More Than I Can Bear (21 page)

“Paige, honey, I've been calling you all morning. Maybe you just had a later night than you anticipated and are still sleeping. But it's almost two o'clock in the afternoon and I haven't heard from you. I just wanted to make sure we were still on to take the girls to the park. They woke up first thing this morning talking about it.” Mrs. Robinson chuckled as she left a message on Paige's voicemail. “Please call me just as soon as you get this message.” Mrs. Robinson ended the call, but stared at the phone.

“Is everything okay?”

“Oh God!” Mrs. Robinson almost jumped out of her skin when her husband approached her from behind.

“You okay? I didn't mean to scare you. What's going on? Why are you so jumpy?”

Mrs. Robinson turned around and looked into her husband's concerned eyes. Hers, filled with worry, stared back at him.

“Sweetheart. What's going on? What's that look for?”

“Nothing, I hope.” Mrs. Robinson walked away just a few feet. She cupped her chin with her index finger and thumb as she thought.

“What do you mean you hope?”

She turned back around to face her husband. “Well, it's almost two o'clock and I haven't heard from Paige. That's not like her. She would have at least checked on the girls by now.”

Mr. Robinson thought for a moment. “Yeah, she usually would have.” That was true. Anytime Paige had left the girls with her parents, even if it was just for a couple of hours, she would call to check on them. “When's the last time you talked to her?” Now Mr. Robinson was somewhat concerned.

“She called me last night during dinner with Ryan. She sounded all giggly and giddy.” Mrs. Robinson paused. “Do you think . . .” Her words trailed off. “No.” She shook the thought out of her head.

“No, honey, go ahead and say it. Do I think what?”

“Do you think that maybe he gave her something?”

“Something like what?”

“That stuff. That stuff people put in people's drinks so that they can take advantage of them? That could explain why she was all giggly and stuff like a schoolgirl.”

“Umm.” Mr. Robinson shook his head. “Although we've never met this Ryan fella yet, the Vanderdales have. I'm sure they would have noticed something fishy about him. The fact that he's met some of her family alone would scare him off from doing any nonsense like that. We know who he is and where to find him.”

“Do we really? What's his last name? Where does he live? What's his phone number? Oh God!” Mrs. Robinson began pacing and biting her nails.

“Come on now, Susie. Calm down. You're thinking the worse. It's all that ID channel business that's got you stirred up.”

“Yeah, maybe you're right,” Mrs. Robinson agreed, knowing she was a true ID channel addict, intrigued by the evil that existed in this world. “I'm sure the Vanderdales could get a hold of him if we needed to. But we don't need to, right? Because Paige is safe and sound, sleeping in like a baby. And can you blame her? Those two girls are a handful.” Mrs. Robinson tried to talk herself down from her worry high.

“Speaking of which, why don't you head back into the kitchen and finish getting the stuff packed for the picnic. I'll wait out here to let Paige in, because I'm sure she'll be pulling up any minute.” Mr. Robinson went and kissed his wife on the forehead for reassurance.

“Okay. I better get back in that kitchen. Those two are probably covered in peanut butter and jelly by now.” She laughed and then reluctantly headed back into the kitchen, even though everything in her wanted to pick up the phone and call her daughter again, but she remained strong and didn't.

After going back into the kitchen and packing up the picnic, Mrs. Robinson sat the girls in front of the television, where her husband was sitting in his chair reading the newspaper and watching CNN.

“Do you mind if I put on a cartoon channel for the girls?” she asked her husband, who was more focused on the newspaper.

“Oh, no, I don't mind at all,” Mr. Robinson replied.

“But we don't wanna watch TV. We want to go to the park,” Adele said, looking like a brown mini Paige.

“Yeah, 'cause I'm riding the big girl swing today,” Norma said, looking like a fair-skinned version of her big sister.

“I know, and we are,” Mrs. Robinson assured them. “But we have to wait on Mommy. Remember I told you that in the kitchen? Now let's watch some cartoons. That Mickey Mouse sure is something isn't he? And Tweety Bird, she is just darling.”

