Twenty-six

Few things could be more embarrassing than taking the Walk of Shame dressed like the St. Pauli Girl. So Jonah lends me a T-shirt and some workout shorts with a drawstring that allows me to cinch them around my waist.

I almost don’t remember the moment when, half asleep, I let Jonah carry me into his bedroom. But this morning I woke up next to him in an enormous, king-sized bed, and since then he’s been considerate. Almost courtly. The total opposite of last night.

As Jonah scrambles some eggs for us, I walk around, taking a look at his place in the daylight. His bedroom and bathroom are the only fully enclosed spaces, occupying a bricked-in area at the center of the enormous open space that forms the rest of his apartment. Stainless steel shines in the kitchen, yet the dining table nearby seems to be made of reclaimed woods, rustic and yet somehow perfect here. I circle around to see low bookshelves beneath the wide windows that look out on Lake Austin and the rest of the city—a space defined as the living room by low leather sofas, a Turkish carpet, and the ottoman I remember. Turns out it’s dark red. At the far end of his apartment—the part where I’ve nearly circled back to the kitchen—is a home office with books stacked around his computer, and a seismograph sitting on a small end table. All the lines move slowly and easily—no tremors today. I step around a treadmill to reappear in the kitchen, where Jonah is spooning our finished breakfast onto our plates.

He’s wearing nothing but boxer briefs and a white tee so tight and thin that he might as well be shirtless. Even after weeks of screwing around, this man’s body takes my breath away.

Jonah gives me a sidelong look. “Feeling okay?”

“Yeah, sure.” I take a sip of the OJ he’s poured into a sleek glass tumbler. “I only had one glass of wine last night.”

“That’s not what I meant.” His hand finds mine, and I watch him examine my wrists, looking for burns from the leather he strapped around them last night. But there’s only one small bruise, no larger than a fingertip.

I meet his eyes evenly. “When you go too far for me, I’ll tell you.” After a moment, he nods.

I only wish I knew just how far “too far” would be.

When we sit at the table, I have a good view of my etching, which hangs on the brick inner wall. Jonah catches me looking at it and smiles. “Is that the right place for it?”

This is your apartment, I want to say, hang it wherever you want—but the truth is, as an artist, I kind of do care about where my work ends up. “That spot is perfect, actually. You get enough light to see it clearly, without so much sunshine that the inks could fade.” It’s in a place of pride, too, which is always an enormous compliment.

Jonah uses his fork to push his eggs around his plate. “I’d like to ask you a question. Feel free not to answer.”

“Um, okay.”

“What else did you read?” He can’t meet my eyes. “From the stuff Kip gave you.”

“I learned you ran track. That your house is supposed to be haunted. And—and I learned that your family’s having a tough time.” That seems like the most tactful way to put it. He’ll have to realize how much I know; the guy can’t be blind to the way the press seizes on his family’s troubles.

Jonah finally looks up at me. Once again, I see a sliver of that deep-buried vulnerability. “What the media reports—that’s not the whole story.”

“I never figured it was.” I rest my hand on Jonah’s forearm. “You can tell me what you want, when you want. I’m not going to pry. I shouldn’t even have read the stuff Kip gave me.”

“No. If it’s in the papers, it’s fair game.”

“Well, I haven’t pried any further than that, and I won’t.”

He nods, but I can tell he doesn’t entirely believe me. At first I’m offended—but then I wonder whether anyone has ever respected Jonah’s privacy. He can’t believe anyone would willingly give him space and solitude, because he was denied it before. I remember the news stories about a mad mother—my own theories about his anger with her—and feel a pang deep inside as I realize how long Jonah’s been building these walls around his heart.

Can those walls ever be torn down?

Not by anyone hiding behind walls of her own.

We eat breakfast in silence, lovers who have told each other everything and nothing.

Jonah drives me back home, kisses me gently before I get out of the car. We’re all right—at least, as close to it as we ever were.

Time to figure out what all this means later. Right now, I need rest.

So I nap for a while longer, take a long, hot shower, and change into jeans and a sweater. A party as epic as Arturo and Shay’s would need a volunteer cleanup crew the next morning even if Shay could help. Since she can’t, the earlier I get over there, the better. Tidying up will take my mind off the tangle of emotions between Jonah and me.

When I pull up in front of the town house, Carmen’s car is already parked out front. I expect to get teased about sleeping in—and then maybe about who I slept in with. So I brace myself to face the inquisition.

I’m not prepared for what I find instead.

Arturo opens the door without even looking at me. “What business is it of yours?”

“If you get evicted, who else are you going to move in with?” Carmen’s voice is shrill and sharp—unlike her. “That makes it my business!”

“We’re not going to get evicted!” Arturo’s face is flushed. This argument has been going on for a while.

“You spent almost a hundred dollars on beer,” Carmen says as she stomps through the living room, grabbing cans and tossing them in a trash bag she has clenched in one fist. “With a baby on the way! That’s irresponsible!”

