by Gwen Masters
Rebecca could see the wheels turning in Amanda’s head as she tried to figure out how much the younger woman really knew. Rebecca made it easier for her. “Yes, I’ve been with Richard this morning. I went down to the office and he told me the whole story.”
“The whole story, huh?” Amanda’s grin turned wicked. “He told you about our reunion, then?”
Rebecca shook her head, as if the whole thing were terribly shameful. If Amanda wanted to keep up the charade, let her. It would all come to a head soon enough, and Rebecca was determined she would have the upper hand when it did. “Rejection always hurts, doesn’t it, Amanda?”
Amanda closed the refrigerator door with a slam that rattled everything inside it. She pointed a finger again at Rebecca. Her voice was a screech, the sound of a woman losing her composure. “He did not reject me!”
“He rejected you because he’s in love with me. He was confused at first, seeing you after so long, but he came to his senses pretty quickly, didn’t he?”
Amanda’s finger was shaking. “Get out of my house.”
“It’s Richard’s house, and I’m an invited guest.”
“You are my husband’s whore, is that it?”
Rebecca gave her a genuine smile. Paybacks were hell—Amanda was losing it, and losing it fast. “Takes one to know one, sweetheart.”
Amanda lunged. Rebecca let her come, ready for it, almost hungry for it. She hadn’t wanted to give anyone their comeuppance in a long time, but now the quiet and demure part of her was gone, and Rebecca was more than ready to do battle. It would have shocked her, had she taken the time to think about it.
The older woman landed against her and they both fell to the floor. Amanda grabbed handfuls of Rebecca’s hair with one hand and scratched at her face with the other. Rebecca twisted away but didn’t fight back, and this infuriated Amanda. She began to pummel Rebecca with her fists, hitting her everywhere she could reach. Rebecca lay on the floor and counted to twenty, then abruptly rolled back over and slammed the back of her hand into Amanda’s face.
The shock of Rebecca suddenly fighting back was enough to send Amanda flat to the floor. Rebecca quickly got to her feet, her shoulders and arm aching from the blows, and stood over the enraged woman. Amanda grabbed at her legs. Rebecca could feel the tiny drips of blood coming from her temple, and realised Amanda had scratched her after all.
At that moment, Rebecca heard the faint sound of siren, and she knew what she had to do.
Rebecca ran into the living room, where she grabbed the cordless phone. She kept running down the hallway to the guest room, where she slammed the door behind her. She could hear Amanda coming after her, and she had just enough time to dial the number before Amanda hit the door with her full weight, making the lock creak.
“Yes,” Rebecca said, speaking quickly. “I’m at one-one-two Dearborn Lane. Amanda Paris has just attacked me. I think she’s gone crazy.”
Amanda kicked open the door. The lock screamed and splinters flew.
Jesus Christ, Rebecca thought. She’s going to kill me.
Amanda came towards Rebecca with fists flying. The next good punch sent Rebecca to the floor, knocking the breath out of her.
“I’m going to kill you, you fucking whore bitch!” Amanda screamed.
Rebecca turned and lifted her legs, planted one of her feet against Amanda’s hip, and shoved as hard as she could. The woman stumbled back and hit the wall with a grunt, then barrelled towards her rival again. Rebecca realised she was in the midst of an all-out catfight, and she could accept that—but the look in Amanda’s eyes, the totally unhinged look that seemed almost unreal, was what frightened her more than anything else.
Amanda was crazy.
And she was beyond pissed off.
The sirens were loud now, right outside the windows. Amanda reared back to kick her, and Rebecca grabbed her foot in mid-air. She pushed upwards, hard, and Amanda screeched as she fell back on to the floor with a thud. Amanda kicked out at her again and caught her anyway, a glancing blow to the side, and the pain seared through Rebecca.
Amanda landed one more kick before a deep voice came from the doorway. “That’s enough!”
Rebecca looked up from the floor. Though he was in plain clothes, she recognised the man instantly—it was the young police officer who had eyed her so curiously the first time she went to Richard’s office. Now he was standing behind Amanda, trying to get her under control. Amanda turned her fury on him and slammed her fist into the side of his face so hard Rebecca could hear his teeth clatter.
“Oh, hell, you did not just do that,” he growled, and pinned Amanda against the wall while she called him every name in the book. Rebecca watched as he pulled handcuffs from his jeans pocket, breathing hard and struggling to keep Amanda under control.
Then Amanda froze, and the sound that came from her was a wail of pain. Rebecca sat up and saw why—Richard was standing in the doorway, staring at all of them.
“Amanda?” he said, his voice small and scared.
The young officer hauled Amanda out of the room before she could say a word.
Richard reached down for Rebecca’s hand. Her hair was a mess, her lipstick smeared, and fine lines of blood were trickling down the side of her face. She had a bruise blooming under one eye. But when she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him down to her, she whispered into his ear, “Something is wrong with her, Richard. What’s wrong with her?”
Amanda was dragged from the house, kicking and screaming. “He’s my husband!” she hollered back at Rebecca, who had come to the doorway. “He’s my husband, this is my house. It’s mine, not yours, not yours, not yours!” She spat in Richard’s direction as the police officers tried to get her into the back of a car without hurting her. “He’s shacking up with somebody and they both deserve to pay!”
