Utopian Day (17 page)

The meal progressed from there with vigor. J.T.
opened a bottle of wine and poured everyone a generous portion. The
conversation was lively as the three caught each other up on the
previous month’s activities.

“
I just broke one thousand dollars
in sales for the first time this month!” Laura
exclaimed.

“
Hey, good for you!” J.T. replied,
raising his glass. “A toast to Laura’s stained glass
business.”

“
Here, here,” James enjoined,
raising his own glass and taking a generous swig of wine along with
the other two.

“
What about you, James, anything
new and exciting to report?” J.T. asked.

“
Well… actually there is…” James
replied, looking across the table at Laura. She turned beet red and
started looking down at her plate.

“
Oh, do tell,” J.T. encouraged,
seeing Laura blush.

“
Laura and I are dating,” James
continued.

“
Oh, so you each found someone to
date within the last month? Who are these two other people?” J.T.
asked jokingly, looking at Laura and enjoying her embarrassment.
She took a carrot off of her salad and threw it at him.

“
Stop it! You know what he means;
we’re dating each other.”

“
Oh, o.k. I get it now,” he said,
pretending not to have understood what James was getting at. “Well,
that’s good news,” he continued with genuine affection. “How long
has this been going on?”

“
About three months,” Laura
replied. “We agreed not to tell you in case it didn’t work out. We
didn’t want it to be awkward between us all.”

“
Well, shoot fire,” replied J.T.
“I’m happy for you two.”

“
What about you, J.T.? Do you have
anything new going on?” James queried.

“
Well, as a matter of fact, I do.
You both know that as part of making amends for my past, that I
track down former employees of the companies I helped shut down and
help them out. Well, there were a few that were hit particularly
hard. Some of them had heart attacks, some of them committed
suicide….” J.T. stopped speaking, having begun to choke up. Laura
could see tears welling up in his eyes. He paused for a moment to
collect himself before continuing. “Over the years I’ve been doing
this, I have made a list of those people and vowed that if I ever
got the chance, that I would visit them personally and
apologize.”

“
Wait a minute, J.T.,” James
interrupted, “you can’t be serious about returning to the States.
What if you get caught?”

“
Now, just hold your horses,” J.T.
replied, putting both hands up in a gesture of surrender. “I’m not
going back to the U.S.”

Laura and James both sat back in their chairs,
visibly relieved.

“
I’ve arranged for each of these
people to be invited on a cruise, supposedly at the expense of
their former employer. One of the stops is in Nassau. I’m planning
to fly out there and meet with each of them individually at a
pre-arranged time in a rental office in one of the hotels there.
It’s already all been arranged. I’ll even be in a disguise so they
won’t be able to recognize me.”

He stared between Laura and James, looking for any
indication of alarm.

“
If you can think of anything that
might set off the alarm bells, let me know within the next week. I
can still have one of my lawyers do the meet in my place, but I
would rather do it myself if I can. I feel this is something I
really need to do.”

Laura and James both looked somber, considering what
J.T. had just said, wracking their brains in an attempt to see any
possible flaws.

“
If you get caught, it will lead
them right back to us,” Laura stated. “Then we’re all going back to
jail.”

“
It’s only for one day, right?”
James asked. “Are you using your real name or your alias for
anything?”

“
I only used my alias to book the
flight to Nassau. Everything tied with the cruise and renting the
office will be in the name of my law firm – protected information
that they can’t legally be forced to disclose under U.S. law. I’m
planning on introducing myself as Jack Smith, one of the people
responsible for shutting down the business – no more detail than
that.”

“
You can’t seriously be in
agreement with this?” Laura said to James, obviously upset. “If he
gets caught, we all get caught. Our lives would be over,
James.”

James looked directly at Laura.

“
My mom died because somebody ran
her company into the ground and she lost her insurance and couldn’t
get the right treatment for her cancer. It would have meant a lot
to me if someone responsible for that would have looked me in the
eye and said they were sorry for what they did.” He turned to look
at J.T. “I think you should go, but only if Laura is o.k. with it.
Like she said, we’re all in this together.”

J.T. looked at Laura, who was shaking her head from
side to side.

“
Look, Laura,” J.T. continued,
“you don’t have to decide tonight. Think about it. I’m not
scheduled to fly out until next Saturday.”

Laura stood up and began walking out the door. “I’m
going down to the beach. I need to be alone,” she said.

James turned to look at J.T. “Let’s just give her
some space… and eat some of that cake she brought,” he said with a
smile.

“
Darn straight.” J.T. replied as
they both got up from the table and went to the kitchen counter to
open the dessert.

When she arrived at the beach, Laura sat down on the
sand and looked out over the beautiful tropical ocean view before
her. She was full of conflicting emotions. She was mad that J.T.
was planning to do something that could destroy the life they had
all worked to build for themselves over the past year. She was also
scared that he might actually get caught and get them all thrown
back into prison. As she looked out at the waves, she thought about
the prayer that J.T. had said before dinner and about her own
journey of recovery in the program at Utopia.

“
Give me the courage to change the
things which should be changed,” she said out loud.

She thought about what James had said, about how it
would have made a difference for someone to apologize for their
role in his mom’s loss of insurance and the resulting damage that
had been caused. She thought about how it would have helped her
heal if any of her former abusers had had the guts to accept
responsibility for what they had done and say so to her face. After
staring at the ocean for a few more minutes, she stood up and
walked back to the house.

Back in the house, Laura found J.T. and James
playing pool. James was losing badly, as usual, but he was having
fun. She smiled as she walked up to the two. They stopped the game
and looked at her, waiting for her to say something.

“
I think you should do it. I have
one condition, though,” she said.

