Wicked Beautiful

by J. T. Geissinger

  Paranoia and I have gotten to be pretty close friends.

  My car—a nondescript older model Ford with a bad transmission—jumps and rattles over the bumpy road. Summer is the rainy season in this part of Mexico, and the rains take their toll on the roads. The city fixes the main streets, but my private driveway is in a state of disrepair; my landlord keeps promising to get someone in to fill the holes, but he works at the same speed Carlos does. I’ll probably end up doing it myself. I’ve gotten quite handy with home improvement projects.

  I park in front of the house, gather my groceries and handbag from the passenger seat, and head up the paved brick path to the front door. Perdón is stretched out across the welcome mat in all his plump orange glory. When he sees me approach, he rolls to his back and stretches, meowing a lazy hello.

  The house is a pink adobe Spanish Colonial with an arched colonnade in front. It’s shaded by a towering stand of palms on the west side of the property; scarlet and orange dahlia bushes add a riot of color to the east. In the backyard, I have an herb garden—protected from the blistering sun by netting I hung myself—and a stone fountain carved in the shape of a mermaid that burbles happily day and night.

  Sometimes late at night I turn it off, because all that cheerful burbling makes me wish I had someone to share it with. But the only male who’s shared my bed in the past six months is of another species.

  “Hey, fatty,” I call lovingly to the cat. “Mommy’s home—are you ready for dinner?”

  He leaps to his feet. Actually, leap is too generous a word. It’s more like he flops to one side, struggles to get his paws beneath him, and pushes up. Then he yawns, shakes out his fur, sits back on his haunches, looks up at me, and issues a loud, demanding yowl.

  Stupid question. Perdón is ready for dinner right after he’s eaten his breakfast. The animal is an eating machine.

  “OK, you little tyrant. In we go.”

  I unlock the front door. Perdón struts in between my feet, his tail swishing imperiously. I push the door shut with my hip, turn, and then cry out in shock. I drop the groceries and my purse on the floor.

  The living room overflows with bouquets of white roses.

  They’re everywhere: on the coffee table, on the side table between two chairs, on the mantel above the fireplace, on the floor. There are dozens of them, full and lush in crystal vases, lending a heady perfume to the air.

  My heart thinks it’s a thoroughbred that’s just heard the starting gate bell at the Kentucky Derby, and launches into a thundering gallop. I freeze, listening to the tick of the clock on the mantel, feeling the blood pound through my veins.

  My brain is frozen, too. I should grab my purse and run, but instead I call out a tentative, “H-hello?”

  After a few eons during which I don’t hear an answer or any unusual sound, I creep forward through the shadowed entry hallway on tiptoe. Wide-eyed, I peek into the dining room.

  More roses.

  I break out in a cold sweat. My hands start to shake. Terror, disbelief, and something I’m not allowing myself to recognize as hope churn in my stomach, wreaking havoc in my mind.

  It can’t be. It can’t be. It can’t.

  I move like a zombie through the house, stiff-limbed and slack-jawed, finding bouquets of snowy roses stuffed into every room. It’s a dream, or a nightmare. I can’t decide which. When I get to my bedroom and see what’s plastered all over the big mirror above the dresser across from the bed, my frozen disbelief finally cracks. I cover my mouth with both hands and sob.

  It’s a montage of Parker and me. Young and happy, smiling madly in every picture taped to the glass.

  “Buenas tardes, Ana.”

  I spin around, arms flung out. In my haste I almost lose my balance and fall.

  There in my bedroom doorway—wearing jeans, cowboy boots, a flannel shirt rolled up at the sleeves, a white cowboy hat, and a ridiculous moustache—stands Parker.

  FORTY

  I feel as if I might faint.

  He’s thinner than I remember, and his hair is longer, but he’s no less beautiful, in spite of that droopy caterpillar nesting on his top lip.

  “Or should I call you Anacita?” he asks quietly, his piercing gaze never leaving my face.

  “That was you in the bar today,” I whisper hoarsely, so deeply stunned it’s as if I’ve been hit with a Taser gun.

  It’s Parker. He’s here. Here.

