The Girl in the Comfortable Quiet (28 page)
Read The Girl in the Comfortable Quiet Online
Authors: Susan Ward
He sets down his drink. I half expect him to come
to me, do something to break this awkwardness and isolation between us, but he
doesn’t move from the arm of the chair.
His eyes are scorching. “Are you finished?” he
says softly.
I nod, lowering my gaze to my hands clasped
tightly in my lap. The silence between us this time is brutal. Not at all
encouraging.
“I can do that, Chrissie.” My face snaps up and I
find those black eyes watching me, assessing every change of my expression.
“I’m ready to do that. I want to do that. With you.”
I let out the air that’s been trapped in my
lungs.
Alan rolls onto his feet and stands above me. “I
have four things I would like to say to you since you’re in the mood for
clearing the air today. If that’s OK?”
I nod again, even though something in his voice
warns me I might not want to hear this.
“I have always been faithful to you when we were
together. You can believe it or not believe it. I don’t give a fuck which. But
don’t ever tell me again that I can do what I want to do so long as you don’t
know it. I always do what I want. So to be clear, and leave no room for you to
fucking misunderstand this: I want you.”
My heart stills. His voice this time is
unmistakable. Icy. Clipped. Angry. Dread shoots through my limbs. And then a
fragment breaks free.
I want you.
Bracing myself, I look at him.
His features are still taut. Angry. “Next, I have
never lied to you, Chrissie. I will never lie to you. I have always told you
the truth.”
My heart leaps in my chest in spite of the
curtness of his words. I can feel the emotion inside him that he is unwilling
to show me yet.
“Thirdly,” he says, inflectionless like he’s
reading a grocery list, “there’s Kaley and I adore her, but I won’t ever want
children of my own. Children are not part of my equation. This is not something
that is ever going to change. Not ever, Chrissie. I love you, but I can’t give
you that.”
I look away, my thoughts and Alan’s history
colliding in my head as I battle the quick rising lump in my throat and the
agony created by that last statement. I’ve never been really sure until this
moment, not completely; Alan doesn’t know and is the only one who can’t see the
truth when he looks at Kaley. A part of me is desperately relieved that I
didn’t say everything I came here to say. A part of me, irrationally so, is
furious with him. How can he
not
see it when he looks at her? And a part
of me wants to hold Alan, blurt it all out, and figure a way through this last
unresolved piece of our history.
The room grows heavy with silence, and I sit
rigid, afraid to do anything that might tip the balance between us. It looks
like he’s waiting for me to catch up with his words, for me to say something,
but I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say or even if that is what he wants.
Typical Alan. I’m not exactly sure where his
words leave us. Are we back together? Or does he want me to leave?
An anxious flutter moves across my senses as I
frantically repeat each syllable he spoke in my head. Once. Twice. Then I stop
and stare.
Unsure what to do, I wait expectantly. After too
many moments of him not saying anything, I can’t stop myself any longer. “You
said you have four things to say to me, Alan. That was only three.”
Those black eyes burn into me.
“Just stay and be good to me.”
EPILOGUE
CHRISSIE’S JOURNAL
The older I get the less I feel a
part of my own story. I don’t think that is unique or strange for a woman in
her forties. I hear it all the time from my girlfriends, how they slowly disappear
and get lost in their marriages, their children or their careers. I don’t know
if that is what’s happened to me. I don’t like to overly analyze it. I am
quieter now and I savor the quiet in me.
I watch more sunrises and
I stir the pot less. I’ve learned that things happen around me, because of me,
and to me, and there is not much you can do or really have any true
understanding of which kind of event each is. I breathe, I watch the sunrise, I
love, and I cherish my tokens and my tears, kissing them both thankfully for
they both are a part of me, bringing me here to where it is comfortable to be
less a part of my own story.
As badly as I have done
many parts of my life, it was never because I didn’t love. The old cookie tin
in the closet holds both my love and my regrets.
I pull out my tokens and
tears one by one and I stare at them, these pieces of meaningless nothing to
others that are markers of the milestones of me.
