What Brings Me to You (37 page)

              One day, a week later, you came home with a bottle of champagne, great news, and a present for me.

              “Which do you want first?” You asked bouncing from foot to foot anxiously like a kid on Christmas morning.

              “Um, the good news,” I said feeding off of your rare good mood.

              “They want me!” You cried. You went on to explain that your business plan, which I’d yet to see, was a success with some of the lower tier execs and some board members. They wanted to partner with you on, what you had coined “The Rosen Method for Training” and possibly invest in some HCI backed training facilities. It all sounded very Billy Blanks, Tae Bo-ish to me but you were happy enough to scoop me in your arms and kiss me which, was such a rarity I went along with it.

              “So what’s my present?” I asked. That’s when you pulled the box out of your pocket. The box with the key to the house you’d gone out and bought for us. We popped champagne and I danced around the apartment in my underwear while you watched from the couch, a crooked smile on your face.

              I found my slice of paradise there in the suburbs with you. I had it all at twenty-two: great house, great job, great friends, great husband, Brooke, Markus and I met for one of our weekly business meetings which usually ended in hen style gabbing, gossiping, grubbing and grey-goosing. That’s when she told us the news: she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer. Cancer is such a scary word. I nearly passed out when she said it, but Brooke put on the brave face and downplayed it significantly by telling us it was early and her type had a very high rate of survival. USF had the leading cancer research and treatment center in the US so we knew she was in good hands. I hugged her and, though I wanted to, didn’t shed a tear. I just admired her and thought about Teddy for the first time since I got married. I thought about how close he and his mother were. I thought about where he was and if he was planning on coming around to visit her while she went through her treatments. I thought about him in his doctor lab coat looking over his mother’s charts and my heart turned over for him. I hoped, wherever he was, whatever he was doing he was as happy as I was. Actually, I hoped he was happier.

              I was spending more time with work and with Brooke. Since she was recovering I had to take over several of her duties and even stood in for her at some social engagements. I was just so happy I could do something for someone else. Like Collette said, it helped me to focus on other people and I felt useful and needed. I’d go at least twice a week to visit her while she was getting treatment at home, most of the time Mr. Holmes was by her side, reading a book or smiling up at his fragile wife. It was very sweet. We’d talk business but in those times I really got to know her and knew she was a woman I could model my own life after, just like Teddy said. It was hard being in her house, in her bedroom and not think of her son. She spoke of him often, and that’s when I found out he did move back to Tampa to be with her. When I realized that I could’ve seen him at the hospital or anywhere around town. I thought that the idea of it would make me sick or apprehensive, but it actually made me smile. Enough time had passed that I would welcome the sight of him.

After we moved into the house, we hit another, as Collette called it “rough patch”. I don’t know that it was all that rough. I think I would’ve preferred if we fought or something, but we didn’t. We were just disconnected. I knew something was off with us but I could never really nail it down. Our routine was relatively the same: I’d come home from working at the restaurant or from meetings with investors, you’d come home shortly after. I’d talk about my day: about Brooke’s treatments and, if I’d gone to visit her that day. You’d pour yourself two fingers of Scotch, I’d have half a glass of wine. We’d change into our pajamas, you’d watch ESPN, I’d read a novel trying hard to block out the white noise of sports pundits before giving up and going to bed. Some nights we’d make love, which was less painful but no less clumsy, but most of the time we’d just lay there until you would roll over with your back to me and fall asleep. I couldn’t understand why the happier I got in my professional life the more you pulled away from me. I couldn’t understand why you seemed to resent me for my success since you were always talking about being the best.

              Collette suggested you were probably really stressed with work and when men get stressed they go inside themselves. Markus suggested I buy sexy lingerie and prance around my house like we were in a Victoria’s Secret commercial. They both suggested that we take a honeymoon, since we never did. That a vacation would be good for us. That we needed to “get away”.

              Our relationship did even out, though we never got to take a vacation or a honeymoon. What we got was so much worse.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Teddy

              I’ll tell you when I finally gave her up.

