On Unfaithful Wings (5 page)

Taking two steps forward, I extended my hand to turn on the hall lamp, but my fingers groped empty air. I chewed my bottom lip: odd smell, no lamp. Nerves danced beneath my skin. Three more paces down the hall, my hand found the ill-placed wall switch and flicked it, spilling light down the hall and into the living room.

Everything had changed.

Everything.

The floral print couch sitting where my worn leather sofa should have been looked like it was stolen from a an old folks’ home. An unfamiliar, oriental-looking rug covered the floor, the paintings on the wall sported neither dogs playing poker nor partially undressed women. The television was nicer than mine, though.

My stomach reacquainted itself with my groin.

The floor creaked in all the usual places as I crept down the hall and across the living room into the galley kitchen with its ancient, olive-green appliances. In one last corner of my mind, I hoped to throw open the refrigerator door and find the usual pizza box, empty mayonnaise jar and something no longer recognizable in Tupper-Ware. And behind them, way at the back, an empty Arm and Hammer baking soda box hiding a skimpy roll of twenties. A small hope in a small corner completely surrounded by doubt.

I opened the door and the interior light came on, which hadn’t happened in the time I’d lived In the apartment, though I always intended to replace the bulb. Inside, no shaggy carpets of mould grew anywhere; it held no cans of beer, no half-eaten Chinese take-out in little white boxes. Instead, seemingly color-coded containers organized left-overs on the spotless glass shelves while bottled water with an Italian name--an item which never found its way into my life--crammed one door shelf full. If it didn’t come out of a tap, it wasn’t real water in my book.

“Damn it.” I slammed the refrigerator door, setting the green water bottles clinking, and stalked back to the living room where I sank down on the floral-print sofa.

Nothing here belonged to me: not the blue glass vase holding fresh flowers, not the shelf of books I’d never read by authors I’d never heard of, not the framed print that looked like someone threw paint against a canvas instead of taking the time to create a work of art. My things were gone, my emergency fund was gone. The walls in the living room were a different color than they should have been, painted a yellowish-tan to go with the sofa that wasn’t mine. I sniffed deeply but didn’t detect the odor of fresh paint. It hadn’t been done recently.

What do I do now?

I leaned forward, elbows on knees, eyes darting from big screen TV to patterned rug to the
Us
and
People
magazines arrayed across the coffee table. I reached for one, looking for a clue to make sense of this. In my confusion and despair over my situation, I never considered there might be someone in the apartment.

“I’ve called the police,” the woman said, her stiff tone belying the fear hiding below the surface. “They’ll be here before you can do anything to me.”

I looked up at her standing in the bedroom doorway and, for a a second, didn’t know what she meant. The disarray of her shoulder-length dark hair suggested she’d just woken. She held the front of her pink, fuzzy robe closed with one hand while the other held a small caliber pistol pointed at the floor. The sight of the weapon brought me back to reality and I pushed myself up from the sofa, banging my knee on the coffee table in my haste. A
People
magazine slid off the top of a pile and I managed to glimpse the date on the cover: October.

Trevor’s birthday was in April.

“It’s not what you think.” I showed her my palms. The gun moved a little, not quite aimed at me. Yet.

“You broke into my apartment.”

“No, I didn’t. I have a key.”

I reached for my pocket to show her and realized my mistake as the barrel of the gun found a target in the middle of my chest. I didn’t like the look of the minor quake in her arm or the strained expression on her face, but if she shot me, it would answer most of my questions. I considered provoking her, but remembered how real the doorknob felt in my hand, and the bedspread at the hotel.

“Keep your hands where I can see them.”

“Look, this is all a big mistake. I used to live here.”

She raised an eyebrow but didn’t lower the gun.

“And you still have keys?”

I nodded.

“Take them out and put them on the table. Wait. Use two fingers.”

I did as she said, wondering if she’d learned the technique while watching TV. The keys jingled as I pulled them out of my pocket and tossed them onto the coffee table. She glared at them for a second then looked back at me. I raised my hands again.

“When did you live here?”

“Right before you.”

“That can’t be,” she said, the look on her face clearly demonstrating she didn’t believe me. “The guy who lived here before me was killed by muggers.”

My stomach clenched hard enough to make me flinch; if I’d eaten anything since awakening in the hotel room, it would have ended up all over the floor.

The woman’s eyes widened, making me nervous.

“You did it.” She jabbed the gun towards me, making me flinch again. “You killed him and took his keys. They told me they changed the locks.”

A siren wailed in the distance and I realized there was a good chance I might not get out of this: either she’d kill me or the cops would arrest me. Neither seemed a good option.

I lunged for the door, catching her off-guard. I hoped she was the kind of woman who kept a weapon to scare would-be intruders, not to punish them.

“Stop!”

I cringed as I sprinted down the hall, half-expecting to feel of a bullet slam into my back. She didn’t pull the trigger, but she didn’t want me to escape either--the blue vase shattered against the door frame near my head, showering me with flowers and glass. I yanked the door open and dove through, barely keeping my feet under me as I blundered down four flights of stairs to the exit, never looking back to see if she followed.

I didn’t know I’d been sweating until I burst through the door into the chill night--the autumn night six months after I’d been mugged. The siren I’d heard was closer now so I darted across the street and hid in the shadows, panting clouds of mist into the night. Less than a minute later, a police cruiser skidded to a stop in front of the building; its siren cut off but the cherries still flashed as two cops spilled out and went to the front door. They buzzed the apartment and waited for the woman to answer, so I took the opportunity to get the hell out of there.

