Just Between Us

by Rebecca Drake

  Besides, Ray made it clear that he wasn’t going to let me go. When I stopped replying to his texts, he came to my house, banging on the door until I finally let him in, terrified that some neighbor would hear and call the police. “Look, it’s over,” I said, trying to be friendly but firm. “It was fun, but we’re done.”

  “We’re done when I say we’re done,” he said in what he must have thought was a masterful voice, looking like an overgrown teenager in his black leather jacket and dirty jeans.

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it, he looked and sounded so pathetic, this wannabe dungeon master with his silly games and threats. The attraction I’d felt was completely gone.

  He must have seen it in my face because he made a sound like a wounded animal, a loud bellow, as he reached into the dishwasher I’d been in the process of emptying and started hurling dishes. Then I really was scared, but I couldn’t call the police. I couldn’t do anything but wait until he’d gotten it out of his system. When he’d trashed the kitchen, his rage spent, he started sobbing again, repeating that he loved me and couldn’t live without me.

  When my friends saw the kitchen of course they assumed it was Viktor who’d done it. I was terrified that they’d end up confronting him and the lies I’d told would come out and Viktor would divorce me. He’d threatened to once, soon after the night at the Chens’. “If I find out you’re cheating on me, I’ll serve you papers,” he said as I reheated dinner for him one evening after he’d come home late, as always, from work. He said the words so calmly, not bothering to make eye contact as he picked at the lasagna on his plate, sniffing as if he could tell that it was Stouffer’s even though I’d hidden the box in the trash.

  A few weeks later, his words came back to me when I found out I was pregnant and I knew it couldn’t be Viktor’s. I didn’t want to believe it at first, even though my cycle had always been like clockwork. I waited to buy the test and then waited to take it, and then I couldn’t bear to look, circling the bathroom as the timer went off, hands clenched into fists as I chanted “Please no, please no, please no” like a mantra. When I finally dared to look I didn’t believe the results. I bought a second test. And a third. Only when I saw those two matching lines for the third time did I finally accept the truth.

  I was trapped, well and truly trapped. The smart thing to do would have been to have an abortion, but I couldn’t do it. Maybe it was just the hormones, but I realized that this was the first thing I’d have in my life that belonged solely to me. I wanted it. I wanted her. I knew it was a girl, even though they said it was too early to tell. I just knew. I’d started thinking of the two of us together. Little Emma or Charlotte or Ava.

  But how could I keep this baby without losing the way to support her? If Viktor found out, it was over. Going back to West Virginia was bad enough, but going back with a baby in tow? I couldn’t let that happen. And when I realized that, I also realized that my friends’ fundamental misunderstanding, their insistence that Viktor was abusing me, might provide the perfect way out.

  And it could have worked. It almost worked. But now none of it matters. The only thing that mattered was my little girl and now she’s gone. A miscarriage. Such a strange word. How do you mis-carry something? As if my baby were a football that I fumbled. It’s not an emotional word, it doesn’t mention what I’ve lost, but it’s a judgment against me nonetheless. As if it could all have been prevented if I’d just carried my baby correctly. If I’d just been able to stop the bleeding.

  chapter forty

  JULIE

  Have you ever been betrayed by someone? Someone you continued to trust even when everyone and everything told you not to, but you loved them so much that you couldn’t stop believing until the truth came smacking you full across the face? That was how I felt as I watched Heather allow Ray Fortini to chain her, hit her, and debase her in multiple ways as if she were a kind of personal blow-up doll.

  I hadn’t wanted to believe that Heather had lied about her relationship with Viktor, even after Alison found the evidence. I’d excused her behavior the way we all do with our friends—brushing away the inconsistencies in character, finding plausibility in the implausible because we want to believe that the people we love are incapable of ugliness. She had to have truly feared Viktor in order to shoot him, that’s what I’d told myself. He’d brutalized her for so long that these particular dates and times that Alison was so hung up about were just that—particulars that didn’t matter.

