren’t joking, kid,” Rick said, eyes bulging out of his face. “What’s gotten into you, Pat? You get a little money and all of a sudden you turn into some Hollywood douchebag?”

  “Why can’t you just be happy for me, Ricky?” I shouted. “Do you know how long I’ve worked for this?”

  Rick got real quiet. I was ready for him to throw a punch. I was ready for him to walk out and not come back. But instead he said, “I know how hard you’ve worked. You’ve put your everything into whatever job you’ve had. If you keep going down this road, you’re going to lose all of it. Maybe not right away, but you will. Believe me. I was the king of pushing people away.”

  “But you’re fine! Everything is going to be fine, bro!”

  “Why do you think I left Sydney? Why do you think I had to start over with nothing to my name?”

  “I’m not going to do that.”

  “I don’t want you to make my mistakes. Look, the money, the women, the clothes, it’s not going to mean anything if you’re alone.”

  “Whatever, Rick. You’re not my fucking father.”

  That night is a blur for the most part, but if I want to see it, there are plenty of videos of me on Twitter and Instagram. Videos of me stumbling on top of a reporter. Videos of me tripping on my co-star Daisy’s dress because I was so drunk bef
ore the show even started. I stepped on the train and ripped it and whatever chemistry we had going on was gone because I embarrassed her. I embarrassed everyone. I have videos of that entire night but none of what went down in that bathroom. I don’t need them. I remember the look on his face when I said those words to him, and the moment he walked out.

  Now, I hold my breath and tap Rick’s number.

  Before the second ring chimes, I hit the red button to hang up. It took six months, but this was the first time I’ve actually made the call.

  What would I even say? “I’m sorry” doesn’t feel like enough. There will never be enough to take back what I did to my friends.

  Ricky was right. I’m alone. I didn’t think that he would have been so right so quickly.

  I grab the metal bar and lift it. My muscles tremble and I get in five reps before I have to stop.

  When I head back upstairs, there’s something on the kitchen island. Half a pizza pie and a glass of wine. My first thought is Scarlett, but the note on the scrap of paper isn’t her big, bubbly handwriting. It’s small, neat, meticulous. Truce. Hope you’re hungry. This is my number. Give me a heads-up with your preferred time tables.

  I carry the paper to the window. The sun is setting. Lena and Scarlett are sitting around the fire drinking wine. The pizza boxes are burning in the middle of the pit.

  I’ll be. She got the thing started after all.

  3

  Bidi Bidi Bom Bom

  LENA

  Everything I learned about cleaning a house, I learned from my mother. When I was a little girl she used to say, We might be poor but we’re clean. She was so meticulous with everything, polishing things with a lemon mixture she’d make herself. She used Q-tips to get behind hard to reach places around the water knobs and the caps on the toilet seat.

  She also used to play her favorite salsa songs. I used to hate it. I wanted to listen to Britney Spears and Destiny’s Child. I told her everyone in the building could hear her. But she’d only smile with her perfect, straight teeth and say, That’s the whole point of music, nena. To be heard.