Smoke

by Meili Cady

  Anger swelled inside of me, momentarily eclipsing my anxiety. I wanted to hurt something. I wanted to make something broken, the way that I felt broken.

  I went to my room and snatched from my bed the teddy bear that Ben had given to me. Brie glanced up from her sketch pad as I passed her door. I carried the bear into the kitchen and tossed it into the center of the tile floor. I lifted the dozen roses from their vase in the dining room. I took them into the kitchen and dropped them over my beloved bear, like tossing flowers onto a casket before it’s lowered into the ground. Adrenaline pulsed through me as I returned to my room and took two cards from a box in my closet: the card that Ben had given me for Valentine’s Day, and the card that I’d given to him. He’d left the card I bought for him at my apartment after he read it. I’d tried to ignore the way he seemed to scoff at it. I assumed he was offended that I’d only written “I love you” as a message. I’d thought that said it all. He, on the other hand, had a veritable novella inside of his card to me. I paused for a brief moment and reread his card.

  Where the wordy prefixed message ended, a handwritten one began, and Ben added his own effusion of affection. In the bottom right corner, he wrote, “I love you.” It made me queasy to read this and know that our relationship wouldn’t last, as I’d hoped it would. It all seemed unreal now.

  I left my room to add both cards to the pile in the kitchen. Brie watched me as I passed her door again, with Edith Piaf’s romantic croon drifting out from behind it. The kitchen tile was cold under my bare feet. I calmly opened a drawer and grasped the biggest knife I could find. I knelt down in front of the pile, took in one short breath, then lifted the knife in the air. The blade struck down blindly into the pile. Blood rushed through me as I stabbed faster, harder. I heard a scream bellow out of me as I brought the knife down through the pile and onto the dense tile. Again, again. I couldn’t destroy everything fast enough. I set the knife down for a moment so that I could rip into pieces the card that I’d given to Ben. I snapped the stems of the roses in half and ripped off their crimson petals. Their beauty seemed to mock me, tempting me to believe that the beautiful moments in life would last. But they had all died, just like the roses in the vase. I wanted to destroy them before the last petal could fall. I grabbed Ben’s Valentine’s card to me and began to cut into the center of it, nearly tearing it in half. Suddenly, I took the knife out and set the card aside, disturbed by the thought of destroying what might be the only existing testimony that Ben had once loved me. I spared the card and picked up the teddy bear. In my hands the bear felt so soft, so comforting. I’d slept with it every night since Ben had given it to me. But holding on to this bear would mean holding on to false hope. I laid the bear on the tile, on his back, and I began to stab into him. His unchanging, woven expression stared up and at me as I dismembered his body, beginning with his ridiculous, fluffy legs. The legs and arms came off easily with the help of the blade, but removing the bear’s head took some doing. Brie heard the commotion, and she walked into the kitchen just as I was sawing the bear’s head off with a now dull blade. Without a word, she stopped at the doorway and watched me from a safe distance.

  After the bear had been taken out and the roses shredded, my hysteria turned from cries to laughter. Then silence. I sat down on the tile, drunk on hard liquor and desperation, and stared at my work. The tip of the knife in my hand was bent from blows to the floor, and my palm was white and red from holding it. I released the knife. It made a loud clanking sound as it hit the tile. Brie leaned against the door frame, sipping red wine from her glass. I looked up at her. She stared at the bear’s detached head on the kitchen floor. “I think he’s dead,” she said in a dry tone. We both let out an uncomfortable laugh.

  When Ben called me in the evening, I told him that the bear was gone. “I’ve been so stressed,” I said. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

  “What happened to the bear?” he asked.

  “Uh . . . the bear met a rather untimely and . . . er, violent end . . .” I said.

  “Oh God.” He laughed, lightening the mood. “Do I even want to know?”

  “Probably not,” I said, cringing at how crazy my behavior seemed in retrospect. “But I miss the little guy now, for what it’s worth. I’m in mourning.”

  “You must have been really pissed if you hurt the bear,” he said. “You loved that thing.”

