“Check it out!” Cici yells, grabbing my shoulder and pushing me a step in front of her. We have gone from one stage to another, and the music barely changes in the crossover. Trey and David follow close behind as the music and bodies pulse around us. She tugs me, talking, but her words are lost in the noise. I am happy, buzzed from the champagne and high from Trey’s kiss.
Cici finally stops tugging, and we are in front of one of the speakers at the front of the stage. She yells something and points at something on the stage. It is too loud to hear, and I glance behind me to see Trey, shaking his head, laughing at Cici’s bouncing excitement. Cici yanks my arm, aware that she has lost my attention. I push back, but follow the line of her arm as she points.
My heart stops and only keeps from falling out on the floor by the cage of my ribs.
“Isn’t that your Baby Daddy?” she screams just as there is a lull in the music. The words are loud, and it is as if the entire place has gone silent. I feel Trey’s hand on the small of my back, then off again, as the words he has heard, the words everybody has heard, ricochet around us. There, in the drummer cage, is Warren. His hair is wet with perspiration, and there is a new tattoo snaking up the side of his neck. My heart catches and beats, and the thrum of the music crashes again. The world has started spinning, and my vision wavers. Then Cici turns to David and says, “That’s her Baby Daddy.” She is giddy, thrilled by her discovery.
My vision snaps clear, and I look at her, cold and full of hate. “You bitch!” I hiss, low and under my breath.
Our eyes lock, and I am not mistaken by the triumph in her eyes. I slam my hands into her shoulders, turn past Trey, unable to meet his face, and weave through the surging crowd until I am again at the door. I go past the people milling in the wide lobby, holding myself together until I can get out and away. I don’t think about Warren and I don’t think about the baby, except when I am alone and prepared. Cici looking at me with triumph, slamming that mental box down off its shelf is too much. It would be one thing to do that when we were alone, or even surrounded by strangers, but in front of Trey . . . it’s way too much.
My stomach plummets at the thought of Trey. Of course he doesn’t know about Warren; he doesn’t know about the baby. Trey wants to be a senator, or the president. Of course, I never told him. He never asked. He didn’t want to talk about our pasts. I knew if he ever found out, he would be done with me; he would have to be done.
“Alison.” It is Trey’s voice coming from behind me, and I wipe at the smears on my face, keeping my head low trying to figure out how to navigate. His hands are on my shoulders, and he spins me to him. I cannot look him in the eye. “What the hell was that?” He draws his thumbs under my lashes, wiping at the tears. I shake my head, and just beyond his arm, I see Cici and David coming our way. Cici, animated, her head and hands moving with her words. “What happened in there?” Trey asks again.
“Nothing.” I need time to pull myself together.
“Who is that man?” he asks, and I shake my head. His hands are tight on my upper arms, holding me taller than I am.
Cici and David reach us, closing a curve around me. “You fucking didn’t tell him?” Cici has laughter in her eyes under the mask of her concerned features. I want to spit on her. The accusation that I hid this, that I lied to him, is clear on her face, but it is an act. It is her justifying that she just threw me overboard by pretending it never had occurred to her that maybe I hadn’t shared my darkest stories yet. As if her life isn’t all set up in different boxes. David thinks he is her only one, I’m sure.
“Did you know he was going to be here?” I ask, my own accusation ringing in my voice.
“Look, don’t blame me that you didn’t tell him,” she says, sounding self-righteous and cold. She turns to David. “I mean, Little Miss Do It All Right and all that shit. How could she not have told him?”
“Shut up,” I hiss, with as much hatred in my voice as I have ever felt.
Trey turns to Cici, blocking her from me. “Look, I need you to back away. Do you understand? Give us some space.” His voice is calm and low as he speaks to her, but there is menace beneath the surface.
“Fucking don’t blame me—” Cici starts.
Trey leans forward, down into her face and snarls, “Back the fuck up, bitch,” and she does, taking David with her, both of them staring at us.
I realize that, like me, this is a different side of Trey, something I did not know was there. I almost feel fear, echoes from my childhood, but then the grief washes even that away. I was not prepared to think of Emily Ann today. Cici’s mouth is moving a mile a minute. Trey turns back to me, closing his hand around my forearm and leading me out into the night, the way you hold a small child’s wrist when crossing the street. I can feel the heat of his anger rolling off of him. We walk down the street and turn into a darkened doorway, off of the sidewalk.
“Who is that man?”
“Somebody I used to know.” My voice is flat, toneless.
“Alison, look, I understand that you don’t really like to talk about the past. I mean, I get that, but . . . shit! I mean, what was she saying in there?”
I shake my head, no words, and he turns, looking out across the street. The heat of the night rebounds from the pavement and up my legs.
“Do you have a kid?”
“No!” I scream, and the tears are falling down my cheeks. My hand comes up to cover my face, the full force of the loss of her overwhelming me. It was a mistake. I should have kept her. I should have held on. It would have been tough while I got my education, while she was little, but we could have made it. Mr. Billups would have helped me. My grandparents would have helped me. Even Uncle Steven would have helped me. I could have done it, but I was a coward and ashamed and didn’t want anybody to know that I had gotten knocked up and then let her go. I let her go like I was ashamed of her—the most perfect thing I ever touched in all of my life. “I let her go!” I scream, and I shove against him, as if it is somehow his fault, and start walking down the street, away from him, away from the party, my heels clicking on the pavement. I don’t know.
