Tattered Innocence (7 page)

He jogged down the steps beside the garage,
got into his Subaru, and sped away. The exhaust of his anger muted
in the sticky orange blossom smell that permeated her landlord’s
yard.

But that wasn’t how it happened. Instead of
Bret’s anger or the sweet smell of white flowers, the stench of the
truth flowed through the neighborhood.

Rachel had closed the door and twisted the
deadbolt locked after Bret left. She sank onto a corner of the
futon, out of the glare of the streetlight. Bret’s family portrait
projected across the alley onto the back wall of theater like her
private movie of shame.

“Oh, God, what have I done?” It was the
closest thing to a conversation with God she’d uttered since the
kiss in the pump house—since she’d quit asking His opinion about
anything. Then the tears choked out. “I’m so sorry, so sorry, so
sorry.”

She felt slimy, like she’d awakened in a
dumpster full of two-week-old movie theatre butter and coke
syrup.

She went into the bathroom and twisted on
the shower spigots full force. A used condom lay in the empty
wastebasket, recalling the act. Pain—expected and
surprising—lingered, assuring her she could never go back.

Water crashed down, weaving her tears into
the spray, washing nothing away.

Wavelets slapped against the
Queen’s
hull. Rachel stood and looked through the companionway at blue sky.
She could only go one place where she had a prayer of getting rid
of her guilt.

The next day, Rachel plopped boxes of
plastic cutlery and napkins on the cockpit bench and watched Jake
head down the dock for a trip to North Causeway Marine’s Ship
Store. Her peripheral vision caught Leaf’s hatch opening and his
head poking out.

“So, you like the trim of Jake’s sail, do
you?”

She sat down on the bench and opened the
boxes. “Hey, Leaf. How’re you doing?”

“Better and better.”

The breeze bellowed a cloud of marijuana
odor at her. “So I smell.”

Leaf laughed a little too long. “Not much
gets by you.”

Rachel rolled a knife, fork, and spoon into
a napkin and tucked them into an empty box. “Just sitting
downwind.”

“Want some home-grown?”

“You’re growing weed on
The
Escape?
”

Glassy-eyed, Leaf stared at her across the
finger pier. “I haven’t stayed clear of Big Brother for seventy-two
years doing lame brained things like that.” He glanced furtively
around the marina. “They’re always watching, you know.”

Rachel placed a fork on a napkin.
“Right.”

“You ought to listen to short wave. That’s
where you get the real goods. The truth. The government should be
working at legalizing medical marijuana, not creeping through the
South, disarming the populace.”

She pushed a curl off her forehead with the
back of her wrist. Did his paranoia fade as he sobered up?

Leaf’s eyes drifted closed as he leaned back
against his cockpit coaming, then blinked open. “You don’t need to
mention this to Jake. I remind him of his gramps. Don’t want to
upset that apple cart.”

“Jake’s not stupid. One whiff and he’d know
you weren’t smoking Cubans down there. But don’t worry about me.
We’ve all got secrets.”

A goofy smile spread across Leaf’s face.
“Such as?”

Rachel rolled three more sets of plasticware
without looking up. Like she’d ever tell Leaf why she was the last
person on Earth to judge him.

Leaf nodded off, his chin bouncing on his
chest as he breathed.

Maybe she did like the trim of Jake’s sail.
She wasn’t blind, just obsessed with another man. Her eyes settled
on Jake walking up the finger pier toward her.

The buzzing of the cockpit fan and the
gentle buffeting of the rigging against the mast lulled her, and
she leaned back against the coaming.

Jake squinted into the sun and strode across
the gangplank. His muscles strained under the weight of the spare
fuel tank he balanced on one shoulder. His backwards baseball cap
held curls off his forehead. He grunted and shoved the tank into
the corner of the cockpit.

Rachel held an imaginary monologue with Cat,
who had known all her secrets since kindergarten.
Jake
outperforms Bret on standardized tests for integrity,
spirituality—although that wouldn’t take much—and most definitely
curb appeal. Acid rock? No results to date.
Flatulence?
Negligible. Emotional availability? Nil.

She would have to make up with Cat soon.
This was getting ridiculous.

