The Kept Woman

FOURTEEN

Sara stood in her kitchen watching the noon news as she ate a bowl of ice cream. After eleven days of speculation, Ditmar Wittich was finally giving an interview. He sat with a scaled model of the scuttled All-Star Complex behind him, delivering a diatribe about how the project was still a good idea. He might as well have been speaking gibberish. The reporter clearly only cared about sentences that contained the words Rippy or Figaroa.

Wittich said, ‘The complex would bring thousands of jobs to the city.’

Sara muted the TV. Other than the German accent, she had no idea where Will got the Goldfinger reference. Wittich was much more of a Stromberg.

She dumped the rest of the ice cream into the sink. Probably not the best choice for lunch, but it beat daytime drinking. When she glanced back at the TV, the screen was split between Wittich and that video that was being called the Rippy Rampage. Sara wanted to look away, but she couldn’t. Hardly anyone in the world could. Someone at the GBI had leaked the file from Angie’s iPad. Amanda was on the warpath, which to Sara’s thinking meant she was probably the culprit.

Angie had been right that the video was damaging, though probably not for the reason she had assumed.

The film that Reuben Figaroa had made of himself and Marcus Rippy raping a drugged Keisha Miscavage had shattered internet viewing records. Unfortunately, all people could talk about was the last three seconds of footage when, off camera, a door is slammed open, a hand reaches out to swat Reuben’s iPhone away, and a woman screams the beginning of what is obviously the word motherfucker.

The blur of pink before the video goes black is almost lost to the naked eye, but slow down the frames and you can see the custom-crafted Italian leather stiletto kicking Keisha Miscavage’s head. The ostrich-skin shoe is dyed bright fuchsia. There is a gold R embroidered on the toe.

Will had recognized the shoe immediately. He had a thing for shoes. He remembered that LaDonna Rippy had worn the stilettos to the one and only interview her husband had submitted to during the rape investigation.

Marcus Rippy was freely giving interviews now. He’d turned on his wife, insisting that he and Reuben had just been having a little fun with Keisha Miscavage. The video backed him up. Keisha was drugged but showing no outward signs of injury before LaDonna entered the room. According to Marcus, it was LaDonna who had done the real damage.

So here was Will’s new case: LaDonna had beaten Keisha. LaDonna had choked her, punched her, strangled her over the course of five hours. LaDonna had left the bruises on Keisha’s back and legs and put her into a coma that had kept her in the hospital for a week.

The forensic evidence backed this up. LaDonna’s DNA had matched the sweat and saliva found on the victim’s body. Keisha’s DNA was found in the spots of blood on LaDonna’s pink shoes. The prosecution wasn’t open and shut-with the Rippys’ money, nothing was ever a sure thing-but there was also a documented pattern of behavior.

LaDonna Rippy was a jealous woman. Will had found three previous out-of-court settlements where victims had been paid for their silence. A woman in Las Vegas was still managing to tell her story despite LaDonna breaking her jaw and busting out her teeth. Another woman in South Carolina from fifteen years ago was shopping a tell-all book. There would be more, because there was always more. It seemed like Marcus Rippy’s wife was looking at serious prison time.

Whether or not Marcus was looking at the same was up to a jury to decide. The world could come up with all kinds of excuses when a man raped and beat a woman. Not so much when a woman was the one doing the damage.

Sara couldn’t let herself sink into this depressing quagmire again. She turned off the TV. She called up her song list and put on Dolly Parton. She kicked the vacuum into the kitchen. She rolled up her proverbial sleeves and started taking everything out of her cabinets so she could clean them.

This was back to her normal level of stress management, though Sara had spent plenty of time watching Buf f y on the couch and drinking way too much alcohol. Will had been tied up closing the Reuben Figaroa case and opening new ones against LaDonna and Marcus Rippy. His late nights and early mornings had him staying at his house so he wouldn’t deprive Sara of her sleep. They were depriving each other of much more than that. Yet another thing that was going wrong. Sara knew from her first marriage that the only sure-fire way to stop having sex was to stop having sex.

Not that sex would be any more than a temporary solution. There was still the larger issue of what had happened with Angie and Will and Will and Sara, and Sara couldn’t fix that on her own.

The phone rang. She bumped her head on a drawer. Sara let out some choice words as she reached for the phone on the counter.

‘It’s me,’ Tessa said. ‘I’m in a phone booth. We’ve got four minutes before my money runs out.’

Sara turned off the music. ‘Why are you calling from a phone booth?’

‘Because your precious niece dropped my cell phone down the hole in the outhouse.’