  Dear God, please don’t let me have a heart attack.

  “I’d ask if that was your boyfriend you were with, but I know cradle-robbing isn’t your style. Though he obviously wishes it were.”

  Parker makes no move to come closer. He just keeps staring at me with this devouring look as if he’s memorizing every feature and curve of my face, burning the details into his mind.

  For a long while, neither of us speaks. Then, because I can no longer bear the crushing silence, I say shakily, “God. That moustache.”

  He strokes it thoughtfully. “I look like a porn star, don’t I?”

  “Not even a star. Like an unpaid extra. It’s hideous.”

  He nods. “Your hair is nice, too. Did you lose a bet?”

  My throat is getting dangerously tight. Not sure if I’m going to laugh, sob or scream, I swallow.

  Parker removes his hat, rakes a hand through his hair, and takes a step into my bedroom. The space seems to shrink.

  “Do you have any idea how many Ana Garcias there are in this country?” His voice is gentle, but his eyes burn right through me. They sear me straight down to my soul.

  I shake my head.

  He says, “A lot,” and takes another step closer. He drops the cowboy hat to the floor.

  I would move, but I’ve become a statue. Or a tree, firmly rooted in place. Paradoxically, there’s so much adrenaline coursing through my body, I’m shaking almost to the point of vibrating.

  “Well.” I clear my throat. “That was rather the point.”

  He nods again. So very serious. So very calm. In comparison, I’m a fireworks show that has gone horribly awry, everything exploding at once with deafening noise and blinding color, burning the bystanders with flying hot shrapnel and chunks of smoking ash.

  “How did you find me?”

  “Tabby.”

  I stagger backward a step, my shock deepening. “She’d never—”

  “She told me everything,” he interrupts softly, “after I told her everything.”

  Everything. That word crashes around inside my skull, smashing and banging into things, leaving wreckage in its wake.

  “She told me about your plan to ruin me. She told me that she was Polaroid, not you.” His voice drops an octave. His eyes are ablaze. “And she told me about Eva.”

  A small noise escapes my lips. My eyes fill with tears.

  Parker comes closer. Then closer still. When he’s standing so close I can count the long golden lashes around his lids, he whispers, “Can you ever forgive me?”

  My knees decide they’ve had enough of knocking, and buckle.

  Parker catches me before I fall. He swings me into his arms, strides over to the bed, and lowers us to it. He kisses me on the cheeks, murmuring passionately, “Forgive me, baby, please, please, forgive me.”

  I break down and cry. “You asshole! There’s nothing to forgive! Except that moustache!”

  “I left you without saying good-bye.” He tenderly kisses me on the lips. “I abandoned you when you needed me most.” He kisses me again, deeper, leaving me breathless and gasping for air. “And then, years later, I made you run away from me with the absolute worst fucking proposal of marriage in the history of mankind.”

  This time when he kisses me, I feel his remorse. I feel all his anguish and sorrow and desperation, every painful, ragged inch of his despair. And all the emotions I’d bottled up so tightly over the long, lonely years since he first left me burst free.

  I break the kiss, bury my head in his neck, and bawl like a baby.

  He lets me.
He rolls to his back and takes me with him, pinning me against his body with his strong arms around me, keeping me together when I would otherwise shatter into a million little pieces and die. I cry on his chest until the sun sets and a big glowing moon rises over the mountains, and then I cry some more, until eventually my eyes are swollen, my voice is hoarse, and I’m completely spent.

  “For the Queen Bitch, you’re surprisingly weepy,” muses Parker, lovingly stroking my back.

  I sniffle. “I’m not the Queen Bitch anymore. I’m just a lowly office clerk with a crappy hairdo and a fat, bad-tempered cat.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Your cat seemed pretty accommodating to me. He didn’t even bat an eye when I broke in through the patio door.”

  “You bribed him with food, didn’t you?”

  Against my temple, I feel Parker’s smile. “I might have given him a treat or two to keep him quiet.”

  We lie in silence for a few minutes, just breathing. The shadows on the wall are long and soft. Outside, a cricket starts to sing.

