Confessed

by Nicola Rendell

  I take another swig and press down on the accelerator. Nasty Mexican rap plays from a station on the radio. I’m barely aware of what’s around me. I can still smell her on me, and fuck me, what an asshole I am. Her mom is in the shit, and now she’s all alone. I’m alone. We’re all fucking alone. Life is a bitch, and there’s nobody in the world—no matter how sweet, how pretty—that can help you through that fucking fight.

  Except now I know that’s not true. Because of her. Who I pushed the fuck away.

  North. My lights bounce off signs I don’t need to read, and I cross into New Mexico. The sun starts coming up way off to the right, just a slice of blue in the black.

  I try to erase the image of her in that little house with me. I try to get rid of the image of her throat, and that necklace. I try to erase her, every last perfect inch of her. I want to drown it. I want to light it on fire. I want to tear it apart and ruin it. I wish it had never fucking happened because goddamn does it hurt.

  Pedal down, I gun it north and blow past the speed limit hardcore.

  That’s when I see the lights behind me. A cop.

  “Awww fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.” I slam the wheel with my palm.

  For one split second, I think I should just gun it, run for it, kill my lights and vanish. But the last thing I need is fleeing from a police officer on my record. Two more felony strikes and I’m fucking out.

  So I bring the truck to a stop and put the cap on the tequila. I take a piece of gum from my pocket and start chewing. Then I light up a cigarette to disguise the smell.

  In the cruiser’s lights, I can see it’s a lady officer. She gets closer and I see she’s got a blonde braid. Of course she fucking does.

  “Evening,” she says. She’s State Patrol, wearing the hat. Gringa, all business, built like a boxer, but I see she’s got just about that same pink lip gloss Lucy wore at first. She’s 1% Lucy Burchett and just looking at her, I feel like I’m going to puke.

  “Yeah. Evening,” I say.

  “Know how fast you were going?” I run my hand over my hair. Lady cops are ball-busters. They make exactly zero small talk. “Maybe ninety.”

  “Ninety-four.” She’s got her clipboard out. “You in a rush to get somewhere? Wife having a baby maybe?”

  Wham and that crazy-ass dream punches me in the face. Driving like a maniac to get to Lucy, for our baby?

  That’s gone. All the fucking dreams are gone. Dreams I’ll never have with a woman I lost in a life that isn’t mine.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I say. I glance at Lucy’s note again, and at her face on the opposite page.

  She looks up from her clipboard. Her pen hovers in the air.

  “I’m really sorry. I fucked something up with a girl, and I’m not thinking right. I’m normally a pretty careful driver.”

  The trooper’s eyes get a little softer. “That the young woman in question?” She points her flashlight at the sketchbook.

  “Yeah, that…” Fuck it all, I’m choked up. I try to clear my voice. I try to man up. “That’s her.”

  I can’t man up. I’m a broken-down motherfucker about to get a four-point ticket with a fake ID.

  The shit has finally hit the fan for old Vince Russo. Screwed.

  I rub my eyes and then stub my cigarette out in the tray, hardly smoked. I’ve even lost the taste for Lucky Strikes. She’s 1000 times more addictive than any nicotine on the planet.

  “I’ll let you off with a warning,” the trooper says. “But pull yourself together, sir.”

  Somehow, I manage to keep my mouth from dropping open. I nod. “I will.”

  “Good.”

  In my head I hear, “Be nice, Vince, be nice!” I say, “Thanks.”

  She gives me an official nod—and holy fuck—a little smile, and heads back to her cruiser.

  I look up at the highway ahead of me. Albuquerque shines in the desert night, crossed with two highways in a massive interchange. The Big I staring back at me.

  Sometimes in your life, you walk up to a crossroads. Not very fucking often does it happen at an actual crossroads, but this is New Mexico. Symbolic shit, it’s par for the course.

  I-25 north? Free. Alone.

  Or I-40 east? To answer the charges. To my Lucy.

  The lady cop flips a U-turn and I watch her brake lights get dimmer and dimmer in my rearview.

