Surviving Valencia (27 page)

Without a word I got in my car and followed along. There was no way I was riding along with them. I had become invisible to Adrian and he seemed to have forgotten our earlier plan.

I felt like a stalker, a loser, driving behind them. I watched the burnt out taillight, the
Strong Women like Strong Beer
bumper sticker, the backs of their heads.
You’re a creep
, I told myself, feeling dirty as I trailed after them, wishing them ill. I could not get Belinda’s face out of my mind. She was to me, at this time, the answer key to the book of code of Adrian. An explanation of what his soul must desire. I wanted to have what she had. I wanted to be skinnier, cooler, smarter. I barely knew him, but I felt as strongly as I had ever felt about anything that I wanted him to be mine. And I wanted to be his.

My desperation and insecurity began to slip away as I drove behind them. The night air gave me confidence. I suppose that’s normal. It’s why motorcycle gangs beat people up. Still, it made me feel special. A mean, delicious feeling of purpose and determination found me that night in the car, batting at my self-doubt. For a brief moment it swept my nervousness right out the open window. I felt ethereal, wise, a little smug. I became more than myself. Stronger. My desires were pushing ahead of everyone else’s feelings. I became powerful and free, sociopathic, invincible.

They parked at the top of the hill in front of Krystle’s little cottage, and I parked farther down so I could touch up my makeup without being noticed. Without the cool night wind in my face, I was becoming myself again. Fading. Shrinking. I put on extra makeup, trying to combat the ordinariness.

The front yard was packed with our co-workers and Adrian and Belinda had already joined the party by the time I walked up the steep, quaint path to the little bungalow. They were standing side by side and they both had beers in their hands, but when Adrian saw me he casually dropped his arm from around his wife’s waist. I got a beer and started talking to some girls who worked mainly on weekends. We were chatting and laughing, as they filled me in on all the Border’s drama I was usually oblivious to, and I forgot to notice Adrian for a little while. When I went to get another beer I saw Belinda leaving, alone.

I scanned the party, looking for him, and just like that he was behind me.

“Are you looking for someone?” he asked.

“I found him,” I said and blushed, realizing how forward that sounded.

“Do you need another drink?” he asked.

“Not quite yet. Have you been left unattended?”

“I have.”

“Everything okay?” I immediately wished I hadn’t asked. Why ruin this by talking about her?

“She has a headache.”

“Oh.” We each took sips of our beer.

“Do you want to sit down?” he asked me. There was one of those old-fashioned glider lawn benches in Krystle’s back yard. It was a little bit removed from where everyone was standing.

“Sure.”

We sat close enough that our legs were touching. It could have been anyone else and it all would have meant so little. We talked for an hour and for the first time in my life, it felt easy to be funny. I felt attractive and clever.

“People are going to start talking about us if we aren’t careful,” Adrian said at one point.

“They talk about everyone. It doesn’t matter,” I said back. Easy for me to say; I wasn’t married.

He got up to get another beer. “Can I get you one?” he asked. I nodded even though I didn’t like it. Anything to keep this going.

People had been leaving for the last half hour or so and the party was fizzling down.

“I better go,” Adrian said, looking at his watch.

“How are you getting home?” I asked him.

“You’re going to take me?” he asked.

“Yeah, you’re right,” I said, unable to hide my smile.

He and Belinda lived on the Near-East side, only a few blocks from my old Mifflin Street dump. I realized as we turned towards downtown that it would have been so much quicker to take him back to his car, which was still at Border’s. It’s what would have made sense. It was five minutes from Krystal’s, and now Belinda would have to take him to work in the morning.

“Do you want me to take you to your car, instead?” I asked.

“No, I wanted to spend some more time talking to you,” he said.

“Oh.” I smiled. “I guess you aren’t afraid to just say what’s on your mind.”

“I guess I’m not,” he said, laughing a little.

“Will your wife think it’s strange that you got a ride home instead of to your car?”

“I’ll tell her I drank too much to drive.”

“Good idea.”

