One Last Thing

by Rebecca St. James

  “Where are we going? Tara, stop!”

  She tried to dig her heels in and I let her, but I got myself in front of her again.

  “You can run away if you want to,” I said. “But it’s going to follow you unless you give me a chance. Just give me a chance, and then if you still want to go you can.”

  “Yo! Gio!”

  I peered past her shoulder. It was Mr. Stand-Up Collar. When I looked back at Wendy, her eyes were wild.

  “Come on,” I said.

  I gripped her with my arm around her shoulders again and ran with her tripping against me into the narrow passageway beside the apartment building and up the stairs and through the smeared-window door.

  “Lexi!” I screamed as we made our way down the green den of a hallway.

  Lexi’s door opened and I threw Wendy inside and dove in after her. I stood against it, holding my breath. The outside door creaked open. Footsteps fell and then stopped and retreated. The door closed.

  “I think he’s gone,” I whispered.

  “Who?” Lexi’s eyes were the size of dessert plates.

  “My manager,” Wendy said.

  “Was he going to hurt you?” Lexi said.

  “Not if I do what he says.”

  “And you just didn’t, so now he might hurt you.” I cringed. “I’m sorry.”

  Wendy, who was still leaning against Lexi’s futon couch where she’d landed, lifted one shoulder. That seemed to be all the energy she had for a shrug. The rest, the vitality that always filled the Piebald, was gone.

  “It doesn’t really matter now,” she said. “I’m busted.”

  “And you don’t mean by what just happened, do you?” I said.

  Lexi backed the two steps to the kitchen. “I’m gonna go ahead and make some tea. Wendy, you want to . . . sit down?”

  “Come on,” I said. “I just want to talk to you.”

  Wendy resigned herself onto the couch and clutched one of Lexi’s throw pillows. I took a director’s chair across from her, and I sat there, saying nothing, because I hadn’t prepared a script. All I knew was that the secrets had to be over.

  “I’m just going to put this out there,” I said. “But Wendy, I’m not attacking you, okay? You have to believe that.”

  She didn’t say anything. The confidence she always had behind the coffee shop counter seemed to have been smothered in makeup.

  “Seth had a copy of the video you were in. And tonight, totally by accident, I saw some of it.”

  Wendy swore softly. It was a far more graceful piece of profanity than Evelyn’s, or the string I spewed when I first knew. I had to give her that.

  “Seth’s sister was with me and she said she’d seen you with him on Montgomery Street.”

  “I’m not a hooker.”

  “That’s not it. Before tonight I could still believe that Seth was one step removed from actual human beings, real women. But you . . . you’re somebody’s daughter.”

  Wendy gave a laugh hard as a fist. “I used to be. Look, I know what you want to ask me, so why don’t I go ahead and tell you?”

  She waited for my nod.

  “He—what’s his name, Seth?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t know his name?

  “He told me it was Johnny. Anyway, he used to come to the club to watch me dance. He tried to proposition me but I told him what I just told you: I’m not a prostitute.” Her attempt to be cavalier was failing, but she still lifted her chin as she went on. “I sold him one of my movies, but we never actually . . . had sex.”

  She ended with a jerky shrug, but I knew that wasn’t everything. It was my turn to wait. Finally she shook the thick, glittery hair as if she were jostling the subject back into place. “Here’s what you want to know: I was nothing to him. Even after I told him no on sex, it was like he just wanted to talk. You know, about his past—”

  She looked at me sharply. I guess it was my gasp that stopped her.

  “Not about you,” she said. “I never even knew he was engaged. He told me about his parents, who I gathered were a trip. Especially his mother. Mostly her. And the more I kind of got to know him, I started putting it together. All the working out and the muscle building—I’ve seen it before. It’s about proving he’s a real man. You know, has power. All that.”

  I didn’t even pretend to know what she was talking about. Seth had to prove that he was a man? To whom?

