Can I Get An Amen? (6 page)

We walked quickly and without speaking. I kept turning back nervously, expecting to see Ted following us, expecting to see him rush the man with the glasses from behind. “Don’t worry; he won’t come anywhere near you,” he said, suddenly stopping. “My name is Mark, by the way.”

I managed to speak, though my words came out in jagged, halted spurts. I sounded like a hysterical child. “My car… is on Summit… Street.”

He shook his head. “No, you’re in no shape to drive,” he said definitively. “I can take you home.”

“No, wait…” I squeezed my eyes shut to think. Though I felt an instinctive and almost reflexive trust in Mark, I knew that
the sensible thing to do would be to call a cab, call Kat, anything but get into a car with another strange man. “I should just call my sister.”

Mark nodded, seeming to follow my train of thought, and stood a respectful distance away while I pressed my cell against my ear. I expected to hear Kat’s sleep-laden voice, reproachful and annoyed, but instead without so much as a ring I was sent to her cool, brief voice-mail greeting.

After I was hung up on by one cab company and never actually reached a human being at the other, Mark looked at me hesitantly, his hands in his back pockets. “Sometimes they just let it ring and ring at this time of night.” I nodded and looked around, as if expecting some other solution to suddenly materialize. “Listen,” he said, “why don’t you just let me take you?” I looked at him, searching his face for something that would give me pause. “I promise I’ll get you home safe.”

“Okay.” Tears began to well up in my eyes again. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

He smiled a small, sympathetic smile. “My car’s this way,” he said, leading us on. It wasn’t until much later that I realized his car was in the opposite direction of the parking garage from the bar. He didn’t just happen upon Ted and me on his way home. He wouldn’t have. How and why he found me there would become one of the many questions that I longed to ask him.

We approached a nondescript blue Subaru and he opened the passenger door. The seat held a scattering of papers and books, and he quickly gathered them up and tossed them into the backseat, muttering an apology about the mess before gesturing for me to sit and closing the door behind me.

I took a deep breath and rested my head against the headrest, letting it all hit me. The gratitude, embarrassment, humiliation,
and fear. I had been so stupid. Fresh tears began to spring from my eyes and I quickly brushed them away as Mark opened the driver’s side door. He sat down and pulled an iPod from his pocket, plugging it into a tangle of wires and adaptors hanging from the dashboard. Bob Dylan blasted unexpectedly loudly from the speakers before Mark quickly adjusted the volume. Afraid to look at him, I stared toward the ceiling, hoping to maintain some control. I felt his hand hover lightly above my forearm, and I let my eyes focus first there, then on his long arms strapped with sinewy muscles, before meeting his eyes. He had the most sincere, intelligent, dark brown eyes.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked. In the dim light of the car, I took in his face. He was also older than I had thought, probably a few years older than me, with a smattering of crow’s-feet and long fine lines running across the width of his forehead, which added an element of depth to his otherwise surreally handsome face.

“I’m okay,” I said, even though I knew it wasn’t entirely true.

He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair before sticking his key in the ignition and coaxing the engine to life. The wagon was a standard, and he stepped onto the clutch and grabbed for the gearshift. He was about to move it into reverse when he stopped, as if deliberating, and turned to look at me. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again before finally saying, “You shouldn’t punish yourself.”

I didn’t know if he meant for tonight, for what had happened with Ted, but it seemed that his meaning went deeper than that, that though I had never laid eyes on him before, he had somehow seen what I had been doing, and he knew why.

H
e waited while I wept into my hands. Like any man, he tried for a while to calm me down, saying how sorry he was for upsetting me, that he only meant I hadn’t done anything wrong, not to blame myself. But then he just sat wordlessly. When I finally stopped, I apologized. “I’m so, so sorry,” I whimpered. “I didn’t mean to ruin your night.”

He smiled kindly. “You didn’t ruin my night. But maybe now you could tell me your name?”

I blushed, realizing that this man who didn’t even know my name was witness to so much. “Ellen.”

“Ellen,” he said, trying the name out in his mouth. “So, where do you live?”

I launched into another round of apologies, saying how I couldn’t believe that I had just let him sit there, how inconsiderate I was. But he chuckled good-naturedly. “Please don’t worry about it.” Glancing at the clock on his stereo, I saw that it was two thirty in the morning.

