Look Closer(120)

I put out my arms and she sails into them, holding me for a long time, moaning with pleasure. I close my eyes and drink it all in, the smell of her, the feel of her, the warmth of her, quite possibly the last time I will hold her like this.

“Ooooh, I’ve missed you, fella,” she whispers.

Not as much as I’ve missed her. But I don’t say that. I won’t make this hard for her.

“Merry Christmas,” I say, when we pull back from each other, enough to see each other’s faces. She takes my hands in hers.

“Merry Christmas, indeed,” she says. “Santa was very generous. Very. You should’ve seen the look on Miriam’s face, Simon. She was crying. She was screaming. She counted the money like ten times. She just kept shouting, ‘A million dollars! A million dollars! Who would give us a million dollars in cash?’ I didn’t say anything, of course. Though I wanted to.”

I seesaw my head. “Better it stay anonymous. Just in case anyone’s still watching me and sees that I gave some random domestic-violence shelter in Wisconsin a bunch of cash. It could lead to you.”

She nods. “You don’t really think anyone’s still watching, do you?”

“I don’t. But I was always more paranoid than you.”

“Good thing you were.” She searches my face. “You didn’t have to do that, you know. Give us that money.”

“Hey, what am I gonna do with a million dollars? I already have heat and A/C.”

She rolls her eyes. “You could’ve kept a little of the money Ted left you.”

“You could’ve taken some of it, lady.”

I offered it to her. All of it. She said no. It’s one of the reasons I love her so much. She’s been poor her whole life, she scrapped and pinched and sold her body to support herself, and here a guy is willing to fork over twenty-one million dollars to her, gratis, and she turns it down. The shelter, okay, but she wouldn’t take a dime personally.

She’s in rebuilding mode, and she wants to rebuild on her own terms.

“Oh, speaking of loads of money,” she says. “I’ve been meaning to ask—did you get the full professorship?”

Her eyes go wide. It gives me a lift, that she cares enough to remember, how much she wanted it for me, the ends to which she was willing to go to get it for me.

“I did not,” I say. “Reid got it. I heard the vote was close.”

“Ugh. I’m sorry.” She drills a finger lightly against my chest, juts her chin. “Should’ve used that information I got you, dummy.”

I shrug it off. “The good news is, the St. Louis cops have cleared my name. They closed the case as resolved. So Dean Cumstain can’t hold it over me. There’s always next time.”

She thinks about that and nods. “You did it your way. As you should.”

A lull falls over us, and she reverts to small talk. How’s work, etc. I join in, too. She tells me about the girls—lights up, in fact, when she talks about those girls.

But our time is coming to an end. I feel it. I feel it and there’s nothing I can do.

“You probably need to get back,” I say.

“Yeah. Walk with me.” She loops her arm in mine, and we take the path down toward the parking lot, my chest full, my heart pounding, as I count the seconds.

I have to tell her. I have to tell her one more time how I feel. I have to make one more pitch for us. What do I have to lose?

“Listen—”

“We’re not normal people, are we?” she says.

I decelerate, breathe out. Then I think about her question and chuckle. “Let me know when you can define ‘normal’ for me.”

“Yeah, but you know what I mean.”

“Not really,” I say. “Is it normal to screw people out of money and ruin their lives?”

“Some people would let that go. Even if they couldn’t forgive it, they’d forget it. Or just live with it.”

“Nick didn’t just steal Monica’s money, Vicky. He destroyed her. He took advantage of her addiction. He lured her away from her family, kept her drugged up, then took all her money, leaving her basically for dead. You know that better than anyone.”

“I know—”

“And Lauren? She knew my family’s situation. If she’d stolen some of the money, like a million bucks or something and left the rest, everything would’ve been fine. It would’ve been a shitty thing to do, no question, but we could have moved on. But no. Lauren had to sweep every nickel out of that account, take everything we had. The money we needed to care for my mother at home. She laid waste to us and never looked back. That’s pretty fucking far from normal. So I don’t see why my response had to be normal, either.”

She squeezes my arm, sensing that I’m getting worked up. I am. But sometimes I need to remind myself why I did what I did.

I stop and turn to her. “Do you have regrets?”

“Do you?”

“I asked first,” I note.

“Yeah, but I’m the girl.”

Yes, she is that.

“My therapist from back in the day would have said that I was giving power to people who did bad things,” I say. “She’s not wrong about that. That, I regret. I regret that I gave them that power. I regret that I let Lauren and my father dominate my thoughts.”