A Clean Slate (25 page)

“I'm sorry. I just wanted to get you alone for a second.” He grasped my wrist and made small, reassuring circles on my skin with his thumb.

The cave was dank and thick with humidity. Water slapped against the walls somewhere deep inside as Sam's fingers encircled my wrist caressingly. My heart rate slowed, I looked into his eyes and decided then and there to sleep with him again that night. I could hear Laney's voice yelling in my head,
No, no, no, you idiot! A one-nighter means one night. Don't you get it? You don't go back for more! You'll only get hurt!
But since Laney had decided to stay away from me for a while, I ignored her. I whispered in Sam's ear that I'd meet him after dinner.

The heated looks Sam and I exchanged throughout the
rest of the day puffed me up and left me feeling like I was, quite possibly, the sexiest woman on the planet. That night at dinner, I wore a slitted skirt and high-heeled sandals that I'd bought on my shopping spree with Laney. Sam and I sent each other more of those looks, and I could have sworn that the temperature soared after the sun went down.

The whole crew was there, since it was Sam's last night, and we were on post-dinner port and coffee when I started to count the minutes until Sam and I could escape, back to my hotel room, or maybe his. But then Mella, in her sunny way, turned the conversation to Sam, and everything changed.

It started out easy enough. “Why are you running back to chilly Manhattan when you could stay here with us?” she asked. Everyone else joined in, cajoling him to postpone his flight. He and Cole had made up, and Cole called down the table, “Yeah, c'mon, mate. Stick around awhile.”

“I wish I could,” Sam said, and under the table he gave my leg a light kick. “But I have to get back.”

“Back to that boring magazine,” Mella said. “Call them and tell them that we're a problem shoot. Tell them you've got to stick around.”

“Well, you're all a bunch of deviants so that wouldn't be a lie,” Sam said, and everyone laughed. We were all giddy on the wine and the Caribbean breeze.

“Seriously,” Sam said, “my son has a soccer game tomorrow night, so I've definitely got to leave.”

Someone called to the waiter for more port, and the conversation split up into little, individual ones again. Chad, who was on my right, wearing all white (including a little white beret) began bitching about his errant boyfriend. I nodded and managed to make appropriately outraged responses, but my mind was still on what Sam had said—
my son…my son has a soccer game.
I'd managed to forget that he had the divorce back home and two kids. I had conve
niently pushed away the fact that he was singularly wrong for me, for what I wanted to do with my life, and although I shouldn't care less—we were on a Caribbean island, for Christ's sake! It was just sex!—already I couldn't think of it like that. I liked him. Or at least, I thought I could like him if we spent more time together, and so being with him again that night would have been dangerous. I'd had too much heartache this year as it was. I'd lost too many people.

And so, when he knocked on my door an hour later, I stepped outside, kissed him on the cheek and said goodbye.

U
Chic
had booked Cole and me first-class tickets home from Puerto Rico to Chicago. Normally that would have made me very happy, but as I sank into the wide leather seat, it seemed like a metaphor for my life—too big and slightly awkward feeling, with enough room to squeeze in someone else. And yet no one fit the bill.

The saccharine voice of the flight attendant came over the intercom announcing our flight time, and I dutifully fastened my seat belt.

“Christ, I hate flying,” Cole said, arranging and rearranging himself next to me—organizing magazines in the seat pocket, fumbling with his seat belt, then unclasping it again to reach down and get something else from his bag.

I picked up the in-flight magazine, trying to figure out what movie we'd get, what kind of music I could listen to on the headphones, anything to keep myself from thinking
about landing at O'Hare and taking a cab back to that lonely apartment. I tried to get myself psyched up, telling myself that I was about to turn over another new leaf. I was about to recreate myself again, this time back into someone with definable goals and a plan for getting herself there.

“So, what happened with you and Sam, eh?” Cole said.

I sat motionless for a few seconds, trying to figure out if he really knew something or whether he was just fishing. “What do you mean?”

“What do you think I mean? I'm not a blithering idiot. I know you two were snogging.”

I wasn't sure if “snogging” was a British term for kissing or having sex, or whether it was a Coley Beckett word that he'd made up to signify God-knows-what, so I didn't answer him right away.

“Oh, c'mon,” Cole said. “I know you fancy him.”

“Did he say something to you?”

“God, no. The man's a bloody vault when it comes to that stuff, but I could see something was happening.”

I sighed. “Well, you won't see anything more. It was just one of those island romances, you know?”

