Broken: A Billionaire Love Story (5 page)

“Can you imagine,” her mother would say, back when she was well, laughing riotously, “all those snobs wanting to hear about that ‘toil and trouble,’ when we were giving them a double double dose of the farty bubble!”

The play didn’t make it after intermission—and the company canceled its hiring stance. It was one of Harriet’s more successful ventures, but activism was built on activity, and not necessarily success. Keeping the message present in people’s mind was its own particular success all in itself.

Olivia walked through the quiet, narrow halls of the hospice, smiling in reflection of her mother in such good health. It was a stark contrast to the reality of now.

Harriet was sleeping when Olivia arrived. Thin linen blankets lay askew on her body. Olivia approached, sliding them up over the tiny, wasted body of her mother.

It was depressing, seeing how little of her was left. For so much of her life, Harriet Martin had been a larger-than-life woman. Olivia had inherited some of her once-omnipresent curves, always adding a little extra to her small frame.

Always, Harriet was bringing over folks from unions and civil rights groups and the like to their home, discussing big ideas over take-out dinners and cases of wine. She would preside over a table, thundering over it, guiding the conversation like the ocean guided ships. It was empowering for Olivia to witness at such a young age a woman like her mother changing so many minds and having so many people repeat all her wonderful rhetoric.

Her mother turned in her sleep and her hands slipped over Olivia’s. Eyes fluttering open, she finally noticed Olivia sitting there with her.

“Hello, dear.” Her voice weak.

“Hi, Mom. How do you feel?”

“Oh, like hell. True hell. But it’s all right.” She turned away, her eyes, face, drifting for several moments. Olivia thought she had fallen asleep. But then she said, “You made the trip again? You should stay home. I’m no sight to see.”

“I like to see you, Mom. I’m glad to be with you.”

Harriet laughed small—big laughs were a cause for concern, as they led to coughing. “Ah, well. That’s nice of you to say, at least.”

For a few short, desperate minutes, they talked about anything else. Anything safe. The weather—wasn’t it cold, lately? Awful. Was Olivia dressing warmly? Good, that was good. How was she eating? Where did she find the time to cook anything with her schedule? And how were those other jobs—was she still managing or whatever at that outlet store?

Olivia was still working at the outlet store, as a salesperson, but she didn’t correct her mother. The store depressed Olivia lately. She hadn’t made a solid commission in three weeks, and she was scared of losing that job. It had been a godsend at the time—at eleven dollars an hour, it let her quit waitressing under a boss who wouldn’t stop asking her to wear skimpier tops and skirts. But the new store made most of their money from insurance policies on the products that came through, and Olivia’s job—and any bonuses to her income—depended on selling the insurance, which often she wasn’t able to do.

With that on her mind, Olivia wasn’t sure how to proceed, but then her mother asked, “How is the work at the rehab facility? Is that going well?”

“Yes, Mom. Going well.”

“Are you full-time, yet?” asked Harriet. She did not wait for an answer. “They should put you on full-time.”

“No, Mom. They can’t do it.” Olivia held in her sigh. They had gone over this several times. “They don’t have a spot for me. Not for someone with my education.”

“Then
get
more education!”

Her mother’s voice, so clear and strong, stunned Olivia for a moment. But then it was followed by a bout of hard, horrible coughs once more. Olivia had to turn her on her side so she could breath, so that the blood rushing upward with each cough did not drown her. When it was done, Olivia cleaned her mother’s mouth with a damp, warm cloth.

“I am sorry for the outburst,” her mother whispered.

“It’s all right, Mom. Really, it is.”

Her mother waved a hand weakly in the air. “You should...you should go back to school, dear. You could do so much for this world. You’ve got to work in the systems they’ve got to make them work for you. If the system needs more schooling, then you ought to get it. I think that’s what you’re for. Is that what you think?”

It was, and Olivia wanted to say so, but her mother had fallen asleep, exhausted by the conversation.