  Ben came to my apartment late in the evening after studying for an upcoming test. He said that he wanted to go to bed immediately, in the hope of getting some sleep before another long day of studying. He gave me a quick kiss when he walked into my apartment, but he seemed preoccupied with other thoughts. He went straight to the bathroom to get ready for bed. After a few minutes, the bathroom door opened and he came out. “Is my contact solution in your room?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t see it,” I said. Ben put his shoes on at the door.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, with a terrible feeling in my stomach.

  “I think I have some solution in my car,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll come with you.”

  “No, no,” he said. “You don’t have to do that. I’ll be right back.”

  He walked out the door and into the night. Something inside me said that he wasn’t coming back, but I tried not to listen to it. Brie wasn’t home, and the apartment was deathly quiet. I was alone with my thoughts. Minutes passed. I sat still, waiting.

  Where is he? It shouldn’t take this long to get something from his car. Was that just an excuse? Did something snap in him and he realized that he didn’t want to be here?

  Another minute passed. I couldn’t stand the idea of waiting any longer to find out. I ran to the door and put my Ugg boots on. Wearing only a flimsy, pale nightdress, I hurried down the stairs of my apartment and sprinted down the street toward where I knew he’d parked his car. I was out of breath by the time I reached the spot. His car wasn’t there. He did leave. It wasn’t in my head.

  I turned around and walked straight back to my apartment. I took my shoes off at the door and went into the bedroom. I sat in shock, motionless on my bed.

  I heard some noise at the front door. Someone was trying to get it. It occurred to me that I’d left it unlocked. I heard the door open and a man’s shoes walking on the hardwood floors of our living room.

  Ben appeared at my bedroom door with a grocery bag in one hand and a fuzzy stuffed animal, a rabbit, in the other. “I didn’t find any contact solution in my car,” he said, “so I went to the market.” He held up the stuffed animal in his hand. “And I figured you needed a new one of these.” He smiled at me with tired eyes. I got up and threw my arms around his waist.

  A SHORT TIME LATER, LISETTE invited me to her condo to have drinks and discuss an upcoming trip. “Are you still seeing Ben?” she asked.

  “I thought you didn’t want to hear about him,” I told her.

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “It’s just us right now. You can tell me.” I said nothing. “It’s not like I don’t know,” she snapped. “I’m not stupid. I know you’re still seeing him.” She took a drink of Bombay Sapphire on the rocks. “It’s okay. It’s your life.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ll see what happens,” I said.

  “I’ll see what happens,” she said. “I don’t trust him. I’ve asked my PI to tail him for me. Just for a while. I want to see what he’s up to.”

  “You put a private investigator on Ben?” I asked her.

  “Don’t get too excited,” she said. “It’s not like I went out of my way. You know that I keep a PI on retainer. I thought he needed something to do anyway; otherwise, what am I paying him for? You should be glad I’m doing this, sweetie. Now you’ll know if Ben starts seeing someone else. You never know what people are capable of.”

  “I appreciate the thought, but this is completely unnecessary,” I told her. “You don’t need to do this.”

  Lis
ette shrugged and said, “I’ll be the judge of that. It’s just a very basic tail, sweetie. It’s nothing to freak out about.”

  ON ST. PATRICK’S DAY, BEN came over to my apartment late in the evening. I’d expected him earlier, and I’d become increasingly anxious as I waited for him to arrive. Almost two hours after he said he’d be here, he walked in the door in a gruff mood. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “Can we please just go to bed?”

  “Where were you?” I asked.

  “These chicks asked me for a ride when I was at the market,” he said. “They said their car wasn’t working or something.”

  “And you gave them a ride?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you know them?” I asked.

  “No. I mean, it wasn’t that far away.”

  “But it took you two hours . . .” I said. “You would have been here two hours ago.”

  “Listen, I don’t want to talk about this,” he said. “I’m so fucking tired.”

