Vulnerable (28 page)

Rawn stopped at her soft pubic hair; he was not getting a reaction. For a few seconds he watched her staring into the air. “Hey! Where are you? You okay?” He laid his head on the pillow, resting his forearm against his forehead.

She mumbled something about being tired. D'Becca fibbed, “I think I'm coming down with something.”

“Like a cold?”

“Yeah.” Her voice was hollow, sad. She turned to her side and made an attempt to lift the corners of her mouth. With affection, she caressed his rich Hershey's chocolate skin. “I went by Tamara's today. Her boutique, Threads.”

Rawn was reticent. He finally spoke, “Oh, really?”

“She's talented. I'm not sure I liked her designs as much as I claimed to have liked them on Thanksgiving. But she really does have a good eye. The dresses I saw today look ahead of their time. She could probably do well as a costume designer.”

Rawn stared up at the ceiling. It was not guilt he was feeling; it was purely regret. Similarly, he was rueful that he left Pacific Place and went to Tamara's and did not take his best friend's warning earnestly.

“Rawn?”

D'Becca lifted him back in to the present moment.

“Yeah?”

“I'm afraid.”

“Of what?”

“I haven't…I've never been here before. I don't know what to do.”

“Been where?”

She dared not reveal the side of herself he had not been acquainted with. D'Becca could not bring herself to admit to Rawn that she was one step short of a kept woman. He knew her as this rebellious kid who got on a bus and came to Seattle when she was only sixteen, defying the odds. And from there she built a life—yes, perhaps by using her looks and unconsciously using her sexuality—and she was independent, her own person. She was not at a place yet to let him think any less of her. She could reach the precipice—giving birth to the words,
the truth.
But she was not there quite yet—in the place to admit that she spent years with a married man. D'Becca knew what Rawn would think of her choices. Besides, she was ashamed that she did not have enough faith in herself and thus allowed a man to influence her and to take advantage of her vulnerability. Not once, over the three years since her relationship with Sebastian Michaels began, had she felt kept.
But of course she was; like her mother said when D'Becca had called and told her that a rich and very successful man was crazy about her. “Is he leaving his wife?” her mother had wanted to know. Rawn took for granted she sustained her comfortable lifestyle strictly from the money she
earned
. He had no idea that she was losing more and more work to girls twelve, fifteen years younger than she with breast jobs and thin as a blade of grass.

While she lay beside Rawn, thinking and organizing her thoughts, she tried to calculate whether she had enough in her various accounts to no longer need Sebastian and still hold on to what she had—the Z3, townhouse, the lifestyle she had adapted to years ago. Although D'Becca had a diverse portfolio, she invested in a few dot-com startups primarily because she was advised to do so. But there was a buzz—and economists were predicting it so—that NASDAQ had reached its peak and the bubble, essentially due to the dot-com mania, was not sustainable. Would such a burst create a Wall Street crash like in 1987? Should she take the risk and sell her dot-com shares? The idea started to take hold of her imagination.

Dear God, what if I lost Rawn
and
Sebastian? Troy was right: what choice
do
I have?

D'Becca was not the type of girl to pray. She needed to learn how to pray. Rawn once said to her, “You can always find God in the details.”
Fix this; please make it right, God.
Deep down, D'Becca had no real individual understanding of God, not even a mere image. She could never forget, when she met Sebastian in Rome, how moved he was when he stared solemnly at Michelangelo's depiction of God painted on the Sistine Chapel: The elderly man with a beard—intimidating, aloof. D'Becca did not relate. The idea of Rawn—his thoughts, his laughter and humor—not flowing through her days, her life…She had fallen in love with him. It was
Rawn she truly wanted to spend her life with. Now, on that night, she understood it so fully.
I want
Rawn's
child.

“Remember that night…not long after we met? When I bought all those candles at Pier 1 and we soaked in your tub…”

“Oh, yeah. I said that was my first. Firsts, no matter what, will always stick with you.”

It had been days since she laughed freely, genuinely. “Right. You did say that was your first time.”

“Thank you for that, by the way. Soaking in a tub with a fine woman by candlelight…Every man should have that experience.”

