by Tessa Dane
“’Bye,” Dina said to me, her eyes saying thank-you as she also began moving off, her parents each holding one of her arms, their car probably further up Broadway, cars double-parked and illegally parked everywhere, waiting for their passengers.
I could see that Dina’s former friends were showing new interest in her, Bredon’s appearance having accomplished that magic. But Dina held her ground, looking at none of them. I was cheering her on, and was only sorry that Robin had left so much earlier. She would have enjoyed helping Dina stand against the group she called “The Medusa Collective.”
When we returned to school for the spring semester, Dina had decided to begin the pre-med program, a heavy schedule of demanding science courses. Still, in her rare free time she would meet with Robin and me for a quick lunch, or for one of the special events that the University had almost every weekend. She never mentioned the December day when we had become friends, and I only told Robin that Bredon and I had met Dina’s parents. Robin could see the whole picture, for it was obvious to everyone that Dina no longer had any use for the women who, just last semester, had been her best friends.
With a whispered prayer of gratitude to heaven that I now knew the Ayers, I made my plan. If Bredon could not pull it off, or find other partners, or get Rand to change his mind, I would go to the Ayers’ financial group, RRA (Rae and Robert Ayers Investment Group, the simplest acronym as Dina smilingly had told me) and hope they could help me. They were people who had the gift of gratitude, and I knew Dina well enough now to know that she had told her parents the whole story of that day in December.
I had been pacing around my apartment as I thought about all of this, and I noticed the text message light was on again. “Tomorrow, Darling. Late afternoon? R.” I felt the rush of sexuality and heat just seeing his initial, and felt the irony of it all. Did Rand really think nothing had changed? That he could back out on Bredon but go on with me?
I knew I had to be careful about showing anger toward Rand. He might still come through for Bredon. Well, I would put him off until all final decisions were made. At least, I hoped that I could do that. Robin’s words came back to me, and I did not want to make God laugh by planning all our futures.
It was late now. I had been pacing, barefoot, thinking, praying for a couple of hours and was too wired to sleep. I had pulled off my outside clothes, and was wearing the light at-home loose tunic and pants that doubled as loungers or pajamas. I went into my medicine chest and got a couple of nighttime aspirin, downed them with a huge glass of water, and fell into bed assuming I would just lie awake, but my exhaustion took hold, and I dropped into a sleep filled with Gothic scenes of danger, flashes of faces from the past and the present, a Freudian textbook for any therapist.
VI
It was coming on to the Summer Solstice, June twenty-first, and the nights were getting ever shorter. I had not pulled up the blackout screen on my shades, so the early dawn woke me, still tired from the emotions of last evening and the dream-filled night. My first waking thoughts were of Bredon. Sitting up in my bed I dialed him, only then realizing that such an early call might make him worry about me. Sure enough, his voice was anxious, so I quickly assumed a cheerful tone, as though neither of us were at a precipice in our lives.
“I know you’re at the office,” I trilled. “You are, aren’t you? Just calling to check on whether you stayed awake.” My tone was light, but I was holding the phone with a death grip.
“Yes, I’m awake.” He gave a low laugh, brief, a tiny interlude in his long hours already spent on the phone.
“Any chance that you’ll get some kind of nap today?” My tone remained light, but I wanted to shoo the world from his office, push him onto one of his sofas, cover him with a blanket, and let him sleep. He had done that so often for me when I was a little girl, falling asleep on a sofa in our parents’ house, especially during the long summer afternoons after I had been swimming and running and swimming some more. Oh, Bredon, I thought, how I wish we were all together now, back there, the four of us. I bit my lower lip, taking deep breaths, which he heard.
“Did you sleep?” he challenged me.
“Of course I did. I just wanted to call you, even before I’ve had coffee.”
“Ah, so even you can be sleepy in the morning,” he said, teasing me because I usually came awake so totally, the minute my eyes opened.
“What happened with your overnight calls?” I asked, praying that he had had good news.
