When his father mentioned plans to travel again for business next week, Cara cast a glance at Miles, and her smile promised what he most wanted to know: that they would be together again. Which they were—many times—over the weeks leading to Christmas. Days and nights that became filled with lies and deceits, the increasing weight of which would alter more lives than when Miles killed that man in Florida.
38.
Cara swallowed another of the pills Wendy Jordan provided in steady supply. Taking it even though she didn’t think she needed them anymore. She was fine with all this, having just been with a customer she considered her own: a friend of one of her other customers, not someone Wendy had sent.
When the new guy said his name was Danny Valentine, Cara had laughed, not believing him. So he showed her his driver’s license—sure enough, he was Daniel Valentine—and told her, “You can call me Cupid.”
Valentine was a quick learner when it came to the money part. When he’d sheepishly asked how much it was going to cost, Cara pretended to be hurt. And Valentine’s cheeks, already rosy from the cold, had reddened as he’d stumbled for the right words. Cara put him at ease. “This is just a date. We do what we want. And if you want to give me a present, you can give it to me. And if you don’t, you don’t. And maybe we see each other again, maybe we don’t.”
It was how Wendy had coached her—the way to avoid getting busted for prostitution. And, yeah, some guy might stiff her as a result. But Wendy said that rarely happened. Most figured the girls had an enforcer who might do them physical harm if they didn’t pay—or would show up at their work or their kids’ holiday party and make a scene.
“Besides,” Wendy said, “you’ll soon be able to tell the ones who are trouble.” And Cara believed she would—the way she believed she could handle this. Not just because of her Amsterdam experiences years ago, but because she had Miles, who on nights when his father was out of town, cooked dinner for her when she got home from work.
She and Miles would eat by candlelight at her dining room table, clean the dishes together, then move to the sofa, sometimes watching TV or listening to music. Conversation came easily. While they discussed some emotional issues—Cara’s marriage, her son, Miles’ dad, that they each had a strained relationship with their mother—they never spoke of the men who paid Cara for sex.
Cara assumed Miles knew those men were just work. That being with them was nothing like when she was with him. With Miles, the sex was wonderful, better than when she was younger and guys she’d dated had been eager to make her feel good instead of wanting her to pleasure them. But there was also a deeper emotional connection with Miles, something about him that seemed just as much a part of her when they weren’t together. As if his heart remained inside her once their bodies separated.
#
For Miles, being with Cara continued to remind him of Amanda—how she’d made his life feel as if defined by two separate parts: the times he was with her and the times he was not. But Amanda had been a fantasy that did not—and could not—exist in reality because of complexities and complications that would ultimately push them apart. Cara was different. Their connection was more complicated, as if they shared an almost desperate need to be one another’s salvation from the choices they’d each made.
And yet Miles kept secrets from her. He didn’t tell Cara he wished she’d stop seeing those men. Didn’t tell her how much Jennifer liked being in her house, especially on the soft sofa cushions and in the coziness of her bedroom.
Miles also kept secrets from Jennifer—and not just about Cara.
Jennifer said she’d been thinking about telling her parents she was hanging out with Miles. How did he feel about that? Would he want to meet them? Miles asked if he could think about it, figuring he’d only need to put her off for a couple weeks and it wouldn’t matter.
According to Mademoiselle Vance, the school board disciplinary hearing investigating the beating of Rusty Bremmer would be scheduled for late January and surely make the newspapers. And Miles couldn’t imagine Jennifer’s mom being thrilled about his being the center of that inquiry.
He also didn’t tell Jennifer—or anyone—about his uneasy arrangement with Debra Vance, who he was also lying to.
Vance had been asking Miles about Juan: wanting to know if something was wrong, why he was acting differently. Miles said he didn’t know.
The truth, however, was that while Juan no longer mentioned having done a bad thing, guilt had become his torturer. He was sullen and agitated, with the restless stir of someone who desperately needed sleep.
At the Concrete Palace after school—on what would be their last day working out together—Juan, sparring with Miles, suddenly snapped and launched into a madman’s attack, punching and kicking out of control, reverting to street fighter instincts Miles had little trouble deflecting, ultimately getting Juan in a hold from behind like a straightjacket.
Juan told Miles to hurt him, that he deserved it. But Miles just held his friend still until he calmed down.
Later, in Miles’ truck, Juan again asked about the man Miles killed in Florida, wanting to know: “Before you killed him, did you hold him down first…like you did me back there?”
“No.”
“Could you have?”
Miles didn’t answer.
Juan said, “So you could have held still that man, but you didn’t. Instead, you killed him.”
Miles looked at his friend through the darkness.
“You killed him because you wanted to,” Juan believed.
Miles, after a moment, nodded.
#
The following week, Debra Vance was waiting for Miles when he came out of the guidance counselor’s office. “College stuff?” she asked.
He nodded. “I’m a little late with my applications.”
It didn’t surprise her that Miles appeared unconcerned. After what he’d lived through the past couple years, a semester or two of community college before finding a four-year school probably wouldn’t require much of an adjustment.