  “It’s like you talk to these guys and you become sort of their therapist.” Wendy licked her lips and shuddered. “Do you have any Kleenex?” she called to Lexi. “I have to get some of this makeup off. I feel like a harlot sitting here.”

  Lexi brought a box of tissues from the bathroom and I waited while Wendy smeared at her face. My heart felt too heavy to even beat. Seth had told her more than I knew about him, and the betrayal ached again.

  “You want me to go on?” Wendy said. She looked years younger without the makeup, and a hundred times more real.

  “No, I don’t,” I said. “But yes.”

  She gave me another eyebrows-raised chance to change my mind, and then she said, “I knew something was hurting underneath. I mean, this was no sleaze bag.” She nodded, the way a therapist actually might. “A guy like that doesn’t come on to . . . somebody in my line of work unless something’s tearing him apart. He’s sitting there in a club—not drinking, looking like a freakin’ swan in a pack of hyenas—and it was like I had to know why.”

  I heard all of that, but a few words formed a separate stack. Proposition. Power. The past.

  I grabbed the one on top.

  “What else did he tell you about his past?”

  “Only what I pried out of him.” Wendy looked away. “I asked him who hurt him when he was a kid.”

  “Why would you ask him that?” I said.

  “Because I knew he’d been abused.” She forced her gaze back to me. “Why else does a guy like him turn to a girl like me?”

  I couldn’t answer that question. I wasn’t sure I wanted to, but we were too far in to stop now.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “He admitted he’d been molested, and then I said, ‘Was it a guy?’ because I knew it wasn’t. I was just giving him a chance to say it him-self.” She smiled ruefully. “He said it, all right. He went off on me.”

  “Went off how?”

  “He was just, like, raging, and that was what I wanted. I wanted him to get it out.” Wendy’s voice slowed, and each time she came to the end of a sentence, it broke off as if pieces of the story were splintering away. “So I said, ‘It was a woman, wasn’t it? Somebody you trusted.’ Then I did think he was going to hit me.” She put up a hand to my gasp. “He pulled back. He’s just not that kind of guy. But I decided it was time to stop.”

  I wanted to say she was lying, that Seth didn’t have that in him. That he would never even think about hitting a woman. But the sick feeling in my throat said she was telling the truth. I had seen it flash through his eyes—when I caught him, when I pushed him to admit he lied to me. When I chipped at his perfect idea of purity.

  Wendy watched me, waiting as if she knew the sound of every one of my thoughts.

  “There’s more, isn’t there?” I said.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Wendy, please—”

  “I’m not sure you want to know this.”

  “I don’t.” I pressed my folded arms against my stomach. “But I need to.”

  She tapped her fingers on her lips with garish nails I’d never seen at the Piebald. “I was about to get up and leave and he covered his eyes with his hands—the way little kids do, like they think if they can’t see you, you can’t see them. And then he just blurted it out.” Wendy’s eyes saddened. “He said when he was ten and eleven and twelve years old . . . his babysitter molested him.”

  The whistle on the teakettle pierced the air and the shaking started someplace deep inside me.

  Wendy’s voice snapped off another brittle piece. “Then he uncovered
his eyes and said something like, ‘There, are you satisfied?’ He looked so humiliated and I felt horrible. I tried to tell him that wasn’t his fault and he didn’t have anything to be ashamed of but he just got up and knocked the chair over and left.” The look she gave me was broken. The violet eyes could no longer hold their focus. “I never saw him again until Monday when he came to the Piebald and you two were sitting there with all this history, like, right on the table between you. When I realized he was your ex-fiancé, I just couldn’t face you.” The final piece split off. “I can’t even believe I’m facing you now.”

  As if to catch that last shard, Wendy smothered her face with her hands—maybe the way Seth had. There was still some voice left, though, and it wailed so long and so deep I was afraid she was dying.

  In a way, maybe she was.

  But I couldn’t go to her. She had just jabbed another knife into the layer upon layer of pain that had become everything I was. She didn’t even know how she’d done it, but I couldn’t care.

