Fierce (Not Quite a Billionaire)

by Rosalind James

  Some guys like girls who are, you know, kind of…small. At least, they don’t mind. Necessarily. That’s what my friend Sean says.

  I’d told myself to check out what she’d meant by that, and I hadn’t. I’d been wrapped up in my own problems, my own desires, and had failed my sister. Again.

  Hemi wasn’t making it any easier. “Would she?” he asked. “Would she really, knowing how you feel about it? Don’t you know that’s how it happens? That it’s the girls like her it happens to, the ones who don’t have enough care?”

  I stepped back as if he’d slapped me. But this wasn’t about me. “I’ll get a kit,” I said again. “I’ll make her check.”

  “No,” Hemi said. “The doctor will check. Whether it’s that, or something else. We’re here to do it. Fill out the forms.”

  “I can’t…” I said again, and then I put my head back, took a breath, and looked him in the eye. It was nothing to be ashamed of. “I can’t afford it. Not unless it’s absolutely necessary. It’ll be a hundred fifty dollars just for the visit, and if they do blood tests…I can’t, not unless we have to. If she’s not better tomorrow, I’ll take her. But I can’t do it now.”

  “Don’t you have insurance?”

  I closed my eyes, then opened them again. “Yes. But not through the company yet, and it’s the highest-deductible policy. I’d have to pay all of this, and I can’t.”

  “Ah.” He walked away, and I sat down beside Karen and put an arm around her. “How are you doing?” I asked her.

  “Not too bad,” she said, but that wasn’t how she looked. She’d leaned back into the chair with an arm over her eyes against the light.

  I hesitated. “OK if we go home?” I asked, battling the guilt. “See if this passes?” It was a reasonable decision. It had to be.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Sure. I just want to lie down. I’m so embarrassed. I’m sorry I wrecked your day.”

  I didn’t have a chance to answer that, because Hemi was back. “That’s sorted,” he said. “Fill out the form.”

  “What’s sorted?” I asked.

  “You won’t pay the bill. Fill out the form.”

  “I can’t let you—”

  “No?” His voice was suddenly furious. “You’re going to let your sister be this ill for your pride? Because you don’t want to be obligated to me? A couple hundred dollars doesn’t matter to me one way or the other. I spend it on a tie. Fill out the bloody form.”

  I filled out the form. He was right. Obligation or no. Pride or no. He was right.

  I cursed myself, during the hour that followed, for not following my first impulse and calling my own doctor. I hadn’t done it because I’d thought Hope wouldn’t want to be under that kind of obligation to me, and I’d been right. But in the end, it hadn’t mattered. I’d had to help her anyway, and she’d hated it as much as I’d known she would.

  I stood up when they came out from the back at last. Hope looked a bit less fraught, but Karen just looked exhausted.

  “Migraines,” Hope said. “That’s what he says. She’s got a prescription.” She lifted a weary hand with the bit of white paper. “And a shot for the nausea, and a prescription for some pills for that, too.”

  I already had my phone out to ring Charles. “One moment,” I said, and went to the counter to take care of the bill. Hope had been right, I saw. Over three hundred dollars.

  Hope went next door and got the prescriptions filled while I sat with a silent Karen, and at last, we could leave.

  Both of them were quiet on the drive back to the apartment, and when the car pulled to a stop, I got out to give Karen a hand. She stumbled a bit along the way, and I asked, “What floor are you on?”

  “Fifth,” Hope said, and I nodded and picked Karen up again.

  “I don’t—” she said faintly, but I’d heard that enough today. Seemed it ran in the family. She didn’t have the strength to keep it up anyway. She relaxed against me with a sigh that got past every defense I possessed, and something twisted hard inside my chest.

  I was a bit blown by the time we got up the shabby carpeted stairway and into the apartment, however hard I tried to conceal it, and Hope was casting me anxious looks as if I’d drop her sister. As if that were a possibility. At her direction, I carried Karen into a small bedroom and set her down on a double bed.

  “Could you wait for me?” Hope asked me, her voice low. “It could be a little while, though.”

