Push

by Claire Wallis

  At work on Monday, Matt goes back to being Matt, though he does ask me if David was mad at him for his departing comment on Friday. I laugh and tell him that David wanted to chase him down for it, but in the end, I managed to hold him back. We had a great weekend, I tell Matt, and then I thank him again for our little talk on Friday. I don’t want to make things awkward between us, so I make no mention of his discussion with David about “the new hottie at work.” Inside, though, I think of it every time I look at him. It still makes me feel giddy. And stupid.

  On my way to lunch, I get a text from David.

  Hi.

  Hi back.

  Day going well?

  Slow. Yours?

  Hands in a toilet so not so great.

  Um, ewww. TMI.

  Sorry, but true.

  I guess I never thought about David having to do that kind of work for Carl, but obviously he does.

  Not your favorite job, I’ll assume.

  Correct.

  See u at 6:00?

  I’ll be there.

  I appreciate it.

  Good.

  I miss u.

  Better.

  I don’t really think about what his reaction will be. It is something else that doesn’t matter. And so I put myself out there.

  I love u.

  I press Send. I stand in line for a deli sandwich, holding my breath. My stomach is dancing. I don’t expect him to say it back. Hell, I don’t know what I expect. My phone pings almost instantly.

  Best.

  It makes me smile. Clever motherfucker.

  * * *

  David is waiting outside for me at six, double-parked and sexy as shit. I am really freaked out about our little text exchange. I would never forgive myself if it changed things between us. If it was too soon.

  I have never said “I love you” to a guy before, because I have never loved one before. Hell, compared to this, I barely gave a damn about a guy before. But, David. David makes me love him. He makes me love us.

  “Hey,” he says to me as I reach the car. He is freshly showered. I can smell the soap and the remnants of his shaving gel. He is wearing dark blue jeans and a plaid button-down. It’s ironed. Very neatly ironed. The idea of David ironing is an absurd turn-on. I think I must be nuts. “How did the rest of your day go?” he asks, pulling me from my thoughts.

  “Great, thanks,” I say as he plants a small kiss on my forehead. “You look extra mighty fine today,” I add as I climb into the car.

  “Must be a girl,” he says, closing my door. I am wearing a stupid-ass smile, and he grins at me as he walks around the front of the car to his side.

  When we arrive home, I get my mail before we head inside. I haven’t checked the mailbox since early last week. David is standing behind me when I insert my key and open the slot. There is only one envelope inside, and when I look at my name and address written on the front, I know immediately who it is from.

  I wave the letter at David. “Christ all-fucking-mighty,” I blurt out emphatically. “What the fuck is it with these people?”

  “What is it?” David asks. I am sure he sees my skin starting to sear. I feel the red creeping up my neck and across my face. He is looking at me cautiously. And then I see his face change. I see the crazy current starting to move through him. I see his body tighten and his skin flush, just like mine. “Is it from him? Is it from Michael?” he asks.

  “No,” I say, practically shouting it at him. “It’s from one of my fucking asshole brothers.” I recognized Ricky’s handwriting the moment I saw it. He must have gotten my address from Michael. I want to break something.

  “What?” David spits back at me in disbelief. “Jesus, Emma.”

  “Michael must have given him my address. Fucker. Seriously, what the hell am I supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. He’s calmer now. His voice settled.

  I work my index finger under the lip of the envelope and tear it open. Inside is a written letter. A note, really. My heart stops.

  Em—

  Michael is in the hospital. He might not make it. I thought you should know.

  R.

  241-445-7878

  And folded up with the note is a newspaper clipping.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Anna

  I am standing on this bridge, and I know that he is watching. He is always watching. First it was from his bedroom window, the one across the courtyard from mine. But then, after David got him evicted, he started watching me from his car, from the sidewalk, from the coffee shop adjacent to the restaurant where I work. Hell, he watches me from wherever he can. I hate him, and the more he watches me, the more I want him to die. The more I want to die.

  David keeps trying to tell me that it isn’t true. That Thomas isn’t watching me. That it’s all in my head, and I’m just being paranoid. I hate that word. Paranoid. How the hell is it paranoia when I see the motherfucker standing there watching me? That is not paranoia. That is the truth. I know that David is only trying to help, but, really, the only way he can help me is to make Thomas and his video camera go away. Even when I take my meds, he’s there. He is real. I swear it.

  David is standing next to me on the bridge, holding my hand. He made me take a walk with him tonight. He said he wanted to help me clear my head and to show me that Thomas is not following me. Not following us. But Thomas is here. I can feel him. I don’t mention it to David, though, because he won’t believe me. He never does. Even the girls at work don’t believe me. Only Thomas knows it’s the truth.

