Holding Out for a Zero

by Wardell, Heather

  He’ll leave me, but for now he’s here and I haven’t been kissed since that stripper and I want to be, so I raise my face and let myself move closer to him.

  He doesn’t miss what I’m saying without words. His fingers curve across my cheek and he leans in and kisses me sweet and slow.

  I kiss him back, my arms wound around him and my body pressed to his, feeling alive in a way I haven’t forever.

  Eventually, but far too soon, he eases back and murmurs, “Wow,” against my lips.

  “Yeah,” I say, out of breath.

  He hugs me hard again and I cling to him for a long moment, then he draws back and kisses me again, shorter but still wonderful. “We should get going, I guess. Remy’ll be waiting.”

  “Let him,” I say, reaching up for another kiss.

  Nico chuckles but cuts it off as our mouths meet again. He has a way of kissing me like I matter, and I like it a lot. Too much. I’ll miss it when it’s gone.

  When this kiss ends we wrap an arm around each other and reluctantly leave our cozy doorway. “It’s only about ten minutes from here,” he says, “and it’s a nice night. Want to walk?”

  “Sure.” It’ll help burn off the calories I took in at dinner.

  I’d have said no if I’d realized our route would take us through Union Square. “I come here on Tuesdays and Thursdays,” he says, “and have lunch. Hang out and read and eat. The Greenmarket’s not on so it’s not quite so busy, and it’s probably my favorite place in the city to relax. Do you maybe want to join me sometime?”

  I mumble something non-committal, but have to fight not to run away. The place is inextricably tied to Gloria for me and I can’t handle being here even a second longer than I have to.

  I feel even worse when we emerge from a crowd and I think we’re almost through only to find myself right in front of a kiosk with balloons tied all over it. My stomach lurches at the shock and I clap my hands over my mouth.

  “You okay?”

  I shake my head and squeeze my eyes shut so I don’t have to look at the awful helium-filled things bobbing at the ends of their ribbons.

  “Hey, buddy, buy a balloon for your girlfriend?”

  “No,” I snap, horrified, before Nico can speak.

  The guy says, “Okay, geez,” in a tone half-annoyed-half-surprised, and Nico begins leading me away. I open my eyes because tripping and falling doesn’t seem like a great plan but I stare down at the ground so I won’t have to see the balloons again.

  Once we’re a block or so away, Nico guides me into a doorway and takes hold of my shoulders. “What happened, Valerie?”

  I shake my head, looking down at the ground. “I can’t handle balloons.”

  “It’s a common phobia,” he says gently. “Some people don’t like the look of them and others don’t like the sound when they—”

  “It’s not that.” I look up at his face, and see a green balloon rising behind him toward the sky, shifting and twisting as each gust of wind between the buildings changes its path. I hate the sight, not just because it’s a balloon but because it’s exactly how my life’s been lately, being jerked around by every little and not-so-little thing that happens. I don’t want to live like this.

  I shut my eyes so I don’t have to see the balloon any more, then lock my arms around Nico’s waist and burrow into him, clutching at his back with both hands to hold him even closer as he draws me in. “I’m not scared of them, I just…” An image of Anthony, dying on the floor next to red balloons I thought I dropped, fills my mind, and I can’t hold back a shudder. It’s always been a horrible image, and now that I know Gloria lurks just outside the frame it’s even worse.

  Nico cuddles me closer. “Okay, we won’t talk about it. It’s okay.” He presses his cheek to the top of my head. “It’s okay.”

  Hardly. I take a breath to tell him everything, then let it out without speaking. I’ll have to tell Remy, to talk about the painting, and I don’t know if I have it in me to say it all twice today.

  Feeling weak, and hating it, I push myself back from him. “I’m fine. Let’s go.”

  His face is calm and sad but his eyes have that ‘analyzing a patient’ look I’ve seen in them before and I know he’s trying to figure me out. Balloons plus not eating equals what?

  I don’t want him doing that, so I take his hand and say again, “Let’s go,” and he squeezes my hand and says, “You got it,” and we head off in a silence I break immediately with inane chatter about the shop windows around us so he won’t have time to think.

