Punishment with Kisses (18 page)

There was an emptiness inside me that hadn’t been filled, couldn’t be filled until all of me was filled, and believe me, in these darkened nameless sex clubs, I was finally getting my fill—in every sense of the word.

Unfortunately, there was little room for Shane in my new life and she seemed fully aware of it. She never once asked to join me in these adventures, and though she used to complain about my dullness in the sack, now she couldn’t wait to have me scale things back sexually.

“You’re spending too much time in these sex clubs, Megan,” she yelled. “You’re so far into that world that you’re becoming just like your sister. Do you want to end up like her too?”

“My God, Shane, I would think you would care more about me than to threaten me like that.” I was livid. How dare she try to suppress my sexual exploration with scare tactics!

“Babe, I’m not threatening you. I’m worried about you. You go out every night, you stay out all hours, I never know what you’re doing out there. I feel like you’re not just trying to find out what happened to Ash, you’re trying to become Ash.”

Maybe I was. Maybe I liked the feeling. The truth was, I was enjoying the sexual explorations more than I wanted to admit. But Shane, well fuck, Shane was the one who was bored with our old sex life, so I’d think she’d be happy about these changes, maybe even proud of my sexual expansion.

I was enraged that she wanted to thwart everything now that it was no longer convenient for her. I didn’t want to be under her thumb, but she was determined to keep me there. It was like living with Father again, and the whole thing made me scream and cry all at once.

“You know, Shane, this is all rather rich coming from the woman who trolled around my sister like a tabby in heat for weeks on end. If you loathed Ash so much, why did you spend every waking moment hanging on her?”

Shane stared, full of bitterness and rage, but clearly mulling her words carefully. “Megan, your sister was a whore. I hung around for the same reason everyone else hung around. Probably the same reason people hang around you nowadays. Feel better?” With that carefully metered yet bitter retort, Shane just turned and marched off, slamming the bedroom door behind her and then the front door, as she left the house. I heard the engine gun and I knew she and her stupid motorcycle were gone for the night, if not forever, and I threw myself on the bed crying like I had the day we buried my sister. It was a long, tortured night.

*

I was sitting at Father’s office, the gnarled oak desk a rather foreboding presence there. I didn’t know why he commanded my company, but I was there, the ever-dutiful daughter, sitting in the room I was usually banished from. In the very few times in my life that he had asked me to come here, I never noticed before how large and imposing the desk was. I was tempted to make an analogy about my father and this beast of office furniture as my mind was doing its best to not focus on why I had been summoned by the man I so rarely had contact with.

So instead, I wondered why the CEO of a lumber corporation didn’t even have a computer. Did his secretary do all his typing? What about monitoring the stock market or something? It was baffling. Combined with his charcoal leather executive chair—also about three times larger than the visitor chair I was seated in—the giant desk and dark wood walls made me feel like I was tiny and insignificant and powerless, like a third grader in the principal’s office. I supposed this worked for Father, making his visitors and employees feel powerless and malleable, but it made me wonder about his confidence, his virility, even his desire to appear the authority at work and home.

Father was always so powerful, so foreboding, that I never dared cross him. After my mother’s death, he detached himself from the family, sending Ash and me to boarding school for a time, and removing every indication of Mom from the home. I didn’t even know where all her stuff went—maybe to the Junior League thrift store—but a lot of our childhood memories went with it. The dinosaur drawings, the Popsicle stick pot holder, that stupid clay ashtray, the family photos from the Grand Canyon—all of them were gone when we came back from that winter at Hollingsworth Academy.

We never once spoke about her after she was gone. Father wasn’t an emotional guy. No, scrap that. He was a clinical guy, and stern pragmatist, so I figured his aloofness made it so he was insensitive to a fault. He married almost immediately after Mom’s death, when Tabitha was nineteen. It was the first time Father did anything that the country club set might frown upon, but I learned early on that at least half of his peers—the male half—were more than just okay with it, they were envious.

