Chapter Thirty

Five months after I left Jerry lying cold and alone in his house in Milwaukee, I waited on a park bench as the sun shone brightly overhead. There was no way to get around it. The first couple of weeks after I returned from the Midwest had been awful. My heart had been torn into a million pieces by what had transpired with Jerry and I was certain that my career would go down in flames alongside the Fresh Face Co-Op.

“You got real lucky with this one,” Nicholas Green told me.

I begged to differ. Everything about my ill-fated consultation with the Fresh Face Co-Op had been anything but lucky. The only strokes of luck had been things that had nothing to do with the actual job.

“To be honest, I didn’t know how anyone would be able to turn this one around when we first got the job,” said Mr. Green. “I looked over the files myself and it seemed like a fool’s errand.”

Was he admitting that he sent me out to die in battle for him? I looked at his face. It was so straightforward and slack that I didn’t see an ounce of guilt or shame coming from him. Then again, that was the way things could be in the consulting business and there was no need to pretend that he hadn’t tried to sabotage me anymore. He knew that I knew.

“However,” Mr. Green continued. “That fire is just what the doctor ordered.”

I looked up. Why did he sound so cheerful? Yes, the fire was not nearly as bad as it could have been considering there had been no serious injuries much less fatalities. Many of the workers who went on strike had been claiming injuries last I heard, but none of them had more than a few bruises from falling after trying to run faster than they actually could from the burning building. However, this hardly warranted the glee in Mr. Green’s voice.

“I’ll give it to you straight, Ron,” he said. “It was the only possible way that place could have made any money. If it didn’t occur so seemingly naturally and in front of plenty of witnesses, the authorities would have reason to suspect that you cultivated the disaster for yourself.”

Clearly, I hadn’t. The fire had started when someone had chucked a cigarette into a waste bin full of paper without stubbing it out. The specialists had deemed the fire an accident.

Still, the way Nicholas Green was speaking to me paired with how he tapped the temple of his head with his index finger indicated that he wasn’t so sure this wasn’t the product of my machinations. What was even more disgusting, however, was that it appeared as if he had admired the idea of doing such a thing, as if I had heroically outfoxed my less than desirable circumstances.

I recalled Elijah’s word: casino. I was deep in the pit of corruption and until that point, I hadn’t even realized how far I’d been submerged.

“But anyway,” said Nicholas Green. “It’s all for the best because the insurance company reimbursed the Fresh Face Co-Op for speculative funding.”

“Speculative funding?” I asked. “How could they do that? They’d been going in the red every month for the past five years.”

“As if you don’t know,” Nicholas Green scoffed at me with a smug grin.

Oh yeah, that’s right, I thought. He thinks I masterminded this all myself.

Nicholas Green playacted with goofy, exaggerated, gestures and the silly voice of a soft-spoken school teacher as if he were going through the motions of explaining something to me that I already knew.

“Turns out the one thing the Fresh Face Co-Op had going for it was a pretty ironclad insurance plan in the event of a disaster there, buddy,” said Mr. Green. “When the place burned to the ground, they made enough money to shoot them in the black even if you include the past five years!”

My eyes popped out of my head. That had to be a fortune! To be honest, I was a little embarrassed that I didn’t even realize that much about the insurance policies taken out on the Fresh Face Co-Op; I had merely glanced at those. I had been much more preoccupied with trying to turn the place around without it being razed to the ground.

Sitting on that park bench months later, I realized that the me who went into this whole mess would have considered what happened the best of all possible endings. The place I hated so much had been burned to the ground and it ended up being a positive mark on my work record.

The only problem was that it wasn’t the best of all possible endings. It wasn’t at all. My heart had sustained damage.

A bus pulled over at the nearest bus stop to where I sat. Out of it came the person I had been waiting for.

From a distance, I couldn’t tell if Elijah looked young or old on that day. He had been a strange mixture of both lately. Sara had that effect on him. Ever since he started mentoring her in investigative journalism, he had rediscovered his love of getting to the truth of things while still maintaining a belief in the fundamental goodness of people. He had just returned from a month-long stint exploring the unseen world of Eastern European crime syndicates. He claimed that what he had uncovered was big and I believed him.

