by Evelyn Glass
“The fuckin’ bastard wants to make me a fall guy. Is that it?”
“Could be.” Nate nods. “Could very well be that. There was also something that I found odd, since in all my intelligence there was no sign of it. Did you know that Julian, the Capo, was found dead in the same room as the men dressed in black, the kidnappers?”
“That’s fuckin’ impossible,” Chance says. “That just ain’t possible, Nate. I was there. I was fuckin’ there and I saw everybody in that room. There was fuck all to see, when you get down to it. A desk, a chair, a cell, some chains. Where the fuck was Julian meant to be, under the floorboards? Nah, so Giovanni had one of those fuckin’ ass-lickin’ bastards drag his corpse in after I left so that the Family and the police would get onto me? Is that it? But then who the fuck killed Julian? Julian was a Capo, a made goddamn guy. Why would Giovanni have him killed? Power, maybe? Money? It’s always one of ’em, in my experience. But why set me up? Why not just clip him and be done with it?”
Chance rises to his feet and begins pacing up and down the room, fists hanging at his sides, looking like an angry animal, jaw clenched, arms twitching like he wishes Giovanni was here in front of him right now.
“Becky,” Nate says. “You might want to know that your father was the one who moved Julian’s body into the warehouse. My contacts are telling me it was a show-your-loyalty situation, since Julian was going to be your husband, wasn’t he?”
“Husband,” I repeat, the word a curse when I say it. “No, never. That fat old man was never going to be my husband. But Dad…”
“Don’t worry on that,” Chance says bitterly. “Your dad looked me in the face when I was a kid and told me to go fuck myself. Now I’m a man he wants to send me to the dirt or to the slammer then the dirt. Guess that look in my eyes was somethin’ he really didn’t fuckin’ like, eh?”
I stand up and go to him, but he takes a step back, shaking his head.
“Chance,” I say. “I’ll go to the police and tell them everything, tell them you didn’t kidnap me, and then I’ll go to Dad and get him to tell Giovanni that this is all a big misunderstanding.” Lowering my voice, I go on: “I’ll tell Dad I’m pregnant. I’ll tell him he’s going to hurt the father of my child. He’ll understand. He’ll forgive, when he knows he has a grandchild on the way.”
“Stop bein’ so fuckin’ trusting!” Chance roars, slamming his fist into his chest, looking three times his regular size as he looms over me. He stands there, panting, and then takes a step back. “Bein’ so damned trusting is what got you kidnapped in the first place. Everyone’s an enemy, Becky, every damn person on this planet is an enemy until they prove themselves a friend. It ain’t the other way around, like you’d have it. You think like that, you don’t live very long. Grow up. The world’s a darker place’n you think.”
He stops, breathing heavily, gazing down at me with an expression I find difficult to read. It’s like he’s angry with me, but not because of anything I’ve done. Angry with me because of who I am, maybe, angry with me for being the silly girl who decided to stay in snow-cold New York instead of fleeing to sun-warm California with my mother, the silly girl who thought she could fix the man who tried to sell her like a pet. But if I’m that sort of woman, I’m also the sort of woman who tries with men like you, I want to say. But I realize I’m crying, choking back sobs, tears sliding down my cheeks. I want to scream at him, to bash my hands against his chest, but part of me knows he’s right. Of course he’s right. I was kidnapped. But that doesn’t mean I should let that experience rob me of all hope, of all empathy. That doesn’t mean I should let that experience make me cold, mean, miserable.
I turn away, back to him, and collect myself, trying to fight away the tears. I don’t want to cry. I don’t want to be weak.
Nate clears his throat. “I think I need a glass of water. I’ll leave you to it, guys.”
He leaves the room. After a few moments, Chance walks up behind me. I hear the floorboards creaking where he rocks back and forth on his feet, unsure of where to go, what to do. I know it’s hard for him in situations like this. But then, he shouldn’t have shouted at me like that.
