28. Harry
28
HARRY
Celia isn’t difficult to follow. Her overwhelming desire to keep me away from her daughter keeps her hanging around the hospital to be sure that I’ve left. She thinks that I don’t spot her with her back to me, talking to a janitor outside the elevator as I pass by.
She could’ve called me when Ruby was admitted to the hospital. She found us in Scotland for fuck’s sake. She turned up at my office in New York. So, I’m pretty damned certain that she could’ve found a telephone number and let me know, even if she just left a message with Lizzie.
She knew that I’d catch the first available flight out of New York. Hell, she knew that I’d drive if it got me here quicker. Which means that she didn’t want me here in Chicago.
But why?
Does she want Ruby to be dependent on her again, to make her realize that all she needs is her mom? If she really loves her daughter, wouldn’t she want her to be happy, even if it means swallowing her own pride and sucking up to my father?
I’ll deal with my father later but, for now, I follow Celia, hugging the shadows of the buildings and keeping my distance. She doesn’t go far. She doesn’t even glance over her shoulder as she steps inside the telephone booth and lifts the receiver, head down, punching in the number from a slip of paper she pulls from her pocket.
I stand just inside an alleyway. It has started to drizzle, the kind of icy rain that hardly splashes the puddles on the sidewalk but drenches you without you even realizing. I pull my collar up around my neck, and peer out from behind the wall.
She glances my way, and I duck my head back inside the alley. Count to ten. Look again as she replaces the handset.
Stepping out of the booth, she pulls an umbrella from her purse, unfolds it above her head, and dashes across the road, dodging the sparse evening traffic easily. I wait for a bus to pass by and follow.
Heading back towards the hospital, Celia dashes inside a late-night diner, shaking water from the umbrella and folding it back up in the doorway. I wait on the opposite side of the road, following her through the steamy windows with my eyes to a seat in the corner where I can see the bright green of her coat.
I watch the waitress pouring coffee for Celia. Through the rain-streaked window, I see her watching the street like she’s waiting for someone. She could just be taking a break from hospital visits, a moment to herself to unwind before catching a taxi home. Before listening to Ms. Pagan’s message, this would’ve been my first conclusion, but now… Now I’m almost certain that she arranged to meet someone here, and I want to find out who.
Celia has already set the tone of playing dirty to keep Ruby away from me, so I’m not above playing her at her own game. The winner takes it all . Isn’t that how the song goes?
Rain trickles inside my collar and down my spine, and I shiver. The buildings on either side of the narrow alleyway offer some shelter, but my hair is already plastered to my head. Fortunately, I don’t have to wait long.
A familiar figure walks past the diner window, shoulders hunched inside his overcoat, chin jutting. Celia sits taller, her body subconsciously leaning towards the doorway as my father goes inside and joins her at her table-for-two.
It’s several beats before my brain processes what I’ve just witnessed and starts functioning again. My gut had been right when Ruby and I walked into Charlie Trotter’s and saw them together—they’re colluding to stop Ruby from marrying me.
But I can still hear the PI’s message left on my answerphone: “ Seems Mrs. Jackson might be suffering from a touch of insomnia. Either that, or she was enjoying a secret rendezvous with her lover .”
What else had she said though? This one is different .
Different how?
I can’t put my finger on it, but I get the strong sense that she is right. Not lovers. But what then? This can’t just be about me and Ruby, can it? Forget what happened thirteen years ago, let’s just make sure our kids don’t get hitched .
I’ve hardly slept in the past forty-eight hours, and this coupled with the alcohol consumed at the Plaza Hotel earlier in the day is making me drowsy, but I dare not get a takeout coffee from somewhere nearby in case I miss them leaving. Whatever is going on here, I want to hear it from my father’s own mouth.
I tilt my face towards the rain and catch the icy drops on my tongue. It isn’t caffeine, but it helps.
Loitering in the shadows, I’m grateful that the cold January weather keeps most folks inside. Which makes it easy for me to slip out onto the sidewalk when Celia and my dad leave the diner together and follow them back to the hospital.
Who are they visiting? Ruby or Graham? Has Celia persuaded my dad to make peace with my future father-in-law?
I grab a magazine from the table and take a seat in the main hospital entrance, where the heat hits me almost instantly. Skipping an article on improved healthcare packages, I settle instead on the personal story of a young woman who spent her childhood in the care system and went on to become a heart surgeon. My eyelids grow heavy…
I’m shaken awake by a rough hand on my shoulder.
I jump, drop the magazine onto the table, and blink furiously, trying to clear the sleep from my eyes and bring the world back into focus. “Dad? What are you doing here?”
Fuck! It hits me then that I was supposed to be trailing him and not the other way around. I have no idea how long I’ve been dozing, or where he has been.
“I could say the same to you.” He straightens his spine stiffly. “Got nowhere to sleep for the night?”
“No… I…” I stand up and grab my carry-on, grateful to find it still there by my feet. One thing is for certain, I’ll never make a private investigator. “I was waiting for you.”
Realization crosses his face. “Let’s walk. I could do with some fresh air.”
His strides are wide and strong; he doesn’t glance over his shoulder to see if I’m following him. He knows I will.
“Were you here to see Graham?” The nap hasn’t done much to clear my head, and I’m thinking on my feet, trying to figure out how best to approach this conversation.
Karl Weiss has never been the kind of father who will sit down and discuss important matters, he’d rather bottle it up, wait for a solution to present itself, and move on. He’s from an era when people believed that personal issues were supposed to stay that way—personal—and pushing him will only make him angry. When that happens, it’s game over.