He was also discovering, I think, his love of Sara. I could tell when he had been speaking to her. There was something lighter about the way he moved his limbs. I was also tipped off by the way he hardly spoke of her except for a few key phrases he liked to say whenever I asked about her.

“Very smart girl,” he liked to say of her. “She’s sharp as a tack. She’s going to be deadly in the profession.”

It wasn’t anything I could confront him about though. In all the years I had known Elijah, there hadn’t been any topic too taboo to speak of until that time. But this was uncharted territory for the poor man. Even though Sara was only a few years younger than he was, Elijah considered the relationship between a mentor and a mentee sacred. I knew there were boundaries he would never let himself cross no matter how his heart cried out for them; Sara’s love was one of those boundaries.

Despite this, the newfound heaviness in Elijah’s heart did not outweigh what had been lifted from his soul and I was glad to see him on that day. He had been much more pleasant to be around ever since he started getting his life together and even old friends from school were asking about him more and more.

On that day, his skin had remained pale and sallow since he hadn’t had the time to regain his tan after his excursion in the deep, dark, underbelly of Eastern Europe, but something about his visage glowed none the less.

“God, you’re tanned,” he said.

“You’ll be soon, too, buddy,” I said. “It happens by virtue of living here.”

It was one of those stereotypical California days that people think of because they’ve only seen it depicted in the movies. The sun shone down, making all the exceptionally beautiful people look even more beautiful than they would have been under any professional lighting.

“Let’s go,” Elijah said.

His big, brown eyes disappeared into half-moons as he smiled. It was weird to see him like that: smiling. He had only recently started doing it and it would take some time for me to get used to it.

After I had quit my job at Green and Associates, I moved to an apartment on a hill in a less fashionable neighborhood. Two things had rubbed off on me in Milwaukee and two things alone: Jerry and having a good deal of space. I was kind of over the whole “stylish apartment” thing, anyway. In the end, I ended up paying much less every month for much more space. This was a good thing since it would be a while before I would see an income like the one I had at Green and Associates.

“Any new gigs I should know about?” Elijah asked.

That was a habit he had picked up from Sara: calling jobs “gigs” like we were rock musicians or something.

“A handful,” I said. “Mostly small things like food trucks hoping to expand and possibly get brick and mortar locations. I sent some of my new hires to take care of those, but I check in, in person, every few days.”

“Because you don’t want to throw them to the wolves like they did at Green and Associates?” Elijah asked.

I nodded.

“I know I can’t keep it up forever,” I said. “Not if my firm gets as successful as I want it to be, at least. But hopefully, the more reliable hires will rise to the top by the time there’s too much for one person to oversee and they’ll know what to do.”

“Do you trust them to do that?” Elijah asked.

I sighed at this. It had been a question I had been asking myself ever since the independent consultation firm I opened after leaving Green and Associates really got off the ground. Clearly, people like Nicholas Green had been trusted, indicating that he had pulled the wool over someone’s eyes. (It didn’t hurt that he was related to one of the partners in the firm, either).

I would have liked to think I would be able to see through someone like that if they were my subordinate, but you never really know what you’re capable of until you’re in that exact position.

“I guess I’m just going to have to hope for the best but prepare for the worst,” I said.

I didn’t even need to look at Elijah to know he was cringing at that. The year before, he would have laid into me for using such a goofy, optimistic, cliché, but he had softened a bit and now I only received his tacit disapproval from time to time.

“Anyway,” I said. “It’s the best I or anyone can do.”

“You’re right,” Elijah admitted. “I hate that you’re right, but you’re right.”

He was beginning to realize that even if you planned for every contingency and sought out every flaw, you wouldn’t dodge it when it came for you. If anything, it would make the good times you had less enjoyable.