When I was getting close, but we were still talking and laughing about one of our co-workers, I turned onto the wrong street and drove past the place where the house I had once lived in had stood. Now there were condos in its place.

“I used to live there,” I said.

“Those are nice,” said Adrian.

“I mean, I lived there before the condos were there. It was a big, old house with mice.” We both laughed. Everything is funny when you’re falling in love.

“Turn here,” said Adrian. He pointed out a laundromat and said that he had once found a fifty-dollar bill in a washing machine there.

Then I took him down the street to where I had once found a five-dollar bill frozen into a snow bank.

“Five dollars? That’s kind of pathetic,” he said.

“But at least I’m telling the truth,” I said.

“You don’t believe I found fifty dollars?”

“Whatever you say…” We smiled at each other.

We drove around for two hours. Finally Adrian said he’d better get home.

I turned onto Livingston Street and found the house number. It was a tiny blue house with white shutters, cute as a button.

“Is this your house?” I asked, picturing his wife, unconscious and safe, resting inside with her cat-eye glasses folded on a table beside the bed.

“It’s not ours, we rent it. But yeah, it’s ours.”

I almost pointed out how cute it was, but thought better of it. Then I almost made some stupid comment about his wife seeming nice, but had the sense to keep my mouth shut about that, too. There was no reason to point out how much he had to lose.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’ll see you at work.”

“Bye,” I said, careful not to accidentally add,
I love you, Adrian.
But I did. I already did.

“Bye.” He shut the door and walked to his front door, waving to me as I drove away.

That’s how the whole thing started.

There was no getting past Adrian’s trip to Minnesota. When I was not hiding in the nursery and Adrian was not hiding in his studio, we made sporadic efforts to act like our old selves. We did so while holding our collective breath that no more detectives would show up, and so far none had.

In the evenings, like everyone else in our neighborhood, we walked our dog and cooked on the grill, trying to give the impression of two innocent, average
folks
. Days passed without either of us mentioning word of John Spade and the events surrounding him. When I occasionally tried to talk to Adrian about it, he would cut me off. “Now we’re safe,” he would tell me. “Let’s just try to get back to our normal lives.”

“I feel like I’m faking it,” I told him.

“If you fake something long enough, it starts to be true,” he reassured me.

It was not just the toppling of my ideals about who Adrian was that gnawed at me. I realized I had preferred being harassed and potentially hunted by one man to feeling like every policeman in the world was after us.

I began to make secret lists to calm myself. Pros and cons, my old trick. On paper, it did not look good:

Pro: I have a lot of clothes.

Con: I’m married to a murderer.

Pro: No one knows I am married to a murderer.

Con: I know.

Pro: People think I am married to a desirable man and have an enviable life.

Con: I am not someone who cares what people think. Wait. I guess that is not true.

Pro: Because of Adrian, I am not alone in the world.

Con: I was married out of pity. There’s no way that Adrian finding me was a coincidence.

Pro: Everyone thinks we are in love.

Con: Are we?

Pro: We are going to have a baby.

Con: I don’t want to have this baby.

Pro: Everyone loves a baby. Maybe I will love the baby. Maybe people will love me if I have a baby.

Con: Adrian is a very bad man. This baby’s father is a murderer. MURDERER.

Pro: We’re going to look at new cars on Tuesday.

Con: I feel like he is trying to distract me with material items.

Pro: At least we will have a new car.

Con: Adrian was involved in Van and Valencia’s deaths.

Pro: At least now I know what happened. Plus, we never would have met otherwise.

Con: He only married me because I was the next best thing to Valencia.

Pro: Valencia is dead, so I am the next best thing.

I locked myself in the bathroom and sat in the corner to make my lists. I wrote them on tiny scraps of paper that I dropped into the toilet bowl as I went. It was the only safe way I could write the truth. Anywhere else would be dangerous. Just writing them down was more confession than I could handle.

“I’m losing it, little baby,” I whispered, rolling my pen over my swollen belly. The pen was a gift from Adrian, a beautiful silver pen with flowing velvet blue ink. It was engraved with my initials. It was funny to me that now I needed things that should only be wants. It was funny to me that a pen could become part of an equation that could add up to me wanting to stay with Adrian.

