Desperate (8 page)

I
still hadn’t cracked a smile, and we were well into our second beer. That wasn’t like me at all. The look on Brad’s face said he knew it, too.

We were sitting across from each other in a booth at Not Your Average Joe’s, a casual restaurant nestled within a strip of businesses in downtown Arlington. Brad had been talking about his girls, and Janice, and flower gardens, and his plumbing business, and I had done a lot of head nodding and listening.

“You know,” Brad said, taking a meaty bite of his
roast beast
(his name for it, not mine) sandwich, “when your friend invites you out to lunch, usually it involves some form of back-and-forth conversation. You know, I say something and then you respond to what I say, and maybe I build on that topic or it leads to a new topic.”

“I’m sorry, buddy,” I said. “My mind isn’t really on small talk.”

“What’s going on?”

Brad’s eyebrows arched, encouraging me to answer.

“It’s Lily,” I said.

Brad shifted effortlessly from buddy mode to confidant.

“And?”

I told him about the present that Lily had bought me from a yard sale, and the picture on the
Wicked Local
website, the fight I had with Anna, the fight I had with Lily, the reconciliation in front of Mrs. Trumbull’s house, and Bessie’s odd accusation.

I know you!

Those words had haunted my thoughts from the moment they left Bessie’s trembling lips.

I know you!

“Could Bessie know her?” Brad asked.

“Bessie doesn’t even know herself,” I said. “Honestly, it was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.”

We stopped chatting when the waitress came over to see how we were doing. I didn’t want anything, but Brad ordered a side of fries.

“How do you eat like you do and not get huge?” I asked, envious because a single fry had the power to tip the scales, and not in my favor.

“Good genes,” Brad said with a shrug. “Have you started playing handball again? If you did, you could have all the fries you wanted.”

I shook my head.

A year after the accident, shortly after I moved to Arlington, I went on a long walk to clear my head and ended up in a tough neighborhood in Cambridge. Instead of getting into trouble, I got invited to join a handball game. I didn’t even know what handball was. We played against a graffiti-painted wall that was part of a run-down housing complex. The game was fast paced, physical, and highly aerobic. I was hooked from point one and became a regular with that crew, attending weekly pickup games, but stopped when one of the young kids I played against was killed during a gang-related altercation. After that, every game I played was a reminder of lives taken too soon, including my son’s.

“I keep thinking about starting up again,” I said to Brad. “But like Anna and her painting, it just isn’t in me yet.”

Brad took another bite of his sandwich. “I’ll join you if you need someone there for added encouragement.”

“Much appreciated, amigo. I might just take you up on that. So what do you think about the thing with Bessie?”

“Maybe it’s nothing,” Brad said.

“I would agree, but there’s been a whole lot of nothings making me feel like it’s got to be something.”

“Have you talked to Anna about it?” Brad asked.

Now I shrugged and flicked a soggy tomato over with my fork. “She’s in love with the baby,” I said. “Any doubts about Lily sound to Anna like I’m having doubts about the adoption. I get it, honestly I do. Our situation is unbelievably fortunate. Lily is a beautiful girl. She’s healthy, no drugs, no drinking, no birth father in jail. There aren’t any siblings to adopt, no arcane rules from some foreign country to follow, and from what Lily says there’s no family history of mental illness. There are so many more challenging situations we could end up in. Adoption is a wonderful way to create a family, but there are a lot of pitfalls, too. Anna feels like we’re very blessed to have Lily come into our lives the way she did, and she’s not wrong.”

“Only you don’t think it’s a blessing,” Brad said, his eyes narrowing.

“You have a way of getting to the point,” I said.

“My line of work is all about clearing the shit away, bullshit included.”

“If I tell Anna we shouldn’t go ahead with the adoption, it will devastate her. She’s fragile as it is from the loss of her son and then the miscarriage. I can’t add to her misery.”

“What does Anna think about her mother’s reaction?”

“I guess when you want something badly enough, it’s easy to justify things or explain them away.”

“I presume that’s what Anna’s done in regards to Bessie.”

“With everything I’m telling you,” I said.

Brad mulled this over. “You’ve got to know more about Lily,” he concluded. “You guys are in too deep to just let this go. I’ve learned to trust my gut instinct. It’s a powerful tool.”

“What do you suggest?”

“Maybe I should meet her,” he offered. “I could get a read.”

“What? Like read her energy?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

I sat quiet, ruminating on Brad’s offer while sipping my beer.

