Misplaced Innocence

by Veronica Morneaux

  “Where’s Candy?”

  “Who?”

  Then there was nothing but dial tone in his ear.

  “Wrong number, I think,” Jared said as he hung the phone up. Charisma had seeped back into one of the kitchen chairs. Her face hadn’t regained any of its color, she didn’t look at Jared.

  “Oh.” The sound whooshed out of her mouth. She didn’t look convinced.

  “Asked for Candy.”

  He hadn’t thought it possible, but she actually blanched even further. It was fascinating how many shades of pale she could become.

  “Oh.” This time the word was even fainter. “I don’t know a Candy.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The kitchen was still. Jared could hear the gentle ticking of a wall clock coming from one of the other rooms.

  He was still watching Charisma, waiting for a miraculous recovery. She was still draped in the chair, studying her shorts intently, and hadn’t even raised her eyes since she had denied knowing a Candy.

  Jared looked for something to say that would lift the heaviness that had suddenly settled around Charisma, but couldn’t find anything. He took a furtive glance at Scruffy, hoping she had come down with something so he could be distracted from the current situation.

  She hadn’t.

  And it occurred to him that there never had been anything wrong with Scruffy. That whatever the apparent worry and distress had been about, it certainly hadn’t been about the wellbeing of her pet.

  It was pretty obvious that it had something to do with whatever had just happened in the kitchen. And judging from the way Charisma was focused on the fraying hem of her shorts, she wasn’t going to be volunteering any information about it any time soon.

  Comfortable with this new realization, Jared leaned back against the counter, blocking Charisma’s view of the phone. “Are you sure you don’t know a Candy?”

  There was an acridity to his words that made Charisma raise her eyes. “I don’t know what you mean,” she insisted. But her words were dull and flat and did little to convince Jared that there wasn’t something else going on.

  “What I mean is,” he began, but his patience was quickly unraveling, “that you called me up in the middle of the night to tell me your dog was, of all things, sneezing and rolling around on the ground while moaning in pain, and to ask if I could come take a look at her. When I show up, your dog is looking about as healthy as an animal can look, and you are looking like you’ve seen a ghost. And the next thing I know I am getting suckered into eating bad cookies and staying the night on a lumpy couch. What I mean is that you clearly know something about whoever this Candy person is and I’m getting the impression that it can’t be something good. And if you’re going to insist that I come over, and that the possibility remains that I may be beaten over the head with cooking ware, well then, I think I deserve to know a little bit about this Candy person.”

  A long pause followed his schpiel. So long, in fact, that he wondered if she was pretending he had said nothing at all. Then, in the same voice she had used when she had said she didn’t know a Candy, she said, “I’m Candy.”

  If she hadn’t looked so earnest, if she hadn’t looked so depleted, he would have laughed. If there was one thing she didn’t look like, it was a Candy. Her oversized shirt, paint splattered shorts, pale skin and dark hair didn’t bring to mind the blonde, gum-snapping, bubbling image Candy evoked.

  She was back to studying her clothing. “Excuse me?” he asked.

  “You know,” she said, and this time her voice was loud, hard, “I said, I’m Candy. I’m Candy, and that person,” she pointed her finger toward Jared, as if he weren’t there at all and the phone was still clearly in her sights, “shouldn’t know where I am, shouldn’t know my number, shouldn’t know that there is a me I don’t call Candy, and I do not know what to do about it!” She raked a hand through her hair, pulling at the silky strands so hard that Jared was sure it must hurt.

  “I see,” he said only because he could find nothing else to say.

  But he needn’t have worried because once he got her started there seemed to be no stopping her story. She stood up, the chair scraping on the linoleum and teetering before settling back on all four legs. Charisma began to pace. “I did everything I was supposed to do! I just wanted an education, and it paid the bills! If I had known.... And then I left everything. Everything and everyone to try and get away from it. I changed my name. I changed my hair. I moved to the middle of freaking nowhere and even now I can’t get away from it.” She paused by the sink, her hands resting on the cold metal edge. Even from across the room Jared could see the raised veins and the ridge of her knuckles as she clung to it. “I just don’t know what else to do. I don’t know where else to go.”

