Desperate

by Daniel Palmer

  I stood in the foyer, perhaps a foot beyond the front door, and looked around the apartment. The place appeared normal, peaceful even, with the lights turned off. The movie posters were still hanging on the walls in the hallway. The little vase of silk flowers was there on the end table near the bathroom door, same as always.

  Glancing through the entranceway into the living room, I saw the silhouette of a figure seated on the sofa. Her body was backlit from the sun, but it was Lily. She kept her body facing forward, while her head was turned to the side, looking at me. She made no effort to stand, offered no greetings, and didn’t even question what I was doing in her home. It was as though she’d been awaiting my arrival all along.

  I took a step toward her. Just a single step.

  “Hi, Gage,” Lily said in a soft and playful voice, flirty even. She kept her body perfectly still, hands resting on her knees, back rigid. I could see she was wearing a black skirt and pink tank top. Her gaze was fixed on me, but her face remained cast in shadows, and though I couldn’t see her expression, I imagined she was smiling. “What brings you here? Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

  I took another step, drawn into the apartment like a moth lured to an irresistible purple light.

  “Where is it, Lily?” I asked.

  Force of will, I guess, but somehow my low voice managed to stay calm.

  “Where is what, Gage?”

  Lily said my name with hint of menace, lengthening it, mocking the way I had spoken hers, her voice lilting just a bit.

  Gaaaagee.

  “You know damn well what I’m talking about,” I said.

  Another step. I was standing at the threshold to the living room. One more step and into the cage with the purple light I would go.

  “I’m bored. I was going to watch a movie. Do you want to watch with me?”

  The television was turned off.

  I took another step—several, in fact.

  Lily’s face was visible. The smile I envisioned was there—a teasing little lift to her mouth. The way she sat accentuated the swell of her breasts and exposed part of her rounded belly. She had her hair pulled back into a ponytail, calling attention to her long and slender neck. As furious as I was, it was impossible to ignore her beauty.

  “Where is the folder? Don’t lie to me, Lily. I know you have it. You snuck into my condo while I was in the shower and you took it out of my workbag. You knew it was important. You had a conversation with Anna on the phone, so you knew damn well I needed to get it to her. You took it from me, and I want it back.”

  My phone rang. I checked the number. Of course it was Anna calling.

  I answered the call, but curtly. “Yeah.”

  “Yeah? That’s how you’re greeting me these days? How nice. I’m just checking to make sure you got the folder off to FedEx.”

  “There’s a problem,” I said.

  “What are you talking about? What problem?”

  “I don’t have the folder.”

  Lily was just on the couch, watching my meltdown, delighting in it.

  “Gage, are you kidding me? Please tell me that you’re kidding me.”

  “No,” I said, rather calmly. “I’m not kidding. I don’t have it because Lily took it from the house.”

  Lily touched a hand to her chest and made an insincere face—Moi?

  Anna made an angry noise. “This is out of control with you and Lily. It has got to stop. Where is the folder?” I could hear desperation in Anna’s voice.

  “I told you, Lily took it.”

  “Enough!” Anna shouted. “Enough blaming Lily! Gage, find my goddamn folder and get it to me now! Do you hear me? There is a lot riding on this! I can’t take it anymore! I can’t. Honestly, I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but it has got to stop. You’ve got to stop blaming Lily.”

  “Here,” I said. “If you’re so convinced she has nothing to do with this, then you talk to her. Ask her for yourself and see if you believe her.”

  I handed my phone to Lily. She took it in a nonchalant manner.

  “Hello?”

  Of course I could only hear one half of the conversation.

  “My apartment,” Lily said. “He just came up here looking for the folder. No.” She lengthened the word no as if to emphasize the impossibility of whatever question Anna had asked. I assumed that question was, Did you take the folder?

  Lily said “No” again, and then, “I’m not worried. No, I’m fine, really. He’s not being threatening.”

  My pulse dropped. Was Anna really worried I’d get violent with Lily?

