Keeping Secrets in Seattle

chapter Nineteen


November 8, 2003

I hate Utah. My stepsisters are little twits, and my stepmother treats me like I’m totally unwelcome here. I’ve written and rewritten at least a dozen letters to Gabe since being here, but I keep chickening out on my way to the mailbox. Every time I talk to my mom on the phone, she says that Gabe is getting along fine without me. If I write to him and tell him what happened, it’ll just turn everything upside down, and then I’ll have to deal with the aftermath…

I changed hotels and spent the next two days taking in some of the sights of Vegas completely solo. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go home to face my friends and family without a ring on my finger. Quite the opposite. The fact that I wasn’t married to Landon was a relief. At last, I didn’t have to pretend. I didn’t have to plaster a phony grin on my face and pretend that I didn’t long for something I couldn’t have. I might have been dumped three minutes before I was scheduled to walk down the aisle, but at least I was finally being true to myself.

I sent my mother an e-mail explaining that despite what my previous e-mail had said, I wasn’t, in fact, getting married to the boyfriend she’d never met, and that I’d be home Sunday night for her to yell at me. I turned off my BlackBerry for a much-needed break and went off the grid for a few days. And so, between pity-induced cookie binges and crying jags, I took myself to see the Blue Man Group and Cirque du Soleil. I walked the strip alone, watching the pirate show outside Treasure Island, and had fresh gelato while receiving a foot massage in The Venetian.

I arrived home from Vegas late night on Sunday to an empty apartment, which was how I wanted it. After calling them from the airport to tell my roommates that I was coming home unmarried, Betsy and Kim offered to pick me up, but I told them to go out with friends. I needed to be alone.

I was single again. And Gabe was marrying Alicia.

After dropping my bags in my bedroom, I ran a bath and meandered through the apartment as the tub filled. Next to the phone was a message from Chloe in Portland. She said she’d been trying to reach me on my cell, that the job was still available, and she wanted to know if I wanted the position. I chewed my lip as I stared at the electric bill envelope the message was written on. If I stayed in Seattle, I would be forced to see the happy couple at every holiday, every family barbeque, and every Mariners game I attended. There was a potential that I could walk into one of my favorite Seattle haunts, just to run into Gabe or Alicia, and the thought sent a shudder through my body.

I didn’t want to see them together. I didn’t want to be in their sickening, opulent wedding. I didn’t want to see them kissing, or holding hands, or sipping steaming cups of Seattle coffee in the rain together. I would rather drown in the very bathtub I was filling than share my city with the happy couple.

“I’m going to take that job.” As soon as the words left my mouth and echoed in the otherwise empty living room, my mind was made up. It was time for me to move on. Time for me to start a new life, away from everything that reminded me of my broken heart.

Digging in my purse, I pulled out my BlackBerry and powered it on. As soon as the screen lit up, it vibrated and chimed my palm like a Vegas slot machine. One, two, three, four…my eyes widened as I saw the voice mail count go up to seventeen missed calls. I whistled softly. Twenty-three text messages. And they were all from Gabe, all sent this afternoon…

I feverishly scrolled through the messages.

I KNOW YOU’RE BUSY, BUT I GOT YOUR PACKAGE IN THE MAIL TODAY. CALL ME.

I almost dropped my phone. “Oh, shit. The journals…”

WE NEED TO TALK. CALL ME.

I CALLED YOUR APARTMENT. KIM SAID YOU’RE COMING HOME TONIGHT. CALL WHEN YOU LAND. I NEED TO SPEAK TO YOU.

VI…HOW COULD YOU HAVE KEPT THIS FROM ME? WHEN DO YOU GET IN? CALL ME ASAP.

I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT TO SAY OR WHAT TO THINK. I’M SICK OVER THIS. CALL ME.

Tap, tap, tap.

I jumped about a foot in the air and walked over to the door. “Who is it?” I called, though I didn’t need to. I already knew who was on the other side.

“It’s me.” Gabe’s voice was low and rough around the edges.

My fingers shook as I unlocked the deadbolt and the chain. I swallowed and opened the door. It creaked like on an old scary movie, revealing the dim light coming from the hallway.

Gabe just stood there with his arms hanging limply at his sides. His dress shirt was untucked under a suit coat soaked from the rain that was pouring outside. There were circles around his eyes, and his mouth was tight.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, craning my neck to see down the stairs. “Where’s Alicia?”

Without saying a word, he walked silently into the living room, where he stood in the center of the room. It felt like he didn’t know where to look, so his gaze flitted from one spot to the next. He finally looked at me. “I’ve been trying to call you.”

