Letters From The Ledge (21 page)

Night bled gradually into the wee hours of the morning and still he held her. Still no words were spoken. She alternately cried and slept and stared off into space. Around two a.m. she slipped out of his arms and put the water on for tea. The whistle of the kettle might as well have been gunfire. He shot upright.

"What’s that? Are you ok?"

She smiled back at him from the stove. "I’m just making tea. You want some?"

He rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. "Yeah, sure, but I have to pee like a racehorse."

He got up and used the bathroom, brushing his teeth and trying to wash the sleep out of his eyes. He came out in a t-shirt and a pair of boxers. By then she’d dropped the bed and changed into pajama pants and a tank top.

Nate walked over and sat on the edge of the bed, sipping gratefully on the warm cup she handed him.

"Agh! Crap that hurt!" He set the cup down and ran to the freezer, grabbing an ice cube and sticking it on his tongue. Paige couldn’t help but laugh.

His tongue stuck to the ice as he tried to be serious. "Tho – ayou theeling beya?"

"I’m sorry, what was that?"

He took the ice cube out of his mouth. "You’re mocking me. You feed me scalding hot tea and then you mock me. Beautiful." He smiled and dropped the ice cube into the cup on the floor. "It’ll probably do me more good in there."

Paige went to the window. Cradling the steaming cup between her hands, she leaned against the molding and stared up toward Brendan’s balcony–Frank’s balcony. "He’s going to ruin me."

"What? Who!"

"Frank. One way or another he’s going to ruin me."

"What are you talking about?" Suddenly Nate got very scared. "What’s he done, Paige? Tell me he laid even a finger on you and I swear, I’ll–"

"He didn’t have to. He did threaten me though–several times." Her words were dry; rehearsed; completely disconnected from her emotions.

"You’re scaring me."

She ignored him and just kept staring out the window. "He made it very clear that my job was on the line and he could make it surprisingly difficult for me to secure another position. He strong-armed me into canceling our trip in order to stay to the very end of this thing, and then he–"

Nate was speechless. Frozen. Waiting for the inevitable.

"He somehow implied that if I didn’t “play nice” that it might affect Kevin’s ability to land other profitable contracts once this is over."

Nate came off the bed in a flash. "What?" He grabbed hold of her shoulders but her body was loose, like an overcooked noodle that could no longer stick to the wall. "Tell me what happened!"

"If you asked him, he’d swear he merely asked me to dinner."

Brendan’s swollen face appeared in Nate’s memory.
He’d deny everything. He’d deny me if it served his purposes…
"What exactly did he say?"

She shook her head slowly, deliberately. “I don’t even remember, but I’ll bet you anything that nothing he said would stand up in court. He talked about how “gentlemen” play the game of business. Maybe it’s all in my head, but it felt slimy, you know? Like I was a piece of meat on a stick.”

Nate stood there blinking. He’d dealt with anger and jealousy in the past, but nothing had prepared him for this deep, self-possessed rage with a mind and a voice that threatened his sanity and tested the legal limits of his capacity to reason.

She looked away from the window and stared into Nate’s eyes with an anger that betrayed her pain. "You know what that makes me? Just another cheap whore with an MBA."

His eyes snapped and fury took over for logic’s weak and rapidly diminishing hold on his thoughts. All he could see was Brendan’s bruises and they suddenly became hers. It was illogical, of course. Frank hadn’t touched her, but knowing what he now knew about Frank’s temper, his manipulation, and the game of control, it was more than Nate could handle–especially when it came to Paige.

"Nate, you’ve got that look. I hate that look."

"What look?"

"The look you got right before you gave that guy in the bar a concussion and several broken ribs."

"That was different."

"No Nate. It’s exactly the same."

His eyes glazed over with rage and pain. "He has it coming Paige! God help me, he’s got it coming."

"He didn’t touch me Nate. He didn’t even say anything directly. It was all stealth and camouflage. His meaning was obvious, but not the kind of obvious that could land him in court for harassment. He made sure of that with the blackmail part."

Nate tried to control his breathing. His trip to the gym had retrained his ability with the punching bag, and he started imagining Frank’s face pinging back and forth with each hit.

"In my head I know exactly what’s going on. It’s just a power play. He’s got the power and I’m his puppet.” She raked a shaking hand through her hair and rubbed one side of her face. "Only it’s not just me on the line now, it’s Kevin too, and our firm. Otherwise I’d have walked out and told him to go screw himself–you know I would have."

Nate stood guard in front of her like a sentry, stiff and still. The only movement was the heaving of his chest and the clenching and unclenching of his fists as he planned the battle.

