Acquainted With the Night (10 page)

Alex was still trying to process Vivien living with the same woman for almost a year. “And you haven’t driven her crazy yet?” she asked lightly.

“Damn it, Alex.” Vivien sighed. “She’s fucking incredible in bed. But some nights, you know, I just want to…and she’s there for that, too. I’m starting to look forward to just hanging around the house on Sunday mornings so we can have brunch and light a fire. Christ, I sound so domesticated!”

Alex had to laugh. “Vivien, there’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Come on, Alex. Can you seriously see me sleeping with just one woman for the rest of my life?”

“That’s not the point. Can you?”

Vivien nodded at the waiter who came to clear their plates away. When he was gone, she said, “I don’t know. But the alternative is not being with her. She’s, um, into monogamy, can you believe that? So I can be with just her, or be without her.”

“Can you?” Alex asked again. “Can you be without her?”

Vivien was silent a long time, staring down at the table.

“I think,” Alex said gently, “you’ve answered your own question. Vivien, you already know the answers. Just accept whatever it is. It’ll be okay.”

“Will it?” her voice was just above a whisper.

“I know it’s scary as hell. But look at it this way. You can’t go back. We never can. You can only go forward. And you can go forward with her, or without her. Give yourself a chance, if that’s what you want. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said at last. “You know, you’re not so bad at this. CJ would be proud of you.”

“I think she might just be proud of you. Once she got over the shock, of course.”

* * *

Alex remembered the conversation with Vivien at her next session when Wheeler asked, “Tell me about your relationship with CJ. How long were you together?”

“Three years,” Alex answered. “What kind of things do you want to know? I love her. She loved me, too.”

“You are still sure of that,” Wheeler said, not quite a question.

“I know she did. I don’t know what to think now.”

“Did you fight?”

“Everybody fights,” Alex said dismissively. “Of course we did.”

“About what kinds of things?”

Alex considered. “I would get mad at her for being late all the time. We had a yelling match in the car one time on the way to my godfather’s house for dinner, and when we got there, dinner wasn’t even in the oven yet. She’s not very tidy, and I would get aggravated with her for leaving stuff all over the condo. She has half-read books everywhere, and leaves her shoes in the front hall for me to trip over. I think she’s too careless with her money, but that’s probably because I rarely had very much and she has way more than she can spend. Her grandfather left her a lot of money in a trust, and she doesn’t pay much attention to how much things cost. I can get compulsive about things, so occasionally she had to sort of call me on obsessing about stuff that wasn’t really important. She’s a night owl, and I’m a morning person, so we had to work that out a little. Things like that.”

After a moment of thought, Alex continued, “We did have a pretty serious disagreement a couple of months before she left.” She described the fight about Steph, and Alex’s suspicion that Steph had been behind the attempt on her life. “It came up a couple of times after that because I had trouble letting go of her as a suspect. In fact,” she hesitated before continuing, “we had another brief fight about it the night before she left. I was never able to let go of thinking Steph was involved.”

“You had a fight about this the night before she disappeared,” Wheeler repeated. “But you don’t think this disagreement was the reason she left?”

Alex sighed. “I didn’t think so, but now I wonder. I can be difficult once I get onto something, stubborn. I’m sure it frustrated her. She was pretty pissed off at me.”

“What about the money issue? Did you resolve that?”

“That was easy once we talked about it. We pretty much fixed it by opening a joint account for the household stuff, and I pay the bills out of it. Her trust fund is separate, and I try not to pay any attention to what she does with the rest of her money. She will buy me a way too expensive present once in a while, but I’ve learned to just let that go. It’s not really a big deal anymore.”

“Did you have communication issues? Trust issues?”

Alex smiled a little. “Communication was not too big a problem. Sometimes she had to prod me a little to get me to open up, but I’m a lot better than I was. Getting CJ to communicate is not an issue, believe me. She’s very much a ‘what you see is what you get’ kind of woman. I’m not that way, but she knows me very well by now. Or she did, anyway.” She shifted a little uncomfortably, and added, “As for trust—the worst fight we ever had was when she thought I was cheating on her. She was wrong. I’ve never cheated on her, and I never would.”