The plane was accelerating down the runway now, hurtling faster and faster. Cole leaned his head back and closed his eyes, and yet his hands tugged at the collar of the lime-green bowling shirt he wore. “I
hate
flying,” he said again. “Especially the takeoff. It's bloody unnatural. Talk to me, Kelly Kelly.”

“How about a question?”

“Fine.” His eyes were still squeezed shut. The front wheels lifted off the ground, soon followed by that weird moment of suspension when the bulk of the plane became airborne.

“What's going on with Sam's divorce?”

“What's not going on, now that's a better question. Are we in the air?”

“Yeah.”

Cole opened his eyes. He slammed down his window blind, then, after a second, raised it again as if to double-check something. “It's quite messy. She wants the kids and is trying to restrict his visitation rights for no good reason except to mess with him. It's killing the poor bastard.”

“Why are they getting divorced?”

“Ah, they got married too young. Right out of university. If you met her, you'd never even think they were together. They just don't match. But old Betsy, she was willing to stick it out because of Sam's money.”

“So he's wealthy?” I thought of Mella's mention of family dough.

“
He's
not, but his family's filthy rich. Once he got out of school, Sam wouldn't take any of it, and this made Betsy very unhappy. She kept trying to talk Sam into borrowing some family cash so they could buy an apartment or a better car, but he wanted to do it on his own. I think little Betsy got pregnant just to make Sam see that they would need more money, that they would need his family's money, but he's always refused. And he did do it on his own, although, of course, he doesn't make anything like his father. He got into publishing by himself, and he's worked his way up slowly. It's what he wants, but Betsy finally got fed up and filed for divorce.”

“It's so sad for the kids.” I thought of my mom's two divorces, of Dee and me always wondering about our dads. Sam didn't seem the type to run from his family, however, and I said as much to Cole.

“Oh, he's a dedicated father,” Cole said, “unlike me.”

I'd been drifting off about Sam and didn't know if I heard him right. “What did you say?”

He tugged at the collar of his shirt again and peered outside at the diaphanous white clouds. “Nothing.”

“You said Sam was a dedicated father, unlike you. What did you mean?”

He shook his head.

“Do you…do you have kids?” The thought struck me as inordinately bizarre. Coley Beckett—bristly photographer, previous hard-core partyer…and daddy?

“One,” he said.

“Where?”

“Back in England. She's four.”

It dawned on me then. “That was the little girl in the photos, the ones you had me develop.”

He nodded, and I thought back to that day—Cole sniping at me about the need to get the pictures just right. The way I'd left him sitting in his studio, staring at the little girl. He'd said she was his niece, and I'd never given it a second thought.

A flight attendant came down the aisle with a flimsy smile, asking if we wanted a drink. I waved her away, afraid she might break the spell, afraid Cole might clam up.

“So were you married?” I asked.

“Ha. No.”

“Dating someone?”

“No.”

“Well, who was she? Some model?” When he didn't say anything, I jumped to conclusions. “Was it Britania?”

“Jesus, no!” He looked at me, annoyed, but then just as quickly the expression disappeared from his face and he only looked sad. He groaned and rubbed the stubble on his jaw. “It was right after the debacle with Britania,” he said, looking out the window. “I wasn't sure where else to go. I didn't know if I'd ever work again. So I went back to England with my tail between my legs, and I basically lived with my mum and dad. I didn't tell them anything about New York. They thought I was still on top of the world, and I wanted to believe it, too, so I drank for about three weeks straight. I bought cocktails and dinners for everyone in that little pissant town, trying to show them that I was still the big man….” He drifted off.

“What happened?” I asked softly.

“Well, one night, I was with a lovely girl named Amanda,
although I can barely remember a thing about it. She came to my mum's house a month or so later and told me she was pregnant. I was a stereotypical arsehole. I said it wasn't mine, I said she'd been sleeping with a fleet of blokes. It scared me so much that I took off and moved to Chicago. But she got my address from my mum, and she kept writing me. I went home when she had the baby, took a paternity test and…”

“And she was yours.”

He nodded.

“Wow.” The concept of Cole as a father was overwhelming, confusing. “What's her name?”

“Josie.”

“And so how often do you see her?”

“A few times a year. Amanda married this very nice bloke, and he's basically her dad.” Cole bit his bottom lip, a vulnerable action the likes of which I'd never seen.

I reached over and patted his forearm. It was a hopelessly inadequate gesture.

“But you see, Sam's different from me,” Cole said. “He'll never leave those kids.”

I nodded. Sam had a life he was devoted to a thousand miles away from me. It was just as I had thought.