“Can you really get something from that?” I asked.

“Only if I try.”

“Since you brought it up, I’ve been wanting to ask something for a while now.”

“Go ahead,” Brad said.

“How did you know you had the gift?”

“Like the first time?”

“Yeah.”

The French fries showed up before Brad could answer—a big, heaping plate of golden badness fried to a perfect crisp. Tempted as I was, I resisted the urge. Anna always marveled at my willpower, and I liked giving her things to marvel at.

“I was a kid,” Brad said, blowing on a fry before inhaling it. “I was probably ten or eleven, not much older. Anyway, one day I was just hanging out in my room and I slipped into another state of consciousness. I can’t explain it any other way.” Brad moved his hand upward in a sweeping gesture, pantomiming his metaphysical shift. “It was something between the state of awake and dreaming. It was like being trapped inside my own body. I couldn’t move or scream. These episodes were extremely frightening and went on for years. It wasn’t until I was much older that I came to realize it was a form of self-hypnosis that allowed me to travel to other realms of existence. I saw people, people I knew from my street and people I knew who weren’t part of this world anymore. I found out I could go into this place, really at will.” He snapped his fingers—
at will
. “It was peaceful there, beautiful.”

“Couldn’t it just have been your imagination at work?”

“Do I really strike you as the highly creative type?”

“You’re good with flowers.”

“That’s a different kind of creativity.”

“Point taken.”

“All I can tell you is what I experienced. I don’t try to convince people that I have this gift. I don’t charge money for my services. I just help people who are in need of some help.”

“People like me,” I said.

“Exactly. So what I can tell you is this. We all have guides,” Brad said. “Travelers who walk this world with us. They can’t be seen, but they can be felt. Their energy is very distinct, and it surrounds us all. My guide is my grandfather. I’d never met him before. He died before I was born. But I saw him from the moment I made that first shift.”

“Maybe you were just remembering his picture?” I asked.

I believed in Brad’s gift wholeheartedly, but I was a quality assurance guy who by nature went around poking holes into people’s claims. If someone told me something worked, I’d do my darndest to prove him wrong. Couldn’t help myself. It was a reflex.

“I couldn’t have remembered any pictures of my grandfather, because we didn’t have any,” Brad said with a smile. “Actually, we didn’t have many pictures of my family at all.”

I thought about Anna and her comparable dearth of photographic memories. It made me feel sad for them both.

“My aunt had some family photos, but we never saw her much. So I told my mom about this man I’d seen with a mustache—like mine now—a well-scrubbed, long face, dark hair raked back and slathered with pomade, close-set eyes, and a snub nose marked by a jagged scar. She dropped the plate she was drying, and it shattered on the floor.”

“You described your grandfather to her,” I said.

“Right down to the scar he got from a broken bottle in a bar altercation back in thirty-five. If you got rid of the mustache and pomade, my brother is his spitting image,” Brad said. “And my grandfather is my guide.”

“Could Max be my guide? Karen?”

That trusty old lump wormed its way right back into my throat with the mention of their names.

“I’m not sure who’s walking with you,” Brad said. “Maybe we could find out.”

“Maybe it’s somebody famous,” I said. “Like John Lennon or something.”

“Or maybe it’s not.”

“What does a guide do?” I asked.

“They do a lot of things. They provide comfort. They can even answer questions.” Brad’s eyes were dancing.

What I loved about Brad was that he never shied away from talking about his talent. Some people thought he was a crackpot, but in twenty-five years of being in business, Brad had never had to chase a customer down for payment. He read their energy before accepting a job, so he knew which customers to take and which to avoid. Even a persnickety quality assurance engineer like me couldn’t argue with that track record. His competitors didn’t know how he did it. Brad’s answer: “I read people like you read product manuals.”

“So these guides talk to us?” I asked.

“Have you ever gone to bed trying to figure something out and when you woke up the next morning, you suddenly had the answer? That’s your guide working.”

“Where do these answers come from?”

“Do you know the akashic records?”

“No, but if you hum a few bars, I could fake it.”

Brad managed an amused look that somehow didn’t patronize. In his heart he wanted me to keep pulling from my trusty stable of semifunny jokes.

“The concept for these akashic records is as old as human spirituality. In the Bible it’s referenced as the Book of Life.”

“So we’re talking about a spiritual book here?”

Brad made the “close but not quite” face.