I swallowed the tractor-sized lump that was forming in my throat. “I know.”

“My mom said that Leandra told her you called the wedding off. Why didn’t you pick up?”

I looked away. “Talking to you wasn’t on the top of my priority list.”

I could feel Gabe’s eyes on the side of my head. Without another word, he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a worn leather journal, dropping an envelope and a few receipts on the floor, and opened it to the middle. The pages were ink-stained, dog-eared, and covered from top to bottom in my loopy, teenaged scrawl.

All of the oxygen in my lungs escaped in a whoosh, and the room was suddenly stiflingly humid. When I opened my mouth to speak, the words clumped up in a ball, and I had to clear my throat before I could go on. “Listen, I—”

“How could you keep something like this from me?” Gabe grimaced as he spoke, making it look painful.

My heart sank to the bottom of my stomach like a boulder, and I wrapped my arms around myself. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to keep it a secret. My mom—”

“Your mother was wrong.” His voice cracked, and it became clear to me that he’d been crying. The sight of him so upset rattled my insides. “Dead wrong.”

“I know she was,” I whispered. “I trusted her judgment. I-I thought that if we told you, you’d go after Cameron. And if your parents found out, they would come unhinged and try to have Cameron sent to jail, and—”

“And that would have been a bad thing?” Gabe gaped at me. “You guys let him go free! You let me stay friends with him all this time! Do you understand how messed up that is?”

“Of course I understand.” My voice shook. “It happened to me, remember?”

For the briefest of seconds, his expression softened, and I thought for a moment that he was going to hug me. I was out of luck. “I know it happened to you.” He paused and looked around. “Is there water running?”

“Oh!” I darted to the bathroom and turned off the water in the nearly overflowing bathtub. When I returned to the living room, Gabe was sitting on the edge of the couch with his elbows on his knees, staring at the floor.

“Gabe?” I said, approaching him. Goose bumps covered my arms, and the boulder in my middle grew even heavier.

“I just don’t understand how you could have kept it from me for so many years,” he said. “Is this why you changed?”

I covered my face and choked on a sob. This was becoming much too raw to deal with. Gabe had officially chiseled away at my protective outer layer, leaving all of my emotions naked and exposed. “I just…wanted to pretend it never happened…I wanted to…move on with my life…I…”

He shook his head. “I would have helped you through it. I was in love with you.”

“It was because you were in love with me that I didn’t want to tell you.” I used my sleeve to wipe the tears sliding down my cheeks. “I didn’t want you to look at me different. I didn’t want you to worry about me.”

Gabe glared up at me, red rimming his eyes. “You’d rather let me think that you’d cheated on me, rather than let me know that you were raped, Vi?”

“I was seventeen,” I said, my throat tight. “I was just a kid. I—”

He finally moved to touch me, sliding off the couch to stand in front of me. His arms around me felt like a key sliding into a lock and turning effortlessly. My throat relaxed, and I breathed in the scent of his cologne, while his whiskers tickled the side of my forehead.

He put his hand under my chin and raised it so that I was forced to look him in the eye. “Why didn’t you find me? Or yell for me?”

I cringed. “I did.”

Gabe’s jaw flexed, and his arms dropped to his sides. “I didn’t know. I had no idea.”

“It isn’t your fault. The music was too loud. Nobody heard me.” I wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand.

“I would have stopped him if I’d heard. I…I didn’t know…” His voice pitched, and he put a hand over his eyes. “I came over that night. I went to your house. Leandra said you didn’t want to see me. Did you know I was there?”

I pressed my lips together and nodded.

He scruffed a hand up over his head and down the back of his neck. “I should have known. I needed to know. All of those times I hung out with Cam. All those times he came to my parents’ house and into my home. He was one of my groomsmen.”

I shook my head. “Was?”

He raked a hand through his short hair. “The wedding’s off.”

“I…what?” There was nothing more peculiar than experiencing horrible pain and total elation at the same time.

He looked away. “I called it off yesterday.”

My mouth dropped open. “What?”

“When I heard about you and Landon going to Vegas…” Gabe began pacing. “Vi, I’m in love with you. I always have been.”

I covered my mouth and stood frozen in place. I’d been waiting nine years to hear those words. The hair on my arms stood up, and a tornado took flight in my gut.

Gabe laced his fingers and rested his hands on the top of his head as he moved. “After you left for Vegas, I checked my credit card statement. She’d bought over twelve hundred dollars’ worth of shoes in the last week alone and hadn’t told me. When I stopped by Mizithra’s to speak to her about it, they told me that she’d quit a month ago.”