I kept the photo of Alan
and me for twenty-five years. It is the one of us that I keep with me always:
Alan asleep beside me, leaning against my breast, at that quiet moment on the
terrace during sunrise before he exploded into the universe, not just a star,
but a non-waning supernova.
It is funny how a moment,
the most significant moment of your life, can happen without you even being aware.
At eighteen the photo made me cry. It was splashed across the tabloids with
black tar innuendo and other photos, private violations that made me cry. It
still makes me cry at forty-two, but the reasons are different. We looked so
young. Alan, commanding in his universe, and yet lost and holding onto me. I
was young, too, but I’m holding on to him. Somehow we made it through that
complex and layered three weeks, but we were both so young.
There is another photo in
my tin, cut from the newspaper from the day stories of the suicide ran in 1994.
Kurt Cobain. The two photos are eerily similar: hair tumbling forward, the
world at their feet and the air full of sorrow. I remember how shaky and sick I
got when I first realized Kurt died at twenty-seven.
If we are both alive
after twenty-seven, Chrissie, we will both know what we are.
I almost
called Alan that day, but I didn’t.
Between the two pictures
sits the silly half dollar from the bet Neil made me that night at Peppers.
Neil was right, Kurt did change music forever, but I never paid my half of the
bet.
It has been ten years
since I buried Neil. I still miss him every day. There are many in my life who
do not understand how I could love him, but I did and I still do to this day.
We said it to each other simply that last day we lived as man and wife:
you
can’t help who you are in love with.
We both had other loves, but it didn’t
prevent us from loving in that human, connected way.
The objects tucked
together make sense to me, but it is the picture of Alan that I look at the
most. I knew the first time I left Alan that he was the love of my life. What I
didn’t know that day is that the love of your life doesn’t always become the
love throughout your life. Sometimes they are a thought, a private joy, a
secret hurt, a ghost in passing, the ghost always at your side or a promise in
the future.
Alan would become all
those things for me and I would never again love anyone else the way I love
Alan.
It is good, very, very
good that none of us can truly see the future. It is good for all of us that
the future, no matter what we see, is really black. I could not see the future,
a heartbreaking and frightening thing, at eighteen. I can’t see it at forty-two,
now a comfortable and quiet thing.
I listen to my family
return to the house, bags being dropped, children running the halls looking for
me. This is my life, the core, the everything that is me. It is a perfect place
for me to step back, enjoy living, and be less part of my own story.
It is peaceful to be in
that place where the most significant parts of your life are not the parts you
actively live on your own. They are the parts shared with you, the part of
others you try to mend, the moments you are no part of and yet the catalyst for
them to have been.
I sit back in the quiet
and I let life, even my own, happen around me, where it is more comfortable.
~~The End~~
Continue the Parker Family Saga with
the next generation, Kaley Stanton, in The Sand & Fog Series:
Broken
Crown (Releasing Summer 2015)
The Girl of Sand & Fog (Releasing
Fall 2015)
The Girl in the Space Between (Releasing
Winter 2015)
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Oh
shit, silence. I don’t like the way Mr. Jamison is staring at me at all.
He leans over his desk, scribbling frantically on
the dreaded pink sheet. He holds it up to me and points to the door.
“Principal’s office now, Miss Stanton! If you can’t be respectful of the
opinions shared in class then keep your opinions to yourself. We don’t
criticize each other’s ideology. Not in this class. We encourage open and
respectful dialogue.”
I gather my things, feeling the heavy stares and
smirks of the silent room, and strangely I realize that I am even more
irritated since I haven’t been booted from class for the British vulgarity, but
for showing disrespect for liberal politics.
I snatch the pink slip and smile, but then again,
what should I have expected? I mean really. I’m in an affluent city in Southern
California.
I shove the door open a little too hard, not
giving a shit and not even provoking comment from Mr. Jamison. I must have
really rocked his world and I think I’ve finally found where intolerable
conduct goes over the line with my teachers. Any language that isn’t
politically correct speak crosses the line and will be dealt with. No one even
seemed to notice that I’d call the girl a “twat.” It’s not on the description
of my infraction, and the twat comment is where
I
would have started
listing my crimes and offenses.