  Lily finished with a volley of short responses—okay, sure, all right, and no problem—and handed the phone back to me. It felt hot to the touch, but that was just my imagination. I put the phone to my ear with some trepidation.

  “You get out of that apartment right now, right this instant, and go find wherever you put my folder,” Anna said. “And don’t tell me that Lily took it. Like she did the necklace? I don’t know what the Adderall is doing to your brain, but something is seriously wrong with you.”

  “I’m not making this up.”

  “You listen to me, and listen very, very carefully,” Anna said, seething. “I’m not going to give up the baby. I’m not going to do it. I want to be a mother again. I need this. I need it like I need air. With or without you, I’m raising this child. So go figure out what happened to the folder, turn over every piece of furniture in the house if that’s what you have to do. But you will get the hell out of Lily’s apartment, right now. You have no business being there. None!”

  Blood thrummed in my ears. My mouth had gone cotton dry.

  That’s when I saw Roy was standing in the entranceway to the living room with a grin on his face. And that was also when I got it. I knew what was happening. And I knew what I had to do.

  “Anna, sweetie, you’re right,” I said. “Maybe it is the Adderall messing me up. I’ll look harder. I’m sure I’ll find it and I’ll call you back.”

  I hung up before she could respond.

  “How much?” I asked, looking at Roy. “How much money will it take to get you two leeches to leave my life forever?”

  “Now we’re finally getting someplace,” Roy said.

  CHAPTER 30

  Roy sauntered into the living room, chewing on a toothpick. His thumbs were tucked inside his belt, and he walked noiselessly from heel to toe. He was wearing a faded blue T-shirt, lightweight jacket, and dungarees. His deep-set eyes took in everything.

  “Give me your phone,” he said.

  I hesitated until Roy lifted his jeans, offering me a flash of the large hunting knife sheathed to his ankle.

  “You can’t record this conversation, Gage,” Roy said. He paused, Roy the thinking man. “So,” he said. “We’ve got ourselves a little situation here. Something we can address like adults. Are you ready to talk?”

  “How long?” I asked.

  “Excuse me?” Roy said.

  I was looking at Lily, addressing my question to her. She’d gone back to sitting on the edge of the sofa. Her skirt rode up her legs, but I got the feeling she would have been equally comfortable naked. She didn’t care. If there ever was a girl named Lily who loved old movies and drew portraits to uncover hidden secrets about people, she was gone. In her place was the new Lily, the one who didn’t care about our dreams.

  Roy stood to my right, with his thumbs tucked back in his belt, the knife still in its sheath. He was eyeing me the way a prison guard might stare down an insubordinate inmate.

  “How long have you been planning to coerce me into giving you a payoff? Was it before or after you moved into my home? I want to know.”

  Lily looked over to Roy. Permission to speak freely? her eyes said. Roy gave a near imperceptible nod of his head.

  “Things just sort of evolved,” Lily said. She sounded relieved, like this was a confession of sorts, a weight finally lifted. “I was pregnant and pissed at Roy when I met you guys, but Roy really d
idn’t want me to get an abortion. He was just pissed because I told him the kid wasn’t his.”

  I remembered Lily telling us the same story on the curb. My eyes met Roy’s.

  “And is it?” I asked.

  A flash of anger crossed his face.

  “Yeah,” Lily said. “I just made up that story because he wasn’t happy about the baby.”

  “So what then?”

  “Then I was like, well, fuck you if you don’t want this baby. I’ll give it to someone who does,” Lily said. She looked at Roy again.

  Roy seemed to accept Lily’s admonition, acknowledging with an indifferent shrug that, yes, he probably could have been more supportive in the beginning. Strange to say, but I felt a bit like a couples therapist closing in on a breakthrough. Here I was, moments from being forced into making a payout, helping the happy couple work through an issue. It was too surreal even for Dali.

  “What then?” I asked.