  Nico lets me babble, and responds when he can get a word in edgewise, and we’re soon at the coffee shop where Remy sits at a table littered with shredded bits of paper napkin, his hand wrapped around a ceramic mug.

  Nico smiles. “You still do that?”

  Remy looks down at the mess. “Apparently.” Then he raises his head and our eyes meet. “How are you?” His voice betrays his nervousness as much as the shredded paper does.

  “I’m okay,” I say, wanting to cuddle into Nico for comfort but knowing that would look weird. “You?”

  “I’m okay too,” he says. “I… thanks for coming.”

  I nod and Nico says, “I’ll grab us some coffee. Remy, need a top hat?”

  I blink, but Remy says, “No, I’m good.”

  Nico goes off to the counter and I say, “Top hat?”

  Remy chuckles. “Mom always says that instead of ‘top up’. No idea why. Just a stupid Hendrickson family joke.”

  The amusement leaves his face, and I know it’s because his parents won’t see him any more. Well, at least his whole family is still alive. And at least he’d had jokes with them. There’s been none of that in my family for two decades, and there sure won’t be any starting now.

  I take a seat next to Remy, not sure I want to but also not comfortable standing there waiting for Nico, and he sweeps the smallest napkin bits from the table in front of us into his hand and stuffs them into his pocket.

  “Could have thrown them out,” I say, pointing to the garbage can by the door.

  “Didn’t want to leave you alone.” He gives me the tiniest saddest smile I’ve ever seen. “Didn’t want you to leave.”

  I pick up a chunk of napkin that survived his earlier attack and begin tearing it into little pieces. “Wouldn’t blame you if you did.”

  He grabs his own piece of napkin. “I didn’t mean to upset you,” he says as he rips the first bits from it. “I still don’t know why I did, I didn’t expect that at all, but I really didn’t mean to. I just didn’t know what to do with the painting and—”

  “We’ll talk about that when Nico gets back.”

  He nods. Without looking away from the growing pile of napkin before us, he says, “He’s being good to you, right? I hope so. You deserve some good.”

  My throat tightens, then loosens as I remember Nico’s mouth on mine. “Yeah, he is.”

  “I’m glad,” he says quietly, then clears his throat and adds, “Nice nail polish. I’ve always wanted a paint that silver.”

  I look down at my nails, about to pull out my bottle of polish and give it to him, then realize my right index finger has a chip. It was fine when I left the apartment; maybe I screwed it up hugging Nico so hard after the balloon kiosk. I stare at the broken place, hating that it isn’t perfect. “Chipped.”

  Remy bends over my hand. “I don’t think— oh, yeah, you’re right. Just a tiny one. No big deal.”

  I know that, but it feels like one. I reach into my purse to find my touch-up bottle, but it’s not there. What I have with me instead is the nude one from my previous manicure, which I got rid of yesterday.

  How did that happen? How have I fallen so off my routines?

  I try to think back to yesterday and my manicure, and after a moment of getting my mind to focus I understand what happened. After that manicure, still feeling uncomfortably full from the previous night’s dinner with Nico, I tried to go grocery shopping but couldn’t bring myse
lf to get any food because nothing looked good. So I bought more meal replacement bars, and a huge bottle of sleeping pills since I take them every night now and I can’t see that ever changing, then went home and had a pill-fueled nap instead, and after that I must have forgotten to switch the nail polish bottles.

  It bothers me, a lot, but when Nico returns and says, “You okay, Valerie?” I make myself say yes. It’s just one more thing he wouldn’t understand.

  He sets a mug down at his place, and another one before me along with a white paper bag. The sight of it reminds me of that sandwich I threw out after Gloria’s funeral, and I push it back to him. “This is yours.”

  He pulls another from his pocket, and a third for Remy. “No, this is. Just thought… they make great black and white cookies here.” He draws out a cookie from his bag, and I stare at its half-chocolate-half-vanilla icing and immediately begin calculating calories.

