Wicked Game (23 page)

He stopped speaking when the door into the ER opened and the surgeon stepped out, his face grim. He spoke to Gloria, but Jaime could hear every word. “She’s going to be fine. The bullet missed any vital organs. There was extensive tissue damage complicated by blood loss, but she is stable and will pull through. Though the baby, I’m afraid, wasn’t so lucky. If we’d known, maybe we could have prevented spontaneous abortion, but well, there’s no way to know now.”

“Cass was pregnant?” he said; the floor seemed to be shaking beneath him.

The surgeon nodded. “About six weeks along. I’m sorry for your loss.”

“I’ll add murder of an unborn child to the charges,” Ryan said as he turned to leave his face gone cold.

“No.” Jaime grabbed his arm. “I don’t want her going through that if she didn’t know. At least spare Cass that much; she’s been through enough.”

“All right, unless Cass chooses to add the charges later.”

“That will be up to her. I don’t want the media knowing about this,” he said to the room at large. “This is private. No one needs to know we lost a baby in this mess.”

Jaime watched as his extended family, his coach, his teammates, his mother, and Cass’s mother all nodded in agreement, and then he went and collapsed into a chair.

* * * *

“Jaime?” Her tongue felt heavy, almost as if she’d had nothing to drink for days.

“Cass, honey. You’re awake?” It wasn’t Jaime who answered.

“Did you give me a tranquilizer, Mom? I told you to stop doing that.” Her mother’s hand was warm against her cheek. “Are we in the hospital? Is Jaime all right? I thought his arm was healing?”

“Honey, Jaime is fine.”

“Then why is he just lying over there? Is that blood on his shirt? Why is Jaime covered in blood?” He lay so still in the bed not far away. She tried to go to him, but the tubes connecting her to the annoying blipping machines wouldn’t let her. “That’s my blood, isn’t it? I remember something…”

“We had to slip him a Mickey for his own good. He was starting to wear a hole in the floor. He wouldn’t eat. He wouldn’t leave your side.”

“How long have I been asleep? I hurt all over. My side feels like it’s on fire.” A flash of light shot across her memory. The laughing woman. Jaime’s horrified eyes. Red paint. She’d spilled paint on her skirt. “She shot me. Mom, that woman shot me.”

“Yesterday morning. You’ve been in and out of consciousness for nearly forty hours. But you’re going to be fine.” Her mother squeezed her hand in hers there was something in her eyes—a sadness that didn’t make sense.

“What aren’t you telling me? Did someone die? That wide retriever—what was his name? Did she shoot him, too? I saw him jump for her, and then … I don’t remember anything after that. Jaime? She was going to kill me, wasn’t she, because of Jaime?”

“Honey, why didn’t you tell Jaime you were pregnant?” Her mother’s voice trembled.

“I’m not pregnant. Why do you and Helen keep thinking that? Were pregnant? What do you mean were?”

“You didn’t know? Oh Cass, honey, I’m so sorry.”

“I was pregnant. She shot my baby? That bitch shot my baby? I … will I be able to have children?”

“It was the stress of the surgery, Cass. You miscarried. The doctors say there is no damage to your uterus. You can have more children. You and Jaime…”

“I don’t want to have children with Jaime. I want to go home, Mom. Please, I want to go back to Alabama. Jaime doesn’t love me. He just likes to … I’ll get pregnant again if I stay. He’s persistent. He wears me down until I give in, and he doesn’t love me.”

“Honey, Jaime loves you. He just doesn’t know how to tell you how he feels.”

“Even if he does, there will still be women, lots of women. Maybe the next one will finish what the last one started. I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep worrying about him getting hurt. He nearly broke his neck last week. I can’t stand the constant fighting anymore. It tears me down to think all he wants from me is sex. He got me pregnant, and because of him I lost the baby.”

“Honey, think about what you’re saying. It wasn’t Jaime’s fault that woman had a screw loose.”

“I want to go home, Mama. Please, take me home. I can’t stay here anymore. I can’t stand the heartbreak.”

“Okay, baby. As soon as the doctors say you can fly, I’ll take you home.”