“The Indonesian group is interested,” he said, his voice stronger. “And I had a long call with a Chinese group. They’ve promised to meet today on my proposal.” I said another silent prayer of thanks and supplication, imploring heaven to let everyone say yes to Bredon’s plan.
My brother hesitated just a beat. “That leaves Rand. He’s coming in from India this morning. I’m going to give it another go, and try to convince him to opt in.” Another almost imperceptible hesitation. “He probably only said yes to meeting me because of you.”
“Then I’m glad we went out,” I said with hard-voiced loyalty, making my brother chuckle. “When will he be there?”
“He’s coming here straight from the airport. No sacrifice, since he’s coming in by private jet.” My brother’s low laugh was sarcastic and bitter and sad. I felt my stomach knot. I realized that Bredon thought I wanted to continue seeing Rand. Unthinkable.
To make my feelings clear to Bredon without mentioning Rand, I used my bossy younger sister voice and said, “When you’re done, call me, okay? Let’s meet for a late lunch. And then you can sleep!” I never mentioned Rand, as though his time with Bredon was simply an inconvenience in my schedule.
Bredon made an “ooh, I’m sorry” sound, and said, “Dray, I can’t. Sorry, kiddo. I told Rand that we would have a luncheon meeting, because his plane will arrive about eleven and he’ll be in the city around lunch time. But I’ll call you after, okay? We’ll have dinner…”
“No, Bro,” I said teasingly, and I should have won an Oscar just for this morning’s acting. “After you have your meeting with him, please, please, go home and sleep!”
“Okay, okay,” he said comically, getting into the spirit of my teasing. Then that brief hesitation again. He did not want to interfere if I wanted to see Rand. I knew it, felt it.
“If you wake up by seven tonight, call me and we’ll have a quick dinner,” I said. “Otherwise, just call me when your meeting is over, and tell me how it went, and we’ll have breakfast tomorrow. Okay?” I hoped that my cheery plans answered his unspoken question about my seeing Rand. But Bredon knew Rand.
“He’s going to want to see you, Dray, no matter what. It was pretty clear that he was taken with you.” Bredon’s voice was gentle, a statement. His tone contained no questions and no judgment. But the tone of my answer was drawling sarcasm.
“Yes, well, I’m busy, and maybe my schedule will open up sometime later in the year.” I yawned with no effort, truly tired from the past night, making my brother laugh the way we did when we were all alive and together and enjoying the give-and-take of teasing. I remembered our parents’ delight when Bredon and I had these conversations, and my heart scrunched itself up as I pictured those scenes, their clarity in my mind so sharp, so lovely and so painful. Remembering in this way always made the world feel so empty. For all my “recovery” from the tragedy, my hold on life was an indifferent one. I held on for Bredon’s sake, and I knew there were times that he had only held on for me. I did not want him to wonder at my silence, so I yawned again, a bit noisily, and “oh, sorry, yawn, yawn.”
“Okay, kiddo, talk to you later,” Bredon said, his voice a bit lighter.
“Maybe you can nap before he gets to your office,” I suggested.
“Dangerous. I might be too groggy to function,” he said, all business. But I had put an idea into his head, because he added, “I’ll tell Mrs. Andrews to check on me by ten thirty. And it sounds like you can use some more sleep.”
He had been a
wake all night and he wanted me to sleep. I prayed that my brother would have wild amounts of adrenalin to overcome his own fatigue. I resented that Rand would arrive well-rested, no long security or passport lines for him, his clearance arranged in advance. The private international charter and corporate jets had luxury full-length beds. Rand would have slept during the final leg of his trip, waking as though he had spent the night at home. Probably, his plane was a family holding, like the building he lived in, and heaven only knew what else.
That day when Robin visited me, before we had to say good-bye again, she whispered like a conspirator that she planned to do all sorts of internet searches on him, and seek out all the gossip about him that she possibly could. I ignored the gossip circuit, and I could not care less about what Rand’s family owned. Right now I only hated the thought that my brother might be exhausted at this critical meeting, and his traitorous deserter of a partner would be full of energy.
