Oh man. Gada was really losing her mind at the end, and I wasn’t around enough to even know how much.
“No,” Lisa says, taking the paper from Alabama. “How do you get King Dings out of that? That first part doesn’t look anything like king. And the second part doesn’t look like funeral, it looks like somebody’s name. Finklehelm?”
“Hey!” her little monster protests. “If you want that, you gotta pay me!”
“Oh, I’ll pay you alright,” Lisa slaps her son’s rear as James, Eve, and Paul step in to join us in a huddle. For a moment, I get washed over with the feeling of the old days, when huddling together and climbing all over each other was a common, everyday occurrence. There’s a level of my soul, which I continually try to crush out beneath my professional, rat-racing, ladder-climbing stiletto, that misses this and misses them every single day of my life.
Emilio hasn’t been able to shrink them out of me after all.
“That’s recreor…recordings,” Paul says, running his free finger beneath the scrawl. Keanu drools, a line of it splashing down on Paul’s hand, running over the backside, and dripping onto Alabama’s head below us.
Paul doesn’t seem to mind, but he grins as Alabama absently reaches up, rubs his crown, and snaps his head upward. Alabama grunts and scuttles out of the way, once he realizes the source of the moisture is not only still hanging over his head, but locking and loading with a second batch.
“It does say recordings,” James agrees. “She can’t remember where she put the recordings? That’s it, isn’t it? But I don’t have any idea about that second part.”
Eve takes the paper from Lisa and studies it hard.
“You think she means the recordings we found?” Paul asks. “Maybe they were in the kitchen and in the den because she was gathering them for us to listen to. Didn’t the lawyer say she wanted us to air everything out? Maybe that does say funeral and she knew something was up and she wanted to get everything together for us.”
Keanu reaches for Paul’s free hand and pulls the edge of it into his mouth, gumming away like a teething vampire. Paul giggles and I catch the unusual comet of expression that shoots across Lisa’s face. It’s there and gone in a breath, but I see it—admiration? Gratitude? Awe?
“This doesn’t say funeral,” Eve says, pulling the paper away from her face. “It says, find them. I think there’s more tapes and she wants us to scout them down.” She peers down at Alabama and Winter. “Hey, you two, how good are you at scavenger hunts?”
The kids rip into the challenge and Lisa has to rein them in before they demolish the house in their hunt. Alabama tears apart every cupboard in the kitchen, with Lisa going behind him and stuffing everything back in place, while Winter pulls everything out of the bookshelves and entertainment center in the living room.
It’s obvious that Winter has no idea what she’s looking for, and even though Paul said he was going to supervise her, I end up doing it myself, because all Paul’s doing is bouncing Baby Keanu on his knee. It looks like they’ve become buddies, with Paul gurgling like he’s suddenly fluent in baby.
Emilio stalks in after the living room has grown dark, casting confused looks in all directions and seeming none too happy that I’m not falling all over myself over his return. It’s not like I’m on James’s side, but Emilio was totally out of line and jumped to way too many conclusions.
The problem is that everything Emilio suggested has stirred up even more old memories. Being here, where everything happened and nothing was really finished, has fired up all the raw and sparking connections like a series of live and uncapped wires. It’s bad enough every time Paul or Eve walks into the room, and I remember stuff like the day Paul split open his chin and ran home crying after a jump off our totally-rigged skateboard ramp out front. Or the night that Eve showed up on our front porch, and Gada let her stay the night because Eve’s mother took too much of her anxiety medication and had to get her stomach pumped again.
Those memories are bad enough, but then I turn around and Lisa’s there, staring at me until I remember how she stood in the bathroom and coached me through using tampons. Or, how she showed me, with a cucumber from Gada’s garden, how to slip on a condom. Lisa was there laughing and crying and swearing through so many memories that they stack up and overwhelm me…and then James walks into the room.
Every part of me—from my emotions, to my muscle memory, to my mental capacity—everything inside me comes undone, just like the flapping soles on my old, second-hand shoes. A part of me is still flapping loose, waiting to be fixed, and Emilio—the guy who I thought had fixed me—seems to have run completely out of glue.