We trudged up the hill from where the bus stop was to where my new home was located. Lately, I had been trying to drive less and walk more. The effect it had on my body was noticeable. My arms and legs had gotten leaner and more muscular. The tanning from the California sun added even more tone and definition. I looked better than I ever had in my life, I was running my own business, a slave to no man, and I was out in the air on a beautiful day with a close friend.

I should have been deliriously happy, but a sad sort of melancholy hung in my heart. It had been there ever since I came back. Elijah saw this but was kind enough not to comment on it. We had that in common; we were both men with broken hearts.

The first time I saw him when I had returned, he came to visit me while I was still living in my old apartment. He had brought me a bottle of brandy, the kind that had been aged in oak casks. We poured each other a glass and I began to tell him all that had happened while I was away. By the time I finished telling him all I had to say, the bottle was nearly empty.

After that, I didn’t say anything more about the Fresh Face Co-Op, Milwaukee or Jerry. We both knew that it wouldn’t do any good for me to repeat my sorrow; that would have made it worse, feeding it my words and my tears.

It was best to weaken it with negligence. I would wake up in the morning and allow myself exactly three minutes to think of Jerry. (Three minutes was the amount of time on my alarm clock between hitting the “snooze” button and when it would go off again.) After the three minutes, I had to do whatever I could to push him from my mind so that I could go about the rest of my day as a functioning adult.

And for the most part, this tactic was pretty effective. Starving the pain in my soul had diminished it from a full-on, all-consuming, burning feeling wrenching itself through my entire body to a dull pulse that never went away, bearable, but persistent nonetheless. It was bearable, that is, until something that happened recently. That was why Elijah had come to see me on that day.

The package had looked innocuous enough sitting on the front stoop of the house I shared with two other families. It was about five feet tall and three feet wide. Upon seeing it, I thought that it was one of the neighbor’s deliveries. Upon seeing that it had, in fact, been meant for me, I assumed that it was something business related that I had forgotten or maybe even a gift from a pleased client.

When I saw who it had come from, though, I became a panicked storm of emotions. I couldn’t even open it. I couldn’t even look at the box from where it sat in my home!

I slid it into my closet, where it remained safely tucked away until Elijah came to my house to take a look at it. He’d know what to do. He always knew when to be suspicious; if Jerry had any ill feelings toward me, he would pick it up immediately.

There was just one problem; I couldn’t work up the courage to open the package! Elijah and I both stood in front of it looking at the wide, flat, brown cardboard box without saying or doing anything much longer than either of us should have.

“I know this isn’t what you want to hear,” Elijah said taking a deep breath. “But I think you need to be the one to open it.”

“You’re right,” I said, parroting the words he had said to me not thirty minutes before. “I hate that you’re right, but you’re right.”

He responded with a crooked smile that comforted me a little bit.

“Smartass,” he said.

I stood posed to open it for a good minute without even touching it. Something inside of me was holding me back, like I was under a spell.

“If you’re not ready for this, we can just hang out for a while,” Elijah reassured me in a very un-Elijah-like way. “Chill out, take a walk, maybe get some juice. Whatever you want to do until you’re ready.”

“No, if I don’t do it now, then I’ll never be able to do it,” I said. “Besides, you’re creeping me out with how reassuring and supportive you’re being.”

“Fair enough,” said Elijah.

At first, I struggled with the actual, physical task of opening the box on top of the serious psychic aversion I had to it.

“Just a second,” I said to Elijah.

I ran to my kitchen and grabbed a steak knife.

“You look like you’re about to kill someone,” he said upon seeing me that way.

“Sorry,” I said. “I just need to tear through this tape.”

“With a serrated knife?” Elijah asked. “Really?”

“I just moved and all my box cutters are at the office,” I said. “Give me a break!”

I tore through the tape on the box with relative ease. The top flap flipped open to reveal something completely covered in bubble wrap. With as much care as I could manage, I put the box down on its side and slid the contents out.

I could tell that it was a painting, a fairly large painting at that. However, the subject of the painting was obscured by the bubble wrap. Just like that, I had to go through the daunting task of revealing something hidden all over again. When the final bit of protective wrapping had been peeled away, I stepped back and stood next to Elijah to take it all in.

