BILLIONAIRE Island: Idyllic Mischief (2 page)

Chapter Two

When Indie got off the call with Sasha, she hadn't managed to fulfill her hope of reaching a decision after talking it over with her BFF. Sasha's life was completely charmed, living on a tropical island in a massive house with private pool close to the beach, a rich husband, two beautiful children and an outhouse full of servants. All she had to do was play tennis and go horse-back riding or water-skiing, all of which she'd become expert at through constant practice. She had no idea what instability and insecurity felt like.

For months Indie had been questioning herself every single day, hell, every single minute of the day, and the thought pressed its unpleasant query on her again-
How much more can you take?
As a kid from a broken home, she always swore she'd only get married if she could be absolutely sure that it would never end up in divorce. Okay, that was kind of girly because there are no absolute guarantees in love, not even if you were Princess Diana. But she'd made it very clear to Bradley, when it became obvious he was moving toward forever. She had to be sure they had the kind of connection that meant they'd work together through every mishap life was bound to fling in their path. She figured people made the decision to separate far too easily now. They decided the love was gone and there was nothing left to fight for. Maybe taking the challenge and getting up in its grill together would be the catalyst for finding out love was there all along. It just got buried by the wayside of overwhelming issues.

Brad had sworn so many times that he was in it, truly in, that perhaps she should have known it was part of the chase. Maybe he just needed to convince her and conquer all final resistance. She'd observed the reckless abandonment to love in her best friend yet couldn't see it in her own yard.
I'll never know for sure I guess, but one thing I do know is that one person can't make a commitment to a marriage if the other one has an engagement elsewhere.
Indie felt she was working alone, trying to bring them together, get some kind of honest communication going, with someone who was existing on a completely different plane. Separating would make no real difference because Bradley was already so separated she was living a life totally alone.

And it was the loneliest thing to live with someone and yet be so alone.

Sex had dwindled to once a week, once every couple of weeks, infrequently, and finally zilch when she fell out of love with him because he was obviously not in it, and never had been. He was far too deeply in it with his first and only love. Their communication had become shrouded in the half truths of fogging, where Brad spun every conversation into alphabetti spaghetti by double-backing on issues, excusing his failures with outlandish reasons, tossing problems back at her door. If all that failed, he instigated a blow out rage that gave him the excuse to storm out and slam the door, leaving her more alone than ever.

How could she bring a baby into a world like that?

Those were the times Indie hated most, even more than the shouting and raging. Even more than the time he'd walked away from her down the hall in their Manhattan apartment, stopped and leaned his forehead into the wall as though about to cry. He'd lifted his fist and pummeled it straight through the plaster and she thought; 'That could have been my face.'

More than the rage, she hated when he slammed out because she knew instead of talking to her, he was going to his favorite lover. The one who always had his attention and had stolen him from her before she ever had him. His real relationship was always waiting for him and he never failed that true love. Her husband's one true love was poured from a bottle.

It hadn't always been this way so why couldn't it be like before. When they met at his casting call for a huge beer ad, Bradley had dominated the room, super-charging it with his charisma and making all the girls laugh flirtatiously hoping his eyes would light approvingly on her over the others.

As a showroom model, Indie didn't get to go to many castings for commercials, but they needed a lot of girls in bikinis for the ad being planned around spring break, so the agency sent her on the call along with a thousand other girls. They were called into the studio three at a time, told to leave their card, put on their marks and told to jump around for the camera as though in a crowd of friends at the beach having the time of their lives.

“Come on girls, let's see those happy faces.” Brad was a barrel of confidence, the ringleader holding the power to deliver fame and fortune, or at least a brief appearance on prime time TV, to a bevy of eager and impressionable girls. At twenty-four, Indie was slightly older than the rest but Bradley caught her eye, smiled and held it longer than was necessary. She somehow knew she'd get the job and leapt up, hands in the air as though she'd hit an impossible winner across an imaginary volleyball net.

