Iain

 

On the way to the hospital, my phone rang. It was my client, Roger, calling to check up on my progress.

I didn’t like to give out too many details while in the middle of a case. I learned the hard way that the more a client knew about how things were going, the more likely they were to spoil it - fishy behavior from them could throw their spouses right off, fucking up their habits, making it impossible for me to land them.

“Everything’s going fine. I promise I’ll let you know as soon as I have what you hired me for.”

“They said you were the best. It’s been three days. Isn’t that enough for you to get everything?”

This guy was out of control. I sighed, turning it into a cough halfway through so he wouldn’t hear my frustration.

“Three days isn’t very long in a case like this, Mr. Deloid. It can take up to a month, especially if she limits her activities to a certain day or two of the week.”

“But she’s out all the time. She’s out right now for fuck’s sake. Where are you?”

Jesus, this guy was too much. I ground my teeth, forcing myself to regulate my breathing.

“Mr. Deloid, I promise that I’ll let you know as soon as I have what you hired me for.” I paused, waiting for him to interject, but he didn’t. “I always deliver on that promise. Always.”

He hung up and I shook my head, pocketing my phone.

It wasn’t uncommon for spouses to get this way. It was just something that came along with the territory, with the job. And, if I thought he was being ridiculous now, it was only a prelude for what was to come. I thought of my earlier statement to Michele: Seeing it makes it real. There was no question that seeing photos of his wife being fucked by another man, while what he suspected all along, would completely shatter his world. I was prepared for that.

My conversation with Michele at the store opened up my eyes to something I’d been teetering on but refusing to fully realize: I was doing something that I had no passion for. I had been, for the last four years, gliding through case after case, taking pictures of terrible people doing terrible things. I was, in some ways, a force of destruction; I ruined families, homes, marriages. I had never before thought of it in that way until now.

I’d taken photos of people in the most intimate situations possible, only shaking my head with disgust. How much I’d judged them, these men and women who crawled into bed with someone else, throwing away everything they had at home. How much I’d hated and scorned cheaters, knowing that I would have given anything at one time to save my own relationship, to turn back time and be a better man for my fiancée. She’d thrown us away, but at least I had the balls to admit that some of it was my fault, too. I hadn’t been there for her.

I’d judged these people, somehow thinking I was better than them, that I was in the better place. But really, I was just a dick with a camera, shattering lives.

It paid the bills, but was that what I wanted for the rest of my life? Michele didn’t seem to dwell on the fact that I could have just as easily turned her over to Brandon, that I could have completely altered the course of her life. I could have handed her to the very man she was running from with good cause. All because he waved money in my face and fed me a sob story. How many others have been the same? How many other women have I busted cheating on abusive husbands?

Had I known it was a possibility? Sure. In an arbitrary way, anything was a possibility. But what would I have done if I had known it to be fact?

Would I have taken the case? Would I have taken the photos, only to knowingly hand them to an abuser?

My mind recoiled in horror. Of course I wouldn’t have. But taking these cases, wasn’t that taking a risk that I was doing just that?

Now that I’d thought that, I couldn’t unthink it. It was driving me fucking crazy - the thought that I could have been the reason someone got hurt. It made me feel physically sick, and I stopped walking, right in the middle of the sidewalk, clutching at my stomach like a child.

Someone bumped into me, cursing, but I didn’t react. It was as if the world had been turned way down, a dial set on slow-motion. It was as if the last four years of my life had been something out of a film, something I had only been vaguely a part of. Had I really been doing this shit for four fucking years? Was this who I was, for real? Spying on people?

Ruining lives?

It wasn’t what I had wanted for myself. The day I got back from my deployment, I was optimistic, hopeful. I was ready to start again with Emily. But when I came home and she wasn’t there, and all I had to remember her by was a picture and a half-assed Dear John letter, it was like someone pushed the pause button on my life for a while.

Someone else bumped into me, and I began to walk again, numbly, to the subway station.

What could I do? I couldn’t just quit my job - I wouldn’t be able to survive more than a few months on my savings in this damned expensive city, and now I had Michele to think about. I wanted to be there for her – badly—and being unemployed and broke didn’t seem like the best way to do that.