  Except they weren’t, not when they were attached to these videos. Alison clicked open video after video, going back in time, proving from the dates affixed to each that Heather had been in the relationship for months. Alison was furious, but eager to make a connection between the lies she’d already uncovered and this new information, determinedly checking the dates on each clip.

  I could only stare, fascinated, at the footage of Heather with her lover. Who was so ordinary, so uninteresting, with his over-the-top bed and cheap box of toys. It was like watching a low-budget porno, and after seeing a lot of clips, I thought that was probably exactly what they were. If we searched long enough I was sure we’d probably find some PayPal site set up to commoditize Ray Fortini’s home movies.

  And any attempt to paint Heather as a victim of this second man didn’t work. It was clear that she was a willing and eager participant in this relationship, and I was surprised to realize that I was as much disappointed by the tawdriness of the whole thing as I was by the deceit itself.

  “Look, this one is from September,” Alison said, pausing another video. “See what he’s doing?”

  She’d paused on a frame of Fortini holding Heather’s arms above her head, zooming in on his hands gripping her wrists.

  “I’ve seen more than enough,” I said, turning away. “Just delete them.”

  “This is just before I saw that bruise on her wrist,” Alison said in a low voice. “Jesus, I was so wrong.”

  What was the point in rehashing it? We’d been duped. The whole thing was sickening. “Delete them,” I repeated, going back to finish searching his fire safe for anything else incriminating. “We need to get out of here.”

  “I will in a minute,” Alison said, distracted.

  In the back of the fire safe, in a manila envelope, I found print versions of the photos that Fortini had taken of us, as well as a USB drive. “Look, you were right, the bastard had backups,” I said, taking them to the alcove to show Alison. She had her own phone plugged into the side of his computer. “What are you doing?”

  “Taking some insurance,” Alison said. “If we delete all of this she could just deny knowing him.”

  “You’re copying her sex tapes?”

  “And some of his others,” she said, nodding at the screen, and that’s when I realized that the woman in this one was different.

  Alison said, “Do you suppose Heather knows that he’s done this with a lot of other women?”

  I shouldn’t have been surprised; of course there were others. Men like Fortini never have just one lover if they can manage two or three. Other women, but the same sex acts, the same bad camera angles and centerfold close-ups.

  My phone suddenly rang, startling both of us. “Hello?”

  “Get out now!” Sarah screamed, so loudly that Alison heard her. “He’s chasing me—I need help.”

  Alison yanked the cord from her phone and began hitting keys, windows closing, one after the other, on Fortini’s computer screen, while I said to Sarah, “What happened? Where are you?”

  “I’ve got the phone, but he saw me. I’m hiding in an alley, but he’s looking for me—he’s on his motorcycle.”

  “Oh, shit,” I said, panicking as I watched Alison typing as fast as she could, windows disappearing and new ones reappearing. “Just stay hidden. We’ll be there soon.”

  “Are you kidding me? I need you now!” Sarah cried. I heard a noise in the background, the revving of a motorcycle, and then the line went dead.

  “Sarah?” I t
ried to call her back, but it went straight to voice mail. I grabbed the file with Fortini’s personal information and stuffed it back in the safe, then locked it and shoved it back under the bed. “We have to go,” I said to Alison, “just delete those files.”

  “It’s better if his whole system crashes.” She sounded distracted. I ran the key back to the kitchen, stuffing the drugs and the money back inside the fake head of lettuce and ramming the plastic ball back in the fridge.

  “Are you done?” I called, quickly surveying the apartment. “We need to leave.” I thought I heard an engine in the distance and ran to the window that overlooked the street to check, but I couldn’t see anything.

  “Done!” Alison called from the other room. I ran back to see her powering off the machine.

  “Everything’s erased?”

  “Yes, let’s go.”

  We set the door to lock behind us, clattering down the metal steps as fast as we could, no longer caring if anyone heard us, so anxious to get away that I tripped as we came down the last step, twisting my ankle and falling hard on my right side.