  “I’m not,” I told him from where I sat on the couch. “I couldn’t sleep at all if I tried to right now. I’ve . . . got a lot on my mind.”

  “Just do a shot or something,” he said. “That usually seems to work for you . . .”

  “I’m out of alcohol,” I told him.

  “Let’s walk to the liquor store,” he said. “After that we can come back and go to bed.”

  At the liquor store, I bought a handful of minibottles of vodka. Shortly after returning to the apartment, Ben took his nightly sleeping pill and lay down in my bed. I stood by him in a white satin nightie and drank through the tiny bottles of liquor. He frowned as he reached out and pinched the side of my stomach. “You’re so skinny right now,” he said.

  “Okay . . .” I said, not sure if this was meant to be an insult or a compliment.

  “You’ve lost a lot of weight . . .” he said. “At least ten pounds since we started dating.” I ignored him and opened another minibottle. “Were you trying to lose weight, or . . . ?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Not really.”

  “Geez,” he said, “you think you’re drinking those fast enough?”

  I glared at him. “You’re the one who was in such a hurry to go to bed.”

  “I still am,” he said. He put his earplugs in and settled down into the covers.

  I couldn’t help but wonder about the girls Ben gave a ride to. I wouldn’t ask him any more about them, but I had a feeling that there must have been some interest there. Ben was an okay guy, but I’d never call him philanthropic. I couldn’t imagine him going out of his way to give a stranger a ride, especially so late in the evening, if he didn’t have some ulterior motive. I crawled onto the bed and sat upright next to where Ben was lying, turned away from me now. The alcohol was taking effect. I wondered if it was possible to ever go back to the way things were, if we were ever going to at least try. I started to cry. Ben heard me and turned over. He was instantly irritated. “What?! Why are you crying? Seriously, I need to sleep!”

  “What are we doing here?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what you’re doing, but I’m trying to sleep,” he said.

  “Can we please talk about this?” I asked him.

  He took one earplug out and said, “If you wanted to have this talk, you could have done it earlier. I have to get some sleep. It’s the one thing I want right now.”

  “I just don’t know what to do,” I said. “I’m scared. Lisette said that she’s having a private investigator follow you. I don’t know what she wants. She might be bluffing, but I don’t know.”

  Ben looked at me incredulously. “This is crazy. This shit’s getting out of hand,” he said. “I don’t know what to say when you tell me stuff like that.”

  “What am I supposed to do?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. He lay back down and turned away from me. “All I know is I’m tired and I don’t want to talk about this or anything right now. I just want to sleep.”

  I tried to wipe my tears away, but more streamed down my face. “Ben, please,” I said. “I just want to talk for a few minutes. I can’t sleep otherwise.” He said nothing back to me. “Ben?” I leaned in to see that he was wearing both earplugs again.

  “Go to sleep,” he said. Unable to contain my emotion, I got up from the bed.

  “I’m going to sleep in Brie’s room,” I said.

  “Don’t,” he said, a warning tone in his voice. “Don’t be stupid.”

  “No, I can’t sleep right now,” I said. “I’ll leave you alone.”

  In the morning, I woke up alone on top of the covers of Brie’s bed. I felt a sick sadness in my stomach from the moment I opened my eyes. I stared up into the whiteness of her ceiling. My eyes were swollen from crying, so much so that it obscured my vision. I shuddered as I remembered the way Ben had looked at me as I sobbed. He was angry. He thought I was pathetic. He saw how weak I had become, and of course it was repulsive to him. He watched with disgust as I sucked down minibottles of vodka before bed, desperately seeking tranquillity. As if he had any right to judge me. He had his sleeping pills and his earplugs and his harsh words to me before he fought for sleep. I was fighting for the same thing, but my weapons were alcohol to drown my awareness and tears to exhaust myself into rest, like a child who needed to be rocked to sleep.

