The Color of a Dream (6 page)

Meanwhile Angela would wallow in despair for
months or years.

If she thought
this
was bad, just
wait.

“Bye,” I said as I turned and walked out of
her room.

Out of her house and out of her life.

I peddled home through the frigid, murderous
cold, as if the hounds of hell were behind me.

When I climbed into bed that night, I
imagined what the future would hold for Angela. What would I do
when she came home in tears six months from now after Rick broke
her heart and moved on to some other girl? Would I be here to
comfort her? Would I take her back?

I rolled to my side and stared at the wall.
My chest felt heavy. What if it turned out differently? What if
Rick really did love her and she was the one who would change him
forever?

What if
someday
I was uncle to
Angela’s children?

I wasn’t sure which scenario would be
worse.

And either way, would I ever be able to
forgive?

Someday
came sooner than I expected.
Five months after I said good-bye to Angela and stood on the tarmac
watching her flight take off for LA—five months after I promised
myself I would forget her—I received a phone call out of the
blue.

“Hi, Jesse.”

The sound of her voice in my ear caused a
fireball of grief to explode in my stomach. I couldn’t speak right
away. All I could do was plunk down on a chair in the kitchen and
rest my elbows on my knees.

“Are you there?” she asked.

“Yeah, I’m here.” I closed my eyes and raked
a hand through my hair.

Why was she calling?
To tell me she
and Rick were getting married?

Or to tell me he’d cheated on her and she
wanted to come home?

It still pains me to admit it, but I wanted
desperately for the latter to be true. I wanted her to tell me she
missed me and that she’d made a terrible mistake. Rick wasn’t the
man she believed him to be. I wanted to hear, ‘Please, Jesse, I’m
miserable. Will you give me a second chance?’

Would I, if she asked?

But that wasn’t why she was calling.

“You must be surprised to hear from me,” she
said.

“Yeah.” I leaned back in my chair and stared
up at the ceiling. “How are you doing?”

There was a long pause. Then she sighed.
“I’m not sure. It all depends on the next couple of weeks.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

When she didn’t elaborate, I had to poke and
prod. “Are you going to tell me what this is about? Or did you just
call to torture me?”

Her voice became a whisper. “Jesse, I’m
really sorry. You know that was never my intention.”

My pride bucked and I shook my head. “Don’t
worry about it. Really. Forget I said that. What do you want,
Angela? Why are you calling?”

And that’s when she dropped the bomb.

* * *

“You’re
what
?” I slowly stood up.

“I’m pregnant,” she said. “And I need your
help.”

“Why would you need
my
help?” I
asked. “Because that baby can’t be mine.”

Or could it? Had she already been pregnant
when she left me?

No, that wasn’t possible. Rick would have
told me.

Or maybe not.

“No, of course not. It’s Rick’s,” she said.
“There’s no doubt about that. He’s the only one.”

The only one
. The words were like a
knife in my gut and I had to force myself to relax my shoulders and
breathe.

“What do you want from me?” I asked as I
closed my eyes and rested my forehead on the doorjamb.

She paused. “I’m hoping you’ll talk to Rick
for me because he doesn’t want me to have the baby.”

I opened my eyes. “What do you mean, he
doesn’t want you to have it? Does he want you to have an
abortion?”

“Yes.”

The anger I felt initially—when I first
heard her voice on the other end of the line—began to recede. It
was replaced by something else. I’m not sure what exactly because I
was distracted by logistics and a long list of questions.

“How far along are you?” I asked.

“About six weeks.”

I sat down again. “Explain this to me,
Angela. Do
you
want to have an abortion?”

“No. I want to have the baby. I tried
talking to Rick but he won’t budge. He says he’s not ready for kids
and he wants to get his career going first. You know… I think I
would find it easier to go through with an abortion if I had a ring
on my finger, but he’s not ready for that either.”

“You mean to say…you’d agree to have the
abortion if he proposed to you?”