My best friend that year told me Father was having a midlife crisis, but he certainly never talked to us about it. Maybe he was. Maybe my mother’s death jolted him awake and he decided to bank on the youth and beauty of a woman only two years older than his daughter. But the truth was, he remained an enigma to me, and honestly, to everyone around us. If he had a breakdown and turned to Viagra and teen pussy as the cure-all for watching my mother die, I’d never know it. For us, she died, we were sent away, he got a new wife, we came home. Nobody in our home ever discussed emotions after my mother died, least of all him.

When we did have talks with Father, they felt much like they did today, with me sitting in his office, surrounded by the trappings of masculinity, waiting to find out exactly what he or Tabitha thought I had done wrong this time.

“Your mother isn’t happy about the shenanigans.” He didn’t bother filling in the gaps, knowing that with a little information I’d hang myself.

“I’ve asked you not to call Tabitha my mother,” I retorted. The woman graduated high school the same year I arrived there, for fuck’s sake. Why did he have to push this all the time? “And I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.”

“I know about your visit to the pool house, Megan. You’re certainly welcome to visit our house any time you like, but it’s not appropriate for you to be breaking in, in the middle of the night, with some hooligan in tow. I want to know what the hell you think you were doing?” He was trying to sound reserved, but I could sense a darkness underscoring his words. It was my house, too, until last year, and now it was
their
house and if I didn’t plan to come to Sunday dinner I was somehow breaking in. Well, in this case I did, but still, it was the principle of the matter.

“Fuck. I did not break in!” I protested a bit too loudly.

“Megan,” Father exclaimed in an odd monotone whisper. The yell whisper I liked to call it. “We’re in a professional setting here. I don’t know what your workplace is like, but that’s not appropriate language at my company.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just frustrating. I didn’t break in. I had the key and I let myself in. Is Tabitha upset, or are you upset?” He ignored my questions.

“And what were you doing there? Why did your
friend
need to be there?” Father said friend like it was an insult, a word that should be spat out in certain circumstances. I wondered what he envisioned when he imagined Shane. Did he simply see the woman corrupting his daughter, or something far more sinister? Did every mention of her and me lead him back to sex? Another irony, given that so few things lead us to sex nowadays.

The conversation continued on for what seemed like hours but must have only been a few minutes given Father’s tight schedule. I managed to stave him off with a confession that I was missing Ash and wanted to feel close to her again—which wasn’t untrue—and I promised not do it again. If I came to the house again I’d have to come alone and plan to stay for dinner per Tabitha’s request. By the time I got back to my apartment, all I wanted to do was throw myself in a hot tub, pop in some schmaltzy meditation CD, and wash away the whole episode. Someone had other plans.

I didn’t pay heed to the unlocked door. It was not uncommon for either Shane or me to walk out without locking it. It was Portland, after all, not Mexico City. In fact, I was slightly thrilled at the discovery, because it could mean that Shane had been back. But as I raced through the unlocked door, not even thinking about whether I should take her back after the way she spoke to me, my foot snagged something and I fell headfirst onto the glass coffee table. As I lay there, moaning, I glanced around, focusing, realizing that someone had torn the place apart. I couldn’t tell if anything was missing, but everything was tattered like a scene from an old detective movie.

Except I wasn’t fishing some dead hooker out of a reservoir and following Whitey back to the smoking gun. I was just a chick with a girlfriend who hated me and a dead sister and an apartment that generally looked like Ikea furnished it completely. Today the whole place was…annihilated. Every drawer upturned, clothes, CDs, tchotchkes everywhere. The pillows and sofa cushions had been slashed so violently I couldn’t help think about Ash, the knife, her body, that night. Was this a sign of rage, or was I reading into it? Were those cushions supposed to be me?

I didn’t even race to the bathroom to vomit. I just knelt there, bewildered and frightened and throwing up on an area rug that once looked like a Lichtenstein painting and now felt like an eerie reminder of how unsafe I was.

