by Moriah Jovan
There was a chorus of “Good night, Cassie”s all around as I left the kitchen, but a hand on my arm halted me just as I reached the stairs. That bad-tempered bitch Giselle—who had flown halfway across the country to give me what I needed to understand Mitch, a predator my equal who had matched me insult for insult, with whom I’d had more fun shopping than I’d ever had with anyone—hugged me tight.
And I returned it, just as tightly.
“Good luck, Cassie,” whispered my frenemy, her voice trembling. “He’s going to need all the love and strength you can give him, and it’s going to take a long time. Trust me.”
* * * * *
Nisan 15
April 23, 2011
I’m not sure any of us slept well that night, except for Mitch, who snorted occasionally as he changed positions and pulled me to him in his sleep.
Most of us were up early Saturday morning, dragging, and decided to go to the local hash house for the breakfast buffet. We spoke little. Hilliard and the Kenards had dark circles under their eyes. Even Sebastian looked a little haggard and he shrugged when I pointed it out.
“I’m not happy about it, Cassie,” he muttered. “He’s my best friend, my brother. Why wouldn’t I hurt for him?”
It was like someone had died, and maybe, in a way, Mitch had, sleeping off his grief like a frat boy after a week-long bender.
“Shit, still in bed,” Sebastian muttered when we all arrived home and I checked on him.
“Midas,” Eilis said sweetly, “we can’t all function indefinitely on two hours a night. Sometimes people have to make it up.”
I stared at him. “Two hours a night? I never could figure out how you got so much done.”
“Now, see, if you’d called me while you were putting your thesis together, I would’ve told you that.”
Bryce opened the doors of the library and stood in the threshold, surveying the damage.
“And this is after Cassie and I got it cleaned up,” Trevor murmured.
“I’ve never known him to lose control like that,” Sebastian said as he brushed past Bryce to enter it. “It worries the hell out of me.”
“It was...frightening,” I whispered.
Mitch hadn’t been able to hold back his nature one more minute, once I’d touched him in the middle of his rampage. He’d shocked me with what had come out of his mouth, that feral look on his face, the raw sexuality I’d seen evidence of on the dance floor.
It had taken a knife cutting his heart out to elicit that response, a response I could’ve lived without the rest of my life if it meant he wouldn’t have had to suffer that kind of soul-deep pain. I would rather give him up completely than watch that again, those big muscles under that fine suit coat gathering magnificently as he swung a fire poker like a baseball bat at his precious bookcases, his precious books—only a cipher for what he really wanted to destroy.
Oh, I loved the sex and I wanted more of that from him, wanted that passionate, unfettered young Mitch to rise up and devour me—but not at that price.
“Okay, well,” Morgan boomed, “let’s get that window boarded and tidy up as much as we can.”
Prissy and Steve and their tax deductions dropped by that afternoon amidst the sawing and hammering to check on Mitch. As Mitch’s first counselor, Steve would be effectively serving as the bishop until a new one could be called.
(Poor Prissy.)
“He’s sleeping,” I said without preamble. “It’s been a hard couple of weeks for him.”
“I wish he’d said something,” Steve murmured. “Asked for help. We would’ve gone to bat for him.”
“He was waiting for the Lord to go to bat for him, and at the moment, I am not impressed by the way the Lord treats his employees.” They both flinched. “Does Louise know about this?”
They exchanged glances, then Prissy looked down at the floor, her hands in her back jeans pockets. “Louise is too...occupied right now to think about it.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, wondering if another person Mitch trusted had abandoned him.
“She is dealing with a sudden death in the ward. That’s one of the things the Relief Society president does, you know, especially when there’s no family. Arranges funerals and burials. You know.” She continued to spew nonsense.
“Prissy,” I growled.
She took a deep breath and dashed tears away with one hand, but it was Steve who offered, “Inez...overdosed. Yesterday. Louise is dealing with it, making the arrangements.”