  There was an empty, yawning sadness to her voice that made Jared want to draw her near. He had the sudden urge to push back the hair from her face and cup her chin in his hand, to pull her close and assure her that everything would be okay.

  The only problem was, he still had no idea what she was talking about or whether or not everything really was going to be okay.

  “I see,” he lamely repeated. Then, as if his verbal repertoire weren’t already in danger of being permanently damaged, he said, “You’re Candy.”

  She sighed. “I’m Candy.”

  “You’re not Charisma.”

  “No, I am Charisma. I am just also Candy.” She shrugged, as if that would explain everything and Jared was struck by the sharpness of her shoulder blades beneath the soft, worn material of the button-down.

  Jared propelled himself toward the kitchen table, nudging one of the chairs away and settling down. He stretched his long legs, crossing one over the other. This would clearly not be a quick synopsis. “Well, then, why don’t you go ahead and tell me about Candy?”

  ~*~

  “This is Candy.” Charisma pushed the photograph toward Jared. A pretty, young girl smiled back at the camera. Her smile was big and bright, her hair so blonde it was almost white. Her lipstick was deep red and made her teeth look even whiter. Everything about this person was different. Everything except those big doe eyes with long lashes. He would have never known it was Charisma. He would have never even imagined that there was a way his Charisma could ever be like this Candy. He admonished himself as soon as the thought had crossed his mind. He certainly had no claim to Charisma, no reason he should be calling her his.

  Except, he’d noticed, recently Jenny Doorman and Mary Anne had been a lot less tempting. In fact, Jared hadn’t been thinking about big pale eyes and curvy shapes barely hidden underneath too-tight jeans.

  Instead he’d been thinking about big brown eyes, clothing too-big for a petite body, and a rare, but beautiful, smile.

  If ever there had been a mistake, this was it.

  “I finished high school early. Things weren’t great at home, you know. It was just my mom. She worked hard, but you know, she was never home, there were always men....” She trailed off and he didn’t pursue it. “That’s not really the point. Well, I guess it is. The one she was seeing when I was in high school,” there was an awkward pause and Jared felt a sinking in his stomach, felt his heart go out to the big doe-eyed blonde Charisma called Candy, “Well, he didn’t treat me like I was in high school. And I knew I couldn’t stay there any more. She told me if I left I was on my own.

  “But I’d gotten into the art school at Rutgers. I really wanted to go. Art was what I’d always wanted to do. I’d spent so long on my portfolio. In-state tuition, you know? I wanted it so badly and I was so close.

  “Nothing pays as well or as quickly as dancing. It was so easy to get into. I just did it to pay the bills. I started out serving drinks and everyone liked me. She shrugged her shoulders again. “It was just, you know, one thing led to another and I was dancing. And it wasn’t even a big deal because I knew if I could just get myself through school and find someone to sell my artwork to, it would be worth it.”

  She stopped
for a breath. He waited for her to continue.

  “But it is New Jersey,” there was a bitter laugh he had never expected to hear from her. “Sometimes there are people you shouldn’t be involved with. For some reason they seem to gravitate to places like strip clubs.” The words were hard, like she was judging herself. “My senior year I got involved with the owner. He was just your regular run of the mill wannabe New Jersey politician who made a little extra owning exotic dance clubs. But he had this gorgeous smile and this way of making you feel like you were the only person in the world.” She raised her shoulders once more. “I don’t know. You know, I thought everything would be okay. You know. I was different, he was different, it was special.” She raised her big eyes and they met his for the first time. “I just didn’t think it would be like this, you know?”

  He didn’t know how to respond. He was still waiting to find out what “this” was.