  I open up the sketch book and flip to the back. I take out the NO FUCKING sign and open it up. I look at our shoeprints together. I go back through my drawings of her, and stop on the one where I got interrupted by her falling asleep by the pizza box.

  Everything inside me hurts. Everything is broken.

  So I put the truck in gear, and head east, goddamn it. East.

  But I don’t text her. Not yet. I’m not even fucking sure she’ll have me, not the way I’ve acted. And I’m not even fucking sure I can be hers at all.

  Not with the cops after me.

  35

  The drive takes 30 hours, and I stop once, at a Days Inn with a working “Vacancy” sign and television stuck on the Home Shopping Network. As soon as I make it across the New York state line, so tired I feel like I’ve got tablespoons of sand in my eyes, my criminal hackles go up. Every cop I see, they’re after me. Every black Suburban is a Fed. Rather than head north towards Connecticut, I go south a ways. To Trenton. To the Trenton Police Department. Before I get out of the truck, I grab a long-sleeved shirt from my bag, slip it on and button it up. I remember Lucy unbuttoning these buttons, her tiny fingers so pretty on the black fabric. But I snap out of it and look at myself in the dusty rearview mirror.

  It’s time to fucking do this thing.

  Do it, Vince. Do it.

  I walk inside and stand at the front desk, where a lady with big hair and an even bigger wad of purple gum is staring at a computer screen.

  “Whatcha need, hon?” My eyes drift to a STOP METH USE poster behind her. Next to that is a wanted poster, with Gregor Gregorovich’s fat face on it and the words: REWARD $25K. “Detective Reynolds. Please.”

  She stops chewing and lifts one eyebrow. “He’s on duty.”

  Which means I know exactly where to find him. A guy who has always and will always work nights. Where is he at five on a Monday afternoon? Denny’s.

  Detective Reynolds is in the back booth, reading a newspaper, and he doesn’t recognize me until I’m right at his table.

  “Holy shit,” he says, pausing with his piece of bacon halfway to his mouth. “You’re a guy I never thought I’d see again. Unless you were in a garbage bag in Long Island Sound.”

  “Nice to see you too.” He’s balding, a little overweight, comb-over. Used to be my arch-nemesis. Now he’s just a chubby guy in a Denny’s with my ticket out of this nightmare.

  He eats his bacon and puts down his paper. I sit down across from him, with my duffel next to me. My fucking bones hurt. “I got some information for you.”

  He puts his bacon down and widens his eyes. The waitress slides a coffee in front of me without even asking, and I take one of those pathetic little containers of cream and dump it in.

  “I'll give you Gregorovich,” I say.

  He pushes his plate aside. “What the hell got into you?”

  Yeah, if he even knew the half of it. Doesn’t matter. “I’ll give you everything I know,” I say, crumpling the little cream container, “But I want to do a deal. Me for him and his crew, clean slate.”

  Reynolds lifts his hands up in the air. “Who the fuck do I look like? Jesus?”

  I wait. I press a second cream container inside the first. The plastic crackles.

  Reynolds presses his hands to the table. “I can’t negotiate stuff like that. We gotta get the DA involved on this. This is huge. You know that. I can’t decide on this in Denny’s, for Christ’s sake.”

  I open up a third container of cream. “Do we have a deal or not?”

  He looks down at his Grand Slam. He looks back at me. “What the fuck brought this on?” he a
sks. “Last time I asked you for info, you said you’d disappear before you ratted out your guys.”

  I take his spoon off his paper napkin and stir my coffee. That’s true, I did say that. But that was before I got hit with a little tornado in a peach dress. Before the two most insane weeks of my life. Before I saw a picture of a life that I never even thought I deserved. Probably don’t even deserve now.

  “My priorities, man. They fucking changed,” I say. And lean back in the booth.

  He pulls his plate close to him again and puts his toast in his over-easy eggs. He shakes his head at his plate. “Gregorovich. You’ll give me Gregorovich?”

  I nod. “Enough to lock him up forever.”

  “We don’t even have his prints. He’s like a damned phantom,” Reynolds says.

  I unzip my duffel and take out the laundry bag from the Super 18. I put it on the table. “What the hell is that?” Reynolds asks, staring at the bag.