She walked alongside Miles down the hall. It was a class period so they were alone. Still, she kept her voice low. “Is Juan coming back to school?”
“I’m not sure.”
“He doesn’t talk about it? You see him every day at work.”
“It’s really not my business whatever’s going on with his family. If he wants to tell me, he will.”
“Delgado,” Vance confided, “thinks Juan’s father’s keeping him close by in order to protect him.”
Miles appeared genuinely puzzled. “Protect him from what?”
Debra Vance looked up at Miles, meeting his eyes. She smiled and lightly touched his arm, convinced that whatever he might do in life that was wrong, he was going to get away with it.
39.
A week before Christmas, on a Sunday night before another trip out of town, Miles’ father told him that he and his mother were going to file for divorce. And that he’d agreed to do it in Florida and had already spoken with a lawyer.
As Miles digested that, George offered other—potentially better—news: he was being considered for a promotion—in Buffalo, Upstate New York—but told his boss he’d need to put off any move until Miles graduated.
“Will they hold the job for you?”
George shrugged. “We didn’t get that far.”
“You should ask. Assuming it’s something you want.”
His dad set down the length of linguine on his fork, the pasta resting in an aromatic sauce of clam broth and butter. “I think I do want it, yes.”
“Cold up there,” Miles said. “A lot of snow.”
“I know. But I’ve been thinking… Maybe the change will do me good.”
His dad was 44—an age Miles couldn’t pretend to appreciate, but assumed was not too old to start over. Maybe his father would marry again. Maybe that was why he’d agreed to a divorce. Maybe he might even have another child—one who wouldn’t kill a man and throw his entire family’s life int
o turmoil.
“You should take the job,” Miles said.
“We’ll see… Maybe I could commute back and forth for a while—at least on weekends—until June.”
It would have been an opportune time for Miles to bring up the pending school board hearing, and that he might be expelled long before graduation. But he kept silent.
“You seem to be doing fine while I’m gone,” his dad said.
“I’m fine.” Miles’ first thought was of having more nights with Cara—which he did.
Two nights later, he was in bed with her when she abruptly awakened in the middle of the night.
#
“I can’t remember what Ian looks like.” Cara stood at her dresser, where photographs of her little boy no longer stood in small easel frames. She’d moved those pictures into his room and kept the door closed, not wanting the men who came into her bedroom to know she had a son—to see what he looked like. “I can’t remember what it feels like to hold him.”
Miles softly stroked her bare back.
“Or watch him play. Or see him with his friends. Make sure his seat belt is fastened. Things I’ve done hundreds of times—thousands.”
“You’ll have him back soon,” Miles soothed.
“What if he’s forgotten what I look like? What if he really doesn’t want to come back? What if he won’t like this house anymore? Or his friends? Or me?”
In Ian’s letters, which came almost every week now, he wrote about the fun he was having and how much he liked his school—words that made Cara both glad and half-crazy. Of course she wanted her son to be happy. But she couldn’t be sure if the messages were true or what Sean told him to write. And as much as Cara desperately wanted to explain things to Ian, her lawyer strongly advised against that—counseling that the judge in Ireland could ask Ian about what his parents said to him about one another and the divorce. And the boy’s answers could generate a negative fitness on Cara, as if she was trying to manipulate him.
“You’re going to get Ian back,” Miles said with certainty, hugging her from behind. “He’ll be here, and it will be better than you can imagine… It just takes time.”
By morning, Cara felt better.
Miles fixed them breakfast—ham and cheese omelets, English muffins, hash browns. And asked Cara if she could take a sick day.
“What have you got in mind?” she asked.
40.
Miles and Cara were half an hour from home, heading north out of Kensington County. Miles said he didn’t know exactly where they were going, only that he was sure they’d come across signs for Christmas tree farms once near one of the state’s historic former agricultural city/towns—Hagerstown, Frederick, or Westminster—or outlying villages like Taneytown, Thurmont, and Emmitsburg.
When Miles’ phone alerted with a text, he checked it, then put away his phone without sending a response.
Cara asked if it was Jennifer, which broke their unspoken rule not to discuss her. The way they also didn’t talk about the men she saw.
Just last night, Miles hadn’t asked who Cara was texting when he walked into the bedroom as she sent an overdue response to Danny Valentine. Her customer with the romantic last name had been trying to entice her with promises of a fabulous Christmas present, making it clear he meant cash, not some trinket. She’d scheduled a date with Valentine for Christmas Eve, his thrilled response with capitalized letters and exclamation points spelling out that he’d be checking with Santa to see if she’d been naughty or nice.
That Christmas Eve date was two days away. At the moment, Cara found herself hoping it would never come. She looked across the gently rolling landscape that had changed from office parks and townhouse developments to suburban sprawl. “What if this road,” she asked Miles, “wasn’t really taking us to a Christmas tree farm, but your ideal place? Where would that be?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere on the water. Or maybe Paris.”
“Paris?”
“I’ve been thinking about that lately.”