  “We were practically living together. Practically because he stayed over when it was convenient for him, and he paid for the apartment. I don’t know if there was someone else at his home. I guess I’m not,” she paused to correct herself, “I wasn’t, the kind of girl you wanted to be associated with if you were looking to move up the social ladder.” He caught a glance of her eyes, large, still wounded.

  “It was so close to graduation; I didn’t really need to work any more because he was taking care of the bills. But I thought maybe I would save a little extra, have a little buffer there for myself. I think it gave him a little thrill that I was a dancer. You know how men are. I didn’t know until later, but he’d managed to steal some money from the mafia. The strip club had just been a front.” She raised a hand to her face and ran it over her eyes, as though she could wipe away the memory.

  “I was there when something happened that I shouldn’t have seen. And then he disappeared. Off the face of the earth, and they thought I knew where he went, or I had their money. They thought I had been special and different, too, but I hadn’t been. He’d left me holding the bag, so to speak. I knew I couldn’t stay.

  “I moved. Got a job illustrating. When the flowers started showing up at my apartment I thought they were from some secret admirer, maybe one of my new neighbors who was too shy to say anything about it. At first, when the letters started coming I thought they had been a mistake. I kept looking for a way to make it not be real. But then I started getting the phone calls. Those phone calls, they started out just like that. The breathing. The silence. Then with asking for Candy. They got even worse. You wouldn’t believe what he would say. I didn’t know what to do. I moved. I left my name and number unlisted. I tried to file complaints. I moved again.

  “I thought maybe if I left New Jersey I would have a chance. I thought maybe he was just so imbedded in everything that no matter where I went in New Jersey he would be able to find me. And you know, that’s how I ended up here. I left New Jersey in the middle of the night and drove until I thought I might be safe. Because, really, what doesn’t feel safer than Carlton?”

  There was a sharpness to her voice now, an accusation that laced her words. Carlton should have been the safest place in the world for her, and even that had proved not to be safe enough.

  “So here I am,” she flung her arms out, encapsulating the entire house, “In the cheapest, most run down house I could find, not even in what passes for the town, with blankets on all my windows and a half a dozen locks on my door because I do not know what else to do.” She let her arms fall down alongside her body. Her breath escaped her in a whoosh and she was left looking utterly defeated.

  And suddenly Jared didn’t think Charisma was being strange at all. Every one of her oddities was making a perfect, terrifying sort of sense and he was sorry that she had been experiencing it alone. Before he could stop himself, he was thinking he should have listened to Bill from the very beginning, and that was always a mistake. In fact, maybe she had even been reduced to this strangeness. Maybe underneath all the pot-wielding, neurotic behaviors, she was the determined art student who learned to be self-sufficient when she was still a child.

  “It happened last night. I got another phone call. I’d just gotten off the phone with Bill, I thought it was him. I thought, you know, he had forgotten to tell me some juicy little tidbit you know he lives to tell, so I just picked it up and there he was. Just like always. And I didn’t know what else to do. So I called you.”

  Jared almost smiled at the displeasure that had crept into her voice, as though he were a meager substitute for someone who could really have done something to stop the phone calls.

  “And of course I couldn’t be like, “Oh Jared, I know we’ve barely met, but I’d like to divulge my entire sordid history to you in the hopes that you’ll come over and sleep on my couch so I won’t have to be here sleeping alone.” So, instead, I thought Scruffy would be my alibi, but of course Scruffy is healthy like a horse and can’t even look sick when I need her to!”

  Jared did smile then. All of it brought to mind a pretty humorous scenario. Because, really, what would he have said if she had said that to him on the phone? He would have been hanging up so quickly her ears would be ringing and he would be thinking what he always had: each time he ran into Charisma things just kept getting stranger. “We better not tell Bill about this.”

  Her laughter exploded, loud and refreshing after the tense minutes of her story. It echoed into the soft sounds of giggles before returning to silence. “Are you kidding, it’s the most exciting thing to happen in Carlton...ever. The whole town would know before dinner and that would definitely not be helping the town’s opinion of me or keep me under the radar. I have a feeling a secret like that out loose in this place would be like walking around with a neon sign over my head.”

