Desperate (13 page)

J
udging by her wan expression and pale coloring, Anna was emotionally drained. It wasn’t just Margret’s visit that had done her in.

After everyone left, we spent a good hour, maybe more, talking about Adderall. Anna packed for her flight the next morning while we discussed things. She had a client meeting with Humboldt in Minneapolis—the big deal, the one that would allow her to quit work for a while and stay home with the baby.

At the moment, however, she had other things on her mind. How long had I been taking the drug? Why hadn’t I told her about my—let’s call it what it was—addiction? What was I gaining from it? Why hadn’t I confided in her?

I did my best to explain my actions in the most simple terms possible. I’d become dependent on the drug to get me through the workday. I needed the steroid-like focus that came from the rush. I didn’t have ADHD, but that shouldn’t exclude me from getting something to numb my pain.

“And you thought I’d have made you stop taking the drug?”

“Wouldn’t you?” I asked. “If we switched places, I would have been worried about you. I would have wanted you to stop taking anything that was a crutch and not a necessity.”

“But you’ve been lying to me, Gage. I’m your wife. I’m on your side, not in your way.”

I lowered my head, feeling foolish. The fear of losing my Adderall had kept me from confiding in my wife. I could have, as she said many times during our chat, put some faith and trust in her.

“How’d you get the drugs?” Anna asked, emphasizing the word
drugs
.

“I filled out an eighteen-question survey,” I said. I explained how I’d rated various symptoms on a scale of zero to three and scored off the charts for ADHD simply because I’d studied up on the symptoms beforehand. I got a thirty-milligram dose for Concerta, which eventually became a fifty-milligram per day prescription for Adderall as the course of my “treatment” evolved.

“What else? What other secrets are you keeping from me?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m not keeping any secrets. I swear.”

“How am I supposed to believe you?”

“Look in my eyes,” I said. “Just look in my eyes.”

Anna did as I asked. A shadow crossed her face.

“You blame her,” she said.

“Blame who?”

“Lily,” Anna said. “You blame Lily for what happened tonight.”

“Well, she did bring it up,” I said. My voice had the smoothness of sandpaper and was full of anger. Just the mention of Lily’s name was enough to quicken my pulse.

“What are you after?” Anna asked. “Are you trying to undermine what we’re doing here? Because that’s how it seems.”

“Why would Lily even mention it?”

“Because she was confused,” Anna said as if the answer should have been obvious to me. “She was thinking out loud. She’s a young girl. She’s not experienced or worldly. She’s just an innocent girl who noticed something and thought to share it, which is what you should have done with me in the first place.”

“Lily is not innocent,” I said.

Anna’s body shook.

“Damn you, Gage,” she said. Anna zipped shut her luggage. As a consultant, she had learned to become a quick, efficient packer. “You don’t want it. You’re dragging me through this and you don’t want it like I do.”

“Yes, I do. I’m just worried about Lily. You said you wanted honesty from me? Well, I’m being honest.”

“No, you don’t want it or you wouldn’t be behaving this way!” Red splotches like heat marks sprouted up on Anna’s face and neck. “I want a baby, Gage. I want to be a mother again, and you’re doing everything in your power to turn my dream into a nightmare.”

Anna went to the living room, and I followed.

“Don’t you get it? Lily brought up the Adderall for a reason,” I said. “You didn’t see how she was looking at me? She was letting me know, looking forward to making the big reveal. She knew she was going to get the opportunity.”

“And what reason can you give me for that?” Anna asked, her voice trembling. “To make sure we don’t get approved to become the adoptive parents?”

“No, no,” I said, shaking my head. “I think Lily is trying to pit you against me.”

“What are you talking about?” Anna looked exasperated, even angry.

“Think about it,” I said. “Ever since Lily has come into our lives, we’ve been at odds.”

“No, you’ve been at odds with us,” Anna said.

“That’s my point exactly,” I said, stabbing the air with my finger. “It’s now you and Lily versus me. The present, the necklace, the Adderall—it’s all about making me think one thing about Lily and you another.”

“Good news. You’ve now got something real to go talk to your shrink about,” Anna said. “Go get yourself a prescription for your paranoia to go along with the Adderall.”

That was how the conversation ended: with Anna retreating into the bedroom, leaving me alone to wonder if maybe, just maybe, she was right.

Hours after our “discussion,” long after Anna had fallen asleep, well past the midnight hour, as soon as I heard Lily walking upstairs, I snuck out the front door. I couldn’t wait a second longer to confront my suspicions. Was I intentionally trying to derail this process? Was it possible my heart was not ready for another child? Could my subconscious be imagining behaviors that simply weren’t there? Was my mind the enemy, and not Lily? Brad hadn’t detected anything evil from Lily’s aura. Everything that had happened was sort of explainable but required eyes that saw through a different lens. The beliefs about Lily that I held certain—certain until my fight with Anna—needed clarity.

