Triptych

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Angie lived less than five miles from Will’s house. She drove away with the radio down low, letting her mind wander as she turned down familiar roads. He looked the same as always, maybe a little thinner, and God knows what he had done to his hair. Angie had always cut it for him, and she assumed he’d gotten an electric shaver to avoid going to a hairdresser who might see the scar on the back of his head and ask him who had tried to kill him.

She knew that Will had been living in the north Georgia mountains for the last two years. Maybe he hadn’t gotten out much while he was up there. Will had always let his dyslexia limit his life. He didn’t like going to new restaurants because he couldn’t understand the menus. He bought food at the grocery store based on the familiar colors of the labels or the identifiable photographs on the packages. He would rather starve than ask for help. Angie vividly recalled the first time he had gone shopping on his own. He had returned with a can of Crisco shortening, thinking the fried chicken on the label indicated the contents.

Turning into her driveway, Angie tried to remember how many times she had left Will Trent. She counted them off by the names of the men she had left with. George was the first one, way back in the mid-eighties. He’d been a punk rock enthusiast with a closet heroin addiction. Number two and number eight were Rogers, different men, but both with the same shitty character flaws; as Will often pointed out, Angie was only attracted to guys who were going to hurt her.

Mark was number six. He was a real winner. It had taken Angie five months to figure out he was running up debt on her credit cards. The idiot had been so shocked when she’d called a buddy from Fraud and had him arrested that she still laughed when she thought about the stupid expression on his face. Paul, Nick, Danny, Julian, Darren… there had even been a Horatio, though that one only lasted a week. All told, none of them had ever lasted, and she always found herself back on Will’s doorstep, ruining his life again until she found another man who might take her away from him.

Angie parked the car in the driveway. The engine kept knocking even after she’d taken out the key and she thought for the millionth time that she should have the poor thing serviced. The car was leaking like an old lady and the muffler was hanging on by a thread, but she couldn’t bring herself to let some strange man work on the engine that Will had restored with his own two hands. It took him about six hours to read the morning newspaper, but he could take apart an engine and put it back together blindfolded. Whether it was a pocket watch or a piano, he could repair just about anything that had moving pieces. He looked at cases the same way-how the pieces were put together to make a crime work- and he was one of the best agents the bureau had. If only he could turn that razor-sharp mind on his own life.

The security lights came on as she walked to the back door and slid her key into the lock. Rob. How had she forgotten about Rob, with his carrot-colored hair and sweet smile and gambling addiction? That made eleven men, eleven times she had left Will and eleven times he had taken her back.

Shit, that didn’t even include the women.

Angie turned on the kitchen lights and pressed the keys on the alarm pad. Will did love her. She was certain of that. Even when they fought, they were careful not to go too far, not to say that one thing that would cut too deep, hurt too much, and make it all final. They knew everything about each other-or everything that mattered. If someone held a gun to her head and asked her to explain why she and Will always ended up together again, Angie would have died not knowing the answer. Not being one for introspection, Will would probably suffer the same fate.

She took a bottle of water out of the refrigerator and walked to the back of the house, trying unsuccessfully not to think about Will anymore. Angie checked the machine for messages as she started to undress. Half of her had been expecting him to call, but the other half knew he wouldn’t. Calling her would have been impulsive, and Will was not impulsive. He liked routine. Spontaneity was something for people in movies.

Angie turned on the shower, staring at her reflection in the mirror as she took off her clothes. She could not look at her body without thinking of Will’s. She’d had her share of abuse at the hands of various foster parents and stepfathers, but all of her scars were on the inside. Unlike Will, she did not have the scar down her face, the cigarette burns and gashes where drunken bullies had decided to take out their anger on a defenseless child. She didn’t have a jagged scar ripping up her leg where an open fracture had led to six operations. Neither did she have the still-pink line slicing up her forearm where a razor blade had opened the flesh, draining her blood and nearly costing her life.

The first time they had met was at the Atlanta Children’s Home, which for all intents and purposes was an orphanage. The state tried to place the kids with foster families, but more often than not they came back with new bruises, new stories to tell. Ms. Flannery ran the home, and there were three assistants who took care of the hundred or so children who lived there at any given time. Unlike the Dickensian image this conjured up, the staff were as devoted to their charges as they could be considering the fact that they were understaffed and underpaid. There was never any abuse there that Angie knew of, and for the most part, her happiest childhood memories were from her time spent under Ms. Flannery’s care. Not that the woman was particularly maternal or caring, but she made sure that there were clean sheets on the beds, meals on the table and clothes on their backs. For most of the children living at ACH, this was the only stability any of them had ever known.

