Love Her Madly (27 page)

“What?”

“You just accused Cyn of trying to manipulate me, and now you're doing it. I'm not utterly stupid. I wasn't then, and I'm not now. Do you really expect me to believe that you didn't want to be with her?”

“Glo, I was nineteen—”

“You were nineteen, so your cock had the deciding vote in all matters.”

“I'm not saying— Listen. That part of me did want her, yes. I was attracted to her. I liked her. I cared about her a lot. I thought she was a very bright, very mixed-up girl. But I always sensed the crazy underneath—”

“You don't know the half of it,” she scoffed.

“Maybe not—”

“She was sleeping with johns. At least one of them tried to rape her. That's one of the reasons she was fucked up.”

I watched the words peel off her lips, but somehow I had to run them through my head three times before I understood them.

“You knew that all these years, and you never thought to tell me?”

“I didn't know until that last day in Costa Rica. She—”

“Why the fuck didn't you tell me?”

Glo gave me a look I've never seen before, a nervous scan up and down as if I had transformed into a person of potential violence. I was the bad guy all of a sudden.

“I thought about telling you when I got back, but there was already so much bad stuff on the news, and I thought she was dead. There seemed no point in having you think—”

“You wanted to protect her! Just like always.”

“Which is a huge crime in your eyes! What difference does it make? It's all in the past!”

“Is it? How can it be if you go and see her and start it up again?”

Someone pounded on the wall. We had been shouting. We glared at each other with naked hostility.

I lowered my voice.

“
You see this, what we're doing right now?
This
is what she does to us. This is what she's always done—”

“You cannot ask me to just turn my back on her and forget it happened.” Glo's voice was husky. She wouldn't look at me directly.

“I am asking that. Don't go. Don't see her.”

“I'll do as I damn well please! Maybe it hasn't occurred to you that I might have a few questions I'd like to ask her, and quite a few things to say. Stop treating me like some stupid child. I know what I'm doing!”

“Do you?”

“Yes!”

“So your mind is made up?”

She turned her back, folded the letter with excessive care, and tucked it into her purse. Cyn was winning, ripping us apart with a flimsy sheet of copy paper.

“You know what, Glo? Do whatever you want. Fuck danger. Fuck the life we've built together. Do what she wants and hurry over to serve her. Evidently, that's all you've ever wanted.”

For a second, the room got very quiet. Glo stared at the table, motionless, except for the quick rise and fall of her chest.

“All I've ever wanted? Since when do you care about what I want? Since when do you bother to lift your attention from your precious theater company for long enough to notice?”

The response I'd been preparing died unformed. The way she was looking at me chilled me to the core.

“Glo—”

“Do you think I've forgotten that you did your best to see her last night? The way you're acting now, all judgmental and self-righteous, it's pathetic. It's a joke. I'm going to go and have one last conversation with her. I need to. If you can't handle it, maybe . . .” She trailed off, gazing past me.

“Maybe what?”

“Maybe we really are fucked. Maybe our relationship is doomed never to move beyond where it was when we were
twenty.” She looked at me, and her green eyes shone, pitiless and certain. “I don't want to be those same people. I can't live my life wondering if our being together is just a fluke. The past few months, I feel like I've been asking you to double down on our life together, and you have a million reasons why you can't. I don't want your fucking reasons. If you don't see us having a real future together, then you have to let me go.”

I watched, stunned, as she repacked her bag, shoving McMurphy's device into her jeans pocket. I felt mildly concussed, unable to respond to how heavy the argument had just become.

“I don't want to let you go,” I managed. There was so much more I wanted to say, but I was paralyzed by the fear that I would say something wrong and make things worse. Jesus, was she really talking about splitting up?

“You want all kinds of things, Raj, and so do I.”

“Can I come with you? I won't see her. I just want to make sure you're safe.”

She gave me a withering look and removed her cell phone from her bag, placing it on the table. It was a wordless commentary on my tracking her down the night before.

“You have your matinee.”

I nodded. She picked up her keys and headed for the door. I wanted so badly to touch her, to get some sign that she still believed in our future, but I stood frozen to the spot and watched her walk away.