“You can think of it as a book,” he said, “but it’s really more like an energy.
Akasha
is a Sanskrit term meaning primary substance. It is the energy that makes up the universe. The book metaphor works because these records contain everything that pertains to you—everything that you are and all you’ll ever be. It’s a detailed accounting of your soul’s journey through this life.”

“So we’re talking God’s library, huh? I’d hate to have to pay one of those overdue fines.”

Brad laughed. My well of jokes rarely ran dry.

“We all have access to these records. It’s that knowing hunch. Your intuition at work, the feeling of déjà vu. You know the answer because you’ve got a gut instinct.”

“You mean the thing that’s making me question Lily.”

“The answer to Lily will be found within those records. We just have to tap into them.”

“Do you think Lily could be evil?”

“There isn’t really good or evil,” Brad said. “There is only positive and negative energy. The terrible things people do to each other come from negative energy. Some people have a little negative energy and some have a lot. What we want to know is how much negative energy Lily gives off. Remember what I said to you about that dark energy? It could be Lily.”

I took a long breath that failed to calm me down. A tingle of anxiety crept up from my toes and filled my throat.

“There’s one very big problem with this plan of ours,” I said.

Brad dipped a fry in a mini-mountain of ketchup. My willpower fast fading, I reached across the table and took a fry for myself.

“Lay it on me, my brother from another mother,” Brad said.

“Don’t take offense, but if something really is wrong with Lily, some hidden agenda, I’m going to need a lot more proof to convince Anna than a psychic plumber picking up her negative vibes.”

Brad looked about as bothered as a cat lounging in a ray of sunshine.

“At least you’ll get to validate your gut instinct,” he said.

“One more issue,” I said, holding up a finger to match that number. “If it turns out Lily has to go, I can’t lose Anna in the process.”

This time, Brad leaned back in his seat and looked uncomfortable.

“Like a guide, I can only point you in a direction,” Brad said. “The pitfalls and undesired consequences of our choices, nobody can control.”

I
had one of those days at work that belonged in the annals of those days at work. So I called Anna and asked her to meet me for a stroll down Newbury Street in Boston. Anna and I loved to walk Newbury Street, especially on a warm, pitch-perfect summer afternoon like this one. We thought it felt like a European enclave tucked inside Boston proper. Many of the shops were unique, with specialty boutiques outnumbering the chain stores by at least a two-to-one margin.

Having come directly from a client meeting, Anna wore her hair in a working-girl bun that I thought looked sexy. She was wearing one of my favorite dresses on her, a blue number that just barely scraped the knees, cinched at the waist by a thin black belt that gave a pleasing shout-out to her fit figure. For all my bad fortune, I was a lucky man to have Anna in my life.

Our first shop stop was Dona Flor, a high-end specialty home goods store. Normally we just browsed, but this time we walked out with a set of nickel-plated roller shower curtain rings. Who didn’t need nickel-plated roller shower curtain rings?

“Do you want to take the T over to the art museum?” Anna asked. “It’s open past nine tonight.”

Anna had bought us a membership back in December, and we’d already earned back the value with the frequency of our visits. I liked the Impressionist collection, Degas especially, whereas Anna favored the American Wing. We both gravitated to the Egyptian exhibit. Anna was deep into studying ancient cultures, believing it helped with her consulting businesses by broadening her perspective on human behavior. It was my heartstrings pulling me to the earthy rooms of mummies, and sarcophagi, and ancient hieroglyphics. Max had loved the museum, but he favored the Egyptian Wing most of all. I ached to leave the museum without picking him up a little something from the gift shop. It was the little things I no longer did that often caused the greatest amount of pain.

“No, I think I’d rather just walk,” I said.

We hit a few more stores. As usual, Anna had something to say about the quality of the retail window displays we passed, but I was quiet and she noticed.

“Is everything all right?” she asked as we were leaving another store without buying anything.

I took her arm.

“Yeah,” I said. I liked how she always checked in on me. We were like two bent arrows learning how to fly straight again. “It’s just Matt Simons,” I added with a grumble.

“Who is that?”

“He’s one of the senior scientists working on the Olympian project,” I explained. He was also a big jerk who could pass for Ichabod Crane’s twin brother, but I left that part out.

“What’s up with him?”

“Now that the project looks like it’s going to be a huge success,” I said, “he’s scrambling to claim a lot of the credit he doesn’t deserve.”

Anna knew all about how Olympian was going to leapfrog the market for lithium ion batteries.