It’s a measure of how close I am to Carmen and Arturo that they think nothing of letting me in while they’re having a bitter argument. Doesn’t make it any less awkward for me. “I’m going to check on Shay,” I say, before hurrying up the stairs. The sounds of their squabbling follow me the whole way.

I find Shay propped up in bed, holding the new crochet needles and soft white yarn I gave her at her bedside baby shower a couple days after I returned from Scotland. But she’s not working with the yarn, just sitting there teary-eyed. She tries to smile when she sees me, but it doesn’t really work. “They’ve been going on like this for at least half an hour.” She wipes at her cheeks with the back of her hand. “I can’t stand it.”

“Hey, hey. Every brother and sister fight sometimes.” This is true, but I feel like a liar saying it. Neither Carmen nor Arturo is the type to shout, especially not at each other.

Shay sniffles. “It was like Carmen was mad at me for getting pregnant to begin with, and then as soon as she got over that, she turned on Arturo. We saved up for one last party before the baby! Everything besides the beer, other people brought! We weren’t being stupid—were we?”

I sit on the bed beside her. Despite the fact that she’s a married woman on the verge of motherhood, she looks so much younger than me right now. More like a girl than an adult. “You’ve got all the furniture for the nursery. You’ve started a savings account for college, and this kid is still a fetus!”

“But there’s day care to pay for too—because I’ve got to finish my degree, or else I’ll just be a lead weight around Arturo’s neck—” By now Shay is breaking down completely.

“It’s going to be fine,” I promise her. “Okay? You guys aren’t going to get derailed by one last party.”

“Did war break out downstairs?” Surprised by the voice behind me, I turn around to see Geordie standing in the doorway, shirtless but still clad in his kilt. He winces at the light coming in through Shay’s bedroom window. “Also, is it November first or have I been out for longer?”

“You passed out around two A.M.,” Shay says between sniffles. “Arturo put you on the nursery floor.”

“Kind of him.” Geordie slumps against the doorjamb. His complexion has taken on a ghastly shade of green. “I’m afraid I may be on the verge of getting sick in your toilet.”

Shay waves her hand toward the bathroom. “Go ahead,” she says miserably. “I’ve vomited in it often enough the past couple months. Someone else ought to get a turn.”

As Geordie stumbles into their bathroom, I hear Carmen yell, “Yes, you do have to justify this! You’re going to be a father, Arturo! You have to justify everything you do that isn’t about taking care of that baby!”

I squeeze Shay’s hand. “I came here to help clean up. But what if I got Carmen out of the house instead?”

“Oh, God bless you.” Shay leans back on her pillows, gone limp with relief.

So I hurry downstairs, grab Carmen’s purse, then point to her. “You. Me. Brunch. Now.”

Carmen and Arturo freeze, midargument. It would be funny if I hadn’t seen Shay crying. Finally Carmen manages to say, “How can you think about brunch at a time like this?”

“On a weekend morning? It’s pretty easy. Come on.”

She doesn’t say a word as we leave, or on the drive to Magnolia Café. But while we wait in line outside, Carmen mutters, “You could have just told me to cool it.”

“Would it have worked?”

Carmen doesn’t answer. She just hugs herself more tightly against the chilly breeze.

“What were you freaking out about?”

“The way they spend money—”

“They threw one party, Carmen. Otherwise they’ve been more careful with their money than you or I have ever been.” Arturo is one of the genius-freaks who started an IRA at eighteen. “That’s not what’s actually bothering you.”

“How would you know? You can’t read my mind. You don’t have to ask yourself what it would be like if you had to help support your brother and his wife and a baby—”

“That’s not going to happen!” Even if I didn’t have so much faith in Shay and Arturo, the Ortiz family is reasonably well off. Carmen and Arturo’s parents aren’t rich, but they’re in a position to help out if the new baby needs anything.

Carmen hasn’t even heard me. “—you don’t have to ask yourself if you’re going to get derailed, because you don’t have any responsibilities like that. You can just keep working on your thesis, and going to the studio. You’re going to make it no matter what. It’s not like that for me.”

“Of course you’re going to make it. You’re a math genius.”

“No, I’m not.” Her voice breaks. “I was really smart on the high school level. And the undergrad level. But now? At this point? I’m falling behind—I can tell I’m falling behind, and my advisor says I have to buckle down or—”

Carmen starts to cry. A few people in the brunch line are staring. Well, let them stare. I hug her tightly. “You’re not scared for Arturo. You’re scared for yourself.”

“One of us has to make it,” she whispers as she hugs me back. “I don’t think it’s going to be me.”

Her behavior over the past several months finally makes sense. All this time, Carmen’s been dealing with this incredible anxiety by pushing her fears onto her brother. First she resented Shay for weighing Arturo down with responsibility so young; this morning, she turned on Arturo. But really she’s scared to death that she’ll fall and no one will be there to catch her.