“You said…”

They spoke in unison: “I thought this only happened in the movies…” A spark ignited, and they were making their way back to the deeper meaning behind their relationship. They were close again.

“What made you bring that up?” Rawn asked.

“You told me that night that you wanted children someday. You never did tell me how many you would like to have.”

Rawn's mind wandered momentarily. He then looked over to her and said sincerely, “As many as we both agree to. That is, the woman that I end up having children with. I refuse to be one of those men who has one kid by this woman and one kid by that woman…I want
one
woman to be the mother of all my children. And when I do marry, it will be once. If I mess it up, I'll never make that mistake again.”

All of a sudden her heart began to race.
I can't do it. I don't know how to do this.

Something—instinct, desperation—made her blurt out, “Would your parents approve of you having biracial children?”

“I don't think they would take issue with who I marry. I'm confident my father would prefer that I keep the bloodline thick, but… Hey, he's
warm and fuzzy on the inside. Half the time Tera and I feared him growing up, but he'd probably be okay with it. Eventually. My mother's as open-minded as they come. Her parents used to travel all over the world. They were artists. Truthfully, I have no idea how my mom and dad ended up together. She sees the world—she sees life—differently than he does, in nearly every way.” Rawn was talking more to himself than to D'Becca when he said, “That's really what Sicily's play was all about: how we go for the thing we are most attracted to and yet it's the least appropriate thing for us.”

“I love how you speak of your parents. I envy you.”

An hour later he left her apartment. When Rawn met the sidewalk, a stranger startled him. They exchanged fleeting gazes, and Rawn said, “Excuse me,” and moved around him and continued in a brisk pace. Over his shoulder, he took another—a better look—at the man once more, because he looked familiar. Dressed in a sophisticated overcoat cut in sheer detail, the man's salt-and-pepper hair blended evenly with his strong face. Rawn knew he had seen him before. He jumped into his Jeep and headed home. At the stop sign, from the corner of his eye, he caught a Beamer parked along the curb. Had the parking lights not been on he would have missed the BMW altogether. The night was misty, a deep dark. Turning onto Lesley Avenue, a white SUV came dangerously close to side-swiping him. The luxury vehicle continued at a high rate of speed along the residential street. Rawn was certain that the driver was completely unaware that they even shared the road. He observed the fast-moving vehicle in his rearview mirror. For a split-second he was flustered, but once the vehicle was out of eyesight, Rawn continued toward his apartment, being mindful while he drove through the thick fog. A hushed mystery fell over the empty streets.

•  •  •

Not two minutes after Rawn left, Sebastian dropped by. They talked briefly before he told D'Becca he had something he needed to take care of and said he would be back in roughly fifteen minutes. D'Becca stared dreamily into the quietness of her room. Her eyes wandered to the walls she had had painted the color professionally known as Winter's Silence, a calming avocado-green. It felt as though she stared robotically for a very long while, but it had only been minutes.
I should change the color of this room. It would look good in apricot.
She decided to take a warm bath, and she would add one of those aromatherapy bath bombs she bought at Lush when she was last in Victoria. The thought of it was making her feel somewhat better by the idea itself. While the steaming water ran, she sat on top of the basin and reflected on her conversation with Rawn earlier. Should she tell him about her pregnancy first, or tell Sebastian when he returned from taking care of something? She was not 100 percent sure who the father was. Unless the baby looked indisputably biracial, D'Becca could not know without a paternity test. Never could she have imagined her life coming to this strange place, this unforeseen moment. Plenty of scenarios played out in her head over the years how things would work out for her, but nothing could have prepared her for being pregnant, and at the same time, not knowing who the father was. Under such twisted conditions, how could she tell Rawn she was pregnant? She got lost in her sadness for quite some time.

The bath water was nearly full when the doorbell rang.