She looked at his stance and could read his intention. "But then what, Nate? After you kick his ass, then what? You go to jail? What good is that? No matter what you do, no matter what I do, I’m going to lose my position at this firm and I’m going to be blacklisted. He’s going to make sure that no one hires me."

"Over my dead body!"

"I'm beginning to think he could have that arranged."

"This is ludicrous. Who does he think he is? The don?"

She started laughing the staccato, incredulous laugh of a person in checkmate. "You know what he called me? ‘High risk and high maintenance’. Once he makes his rounds, no one will want to take a chance on someone like me, whether it’s the bad publicity or fear of losing Frank’s favor. He wins, and he knows it."

"He threatened your career, Paige. You can fight this! Talk to Kevin. Tell him what’s going on. Even though I hate it, at the very least you know you have favor with Kevin."

“
Kevin
trusted me to do this right! Ever since this thing with Frank started, he’s got this thing about the money and the future clientele.”

Nate snapped out of it momentarily, his brain picking through the remains of the facts, trying to find some tiny shred of hope. “There’s got to be something more. Something we can use against him.” Nate bent over and held his head in his hands. "Oh my God! I can’t believe I’m even talking about this. I know exactly what to do. That bastard has no idea who he’s-"

He pulled on a pair of jeans and grabbed his keys.

"Nate! It’s two-thirty in the morning!"

It didn’t show itself very often anymore, but the red-hot poker had already begun searing his chest from the inside out. He knew that if he gave in to it there’d be hell to pay on all sides, and what he stood to lose was formidable, but he had to get out of the apartment.

"I need to walk."

“
It's all for nothing if you don't have freedom.”

- Braveheart

Nate left their building and started to walk the empty streets–empty being relative in New York City. It only annoyed him further that people were still out at this hour. There was nowhere to get away–ever. He tuned out the rest of humanity and disappeared into his thoughts as he walked. There had to be a solution that didn't end with Paige paying the highest price–again.

To men like Frank and his father, control was the same as money–a commodity to be hoarded and hardly ever traded. Frank was into control for control’s sake, and Paige was merely the latest pawn on the board. Her career meant nothing to him. He was the captain of an enormous powerboat, unafraid to use her and anyone else to get to his destination. No one argued with the captain. That was just how the game was played.

Nate played the game too, but he played it differently. For him the decisions were more humane. They were more about holding back. He was careful with his words and calculated his actions. Always alert to the wind and the waves, he adjusted the tack according to the conditions on any given day. His was a sailboat, but he was definitely the skipper. Maybe his was just a different kind of control.

He took the shortest route to Madison Avenue. Rounding the corner with a vengeance, he stopped just short of the awning on Frank's building, stuffing clenched fists back in his pockets. Three a.m. was hardly the right time for a confrontation. Besides, Paige was right. After the arrest, any meaningful conversation would be virtually impossible.

Knowing his enemy was an advantage that couldn’t be overlooked. It was a matter of beating him at his own game. He neither wanted nor needed Frank’s business. Nate’s reputation was impeccable. Frank couldn’t really hurt him.

There was always Nate’s father. As strained as their relationship had been in the past, blood was still thicker than water, and Gregory Banks would go to bat for his son in a heartbeat if it had to do with an altercation in the business world. He wielded just as much power as Frank, but on a whole other level. His was old money–the kind that talked.

When he walked back into the apartment, Paige was lying in bed but the lights were still on. She was facing away from him and she didn’t turn around when she heard him come in.

"Did you kill him or do I still have to go to work in a couple of hours?"

He walked around and knelt down next to the bed. Gently brushing the hair back from her forehead, he kissed the spot it cleared, then put his face down next to hers.

"What? What is it?" She looked confused.

"Nothing." He just smiled at her. His love for her went deeper than the rage, covering the anger like a blanket on its way past the fire.

"Are you going to answer my question?"

"No."

"No you won’t answer my question, or no you didn’t kill him?"

"I didn’t even talk to him. I walked over there but I couldn’t go through with it. Not at three in the morning anyway. You were right, he probably would’ve had me hauled away in the back of a patrol car, and I don’t need that kind of hassle if we’re going to fight this thing."

"Fight it?” Paige scoffed. “There’s no fighting this. It’s hopeless."

"I’ll find a way. This is not going to end here, I promise you.” Nate sat down on the floor and looked out the window. “I’m going to talk to my father."

"Wow. I don’t think I’ve heard you utter that phrase in over a year."

"Yeah well, desperate times call for desperate measures."

"I’ll say."