He stands back sulking and finally plants himself on the opposite end of the couch from Paul and Keanu.
“Grace,” Emilio says, as he smoothes his palms over the knees of his Giorgio Armani slacks. He’s working his full-on shrink voice and where I used to find the tone comforting, I only find it irritating now, as I try to re-shelve the old VCR tapes that Winter has unearthed from the cabinets of Gada’s entertainment center.
“Yes, Emilio,” I say.
“We need to talk.”
Paul might be rattling Keanu’s teether in front of the baby’s face, but his eyes dart back and forth between Emilio and me. Nosy as ever, Paul is still trying to get in on, and absorb, what the rest of us are doing. I used to think it was because he wanted to study us and find ways where he could fit in a little more, but as I watch him wallflower-it on the couch, I start to think that maybe Paul’s just always been nosy.
“I’m kind of busy at the moment,” I say, pushing another tape back into place. Winter plerps down beside me and begins dragging everything out from beneath Gada’s coffee table.
Emilio plucks at his slacks. “I think you need to prioritize right now, Grace.”
“I am, Emilio,” I say and even though I don’t mean to be so brutally cold in my response, the words come out of my mouth are more telling than I thought. It means everything to me to figure out what Gada wanted us to know and which one of my previous friends here created the lies that tore us apart all those years ago.
I cast a glance at Paul. He’s not moving. Lisa’s in the kitchen eating chips with Alabama since he gave up as soon as Lisa started insisting that he help reassemble the kitchen with her. Eve says she’s looking in the bathroom, but then I hear the shower kick on. James and Sheri—god knows what they’re doing in the den—all I’ve heard is the low rumblings of speech, and it makes me shudder to think of them doing anything besides talking in this house.
It would be disrespectful to Gada.
“Grace,” Emilio says again, this time with an insistence that really irks me. He’s not going to let up.
“Alright,” I snap, standing up in the puddle of stuff at my feet. “Let’s go talk. But I’m going to look while we’re up there.”
Paul frowns, but baby Keanu gives a squeal of delight as I follow Emilio upstairs to Gada’s room.
He stands beside the door like an usher as I walk in, and closes it behind me.
“I did a lot of thinking while I was driving around,” Emilio begins.
“Mmm hmm,” I murmur as I open the closet. I sit down and fold up my legs, reaching in for the shoe boxes at the bottom of Gada’s closet. I pop open box after box, but all I find is pair after pair of old lady loafers, rubber galoshes, and an impressive collection of plaid house slippers.
“I think it’s possible that you’ve never resolved your past issues with James,” Emilio says. It’s taken him so long to say anything at all and I’ve gone through so many boxes, I almost forgot he was over there on the bed, formulating his next dramatic thought.
“You’re right, Dr. Emilio,” I say, replacing the box top on yet another pair of slippers. How many feet did she think she had? I miss you so much, Gada. “I never did get closure. James slept with my best friend and we never talked about it. None of us. That’s what this week is about, remember? My grandmother knew that what we all
had together was a once-in-a-lifetime friendship and she didn’t want us to throw it away forever. She brought us here to hash things out and that’s what we’re trying to do right now.”
“You’re trying to find these tapes, which may or may not exist, in order to point fingers.”
I nod. “Maybe. Or maybe I just want to hear what’s on the tapes and know, once and for all, what happened back then.”
“Like you kissing James’s brother.”
Whoa. I put aside the unopened box I just pulled from the closet and twist to look Emilio in the face. “Why would you bring that up?”
“It’s pertinent,” Emilio says, his chin all pulled up and his eyes scanning the floor to the side of me, as if there is a map there or something. “Your prior history of fidelity is—”
I roll my tongue in my mouth. “You think that what happened between Paul and me proves that I would be unfaithful to you in the future?”
Emilio tips his head with a slow nod, his eyes still deep in the carpet. “Or in the present.”
