His Forbidden Bride: 50 Loving States, West Virginia (18 page)

I
wasn’t trying
to assuage Dixon when I told him I thought I was okay. Knock-out drugs withstanding, I can sense the baby inside my body will be fine after this. And when I walk back into the guest house, it feels like I’ve taken a very scary dip in the water. Ultimately not harmful, but emotionally exhausting.

I end up falling back into Sola’s bed for a very long time, and this time when I wake up, I’m still in it. It’s also morning again.

If not for the fact that I’m dressed in an entirely new outfit, the same yoga pants and long-sleeved top I put on in the tugboat’s cabin, I would have thought the whole thing a nightmare.

But it wasn’t. If I didn’t know that for sure before I take a shower and repack the few things I took out of my suitcase, then I definitely know it when I walk out to the living room…

And find Mason sitting on the couch, flipping through an old issue of
Vanidades
magazine. He’s once again dressed in dark jeans. But this morning he’s paired them with a simple waffle shirt. Unlike the last time I saw him, he’s not dripping wet, and his Southern Freedom Knights jacket is nowhere to be seen.

“How did you get in here?’ I demand.

Mason grunts and throws the magazine back down on the coffee table. “You ready to go?”

Seriously, why is he in Sola’s living room? But I also feel compelled to ask, “You know Spanish?”

“A little,” he admits with a frown. “Enough to do deals with the wet—”

He stops himself and replaces it with the word, “Hispanics. Dixon couldn’t be seen doing deals with them. He was the one they sent to do deals with our kind without attracting too much attention. I’m the one they used for the people they didn’t want to be associated with.”

“Okay, well thanks for that disturbing bit of information. And for looking out for me while I slept, I guess.” I start toward the door. “I’m going now, so you can also be on your way.

“Ain’t good-bye yet,” he informs me, standing up and blocking my path to door. “Not ‘til we get to Seattle.”

I shake my head. “I can get my own self to Seattle.”

“Probably,” Mason agrees. “But D. told me to take you, so that’s what I’m going to do.”

“Seriously, I’d rather drive myself. And no offense, but the thought of spending a day-and-a-half in a car with a virulent racist murderer really doesn’t appeal to me.”

“No offense back, I don’t give two fucks how you feel about being in a car with me. D. said I was taking you, so that’s what I’m going to do. Now, you can stand here and flap your mouth some more or hand over your keys, unless you want to do this the hard way.”

Against my better judgment I ask, “And the hard way is?”

His mouth hitches into a lazy smile, just the same as Dixon’s. “I don’t know for sure how you’re going to like spending a day and a half on the back of my bike with your arms handcuffed around my waist, but I suspect it ain’t going to appeal to you. Plus, we’d have to leave your suitcase behind. But if that’s how you want to do it…”

* * *

S
o that’s
how I end up spending the next several hours in the passenger seat of my own car. Arms crossed in grudging silence, until we get to San Francisco.

Mason scans the horizon, his light blue eyes taking in the city. “Guess we’ll stop here for the night,” he doesn’t sound at all happy about the prospect. “Have to check in with Dixon and tell him we got here safe.”

“Are you afraid your gang will come after us in San Francisco?” I ask him.

“No, the board hasn’t been missing long enough for them to worry yet. And they don’t have the resources. D. emptied the accounts, and most of them don’t have two nickels to rub together without the club. I just hate cities, that’s all.”

“I think Dixon hates them, too,” I say, thinking back to how he spent his time during the month he lived with me. “He really likes being outside.”

“Yeah, his old man was a piece of work, and he only got worse after D’s mom died. Drank a bunch. Me and D. would meet up and camp out for days. A lot of times, outside was the safest place to be.”

“Did his father smoke,” I ask, remembering the episode with the neuro res and the cane.

“Three packs a day and sometimes he used D. to put them out. D. sure wasn’t crying at the funeral after the bastard’s liver finally gave out.”

“And you?” I find myself asking.

“And me what?”

“Was your dad a piece of work, too?” The memory of Dixon’s uncle, dead on the deck floats into my mind. Of hearing Mason say at one point during the clean-up, “Well, my old man was right about this being a good place to dump a body.” With no emotion whatsoever.

“I ain’t sad D. killed him if that’s what you’re asking.”

I think back to Dixon’s response to my similar feint yesterday.
No, Doc, that ain’t what I’m asking.

And I wonder how many old broken bones an x-ray scan would find under Mason’s otherwise massive body.

“Is that why you’re going against everything you know to help Dixon?” I ask him. “Because your father was abusive?”