“We didn’t know if Mitch would want to know,” Prissy muttered. “Figured it would be best to let you make that call.”
I stood there stunned.
But not.
“Did she leave a note?”
Prissy looked away, rubbing at her nose.
“She did,” Steve said when Prissy didn’t answer. “It just said, ‘I’m past desperate.’”
Whatever that meant. “Excuse me,” I murmured. It only took a minute to find what I was after, but when I returned, I found the Seaton tax deductions hanging from Clarissa’s arms, the three of them giggling madly as she swung them around the large foyer.
It was like seeing the first yellow crocus of spring pop up through the snow.
I handed my credit card to Prissy. “Spend whatever you need. Just make it nice and call me with the date. And, oh,” I said after we’d exchanged hugs, “I thought you should know. Your hunch was right.”
Her mouth tightened.
“But don’t worry,” I said with the kind of cheer displayed only in laundry detergent commercials. “I’ll deal with it.”
She nodded and they all left, the Seaton children waving frantically at their new friend.
When Sebastian, Bryce, Eilis, Justice, Nigel, and I decided to play Monopoly, Gordon announced his intention to drop in on a nearby rare book dealer.
“I’ll go with you,” Giselle said, and after quick kisses to their respective spouses, they were out the door.
I looked at Nigel and said, “I thought the library in your house was yours.”
He shook his head. “All Gord’s. He’s turned into something of an expert at spotting valuable books. Spends a lot of time at estate sales, used book stores. Goes online and helps people figure out what they have.”
“Well, at least now Giselle has somebody to talk to about that stuff,” Bryce murmured absently as he played his turn. “Her training’s in literature, so maybe he can take the heat off me and I won’t have to act like I know what the hell she’s talking about.”
“I don’t like playing games with her, anyway,” Sebastian muttered. “She’s a sore loser.” Bryce nodded in agreement.
Morgan, Knox, Trevor, and Clarissa availed themselves of the billiards room adjacent to the library.
While the others set up the game table, I headed upstairs to check on Mitch, who lay on his side snoring slightly.
Glass of water on the nightstand...
Open bottle of Tylenol PM on the bathroom counter...
A smear of toothpaste in the sink and a wet toothbrush on the shelf...
Wadded-up towel on the floor...
I breathed a sigh of relief that he was not, in fact, comatose, and could take care of himself. He simply needed time for his mind, body, and spirit to decompress.
When I smoothed the coarse hair at his temple and dropped a kiss there, his cheek wrinkled with a smile, but he didn’t awaken.
Hours later, I was left alone at the Monopoly table with Kenard, the two of us having become tacit allies in order to have a chance at beating Sebastian, and now, as the last players standing, we were playing against each other. Everyone else had gone to bed.
“What happened?” I asked, point blank.
He looked up at me with those gorgeous green eyes of his. “What happened when?”
“To you.”
He took a deep breath and then released it slowly, sat back, and wiped his hand down his heavily scarred face. He looked down at the floor and tapped his t
oken on the arm of the chair. “A lot of things converged,” he rasped finally. “What I’d been taught about the Church, about what we believe—it wasn’t right. Everything else was predicated on that, all the choices I made, particularly the woman I married, who pretty much destroyed me. It’s taken me a long time to relearn it all. To recover my personality and my faith, to be okay with both and learn how they work together, figure out they aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“And you believe?”
He pursed his lips. “If there’s a chance,” he said slowly, “that I can be with Giselle and my kids forever, I’ll take it. I’ll jump through whatever hoops I have to. If there is no chance, then my jumping through the hoops won’t make any difference. I will do whatever I have to do to make Giselle happy and this is something she really wants. See, she— She gives me some frame of reference for what’s important and what’s not. She’s the only thing I’ve ever had to hold onto.” He stopped. Started again. “If it weren’t for her, I’d have blown my brains out long ago and I got pretty damned close a couple of times before I met her, got to know her. She gave me hope, gave me a reason to keep going.”