I show the pink slip to the office secretary and
am instructed to sit down on the waiting room sofa outside the principal’s
office. After five minutes, the door opens and in meanders a boy, pink slip in
hand, who is directed by pointed finger to the seat across from me.
He drops heavily on the bench facing me and says
nothing. He closes his eyes and crosses his arms.
There is something strangely familiar about the
guy, but I chalk that up to probably having passed him in the hallways. He
isn’t exactly cute, but he isn’t exactly unattractive either. He is
interesting, quite a unique specimen at Pacific Palisades Academy. He has that
guy’s guy intensity that radiates an air of not giving a shit, though somehow
in a strangely intelligent way, and I am surprised to find it mildly thrilling.
He is taller than me, a good thing since I rarely
find guys of adequate height for my five-foot-ten-inch frame, and he has a
lean, nicely muscled body like a surfer, a slightly worldly aura somehow
accomplished by his clothes that are more European style than American, and the
most penetrating green eyes I’ve ever seen.
Interesting. I can’t tell what he is, since he’s
such a hodgepodge of mismatching things that it is impossible to identify the
group he falls in with at school.
I sit there staring at him, fiddling with the
pink detention slip, and when the office secretary leaves, those green eyes
open and he asks, “You’re Kaley Stanton, aren’t you?”
Shit, not this again. And it’s such a
disappointment because there was a slight prick of interest before he spoke and
his voice—well, I never expected that—but it made the hairs on my body stand
up.
“Oh, fuck me!” I snap, letting loose my fallback
response, the knee-jerk reaction that comes from perfect strangers knowing my
name.
“Not on the first detention.”
That is the first quick comeback I’ve heard in
two months here. I try hard not to smile and can’t stop myself. Arching a brow,
I counter, “I’ll probably be here next week. Maybe you can fuck me then.”
Those green eyes sharpen on my face. “You don’t
recognize me, do you?”
I tense. Why would he think I’d recognize him?
“No. Should I?”
The guy shrugs. “What landed you in here?”
“Fomenting political insurrection. You?”
“Jerking off in the gym.”
It is hard to tell if he is serious or just
trying to shock me. Masturbation is a perfectly acceptable topic of
conversation at PP Academy.
PP Academy
…I laugh, stare at him hard and say,
“I’m glad you didn’t offer to shake my hand.”
The boy doesn’t smile and I bite my lip to stop
my laughter.
“You look and sound just like your dad.
Sans
accent, of course,” he says in a heavy, all-knowing way, irritating me and
sounding as though he’s irritated by his own discovery.
OK, it’s time to stop this now. The boy is
messing with me, but unfortunately I’m a little off-kilter from my bizarre
internal response to him and whatever it was I heard in his voice when he made
that annoying assumption on my parentage.
I snap, “How would you know?”
“I just saw him a month ago in Munich,” he
replies casually, twirling his own pink paper around his finger.
“Did you really? Do you have a psychic hotline?
Do you speak with the dead as well as see them? My dad has been dead over ten
years.”
The guy shrugs again, leans his head back against
the wall and closes his eyes. “You’re funnier than Alan Manzone. He’s a real
prick these days.”
Before I can stop myself, yet again I respond to
his baiting. “Alan Manzone is a prick every day.”
The boy just shakes his head. “No, he’s actually
a really cool guy.”
“He’s a narcissistic asshole.”
“You really hate him, don’t you?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Probably,” he says. “Do you want to get out of
here? If we stay, Williams will keep us until after six cleaning the bleachers.
We won’t get in trouble, you know. No one wants to deal with my mother so they
won’t call her. I don’t think they’ll call Chrissie either. I never stay for
detention. Do you want to get out of here?”
I stare up at him apprehensively. Who is this
guy? He says everything with such an air of knowing unenthusiasm. Debating with
myself over whether to leave with him, I ask, “If you don’t stay why were you
on the bench?”
“I saw you leaving class with the pink slip.”
That pleases me more than I want to be. Direct
and honest in a no-bullshit type of way. Another rarity at PP Academy.
I give him
the stare.
“You know, you could
have just said ‘hi’ to me in the halls. You didn’t have to be a stalker about
the whole thing.”
“Sure, I could have. But meeting on the detention
bench makes a more interesting story, don’t you think?”