I directed him to Kat’s condo, reaching deep into my bag to confirm the presence of the spare key that I had figured I would never have occasion to use. Kat’s was closer than my parents’ and for some reason I didn’t want him to see their large, handsome home.

The ride to Kat’s took ten minutes, during which I tried to think of topics of conversation that wouldn’t seem either silly and inconsequential or heavy and intimate. I asked him about his friends, making sure that they weren’t stranded without a ride home. “Don’t worry about those guys. O’Brien had already left and Jay can take care of himself,” he said.

My stomach lurched when we turned into Kat’s complex and I realized that I had to leave him, that I had to stand up and open the door and get out of his car. I felt immobilized. It was so much more than a physical attraction; I just couldn’t imagine him driving away, and never seeing him again. I told myself that it was because he had saved me. There had to be a name for what was happening to me, that some doctor had given an eponymous title to the condition of being attracted to your rescuer.

“So,” he said, eyeing the white buildings, the car creeping forward, “which one is yours?”

I pointed toward Kat’s. “Number seventy-eight.”

He pulled right up front and double-parked, the emergency brake creaking compliantly.

He turned to face me, then smiled again kindly. “Ellen, you take care of yourself, okay?”

“Thank you for everything, Mark.” I hesitated, not wanting to leave. As we stared at each other, I sensed that we both had more to say, but neither one of us spoke. Finally, I reached for the door. “Well, good night.”

“Good night.”

He didn’t leave until I was up the stairs and had opened Kat’s door. Dead bolting it behind me, I slipped off my shoes. I pulled out my cell phone and scrolled to my mother’s name, sending her a text to let her know that I was sleeping at Kat’s, a fact that I was sure she would check in the morning.

Kat’s condo was beautiful but surprisingly traditional. Most people expected her to live among clean modern furniture arranged with a minimalist’s eye, but Kat’s place was all about comfort. Thick, cable-knit cashmere throws were draped over big white slipcovered couches. The hardwood floor was partially covered with a nubby wool area rug, and her old TV was hidden away inside an imported Balinese armoire. Everything was serenely soft and neutral.

I tiptoed up the stairs and creaked open the door to Kat’s room. She immediately jolted up in bed, squinting toward the door.

“Kat, it’s me.”

“Ellen?” she asked. Her usually sleek hair was in disarray and she was wearing a hideous V-necked nightshirt that had slipped off one shoulder. My mother gave us nightshirts each Christmas, and, surprisingly, Kat actually wore hers. “They’re comfortable,” she’d claim when Luke and I would tease her. This one had a frolicking dolphin pattern, as they all tended toward the juvenile and girlie. My mother usually had better taste, but I imagined that she still liked to picture us sleeping in a pastel pink bedroom with a crucifix above the bed and white cotton underwear in the drawers.

I walked over to Kat’s bed and slipped off my cardigan, tossing it on the chair in the corner.

“Ellen, what’s wrong?” she asked, more alert now.

She reflexively made room in her bed and I slid in next to her under the fluffy white down comforter. We nestled into each other like we had done as children, when one of us was scared or in trouble. It used to be Kat who came red eyed and sniffling into my room.

Again I found myself fighting tears. “I have been so fucking stupid, Kat.”

I felt her chest rise and fall. “At least you know it now, Elle,” she said. Her voice was laden with a fatigue that came from more than sleep.

. . .

I told Kat everything that had happened, with Ted and then Mark. She listened, and I could feel her rage building. “You need to go to the police. You have to have that asshole arrested.”

“Go to the police and tell them what, Kat? That some guy lied about a basketball and put his hand over my mouth?”

“That’s not what happened.”

“But that’s how he would make it sound. Believe me.” And even Kat couldn’t argue with that.

I could tell that she was suspicious of Mark, and heard her disapproval when she learned that he had driven me there. “You shouldn’t have gotten in the car with him, Elle.”

I let my head cock to one side. “Check your voice mail, Kat. What was I supposed to do?” I waited for her to become visibly chastened before continuing. “Anyway, I promise that it was totally safe. He wasn’t going to do anything.”

“Elle,” she said, “frankly, you don’t have much credibility as a judge of character right now.” And it was my turn to be silenced.