We’d told Lily to lock her front door at night. Apparently, she was absentminded. I went up the stairs and paused on the landing. The door to her apartment was closed and I presumed locked. I hoped she was safety conscious enough to lock at least one of her doors. Maybe she’d think it was Anna coming to pay her a visit. Either way, I knocked twice, waited, knocked a third time, and heard footsteps shuffling toward the door.

“Who is it?” Lily asked. Her cloying voice made me think she was expecting me.

“It’s Gage,” I said to the shuttered door. “I’m sorry it’s late, but I heard you come home. I’d like to speak with you for a moment, if you wouldn’t mind.”

The door opened and there was Lily, still wearing her waitress uniform.

“Hi, Gage,” she said. She stood with her hip cocked, like a vintage pinup, with one arm propped against the door frame as a barrier. Her tongue slipped between her ruby-painted lips to wet them just slightly. “You’re probably wanting to talk about the home study, aren’t you?”

“I think we need to have a little chat,” I said.

A man’s steely voice called from out of my view, “Who is it?”

Lily lowered her arm and motioned for me to enter.

From the foyer I saw the man standing just down the hall, drinking Budweiser from a can. He was tall and wiry, and though he wore a denim jacket with a black T-shirt underneath, I could tell his body was ripped with muscle. Intricate tattoos were visible on his hands and others snuck out from the collar of his shirt, wrapping around his neck like growing vines. His lean, sharp-featured face was pockmarked and covered in a heavy five o’clock shadow. His hawklike eyes gave the impression he saw every situation as potentially confrontational. He had thick black eyebrows and close-cropped dark hair. He looked like the sort who had come out of the womb with a chip on his shoulder, the world against him, and the fists to fight for his survival.

“Who is this?” the man asked again.

“Roy, this is Gage. He’s going to adopt my baby,” Lily said. “Gage, this is Roy. He’s the baby’s father. He’s going to live with me for a little while.”

“W
hy don’t you come in and have a beer?”

Lily headed toward the kitchen, presumably to get me something to drink, a beer I didn’t want. She left me alone in the narrow hallway with Roy, who stood just a few paces away.

Roy took a long, purposeful swig of his Bud, keeping his eyes locked on me as if I might try something—attack, run, who knows what—if he let himself be distracted. Roy finished his beer in one long drink, crinkling the sides of the can with his fingers to show me he was done. He still didn’t speak. He just kept eyeing me.

“So, you’re the dude who’s going to raise my kid,” he said.

The word
awkward
popped into my head.

Roy kept eyeing me. I noticed how deeply set his eyes were and I wondered if it gave him a different perspective on the world. He was a hard man who made it hard to tell if I repelled him, amused him, sickened him, or a combination of all three.

“This is a lot to take in,” I said. My heart was pounding now, palms gone sweaty. How did we end up here, meeting like this? Lily acted so nonchalant about it all. Didn’t she understand the ramifications of the father entering the picture? Other thoughts crossed my mind. Would he be willing to sign off on the adoption? Would he contest Lily’s wishes? Would the baby grow up to have the same hard-edged look in his eyes as his father?

“What do you mean, take in?” Roy asked.

I picked up the drawl in his speech and wondered if he came from someplace warm, where people walked slowly, where they weren’t used to rushing to get out of the cold. Florida perhaps. His dark complexion could be genetics or the product of the sun.

“It’s a big new development, Roy,” I said.

I wanted to get his last name, but we hadn’t shaken hands, and Roy made no gestures to break the ice. We remained a good distance apart. I saw him run his tongue back and forth along the bottom of his lip. For some reason, I got the feeling this was a habit of his whenever he got to thinking. And I could see Roy was a thinking man. If Lily was the crying woman when we first met, Roy was the thinking man. The way his eyes probed, how he shifted weight from one foot to another, he didn’t do anything without having planned for every possible contingency. This was my suspicion, anyway. He knew the exits before he entered a room. He wouldn’t talk to you, not really talk, until he knew your angle, your backstory, your weakness, something he could use to his advantage. No movement was wasted, no thought without purpose; everything about him projected the single-mindedness of a predator. He was all about the hunt. One minute you might be hunting by his side, but in a flash he’d turn you into his prey.

Lily came back from the kitchen with two beers.

“Wish I could join you,” she said. “But the baby isn’t ready to drink.”

Lily tossed me the beer. I caught it midair, inverted it with a twist of my wrist, popped the top, and took a long swig, slurping up foam. Roy and I eyed each other as I drank my beer. That was when I saw the first hint of pleasure cross his face.