* * * *

The anguish in her voice tore him apart. She was right. If she stayed, she would end up having his child. If she stayed, he would end up losing everything to her. If she stayed … he rolled away, letting the drug pull him back under … if she stayed his heart wouldn’t break into a million little pieces.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The first weekend of October came before Cass was ready. Summer had somehow slipped away at the end of September. There was a chill in the air after sunset now.

Cass went about her days much the same as she had before her brief time in Miami. Putting out applications and trying to keep herself busy. The ongoing scandal had cost her friends. Some of the women who once welcomed her now turned their backs on her when they saw her coming. Her Sunday school teacher even took her aside to read her the riot act for her many and varied sins.

The largest sin apparently was wrecking the favored son’s chances at a championship season. Miami had lost all of their last three games, though the first two were because Jaime was on the sidelines instead of playing. His backup had tried valiantly, and both games they’d almost, almost won. Cass didn’t watch the games. She didn’t want to see him kill himself. He hadn’t called her before any of the games either. She’d waited, watching the phone, but it never rang. She didn’t know if she felt disappointed or relieved.

She learned of Yolanda Gray or Alicia Gonzalez, or whatever her name was on the news. A wanted felon in two states. She’d been declared unfit to stand trial for attempting to kill her. Jaime looked tired and pale in the courtroom the day she was taken away to a mental facility in North Florida. New York and New Jersey were filing extradition papers, but for now, she was staying put in Florida.

Gloria and Helen came home with her, and both went back to work. Her mother begged her to stop lying around moping on the sofa the few days a week she allowed herself to lie around moping. However, after the verbal sin-lashing she’d gotten, she found herself lying on the couch in her robe more than she cared to admit.

On Saturday that first week of October, Cass was again lying on the couch watching television trying to avoid sports, news, sports news, Hallmark commercials, anything on the Lifetime network, and diaper commercials, which pretty much left her with just the Weather Channel for company. Even they liked to torment her with shots of the beautiful weather Miami was having this weekend.

The doorbell rang just as she decided she should turn off the television and get a life. She opened the door to find the FedEx guy standing there holding an envelope. Her heart started racing, and she knew she must have looked like she was about to drop because the guy asked her if she was okay. She assured him she had never been better and took the package from him.

It was for her, the return address one she didn’t know in Miami. She set it on the table as if it were a bomb and fixed herself a sandwich, took a bite of the sandwich, and tossed it in the trash because it tasted like sawdust. Everything tasted like sawdust. She ate when her mother forced her to. She wasn’t starving.

She gulped milk, pouring half a bottle of chocolate syrup into it, trying not to remember the milk shakes she and Jaime had the day before their lives went to hell. Chocolate milk was the only thing that stayed down. Sometimes toast. Except toast tasted like sawdust with jelly on it.

She went to her room. The dolls on the shelf looked at her with their dead baby eyes, so she went back to the couch. A while later, she found herself circling the envelope like a vulture. It hadn’t exploded.

Maybe it would have been better if it had.

She picked it up, and closing her eyes, she ripped the tab and dumped the contents onto the table. Dirty pictures wouldn’t make a clattering noise would they? She peeked with one eye and saw the mirror side of what looked like a CD shining up at her. She looked in the envelope and found a single sheet of paper trapped beneath the flap.

I thought this might help you.

That was all it said; there was no signature. “Help me with what?”

She picked up the disc and found the words
Watch Me
scrawled on it in the same handwriting. It was a DVD.

Shaking, she held the thing out at arm’s length as she walked back to the living room. She hesitated but finally loaded it into the machine. The scene switched from a sunny day in Miami to a different sunny day in Miami. The one in which her world had literally almost come to an end.

Instead of the one-minute clip of that day she’d seen on the news, the scene that played out before her was horrific, detailed, heartbreaking.

The woman Alicia, confronting Jaime with her delusional lies. The disbelief on Jamie’s face that turned to stark fear. He stepped in front of her, shielding her. She saw him look past Alicia, his eyes sending some sort of message, and then he jumped from the podium, rushing the gun. But they were too late. Alicia squeezed the trigger, aiming past Jaime. Then she hit the ground, laughing maniacally as a group of men restrained her.

She saw herself standing there, fear holding her to the spot. Her body jolted with the impact of the bullet, and all she did was reach up with her hand and cover the spot. Cass remembered that. There wasn’t much pain, just a burning sensation, followed by wet sticky blood.