  “Course.” I left the two of them there, went out into the living room, and sat down on a faded green fabric couch.

  Hope had tried, I guessed. The beige walls were hung with framed prints of the type I might have expected. The Impressionists: Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh. Flowers, mostly. Of course. There was a shawl thrown across the back of the couch, and everything was tidy. But Karen had been right. The bathtub was in the kitchen, and the only view was of an air shaft and the building across it.

  It was, in fact, nearly half an hour before Hope came out of the bedroom again, shutting the door gently behind her. She looked so weary, and my earlier anger had evaporated.

  Don’t you get how close to the edge I am? she’d asked me at the restaurant. I hadn’t, but I got it now.

  “You get her settled?” I asked her as she sank into a chair at right angles to me. “She feeling better?”

  “Yeah. Asleep.” She ran a hand through her mass of fine blonde hair and sighed. “And now I need to settle with you. I’ll pay you back, of course. It just might take a while.”

  “No,” I said. “You won’t.”

  “I will. And there’s something else I need to say, too. Thank you for helping today, for everything you did. It was kind of you.”

  The doorbell rang, and she sat up straight with an obvious effort. She was knackered. “Huh.”

  “Ah,” I said. “That’ll be lunch.” I went to the intercom and pressed the button. “Yes?”

  “Delivery from King Tsin,” I heard.

  “Buzzing you up.” I did it, pulled out my wallet, and, when the fella puffed his way up the stairs, took a couple white plastic bags off him in exchange for a fair number of bills.

  “Forks and plates? Glasses?” I asked Hope, who’d been making some…noises behind me. Frustration, maybe. Maybe even anger again. I had to smile a bit. At least anger was better than worry and defeat. I’d always thought so, anyway.

  She lifted her arms out from her sides and let them fall. “Well, sure.” She went to the kitchen for them, which really meant that she stepped across the room for them, and I set the bags on the coffee table and followed her.

  “Wine glasses,” I said. “Corkscrew.”

  “What? I’m sorry, I don’t have any wine. Let alone the kind you like.”

  “But you see—I do.”

  She pulled out a couple juice glasses and a corkscrew and handed them to me. “Sorry. I don’t buy enough wine to make the special glasses worth it.”

  By the time she’d come back, I’d opened the bottle and poured. “Not as cold as it should be,” I said, “but we’ll pretend, eh. It’s a Riesling. Good with Chinese. See what you think.” When she hesitated, I added, “Don’t you think you’ve earned a bit of indulgence today?”

  She smiled for the first time in hours. “You know what? I think I have. Our day out didn’t go so well, did it?”

  “Oh, I dunno. It had its moments. The one where you almost slapped me again was pretty special.”

  This time, she laughed. “You must be a glutton for punishment.”

  “Mm. Not quite right. But go on. Try the wine.”

  I waited and watched as she sipped, tasted, enjoyed, and, finally, sighed. “Really good,” she said. “Really, really good. But how did you get the guy to pick up your wine?” She caught herself, then, and laughed. “Oh. Duh. Money.”

  “It has its uses. Can’t buy you, of course, but could be it can buy something I can watch you enjoy. That works for me.”

  She looked a little flustered at that, got busy sea
rching out a bowl and dumping ice into it to chill the wine. Then she was opening cartons, exclaiming as if I’d done something special, something luxurious, instead of just calling for Chinese takeout. Taking not a bit of it for granted.

  She went back to the topic, though, once we were eating, when she had her pretty legs tucked up under her in the big chair and her plate in her lap. She couldn’t resist closing her eyes at every sip of wine, though, and I couldn’t resist watching her.

  “Thank you for this,” she said. “I didn’t realize how hungry I was. And for what you did today. For helping Karen, and helping me. I know it didn’t turn out the way you expected, and still—you helped. You did so much. You did more than so much. Carrying Karen and everything? I wasn’t very…gracious about it, and I know it. So I need to be gracious now. Or at least…” She laughed under her breath. “I need to try.”

  I shifted a little at that. “Nah. It was what anybody would have done.”

