by CD Reiss
“I’m sorry,” Jessica said, “I can’t hear you?”
I looked back at her, finding the tears of a minute ago were still available. I blinked them out, and they dropped like stars.
“Does he choke you, Monica?”
I nodded.
“He does? He chokes you?”
I shook my head. She looked confused. I cleared my throat and eyed my bag. “I think I should go.”
“He choked me,” she said. “I had bruises just like yours. I thought I was going to die. That’s the turn-on for these men. Watching your pain and fear.”
“These? Bruises like these?” I said, touching my neck.
“Yes.”
“I fell down a hill.”
“You don’t have to lie to protect him. I’ve been in your shoes.”
I squeezed her hand. Her French manicure was perfect on all of her fingers but the right thumb, which was cracked. “Can I have a glass of water?”
“Sure.” She craned her neck to see in the house. “She’s gone to bed. God. Couldn’t wait another half an hour.” She slid the manila envelope from under her phone and handed it to me. “This is for you. There’s nothing in there Jonathan doesn’t know, and it’s everything he won’t tell you. I know everything, and that scares him.” She patted my head as if I was a terrier. “Do you want ice?”
“Yes, please.”
She squeezed my hand one last time and got up, closing the door behind her.
The temptation to open the envelope was intense, but I had very little time. I hugged it to my chest, unopened, and snatched Jessica’s phone. I slipped through the sliding glass doors and out the front. The phone was recording a voice memo. I shut it down as soon as I hit the street. If she tried to chase me, she’d be looking for my car. I still walked behind hedges and in the darkest parts of the street until I got to the Jag. I sped away as fast as the car and common sense allowed.
On the drive home, I considered that I’d done something really stupid. I didn’t know which stupid thing I’d done. A string of things had seemed right at the time and could still be right. The phone, which wasn’t getting signal and would be untrackable until it was turned on again, frowned at me like a hostage. I could turn it on and quickly put it into airplane mode. I could pop the SIM card. I could hear everything if I really wanted to.
“Fuck off,” I said to the black rectangle on the passenger seat. “You’re full of shit.”
I giggled at my double entendre that recognized the recording of Jonathan’s spanking was inside. Then I laughed because my brain emptied of everything but the one thing that mattered. I trusted him. He hadn’t earned it and he certainly had pushed my limits, but deep in my heart, I didn’t need to hear the recording. I believed him. I always had.
When I realized I was going ninety-five, I pulled over. I rubbed the tears from my eyes, got my breathing to a normal rate, and turned on the overhead light. Once I got back, I wouldn’t be able to open the envelope because Jonathan would be there. Whatever was in there needed to be read furtively, in the dark of night, alone. It would be evil and ugly, written with the silk of a spider’s web.
twenty-three
My feet dragged up the steps, boots clopping on the wood. I was fucking tired. I should never stay up late the night before any meeting, but especially not that meeting. I was going to crawl under the sheets with Jonathan, curl up next to his beautiful, warm body, and sleep.
Except he was sitting on the porch. He did not look happy.
His jacket was slung over the back of the porch swing. He wore his pants, fastened, his shirt, unbuttoned thrice, and his shoes. The shoes bothered me. He could walk away any second. He held out his hand. I dropped his car keys in it.
“I shouldn’t have to tell you,” he said, “but don’t do that again.”
“Do what? Steal the car? Or drug you?”
“See my ex-wife.”
“That’s the one thing I won’t apologize for.”
I put the envelope and phone next to him then leaned on the porch railing. He didn’t even look at them but kept his eyes on mine and his foot braced on the table in front of him. We regarded each other in silence for a second.
“Have you put the starter back in my car?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“I’ll get over there later.”
“Lil will take you.”
“I’ll take the bus,” I said.
“No, you won’t.”
“Go to hell, Jonathan.”
“I should go to hell? I? Me? I should go to hell?”
“Yes, you. You have felony charges against you, and you spend all your time finding ways to keep me from helping you. What was your plan for dealing with her? You gonna just let her blackmail you because you have the money lying around?”
“No, Monica, I had a plan. But I spent all my time making sure you didn’t fuck it up.”
I sat back on the railing and crossed my arms, locking my feet against the vertical rails so I didn’t fall over. “You could have just told me.”
“I don’t tell people things like that. It’s not my way.”
I rocked back on my feet. The railing had held for a hundred years and would hold for a hundred more, but Jonathan didn’t know that. He stiffened when it looked like I’d fall.
“Did I fuck it up?” I asked.
“No. You just fucked me up. I couldn’t think. I knew all the things Jessica would say to you, and I thought she would drive you away. Whatever you needed to hear, and I thought the worst, she’d say it. Then this time, you’d be gone for good.”
If touching him would have been appropriate, I would have stroked his cheek and kissed his mouth. I would have held his hands, warning them against the late November chill. I would have whispered my love in his ear in the cadence of his laughter. But we had too much of the last two days between us to make any of that meaningful.