 

We arrived back in Chicago on a Monday afternoon, and the first thing I did was call Laney at work. All my selfish hopes that she was missing me, worried about me, pacing her office when she couldn't get hold of me, turned out to be complete fantasy.

“Hey, Kell,” she said in a lazy sort of tone.

“Hey,” I replied, just as noncommittal.

A pause.

“How've you been?” she said, as if nothing had happened between us, as if I was just going to say “fine” and ask her the same thing.

“Great!” I infused my voice with enthusiasm. “Just got back from the Caribbean.”

“What? What were you doing there?” Her voice was excited, and just for a second, it really was like the old days.

“I went for work. With Cole.” I filled her in on some of the more glamorous parts—working with the supermodels, how I'd gotten to take some of the shots—and she made the appropriate oohs and ahhs. I was dying to tell her about Cole's crush on her, and about Sam, too. I wanted to give her every detail and hear her usual analysis, but I held back. There was something mildly withdrawn in her voice that told me we weren't exactly fine.

“So what's going on with you?” I said.

She sighed. “I've been doing a lot of thinking. Can you meet me at Uncle Julio's in half an hour?”

“Of course.” Maybe it would be okay.

Ten minutes later, I hailed a cab to the restaurant, but when I saw Laney sitting at one of the wooden tables there, I knew the stalemate wasn't over. She was ramrod straight on the stool, arms wrapped tightly around the bag on her lap, her lips pressed together. It was the face she made when she was unhappy, when she was really pondering something that troubled her. And the worst part—symbolically at least—was the lack of margaritas on the table. Whoever arrived first always bought the first round.

I walked slowly toward her, wanting to postpone the conversation. In those few seconds as I approached her, I saw a progression of all the Laneys I'd known—the girl on the yearbook staff with the big bangs, the younger sister in the crazy, loud household, the punk-wannabe college girl, the eager advertising babe, and finally this polished woman with the red coat and the stylish hairdo. I was as proud of her as I had been of Dee. It's cliché, of course, to say that your best friend is like a sister, but the conclusion was true. She was family to me, and yet now I wondered if I was about to lose her.

I slid onto the stool opposite her. The place wasn't crowded yet, and so we had the long table to ourselves.

“You look tan,” she said.

“Really? I tried to wear a hat.”

She smiled a small, almost wistful grin. “With your complexion you've got to wear at least 30 SPF.”

“I know.” She was always telling me that when we went on vacation together.

She blew out a puff of air. “So here's the thing.”

Oh, God. We were getting right to it, whatever it was.

“I've been doing a lot of thinking,” she said.

“Wait. Before you get there, can I just say I'm sorry for not telling you about Ben? I'm really, really sorry.”

“Kell, it's okay. Just let me get this out, all right?”

I nodded.

“I've been a bad friend.”

“What?”
I
was the bad friend here.
I
was the one who'd relied on her too much, who'd conveniently forgotten to tell her that I was seeing my ex again.

“It's true.” She put her bag on the table and crossed her arms. “I've been getting upset at you lately. Annoyed, I guess you could say, and it wasn't really about Ben. It was more to do with your job with Cole, how you were turning your life around.”

I opened my mouth to protest, to tell her that I hadn't turned anything around, but rather that I'd just pissed away a chunk of the year.

Laney kept talking, though. “As upsetting as it was this summer to see you so down, I got used to it. I guess what I got used to was taking care of you.”

She shot me a look. I shook my head. What was she talking about?

“C'mon, you know how it is at my house. I'm always Laney the crazy one, Laney the fuck-up. And the guys I date, they don't rely on me for anything except to look good. And
yet this summer when you were depressed, I was Laney the savior. In a messed-up way, I think I actually liked that you were so out of it.”

“No, that's not true,” I protested. “And however you felt, it doesn't matter. You helped me when no one else did, and I'll always be grateful for that.”

A waitress came by. “Can I get you ladies a swirl?” she said, her voice chipper. “It's margarita and sangria mixed together.”

“No, thank you,” Laney and I said in unison. The waitress dropped the cheerful face and walked away.

Laney leaned closer to me over the table. “I didn't know it at the time, but I liked being the caretaker. I didn't try very hard to get you to see a doctor. I didn't call your mom, or even tell Ben how bad it had gotten. I didn't do anything because I wanted to be the one who was looking after you. It's sick, but when you came out of it, I started feeling strange. I think I wanted you to go back to being depressed. And that's why I got so clingy, why I kept talking to you about doctors and memory loss research. And that's why, when I realized that you were turning to Ben again and not me, I just sort of lost it.”