Olivia wanted to stay for several more hours, but the dogs at home needed feeding. Still, she lingered, watching her mother’s frail form, and hoped she would wake-up and spring up out of bed, full of energy and life, ready to make her sandwiches and juice and solve all her problems as she had long ago, once upon a time.

Chapter 6:

Shane had suffered through a number of wake-up calls over the course of his drinking and drugging career. He would find out, much later, that addicts often had numerous incidents that should have made them become sober but didn’t—that there was no real sense to what did and did not give someone a lasting moment of clarity that led to long-term clean living.

One such wake-up call happened at the age of twenty-one, advanced into his addiction enough to use substances almost entirely to moderate his mood, he woke up in the middle of a subway downtown in Washington D.C. with no recollection of how he got there.

He searched for his phone—not there. He looked for his wallet—not there. He had bruises all over his hands, dried blood trailing down his arms and from his head, his legs a mishmash of torn flesh from maybe falling down again and again.

Shorts and an undershirt and sandals—that's all he had on. He thought he remembered starting the night off with a jacket.

The last thing he remembered was...was...drinking a beer in a bar. Helping to down a pitcher of beer with some friends. Where had he gone? Where had he been? Where were his friends?

Of course, he had arrived in the city with friends from his writing program. Shane, against the wishes of his whole family, studied writing at college. Poetry, specifically. It was the only thing in the world that spoke to him. The words of men like Dylan Thomas, William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski—drunks like he felt he was becoming a drunk—felt like they had been woven straight from his soul. He had no illusions about the nature of his drinking and his art; he wasn't so vain to think that an artist had to drink or use drugs to be artistic. He just felt like he was in the vein of the people who happened to do both.

He had been writing steadily since he was sixteen, a little bit after the accident. It started as a way of therapy, to deal with what he did to his little brother, Hunter. It became an essentiality of his life shortly thereafter. He had no interest in the family business, no interest in running profits and losses and deficits and all the rest. That was soulless. He wanted to write, that was all.

He felt star-crossed, in some respects, with his love affair with poetry. Rarely, if ever, did he truly feel that he would be allowed to pursue what he wanted to pursue. To a certainty, he knew that his family would wrangle him into doing what they wanted, and so he resented them endlessly for it, and had gone to the college farthest away from them that he could find that still had a good poetry program—in New York, and then Vermont for graduate school.

There was someone else in the subway with him. Tall, wearing a shabby, hole-filled coat.

“What time is it?” he asked the man.

“About six.” His voice was low, scraggly.

“In the morning?”

“Yup.”

Christ. How had he gotten down there?

Wavering, he walked up the steps and tried to navigate out of the subway station entirely. It took him a while. This city was not native to him, and he was only here on holiday.

It was only after exiting through the booth—somehow having a ticket to get out—that he considered that the place was closed. No one else was around. Maybe the man who told him the time was the one who had taken his wallet and his phone.

Good luck with it. All it held was a credit card, which would be cancelled as soon as Shane got his hands on a phone, and maybe twenty dollars in walking-around money—if Shane hadn't drunk all that cash away already.

By seven o'clock, Shane managed to find a Western Union and had some money wired to him from home. He used Arthur. Arthur wouldn't ask any questions.

As he waited for the money, he found out from the clerk that it was the thirtieth of September. The last day he remembered was the twenty-fourth, when he was going to party his brains out so that he could manage to stay without alcohol or drugs for the next three days, where he was due back home in St. Louis for his little brother's sixteenth birthday.

He clearly remembered Hunter’s voice. “You'll make it, right?”

“'Course I will,” said Shane.

“It's just...you've missed the last couple.”

Already, Hunter didn’t believe him. Shane considered that his little brother’s right, though he hated to think about why that was so.

“I know! I know I have.” Shane's voice clogged up a bit with shame. “But I'll make it to this one. I promise.”