“How did you resolve that?”

Alex met her look. “I told her the truth, and she believed me. That was the end of it. She’s never referred to it since. CJ doesn’t hold grudges.”
Or at least I don’t think she did, but maybe I was wrong.

Wheeler asked calmly, “And how was your physical relationship?”

Alex shifted again, and finally answered, “I don’t remember ever having a single cross word with her about sex. We talked, and there were a few things to work out, like there always is in a new relationship. I’d never slept with a woman before CJ, and it took me a while to get through just being overwhelmed by how…” she struggled for the right words, “how emotionally satisfying it was. I was overcome for a while, all those new feelings. Emotions, I mean, not physical feelings. Sometimes I was still overwhelmed, even after living with her for almost three years. It was always good between us. I was still very attracted to her, and she apparently felt the same way about me—she initiated sex a lot. Is this what you wanted to know?”

Wheeler tapped her fingertip on the arm of her chair. “When most couples have issues, they normally center around communication or trust, money or sex. I’m not a marriage counselor, but it doesn’t sound as if you had any major issues around any of those.”

“No,” Alex said, with what she hoped sounded like complete conviction. “I don’t think we did.”

Wheeler looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, “Let me ask you another question. Last week, you said you thought what you needed from therapy was to answer the question of why CJ left you, so that you could move on. Do you still feel that way?”

“Yes,” Alex said firmly. “Very much so.”

“I think I should ask you why you are convinced that CJ left you.”

Alex looked at her in confusion. “What do you mean? She was living with me, and she disappeared.”

“Let me rephrase. Why are you convinced that she left
you
?”

“I don’t understand. She left everyone in her life, her friends, her job and co-workers, my nephew, whom she adored.”

“She left her life.”

“Well, yes. What are you saying?”

“I’m just asking you to consider whether you were the reason she left. Are there any other possibilities?”

Alex just stared at her. She’d never, for one moment, considered that her pain was some kind of collateral damage in CJ’s departure.

“But why?” she demanded. “What other reason could she possibly have had?”

“I don’t know,” Wheeler responded gently. “Do you?”

Alex sat back, combing thoroughly through her mind for other possibilities. “I suppose if she were sick, dying or something, and wanted to spare me, spare all of us from that. But she wasn’t sick. I have access to her medical records through the department’s health insurance website because we have each other’s passwords. She had a physical two months before, everything was fine, mammogram, pap smear, everything. She had no symptoms of any kind. She was fine.”

“All right. What else?”

Alex felt her anger flare suddenly. “Why are you asking me this?” she snapped. “Are you suggesting that she left me for someone else?”

“I’m not suggesting anything except that you should look for other possibilities. Do you think she was having an affair?”

“Jesus God, no. Even if she were the kind of woman who would, and she wasn’t, she just didn’t have time. We often drove to work in the same car, went home together, we had lunch together about half the time. She worked one floor below me, I saw her every single day. We were in bed together almost every night. The only time she could have been seeing someone else would have been about ten minutes a week.”

“All right. She didn’t leave with someone else. Why did she leave?”

“I told you, I don’t
know!
Yes, we had a fight, but everybody fights! I don’t know why she left. That’s what I need to figure out.”

Wheeler looked at her steadily for a moment, then said, “What I’m suggesting to you is that you do know. You have told me several times that you loved CJ, and that you believed CJ loved you as well. Do you really believe that still?”

“Yes,” Alex said, her voice hoarse. “Yes.”

“Could your belief that she left you be rooted in the number of people in your life who left you prematurely? You told me your mother died when you were ten, your father was killed when you were nineteen, and you lost your niece to cancer when she was a child. Even your ex-husband.”

“I left him,” Alex mumbled, her mind still reeling. “And my parents, my niece, didn’t leave me. They died.”

“Those are still losses. You’ve lost a lot of people. Could you be seeing CJ as just one more person no longer in your life, one more person you lost?”

