Night of the Living Deb (11 page)

Is that how I’d lost Brian? After one night in a strip club to celebrate Matty’s upcoming wedding?

Had he felt trapped by his faithfulness, by the mere idea he might be spending the rest of his life with me, under the thumb of my overbearing mummy? By the fact that Said Mummy expected him to put a ring on my finger and purchase this cow on layaway?

Did it scare him to imagine that maybe the idea of marriage didn’t sound so all-fire awful to me either? That the idea of being legally bound to one another at some point in the future wasn’t Cissy’s alone?

Ohmigawd.

There it was, out in the open.

I’d admitted it, if only to myself.

I wasn’t falling for Malone good and hard: I’d already hit the mat. I was sunk, a goner, snookered, down and out for the count.

All right, so maybe I’d realized it before, but I’d been too wary to even whisper how I felt to anyone. Besides, I’d figured I had plenty of time to tell Brian, when the moment was right.

The right moment.

Talk about missing the bus.

Hell, I was sucking up exhaust fumes.

I balled my hands and tapped my fists against my forehead.

How stupid was I?

I thought I was being smart, guarded even, protecting

my heart as I waited for the perfect time to say something.

Though what made any time “perfect”? How did we even know we’d have another tomorrow or the next day?

We didn’t.

I thought Malone and I had forever.

Instead, he’d taken my vulnerable heart and stomped it with the verbal equivalent of golf cleats.

I felt like my guts were bleeding out, and I had no Band-Aids large enough to patch up all the holes.

“You sappy-ass girl,” I berated myself, making a feeble attempt at laughing into the dark and empty room where the only noise was the beep-beep-beeping from the handset that I hadn’t hung up until I tossed it to the floor, yanking the phone off the sofa table and sending it clattering to the floor.

Like I gave a hoot.

I shuffled into the kitchen, where
2:35
glowed in bright blue on my microwave clock. Instinctively, I went for the freezer, pulling it wide and reaching for the Haagen Daz, until I remembered I had none.

What’re you doing?
I asked and stopped myself.

I shut the freezer door with a smack.

Because what I needed wasn’t anything edible, it was food for my sad, just-dumped, beaten-down soul.

I walked over to the stereo and fumbled in the dim, finding the CD I’d burned years ago just for such situations.

I dusted off the cover, popped that baby into the player, hit the power button, and set the volume at a reasonable level, one that I could hear but wouldn’t wake up

my neighbors.

Disco’s infamous “I Will Survive” bounced through the speakers.

Sing it, Gloria,
I thought sadly as I made my way back to the sofa and curled up, dragging the throw over me and listening to my favorite “screw you jerk for leaving me”

song of all time.

I closed my eyes as “The King of Wishful Thinking” came on, another quintessential post breakup song. It was all about ignoring the hole in your heart and pretending you’d be all right, even if it wasn’t the truth.

How could you, Malone? How could you do this to me?

I squished my cheek into the pillow, fighting the tears as hard as I could. I was so angry, so disappointed, so utterly confused, but I’d be damned if I would cry myself out over a man. Not again. I’d done it enough through the years, and I refused to do it now, no matter how much it

hurt.

Sting started to wail “King of Pain,” and I jumped up from the couch and shut my CD player off.

Enough already
.

Pathetic jilted chick sobbing into her pillow.

How totally cliché.

And how totally not me.

I had never been the kind of female who didn’t feel complete without a man. I had a great life, loved my independence,

and I was perfectly fulfilled when I was all by my lonesome. Surely, I had better things to do than act

like a dopey girl who’d been wronged by her dude.

Damned straight I did.

Besides, Malone wasn’t exactly beating his breast and wailing over me, was he? No, siree Bob, he was getting his kicks with a piece of Trayla Trash.

Not worth the salt of my tears.

Roughly, I wiped my eyes and slapped at the switch to turn on the lights. Then I headed over to my easel.

I initially filled my palette with black, picked up a clean brush and let her rip, sweeping boldly across the crimson and silver with angry strokes.

