So Close (25 page)

              “I tripped over these stupid crinolines,” I said shakily.  “I might be a little tipsy.  Will you get me some water?”

              “I’ll wait for you at the top of the aisle,” Tom said as she helped me up.

“Ready?” she asked sharply, pulling away the cup before I’d even finished the water.  “Don’t worry, every bride is like this.  It’s normal.  What you’re going through is completely normal.” 

“Okay.”  It was the vaguest thing I could say, the thing that would allow me to subsist on sips of air, as if we were about to board a plane, not my future.  “You can go ahead and take your seat.  It’s going to be great.”  I took one last peek out the shutters as the ushers peeled away the paper to reveal the pink aisle.  And it finally hit me.  My ‘beautiful day’ was the dream wedding of a dead sixteen-year-old girl.   

Part IV

Chapter Eleven

I didn’t have a drink for the entire reception, the survivalist in me instead focusing on the tactical assessments required for campaign stops. 
People look happy.  Good.  That’s good.  This is working.  This is a success.  What’s next?  Where should I stand?  Who should I talk to?  What does he need me to do? 

What does he need me to do.

Despite the band and the chatter I heard only a whooshing sound as if an industrial fan had been turned on between my ears.  I went through the motions; twirling Ray Lynne on the dance floor, posing for pictures, kissing Pax when glasses were clinked with spoons.  Tom spun me around the parquet like he was the Beast to my Belle, sending Lindsay and Grammy’s hands to their hearts.  But we didn’t say another word to each other. 

I have no idea what time Lindsay finally ushered Pax and me to her brother’s vintage car, the three of us ducking through an arc of sparklers held aloft by guests as if we were royalty.  She told me she loved me and, as the bursts of light flitted around us, I told her I loved her, too. She reluctantly retreated to Tom’s side and he nodded goodbye to us.  I suddenly needed to inhale.  “Get me out of this dress,” I begged Pax when the driver pulled away, but in his champagne-soaked state Pax misunderstood.  “No,” I gasped as his lips suctioned my neck.  “Can’t breathe. 
I can’t breathe
.” 

As he ripped at the buttons I realized releasing my ribs did nothing.  The space that held my heart had been compressed, squashed, crushed like the cans that littered the bottom of Tom Davis’s car—one of his ‘everyman’ touches, as Jeanine called them.  But dear God, Tom Davis could
not
be just like every other man, he just couldn’t.  Even if he was from a town like Tallyville.

Sitting on the floor of our expensive hotel room with my gown down to my hips and my hand around a minibar bottle, I spent the first hour alone with my husband blinded by the reason I never wanted to be married.  Was their weakness inevitable?

              “Why aren’t we on a plane to an island?” Pax asked from where he sprawled at my feet.  Clutching his bow tie and complimentary bag of gummy bears he looked like he’d been shot in the back before he could reach me.

              “Work,” I reminded him of our decision to put off the honeymoon until after the election and dropped my head back against the bed, my chest sore from the imprint of Tom’s confession, the bruise of Delilah’s departure.  Oh my God, what was going to happen to the kids?  All the kids.  Billy, Ray Lynne, Chip, Collin. 

              “I’m supposed to ravage you now.”

              “Yes.”  Another scattered rose petal slipped from the coverlet to my bare shoulder.

              “Any minute.”  He lifted a finger into the air.

              “Great.”

“My ears are actually ringing.”  He turned his face to me.  “If this is what Davis feels like after one of his shindigs, he’s made of better stuff than I am.”

              “Don’t,” I said a little too sharply. “I don’t want to talk about them tonight.” 

              “Ah!  An opinion!”  He lifted onto his elbows.  “Now I remember you.”  He made his way over on his elbows as if crawling under a military obstacle course and raised his face to mine.  “Hey, girl I married.”

              I was unprepared for the simple connection as I gazed down at him.  I loved him so much.  I did.  But I realized I wouldn’t know if I loved him enough to make it until I saw if we did.

              “Oh, hey,” he said with concern, sitting to pull me against him as my tears broke.  “It’s okay.”

              I tried to find the words.  “I’m just so . . .”

              “Me, too,” he murmured, stroking my dampening cheek. “So happy.”

“Right,” I said, grateful that he couldn’t know how wrong he was.

