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?”
She rolled off my lap and sat next to me, looking into the empty, diagonal street. “You hurt me too, when you did that. With the invoice. Any box could have been held up. I might not have been able to figure it out.”
“I didn’t care. Don’t you get it? I wanted to possess you, and I didn’t want Kevin in my way. And you love me, Monica? Do you still love me? Are you that naïve?”
“I still love you.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about. Look what I’ve done to you already. You’re stealing things and drugging me. What are you turning into?”
“You’re turning into a dick.”
“I’m not turning into anything. What I am now, I’ve always been. I can’t believe you can hear this story and sit there as if it’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.” She pulled her knees up to her chin, a defensive posture if I ever saw one. “Did you want me to judge you?”
“Why wouldn’t you? Don’t martyr yourself to me.”
“Jesus Christ! What is wrong with you?”
“Your decency is endearing, but it’s already dying.” I stood up, my course of action set. I felt that tightness in my chest again but ignored it. “At least with Jessica, she knew what she was getting, and she could handle it. I can’t say the same for you.”
That hurt her, as it was meant to. The urge to gather her in my arms and say I was sorry was overwhelming. I had a moment where I could have done that, explained it all away, but that would be an act of a cowardice. I refused to allow another woman to be ruined because of me.
“Get out,” she said, feet on the swing, curled and tangled at the ankles. “Just go.”
“Your car is fixed,” I said, scooping Jessica’s phone and envelope.
I walked off the porch without looking back. The slap of the car door seemed final. The roar of the engine and backing onto her sheer drop of a street seemed like continued punctuations in an ever long sentence. I rounded the corner, then another, up a hill, until I was at the top of hers again. If I went back around and she was still on the porch, I’d grovel. I’d pour my heart out to her. If I told her I was afraid of corrupting her, exposing her to my family, turning her into an unscrupulous monster, killing her, maybe she’d prove me wrong.
But she was gone. Part of me was glad she was protected from truths that could be used to draw forgiveness and love from her. But the rest of me felt cracked down the middle.
I parked the car at the side of the road by the freeway entrance because the crack had opened into a void, and I was falling into it. I couldn’t drive. I knew I’d done what I had to. I knew I’d been a man. Done it right. Taken responsibility. I vowed that my single life wasn’t going to be what it had been before. I wasn’t going to bed whoever caught my fancy. I would play it straight. No looking. No dating. No casual fucking.
Because who else did I want? Who else fit so right? Who else could heal me? Who else could I damage as deeply, hurt as fully? Who needed more protection from me?
Right there, in my car, I said good-bye to a piece of myself. I gave up on it because doing so saved Monica from being the third in line for ruination. Saving her was a dark glow at the edge of the void, and that void… My God, that void was endless, lonely, black with loathing, and I clutched the wheel, white-knuckled, as I fell down it.