“So, why don’t we go into the living room and hang out,” Lily said. “It takes me a while to wind down after a shift.”

I wondered what time it was. One in the morning? One-thirty? I wasn’t wearing my watch, but it was late, or early morning. Everything told me to get out of there, go downstairs, wake Anna up, have a chat, do something other than what I was doing, which was sitting on the couch in Lily’s apartment. But I didn’t go anywhere. I sat down and became a part of the moment. Maybe it was Roy. Maybe in a way I was thankful for his sudden arrival.

Here was the shameful part, the thought I couldn’t speak aloud:
maybe Roy was the answer to my problem
.

Roy pulled up a chair, spun it around, and sat in it so the chair back was pressed up against his chest. He stretched out his arm and held out his hand, and Lily responded by tossing him a beer. Roy popped the top and Lily raised her bubbling glass of what I guessed was soda water and cranberry juice.

“Well, here’s to all of us,” Lily said, then took a sip.

A moment of silence expanded. The only thing I could do to settle my unease was to drink. Before I knew it, half my beer was gone and we hadn’t spoken a word.

“So, Roy,” I said. “Where are you from?”

“Sort of all over,” Roy said.

I gave him a chance to join in the small talk, but he preferred to let the conversation die. Instead, he drank more of his beer. I did the same and realized I’d finished all twelve ounces in about three swallows.

“So what brings you to us?” I didn’t know what else to say, but that got the hint of a smile from him.

“I needed a place to crash for a while,” Roy said. “Lily told me how nice you folks have been to her.”

“Were you two living together before?” I asked.

Lily laughed.

“OMG!” she exclaimed, tossing her head back with another laugh. “Yeah, Roy and I were living together when I met you guys. He’s the big jerk who locked me out of my own apartment. Jerk!”

Lily flung a couch pillow across the room, and Roy batted it away like some irritating insect.

“I didn’t want you to leave, be-yatch,” Roy said, giving Lily a hard stare. “I told you I didn’t want no baby.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t have to have no baby, asshole,” Lily said, her tone both mocking and mimicking. “We got a family now.”

“You could’ve dealt with it other ways.”

Lily set her drink down on the floor so she could use both her hands to flip Roy off. I took a guess about what Roy meant by other ways of dealing with it.

“I told you that wasn’t an option. But I took care of it. It’s all good now.”

I wondered if that was the real reason for their fight. Lily had told me she wasn’t sure who the father was, but she seemed sure now.

I watched Lily cross the room and wrap her arms around Roy’s wiry neck. She kissed the side of his head and ran her tongue around the outside edges of his ear. I swallowed hard. Who were these people? What were they doing in my apartment? What was I doing here? Lily stopped kissing Roy and started to massage his shoulders. Roy tilted his head to the side and I heard his neck snap with a pop. First time I’d seen him look happy.

He went back to eyeing me while Lily continued to work his shoulders. I tried to stay relaxed, but the way he was watching me made the hairs on the back of my neck start to rise. I still couldn’t figure out what was going to happen. He could get up and start beating me, or come over and give me a bro hug, and neither would have been totally surprising.

“So what happened to your apartment, Roy?” I asked.

“Got kicked out,” Roy said.

Again he passed his tongue across his bottom lip. Then he ran it along the inside of his mouth. Next thing I knew, he took a can of Copenhagen chewing tobacco from his jacket pocket and slipped a dip into his bottom lip. He started spitting into his beer. I guess that explained his oral habit.

“Roy got kicked out because he can’t get a job,” Lily said to me.

“You hush now, Lily,” Roy snapped. “Gage here isn’t interested in all my business.”

“Oh, but I am,” I said.

“If you ask me, it ain’t fair how they treat convicts. Everyone thinks if you do time, you can’t ever be good. But Roy is good. Real good. He just made some bad mistakes, that’s all.”

“Lily, let’s change the subject.”

“Do you mind if I ask what you were in for?”

Roy’s expression turned dark and serious—menacing, I’d have to say.

“I guess since you’re going to be the daddy,” Roy began, leaning forward in his chair far enough to lift the two back legs off the floor, “you’re going to want me to tell my story. I didn’t know my daddy, didn’t much care to from what my mamma said. But it would be better if the kid knew a little something about me.”

I tried to swallow more beer but forgot I’d already drunk it down. Still, I sucked hard enough to get a few cold drops to take away some of the dryness.

“I did five years for armed robbery. I’m not going to lie to you, Gage, I did the crime and paid with time. Nobody got hurt, but I got caught. Sent me to Walpole. Did my time peaceful, made no trouble, got paroled, and I’ve been clean ever since.”