“Interesting for who?”
“My mom and dad, who by the way, think that I am
gay.”
That level of honesty wrapped in self-confidence
is too appealing. I don’t want to get close to any guy, something tells me
especially not this guy, but somehow I feel myself being drawn to him.
I sink farther back into my seat. “And are you
gay?”
“Hell no. I just like to fuck with my dad.”
I shut off the shower, deciding not to call Chrissie. I dress for an
excursion on my bike. Traveling the rural splendor of the United States on a
Harley is one of the few things left in my life I still enjoy. The decision
this time has nothing to do with savoring the scenery. The days it will take to
travel from New York to California will give me a chance to back out if sanity
decides to return. The call ahead of time will do neither of us any good if I
decide not to see her.
I sink down onto my
bed to make two phone calls. I tell my assistant to clear my calendar for the
next month, and hang up as she bellows every reason why that isn’t possible.
Then I call the garage to get my bike ready.
I tuck into a
backpack only what I need for the journey to Los Angeles. I almost leave the
bedroom when I recall the lump in my sheets. Tucking the bracelet into my
pocket, I reach out a hand and shake the body in my bed. “You need to get dressed
and get the hell out of here, love. I’m going to California. If you’re a whore,
I’d like to pay you first. If you’re a nice girl, leave me your number.”
The brown-eyed
beauty sits up, pulling with her the blankets to cover her naked flesh. Morning
after modesty, another farce since my memory isn’t so dim that I forgot what we
did last night. Those pouting red lips smile.
Ah, Boston bred.
The girl isn’t ruffled by any of it.
Smoothly charming,
she says, “I’ll bill you. Though it’s often considered a blurry difference, I’m
not a whore. I’m your attorney. One of your divorce attorneys. I brought the
finalized settlement contracts, and though you missed our meeting, I waited ten
hours in this apartment for you to return to sign them since your ex-wife has
an irritating proclivity to change her mind. I thought it best we jump on the
offer and settle it fast since you didn’t have a pre-nuptial agreement.
“When I tried to
explain, you jumped on me. I thought what the hell, it’s been a slow day and
I’m earning five hundred bucks an hour for this. Why shouldn’t my job have an
occasional perk? You have been interesting. I’ve never been laid by a man who
holds an infinity band while he fucks me. I think it’s better I don’t tell you
the things you mumbled. I’ll only warn you that you should be relieved it’s
covered under attorney/client privilege since my meter ticks until you sign
those documents.
“The contracts are
on the dresser. Please sign them so I can shower, dress and go. It’s Saturday,
in case you don’t know what day it is, and I play racquetball at six.
That
I didn’t expect you to know. It was a subtle attempt to speed you up in the
signing.”
I laugh softly. My
attorney is charming. I go to the dresser and do a quick study of the
contracts. “Thank you for not boring me with whatever I mumbled and thank you
for promising to bill me so it’s privileged. You can, however, bore me by
letting me know how much this is costing me.”
Panties and bra in
place, my attorney scrambles from my bed, gathering her clothes, then snatches
the signed contracts from my hand.
“Me, I cost you
seventy-two hundred for this meeting. Your ex-wife cost you one-hundred-sixteen
million two hundred-twenty-seven thousand, a combination of cash, future cash,
and an interesting assortment of personal property. You did, however, manage to
retain the Malibu house that, against my advice, you battled her over, the bill
from me five-hundred thousand over the value of it.”
I clutch her chin a
little roughly and give her a hard kiss. “You, love, were a bargain.”
I leave her, half
dressed, staring at me from my bathroom doorway. It sounded theatrical even to
me. Chrissie would have given me such shit for those theatrics, but the girl
seemed to be expecting something like that so I played along.
Thank you for reading. You might enjoy a sneak peek into Chrissie and
Alan’s future, with
Rewind
A
Perfect Forever Novella.
He doesn’t laugh.
Instead, his gaze sharpens on my face. “I am being nice, Kaley. I came to you.
I got tired of waiting.”
What? Did I just
hear what I think I heard?
Before I can
respond, he says, “How’s your afternoon looking? Do you have time to take off
and come see something with me?”