  Too high, no matter how I do the math.

  “We just had dinner,” I say, trying to sound casual. “I couldn’t eat another bite.”

  The brothers exchange a quick glance, and it fires me up. “What? Don’t believe me?”

  Remy launches into a flurry of “of course we do” comments but Nico sits sipping his coffee without a word. I want to challenge him on it, but I can’t do it in front of Remy because I don’t know how it’ll turn out. Once Remy winds down, I say, “Well, I am full, and I’ll save it for later. That okay with you, Nico?”

  “Of course,” he says quietly. “Room in your purse for it?”

  I nod because I have to and stuff the stupid bag in there beside the wrong nail polish, then say, “Okay, done. So, why’d you want to see me, Remy?”

  He glances at my purse, and I realize I already know the answer. He, like his brother, is worried about my eating. This little get-together is an intervention. I take a breath to tell them both where to go but before I can speak Remy says, “I feel awful about showing you the paintings. I thought they might make you sad, or angry that Gloria passed away, but I never expected you to be as upset as you were and I wanted to apologize and maybe find out what bothered you so much. I hoped Nico could help me talk to you about it. Maybe we can help.”

  I give a grim laugh and stare into my coffee. “You can’t. Nobody can.”

  “Do you want to tell us?”

  I flick a sideways glance at Nico then return my attention to my coffee. “I don’t know. And it wasn’t just the paintings, not really. The last one… told me something I didn’t know, but it’s more than that.”

  Nico puts his hand on my shoulder at the same time as Remy puts his hand over mine. I look back and forth between them, ready to be annoyed that they’d coordinated such a thing, to find them both looking embarrassed and surprised. “Not planned?”

  They both shake their heads and Remy says, “I just want to help, and I guess he does too.”

  Nico murmurs his agreement and gives my shoulder a squeeze, and before I can decide if I want to I find myself saying, “I’ve always blamed myself for Anthony’s death, and now for Gloria’s too.”

  “Oh, honey,” Remy says, trapping my hand between both of his. “No. You told me Anthony’s was an accident. And Gloria… if it’s anyone’s fault it’s mine for letting her go to the storage locker to paint alone.”

  “Seems to me,” Nico says softly, “it’s the fault of the guy who mugged her.”

  “Well, obviously. But if I’d seen her right when she wanted to, maybe she wouldn’t have gone to paint that night.” I sigh. “Then he would have mugged someone else. Which wouldn’t have been good either, of course, but at least it wouldn’t have been Gloria.”

  “You could be right,” Nico says, speaking over Remy’s little sympathetic sound and making my heart hurt for the moment until he adds, “But maybe she’d have been hit by a bus after seeing you. Or maybe you’d have been. Or both of you. You can’t ever know what would have happened. Life’s not like that.”

  My eyes glued to my tiny nail polish chip, I say, “Well, it should be.”

  Neither guy speaks for a long moment, then Nico says, “I’m sorry, but I don’t know who Anthony is.”

  “My brother,” I say to my nail because it’s easier than talking directly to Nico. “He choked on a balloon. When he was three.”

  I raise my eyes to Nico once the words are said, and I see him understand my earlier freakout but all he says is another, “I’m sorry.”

  “Is that how old he— wait, there were balloons in that painting, and a little boy,” Remy says, sounding like pieces are snapping together in his mind. “The front part was a celebration.”

  “He died right before his birthday party,” I murmur, not sure I really want to do this but knowing I’ve now gone too far to stop. “After Gloria and I decorated for it.”

  “But the back…” Remy swallows hard, his face going pale. “The stuff on the back…”

  Though I’m afraid, I say, “Everyone thought I didn’t put away the packet of balloons I was using to decorate for his party. I thought so too. But when I saw Gloria’s painting, I…” My throat tightens and I have to swallow hard too before I can whisper, “It was her. She dropped some out of her pocket by mistake. And then took the ones I was using from the mantel and put them down to make it look like it was me.”

