“Come on Dee!” Rod says in a frustrated tone. “You don’t think me getting shot was an accident do you?”
Something doesn’t feel right about this conversation. I mean this is Rod talking to me, and he’s never kept this many secrets. Or at least I never thought he did.
Then, it hits me. I know what doesn’t feel right about this.
“Rod, do you really have amnesia?” I ask, fearing the answer.
There is a long silence. Rod stares forward into the dark of our bedroom, and I hold my belly as the baby kicks. His lack of response tells me everything I need to know, but I won’t believe it yet. Not until he says it.
“Rod?”
“I don’t,” Rod finally says. “Never did.”
“Why would Lucas lie about the diagnosis?”
“He didn’t. My injuries supported me having amnesia.”
“So all this time…”
“Yes. I’ve been faking amnesia.”
I choke back tears. “Do you really still love Peach? Is that why you’re paying her a monthly stipend in addition to her child support?”
“How do you know about that?”
“I think you should probably answer my questions, because I’m getting real impatient, Rod.”
“No. I don’t love Peach. I think she was somehow tied to my shooting, but I can’t be sure.”
I think Rod is wrong. I saw Peach in the Emergency Room when they didn’t know if Rod was going to live or die. Her grief was real.
“Why the extra money then?”
“Because Peach knows things that could land me in prison for the rest of my life.”
“So you only stayed with me to protect your amnesia cover story?”
Rod clears his throat. “That’s not the only reason, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t part of it.”
I scramble out of the bed and put on my robe. There is no way I’m sharing a bed with him. Our fresh start is a lie. Everything about Rod is a lie. But then I knew this when I found out about Peach and Rodeisha in the first place.
“Where are you going?” Rod asks.
“To one of the guest bedrooms. I’m not sleeping with you.”
He shakes his head. “No. You stay. Let me go. I want you to be comfortable. No matter what, I do love you Dionne.”
“Your actions prove otherwise. Men who love their wives don’t plan to leave them for the sideline hoe, until the sideline hoe gets them shot.”
“You don’t think I used this whole thing as a second chance for us too? We haven’t been right in a long time, but we used to be.”
“I gotta admit, you tricked me, Rod. I did think this was a second start for us, but I’ve been wrong about everything.”
Rod looks at me with sad eyes as he takes his favorite pillow and gets out of the bed. I wish my grandmothers hadn’t prayed for him. They’re probably the reason he’s still here. He’s here and he’s hurting me every chance he gets. I think I need to have someone pray for me.
Chapter Thirteen
Sydney
Lucas and I are working the night shift, and this time it’s my turn to comfort him. Less than an hour ago, Jewel died in her sleep from a brain bleed. Of course, Lucas is blaming himself and wondering if he missed something during her surgery. It’s always rough on him when he loses a patient. My man thinks he’s a superhero.
“Baby, it’s not your fault she injected that stuff into her booty. God rest her soul. You did everything you could.”
Lucas shakes his head and paces the on-call room. “No. I should’ve done another CAT scan after surgery. I didn’t double check. I didn’t make sure.”
I hate that Lucas is here blaming himself for this, especially since the police have yet to apprehend that Keke person. She should be the one carrying this load of guilt. She killed Jewel.
I take his Lucas’s hand and pull him down next to me on the bench. “Lucas. You know we can’t save them all.”
He exhales deeply and sighs. “We can’t. What about your patient, Stephanie? When are you operating on her?”
“Tomorrow. I was waiting for her to respond to the antibiotics. I think it’s safe to operate.”
Lucas puts one hand on my knee and squeezes. “I know you can’t stand Fatima. I understand, and no one could expect you to like her, but for Stephanie’s sake, can you please let her scrub in?”
I pull my bottom lip in and flare my nostrils. He’s right and I know he’s right, but the thought of Fatima in the same space as me, and breathing the same air – I just don’t know if I can take it.