In the first year, he'd been loving and attentive as though she was the most special to him but now Indie believed that was a ruse to keep her innocent of the fact that he was elsewhere. She should never have asked the question that let him know she was on to him. Taking back a question is like putting the genie back in the bottle – it can't be done. And the moment she questioned his drinking was the moment he began to change and all his charm and flattery gave way to denial and fault finding. He became a highway robber in the marriage, waiting by the side of the road to hijack her before she had the chance to get the sheriff on him.

Indie had tried to talk. Best time to get a response was when he was contrite and sorry for passing out on the bathroom floor or embarrassing her in public after one, or ten, too many. The next day, in his version of a hangover, because drunks don't get real hangovers, they only come down from escaping painful emotion into brief regret. Then Brad said that marriage was too much responsibility, that he felt pressured to be the caretaker for two when it had always only been him. Mostly he complained there were too many bars everywhere in Manhattan.

Another week passed and Indie fessed up to Betty before she told her husband.

“Oh honey, I've known it for weeks.” She patted Indie's arm in her motherly way. “Tell you what we'll keep it our little secret for as long as possible, or until you burst the seams but I doubt you'll be able to go to Europe.”

“Thanks, Betty you're an angel. I figured as much. I just don't know what to do yet.”

“Don't rush your decision sweetie, it's a big step, the biggest. At the same time don't sit on it forever.”
Indie made the commitment to tell Brad when he came home that evening and base her decision on his reaction. Perhaps starting a family would pull him out of his stupor and back into their marriage. She'd Googled alcoholism and the local head office of AA had shown up top. When she left the showroom the afternoon, she found herself making the detour to Park Avenue to check something out.

“Hallo, I, um-wanted to ask a question.” She was tongue-tied with humiliation. What if the woman at the desk thought she was the alcoholic?

“What can we do to help?” she said, neutral and non- judgy so that Indie felt the overwhelming desire to spill it all.

“I wondered how you know if someone is an alcoholic for sure and if they can stop.”

“Sure, it's a common enough question and alcoholism isn't about how much you drink or whether you drink alone, it's determined by whether the alcohol causes a change in your personality.”

“I see.” Unfortunately she saw more than she'd wanted to. “So a person would find it hard to change that?”

“Without the program, basically impossible,” she said. “And it's a family dynamic. All members of the group need to be in treatment.”

“The entire family?”

“Everyone living in the home with the illness is contributing to it.”

“But not the children, the children don't go to treatment?”

“Especially the children.” It hit her then, how important it was to choose your partner wisely, not based on how charismatic or exciting they were, or how many other women wanted him for themselves. Somehow the fact that Brad had chosen her and she'd chosen him meant that she was involved in his illness.

Ricky, Indie's favorite doorman was brandishing a package when she arrived home. She clutched it to her in the elevator, excited as a kid at a birthday party, by the stamps from the Island of Mauritius all over the paper. Sasha had sent her a gift, a pile of beautiful hand-stitched baby clothes. Mauritius being a one time French colony, she said the clothes there were top quality, although that was changing with the competition from the Far East. Indie lifted the tiny outfits from the paper, minute white buttons down the front of a soft lawn onesie, no bigger than a poppy seed and imagined the little person inside her that would in no time at all put its tiny arms and legs through the openings. A surge of excited happiness blossomed as she imagined the child and her as a family unit. She knew she really wanted to have her baby.

The note from Sasha told Indie to meet her in London as arranged. She was still going for her annual shopping tour, mostly to source new riding clothes and leather boots and Indie should join her even if she wasn't doing the shows. It would be her last chance to travel before the baby and she needed to see her, had loads to tell her and wanted her best friend's advice.

Indie made dinner, her special pasta sauce with tortellini and dithered over whether to open a bottle of wine. Afraid of the consequences of either decision, him getting drunk and belligerent, or else antagonized that she was with-holding wine because she thought he couldn't control himself. In the end she decided against. Once she told him, she'd have the perfect excuse of being pregnant for not drinking.