“Tweety Bird is a he,” Adele said.

“Nuh, un. It's a girl bird,” Norma begged to differ.

Adele laughed at her sister. “Tweety Bird is a boy bird, isn't that right, Grandpa?”

Mr. Robinson lowered the paper and looked to his wife for an answer. She shrugged.

“Tweety Bird is whatever you want it to be,” was Mr. Robinson's reply.

“Yeah, just like God. God can be black or God can be white,” Adele said.

“Yeah, just like God,” Mr. Robinson said, then quickly turned his attention back to his newspaper before his granddaughters could drag him into another one of their debates.

The girls sat and watched two cartoons before Adele finally spoke up again. “I'm done watching cartoons. Time for the park.” She stood up as if what she'd said was final.

“Yep, time for the park,” Norma concurred.

Both Mr. and Mrs. Robinson stared at each other.

“Okay, let me call your mom again.” Mrs. Robinson stood up and walked over to the phone and dialed Paige's number. It rang and rang and rang until it dumped her into voicemail. This was the case for both her cell and land line. Once again, Mrs. Robinson left a message. “Paige, this is not like you at all.” This time around Mrs. Robinson sounded more perturbed than worried. Maybe she was just so worried it was making her mad. Nonetheless, she left her message. “These girls have been waiting patiently to go to the park. It's going on three o'clock. I don't think your father and I can hold them off any longer. Besides, the sandwiches are going to get soggy. Just meet us at Blacklick Park. I'm sure you'll find us on the big girl swings.” Mrs. Robinson let out a small laugh that didn't do too good of a job at hiding the worry that was seeping back into her voice. “See you soon. Love you.”

Mrs. Robinson hung up the phone, and before turning around to face her husband and grandchildren, she wiped away the lone tear that slid down her face. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. Mother's intuition.

“Do you want to drop by Paige's house before we head back home?” Mr. Robinson had asked his wife as they packed up the car after spending two hours at the park with the girls.

Mrs. Robinson thought for a moment. “No, no. Let's just go home.” Of course she wanted to go to her daughter's house to see what was going on. But once scene after scene of episodes from the ID channel popped into her head where family had found their loved ones dead, the last thing she wanted to do was have her grandchildren there to witness something bad.

“Grammy, did you see me on the big girl swing?” Norma asked excitedly, but got no response. “Grandma, did you?”

“Huh, what?” Mrs. Robinson said, snapping out of her thoughts about her daughter.

“Did you see me on the big girl swing? I went wayyyyyyy high.”

Mrs. Robinson didn't want to lie to her granddaughter, but she did anyhow. “Yes, Grandma saw her big girl.” She hadn't though. She'd been too busy looking around, hoping, and praying she'd see Paige walk up to them at the park. That never happened. The same way she had spent the last two hours thinking about Paige's whereabouts, she spent the twenty-minute ride home doing the same thing.

When Mr. Robinson pulled up into the driveway, Mrs. Robinson barely let him put the car in park before she went barreling out of the car and into their house. The first thing Mrs. Robinson did was go over to the phone and check her messages.

“You have twenty unheard messages,” the automated system said. Mrs. Robinson sucked her teeth. She'd wished she'd listened to her husband a long time ago about checking and clearing out the messages on the voicemail. Mrs. Robinson wasn't a big talker and didn't really have people she spoke to on a regular basis, so she hardly was ever on the phone. But when Mr. Robinson missed a doctor's appointment they both had forgotten about and would have been reminded of had they checked the messages and heard the reminder call from the doctor, they could have avoided the fifty dollar no-show fee they'd been charged by the doctor's office.

Mrs. Robinson had promised to do better with checking messages, but that was months ago. So now here she had to go through about fifteen minutes' worth of messages to see if Paige had tried to call. And after going through about sixteen messages, Mrs. Robinson came to one that nearly made her heart skip a beat. She listened intensely. Just to make sure she'd heard the message correctly, she listened again. “Oh, God. Oh my God! Samuel!” she called out to her husband. “Samuel!”