“I was only trying to help,” I tell him, once the tears are no longer welling in my eyes. “That was all, Chance. I was just trying to find a way to help you. I want you to be safe. I want everything to be okay. That’s it. That’s all I want.”
“There’s a way to end this,” Chance says. “But it means we’ll never see each other again.”
The words shock me so much, I turn swiftly on him. “What do you mean?” I demand.
“I’m trouble for you, Becky,” Chance says. “I don’t reckon a man like me can keep a woman like you, not forever, not like you might want it. I reckon the only way to end this is for me to leave. Then you can go to the police, to your dad, and tell ’em whatever you want. But if you go to ’em with me at your side, I’m gonna end up dead. The cops, Giovanni, Julian…somebody’s gunnin’ for me. Might be your old man, might be the Boss, might be some player we don’t know about. But it all amounts to the same thing for us. We can’t be together.”
“No!” I snap. I place my hands on his shoulders, as I’ve done many times whilst we’ve been having sex, so much so that when he’s naked I can see my nail gouges in his skin. “You’re the father of my child, Chance. We have to stay together, no matter what. And—” I pause, wondering if this will be going too far, but then I reflect that if there was ever a time to be honest, it’s when he’s threatening to leave me. “And I think I love you, Chance. When I think of being apart from you, I get a pain in my chest, a real, physical pain, and when I think about our child growing up and not knowing who his or her daddy is—”
Chance lifts up his shirt, showing me his scarred-covered belly. Turning in a slow circle so I can see the scars on his back, too, he says, “Do you reckon a man like this can ever be a daddy, Becky? Do you really think any kid deserves to have a hunk of scars for a father? Nah, you’d be better off goin’ back and findin’ someone else, someone who with a well-to-do job like, I dunno, like a fuckin’ accountant or something, something where blood and bone plays no part in it. That’d be the smart thing.”
“I don’t want the smart thing. I want you.”
He offers me his small half-smile at that, but doesn’t reply. “We better get some sleep. We can talk over all this in the mornin’, make sense of it then when it’s had time to get through this thick skull.” He taps his forehead. “Goddamn, Becky, you’ve got magical powers to make me look forward to goin’ to bed and holdin’ you. Do you remember what I was when I found you at the warehouse?” He calls through to the kitchen, where Nate is pouring, draining, and re-pouring a glass of water: “We’re gonna hit the sack, Nate. We’ve got a lot of shit to think about. We’ll talk more in the mornin’, alright?”
“Okay, works for me, guys!” Nate calls back.
We go into the bedroom, the heating blasting into the air, and together lie down on the bed. We don’t undress. I think we’re both too tired for that. I didn’t realize just how exhausted I was until I lay my head on the pillow. Now, I close my eyes and nuzzle into Chance, listening to the sound of his breathing.
“It’s okay,” Chance says, stroking my head. “It’s all gonna be okay, Becky. You’ll see. Life has a way of workin’ itself out sometimes. I reckon in the mornin’ everything’s gonna seem way better.”
“Yeah,” I whisper, sleep taking me.
It feels like I sleep for a matter of seconds, but when I open my eyes, murky sunlight is resting on my face. I sit up, eyes still closed, stretching my arms out, working the sleep out of my joints. “Morning,” I say, reaching across the bed for Chance.
But my hand grips a handful of sheets and nothing else.
“Chance?”
I’m on my feet, rushing through the apartment. The living room, the kitchen, empty…I rush through into Nate’s bedroom. He jumps up, leaping across the room, kicking over a tray of hard drives
.
“Where’s Chance?”
“He went last night, after you fell asleep,” Nate says, relaxing when he sees it’s me. “Said he’d told you. Said you were okay with it. He said you agreed that it was better this way.”
I leave the room, head pounding, heart pounding, pulse pounding in my hands. Somehow, I make it to the landline phone. Somehow, I manage to dial my dad’s number. Somehow, I manage to say, “Dad, I’m coming home.”