“You are a blazing idiot.”
“This isn’t how I thought this would go,” he says, crossing the floor to me.
“How what would go?” I ask, but as my gaze scales up his leg, it catches on his outstretched hand and the glinting hunk of diamond inside the ring box he’s holding.
Fucking gulp.
“What are you doing?” I choke out.
“What does it look like?” he asks. I’m sitting in the nest of Gada’s shoes and he’s standing there, holding out an engagement ring with a rock the size of a Pink Panther sequel. He should have armed guards for a thing like that. He waves it at my eye level. “Well? What do you think?”
Wow—that’s every girl’s dream proposal, is what I think, but my tongue feels like it’s swollen up and covering my air passages.
“Grace?” Emilio says, jiggling the ring box again. “Will you marry me?”
He says each word slowly, as if I wasn’t born with any brain cells. I look down at the heap of shoes all around me and clear my throat.
“It’s okay, baby,” he says, dropping into a squat beside me.
Oh God, he thinks I’m crying. I shake my head.
“No,” I manage to release the word. Then, “I can’t marry you, Emilio.”
He snaps the box shut and stands. Hovering above me, he lets out a dismal snort before turning away and walking back to the bed.
“You’re still in love with him.” His tone is an icicle, projected at me like a javelin.
“I’m not in love with him. That’s stupid. It’s been seven years,” I snap. “I just don’t know if I’m ready for marriage.”
“With me.” Another snort. “And what if he was the one asking you?”
I glare at him. He doesn’t deserve an answer. We’ve only been dating six months and this proposal is hardly a plea of passion. Not at all.
I don’t even bother to go into the whole, a part of me will always love James, because I think Emilio’s head would explode if I gave him that much truth at the moment. The sad fact is that James was my first love on every level and as much as he wants to, Emilio can’t erase that. Not that it matters much at the moment. What really matters here is that Emilio’s the kind of man that wants to be the first to break across every blue ribbon line and I resent his resentment at not winning this ‘race’.
Jealousy is one thing, but this is more than that. The realization hits me like a hundred cookie jars: Emilio doesn’t know me at all. Stuff that in your psyche, Emilio.
“Well, then, I have an ultimatum for you. It should be an easy choice if you’re being honest about him.” Emilio sinks down on the bed, reverting to shrink mode by crossing his legs and lacing his fingers over his knee cap. “I’m leaving. I’m going to the Concorde Inn in town and I’ll be getting a room. If you’d like to join me—”
“Gada’s final wishes were—”
He holds up his index finger, his eyes fluttering closed as he does it. As he does it, another little seed of disgust blooms for Emilio. In only the few days here, he’s made a garden plot in my heart.
“You need to understand this for what it is. A reversion to what felt safe in your past, brought on by your grandmother’s death. It’s even more obvious because of what you just said. Let’s be honest, from the look of this house, any inheritance you receive would be a pittance to you anyway, compared to the salary you already make. Staying here is unhealthy for our relationship, because what’s really holding you here is your past attraction to—”
Fuck keeping my mouth shut.
“You insensitive son of a bitch!” I roar at him. “What’s holding me here is closure! The woman who raised me saw that I walked away from the five people who were family to me and her last wish was that I have the chance to fix that. What’s keeping me here isn’t some twisted desire for a second chance at my childhood sweetheart…it’s so that I can get some damn closure with all of these people who meant the entire world to me, just like my grandmother wanted me to!”
“Closure,” Emilio sighs, his eyes fluttering again under the strain of continued patience, “is not about getting answers, Grace. ‘Getting answers’ only leads to more questions. It can become an endless, dependent cycle of disclosure. True closure is about letting go. True closure happens when you recognize that the past is over and the future is waiting.”
I narrow my eyes on him. “Maybe we’re over, Emilio.”