Angie always told people that her parents had died when she was a child, but the truth was she had no idea who her father was and her mother, Deidre Polaski, was currently a vegetable living in a state home. Speed had been Deidre’s drug of choice, and an overdose had finally put her into an irreversible coma. Angie had been eleven when she found Deidre in the bathroom, slumped over the toilet, the needle still in her arm. She had stayed with her mother for two days, not eating, barely sleeping. Sometime around midnight on the second day, one of her mothers suppliers had come by. He had raped Angie before calling an ambulance to come get her mother.

She got into the shower, let the water cascade down on her and wash off some of the day’s grime.

Rusty.

That was his name.

“I’ll kill you if you tell anyone,” he had warned, his hand wrapped around her throat so tight that she could barely breathe. His pants were still down at his knees, and she remembered looking at his flaccid penis, the curly, dark hairs sprouting along his thighs. “I’ll find you and kill you.”

He wasn’t the first. By that time, Angie was already sexually experienced thanks to a never-ending line of her mother’s boyfriends. Some had been nice, but others had been cruel, menacing animals who had doped up Angie’s mother just so they could get at her girl. In all honesty, by the time Angie reached Ms. Flannery and the children’s home, she could feel only relief.

Will’s story wasn’t exactly the same but it was close enough. His body served as a map to pain, whether it was the long, thin scars on his back where the skin had been rent by a whip or the rough patch of flesh on his thigh where they had made a graft to close the electrical burns. His right hand had been crushed twice, his left leg broken in three places. He had once been punched in the face so hard and so repeatedly that his upper lip had split open like a peeled banana. Every time Angie kissed him, she felt the scar against her lips and was reminded of what he’d been through.

That was the one thing about the older kids at the orphanage: they all had a similar history. They were all unwanted. They had all been damaged. The younger ones never stayed for long, but by around the age of six or seven, there was basically no hope that you’d ever be part of a family. For most of them, that was a good thing. They had seen what families were like and preferred the alternative. At least, most of them did.

Will never gave up, though. On visiting day, he’d stand at the mirror, carefully combing his hair, smoothing down his cowlick, trying to make himself look like the kind of kid you’d want to take home with you. She’d wanted to kick him in the teeth, to shake him hard and explain that he wasn’t ever going to be adopted, that no one would want him. One time, she had actually started to do this, but there was something in his expression, a kind of hopefulness mixed with the expectation of failure, that stopped her. Instead of punching him, she had guided him back to the mirror and helped him comb his hair.

Angie turned off the shower and wrapped herself in a towel. She smiled, letting herself remember the first time she had seen Will in the common area. He was eight years old with curly blond hair and a little cupid’s bow of a mouth. He’d always had his nose in a book. At first, Angie had assumed he was a nerd but she later figured out that Will was staring at the words, trying to get them to make sense. The irony was that he loved words, adored books and stories and anything else that might take him out of his surroundings. In a rare moment of candor, he had once told her that being in a library was like sitting down at a table laid with all his favorite foods but not being able to eat any of them. And he hated himself for it.

Even now, he would not accept that his dyslexia was anything but his own personal failure. No matter how much Angie prodded and even begged, he would not get help. By the time she met him, Will had learned all kinds of tricks to hide his problem and Angie doubted his teachers thought of him as anything but slow. His current job was no different. He used colored folders so that he could find cases by sight, and different types of paper so that he could locate them by texture.

In school, Angie was the one who wrote out his term papers, taking dictation on subjects she had no desire to understand. She was the one who had to hear his tape recorder going night after night as he listened to books, memorizing whole passages so that he could contribute in class the next day. By graduation, he had worked ten times as hard as anyone else and still barely passed by the skin of his teeth. And then he went to college.

Angie had never understood why all of this mattered so much to him. With his height and good looks, Will should have grown into the kind of heartbreaker that Angie was always running off with. Instead, he was quiet, shy, the sort of man who would fall in love with the first girl who let him fuck her. Not that Will was in love with Angie; sure, he loved her, but being in love and loving someone were two different things. He wanted her for her familiarity in the same way that he wanted to go to the same restaurants and buy the same groceries. She was a known quantity, a safe bet. Their relationship was more along the lines of an overprotective brother and sister who happened to be having sex with each other.