“Listen to me, okay? You’re going to get through this. Yeah, graduate work is difficult. It’s supposed to be! But you were smart enough to get there, and you’re smart enough to make it through.”

Carmen shook her head against my shoulder. “I don’t know.”

“Sometimes life is like a video game. When things get harder, and the obstacles get tougher, it just means you leveled up.”

She laughs brokenly. “Except I suck at video games.”

“I know.” Carmen never even figured out how to steer her car in Grand Theft Auto. “But you don’t suck at math. Come on. Deep breaths.”

She keeps crying it out for a while, though, and is still teary when we finally get seated. Still, one of the great truths of life is that any situation can be improved with coffee. By her second cup, she’s perked up a little—and when her waffles arrive, she’s calm again, enough to notice my relatively empty plate. “Hey, why didn’t you order anything?”

“I got tea and toast.”

Carmen gives me a look, no doubt remembering my ability to slaughter a stack of pancakes.

“Well,” I admit, “Jonah might have made me breakfast this morning.”

“Oh, yeah? He stayed over?”

“I stayed over.”

Carmen’s eyes are still red from crying, but I can tell she’s glad to have something else to think about for a while. “You’ve been so quiet about this guy. When you first met Geordie, you told me everything.”

I’ll never be able to explain why I didn’t tell her about Jonah at first, or why so much of our relationship will remain secret. But if he’s going to be a bigger part of my life, I have to open up about him a little more. “Jonah’s a very private person,” I say. “I respect that.”

“Fine. Be mysterious. It doesn’t matter, because obviously this relationship is the definition of a whirlwind romance. And you’re totally into him. I mean, you went to Scotland with him! How much was that ticket at the last minute?”

She isn’t asking for real—just trying to get me to prove I’m head over heels for Jonah. Still, this might be the moment to be totally candid about the Scotland trip. “He got me the ticket.”

Her eyes go wide. “Jonah bought you a ticket to Scotland? Oh, my God, Vivienne. That’s huge!”

“Not really. His dad actually was one of the cofounders of Oceanic. So he’s got an in with the airline.”

This doesn’t have the effect I expected. Carmen frowns. “You said Oceanic?”

“Uh, yeah. Why?” Was there a crash today or something?

Instead Carmen says, “So . . . Jonah’s part of that screwed-up family in the tabloids.”

I gape at her. “How do you know that?”

“If his dad founded Oceanic, and his name is Jonah Marks, that means his dad was Alexander Marks, right?”

“Since when have you heard of any of these people?”

Carmen makes a face. “The usual! TMZ, sometimes the news, supermarket tabloids—I mean, come on, you have to read those once in a while, right? What else can you do while you’re waiting in line?”

“I check my phone and talk myself out of buying candy bars, like a normal person!” Great. Everyone in the whole world pays more attention to gossip than I do. So much for keeping Jonah’s secrets. Calming myself as best I can, I say, “I think Jonah tries to keep his distance from all that.”

“He didn’t even say anything about his mom this morning?” Carmen winces. “I bet he hadn’t heard yet.”

“Hadn’t heard what?”

Even the most serious news sources print sensational headlines for this story. There’s no way to describe it that isn’t lurid.

CHICAGO “MAD HEIRESS” ARRESTED FOR ASSAULT ON STEPSON

Everything from the Wall Street Journal to OhNoTheyDidn’t has differing accounts of what happened. A few blurry camera-phone videos have been posted to YouTube, but none of them reveal much beyond distant movement in the dark, and the sound of a woman shouting. As near as I can piece together, Jonah’s mother left Redgrave House—already unusual, for her—and went to The Orchid, a downtown club and restaurant so chic even I’ve heard of it. The Orchid’s owner turns out to be Maddox Hale, Jonah’s younger stepbrother. When Jonah’s mom accosted Maddox, an argument ensued, and apparently she hurt him—though nobody can agree whether she knifed Maddox through the hand, only slapped him, or something in between. I don’t get a good look at Jonah’s mother at any point on the videos, but I do hear a man saying, “She doesn’t know what she’s doing. It’s all right. I don’t want to press charges.”

So Maddox would have let it go, whatever it was she did. The police feel differently.

All I know for sure is that Jonah must feel so torn up inside. And I understand instinctively that he will never, ever talk about it with a single soul—not Rosalind, not me, not anybody.

Maybe I should call him or run back by his apartment. Not to make him open up if he doesn’t want to, just to be there with him.

Yet that feels like . . . too much. Like acknowledging his pain would be too intimate. How can we be this close and yet this distant? I want to bridge the gulf between us, but maybe that’s impossible.

The entire day, I wait for him to call. I don’t expect Jonah to vent about his family’s sorrows, but he might turn to me for companionship. For understanding.

He doesn’t phone that day. Or the next. No e-mail either.

Whatever hell Jonah is going through, he seems determined to go through it alone.