Lost In Rewind (Audio Fools #3) (27 page)

“About a month before all my dirty dreams with my best friend’s little sister were to come true, my worst nightmare came to be. Like I told you before, I found out from Michelle that Jacqueline,
my
Jacky, was suffering and battling cervical cancer on her own. I was angry. I couldn’t understand why she would withhold something as serious as cancer from me—
me
, of all people? Did she think so little of our friendship that I wasn’t even worth the truth?

“Her weekly trips to the city to see her parents started making more sense. At one point, I honestly thought she had a real boyfriend in New York, someone her parents had approved of, not some guy she fucked in school in secret. I spent a whole month following her into the city every weekend to see for myself that this wasn’t some kind of horrible joke. She would go by herself into the hospital for treatment for two whole days every week. I remember waiting for over thirty hours on a park bench across the street from the hospital for her to come out, just to make sure I didn’t miss her. I couldn’t let her do this on her own. The cheap, decrepit, five hundred-square-foot studio I’d rented was by the hospital where I could keep an eye on her from my window. All it had in it was a clean mattress and a pillow. It had no fridge or a kitchen, just a hot plate for boiling water for coffee. That’s when I stopped putting milk in my coffee. Sugar and lemons don’t spoil as fast as unrefrigerated milk.”

I hear Kali take a deep breath, which reminds me of our distance. I need to stop. I’m already late to my first meeting.

“Why are you so far away from me? I have things I need to tell you and real life keeps catching up. If I hang up to go be an attorney for a few hours, will you promise to pick up the phone when I call you back? I won’t take lunch today, I’ll call you as soon as my meeting finishes and I’m on my way to court.” I hold my breath for her reply.

“You don’t have to apologize or ask permission to speak with me. I need to know what Joella said to you more than what I can offer you back by hearing it. We both should get back to our lives and talk later.”

“Kali—,” I’m about to tell her that she’s becoming a huge, important part of my life, but then I stop myself. Maybe it’s not wise to engage her with intimate words until she fully understands who I am and what I’ve done. “I’ll talk to you soon.”

I
agonize over Kali’s reaction to my affair with Sara by milking the revelation, but it’s inevitable. If I crave any sort of a normal relationship with this woman she ultimately must accept me, including all my mistakes. My involvement with Sara wasn’t a mistake, since our union produced the most beautiful children in the world, but the way I kept Sara waiting indefinitely with the hopes of us having a real life, was.

The meeting I’m in slowly drags on for hours with back and forth behind-the-scenes negotiations between our clients. I’m thankful my assistant is vigorously writing it all down because I have a different kind of negotiation afflicting my mind. I have a drawn-out countdown led by my heartbeat swimming through a suspended sea of tension until I hear her voice again. I won’t be able to fully take in a deep breath until we speak.

I excuse myself, no longer able to wait and return to my corner office down the long hallway. I instinctively touch my chest to feel the key but it’s gone. I don’t dwell on the absence of my talisman and quickly fish inside my suit pocket for my phone. I sit comfortably in my oversized executive chair, but it feels wrong. I abandon my desk and relocate to the couch, and that feels wrong too. I look around my office with the New York City skyline wrapped around it like a postcard closing in on me from every direction and proceed to the windowless bathroom. I lock myself inside, but it’s inane since I’m not sure who exactly I’m locking myself from.

I settle on the bench facing a mirrored wall and dial her number. She answers before the line even rings and I swear her voice is better than any painkiller I’ve ever taken.

“Hello.”

“Hi Jeffery.” The way she pronounces my name is indescribable.

“I don’t remember where we left off,” I lie. I could recite and transcribe our conversations verbatim.

“You enlightened me on why you drink sweet black coffee with a slice of lemon during the time you were coming into the city to be your future wife’s guardian angel, and now I think you’re about to tell me about your friend’s sister.”

Her perception of me being Jacky’s protector reminds me of my wife’s letter. She also believed I was her savior, but truly she was mine. I don’t let myself get too philosophical and dive right back to the task at hand—the truth.

“During that time, I’d almost forgotten all about Eddie’s sister. I had so much on my mind that I didn’t need to occupy space with a silly fantasy or some girl I knew practically nothing about. I’d started getting closer to Jacky, sitting next to her in all our shared classes, studying together like we did when we first met, hoping our proximity would force her to tell me about her condition, but she didn’t. She kept it from everybody. Her silence drove me crazy and I felt lied to, I felt unimportant. I actually wished she had a real boyfriend she ran to on the weekends and not cancer, because another guy I could fight, but I couldn’t fight cancer.

