Binding Arbitration (53 page)

“Maybe Aidan’s confused how he feels about me with how he feels about Cass.”

“And maybe it’s just as simple as he always loved you, but he was scared. He isn’t scared anymore.” She cuffed my chin. “What about you?”

“I don’t know.”

“When we love, we love with our whole hearts, and when we grieve, we grieve with them just as vigilantly. We’ve all lost children—you, me, Kat…even Jeanne feels that loss. Your mother not only lost her grandchild, but she feels she’s lost you, too.”

I started to cry. “It’s hard to imagine anyone else in pain, when you’re hurting so bad yourself.”

“Fresh grief, like any new emotion, is overwhelming, but it’s the only one that fades away with time.” She picked up another box and started filling it.

Chills ran up my spine and my eyes met hers. “Who was the father of your baby?”

Her face was devoid of all emotion.

“You don’t have to tell me, if it’s too personal.”

She thought for a moment. “Richard Doyle.”

The goose bumps went from my arms to the base of my skull, and then crept up the back of my head. “Senator Dick Doyle, who I helped put behind bars?”

“He ended up where he belongs.” She went to the closet as I taped the box…and my mouth—shut.

“What’s this?” Suzy asked.

I looked up and saw Aidan’s black Armani sport coat, the one he was wearing the day I met Evita. It was the first time I’d spared my new friend a thought, and I chastised myself for my selfishness. Our first meeting seemed like a lifetime ago now. “It’s Aidan’s.”

“You should return it to him.” She extended it toward me. Something fell out of the pocket, and Suzy bent to retrieve it. It was a packet of envelopes tied with a red ribbon.

As I took the envelopes and the blazer, I remembered he’d wrapped Cass in it when he had gotten sick at the retirement home. It must’ve been hanging in the closet since that day. I looked down at the bundle tied in ribbon. My name was scrawled over each of them in Aidan’s script. I’d know his handwriting anywhere. The red trimming that held them together seemed brittle, when I slid it free from the envelopes.

Suzy’s voice traveled on a whispered breeze. “There’s an old saying, ‘The word that is heard perishes, but the letter that is written remains’.”

October

Dear Libby,

I’m on the road again and missing you. You weren’t in the library last night, and I didn’t get to kiss you goodbye. I wonder sometimes why I miss you and wish you were with me, when I haven’t seen you in a few days. I wonder why, when you’re quiet, I become desperate to know what you’re thinking. When you smile, I hope I’m part of the reason. If you’re sad, I hope I can find a way to make it better. When I don’t expect to see you, and then I catch a glimpse of you, I wonder why I can’t breathe.

Last week, one night after I walked you to the doors, I sprinted up to the third floor and watched as you walked away from the building, your long hair trailing behind you. I stared after you until you disappeared, and I stood in that spot, hoping that if I remained still, my longing would change your course and you would come back to me. Even if you just sit alongside me, it’s enough.

I want you in a way that is so foreign. Physically, to be sure, but the ache I feel when I go without you a few days is in my chest. It makes it hard for me to breathe. I want to feel the rhythm of your heart beating in time with mine. I want to take you into the stacks and kiss you until you can’t whisper ‘stop’, until you can’t move because your knees go weak with trembling, and you can’t speak because you start to giggle.

I want more, I feel more, I need more, but if you’re sitting in the same room, I can live off the hope that someday you’ll be mine.
—Aidan

November

Dear Libby,

We’re on the road somewhere between Milwaukee and home. The night is so dark that I can barely see the stripes on the pavement. I try to study, but my thoughts stray back to you as I’m hypnotized by the yellow lines as if they are the yellow brick road drawing me back to you.

It snowed during the last three innings of the game, coming down so hard at one point we had a fifteen minute snow delay. In the dugout, I stared into the distance and I imagined you standing there. Your hair falling over your shoulders, your eyelashes covered with giant snowflakes. The green of your eyes beckoned me, but when I reached out, you slipped away into the swirling snow.

I wonder if you’re curled up in bed already. I wonder at my desire to crawl in alongside you and wrap you in my arms. I lay awake wondering what sounds you’d make, if you would let me touch you the way I was meant to. I wonder what it would feel like if you let me become part of your body, in those moments when I can’t garner air for the thought of my wanting our joining. I want to feel your body wrapped around mine so that it awakens me deep in the night. I know you don’t want me to feel that way about you, but I do, and the more I try to squelch it, the more desperate it becomes in my dreams. I dream of it now, even when I am fully awake. It’s much more than lust, but I don’t know how to speak the words of tender yearnings. How often I think of forgetting everything for the sake of lying in your arms, breathing in your scent, tasting your sweet, silky skin, or staring into those emerald eyes until you shudder.

I’ve tried to forget you and because of my efforts, you’ve become more vivid. You storm my sleeping mind. I’ve tried to replace you. I’ve tried not to want you. I’ve tried not to love you, only to find myself hopeless and helpless. I will pursue you until you can no longer deny what we see when we look at each other, as if not another soul exists. In this world, you are the only thing that did not come easily, the thing I don’t think I can live without. You’re irreplaceable. If I could show you my feelings as plainly as the words on these pages, the world would be simple, and you would be mine.
—Aidan

February

Dear Libby,

I’m scared. For the first time in my life, I’m terrified. I’m sure you are, too. I’m angry, and I want someone to blame, but I know where the blame lies, even though I lashed out at you. I know you didn’t do it on purpose, but I feel trapped, like I have to choose between you and what I worked so hard for all these years. How do you choose between what you’re supposed to be, and what you should do?