Well, I would will energy into my brother’s spirit, I would be the witch that men suspected resided in every woman’s soul. And the saint. I would pray like mad to every saint; Saint Teresa, who withstood all kinds of illness and maintained her sense of humor, her irony, her mystical arc to heaven, reforming the Carmelites in the process. Balance, sanity, tolerance, wondrous love, a perfect saint to intercede for Bredon. And I would ask Saint Anthony, the miracle finder, that Bredon find all the money he needed, and Saint Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes, to add his intercession just in case Bredon’s deal was teetering toward disaster. And of course, God, the Great Spirit, Jesus, The Holy Spirit, The Virgin, all the Angels, St. Michael especially, that super Archangel, Bredon’s favorite celestial being. We were Anglicans, very high-church, and one of my classmates, a Methodist, had once said, “You people are no better than the Roman Catholics.” That had sent me into gasping laughter, because Methodists also call themselves Catholics, right in their prayer book, which the girl obviously did not know. And I was laughing because Robin was sputtering in protest, offended on my behalf, saying, “How dare you be so narrow-minded?” Robin, whose family was Jewish, loved my stories about the holy people of the world, including that Saint Teresa’s family was Jewish. The double irony, of the saint’s character and her background, perfectly suited Robin’s comically wry view of the world.
Morning coffee had not compensated for the night I’d had, and I was tired, unusually so. Generally I was full of energy in the morning hours, but as I read The Times, the sunlight coming onto the window seat of my study alcove warmed me, then lulled me into sleepiness. Thinking I would lie down for a few minutes, since I was still in my bed-and-lounge clothes, I felt the emotional fatigue and the sleep-troubled night overtake me. The world faded to dreams.
It was almost four when I woke up. I had kept all the phones on, and ran to check my cell phone – no message – and then my little back-up cell phone that folded so thinly, took pictures, had a few apps, but best for its phone and its smallness. It was the one I most traveled with, the phone Bredon often called first. No message. Before I could reach it, the heart-attack ring of my land line sounded, a shrill sound I kept meaning to get changed but which served well as a literal wake-up call.
An unnecessary glance at caller ID. “Hello, Bredon.”
“Hi, Dray.” His voice had a studied calm. Things had not gone well.
“What did Rand say?” I was trying not to sound as overwrought as I felt.
“His family was so spooked by the near failure in India, they’re insisting on closing down all investments like our deal, at least for a while. Rand told me that he still was open to the possibilities, but the family’s pressure was pretty intense.”
“So can everything just be put on hold while you do other projects?” I was frantically praying he would say yes, and my stomach curled as he said, “No, not possible. I am going to be flying out later tonight. Kuala Lumpur will be my first stop. You’ll have my full itinerary from Mrs. Andrews, and yes, I’ll sleep on the flight.” I could sense his sad grin. “I should be back by Sunday night.”
We were not spooked by flying. Bredon and I took jets after our parents’ deaths, and for some reason I never feared that we too would be blown out of the sky. Perhaps I simply did not care. If our parents’ deaths do anything at all, they prepare us for our own mortality. And the danger now was more on the ground than in the air, armies everywhere. Then I thought, well, Kuala Lumpur is not Paris, but no place was truly safe anymore.
These thoughts had gone quickly through my mind. “Can I come?” I asked.
“No, for obvious reasons and reasons that make me too angry to discuss.”
I knew he meant that when men who brought women who were not their wives, it was assumed that the women would be bribes and bonuses. They would sleep with the other men in exchange for a smoother deal. In effect, it was a pimping process, a woman in exchange for money. Bredon had always refused to do that. I wondered if Rand had also always refused. But in any case, no, I would not be going on this trip, nor would Bredon’s girlfriend Ree, whose real name was Ariana Cleves. Like so many of us, she’d had a couple of names conferred on her at her baptism, babies among the rich often named for the maternal line. My mother, for example, was a Drayman. And Bredon was the family name of my father’s mother.
