Now She's Gone: A Novel (17 page)

“Whatever, Bruce,” she muttered.

“Listen, you are not going to do that to me. You are not going to turn this thing around on me. You are the one at fault here, not me.”

“Oh, we all know how perfect you are, Bruce. You never make a mistake.”

I willed myself to stay calm. She hadn’t changed one bit, not one ounce. And there was more animosity in her voice than I’d ever heard. It was an underlying hostility, almost as if she was trying to hide it.

“Why do you hate me so much?” I asked softly, hating to ask, hating to find out.

“It’s not you. Everything doesn’t have to do with you, you know? It just doesn’t. You’ll never understand that, but it doesn’t.”

What Have You Been Doing?

We went back to her place and sat opposite each other. I got the old rocker. I was almost afraid to sit in it. I sat down gingerly, easing myself into it and when it didn’t collapse, I breathed a sigh of relief. We didn’t speak for the longest time.

“Nice place,” I finally said.

She looked around. “It’s okay.”

I nodded. “So what have you been doing?”

“Nothing.”

My head snapped up and our eyes clicked. We almost smiled. We didn’t. She looked away, then back.

“What have you been doing?” she asked.

“Looking for you.”

“Looks like you’re done then.”

Smartass. I nodded. I was almost ashamed that I had tracked her down. It was so apparent that she hadn’t wanted me to.

“So what do you want?” she asked.

“Well, I wanted to see if you were okay, first and foremost, because I do care about your well being.”

“Is that right?”

Ignoring her comment, I took a breath and continued, “And secondly, I want to get this done. I have to move and if I’m married to a woman who doesn’t want to be married to me, I can’t move on.”

She glared at me, then away. “I can see that.”

I nodded. “Where’s your jewelry?”

“My what?”

“Your jewelry,” I said and moved in the rocker. “Where is it?”

“Why?”

“I want to know,” I said and moved again. The rocker creaked. Oh shit. I held my breath but it broke anyway. It broke right in half and I fell flat on my ass to the floor. Sandy just looked at me, her eyes wide. She tried not to laugh. I tried not to laugh. This was supposed to be a serious discussion! We had some serious shit to talk about! But we couldn’t help it. We cracked up and laughed for a few minutes. It was good. It helped ease the tension.

She came over and held out her hand. “Come on. Get up.”

I took her hand and she helped pull me off the floor. “Thanks.”

“You’re going to have to replace that,” she said. “That’s Kelsey’s rocker.”

“It’s a piece of shit!”

She shrugged and eyed me. “I know. She found it in the alley. Thought she could fix it up or something.”

I stared at the thing. There was no hope for it. “Why don’t you buy some real furniture?” I asked.

“Why?” she asked. “It’s not my house.”

I stared at her.

“Well,” she said. “It’s not.”

“Then…” I stopped myself. I didn’t really give a shit.

She was still eyeing me. Her arms were now crossed. “Have you lost weight?”

I shrugged. “A little.”

“Don’t,” she said and moved her head to the side. “I don’t like skinny men.”

“What does my weight have to do with you?” I asked.

She looked momentarily shocked and snapped, “It doesn’t. I just think you don’t look that great when you lose weight.” She went back over to the couch and flopped down on it, her arms still crossed. “Want something to eat?”

“What do you have? Peanut butter?” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I kicked myself in the ass. I had no intention of letting her know I’d been in here the other day.

She didn’t catch on and sighed, “What do you have against peanut butter?”

I hated peanut butter, always have. It was goopy weird shit that stuck to the roof of your mouth. I don’t know why anyone liked it. “Nothing,” I said and went to the other end of the couch and sat down. “Would you like to go somewhere to eat?”

She shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe. Would you?”

“Sure,” I said.

“You’ll have to pay for it. I don’t have any money,” she said and pulled the clip out of her hair and shook it.

I stared at her. She was always so sexy when she did that. Her hair just came down and framed her face. She looked so damn good. I looked away from her.

She continued, “I had to put a new alternator on the Ford.”

I nodded.

“And I only get paid every two weeks,” she said and rubbed her hair. “Which sucks.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “Are you going to tell me what happened to your jewelry?”