  “No, it wasn’t. It was kind. And I have to say something else, too.” She was clearly steeling herself. “That you were right. The person who’s been wrong, who’s been offering mixed messages—it isn’t you. It’s me. If I hadn’t wanted to go out with you, all I had to say was no. I said yes, and then I…kept backing off, and blaming you for it. And I realize that isn’t fair.”

  Her eyes were steady on mine, and she wasn’t a butterfly now. But then, she never had been.

  “Of course it’s fair,” I found myself saying. “Of course you’re scared. You have too much to lose. Maybe I thought you were just…teasing, but you’re not. You’re scared, because you’re on the edge.”

  Her eyes were shining a bit now, and she was taking another of those deep breaths. Keeping herself back from that edge, because there was nothing and nobody on the other side.

  “Why?” I asked. “Why is it you and Karen?”

  She shook her head, her hair moving with her. “You don’t want to hear all this.”

  “Yeh,” I said. “I do. Tell me.”

  Cross My Heart

  I hesitated for a minute. Could I really talk to Hemi about this? I took another bite of beef and broccoli while I thought, and then followed it up with a swallow of wine that, once again, had clearly come from wherever they hid the good stuff.

  I did tell him, in the end, precisely because he didn’t press me to. Instead, he sat with that stillness of his and waited.

  He wasn’t a patient man; I knew that by now. That wasn’t where the stillness came from. It came instead from his self-discipline, from a nearly iron self-control. But how would somebody like that judge me and my less than perfect life?

  “I guess,” I began at last, “I don’t want to tell you because of what you said today. About the girls who don’t get enough care.” I looked at him squarely, needing to face this. The thought that woke me up in the middle of the night, that made me sweat. And the reminder that helped me fall asleep again. “I know I can’t give Karen everything she needs. But I can give her more than she’d have otherwise. I know my best isn’t enough, but it is my best, and it’s what we have.”

  He shifted a little again on the couch, for once not looking quite so perfectly calm and focused. “I shouldn’t have said that. I was trying to convince you, and I don’t always…”

  “You don’t play fair,” I finished.

  “No.”

  “Why don’t I believe that?” I asked. I smiled at him, and he looked startled. “Come on, Hemi. What have you done today? Let’s see.” I ticked them off on my fingers. “Taken Karen and me to look at roses, let Karen be incredibly rude to you, let me yell at you about fairy tales, taken care of us when Karen got sick, and paid the doctor’s bill instead of leaving me in disgust.” I held up my hand, palm facing him. “That’s five. And, hmm. You also let my little sister throw up on you, carried her up the stairs, which I know was exhausting, because I saw you, and bought me lunch. Plus, let me tell you, some pretty amazing wine. I believe you’re a ruthless businessman and the terror of the boardroom, but you’ll have to forgive me if I’m having trouble believing you’re a horrible person. Even if you wouldn’t let me slap you.”

  “I didn’t let her throw up on me,” he pointed out. “I carefully held her over the grass.”

  “Close enough,” I said, and he looked at me and waited.

  “So.” I took another sip of wine for courage. Which helped, or maybe it just tasted delicious. Either way, I needed another sip. “Our story’s not that interesting, and not that uncommon, either. And anyway, everybody’s got a sad story, right?”

  “They do. But only you have your sad story.”

  “Oh. Well. Yeah. That would also be true.”

  “Do you and Karen have the same parents?”

  “No.” He was easing me into it, I realized. I didn’t know why he wanted to know, but I guessed I’d tell him, because this wasn’t the Hemi from the restaurant. This was the Hemi from the roof. This Hemi, I could talk to. “Same mom, different dads. Mine took off early, and hers took off later. He was a musician. My mom’s boyfriend. Here, oh, maybe half the time, then gone on gigs, you know. And very…volatile. Very moody. It was stormy, always, when he was around. I got used to taking Karen away, I suppose, because this apartment’s too small for fighting. Or too small for fighting when you have kids. Children shouldn’t have to be in the middle of that.”

  “No,” he said. “Yet they so often are. How old were you when she was born?”

  “Nine.”