  “Then I found you guys on the website. Just like I said. And when you invited me to live with you, well, that was just about the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.”

  “And you repaid our kindness by playing games with me, pitting me against my wife.”

  Lily shrugged. Anna and I were a means to an end, a source of cash. No hard feelings. Sorry for making you a chump. That was what her shrug said to me.

  “Well, it might have gone another way, but a few nights before I moved in with you guys, Roy and I were hanging out. He was being sweet because he wanted us to be together again. I was going to move back in with him and break the bad news that we were going to keep the baby. But before I did, I decided to torture Roy by making him watch an old movie with me.”

  I looked surprised. “You really are an old movie fan?”

  Lily appeared to be offended by my insinuation. “What? Did you think I was lying about that?”

  “Well, the thought did cross my mind,” I said.

  “He watched Gaslight with me,” Lily said, thumbing over to Roy. “You know the film?”

  “I think so,” I said. “It’s about a guy who makes his beautiful wife think she’s going crazy.”

  “Charles Boyer gaslights Ingrid Bergman,” Lily said, almost reverently—lovingly, I might say. “Roy hates almost every movie I’ve made him watch, but he loved this one. He got to thinking, could we gaslight you? Not in the same way, but could we, you know, make it so hard on you that you’d pay us to leave?”

  “And here we are,” Roy said.

  “Yeah, here we are.”

  “So you knew about the rocket before you bought me that present?”

  Lily reverted into herself, a girlish retreat, as if she were too embarrassed to acknowledge the truth. My bad, her body language said, without feeling bad about it at all.

  “Lily told me about your model rocket hobby, and then I found the photo. Figured it would bug you out,” Roy said. “It actually wasn’t easy to find. I had to call a bunch of hobby stores and then drove to New Hampshire to get it. Sorry ’bout using your boy, but we needed something good to kick things off. The rest of the stuff we did to you we just sort of improvised. Nothing personal.” Roy’s grimace, the way his cold eyes squinted, the deep creases on his face, like Clint Eastwood staring into the sun, didn’t convey any real sympathy for me. No, it was more like he suffered in life, so everyone else should, and tough shit for that. “But I also read your story, so I knew some drunk driver took your wife and kid from you. That sort of accident is going to get you a lot of cash from the insurance company. A lot.”

  “So what’s the number?” I asked. “What will it cost me to make you disappear?”

  “Well,” Roy said, spitting his toothpick onto the floor, “how much you got?”

  CHAPTER 31

  This next part was going to disappoint Roy. Sure, he read about the drunk driver, but nowhere in the article did it mention the guy was uninsured. So these two clowns were coercing a quality assurance guy, a middle-income earner who needed the mortgage deduction and rental income from his upstairs unit to balance out the rest of his finances.

  “If I pay you five thousand dollars, will you go away?” I asked. I felt the strength return to my voice. There was a way out—we just needed to settle on a price.

  Unfortunately, judging by the looks Roy and Lily exchanged, I could see he wasn’t going to bite.

  “That’s a joke, right?” Roy said, approaching me, closing our gap. His shoulders went back, chest pushed outward, a fighter’s posture. He got right up into my face, close enough for me to feel his hot breath.

  “Roy!” Lily said, sounding alarmed. “Don’t hurt him.”

  “Then he’d better play nice,” Roy said.

  Lily kept to her seat on the edge of the couch. “Listen, Gage, I like you and Anna a whole lot, and I’m really sorry about all of this,” she said, speaking sweetly. “But Roy here is being serious. He wants a payday. He needs it. I can’t get into it with you, but he’s got some obligations and he needs the money. So let’s try again.”

  “Yeah,” Roy said, replacing his discarded toothpick with another. “Let’s try again.”

  I was nervous, but I wasn’t completely scared or intimidated. Perhaps I should have been overcome by rage, shaking furiously. And yet, to my surprise, I wasn’t even feeling a flicker of anger, because I was about get a thorn named Lily taken out of my foot. What we were engaged in carried all the emotion of a business transaction.