Richard watched as his wife was loaded into the back of a police car. The young officer came to Rebecca, introduced himself as Steve, and took her arm gently, leading her to the porch. The ambulance arrived and, after a bit of tense discussion, the officers and the paramedics approached the police car. Amanda screamed curse words as she was led to the ambulance and strapped to the gurney. The doors closed on her tirade and the ambulance began to move slowly back towards town, carrying a very angry woman in the back.
Richard watched every move. As the ambulance drove away, he looked back at Rebecca. She was talking to Steve and nodding at something he said. He watched as she signed the paperwork he handed her. When she turned to look back at the ambulance, Steve put his hand on her shoulder and whispered into her ear. She nodded and gave him a grateful smile.
Richard looked back at the ambulance and watched until it was nothing but lights in the distance. He wondered again at Amanda’s reasons for leaving, but this time he thought he might have the real answer.
Chapter Seventeen
Rebecca sat at the kitchen table and dabbed at her eye with a cool washcloth. It was swelling up and her vision was getting blurry. Her side hurt something fierce, and she knew the bruises there would look terrible in a few days. What hurt most of all was the realisation that she hadn’t been involved in a fair fight. There was something wrong with Amanda, something she couldn’t put her finger on, and she felt an enormous amount of guilt for pushing her over some edge she hadn’t even known was there.
Richard sat on the chair in front of her, gently washing the cuts on her face. She had refused help from the paramedics and they had let her go, assured she was in good hands with Richard. After all, everyone knew him, and they knew he would take care of her.
“I had no idea,” she said as he put a Band-Aid over one of the worst scratches. “She’s really crazy, Richard. I could see it in her eyes. Batshit crazy.”
He nodded sadly. He was upset for a multitude of reasons, and now he had a new one. He had never seen Amanda like that before; she had been kicking, screaming and glaring at them like they were the spawn of Satan himself, and that was something his wi
fe had never done. It was something she never would have dreamed of doing, and he couldn’t make himself believe it was all Rebecca’s fault. There was something more there, and the thought of what it might be scared him.
“I need to check on her,” he said, and Rebecca immediately nodded.
“She needs you,” she agreed.
Richard looked into Rebecca’s eyes and touched her face. She had taken a real beating.
“Are you going to be okay?”
Rebecca shrugged. “I didn’t mean for it to go as far as it did,” she said.
“You provoked her?”
“Yes. But I didn’t hit her until I had no choice, Richard. I didn’t want to hurt her.”
“You didn’t do it with the intention of getting a restraining order and having her kicked out of the house…did you?”
Rebecca blushed. “It crossed my mind. But then I saw that look in her eyes.”
Richard put another Band-Aid on the scratch on her face. She looked like hell.
“She’s sick,” she said softly, and Richard nodded.
“I think she is.”
“Do you think that’s why she left?”
Now Amanda had come back and fallen apart, things from the past started to make sense. He did remember her crying as she did the dishes, and he remembered the times she would stare off into space, seemingly in another world. He remembered her sleepwalking, waking up in the kitchen and once in the backyard, naked in the moonlight. She always started crying after those episodes, claiming she was just really tired or there were things on her mind. He had tried to get her to open up but she had refused, saying it was nothing, but now he knew it had been much more than that.
Before she had disappeared, she had taken a trip with her mother. They had driven to Chicago and spent several days shopping, but when Amanda had come back she hadn’t had anything new to show him, not even a little souvenir. “There was nothing I wanted,” she had said.
Now he thought back on that day and wondered if she had really gone to Chicago.
“I need to see her,” he said. “I need to see her family, too.”
Rebecca nodded.
“It might be best if you stay here,” he said, and she nodded again.
“I will do more harm than good,” she agreed. “Do what you have to do.”
“Will you be here when I get back?”
She leant forward and kissed him, though her lips were swollen and it hurt her mouth. “I’m not going anywhere.”
At the hospital, Richard leaned over the information desk. “I’m looking for Amanda Paris,” he said. The attendant gave him a slip of paper with a room number. He recognised it as the seventh floor, and the realisation of that seemed to suck all the breath out of the room.
The seventh floor was the psychiatric ward.
“Mr Paris?” the young woman asked, standing from her desk to hold on to his arm.
“I’m all right.”
He got on the elevator and closed his eyes while the floors flashed by. He had been on the seventh floor only once before, when his grandmother had been diagnosed with dementia at the age of eighty. He had hated the place, with the bars on some doors and rubber walls in some rooms. He supposed it had to look that way, but it still made him think of old movies and procedures that were more like torture than medicine.
When the doors opened, he came face to face with his mother-in-law. Grace was a small, compact woman with a dark complexion, so different from the fair skin of her daughter. Her hair was almost black and the curls clung close to her head. Her dark eyes studied him warily as he stepped from the elevator.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked immediately, and Grace shook her head.
“You didn’t need to see her like that.”
So there it was, the real reason Amanda had disappeared. Richard looked down the hallway at the closed doors with their tiny windows and wondered which one held his wife.
