chapter Thirty
“Where’s Clark?” Jamie asked, wadding up a clean shirt and tossing it into his bag. Ellen took it back out and folded it before returning it to the top of the pile.
He’d come by to pack up some of his things for a longer stay in town. Carly wouldn’t be released for another day or two, and Isadora would need to remain in the NICU for at least a week, maybe longer, depending on how she did.
Meanwhile, Jamie had been busy, settling into his new life with a speed that made Ellen’s head spin. With Carly’s permission, he’d already made an offer on a house on the edge of town. Ellen had seen the listing—it was a big place on a few acres, with a stone fence around the perimeter. Jamie said it would be easier to keep it secure than Nana’s house, and moving there would get him and Carly and the whole circus out of Ellen’s hair.
She would miss having Carly next door, but she had to admit, the news was a huge relief.
“I don’t know,” Ellen said. “I haven’t seen him.”
Not for lack of watching. She’d found herself looking for excuses to play with Henry near the windows or out in the front yard, but Caleb hadn’t been around for a few days. There was a new guy who wore a navy blazer and an earpiece, like a Secret Service wannabe. Ellen disliked him by default.
Henry didn’t seem to like him much either, and he wouldn’t stop talking about Caleb. Cabe’s phone. Cabe’s stories.
Cabe is?
I don’t know.
Cabe come now!
Sorry, buddy. I don’t think he’s coming.
Why?
“I need to find him,” Jamie said. “Carly and I were talking about the security situation, and we’re going to need extra help after Dora gets out of the hospital. I’m going to ask him to take over.”
“What about Breckenridge?”
“Screw Breckenridge.” He opened a dresser drawer and started emptying out the contents, miscellaneous extra clothing he’d left behind at her house over the years. “I’m the one who pays them, but they listen to the label more than they listen to me. Plus, I owe Caleb. He did a great job of handling all the crap I pulled last week, and then he got all of us to the hospital. Who knows what would’ve have happened to Carly and Dora without him?” Jamie threw all the clothes on top of the bag, which was never going to zip now. “He’s the man. I want him running the show. Do you think he could do my concerts and everything? He might have to expand. Anyway, I need to get him on board, and I had this idea that he—”
When he finally glanced over at her, she must not have been controlling her expression very well, because he abruptly stopped talking and dropped everything on the bed so he could pull her into a hug.
“Shoot, Ellen. I’m sorry. I’m a moron. I should be hanged for that. I forgot you guys were still . . . Want to talk about it?”
She looked over at Henry, who was sitting on the floor near the guest room doorway eating Doritos straight out of the bag and getting crumbs everywhere. His fingers and face were coated in powdery cheese. It was a horrible snack, but Jamie had brought it, and she hadn’t been able to hide it fast enough.
“You have to go back to the hospital,” she said.
Jamie sat on the bed and gave her shorts a tug, urging her down beside him. “Spill it. I think the Doritos are going to buy us ten minutes.”
Ellen glanced over at Henry. “Maybe five.”
“Talk fast.”
So she tried. She cast around for a beginning. “You know how you asked me if I was having totally awesome, totally meaningless sex with my bodyguard, and I said yes?” She pitched her voice low and hoped Henry wasn’t old enough to follow any of this.
“Uh-huh.”
“That was a lie.”
“Duh,” Jamie said.
“Duh?”
“Duh, as in, Duh, I knew that, Ellen.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I know. I knew that, too.”
“You read minds now?”
“I read yours. It’s not that hard. Also, you’ve never had meaningless sex in your life.”
“I was trying to turn over a new leaf.”
She glanced at Henry. He’d dumped the rest of the Doritos out onto the floor and was arranging them in a pattern discernible only to him. He was making an unholy mess, but if she wanted to talk to Jamie, this was the only chance she’d get.
When she looked back at her brother, he was shaking his head. “No, you were trying to give yourself an excuse to get closer to him, because getting closer to him scared you, but you wanted to do it anyway.”