This made no sense to me, and I began to
feel as if I might have dodged a bullet when Angela dumped me.

“Yes,” she said, “because at least then I’d
know there would be other children. But right now, I’m not sure
about our future. He doesn’t seem ready to commit.”

I hate to say I told you so…

Leaning an elbow on the table, I cupped my
forehead in a hand. “What do you want me to do about it,
Angela?”

Did she actually think I would call Rick and
try to talk him into marrying her?

“Could you talk to him for me?” she asked.
“Could you get him to let me have this baby?”

I took my hand away from my face.
“
Let
you have it?” Now I was angry. “It’s not up to him,” I
said. “It’s
your
body. He can’t force you to have an
abortion if you don’t want to.”

“But he said he wouldn’t be happy if I had
the baby. I’m afraid I might lose him if I don’t do what he
wants.”

Oh, God. Was she really saying this?

“Then go ahead and lose him,” I said. “If
you want to have this baby, kick Rick to the curb because he won’t
be there for you either way. And he certainly doesn’t deserve your
devotion. I warned you when you left here that he wouldn’t be
there, not like I would have been. You know that I would have never
forced you into…”

I stopped myself because we couldn’t go
back. Even if we could, I wouldn’t want to. It was too late. But I
didn’t want to see Angela crushed by Rick’s selfishness, either.
I’d loved her once and nothing would ever change that.

I realized she was crying. Part of me wanted
to comfort her, to take her into my arms and tell her everything
was going to be okay, but I couldn’t do that. We were on opposite
sides of the country, and more importantly she was pregnant with my
brother’s child.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she
said. “I can’t raise this baby alone and I’ll die if he leaves
me.”

“You won’t die,” I told her. “You’re a
strong woman. You’ll be just fine.”

She continued to weep into the phone. “I
want to have the baby. I really do.”

“Then tell him that.”

We sat in silence for a long time. I
listened to her blow her nose.

At last she spoke. “Okay. I will.”

We chatted for a few more minutes until I
sensed that she was feeling better.

Before we hung up, I asked her to keep me
posted.

Because I couldn’t simply just forget about
this.

The next night, at exactly the same time, my
phone rang again. I quickly muted the television and dove across
Bentley as he lay on the sofa beside me.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Jesse. It’s me again. You said to keep
you posted.”

I recovered a more comfortable position.
“Yeah. How did it go? What did he say?”

She took a deep breath and let it out. “I
couldn’t get him to change his mind about the baby but he told me
to be patient. He said…maybe we could get engaged at Christmas. But
he needs to focus on his career first so I want to give him
that.”

I frowned and sat forward on the edge of the
sofa. “What are you saying? That you’re going to have the
abortion?”

“Yes,” she replied. “He made an appointment
for this Friday and Christmas isn’t that far away. I can last until
then and maybe next year we can try and have a baby, after he signs
some clients of his own.”

“Angela,” I said, “he’s not going to give
you a ring this Christmas.” I felt cruel speaking so bluntly but
she needed to hear the truth.

“How do
you
know?”

“Because he’s my brother and I know
him.”

“But you don’t know
us
,” she argued.
“You don’t know what we’re like together.”

I shut my eyes and shook my head. “I do
remember what you said before you left—that it was intense.”

“That’s right.”

“Is it
still
intense?” I asked. “Is
it like it was when he came home for Christmas and you were
sneaking around behind my back? Or has some of the excitement worn
off?”

Angela fell silent. “That was
different.”

“Of course it was,” I replied. “You were the
forbidden fruit. Now you’re not.”

“Jesse!”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I have to call a
spade a spade, and the sooner you figure out what Rick’s all about,
the better off you’ll be.”

“No. You don’t understand…”

I pinched the bridge of my nose and paused
before I spoke.

“Maybe I don’t,” I replied with
resignation.

“If you could only talk to him,” she pleaded
in a quivering voice. “Because I don’t want to lose him.”

