A Lush Betrayal (27 page)

You always like to think that at the end of your life you’ll remember those special, delicate moments when the greatest love and beauty you experienced burned strong and true. The day you married the love of your life. The moment your baby entered the world. That special feeling you got when someone told you they love you. But this moment—this brief, flashing minute in my sister’s hospital room— as my mind tries to wrap itself around what my heart has already heard, the puzzle pieces snapping into place with the cold finality of metal gates closing,
this
is a moment I will
pray
I forget and yet will never be able to.

My blood goes cold in my veins, and I find myself gasping for air. I hear an almost inhuman cry come from Tammy. I look at her and see her eyes darting between Walsh and me. Like slow motion, my gaze shifts from her to Joss, who’s motionless, staring at Mike.

“What the hell—wait. What?” Walsh asks, confusion clouding his handsome features.

“It’s not—” Joss starts, reaching out to Walsh, but his eyes slide to me.

“Tammy?” Walsh asks, ignoring Joss and looking at my sister imploringly.

“Oh, God,” she chokes out.

Sparks flicker before my eyes and I think I’m going to faint. I reach for the railing of the bed and teeter. I feel someone put an arm around my waist and guide me to a nearby chair. I look up and it’s Colin. He leans down and says quietly, “Put your head between your knees and breathe. Nice and easy.” I do as he says.

Through the haze in my head and the searing pain in my heart, I hear Walsh’s voice. “You wouldn’t. You didn’t. God, Tammy, tell me you didn’t.” His pain is so sharp and so intense I forget my own for a moment.

I hear the desperation in her voice as Tammy rushes to answer to him. “I love you, Walsh. I love you. It was an accident, I swear. Please. Oh God, Walsh, please don’t leave me.”

She’s sobbing and Joss is saying something and then there is the sound of bone striking flesh, and Tammy screams. Walsh bellows, “You motherfucker! We’re done. Do you understand me? All of it, Joss. We. Are. Done.”

I raise my head to see Walsh charging out of the room as Tammy continues screaming and sobbing. Joss is bent over, holding his face, and Mike is crouched in a ball against the wall, his head in his hands.

Joss stands and looks right at me, his face bleeding from where Walsh’s fist split his cheek open.

He reaches a hand out to me but doesn’t seem able to form words, and I just keep breathing, because right now that’s taking every bit of concentration and energy I have. Tears keep rolling down my face as Colin strokes my back.

“Joss! You have to go after him!” Tammy screams. “You have to. You can’t let him drink. Please. Oh God, what have I done?” she sobs.

Hearing that Walsh might drink seems to snap Joss out of his coma. He continues to stare at me. “Okay,” he answers her quietly.

“Go!” she shouts. “Go find him.” Then she breaks down again.

“I have to—” Joss says to me, desperation in his eyes. “He might hurt himself.”

I look at him and swallow. Then I turn away. What’s the point, after all?

I hear him walk out the door, and Colin leans down to me. “Will you be okay?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“You and Tammy—I mean, you won’t—”

I look up at him as he hovers over me. “It’s fine, Colin. I promise.”

“Okay.” He stands up and looks over at Mike, who is still crouched against the wall. “I don’t know what the fuck you were thinking, man, but this is far from done. Get up.”

Mike stands with robotic movements. Then he looks at me. “Mel,” he croaks out. “I’m so sorry—”

He’s interrupted by a nurse who walks in briskly, asking about the commotion. She takes one look at Tammy and starts ordering everyone to get out.

We file into the hall, where Colin gives Mike a hard look and then turns to me. “I’ll call you later, let you know how everyone is, but we’ve got to go keep them from killing each other.”

I nod and mumble, “Okay.”

Mike tries to talk to me one more time. “Mel, I never wanted you to get hurt, I swear. You deserve so much better than him—”

I look at him for a moment, my head so cluttered and yet so empty at the same time. When it finally sinks in, what he’s said to me, I reach up and slap him across the face. Hard. “I think we all got exactly what we deserved, didn’t we, Mike? You made sure of it.” Then I turn away from him and slump against the wall.

