Moore to Lose (29 page)

The angst in Bruce’s voice as he began to wail
“Tell me that you need me, Tell me that you want me, Tell me that you love me, yeah tell me that you love me,”
was like a searing hot knife slicing into Schooner’s chest. Tell me that you love me. She was out there and now, finally, she was so close.

For so many years, there was no way to find someone who disappeared. If you wanted to be gone, you were gone. There was no internet. There were no search engines. People didn’t have cell phones or smart phones. There were no apps to find people. Without hiring a private detective (which was more than a little out of his means as a college student), the tools available had been a phone book or directory assistance. Unfortunately, there were hundreds of Robert Silver’s residing in New York City and if you had an unlisted phone number, the trail ended there. By the time modern tools were available, he’d had fleeting thoughts (or fantasies, if he were honest with himself) of finding her again — but intruding on someone’s life, someone who might have a family and children that could be affected, always held him back.

But she was on Facebook. She had put herself out there and Beau, of all people, had found her. Beau — who had never liked her, finds Mia. What a kick in the ass, Schooner thought as he pulled into their driveway.

“Do you want to go out for a sail?” He turned to Holly in the back seat.

“I do, but I think I need to sleep or I’ll never get up for my flight in the morning.” She looked beat.

“Sailing? You want to go sailing at this hour?” CJ’s mood was getting fouler by the moment.

“It’s my birthday and I’ll sail if I want to,” he laughed. Man, they were just toxic together.

Strolling into his home office, Schooner grabbed a bottle of Courvoisier 21 year old XO cognac and a heavy Orrefors crystal snifter out of his bottom desk drawer, plucked a Cohiba from the custom teak and cedar humidor on the side table, grabbed his double guillotine cutter and a lighter. CJ was perched in the doorway watching him, but Schooner knew the Cohiba would keep her from following him and he was tempted to light it right then and there.

“I want to talk to you about tonight.” Her arms were crossed over her chest.

“And I want to enjoy the rest of my birthday. Can’t this wait until Holly leaves?”

“I’m
really
angry with you,” her eyes flashed venom.

“I know and I just spent my birthday doing what you wanted me to do and now I just want to spend the rest of it doing what I want to do.” I want to sail out in the middle of the harbor, sit on deck, look up at the stars and think about Mia. That is how I want to spend my birthday. As he brushed past her, he quickly kissed her cheek, “Thanks for the party,” and he strolled out the sliding glass doors onto the deck and down to the floating wooden walkway leading to the dock.

Courvoisier in hand, surrounded by water and shrouded in the black night, Schooner was alone to get inside his head, and in there, the scenarios were running rampant. What was he going to find? He had successfully avoided getting sucked into social media until now and tonight he wished he’d paid more attention to it. Monday morning, he’d ask Yoli to help him get set up on Facebook. He could trust Yoli with this, but the thought of “coming clean” to his best friend and business partner, after twenty years, was daunting. She was going to be blown away that he’d never shared Mia with her. But there was nothing to share. Mia was gone. Until tonight. Talk about a birthday present. This was more than he’d wished for in over two decades.

“Mia Silver, little do you know, but you were my birthday present tonight,” he toasted the night sky.

It was after 4 A.M., Yoli would be at work by 7 A.M. on Monday. I’m twenty-seven hours away from Mia, he thought. Twenty-seven hours away from possibly knowing. Finally. After all these years. No matter what the answer — he’d finally know what happened, what he had done to make her leave him, to make her run and never look back. Had her heart been broken like his? Had she ever missed him?

“Did you even love me, Mia? Did you ever think about me after you walked away?” Schooner couldn’t believe he was verbalizing the specters that had haunted him long ago and in moments when he’d let them surface, for they never truly went away — ever. “Did you?”

He poured himself another cognac.

He just needed to make it through the next twenty-seven hours. He’d made it through twenty-four years, but these upcoming hours seemed a more impossible hurdle now that he knew he was so close to finding her. Finding her … a dream he had carried for a very long time, but was certainly
the
surprise of the evening.

“Oh Baby Girl, what are you going to tell me? Are you going to break my heart again or help me finally bury this ghost?” He knew, even as he verbalized it, that the ghost of Mia Silver was something he never, ever wanted to exorcise, for if he let it haunt him for the rest of his days, she would always be with him.

“Anything yet?” Yoli poked her head into Schooner’s office. It had been two hours since she’d set up his Facebook profile and he’d sent Mia a friend request.

He shook his head no. “But I’ve been checking out her Facebook page and pictures.” The smile in his eyes was evident.

Yoli came around and stood behind him, looking at his computer screen. “There are a lot of pictures of her with this guy. Might be her husband.” Schooner flipped through a few of the pictures to show Yoli.

Shaking her head, “Have I taught you nothing? That is not her husband.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because he’s gayer than I am. The man is a screaming queen. I like Mia already.”

They continued to look through Mia’s online photo album. There was one picture of Mia with a tall, slim man with light brown hair. Her hair was different and she looked a few years younger. They were standing outside an old mansion, maybe some type of an inn, he had his arm over her shoulder and hers was around his waist. “That one might be a husband or boyfriend.”

Schooner nodded. From their body language, he had to agree. Mia looked happy, relaxed. He continued to flip through the pictures, but the guy wasn’t in any other shots. His gut reaction was that he was glad, but immediately felt bad about it — he wanted Mia to be happy.

“No kids,” Yoli noted. “I don’t think she’s married.”

Heart racing, Schooner wondered if she might be right. There were no family photos, no kids celebrating milestones. No baby pictures, graduations, Halloween costumes. Could she be single? Breathing deeply to try and slow his heart beat, Schooner wondered if Mia was unattached and available and then immediately drew himself back from the thought. Don’t go there, he admonished.

