Jillian
“THAT’S NOT A WORD!” I yell at Raine. The Scrabble board is between us on the living room carpet. After a frustrating day of writer’s block at the keyboard following Raine’s comments last night, I gave myself the night off to spend some time with him, and to rethink Becca and Drew.
“What? Yes it is!” he says with conviction, looking up at me with wide, innocent eyes. He’s lying on his side with his elbow resting on the ground, cradling his tawny head in his hand.
“There’s no x in tricks, Raine!”
“Yes, there is! ‘Silly, Rabbit. Trix are for kids,’ ” he replies.
“That’s a breakfast cereal, not a word!” I laugh.
“So? That counts.”
I roll my eyes. “No, it doesn’t.”
My cell phone rings and I lunge for it on the coffee table without getting up. I topple over when I overextend my reach, falling on the carpet and kicking the Scrabble board.
“Ticklish?” Raine grabs my bare foot without waiting for an answer and passes his finger over the bottom.
He’s found my Achilles’ heel. I let out a high-pitched squeal of laughter.
“Tickle, tickle,” he teases.
I hit ANSWER, hoping I don’t pee myself.
“Jillian? It’s Kitty . . .” I pull my leg from Raine’s grasp. My face goes slack and my blood turns to ice when I hear the tone of her voice. It’s the same tone she used when Dad died.
I rest my face in my hand and brace myself. “What is it, Kitty?”
Raine sits up. I feel the heavy weight of his gaze on me.
Kitty sniffles and I know. My heart pounds. “Vera had a stroke. She passed away a few minutes ago.” Her voice breaks and she sobs. “Can you meet me at the funeral home tomorrow morning?”
I don’t need to ask her which one. I know that, too.
I bite down on my hand as my eyes fill. Another one gone.
Death 5, Jillian 0.
“Yes.” I say through a choked breath. “What time?”
Raine’s fingers dig into my shoulder. “What is it?” he whispers. I can’t look at him. I suddenly can’t get enough air into my lungs and I shake him off.
“Ten?” she says through her tears.
“Okay. I need to go.” I choke back the lump in my throat.
“Will you be okay?”
Of course I won’t be okay. “Yes. See you tomorrow.” I say, and hit END.
“Jillian? What happened? It is your aunt?” Raine asks. His shoulders are tight and the desperate look on his face begs me to answer.
I clasp my hand over my mouth and nod. Then I run.
My lungs compete for air between my sobs as I race out the front door into the cool night. The waves crash on the surf on the far side of the boardwalk across the street. I dash out, avoiding the oncoming headlights, over the gangplank and onto the beach. The tang of the sea air fills my senses and a light breeze blows my hair into my face. The sand feels cool against the soles of my feet, sending a chill through me.
I collapse onto the grainy surface and pound it with my fists, letting out a scream of frustration and loss.
To me, each death is like another star winking out in the sky, one by one, carrying me closer to darkness and to my own death. Life keeps being stolen from around me.
Warm arms envelop me from behind and pull me close until I sit between Raine’s legs, and his body shelters mine. He wraps the blanket I keep on the couch around us, creating a cocoon. Then he kisses the side of my head and rests his chin on my shoulder. I welcome the sudden warmth on my gooseflesh-covered skin.
“I’m sorry I ran away,” I say, wiping my eyes with the back my hand.
He doesn’t speak; he just hands me a tissue. His thoughtfulness touches me and I blow my nose. “Thanks.”
The surf pounds the sand farther out in front of us.
His breath is warm on my ear. “The day I came for the photo shoot, you asked me who I sat for to have my portrait painted. Do you remember?”
I freeze when I realize he’s about to tell me something about himself—unprompted. I don’t know what to say. My mouth refuses to operate, but my hand squeezes his forearm in encouragement. I nod. His uncanny knack for diversion interrupts my grief.
“It was my mom,” he says. “She was an artist.” He swallows before he continues. “She died in my arms when I was eighteen. It was spring, right before I graduated high school. She had pancreatic cancer. I still miss her,” he whispers, and his voice hitches.
My heart lurches. I feel his pain as much as if someone sliced my heart open with a blade. I reach my hand up behind me and caress his cheek. “I’m so sorry, Raine. I understand.”