He turned back toward her and looked her in the eye. "Listen, I want you to keep an eye out for anything you could use against him–just in case. Make copies of documents, email files to yourself, whatever you have to do. I don’t want it to have to come to that, but it’s probably not a bad idea to hedge our bets. Frank’s biggest enemy is his own pride. He thinks he’s untouchable. We need to prove him wrong in that."

Paige rolled away from him and started to cry again. He slid into bed behind her and held on.

"I don’t understand why I’m crying so much. It’s like a switch got flipped on and the water works started and now I don’t know how to turn it off." She reached for a tissue and wiped her face. "I feel so stupid!"

"It’s ok. Just let it go. Maybe you’re making up for lost time–or tears." He looked out over the top of her head and tried to come up with a solution.

“Nate? I’m so sorry–about Barbados. I really do want to go.”

He kissed the top of her hair. “Shh. Don’t you worry about that. We’ll go. When this is over, we’ll go.”

__________

By Saturday the swelling had gone down considerably in his face, but his mother still caught a glimpse of it while he was making a sandwich in the kitchen. She stopped cold.

“Brendan? What happened to your face?”

He wasn’t in the mood to play games. Not any more. He was tired of keeping her out of it, so he looked right at her. “Your husband happened to my face.”

She swallowed visibly and gripped the counter. “Oh my God.”

“You think that’s bad, you should see this.” He hiked up his t-shirt and revealed a landscape of color where the ribs were starting to heal.

Ginny put her hand over her mouth and started to cry. She reached out for him instinctively but he put his shirt down and pulled out of the way, his message clear.

“We have to see a doctor.”

“What’s the point? They’re just going to ask me what happened. Are you willing to be honest about it?” He’d already decided that since he hadn’t died of his injuries in the past forty-eight hours, the ribs were either bruised or cracked, but either way they couldn’t do anything for him except pain meds, and he had plenty of meds.

Ginny was silent.

“That’s what I thought.”

He watched her start to get angry.

“Don’t be mad at me–I’m not the one who beats people up. Where is he, anyway?”

“He had to go out of town.”

“How convenient.” Brendan took a bite of his sandwich, noting that every time he chewed, the one side of his face ached with the motion. He catalogued the pain and let it push his hatred deeper in.

He felt sorry for her. She pulled a chair out and sat down, looking dazed and confused. “What did you fight about?”

Brendan suddenly realized that she might be his only ally. “It started out being about Wharton. It ended up being about him. It’s always about him.”

She looked up at Brendan with a mixture of sorrow and fear. “You told him you knew, didn’t you?”

“I can’t believe this. You’re going to put this on me? That is just so typical.”

“That’s not what I meant! I’m just–trying to figure out what would make him do something like that again. It’s been so long since we’ve had an incident.”

“Is that what you need to believe?”

When she looked into his eyes and saw the truth, the tears started to flow freely. “No.”

“Do you honestly believe that someone with a problem like that can just beat it on their own? Just say “ok I promise I won’t do it again” and then stick to their word? Is that what you think? All these years, all the women, all the booze. The only thing that’s changed is that I got smart enough to stay out of his way. This time he came looking for me.”

It was early enough in the morning that she was still sober, but it wouldn’t be long after this news, so he took advantage of the moment. “I’m done. I’m staying until graduation, but that’s it. If he won’t pay for Europe I think I’ve got enough saved for a plane ticket, but make no mistake, it’ll be a one-way.”

She shook her head. “Don’t be silly Brendan. Where would you go?”

“At this point, I don’t really care.”

She dried her eyes. “Now wait a minute. You can’t be short-sighted about this. You have to have a plan.”

“Oh, I have a plan. I may not have much else, but a plan I’ve got.”

Brendan walked out of the kitchen and left his mother sitting there. She was crushed and he didn’t care. He felt guilty for not caring more. But what kind of a mother stands by and allows that kind of abuse? He was starting to think maybe he’d have been better off with Gina Marie Foster.

__________

Brendan grabbed his camera and left the house with Tess’ box under one arm. He boarded the subway, clutching the box as if it were a briefcase full of unmarked bills.

Peggy greeted him with a smile. “Howdy handsome! What-cha got there? A present?”

He looked down at the box, decorated with such care and beauty. It was a gift–Tess’s gift. From one broken heart to another. She’d gifted it to him. Now they needed to talk about it.

“Sort of.” It was all Brendan could think to say.

“What’ll it be?”

Brendan smiled. “The usual.”

Peggy’s face lit up. “I like it when you smile. You have a nice smile.”

Brendan shook his head, embarrassed. “So I’ve been told.”