              When I finished my prerequisites at the University of Tampa, I decided it would be best for everyone if I just disappeared for a while. I just couldn’t be around you Lacey, for one thing. I couldn’t look at you and think about what I’d done, what I’d agreed to. I couldn’t be around my dad and not want to beat the shit out of him for cheating on my mother with Claire. I couldn’t look at my mother and not want to tell her what a douche bag dad was and take her out of that house. I couldn’t stand the possibility of running into Charley. The town was too small, she was working with my mother, I would see her, or though I saw her, everywhere and it never got any easier. So I rented a condo in South Beach while I finished med school at University of Miami. Being on the beach was a pathetically nostalgic reminder of Charley that kept me focused on my goal: to make her proud. Mom called to talk to me about the restaurant opening but I told her I couldn’t go because I was so busy, which was a only half true. The truth was, I knew if I saw her I wouldn’t be able to restrain myself and I needed to restrain myself. I’d convinced myself that things were better this way. I couldn’t hurt her if I just stayed away, so I kept an eye on her from a distance. Andy kept me up to date on all the shit with her brothers and mom kept me in the loop about the goings on in the restaurant over the phone, making sure to send me any and all of the press clippings.

              Then mom got sick and I had to go back. There’s really no sense in rehashing the whole thing, but the highlights are it was breast cancer and they caught it early. Dad spent every day in the hospital with her and every time I saw him sitting by her bedside playing the dutiful husband I wanted to throttle him. Mom was mom. Brave. Stoic. Beautiful. I wished I could tell her about my dad. I wished I could tell her how he’d been screwing her best friend for near thirty years. But I couldn’t burst her bubble. Not while she was recovering from cancer. I couldn’t break her while she was at her weakest, instead I did my job as the good son and stayed with her.

              So at twenty-seven years old, four years after I stood her up I was back from U of M to do my residency at Tampa General Hospital to be nearer to mom. It was a relatively slow day, but I was doing rounds with the other interns in the ER. There was, all of a sudden, a lot of commotion and she was being pushed through the double doors in a wheelchair

You’d think, the way that I idolized her in my mind, the reality would not have measured up. You would be wrong. She was even more beautiful than I remembered her. Seeing her, even four years later in a goddamn wheelchair was just as hard. In my mind I ran to her, scooped her up out of that wheelchair and carried her off into the sunset.

In reality, I stood behind a pillar and a crowd of attending doctors and watched her from far away, just like I did on the beach so many years prior, only this time I didn’t even have the guts to hit her with a Frisbee.

              She was banged up.

              She was out of it.

              She was with another man.
Dick head.

              I just stood there, dumbfounded, watching the scene unfold. Nurses were rushing around her shining lights in her eyes. Her usual deep, dark, eyes were as I’d never seen them; dead. Her attending was speaking to her in that way we learned; calmly, like speaking to a rabid animal but it was like he wasn’t there, it’s like none of us were there. Meanwhile, a nurse was talking to this big guy who kept saying “where is she, let me see her” over and over, while two more nurses were blocking him from getting to her. The guy was massive, had to outweigh me by fifty pounds of muscle easy.
Overcompensating,
I thought. He was obviously pissed and he puffed his immense chest out with each breath. His knuckles were so busted up they looked like hamburger meat.
Did he hit her?
I thought and made a move through the crowd, which was now three people deep to get to her and her eyes locked on me which paralyzed me. She came out of her daze in that moment and opened her mouth to speak. Her voice was so small and croaky and I imagined that she was saying Teddy but she wasn’t, then it sounded a lot like
save me, save me
but because her lip and jaw were swollen she was really saying
Jaime! Jaime!
over and over again. The big guy rushed to her side and held one bloodied hand up to her cheek and looked into her eyes. She seemed to come out of whatever fog she was under. He was muttering something to her that only she could hear but she was nodding furiously. Nodding and crying and holding his huge paw which was wrapped around her swelling cheek. I immediately hated him because it was clear that he did what I failed to do; keep her. Love her. I hated him for that. I hated him so much that I felt myself get physically ill watching them. What finally did it, was when she stood up slowly, and he tenderly held her hand and lower back while they transferred her from the wheelchair to a gurney. At the moment she was in between she looked up at him and, though it must have been incredibly painful, she smiled at him. There was such trust, such complete and utter pride, confidence, love for him in her eyes that I knew, once and for all, at that moment, I’d lost her.