“What do you think?”
After the sauna-heat inside the hospital, the cold night air is like a slap in the face. I don’t ask where we’re going. “Ruby then?”
I match his stride, glancing at his profile, but he doesn’t look at me, barely acknowledges my presence. To an outsider, he would appear to be a man minding his own business while I harass him for money to buy a coffee.
He stops at traffic signal and waits for the lights to change color. “Out with it, son. I didn’t raise you to be a fucking coward.”
I bristle, shoulders instinctively hunching up around my neck. I don’t know why I expected anything less.
My father views kindness as weakness, an opening to allow someone to shoot an arrow straight through the heart and leave you broken. Things might’ve been different if he’d allowed himself time to grieve my mom, but instead, he donned his suit and went straight back to work, staying in the office until late, and making sure he was the first one there in the mornings.
Maybe that’s why he doesn’t want me to marry Ruby—he doesn’t want to see me broken too. But I am nothing like him.
“You’re right, Dad. You didn’t. And you know what, I don’t care what you and Celia are plotting together, because it isn’t going to work. I’m not afraid of getting my heart broken. I love?—”
I don’t finish because he shoves me back across the sidewalk, my spine hitting the wall of the bank on the corner of the street. I drop my carry-on. His hand closes around my throat, the steam of his breath mingling with mine. He isn’t strangling me. It’s a warning: don’t cross the line or else.
“You don’t have a fucking clue about love.” His spit hits me in the face as he hisses the words. “What would you do for her, huh?”
“I-what?”
“I want to know. What would you do for Ruby Jackson, this woman you claim to love so much?”
A young man, leather jacket, faded jeans, walks past, hesitates, and takes a couple of steps back. “What’s going on here? You alright, buddy?” He aims this at me.
“It’s cool.” I widen my eyes at him, hoping that he’ll move on. “Family stuff.” I hear the snort of air leaving my dad’s nostrils and ignore it. He deserves to be embarrassed.
The guy nods and keeps walking.
“I’d do anything for her.”
My dad’s eyes are slits in the yellow glow of the streetlamp above our heads. “Would you wait for her?”
“Of course I would.”
“So, what’s the fucking rush? Scared she won’t feel the same way about you?”
“She does feel the same way.” I don’t understand what point he’s trying to prove. “Love doesn’t have to be a test. I don’t need Ruby to pass some kind of initiation ceremony for me to believe that she loves me too.”
He grabs my coat collar, pushes me against the wall one last time, and then releases me. I exhale deeply, unaware that I’d been holding it in my lungs, my knees trembling.
“How long would you wait for her?” he asks.
“What? I don’t know, as long as it takes, I guess. But it’s a moot point because we’ve already set the date.”
“Cancel it. Tell her you’ve changed your mind. You want to wait a while, do it properly instead of rushing into it. Every woman dreams of a big white wedding. Tell her you’ll make it worth the wait.”
My brain is soaking up the words—more than he has ever said to me in one conversation before—and forming them into something I can make sense of. Is he buying him and Celia some time to turn me and Ruby against each other? Or is he truly hopeful that we’ll realize what a huge mistake we’re making?
“No. Ruby isn’t like that. She doesn’t want the big white wedding; she’d rather keep it simple.” It’s not about the wedding, it’s about the person you’re marrying , that’s what she said.
“So, promise her whatever she fucking wants then.” He swallows, looks away, like he’s searching for the ace card on the wet sidewalk. “If she loves you, she’ll wait.”
“But I don’t want to wait. Life’s too short…”
A vision of glaring headlamps pops into my head, screeching tires, the volcanic sounds of metal-on-metal.
His shoulders slump inside his heavy coat, and he bows his head. “Maybe not as short as you think.” He keeps walking, and I jog to catch up with him, my carry-on dragging behind me.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He doesn’t look at me.
“Dad! Talk to me. What the hell is going on here?”
“Go home, son.” He crosses the road in front of an oncoming vehicle, and the driver hits the brakes, tires slipping across wet tarmac.
I raise a hand, yell, “Sorry!” to the driver, and chase after my dad.
He hears my footsteps, turns around, and grinds out between clenched jaws, “I said, go home, Harry. Go on. Fuck off!”
“Yeah, I know what you said, but I can be a stubborn bastard too.”
He shakes his head, a half-smile tugging one corner of his mouth. “I got something right then.”
My brain has been playing catch-up since he woke me up in the hospital, and now the reason I was there in the first place comes flooding back, sucking the air from my lungs. My dad and Celia Jackson. She called him from the telephone booth, and he came.
He came.
He wasn’t there to visit Graham or Ruby; he was there because of Celia.
How long would you wait for Ruby?
“Thirteen years,” I mumble under my breath, the truth crawling under my skin and squeezing my chest.
“Fucking bingo.” His voice is thick with emotion.
“Celia Jackson?”
It doesn’t sound right, the name on my tongue, not when I’m facing my dad. Talia Pagan said this one was different—not a case of the cheating wife. She’d seen something else, and she was trained to know what she was looking for.
“How long…?” Stupid question, I already know the answer. “I mean how did you… When did it start?”
My dad rubs the rain from his face with his hands and tilts his head towards the sky. “Wrong tense.”
“What do you mean?”
He sighs heavily. “The question isn’t, when did it start ? The question is, will it ever happen ?”
He walks away, and this time I let him go.