“Please be careful,” I said, but the rusty shriek of the closing door muted my words. I don't know if she heard me.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Glo

Having just thrown down a possible marriage-ending ultimatum, I was surprised that I didn't feel like crying. Instead, my head felt clearer than it had in a very long time. I had said what I needed to say to Raj, deflected most of his bullshit, and now I had one last major task to scratch off my list: meet Cyn.

A shiver of excitement jolted through me at the thought of it, but I shook it off. I was still carrying McMurphy's tracking device, and the idea that he might be lurking somewhere, watching, had me on edge. I mustered up some feigned confidence and walked out into the gray, blustery afternoon. I cast a look up my street, on high alert for a shadowy figure slumped low behind the wheel of an anonymous sedan.

That dumb hat of his will be the tip-off
, I thought, and tittered nervously to myself as I hurried across the street. I ducked into a local Internet café and asked to borrow the phone. The woman at the counter looked me over suspiciously and asked if I wanted to purchase an international calling card. I told her it was local and would be brief, but I would pay whatever she wanted. She pushed the boxy desktop telephone toward me with a sigh.

“No charge. Be quick.”

I dialed the number on Cyn's letter. It went immediately to a voice mail system. I told her to meet me at the Copper Dragon.
I would be there in less than an hour, and I was coming alone. I hung up and thanked the woman, who didn't look up from her magazine.

On the street, I hailed a cab and asked the driver to take me to the last subway stop in Queens, just before it dove under the river into Manhattan. I had a feeling that Raj would pull some grand melodramatic gesture, like rushing to intercept me on our usual subway platform, begging me to love him forever. His presence would screw up my plan. He would never expect me to ask Cyn to meet at his theater, and that made it the perfect place. I would have the advantage of being on familiar ground, somewhere private where we wouldn't be interrupted. If Cyn really wanted to see me, she would accept my terms. It was as simple as that.

As the driver carried on a mumbled conversation in an indecipherable tongue, I pulled the GPS tracker from my pocket and slid it deep into the darkness beneath his seat. I glanced out the rear to see if any cars were tailing us, but there was a city bus following directly behind, blocking the view. At the subway entrance, I paid the fare and slipped quickly down the steps into the station. As the train pulled in, I found myself smiling, imagining McMurphy trying to follow my electronic trail. He'd no doubt be surprised to discover I spent a Saturday going to and from the city's many delightful airports and halal stands. By the time he figured out he'd been duped, it'd be too late.

As I climbed out of the station into the low gloom of the overcast afternoon, I shook off the first tremor of nerves. My stomach was still reeling from the alcohol, aspirin, and marital drama, and I was running on no more than toast and coffee. I thought a cold soda might help, and looked up to discover the wish-fulfilling doors of a drugstore. The moment I stepped inside, I remembered that I hadn't filled my birth control prescription. Fertility, left unchecked, would resume tomorrow.

Soda in hand, I walked to the Dragon. Before I went inside, I paused by the door of the theater, and with the paper bag from my purchase, erased what little remained of Raj's chalk message. I didn't want Cyn to see it.

I walked into the darkness of the Dragon. It was empty of customers. Ted, the bartender, smiled at me.

“What's this? You've been recruited as set dresser now?” he asked.

“Kind of,” I lied.

“That's bollocks,” he scoffed, amiably. “Want a drink?”

I was about to shake my head, but my eye fell on a bottle of dark rum, the same brand that Cyn and I had been drinking before everything fell apart. “Yeah, why not?”

“What'll it be?”

“That dark rum, with the silver label. Neat.”

“Neat? You got it.”

He poured one for me and one for himself. We clinked glasses. “To your good work,” he said.

“And to yours.”

We slugged back the rum, and Ted screwed up his face. “My god. It's like paint thinner.”

I smiled and felt my stomach roar as this latest insult was laid down. “There's a girl coming to meet me. A friend. When she gets here, can you send her down? Phone doesn't work, and I can't always hear a knock.”

“Sure. What's she look like?”