Sara covered her mouth to muffle the laughter.

‘Yeah, it’s really funny that my phone is encased in shit and I’m going to have to stick my hand down there and fish the fucking thing out.’ Tessa’s missionary work was more about helping people and less about watching her language. ‘I am literally in the middle of nowhere. I can’t just walk up to a Verizon store and buy a new one.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘Probably scribbling in my books and cutting up my clothes.’ Tessa sighed. ‘She’s with her father, who is making sure I don’t kill her. And don’t tell me I was just as bad when I was her age. I already got an earful from Mama.’

Tessa had been just as bad, but mentioning their mother was enough to drain away any desire to tease. ‘I got an earful, too.’

‘She’s worried about you.’

Sara pushed herself up onto the counter. ‘There’s a fine line between being worried and being self-righteous.’

‘What’s that, Kettle? Pot can’t hear you.’ Tessa changed the subject before Sara could come up with a snappy retort. ‘Have you had the Talk with Will yet?’

The Talk. The reckoning. Sara was dreading it as much as Will.

She told her sister, ‘I’ve been giving him some space. All that stuff with Reuben Figaroa and Anthony and…’ She didn’t have to remind Tessa of the details. The story of the hostage stand-off in the mall had made it all the way to South Africa. ‘I just didn’t want to pile onto him: “Sorry you witnessed a horrific suicide, but let’s talk about our relationship.” ’

‘You’ll have to get around to it eventually.’

‘What’s the point?’ Sara asked. ‘What’ll happen is, I’ll say what I have to say and he’ll nod a lot and look down at the floor or past my shoulder and he’ll rub his jaw or pick at his eyebrow, and at the end of the day he won’t tell me anything about how he’s feeling because he thinks he can just pretend it away and we’ll be fine.’

‘Ohhh.’ Tessa drew out the word. ‘You didn’t tell me Will was a man. Now all of this suddenly makes more sense.’

‘Ha ha.’

‘Sissy, you keep saying to me again and again that he won’t talk, but what are you saying to him?’

‘I told you I was giving him space.’

‘You know what I mean,’ she countered. ‘I can see you being all stoic and logical and letting him think this is some sort of math problem that has an X or Y solution, when inside you’re about to die, only you can’t let him know that because you’re worried about looking like some damsel in distress.’ She stopped for a breath. ‘Lookit, there’s nothing wrong with being a damsel. It’s not a man/woman thing. It’s a human thing. You like taking care of him. You like feeling needed. There’s no sin in letting Will have the same thing with you.’

Sara knew what was coming next before Tessa even said it.

‘You need to show him how you feel.’

‘Tess, I just-’ She had to tell the truth, if only to her sister. ‘I know this sounds petty, but I don’t want to feel like I’m his second choice.’

Tessa’s response was not immediate. ‘Will is your second choice.’

She meant Jeffrey. ‘It’s not the same.’

‘In a lot of ways, it’s worse for Will. There’s no question that you’d still be with Jeffrey if he were alive. But in Will’s favor, Angie’s still alive but he’s choosing to be with you. So it’s really more like a divorce, and you have to put up with his bitchy ex-wife, which puts you in line with exactly half the female population.’

Sara leaned her head back against the cabinets. She stared out the windows in the living room. The sky was an almost painfully clear blue. She wondered how Will was spending his Saturday. Their perfunctory phone call last night had been filled with a lot of noises about future plans that neither one of them seemed too excited about.

Tessa said, ‘Every person has baggage. You’ve got all your shit with Jeffrey. Lord knows I’ve got my shit. People have baggage. The next guy, if you move on, will have baggage. The pope has baggage. Jeffrey had baggage. You didn’t hold that against him.’

‘Because he belonged to me,’ Sara said, and she understood that this was what hurt most. She was jealous. She didn’t want to have to share any part of Will with anybody else. His mind. His heart. His body. She wanted him all to herself.

‘Sissy, don’t cry.’

‘I’m not crying,’ Sara lied. Fat, stupid tears were rolling down her face. In the abstract, she could logic out all of the reasons why Will was wrong for her. But then she thought about losing him and she could barely find a reason to get out of bed.

The phone started beeping, giving them their thirty-second warning that time was running out.

Tessa said, ‘Look, you know your choices. You can go find Will and tell him that you love him and that you want him in your life and that you’re miserable without him.’

‘Or?’

‘You can turn Dolly Parton back on and finish vacuuming out your kitchen cabinets.’

Sara looked around the kitchen. She really should stop being so predictable. ‘Is there a third option?’

