Back To You (33 page)

“NOOOOOOOOOOO, Jack!  Jack!  I can’t do this!”  Alexis was screaming, losing her grip on reality.
  A loud crash and what sounded like broken glass hitting the floor startled Suzy.

Suzy looked into Jack’s eyes.  “Let me talk to her, Jack.”  Then Suzy said to Alexis, “Alex, open the door and let me in.”

*****

  I had no idea what I was going into when she opened the door.  I don’t think I could have imagined what happened even if I tried.  Alexis was backed into a corner, holding a piece of glass from the mirror she had shattered.

“Alex.  Hey I know I don’t know you all that well, but I’m worried about you.”  I took a tentative step forward.  “Jack is freaking out right now.  What’s wrong?”

“I can’t do this.  I can’t let him go.  I can’t let him be with you.  He loves me, I know he does.  He said he would be there for me.  He said he would take care of me and our baby.  He PRO
MISED.”  Her eyes were wild.

I stopped moving.  Baby?  “Alexis, what are you talking about?  What baby?”

“Our baby you stupid BITCH!”  She held the glass shard out, pointing it at me.  She held it so tight I could see blood beginning to seep around the glass.  “He loves ME, not you.  ME!  He has been with me all along.  All the time you have been ignoring him.  You left him with a broken heart, but I was there for him.  ME!  He loves me.  He wants me.  He wants this baby, he said so...”  She continued to ramble on in a rage.  “He can’t marry you!  CAN’T!”  She put something in her mouth and swallowed.  “See, I won’t let him.  He’s mine, not yours.  You can’t have him!”  She started to sink, slowly sliding down the graffiti covered wall of the bathroom.  She turned the piece of mirror and began slicing her wrists.  “Mine!”  And with a final thrust, shoved the glass into her stomach.

I screamed.  At least I think I did.  The rest of the night was a blur.  The ambulance rushing Alexis to the hospital, the co
mmotion of the bar guests and the bartenders trying to calm everyone down.  Jack was in and out of my memory.  I remember him asking me what happened.  For the third time in forty eight hours, I couldn’t speak.  There just weren’t any words that could give clarity to the chaos in my soul.

“Baby.  Marry.  Swallowed something.  Cut herself.  Stabbed herself.”  I was sobbing.  He left my side.  He said he had to go to her.  The room went black around me.  My world collapsed around my feet as I hit the floor.

C
hapter 28 

The next day was a complete fuzzy blur.  Andrea drove my car down to pick me up so I could get back to Georgia.  I couldn’t reach Jack.  He was at the hospital with Alexis.  She survived, but she was in serious condition.  She would have scars and permanent damage.  Me too.  They had her on a suicide watch.  It was just too much for me to take.

Carrie
made sure I didn’t mope too long when I got back to Georgia.  She helped me pack my things.  I needed a fresh start.  She was working as a drama teacher at a school close to her parents.  She had an extra bedroom with my name on it.

I hadn’t heard from Jack.  Actually, he called and left a message be
gging me to call him back.  And he called again, but when I saw his number on caller ID, I just let it ring.  I wasn’t ready.  He had Alexis to worry about.  And their baby.  I disconnected my phone.

The next weekend, Carrie was tired of my moping.

“Get dressed.”

“What?”  I looked up from my pillow.

“Get dressed.  We’re going out.”

“I don’t want to…”

“Shut up and get dressed.”  She was a woman of few words, but what she said she meant.

I wasn’t too sure that going dancing would help much, but I decided to go anyway.  Anything to keep myself from wai
ting by the phone to see if he called, and not answering it because I had no idea what to say or how to feel.

That was when I met Allen.

Allen.  He was vibrant and full of charm.  We danced the night away.  He came home with me that night and made love to me.  It was an emotional overload.  I wasn’t sure if I expected him to make love to me, if I even wanted it, or if I wanted it just so I could wipe away the memory of Jack making me feel so wonderful with those stunning roses and his beautiful words.  I went through the motions.  Allen was a good kisser and got me into it for a bit.  But by the time it was over, I was just pretending to enjoy it.