  I walked quietly back to my room where Ben was asleep in my bed. Morning light cracked through the blinds of my window, but the air inside remained cold and lifeless. I took great care not to disturb Ben as I crawled back into bed next to him. I knew that I’d deprived him of sleep last night, and I didn’t want to wake him abruptly. I lay on my side in the fetal position. His body was turned away from me. I reached my hand out to gently touch his back to let him know that I’d returned. His skin lacked any warmth, as did his reaction to my touch. I could feel now that he was only pretending to be asleep, and that his muscles were tense and determined not to acknowledge me.

  I wanted him to understand that I hadn’t slept in Brie’s room to be cruel to him. It was somehow less painful for me to sleep there. I was able to take some small comfort in knowing that he was in the other room. That way it was easier for me to pretend that it wasn’t over between us and that he still felt some affection for me. I could still imagine that if I’d been next to him that he would have made love to me, or even just held me in his arms the way he used to, not long ago. Next to him, I would have known that all this was merely a fantasy I was clinging to.

  In the beginning of my relationship with Ben, I saw incredible happiness in my future. As the months went on, though, I’d watched with a breaking heart as life and love faded from our relationship. In blind desperation, I’d hung my last hope for happiness on my future with Ben. But I knew that he would leave me. If I’d had the choice, I’d leave me too. I couldn’t stand what I’d become. I was stuck with me and this bizarre, unbearable reality that was suffocating me.

  I carefully slipped out of bed and walked to the bathroom to begin getting ready for work. I washed my face and dabbed concealer on the deep circles under my eyes. I heard the door of my apartment slam shut. I dropped my makeup brush onto the linoleum floor and ran out of the bathroom. Holding my breath, I threw open the door to my apartment and looked below me to see Ben walking away, toward the street. I shouted his name, but he didn’t respond. “Ben!” I called after him again, my voice shaking. “Where are you going?” Without turning to look at me he called back, “I’m going. I have to go.”

  I watched from the top of my stairs as he turned the corner and walked out of my life. I didn’t have time to run after him, and no time to cry. I went back inside to finish my makeup.

  As I applied foundation to my face, I felt as though I was painting a cadaver. I couldn’t look distraught when Lisette saw me, so I buried everything I was feeling. I dabbed pink blush on my cheeks to give the illusion of liveliness. I zipped up my black pencil skirt and grabbed my blazer, then drove to meet Lisette and th
e rest of Team LL at her penthouse.

  15

  WRITTEN ON THE WALL

  In the spring of 2010, David left the operation, with Ko shortly to follow. Lisette and David’s relationship, both personal and professional, had soured. They’d lost whatever trust they’d had in the beginning. Lisette had accused David of mishandling money and lying to her, and he responded by calling her a “crazy bitch” who thought this was “all a game.” I wasn’t present when any of this went down, but vague details were filtered through Lisette. I didn’t know what to believe since I was hearing only one side of it, and frankly I didn’t care about the details. It was all done behind closed doors, and I never knew the full story on anything anyway, so I stopped trying to keep track. Lisette had somehow managed to get ahold of David’s weed supplier, Jose, and she had every intention of carrying on without David. In a time when she might have counted her losses and folded the entire operation, she was adamant about moving forward without David as a partner. Now she was working with Jose, who in her eyes was more powerful than David, and closer to the “gangster” fantasy she’d seen play out in her favorite movies. She told everyone on the team to delete David’s phone number.

  Henry was the next to go. Team LL was falling apart, after less than six months since our first trip to Ohio. Lisette had broken off her romance with Henry a few weeks before, but he’d continued to work for her. During our recent trip, it had occurred to me that perhaps I wasn’t the only one on Team LL with a broken heart. I can’t speak for him; I can only guess what he might have felt. Watching him try to keep his distance from her when we were traveling, I wondered how he was handling everything. She was snappy and impersonal toward him, but he remained strong and kind in return. He seemed to genuinely care for her. It was almost as if Lisette enjoyed the possibility that she’d made him miserable. I’d developed a kind of camaraderie with Henry, but to abide by Lisette’s expectations, I tried not to engage in conversation with him. Shortly after we returned to L.A., Lisette announced that Henry had been fired.