Why was I having this conversation? Why was
I getting involved?

“What about the baby?” I asked. “Do you want
to lose him, or her?”

She hesitated, then answered firmly. “No,
but Rick already made the appointment.”

Ah, Christ. I was in it now. Deep. All
the way up to my ears
.
I couldn’t possibly walk
away.

“What’s your address?” I asked, reaching for
a pen.

“Why?”

“Because I have the next three days off and
I’m coming out there.”

“Really?”

“Yes. So cancel the appointment for now, at
least until we have a chance to talk about it. Will you do
that?”

“Yes, I’ll cancel it.”

Meanwhile, I had no idea what I was doing or
what I was going to say to Rick when I arrived. I had no plan,
except to book a red-eye flight out that evening.

As luck would have it, my flight was
delayed. A storm cell moved in and all the planes were grounded.
Other incoming flights were rerouted and by midnight the airport
had turned into a zoo full of angry animals. Passengers missed
their connections and were stuck in the terminal all night. People
shouted at the airline reps, who couldn’t do much about the
weather. As I witnessed the chaos, I was glad I was just a baggage
handler.

Travelers had no choice but to sleep on the
carpeted floors at the gates inside security while others crowded
onto shuttles to the nearest hotels to wait out the storm.

Thankfully I was able to return home after I
was rebooked on a flight for the following evening.

* * *

The storm passed and my boss managed to
shift the schedule around. He told me to take a few extra days off
so I wouldn’t have to turn around and come right home as soon as I
arrived in California.

“Have a great time,” he said.

Sure
.
What a party it’s going to
be
.

I boarded my flight that night and we took
off without any further delays into a luminous sunset that took my
breath away. It had been hell getting to that point, but suddenly I
felt blessed to have been assigned a window seat where I could
stare in awe at the pink horizon and the tiny white lights of the
city below as we gained altitude.

When the sunlight faded to black and I could
see nothing but darkness, I put on the headphones and watched a
movie.

Then I fell asleep.

I woke after an hour or two, somewhere over
the Midwest. The cabin lights flickered on and the pilot spoke to
us through the noisy static of the speaker system.

He informed us that we would need to make an
unscheduled landing in Salt Lake City because there might be some
problems with the equipment. He was conspicuously vague about the
nature of the problems and an immediate hush fell over the cabin
interior.

Even the flight attendants appeared shaken
and alarmed as they moved up and down the aisles, collecting empty
plastic cups and crumpled up snack wrappers, while politely asking
everyone to fasten their seatbelts and return their seats to the
upright position.

The panicked sound of call buttons chiming
overhead added to the tension, and the silence among the passengers
was especially unnerving as we descended into the clouds and hit a
bad patch of turbulence.

The woman in front of me threw up in her
airsickness bag. The man beside me gripped the armrests so tightly
his knuckles turned white.

Leaning back against the seat, he turned his
head toward me. “I wonder what the problem is.” His upper lip
glistened with perspiration. His cheeks were pasty gray.

“I guess the pilot’s too busy to explain,” I
replied as I turned to look at my reflection in the dark
window.

Was this it? Was this how my life was going
to end?

We continued to bump and jostle over tight
air pockets in the clouds and I wondered if I was I going to die on
this insane rescue mission to save my ex-girlfriend from making the
worst mistake of her life.

And what would Bentley do if I never came
home? Oh, Jesus, I’d put him in a kennel the day before. Would my
parents go and collect him? I wanted to call them and ask if they
would do that one last thing for me…

Really, God?

On top of everything else, is this really
necessary? Can’t you give me a break, just this once, when I’m
trying to do something good for someone who stomped on my heart and
crushed it like a bug?

In that precise instant, the turbulence came
to a halt.

The rest of the descent was smooth and
surprisingly ordinary, though it took some time for my raging pulse
to decelerate to a normal rhythm.