Jaime caught her before she collapsed, and she reached for his face, smearing him with blood. His panicked cries for help and for her to look at him turned to, “I love you, Cass. Look at me, Cass. Pepper.”

It took six full-size football players to pull him away from her so the team medics could help her. It took more than six to restrain him after they pulled him away. He was like a man on fire. Then he just dropped to his knees. She could see tears, as he mouthed, “No, baby. No, baby. Don’t leave me.” Then the footage ended.

She turned off the player and lay on the couch, holding her ribs. That day at the airport, he’d kissed her on her forehead and watched her fly away. He didn’t say anything then about loving her. He hadn’t begged her to stay. He’d simply said good-bye. Then she was gone. Why hadn’t he begged her to stay?

“Why didn’t you tell me you loved me? Why did you let me go?” she screamed at the television. “I hate you, Jaime Dalton. I HATE YOU.”

* * * *

“Do you have the game on?” His voice over the phone sounded tired.

“No.” But she did. After watching the DVD repeatedly until she finally broke, she needed to see him for real.

“Don’t lie to me, Pepper. I know you have it on.” She could hear the crowd around him, his breath as he waited for her to answer.

“Why are you breathing heavy? And stop calling me Pepper.”

“Because I’m tired, I’m out of shape, and its cold out here.” She noticed the steam coming from the breath of the guy currently on camera.

“Where are you?”

“New York. Are you home alone?”

“We’re not having phone sex, so stop thinking about it.”

“I wasn’t. I wasn’t—stop making that noise.”

“What noise? I didn’t make a noise.”

“You do this sort of catchy sound in your throat when you don’t like something I say. Sort of between a humph and a croak.”

“I do not sound like a frog, Jaime Dalton. Go play your violent game of tag and leave me alone.”

“Pepper, come home. I need you, baby, please.”

“No, Jaime, don’t ask me that, not now.”

“Am I on TV?”

“No, they’ve got that big guy on right now. I can’t remember his name, the one with gold teeth.”

She heard him shout something, and then the camera swung around to him. His arm beckoning the guy to come closer. “Hey, are you live?” She saw him as well as heard him. His face looked gaunt. He looked as tired as he claimed to be.

“Yeah!” she heard the cameraman shout back.

“Good. Come here. I’ve got something I need to tell someone, and she isn’t listening.”

She could hear the commentators wondering what was going on over the airwaves and got a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

“Cass. Look at me. Listen to me. I love you. I’ve always loved you. I fell in love with you on August 18, 1986. I pulled your hair at recess, and you knocked me flat on my ass.” She heard him over the phone, his mouth moving to the words on television, and then she heard him in stereo.

“Don’t do this, Jaime. Not like this. Please.”

“I let you go because I loved you, and I didn’t want you to be hurt any more than you already were. It was a mistake. Come home to me, baby. Cassandra. Come home. I won’t call you Pepper ever again. I promise to stop fighting with you. I promise…”

“Jaime. We lost a baby … we didn’t even know it existed, and I can’t stop grieving for it. I’m not ready to think about…”

“Cass, we’ll make more babies. I want babies, the two point four you want, and we’ll get a dog. We can’t start working on those babies with you gone. Come home, baby?”

“No, Jaime. Why don’t you understand it’s not about children? It’s about you making me crazy. It’s about you risking your neck. It’s about…”

“I’ll quit. I’ll quit right now, I’ll walk off the field right now, Cass. I’ll go to medical school. Football doesn’t mean a thing to me anymore. I’ll set this helmet down and walk out right now. Just say you’re coming home, and I’m gone.”

“Are you crazy?” Somehow, she could hear a little tinny version of her own voice coming from the television. “If you walk off that field, you’ll blame me for the rest of your life. I won’t let you throw away something you love just because…”

“Just because what? You were going to say you love me, weren’t you?”

“No, I was going to say I’d become the most hated person in Miami, and probably the whole the country. Jaime, we aren’t meant to be. Just let me go.”

“No, I won’t let you go. I gave you time to heal. Now it’s time to put your life back together, to put our lives back together. If there is one thing football has taught me, it’s never to give up on something you want. And, Cass, I want you. You’re all I’ve ever wanted. You and your sassy back-talking mouth. You’re the only person who can knock me on my ass. You’ve been doing it since the first day of kindergarten.”