Over the next couple of weeks, he wined me and dined me.  He asked me to marry him in a whirlwind of romance.  He also told me that he had been rendered sterile and couldn’t have kids because of a vaccine he had in the military.  I figured that was just fine, knowing that kids were not likely to be in my future.  Considering I had lost one, most likely two.  I stopped ta
king the pill.  Allen started throwing up.

It was
a few days later that I suspected I might be pregnant.  I almost fainted while getting my hair ready.  We stopped and got a test on the way to dinner.  I was dying to know, so I went to the ladies room in the restaurant.  It was positive.  I was shocked.  Scared.  Excited.  And confused.  After a visit to the doctor, it was official.  I was going to have a baby.  The only thing I could think to pray for was that this little one survived.  That my body wouldn’t react like it had before.  I was even ready to give up my dreams of the high life for this little tiny alien looking speck of dust growing inside of me. 

Everything
was going well.  I had made it past six weeks.  Then Allen got arrested.  Twice.  I found out that he was a liar.  Not just any liar, a full-blown, believe everything that comes from his own mouth, pathological liar.  I broke it off.  He begged his way back in.  Then he was arrested a third time.  There was no way I could handle it.  I called my uncle, packed my bags and headed out to California.

*****

“Bed rest until you are far enough along to have her safely.”

I was disappointed, sad, frustrated, and extremely pr
otective.  I had five weeks left until my baby girl was supposed to arrive.  The contractions started and grew steadier.  I called my doctor and went in immediately.

“So they aren’t Braxton Hicks like the book said?”

“No.  If you have her now, her lungs might not be strong enough yet.  You have to take it easy.”

“I was taking it easy.”  I almost whined.

“Working around the house is not taking it easy.  By bed rest I mean that you are not to get up out of bed except to go to the bathroom.  You sit and lay down.  I don’t even want you to go into the living room more than once a day.  That is bed rest, Suzy.”

I loved my doctor.  He was funny and sarcastic and just e
xactly what I needed in a doctor.  He told me a couple months back that I probably would not be able to have natural childbirth.  I wanted to try at least, so he agreed we would try.  Lamaze classes, birth plans, breastfeeding classes.  I was doing it all.  I just wanted to experience everything I could.  I wasn’t expecting bed rest since I had come so far with such ease.

“Now have your
uncle take you home and don’t go anywhere for the next couple of weeks.”

I spent the next two and a half weeks reading.  I went out to watch TV occasionally, but mostly I just plowed through my pile of books.  My friends told me I should read them
before she was born because after she was born, I wouldn’t get that luxury much.

I hadn’t written a thing in over a year.  I just didn’t have an
ything to say.  I had accepted my lot. 

“Okay Suzy.  You can stop taking the medicine and let the contractions happen.  I suspect it won’t take long.”

“I hope not!  There aren’t any more books in the series I am reading.”  I laughed.  “So how do we move this along?”

“A little ready for your daughter are you?”  He laughed.  “Well, if Mother Nature isn’t moving fast enough, you can eat a big bowl of spaghetti and walk.  That usually helps.”

“Spaghetti?”

“Old wives tale.  Tomato sauce brings on contractions.  Lots of women swear by it.  Hey, it’s worth a shot.”

“When do I see you again?”

“Next Wednesday, if not before.”

“I hope I can find some good Italian food around here.”  I waddled out the door.  This baby was huge.

As for walking I knew exactly where I wanted to go.  The
beach.  I needed some time to think.  I had no idea who the father of my child actually was.

It was midnight and I finally was ready to head to the hospital.  The contractions were steady but not extremely pai
nful.  We did everything we could to let me go drug free, but eventually I had to break down and get the epidural.  It was a waiting game for another few hours, but my body refused to dilate.  The baby went into distress and they rushed me into the operating room.