Did Shane do this? Why would she come in and do this? When I could finally control my sobbing, I called her, not the police, which I know was the mark of a hysterical woman. I just couldn’t believe she could hate me this much. Within twenty minutes Shane was by my side, calling the police and holding me as I rocked back and forth on the carpet, still sitting next to a pool of my own filth. She sounded genuinely concerned when I called, though I didn’t recall even stringing together more than a few sentences before sobbing again. My gut instincts were right…well, to a point. Shane had been there that morning and packed her few meager belongings in a duffel she was planning to return. She swore to me that she didn’t molest the apartment. That must have been left to a burglar, but why on earth they picked me I had no idea.

As Shane and I made our way through each corner and drawer of the few rooms, we tried cataloguing all that could’ve been worthwhile to an ordinary thief—DVD player, stereo, laptop, iPod, Gucci bags. Shit, thieves have been known to take Calphalon pans and faux jewelry, but none of that was gone, not even the diamond ring I got for my high school graduation gift or a giant Louis Vuitton suitcase that belonged to Ash. In fact, nothing was missing. Nothing at all, except two of Ash’s tattered old diaries that were sitting on my nightstand (next to a pricey Jonathan Adler lamp, even).

The horror of what might really have been going on hit me: Ash’s killer knew I was on to her. Or him. The killer knew I was getting close. Hell, I didn’t even know I was getting close until this very moment when I realized that my home was burglarized, torn apart piece by piece, all in search of Ash’s diaries.

“Oh, my God!” I heard myself shout as I darted to the vanity. Ash’s other diaries, including the one I dubbed The Real Sex Diary, were hidden along with her home movies and the camera. Usually they were all stored in a cubby, hidden in the wall behind a two-way mirror in front of the bed. But one day I got worried and I had Shane fashion a new hiding place in the bottom of the vanity. The bottom drawer had a false front so when you pulled it out, you only saw the usual cosmetics, but behind the drawer was another door that opened into an attached cubicle fashioned into the brick and drywall behind the cabinet. It was ingenious. I thought so when Shane built it, and now as I was pulling the drawer apart and jamming my hand inside the opening, feeling around for all that was left of Ash, I was convinced that Shane was telling the truth.

Even if she had been there, she knew exactly where everything was—including those diaries and DVDs. If she wanted to get rid of them, she could have done so a long time ago. Since they were still there, that exonerated Shane. So if the burglar was after these diaries, they only got two of them because they didn’t know where the rest were hidden. So just who, then, didn’t know?

The real sex diary of Ashley Caulfield, July 4

Last night I transcended it all. I feel like things are changing for me from the inside out. I’m getting to the point where I can demand that The One give me everything I need. I’ll offer it too. I’ve taken this to the point of no return. There’s no turning back for us now. Last night I was at another play party strapped into a PVC jacket that held my arms close to my chest, while women took turns lapping at my cunt, juices running down the sides of their faces like ejaculate from me. It made me delirious and I came like rockets watching them on all fours begging me for more. Sure, pleasure me, bitches. But at the end, something did click, something did change, because they opened up the jacket and released my arms, and for the first time in a long time I felt a bit free myself. I know I’m going to walk away from this life and I’m taking The One with me. I’m resolved. It’s going to happen. I won’t let anyone stop us.

Though Shane wasn’t responsible for the break-in, she was still insistent on the breakup. It hardly mattered to me, though, because all I wanted to do was absorb myself in Ash’s diaries—the ones the burglar didn’t discover. I was worse than I was that summer I returned home. At least then I would stop to eat or stare at Ash’s beautiful friends from the balcony. But now I was a woman possessed. The first few days I called in sick, but soon my boss insisted I take a personal leave, never once asking me to set a date for my return. I couldn’t. I was busy spending every waking moment poring through Ash’s entries over and over again trying to understand her all-too-cryptic passages. She must have been serious about her privacy to go to these lengths—hiding diaries, making acronyms and pseudonyms for so many people and places. But what was my sister hiding, and from whom? I felt like the passages in her journals were trying to say something, she was trying to speak to me, as clichéd as it sounds, and I just couldn’t wrap my damn head around it.