A framed picture of Leah sits strategically placed, probably by her, next to his computer monitor. I glare at it. It’s one of those posed studio pictures that the photographer painstakingly tried to make look natural. Leah was looking slightly to the left of the camera, and her mouth was pouty and slightly open. “Kiss me, I’m a beautiful whore,” it says in black and white.
“I want to have a huge office one day,” he says, following my eyes to a picture of Leah. “More books-that I don’t read- a fireplace, and one of those big, arched doorways with the heavy knockers.”
“Are you going to hang that picture up in your new office?” I ask. It hurts to see her there, so fixated in his life.
Caleb shrugs and looks at me in interest.
“Depends. The girl in the frame might be different. I do have a thing for brunettes.”
I pull a face at him.
“And my bedroom…”
His sheets are black silk and they lay rumpled and unmade. It makes me sick to think of all the women that have rolled around in his sheets.
“Where’s the bathroom?” I say in weak voice. He leads me to through the bedroom and watches me stare. There is a shower with six different shower heads and sunken bath that could easily fit five people. There is even a small wine bar built in the corner. He laughs at my expression.
“This is my favorite room too.”
“Wow,” I say.
“Well, if you spend the night sometime you can have the privilege of using it.” All the blood rushes to my head.
We land up back in the living room. I slump onto the couch while Caleb goes to fetch a bottle of wine from the kitchen. He comes back with two glasses balanced in one hand and a bottle of red in the other.
He fills our glasses and hands me one, his fingers brushing against mine in the process.
When he disappears from the room to start dinner, I pour the wine down my throat like a shot and refill my glass. I half expect either Leah or his memory to make an appearance at any second and I don’t want to be sober when it happens.
“So, can I see this ring you bought for your sweet little girlfriend?” I say when he walks back into the room. I don’t know why I ask this but I’m sure the wine has made me bolder.
“Why do you want to see the ring?” he looks at me from under his lashes.
Hmmm, because I want to see what could have been mine.
“Curiosity. I’m a girl and I like jewelry. You don’t have to show me, if you don’t want to.”
He disappears into the bedroom and comes back carrying a small blue box. Tiffany’s. How predictable.
“Whoa baby,” I say cracking open the lid. It is a carat past enormous. The most beautiful and obnoxious bauble I have ever seen. Well, aside from Cammie anyway….
“This thing needs its own zip code.”
“Try it on.” He buffers the box at me and my hand automatically pushes it away.
“Isn’t it bad luck to try on someone else’s ring?”
“Bad luck for the bride, I think,” he taunts.
“In that case…” I say reaching for it. “Wait!” I pull my hand back. “You have to propose first.” I hand him the box and sit back waiting for the show.
“Everything has to be a production with you doesn’t it?” he says standing up and turning his back to me. “Ask and you shall receive.” When he spins back around his features are twitchy and nervous.
“Bravo,” I clap my hands.
“Olivia,” he begins. I look at him in mock surprise. Then suddenly he is serious…or he seems so. I catch my breath. “You belong with me. Do you believe me?” I feel my sweat glands open.
Holding my breath, I nod. This is supposed to be for laughs, but it doesn’t sound funny, it sounds like something I will be replaying years from now—when I am sitting alone in a room full of cats.
“Will you marry me, Olivia? You are the only woman I know how to love. The only woman I want to love.” He doesn’t lower himself to his knee and he doesn’t need to. I am rocking on the edge of an emotional meltdown as is.
I know I was supposed to give some sort of response. I grope for my wit, but my mind is as dry as my mouth.
The wine speaks for me. I kiss him, because he is close and there is no other response good enough. It is just a brush of lips, warm and hasty. He freezes and stares at me with his eyebrows cocked in surprise.
“I would have given you diamonds a week ago, if I knew it would get me that.”
I shrug.
He lifts my finger and studies Leah’s diamond. “It looks…..”
“Silly,” I finish for him. “Here, take it,” I tug at the band and it rams into my knuckle. I try again. It is…stuck.