“It’s in my room.”

It wasn’t in her room. It was gone. I knew she had pawned it. It didn’t matter, not really. But it pissed me off that she’d pawn her engagement ring.

“Go get it,” I said.

She eyed me. “It’s not here. I have it in a safety deposit box. There have been a lot of break-ins.”

“Sandy, I know you pawned it.”

“I didn’t pawn it,” she said, then added, “All.”

I almost growled I was so frustrated. But it was her stuff. If she wanted to give it away, let her do it. Wasn’t anything to me.

She glared at me. “Look, it’s been kinda hard lately. We had a lot of repairs to do to the house and Kelsey can’t really pay for anything because the mortgage is so much because of the location. So I needed some money. Simple as that. As soon as I get things straight, I’ll go get it back.”

“Give me the tickets.”

“What?”

“Give me the pawn tickets,” I said calmly. “So I can go get it back.”

“No, it’s my stuff. I’ll get it later.”

“When did you pawn it?”

“It’s been a couple of months.”

Shit!
“Well, there goes that,” I muttered.

“What’s it to you? It’s my stuff.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“I didn’t pawn everything,” she muttered. “You’d think I sold my engagement ring or something.”

Phew. Thank God.

She stared at me and I could tell she was getting frustrated. She was lying about something. She hated to lie, it made her nervous. She believed in Karma.

“Listen,” she said. “When I got down here, Kelsey told me they would steal my car and it would be best to sell it. I sold it and I didn’t want to open an account at a bank and kept the money here. I bought a few things for the house and the car.”

I stared at her.

“And one day I took off to the beach and came back a couple of hours later and the house had been broken into. They took all my money.”

All my money, too.

“I had my jewelry hidden in the freezer. They didn’t find it.”

“That sucks.”

“I didn’t have a cent,” she said. “So, I had to pawn some stuff. When I got down to my engagement ring, I went to work.”

Why hadn’t she just told me that in the first place? Why did she always have to walk around things? I kinda felt sorry for her. “Well,” I said. “That’s too bad.”

She nodded.

I couldn’t help it. I said, “Why the hell did you keep all that money in this house? Are you crazy?”

“I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

Well, she was right about that. I didn’t understand.

She sighed loudly and said, “Look, why don’t you just yell at me and get it over with ’cause I am really tired. Some of us have to work, you know?”

She had such audacity! She’d get onto me for working too much and now I was bugging her and keeping
her
from working. She was precious. Just precious. “I told you. I’m not here to yell at you.”

She shrugged. “Whatever.”

“Why did you leave?”

“Does it really matter, Bruce?”

“Yeah, it kinda does. You had no reason to leave.”

“I didn’t?”

“Did you?”

She sighed. “We all have our reasons for things we do. Most people never understand them, but we do.”

“What was your reason?”

“It’s none of your business,” she said, looking away. Her bottom lip trembled. She was about to cry. I had seen her do that a thousand times.

“I took good care of you.”

“You took too good of care of me!” she screamed and tears rolled down her cheeks. She wiped them away as if they perturbed her.

“I didn’t know there was such a thing.”

“You don’t understand. You’ll never understand.” She got up and went to her purse, dug out a pack of cigarettes and lit one.

“Help me to understand.”

“I can’t! I can’t, Bruce! I don’t understand it myself!”

“Why didn’t you just come home?” I asked.

“I couldn’t! You don’t understand! I couldn’t. I knew what I put you through and I couldn’t face you. I was too ashamed.”

“Why don’t you cut the shit and just tell me what happened?”

“Nothing happened,” she said and smoked. “Nothing.”

“Something happened,” I said. “You just don’t walk away over nothing.”

We stared at each other. I nodded slightly at her. She nodded back, looked away and sighed loudly.

“Promise you won’t make fun of me?” she asked quietly.

“Yeah!” I said, getting even more frustrated.

She took a deep breath, then a drag on her cigarette and as she exhaled she said, “I woke up late at night about a year ago and realized I’d never have it. I’d never be anything other than your wife. I’d never mean anything to anyone else.”

“You meant something to me.”

“Again you miss the point.”

“Oh, please.”