“I am very sorry about the sleeping pills,” I said. “I didn’t think until after that you need your self-control, and I took it away. That was wrong and a breach of trust. I’m sorry.” When he didn’t answer, I continued. “I may steal your car again, though.”
“Take it.” He waved his hand as though he was giving me the last bite of dessert. “Can you tell me what she said?”
“Apparently, you killed your first love. She made it out like cold-blooded murder.”
The anger drained from his face, replaced by the flatness of fear.
“Don’t look like that,” I said. “I love you.”
“But I did it.”
“I know.”
We regarded each other for what seemed like a long time.
“That envelope, right there, she gave it to me. It’s a draft of an article written for eLA Rag. I already have piece of it that Gabby got her hands on, don’t ask me how. They suggest that you were driving the car Rachel was in when she drowned. You saved yourself and let her die. Jessica said you’re aware that she knows all this.”
“I am.”
“Can I hear the whole story from your lips, please?”
“No, Monica. No. A thousand times, no.”
“All I got from her was the goddamn envelope before I took her phone. So I can go back and—”
“This is her phone?” He pointed to the black rectangle on top of the envelope.
“Yes.”
He picked it up. “You stole her phone.”
“I prefer the term lifted,” I said. “In any case, if she did ‘ask for it’ like you said, the raw audio might be on there.”
“You stole her phone.” He cradled in the space between his palms, as if he didn’t want too much of it touching his skin. “Did you listen?”
“No. That’s all you. Figure it out.”
“You don’t want to know how far I went with her?”
“You told me how far you went.”
“You are so strange, Monica.”
“I never made the decision to love you. But I decided to trust you. That was a choic
e.”
He fingered the phone, flipping it over as if contemplating a greater meaning. “If the whole scene is on this phone, its best use may be to go public.”
“Whatever you want.”
“People will know.” He looked at me with meaning, as if trying to impart a few volumes of knowledge.
I knew exactly what he meant. They’d know how we were together. They’d talk, and they’d look at me in a way I didn’t want to be seen. “Fuck people and fuck what they know. Do what you have to.”
He held out his hand, and I took it, letting him pull me onto his lap. His arms wrapped around me and pulled my legs to one side. I put my fingertips on his cheeks, letting the rough stubble scratch them. I traced his jaw, the angular line, the hardness of it, and his lips, source of so much pleasure, their softness on my fingers as I imagined them between my legs. I shuddered a little and rested my head on his chest, losing myself in his leathery scent. God, please let me not be confusing love and beauty. Let this be as real as it feels, not some imaginary thing.
“Why did you want to see her?” he whispered.
“To try to lift her phone. But if I told you that, you’d just say no. And if I failed, you would have thought I was incompetent.”
He kissed my forehead, my cheeks. “You’re not leaving me?”
“No.”
“But you haven’t heard everything.”
“I don’t want a reporter’s research. I don’t want Jessica’s lies. I want it from your mouth. I chose to trust you, and I want you to choose to talk to me.”
twenty-four
JONATHAN
I held her silently for a long time, wondering if she could keep her promise to stay with me. I’d become so attached to that woman that her presence, somewhere in the world, comforted me. The connection, once I’d admitted it was there, was palpable, a rope of energy between us. Knowing what she was doing at any given moment was an almost religious experience, specific to her, and almost sexual in its purity. I knew she felt too, but she was a wild card. Her reactions never fit my expectations.
If she was going to leave me because of things I’d done, she would have done it already. The effects of unburdening myself could last indefinitely and affect me the way they’d affected me with Jessica, in well-timed words and the sense that I was trapped by her knowledge. But it didn’t matter any more. As of last night, I’d done enough to alienate Monica from me and more to bring her close. The tension between the two had to break.
So I formulated a way to express the narrative. It didn’t run in a straight line. It started on a rainy December night, took a left when I was twenty-three, came around the bend a year later, switched gears the previous month, and only began the previous night, with a death.
“Rachel died last night,” I said. She pulled away to look me in the eye. Even in the dark, I saw her confusion. “Well, I lied.”
I wanted to see her face, so I pulled her up to a straddling position. Her shoulders slouched. I brushed her hair from her shoulders. It was too dark to see her face clearly, but I knew I wouldn’t like what I saw.
“I’m sorry. There’s more. Do you want me to come clean?” I asked.
She put her hands on my shoulders. “Ok, go ahead.”
“Rachel required constant care. The accident left her in a vegetative state. She wasn’t even herself anymore, so little of her brain was functioning. She could have lived forever, except that when Jessica first met you at the Stock, the day with the cast on her arm, I panicked. I thought she’d tell you everything. I didn’t know why, and mostly, I didn’t know why I cared so much, but I knew I did. I needed time to think, so I moved her to another facility. She never fully recovered.”
“I’m sorry,” Monica said. “Are you sad about it?”
I felt myself smile, because that would be the question Monica would ask, not the thousand others. “Yes, but other things too. It’s complicated. I’d assumed she was dead between the accident and when I was about twenty-three. I’d done my share of grieving over it. But I found out she was alive, and Jessica and I found her and moved her.”