“I’ll scrub in too,” Lucas says. “You won’t have to be in there alone.”
“You don’t think I can handle a surgery with Fatima?”
“I think you can, but just in case she says anything to you to hurt you, I want to be there. I’m not going to let her hurt you anymore.”
I love Lucas’s words, but while Fatima did hurt me, the majority of my pain was from how he made me feel. But I do like that he wants me protected and safe. I want to feel that way.
“Thank you, babe,” I say.
My pager buzzes. I reach down and read it. Dang. Stephanie just coded.
“Looks like we’re gonna have to operate sooner rather than later,” I say. “Stephanie coded. Is Fatima in the hospital?”
“I think so,” Lucas says.
“Go find her. I’m booking OR 3. See you in there.”
I rush out of the on call room and to the nurses’ station. Jillian is there, flipping through a chart, I’m assuming it’s Stephanie’s.
“What’s going on? Why aren’t you with her?” I ask.
“I was coming to find you. We need to operate. I think some more of the silicone migrated to her lungs. Chest sounds are not good.
I nod as I take the chart from her hands. “We’ve got to get that poison out of her. Come on.”
Jillian and I rush Stephanie to the operating room, with an anesthesiologist running behind us. I hand him the chart so he can read it by the time we get to the OR.
The anesthesiologist, Dr. Brennan, and I hurry to scrub in as the operating room nurses prepare Stephanie for surgery. Fatima and Lucas are already scrubbing in.
“I’m glad you decided to do the right thing,” Fatima says.
She storms into the operating room in a huff, with Dr. Brennan right behind her. Lucas shakes his head and frowns.
“Did she really just say that to me right before I’m about to operate?” I ask.
“Yeah, she did. It’s all good. Come on. Let’s not lose this one.”
The most recent scans that Jillian ordered right after Stephanie coded show exactly what I thought they would. She’s got another blood clot in her lungs. This one is huge.
“Let’s get this clot first, and then we can get the silicone deposits.”
“You’re gonna cut her chest open and then flip her on her stomach to get the silicone?” Fatima asks. “I think you should remove the silicone first. She’s stable. That clot can wait a bit.”
I consider this for a moment. “No. We can use laparoscopic surgery to get the clot. If we don’t crack her chest open, we shouldn’t have a problem going in near the base of her spine to get the silicone.”
“Okay. That sounds good,” Fatima says to my surprise. Maybe she’s not just here to contradict everything I have to say.
“I want her to live,” Fatima says as if she read my mind. “This is a senseless reason to die.”
We work together feverishly on Stephanie. First, Lucas and I remove the clot. He’s got the steadiest hands in the hospital, so it makes sense for him to do it. Then, Fatima and I meticulously remove the silicone lumps. Some of them have adhered to muscle and fat, so it is a tedious process. The silicone remaining in her buttocks is the hardest to remove. The pieces that have hardened are easy but the gel substance is difficult to grasp with our tools. I suction some out with a mini-vacuum while Fatima uses a scraping motion to remove the pieces that have attached to the underlying ski
n tissue.
After three hours of work, the plastic surgeon comes in and does the best he can to reconstruct Stephanie’s buttocks. Even if he does his best work tonight, Stephanie is going to need skin grafts and several reconstructive surgeries before she looks “normal” again. She probably looked just fine before this surgery and now her young body is mutilated.
I don’t feel comfortable until Stephanie is stitched up and she’s being wheeled to recovery. It’s then that I realize how tired I am. I feel a crash coming on.
“Good job Sydney,” Lucas says. “You were amazing.”
“Thank you Dr. Jeffries,” I reply with a wink. “You are pretty amazing yourself.”
Fatima makes a gagging noise and goes to the sink to wash her hands and remove her scrubs. Lucas and I do the same.
I stand next to Fatima at the sink and we wash our hands in silence. It is an awkward silence, because I think both of us want to say something.