My thighs burned as my feet pounded the pavement, carrying me away from my former home. Possibilities, excuses, scenarios raced through my mind, playing and replaying, but none of them made sense, none of them seemed remotely plausible. Underneath them, the same refrain kept repeating over and over:

Thiscan’tbehappeningthiscan’tbehappeningthiscan’tbehappening...

My head buzzed with a feeling of helplessness, panic pushing me on without knowing where to go. I ran until a stitch in my side forced me to stop. Like the world’s worst long-distance runner, I paused--bent at the waist, gasping for air. When I looked up again, I saw my subconscious had led my feet to a familiar place, somewhere I felt comfortable, safe.

Sully’s.

***

They say smell is the strongest trigger of memories. I believed it the second I stepped through the door of Sully’s Tavern. The odor of beers spilled decades before – many of them spilled be me--soothed my jangled nerves, reminded me of countless nights seated at the bar, elbows propped on the stained wooden surface, sometimes alone, sometimes not. I sat on a stool that once could have described every contour of my ass and waited for the barkeep to notice my arrival. A miniature galvanized pail of peanuts sat before me, lonely without the once ubiquitous ashtrays that disappeared as smoking laws changed, so I pulled it closer to keep it company. The peanuts tasted comfortable on my tongue, adding to the assuasive smells. Maybe I’d been gone for six months but Sully’s Tavern still felt like home. After the kind of day I’d had, I needed that.

I shoveled more peanuts into my mouth and began wondering where-the-Hell I was going to spend the night.

“Good evening.”

The words startled me, making me jump a little. I stopped chewing and looked up from the bucket of nuts into the bartender’s familiar face, complete with bushy red mustache and freckles. I always thought Sully appeared to have stepped straight out of a day job singing baritone in a barbershop quartet. The only thing missing was one of those funny hats.

“Hi, Sully.”

“What can I get for you tonight?”
“I’ll have the usual.”

He stopped in front of me, favoring me with a quizzical look. Another handful of peanuts went into my mouth.

“And what would that be?”

I returned the quizzical look, in case he might need it another time. “Vodka soda with lime. Don’t you know me, Sully?”

“Can’t say I do. Should I?”

I swallowed the peanuts half-chewed, coming dangerously close to choking on them; the feeling of comfort the tavern brought followed them into my stomach. Over the years, this man had poured me into a cab more times than he’d poured most other folks drinks. Mikey’s words crashed on me like an anvil in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon:
no one will know you.
I suddenly needed that vodka badly.

“Guess not.”

“Lime juice or slice?”

“What?”

He dipped a glass into the bin of ice, filling it. “In your drink. Juice or slice?”

“Slice. And you know what? Hold the soda.”

“Fair enough, but there’s no discount for skipping the mix.”

He laughed at his own joke, but I only nodded. I didn’t see the humor in it, in any of this. A well-used Coors Light coaster landed on the bar followed closely by my drink, a short red straw leaning against the wedge of lime hanging on the rim of the glass.

“You want to start a tab?”

I stared at the glass in front of me for a second, at a drop of water running down the side, and felt a twinge of regret that I was about to consume drinks I couldn’t pay for from a man who’d always been good to me. The saliva flooding my mouth at the sight of the vodka convinced me it would be all right.

I nodded.

“Need some collateral. Credit card, driver’s license, keys. You know, something so I know you won’t take off without paying.”

I felt that twinge again as I reached into my pocket and pulled out my now-useless set of keys for my one-time apartment and tossed them on the bar between us. Sully scooped them up and then paused, his eyes narrowed as he searched my features.

“Sorry I don’t recognize you. Lots of people come and go here.”

“Here’s to a busy tavern.” I chuckled listlessly, plucked the lime and squeezed it into the vodka, then tilted the glass toward him in a mock toast.

“With a toast like that, the mix is on me next time.”

He went back to bartender business and I stared at the drink in my hand, licked my lips. How long had it been since my last drink? I’d been off the sauce for nearly a year, desperately trying to prove to Rae I was a changed man worthy of her taking me back, worthy of being close to my son again. If you added my six months absence from the world, that made it close to a year-and-a-half. I should have felt guilty about even being here. I didn’t. I had no money, nowhere to sleep and no idea how to rectify either. Six months of my life was missing. Michael had told me no one would recognize me and Sully proved it. That meant Trevor and Rae wouldn’t know me, either.

And they think I’m dead.

A knife edge of regret sliced through my chest as I downed the vodka hoping the path it burned down my throat would counteract it. It didn’t work. I signaled Sully and order another then swiveled on my stool, surveying the room.

Like the exterior of my apartment building, nothing about Sully’s had changed: the same sports might have been playing on the big-screen TVs the last time I was here, the same guys shooting pool, the same girl serving tables. It took an act of God to change places like this. I’d been so regular here it surprised me every time I walked through the door without someone shouting “Norm!
”
to greet me.

I drained the second vodka, the cool touch of ice against my lips a contrast to the liquor burning my throat on the way down. Sully looked up as I set the empty glass down and I nodded at him.

“Mix?”

I shook my head. “Why waste good soda?”

Before the new drink arrived, I noticed three men sitting at a table in the far corner, their features all but hidden by the dim lighting of a wall sconce. My heart thumped.

Marty, Phil and Todd. Drinking buddies. Three of the best, salt-of-the-earth guys you could ever meet. Sully served lots of people, so it made sense he might not recognize me, but these guys should. We’d competed together on the Olympic drinking team with a specialty in synchronized puking.

I pivoted back toward the bar as Sully set the next drink in front of me. I nodded my thanks.