Close to midnight Indie went to bed, after cleaning up all the evidence of food. If any remained, Brad would likely flare up for trying to make him feel guilty for not coming home.

She must have fallen asleep instantly because she was dragged from rest hours later by the crashing of broken glass out in the living room. The leap of terror at the fear of intruders was soon replaced by one deeper when she heard Brad swearing and cursing in his slurring lost voice.

“What fucking idiot left that there? Trying to fucking kill me in my own home.”

The impulse to pull the covers over her head morphed into the need to get him to bed. More items were being overturned onto the solid wood floor and shattering and her irritation kicked into gear.

“Brad, just lie down and sleep it off before you destroy every single thing dear to me in our house.” She picked up the pieces of an antique frame her grandmother had given her that held a photo of her departed father.

“I am trying to fucking get to my bed but you put all these fucking doo-dads in my way to fucking trip up on, you stupid bitch.”

“Okay, just sit down on the sofa and take off your shoes while I get a quilt for you. And please mind your language.”

“Are you fucking crazy woman? I'm going to my bed,” he slurred. The acrid aroma of stale beer belched from the side of his mouth.

“We agreed that when you came home- late- you would sleep out here, remember?” Indie said.

“I said, I ain't sleeping on no fucking sofa. I paid for the bed and I'm going to it.”  A tiny quell of fear rose in the pit of her stomach as the snarl of rising anger crept into his voice. She knew she should have left it alone but couldn't. Her own fury was rising at him already breaking what he'd promised if she'd only agree to stay and at living her life at the mercy of his drinking binges.

“You need to stay out of the bedroom, Brad because you smell atrocious and I'm not waiting up all night in case there's a repeat of you throwing up on me.”

“That's it, throw your shit in my face like always.” In a flash his rage erupted from beneath its onion skin layer of restraint. “I told you I'm not sleeping out here so don't bring up your lying shit from the past to get your own way.”

“It's not my way and I'm not lying. My way would be that you don't come home so drunk you can't control your own mind or body. Nothing in this marriage is my way.”

“I can control myself, I just can't control you from getting on my case all the fucking time. I've had enough of you nagging and bitching.” He was shaky on his feet by the side of the couch, towering over her, trying not to huddle away from him, wishing this wasn't happening.

“No you can't. Because if you had any self control you'd get some help for whatever's eating at you so bad yo u need to drown it out of yourself with poison that's destroying both of us.'

“Only thing eating at me is you.” From jabbing his finger at her, he re-clenched it back forming a fist that he raised in the air. With enormous visible effort, he managed enough self restraint to bring it down not on her but on the chrome and glass art deco side table she'd discovered in a small antique store on the Ile-St-Louis in Paris and bought with her own money to carry home, dismantled, in her luggage. It was a reminder of happy travels and small successes, covered with framed photos of her family and collection of antique perfume bottles. The sound of shattering glass was all but muffled by Brad's howl as the glass and metal cut into his wrist and hand. He fell back about to topple as blood streamed onto the white Montauk sofa and Jonathan Adler pillows, testament to their designer lifestyle. 

The smell and aura rose from his body and enveloped them like a black magic spirit as Brad reached out two claws that she was certain he was going to wrap around her throat. Indie stood frozen, gaping in disbelief at the demon her husband had morphed into and at the last moment, he changed direction and instead of grasping her by the neck, grabbed her waist and hauled her painfully, fingers digging hard into her tender stomach, up over his shoulder. He lurched into the bedroom and threw her onto the bed with the dismissive rage of an inflamed toddler tossing away a stuffed animal. Indie scrabbled up the bed toward the headboard, pulling the quilt and her own limbs around her as a shield from wherever his need to vent would carry him. No way she was lying supine on the bed, laid out for his wrath.