Yeah, that was pretty much what she’d been doing.
“Have you figured out you’re in love with him yet?”
She flopped back onto the bed, letting her legs dangle over the side. “Yes.”
“So you’re at that stage.”
“What stage?”
“The stage where you know you love him, and you think he loves you, but you’re totally convinced it’s over for some lame reason you can’t even articulate, so you go around all mopey and heartbroken until you get a Frisbee in the face and realize you’re being an idiot.”
Ellen actually had been hit in the face with a Frisbee once. She’d sat up just as someone threw it over her head, and it had smacked squarely into her eye socket, giving her a shiner that turned black, purple, and blue before fading to a sickly greenish-yellow a week later. Jamie had thought the whole episode was hilarious, and he still brought it up as often as possible.
“That’s a stage?” It didn’t feel like a stage. It felt like the end. Irrevocable. Miserable.
“That’s totally a stage. Want me to be the Frisbee?”
She put her forearm over her eyes. “I don’t need a Frisbee. This isn’t funny.”
Jamie patted her on the knee. “I only think it’s funny because I already got my black eye. Why don’t you try telling me why you and Clark can’t be together?”
“He knew this photographer was a felon and a threat to me and Henry, but he didn’t tell me, and Richard let the guy take Henry’s picture.”
“Wait, is this the one Caleb had arrested over at Maureen’s house?”
“Yeah. How’d you know about that?”
“Breckenridge gives me updates. So that’s what you argued about? Because he didn’t tell you?”
“Sort of.”
“But he’s not supposed to tell you all that stuff. He’s just supposed to deal with it. That’s his job. He took care of it, right?”
“Yeah, but—”
“No, wait, listen. Breckenridge knows all kinds of stuff about my security they don’t tell me. I get stalkers and really freaked-out, weird e-mails, sometimes even death threats. I don’t want to know about it. I don’t need to know.”
“This is different.”
“How?”
Because I was sleeping with him. Because if he’d cared about me, he’d have told me everything.
But she cared about him, and she hadn’t told him everything. She’d told him next to nothing. And as much as she resented Caleb’s decision to keep what he’d known about Weasel Face from her, she understood why he’d done it, and she knew she’d blown it out of proportion. She’d used it as an excuse, one of half a dozen ready options she’d latched onto because she couldn’t handle feeling like her life was spinning out of control.
“I rejected him,” she said, and the words came out weak and despairing.
“So un-reject him.”
“I can’t. He’s cold with me now.”
“Of course he’s cold. You hurt his feelings. He’s manly. That’s how manly guys do hurt feelings.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. Though she did, a little bit. How else would Caleb be when in pain but strong, controlled, and silent? “He doesn’t care anymore.”
Jamie had the gall to laugh at her. “Maybe you don’t need a Frisbee. Maybe you need, like, a baseball bat.”
“Quit it.”
“Quit what?”
“Quit picking on me when I’m down.”
Jamie leaned over and plucked her forearm off her eyes, dropping it on the bed beside her head. His face was as familiar as her own, and as she studied it she realized he wasn’t trying to pick on her, not really. He was trying to help her.
“Ellen, what are you afraid of? That you’ll go after him and he’ll say no, or that you’ll go after him and he’ll say yes?”
She was afraid he’d turn her down. That Caleb no longer loved her, or maybe he never really had. She was afraid he’d be cruel, and his cruelty would wipe out all her good memories of him.
She opened her mouth to tell Jamie all that, and she said, “Losing myself.”
Oh. Damn. There was the Frisbee. There was the sensation of getting smacked in the face with the truth. She couldn’t seem to get enough air into her lungs.
It wasn’t about Caleb. Once again, what she was afraid of had nothing to do with him and everything to do with her whole life. The way her mother had pushed her into Jamie’s shadow. The way Richard had cultivated her dependence and girdled her self-confidence until she became someone she didn’t recognize.