“Grace,” he says his condescending tone faltering. It infers that I am so ignorant, it is his job to unfold all his worldly wisdom for me. “Don’t make a mistake here. You’re talking as if the people downstairs are glowing examples of love and friendship. I believe you are disillusioned about their true natures. You are so much more than them.” He stands and strides forward, gently gripping my forearms and looking deep into my eyes with his soft, pleading gaze. His words stretch. “I’m going to guide you to discovery here. Try to explore the real reason you feel such a strong need to be forgiven by such inferior people.”
I don’t think before I act. I jerk loose from his gentle grip, wind back, and let my open palm crash against his cheek.
“I’m the same as them,” I say. “I came from here just like they did. I want you out.”
Emilio holds his cheek. I hope it’s stinging as much as my hand. He rubs the skin, his tongue rolling in his jaw before he tightens it. He hoists his suitcase onto the bed and throws it open. He collects the few things he left on the bedside table and tosses it on top of his neatly folded, dirty clothes. I want to feel satisfied, but my stomach feels the way it did when I rode The Scrambler at the local, Fishfly Festival.
“I apologize,” I offer, but there’s no warmth in it. “I shouldn’t have hit you.”
He yanks the zipper closed. “No, you shouldn’t have,” he says, dragging the case off the bed. “I’ll be at the Concorde until Wednesday afternoon. My ticket is for a one p.m. flight home. I think the grief of your grandmother’s death, and this absurd living arrangement, has greatly affected your sensibility at the moment, Grace, and you’re correct, I might need to be a little more understanding of that. So, if you’d like to join me at the hotel, we can at least begin the work of putting all of this behind us.”
“The work,” I say absently.
He pulls out the rolling handle. “We will have to do some work to repair this. I had no idea these people even existed before this week, let alone the ties they have on you. I’m a little…disappointed…that you didn’t reveal this area of your life before and that we didn’t have the chance to work through it, prior to this visit. Why do you think you give them so much power over your decisions?”
“Those inferior people, you mean?” I know he’s probably thinking that I was too ashamed of bringing them up. As I blink at Emilio, I realize he’ll never know why.
He drops a kiss on my head. “I’ll be waiting at the hotel.”
Emilio lugs his suitcase down the stairs as everyone watches. Paul stops
dancing the baby on his lap; Winter stares from the floor; Lisa, Eve, and Alabama drift into the living room with bowls of mac and cheese; and James and Sheri come to the door of the den as Emilio wrestles his huge suitcase out the storm door leaving a soft damn in his wake. I shut the door behind him.
“What happened there?” Lisa asks, pointing her fork tines at the door.
I shrug. “He had to take off for work.”
Lisa rolls her eyes. “Yeah, right.”
Everybody slowly fades back to what they were doing. Well, everybody but Alabama. The kid waddles over to me with his bowl of lunch, scooping and chewing and staring, and then, “We could all hear you fightin’ up there.”
Paul’s eyes flick to me. He gets up and carries the baby into the kitchen.
I look back at Alabama. “You shouldn’t have been listening.”
“Then you shouldn’t have been yellin’,” he counters. There’s no way to be offended. He’s sporting a glop of cheese on his upper lip like half a moustache.
“You know, I knew a kid just like you once,” I say. “She had a big mouth too.”
Right on cue, Lisa shouts from the kitchen, “Alabama! Get in here and eat at the table!”
The kid’s eyes switch from tough little bad ass kid, to holy shit, mom’s tone means business. He scurries off, into the kitchen, the same way Lisa would when her mother shouted for her.
There’s a chuckle behind me. I turn to see James holding a box of tapes. Our eyes meet and, for a moment, I’m in that sleeping bag again, staring into those deep cocoa irises, hazel at the edges, and my trust drifts up to the surface like a genie called out of a bottle. This is James.
I sway toward him and catch myself, but I’m slammed by Sheri’s roasting glare. She’s trying to eyeball me to dust from over his shoulder.
“I found these and we’ve been sorting through these,” he says. “Sheri and I took out the ones that were just mix tapes, but these all have red and green stickers too. I’m not sure the stickers mean anything.”
1985: Careless Whisper (Love in the 80s #6) Page 12