“Pretty. Blond.”

“Single?” he asked, pretending to fix his hair. “Only joking. Of course I'll send her down.”

I descended into the darkness of the theater, groping blindly for the switch to light the dusty iron chandelier that hung in the narrow hallway leading to the auditorium. The space always made me nervous, and this was the first time I'd been there
alone. Raj told me that it had been an operating theater in the thirties, and later, the home of a fortune-telling psychic, though he might have been pulling my leg. I made an effort not to think about creepy soothsayers or botched surgeries while I ran my hands up and down the wall, my sweat turning cold as the light switch continued to evade me. I took another step deeper into the hallway, attuned to a dozen creepy creaks and twitches from the utter darkness that surrounded me.

Come on. Be here
, I breathed as my hands continued searching. The switch had to be close. I circled my hands like Daniel-san,
Wax On, Wax Off
, but still, nothing. I gulped in air, feeling panic closing in.
Maybe this was all a mistake
, I thought, splaying my fingers wide as my heart began to race. Maybe Raj was right and I had walked into a trap. My fingers ran over something soft and sticky, and I jerked my hands away, panting, unmoored, in the total darkness. In that moment, I imagined the worst: for seven years, Cyn had harbored a furious grudge over what had happened on the island and was now back for revenge, served very, very cold. As the thought took root, I heard a strange hum from the auditorium and my breath quickened.
Was it possible that she was a danger to me?
I asked myself.
Yes.
Now that she was back, anything was possible.
Was it likely?
The hum ceased, and my hand shot out, groping for the wall to guide me back to the front door. Had my fingertips not, at that moment, brushed the light panel, I might have fled, abandoning the enterprise entirely.

I flicked on the light and spun around, searching the dingy velvet walls for haunts and bogeymen. Of course there was nothing. I inhaled slowly and tasted rum in the back of my throat.

As my heart rate decelerated, I returned to my unanswered question.
No, it was not likely
. Cyn wouldn't hurt me. I felt that, deeply. I passed to the end of the hall and switched on a
dimmer, raising the house lights to hangover-friendly level of illumination. In the heavy stillness of the deep, empty space, I descended the center aisle between the rows of seats, taking in the set.

Raj had done an admirable job. He wasn't the handiest person with a hammer, but he'd single-handedly constructed a passable apartment setup, with a couple of functioning doors and a window that looked onto a fake brick wall. There was a mattress on the floor, and a battered-looking office chair. A small camping stove rested by a blackened wall, and all kinds of believable junkie detritus littered the floor.

After giving the set mattress a quick sniff to make sure the stains were not authentic, I lay down across it, feeling my anxiety dissolve into pure exhaustion. The pounding in my head was fading. I yawned and let my eyelids fall shut, drifting into a glorious state of mindless twilight.

I was jerked back to reality by the distant click of the theater door closing.

I bolted upright, so quickly that my vision went crimson. She appeared at the top of the stairs wearing a gray raincoat over a white shirtdress, a leather belt accentuating her trim waist. Her legs were bare, and she wore white ballet flats with golden accents on the toes. Raj was right, she did look rich.

“Glo?”

I nodded.

She floated down the stairs toward me. Her hair was shoulder length, like mine, and underneath the house lights, it shone like bronze. Her skin was pale, and she had bluish crescents under her eyes, but her smile, when she released it, had lost none of its commercial brilliance.

“It's really you.” She paused at the foot of the stage and stood, beaming up at me. Her eyes were glassy with pre-tears.

“Yeah,” I said, getting to my feet. Truth was, seeing her was a
little overwhelming, like bumping into a movie star. Even now, on first glance, she seemed to burn at a different brightness than anyone else I knew. I reminded myself to stay grounded, to not allow myself to turn into the starstruck fangirl that Raj accused me of being.

“Thank you so much for meeting me,” she said. She clutched a gold-accented leather bag in front of her body, and I saw that she wore a monstrous emerald ring on her left hand and a delicate gold watch on the other.

“You wanna come up here? It looks bad, but it's more comfortable than those ancient seats.”

“Sure.”