  He laughed at the dryness in her voice. “Something like that.” After all, he was staying quiet about his experience in New York for the same reasons. He couldn’t really blame her for what he’d also been trying to do. She leaned forward, propping her chin in her hands, and what little laughter had filled her face began to dissipate.

  “It’s just, you know, I was getting used to it here. I even liked it here. I had Bill and Scruffy and, well, I guess that’s about it. But it was more than I’d had before. I had my studio, a house in dire need of being painted... And now I’ll have to try somewhere else. Again.”

  Jared found himself frowning. The idea of her up and leaving was becoming increasingly less pleasant. He brushed it away, found a rational explanation for what it might be. “I don’t know. If you were found here, what makes you think you won’t be found somewhere else? You can’t just spend the rest of your life packing up and moving every time you get a phone call.”

  Charisma’s frown mirrored his own. “I don’t know. I mean, he has to get tired eventually. He has to find someone else, forget all about Candy, all about me....” Her voice trailed off, and even though it had been a statement, there was a pleading to it that Jared found heartbreaking. He hated to tell her it didn’t have to be that way. He hated to remind her that any man who was going to do what he had already done to her, follow her the places she had already been, would certainly not be thinking about letting her go on in peace.

  Instead he shrugged. “You never know. What if he doesn’t?” He didn’t have to say the rest because it was clear she had been thinking about it a long time. What if he wouldn’t stop until he had her, whatever that might mean to this man who sent empty envelopes, flowers, and phone calls that could send a chill even through an adult man? She looked even smaller, even lonelier than she had before, the table too big, the chair too big, like she was a child getting ready for an hour of imaginary tea time.

  He sighed. “Let’s not think about it here.” He was talking before he even had the time to think about what he was really saying. “Why don’t you pack some things, and we’ll head over to my place.” He followed her glance to Scruffy, sprawled at her feet. “Of course, she can come too. I’m not a vet because I hate animals.”r />
  There it was again. That smile. The smile that made him think maybe the Candy really had been an element of her life and she was standing up from the table and looking like a new person. “Really?”

  “Really,” Jared repeated, feeling like he had just granted the sole wish of a Mother Theresa type.

  She was already out of the kitchen. He could hear her in the other rooms in a rush that sounded like she was arbitrarily throwing things into a bag. Scruffy heaved a sigh from her place on the floor and Jared was suddenly feeling like his life had taken a crazy, impossible turn.

  When she returned to the kitchen she was clutching a stuffed fox wearing a fishing cap.

  On second thought, maybe Charisma behaved strangely regardless of her history.

  She raised it in his direction. “I hope you don’t mind. I have this big project I need to be finishing up for my publisher.”

  He almost laughed, the words seemed so professional and here she was gesticulating with a dead animal wearing clothes. He would have never imagined his life could ever be so fantastical. Instead he said, “Of course not.”

  “Are you ready then?” She had the fox tucked under one arm, a bag that seemed disproportionately heavy over one shoulder and a sack of dog food she had procured from somewhere clutched in her hands. She looked like an overeager camper.

  “I’m ready.” He took the bag of dog food, and God forgive him, the ridiculous looking fox while Charisma called for Scruffy. Out in the sun, Charisma painstakingly locked each of the locks on her front door, and Jared felt another pang for her. She seemed even younger than he had thought she was initially. Young and alone, and he forgot all about the stuffed fox he was putting in his trunk.

  ~*~

  Charisma had expected that Jared would live in some sort of bachelor pad. A place where a different woman could stay over every night of the week. Instead she found herself in a homey place that felt like a little lodge, that felt like it had already seen a woman’s touch. She was focusing on one of the small throw pillows on a worn sofa, embroidered with “Home is where the Heart is” when Jared said, “This place used to be my parents.” He didn’t offer any more information, and Charisma had the uncomfortable feeling she shouldn’t ask anything more about it.