All my concerns and regrets competed for attention, keeping
me awake long after Kat had fallen back asleep. I thought about Gary and the divorce, how stupid and reckless and selfish I had been. I saw Ted’s face and felt his heavy hand over my mouth, feeling a shame that was so unbearable, I had to relieve myself with thoughts of Mark. Thinking about him was like a respite from the rest of it.

The phone gave a jolting ring at exactly 6:03 a.m., and we both knew exactly who it was.

“You talk to her,” commanded Kat, facedown next to me, her voice muffled by a pillow.

I reached over and grabbed the portable, waiting for the caller ID to confirm what I already knew. Again the phone rang loudly, frantically, demanding to be answered, as if it understood the urgency felt by the caller.

“Hi, Mom,” I said, feeling like a guilty child.

“Ellen! I can’t believe you think you can stay out all night long. Your father and I—”

“Mom, I texted you. I wasn’t out all night,” I said, weakly defending myself. “I slept at Kat’s.”

My mother was fiercely intuitive and sensed from my softer, almost contrite tone that something was wrong. “Oh my Lord… What happened, Ellen?”

“Nothing, Mom.” I felt my face redden, and my voice cracked. “I just woke up.”
So to speak.

. . .

“You need to give me another couple of hours,” muttered Kat. But my mind was already spinning, so I went downstairs and made a pot of coffee. Kat had recently redone her kitchen, and like the rest of the condo, it was understated and elegant, with white cabinets and soapstone counters.

We had all shaken our heads and clucked our objections when Kat had decided to become a hairdresser.
What a shame,
everyone thought. She was always the most athletic of the three of us and seemed to cruise by academically with very little effort. She may have been the one for whom our prep school education paid out its dividends, until, as it was whispered,
she threw it all away
.

But being a hairdresser had worked out nicely for Kat. She worked in one of the best salons in New Jersey, cutting and coloring the hair of the women who would normally go into New York for that sort of thing. Her schedule was fairly flexible and she never tried to make any inane conversation with her clients, garnering her big tips for the peaceful hour and great blow out. She
heard
a lot, though, often calling with bits of gossip about people we knew. “Remember Ashley Morrow?” she would say. “Two years ahead of me, one ahead of you? Anyway, her mother is leaving her father
for a woman
.” Kat was no prude, but she knew how scandalized the Morrows’ circle would be; anything having to do with homosexuality always sent the WASPs lunging for their vodka tonics.

Finally Kat padded downstairs and poured a cup of coffee, joining me at the breakfast bar.

“The kitchen looks nice, Kat.”

She ignored me and took a sip. “Thank God you made the French roast. I have some hazelnut shit that my neighbor gave me. I was afraid I’d come down to my house smelling like a Yankee Candle shop.”

“Why don’t you throw it away?” I asked, knowing Kat’s distaste for flavored coffee.

“Because Mrs. Martin is a sweet little old lady, and if she comes over I’ll have to make her some.” Kat really was so much kinder than she wanted anyone to know.

. . .

It was Friday, Kat’s busiest day at the salon, so she dropped me off at my car on the way to work. As we turned onto Summit Street, I craned my neck to spot it, half expecting it to be gone, a penalty exacted in lieu of the danger I had escaped. But my car stood exactly where I had left it, looking conspicuously static. It felt like everything had changed, but here was my silver Volvo wagon, with not so much as a parking ticket to show for the events of the previous night.

“I’ll check on you later,” said Kat as we hugged good-bye.

When I got home, my mother was primed to take advantage of my vulnerability. Even though she didn’t know what had happened, she
knew
. She always knew. Of course she could have no idea of the specifics, but in her mind the Lord had finally stepped aside, allowing me to see the inevitable and natural consequences of my behavior. That there were no phone calls from the police or hospital, no irreparable and devastating damage, was just further evidence of his goodness and mercy.

My mother realized that she had a window of opportunity to bend me to her will, and she intended to maximize it. She sat at the kitchen table, reading from
Evangeline
, one of her magazines that focused on the issues affecting the Modern Christian Woman. On the cover was a man staring lewdly at a computer screen, with a dreamlike bubble floating above his head featuring an amateurish montage of a marijuana leaf, a few lines of cocaine, and a stack of money. The cover line read,
THE PRINCE COMPLEX.
It was hopelessly goofy and out of touch.