“I would have helped her,” he said to Grace now. “I would have done whatever I could to help her. You knew that.”
“She made us promise not to tell you.”
Somehow Richard suspected this wasn’t true, but he let it go. What good would an argument do at this point? The last three years could never be taken back, and, though he was sad about the way things had turned out, he wasn’t about to rehash the bad memories.
“What happened to her?”
Grace sighed and her whole body seemed to get smaller. Richard felt sorry for her—no matter how she had lied to him, or what she had hidden, her daughter was very sick. He couldn’t imagine what that must be like, and he hoped he would never find out. He reached out and touched Grace’s shoulder, and that simple human connection seemed to break something in her. She began to sob there in the hallway, and Richard pulled her into a warm hug.
“Let’s go get something to drink,” he said to her, leading her into the elevator. “You can tell me over some coffee, okay?”
The doors closed behind them. Richard would come back to see Amanda later. Right now, Amanda’s mother was the one who needed him more.
“She was always a flighty kid,” Grace said, stirring cream into her coffee. The tears had worn themselves out for the time being, and now she sat at the cafeteria table with the kind of dignity Richard had always seen in her. “She had big dreams. Big fantasies. She would spend weeks on end playing princess…she would be in perfect character when she woke up and still in character when she went to bed. At first it was annoying, then it was eerie, but after a while it became a part of who she was, and we just didn’t notice it anymore.” Grace shrugged. “It was just a quirk.”
Richard nodded and sipped his own coffee.
“She had her first breakdown when she was sixteen. Some high school boy broke her heart. She started crying and just didn’t stop. We finally took her to the doctor and he prescribed some medicine for her. Something to calm her down, you know. We got home and thirty minutes later I found her in the bathroom with the empty bottle beside her.”
Richard winced. He knew it was bad, but he hadn’t realised how much so.
“That was our first trip to the ER. Stomach pumped. She had a psych consult, and they said she needed evaluation. She ripped the IV out of her arm and tried to leave the hospital. Blood was flying everywhere from that IV, she was still throwing up from the pills, and she was screaming about being in prison.” Grace shuddered. “It was terrible.”
“It sounds like it was.”
“There were a few other episodes. They all lasted a few weeks, then she would get her meds adjusted, and she would be on an even keel again. Then you came along, and there were no more episodes. We figured she had grown out of it, and we were so grateful.”
Richard wiped his eyes and stared at his coffee.
“Her episodes were attached to emotional upheaval. We thought she might have an episode when you got married, with the stress and everything, but she came through with flying colours. She acted perfectly normal, and that was a credit to you. You’re so steady, Richard. So solid. We knew you were good for her.”
Richard let out a harsh laugh. “I missed it, Grace. I missed the signs.”
Grace patted his hand. “She was very good at hiding it, Richard. And when she did start to slip a little, she came to me. She said she thought she was going into a bad place, like she had before. I took her to a doctor, and he said she needed intense therapy. She didn’t want to get it, so she went back to you, and I kept waiting for a call. An episode. A trip to the ER. Something.”
“But it never happened. She just disappeared one day.”
Grace smiled sadly. “That was her episode. You didn’t miss it, Richard. She ran off and, for a long time, we didn’t know where she was, either. I know you thought I did, but I didn’t.”
“Where did she go?”
“I’m not sure,” Grace said. “She called me about three months later. Said she was happy again.” Grace paused and fiddled with her napkin. “There was a man
involved.”
So it was true, then. Richard shook his head as he wondered which parts were true, and which parts weren’t, and if he would ever know for sure.
“She said she left me for someone,” he told Grace.
“She didn’t leave you for someone, but she did meet someone when she was gone.”
“Is there a difference?”
Grace studied him for a moment, then shook her head. “Not to the heart, there ain’t.”
Richard got up and refilled his coffee cup. Grace watched him the whole time, and when he sat down again she said, “The latest episode happened when you filed for divorce.”
“It’s my fault, then.”
“It could only be your fault if you knew,” she reminded him.
“So she came back and thought we could make it work, but then there was Rebecca.”
Grace nodded sadly. “Yeah.”
They sat silently, thinking about the woman on the seventh floor, the one Grace loved, the one Richard had moved on from, but still felt responsibility for.
“I think you should go through with the divorce,” Grace said suddenly, startling him. “You’ve waited for her for three years. That’s a long enough time, no matter what your momma says. Besides, there’s Rebecca, and she doesn’t deserve to be left hanging.”
Rebecca was at his home right now, nursing wounds inflicted by his wife, and she had promised to wait for him. She had flown from Miami to find him, confronted his wife to claim him, and had reassured him every step of the way. No, she did not deserve to be left hanging.
“I feel guilty,” he admitted to Grace. “I was her husband, and I didn’t go looking for her. Then I filed for divorce, and sent her off the deep end. I feel like much of it is my fault.”
“She’s sick,” Grace reminded him. “That’s nobody’s fault.”
Richard nodded, though he wasn’t entirely convinced. Grace patted his hand one more time and stood up from the table. “I’m going upstairs,” she said. “Why don’t you go see Rebecca, and come back tomorrow, when Amanda is a little more like herself.”
