Letters From The Ledge (34 page)

“A what?” He looked puzzled. It was actually adorable. This hole was so, so much bigger than I thought.

“Never mind.” I picked up the glass and downed the entire thing. When I looked up at Finn he had a sort of hopeful smile on his face and I had to laugh out loud. I pocketed the business card and slid a little closer to him. “Thanks for ruining my shirt.” I leaned toward him then and he met me there. Sweet and soft, the lime mixed with Vodka in an unforgettable mélange.

I couldn't have written a better exit scene, so I shimmied my way out of the booth and stood up. I didn’t dare open my mouth again, so I simply smiled and turned around. Kate ran over to me as I was leaving, grabbing my arm. No sense mincing words. I just gave it to her straight.

“I’m going home. I’m going to bed. I don’t want to talk, and I don’t want company, so if you want to stay, stay. Have a blast. Call me in the morning.”

She looked over her shoulder at David, who was still waiting on the dance floor. Finn had already disappeared from our booth. “Are you sure?”

“Positive. Have fun.” I kissed Kate on the cheek. “Call me tomorrow.”

She grinned and hugged me. “I will. Thanks!”

It never took much encouragement for Kate, and she and David actually seemed fairly well matched. Why should my stupidity cost her a good time? She was gone before I’d finished waving her off. I shook my head, smiling in spite of myself, and made my way toward the door. Time to let another frozen soul take my place in the fire. Maybe Finn would have better luck with one of them. He’d certainly be better off, he just didn’t know that yet.

I was relatively unprepared for the cold wind that hit my face as I walked outside, but no sooner had I slipped into my jacket than one of the bouncers was touching my shoulder and pointing me toward a warm, waiting cab.

“For me? You shouldn’t have.”

“I didn’t.” He opened the door for me and I ducked down onto the seat. He stuck his head in after me. “The driver will wait till you get inside.”

“He’ll what? What are you talking about?” But he closed the door on my question and tapped the top of the cab twice. As we drove away I saw Finn standing in the shadow of the building, watching, hands stuffed in his pockets.

I should have known better than to slam that second drink, but it was a necessary kind of numb. Besides that I felt strangely sober. The swimming in my head had considerably less to do with Cachaca than this puzzle of a man who would stand in the shadows and yet see me home safely.

He’d lobbed the ball squarely into my court, and he was waiting. Problem was, I’d lost my finesse, and technically speaking, my name was still on the injured reserve list. I wasn’t even sure if I still knew how to handle the ball.

But the passion was there, lingering. I could feel it like an ember in my belly. Finn had blown on it–stirred the ashes, and it was growing warmer by the minute. He was right, of course. I was terrified. Unfortunately, mixing fear with passion is what drives me forward–usually right over the cliff and toward certain death. 

But oh, what a sweet death it would be…

Finn says that what you focus on, you make room for, but I’m pretty sure that was Qui-Gon Jinn. Or Yoda. Come to find out Finn’s a big Star Wars fan, which doesn’t seem to fit him at all. Like I said, the man is a puzzle and by the way, I'm not overly fond of puzzles. I’m the kind of person who prefers simple, logical, preferably painless solutions to a problem. So I figured if I put enough focus on something else, I could squeeze out all the extra space in my heart and mind, leaving no room for a new relationship.

It seemed like a perfectly brilliant plan when my subconscious conceived it. Once I thought it through of course, I realized it made no sense at all. That tends to be the problem with subconscious conception–it’s hardly ever immaculate. But by then it was too late.

I spent those first few days after we met focused on my writing. I almost had myself convinced that there was no Finn–that the man standing in the shadows was merely an apparition–a reflection of my lack. The antithesis of my need for control.

The Times had called and offered me a bi-weekly column on a three-month trial. I started writing and I didn’t stop for nearly forty-eight hours straight. I stayed holed up in my apartment eating Nutty Bars and drinking vitamin water and vats of coffee, sleeping on my keyboard and on my couch and waking up constantly from strange dreams, with words drowning in my head, begging to be rescued from the depths. I couldn’t write fast enough.

I was writing article specs, special interest pieces; I even worked on my novel with renewed vigor. And, just as Finn predicted, a new character showed up in my fiction: a mysterious foreigner with a chivalrous heart. It was bad. It was worse than bad.

It was pathetic.

By the third day when Kate knocked on my door, I still hadn’t showered and I must have scared her pretty good, because she started snapping pictures on her cell phone and pushing me toward the bathroom. 

She sniffed at me. “Have you been drinking?”

I just stared at her. “What? No! Of course not!”

“Oh my God. Oh. My. God! Look at you!”

“What is your problem? And what are you taking pictures for anyway?”

“What are you
wearing
?”

I looked down at my favorite sweats and moccasins. “I’m comfortable.”

“You look homeless.”

“I’m writing.”

This stopped the clicking of her phone’s camera, at least temporarily. “You’re writing? Really?”

“Yes. Really. And I’m on a roll, so don’t judge me.”