“Okay, wait—”
“Hold on, Mon—”
“You found her? Who was keeping her?”
“I said hold on, goddess, please.”
“Have mercy on me, Jonathan. I thought she was dead until a minute ago. You have no idea what’s been going through my head.”
“What?”
She put her forehead to my shoulder. “You killed her during sexual asphyxiation and covered it up with the accident.”
“You have a very vivid imagination.”
“So, that’s not what happened?”
“You know that’s not my kink. I mean… Jesus, I should have explained this sooner.” I pulled her up again and took her face in my hands. She looked very tired. I had no idea how to make this any shorter, but I knew we had to finish it, if she could stay awake for it. “I have to stop and tell you about my father.”
“The passive drunk you told me about?”
“One of the many lies I tell about him.”
“The one who seduced Rachel first.”
“Not a lie. That was the beginning of me learning the truth of who I am. He’s a sociopath. Clinical. He has no empathy. He only finds things interesting or not interesting, and hurting people is interesting. Young girls are interesting. Seeing my mother scream during childbirth? Same. My sister Carrie is a psychologist, and once she realized it, realized all the shit he’d done over the years, she moved to Italy. Swear to god. I see that look on your face. It’s not genetic.”
“I didn’t think you were a sociopath.”
“No, but I’m a sexual sadist.” Saying those words was hard, even though I knew how true they were. As much as Debbie had tried to remove all of my negative connotations from them, I still felt a pang of self-loathing. Monica didn’t seem perturbed, probably because it was just us on her porch. I knew that her shame was in how she was seen by strangers, not what we called each other when we were alone. “I thought for a long time that made me like him. That we were the same because I enjoy that look on a woman’s face when I squeeze a little too hard, or that I like to make her uncomfortable. I thought it was a part of him inside me.”
“And it’s not?”
“It is. But even he’s capable of doing good things. He was the one who rescued Rachel from the car and put her into a facility.”
She leaned back as if stunned. “Why?”
“She was about to blackmail him. She was going to expose that he had been with her when she was sixteen. You don’t blackmail J. Declan Drazen. He doesn’t appreciate it, let’s say.”
“Why didn’t he just let her die?”
“I don’t know. He has a thing about not shitting where you eat, so if he thought she was within his circle, he wouldn’t have hurt her. But he was secretive. We found out everything about the accident the hard way. When I went to him about it, he literally laughed. I found out I was driving when some reporter came sniffing around, probably this guy.” I tapped the envelope. “I found out she was alive right after that. It was, let’s say, overwhelming.”
“You felt like a fly caught in a web.”
She’d captured that feeling exactly. What she didn’t capture was the feeling that if I got free of it, I’d be less human for letting go of the grief and guilt. It was mine. I owned it. If I unburdened myself, what would I become? An animal who stopped caring about the things I’d done? I couldn’t allow that. My shame was made me a moral person, even if it crippled me emotionally.
She snapped up the envelope and pressed it to my chest. “You should read this.”
“I don’t need to.”
“It says you were soaked in salt water. Has it occurred to you that you rescued her?”
“I dove in, but I was too drunk to rescue anyone,” I said. “Probably nearly drowned myself.”
“They got your medical records. The skin on your hands was totally fucked up. You were banged
to shit. Like you wrestled with the ocean pulling someone out of it.”
I remembered that. In my sequestered hospital room, my mother had been at my side, smelling of whiskey, and she claimed ignorance about that and everything. Dad spoke to me after, describing Rachel’s death by drowning, the body’s absence, the car “she stole” floating into the Pacific with the tide. He’d get me another. Not to worry.
I’d been so shredded about Rachel, I’d paid no mind to my bruises or the skin missing from my hands. I figured that in my blacked-out stupor, I’d fallen. Repeatedly.
Maybe Monica was right. Maybe I hadn’t been such a passive player. Or maybe it didn’t matter anymore, because Monica’s big brown eyes looked at me for answers as if I had any. She looked at me as if she was on a starting block, waiting to win the race to forgiveness. I could tell her anything. I could tell her I’d strangled Rachel and buried the body, and she’d forgive me. God damn. I had done something truly evil in letting the woman love me.
“We ruined her family,” I said. “Not that it was worth much.”
“You know, I think—”
I didn’t let her finish. “Jessica’s family, too. My father put hers in his grave. And when I married her, she was cut off. Then she became this thing that tries to squeeze me.”
“Jonathan, listen—”
“And Kevin. I mean douchebag, yes. I had my chance to hit him on the head with a cinderblock, but that somehow wasn’t permanent enough. I needed him wiped off the map of Los Angeles. So I had his warrants checked at the border. I needed his career with you to be over, so I made sure the last page of the commercial invoice was missing.”
The look of shock on her face, the feel of her limbs tightening made me want to reassure her at the same time as it strengthened my resolve. “I mean, look at you. You’re surprised. You can’t believe I’d do something like that, right? You knew it was true, but you can’t believe it. Say it.”
“I believe it.” Her voice was soft and low, as if she was telling herself more than me.
“And you still love me? Because you believe in my innate goodness?”
