Chapter Twenty
Ugliness
Siena, January 6, 2012, Dallas, TX
After buckling Austininto his highchair, I put on a Nineties playlist and got busy with his lunch of mashed veggies and minced chicken. The last four months of quiet domesticity, interspersed with lively Texas-sized holidays, helped me settle into a new routine. It was simple and lovely: home-cooked meals, peaceful yoga classes, afternoon runs with the stroller, downtime for sketching. And amidst all those activities, the night with Connor began to ebb away like a bad dream, a figment of my imagination. I could almost glimpse the end of the proverbial tunnel—the day when it would fade into the past without a trace.
A brooding song about mistakes, bad girls, and remorse cut through my reverie, but I only shrugged and poured myself a glass of water. The whole thing was over with and forgotten. A case of temporary insanity, a lapse of judgement, a drunken slipup. The singer plunged into something about defense and redemption when Guinness exploded with a wild sprint toward the front door. I checked the clock: 3:30 PM—probably a diaper delivery.
But it wasn’t.
Ignoring the dog’s affectionate advances, Ryan charged into the kitchen, stiff as a post and white as a sheet. On his shoulder, hung his laptop case, its zipper half open.
I shot to my feet—and went still at the frost in his eyes.
“What’s wrong, baby?” I hugged myself, cold all over.
Very slowly, he took his gaze off me and touched my phone screen. The song stopped. Silence, thick and pounding, sucked all the air out.
“Chee-chee!” Austin’s happy little voice broke in. “Chee-chee!”
“Cheerios,” I corrected automatically, tossing a handful onto his tray with a shaky hand.
Ryan slid the case strap off his shoulder, took out his laptop, and placed it on the table. Focused and precise, like a surgeon preparing his instruments.
My thoughts raced with inconceivable scenarios. Impossible scenarios. I blew out a shuddering breath. It was only my guilty conscience. He had no way of finding out. No way at all. And what would his laptop have to do with it, anyway? Nothing, of course. Nothing.
You don’t know that. Yes, I do. Stop it. Stop.
I stepped closer. “Ryan, what...you okay?” My voice was a thrum of an irregular heartbeat.
He reached into his jacket pocket, took out a flash drive, and inserted it into his laptop.
The water I’d drunk rose to my throat. “Are you going to tell me or...?”
There wasn’t anything alarming on the screen. A couple of open windows, sound controls. He clicked on something. Then, he straightened, his eyes like two shards of ice.
I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans. “Seriously...w-what’s all this—”
A soft rustle of fabric. Then, a man’s voice. “I’m recording you, Siena. Is that okay?”
The air had gone. All of it. At once. I swallowed. Grabbed onto the kitchen table.
“Yeeep...” My voice drawn out and breathy.
A clang of a hammer in my head. “Ryan, no—” A crash of an ax. “Ryan, wait—”
“I know you’d had a little to drink, but I’m not out to take advantage of you. Are you sure you want to do this?”
Heat, skin-splitting, suffocating, wrapped me like a plastic bag. Tight. Tighter.
“Ryan, just let me—”
“I’m not drunk, Connor...I’m sure.”
Something rolled down my face, warm and pathetic. “Ryan, please...”
His gaze on me was unblinking, unseeing. His face—a still, white mask. His neck—a rigid red column with a bulging blue vein.
“Are you here because you think you’ll otherwise compromise your mural commission at my residence?”
My laughter, throaty and flagrantly theatrical. “Course not.”
I was going to be sick. Pass out. Have a stroke. “Please turn it off, Ryan. Just let me...let me tell you what happened—”
The plunging darkness in his eyes would stop a moving train. I drew back. Banged my hip into the table corner and gasped from a shot of pain.
“Do you want to have sex with me, Siena?”
I darted a glance around the kitchen, the world shrinking into a prison cell. A torture chamber with no way out. A coffin.
“Yeeep, I do...don’t I?”
Austin babbled something to the renewed rustle of sheets and soft whimpers.
“You understand you can say no and leave any time you want.”
“I don’t want to leave, Connor...”My voice teasing. Slutty.
I would leave. Flee this beautiful, clean house. Run far away where I wouldn’t have to listen. I lurched toward the living room, my legs trembling with effort.
“Sit down.” Ryan’s words were a pitiless crack of a whip.
I sank onto the kitchen chair. Folded my hands. Ugly. Filthy. I urgently needed a shower.
“Good, I don’t want you to leave either.”
I gulped for breath, searched for words. It was done now. Done. I would explain. “Ryan, listen. Ryan, I thought—”
Connor’s voice made me go still. “Well, fuck...” A low whistle, followed by the shuffle of fabric. “You’re a straight ten.”
I stared at the laptop through the thickening blur and hammering in my ears, its black lid a bottomless abyss. He stopped recording after the consent. Didn’t he?
Didn’t he?