I had once heard it said that a person’s deepest fear is his greatest desire. My deepest fear and unshakeable expectation had always been to find that Adrian did not love me. I had sensed that this was all too good to be true, that I was living a life meant for some other woman. And now as I watched my life unraveling, and saw my deepest fears becoming reality, I wondered if somehow I had willed this to happen. Or was I simply a peculiarly unlucky person? Or, worst of all, did none of this, as usual, really have anything to do with me?

I felt like the neurons in my brain weren’t properly clicking together. It was all too tricky for me to get hold of. I couldn’t be sure of anything. I flushed the scraps of paper that had contained my list, wondering what my next move was.
Probably nothing
, scrawled the deep blue ink onto a fresh scrap of paper, the fancy pen taking off with its own free will.
Probably just wait and see what happens
it taunted, and then it added a smiley face out of spite. I threw these scraps in the toilet bowl and snapped the pen cap back into place.

But the longer I sat there, looking at the grooves on the back of the toilet that had never once been cleaned, the more obvious it became.

That’s it,
I wrote on another scrap of paper.
None of this, as usual, really has anything to do with you.

Unexpectedly, a tear fell from my eye and the blue ink fanned out into a watery blur. It reminded me of dying Easter eggs, many, many years ago. For a moment the constant art studio smell of our house was replaced by a poignant, acute memory of the smell of boiled eggs, the sound of Van and Valencia’s laughter, the feel of the metal wire ladle used to hold and dip the eggs.

“Let her do it herself,” Valencia was telling Van and our parents. She was wearing her red
Coke Is It
t-shirt and her arms were out as a protective barricade against my irritable family who did not so much believe I could not dye some eggs, but who simply did not have the patience to let me.

“She can do it. Look, she’s doing a good job. That’s the best one yet! I like the way the colors swirled.”

The memory, momentarily so clear, was slipping away like a dream. I replayed the bit I could remember again, letting the tears flow down my cheeks. Sometimes no memory could move me. Years of untouchable immunity rolled by, while I stood back, jaded and detached. Bored by all that had happened in the past. Over it. Then some sweet, forgotten moment would spring with the delicate vibrancy of a crocus through snow and break my heart.

“None of this. Has anything. To do with you,” I whispered, looking around me at the Turkish towels, the cool white tiles, the Italian towel drying rack. Then I uncapped the pen and wrote the words, and watched my tears distort them.

The toilet bowl came in handy for the times when the words on the little scraps made me sick.

We sat there one evening, a month and a half after Adrian’s trip to the Cities, trying to watch a movie when I brought it up again.

“Honey, please talk to me,” I said.

He paused the movie.

“I always talk to you,” he said.

“About Minnesota. About John Spade.”

He stopped the movie and turned to face me.

“I’m having a really hard time dealing with this,” I said.

“I know, but it will get easier.”

“Adrian, you
killed
someone.”

“Shh,” he interrupted. “The windows are open!” He stood up and went to close them, lock them, lower the blinds, turn on the air. I waited, trying to contain my annoyance, afraid that the conversation would once again be put on hold.

“As I was saying,” I whispered as he sat back down. “I am having a really hard time getting past this.”

“You don’t have to whisper. We’re all good now. You need to relax. It’s not healthy for the baby or you to get all worked up.”

“It’s just… It’s too much for me. I feel so alone.”

“I’m the same person I was before this happened. Don’t treat me like this. Everything I have ever done, I have done for you. You know that. Right?”

“I know, Adrian. I totally know. That’s the problem. I was nothing before you. I was a total loser. But now what?”

“I’m not following where you’re going with this.”

“Adrian, having you love me made me normal. Better than normal. I felt like a success. Now what am I? The wife of a murderer?”

“Would you listen to yourself? Would you listen to how selfish you sound?”

“So I sound selfish. Don’t turn this back around on me. You always do that when we fight.”

“I understand this is a lot to absorb but could you quit calling me a murderer?”

“But you are.”

“I am not.”