Perhaps confused by the primness of her attire, I was about to offer a hand to help her up, but she made the two-and-a-half-foot climb in one effortless step.

“So this is your theater?” Her eyes swam across the squalor. She stood two feet from me, an arm's length away, but we didn't touch. It felt strange not to hug, but we hadn't, and now it was too late. I shoved my hands in my jeans pockets, and shuffled backward awkwardly.

“It's Raj's, and his partner's. Please, have a seat.”

I lowered myself to a cross-legged position on the mattress. She settled herself into the chair, and beamed at me like a Disney Princess about to burst into song. “I've dreamed of this moment so many times. I can't believe it's really you.”

“It's really me.”

“Thank you for seeing me.”

“Please stop thanking me.” She colored, and I realized my tone carried an edge. I almost apologized, but an inner voice pointed out that apologizing was exactly the kind of thing a giddy fangirl would do. We were equals. If anything, I was in charge. “Of course I came. I mean, come on. How could I resist?”

“I'm sure you're wondering where I've been all this time, and why I'm here.”

“Yeah.”

“I want to tell you everything, Glo. I owe you that.” She clapped her hands on her knees and sighed happily. “But first, you look so beautiful. How are you? How is your life?”

“It's good, thanks,” I said, allowing a frisson of impatience to percolate through my words. My life was not on the table for discussion.

Cyn leaned back and swallowed, recalibrating.

“I've wanted to reach out, Glo. I wrote you so many letters over the years and never sent them. At first because it was too dangerous, and then because I didn't think it would be fair or kind to butt into your life like that.”

“You mean, kind of like you are right now?”

She nodded shortly, the color rising in her cheeks.

“What do you want, Cyn? Why come back from the dead after all these years?”

She forced a laugh. “Is it so terrible to see me?”

“It's not the best, no. You seem to be stalking my husband. You've got some demented paramour coming into my office and planting bugs on me, and now you're sitting here, all smiles and sunshine like this is a normal, happy reunion.”

“I didn't mean for things to happen this way. I didn't want to drag you into any of it. But I ended up in New York City and looked you up, and with the information in my head, I couldn't resist trying to see you, just once.”

“You mean you couldn't resist seeing Raj. You went to his show last weekend, and since then, my life—”

“Actually, I went to see you first,” she interrupted coolly. “I watched you shiver your way through lunch in the pavilion in front of the Federal Building. You had a few bites of salad and three cigarettes. You were still so much the Glo that I knew that
it surprised me. After seeing you, it was like I couldn't back off. I haven't felt anything good in so long, and seeing you . . . Then last week, upstairs in the bar. It took everything I had not to walk over and sit at your table. Like old friends.” Her voice dropped out. “Can I smoke in here?”

I nodded. I had been eating lunch in the pavilion. She could have simply walked up and said hello, and spared me so much worry and angst. Instead, she chose the route of cloak-and-dagger bullshit, and even now, it continued.

She lit up with trembling hands. “Want one?”

I shook my head.

“I know that this has probably been a little unexpect—”

“What do you want Cyn?”

She heard the edge in my voice, and she straightened.

“Your letter said you needed my help. Tell me what you want from me.”

She took a long pull on her cigarette, and when she looked at me again, all the vulnerability was gone from her face.

“You loved me once. You tried to save my life back on that island, after you threw me to the wolves. I think we both know you owe me one, so what I need from you now is to save my life. For real this time.”

“Threw
you
to the wolves?”

“That's right. You got away, didn't you? Got to spend the rest of your life with your own true love? Well, maybe I don't seem real to you anymore, or human, but I want my goddamn happy ending, too. So please, help me. I promise I will go away and leave you alone forever. Both of you.”

“And if I don't?”

She fastened me with a stare of cold disbelief. “Do you particularly enjoy the thought of my blood on your hands?”

I had the sudden urge to hit her, to wipe that haughty look off her face. “I've changed my mind about the cigarette.”

She pulled out her pack and tossed it to me. I lit up, all too aware of my own trembling fingers. The first drag steadied me. The second made me bold.