Austin slapped at the highchair tray, an explosion of cheerios flying all over. A steady accompaniment to the uneven whir of heavy breathing.
There was a thing in our new kitchen. A vile, filthy thing. It buried its face in its hands. Its strangled sobs clashed with its breathy voice inside the laptop.
“Ah...Connor...”
“Yeah...” His voice low and muffled. “I can’t believe you’ve been hiding this pretty little thing from me...”
“Connor...mmm...ah....”Moaning. I was moaning. “Ohmigod, Connor...”
No. It wasn’t me. It couldn’t have been. “Ryan, it’s not—”
“You like that?”
Then, it was only my voice. Very obviously mine, interspersed with escalating “ohmigod’s,” “ahh’s,” and “mmm’s” and the obscene caper of the rustling bedsheets.
I wedged my head between my knees, shaking like a leaf.
“Mm-hmm...come for me.”
“Ohmigod, Connor...ohmigod!”My voice, intolerably high-pitched and breathless, followed by the peals of an uninhibited climax.
“Om-gah!” said Austin.
My skin was someone else’s skin. My mouth—someone else’s mouth. I lifted my head, dull and heavy. My words rushed out, thin and shrill. “I left after...I...just listen to the—”
The recording stopped. I threw a wild glance at the laptop screen. A screensaver had kicked in, something geometric, premade for Windows. “Is that...isn’t there...more...?”
I wished Ryan would shout. Or hurl something against the wall. Or break something. But he only stared, frozen. With great effort, he buried his hands in his pockets. His white-knuckled fists.
I stood. A shaky, ugly thing on shaky, ugly legs. “Ryan, please, you don’t—”
He stuffed his laptop into its case, slid the strap over his shoulder, and stalked out of the kitchen toward the garage.
I ran after him. “Ryan!”
A hideous thrum of wheels on the scraped walnut floor stopped me short. The largest suitcase we owned—a steel-gray thirty-two-inch hard shell. He rolled it into his closet.
“Oh, God...no...” I followed him in.
He threw the suitcase on the floor. Shoes, slacks, jeans. Shirts, ties, jackets, complete with hangers. Gym clothes. Briefs. Socks.
Something brushed against me. Guinness—ears pressed back, tail between his legs, watching Ryan’s every move. Austin began to cry in the kitchen, an indignant wail of neglect.
“Ryan, please...” I touched his arm.
He flinched as if struck. “Don’t touch me.” His voice was like something had died inside him.
“Ryan...l-let me...” A grotesque howl of fear and despair.
“Don’t talk to me.” His voice held a new note. Suppressed rage.
I stepped into the hallway.
He straightened and walked past me to the bathroom.
I leaned against the wall. My head was like someone had stuffed it with rattling rocks. My throat burned, convulsing with ugly, hoarse sobs.
From the bathroom—a clang of his electric shaver, aftershave, deodorant. A thud of his toothbrush, toothpaste.
He returned to the closet, zipped up his life into the suitcase, and marched past me to the front door. I trailed behind, blubbering like a child. I couldn’t stop.
“Ryan...don’t leave...”
There was nothing familiar in his eyes when he turned. Only loathing that seared skin and consumed flesh.
“I’m not leaving.” His voice bubbled with the kind of fury that makes a man put a fist through a wall. “I’m dumping you. Like trash.”
He threw open the door. Then, he walked out, giving me what I thought he never could, what I thought I needed. What I fully deserved. Pain and degradation.
I stammered to the kitchen and took my screaming baby out of his highchair. Then I sat on the hard kitchen chair with him in my arms. He stopped screaming.
I pressed my face into his silky hair. “It’s going to be okay, buddy...” The words dried on my lips.
After the endless stream of soothing, bathing, nursing, and putting Austin to sleep in his espresso sled crib, I returned to Ryan’s closet. Numb and cold, I stood outside before stepping in. He’d taken most of his clothes and all his briefs and socks. He’d taken most of his shoes. Everything he could fit in the suitcase. I ran my trembling hand against the remaining shirts: light blue, steel-gray, oxford white. The shirts of the beautiful man who dumped me. Like trash.
Gingerly, I reached for one of the few t-shirts he left behind—a simple white crewneck, classic fit, extra-large. He wore it six years ago, the night we made love for the first time. Before we both knew I was trash.
Heaving and choking, I bolted to the bathroom. After flushing down my vomit, I knelt on the cold floor and curled into a ball. A fiery butterfly flitted its red wings behind my closed eyelids, resurrected by the rain of my tears. He doesn’t love you anymore. Oh no, he doesn’t.
I turned on the shower. There was no antiseptic soap, so I used my body wash and scalding water to scrub every inch of me until my skin felt raw.
Still damp, I put on Ryan’s classic fit, extra-large t-shirt, and climbed into bed.
The night closed around me to hide my ugliness from the world as I drifted, drifted, drifted on the ocean of pain.