When I got home that night, I called you for the first time since our conversation in your bedroom after you drugged me.

              One month later we were engaged.

              Three months after that we were married.

              Six months after that you moved out.

              Eighteen months after that you were dead.

              And so was he.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Charley

              Adam. I didn’t recognize him when came in through the back door. The door that I always forgot to lock. He certainly didn’t look like any of the army portraits displayed all over mom and Paul’s house. He had a straggly beard and his hair fell into his bloodshot eyes. At the time I wondered why his eyes were so red. I wondered how long it had been since he’d slept. He seemed manic, jittery, and paranoid. I knew that he’d been dishonorably discharged a couple of years prior and he and Caleb were living in a condo somewhere nearby. My name had changed so I don’t know how he found me. I didn’t even think it mattered to him that I was around. But there he was. I couldn’t do anything to stop him because, even though he’d lost weight and he was strung out, he could still overpower me.

I ran through the kitchen trying to get to my bedroom where I knew there was a lock on the door and my cell phone, but he caught me by my hair, my fucking hair, and slammed me hard twice against the counter top. My head bounced like a medicine ball both times with an audible crack in the tile surface. (A crack that you never fixed, by the way.)  Then the dragging started. He gripped my hair so tightly around his fist that the more I struggled the more of it ripped out so I stopped kicking while he dragged me through my house where he eventually ended up in my original destination: the bedroom. When he let go of my hair, I knew there was a chunk missing and that I was bleeding. My hand instinctively went for my head instead of his throat.
Stupid
. He punched me hard in in the jaw and a second time in my gut effectively rendering me breathless and unable to stand. I sat, or more like slumped, against the footboard trying to regain my breath. He knelt down in my face and screamed words that in my state I could barely comprehend. Words over and over like.
“Bitch…fucking cunt…ruined…your fault…ruined… bitch….dad and Caleb…ruined…”
I couldn’t process what he was saying and the pain, so I focused on the pain and how to get him out of my house, but nothing came to me. I was panicking.

He grabbed me by my armpits and threw me onto the bed, my head smacked so hard against the mattress, which after the previous trauma, made me feel like I would pass out. Then he climbed on top of me. I don’t know when his clothes came off or when mine did but he was on top of me. I struggled. I crossed my legs and flailed my arms as much as I could, I even connected a few times with his face but it’s like he didn’t even feel it. He pinned my arms with his and tore my legs apart with his knee. I sobbed and thrashed and sobbed but he was too heavy.

              “I’m going to fuck you over the way you did me you stupid, cunt.”

              In that moment I didn’t know what would happen to me. I didn’t know if he would rape me or kill me or both but whatever he did I wanted it to be quick, so I prayed for it to be over quickly.               And then, you showed up. You should’ve had your own theme song for the way you swooped in and you pounced on him. Literally pounced. I was outside my body, then, watching you do it, and it was beautiful. You pinned him to the floor, almost in the same position the he had me. I scrambled off the bed for clothes or anything to cover my naked body with, but I couldn’t get around you and he on the floor so I crouched in the corner of the room and watched it. I watched you, punching and punching and screaming and punching his face and his body. I know I heard bones crack and I hoped to God that they weren’t yours. Adam at one point got in a lick, then ran to our bathroom to find a weapon I supposed, but Marine training and clean living could beat coked out Army training any day. You grabbed him by the nape of the neck and forced his head through the shower door raining glass everywhere. You slammed his head into the tile over and over and over until the bottom of the shower was red and the white tile walls were pink and Adam wasn’t moving anymore.