  I got up and motioned to Lexi who stood white faced between the kitchen and us with a rattling tray of teapot and mugs. “Can you—?” I said.

  “Absolutely,” she said.

  She set the tray on the counter and went to Wendy and I let myself out the door. Outside in the dank green hallway I flattened myself against the wall.

  His babysitter when he was ten and eleven and twelve years old. He covered his eyes because he couldn’t look at her when he told her that his female babysitter had abused his just awakening little male body.

  Fritzie? Did she mean Fritzie?

  Fritzie and Seth?

  No. Just no. Nonononononono.

  I slid down the wall toward the filthy carpet. Dear God, just let it be no. Because if it was yes, I couldn’t—

  The door opened at the end of the hall and I halted in midslide. As my calves burned a shadow fell across the rug. That stupid stand-up collar.

  My first instinct was to duck back into Lexi’s apartment, but then he would know where I’d taken Wendy.

  I pulled away from the wall, turned all the way around, and walked as casually as my on-end nerves would let me until I reached the next door that led outside. I pushed through it as if I were going out for cigarettes—and then tore down the steps and off down the alley.

  Garbage cans and trash bags and rancid odors flipped past me, but I didn’t stop or breathe until I got to the edge of North Bull, and I only flung myself behind a Dumpster then so I could make sure he wasn’t following me. The street was as quiet as it should be at close to three in the morning.

  I couldn’t run anymore but I walked fast and hard, cutting through the squares and across lawns until Gaston Street was finally in sight. All the lights in the main house were off but I wasn’t headed there. I took the steps up to the carriage house apartment three at a time and banged on Kellen’s door.

  The heels of my hands were bruising by the time the curtains parted on his living room window and his swollen eyes looked out at me.

  “Kellen!” I shouted at him. “Let me in!”

  The door tried to come open but it caught on its chain. Mumbling the third set of curses I’d heard that night, Kellen fumbled with it and finally set it loose. The metal banged against the frame as he yanked the door open and stared at me in the yellow light that spilled out onto the landing.

  “What the—”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  He stepped back and let me blow past him. Scratching at the front of his T-shirt with one hand, he ran the other over the stubble on his head, as if he were making sure it was there and he was him. Who I was, he hadn’t seemed to figure out yet. I tried to pull it together.

  “I’m sorry I woke you up,” I said.

  “I’m sorry you did too.” His upper lip curled. “You smell like a brewery. Are you drunk?”

  “No! Kellen, listen to me.”

  He pulled a fingertip across my forehead. “You’re sweating. What the—what’s going on?”

  “I just need to talk to you.”

  “In the middle of the night?”

  “Yes.”

  Finally the angst in my voice seemed to find its way in. He sobered and gestured toward the couch.

  “You want coffee or anything?”

  “No.” I sagged onto his sofa that smelled like dirty clothes and Mexican food and everything else boy. I could feel my perspiration seeping in where it would eventually add to the aroma. “I have to ask you something and I want you to be totally honest, okay? No matter how bad you think it’ll sound—you have to tell me the truth.”

  Kellen’s skin passed white and went straight to almost blue, and he lowered himself onto the early Attic coffee table with agonizing slowness.

  “You’re scarin’ me,” he said.

  “It is scary. Oh, Kellen . . .” I breathed in. “Okay, I can’t cry. I just have to say it.”

  “What?”

  Both his face and his voice splintered at their edges. “Tara, come on.”

  “You remember Fritzie.”

  One furry eyebrow went up. “Do I remember Fritzie? Ya think? She’s a crazy person. What about her?”

  “She’s worse than a crazy person. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  Kellen let out a long breath and tucked his hands under his thighs. I knew it was to keep them from shaking. “Maybe,” he said. “Tell me.”

  I told him the whole thing, pieced together from every scrap I could remember from Wendy and from what Seth said in his letter. As I talked and Kellen watched me, the rosiness that was Kellen returned to his face. For him, maybe the knowing was better than the not knowing.

  “Did you know about any of that?” I said.