“Stop tapping your foot. It’s annoying me.” Yoli quickly brought him back and he had to consciously stop bouncing his right leg. “You are a mess, Schooner.”

“I know,” he laughed, “I really am. I am freaking out. I want to talk to her now. I want to hear her voice. I want to know what the fuck happened.”

“Well, it’s just about lunchtime now on the east coast, so she may not have even seen this.”

“Maybe not,” he continued to go through her pictures. “Why can’t I get into these albums.”

“They are not set to the public viewing setting. You can’t see those unless you’re friends. The other ones are set to the public setting.”

“Maybe that’s where the husband and kids are.” See, he told himself, that’s why you can’t let yourself go there.

“Might be. You don’t know, so don’t speculate. Best case scenario she accepts your friend request. Have you thought about what you are going to do if she doesn’t accept or you don’t hear back?”

Schooner looked up and gave her his full blast smile. “I have thought about that. If she doesn’t get back to me by midday tomorrow, I’m going to give Scott Morgan a call. Have lunch with him this week. You know he’d sell his mother for a piece of our business and I’ll pick his brain about our old college classmate, Mia Silver.

Yoli smiled and shook her head. “You can’t take your eyes off of her, can you?”

He didn’t look away from his computer screen, just smiled and shook his head.

Yoli left his office thinking what a shocking morning it had been and praying his heart would not be decimated by day’s end.

It was a few minutes after ten when the email hit his inbox. Friendship request confirmed. She said yes. Wow. She said yes. She was ready to talk. She didn’t hide. She didn’t run. She didn’t ignore him. She said yes. She wanted contact with him.

Logging on to Facebook, he saw her name in the right bottom corner of his screen with a green dot next to it. He grabbed the piece of paper with notes he took when Yoli explained it. Click on her name and a box will appear. Type private message.

Schooner: Mia are you there?

C’mon Baby Girl, answer me. The seconds that passed felt like millennium.

Mia: Yes

Ok, this is it. I’ve waited twenty-four fucking years for this.

Schooner: Mia, what’s your phone number?

He waited. C’mon Mia, you did not accept my friend request without knowing we were going to have this conversation. You owe me this. And this conversation is going to happen now. Still no answer. Do not run. Do not run out on me again.

Schooner: Mia, what is your phone number?

And there it was and he was trying to dial and it was like being in one of those dreams where you keep trying to dial the numbers right and your fingers just will not cooperate. And then they finally did, the number was dialed and he hit the green call icon.

“Hi.” God, I never thought I’d hear that sound again, he thought, closing his eyes. Just the word “hi” was the sweetest sound imaginable.

“Hi.” He managed to get past the lump in his throat.

There was silence and he had to know. This had haunted him for twenty-four years, eaten at his heart, gnawed at his soul, scratched at his psyche. Forever changed who he was and the course of his life. She had that much control.

“Why did you leave me?” He hoped she didn’t hear the tightness that was holding tears back — that was how emotional he was.

The silence on the line was deafening before, “You told her what happened to me.” And there it was. He literally saw black and put his head down between his legs, taking his cell with him. You told her what happened to me. The ultimate betrayal of trust. Taking someone’s most painful, darkest secret and sharing it with the enemy. Colluding with the enemy. Oh my God, he would never have breached his promise to her, but she’d just spent twenty-four years believing the guy she trusted and gave her heart to had betrayed every sacred thing that they had shared — making them all a pack of lies. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. She was so fragile after the attack and she had trusted him to protect her, to become her lover and she spent her life believing she’d been betrayed. Oh God.

He sat up again slowly and began to shake his head, as if she could see him, “No. I never told her. Mia, I never told her anything. Did she tell you I told her?”

“Schooner,” Oh God, just hearing her say his name made the lump in his throat expand, “it was a long time ago.” It felt like she was already shutting down. He needed her to understand. She needed to know. She couldn’t stop this conversation now. She needed to believe him. She had to believe him.

“Mia, I didn’t tell her. I never would have betrayed you that way. All I ever wanted to do was protect you,” he was fighting to keep his voice from cracking, “and I didn’t know why you left me. I never knew why you left me.” So much for keeping emotion out of my voice, he self-chastised, shaking his head. He knew he was beyond controlling it. “But I swear, I never, ever told her.”

He tried to compose himself in the silence. What had she said to drive her away? Make her run. Mia had loved him. He knew that then and by her admission of the reason she had left, he knew that now. That was why she was so devastated, because she did love him so very much. Oh Baby Girl, the whole time I was dying, so were you. We were both dying. This was so senseless. This never should have happened.

“If she told you that she knew, then she was bluffing and she played you.” The sob he heard come from Mia ripped at his heart. The realization was upon both of them. “Holy fuck,” he groaned. Bad enough his marriage had always been a sham, that was the bed he made and he had to lie in it, but she had run off Mia, breaking the two of them — leaving them both with a lifetime of unanswered questions, heartbreak and shattered souls. And in the softest of voices he begged, “Please believe me, Mia. You know all I wanted to do was protect you.” And I thought I was doing such a good job, but I let you down again. I let her destroy you, destroy us.

He could hear her break, the sounds of her sobs ripping into him. He closed his eyes, wishing, just wishing that he could hold her, pull her head to his chest, kiss her hair. Tell her it was all going to be ok now. He’d found her. It was going to be ok.

And then she ripped him to shreds. “Oh my God, Schooner. I am so sorry. I am so, so sorry. Oh my God.” It took him a moment to understand. Empathy. She was concerned about him. She was devastated over the hurt she had caused him and in that moment, his heart shattered. She was hurting for him.