I blinked. “So this is hitting a little too close to home for you.”
“Oh, yeah. I spent years serving in the Church. I hadn’t made it to bishop by the time my house burned, but it probably wouldn’t have been long before I did. I know how it is, spending all that time caring for other people when you’ve got a bundle of your own problems at home you can’t tend to. Serving the Lord. You’re told from the time you can walk that if you do everything right, the Lord will bless you. Well, okay. The more I served, the worse my life got. What’s the take-home message there?”
Mitch and Bryce, two sides of the same coin. Mitch had been driven to succeed at it despite the odds, and Bryce had simply been trying to keep his head above water—but Mitch had had a supportive and loving wife, while Bryce had spent those years fighting an abusive spouse, protecting the children she bore.
“So here we are,” Bryce was saying, “the same age. Both of us born and raised in the Church. Returned missionaries. Married in the temple. Taught the same things. Promised the same blessings. Served in most of the same positions. But. I did the deed and I took my wife down with me, so the least I can do is be gracious about it and say, hey. I deserved what I got. Mitch, though— He kept his honor and this freak thing happens and he gets hung out to dry? I don’t know what to think. I don’t know what it means. Again. Giselle keeps telling me it’s just naïve men trying to do what they think is right, but...”
“That’s what Mitch keeps telling me, too,” I murmured.
He looked around, at the broken barrister cases and the books piled haphazardly on the hearth. “You know, when you walk into a man’s house and he’s destroyed his library and thrown an iron rod through a window, you kind of figure he doesn’t believe that.”
“He...thinks God abandoned him in his most desperate hour.”
Kenard laughed bitterly, his scarred lip curling, making him look absolutely satanic. “Yeah. I know exactly how that feels.” Then he rose and headed toward the door. Stopped there. Looked down at the carpet. “I will say this,” he finally said. “I like going to church now, with Giselle and my only living child. He’s my fifth. I don’t know if you knew that.”
And again, my gut clenched with the thought of losing my children, and I nodded. I reached behind me and found the tissue box.
“Anyway,” he continued, “Giselle, Dunc, and I, we’re a family, sitting there in the pew in a familiar place, and it feels...right. Like I finally have what I wanted all along, like God’s okay with who I am and always was. Like what happened to me and my family was to correct a bad decision I made when I was too confused to know better, to release my kids from a life of misery and give me the woman I longed for all the years I spent married to a monster.
“It’s taken years to get here. I look at Giselle and wonder what good I did to deserve her, and for whatever reason—conditioning or wishful thinking or truth—sometimes I’m tempted to think maybe it’s because I was faithful all those years. But even if that’s not true, I still had to go through what I did to be worthy of a woman like Giselle, that strength and confidence. A refiner’s fire.” He paused. “I have third- and fourth-degree burns over forty percent of my body, and I’ll tell you something. If I had to walk through that fire again to have her, I would.”
I gulped.
“G’night, Cassie.”
“Night,” I whispered, but he was gone.
* * * * *
The First Day of the Week
April 24, 2011
Mitch was gone when I awakened Sunday morning. Eight-thirty, and Mitch’s side of the bed was cold. I got up and wrapped myself in a thick robe to go find him.
“Yo, Cass,” Sebastian called when I walked into the kitchen to find him, Eilis, Knox, and Nigel at the table eating, playing poker, but no Mitch. “Where’s Sleeping Beauty?”
“Gone,” I murmured, confused. I turned, looked back into the foyer, from where I’d come. Started back out and stopped at the library doors. Opened them. Nothing but the Monopoly game we’d left last night, awaiting our return. No Mitch.
“Mitch!” I shouted up the stairs, my hands cupped around my mouth.
“His car’s gone,” Trevor called across the house, from the area of the garage door.
“Well, he has to come back,” Sebastian said. “He lives here.”