  “A knife,” I say, “with Gregorovich’s prints all over it.”

  Reynolds glances from me to the bag and back again. And drops his toast into his eggs.

  Just like that, I’ve got myself a goddamned deal.

  36

  With a bottle in each hand, I fill the kitchen sink with gin and watch it glug down the drain. It smells medicinal and nauseating. I put the empty bottles in the now-full recycling bin—Mom had stashes all over the house—and peek out into the living room. She’s on the couch, wrapped up in an afghan, watching Columbo on Netflix. She’s wearing her pajamas and her cute little reindeer fur slippers that we got when we were in Finland. She looks thin, and there are bags under her eyes. But she’s smiling, the same warm, contented, sincere smile she smiled when I visited her at the hospital three days ago, and the same one she wore when I picked her up and took her home this morning. She is still a bit unsteady, and the doctors told me that the next 30 days are crucial for her recovery. It doesn’t matter if she intended to or not, Dr. Singh said. She brushed up against death. And it takes a long time to get back on your feet again.

  So my mom and I made a pact on our way back from the hospital. No more alcohol in the house. No more talk of Dad. We will focus on happy things. We’re going to go to yoga together every day. We might rescue a dog. We’re going to take it one step at a time.

  “Just going to take these outside,” I tell her.

  Mom lifts her eyes. “Okay, honey. Johnny Cash is in this one!” she says, pointing to the screen.

  My heart pinches up in my chest. Why? Why, Johnny Cash? Why? But I muster a smile for her. “I’ll be right back. We can watch together.”

  Awkwardly, I hold the recycling bin with one arm and open the kitchen door. Outside it’s hot but breezy, and somewhere in the neighborhood, I hear a lawnmower and the noise of someone splashing into a pool. With Dad gone, things are much, much quieter. The feds dropped the charges against me when my dad fessed up. He’s locked up in Danbury at a country club prison awaiting trial. So now my mom and I are completely, utterly, blissfully on our own. With no income and no idea what to do next. But we’ll figure it out. Somehow. I think.

  With my elbow, I open up the cover of the recycling bin and dump in the bottles. They make an ear-splitting racket as they go in, and one bottle shatters as it lands.

  My ears throb, but it’s quiet again, and I close the lid.

  “Lucy,” says a voice.

  I spin around. “Oh my God,” I gasp, and clutch the empty sticky bin to my body.

  It’s Vince. He’s wearing a gray T-shirt now, not black. And flat-front khakis, not jeans. He’s shaved his stubble, and I see the tight, clean line of his jaw. His skin looks fresh and warm and even over the recycling bin, he smells like he’s just taken a shower.

  And he’s holding a bouquet of red roses.

  “These are for you,” he says.

  The world slows down, not unlike the time I ran him off the road. I just stand there, almost paralyzed, in a haze of warm Vince, August humidity, and slightly sour strawberry yogurt.

  “I never thought I’d see you again.”

  “I know. But is it okay,” he asks, almost wincing, “that I’m here?”

  Is it okay? He has no idea. He cannot imagine. “You have no idea how much I’ve needed you. How much I’ve missed you.”

  He takes the recycling bin from my hands and puts it down. Then he puts the flowers in my arms, stepping closer. “Yeah, I do. How is your mom?”

  I’m getting lost in him again. I am surrounded in him. Him, who feels like home. “She’s okay. She just got out of the hospital today.”

  He nods, looking relieved. “I missed you so fucking much,” he says.

  The florist’s paper crinkles against my body, and a spray of baby’s breath touches my cheek. I stare up at him. My heart pounds and my hands are suddenly clammy. “I’m so glad you found me.” My voice is hushed and quiet.

  He puts his arms around me. Slowly, looking pained, he presses his forehead to mine, holding my jaw in that way he does, just before he kisses me. A torrent of happiness starts to come up through me, spilling out as tears. Tears for what I thought I had to grieve over and don’t anymore. Tears for the last three hopeless days. He chases one down my cheek with his thumb. He pulls me closer, and the roses shift in my arms. I feel a thorn prick my skin at the end of the paper, and it brings me back to reality. He is here. It’s okay. The dream isn’t over.