The rest of the weekend I impersonated the honeymooners on whom I’d once waited.  Thankfully the occasion didn’t call for conversation because my head felt like metal trying to stay aloft over a magnetized floor.  At least my dazed expression could have been a symptom of post-nuptial jetlag.  We exchanged knowing nods with the other newlyweds at the hotel, one orgasm ahead of the realization that they could have bought a house with what they just spent on a party. 

Monday morning I took Pax to the airport where we clenched hands in my idling car.  He reached for the door, but then looked back at me.  “Really?  You’re okay?”

I tightened my fingers against his, feeling the foreign pinch of our rings colliding.  “I’m bummed that we’re back to saying goodbye at an airport, that’s all.”

“I know.  I’d give anything just to get some fucking time together.”  He let out a stream of breath.  “We just have to hang in there until November, right?”

November. 

Was saying no to Tom even an option?  Would he fire me?  Where would I go? My resume had
one
item on it.  Why would Pax want that for a wife?  The embroidered ‘Mrs. Westerbrook’ panties Becky had given me sat untouched in my suitcase.  I couldn’t let him leave like this.  “Um, don’t you mean forever?”  I strained for the light intimacy he’d sought since we’d left the sparkler canopy.

He laughed, but it didn’t cover the ripple of relief that passed over his face.  I’d acknowledged it.  We were married.  With a last kiss, I watched him walk into the terminal and drove off before he could turn around.

Tom was scheduled to talk Middle East and Medicare at senior centers along the coast and, steeling myself, I raced to join the team as they pulled into Daytona that afternoon.  Discovering Lindsay had bowed out to recuperate, I reverted to trailing Jeanine like I had a crush on her.  She was juggling a million tasks and happily took advantage of my proximity without questioning its cause.  I grabbed one of the interns—me at twenty-one—and offered an exhilarating amount of access, while ensuring that Tom and I were never alone, praying that if I deprived him of the opportunity to follow up he’d be forced to find an alternate solution. 

For the whole week I only risked eye contact when he was in front of the crowds being the man I wanted him to be.  Standing by a back wall as he listened attentively to some elderly woman, I found it inconceivable that such a compassionate, intelligent person could ask me to do
it
—as I had come to call his request. 
Was it really necessary, anyway? 
I’d wonder. 
Say this Cheyenne person did make some sort of claim.  Couldn’t he just tell Lindsay the chick was crazy—some crazy fan?
  It’s not like women weren’t swooning wherever we went.  Lindsay’s decision not to put her energy there pre-dated my arrival—it was one of the first of her strengths to impress me. 
Was it such a stretch that a groupie had gotten lost in her own Tom Davis fantasies?  And, minus one detail, wasn’t that what had happened?  I mean, essentially?

              It was my mother’s logic and I knew it.  But Delilah’s was the only other voice in my head. 

Friday evening Jeanine sent me to the Breaker’s concierge to check for the tie that hadn’t been returned from the cleaners when Tom was suddenly behind me.  “Got a sec?”

              I’d thought he was already working the fundraiser in the ballroom.  “Sure!”  I reluctantly followed him behind an urn of pungent flowers.  “We’re triaging your tie—”

              “Oh good—there’ll be hell to pay if they don’t find that thing.”  He was serious.  “Listen.”  He stepped closer.  The bouquet’s scent made me ill.  “I can see you’re taking this to heart, Amanda.  And I feel like shit about it.”

              “Oh, no, that’s okay,” I said reflexively, even though it was the farthest thing from, “I’m just glad you see that I—”

              “You’re the only one I could trust a hundred percent.”  His put his hand on my arm as I realized he wasn’t backing down.  “The only one who gets the magnitude of what this stupid thing could do to her.”  He held it in place.  “What it could take from her.”  My stunted exhale was like canal water slamming into a lowered lock.

              “Tom.”