Jake wiped the sweat from his face with the
sleeve of his T-shirt, then met her gaze. “What are you staring
at?”

“I’m not staring,” Rachel lied. She dropped
her gaze to
Aug. 9-13
carefully lettered across the top
sheet of the legal pad in her hands. “You could have told me the
ten people we’re ferrying to sea camp are teenage boys.”

Jake leaned over her shoulder and she
smelled sweat and Juicy Fruit gum. “What’s wrong with teenage
boys?”

Her breath stopped in the quiet. He had to
be reading her menu.
Please don’t let there be any transposed
letters.
She could almost see the squiggles and backward
letters on her original menu searing up through the page. Sweat
broke out under her arms even though she sat in the stream of the
fan. “I just had to write a new menu. Nothing’s wrong with teen
boys.” Hall was eighteen now—even if he was stuck in her heart at
eleven when she could still get away with mothering him.

“Hmm.” Jake shifted away from her.
“Hamburgers, corn dogs, spaghetti, chips, cookies—these guys will
think they’ve hit food nirvana.” He stood and crossed his arms.

She let the air out of her lungs and slumped
against the coaming, annoyed that she’d overreacted. “We haven’t
had to refund anyone’s money in the two months I’ve been cooking.”
She should just tell him she had dyslexia and let him think her IQ
was in single digits.

“Get over yourself, Rae. I was giving you a
compliment.”

No one had ever called her Rae before. It
sounded good, better than his compliment by a long shot. Her chin
lifted.

But the satisfaction of pleasing Jake
smacked into
the f
eeling she didn’t
deserve anyone calling her Rae.

She needed to go where she’d get the help
she needed. She glanced at Jake. Maybe he’d find some comfort
there, too. “Sunday night—I’m taking you on a field trip. No
excuses. It’ll be good for you.” She needed this like air, and
maybe he did, too.

Jake quirked a brow, stared at her for a
heartbeat, then went back to coiling the sheet. He stowed the rope
in the cockpit locker and headed aft.

Whatever. She was too desperate to care
about Jake and his bursts of sullenness. She’d go alone.

The
Queen
rose and fell under Jake’s
feet, her clumsy attempt at consolation. Rachel had left for the
weekend, and the sea campers wouldn’t arrive till Monday.

He circled the deck looking for something to
do. Saturday and most of Sunday had crept past with little to
distract him from the throbbing under his ribs.

His eyes swept the ship. Gramps would have
loved running the business as much as Jake did. They would have
been good together, but they both lost out. And it was Jake’s
fault. If it hadn’t taken him six years and Gramps’ death for him
to figure out the corporate world was killing his spirit in tiny
increments, they could have been sailing since he graduated.

Jake jogged down the steps into the main
salon.

Shafts of sunset cut through the portholes,
slashing color across the white paint and teak trim of the salon.
He had painted every surface in the cabin while Gabs worked nearby
on other projects. The clarity of hindsight told him they’d always
been together, but separate.

Orange light bathed the stove―Gabs’ pride
and joy―the only thing Jake had bought top-of-the-line on the
Queen
. The racks Rachel had pulled from the oven before
starting the self-clean cycle leaned against the cupboard. He could
finish cleaning the stove. Anything was better than chewing on his
regrets. He filled the sink with soapy water and tossed in the
burner guards.

He’d eaten so many of Gabs’ meals staring
into her face, talking about dreams she never shared.

His emotions rolled back over the weeks he’d
spent in a haze of plodding through his to-do list readying the
Queen
for her new career. The tasks had been his link to
sanity. Always, in the back of his mind, he hoped Gabs would come
back to him and the
Queen
. But he’d seen the stubborn set of
her jaw when she said good-bye on their not-wedding-day.

He’d refused to grieve—for Gabs, for Gramps.
Every week people boarded the
Queen
, ready to sail—people
who had prepaid, whose money he’d already spent. The next week, a
new set of sailors―airline printouts for Daytona Beach or Orlando
crumpled in their pockets—walked up the pier.

And on it had gone. Except for weekends when
the pain surfaced. It hadn’t shrunk or faded or toughened to a
scar.