They had to do an emergency cesarean section on me just to get Rose out safely.  Even then, she wasn’t crying like they wanted.  I just wanted to hold my baby girl.  I tried to get
off of the operating table while I was still opened up and numb.  My doctor nodded to the nurse, who promptly stuck a needle into my IV.  I passed out as they rushed my baby out of the room.

C
hapter 29

I had never seen anything so beautiful in my entire life.  One look at Rose’s green eyes told me all I needed to know.  Jack had given me the most precious gift I could have imagined.  I would just stare at her and get lost in those green gold eyes.  Rose took my heart immediately as her own.  She was my life.  My everything. 

I tried to f
ind Jack, but he had moved away.  My friends said he was looking to find himself and a career he would be happy with.  Life moved on.

*****

He packed his guitar and a few bags and headed to New Orleans.  With the exception of Alexis, the rest of the band followed.  He managed to get a few gigs here and there and worked odd jobs to survive.  New Orleans was an awesome distraction from everything that had happened over the last year.  The City that Never Sleeps is what they called it.  And they were right.  You could be busy every minute of every day there.  And the lake wasn’t far away either.  He found a new spot by the water to do his thinking.  He drank when he wasn’t working.  He tried to write songs when he had free time.  Every once in a while he found himself strumming the song he had written for Suzy.  He didn’t even get to play it for her.  He tried to replace the memory of the scene at the bar with the memory of the night before it.  Anything he could hold onto.  Because memories were all he had of her anymore.

It
was possible to lose yourself completely in a city like New Orleans.  It was loud, busy, and full of life.  Having a social life was easy.  If you wanted one.  Jack just wanted to disappear.  He dated.  He found women who wanted nothing but a quick fuck, no strings.  No emotions.  He had enough of his own.  He definitely didn’t want to complicate his life any more than it already was.

It was a dark time of his life.  After a couple of years li
ving like that, he stumbled into a famous restaurant in the French Quarter.  He was drunk after playing a gig and needed to eat.  It smelled so good in there.  His server took good care of him.  After he was finished eating, she was ready to get off work.  She brought over some café au lait, and he asked her to sit with him.  They talked for hours.  He told her everything.  Suzy.  Alexis.  Losing it all in one moment.  Feeling lost and without purpose.  How meaningless his life felt.  Carole listened intently, holding his hand while he talked.

Jack and Carole were together for five years.  She was a comfort to him when he had needed it most, but she wasn’t the love of his life.  In fact, the only thing he knew how to love a
nymore was his music.  And food.  Carole was the niece of the restaurant owner and introduced Jack to the pleasure of creating delicious food.  He figured that as long as humans had to eat, people should enjoy every second of it.  Jack loved working in the kitchen, creating new flavor combinations.  He worked part time with Carole’s uncle, learned enough to know that he belonged in the kitchen just as much as he belonged on stage.  He enrolled in a culinary school there in New Orleans, the best place to eat in the world.  Chopping, shredding, grating, stirring, folding, mixing.  It was his own therapy.  And he was good at it.

*****

Rose and I stayed with my uncle for a couple of years. I started a temp job at a pump company not far from the house.  It was far from exciting, but it was a paycheck.  Small paycheck, but anything was better than nothing, right?

My time as a temporary worker was almost up when I met the man who was purchasing the company.  Ted wanted to change the company from small business to multi-million dollar business.  He had big plans, a big wallet and the Midas touch when it came to business.  I was taking a break in the tiny break room when he came in and grabbed some coffee.  I offered him some of the cake I had brought in for an employee’s birthday.  He sat and talked to me for a while and before I knew it, I was hired as a permanent employee with a decent raise and a newly created position.  I was officially the human resources manager and benefits organizer/project manager.  I guess my charm and education finally earned me a better job.  Ted even paid for me to get all of my certifications.