Chapter Twenty
Becky
Winter turns to spring and life goes on. It’s odd, because I was so obsessed with Chance that I assumed life would just end if we were ever parted. Life became that motel room, life became touching each other, life became holding each other close. Life became waiting for him to look into my eyes, just once, or to make love to me instead of fuck me, or to whisper my name, or to put his hand on my belly and tell me he can’t wait to meet our child. Life became the expectations of our shared future. Life became his lips, his scars, his blue-flecked eyes. And now life just goes on, on and on, as though time hates me and wants to punish me. Life doesn’t stop. It’s too cruel for that. It never stops.
I move back into the apartment with Dad and to say things are awkward would be like saying that balancing on a tightrope is difficult. I find myself resenting him like I never have before. And this resentment is compounded by the guilt I feel about it, guilt which I should not feel, guilt which I have no business feeling. He tried to sell me, he’s partly the reason I was kidnapped, and yet I still can’t distance myself from him completely. I still find myself thinking: But he’s my dad. It makes me sick. It annoys the hell out of me. So I bunker myself in my room, laying down newspapers and setting up my easel and painting. The police asked few questions when I returned, even when I told them Chance was innocent, he never hurt me. They didn’t care. All they cared about was a news article and a flashy headline: Aspiring Artist Found Safe.
“You shouldn’t say that he was nice to you,” Dad says to me one day, when we happen to both be in the living room. I was here first, watching a reality show, and he barged in and sat down and for several minutes we just sit here, awkwardly, until he comes out with this, in a gruff, grizzly voice. A drunk man’s voice. “It makes people think the wrong thing,” he goes on. “It makes people think that you went with him willingly and that you—that you did things with him or somethin’. It makes people get the wrong idea.”
“I don’t care what it makes people,” I say. “I don’t give a shit about what people think.”
“Watch your language!” Dad snaps. “Look, I know you might still be mad at me for arranging yours and Julian’s marriage, but you need to understand that Julian would’ve been a very good match for you. He was rich, he had connections, he was—”
“A perverted old man who gave me to a group of men to be gang-raped.”
“Now, Becky, how was I supposed to know—”
“You weren’t supposed to sell me in the first place!” I scream at him, waving my arms, feeling like a madwoman in a topsy-turvy world. “Let’s not pretend that you tried to sell me to an old man out of any concern about me, Dad. You tried to sell me because you’re weak and couldn’t walk away from the blackjack table!”
At some point during my speech, I’ve climbed to my feet. Now, I’m standing over him, looking down into his red-cheeked face, his eyes bloodshot, his skin sagging. And even now, in the midst of my anger, I can see the good man in there. I see the man who used to sit me on his knee and read me stories about foxes and rabbits and I see the man who several times during my childhood would come home and cry in the bathroom when he thought nobody could hear him, cry about what his work made him do. I see the man who bought me my first painting set when I came home from school one day with my fingertips covered in blue.
Turning away, I head toward my bedroom. “As soon as I save enough money,” I say, “I’m getting my own place. I can’t live here anymore, not when you won’t even admit what you did was wrong.”
“It was wrong,” he whispers.
I pause at my door, half-turn back to him. “What did you say?”
“It was wrong,” he repeats.
I turn all the way. Tears are sliding down his cheeks, I see, his jowly, fleshy cheeks. My heart breaks a little, even more than it’s already broken from Chance’s long absence. “Of course it was wrong,” he goes on. “All of it’s wrong. The whole damned thing is wrong. I’m—I was a fuckin’ animal selling you to that man, if you want the truth. And I was a fuckin’ asshole for getting into the debt to begin with. And I was a fuckin’ asshole for getting into a situation where men like Julian and Giovanni have power over me. But it’s too late now…” His eyes begin to close and I realize he’s drunk, just drunk, and he may not remember this admission in the morning. “It’s too late…”
His chin rests on his chest and he begins to snore.