Bredon and Ariana were very private and discreet, often spending weekends at our family lodge far upstate in New York, going by separate small planes out of Teterboro Airport, flying to the little county airport down the road from our lodge. A married couple lived in the caretaker’s cottage on the grounds there. They cleaned and tended the house and land, hiring additional help as needed, to cut trees or do major skilled electrical work or carpentry. Usually, the husband would pick up Bredon and then go back for Ree when her plane landed. The lodge was owned under a corporate name completely different from any of the family’s publicly known holdings, so it was a true retreat, but far away and requiring time, weather, and flight coordination. With their marriage on hold since our parents’ death, the lodge was their hideaway where they could spend long hours together without public notice or fuss.
Ree was lovely, her character gentle, far gentler than mine. There was no way that Bredon would expose her, beautiful and kind person that she was, to the open leers that she would be sure to receive from the international financial dealers. Supposedly worldly, they retained their narrow moralism, convinced that all Americans are sexually free, which made all American women potential prostitutes. I had no desire to see and be ogled by such men, but I did not want Bredon to feel even more alone than he must have felt now, with this deal so tenuous.
“Can I at least drive with you to the airport? Have coffee with you?”
“I’m keeping this trip very quiet, Dray,” and he did not have to explain why. No rumors should even be whispered, even speculatively, about the unusual enormity of the risk Bredon was taking. He wanted no word anywhere that there might be a problem.
I decided a light approach was needed to counterbalance the hard realities that had us so sober and thoughtful. “All right, Big Bro, do your thing, go and make deals. Knock ‘em dead.” I grinned, for I had used the words he would use when I was a little girl about to appear in a school play or was starting a tennis game.
When we hung up I realized how hungry I was, and how much I had neglected everything, mail, messages, reading, friends. My occasional disappearances from view were thought to be caused by lapses into depression. The assumption that I retreated to grieve was occasionally true, and also served to keep people from asking questions about where I was. On rare occasions Bredon and I would spend time with a couple of cousins, to gather “family” time in some form. Mostly, I roamed the city’s endlessly changing neighborhoods, the clusters of ethnicities making little cities in the big one. I visited museums, I visited churches. My alone times were to renew myself, and Bredon could always reach me by the little phone whose number only he possessed. My calls from that phone came up as “restricted num
ber,” another of Bredon’s privacy tactics.
Preoccupied with thoughts of Bredon, not wanting to talk to any friends because I was so restless over him, I decided to order a meal from a nearby Turkish restaurant, a new, upscale place that quietly packaged and sent out prepared meals to people in our vicinity. Many people did not want to go to a restaurant at the end of a long day, nor to cook, nor order from a place that did only takeout. And I wanted to go to church, I wanted to attend evening prayer services at St. Mary’s if they had one tonight, and whether or not there was a service, to light candles, and pray, and think. But first I called Marilisa.
“Please,” I said, “come take the roses. Their scent is gorgeous, but now I’m getting a headache from them!”
Of course she knew better. “I’ll come for them now. Do you mind if I keep them in my apartment?”
“Yes, keep them,” I said, play-acting cheerful indifference, not fooling her one bit. Neither of us wanted to waste the beauty of those flowers.
She was there and gone, with the roses, within ten minutes.
As I was about to call the restaurant on my land line, the phone rang with a caller ID number and no name. It was the local 212 area code, and I wondered if it were a friend whose name was not in my phone’s directory. Generally, I wait for the message to begin, and I have told everyone, “If you don’t talk to my machine, you don’t talk to me.” Anyone who had any of my phone numbers knew this. Robo-calls hung up when the machine came on. I resented phone calls most of the time, intrusions, unless I had planned a call with a friend. Which is why I turned my ringers off most of the time. But I had forgotten that all ringers on all phones were operating because I had been waiting for Bredon’s call.
The message recording started: “Dray, this is Rand.” And he waited. When I did not pick up he said, “Dray, please, I want to see you. Please pick up.”