“Yeah, sure, I guess. Let’s go with that and stop talking about it,” Mason answers in a way that tells me that’s all I’m going to get from him on the subject. Then he pulls into the garage of the first hotel he sees.

* * *

I
think
about running away in the night. But Mason still has my keys and I’m not even sure the hotel will let me have my own car back since Mason checked us in with the valet.

So instead, I end up sharing continental breakfast with a much less chatty Fairgood. One who answers every question I have with little more than monosyllabic words and grunts.

I’m almost happy when we get back on the road, because it means I’m that much closer to not having to spend any more time with Mason.

Still, I find myself peeping over at him. Unable to resist the temptation to diagnose his behavior despite how very little he’s given me to go on.

“So you just do whatever Dixon tells you?” I ask, trying a different tact. “Up to and including driving his black baby mama to Seattle?”

Mason grips and ungrips the steering wheel. “You’re more to him than that,” he eventually answers. “Maybe you ain’t as smart as he says you are, because you ought to have figured that much out after seeing all them dead bodies on the boat.”

I shift in my seat, not wanting to believe, but having to ask. “So you’re saying he still has feelings for me. Even though I’m black?”

“Yeah, even though. Or maybe because of it. Hell, I don’t know.” He grunts and refocuses on the road. “You grow up all your life being told you can’t have a thing, it’s going to make you wonder. Then you take a bad hit to the head? I dunno, shit happens, I guess.”

I can tell he more than wants to be done with this conversation. But my now inherent sixth sense for latent drama detection won’t let me let it be.

“This isn’t about Dixon and me, is it?” I guess out loud.

Now he looks over at me like I’m an idiot. “Of course it’s about you and Dixon. Who else would it be about? You think I’d be driving you around in this fucking golf cart disguised as a real car if it wasn’t about you and him?”

He’s trying to make me feel dumb, intimidate me into shutting up. But at the end of the day, he’s unwittingly made an appearance on exactly one episode of a drama-filled reality show, while I’ve been contracted for over one hundred—not including reunion specials. I’m just plain old better at uncovering drama than he is at keeping it hidden.

“No,” I answer after carefully considering his words. “I really don’t. It’s taken me seven years to outgrow my reality show values, and I didn’t even start off on
Rap Star Wives
. You and Dixon were born into this. So no, I don’t think you’d let him kill your father and explode your legacy just because he asked you to…not unless there was something else in it for you. Or…”

My drama sensor finally goes off like it’s hit pay dirt as I realize out loud, “
Or someone else
.”

Mason doesn’t answer, but his hands are gripping my Prius’s steering wheel so tight, I can tell I hit a nerve. And that sends my mind down all sorts of different paths. Wondering what girl could have caused Mason to reconsider his value system after all this time. Who is she? And perhaps more importantly, what will he do now that he’s no longer a Southern Freedom Knight?

But then Mason explodes. “You know what? Me and Dixon have been through a lot together! We were born the same exact week, so we’re more like brothers than cousins. So if he says it’s time to dismantle the SFK, I do it. If he says he needs me to drive his big-mouthed girl to Seattle, I do it. That’s the whole story. The end of the story. Now shut the fuck up!”

Oooh, I’ve made someone very mad!
I waggle my eyebrows, Nitra Mello on total fleek, even as I agree with an easy going tone, “Okay, I’ll be quiet, but if you ever want to talk about this girl with somebody…”

“I swear to fucking God, I will put you in the trunk of this car and duct tape your mouth shut,” he threatens. “D. just said I had to drive you. He didn’t say how.”

I don’t think Mason would really do it. But there’s a rather thin line between think and know. So I clamp my mouth shut on a smile, and settle for silently knowing what I’m pretty sure I now know.

This goes on for a few minutes before Mason cuts into my thoughts with a growled, “Fuck, we need gas.”

He pulls into the first gas station he sees. “Fucking take a piss now, because I ain’t stopping again until we get to Seattle.”

Again I decide to err on the side of preventative belief.

“May I give you money for gas?” I ask when I come back from the bathroom and find him at the pump.

His eyes narrow. “Funny, you don’t sound anything like you did on TV.”

I look at him, thinking that’s why I liked his cousin. He’s the only real life love interest I’ve ever had who hasn’t expressed surprise that I don’t actually sound like a reality show stereotype in real life.

“I’m not Nitra Mello anymore. I’m Dr. Anitra Dunhill full time from now on,” I tell Mason.

“Well, I don’t need your money, Dr. Dunhill,” Mason informs me. “But as long as you’re on this side of the car…”

He opens the Prius’s back door and half his body disappears inside.