  Inside my chest, a small, tender flower unfurls her petals to the morning sun.

  I say quietly, “I can’t believe you’re here.”

  Parker’s arms tighten around me. He kisses the top of my head.

  “I’m so sorry, Parker. For all of it.”

  “So am I.”

  Tentatively, I ask, “How’s Tabby? And Darcy? Are they angry with me?”

  “Darcy’s fine; she misses you like hell, but she’s been distracted lately with a new project.” His voice warms. “She and a certain insane German chef are collaborating on a cookbook. Among other things.”

  “Other things? Is that your roundabout way of saying she and Kai are dating?”

  “‘Dating’ is one way to put it. Another is ‘screwing like rabbits every chance they get.’ I accidentally walked in on the two of them in the stock room at Xengu.” He chuckles. “I’ll need extensive hypnotherapy to get those images erased from my mind. I had to throw out four crates of artichokes, two dozen boxes of strawberries and an entire pallet of escarole that had been crushed in their…enthusiasm.”

  I smile, missing Darcy so hard it’s a physical lump in my stomach. “And Tabby?”

  Caressing my hair, Parker sighs, a sound layered with emotion. “She’s a tough nut, that one. Her loyalty to you is remarkable. Connor’s convinced she’s a lesbian.”

  “She’s not. And who’s Connor?”

  “My friend and security guy; he’s the one who tried to hack into your email. He’s got a huge haterection for Tabby, but she won’t give him the time of day. He’s been trying to get her to come to work for him, but he won’t admit she’s smarter than he is, which is her one condition for accepting the job. Last I heard, he’d offered her seven figures a year in salary, but she still turned him down. Apparently she told him that unless he said the words, ‘You are superior to me in intellect, class, and fashion sense,’ he could find another world-class hacker. So far he’s refused, but I think he’s getting desperate; he’s got a big client who was recently infiltrated by some radical Russian group, and the client is threatening to sue Connor unless he tracks the source and assists police with prosecution. Which, apparently, he can’t do without Tabby’s help. So she’s got him by the proverbial balls.”

  We share another silence as I digest what he’s told me.

  Then, more somberly, he says, “I visited your mother.”

  I haven’t spoken to my mother at all in the months I’ve been gone. There’s a distinct difference between forgiving and forgetting, and though I’ve let go of my anger at her for her part in the tragedy of Parker and Isabel, I haven’t yet wanted to try to reach out.

  Truth be told, I don’t want to talk to her about what happened. I don’t want to know if she’d discovered what Bill Maxwell did with his rigged card came, if the hatred she displayed toward him that day in her kitchen went beyond what she’d said.

  Knowing wouldn’t change anything, anyway. The past is fixed in stone; we can’t carve new endings to old stories, no matter how desperately we might want to.

  When I don’t respond, Parker inhales and then exhales. My head rises and falls with his breath. “She told me about all the letters you sent after I left. I never received any of them, of course.”

  I whisper, “Your father.”

  Parker’s voice turns bitter. “He didn’t even bother to deny it. The day I called him, he was drunk at two o’clock in the afternoon, raving about the country having a black President. I won’t be speaking to him again.”

  He’s quiet for a moment, and then the bitterness is gone from his voice. “She misses you, too.”

  I close my eyes. “I can’t see her, not yet. It’s too fresh. And besides, if I go to Laredo, I’ll want to go…I’ll want to see…”

  I don’t finish my thought, but he knows who I’m talking about. With a new, infinitely soft tone in his voice, he whispers, “She’s so beautiful. Like her mother.”

  My chest tightens. Fresh tears threaten to fall. “You went to the school?”

  “Yes. Sat in the parking lot like a creeper, staring through binoculars. Thank goodness your mother was with me, or I’d really have felt like a perv.”

  Parker and my mother, staring at Eva through binoculars. Though I’ve done it myself countless times, the thought makes me unbearably sad.

  “In a few years she’ll be eighteen, a legal adult,” says Parker softly.

  I nod.

  “Which means she can make her own decisions…about things like meeting her birth parents.”

  My head snaps up. I stare at him unblinking, my pulse a freight train speeding out of control.