“Is John Spade dead?”

“He is.”

“Alright.”

“But I’m not a murderer.” He ran his hands through his hair in aggravation. “What happened twenty years ago was a terrible mistake that I never should have been involved with. As for John Spade, would it have been better if I had waited at home with a loaded gun until he broke in? Would that make you feel better? Self-defense is self-defense. Our lives and our baby’s life are worth more than his life and he is the one who made me have to decide that. The past could have stayed in the past, but he didn’t want to let it. I can forgive myself. I did what I had to do for us. For me and for you.
For you
. Got that? I did this partly for me, and partly for the baby, and mainly for you. Could you have done that much for me?”

“I wouldn’t have had to! I never would have gotten us into something like this!”

“You never get yourself into anything. You just ride along with the crowd and borrow everyone else’s life. Don’t you get tired of living vicariously through other people?”

“That’s mean,” I said, numbed and surprised by his cruelty.

“It’s true. You let everyone else make the decisions and you just go along for the ride. Then you sit back and judge. Well, you can’t have it both ways.”

“If it had been up to me, you would have stayed here and we would have gone to the police. You would have just told them what happened twenty years ago and we would have dealt with it. But I guess that’s not enough
action
for you, so here we are. We were happy and now we’re murderers! We have police visiting us! We’re going to be afraid as long as we live. I’d rather just go away by myself and live my own honest, boring life.”

Adrian stood up and the remote control fell on the floor. Frisky had been lying nearby and he sensed the change in the room, and began to yawn nervously. “Be sure to bring your wardrobe of designer fucking clothes with you on your little trip,” said Adrian. “Oh, by the way, how do you plan to pay for it?”

“I will find a way. And why don’t you quit buying me things if you secretly have a problem with me having them.”

“I don’t buy you all those clothes, you do. With my money.”

“Actually, most of my clothing I sewed myself for practically nothing, but you wouldn’t notice that anyone else in this house has any creativity or talent, because you’re so busy being wrapped up in your own
artistic life
.” Then I took it a step further, “Do you think you’re really that talented, or is it more likely that one movie star liked your work and everyone else has followed along like sheep?”

He laughed. “Unreal. I am very, very talented. Not that you are any kind of a judge of talent.”

“Of course not. No one is remotely intelligent compared to you, Adrian.”

He nodded and seemed like he was going to add to that, but instead came back with, “You didn’t answer me: How are you going to pay for yourself, now that you’ve gotten accustomed to living off me?”

“By selling oranges.”

“What?”

“By selling oranges,” I said again. And right before my eyes he became a tiny little man. Small enough to fit in my pocket or crush between my fingertips. I walked out of the room. He followed me.

“Don’t you understand this is the perfect crime?” he said, switching from angry and condescending to the equally unsettlingly slippery tone of a salesman. “Do you think anyone
cares
what happened to some rapist? Even if they think someone killed him, they’re going to figure the bastard deserved it.”

“We aren’t just talking about
some rapist
. What about Jeb?”

“We didn’t do anything to Jeb.”

“He’s dead because I got him involved.”

“Jeb is not our fault. You need to let that go,” he said, heading into the kitchen.

“Are you worried about where he is? There’s a body out there. Where are you going?”

“I’m sure John Spade took care of it. I’m going to make us some tea.”

“Are you serious?” I asked, following behind him.

“But as for John Spade, I did the world a favor. And you know what? If they do start looking for who did it, they have about four or five women’s families filled with possible suspects. Think about that! They’re going to look at those cases and say, ‘Who here wanted to kill John Spade?’ They don’t even know you and your family are connected!”

“What’s with this
You and your family
? Don’t you mean
Us
? ”

“Fine. You knew what I meant. But I’m saying that
We
aren’t going to be the first place they look. They don’t even know about us.”

“In Minneapolis they don’t, but here in Savannah they do! And what do you mean by
if
they think someone killed him? Isn’t it obvious he was killed?”

“Oh man, I forgot one,” he said, closing the kitchen window.

“Adrian, what happened?” I had been assuming all along that John Spade had been shot.