“Ok Ok. I won’t judge, but answer me one question: When’s the last time you left the apartment?”

“It’s cold out.”

“Just answer the question.”

I didn’t.

“You
have
been out since the other night.” She looked toward my kitchen area. The dirty dishes betrayed me. Another photo was snapped.

“Hey! Stop that!” I tried to swipe her camera but she pulled her arm away just in time.

“Just…go take a shower. We’re going to dinner.”

“I already ate.”

“Yeah. I can see that.” She shut me in the bathroom. “Chinese, Pizza, Mexican…Any other take-out genres I’ve missed?”

I turned on the shower. “Don’t forget Nutty Bars!”

I could hear her crinkling wrappers on the other side of the door. “Right. How could I forget? Some organizational guru you are! Look at this place! It’s like a
bomb
went off in here.”

The shower did feel pretty good. Through the warm rain I could hear Kate banging around my apartment. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, but she seemed really pissed off, so I decided to take my time.

When I finally emerged in my towel she was sitting on my couch eating a Nutty Bar. “They’re good, right?”

She just stared at me. “Well, at least you don’t
look
like a hermit anymore.”

“I’m not a hermit! Don’t be ridiculous!”

“Have you even seen another human since…” She picked up the jeans that I’d been wearing the night of the Yankees game. “Since we went
out
the other night? Jesus Truly.”

When she lifted my jeans a card fell out of the pocket. It was Finn’s card. I stopped toweling my hair. There was a moment of awkward silence and I swear I saw an actual light bulb turn on above her head before she looked up. “Has he called you?”

“No.”

“Have you called him?”

I shook my head.

“Why not?”

I resumed my toweling. “C’mon. You know better than to ask me that.”

Kate was turning the card over in her fingers. “All this texting back and forth the last couple of days–all this talk about David. I never even asked. I just assumed you’d been seeing him. I mean, I’m sorry…I knew you were upset the other night, but Truly, he was perfect! What
happened
?”

I ducked into my room for a bra and some underwear, and then came back for the jeans. I could say they were my only clean pair, but that would be a lie. Suddenly I just wanted to be wearing them again. 

I told you it was pathetic.

I picked up the pink top – also still crumpled in the spot I’d left it, and walked it into the bedroom laundry. I tried smelling it, but there was no hint of him. I don’t think he was wearing cologne that night, yet I vividly remembered how he smelled. Warm and clean and somehow soft, but not like "Downy-soft". His softness came from someplace else. Someplace I’d never been. And frankly it still scared the hell out of me.

No amount of take-out food was going to get me over that hurdle, and I knew it. I was just procrastinating, which is something I absolutely disdain in the rest of my life, yet have a special knack for when comes to relationships. My therapist says there’s a link there– a thread that needs to be pulled on. I say leave the poor thread alone.

I tossed the shirt and picked out a black sweater, then headed back to the bathroom for a couple of hair tricks. I was going to skip the makeup until I saw my face in the mirror and realized I looked like my mother when she was going through chemo–kind of pasty and swollen. Kate was right. I did look like a hermit. I did my best with a quick coating of tinted moisturizer, a little blush, mascara and lip-gloss, but it was no use. I sighed. Maybe we could pick a restaurant with mood lighting.

“So? Where do you want to eat?”

When I came back out again Kate was paging through The Times. “I don’t know. I’m not really hungry anymore. I just ate that Nutty Bar.” She smiled at me. Kate was a good egg.

“Hey. Don’t knock Little Debbie. We have a special kind of relationship.”

“Yeah, but you can’t keep running to Little Debbie every time you get scared. You’ll end up big and fat.” Her smile was sad. “And
lonely
.”

I grabbed her arm and pulled her up off my couch. “How could I possibly be lonely with friends like you around, hm? Come on, we’re out of here!”

I reached into my pocket and fingered the card. High noon was fast approaching. I could feel it in my bones. And after that? Taps.

I’d probably be better off marrying my therapist. 

After my mom died, things got a little rough. My dad couldn’t really handle it–and by ‘it’ I mean my little sister and me. I was thirteen when mom got sick, fourteen when she died. My sister was only twelve, but in Queens, twelve is more like twenty, and fourteen might as well be thirty. For about a year mom was in and out of the hospital and it was just Jenny and me after school every day.

At first she tried to be good, helping me as much as she could to make dinners and wash dad’s work shirts, but we had to take her off laundry duty when she turned all dad’s light blue, embroidered shirts a speckled kind of pink. It was like a stain he wore every day–a stain that told everyone down at the auto body shop just how bad it had gotten at home. I tried to get those stains out but I couldn’t, and we couldn’t afford to buy him all new shirts, so there was nothing to be done. Never mind that Jenny’s dance uniform got ruined in the same load. We couldn’t replace that either. With mom not working we were barely making it.