  David is a good guy. A really good guy. His structure and order has turned out to be the perfect counterpoint to my mental disarray. We have been living together for almost two months now. He moved in right after my last hospital stay. It was such a fucking joke that time. I didn’t take those pills to kill myself; I took them to prove to David—and everyone else—that Thomas was watching me, because he would call an ambulance if he saw me do it. It failed, though, because they told David that I was the one who made the call even before I took the pills. Which is impossible, of course. Thomas must have had some woman call in for him. He knew he’d be busted. I didn’t think he was that smart.

  When David moved in, I taped cardboard over all the windows to shut Thomas out of our lives. It worked for a little while, but then one day, David saw him, too. He saw the video camera set up in Thomas’s window, aimed right at our window. He went straight to the police and managed to get Thomas evicted. The police found videos of me—before I put up the cardboard—in Thomas’s house, so don’t tell me he isn’t still watching me. He’s a fucking pervert. I should have gotten a restraining order or pressed charges when I had the chance. I regret that I didn’t.

  David says that Thomas isn’t even in New Orleans anymore and that he wants me to relax about the whole thing. But I can’t. I know David is just saying those things because he wants to protect me. He has always wanted to protect me, from Thomas and from myself. He was that way right from the beginning. David was refurbishing Dr. Schreiber’s office, and we just started talking in the waiting room before my appointment. I gave him my number when I left. I never do that kind of stuff, but I’m glad that I did. He called me a few days later to ask me how I was. We talked on the phone five or six times before I agreed to have coffee with him. I told him right out the gate that I am wack—that I have “issues.” He said he figured as much, seeing as how we met at my therapist’s office. But it turns out that he has issues of his own. He didn’t tell me about them at first, but after we were dating for a while, he told me that when he was finished with the remodel, he started seeing Dr. Schreiber, too. David has a messed-up, disheveled past, and his last girlfriend, Jenny, took shit to a whole new level and messed him up pretty bad.

  Jenny was a junkie. When she died, she was in it pretty deep with her dealer. Like for tens of thousands of dollars. She started selling for him to pay off her debt—and as a way to score her next fix. She never caught up, though, and tr
ied to drag David into it, as well. She wound up dealing out of the tattoo parlor where she worked, selling pills and dope and shit to anyone who would buy. And then she got some bad stuff and sold it to some crackhead who went crazy and pounded her with a rock or something. He dumped her body in the river. Jenny and David had broken up weeks before that, he told me, over the fact that he refused to help her deal with the mess. And because he was tired of her always being strung out.

  David says he talks to Dr. Schreiber about how he feels responsible for Jenny’s death because he refused to help her. When the police came to him after Jenny’s body was found, David was the one who had to tell Jenny’s family that she was a user, and he had to tell the cops about everything. About her habit, about her arrangement with the dealer, about how she was selling from the tattoo shop, and about how he had refused to help her out of the situation.

  The trail of shit Jenny left in her wake was pretty incredible. The owners of the tattoo parlor had to shut it down, even though they hadn’t known what was going on. And, worse still, the district attorney didn’t have enough evidence to press charges against the crackhead, so he walked, denying it up and down the entire time. Yes, he bought drugs from Jenny, he said. But he didn’t kill her.

  So David has been stuck with Jenny on his conscience, and Dr. Schreiber has been helping him sort it all out. I think things are better for David now, though I know he worries about me. I wish he didn’t have to. I wish I could prove to him that I am not being paranoid.

  David squeezes my hand, and we stand together looking out over the water. The traffic is whizzing by, and even though it is dark, I can feel Thomas watching us. I don’t say anything to David, though, because I am supposed to be clearing my head. I am supposed to not be thinking about Thomas.

  We are both quiet for a long time, but then David takes a deep breath and tells me he knows how to make Thomas go away. He knows how to fix this. He sounds sad as he says it, but the conviction in his voice makes it sound like a pledge. As if he’s promising something that he is sure he can deliver. I tell him there is no way he can make this better because he doesn’t even believe me. He doesn’t even think Thomas is real anymore. I let go of David’s hand because right now, despite his vow to fix this, I don’t want him to be here. David thinks he understands, or rather he thinks he’s trying to understand, but how could he? How could he know what it feels like to have someone watching your every move, every hour of every day? How could he even begin to understand what this feels like? How does he think he is going to fix things for me?

  David tells me it is difficult for him to believe that Thomas is still watching me when he doesn’t see him. Ever. He looks for Thomas, he says. All the time. But he never sees him. I tell him that there are a lot of people who believe in ghosts and aliens—and God, for that matter—even though they have never seen them. Just because he doesn’t see Thomas doesn’t make me a liar.

  I am mad. So mad. How can he make Thomas stop when he doesn’t even believe he’s there in the first place? When I ask him that exact question, my voice is full of sarcasm and attitude.

  David swipes a hand across the back of his neck, as if he is rubbing out a kink in one of his muscles. “By making him believe that there is no more you.”

  I don’t understand.

  David asks me if I think Thomas is watching us right now. It is a baited question, and I’m not sure what he wants me to say. Does he want the truth? Or does he want me to lie? As I consider my answer, I look down toward the end of the bridge. There is a man standing there, looking out over the water and talking on a cell phone. He’s the only person around who isn’t zipping past in a car. And I know that it is Thomas. I don’t look at David when I say yes.