“What’s he doing? Attacking the quality of everyone’s work?” she asked.

I returned a surprised look.

“How’d you know?”

Anna gripped my arm and we kept walking.

“Sweetheart, it’s my business to know. I see it all the time. Office politics is just a fancy term for bullying. Retailers are some of the biggest bullies around. I’ve worked with clients whose egos were so big, they’d rather see the business fail than admit they were wrong. What’s he doing exactly?”

“I think he wants to be the project’s Program Manager,” I said.

As Director of Quality Assurance, reporting to the VP of R&D, the Program Manager was technically on my level, but I had a dotted line reporting into that role. Somebody had to be ultimately accountable for the project delivery.

“Isn’t that Adam’s job?” Anna asked. Adam Wang’s numerous assets and few shortcomings had been the topic of many previous conversations.

“It is, and Simons seems to be gunning for it. This guy sniffs out openings to attack the way DEA dogs go hunting cocaine.”

“So is he after you, too?”

I gave Anna an approving look. “You
are
good at your job.”

“That’s why they pay me the big bucks,” Anna said, pinching my arm.

“Well, I spent the better part of the day defending our test matrixes for the upcoming build. Everyone, and I mean everyone, is on edge. So all Matt managed to accomplish was waste time at a bunch of unnecessary meetings.”

“Why is everyone so testy?” Anna asked.

“We have a very significant demo tomorrow,” I said. “Guess I should have expected some arrow slinging.”

“And what about your test matrixes?” Anna asked.

“Our test plans are fine. They’re excellent, in fact, but just having Matt call me into question tarnishes my reputation.”

“At least you’re in the clear.”

“Yeah, but just because the test plans are fine doesn’t mean the project is going to be a success. A lot is riding on this demo. It really has to work.”

Anna pulled herself closer. “I’m sure you’ll be just fine, and the demo will go great.”

I smiled weakly. “I wish I had your confidence.”

For a time, I forgot all about Lily. I didn’t know where she was or what she was doing. I hadn’t attached a GPS tracker to her ankle. Lily came and went as she pleased, a separate but wholly connected part of our lives.

Neither of us felt in the mood for a big dinner, so we opted instead for cheesecake and coffee at the ever-crowded Trident Booksellers & Cafe. Anna nabbed one of the coveted tables near a window, while I disappeared in search of a book I wanted to buy. When I returned, Anna had our cheesecake, her latte, and my coffee waiting.

“What did you get?” she asked, pointing to the brown bag I now carried.

“A book,” I said.

“Cute, wise guy,” Anna said. “What, pray tell, book did you purchase?”

I took the book out of the bag and flopped it on the table. Anna’s eyes went wide with excitement.

“
The Coolest Baby Names Ever
,” she read, her mouth creasing into a breathtaking smile.

“I figured we should start thinking ahead,” I said.

Anna leaned across the table and gave me a kiss on the mouth that might have turned a head or two.

“Baby, thank you,” Anna said.

“The book didn’t cost
that
much,” I said.

Anna leaned over the table once again, but this time to deliver a playful slug on my arm.

“I don’t care what the book cost,” she said. “I care what it represents.”

“It represents that I’m in this with you, all the way,” I said.

We kissed again, more a peck this time around.

“You know, Lily is still very shaken by what happened with my mom,” Anna said while leafing through the book. “We spoke about it this morning after you left for work.”

“So I’m guessing she’s going to want to delay her visit with my folks for just a bit.”

Anna made a little noise, so she didn’t have to say that was an understatement. Searching for a change of subject, I asked to see the book and flipped to a random page.

“What about Bay?” I suggested.

Anna made a face.

“As a name, or something we should do at the moon?” she asked.

“Cosimo,” I offered.

“Is that even a real name?”

“It’s in the book,” I said, pointing.

Anna ripped the book from my hands.

“How about Saffron?” she asked.

“Too spicy,” I said.

“Trudy?”

“Wasn’t she on
The Facts of Life
?” I asked.

“Notice how I’m picking out the girls names,” Anna said.

“Notice that I don’t care what we have, as long as he or she is healthy and ours.”

“Cheers to that,” Anna said, with a sip of her latte.

I took the book from her.

“How about Thelonious?” I asked.

“How about it’s not tickling my ivories,” she said.

“Oh, do you want your ivories tickled?” I asked.

“Maybe,” she answered, returning a knowing smirk.