Erik’s question popped into my head again, persistent and loud. You like her, then?

He’d said that it was simple. He blew off every complicated aspect of our relationship like it was just small print, not to be read, just skimmed over. But I wasn’t sure it was simple at all. Something inside me, something urgent and primal, told me that Brandon hadn’t gone away for good. That he was only biding his time.

And then there was the sheer, simple fact that Michele was still technically married to him. She didn’t talk about Brandon much - not that I blamed her - but I knew that she would have to deal with him sooner or later. What did that mean for me?

Either way, I wanted to be there for her in that way too. Even if it meant holding her hand all the way up to the judge to sign the papers. Even if it meant beating Brandon’s ass the second he looked at her funny.

He hadn’t deserved her.

I tried to imagine Michele young, freshly graduated from college, meeting a much older man, getting swept off her feet. She had been poised to fly, but he had only chained her down. Clipped her wings.

The first time I saw her photo, I remember thinking that she was beautiful, and that she looked like an animal in a cage. I’d tried to push the thought away, but it had persisted.

Something had told me that there was something weird with Brandon handing me that case, and I hadn’t trusted those instincts at first.

Now I knew better.

 

xxx

 

There was nobody in my mother’s room when I arrived. The purple curtain with smiley faces was drawn halfway around her bed, a false attempt at cheer in such an unhappy place. She was asleep, so I took a chair close by the freezing window, relaxing against the stiff back.

I studied her face, something I hadn’t allowed myself to do for very long the last time I was here. My eyes danced over her nose, her brow, her lips, all familiar to me, yet, at the same time, oddly foreign. Half a decade was a long time to go without speaking to someone. I let myself wonder, guilt-free, what her life had been like during all that time.

According to Dad, she kept the brownstone I grew up in and quit her job at the temp agency. She now worked part-time at a local grocery store in the floral department, something my dad said she enjoyed. I couldn’t imagine my mom handling flowers for a living.

I thought of my GI Joes. Did she even remember that? My memory felt oddly blank; I couldn’t remember what color her bathrobe was, or which Hot Wheels I had used as getaway cars. But I remembered the mildly bewildered look on my mother’s face. She hadn’t even thought twice about breaking my toy.

Was it worth a lifetime of grudges?

“Iain.”

She was awake. I cleared my throat, and she did her best to sit up, but she struggled. Reflexively, I stood, walking over to her and helping her, her body frail and shaking under my hands.

“Mom.” After ensuring that she was secure, I took a step back. “How are you?”

“I hurt like hell and they’re feeding me shit,” she said. It sounded an awful lot like something she would have said before, when she was still drinking. “But I can’t complain. The nurses are lovely.”

That wasn’t something she would have said before, though. “Any news?” I asked.

“You mean about my failing liver?”

“Well… yeah.”

She shook her head, her voice sad, defeated. “I drank too much. It’s too late for them to do anything.”

To hear her say that she drank too much… I wasn’t ready for it. I pulled my chair over, sitting down, riveted.

“When did you decide enough was enough?”

She met my eye, then looked down at her hands, studying them. Her palms were red like they’d been burned.

“After I blamed Emily’s miscarriage on you, I realized that I had become the worst possible version of myself. It took losing my only son to see that.” Her eyes were glistening, but I made no move to comfort her. I sat there, stoic, my hands on my knees. “I wish I could tell you that I had a reason I drank. I don’t. It was just something I did.”

“There had to have been something that drew you to it,” I said.

“Really, Iain… it was just something to do. I wasn’t drinking because of a bad marriage or a bad upbringing. At first it was wine at dinner. Then it turned into cracking a bottle open earlier and earlier… until I couldn’t function without any.” She swiped at her eyes, licking her dry lips. “I regret every day of my life that I spent drinking. If I could trade anything… anything at all, I would trade the memories I gave you for something good, something better.”

My throat swelled at that. I tore my eyes away from her, and my focus landed on the IV machine behind the bed, the beeping low and steady. I wasn’t ready to think about my mother being someone more than who she was when she raised me. Even though I knew she’d been sober for five years, it was something far removed, something I had only imagined. Seeing her sober was so different than I imagined it would be.