“Thanks for your help,” I say, deciding to be the adult. “That was a pretty complex surgery.”
“You’re welcome. I don’t know if we got all of the silicone, but I don’t know that anyone could’ve.”
Lucas pulls off his gloves and stands next to me at the sink. “No one could’ve gotten it all. I think you all saved her life.”
“We all did,” I say.
Fatima chuckles. “We make a pretty awesome threesome.”
Crickets. Dead silence. Like really, Fatima? Really?
“Okay, it was a bad joke,” Fatima says. “But I do like working with y’all. Looking forward to being in surgery with you both again.”
Fatima dries her hands and leaves me and Lucas at the sink. He lifts his eyebrows and smiles.
“Threesome?”
I narrow my eyes at him and growl. “Don’t even think about it.”
Chapter Fourteen
Camille
“Do you think you can help me…be happy?”
Dr. King taps her ink pen on the side of her journal, as I ease back onto the couch. There, I said it. I hope she can help me.
Because I think, Lord help me, that I might kill Bryan if he tries to sell my house.
“Happiness means different things to different people, Camille. What does happiness mean to you?”
I breathe deeply and carefully choose my response. “It means that I can have what God wants me to have. It means me doing exactly what I’m on this earth to do, and enjoying my life.”
“And what’s keeping you from that now?”
“Rules. My husband and his rules. He feels that God has empowered him to be the priest of our home, which I don’t disagree with, but he thinks that means he has absolute power over me.”
“Is this new? Has Bryan always acted like that? Was he like that before you married him?”
Dr. King’s questions feel like an attack. A flurry of things that I haven’t thought of before.
“Bryan hasn’t always been this way. He just started this when I had my…um…legal troubles.”
“So his reaction was to come up with rules.”
I nod. “He’s acting like I’m a child that needs punishing. I am not a child.”
“You’re not. Tell me, what are you on this earth to do?” Dr. King asks.
I look at the floor and then up again. “I-I don’t know.”
“Since happiness to you means walking in your purpose, then you’ll need to discover that. I can’t tell you that.”
“I see.”
“Or when you say, ‘doing exactly what I’m on this earth to do’, are you just repeating things you’ve heard in a sermon or at a women’s conference?”
I clear my throat and frown. “It sounds right, doesn’t it?”
“It does, but I want it to be more than just words for you.”
“Are you happy, Dr. King?”
She nods. “Today, I am, but not every day. Sometimes I am sad and frustrated. Sometimes my spirit is restless.”
Well, I need a new therapist then. If she’s not happy, how in the world is she going to guide me?
“Maybe it’s Bryan. Maybe I don’t want to be married to him anymore. He seems to hate me anyway. He called me manipulative and deceptive right to my face and then read the definitions out the dictionary like I didn’t know what those words meant.”
Dr. King frowns. “I don’t like that. If I may be frank, it sounds like emotional abuse.”
Finally, she’s starting to understand where I’m coming from. At first, I thought she was on Bryan’s side.
“It felt like abuse when he said it.”
“Did you tell him as much?”
“Oh no. I don’t like arguing with him. I usually let the Lord fight my battles when it comes to Bryan, but he said that he was putting our house on the market. I love my house. I don’t want to sell it.”
For some reason I’m spilling my guts to Dr. King. I didn’t have to tell her about him selling the house, but I need her to understand why Bryan is on my nerves so much.
Dr. King taps her pen on the notebook again and then scribbles down a few words. “And you stated your objection to selling the home? Did he provide you with any alternatives?”
“No.”
“Do you think there are any options that you’d share with Bryan?”
“Yes. I would like to get a different job, outside of the church. I think if I make more money we can keep the house.”
“But you don’t think your husband will like this?”
“I don’t think he’ll let me. Even though we don’t make a lot of money, Bryan thinks we’re called to be in ministry.”
Dr. King gets up and walks over to the stove and puts on a pot of water. “Remember the first day you were here and we talked about choices?”