The morning Gabs broke up with him, Jake
woke curled around her. His skin warmed in the places where it
touched hers.

Curtains fluttered in the pre-dawn grayness.
The scent of rain-wet concrete floated through the window.

He felt her body quake, then heard the
telltale sound of a sob she tried to silence. That must have been
what woke him.

“What is it, Gabs?” Jake mumbled and reached
for her shoulder. She flinched away from him and pressed her
forehead against the wall.

Crickets chirped between her sobs. Soft
light spilled over the crucifix on her bamboo dresser.

He went up on one elbow.

Tears rolled down her face and soaked into
the rumpled sheet.

“We shouldn’t have had sex.” She sat up and
cinched the sheet around her.

The ceiling fan hummed in the growing
light.

Jake thumbed a tear from her cheek, a
caress. “I love you. We’re six weeks from the wedding―” He begged
her to see reason.

She pushed his hand away. Her head drooped
over the sea-green comforter bunched between them. “I’ve let God
down.” Hysteria tinged her voice.

“I’ll go to confession with you.”

“You’re not Catholic. You didn’t go to
twelve years of parochial school. You don’t have the voice of
Sister Mary Kate in your head telling you sex is evil.”

“Of course nuns and priests are going to
think that. That’s why they don’t do it. Ninety-nine-point-nine
percent of the rest of the population thinks sex is a healthy part
of life. It’s normal to want the woman you love. I need you.”

“Need me? You have a chokehold on me, and we
would both drown in marriage. I didn’t see it till now.” She moved
further away from him on the bed. “I can’t marry you.”

Amber light filtered into the room. Gabs
scrubbed a damp corner of the sheet against her cheek and stared at
him.

“You, and every other guy I’ve dated, tested
my conviction to wait for marriage. I’ve lain awake since one a.m.,
trying to figure out why I gave in…. I think I knew subconsciously
something was wrong with our foundation. In a convoluted way, I
thought sex would fix it…. Well, it didn’t.” She sobbed.

Her words nicked open a fear he’d suppressed
for months. “This isn’t about sex. You never loved me as much as I
love you.”

“The only way I could make things remotely
‘right’ would be to go ahead with the wedding…. God help me, I
can’t. I can’t marry you.”

A strangled sound wrenched from the back of
his throat. “No!” He opened his mouth to argue and closed it.
“You’ve been pulling away for a long time―” Jake grabbed her hand.
“Don’t do this to me.”

She wrenched away and tucked her hand inside
the sheet.

“Now I can’t even touch you?” His disgust
hung between them.

“Don’t you feel guilty?”

He felt guilty for plenty of things, but
making love to Gabrielle wasn’t one of them. “Last night was
beautiful.”

Her forehead creased, and pain radiated from
her. “It was wrong. I blame myself. I’m the one who knew better.
Someday you’ll wish we’d waited.”

“So, if we didn’t have sex, we’d still be
getting married?”

She shuddered. “I can’t predict what might
have happened.”

“Oh, you have it all decided.” His voice
hardened to granite—as though he could fend off the blows Gabrielle
was dealing.

“Finally, I get the real you, not the one
who constantly sucked up to me because you cared more.”

He watched her red-lacquered nails rake
through her hair, then stood and grabbed his clothes from the
floor. There was no point in arguing with her when she got like
this.

Gabs’ eyes darted away from the tan-on-white
of his skin until he dressed. She looked back at him.

He stared at her, clench-jawed. “We’ll talk
when you’ve calmed down.” He buckled his belt and went out. Even
his skin felt numb with shock, impervious to the cool morning air,
the possibility that this really was the end.

The orange light pouring through the galley
porthole deepened to rose as he wiped the last of the ash from the
oven and replaced the racks.

He’d looked forward to sex with Gabs for the
better part of a year, and the experience had been euphoric. But
she’d smashed his awe in the vise of her revelation. She didn’t
love him.

He shut the oven door. He had to get off the
boat. Thinking about Gabs and Gramps would drive him crazy.

He texted Rachel that he’d go on her field
trip. Even a trip to Walmart sounded better than staying on the
Queen
tonight.

Rachel marched through the saw grass.

The moon glinted off the ocean.