I stood, took Anna by the hand, ready to usher her out of the coffee shop, quick as could be, but she pulled back and held her ground.

“Let me buy a sandwich,” Anna said. “Just in case.”

I nodded, because she did this most every time we went out for lunch. Anna purchased a chicken panini with tomato, avocado, and cheddar cheese from the fresh-faced young woman working behind the counter. It did not take long before we came upon a derelict-looking man, with a filthy gray beard, wearing a ratty sports coat and soiled pants, sitting on a metal grating in the shade of a tall building. His hands were extended as we passed.

“Can you spare a dollar?” he asked in a raspy voice.

“I don’t have a dollar,” Anna said, “but I do have a meal.”

Anna was loath to give money to those who begged for fear they would use it to buy alcohol or drugs, but she had no qualms about feeding the hungry. As she knelt down to hand over the sandwich, I thought back to the day she crouched before a girl who sat crying on the curbside of a bus stop. It occurred to me then how one simple act of kindness really did have the power to alter lives.

We arrived home in separate cars. I parked on the street so that Anna could pull into the driveway. We walked up the front stairs holding hands. At some point in our marriage, Karen and I had stopped holding hands while traipsing through the basic rhythms of life. I can’t say when that happened exactly, but I only know that it did because I had Anna. I suspected that down the road, Anna and I would stop holding hands when we walked into the house together. It wouldn’t mean our love for each other had lessened, just that it would grow and change with the years.

Anna wasted no time getting down to business. Standing in our narrow hallway, she began to undress before I closed the front door behind me. We were kissing now, our mouths locked together, tongues exploring. Anna pushed me away, only to undo her belt. I slipped my hands around her slender waist, pulling up the fabric of her dress, feeling the firmness of her body and silky brush of her leggings. I hiked her dress up higher and higher until the slippery fabric rested above her hips. A groan escaped Anna’s mouth as I caressed her hair while kissing her neck. My other hand was still working to touch whatever body parts had been concealed by her clothes. She turned herself around, hands pressed firmly against the hall wall, pushing herself into me, grinding her hips to feel my excitement build.

Pivoting her body, Anna met my gaze. “We’re going to be able to do this less and less once the baby is born,” she said, breathing hard while working to unbutton my pants. She ran her hand up and down the front of my zipper, getting me even more ready than I was before. We stumbled into the bedroom, kissing and caressing, tugging at our clothes, growing hungrier by the second. Locked in an embrace, we fell onto the bed and peeled away what little remained of our clothing. When I entered her, Anna cried out softly, as though the immense pleasure still came as a surprise. The more Anna moaned, the more I wanted to please her. My body tingled as I began to increase the speed of my rhythm. We were breathless now, sweaty, our appetite for each other insatiable until we climaxed together. Anna cried out as her whole body tensed. I felt her shudder in my arms.

I lay on my back, with Anna nestled snugly against me. She traced the contours of my chest with her long finger, her body completely spent and relaxed. I was home.

I slid out of bed feeling lighter than I had in weeks. Anna looked over my naked body, pleased with what she saw. I took off the condom I had worn and wrapped it in a couple of tissues. Anna was terrified of another failed pregnancy and didn’t want to take the pill because it messed up her hormones. I had volunteered to wear protection. It didn’t lessen our pleasure any.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

“For more of that,” Anna said, playfully slapping my behind.

“Takeout? Italian? Chinese?”

“You decide.”

“Chinese,” I said, thinking about the first time we met Lily.

“We need to do this more often,” Anna said to my back as I ambled out the bedroom.

“Most definitely,” I answered.

I made a bathroom pit stop, did my business, and casually tossed the condom in the trash. I turned the handles on the sink to get some warm water flowing. Steam from the water clung to the mirror on the medicine cabinet, fogging away my reflection. I threw two handfuls of water on my face and thought about what Anna and I could watch on TV while we ate. We had a bunch of stuff on DVR if we couldn’t agree on a show. Maybe
Shameless
. Maybe
Californication
. Doubtful she’d be game for
The Walking Dead
.

I was shutting off the water when something caught my eye. To be more specific, it was something that wasn’t there that had grabbed my attention.

It should have been hanging on the upper left corner of the medicine cabinet. It had been there every single day. For the first time since I’d moved into this place, the necklace—a silver chain and tiny heart-shaped locket with a miniaturized picture of my family inside—wasn’t there.

And I knew just who had taken it.