  Of course, when the deed was done I’d be burdened with a terrible secret. Lily would have to vanish and Anna could never know the reason why. The guilt would carry an additional cost above and beyond what I was about to pay, but it was the price of freedom.

  I’d make up for it, no doubt. Once these two parasites were gone, I’d redouble my efforts on the adoption front. No matter what, however, I wasn’t going to try to work a deal where we could still end up with Lily’s baby. First of all, it was borderline human trafficking. Second, even though the baby was not responsible for Lily’s wicked ways, I doubted I could forgive my tormentors enough to give their child the upbringing he or she deserved. Unpleasant and indelible memories would always be lurking just below the surface, getting in the way of all the love I had to give. Once we moved on from this experience, Anna would see how committed I was to our future. Without Lily to get in the way, my wife would never again have reason to doubt my desire to become some child’s adoptive father.

  “Why don’t you tell me a figure,” I said to Roy.

  Roy propped his foot up on the edge of the coffee table. He wore black hiking boots, the kind that could easily break my ribs if he kicked me there. He was looking at me as if that was how this might end up.

  “Two hundred grand,” Roy said. “That’s the price.”

  I swallowed hard. My heart rate climbed until I could feel it beating in my throat. I thought we’d come up with a reasonable number and put a stop to the madness. It was going down a different way. I briefly contemplated charging Roy, but if I did make this a physical confrontation, I’d probably be beaten into a coma and stabbed with his knife.

  Instead of fighting, I asked, “Are you serious?”

  Roy cocked his head to the side as if I’d confused him somehow.

  “You don’t have a clue how serious I am. Two hundred grand.”

  He took his foot off the coffee table and I could see him ball his fists.

  Lily noticed as well. “Roy,” she said. “Take it easy now. We’re gonna work something out.”

  I’d been frozen in the same spot for a while, but something made me take a step back. Maybe it was the death stare Roy was giving me. Max had taken karate lessons starting at age six. In the dojo, at his very first class, he learned to stand in a horse stance, one leg forward the other back, improving leverage. This was the same stance I took—a fighting stance.

  “Roy,” I said. “I don’t have that kind of cash.”

  Why? Where was all my money? Roy was eyeing me, asking those same que
stions. What happened to the payout from the accident? What about my job? My savings?

  In truth, I’d been diligent about saving money since entering the workforce. I always contributed the max to my 401k, skimped on vacations, didn’t overextend with the home, drove cars until they’d go no more, did a lot of repairs myself, basically lived a modest existence on a modest salary. Then my world ended—my wife and son were gone—and with them went my reason to care about cash. What little money the lawyers managed to get from the driver’s family I gave to charities Karen supported and causes Max would have championed. I didn’t want it in my bank account. It was tainted with the worst of all memories.

  World Wildlife Federation? Yeah, here’s twenty grand in Max’s name. Save a whale. Save a lot of whales, because I can’t save my son. Red Cross? Karen was a trained nurse, so I reasoned she’d want them to have all the money I should have been putting into my retirement savings. But what was I saving for? My self? My future? The accident took both from me.

  When I did finally start paying attention to money again, I made some risky bets on some rancid stock tips. In hindsight, I would have been better off tossing half the money I put into stocks out the window of a moving car. By the time Anna came into my life, I’d managed to pull myself out of the financial kamikaze dive, but the damage had already been done. My savings were pretty depleted. I had enough to scrape together a mortgage on this place only because I’d sold my home in Swampscott. Roy could threaten me all he’d like, but unless he was also an adept money manager, he’d get only what I could give.

  “What kind of cash are we talking about?”

  I didn’t hesitate. “Fifty grand,” I said. “That’s what I can afford. Fifty grand and that’s stretching it for me.”

  “Fifty grand to make us go away?” Roy said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Fifty grand and you two disappear. You’ll go away and you’ll never come back.”