“Crap!” I moan. “I am so sorry Caleb. This was such a stupid idea.”
“Don’t apologize. Your fingers are probably just swollen. Give it some time and we’ll try again later.” And then he disappears into the kitchen to see to dinner and I am left on the couch with half a bottle of wine and Strawberry Shortcake’s ring on my finger.
“I don’t get it. How can you think so differently from before?” I ask while we sit eating dinner at his dining room table. I am buzzing from the wine and my tongue feels dangerously loose. “You don’t like the ring you chose, before the amnesia, you don’t like the girlfriend ….or your condo. How can the same person be someone else entirely?”
“No one said anything about not liking the girlfriend. What might have been my taste then is not so now.”
“So the amnesia made you a different person?”
“Maybe or maybe the amnesia revealed that I’m not the person I was pretending to be.”
He is right. The years that he went missing from my life, he’d morphed into a professional bachelor, right down to his cheesy, silk sheets. It wasn’t my Caleb. The one who had put that purple blob of paint on my ceiling.
“Do you love Leah?” The words are out of my mouth before I have the chance to swallow them. My mouth tastes bitter.
“She’s lovely. Very kind and sophisticated. She always says the right thing at the right time. But I can’t seem to summon the things that I’m supposed to be feeling for her.”
“Maybe those feelings were never there in the first place.”
“Do you ever think that maybe you’re crossing the line?” He puts down his silverware and rests his elbows on the table.
“Hey, we’re just two strangers getting to know each other. There are no lines yet.” I push back from the table and cross my arms. My mood had soured like old milk and I wanted to fight.
“Truce,” he says holding up his hands. Before I can agree, he grabs our dinner plates and hustles into the kitchen.
I help him stack the dishes in the washer and then Caleb retrieves some ice from the kitchen and holds it on my finger.
I watch his fingers work through languid eyes. His next move almost makes me faint. He is trying to explain the rules of football to me, which I am pretending to care about, when he reaches for my finger and gently puts it into his mouth. The ring slides off easily this time. He takes it from his lips and replaces it in the box without another word. He carries it back into the bedroom and I clench and unclench my fist.
“I need to go,” I say, standing up.
“Don’t,” he says.
My phone starts ringing and I let go of his eyes to dig around in my purse. My phone hardly ever rings. I only have it for emergencies and Cammie. I expect to see her number when I look at the screen, but instead it’s Rosebud’s.
“Some-a-one breaks your apartment,” she yells when I pick up.
“Calm down Rose, I don’t understand—what?”
“Some-a-one breaks your house!” she yells, like I had asked her to turn up the volume instead of speak clearly.
I shake my head, which is still infused with wine. Then it clicks. Someone broke into my apartment.
“I’ll be right there.” I hang up and look at Caleb. “Someone broke into my apartment,” I repeat Rosebud’s words. Caleb grabs his car keys.
“I’ll drive you,” he says steering me towards the door. He drives faster than I would and I am grateful for it. I think about Pickles, who I had forgotten to ask Rosebud about. I silently pray that she is okay. Caleb walks me to my door where two police officers are waiting.
“Are you Olivia Kaspen?” the older of the officers asks. He is dead-eyed and pockmarked.
“Yes. My dog?” I try peering around them, but their uniformed bodies create a barrier between me and my front door.
“May we see some identification?” I pull my driver’s license out of my purse and hand it to him.
Satisfied, the officer steps aside. “Your neighbor has your dog,” he says a little more kindly. I breathe a sigh of relief.
I check to make sure Caleb is tagging behind me and step over the threshold. I don’t know what I am expecting to see. But, it wasn’t this. Everything a thief would want to steal is still there; television, DVD player, stereo. I blink confused and then my eyes catch the chaos formerly known as my home. Everything is smashed. Everything. Pictures, knickknacks, lamps. My sofa had been slashed open and the stuffing is pooling out like white vomit. I hear myself make a noise that is part sob—part wail. Caleb takes hold of my hand and I cling to him. I move from room to room my eyes bleeding tears as I survey the damage, or rather the annihilation of everything that I own. My coffee table is the only piece of furniture that remains unbroken; however, the intruder has taken the time to carve the word “SLUT” into the wood.