He wandered up the path and made his way to the oak tree and found Tommy sitting there, in the spot he usually occupied. Tommy looked up at him through tear-stained eyes. “Hey Brendan.”

Brendan squatted down in front of Tommy and set the box down, laying his camera on top. “Are you ok?”

Tommy shook his head and started to cry. Brendan moved in beside him and put an arm around the boy’s shoulders. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen, but he was small for his age, and timid. Brendan held back tears of his own and sat looking out at the view.

Finally Tommy spoke. “I don’t want to end up like her.”

“What do you mean?”

“I feel so guilty for being mad at her, but she took the easy way out.”

Running always seemed like the coward’s way out to people who weren’t going through it, but sometimes it was the only choice. Brendan understood that–he understood Tess–understood the desperation that drove her, but from Tommy’s point of view, that’s not how it went down.

Tommy was stiff under Brendan’s arm. “She quit, man–and now I’m left here, and my life is shitty too, and this is the example I get to follow?” He shrugged out of Brendan’s grasp, anger giving him a boldness that overcame grief, even if just for the moment.

Brendan sighed. “It wasn’t like that Tommy–not exactly. She just couldn’t see her way out. Her vision was too small. Too focused. It consumed her.”

“You’ve read the letters; the journal. You know what he did to her, right?”

“Yeah.” Brendan’s jaw tightened. “I know.”

“I can’t even look at him. I hate him with everything that’s in me. At night I lie in bed thinking about ways that I could make him pay.” Tommy’s freckles seemed to heat up along with his face. Framed in bright red hair he looked almost like a cartoon of himself.

“It won’t do any good. You’d end up in juvi.”

“Can’t
he
be put in jail? I mean, surely they could lock him up for that.”

Brendan sighed. “Not now that she’s dead.” The word ‘dead’ hung suspended in the air between them. It was funny how saying someone had died was different than saying they were dead. Dead had an eerie weight to it–a finality that indicated past tense. Died was a word that kept it fresh - like it had just happened, but dead was for people who’d been gone a long time. Tess had been dead for nearly a year.

“That doesn’t seem fair. She paid with her life. He should pay with his. He can’t just walk around like nothing’s happened.”

“Normally it would be his word against hers. A few letters and a journal isn’t enough to stand up in court. Ask any lawyer. We could have written these journals just to get him in trouble. Besides, it’d put your family through the ringer.”

“Yeah, and we’re not messed up enough.” Tommy scoffed.

“Because she killed herself his defense would be that she was always mentally unstable and that she fabricated the whole thing.”

“It’s not right.” Tommy wiped his nose with the back of his sleeve. “And it’ll never be ok again. Never.”

“It will.” Brendan said with more authority than he felt. “It just takes time.”

Tommy shook his head then looked over at the box. “Why’d you bring that here?”

Brendan followed his gaze. “Just some unfinished business. I needed to talk to her about some stuff.”

“Do you always bring flowers?”

“Yeah.” Brendan felt uncomfortable answering, even though it was the truth.

“That’s nice. Really nice. I’m sorry you guys couldn’t have been together in real life.”

“Me too.”

Tommy brushed his pants off and started to get up. “Well, I’d better go. Leave you two alone.” He grinned and Brendan tousled his hair. “You might want to take off those glasses–she’d want you to look her in the eye when you talk to her.”

“Get outta here already!” As he watched Tommy walk away, he wondered what it would’ve been like to have a little brother. Maybe he did have one, out there somewhere, and he just didn’t know it. He wondered if Gina Marie Foster ever got married and had other kids, or if maybe she ended up in a cemetery somewhere, just like Tess.

When Tommy was out of sight he took the top off the box and pulled out the first letter he’d read–the one that had been taped to the top of the box. He flapped it against one hand as he tried to form the words in his mind, then he took Tommy’s advice and removed his hat and glasses, even though it made no sense whatsoever.

“I love you Tess. I always have. But Tommy’s right. I don’t want to end up like you either. I’m not saying you took the easy way out, I’m just tired of running away. I want a different life, and I’m going to go make one for myself, so in a few more weeks, after graduation, I won’t be coming around as much. I’m hoping to do some traveling in Europe and I might not be coming back right away.”

“And there’s something else you should know.” He took a deep breath and rubbed a hand over his chin. It scraped across the stubble he’d been avoiding so he wouldn’t have to shave around the bruises. “I met someone.” He tried to get the words out without breaking them, but they cracked ever so slightly on the way past his heart. “And she’s great. And…she makes me feel like a man, Tess. She makes me feel like I can do it, you know? Like I can do the right thing and be strong enough and–”