  He’s just about to kiss me, but he stops, his lips just brushing mine, to whisper, “I am so, so sorry.”

  I lead him inside by the hand, but he holds up a finger and steps away. He reappears one second later with a bouquet of yellow roses that he’d hidden around the corner. He smooths his shirt. He runs his hand through his hair. And then he takes a deep breath and nods. We head through the door.

  My eyes are damp with happiness, but I’m also nervous. They are two of the most important people in my life, but they are at polar opposites of every spectrum known to humanity. They’re going to have to meet sometime, though, and it’s going to be now.

  I take his fingers in mine and bring him around the corner into the living room. I hear Johnny Cash saying something to Peter Falk, and my mom looks up from the television.

  There would have been a time, with a gin in her hand, that she’d have said something like Hide the silver! But now, she doesn’t. Her expression is hard to decipher. Something very strange has happened to her, and I’m only just beginning to understand it. It’s like she has transformed, like she has come out of her cocoon and is a new butterfly. Fragile but finding her way.

  She smiles up at him and gets off the couch. The afghan is wrapped around her like a cloak. “Hello,” she says.

  “Mom, this is Vince.”

  “Vince Russo.” He hands her the bouquet of yellow roses.

  Her eyes sparkle. I don’t think my dad ever gave her flowers, even once. “I’m Helen,” she says, “Are these for me?” “Yes, ma’am,” Vince says.

  She puts her nose down into the cool petals. Her eyes go up and down his tattoos and then meet mine, wide as I’ve ever seen them as if to say, Lucy Marie Burchett! Who in the world!

  Except, she’s not angry.

  She’s not even puzzled.

  She’s tickled.

  “So, Mom,” I start blubbering. “Here’s the thing. When I was gone…”

  “How are you feeling, Mrs. Burchett?” Vince interrupts.

  Her face warms up. “I’m doing pretty well, thank you.” She sits back down on the couch with the flowers in her lap. She mutes the TV. “I have to say, you don’t look like the boys Lucy usually brings home.”

  Vince squeezes my hand. He nods. “I’m sure I don’t.”

  “What is it you do for a living, Vince?” Mom asks.

  He clears his throat and takes a breath. It probably only takes a second, but it feels like ten minutes. On the screen, Johnny Cash is sitting on a white sofa, drinking a bourbon.

  “Well. I used to rob banks. I have a pretty subs
tantial criminal record, which I’m happy to share with you.”

  I gape up at him. Oh my God. What is happening here? I am in a parallel universe. I was working up a whole story about how he is a tattoo artist and Iraq War veteran.

  “Do you now?” Mom says. She’s smiling again.

  I start to form a word, but no word comes out. Here he is, in my house, standing in front of my mother, saying the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

  So help us, God.

  He nods. He’s doing that thing where he’s trying not to smile, but it’s not working, and he shows off his dimple. “But your daughter here, she… She made me reevaluate things. And now I’m going to try my hand at being an artist.” He turns to me, and I feel like there is nobody but the two of us in the world. Everything funnels down to just him and me. “That probably sounds ridiculous. But she makes me want to do a whole lot better than I’ve done before.”

  Mom hugs herself under the afghan, still smiling. There’s a long, long pause. I become aware of the clock in the hall ticking, and then she says, “That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard anybody say.”

  I grip his hand. He grips mine.

  But then Mom says, “And about your criminal record…”

  Oh God. Here we go. The third degree is upon us.

  “I married a man who said he was honest, but he wasn’t. So I think you’re already way ahead of the game.” She turns up the volume a little. “Would you like to stay for dinner? I think we have a frozen chicken casserole.”

  Vince pulls me close. He puts his hand around my waist. I wrap my arms around him as best I can. With my ear to his chest, I hear him say, “How about I make a little something for all three of us?”

  After dinner, a quite lovely pasta puttanesca that Vince figured out using stuff from the pantry, he and I do the dishes side by side at the big enamel sink. I feel like I am shimmering with happiness, bubbling with it. Do I deserve to be this happy? Do I know how to be this happy?