When Mr. Robinson, who had been in the kitchen with the girls unpacking the picnic items, made his way to his wife, he found her standing there trembling with the phone in her hand. She was shaking so badly he thought the phone would shake right out of her hand. “What is it, honey?” He walked over to her and took the phone.

“Listen. Listen to the message,” Mrs. Robinson pleaded.

Mr. Robinson placed the phone to his ear and replayed the message. He was speechless as he removed the phone slowly from his ear. “Oh, my God. When did we get this message?”

Mrs. Robinson hated to say. “Two weeks ago.” Tears poured from her eyes as she kicked herself for not keeping her word and checking the voice messages regularly. Now because of it, Paige could be in trouble.

“If this message is two weeks old, then that means he's already out,” Mr. Robinson said in horror. “He's already been released.”

“That means he's been out of jail a week already.” Horror covered both Mr. and Mrs. Robinson's faces. “He's got my baby,” Mrs. Robinson said. “They done let that man out of jail and he went and finished what he started. Oh, God. He's done something to our daughter; I just know it!”

“I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!” With a piece of paper crushed inside each one of Paige's fists, she looked up to the heavens and cried out. Tears streamed down her face like a flowing river that had no ending place. If her eyes could shoot darts, she'd aim them at God's heart . . . if He even had one. As far as Paige was concerned, if God had a heart for her and He loved her as much as the Bible had professed, then why would He do something like this to her heart? Why would God tear it up into a million little pieces and serve it up to Satan on a silver platter . . . time and time again?

Paige sat on her bed and uncrumpled each document she held in her hands. She flattened one out and then the other. Her eyes went back and forth from one to the other. “God, you are supposed to be my joy. I know that no man can steal my joy, but I never once thought you'd take back something you gave me . . . and to take it back so quickly.” Paige snickered. “Then again, I guess your Word does say that the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.” She shook her head. “Guess some of these folks are right complaining about how the Bible contradicts itself.” Paige balled her fist tight, closed her eyes tight, and screamed at the top of her lungs like she was about to explode. “My entire life is a contradiction. I don't trust joy anymore.” She opened her eyes looking upward. “I don't trust you.” Tears spilled endlessly from Paige's eyes. Time and time again Paige had given her trust to God, but it seemed as though time and time again, He let her down. Well this was it. No more of that on-again and off-again crap with the Almighty. It was over between them. Trust was the most important thing in a relationship. No trust, no relationship. God had shown Paige exactly who He was. Well she believed Him. He was a man . . . woman . . . being . . . whatever that couldn't be trusted—ever!

“Why?” Paige cried out.

Had her daughters been home, Paige's wails would have probably scared them to death. At the moment Paige would have thanked God the girls were safe and sound at her parents' house, but she wasn't about to thank God for a darn thing! All she could fix her mouth to do right now was curse Him.

Paige looked down at the HIV test results. They were the last of the last HIV tests results she and her girls would be having done. She'd made that decision a couple weeks ago when she'd had her blood drawn. Although she felt as though she was safe from not having contracted the disease from Blake, considering the first two tests were negative, she wanted to take another one for general purpose. Third time was a charm . . . and final confirmation. That and the fact that she was getting closer than ever with Ryan. She had no plans whatsoever to give her body to him anytime soon, but they'd kissed and whatnot. And after their date last night, she knew beyond a doubt that one day she'd give him her heart.

If she didn't know any better, she'd say that last night on their date she'd given him her soul, and he had given her his. Before last night there had been so many details of her life she felt compelled yet scared to share with him, and so she'd kept the details locked and tucked securely within her soul. There'd been so many intricate details she hadn't laid out, one being the fact that her husband from her first marriage had tested HIV-positive. She didn't want the ultimate whammy, and the thing that forced her to reveal this detail, to be having to tell him that she was HIV-positive. So, she decided to go ahead and get one last test. Those test results were one of the wrinkled-up documents that now lay on Paige's bed. When Paige received the negative test results in this morning's mail, she was ecstatic. She'd done a Holy Ghost dance right there in her living room.