“I’m not expecting you to forgive me right now,” Mom said. “I’m not stupid. I can’t just take back all these years. I’m just hoping that one day, maybe, you will forgive me.”

I ran a hand through my hair, not sure what to say. I looked back at her, her face blank but her eyes brimming with tears. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to know that your time was ending, to know that you had to tie up all those loose ends you left hanging in life.

What if she hadn’t gotten sick? Would we have spent the next five years in silence, too? Or would our paths have crossed, naturally or not? Would we have reconciled?

“I liked Michele. That girl you brought.”

If this was her attempt at changing the subject, I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. A part of me wanted to keep Michele as far away from this part of my life as possible. But the other piece of me, the bigger piece, knew that it was no use trying. Michele had managed to crawl her way into the empty space in my heart, and I couldn’t bear shutting her out of my life. Even the parts that sucked.

“Yeah,” I said. It occurred to me that Mom had no idea just how isolated I’d been since Emily left me. “She’s… great.”

“You’ve only been together two weeks?”

“A little over, yeah,” I replied, remembering how Michele had jumped in to answer that question when I’d been at a loss for what to say.

There was a slight pause, only the beeping of the IV to be heard, and the shuffling of the hospital outside of the room. “I was surprised when she said that. I would have thought you’d been together a lot longer.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I don’t know. Just the way you looked at each other, I guess.” She blinked, her eyes losing focus as she did so, as if she were looking at something I couldn’t see. “Like you’d been through hell and back together. That’s how your dad and I were, before things got bad.”

Not wanting to compare Michele and I to a marriage that failed, I shrugged. “We barely know each other yet.”

She gave me a tiny smile. “It’s stupid, but I’ve always believed in fate. And if you meet someone you’re fated to be with, then you know that person, even if it’s only been two weeks.”

What she was saying resonated with me. The day on the street that I ran into Michele, it hadn’t been planned. She’d looked so wary, so uncertain. But something about her drew me right in.

Was that fate, or was that attraction?

Was there a difference?

“Maybe,” I said. “She wanted to come with me really badly that day. I… don’t know why.”

“Mediator?” she suggested. “Or, maybe, she knew somehow that you needed the support.”

It felt like so long ago, but it had only been three days. The night before, she’d fallen asleep in my arms, the feeling so natural that I had slept like a baby until morning.

“Do you ever hear from Emily?” she asked me.

I stiffened. “No.”

“Iain….” she picked at a loose thread on her blanket. “I’m sorry about what I said to you when Emily lost the baby. I was… skewed. Everything about my life was altered because of my drinking. I just… blamed it on you because I couldn’t rationalize it any other way. I’d always known it was my fault you joined the Army, that I pushed you there. I was proud of you, but I was also terrified that one day my only son would come home in a box. And I couldn’t come to terms with the fact that if you did, I would have been the one who put you there.”

I clenched my hands against my knees. I only stared at her, urging her to continue, but dreading what she’d say. The miscarriage was something I had packed away tightly in the back of my mind. I’d grieved over it, but it was still something I could barely talk about without going to an extremely dark place.

“I didn’t know what to do other than to take it out on you. So I blamed you, even though I was really blaming myself.”

Her drunk brain blamed the miscarriage on the Army. Well, in some ways, I did too. But she had no way of knowing how much I’d blamed myself for everything that had happened, and I wasn’t ready to go down that road with her. I only nodded.

“You don’t have to explain anymore,” I said, my voice tight.

“Okay.” She nodded, her eyes red. She grabbed a cup of water from a tray next to the bed and took a small sip. “I just… I didn’t want to… you know. Go. Without you knowing that.”

Overcome by something I couldn’t name, I laid my hand over hers - it felt impossibly small beneath mine. For the first time in five years, I felt something lighten within me, like an exhale from a breath I hadn’t been aware I’d been holding.

My mother’s eyes closed, an expression like peace on her face, and even after she’d fallen asleep, I didn’t let her go.