I draw in a deep breath and drop my hand. I share something in return. “I lost my mom to cancer too—breast cancer—when I was fourteen. Vera was mom’s twin sister. She and Kitty have been my surrogate mothers ever since. They raised me with my dad. He died four years ago of a heart attack, like Robert. It’s just me and Kitty now.”
Raine squeezes me tight and buries his face in my neck. “I didn’t know,” he mumbles. “I would have told you sooner about my mom. I don’t want you to go through this alone. I’m here for you.”
“Thanks, I appreciate that.” I twine my fingers with his under the blanket and suppress a sob in reaction to both my grief and his empathy. Subconsciously, I think I always suspected that she was the one tied to his grief. It explains why he never speaks of her in the present tense. “You were close to your mom, weren’t you?”
“Yeah. We were close. She was the one person who really believed in me . . . encouraged me to follow my dreams. You know what was worse than her dying?”
“What?”
“Knowing she was going to die and not being able to do anything but watch that fucking disease steal her life for eight months. Let’s just say I’m a little too good at tapping veins,” he says, his breath warm next to my cheek.
“You took care of her?”
“Yeah. At the end, she gave up on the chemo and refused to go back to the hospital. Nurses came during the day, and I helped at night if she needed me. The last month was the worst. She needed a lot of morphine.”
My heart aches for Raine. “I’m sorry.” Kitty, Vera, and Dad shielded me from that with my mom. I probe tentatively. “Is this when things became difficult with your father?”
His chest expands behind me and he releases a deep sigh. “They were always difficult, but after she died everything went to shit and a whole new level of difficult.”
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
“How’s this? I’ll tell you my story if you tell me about Drew . . . the real Drew.”
The salt air breeze makes my hair clump and stick to my cheek.
“Only if you go first,” I say, sweeping back the piece closest to my mouth.
“You drive a hard bargain, lady.” He kisses the top of my head and snuggles me even closer into him. “My dad worked in banking. We lived in a big house in a good neighborhood. You know the ones? Enough rooms to get lost in, but close enough to your neighbor’s to spit and hit it?” His voice fills with resentment, and I already know this story doesn’t have a happy ending.
“You grew up with money?”
“Pretty much.”
“What happened?”
He inhales deeply and his body clenches around me. “Like I said, things between me and my dad went off the rails long before my mom died. Ever since I turned twelve, he’s looked for reasons to punish me. But never in front of my mother. She wouldn’t have stood for it. Clever bastard. He was opportunistic. He’d wait for me to fuck up somehow—like the time he caught me skateboarding on the new wood floors in the upstairs hallway—and then use it as a chance to teach me a lesson, knowing I’d lie about the bruises to cover my ass and not upset my mom. Lucky for me he traveled a lot, so it wasn’t something I had to deal with every day.
“He didn’t use a closed fist until I was fifteen. The day he caught me in bed with my high school girlfriend he punched me for the first time. Really punched me. There was hate behind that punch. That was the day I vowed I’d never let him beat me again. I talked my friend, Mikey Petrillo, into teaching me how to box, and I started weight training like a madman. Once my father realized I could defend myself, things settled down, for the most part. He didn’t stop criticizing me, but he thought twice before raising his hand to me.”
“Did he ever . . . touch your mom?” I ask, trying to delicately piece together the extent of his father’s domestic violence while sidestepping any judgments about his sexual history and the humiliation he must’ve felt.
He shakes his head violently. “No way. He loved my mom. She walked on water as far as he was concerned. That’s the only saving grace in this whole shit show. He would’ve cut off his own arm before he touched her. He saved all of his frustration for me.”
“I’m sorry, Raine. No one should have to endure that kind of behavior,” I say, despising his father even more. I can only imagine the depth of the damage a relationship like that could have on Raine.
“Thanks.” He kisses the side of my head. “Things snapped again right after Mom died. I was a mess for most of the summer. But my dad was worse. He hated the fact that he wasn’t there when she died, and he resented the hell out of me for being there.”
“Where was he?” I ask, finding it odd he wasn’t by his wife’s deathbed.
“Atlantic City, maybe? I don’t know for sure. A couple of months before she passed away, we figured out my dad had a gambling problem. He’d lost his job six months earlier. But that was only part of it. He was a recovered alcoholic for over twenty years, and he never picked up a drink while she was alive. His sobriety ended with a scotch after the funeral. Drinking transformed him into a violent drunk—like he needed more of a reason.” He snorts. “By then, I just wanted out. I was on my college countdown, waiting to leave that August.”