“Eddie hardly ever mentioned his family or his sister, and at that point, I hadn’t spoken to her in months, but obviously, the curiosity was still there, buried under the harsh reality I’d found myself living with. The day after his sister’s birthday, I questioned him about her as nonchalantly as I could. I remember him freaking out about forgetting to call and missing his sister’s eighteenth birthday. He was worried that his parents had been too busy with their own bullshit and may have forgotten her birthday as well, and that he was the worst fucking brother on the planet. I felt awful. What if everybody had forgotten her birthday? Why didn’t I call her? I remembered, and I had promised her I’d call. I wanted to call her, but I didn’t have the time or the balls to hear the disappointment in her voice; after all, it was Friday evening and I was headed to the train station, right behind Jacky, to go into the city and make sure she was okay.

“It was Saturday and I was studying at the dilapidated place in New York I had called home every weekend when Eddie’s sister actually called me. I never gave her my number or called her from my own phone, so I was surprised she had my number, but at the same time, excited to talk to her. She didn’t say a word when I answered; she just hung up. But I knew who it was because I instantly recognized her phone number. I called her back and my heart broke when I heard her sad voice and realized how important my promise and I were to her. I had no intention of seeing her, but when I heard her crying, I couldn’t pretend anymore that I didn’t care or that she didn’t matter. I didn’t want to be that asshole responsible for breaking her heart. After she hung up on me, I decided to check up on her and make sure she was okay, and perhaps apologize for being a jerk and leading her on with my empty, foolish promises for years.

“I’d paid a visit to Eddie’s folks’ home on the Upper East Side and was greeted by his mom. Mrs. Klein was disoriented, drunk, and had no idea where her teenage daughter was, so I waited, and waited, and waited until I was ready to kill someone. I dialed her number countless times, but she wouldn’t answer my calls. I had imagined dozens of scenarios—none of them good. I had this ache in my heart, reminding me that if something bad were to happen to my best friend’s sister, I would be responsible. After waiting on her cold, stone steps and calling her for hours, she finally answered her fucking phone. I can recite that phone call in my sleep.

“She sounded out of breath when she answered
.
I’d asked where she was, afraid she would hang up on me again.
‘Why do you care?’
she snapped back. If only she knew just how much I cared.
I told her I’d been outside her house for hours. I told her that her mom had said she’d be back soon. Then I asked her if she was planning to come home at all that night. I was worried about her safety; it was late and she was only eighteen, still in high school.

“I was outraged, but it was nothing compared to how I felt when I heard a man’s voice in the background say, ‘
What’s wrong, baby? Who’s calling you?’
I was ready to find and kill whoever had called her
‘baby.’

“In a state of rage, I yelled,
‘WHO. THE. FUCK. ARE. YOU. WITH? Why did he just call you baby? Eddie said you don’t have a boyfriend.’
I wasn’t even drunk, and I was talking to her like she was mine, like I had a right to question someone calling her baby.

“But nothing could’ve prepared me for her next words. She said, ‘
Jeff, calm down. I’m with Phillip. He offered to fuck me at his place, and since you haven’t made good on your promises, I’m taking him up on his offer.’
And then she hung up, leaving me to wait and suffer a slow, painful death at the hands of her words.”

I close my eyes and let out a long breath as the image of Sara at eighteen bombards my brain—her puffy eyes and those sad, trembling lips.

“Do I even need to know what happened next?” Kali asks, ridicule and judgment coating each word.

“Yes, you should hear what happened next, because it was the beginning of what the rest of my life became—a lie and a truth, that even I couldn’t tell apart anymore.”

“
Is This Love
” by Whitesnake

I
can’t hold down the bile that keeps rising in my throat when he talks about him and other women. I lie on the rug in the middle of my room and listen to a story from the mouth of the person I know will affect my life, and in some ways, already has.

I know what he did. He slept with his friend’s sister, and I’m afraid he did something horrible to her. I’m afraid he’s about to tell me a heinous crime he committed. I may be his next victim. Psychopaths look like regular people, and in his case, they can even be very attractive. I shake my head at the nonsense that just entered it, because there is no way my grand-mère would’ve led me to my death.

There has to be more. I don’t want to hear about the women he loved and slept with, but I asked for this, and now it’s too late. I can’t tell him to stop. I’m about to hear what he and some girl did and how it changed his life.

On the other end of the line, I hear him clear his throat and take a strained, deep breath. I can’t see him, but I’m sure it can’t be easy for him to talk about his wife and some girl.

“When she finally returned home that night in a cab—scared, sad and all alone, I realized exactly how important she was to me. I wasn’t going to touch her, I wasn’t going to kiss her, I wasn’t going to do anything but talk to her. But we ended up doing everything. Until I held her in my arms, it was all just an innocent, safe fantasy, make-believe, an escape from feeling rejected. But that night, the instant we kissed in the backseat of that cab, my whole world shifted. I took her back to my shitty studio overlooking the hospital, and that’s where I took her virginity and gave her my sanity. She was my pill, my drug of choice; I became an addict. When I touched her, nothing and no one else mattered. She would look at me like I was her world, and I wanted to be someone’s world. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t tell her that I had another world, so I kept both as far away from each other as I could.