“Really? Do you know French?”
“I’d have to learn,” he said. “You would, too.”
#
It was a lie of course. Miles and Cara weren’t going to run off together. It was pretend, the way he and Amanda used to talk about stealing off on her husband’s yacht to sail to Costa Rica. How they’d sell the boat there, use the cash to buy a secluded house up in the hills, and have sex with the windows wide open. It was pure escapism, life as it never could be.
For the rest of the day, Cara and Miles didn’t discuss fantasies. They dwelled in the moment, even though that was its own fantasy—the sublime and compatible mix of their mutual attraction and lust played out in public where other people surely noticed their free and often-expressed affection, not to mention the difference in their ages.
It felt safe and daring at the same time: sharing the same side of a booth in a quiet café with surprisingly modern food in Frederick; following small road signs to a tree farm where they walked hand in hand across acres of firs and pines, not so much looking for the perfect tree as enjoying the sweet scent of evergreens and looking toward distant low mountains which offered a view so different from Florida.
They decided on a pair of six-foot Frasier firs growing next to one another. “Neighbors, like us,” Cara said, hugging Miles’ arm as they admired how the light caught the silver undersides of the trees’ soft needles.
Miles lay on the ground and sawed near the base of the trunk as Cara held a branch to keep the tree upright, both wearing gloves Miles had thought to bring along.
They were a quarter mile from the parking lot but declined the farmer’s offer of a ride in his decorated hay cart. Instead, Miles pulled the trees behind them while Cara carried the saw. They were in no rush to leave.
In the small gravel parking lot, Miles loaded the trees in the back of his truck. When he received a text, Cara didn’t ask who it was from, but turned toward the mountains while he read it.
The text was from Jennifer, asking about the plumber Miles was supposedly dealing with at home, the reason he gave for not being at school. She wanted Miles to pick her up and take her back to his house. It might be their last chance to be together for an entire week, because she was spending the holidays in what she called Merry Christmas Dahlin’ Charleston!
Miles texted back: Guy just got here.
Jennifer responded with a single letter: F.
Miles put away his phone and opened the passenger door for Cara.
He drove them home along an especially scenic route, following narrow winding roads until they reached the leafy affluent suburbs—the handsome homes built for those on federal payrolls and private contractors made fat by D.C.’s taxpayer-funded waters.
Once back at Cara’s house, Miles set her tree in a stand, then started dinner while Cara brought up boxes of decorations from the basement. But before she hung the first ornament, she started to cry.
Miles was there in a moment, holding her, whispering, “We’ll send Ian a picture—okay?”
Cara nodded, wiping her eyes, then headed upstairs for one of the pills Wendy had given her. Because there wasn’t going to be any way to make it feel like Christmas this year.
And that was before Danny Valentine’s surprise.
41.
“You doing alright?” Debra Vance asked Miles, concerned about his absence the day before. When he nodded, she wasn’t sure she believed him.
It was Friday, December 23rd, the last day of school before winter break.
They stood alone in the hall behind the school auditorium. Vance wore a bright red sweater crocheted with a corny wreath, a Christmas gift from her mother ten years ago. Every year she told herself it was ridiculous to pull the garment from the bottom dresser drawer, but every year she put it on.
Vance told Miles: “You’re going to be served with a subpoena—probably tomorrow. It’s for the Board of Education hearing about Rusty Bremmer. Juan and the others are going to ge
t one, too.”
Miles merely nodded, as if only half registering what she was telling him.
She added more: “The Elf has timed it to ruin Christmas.”
No reaction from Miles.
She said, “You should call a lawyer. You can also call me—anytime, if you need someone to talk to.”
He thought a moment, then managed a serious smile and hugged her, a seemingly platonic gesture, leaning forward to accommodate the differences in their heights, careful in the way some men are for physical contact not to continue below shoulder level. Yet there was something about how his hands touched the small of her back that made Debra Vance close her eyes.
Miles whispered: “Merry Christmas, Mademoiselle Vance.”
#
That afternoon, Miles and Jennifer exchanged presents in his truck, parked in Georgetown. This would be their Christmas because Jennifer was leaving for Charleston in the morning.
She gave Miles a vintage knit scarf of soft grey-and-black yarn, draping it around his neck to pull him close for a long kiss. “Do you like it?”
He did—the scarf and the kiss.
“Now my present,” she said, having asked already at least half a dozen times, What is it? What is it? Echoing that again even though just seconds from finding out as her polished nails tore back silver wrapping paper to expose a plain white box. She lifted the lid and square of cotton padding inside. “This is so cool!”
The antique bracelet featured a dozen dangling charms that made tinkling sounds like tiny wind chimes.
Jennifer examined the Monopoly-board-size pieces that told the history of its previous owner: a small vivid-green emerald set in polished sterling into which was engraved May 5, 1925; a schnauzer, standing as if in a dog show; a replica of the QE II; a palm tree; a heart engraved with the name Ruth; a little boy; a little girl; a religious cross.
The Pretty Woman Who Lived Next Door Page 18