“Yes.”
“It wasn’t just about the questionable choices you’ve made in the past, but it’s about the choices you’re going to make for your future as well.”
“So are you telling me to get a different job?”
She smiles. “I’m telling you to make a choice about your future.”
I like the way Dr. King never comes out and tells me to do anything. She doesn’t judge either. But I need her to tell me what to do. I don’t know how to choose. Bingo made me happy, especially when I won. And everyone thinks that’s all wrong.
Dr. King walks over with a cup of tea and hands it to me. “Happiness is a product of your situation and environment,” she says. “Joy is a fruit of the Holy Spirit. What you want, Carmen, is joy. Joy doesn’t disappear when you go through a valley.”
“Is that what this is? A valley?”
Dr. King nods. “I think so. A temporary place.”
I sit back on the couch and slowly sip my tea. Are my problems with Bryan only temporary? I would like to think that they are, but every day I find myself thinking about making a permanent solution. Walking away from it all.
Maybe then I’ll discover this joy that Dr. King is talking about.
Chapter Fifteen
Dionne
Hailey and I are nearly done with the preparations for my all-white baby shower/New Year’s party. Honestly, when you have as many millions as we have, it’s pretty easy to put on a star studded affair. You just pick up the phone and people start scrambling.
If it wasn’t for Hailey and my sisters I wouldn’t be in a party mood at all. I haven’t said a word to Rod all day, since his revelations from last night. He doesn’t have amnesia. Never did. How can I believe anything he says?
“Is the photo where you want it ma’am?”
I gaze at the larger-than-life photograph of our “family”. In the photo Rod stands behind me with his arms wrapped around my belly, and Rodeisha is in front of me holding her daddy’s hand with a huge smile on her face. Because Rodeisha looks just like Rod, she doesn’t look out of place at all. The photo looks like love.
And it’s all a lie.
When I don’t reply to the worker, Hailey says, “It’s fine. Thank you.”
Hailey pulls me into my serenity room, and as soon as she closes the door, my shoulders start to shake. She hugs me.
“Honey, what’s wrong? Your party is tomorrow night! We can’t have a hormonal breakdown.”
“It’s not hormonal. It’s Rod. He doesn’t have amnesia.”
Her eyes widen. “Is he still talking about leaving you?”
“No, but it just felt so much better to think he’d forgotten everything that went on with Peach. If he could forget, then I could. He was planning to leave me. What if he loved her? What if that hasn’t gone?”
Hailey strokes my back softly. It does little to comfort me.
“Just be glad you’ve got this baby on the way. And with his indiscretions, he’ll have to pay you very handsomely in alimony and child support. Let him leave. But enjoy this moment. Today, you are still A-list, and that tramp is still a jump-off and a hoe.”
“I just want to know what she has on him. I know it’s more than that fake booty. When he talks about her it’s almost as if he thinks his hands are tied. Why would he feel that way?”
“You’re thinking too hard, girl! We know exactly what we’re getting ourselves into when we marry rich men.”
Hailey cannot speak for me. She married a rich man, I didn’t. I married an up and coming producer. True enough I will be financially set if he does decide to leave me now, that’s not the way I wanted my marriage or my life to turn out. I actually love my man.
Plus, I don’t just want a cash settlement. I look over at the stack of gifts piled on the table in our grand parlor. Gifts from artists and celebrities all over the world who respect and have love for Rod. I want the life. I want the connections. I want the accolades.
“Shoot, if I were you and my husband was leaving, I’d take that settlement and start my own thing. What do you know how to do?” Hailey asks.
I laugh out loud. “Plan parties and vacations.”
“You think that’s nothing? Humph. I’m thinking A-list Events by Dionne Knight has a nice ring to it. Think about it, you won’t even have to invest too much into marketing. You’ve got everyone’s name and number in your phone.”
More Lies and Alibis (Using Lies as Alibis #2) Page 7