Then it was quiet. Except for me. I screamed and screamed and screamed and kept screaming. It was probably the screaming that kept you from killing him because instead you chose to hold me close and rock me, petting my hair off of  my face. I could smell the metallic scent of blood on your hands but I let you hold me because, again, you saved me. At a certain point in the car on the way to the hospital, I stopped screaming. I stopped being there. It wasn’t until I saw Teddy, just staring at me that I came out of it.

              Teddy. It had been years since I’d seen him and, of course, it would be the day that I get attacked by my crazy half-brother that he’s there in his white lab coat and green silk tie, watching me. I felt a rush, a wave of something I hadn’t felt in a long time when I locked eyes with his. I called his name but he didn’t hear me, and I’m glad because I felt so guilty for doing it especially when I realized you were the one who’d rescued me, that you were the one who was standing beside me, not Teddy. I wanted to be grateful to you for rescuing me, but I couldn’t stop seeing Teddy’s perfect angelic face. I imagined being brought in and having him attend to me. I imagined his gentle hands cleaning my wounds and caressing my body. I wanted that from him. I wanted it more than I could ever admit and I was fraught with guilt because of it.

              They all tried to blame me for their misery. Paul represented Adam in court when we pressed charges even launching a counter suit. Turns out he lost his job with HCI. The three of them were close to being destitute and they went after the money I was making with
La Marlotte.
That’s when mom left him and when you finally stopped hating her so much. You let her move in with us for a bit while she found that really nice condo which, to this day I don’t know how she could afford since she wasn’t working. It was nice, her being there for those few weeks while I wasn’t working to help me recuperate. I was glad that I wasn’t alone because God knows I’d been fantasizing about Teddy and may have broken down and called him had she not been there.

              I thought after the attack that things between you and I would change. I thought we’d go back to the way it was in the beginning, but I think that’s actually when things started to get worse. You didn’t take any time off from work to be with me, you said you had to work if I wasn’t. I figured it made you feel good to do something productive other than look at my ugly, beat up face. When you’d come home you’d thank my mother for watching me, then watch ESPN highlight reels. You never asked about my therapy (physical or otherwise) you never asked about my day. You were so distant from me and no matter what I did to try and get you back you were gone. You hid your face, your real face, the one that you showed to me the day we were married, all the time behind an impenetrable wall. 

              The thing is, I knew that you loved me. You wouldn’t have saved me, not just from Adam but from Paul, too, if you didn’t love me. Besides that, you said it all the time: before you’d leave for work, before we’d go to bed, at the end of every phone call, but it, and I hate that I made this comparison, wasn’t like how it was with Teddy. You didn’t hold my face. You didn’t look deeply into my eyes. You didn’t kiss me passionately. I wanted to be angry about it because I thought it was a byproduct of what we’d been through, but when I thought, I mean, really thought about it it was just the way you were. Intense, distant, cold. I knew so well what you meant when you said your dad brought boot camp home with him. You brought it home with you, too. But I wanted it to work because dammnit I wasn’t going to be like my mother. I wasn’t going to give up on you and go running to another man. But I was still at my wits end. Collette (and even Markus) gave me these tricks to try and seduce you but I never tried them. I knew from the beginning you weren’t a “tender” guy. I knew that you were the way you were and I learned to love you, just like you learned to love me. 

*****

              Your reclusiveness played on my tendency to isolate myself and, other than work, I really didn’t go out. I was lonely in the evenings without you. I mean, you were there, but you weren’t
there.
The disconnection between us caused me to revert to old habits and withdraw from Markus and Collette. I was getting desperate for you to see me, to feel like a couple again.

             
Since work seemed to be the only thing that made you happy, I thought I’d visit you there. I thought maybe if you showed me around your world we’d be more connected to each other. I’ll admit, I was grasping at straws.

              I pulled into the visitor parking area of the HCI building. The HCI building is a beacon of commercialism and capitalism in an otherwise pathetic Tampa Bay skyline. Seventy stories of pure glass and steel, the way the sun hits it, from certain angles, it almost looks like a mirage. I don’t think I need to reiterate the metaphorical resonances of that image.