‘Fuck the hair off his balls.’

Sara laughed.

They both silently waited for the three quick beeps on the phone before the line was cut.

Sara hung up the phone. She looked out the windows again. A bird floated through the air. Its wings fluttered in the breeze. Sara missed having bird feeders in her backyard. She thought about the open houses she had looked at with Will a lifetime ago. She had pictured her weekends spent filling up hummingbird feeders and doing laundry and reading on the back porch while Will worked on his car.

When they were all standing in the waiting room in the Grady ICU, Angie had told Will that she wanted to give her daughter a happy-ever-after.

Sara could give that to Will. She could give him everything if he would only let her.

The dogs stirred from the couch. They wandered toward the door. Their tails wagged, because they knew the person on the other side.

Sara’s first thoughts were purely instinctive. Her hair was packed into a granny bun. She was sweating from being inside of the cabinets. Her face was red from crying. She was wearing a ratty T-shirt and cut-off jeans. Even her bra was baggy. They had not been in a relationship long enough for Will to see her this way.

She jumped down from the counter with the hope of making it to the bathroom before he opened the door.

She made it to the living room.

‘Hey.’

Sara turned around.

He had a bunch of takeout menus in his hand. ‘These were in the hall.’

‘My neighbor is out of town.’

He dropped the menus on the dining-room table. He held up his key to her apartment. ‘Is using this still okay?’

‘Of course.’ Sara pulled at the cut-offs. She straightened her shirt. Will had obviously come from home. He was in jeans and one of his running shirts. Tessa’s third option flittered through her mind.

He said, ‘Faith just called me. Kip Kilpatrick died about twenty minutes ago.’

Sara knew the man had been in the hospital for the last twenty-four hours. His symptoms were all over the place. ‘Did they ever figure out what was wrong with him?’

‘He ingested high amounts of ethylene glycol. It’s found in antifreeze and-’

‘Transmission fluid.’ Sara remembered the distinctive red bottle in the back of Angie’s trunk. ‘She’ll get away with it, won’t she?’

‘I don’t care. I mean, I care because a man died. Even though he was a prick.’ He shrugged. ‘Faith says it was the sports drink. It’s red, the same as the transmission fluid, and apparently the taste is sweet, so Kilpatrick wouldn’t have noticed it. Half the bottles in his office mini-fridge were spiked.’

‘Clever.’

‘Yeah.’

They both went silent.

Sara felt like she had had some variation on this conversation for the last week and a half. They talked about something terrible that Angie had done. They talked about work. One of them said something about grabbing a meal, over which they would have an even more stilted conversation, then Will would make an excuse about needing to go home so that he could finish some paperwork and Sara would go home and stare at the ceiling.

She said, ‘So, what else? It’s lunchtime. Are you hungry?’

‘I could eat.’

‘There’s nothing in the house. I’ll need to shower if we go out.’

‘I miss you.’

Sara was shocked by his directness.

‘I miss your voice. I miss your face.’ He walked toward her. ‘I miss touching you. Talking to you. Being with you.’ He stopped a few feet away. ‘I miss the way you rock your hips when I’m inside of you.’

Sara chewed her lip.

‘I’ve been trying to give you some time, but I feel like that’s not working. Like I should just start kissing you until you forgive me.’

If only it was that easy. ‘Babe, you know I’m not mad at you.’

He put his hands in his pockets. He didn’t look at the floor. He didn’t look past her shoulder. ‘I’ve got a court date at the end of next month. There’s something called a divorce by publication. You put a notice in the newspaper, and if you don’t hear back in six weeks, the judge can grant you a divorce.’

Sara felt her brow furrow. ‘Why didn’t you do this before?’

‘My lawyer said it would never happen. Judges don’t like to do it that way. They rarely sign off on it.’ He said, ‘I asked Amanda to pull in a favor and find me a judge who would.’

Sara knew how hard it was for Will to ask for help.

He said, ‘I’m sorry I kept things from you. I know my not telling you stuff is a big thing. And I’m sorry.’

She didn’t know what to say except ‘Thank you.’

He wasn’t finished. ‘The way I grew up, you had to hide the bad things. From everybody. It wasn’t just about people liking you or not liking you. If you acted out or said something wrong, it got passed on to your social worker and your social worker put it in a file and people-potential parents-they wanted normal kids. They didn’t want problems. So you had a choice. You either let yourself be really bad, like to let them know that you didn’t care whether or not they chose you. Or you kept your problems to yourself and hoped.’

Sara didn’t dare answer. He so rarely talked about his childhood.