“This doesn’t look like a robbery,” I hear Caleb say to one of the officers. I slip into the bedroom before I can hear his reply. I step over my mutilated clothes and into my closet.
My memory box is laying topsy-turvy on the floor. I drop to my knees and begin rummaging through the bric-a-brac, running my fingers over each object in relief as I recover it. Almost everything is there. Almost. I press my palms to my eye sockets and rock on my haunches. Why? Why? Only one person would have a use for what is missing. She is the devil’s spawn, evil, with red hair and motives as big as Ursula the sea witches’ ass.
My head automatically turns in Caleb’s direction. Time. I was out of time. She was on her way to his condo now, no doubt, the evidence clutched in her hands. I start shaking. I am not ready. I can’t say goodbye yet.
“Miss?” the police officer is standing at the closet door, looking down at me. “We need you to fill out a report, to let us know what they took?” I see Caleb push past him and walk carefully around my ruined belongings. He lifts me from the floor and leads me back into the living room, his hands are like anchors on my arms.
I feel anger bubbling beneath my eyes, my nose, and my mouth. It is coursing through my limbs and doing a tap dance across my abdomen. I want to grab that bitch by her skinny little chicken neck and squeeze until she pops. I grope with my calm and turn to the policemen.
“They didn’t take anything,” I say waving my hand at the television. “This wasn’t a robbery.”
“Do you know anyone who would want to do something like this, Ms. Kaspen? An ex-boyfriend perhaps?” he says stealing a glance at Caleb. Did I? I grind my teeth. I can tell him everything right here, right now—beat the bitch to the punch.
Caleb is looking at me intently. I open my mouth to say something, but he beats me to it.
“Tell them about Jim, Olivia,” he says gently.
Jim? No—Jim would never do something this precise. No, this was a woman’s work. The detail impeccable.
“It wasn’t Jim,” I say. “Let’s go get Pickles.”
After they leave, Caleb takes my hand and tenderly says, “I want you to stay at my place tonight.”
I have no intention of doing any such thing but I am on mute until I can stew up a plan. We lock up and go over to Rosebud’s apartment, where Pickles throws herself at me with rabid hysteria. Rosebud clucks around me like a mother hen, touching and prodding until I grab both of her hands and assure her I am fine.
“Wait here,” she says disappearing into the kitchen. I know what is coming. The moment she first laid eyes on me, Rosebud decided that I needed taking care of. Her first gift had been a tarnished hunting knife that belonged to her dear, dead Bernie.
“If someone breaks in, you use this,” she jabbed the knife in demonstration, slicing at the air, and then handed it to me, hilt first. I was honored and mortified, but ended up stashing the knife underneath my bed.
Now, every time she sees me, she runs back into her apartment to fetch some half-eaten or lovingly used item she had set aside for me. I don’t have the heart to refuse.
She stumbles out of the kitchen carrying a massive bag of oranges and pushes them against my chest. Caleb raises an eyebrow in question and I shrug.
“Thanks Rosie.”
“No proby,” she winks at me. And then in a very loud whisper, “You steal this boy’s heart. Make him marry you.” I glance up at Caleb who is pretending to study Rose’s framed needlework. He is trying not to smile.
I kiss Rosebud’s wrinkled cheek and we leave. Caleb takes my oranges and gives me a smile that I don’t understand.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me...”
He shrugs. “Her—you. It was very sweet.”
I blush.
We climb into his car and ease onto the highway. I count the streetlights tying to think of a way to steer him away from Leah.
When we pull off at his exit, I am swearing under my breath. We are blocks away from his high-rise and if I don't want to be caught. I have to do something—and fast.