  The problems had started right away, and by the time I’d been eleven or twelve, they’d gotten that much worse. Fights over money, over Guy’s dark silences and long absences, over my mother’s suspicions of other women, and over so much more that I tried not to listen to and couldn’t help hearing. Over everything that men and women fought about. My mother pushing, tearful, anxious, and Guy walking away again and again, his voice barbed, contemptuous, darker and darker as the minutes went on. The tension in the little apartment so sharp, it had cut Karen and me like knives.

  Karen’s face would get that pinched expression that meant she was going to cry, and once I got old enough to take her out of there, that’s what I would do. Carrying her at first. She was too heavy, but I couldn’t leave her behind. And once she was old enough, walking with her, holding her hand, her preschooler’s legs slow on the flights of stairs. We’d head to the park if it were still light, or to the corner store if it were dark, hanging around while Mrs. Kim frowned and clucked her tongue at us from behind the counter.

  Eventually, Mrs. Kim had put me to work stocking shelves on those nights. “To pay for magazine your sister is ruining,” she’d tell me with a scowl, destroying her image by pulling an orange juice off the shelf for Karen. And I’d been glad to do it, glad to be useful, not to feel unwelcome. Glad for anything, really. My expectations had been pretty low.

  “So that’s how I started my glamorous assisting career,” I told Hemi. “And why Karen’s such a good reader.”

  “What happened to them?” he asked. “Your mum, and Karen’s dad?”

  “Well, Guy…one day, when Karen was nine and I was eighteen, he left for a gig and didn’t come back. Not even for his clothes. He always said he didn’t believe in ‘things.’ I guess he didn’t. Too bad he didn’t believe in people, either.”

  The weight was there in my chest as I remembered. My mother getting quieter by the day, eating less and less, telling me she just “didn’t feel like it.” Almost visibly checking out. The night when she’d finally stuffed all Guy’s things into garbage bags, and I’d helped her haul them downstairs. I’d never forgotten the sight of those white plastic bags landing in the Dumpster with a soft thud, or the finality of the metal lid clanging shut. Or the look on my mother’s face.

  She’d walked upstairs like an old woman, had gone into her bedroom and laid down, as she so often did when she got home from work. And once again, I’d made dinner with Karen, had helped her with her homework, and my mother hadn’t come out
.

  “I swore,” I told Hemi, “that I’d never let a man do that to me, that I’d never let myself care that much. It seemed to me like men only wanted you if you didn’t want them. Because the guys…they just left anyway, you know? It didn’t matter what she needed. They just…left.”

  I had to stop a moment and get myself together. Karen was right. I hated to cry. I hated, especially, to cry here, where I’d seen my mother cry so often. Or to cry in front of Hemi. If you couldn’t show a man you wanted him without him losing interest, surely crying in front of him was the ultimate weakness.

  I’d already said too much, but all the same, I said more. Maybe it was the worry, or the day. “I told myself,” I said, “that I wouldn’t have that life. Because men can just leave. They can decide they’re done with all that and walk away like it’s nothing. Like it’s…disposable. Women don’t get to make that choice. Mothers don’t get to walk.”

  “No,” he said. “Mothers walk, too.”

  Something in his voice made me look at him more sharply. “Oh?”

  He waved a hand. “Never mind. Your mum didn’t, eh. Your mum stayed. But all the same, she’s not here.”

  “No. She died. That’s the sad story part. The rest of that’s just normal life, and I know it. Hardly worth talking about, so why did I? Blame the wine. But my mom—it turned out that there was a reason she had to rest so much, that she stopped eating. She had colon cancer, and she went pretty fast.”

  I had to shut my eyes a moment at that. Because, yes, that was the hard part. The very worst thing to remember. Those last days in the hospice, my mother’s skin nearly transparent, stretched so tightly over her cheekbones, her hand gripping mine so tightly.

  “Take care of your sister,” she’d said on that last day, her voice a rasp. “Please, baby. Please don’t let them take her away.”

  “No.” The tears had threatened to rise and choke me, but I hadn’t let them. My mother had needed to see me strong, had needed to believe I could do it, that I would do it. She’d deserved to die in peace. “I won’t let them take her.”