He catches up and spins me around, then he folds me in his arms because above all else, he is a kind man and I am sobbing. He doesn’t say anything. I hear his heart, thud, thud, thud, against the rim of my ear. I feel him breathing against the flattened curve of my cheek.
“I let her go.” I say it again, hearing how horrible it sounds outside of my head.
“We need to talk about this,” he says when I have calmed a little.
I shake my head.
We have come to one of the bus benches, and he angles us into the acrylic-glass enclosure. A homeless guy is lying on the ground behind the bench, snoring. Trey doesn’t touch me, but sits with his hands braced against the bench, his face turned toward me. “We need to talk about this,” he says again.
I shake my head again.
“Yeah, we fucking need to talk about this.” The hiss of his breath, the vulgarity of his language, tells me how close he is to losing control.
“There’s nothing to talk about. It’s not about you.”
“You have a kid and don’t think that’s something I should know? Shit.”
“It’s not about you.”
“I don’t even know you. Who are you?”
I hear him speaking, but from a very great distance away. Mostly I hear the traffic, the bum snoring behind us. Trey’s voice drops, and when he speaks again, I hear the pleading in it. Is that the sound of his heart breaking? “Alison, I need you to help me understand this.”
I nod. He deserves an answer, but I still have no words. I try to find my way through my mind to speak. If he is still sitting here with me, still trying to understand, then maybe he will understand in the end.
“Were you, like, a groupie?” I hear the distaste in his tone, the image of me as a band straggler in his mind.
“No.” I laugh, a cold and broken laugh. “I wasn’t a groupie.” I let the word hang heavy and thick in the air. “I knew him—” I start and then stop, taking a deep breath. Then, “I knew him before my mother died, and when she died, I kinda didn’t know what to do, and I thought he loved me.” My words tumble over each other, circular and confused. “So I moved to St. Louis to be with him, and then he left and I found out I was pregnant, and I didn’t have anybody or know anything, you know? I just didn’t know what to do. So I went to this place. They let me stay and made sure I had a doctor. They, like, made sure she would be healthy, and I gave her away, because I couldn’t be a good mommy.” My words are crashing in on themselves, and I fold down over my knees, looking down at the scarred sidewalk. I am out of air and gasping for breath, and I don’t know if he understands. I feel darkness clouding my vision, closing in.
I try to catch my breath. Does it matter if he understands? We’re not going to be together. I could never fit into his life. I had always known that my history would show up and he would find it distasteful. His family would find it distasteful. His voters would find it distasteful.
“Why didn’t you get an abortion?” he asks, and he says the word abortion the same way my grandmother says the word cancer.
I don’t respond. If he can ask me that, then he cannot understand. How could I even begin to explain to him that she is the only right thing I have ever done? How could I have killed her, the most perfect piece of my life? How can I explain about “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong,” about how, even though I could never do anything right, she was perfect? For a long minute he sits and stares out across the road, not saying anything, letting me rock in my own despair.
Finally I hear him letting out a sigh, a long, shuddering breath of air, as if he has made a decision. He lifts a thread of my hair and looks under it, at my face. “Are you okay?”
I look back at him, letting all of the broken and shattered pieces of my soul shine through my eyes. He takes my hand and draws me to my feet, folding me into the hollow of his arms, my tear-stained face smearing against his shirt.
“We’ll talk about this later,” he says, in control, pulling himself together, putting on his public face. We came all this way for the party, and here we are sitting outside listening to a bum snoring behind us.
I nod, but we won’t talk about this later. There is no later. Who are we kidding? We are never going to build a life together. He doesn’t know me at all. I have filtered my life for him, the same way I filter it for my grandparents, for everyone really. He can never know me. I could never be a senator’s wife.
“Can we go back in?” he asks, and I nod. I walk with him back toward the door, and he holds it open for me, his hand touching softly on my shoulder as I pass through.
Inside I motion for him to lean down to me, and I tell him I’m going to the restroom. He nods, “I’ll be over there.” He points toward one of the stages.
I pass a server on the way to the bathroom and take a glass of champagne from his tray. I drink it as I walk. I leave the flute on the counter beside the sink and splash water on my face. I need time for my scorched soul to stop smoking.
My elbow hits the flute, and it skids off the counter and shatters against the marble tile. I stand above it, my face dripping with water, my hair cascading down, a tunnel above the shards. I stoop and scoop the shards into the bowl of flute.
The champagne washes through me, surging in my blood. I fall back, into one of the stalls, locking the door. I sit on the toilet, not thinking, just going numb, and I remember. I remember the way all my thoughts used to just realign when the blood began to flow.
The tunnel narrows, and I don’t test the glass on my wrist, I push it into the flesh above my wrist, where the veins pulse blue and fat. Before the blood coats my hand, I slash against the other, then drop the shard of glass.
The blood surges with each beat of my heart, and I tilt my head to rest on the side of the stall, letting my arms fall. A wasted life. A life wasted.
Sometime later, from very far away the door opens, and voices echo and ricochet off the walls. I stir, unsure, confused, but close my eyes again, too tired to care.