Not that sex had ever been an easy thing between them. God knew Will had the equipment-before she had gone on the pill, Angie’s diaphragm had been the size of a dinner plate-but there was a big difference between holding a hammer and knowing how to hit the nail on the head every time. Over the years, they had gone backward from that first awkward time in the upstairs janitors closet at the children’s home, so that now when they had sex, it was like a couple of bumbling kids sneaking around behind their parents’ backs instead of two grown adults making love. They always had the lights off and most of their clothes on, as if sex was a shameful secret between them. The three-piece suit Will was wearing this afternoon shouldn’t have surprised her a bit. The more clothes he could wear to cover his body, the happier Will was.

This was some kind of cosmic joke, because Angie knew that underneath his clothes, he had a beautiful body. She could feel the muscles in his back when he tensed, her hands wrapped around the curve of his ass, her feet cupping his strong calves as she pushed up to meet him.

Yet, he was ashamed of his body, as if the scars said something bad about him instead of the people who had caused them. She hadn’t seen him fully undressed in at least twelve years. That was what their last fight was about. They had been in his kitchen just as they were tonight. Will was leaning against the counter and Angie was sitting at the table, yelling at him.

“Do you realize,” she had said, “that I have no idea what you look like?”

He’d tried to act confused. “You see me every day.” Angie had slammed her fist on the table and he’d jumped. Will hated loud noises, took them as a signal that he was about to get hurt despite the fact that he was more than capable of defending himself.

The clock in the living room had ticked audibly in the ensuing silence. Finally, he’d started nodding, then said, “Okay,” as he unbuttoned his shirt. He was wearing an undershirt, of course, and she had stepped forward, put her hands over his, as he started to pull it off.

It was her. She was the one who couldn’t look at him, who couldn’t bear to see the reminders of what he had been through. His scars were not his own, they were souvenirs from their childhood, symbols of the men who had abused her, the mother who had chosen a needle over her own daughter. Angie could writhe naked in the backseat of a car with a total stranger but she could not bring herself to look at the body of the man she loved.

“No,” she had told him. “I can’t do this anymore.”

“Who’s the guy?” he had asked. There was always a guy.

The next day, she had called his boss, Amanda Wagner, and told the woman to look for the tape recorder Will kept in his pocket so he could record all of their conversations.

“And here I was thinking you were his friend,” Amanda had said. Angie had given some crass response, but she knew in her heart that this was the right thing to do, the right thing for Will. The only way he would ever have a chance at a real life, at any kind of happiness, would be on his own. Still, she had burst into tears the moment she put down the phone. Maybe he had been fine up in his mountain enclave, but Angie had missed him like hell. The truth was that she had longed for him like a stupid schoolgirl.

And then the bitch had transferred him back to Atlanta. He was too good at his job to waste away in the hills, Amanda claimed. Besides, she liked Will too much to keep him away. For his part, she was the closest thing to a mother that Will had ever had. They pretended to hate each other, two tomcats sizing up each other for a fight, but Angie knew that in their own dysfunctional way they were a team. She recognized the signs.

To her credit, Amanda had given Angie a courtesy call to let her know about the transfer. “Your boyfriend’s back.”

Angie had finished the song, her smart-ass on autopilot. “Hey-la, hey-la.”

Even though Angie had known for weeks that Will’s new office was in the building, had prepared herself for running into him, she had felt blindsided when Will had gotten off the elevator this morning. Seeing him with that prick Michael Ormewood had been like a punch in the stomach. After that, Angie had spent most of the day trying to think of a reason to go see him. She knew he would go straight home after work.

He didn’t date and as far as Angie knew, except for a hand job from another little slut at the children’s home, he had never been with another woman.

As the day wore on, she’d felt almost sick from wanting to see him. After arresting three Johns who had the bad fortune of choosing “Robin” from the line of working girls in front of the liquor store, Angie had swiped a pad of pink notepaper from the fruit who worked across from her, knowing the bright background somehow helped Will read words more easily. In careful block letters, she had written out John Shelley’s name, then driven straight to Will’s house before she could think about it too much and stop herself. His face was so easy for her to read, and she had known from his expression exactly what he was thinking when she handed him the note: so this is the guy, the next one you’re going to leave me for.

Angie wiped the steam off the bathroom mirror, caught her reflection and did not like what she saw. John had said she was pretty, but he was only looking at the surface. Underneath, she was a hag, a miserable old witch who brought misery to everyone she met.

Will was worried about John Shelley, but he could not have been more wrong if he’d tried. It was only a matter of time before Will figured out the truth. He could barely read a book, but he could read the signs clearly enough. One of the biggest regrets in Angie’s life wasn’t the eleven men or her comatose mother or even the hell she routinely put Will through. Her biggest regret was that she had slept with that asshole Michael Ormewood.