Becky
Winter turns to spring and life goes on. It’s odd, because I was so obsessed with Chance that I assumed life would just end if we were ever parted. Life became that motel room, life became touching each other, life became holding each other close. Life became waiting for him to look into my eyes, just once, or to make love to me instead of fuck me, or to whisper my name, or to put his hand on my belly and tell me he can’t wait to meet our child. Life became the expectations of our shared future. Life became his lips, his scars, his blue-flecked eyes. And now life just goes on, on and on, as though time hates me and wants to punish me. Life doesn’t stop. It’s too cruel for that. It never stops.
I move back into the apartment with Dad and to say things are awkward would be like saying that balancing on a tightrope is difficult. I find myself resenting him like I never have before. And this resentment is compounded by the guilt I feel about it, guilt which I should not feel, guilt which I have no business feeling. He tried to sell me, he’s partly the reason I was kidnapped, and yet I still can’t distance myself from him completely. I still find myself thinking: But he’s my dad. It makes me sick. It annoys the hell out of me. So I bunker myself in my room, laying down newspapers and setting up my easel and painting. The police asked few questions when I returned, even when I told them Chance was innocent, he never hurt me. They didn’t care. All they cared about was a news article and a flashy headline: Aspiring Artist Found Safe.
“You shouldn’t say that he was nice to you,” Dad says to me one day, when we happen to both be in the living room. I was here first, watching a reality show, and he barged in and sat down and for several minutes we just sit here, awkwardly, until he comes out with this, in a gruff, grizzly voice. A drunk man’s voice. “It makes people think the wrong thing,” he goes on. “It makes people think that you went with him willingly and that you—that you did things with him or somethin’. It makes people get the wrong idea.”
“I don’t care what it makes people,” I say. “I don’t give a shit about what people think.”
“Watch your language!” Dad snaps. “Look, I know you might still be mad at me for arranging yours and Julian’s marriage, but you need to understand that Julian would’ve been a very good match for you. He was rich, he had connections, he was—”
“A perverted old man who gave me to a group of men to be gang-raped.”
“Now, Becky, how was I supposed to know—”
“You weren’t supposed to sell me in the first place!” I scream at him, waving my arms, feeling like a madwoman in a topsy-turvy world. “Let’s not pretend that you tried to sell me to an old man out of any concern about me, Dad. You tried to sell me because you’re weak and couldn’t walk away from the blackjack table!”
At some point during my speech, I’ve climbed to my feet. Now, I’m standing over him, looking down into his red-cheeked face, his eyes bloodshot, his skin sagging. And even now, in the midst of my anger, I can see the good man in there. I see the man who used to sit me on his knee and read me stories about foxes and rabbits and I see the man who several times during my childhood would come home and cry in the bathroom when he thought nobody could hear him, cry about what his work made him do. I see the man who bought me my first painting set when I came home from school one day with my fingertips covered in blue.
Turning away, I head toward my bedroom. “As soon as I save enough money,” I say, “I’m getting my own place. I can’t live here anymore, not when you won’t even admit what you did was wrong.”
“It was wrong,” he whispers.
I pause at my door, half-turn back to him. “What did you say?”
“It was wrong,” he repeats.
I turn all the way. Tears are sliding down his cheeks, I see, his jowly, fleshy cheeks. My heart breaks a little, even more than it’s already broken from Chance’s long absence. “Of course it was wrong,” he goes on. “All of it’s wrong. The whole damned thing is wrong. I’m—I was a fuckin’ animal selling you to that man, if you want the truth. And I was a fuckin’ asshole for getting into the debt to begin with. And I was a fuckin’ asshole for getting into a situation where men like Julian and Giovanni have power over me. But it’s too late now…” His eyes begin to close and I realize he’s drunk, just drunk, and he may not remember this admission in the morning. “It’s too late…”
His chin rests on his chest and he begins to snore.
I go into my bedroom—paintings from when I was a kid and teenager on one wall, a trophy from a Spelling Bee resting on a cabinet, the bookshelf with old American literature and Harry Potter books resting on it, dusty now from long disuse—and walk to my easel. Sitting on the stool, I feel my ass hurting more than usual. I’ve been pregnant three months and I’ve managed to hide it from Dad and Mom. Mom is easy, since we ever only speak on the phone, but with Dad I’ve had to make sure to wear baggy clothes, even going to the store to buy a load of loose T-shirts with the excuse that I need them for painting. But just how long can I go on like this, pretending the baby doesn’t exist? Just how long can I keep up the charade? Pretty soon my bump is going to grow bigger and bigger until it is so big there will be nothing I can do to hide it. Pretty soon Dad is going to find out. And then what? Hopefully I’ll have my own apartment by then. But that means getting a new job, which I’ll have to do quickly if I don’t want the interviewer to see me as a baby bomb waiting to go off. That’s a depressing thought, but one I have to think about.