Ted had a crush on me.  It was pretty obvious, at least to me.  I didn’t want to date my boss, but he was a very intriguing man.  He was twenty years my senior, had class, but came from a small, poor town.  He was a self made man.  Ted gave me exactly what I needed to figure out who I was, even though I didn’t know it at the time.  He was the smartest man I had ever met, and he knew me better than I knew myself.  Not like Jack knew me, but he knew what my potential was.  What my goals needed to be instead of what I was resigning my life to.

Unfortunately I was having a tough time fitting in with some of the other female employees.  It wasn’t that I wasn’t friendly, b
ecause I was.  It took me a while to realize that they were intimidated by me.  I couldn’t figure out why, but Ted explained it very well one night.  He said that I was smarter and prettier than they were.  It didn’t matter how nice I was because that just made it worse.  I was highly educated, raised with manners and believed in good morals and fairness.  Basically he said that I would never get along with other women in any job I had because they would always be jealous of something.  I swore I wasn’t trying to intimidate anyone.  I just wanted friends at work.  He said it didn’t matter.  The fact that I wasn’t even trying to be intimidating made matters worse.  The only way I would be successful was if I was my own boss.  I wanted to know what in the hell I was supposed to do about it.  It wasn’t like I could quit working and write novels for a living.  Not when I was a single mother barely making enough to survive.  I was on food stamps just a few months before!  That didn’t seem very intimidating to me.  I had no choice.  I had to work a job with guaranteed benefits so I could raise my child.  My dreams went to the back burner.  Rose was much more important.

The first opportunity I had to move
out on my own, I did.  My relationship with Ted was unusual.  He was still married to a woman who was completely disabled after having a massive stroke and lived in another state.  He never saw her, but he continued to support her.  That was the promise he made when he married her.  I respected him for that.  He also gave me the freedom to build my life anew. 

I prayed that I might get my foot into the door of a publis
hing company.  Anything to use my writing skills was better than nothing.  Because he traveled all of the time, Ted and I continued our strange relationship and still saw and talked to each other often.  I was happy, even though I was working as a human resources manager instead of a high executive of a publishing company, or even being published myself.

Ted had given me the chance to heal some of my wounds.  I was able to fight my w
ay back into a little self confidence, wanting personal success.  Ted helped pay my bills.  I kept working so I wouldn't feel guilty for taking anything from him.  Made me feel like a "kept" woman.  I knew that although his "wife" didn’t even know who he was, I could never marry Ted.  But, honestly, it was an ideal situation for me.  I wasn't forced to pretend to love someone passionately when that part of me had died in so many ways.  I did love Ted.  He was good to me.  I had independence and complete control over my life.  I struggled working in corporate businesses.  It wasn't my dream.  I tried to make the best of it.  But Ted was right.  I still felt like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole.  I quit writing because I had nothing to write about.  My life became the daily grind of getting up, taking Rose to school, going to work, picking Rose up, making dinner, helping with homework, bath and a little cuddle time before bedtime. 

Mom had reunited with someone she knew from her high school days
and decided to move back to California.  They were committed to living out their days together.  They took Rose on Friday nights so I could have some time on my own.  I had gotten a promotion at my job and scrounged together enough credit to buy a small house.  It was adorable and needed serious TLC, but it was mine.  Well, mine and the bank’s.  Most of the free time I had, I used to fix up the house.  Ted was in and out of town.  He actually helped a lot with the renovations.  My life was comfortable and quiet.  And that was perfectly fine with me.  Occasionally I missed nights of passion and wished somehow life would have turned out differently.  Most of the time I just didn’t let myself think about it.

I went on like this for a few years. Unfortunately the econ
omy went to shit.  I had a “not so great” rapport with one of the ladies at my workplace, and she found a way to get me fired.  Well, the term was “let go due to cutbacks”, but we all knew she hated the fact that I was smarter than she was. 

Since I had moved back to California, Leah and I r
enewed our friendship.  She asked me to go to some cake decorating classes with her to distract me from job hunting and relying on my millionaire boyfriend. 

