by Leanne Davis
It didn’t bother her in the least that she wasn’t as spectacular as his family might have preferred in Micah’s woman. Tracy knew right down to her toes how much Micah loved her. He adored her. He revered her and always had, starting from the days when they were broke and living in a studio apartment after first getting married and starting their new life together. What did she care if his family were uptight snobs who never experienced any passion in their lives? She preferred to have fun and laugh, or hang with her girls to being forced to tolerate their cold, formal, boring lifestyles.
So now, to hear that Micah was doing this for them, his snobby family, was completely surreal to her. The pressures they put on him absolutely shocked her. She thought Micah was happy with her in Calliston, with their two girls and their normal, ordinary, and, what she thought, was a wonderful lifestyle.
“You did that out of a juvenile need to please your family? Your father? The most demanding, uncompromising man on the planet? We agreed years ago he wasn’t worth our time or effort or emotions. He’s mean. He’s un-pleasable. You know that! How could you even try to seek the unattainable? Are you telling me, all these years, when I thought I was what you wanted, you privately agreed with your family and shared their opinions of me?”
The thought was almost as crushing as Micah being a crook.
Jumping up, he was right beside her in two steps. He simply scooped her up to his chest and cupped her face in his hands. “No. NO! That’s not it. Don’t ever think that. You are ten times better than any of them. You were and are the only person to whom I’ve ever felt I belonged to in the world.”
She started to cry as she stared up into his face. It looked like Micah. It sounded like him. This Micah, who held her, loved her, and supported her was her husband. Her Micah. Her true love.
Oh God. How could this really be happening? Tears spilled over her eyelids again and she hiccupped. She started to tremble. “Then why? Why would you do that? What possible reason could you have to throw away me? Us? Everything?”
He shook his head and his own eyes filled with tears. “I didn’t mean to. It started slow. The economy tanked. We lost a lot of investments. I tried to pull them out and reinvest into safer stocks, but we got hit hard. Harder than I ever admitted to you. I didn’t want to worry you at first, I told myself, when actually, I didn’t want to disappoint you. I thought we could ride it out. But it went on and on and on. The economy didn’t relent, and by then, our entire savings was gone, and our retirement was half what it previously was. I got desperate. I reached out to every contact I could. I got a tip from someone I grew up with. I thought it was reliable.”
She gasped. “Like insider trading? That’s illegal too!”
“Yes, well, I thought, just this one time I’ll get ahead. Get us ahead. I thought I’d finally be able to give you the life you deserved.”
“Oh my God! We were living the life I deserved. I loved it. You had no right to destroy it.” She wanted to smash her fist into his nose, just like Donny did. “Not for some stupid status or ‘what we deserve.’ What a bunch of bullshit. White-collar, uppity, snobby bullshit. I can’t believe you ruined us. Just for that. How could you do it to Donny too?”
“Donny had just confided his concerns to me over what Vickie was doing to his personal finances. He feared his business was next to tank. I thought I could provide him the same boost I was giving us. So many rich assholes just keep getting richer and richer without ever noticing it. A million up, a million down, they don’t care. But a million for us? That would be life-changing. I thought it would work so I could reinstate everything and then some.”
“Oh, but let me guess: the get rich scheme didn’t work. Imagine that.”
He held her face, and his expression softened and fell. He shut his eyes before saying, “I love you. I will never be able to tell you how much.”
She grasped his fingers on her face, clutching his hands in hers. “You ruined it. You ruined us. I just don’t understand…”
“I know,” he whispered softly, bringing her forward and closer to him. He kissed her gently. His fat tears overflowed and finally streamed from his eyes. She clutched his shirt, and cried in deep, body-seizing sobs. He held her against him, but she screamed and railed at him. She nearly convulsed against his chest as his arms held her tightly. All she managed to whisper over and over again was “You ruined us.”
He released her and she pummeled his chest, and nearly clawed his face. Blood was dried on his shirt and still trickling from his nose. He finally restrained her before she went totally out of control. Fearing she would lose her mind, she could just not believe he would do that. He put her under him and lay on top of her, trying to soothe her. He crooned into her ear as she sobbed uncontrollably.
Her legs parted when he shifted, and he lifted his head as her crying slowed. They stared at each other. Time seemed suspended. Sadness nearly dripped from their shared gazes. He touched her cheek. “I’m sorry.” It was a whisper. A prayer. A reverent plea.
He lifted his hips and rested gently against her. She moaned. He watched her face as his hand slid from clutching her waist and trying to soothe her, to gently touching the waistband of her pants, which he put between his thumb and forefinger without doing anything more. She nodded while closing her eyes and letting his lips touch hers. She forgot her grief in his lovemaking, but only temporarily.
Lying together, quiet, half dressed on the floor of their living room, she finally lifted her head. She was so exhausted, it hurt to gasp the air into her lungs. Her eyes were dry and swollen. “How do we tell our children?”
He shook his head. Clearly, he had no answers for the impossible situation he was putting her through. He swallowed and said softly, “That’s why I was staring at the gun. It’s why—”
“NO!” she interrupted him. “No. Stop it. Promise me. No matter what, you will never talk about that or threaten to do that again.”