“You’re kidding.” I bit my lip. I wish being right felt better than this. But it didn’t feel good, it felt horrible.

His forehead wrinkled. “I’d seen her leave for work dozens of times. But she’d been faking it. She’d been faking everything. You were right. Her parents aren’t wealthy. They live in the suburbs of Portland, in a modest house, and her dad’s—”

“A garbage man,” I finished for him. My fingers twitched at my sides, longing to reach for Gabe. My pulse pounded in my ears, and I had to bite the insides of my cheeks to keep from pulling him close to me and pressing my mouth to his. We could be together now. My secret was out, and we were both free now. It was everything I’d been dreaming about…

His eyes clouded over. “I almost married a woman who’s been lying to me from the beginning, and the woman I’ve been in love with since I was a kid has been lying to me for almost a decade.”

The heartbeat in my ears stopped, and my shoulders dropped down an inch. “Excuse me?”

“I don’t know who to trust,” he said in a gravelly voice. “You…Alicia…Cam…your mom…everyone I know is a liar.”

Anger replaced joy, and I pointed my finger in Gabe’s face. “You’re lumping me in a category with Cameron Hakes?”

“He’s been walking free for almost ten years, Vi.” The muscles in Gabe’s neck flexed. “Who knows how many other women might have been hurt because you lied about what happened?”

His words were a punch to the gut. “You’re blaming this on me?”

“Of course not. But I can’t believe your mom and Curtis would let him walk after hurting you.” He shifted his weight between his feet and shook his head. “It’s asinine. Why would a parent let their daughter’s rapist go free?”

I shivered as adrenaline coursed through my body. “My mom went through something similar. She—”

“I don’t give a shit what Leandra went through!”

I backed away. Every vein in his neck was visible under his tawny skin.

“What about what you went through? You were just a kid! The thought of his hands on you…the idea of you yelling for help and having nobody answer.”

“You need to calm down.” I took him by the arm. “Look at me.”

Anger radiated from the pools of blue that were his eyes. “You don’t understand. I never stopped loving you. All these years, I thought you’d cheated on me. It never occurred to me that Cam was capable of something like this. I want to kill him,” he said through clenched teeth. His muscles hardened under his jacket sleeve. “I can’t even think straight. I could kill him.”

My gut twisted nervously. His whole body had gone rigid with anger, sweat piquing on his hairline. “You don’t have to worry about it,” I told him. “The wedding is off. You never have to see him again.”

Gabe shook off my touch. “Cam’s flying here next week. We were supposed to spend some time together before the wedding. He was coming early to see his dad, and so we could hang out since he missed the bachelor party.”

“Just call him…tell him the wedding isn’t happening.” I was sick to my stomach and wrapped my arms around my middle. “You have to tell him that the wedding isn’t happening. Not to come.”

His eyes were wide and bugging out. “I’m going to put Cam in the ground.”

I put my palms on either side of Gabe’s face and made him look at me. “It’s over now, Gabe. It’s been nine years. I’m okay now. We’re okay.”

“No, I’m not.” He shook his head slowly.

“I love you, Gabe,” I said, my throat tight. It was the first time I’d said that to him in years. When he said nothing and just stared at me, quaking underneath my palms, I added, “Do you…still love me?”

When his lips met mine, the kiss was brief, hard. Not the least bit reassuring. My insides chilled as fear spread through me like cold water in a bathtub.

“I need some time.” His voice was scarcely above a whisper. He backed away from me and focused his gaze on the window overlooking Olive Way, his fists still clenched at his sides. “It’s not your fault. It’s Cam…and Leandra. One of my best friends is a rapist, and I just called off my wedding. I can’t wrap my head around this. There’s too much to process. I just…I just need some time.”

“Time?” I echoed, goose bumps standing up on my arms as I watched him glowering at the cars passing below. “How much time? What can I do—”

“Nothing,” he growled. “Just let me figure this out. That’s all.”

“I…” My mouth opened, then closed. Then opened again. “Will you call me when you’ve got yourself together?”

Gabe nodded. Just once, before stalking out the door and pulling it shut with a click. I looked around at the scattered papers he’d left on the floor and bent to pick them up. One was a flyer for an awards banquet his boss was throwing for the employees of Gabe’s firm, and the rest were discarded receipts for gas and groceries. On the couch lay my journal, open to the page that described the night Cameron attacked me in detail.

I picked it up and hurled it at the wall, knocking over a lamp and shattering it on the floor.