At around ten o’clock, Shane checked into a motel using the money from the wire and cleaned himself off. The motel was in a dirty part of the town, every surface looked  filthy and overused, like God had taken a dirty, greasy sponge to every building. Shane wrote down a few lines of poetry on the motel stationary, something about the color of the blood on his hands, his face, stuffing them into his pocket to work on them later. These lines were lost again before he ever made it back to college.

Somewhere in this city, his friends had been staying at a hotel. Well, they were gone now. Their stay had only been for the weekend, which ended a few days ago. He supposed they thought he had just wandered off on his own—a reasonable assumption. Shane had done that several times before.

Ten minutes after his shower he had picked up a fifth of vodka, and swaggered into a tattoo parlor down the street. With no ceremony, he sat straight down in the first open chair he saw.

The artist—heavily tatted himself, eyed Shane with some curiosity. The only-just healing scabs on his hands, his forehead.

“You ever had a tattoo before, fella?” the artist asked him.

Shane told him no, of course. He didn't say that his mother would hate it—that his father probably would have too. His uncle definitely would, wanting him to be in the business.

In a sick way, he had enjoyed the blackout. That was the way his little brother Hunter had described his accident—like a black out. One moment, Hunter knew exactly what was happening, and the next it was days later.

Shane blamed himself for the accident, of course. But he wanted to be able to commemorate this new understanding—to remember it forever. To show the way his memories had been burned away in the same way he had done them to his brother.

“Flames,” he told the artist. “Here, on my shoulder.”

He pulled up his shirt, showing the artist where to work. The blackout was troubling, of course, but also pleasing—and it was the same way when the artist began to work. Pain and pleasure mixed together, just like people said. Shane wanted his body to remember this incident, even if his mind didn't.

Chapter 7:

At around nine at night, Olivia finally made it back home from the hospice.

Home was a small house that she and her mother had shared, until Harriet became too ill to be properly cared for inside of it. It was at the end of a cul-de-sac in a neighborhood that shifted its fortunes with the wind. Ten years ago it had been affluent, but on the downswing. These days, it was downright shabby in places, but was crawling back up to some tender amounts of wealth—young, poor folks getting nice jobs after graduating from college and staying in the trendy area. So, small houses had begun to replace their chain-link fences for wood, or houses with sagging garages had them torn down and replaced with small gardens, that sort of thing.

Four dogs greeted her when she walked through the door—two large, two small. The large dogs were Mason and Parker, golden labs. The small ones, terrier mutts, were Kip and Natalie. Originally she had thought that the small dogs would be property of the larger ones, but this had turned out to be the inverse of the truth. Kip and Natalie both were positively alpha, barking and growling all the way to the front of the food line when they had to.

She gave each dog good pets, scritching their ears, smiling as they amiably combated to lick her hands.

“Time to feed you guys, huh?” Her voice had transformed into “dog voice,” ratcheting up in pitch. “All right.”

Arranging her bags, trying to unload the day, she dropped her cell phone out onto the counter and saw for the first time the eight waiting voicemails—all from the same number. All from Roderick.

She shook her head. Part of her hesitated, her finger shaking over the delete button. She had heard it all before from him:

“I’m so sorry for how things turned out. I think we both have things to apologize for. I’d love to sit down with you and talk it all over. Can we still be friends? All my thoughts are about you. When are you going to forgive me? Aren’t you always talking about how it’s best to forgive someone?”

And so on and so on.

Roderick was an obsessive. Like any obsessive, he didn’t want answers or closure, he just wanted more to obsess about. She hoped that eventually he would get the message that her cutting him off completely was the healthiest thing for both of them.

Their relationship had only lasted eight months, but that was long enough to create a lot of unhealthy feelings. He wasn’t an addict—Olivia had been lucky enough to avoid
that
particular downfall of other people in her line of work, who couldn’t seem to stop wanting to fix the men and women they studied.

But, that didn’t mean Roderick was without a mighty helping of problems. His surface was all easy, warm, hearty happiness. She thought he was even-tempered and happy—but all that boisterous exterior hid a twisted, insecure center that lashed out at her every chance it got, just because she was there in front of him when he felt down.