He nodded slowly. “All right. I promise you, Tracy.”
“We need to tell them soon.” Soon, he would be gone. In prison, or in custody, or incarcerated or whatever the hell you called it. How should she know? She never committed a crime. She didn’t even knew anyone who had done time in prison.
Now she was married to a potentially convicted felon.
The ramifications were only just starting to unfold, and no doubt, would continue to increase as the days crept by. There was the family to tell and friends, who would be shocked, appalled and dismayed. There were the parents of friends and the children’s teachers to tell. And their children. They had to immediately get their affairs perfectly in order. Whatever was left of them.
His mouth yet again touched the top of her head. She could feel his warm breath as he pressed a kiss on her. “I’m sorry. Forever, Tracy, I’m sorry. I love you so much. Never, in the worst days to come, never doubt that. I never wanted to hurt you.”
They were pretty words, but not capable of helping her in the ensuing months.
****
Donny nudged at Vickie’s arm. She was lying face down on their unmade bed. It was so destroyed, half the covers were undone from the mattress, and bare where she lay with her face turned to the side, a puddle of spittle pooling under her chin.
“Vickie.” He nudged her harder. She groaned before her eyes finally started to flutter open. He grew impatient and grabbed the glass she left on the nightstand. Water? Vodka? Who the hell cared? He dumped it over her head.
She shrieked and sat up, blinking furiously. Her eyes didn’t focus on him because she was still drunk. Her head lolled back and forth while he stared at her. His heart froze in anger so deep, he had to flex and unflex his fingers to keep from making fists. Fists that he wanted to do bad things with.
How? How could he, Donny Lindstrom, a nice, funny, well-liked guy, get stressed to the point of almost wishing ill for his own wife?
He stared at Vickie Moore tonight. She wore plum-colored lingerie. She always wore sexy bras and seductive g
et-ups to bed. It was now crooked with half of her left breast falling out. She had large breasts with big, pink nipples. The drink he poured on her splashed her face, upper chest and one boob. A year ago, he might have leaned over and licked it off. Now, he wanted nothing more than to shower. The lacy part of her get-up was stuck in the backside of her thong. Her mouth was smeared with lipstick. But it was her eyes he detested most: bloodshot and black-rimmed with slept-in makeup. It was her glazed, drunken eyes that stopped her from being the wife he desired any longer. That was ironic, since there was no one more beautiful than Vickie. And no one could deny it. She had a fun, flighty, flirty personality. She sucked him off on their second date in a way he never experienced before. It was all sex, all the time for the first few weeks, quite literally, rock-your-world sex. He’d never gotten off so often or so intensely as he did with Vickie. He fell quick and hard into what he thought was love and lust and adoration. Her smile made him feel like he stood taller. There was something almost reverent in how she could make a man feel.
He was well aware of her rocky, tumultuous history. At twenty-eight, she’d been married and divorced three times. She borrowed money and wasted much more, soon falling into debt that dipped well into the thousands. She was, quite simply, a train wreck.
But she wanted to be his train wreck and he’d never felt happier. Never had a relationship consumed him like theirs did. He dated lots of women and had a few short-term relationships, but nothing like what he felt for Vickie. He fell completely head over heels in love with her.
And then she got pregnant. He got careless with her. Something he’d never done before. But she came on to him so much, and so often, that he didn’t always realize it was going to happen again, or so soon, so he wasn’t always ready with protection. So of course, she got knocked up. The crazy part was how okay he felt with it. He thought he could change her, and hoped to stabilize her. He knew he loved her, and thought he could handle her.
What he failed to realize was that only two years later, he couldn’t even stand her. He grabbed her arm and jerked her forward, dragging her behind him like a limp rag doll. He flipped on the shower with only cold water and threw her in the tub. She shuddered and sputtered when her eyes finally opened as she tried to stand up, but she slipped twice in her drunken stupor. She screamed, “You stupid asshole,” in a slurred, almost incomprehensible garble of words.
What no one knew then, and not one single person understood, was that she was an alcoholic. It was quite shocking for Donny, and the opposite of what he expected after marrying her. He walked around in a deranged trance for weeks after finally arriving at the proper conclusion. During their few months of dating, they partied hard. Frequenting bars and clubs, they got drunk a lot and had endless sex and fun. He didn’t notice her problem at first. Right after she got pregnant, she managed to control it enough to have a healthy pregnancy and a safe birth. But three weeks later, he came home to find her… like this. She was fully passed out, leaving his newborn baby lying helpless, screaming and crying, on the corner of the bed. He was shit-in-your-pants shocked at the scene. He never expected to come home from work and find her like that, or his baby in so much distress. He didn’t realize that although Vickie didn’t drink every day, when she did, she drank herself stupid. She didn’t stop until she physically passed out.
All three of her failed marriages weren’t because of her flighty, careless personality, or her husbands’ boredom. No, the problem was her drinking; and that finally came to light for each of her husbands although none of them could stop it, or stand her. So of course, they divorced her. She pretended it was all her doing, when, in fact, it was theirs. As far as Donny could gather, none of them exposed her secret, perhaps out of some misplaced guilt.