  “Sort of.” Kellen scrubbed at the back of his neck, eyes closed. “Just this one time. We were maybe ten and she was with us for the weekend and Seth was over here. You were already in bed and she let us stay up to watch some old movie with her. I think it was Top Gun.”

  “Top Gun. You were ten.”

  “I know, right?” Kellen got up and relocated to the beanbag. His hands were steady again. “Seth and I were all into the whole fighter pilot thing so we thought it was cool, until we got to the sex scene.” He folded his arms across his chest. “There we are, these little prepubescent virgins, and there’s Tom Cruise and what’s her face goin’ at it.”

  “Fritzie didn’t fast-forward it.”

  “Uh, no. She starts, like, trying to act it out with us.” Kellen looked at me sideways. “You don’t want the details, right?”

  “No.”

  “Seth kind of froze but I was all, ‘Gross! Knock it off!’ so she backed off and I said, ‘Come on, Seth, we’re outta here.’ ” Kellen stared at the hairs on his arms. “The worst part of it for me was that we didn’t get to see the end of the movie. I guess that wasn’t the worst part for Seth.”

  “Obviously she pursued it with him later. A lot.”

  “You know what’s weird?” Kellen said.

  “This whole thing?”

  “Yeah, but I’m talking about . . . I pretty much forgot about that incident until you just brought it up.”

  “Seth never told you about the rest of it?”

  He gave me a deadpan look. “Guys don’t talk about this kinda stuff. I mean, come on, that must have been humiliating for him.”

  “Especially since it obviously wasn’t happening to you because you told Fritzie to knock it off and he couldn’t.”

  “I don’t get that. Why couldn’t he do that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and then I shook my head. “Maybe I do. Seth was always way more cooperative with adults than you were. He was the rule-follower. You were like the rule . . . questioner.”

  “Ironic, right?” Kellen’s voice suddenly had a bite to it. “He becomes the poster kid for the Ten Commandments and gets hooked on porn.”

  “Yeah. It seems like both of those were reactions to the abuse. I mean, right? That has to be it, doesn’t
it?”

  Kellen stood up and paced to the window and looked out between the curtains and slapped, barefoot, to the kitchen and leaned on the counter—until I finally said, “What are you doing?”

  “I’m just trying to decide whether to say this or not.”

  “No more secrets. Say it.”

  “It’s not a secret. Look—”

  Kellen came back to the coffee table and sat on the edge of it again. He leaned his forearms on his thighs, so that I could see his eyes as he locked his blue gaze onto mine.

  “Yeah, it stinks that Seth got abused by that witch. I even get how it messed him up and he turned to porn and all that. But, see—and this is where you’re probably gonna get ticked off at me—but I don’t see that as an excuse. He still screwed up. He still hurt you. He hurt our whole family, and I don’t think we oughta let him off the hook because of something that happened to him when he was ten years old.”

  He held on to my eyes for another moment and then stood up again. “Now you’re mad at me.”

  “No, I’m not. I go back and forth with that about fifty times a day.” My breath caught. “Oh my gosh.”

  “What?”

  I sat up on the couch and breathed into my hands.

  “What? Are you hyperventilating? What?”

  I dragged my hands through my hair. “Okay, just let me say this because I just now thought of it and I have to hear if it makes sense.”

  “You’re already not making sense, but go for it.”

  I tried to set it up with my hands. “Okay, we can sit here and judge Seth and we’d be right. He messed up; he hurt people; I have scars I’ll never get rid of, all that.”

  “Right.”

  “That’s all about him.” I looked from my hands to Seth. “But what about us?”

  “What about us?”

  “What does that say about us—okay, about me if I just keep coming back to how horrible that is. If I say, he suffered but look how he made me suffer, then I never get over it. I’m just bitter.”

  “You have a right to be.”

  “But I don’t want to be, Kellen. I’m sick of it.”

  I started to cry—that wet, loose kind of crying that finally feels good. It apparently didn’t feel good to Kellen.