I paint for around an hour. Lately, almost subconsciously, I’ve been painting Chance over and over, only it’s not Chance, not exactly. It’s more like how I see Chance when I close my eyes, depending on my mood. So one day I’ll paint a giant, dark-eyed, blue-furred wolf standing atop a knife-shaped mountain, howling into a moon so full that it blots out the stars. Another day I’ll paint a barbarian, knuckle-dusters made of bone gripped in his hands, growling at me, scarred chest bare. Another day I’ll paint a gentleman in a suit looking lovingly into my eyes. I ache for him as I paint, my pussy burning, my chest tight with longing. Going from almost two months of constant contact, touching, rubbing, writhing, explosive orgasms triggering repeatedly inside of me, to sitting here imagining what it would be like to be with him again is agony. When I’m done painting, I’ll often sit stone-still and imagine that Chance is behind me, that any moment now he’ll lean down and place his hands on my shoulder, whispering in my ear, “I love you,” or, “I’ll always be here for you.” And even if I know he would never say anything like that, it doesn’t change how warm it makes me feel.
I love him, I love him, I love him.
I try to tell myself otherwise. Lying awake at night, alone, lonely, wishing that he was beside me, I try and lie to myself, reasoning that I’m only attached to him because he kept me so close to him, or because he saved me from those wicked men, or because he was so sexy, so wild. But I know that, though all of that is a part of it, it’s more than that, too. It’s much more than that. I’ve never believed in souls, but now I find myself thinking if maybe there’s something in it after all, if Chance and I have a connection that goes beyond reason. Then I laugh at myself, because that sounds like mumbo jumbo. Really, it just comes down to one simple fact: when I awake alone at night, I would give anything for him to be beside me.
I’m going over all this, paintbrush hovering near the paper, when my cell starts to ring. It’s the new Taylor Swift song I assigned to Mom, so I know who it is before I answer. Which is good, otherwise her chirpy voice might surprise me as it squeaks through the speakers.
“Hey, honey!” Mom is strange, the only woman I’ve met who can sound chirpy and worried at the same time. When she’s concerned or worried—like she sounds now—I often think of a chipmunk returning from a run to find that all her nuts have been stolen. “Just thought I’d check in on you.”
“You’ve been doing that a lot lately,” I say.
“I’m worried!”
I go to the bed and lie down, having to maneuver more than before to make up for my belly. Three months, and already I have to account for it. How the hell am I going to move at eight months? Staring up at the ceiling, which is still patchy with colors from where I tried to do my own version of the Sistine Chapel as a kid, I wait for Mom to come out with it.
“So, how’s your father doing?”
She’s been calling more and more this past month, always with that same question, as though I’m not her daughter but a spy employed for the sole reason of checking up on Dad.
“Mom,” I say. “I know you still care about him, but—”
“Now hang on a second, missy!” she breaks in. “I don’t think that’s any of your business.”
“Mom.” I sigh. “What’s gotten into you lately? First, you were calling to check in on me after Chance brought me back—no, I won’t call it a kidnapping—and now you’re calling at least three times a day to—to what? I know. To keep tabs on Dad.”
She lets out her chipmunk sigh. I have a clear image in my head of a chipmunk with puffed-up cheeks letting them deflate. “I recently found our old photo album. You know I’m working as a teacher’s aide now, right? Well, I was looking through the photos because the kids wanted to a see a picture of you, and then I came across the one of me and Michael before you were born, when he had that dreadful haircut, and when he was happy, and hopeful, and not deep in the Family life. I remember him telling me that we’d open a little tearoom somewhere in Maine or Texas or—you know, somewhere that isn’t New York.”
I can’t help but laugh. “Dad, opening a tearoom?”
“I know. It’s silly. But I was looking over the pictures of us, so young and happy, and then over the pictures of the three of us, a perfect family. I think we could’ve been a perfect family. But then with his drinking and his gambling and—and, oh, Rebecca, I just wish I didn’t let him push me away! I know it makes no sense. Logically, logically, yes, it makes no sense. I understand that. I’m an educated woman, I’ve been to college, I was proposed to by a doctor once upon a time, and yet I felt drawn to him like a moth to a flame. Do you know, since your father, I’ve only even been with one other man and even then I’d had too much wine—”
“Woah! That’s enough information, Mom!”
“I’m sorry. I know. It’s just…Do you think I should call your dad? I have his number, for emergencies, but maybe I could call him and we could talk and see where it goes?”
“I’m not going to play matchmaker for the two of you,” I say. “It makes me cringe so hard I might be sick.”
“Oh, Rebecca, that isn’t very nice, is it?” I roll my eyes, and she snaps, “I heard that. You just rolled your eyes.”
We giggle together for a few moments, and then I start thinking about me and Chance, which I’m always doing even if it’s in the background. Chance is never far from my mind. I start thinking about Chance and how I’ve let him push me away, how, since he left me alone at Nate’s, I’ve made no effort to find him. He thought he wasn’t good enough for me and by retreating to my regular life, with my regular problems, I’ve agreed with him. Just like Mom did all those years ago, I’ve let him drift away from me. Could I become Mom? Could a decade go by with me raising our child alone with me dreaming of Chance every single day, with me wishing I had done everything differently?
“If you want to call Dad,” I say, “I think you should call him. I think it’s a great idea.”
“Oh, I knew it was!” Mom screeches, making me hold the phone a couple of inches away from my ear. “I will, I definitely will. I think it will be awkward, but, but…Well, people are still the same, deep, deep down, aren’t they? Good people are good people and bad people are bad people. And your father has always been a good person, where it matters.”
“Sure,” I say. “Sure, Mom.”
We say our goodbyes and I return to the easel, to Chance, this time covered in blood brandishing his gun, shooting down the men who tried to rape me.
Touching the still-wet paint, I whisper, “I want to be with you, baby. I want to be with you again.”