What I should do is take care of you and beg for you to forgive me. I should take you home and marry you, not because you’re going to have my baby but because I can’t live without you. I can’t imagine a world where you’re not in it.

But you won’t talk to me.

Yesterday you blamed me, and you were right. This was my fault, I should have done something to prevent this from happening, but I wasn’t thinking of consequences. It was the only time I hadn’t thought through exactly what could happen. But that’s what you are to me, you’re the freedom to stray from the plan, to act impulsively because when I’m with you nothing else seems to matter, and that scares me.

I’ve wanted you, I’ve had you, and now I don’t know how I can go without you. You won’t talk to me, and you won’t let me touch you. You’re suffering, and you won’t let me help. Scarier still, you won’t look at me.

You must hate me for ruining your life. I can’t bear to think it, but I must disgust you. Please, Libby, look at me, and see my love for you. See me. Release me from my suffering with just a single kind word.

And I beg of you find it in your heart to love me.
—Aidan

March

Dear Libby,

Yesterday you didn’t show up like you promised. You won’t talk to me, and I can’t imagine what you’re thinking. I thought you didn’t want the baby, and that’s why you agreed to go with me to Indy. To end this misery between us.

I’ve looked everywhere for you. Your apartment is empty. Vicki showed me your vacant room, but she knows more than she’s telling. She knows where you are, and I’m pissed. I went to the diner and begged Mr. Rodgers for your home address. He told me if you wanted me to know, you would have told me yourself. Isn’t that true? Finally, he escorted me out the front door and told me if I came back he’d call the law on me.

Why are you punishing me like this? Tell me what you really want so I can give it to you. I would give you anything, or do anything, to make you happy. But now I can’t even tell you that.

All I can do is write letters that can never be sent. I should have mailed all the others, long ago; I could have slid them under your door, or slipped them in your book bag. Now all I want is an address. I want to spill my guts and I don’t care if you laugh in my face, I want you to know what I feel is real and frightening, and I want you to go on the journey with me.

I want to tell you more than anything else. I’m done trying to fight what’s already a lost battle.
—Aidan

Graduation Day

Dear Elizabeth,

I graduated today…
and so did you. I didn’t know you were going to graduate, but that’s because you never told me. Looking back, you never told anything, you were one big mystery and maybe that was part of your allure. Maybe I wanted you so bad because I was never going to really know what was going on in your head, so I’d have to settle for your body.

But we both know it wasn’t because I wasn’t willing to listen, it was because you couldn’t bear to reveal yourself. You hide behind whispered words and secrets.

I think now that you wanted to make me suffer and pine for you. All these months, you’ve been hiding somewhere nearby, away from me, but right under my nose to prove once again you’re smarter than me. All my suffering has been in vain because you were near at hand and could have staunched it. All my recriminations could have ceased, if you would have called or came to see me, face-to-face. You wanted me to suffer and hurt.

But I have never suffered more than I did today, when I watched in shock as you walked across the stage with our baby beneath your body. Your body carries part of me. A body I know as well as my own, a body so vivid in my mind that I could almost feel you breathing as you walked across the stage with your air of intellectual superiority. You are by far the smartest girl I’ve ever known, but you are also the cruelest. You walked down the aisle, and I watched your measured advance. You refused to look my way, and I know you knew where I was. I could feel your stoic determination not to crumble where I, or anyone else, could witness it. I saw it all, all your pain, and all of mine washed through me. What I wanted more than anything in that moment of insanity was to take you. I didn’t want to be tender, I wanted to unfurl all my anger, and lust at you. And perhaps if I could keep from killing you, I would be able to be tender and love you the way you needed to be loved.

But I wouldn’t touch you, when you hadn’t spared me a stray thought in all these months. Could I speak a single word to you without putting my hands on you? No, so I stalked away. I wouldn’t meet your gaze, though I could feel you begging me to do so from across the expanse of a parking lot. I didn’t want to see you then, to know I couldn’t have the one thing I had wanted more than my own happiness.

I didn’t taste my expensive food at lunch. I didn’t hear my father’s speech about success. I didn’t feel my mother’s pleasure at my achievement.

I’d been bottle fed on pride since the moment of my birth. I’ve never had to swallow it in my life, and I didn’t feel inclined to do so at the hour of your choosing. So I walked away.

I saw you after lunch on the square in the center of town tossing pennies into the fountain. It hurt me to watch how beautiful you were when you placed your hands on your stomach in reassurance.

Sooner or later, you’re going to have to need me, and until you really need me for more than a conversation, we’ll never be together. I want you to need me. I hope your suffering and fear will finally make you humbly accept my love. Perhaps, if there is any glimmer of hope, you can admit to yourself that you love me, too.
—Aidan

37

FINAL APPEAL

Do the right thing at the right time for the right reasons.
Leonard Chitunhu

Libby

I looked up from the case file I was working on when Vicki strolled into the office at eight-thirty. She set Betty Poop on my desktop before she threw the
Tribune
over the brief I was reading. I raised an eyebrow.

“Page thirteen.”

I ignored the paper and blew kisses at Betty, who gurgled in response. Her baby sounds made two babies do cartwheels in my abdomen, as if they were eager to have her as a playmate.

It was the end of May, I was four months pregnant, the Legal Aid office was thriving, and the Cub’s home opener had come and gone without the closing pitcher paying me a visit. He was trying to make me suffer, by refusing my phone calls and ignoring my notes. Either way, I wished he’d show up, so we could get the confrontation over with.

Fletch hand-delivered each signed payroll check for Vicki and me. I hadn’t caught a glimpse of Aidan, but I had a feeling he was laying in wait. “What’s on page thirteen?” I asked.

“An article about your husband and a Hollywood starlet.”