  David sighs. He grabs my hand again and tells me that if Thomas is watching us right now, he will see us jump off this bridge together, and he will think that I am gone. That we are gone. Then he’ll leave me alone. He won’t come back. David promises me. He promises me that Thomas will leave...me...alone. That it will be over. He promises. And I believe him. I believe him because he has never broken a promise to me before. Ever.

  David knows that I cannot swim. I once refused to go boating with him at Lake Pontchartrain because of it, and he thought it was odd that I never learned.

  He must see my trepidation, because a second later, he is calming my unspoken fears with talk of how we will jump together. He says that once we hit the water, he will pull me back up and drag me to the shore. I don’t have to swim. I only have to hold my breath. I can do that, I tell him. I can hold my breath.

  I tell David that, yes, I will do this because I think he is right. I think this will work. I wrap my arms around David’s neck and he wraps his arms around my waist and I say thank you to him. I say thank you for making this better. For fixing this. He lets go of my waist and looks at me. He is only holding my hand now, and he tells me that on the count of three we will jump together. I know that Thomas is watching us now, and I am excited. I am thrilled that he will see us. For the first time ever, I am happy that he is here.

  David counts. But when he says three, instead of jumping, he whips his hand out of mine and steps back away from the edge of the bridge. I snap my head around to David and ask him what the hell just happened. He is smiling at me. A big smile. A look of excited contentment flashes on to his face. He looks so strong. So sure. So very controlled. I know now that he isn’t going to jump. He never intended to jump.

  My feet are still at the edge of the bridge. Frozen. When I turn my eyes toward the end of the bridge to look for Thomas, I see that he is gone. That no one is there. We are alone, David and I. I look down over my toes. At the water beneath the bridge. Someone is in the water. Thomas is in the water. Thomas is waiting for me. I begin to think that maybe this is how it should be. Maybe David is right. Maybe this is the way to make it better. Maybe I should just jump. Maybe I should be with Thomas.

  Before I can lift my feet up off the bridge, David’s hands are on me, his palms pressing into my spine and his fingers splayed out, the tips curving slightly around my waist. And then they push me forward. They push me toward Thomas. To where I know I am supposed to be.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Emma—Present Day

  I take the letter and the piece of newspaper into my apartment and sit down on the sofa to read it. David lingers nearby for a while, then disappears into the kitchen. The article, dated from this past Thursday, describes how international businessman Michael Groff was attacked the previous day, during daylight hours, by an unknown assailant. He was beaten with a baseball bat and left for dead. Complicating the attack is the fact that apparently Michael’s business, which is among the world’s top three international lumber dealers, has been implicated in the unlawful harvest and importation of exotic hardwoods, and he is awaiting trial. TruTimber Imports buys and sells wood—teak, African mahogany, macassar, East Indian rosewood, bubinga—and after a thorough undercover investigation of their international harvesting practices and import permitting procedures, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is pursuing charges against the company for various illegal actions.

  The attack on Michael took place in a parking garage, and there are no known witnesses. Police are unsure as to whether the attack is related to the criminal charges pending against him.

  Damn. I stand up and walk into the kitchen. David is by the sink, looking lost. I hand the letter to him. He reads it and looks up at me in question. Then I pass him the newspaper article. He leans his back against the counter, crosses his ankles and reads the article from beginning to end. When he finishes, he puts both papers down on the counter and sighs.

  “Wow,” he says softly. “That’s insane.”

  “I know. I can’t believe it.” My head is churning. I’m not quite sure how I am supposed to feel about this. Should I be sad? He was my mother’s husband after all, my stepfather.

  Fuck that. Fuck the way I am supposed to feel. Fuck him. I feel glad, that’s how I f
eel.

  “I’m glad,” I say out loud. David’s brow raises and his mouth opens, but he doesn’t say anything. “I’m relieved,” I add. “I hope the fucker dies a rotten death. Shit, let’s be honest, I’d like to shake the hand of the man that swung the bat.” My hand flies up to my mouth and covers it as soon as the words come out. As if I am holding in all the other things that want to come out. All the other words I’d like to say about Michael. And then I start to laugh hysterically. Belly-cramping, side-splitting laughter spills out of me until tears are rolling out of my eyes.

  David is staring at me as if I am certifiable. It’s clear that he is choosing his words carefully. “Can I be glad, too?” he asks.

  “Fuck, yeah,” I say emphatically, trying to rein in my psychotic laughter. “If he dies, I am free from everything. All the bullshit. All the doubt.” I am quiet for a moment because I’m not sure if I should say what is really on my mind. Fuck it. “Is it wrong that I want him to die, David?”

  He shakes his head quietly and wraps his arms around my shoulders, hugging me tight.

  “Are you going to call your brother?” he asks a minute later. The thought stops me in my tracks.