“I didn’t
lose
her,” Alex muttered again. “She
left
me.”

“She’s still lost to you,” Wheeler answered.

Grief broke loose inside her, like a giant piece of an iceberg tearing free. Alex began to weep, angrily this time. Wheeler let her get up and pace for a while as the tears streamed down her face, with Alex furiously hurling them from her cheeks as she stalked around the office. When they subsided, Wheeler wordlessly handed her the tissue box again.

“God,” Alex said, “I’ve never been so confused in my life. What are you saying? Just tell me, for God’s sake.”

Wheeler leaned forward until Alex was able to meet her ice-blue gaze. “Alex. I don’t know what your personal spiritual beliefs are, but I think it’s very possible that you know what happened, in your soul, on some deep level. If you knew CJ as well as you seem to have done, you know why she would leave. You may not be sure of all of the circumstances, but in some way, I think you know why she left. If you can’t tell me, at least tell yourself.”

Alex continued to stare at her. Wheeler said, “You’re thinking too hard. Think less, feel more. Sit back, close your eyes a moment. I’m going to ask you again, and you’re going to answer me, all right?”

Slowly Alex sat back in the leather chair, trying consciously to let her body relax, trying to empty her mind. After what seemed to be a long time, she heard Wheeler’s voice asking quietly, “Why did CJ leave, Alex?”

The words left her before she could catch them.

“Because she loved me,” Alex answered.

That answer made no sense at all. Alex could only wonder if it was the right one.

Chapter Ten

Alex was sitting in her living room on Saturday night with the Denver Nuggets basketball game on the television, the sound muted. She had a book in her hand, but she was not paying much attention to either the game or the reading. Her phone rang, surprising her.

“Hi,” Nicole said. “I didn’t wake you up, did I?”

“It’s only nine forty-five. Not even I go to sleep that early.”

“You have been,” Nicole countered.

“Going to bed, yes,” Alex admitted. “Not sleeping. Are you calling to recap the date?”

“I am, actually. How high school is that?”

“Pretty close. Want to tell me what you wore?”

“Oh, stop it.”

“Is Charlie asleep?”

“Crashed out like a toddler. It’s been a carbohydrate-filled afternoon, between popcorn and soda at the game and pizza after that.”

“You sound wiped out yourself.”

“A little bit. It was mostly the strain of being on a date, something I haven’t done, by my calculation, for a good sixteen years.”

“How much did it feel like a date, given that you had a ten-and twelve-year-old with you?”

“Not very,” Nicole admitted. “But that was mostly because of Bill. It felt a lot more like a family outing, if you know what I mean.”

“Not entirely. Did you have a chance to talk?”

“More than you’d think. Fortunately, the boys got along very well. Bill’s son Drew was nice to Charlie, and I think my son has a serious case of hero worship. A sixth grader seems very grown up to him.”

“It’s funny,” Alex said, “how much difference a year or two makes at that age. Any age difference less than a decade now feels like nothing.”

Neither of them mentioned that CJ had been seven years younger than Alex. Nicole said, “Bill was very laid-back about it all. But the best part was that we got to talk about things other than work and our kids. Really, you have no idea how wonderful it was to discuss a book other than
Peter Pan
.”

Alex’s heart ached for her sister. Alex had tried so hard her whole life to protect Nicole, and she’d been unable to shield her from the worst heartache of all.

“Sounds promising,” she said.

“Early days. But he is very nice, and we do have some things in common.”

“So,” Alex whispered, “did you get a kiss goodnight?”

“You are bad. Yes, a very chaste one on the cheek. But we did agree to go out again, without Charlie and Drew this time.”

“Even more promising.”

Nicole was quiet a moment, then asked, “Alex, do you think it’s too soon?”

“Honestly, Nic, the only question that matters is whether
you
think it’s too soon. Does it feel wrong?”

Her sister’s sigh came clearly over the phone line. “No. I kept spending the whole afternoon wondering when I would be stricken with guilt over David, but I just felt sad. I just
hate
it that he won’t be here to see Charlie grow up. It’s so goddamned unfair.”