I go into my bedroom—paintings from when I was a kid and teenager on one wall, a trophy from a Spelling Bee resting on a cabinet, the bookshelf with old American literature and Harry Potter books resting on it, dusty now from long disuse—and walk to my easel. Sitting on the stool, I feel my ass hurting more than usual. I’ve been pregnant three months and I’ve managed to hide it from Dad and Mom. Mom is easy, since we ever only speak on the phone, but with Dad I’ve had to make sure to wear baggy clothes, even going to the store to buy a load of loose T-shirts with the excuse that I need them for painting. But just how long can I go on like this, pretending the baby doesn’t exist? Just how long can I keep up the charade? Pretty soon my bump is going to grow bigger and bigger until it is so big there will be nothing I can do to hide it. Pretty soon Dad is going to find out. And then what? Hopefully I’ll have my own apartment by then. But that means getting a new job, which I’ll have to do quickly if I don’t want the interviewer to see me as a baby bomb waiting to go off. That’s a depressing thought, but one I have to think about.
I paint for around an hour. Lately, almost subconsciously, I’ve been painting Chance over and over, only it’s not Chance, not exactly. It’s more like how I see Chance when I close my eyes, depending on my mood. So one day I’ll paint a giant, dark-eyed, blue-furred wolf standing atop a knife-shaped mountain, howling into a moon so full that it blots out the stars. Another day I’ll paint a barbarian, knuckle-dusters made of bone gripped in his hands, growling at me, scarred chest bare. Another day I’ll paint a gentleman in a suit looking lovingly into my eyes. I ache for him as I paint, my pussy burning, my chest tight with longing. Going from almost two months of constant contact, touching, rubbing, writhing, explosive orgasms triggering repeatedly inside of me, to sitting here imagining what it would be like to be with him again is agony. When I’m done painting, I’ll often sit stone-still and imagine that Chance is behind me, that any moment now he’ll lean down and place his hands on my shoulder, whispering in my ear, “I love you,” or, “I’ll always be here for you.” And even if I know he would never say anything like that, it doesn’t change how warm it makes me feel.
I love him, I love him, I love him.
I try to tell myself otherwise. Lying awake at night, alone, lonely, wishing that he was beside me, I try and lie to myself, reasoning that I’m only attached to him because he kept me so close to him, or because he saved me from those wicked men, or because he was so sexy, so wild. But I know that, though all of that is a part of it, it’s more than that, too. It’s much more than that. I’ve never believed in souls, but now I find myself thinking if maybe there’s something in it after all, if Chance and I have a connection that goes beyond reason. Then I laugh at myself, because that sounds like mumbo jumbo. Really, it just comes down to one simple fact: when I awake alone at night, I would give anything for him to be beside me.
I’m going over all this, paintbrush hovering near the paper, when my cell starts to ring. It’s the new Taylor Swift song I assigned to Mom, so I know who it is before I answer. Which is good, otherwise her chirpy voice might surprise me
as it squeaks through the speakers.
“Hey, honey!” Mom is strange, the only woman I’ve met who can sound chirpy and worried at the same time. When she’s concerned or worried—like she sounds now—I often think of a chipmunk returning from a run to find that all her nuts have been stolen. “Just thought I’d check in on you.”
“You’ve been doing that a lot lately,” I say.
“I’m worried!”
I go to the bed and lie down, having to maneuver more than before to make up for my belly. Three months, and already I have to account for it. How the hell am I going to move at eight months? Staring up at the ceiling, which is still patchy with colors from where I tried to do my own version of the Sistine Chapel as a kid, I wait for Mom to come out with it.
“So, how’s your father doing?”
She’s been calling more and more this past month, always with that same question, as though I’m not her daughter but a spy employed for the sole reason of checking up on Dad.
“Mom,” I say. “I know you still care about him, but—”