She’d fought so hard to find herself after a lifetime of being who other people wanted her to be. Jamie had helped, and so had Henry, but ultimately it had been her fight, and she’d won it. She’d built herself a fortress on Burgess Street in Camelot, Ohio, and stalked around the battlements, proud and independent. Nobody was going to get inside again. Nobody was going to help her, because she’d finally figured out how to be sufficient all by herself.
After a lifetime of depending on people, it had felt so good to be enough that she’d turned it into a vice. Independent Ellen didn’t believe in love. She didn’t need romance. And she didn’t recognize the best thing that had ever happened to her until she’d driven him away.
Jamie quirked an eyebrow. “You just had, like, a million different expressions on your face over the space of five seconds.”
“The Frisbee,” she said.
“Ah.” He leaned back and dusted off his hands. “My work here is done.”
Ellen’s heart raced. She sat up and tugged on his sleeve. “No, you have to help me figure this out.”
“What’s there to figure out?”
How could she fix it? She’d fallen in love with Caleb, but she’d treated him like dirt. Meanwhile, she’d handled her a*shole ex-husband like a man worthy of concern. “I picked Richard over him. Richard. God, how terrible am I?”
“Not terrible. Just stupid.”
“Oh, thanks. That’s really helpful.”
“No, it’s all right. Love makes everybody stupid. It’s a cliché for a reason.” He stood and shouldered the bag. “I have a fiancée and a baby to get back to.”
“You’re mean,” she said, because he was abandoning her when she needed him.
“You already figured it out, Ellen. Now you have to decide what you’re going to do about it. I can’t help you with that.”
On the way out, he stepped over Henry, who had ground several Doritos deep into the nap of the bedroom rug. “Sayonara, Squirt. See you soon.”
“Sy-nara,” Henry said. “Sy-nara means?”
“It means goodbye,” Ellen said. Jamie flashed her a quick smile and left.
“Your water is?” her son said, and she picked him up and went looking for his sippy cup.
A few days ago—God, had it only been a few days ago?—she’d asked herself what she wanted, and she’d decided she wanted to be a Chiclet. Now she knew she’d been fooling herself. She’d wanted Caleb. She still wanted Caleb. The whole Caleb, not some imaginary version she’d constructed to suit her fantasies. But she was letting fear keep her from going after him. Fear imposed on her by the past—by her mother’s warped priorities and her own juvenile decisions.
Caleb wasn’t Richard. He was the farthest possible thing from Richard. She’d told him not to manipulate her, not to push her around or play games with her, and he’d done as she asked. Unless you counted the fence, which she didn’t really, because he hadn’t felt he had a choice, and he’d been right. Weasel Face was the same thing—Caleb had been trying to protect her. Yes, he should have said something, but he didn’t have to be perfect for her to love him. Nobody got everything right all the time.
“There it is, baby,” she said when she located the sippy cup under the kitchen table. She set Henry on the ground and let him crawl underneath to retrieve it.
Caleb respected her opinions. He didn’t always agree with them, and he didn’t roll over and let her get whatever she wanted, but he respected them. Where Richard would have told her she was wrong, Caleb had said, “Let’s negotiate.” Where Richard had made her feel small and worthless, Caleb had made her feel beautiful, sensual, and appreciated. He liked her and admired her. He made her laugh. He made her come like a freaking freight train.
She loved him. Was she really going to let the legacy of a crummy childhood and a worse marriage keep her from finding out if she and Caleb could build something together? Something better? Something incredible?
She could be stupid, but she wasn’t that stupid. Not anymore.
Ellen looked at the clock. It was already a quarter past five. Opening the drawer in the phone table, she pulled out the slim Camelot phone book and flipped through to the Cs.
There it was: Clark, C. 501 Brooklyn Ave. 437-3372.
If she’d wanted to know where he lived, all she’d had to do was look in the damn phone book.
“You want to watch a movie while Mama takes a shower, Peanut?”
“Yas,” Henry said. “Watch the train one.”
If they hurried, they could be at Caleb’s in time for dinner.