Again the conversation died and we went back to our heavy silence. Me tapping my feet on the floor, running my hands nervously on my empty beer can, eventually crushing the sides. Lily was rubbing Roy’s shoulders and I could see through the doorway a corner of one of her framed movie posters. I tried to imagine Roy and Lily together in bed, munching on popcorn, watching a classic Garbo and commenting on the dresses she wore, the setting, the wonder of cinema from that period. I could more easily picture them watching
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
. Hell, I could imagine Roy being one of the stars (a star with the chainsaw, that is). How was Anna going to react to this new major development? Would she welcome Roy the ex-con into our home as she did Lily, or would she view him as a threat, someone who might talk Lily out of the adoption? What about the genetics? Would she be worried the baby would grow up to be an armed robber just like Daddy?

Roy spit into the mouth of his beer and swigged from a freshy. He didn’t seem to mix the tobacco and alcohol, a skill that took time and practice to perfect.

“So, where did you two meet?” I asked, clawing for conversation when really what I wanted to do was leave.

“Jail,” Lily said. She held back a smile until her mouth couldn’t contain the joke any longer. “Just kidding. You should have seen your face, Gage.”

“We met at Jillian’s,” Roy said.

“He’d come in and play nine ball a lot,” Lily added. “He wasn’t a hustler, but he was a good player.”

“The way I recall it, I was the best.”

“Baby, you are the best,” Lily said, and she leaned over his shoulder to kiss him on the mouth.

When Lily pulled away, Roy and I were left looking each other over. I imagined he was wondering what I was good at doing. He knew it wasn’t playing pool, and it certainly had nothing to do with crime. Was he thinking I was too soft to raise his kid? Meanwhile, I was left wondering if I could raise a child from such hard stock when my only experience was a son who loved stuffed animals and never spoke an unkind word in his too-few years.

Lily left Roy and returned to the couch.

“Want me to put on some music?” she asked. “I play it at night, but softly. I hope it’s never been a bother.”

“It’s never bothered me,” I said, standing up. “But I really should get going. Roy, it’s been a pleasure.”

I stuck out my hand for the proverbial shake good-bye, but Roy just eyed it with a contemptuous look. He looked away only to spit some dip into his empty beer can.

“What were you doing up here, anyway?” he asked. It sounded like the suspicion in his gut had finally bubbled up to his throat. “You always come check on my girl at this late hour?”

“Roy.” Lily stood. She’d seen this before. The way he was eyeing me was a warning sign. “Don’t be silly now.”

“He’s a big boy,” Roy said. “He’s gonna be my baby’s daddy. He knows how to answer a question all on his own, Lil. Now, you let him answer. Why’d you come up here at this late hour? Do you do that a lot?”

I could see the muscles in Roy’s neck start to tighten and coil. His eyes burrowed into mine as he held his gaze unflinching. I was afraid to speak—afraid I’d stutter. An icy chill raked up my body. Nothing I could do but quake just a little. Roy looked ready to pounce. If he was trying to agitate me, it was working. I tried to think of something to say. I couldn’t imagine how the truth would sound: “Well, Roy, since you asked, I think Lily here is a cunning individual and I came up here to confront her, but gosh darn it and go figure, she’s acting nothing but sweet as honey and peachy as pie and I shouldn’t ever have been questioning her intentions, so I’ll just be going on my way. Pleasure meeting you and thanks again for letting me raise your child as my own. God bless you both.”

The truth wouldn’t set me free, it would set me on my ass, with Roy’s fists flying in my face. So I needed another story, and by the grace of God it came to me.

“I heard more footsteps upstairs than usual,” I said. “Lily always comes home alone, so I got nervous there might be a break-in or something. I checked your front door and it was unlocked.” Here I turned my attention to Lily. “I got to tell you again, always lock that door. You can never be too safe.”

“Lots of criminals around here, huh?” Roy said, making a slight chuckle somewhere deep in his throat. “You don’t know tough neighborhoods.”

“It’s very nice of you to check up on me,” Lily said. “But I’m fine, really.”

“Well, then,” I said, clearing my throat. I took a step toward Roy and extended my hand again. He gave me the eye, as if he could see right through my deception. Whatever still troubled him, he managed to shrug it aside.

“Gage, it’s a true pleasure,” Roy said, swallowing my hand in his viselike grasp. I nearly cried out from the force. I searched Roy’s eyes for any sign that he intentionally wanted to hurt me but saw nothing. The fact that Roy was just that strong was no less disconcerting. “And thanks for all your hospitality,” Roy continued, “especially with what you’re doing for Lily. If it were up to me there wouldn’t be no baby, but if there’s got to be one, well, I guess you’ll be a much better daddy than I’d ever be.”

With that parting salvo, he finally let go of my hand.