  Alison was trying to help me up when we heard the rumbling noise of a motorcycle and saw a single headlight racing toward us down the street. We couldn’t get across the street to our car without being noticed.

  “This way, quick.” Alison hauled me to my feet, and with her arm under my shoulders she pulled me into a row of scraggly trees and overgrown bushes that ran along the back of the property.

  The engine noise got louder and then the light was coming down the opposite side of the house. I’d forgotten about the parking out back. We pushed farther into the scrub, Alison yelping as she brushed against a prickly bush, both of us trying to hide from the blinding light of Ray Fortini’s Harley.

  The light switched off as the engine stopped, and there was nothing but the silent dark and both of us breathing a little easier. Until we heard the low growl a few feet away. There was a dog chained in the backyard next door. We hadn’t noticed him when we’d gone inside the apartment; maybe he hadn’t noticed us. He saw us now or smelled us, pulling hard against the chain that tethered him; we could hear it slither and clank against the ground. The growl got louder, a sound that made the back of my legs tighten in anticipation of his jaws.

  We couldn’t see Ray Fortini, but we could hear his feet crunching on the gravel driveway. “Shut up, King,” he said, crossing close to the place we were hidden on his way around the side of the house to his apartment. The dog barked, a small yip to start with, as if King were warming up, and then louder and progressively more aggressive. There was a light on the edge of the building and we could see the silhouette of Ray Fortini, shielding his eyes and trying to peer into the trees. We were crouched behind an overgrown evergreen shrub, holding as still as we could, although my ankle was throbbing so much that I rolled forward onto my knees, feeling the ground, hard and icy, beneath my fingers.

  The dog kept barking, we could hear it whipping itself into a frenzy, and we saw Ray Fortini dig in his pocket for something, and we both tensed. I felt Alison’s hand on my arm and thought she was trying to steady me, but then I realized she was scared.

  He stepped forward, out of the light, and we had no idea what he was doing until we spotted a tiny red glow. A cigarette. I could smell it as he stepped closer, and Alison’s hand tightened on my arm. I tried to breathe shallowly and silently, hoping that the dog’s incessant barking would cover any noise we were making.

  “What are you barking at, dumbass?” Fortini’s voice was so close that we could hear his own, heavier breathing as he walked around. Then he drew closer to the dog and said in a softer voice, “Hey, there, buddy, what’s got into you tonight?”

  There was an ominous silence for a moment, but then the crunch of his footsteps again and the tiny red light disappeared around the side of his building. A few seconds later we heard the sound of the metal steps clanging against the brick.

  “C’mon,” Alison said, pulling me by the arm she’d been clutching. “Now’s our chance.”

  We crept out of the bushes and I hobbled after her as fast as I could around the other side of the house and over to our car across the street. I didn’t know if Ray Fortini had gone inside his apartment or whether he was still outside, standing on the landing. I was afraid to look back.

  * * *

  We found Sarah six blocks away, lingering in the back of an all-night Laundromat. She’d taken the wig off and was carrying it like a long, hairy purse. Her real hair looked matted and her makeup smeared. She’d taken her heels off, too, and was massaging one bruised foot as we pulled up. “Why did you come here?” I asked as she hobbled into the car.

  “Having other people around seemed safer.” She handed over the phone she’d taken from Fortini and we pulled over so Alison could clear all the data from it.

  “Maybe we should drop it back off at the bar?” Sarah said. “What if he reports it stolen?”

  “We can let Heather return it to him,” Alison said darkly.

  “What does that mean?”

  “He’s her lover,” Alison told her, and Sarah responded to the details first with shock and then with fury.

  “We should go to her house and confront her,” she began angrily, but stopped short, digging in her purse for her phone. “I forgot—she’s not at her house, she’s at the hospital.”

  She told us about the miscarriage and I couldn’t help it, I felt the anger over Heather’s betrayal tempered by sadness.

  “Where is she?” Alison said. “Text her and say we’re coming.”