I didn’t stop for hours, didn’t rest until I was too exhausted to lift the brush to the canvas. The result was something more violent than I’d intended, rawer emotionally, but there it was, my guts laid out in acrylics.

It felt good, somehow, to have released all that pent-up angst, and I knew that I could sleep, at least. Well, it was something.

So I went to bed, making sure to turn off the cell phone on my nightstand before I slipped under the covers and closed my eyes, too tired to weep.

But not too tired to dream.

I found myself wandering around the grounds of a state fair, brightly colored lights and overloud laughter swirling around me. I didn’t see anyone, though all the rides were in motion, the Ferris wheel rotating, the Tilt-a-Whirl spinning.

I heard a voice, someone calling, “Andy, please, help me,” and I tried to follow it, but I wasn’t sure where it was coming from. Everything seemed to echo in my ears. The lights blurred my vision.

Out of nowhere, a figure in a red cape flew at me, hooded so I could see no face, though she proffered a black pot in which a green stew bubbled.

“Cabbage soup?” she asked in an odd sort of cackle.

“Homemade cabbage soup?”

I turned and ran from her, hearing that voice, still calling my name, and I entered the House of Mirrors, where I was suddenly surrounded by infinite reflections of myself, so I hardly knew where I started and the mirrors began.

“Andy.”

There it was again, only it sounded so near.

I spun around and saw him, standing smack behind me.

“Malone,” I said, glancing back, over my shoulder.

But he wasn’t really there. Only more mirrors, deceiving me.

“Brian, where are you?”

I ran ahead to where I thought he was, but I hit the glass.

Turned around and went the other way, only to smack into another dead end.

“Tell Cissy I’m sorry to miss the party,” he was saying, starting to fade, looking blurrier by the moment. “I love her cabbage soup.”

He kept talking, but it turned into gibberish, words that made no sense.

I pounded the mirror with my fists, screaming his name, until the silvered walls around me shattered, raining shards of glass.

Raining.

Pitter-pat, pitter-pat.

My eyes flew open, and I blinked at the gloom, grabbing at my clock on the nightstand, which showed nearly eight-thirty.

The dim outside the shutters made sense when I realized it was actually raining, water tapping on the windowsill.

Not slivers of glass.

Then I heard a louder
tap-tap
, and it wasn’t my head hammering.

I sat up in bed, strained to listen.

Someone was knocking on my door.

My T-shirt and striped sweatpants rumpled, I swung my feet to the floor and padded across the carpet that stretched wall-to-wall throughout the condo. Squinting through the peephole, I sighed at the sight of my mother, standing on my doormat, shaking out a large umbrella.

What was she doing here?

Mother rarely showed up anywhere uninvited. And I definitely hadn’t extended an invitation. Although she did have a sixth sense as to when I was at a low point; often the perfect time for her to twist my arm into doing something I wouldn’t do if I felt stronger. Maybe she needed another warm body for a committee she’d agreed to chair to raise money for out of work oil barons.

God only knew.

With Cissy, it could be anything.

Reluctantly, I opened the door, and she looked hard at me, wearing an impatient frown.

“Do you realize your phone is off the hook?” she asked, front and center, before using her umbrella handle to push the door out of my hands, wide enough for her to enter past me. “I’ve been trying to call you all morning, for heaven’s sake. What on earth’s the matter with you? Are you sick?”

Was I sick?

Interesting question,
I mused as I shut and locked the door.

Did heartsick count? Although I was officially in denial about that, being the neofeminist that I purportedly was at heart, far beneath my ever-sensitive girlie girl skin.

“I have to finalize the menu for your birthday party with the caterer by noon, since you keep changing your mind . . .”

I kept changing my mind?

“. . . and I’ve got a million things to do before Wednesday besides, not to mention getting ready for my trip with Stephen this coming weekend. Only you seem to be avoiding the world, so Mohammad had to come to the mountain.

You don’t look well.” Her finely plucked brows shot up. “Good God, you’re bleeding!”

I had no idea what she was talking about, until I glanced down at my arms and realized I had smears of crimson on them. No one ever said that art was neat.