  He says, “It’s worth a shot.”

  “What if she doesn’t know she’s adopted?” I ask breathlessly.

  “She talked about it on her Facebook page; she knows. She thinks it’s cool, like she was chosen, not something to be ashamed of. She sounds remarkably well-adjusted. I think her parents did an amazing job raising her.”

  “B-but if I meet her, I’ll be exposed…no one can know who I am—”

  “You’re Isabel Diaz of Laredo, Texas, daughter of Tómas and Guadalupe,” he says gently. “That’s all anyone ever needs to know. No one in Laredo or anywhere else knows about your connection to Victoria Price, or to Ana Garcia. And besides, it’s the truth. You are Isabel. I think we can both agree that the truth is a much better alternative to lying.”

  Possibilities spin madly inside my head. The future is suddenly so much brighter, so much more full, than it was merely a few minutes ago. “But your political career, your run for Congress. The tabloids will go crazy—”

  Parker laughs. “That was over before it even began. I abandoned everything else when I started to search for you. I’ve been living in Mexico full-time for the past few months so I could concentrate on finding you.” When he sees my look of distress, he’s quick to add, “Because I finally got my priorities straight. Opening two new restaurants a year, dating a different girl every week, aspiring to political office…that was all driven by emptiness. I was trying to distract myself from loneliness and self-loathing, I know that now. I didn’t give up anything that really mattered, and you didn’t ruin my life by leaving, OK?”

  His words are emphatic, and ring with truth. I feel a little relieved, until something else occurs to me. “She’ll want to know why we gave her up for adoption.”

  There’s a shrug in his voice. “Because we were teenagers. We wanted her to have a better life than we could give her.”

  “But—”

  Parker silences me with a kiss. “We’ll figure it out as we go. Nothing’s set in stone. We have a few years to figure out logistics, if that’s even what Eva ultimately decides she wants to do. When the time comes, we can reach out to her through the adoption agency to arrange a meeting and see how she responds. OK?”

  Shaking, I lower my head to his chest. “OK.”

  We’re quiet forever, listening to the sounds o
f the night, until finally I take a deep breath and whisper, “So what happens now?”

  Parker lifts my head. He sweeps his thumbs over my cheeks. He looks at me in silence until, almost imperceptibly, a smile begins to curve his lips.

  “Now I think I should produce that ring I promised you.”

  I should probably go get my medicine from the bathroom; what’s happening to my heart doesn’t seem quite normal.

  I say, “Threatened me with, I think you mean.”

  “Yes. Excuse me. And before you say no, I need to tell you that it’s a ten-carat flawless stone, round brilliant cut, with tapered baguette side stones in a platinum setting. It’s quite impressive, even by your standards. It cost more than your Rolls-Royce.”

  My laugh is feeble. “Only ten carats? How miniscule. Tiffany?”

  “Cartier.”

  “Ah. Well. In any case, this might be a good time to mention that I’ve already told you I’m not ready for an institution.”

  Parker’s smile is not one of a man who thinks his proposal has just been refused.

  “Fair enough. I’ll ask again in the morning. Things always seem better in the morning.”

  “Oh, really? Does this mean you’re inviting yourself to spend the night? Whatever will we do with ourselves?”

  His lids drop, and his voice comes out husky. “Well, I could try to make you see the true face of God.”

  My heartbeat, which had settled down to more reasonable levels, immediately skyrockets into the stratosphere again. “Now you’re talking, Mr. Maxwell.”

  “I’m glad you agree, my beautiful Bel.”

  Before I can start to cry again, Parker kisses me hard, swallowing the sob of joy rising from my throat.

  Our clothes come off with such speed it’s almost magic. We fall on each other in desperation, clutching and moaning, stroking and sighing, our mouths as greedy as our hands. Months of separation are erased in an instant.

  Just as Parker is about to slide inside me, a loud, screeching howl brings us both to a stop.

  Sitting in the bedroom doorway, Perdón glares at us in disgust.

  “Shut up or I’ll make a rug out of you, buddy,” Parker pants, craning his head over his shoulder.