He was cautious before leaving her in charge of their infant. Much to his deep disappointment, he knew he couldn’t really trust her. For all her fun and merry-making, she was also selfish, careless, rash, and completely unreliable. He took several weeks off to be with their new baby in order to teach her the basics of caring for an infant. She tried. Even more than usual. He saw moments where she actually cooed, or played, and seemed to be bonding with Julia. Others, however, found her not so involved. She never got up at night, and refused to pick her up when she cried. She didn’t do the normal things most new mothers would do.
Donny did all the baby chores. The problem was: he needed to work. He patiently spent days preparing her for her first day alone with Julia. Eight hours. That’s all she had to handle. Instead, he found her dead to the world while his child screamed, neglected, and uncared for, beside her.
He scooped Julia up, fear crushing his heart over Vickie. Only as he leaned closer to her could he smell the booze nearly evaporating in fumes from her skin. Her benders would eventually poison her system and kill her one day. Of that he was sure. He’d never seen anyone drink as much as she did when she lost control.
But at that moment, he sat back on his haunches, feeling completely blindsided. What the hell was this? He left her to care for his infant and discovered her passed out on the bed after only hours.
Days later, he confronted her again and she finally told him the truth. She did that often.
That was what was wrong with her. That was why she couldn’t sustain a job or relationship, or even a bank account. She did that and missed workdays on benders that eventually got her fired. Every relationship also got ruined. And of course, no job means no money.
She promised to stop, and they fought long and hard for days. He railed at her after he found his daughter so neglected. He made it clear that it could never happen again. Not to his daughter. He was set to divorce Vickie right then and there, but she begged him to stay. She cried and carried on, making every promise possible until he eventually relented. She could be so earnest. And so upset. And so heartbroken and horrified at what she’d done to their baby.
But she was liar, and it happened again. And again. Not immediately. Not even very often. But it kept happening. She again tried to stop. They emptied the house of all the liquor. They never ordered any when they went out, and he stayed glued to her side if they went anyplace where it was served. She attended Alcoholic Anonymous meetings and swore that she had a grip on it.
Donny was new to everything. He’d never been around an alcoholic. He didn’t know how well they lied, or said what everyone wanted to hear in order protect their opportunities to drink. Sometimes, she didn’t even realize she was lying to him, and even worse, to herself.
At that point, he didn’t understand what a terrible disease it was. A nasty, take-no-prisoners, ruin-your-life-as-surely-as-cancer-could disease.
He assumed she understood how awful, devastating and truly wrong her behavior was. No parent was allowed to do that with a baby in the house. It was unheard of, at least, to him. She’d surely get that. He eventually believed she was truly traumatized enough to understand the gravity of what she’d done.
There again, his naïveté. It was a brutal, but quick learning curve.
Vickie did it again. She couldn’t stop. He couldn’t leave Julia there, so he put her in daycare. They pretended Vickie had taken a part-time job in retail with crazy hours. As if. But it worked well enough and no one had caught on to their lie yet. Donny dropped Julia off at Tracy’s house as often as he could get away with it. He stopped worrying that he was totally destroying his beloved child when she was with Tracy. He couldn’t stand daycare. What if anyone hurt her? Or ignored her? What if he stumbled onto one of those horrible ones the news reported every six months or so? She was so small, and could talk only in a few words. She definitely could not have a conversation. She was completely helpless, and an easy victim. He couldn’t stand it, so he often relied on Tracy.
Tracy didn’t really want to accommodate his babysitting needs, and he knew that. But she didn’t refuse him, at least, not yet.
That was up until the last three days. She said outright no to his requests and hung the phone up on him. Now, h
e knew exactly why.
Vickie stumbled from the shower, wet and shaking. She did a face plant into their bed, still all wet, and Donny pulled the covers over her before she passed out once again. He slowly lowered his ass to the edge of the bed and bent forward to rest his forehead on his knees.
So this was how his life would be.
The depression of it, the sickness of it, and the sadness over what it had become was enough for Donny to almost understand Micah’s reason for staring at an unloaded gun.
Chapter Three
TRACY GROANED WHEN THE front door swung open and she found Donny standing there with Julia in his arms. She glared at him. “You’ve got to be freaking kidding me.”
Her tone was low and quiet. She so rarely swore. She never said “fucking.” She usually inserted “freaking,” or said the “f-word” or “f-bomb”. She was always PG, even when the kids weren’t around. The kids must have been close by now, however. He was counting on it. “Please, Tracy.”
Glancing back as she stepped forward, she forced him to retreat further so she could join him on the porch as she shut the front door. Then, she took her hand and pushed at his shoulder. “Were you not here? Can you really come here and expect me to babysit your kid now? Today? Two days before my husband goes to prison? No. No way. I won’t do it. Go get your lazy, incompetent wife to do her damn job for once. Just get out of here, Donny.
His mouth tightened as his gaze swept over her. She hadn’t showered in days. Her hair looked greasy and hung down to her shoulder blades. It was drawn back in a snarled ponytail. She hadn’t worn makeup in that long either. Her face was pale and her eyes were puffy and red from crying so much. She resembled what a grieving widow must surely look like.