“No, just listen to me! I finally realized why I’d get so pissed off and frustrated. Remember how I’d get so mad sometimes?” She paused, then continued, “I realized that I’d never fulfill my dreams and the thing was I never really
had
any dreams. No real dreams.”

I understood that, oddly enough.

“I woke up one day and I realized I was getting older and I’d never done anything with my life. I’d basically sat on my ass and let you take care of me.”

“I wanted to take care of you.” I sighed and looked at her. “And you helped people. You were always volunteering and you worked! You helped your mother out.”

Her eyes narrowed at me. “Oh, really?”

I was so busted. It wouldn’t take her a minute to figure out I had been reading her journals.

“Anyway, that’s not the point,” she said. “What if something happened to you? Then where would I be?”

I shook my head. Again, the audacity. But I knew she didn’t mean anything by it. That’s just the way her head worked. I took a breath and said, “If anything happened to me, I had everything taken care of, Sandy. I made the arrangements.”

The tears were on her face again. “‘The arrangements’? Oh, God!”

“What did I say?!”

“Nothing,” she muttered. “Maybe I’m just crazy. I don’t know how to explain it, but every once in a while I would get this urge and it would eat me alive.”

“What urge?”

“Haven’t you ever felt the urge just to get in your car and drive? Just drive and not stop? I did. Just go, leave and see what’s out there. I did that and I found myself near Miami and I found Kelsey and she said, ‘Stay as long as you like. I’m not here much.’”

“I’m still a little fuzzy on the urge thing.”

She rolled her eyes, put her cigarette out and lit another one. “I can’t explain it. It’s just… I never wanted to
leave
you. The thought of some other woman having you drove me crazy. But then again, the thought of me never knowing another man like I know you, drove me even crazier.”

I just stared at her.

“I’d never
sleep
with anyone else besides you. No man would ever love me besides you. I panicked.”

I stared at her. Now she was crying. Her bottom lip trembled as she tried, in vain, not to. She hid it, her pain. She always did.

“Is this what this is about?” I asked. “You want another man to love you?”

She shrugged and shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“What about Peter?”

Her head jerked up. “Excuse me?”

“I know about Peter.”

She looked away and threw her cigarette into the ashtray.

“Yeah, Peter, the guy you fucked for over a year. Poor Peter. I guess he wasn’t good enough.”

She shook her head and said, “I’m sorry.” Then she burst into tears.

I stared at her, thinking about her reaction. I didn’t know what to say.

She turned to me and said, “Peter was a fling. That’s all.”

“He wanted you to run off with him.”

“Yes, he did,” she said and wiped her eyes.

“So why didn’t you? He loved you. He was another man.”

“Bruce, Peter was great and I won’t lie, but he wasn’t like you. He could have never taken care of me the way you did.”

“How can I take care of you if you run off?”

She sighed and shook her head. “We might as well stop here. You don’t understand.”

“You want this. You want that. You won’t take no for an answer. Oh, I get it, Sandy. But what you don’t get is you hurt people.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I just… I just don’t know what to say other than that.”

“No, I get it,” I said and I did. She was being eaten up by guilt. That’s all. It showed in her face, her mannerisms. “Did you think I’d never find out about him?”

She shrugged. “I guess I knew you’d find out eventually. But I didn’t leave because of that. I mean, I did. I felt so bad but… I don’t know. I left because of me, of…” She stopped and took a breath.

“Why?”

“Because I never felt good enough for you,” she said.

That shocked me a little. “Are you serious?”

She stood and paced a little, then stopped. “I never felt good enough for anything, Bruce. And when I got you and we got married, I felt like I didn’t deserve it. Maybe I was just looking for a way to fuck it up or something. Maybe I just wanted to see if I could make it on my own. It’s obvious I can’t, not really.”

Self-esteem. She never really had any and she still didn’t. She was so smart and pretty. She was probably the best looking woman in town but she just didn’t see it. Her own beauty couldn’t help her. Neither could her brains.

“Do you know how much I worried about you?” I asked, staring her dead in the eye. “I was sick. I was sick with worry for you! And for what? To find out you didn’t give a shit about me and you never did!”