It wasn’t the cancer that killed her in the end. She developed some weird kind of clotting reaction that caused her to bleed out of every pore and orifice she had. It was fairly disgusting, and pretty frightening. They did everything they could to reverse it, pouring blood and fluids back into her just as fast as she was losing it, but it didn’t seem to matter. She got weaker and weaker, and one afternoon as I was sitting there in the hospital room, trying to work on my Algebra, she just slipped away. No fan fare, no big crash-cart scene like on TV… the line just went flat and the nurses ran in, but she’d signed some kind of an order not to do anything heroic if her heart stopped, so they just stood there looking as stupid as I felt. Jenny was at dance class when it happened.

After mom died the shirts made it even worse. I know it sounds silly, but intense experiences create weird triggers, and I swear it was like her faded blood was splattered all over him. I could barely stand the sight of him coming home from work.

That Christmas I saved up all my babysitting money and went down to the shop when dad wasn’t there. Jimmy ordered a new shirt for him and promised not to tell. When he opened my gift he smiled for the first time in months. We exchanged a look that told me how grateful he was. Jenny stormed up to her room and slammed the door. It was a normal kind of kid mistake that shouldn’t have been such a big deal, but mistakes are harder to deal with when you have to look at them in the mirror every single day.

She quit dancing and started hanging out with some girls in the neighborhood that didn’t have the best reputation. I tried to talk to her, but she stayed out too late on school nights and dad was too exhausted to care very much. Most of the time I lied for her, saying she was at the library or a friend’s house. I kept hoping she’d turn it around, but I had all I could handle trying to keep house and keep buying groceries and keep from failing school.

I guess that’s when I started to get good at organizing things. I made charts for Jenny and I so we could get all the chores done. I created a budget and tried my best to stick to it, spending my weekends going to the different stores that were advertising specials to save money on the essentials. It felt better somehow, keeping things in order, like everything I was doing kept what was left of us from falling apart. Most importantly, it gave me a purpose when I really needed one.

Dad got more and more depressed. The more I took care of things the less he tried. He worked late at the shop almost every night and every Saturday trying to make enough to cover the hospital bills, but it was never enough. He came home every night at around eight o’clock, drank a beer, sat in his chair for an hour with the TV on, ate something I warmed up, and then went to bed. On Sundays he slept most of the day and drank more beers than usual, but otherwise it was the same.

When Jenny was sixteen she started going out with the head of one of the gangs in our neighborhood. He was my age, two years older than her, and I tried to warn her off of him, but by then she’d stopped listening to me altogether. We were like opposite poles of a magnet, pulling our lives in completely different directions. Looking back now I really wish I’d tried harder with Jenny, but I was just a kid. And at the time I was too busy studying and applying to colleges to notice just how bad it had gotten. I guess dad and I had the same problem, we just chose different methods of dealing with it.

The nice part about being from a single–parent household with a good sob story is that you qualify for a ton of financial aid. I’d somehow found a way to squeeze in work for the student newspaper and my grades were holding steady in the low nineties. I killed it on the SATs so my future was looking pretty hopeful as far as college was concerned.

Then one night in May, three weeks before graduation, Jenny came stumbling through the door. I figured she was high and told her to head up to bed before dad got home and saw her like that. She was holding her stomach.

“Are you sick?”

She didn’t answer me.

“Jenny what’s wrong? Didn’t you hear me? You’d better get up to bed.”

When she looked up at me she was deathly pale. She unwrapped her hands from her middle and they were covered in blood. I jumped up from my chair, spewing books all over the place and just barely caught her before she hit the ground. Her shirt pulled up as she fell, revealing a gushing knife wound under the right side of her ribs.

“Oh my God! Jenny what happened?”

She had a glazed look on her face and I grabbed the phone to dial 911. I tried not to panic and did what they told me, putting a pillow under her legs and covering her with a blanket while we waited for the ambulance.

“Carlos said not to worry, that they wouldn’t dare hurt his girl.” She mumbled. “But they jumped me and then left me for dead. He doesn’t know yet Truly. You have to tell him. He’ll have to answer for this. He’ll have to pay them back.”

“You’re kidding me, right? Jenny you’re bleeding to death and you’re worried about Carlos? What’s wrong with you?”

“But I love him,Truly. And he loves me.”

“That’s not love Jenny.” I stroked her hair back and kissed her forehead. “That’s not love.” I held her head in my arms and rocked like that for five eternal minutes until the windows reflected the spinning red and blue lights that I hoped would rescue me from the nightmare I was caught in. She was slipping away from me too. Just like that.

The paramedics came through the still open door and got right to work, asking me questions while they assessed her condition. When they saw how much blood she was losing they scooped her up and got her right on a gurney, using words like shock and liver laceration.

She was unconscious by the time we got into the ambulance. I tried to call my dad at the shop but Jimmy said he was welding and he’d have to call me back. I gave Jimmy the name of the hospital they were taking us to and told him something terrible had happened to Jenny.

I sat in the front seat of the ambulance next to the driver while a man and a woman worked on Jenny. One was on the radio with the hospital telling them to prepare the trauma team, while the other was sticking an IV in her arm. She didn’t make a sound, and Jenny hated needles. I looked down at my hands, covered in blood.