He said, ‘With Angie, anything I told her, she would find a way to throw it back in my face. Find a way to hurt me with it or make me feel stupid or-’ He shrugged, likely because the possibilities were endless. ‘So I kept it all inside, no matter how important or inconsequential, because that was how I protected myself.’ He still did not look away. ‘I know you’re not Angie, and I know I’m not a kid living at the home anymore, but what I’m saying is that it’s a habit I have, the not telling you things. It’s not a character trait. It’s a flaw. And it’s something I can change.’

‘Will.’ Sara didn’t know what else to say. If he had told her all of this two weeks ago, she would’ve thrown herself into his arms.

‘I got you this.’ He took a key out of his pocket. He slid it across the counter. ‘I changed the locks. I installed an alarm. I changed the combination on my safe. I took myself off everything that has to do with Angie.’ He paused again. ‘I understand that you need time, but you need to understand that I am never, ever going to let you go. Not ever.’

She shook her head at the pointlessness. ‘I appreciate the sentiment, but there’s more to it than that.’

‘There really isn’t,’ he insisted, the same as he always did. ‘We don’t need to hash it out, because all that matters is how we feel about each other, and I know that you love me, and you know that I love you.’

All that Sara could see was a giant circle. He was apologizing for not talking about things, then saying that they should not talk about things.

‘Anyway,’ he finally said. ‘I’m gonna leave now, give you some time to think about this, maybe start missing me too.’ His hand rested on the doorknob. ‘I’ll be here when you make up your mind.’

The door clicked shut behind him.

Sara stared at the door. She shook her head again. She couldn’t stop shaking her head. She was like a dog with a tick in its ear. He was so infuriatingly elliptical.

I’ll be here when you make up your mind.

What did that even mean?

Here, as in the general ‘I’m here for you,’ or here, as in actually physically waiting right now in the hallway for her decision?

And why was it solely her decision in the first place? Shouldn’t the future of their relationship be something they decided together?

That was never going to happen.

She turned back to the kitchen. Pots and pans were scattered on the floor. The vacuum hose was full of dog hair. She would have to clean it out before she let it touch the cabinets. Or she could just give up on today, take a shower, get on the couch, and wait for a reasonable hour to drink.

The dogs followed her to the bathroom. She turned on the shower. She took off her clothes. She watched the water fall, but didn’t get in.

Will’s words played on an endless loop in her head. The memories worked at her irritation like a match striking flint. All that he’d offered her were Pyrrhic victories. He was finally divorcing Angie, but Angie would still be around. He had changed his locks, but Angie would find a way inside just like she had before. He had gotten an alarm. Angie would know the code, just like Will had known the code to unlock her cell phone. He’d said that he was never going to leave Sara. So what? Neither was Angie. This was just more of Will’s fairy-tale thinking that all he had to do was wait it out and everything would magically be okay.

Sara turned off the shower. She was so frustrated that her hands were shaking. She put on her robe as she walked back into the bedroom. She picked up the phone to call Tessa, but then she remembered the outhouse. And then she realized that calling her sister was pointless, because Tessa would only say the obvious: that in his usual roundabout way Will had just offered Sara everything that she had wanted from him for the last year and her response was to let him walk out the door.

Sara sat down on the bed.

Dumbass, she thought, but she didn’t know whether she meant herself or Will.

She had to look at this logically. Will’s earlier declarations could be interpreted one of two ways. One: he was going to try to be more open, but he would rather stick needles in his eyes than talk about their relationship. Two: why would they talk about what they wanted when they already had everything that they needed?

One and two. X and Y.

‘God dammit,’ Sara muttered. The only thing worse than her mother being right was when her little sister was.

Sara stood from the bed. She cinched her robe tight as she walked back up the hallway. She passed through the living room. The dogs followed her to the door. Their ears perked when Sara wrapped her hand around the knob.

Her resolve started to slip.

What if Will wasn’t standing there when she opened the door?

Too much time had passed. Five minutes? Ten? He wouldn’t still be out there.

What if here meant somewhere else?

Logic had failed her, so she had to rely on fate. If Will wasn’t in the hallway, she would take his absence as a sign. That it wasn’t meant to be. That she was a fool. That Angie had won. That Sara had let her win because she was too busy obsessing about what she thought she wanted rather than stopping and appreciating what she had.

Show him how you feel.

Tessa had told her to be more vulnerable. There was nothing more vulnerable than opening a door without knowing what would be on the other side.

Sara loosened her robe.

She unpinned her hair.

She opened the door.