When he re-emerges, he has a manila envelope in his hand. “Here, read this instead of bothering me for the rest of the trip.”

“What is this—?” I start to ask.

But he turns away, walking toward the station’s restrooms before I can finish my question. “Gonna take a piss,” he calls back to me as if I need to know that.

B
ack inside the car
, I open the envelope and find…

A brown craft paper journal, with the words UWV/Mercy Mental Health Services emblazoned across the front. I pull it out along with several pages that have obviously been torn out of an indexed notebook. A letter, I realize when I see the words written at the top of the first page.

F
orget my training
. With shaking hands, I put aside the letter and open the journal. Inside I find an unexpected bounty of words that begin with, “
Today I saw my future wife for the first time…”

Unable to stop myself, I read a side of this tale that I’d never heard. About a thirty-something amnesia patient who didn’t know anything of his past. Only what was in doctor’s reports. He’s miserable and confused and weak, which he hates. His misery makes him belligerent, and half his PT sessions end with him limping out in a snit. That is until his physical therapist takes him down to the chemo lounge, during one of his mandated walks. He hangs back on the wall, only watching for the excuse to not have to walk for a while. But then
she
comes into the lounge with her guitar. A nurse with the prettiest hair and eyes he’s ever seen. He loves her the moment he sees her singing with those kids. But he’s feeble at this point, “not half a man,” so he watches from afar. Works harder at the PT. Biding his time for now, but knowing she’s his.

Then one day he calls out to her, and what follows is pages and pages of every word I ever spoke to him. Of how he tries not to stare at my beautiful brown skin or fall into my dark eyes, but how he can’t help himself. In this version of his story, every single thing I say and do means volumes to him. From bringing him lunch to telling him I’ll be the family who can’t be here for him.

“
When I hear the word ‘family,’ I don’t get the sense of it as a good thing. But when she says the word, it’s all I can do not to grab her and kiss her the way I been wanting to all along
.”

He goes on and on like this. And yes, there’s the map he drew for me that one day when we were doing cognitive exercises, with the label “
Drew this for her because she asked me to
.” Then comes a dark moment with the cane and the smoking resident. He thinks he’s scared me away forever, that I’ll never come see him again. He’s pondering how to find me downstairs now that his walking around privileges have been revoked. Trying to figure out how to convince me to come back to him when the journal entry abruptly cuts short. Only to pick up at the next entry proclaiming that I miraculously showed up in his room, “
more worried than scared.”
And though I didn’t come back after he kissed me, he knows. He just knows.
“If we could make it through that, we can make it through anything.”

My heart clenches reading the words, so indicative of the John Doe I knew. So sure of himself. But so naïve when it came to matters of love.

The journal ends the Monday after I take him home.
“I’m outside now. Not in the hospital’s outside, but in
her
outside and down to my last page. She’s brought me home. Maybe because she’s a very good person. At least that’s what she’s probably telling herself. But I think she’s feeling it, just like me. That we belong together. That now we’ve found each other, we ain’t got no business ever being apart. She ain’t my wife yet, but I know it’s just a matter of time. We’re going to be something to each other. She’s going to agree she loves me, too, and at the end of this story, she will be mine. All I gotta do now is wait.”

B
y the time
I’m done reading, the diary pages are damp with my tears. And the car, I realize, is still parked.

I look over at Mason. “Why are we still at the…”

I trail off before I can finish because I see we aren’t still at the gas station. I was so absorbed in reading, I didn’t notice that not only had we left the gas station, we’ve driven about forty miles. And now we are sitting outside of a building I’d only seen before in online images. A spaceship-like structure constructed of brushed aluminum and glass that looked as far from my little brick two-story apartment building in West Virginia as you could get.

Yet, on the steps sits a long, lean figure I still associate with West Virginia. Except he’s not dressed in sweats now, nor leather. Today he’s wearing a simple Henley with jeans and he has a piece of paper in his hand.

He stands as soon as I get out of the car.

“Dixon…” I say, not knowing what to make of the fact that he’s here at my new home. As if I conjured him out of thin air with my tears.

But he shakes his head and holds up the document in his hand.

“I filed for a name change,” he tells me from above. “My name—my real name—is going to be Woods from now on.”

He lowers the papers and says, “I ain’t John Doe no more, Doc. And I could never ask you to love Dixon Fairgood. But do you think you could love Woods Mello? Because believe me, he loves you more than anything else on this earth.”

We stand there like that. Him above and me below. The ultimate question hanging between us, along with both our pasts. Waiting for my answer.