“
Name it,” J.T.
replied.

“
You call us once you are in the
air on your way back to let us know you didn’t get
busted.”

J.T. nodded soberly, “Will do… and thanks for
understanding.”

“
I think it’s great what you’re
doing, J.T.,” Laura said.

“
I just hope it can help them move
on somehow,” he replied.

J.T. went to bed that night looking forward to the
upcoming trip, wondering what it would be like. He was both scared
and excited at the same time.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Nick Bartonovich sat in the chair across from the
doctor as he was given the results of the battery of tests that had
been run over the past few weeks. It was never a good sign when you
were called back in to the doctor’s office to get the results –
they never liked to give bad news over the phone, it seemed. All
the same, he hadn’t been prepared to hear the ‘C’ word.
Appendicitis, an ulcer, anything but cancer.

There had never been anything that Nick couldn’t
handle, even since he was a kid. When his parents had died within
weeks of each other, he had cried, sure, but he never let anyone
else see. He was only ten, but he determined then that he would
never let anyone hurt him that badly again. He decided that
he
would be the one calling the shots, making the plans,
bending events to his own will and desire. When his uncle tried to
get him to take off more time from school to grieve, Nick snuck out
of the house and went to school anyway, hitting the books harder
than ever. His hard work paid off and he eventually earned a
scholarship into college. Once he was there, he started dabbling in
running numbers for the college games, found he was good at it, and
started the path he was still on today.

But this was different. This wasn’t some external
enemy he could defeat with the force of his will. He couldn’t write
a check and make it go away or send Mia out to persuade cancer to
change its mind and leave. And for the first time since he’d been
that little boy who had just lost his parents, Nick Bartonovich was
afraid.

He sat in a daze as the doctor talked about possible
therapies for stage two stomach cancer. Surgery would be mandatory,
possibly followed by chemotherapy and radiation therapy. All of it
coming at him so fast that he felt like a mosquito caught in a
rainstorm, having to dodge every word like it was a drop of water,
threatening to envelope him if he came too close to it. He came out
of his daze at the end of the conversation to hear that he had an
appointment the following week with an oncologist.

The doctor slid a card across the desk towards him
with the particulars of the appointment before asking if Nick had
any questions. Nick could barely breathe. It was as if all of the
oxygen had been sucked out of the room and he didn’t have enough
air in his lungs to speak. So he simply stared at the card and
nodded his head from side to side.

He almost had a head-on collision while driving home
because he wasn’t paying attention to driving – still attempting to
process the news he had just been given. He parked the car in the
garage and made his way to the den, where he poured himself a
scotch and sat down in his favorite chair, looking out the front
window. That was where Mia found him when she came in the front
door.

Nick had told her to come in around 2:00 p.m.
because he had a doctor’s appointment and wouldn’t be back before
then. He had planned on following their usual routine at that time.
He would review his various business activities for the day and
assign to her any tasks he needed taken care of.

Mia wasn’t anything like a secretary. He had a
half-dozen of those that worked at his corporate office downtown.
He could video conference, call, or email the corporate office
administrator from his office here at home should he need something
done. Mia was more of a specialized personal assistant. She would
handle the coordination of delivery and pickup of funds that were
made or lost from the gambling enterprises. If some of the high
rollers were having a bad spell and refusing to pay up, she would
persuade them to change their minds and come back with the cash. If
a business associate needed help deciding to do what Nick was
suggesting, Mia was the one he sent to work it out. She was very
good at what she did and he had complete faith in her abilities.
But today, there would be no such assignments.

Mia could tell that Nick was not in a good mood, so
she did what she normally did when she found him in a foul mood –
she waited. Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes passed and Nick didn’t
move. He was just staring out the window, holding the half-consumed
glass of scotch in his hand as his arm lay on the armrest of the
chair.

Mia could only recall one other time that she had
seen him like this. It had been in college when the girl he had
been dating had dumped him. He had tried to win her back with gifts
and flowers, but she had finally told him that there was nothing he
could do to win her back, that she just didn’t love him and never
would. He had sat in a chair and stared out of the window for the
rest of the afternoon just like he was doing now. It wasn’t
something he could fix. He couldn’t force her to love him like he
could force someone to pay a debt. He knew that and he was undone
by the fact.

At the end of the day, he’d snapped out of his
stupor, told Mia to get dressed to party, and they had gone out
together. It was the first time Nick had ever asked her to go
anywhere with him socially. Before, it had always been business.
They had gone to a few bars and Nick was beginning to get drunk.
When they entered the next bar, Nick caught sight of his former
girlfriend sitting at a table with her new football player
boyfriend and a couple of his teammates. Nick began hurling insults
at his former flame and her new beau. After the second or third
comment, the big football player had stood up, red-faced, and begun
coming towards Nick, intent on a fight. He was followed closely by
his two teammates.

Mia did what she did best. She protected Nick and
looked out for his interests. Before the first would-be assailant
had come within striking distance of Nick, Mia had already covered
the distance between them, delivering a side-kick to his knee that
sent him crashing down to the floor in agony – an injury that would
leave him out of commission for the rest of the season. Without
skipping a beat, she took another step and leapt into the air to
deliver a well-placed knee to the second man’s diaphragm. At the
same time, she used the palms of her hands to strike his ears
violently, leaving him breathless and in considerable pain in the
process. The third man was at her side by this time. Seeing what he
was up against, he decided not to take any chances. Lady or not, he
was going to punch Mia – or so he thought. Mia easily deflected his
clumsily delivered haymaker and delivered an open-hand strike to
his trachea. He instantly put both hands to his throat and began
gagging and gasping for air.