“It’s paint,” I told her. “I was up late last night. Couldn’t sleep,” I admitted, then bit my lip to keep from saying more. I wasn’t yet ready to tell her about Malone. I didn’t

know if I’d ever be ready for that.

“You don’t have the flu, do you?”

She held the umbrella between us, perhaps to ward off potential germs. In her dark cape, she looked rather like Mary Poppins, if Mary had been a society dame and dressed in Chanel and pearls instead of funny outfits.

“Do I need to call Dr. Cooper?” she pressed.

When I shook my head, she lowered her weapon, which was dripping onto my carpet, as if it were sobbing in sympathy.

Seeing as how I had no umbrella stand, she simply propped the thing against the wall then proceeded to remove her driving gloves, but not her black Burberry. She had on black suede boots that should’ve been destroyed by the rain.

But, like Cissy herself, they appeared indestructible.

“Did you hear what I said before, Andrea?” she prodded.

“About trying to reach you and not getting through?”

“I heard you,” I replied.

“All I got was a busy signal, so you must’ve knocked the receiver awry, and your cell was turned off, though I left a message . . . ah, there! I was right.”

She zoomed in on my old Princess phone that I’d pulled off the sofa table, and she gracefully stooped to retrieve it and the handset, returning both to their rightful home. The moment she did, the damned thing twittered maniacally.

Mother raised her eyebrows, and I shrugged.

So she answered, with a perfectly drawled, “Andrea

Kendricks’s residence,” as if she were my social secretary.

A hilarious thought, though I didn’t smile.

“Yes, all right, well, I’ll see,” she replied to whoever was on the other end, before she proffered the handset.

“It’s someone named Allison Price. She has news about Mr. Malone. Is there a problem with your beau, my dear?

Is he ill? Is that why he didn’t show up for brunch?”

“He’s not ill, no,” I said, though he could be, for all I knew. He could have some type of rare brain fever that caused him to act like a lout.

“Andrea, your eyelid is twitching. Do you need a Xanax?”

Oh, baby, a whole lot more was twitching than my eyelid.

“No Xanax”—not yet—“just the phone, Mother, please,”

I said, and snatched it away, spewing into the receiver, “I don’t want to hear, Allie, because I don’t care. He called here last night, apologizing for bugging out on me, can

you believe, and told me he needed space.
Space?
For crud’s sake, what kind of an excuse is that when I gave him all the space he needed? It’s not like I was his keeper or anything.”

Amazing how quickly I’d taken up the “Brian is a jerk”

banner after Malone’s terse “Dear Jane” message delivered in chicken fashion via Ma Bell. I’m surprised he didn’t go all out and send an e-mail.

My mother stood at my elbow, listening ever so intently, perfectly made-up eyes going wider by the minute.

Allie tried to say something, but I beat her to it.

“You were right. He’s a jerk, a clod, a caveman, and I don’t care if he does go to Vegas with that dancer slash hooker, because he can rot in Hell for all I care,” I went on in a rush, only to have her cut off my tirade with a shrill, “Shut up, Kendricks, and turn on your TV right this minute! Channel 8, and hurry!”

Not that I made it a point to obey the Attila the Blonde, but I was too curious not to, being as how she sounded downright frantic.

I picked up the remote, gave it a punch, and flipped to Channel 8 just in time to see my boyfriend’s—um, former boyfriend’s—face in a photograph with the caption
wanted for questioning
beneath.

Geez. I mean, I was certainly pretty upset with him, but I didn’t expect the police to get in on the act.

As if that weren’t enough, I saw the SkyCam helicopter zeroing in on a red car that looked uncannily like Brian’s.

They did a quick zoom, and I stepped closer to the TV screen, noting yellow crime scene tape and orange cones boxing in the vehicle while men in dark shirts removed items from the trunk in paper bags.

What was this? A morning rerun of
CSI
?

I turned the sound up, catching a single word before the perky anchor babe veered away from the scene and to a story about food poisoning at a local cafeteria.

My head spun, as the word I heard wasn’t a good one at all, considering that it was “murder.”

Chapter 11

“Did you see it? Did you see it? Can you even
believe
it? It’s like a soap opera minus Susan