I hated relying on anyone other than myself to provide a home for Rose.  He was a perfect gentleman about it.  Never said a word e
xcept he was the luckiest man in the world to have me in his life.  He couldn’t marry me, so that was the next best thing.  Besides, he had no children and treated Rose as one of his own when he was in town. He spoiled us, but I still wouldn't let him buy me a house and completely support me in the lap of luxury.  That wasn't why I was with him.

The cake decorating classes were just the beginning.  I was a natural.  I had always loved cooking.  I was thankful for the resta
urant job Mom had when I was young and attributed a lot of my talent to that.  I started getting orders for my cakes.  Then I started working entire parties, making all of the food.  I started with jobs here and there.  Wedding receptions, family reunions, surprise birthdays.  I experimented with age old recipes, tweaking them just enough to make them extraordinary.  I stuck to keeping it real, using good ingredients, which made all of the difference in the world.  I had access to the kitchen of the church I occasionally attended when I had a larger scale gig.  I was finally beginning to crawl out of my self-imposed prison one creative catering job at a time.  I wasn't making quite enough to completely support Rose and myself yet, but I was sure it wouldn’t be long.

In the meantime, Ted's health began to decline.  I knew he had a hereditary heart disorder.  One night we were together, just after making love, holding each other and talking about the future, when he grunted in discomfort.

"You okay?"  I asked, sitting up and looking at him with concern. I had that instinctual cold pit in my stomach.

"Fine.  Probably just a little heartburn after that delicious meal you cooked tonight."  He shifted. 

I could tell he was uncomfortable, but true to form, he wasn’t going to admit it.  Stubborn man.  Stubborn stubborn man. 

He was still not feeling well when he left for the airport the next morning.  He was chewing Tums constantly.  "I hope this isn't some kind of virus."  He remarked.  "Better not kiss you on the lips just in case.  Don't want you and Rose to catch som
ething."  He pecked my cheek and got in the car.

At exactly 3:33 that afternoon, the phone rang.  Rose had just gotten home from school and beat me to the phone.

"Um.  Yeah.  Sure.  MOOOOOOOMMMM!"  She yelled for me.  I came out of the kitchen wiping my hands on a towel.

"Hello?"  I put the phone to my ear.

"Suzy?  This is Teresa.  Ted's assistant."

"Yes."  I could feel my stomach drop.  "Is everything ok?"

"Um, no.  Not really.  Ted had a massive heart attack on the plane this morning.  They did everything they could before they could land in Chicago.  He was taken directly to the hospital."

"Oh no!"  I almost dropped the phone.  My hands were sha
king.  "Is he...Is, is he?"

"He is in an induced coma and had major surgery.  Right now he is in ICU.  It is touch and go for now."

"Can I...Should I...Be there?"  I stammered.

"Probably not right now.  Don't make any plans yet.  I gave the nurses your phone number so they can keep you posted.  And I will give you all of the information so you can contact the hospital.
  In the meantime, I will check on flights for you."

"Does that mean they think he will be okay?"

"They have no idea.  The truth is that you might not get there in time.  Maybe you should call the hospital.  You are listed as next of kin in all of his paperwork.  If anything happens, his attorney will be in touch as well.  If he wakes up, he might need some long term care."

"I can clear my schedule so I can care for him."

"That would mean a lot to him.  Now do you have something to write on?  The information is..."

As soon as I hung up with Teresa, I called the hospital.  Ted had been very clear about the care he wanted to receive if anything happened to him.  He did not want to be kept alive by machines if there was little or no chance of him recovering.  At that point, he was hooked mostly to monitors, but he was kee
ping himself alive.  They were keeping him in a coma so he was not agitated before the work they had to do had some time to heal.  If he came out of it, he could live a normal life, with dramatic changes to his lifestyle.  Less travel, healthier food, et cetera.  He would be on medication for a long time.  But that was a big IF.  Time would tell.