“Whoa,” Elijah let out an awed half whisper.

It was very clearly a painting of me. It was not what I would think of as a photorealistic painting, none of Jerry’s works of art ever were, but for some reason, it felt like the most authentic representation of me that I had ever seen. It depicted myself as I lay supine and slumbering on what I could only assume was Jerry’s couch. It was raw, and it was painful, and it was vulnerable, and it was beautiful. I was so taken in by it, I didn’t realize that tears were streaming down my face until they dripped down on the blonde wood floor.

I blushed a little that someone other than me was seeing this. Yes, I was naked in the painting, but I was not that ashamed of my own body. There was something even more vulnerable about it than that, though. It was as if the core of my being was right there on display.

All at once, I regretted having Elijah here to see this, not because of the emotional vulnerability. That was only part of it. I was afraid that he would say the word I had come to dread from him: casino. I was afraid that he would see this as a manipulative tactic because I knew that he would know better than I would in that moment and that I would have to get rid of it.

I didn’t want to get rid of it, though. I loved that painting with my whole soul.

I glanced over at Elijah who was still completely dumbstruck with what was before him. I couldn’t get a read on him at all. It was like looking into the eyes of a thresher shark.

“Whoa,” he simply repeated himself.

“Yeah,” I said, my voice croaking from all the emotion that was coursing through my veins.

“This is…” Elijah began to say, but could not finish his thought.

“Yeah,” I said again.

Whether this was malicious or not, it was an absolute work of genius. Even Elijah could not deny that. Jerry was a true artist.

“He painted you while you slept,” said Elijah.

“I guess it sounds a little strange when you say it out loud,” I said.

“It does,” said Elijah.

I winced at that. I was hoping he would say otherwise, but he never was the sort to spare anyone’s feelings. That was why I had him here in the first place.

“What do you think I should do?” I asked.

Elijah didn’t look at me. Instead, he cocked his head to the side like a thoughtful puppy. He held his chin in his left hand and let his hips skew akimbo. This was a posture he had not taken since college. I realized that I missed seeing him this way.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Should I destroy it?” I asked.

“No,” said Elijah. “You should definitely not destroy it. This is a true work of art. I don’t believe in destroying works of art.”

I exhaled a sigh of relief. This was at least part of the answer I had been hoping for. It would have killed me to do something like that.

“Should I get rid of it somehow?” I asked.

Elijah did not answer so immediately this time. This set concern rumbling in my gut. I wasn’t sure what I would do if he said “yes.” It would hurt to give it up, not as much as it would have hurt to destroy it, but it would still hurt. Then, there was the question of how to get rid of it. I’m sure I would be able to find an interested buyer; it was a beautiful piece that any serious collector would be glad to have in their home, but it made me so uncomfortable to think about. Who knows where it would be displayed and how many people would see it on any given day? I had opened myself up to Jerry and Jerry alone. Though it was all right that Elijah was seeing me this way, we had been close friends for years, it was still very uncomfortable for me and it would be even worse with strangers.

Elijah continued his silence for an uncomfortably long time.

“I don’t know,” he finally said.

It was quite a thing for Elijah to admit ignorance and here he was admitting “I don’t know” twice in a row. I would have reveled in the rarity of it had the moment not been so intense.

“Do you want to take a walk or something?” I asked.

“In a minute,” said Elijah. “I’m still figuring this thing out.”

I glanced back at the painting, trying to figure out what on god’s green earth Elijah was trying to figure out about it. In the painting, my skin took on a bluish tone which could have been due to sadness or shadows, but something about the type of blue Jerry had chosen just didn’t seem sad. Rather than a grayish or sullen blue, it was blue like the Caribbean Sea. Even though there was a little bit of sadness in the way my eyelashes rested on my cheeks, I looked more peaceful in that candid moment than anything else.

Finally, Elijah pulled his eyes away from the piece.

“Woof!” He exhaled a heavy breath as he spoke. “I think I’ll take that walk now!”