              “Amanda, that Cheyenne keeps trying to get to me,” he said furtively, his face contorting to an expression I’d never seen on him.  Fear.  “It’s putting everything everyone’s worked so fucking hard for at risk.  Every day that I don’t deal with her—look, you know it’s been a shit year for Linds and me.  If this were any other time—if we had more solid ground to stand on—if she hadn’t just been straight to hell and back—if she wasn’t, as I stand here with you . . .”  I realized he was blinking back tears.  “Then I would talk to her.  We would deal with this.  Of course we would.  But she’s not strong like she was.   All this B.S..”  He waved his free hand toward the ballroom of men marking time until cigars were lit.  “Has taken such a toll on her.  You see it.  I know you do.  Don’t make her pay for a burden that should be mine alone.  Don’t do that to our kids.  If you really do love her—”

“Tom.”  Jeanine rounded the urn.  We sprung apart.  “They’re waiting.  Amanda, teach Gerry how to fill out a fucking dry-cleaning slip, will you?” 

Tom’s shoulders lifted and he turned to go in and give his stump speech.  I walked quickly past the concierge to get outside.  I couldn’t argue with a thing Tom had said—not a word of it.  My cell rang in my clutch. “Grammy, I’m sorry.  I’m in the middle here.  Can I call you back?”

              “Mandy?”

              “Ray Lynne?”  I plugged my other ear to hear her little voice.

              “Mandy, you have to come here right now.  Okay?” 

              “What’s wrong?”  I clenched the phone.  She’d never called me.  “Where are you?  Is it Grammy?”

              “Grammy’s yelling and Billy’s yelling and Billy said curses and Grammy says she’s going to call the police when he comes back.”

              “The police?  Back from where?  Where’s Billy?  What did he do?”

              “Mandy,” she took the staggered breath of a child who’s held it together as long as she could. “Come.”  Her ‘m’ sloped into a sob that sent me sprinting past the valet, screaming for my keys. 

I took the highway until I ran out of highway and then I went too fast on the back roads.  Unable to extract more information, I calmed Ray Lynne as best I could before she swore she’d go to her bed and stay there. 

Neither Billy nor Grammy answered their phones and it was past midnight when I made it to her driveway.  The surrounding houses all were dark and I startled when my headlights swept across Billy laid out on the top porch step.  The sound of my car door slamming made him sit up as unsteadily as if he were falling down, not getting up. 

              “It’s Mandy, Billy.”  At least he was here—alive.  “
What
is going on?”

              “She’s a bitch,” he said drowsily before his head dropped forward.

              “Who?  Grammy?  Mom?  Is she back?  Hey.”  I stepped forward to grab his shoulders only to turn my face away.  It smelled like he’d been getting stoned in a sealed closet.  “Answer me.”

              “Can’t have people over . . . can’t leave.  Not going to play fucking cards with her like everything’s—she’s bullshit.”

              The light from her bedroom window suddenly spilled over the porch roof and onto the lawn behind me.

              Not letting go of his shoulders, I dropped my voice and crouched before him, locking my elbows to keep him from slumping into me.  “Why did she call the cops?” I asked although the answer was in my nostrils.

              “She’s fucking miserable . . . like Mom says.  Said she’d report me if I stepped off the porch.  But she won’t let me in.  Ha!”  His lips curled into a smile that his face was too high to follow through on.

              “Did you just smoke or did you take something?  Shoot it or snort it or whatever?  Fucking tell me the truth or I’ll hate you forever, I swear to God I will.”  I peered into his dilated pupils and for a disarming second I saw the kid who begged me to make him a superman cape out of a bath towel.   He dropped his gaze to my chin.

              “Just smoked.” 

              “Don’t.  Move.” 

              Using my key, I took the steps inside two at a time.  Ray Lynne was slumped over her stuffed raccoon and a box of Nilla Wafers on her coverlet.  I went to Grammy’s door.  The light beneath it clicked off.  “Grammy,” I called softly.  Silence.  I turned the knob and it took a second for my eyes to adjust to the darkness.  There in the single bed next to the one my grandfather had slept in, she lay staring up at the ceiling from beneath her quilt.  “I can’t do it again, Mandy.”

              “I’m not—when is Mom coming back?”

              “Her phone’s turned off.  And don’t think she and that loser don’t know it.”

              “For how long?  You haven’t heard from her at all?”

              She was silent.  I tried to stay with the immediate fire.

              “I’m so sorry about Billy.  I had no idea that was going on.  Not that it
is
going on.  This is just all so much change for him.  I’m sure with Mom out—”

“She’s out, all right.”