I hear Colin tell him to
leave it
and they walk away down the hall. I sit on a nearby chair listening to Tammy cry through the partially open door. Then I remember the promise I made to myself only hours ago. I will be there for my sister the way she’s always been there for me. I take a deep breath, stand up, walk in to my sister’s hospital room, and hold her as she mourns the loss of her love while I bury the loss of mine.

Joss

A
S
I ride in the back of a limousine, fast food restaurants and rundown strip malls flashing outside the windows, I can still see the expression on Mel’s face as she collapsed into the chair with Colin helping her. Her beautiful eyes looked at me like I’d torn her world in two. It occurs to me that my heart is still beating and I take breaths regularly as if on cue. I’m not sure how this is all working. I don’t
feel
anything. It’s like my whole body has gone numb, and in my head a refrain beats away.
Find Walsh. Find Walsh. Find Walsh.

There will be no coming back from today, this I know. Mel and I are over, in a way so complete it’s almost as if we never existed together in the first place. The damage I have inflicted is so extensive it sickens me, yet there is an underlying relief. At last I have finally gotten what I deserve—pain, rejection, self-loathing so intense that I can’t imagine ever looking at myself in a mirror again—all of it washing over me, cleansing me, scouring me until I’m raw and bloody and punished as I should have been the instant it all happened.

These thoughts skitter through my mind, like pieces of gravel being tossed around by the tires of a car, but I force myself to focus on trying to do something right, something useful. And that something is saving Walsh from himself. Luckily Walsh used one of our hired cars and drivers to ferry him around, so I’ve had my driver talk to his and I’m on my way to him. In keeping with today’s theme of utter destruction, he’s at a bar.

We pull up in the parking lot of the place, and my heart races inside my chest at the thought of having to face Walsh, his words, his fists, his broken heart. But he’s here, with abundant quantities of alcohol, and I love him too much to take the easy way out.

Just before I get out of the car I look around. The bar is a honky-tonk surrounded by pickup trucks, and I realize I’m still wearing eyeliner. Lots of it. Fuck.

“Hey, man,” I ask the driver. “You have any Kleenex up there?”

He hands me a box and I set to work, trying to wipe as much of the shit off as I can. I never went through a punk or glam rock phase, so I don’t know much about eye makeup. I’m sure there’s some better way to get it off than spit and tissues, but for now this’ll have to do. I’ve already got a pretty good-sized welt on my face, so if some asshole hits me for wearing makeup, it doesn’t much matter. What’s one more for the road?

My phone’s been blowing up with texts from Colin, and another one comes through as I’m about to walk into the bar. I go ahead and text him the address I’m at, figuring if I can’t get through to Walsh, maybe he and Mike can when they get here.

I walk in and find myself in a cheap prefab building with a concrete floor covered in peanut shells and sticky beer. The place is decent-sized, and country music is blaring from the sound system. The clientele seem to wear one of two types of hats—hard hats or cowboy hats—and almost all of them look like they’ve spent most of the day working outside in the sun.

I stand near the door, scanning the interior as my eyes adjust to the low light. When my view reaches the far back corner of the room, I see him, sitting all alone, staring at a large mug of beer on the table in front of him. God, I hope I’m not too late. I approach cautiously, fearful that he’ll charge if he sees me coming.

When I get about six feet away, he looks up and says, “Took you long enough.”

I reach down and pull out a chair, sitting opposite him. “You were expecting me?”

He snorts. “You may have fucked my fiancée, but you’ve been my best friend most of my life. I know you better than you know yourself.” He pauses. “Besides, I figured Tammy would make you come.”

I nod, watching him as he slowly turns the mug of beer around in a small circle on the tabletop.