“House phone rang early this morning,” Nigel said through a yawn. “Don’t know if that means anything.”
With that, they all went back to what they’d been doing, but I was too worried about Mitch to care. Where could he have gone? It wasn’t like him to leave me no note, no voice mail, no indication.
And he was in a dangerous frame of mind.
I picked up the phone and hit the caller ID, and my heart caught in my throat.
Oh, no.
Not with the way he’d cracked on Friday.
I bolted up the stairs and threw on clothes that didn’t match. I ran back down the stairs and through the kitchen, out the garage door, ignoring everyone. I got in my car and zipped down the driveway, then out onto the highway. It took me half the time to get to church that it usually did.
There.
Mitch’s Bugatti, in its usual spot.
I parked— Far away because the parking lot was, as usual, bursting.
But I sprinted into the building and shocked the hell out of all the people I knew who were all dressed in Sunday best and present as if the world hadn’t blown up.
They probably didn’t know anyway.
I shot down the hallway, dodging a dozen people, to the stake president’s office and blew in there, too.
“Where is he?” I demanded of the first man who happened across my path.
“Uh, Sister Hollander...”
“Where is he?” I shouted, then saw Sally Bevan step out of President Petersen’s office, her nose and eyes red, her furious husband shoving her in front of him, his hand wrapped tight around her arm.
“Why?!” I cried at her, reduced to begging.
“Because she can’t be happy with what she’s got,” Dan snarled at her. She hiccuped and wiped her nose on the back of her arm.
She wouldn’t look at me.
“He’s gone.” I looked up when I heard Petersen’s low voice, whose expression I couldn’t decipher.
“You ignorant bastard,” I whispered, staring at him.
He looked down and scuffed his toe on the carpet. “We all make mistakes, Cassie,” he muttered. “He’s—was—my friend. I’m not proud of it.”
But I didn’t stay to listen to his platitudes about whatever mistakes Mitch had supposedly made, up to and including—especially—marrying me. I burst out a door opposite the one I’d entered and saw Mitch, dressed in jeans and a rugby shirt, walking to his car.
No.
Swaggering.
One hand in his pocket and the ot
her shaking his car keys out.
“Mitch!”
He stopped and turned. Stared at me.
“Cassandra, what—?”
But I threw myself in his arms before he could finish, and I held on for dear life because who knew his state of mind at the moment, a chip on his shoulder, driving his death trap.
That thing had to go.
I rained kisses all over his face because he was there, awake, not roaring, not collapsing, not—
“Cassandra,” he sighed, wrapped his arms around me and let me kiss him.
“What are you doing here?” I murmured between kisses. “Why did you come here?”
With a sigh, he disentangled me and put me on my feet only so far as to catch my hand and pull me into his body. His arm draped over my shoulders, he held me close as we strolled toward his car. “I woke up about three, four this morning and felt like...everything was going to be all right. I didn’t know what day it was, but you were there sleeping and the house was quiet. I went downstairs and saw the rental cars outside, so I knew I had family around me. Looked in the library. Window’s boarded up, rug’s gone, glass is all cleaned out of the bookcases, poker’s back where it belongs, and the books aren’t burnt.” His mouth twitched. “I don’t know, I wandered around for a little bit, got some noodles. Like nothing had happened, nothing had changed. Like I hadn’t changed. Like I hadn’t...torn my library apart or, uh—” He sucked in a deep breath. “What I said, what I did to you—” Released it in a whoosh.
I looked up at him, saw his chagrin, the flush on his face. He could barely look at me. “Don’t you dare apologize to me for that, Mitch Hollander. I loved it.”
“But—”
“Don’t. Just promise me more of it.”
He sighed and snuggled me closer as we walked. We got to his car and he leaned back against the door and framed me with his legs and arms to look at me.
“Anyway, I felt just fine. Went back to bed and dozed for a while. Phone rings, it’s Petersen, says he wants to come over and talk.”