She'd cried tears of joy and then gathered enough composure to go on and read the rest of the mail. Now here she sat still crying, but now, after being greeted in the mailbox by the other document that lay on Paige's bed, she was no longer crying tears of joy. Just like always, she hadn't had a tight enough grip on joy and the devil had skipped along and snatched it out of her hand . . . and God had let him.

“No, no, no! He can't have my daughter. He can't!” Paige punched the letter she'd received in her mailbox today from Blake's attorney. They were kindly informing Paige that they'd learned of Adele's existence. In short, the letter said that they did the math and realized that unless Paige was, in fact, having an affair with Norman during their marriage, then Adele was Blake's child, in spite of Norman's name being on the birth certificate. A copy of the birth certificate was attached to the letter.

Paige read the attorney's letter again for the umpteenth time. Whenever she read the line about them filing an order for a paternity test, she cringed. “I could go away,” Paige spoke. “I could pack up my babies and just go.” She looked over at the family portrait of her and the girls that Ryan had taken that rested on her nightstand. “Isn't that right, little ones? Mommy can go away and it can be just the three of us. We'll live happily ever after. Just us. No man.” Paige smiled, visualizing her fantasy. “Maybe a Caribbean island somewhere. We'll spend days on the beaches building sandcastles.” She talked to the picture as if her daughters might respond. “How's that sound to you?”

Paige was taking her own thoughts seriously even though she knew one could run but they couldn't hide. The letter in hand had proven that. She'd tried to run from her problems, yet everything had caught up with her and seemed to be crumbling down. As much as she'd wanted to celebrate her negative HIV test and the positive life she wanted to start with Ryan, she couldn't because the black cloud of Blake trying to take her daughter away from her had consumed her.

“How did he even know? How did he even find out about Adele?” Paige asked herself. She tried to think of who could have told him, but they didn't have any mutual friends who could have passed on that information to Blake.

Fear tore through Paige's heart. “Maybe he hired someone to watch me. Maybe all this time someone has been watching every move I've made.” With that thought, chills ran through Paige's body. She jumped up and ran over to her bedroom window and closed the open curtains after double-checking that the window was locked. Next she ran into her bathroom. Behind the shower curtain was a window that she usually kept open. The sound of running water mixed with the sounds of nature while showering always gave Paige a wave of peace. Now to know that someone might have been right outside her window each time she showered made her skin crawl.

As she approached the shower curtain, it moved and Paige's heart just about beat right out of her chest.
It's probably just the wind,
that voice in her head told her. Had she been watching herself on a theatre screen she would have been fussing and calling herself all kinds of idiots for not turning around and running. But this was reality and the naïve voice in her head was prevailing as she got a grip of the curtain and pulled it back.

She gasped even though there was nothing there. Her gasp was at the wind as if it had taken shape. But that's all that was behind the curtain: the invisible wind, the window, showerhead, and her brown sugar Soul Purpose shower body gels and scrubs.

After letting out a deep sigh of relief, she closed and locked the window. Next, Paige exited the bathroom and zipped through her bedroom and out into the hall. The hallway bathroom had no windows, so she bypassed it. She went into Norma's room and made sure the windows were locked and the blinds were closed.

“Ouch!” Paige tripped over one of Norma's toys and landed flat on her front side as she hurried to leave and go check Adele's room. Paige stood, brushed herself off, and then looked down at her stinging knee where she'd left pieces of rug-burned skin on her baby girl's bedroom floor.

Paige limped over to Adele's room as tears streamed down her face. Sure her skinned knee hurt, but not enough to draw tears. Her tears were a compilation of that physical pain and the pain her heart was feeling. Tears of anger. Mad at God for allowing the pain. Paige sniffed as she checked to make sure Adele's blinds were closed and windows locked.

She shook her head, wiping tears as new ones followed. She made sure the sliding patio doors were locked, the kitchen windows, the living room windows, and finally the front door. As she turned away from the front door she had a second thought. “The screen,” she said, and then turned back to open the front door to make sure the screen was locked.

Paige swung the door open and was certain that as the scream erupted from her mouth, her heart had stopped. She couldn't breathe and she had no idea if she'd ever breathe again.