Raine’s story sounds like he’s describing someone else’s life. I suddenly see the train coming and prepare for the wreck. I clasp his hand tighter. “Where were you supposed to go to school?”
Pain fills his voice. “Princeton. For architecture.” Then it clicks. His reaction when I showed him Robert’s office. An ache hits my heart.
“Tell me the rest,” I whisper and squeeze his thigh.
“I opened a letter the first week of August. It said my tuition was overdue, and if it wasn’t paid on receipt, I’d lose my place in the freshman class. I was furious. I confronted my father . . .” Raine falters.
The breeze swirls and mingles our hair around us, brushing my cheek. I ask softly, “What happened?”
His lips rest near my ear. “I didn’t realize he’d just downed a fifth of scotch when I went storming in. I waved the letter at him demanding to know why he hadn’t paid the bill. I knew he had my full, four-year tuition in a trust account. Rather than give me an answer, he punched me in the face and almost broke my nose. At the same time, he told me he’d drained my college fund. The money was gone, and the house would be in foreclosure by the end of the month. We got into a full-blown fist fight. I thought I’d won but made the mistake of turning my back on him. When I went to leave, he hit me in the back of the head, and then proceeded to kick the crap out of me. I ended up in the hospital for a week.”
He tenses around me again while my heart squeezes over how he was treated.
“I hate him, Jillian. He stole my future,” he says through gritted teeth.
“What happened after that?” I ask gently, knowing there was more, but not better.
“After I left the hospital, Mikey let me move in with him in Morristown while I got my head straightened out. It was too late to get financial aid. I was screwed. So, I took a year off and worked for Mikey during the day and got loaded every night until I worked as much of the anger out of my system as I could.”
I think about what he just said and frown. “Wait. How did you have access to that much alcohol at eighteen?” The legal drinking age in New Jersey is twenty-one.
His shoulder grazes mine as he shrugs behind me. “Mikey was twenty-three and kept the fridge stocked. Then I got a really good fake ID.”
I stop myself from saying anything for fear of sounding judgmental. Instead, I ask, “How did you end up back with your father recently?”
He snorts. “It was out of necessity. My father isn’t always in a drunken state of rage. When he’s not drinking, he’s bearable—like he was before my mom died. After the confrontation about school, he begged my forgiveness and swore off drinking. Despite my hating his guts, we’ve been in touch on and off. I even helped him pack up and move after the foreclosure. He works in a local bank now and stays sober enough to keep the job. But put a drink in his hands, and he turns into Mr. Hyde.”
“Why did he hurt you, Raine?”
He hesitates. “I don’t really remember what happened before he nailed me on the back of the head. It could’ve been anything. He gets delusional when he drinks.”
“There was no place else for you to go?”
He shakes his head next to mine. “My ex-girlfriend Vanessa basically kicked me out of her townhouse the day I met you in the hospital parking lot. We’d lived together for two years.”
I draw in a sharp breath. I didn’t expect that. “You lived with Vanessa up until two weeks ago?” Based on the conversation I’d overhead, I would’ve never guessed the longevity or seriousness of their relationship. But what do I know?
“Technically, but the relationship had been tanking for months before that. We didn’t end on good terms.” He squeezes me. “Hey, you promised to tell me the Drew story.”
I’m still stuck on the live-in girlfriend revelation, feeling a little jealous. Vanessa? I wonder what she looks like. I knew I disliked her from their conversation and now I dislike her even more.
I shiver against him. “Can we go back inside where it’s warmer first?”
“I’m not keeping you warm enough?” he asks, sounding offended.
“It’s not you. The breeze is blowing up underneath the blanket.”
Raine gathers me under his arm, and we head back to the house. I think of something and pinch his butt through his jeans.
“Hey!” he flinches.
“For someone smart enough to get accepted to Princeton, I can’t believe you tried to con me with the word Trix!”
He chuckles and pulls me closer. “It was worth a try.”
My heart swells with more than appreciation. I realize he’s given me solace and helped me to contain my sorrow. At least for tonight.
Not only that, he’s slipped further into my heart; and, for the first time, there’s no echo of Drew.