  Nico’s arm goes around my shoulder. Remy pushes back from the table as if it’s on fire. “No. No, I don’t believe it. She wouldn’t have done that.”

  “Remy…”

  Nico might as well not have bothered. “No way. She wasn’t a monster. She wasn’t.” Remy slams his chair back further and jumps to his feet. Glaring down at me, he says, “How dare you talk about her like that? Just to make yourself feel better. Disgusting.”

  “Remy!”

  Again he ignores Nico. “I can’t believe I was worried about you. You’re the monster.” With that parting shot, Remy turns and flees the coffee shop.

  I shut my eyes as misery sweeps over me. I’ve felt like a monster for twenty years so I should be used to it, but I’m not. To keep from totally giving up, I say, “Well, at least I didn’t run away from him this time.”

  Nico draws me closer. “I’m so sorry,” he murmurs. “What she put in that painting must be very hard to accept.”

  Not caring that he’s going psychologist on me again, I turn toward him without dislodging his comforting arm and say, “It is. All these years, I’ve blamed myself. I did everything I could possibly do to get myself under control and stay there so I could never screw up like that again. But…”

  He waits, silently studying me with sympathy in his eyes, while I struggle to find words. Eventually I do. “But I didn’t screw up. I didn’t. She did, and she never admitted it. Everything I’ve done for twenty years has been to fix a mess I didn’t make.” Fresh sadness floods into me. “And she died like that, hiding it. She must have felt so awful. Everyone knew about me, or thought they did, so I at least had the chance to say I was sorry, to do something about it. She never did.”

  Nico kisses my forehead. “If she’d told the truth,” he says softly, “either when it happened or before she passed away, what would you have said to her?”

  I consider. “Before she… I don’t know,” I admit. “To find out she’d left me with the blame for twenty years? I don’t know what I’d have done. But if she’d been honest back when it happened, if she had admitted it was her, I’d have forgiven her. I know I would have. It was just a stupid mistake. I’d have told her so, told her it wasn’t her fault and…” I frown. “Why are you looking at me like that?” I’ve never seen a man’s face so gentle and sad.

  “But… you never forgave yourself for the same mistake,” he says, his voice sounding like his face looks. “Did you?”

  “It’s not the same thing,” I snap.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it just isn’t,” I say, my sudden unprovoked anger vanishing and leaving me with such fatigue and confusion that I can’t stand to be wit
h him another moment. “Look, are you ready to go? I’ve had enough coffee for one night.”

  Though his mug is only half-empty, he says, “Of course. Do you want to go for a walk, or…”

  “I think I just need a taxi home. Okay?”

  In answer, he gets to his feet and holds out his hand to help me up. I don’t accept it, and he doesn’t say anything about that, and we walk out of the coffee shop and toward 7th Avenue to get a taxi going the right way to take me home.

  Fortunately we make it across the next side street before I see the window display of the store on the corner, because I freeze in place as shock nails my feet to the ground.

  Nico takes a few steps more before turning back and saying my name, but I don’t look at him. I can’t stop staring at the window.

  At a huge print of that photograph of Gloria and the unknown blond man.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  “Valerie?”

  “I… why is this here? That’s Gloria and— I don’t know who, I found a copy of it in Gloria’s stuff. Who is the guy and why—” I shake my head, hardly able to put words together at the shock of seeing this picture here. “I don’t understand. What kind of place is this?”

  Nico takes my hand. “Let’s find out.”

  He guides me into the store and up to the counter, where a cheerful-looking older man says, “Can I help you?”

  “The picture in the window,” Nico says, gesturing back toward it. “We were… wondering about it.”

  “Gorgeous, isn’t it? I did that one myself.”

  Nico glances at me, and when I don’t speak because I can’t think of the right question to get this explained he says, “The woman in the picture is my friend’s sister,” while slipping his arm around my waist.

  Friend? After those kisses we shared earlier? A sick tired sadness skulks through me. He’s pulling away. Already. Like I knew he would.

  The clerk squints at me, then nods. “Yeah, I can see the family resemblance. You’re all a lot alike.”

  “All?” I manage.