“You ever watched the condensation on a cold mug drip down the sides?” he asks. “I used to sit and watch that shit for hours when I was drinking. The way the droplets form out of nowhere then start off sliding down slowly until they reach some sort of critical mass or something and move faster. When they hit the tabletop, they spread in this really particular way, following the arc of the glass or the bottle. Then, because that water can’t work its way under the glass, it builds up all around in a ring.” He shrugs and then just sits and watches that mug.

Finally I break the silence. “I’m not sure what to say, man, but it’s not how it sounded.”

“Really? ‘Cause it sounded like you slept with my fiancée. The only woman I’ve ever loved. Hell, the only woman I’ve ever been with, as you well know. My girl since I was fourteen years old. That’s what it sounded like, Joss.” His voice is calm, but it’s the defeated kind of calm, not the peaceful kind.

I lean my elbows on the table, my head in my hands as I struggle to describe what the hell happened that night.

“That first time we came to see you in rehab—our first group therapy session?”

He nods.

“You were so different, man. I mean, in the span of a few months, you went from Walsh who partied a little too much to Walsh who was drunk off his ass constantly to Walsh who was killing himself with booze. Then we checked you in and that first day we saw you it was—shit, I don’t know—kind of like we’d lost you for good. You were angry and resentful, and there we were, thinking we’d done the right thing for you, but you hated it. You hated us.”

“Damn right I hated you. You’d taken away my crutch. I’d relied on that shit since I was a teenager. You’d be pissed if someone took away your one comfort too.”

“I know you had every right to be pissed, Walsh. I’m only saying that, for Tammy and me, it was hard to see. Hard to understand, and hard to watch.” I pause as he keeps slowly turning that mug of beer. I haven’t seen him take a drink from it yet, but for all I know he had another before I got here.

“After we left, Tammy was a mess. She cried all the way back to Portland. When we got to town, I was afraid to leave her at your house alone so I took her to my place.”

I see Walsh grip the mug now, his knuckles becoming white as he squeezes the life out of that poor glass.

I clear my throat. “It started off as me trying to comfort her. And it went from there. I wanted her to stop crying. It felt like my whole fucking world had been ripped to pieces. After my mom died, Walsh, you and Tammy were all I had. I know that’s probably my own fault. I shouldn’t have relied on you so much. But I did, and then you were gone, and Tammy was left. She was all I had, and I was the only one there to help her. I helped her the wrong way, I get that, but you have to know, it wasn’t premeditated. I hadn’t been lusting after Tammy. I didn’t set out to do it. It—just—happened.”

Walsh leans back in his seat, never taking his eyes, or his hands, off the beer.

“So this summer with Mel? What’s that been about?”

“
That
has nothing to do with Tammy.”

“Tammy must not have believed it or she wouldn’t have had the reaction she did. Or was she jealous? She still wants you and you picked her sister?” The bitterness in his voice rips a piece from my soul.

“No, dude. You’re the only guy she’s ever wanted. She
never
cared about me. Hell, she wouldn’t speak to me or look at me for weeks after it happened. Trust me, she’s not jealous. She hates me because of what happened and she didn’t want me to touch her little sister. She knew this would all come to pass sooner or later, and she didn’t want me to drag Mel into it.” I sigh and feel my heart pinch. I press my fist to it, trying to contain the pain before it radiates to the rest of my body. “And obviously her fears were right. I should have stayed the hell away from Mel.”

“You should have stayed away from both of them.”

“Yeah, you’re right.”

“So, why Mel?”

I know the answer instantly, but I pause before saying it. Maybe I’m trying to find some more elegant, complex way to express it, but it’s really so simple that there’s only one thing to say— “Because I love her. I can’t help it. I just do.”

“Yep. That’s the way it works.”

He finally looks up at me. His face is blank as he lifts the beer to his nose and inhales deeply. Then he slowly pours it out on the floor beneath our table. He sets the mug back down firmly.