D
'Becca lay bleeding, shivering, and her head throbbed. She felt disengaged from her body, and everything in the room was spinning. In the back of her mind, she thought she heard whispering. Every muscle in her body seemed to ache. Her mind flickered in and out of consciousness. Snippets of detail in her mind's eye came and went: a female voice asking if she was okay; Sebastian standing over her; the urgent sound of Sebastian's voice talking to someone; a hard blow against the side of her face. The sequence of events did not make sense to her fractured mind.
Is this how it feels when you have a lobotomy?
Darkness, and then light again. She could not decipher between what was happening and what had already occurred. In the back of her mind D'Becca heard two voices, but she could not trust herself to make sense of what her mind was telling her. Flashes. Darkness. And glimmers of light again. She felt the pain press against her brain. “Sebastian,” she whispered. “Sebaaaastian…” her voice slurred. She made out Sebastian's voice; it was his words she could not discern. Blood flowed evenly from her nose, stopped at her upper lip, and then proceeded to trickle to the edge of her chin. “Seba…”

She attempted to move, to crawl for help. A black boot came into view. Then pain, piercing and jagged, shot through her face and the sting ricocheted against her skull. She could hear sounds, like a band, echoing loudly in her right ear. The horns grew louder and louder in each ear. In and out of consciousness, D'Becca pushed back a similar scene when she was a little girl. Her eyelids felt
heavy and her vision kept slipping away. Her mind was failing, yet the memory was terribly real, so exceedingly clear in her reverie. Her mother lay on the kitchen floor, blood dripping from her mouth, landing onto the linoleum floor in tiny droplets. It had been D'Becca who washed up the blood; her mother went to the sofa and had a drink, the glass wobbling in her blood-stained hand.

Suddenly, everything went gray. Flashes of white. Before long, it all faded to black.

“
H
ey, lady. Got your message. It's been such a chaotic week, and I'm so—I apologize profusely for not returning any of your calls. I wasn't blowing you off… Listen, I'm out of town and when I get back, I'll call you. I think I'll have to miss meeting your flirtatious professor.
Ciao
, luv!”

Tamara ended the call and pressed ten digits to make another call. “Pricilla? Hey, friend. Where are you?” She turned into the underground garage of her condominium high-rise. “It's Tamara,” she continued, leaving Pricilla a message. “Call me.” She pulled into her parking space, and without turning off the engine, dialed yet another number.

“Henderson!”

“Hey, baby.”

“Hello. And where have you been? You must be all up in some man's arms…you haven't returned my calls since…it had to be before Thanksgiving.”

Turning off the engine, Tamara laughed, although it was contrived.

“What's up?”

“Are you in L.A.?”

“Nope, Miami.”

Tamara tried to suppress the sound of frustration, which began to build the moment she received Pricilla's voicemail and did not get a live voice. Where was that parasite when Tamara needed her?
Still traveling around the country promoting that damn book!
She attempted to sound nonchalant. “When will you be back in L.A.?”

“Why?”

“Okay, now. Henderson, am I on the wrong side of you today?”

“No,” he said flatly. “The question was simple. Why?”

Tamara walked toward the door that led to the building elevator. With a sigh, she began, “Hen…”

“What do you
need
, Tamara?”

“Why do I have to need something,
friend?”
She pressed the elevator button.

“I know this ain't good.”

“I thought you didn't use words like
ain't
.” She stepped into the elevator. “As I recall, something about it sounding ghetto. So when did you say you'd be back in L.A.?”

•  •  •

Imani and Kenya sat at a table, everyone around them speaking in Spanish. Imani and Kenya pretended to be comfortable with the decision to meet with a young woman in a Washington Heights café, and who spoke no English. When Kenya told Imani, she said, annoyed, “So tell me, how exactly will be able to talk to her?” With a shrug, Kenya said, “We'll manage.” Neither was at ease. Even while they could easily blend in with the bronze-skinned South American clientele, they looked out of place. Not because the patrons looked foreign; it was more so because Imani and Kenya looked sophisticated—well dressed and polished. Hardly speaking to each other, the sisters put on a front; it was something they did most of their lives. They were good at
faking it.
Make-believing they held no resentment; make-believing they were close; make-believing their love was deeper than their differences; make-believing Dante loved them equally. But was it possible to love two children
equally?