“Arrrrhhhh. Ahhhhhhh,” Mrs. Robinson screamed when she saw her daughter through the screen door. “Oh my God, Paige. What's wrong? What happened? Is he here? What did he do to you?”

Paige's heartbeat had once again skyrocketed as her breath got caught in her throat. “Mom, nothing's wrong with me. What's wrong with you?” Paige asked through the screen door, finally able to catch her breath. “You're the one screaming.”

“But I'm only screaming because you screamed.”

“I only screamed because you scared the living daylights out of me when I opened up my door and saw you standing there. Why didn't you knock?” Paige still had her hand on her heart. She'd been in such a frenzy, running through the house like a madwoman in a horror movie making sure all the windows and doors were locked. When she flung open the door to check and make sure the screen was locked, all she saw was a figure. The tears in her eyes had already blurred her vision. Just the mere fact that she hadn't expected anyone to be standing there frightened her. The scream escaped before she could even make out the figure to be that of her own mother.

“I was about to knock but you flung the door open like a madwoman,” Mrs. Robinson said, removing her hand from her chest and finally able to get her heart rate back to normal.

Paige just shook her head as she opened the door and let her mother in.

“Good, Lord, child. You were almost the death of me.”

“Ditto.” Paige was walking toward her couch but then she stopped in her tracks and turned toward her mother. “Who?”

Her mother looked at her with a puzzled look on her face. “Who what?”

“Who did you think did something to me? Ryan?” Paige rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Mom, Ryan isn't that type of guy. He's—”

“Blake.” Mrs. Robinson swallowed hard as Paige stared at her. “I wasn't talking about Ryan. I was talking about Blake. I mean, yeah, at first I thought Ryan might have done something crazy to you, but then when I got that phone—”

“Mom, you know Blake is in jail. Why would he be here?” Paige couldn't wait for her mother to finish talking in order to get that question out. She had a feeling that her mother knew something that she didn't know. Paige didn't know if she wanted to know.

Mrs. Robinson hated to be the bearer of bad news. She took a step toward Paige. “No, Paige, not anymore. I . . . I . . . got a message.” Mrs. Robinson gave off a nervous chuckle and shook her head. “You know me; never checking those voice messages.” She let out a laugh that quickly evaporated, eaten up by the serious glare Paige was giving her.

“Mom, come on,” Paige said, getting agitated. She just wanted her mom to spit it out. “What's going on?”

“Oh, baby. He's out. Blake's out of jail.” Mrs. Robinson immediately walked over and put her arms around Paige who just stood frozen stiff, her eyes staring off into Neverland. “He's been out a week. I'm sorry, baby. The courts called the house and left a message. It was the only working phone number they had on your contact list. You know you've moved a thousand times since Blake went to jail. They called a couple weeks ago. I just got the message. I only checked the messages because I was worried sick about you. We were supposed to take the girls to the park today and then you didn't show up. You didn't call. I thought that maybe something had happened to you and then when I got that message I just thought . . . And then I just raced out the house to come see about you. Your father was calling after me trying to stop me but I just had to come see about my baby.” Mrs. Robinson's words just kept going on and on and on. She was near hysterics.

Paige, in a zone she couldn't describe with words, patted her mother on the back. She'd ignored the ringing phones while she wallowed in misery after checking the mail. She'd been in no shape to pretend to be having fun with her girls at the park. She couldn't allow them to see her in this state.

“Mom, calm down. It's okay. I'm all right. Blake isn't here.” Paige pulled away from her mother, then turned and walked away in thought. Here she'd been checking all her windows and doors just in case Blake had sicced some private detective on her to watch her every move. All along it could have been Blake himself watching her.

“Baby, are you all right? Do you want to come stay at the house with us for a while?”

Paige shook her head while still dazed. “No, no, Mom. I'm fine. Blake's not going to bother me.”

“But how do you know? That man is crazy.”

“Because I'm not the one he wants,” Paige hated to say as she turned around to face her mother. “He wants Adele. He wants his daughter and I have a feeling that he'll stop at nothing to get her.”