  We drove to Sewickley Valley Hospital, and I don’t know about the others, but I felt shaky. I had been in the ER only once before, when Owen broke his arm in first grade, and I hadn’t remembered it as so busy and chaotic, but maybe that was because I’d been there on a weekday morning and now it was after nine at night. As we came through the sliding doors we could hear a child screaming. It was jarring, an old woman groaning in pain as her middle-aged daughter fussed over her, a man wearing a dazed expression and holding an ice pack against his head, and a teenage mother, heavy black eyeliner smeared, trying to hush a screaming, red-faced toddler. Sarah led the way to the front desk, where a harried-looking woman sat wearing a lab coat over a Penguins jersey. She had a phone against her ear as she typed away on a computer keyboard, eyes fixed on the monitor. We stood there, the child howling behind us, as the woman said, “Yes, they’ve been moved upstairs.” She hung up and shifted one hand from her keyboard to tap a clipboard on top of the desk without making eye contact. “Just sign in and we’ll call you back in a few minutes.”

  “We need to see—” Sarah began.

  “Just sign in,” the woman repeated in a louder voice, whapping the clipboard harder. I would have just done it at that point, but I wasn’t Sarah.

  “We’re not patients,” she said. “We’re here to see Heather Lysenko.”

  The woman looked up then, clearly annoyed, but all she said was, “Spell the last name.”

  Sarah rattled it off and the woman typed it in, frowning at the screen and moving the mouse for a moment with beringed fingers, before jerking a thumb toward the doors. “She’s still here. Through those doors and down on the left.”

  The child’s howling seemed to intensify as we passed through the heavy doors, but when they closed behind us the noise faded, replaced by beeps of various machines and the rapid footsteps of doctors and nurses hustling past us on the shiny linoleum floors. I’ve never liked hospitals, with their strong disinfectant and rubbing-alcohol scents that can never fully cover the smell of blood and disease. I tried to avoid touching anything as we walked past empty or curtained beds. A nurse in a purple smock stopped us. “Who are you looking for?”

  “Heather Lysenko?” Alison said, and the woman led us down the row to the one bed whose curtains were completely closed. She pulled it back just enough to poke her head around and said, “There are some people here for you, Mrs. Lysenko.”

&nbs
p; We heard Heather say, “Okay,” in a low voice, and I felt a tug at my heartstrings. She sounded sad and exhausted. The nurse stepped aside to let us through, briskly pulling the curtain closed again around us. Heather lay on the bed wearing one of those horrible hospital gowns, tightly clutching the thin sheets and blanket covering her lower half. Her face relaxed when she saw us. “Thank God,” she whispered. “I thought you were the police. They’re the ones who brought me here.”

  “Sarah told us,” I said. “We’re so sorry about the, well, the baby.” I felt awkward, and Alison and Sarah sounded equally awkward as they echoed me.

  “She’s gone,” Heather said, tears filling her eyes. “I thought the bleeding would stop, but she’s gone.” A sob escaped and she pressed a shaking hand to her mouth, but the tears spilled over. I turned to Alison to whisper that this could wait, surely a day wouldn’t matter, but Sarah spoke before I got the chance. “Viktor wasn’t the father, right?”

  Typical Sarah—abrasive and straight to the point. Heather looked as stunned as I felt. Through her tears she said, “What are you talking about?”

  “He couldn’t be because he had a vasectomy, didn’t he?”

  “Really?” I said as Alison said, “What?”

  Heather’s already pale skin blanched and she tried to hide her reaction, bringing her hands up to cover her impossibly beautiful face. Perhaps she thought we’d stop Sarah, but nobody did.

  “So who’s the father? Ray Fortini?” she said.

  Heather’s gasp was muffled, but we heard it. She tried to cover it with a cough, before saying, “Who?”

  Sarah snorted. “Nice try, but it’s too late to lie to us.”

  The sudden churn of a motor made three of us jump, but it was only Heather raising the bed. She repeatedly jabbed the button on the bed’s remote control, struggling upright with it, swiping at her face.