I pushed through the heavy chrome and glass revolving door and was hit with a blast of air conditioning. The reflective glass and shiny reflection of the black marble floor was so blinding, it took a minute to get my bearings. There was a small reception area made of a frosted glass and the same sleek black granite. The matching receptionists both had these little rimless reading glasses of the same effulgent quality of everything around them. I felt like I was in a funhouse of mirrors. I approached the reception so I could be buzzed into the offices as I didn’t have an employee badge or anything.

              “Hi, I’m here to see Jaime Rosen.”

              “Do you have an appointment?” Receptionist on the left asked snottily.

              “No, um, I’m his wife, I was hoping that I could drop in and say hello. Maybe take him out to lunch or something.”

              “Mr. Rosen is with a client at the moment--“ Left receptionist said as if to shoo me away. Then, Right receptionist cut her off.

              “Wait, you’re Charley, right?”

              “Yes. Um, have we met?”

              “I was at
La Marlotte
last week. It was my tenth anniversary. You made a special trip by my table and gave us a free dessert when you found out.” Right receptionist had kind eyes behind her little, rimless glasses.

              “I did, didn’t I? I hope you had a nice anniversary.” I know that was laying it on thick but I needed to see you.

              “Are you kidding? It was fantastic! I’ve been dying to try that place for the longest time. Jason, that’s hubby, he got us reservations four months in advance.” She shook her head lightly side to side as if she still couldn’t believe he would do something like that for her.

              “Sounds like a good guy.”

              “The best,” she blushed a bit and jealousy surged through me. You never really did anything like that for me, not that I expected it or anything. We’d been married almost three years and the most “romantic gesture” if you could even put it that way, was the surprise purchase of the house. I didn’t ever expect you to be “Mr. Romance” or anything but seeing Right Receptionist blush at the sweetness of the gesture made me wish I had that too. At least I’d know you were thinking of me. Listening to what I wanted. “Here’s a key card. I’ll go ahead and make you one of your own so if you ever want to drop in you don’t have to stop by here.”

              “That’s really nice of you.”

              “Hey, least I can do for the woman who gave me a dessert that changed the course of my life.” We both laughed. “Go on in, your key card will be ready when you leave.”

“thanks so much.”

              “Anytime.”

              I waved the key card in front of the lock and the large chrome and glass doors clicked open. There were lots and lots of business people running around looking important. All in dark colored business suits carrying manila folders and coffee. I felt sort of out of place but reminded myself that with my degree I could’ve ended up working here.

              I asked one of the very busy looking people if they knew where the gym was and I took the elevator down to the basement level. At this point I expected your standard industrial looking area with exposed duct work and ill working heating/cooling system, but the gym was gorgeous and there was already a life sized cut out of you at the entry way. As it turns out the gym was a gym/spa for employees with massages and facials. I couldn’t believe I’d never been there before. The gym receptionist was an almost cookie cutter twin of the Basketball Boobs the first time we met, except, and I’m loathe to even say this. Younger.

              “Is Jaime in?”

              “Do you have an appointment?” I was just about to tell mini Basketball Boobs that I was your wife when I saw you through the fake ficus trees between reception and the rest of the gym. You were in your usual gym gear, polo shirt and mesh shorts, but the woman, tall leggy blonde was dressed in business attire: white linen pants that accentuated the length of her legs and a silk top printed with large red poppy flowers. She was much taller than me but you still towered over her. I brushed past the little receptionist who seemed not to be too put off by it and walked up to you. Something in your posture was different. Your arms hung loosely by your sides, dangerously close to her arms. You seemed even more confident than I was used to, but I figured it was because you were in your element or whatever. Then you did something unusual for you. You laughed. A real, hearty throaty laugh with your head thrown back. I don’t think I’d ever heard it before. Then I saw your face. The shields you held up to everyone, even me sometimes, were melted away. You showed her your secret face and I felt so betrayed I stopped dead in my tracks. You saw me and your shield went back up. Then I got a look at her.