On Every Street (20 page)

Telling Javier that the pregnancy had been false was the hardest thing for me to do, much harder than telling him I thought I was pregnant to begin with. I felt like a total idiot getting our hopes up like that.
I should have waited for a doctor’s test to confirm it; I should have bought another kit just to be safe; I shouldn’t have trusted the cheapest brand. I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions and I shouldn’t have sunk my teeth into the one I’d jumped to. It’s just that he was so happy…I’d never seen him that way before. He’d even gone out, and bless his heart, bought a tiny plush angel for our future baby.

He was devastated. He’d never looked so wrecked to the core, just absolutely devastated. He didn’t cry or yell or anything. But I could tell in the way he held me that he was just trying to hang onto himself.
That he might not even stay together. And I was the one that broke him.

Days passed by in a
weary silence as if we were living in a funeral home and were strangers to each other. I had my own grief to deal with, but I put that aside for him. He had fixed me once, hadn’t he? Why was it so much harder for me to fix him?

I even told him that we could actually try. We could try to get pregnant
; we were both young, and if that’s what we wanted, it would stick. For keeps. For real. We could have it, it would be ours. Your wish is my command.

But it only angered him and I didn’t know why. Maybe
since the bad news he’d changed his mind, adjusted to the new reality just as I had done before and constantly. One morning I went out on to the porch and saw him at the edge of the water, throwing the plush angel out into the waves. I imagined the poor thing would float for a while, lost at sea, then finally sink, maybe finding its resting place beside a small bottle of acid. A seafloor full of things we needed to forget.

Before I knew it, the days had turned into weeks and I felt like we were just shadows of the people we used to be. He wouldn’t talk to me anymore, not about what was important, not about what we used to. Our conversations were shallow and safe. He became busier
, and in retaliation, so did I. I took on extra shifts at Hogan’s Heroes because it kept my mind off of it, working all weekends. Julie was a good person to lean on and she never asked too much about him, never questioned why we hadn’t gone on a double date in a while. I guess some things were pretty obvious just by looking at me. Yet I’d stare at him over and over again for one hint of why that coldness that had crept into his eyes and I couldn’t glean anything. I loved him with all my heart, and all I could think about was that he was slowly slipping away. I just wanted him to keep loving me like he had, because the minute he stopped would be the minute everything ended.

One Saturday night
I was driving to work when I noticed a whole slew of fire engines parked outside. It turned out there was a small kitchen fire, not enough to cause a lot of damage, but enough to close down the bar for the night. To tell you the truth, I’d been looking forward to gabbing with Julie and having a few well-deserved drinks after our shift, but she’d already gone home.

I stopped by the gas station, filled up the truck
, and picked up a six-pack of Tecate. I liked the Mexican beer more than Javier did, but I figured I might win some points by showing up at the house with it. Perhaps it would lead to the bedroom too. That was the lucky thing about Javier and I—even though we weren’t communicating by voice, our sex life had filled in the blanks. His desire for me was still at full throttle and I never had to complain.

The house was completely dark when I pulled up to it, which struck me as odd considering Javier was at home when I had left, tooling around on the computer. When he went out he usually went out late at night and it was only eight p.m. I parked the truck in the
garage then decided to go in the house through the door there instead of the porch. Thinking he could be napping, I quietly closed the door behind me and crept down the hall and up the stairs. I put the beer on the counter in the kitchen and pulled one off the ring. If he was awake, it was his, but if he was asleep, it was all mine. I tiptoed down the hall toward the bedroom door.

And heard him moan.
For a split second I wondered if something was wrong, if he was hurt or maybe having a nightmare. But this wasn’t a moan of pain. It was the all too familiar moan of pleasure, the sounds he’d make in my ear when he was riding me hard.

I raised my brow, tickled at the fact that he was jacking off, wanting to go in and watch him as he came. But that whole idea, my whole world, came to a
halt when I heard the sound following it.

A woman’s cry of equal pleasure.
A woman in the throes of passion. A woman moaning and groaning along with Javier. A woman that wasn’t me.

I was stuck to the floor, my chest being beaten from the inside, my heart sinking to the ground.
The shock, the hurt, the sadness, the grief. The disbelief. The terrible disbelief. This wasn’t real; this had to be a dream. I could hear their cries get louder and louder until they were both coming, the sounds filling the house—our house—and stabbing me in the gut. My insides twisted, feeling the pain that was all too physical, almost falling over. The beer almost slid out of my hands and I caught it just in time.

This
couldn’t be real. This couldn’t be happening. But my body knew the truth, and it was aching, breaking—I was falling apart. Javier was cheating on me. He was fucking another woman in our house. In my bed.

I put my hand to my mouth, trying to keep the vomit at bay. I was going to be sick. Oh, I couldn’t be sick here
; they’d come out and they’d see me, they’d see the vomit everywhere, and I’d have to confront it all. I’d have to face it and her and him and I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to.

I swallowed the bile that had filled my mouth and fought to take in air. I stood there, in the hall, one beer in my hand, a person drowning on their feet. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t be.
The anger, the pain, my fucking heart.

My fucking man.
How could he? After everything we’d gone through. After everything he’d said. The pain was so excruciating I’d rather have my legs burned by acid a million times over before experiencing this. This made me envy Miguel, his throat slit, dead and peaceful. This crippled my soul, the one thing I had left. He broke my heart until I couldn’t be sure I had one to begin with.

And then the laughter started. The girl, that fucking whore’s voice, was soaring out of the room, whispering sweet nothings to him. He whispered them back. I heard “baby” and “beautiful” and the only relief in the sting was that he didn’t call her “angel.”

My sorrow quickly whipped itself into anger. Anger was an old friend. Anger was a weapon I knew how to play with. I went down the hall, prepared to barge in on them. I was prepared to catch them in the act, to show that I knew, to rub Javier’s face in his deceit, in his destruction of our love, something he so carelessly tossed aside for someone else.

I found that the door was open a crack, and if my lungs were capable of breath, I would have held it. I pushed the door open, very slightly, very quietly.

And saw something I didn’t expect. They were facing away from me, lying on their stomachs on the bed, side by side, their feet hooked around each other’s. They were staring into each other’s eyes, and while Javier looked like his cool and disgustingly charming self, the woman was very obviously in love. She was long with tawny curves and a thick head of red hair, and she smiled at everything he said. They were still making sweet talk to each other but I couldn’t hear it anymore. The heartbeat in my ears was too loud, drowning out everything.

My mouth dropped open, my lips ready to scream, my tongue ready to fight. And I realized I couldn’t do it. Not this way. If I confronted him, I’d give him the satisfaction of knowing that I knew. He’d blame my leaving him on that. He’d follow me around the world and beg for forgiveness that I would never grant him. The only thing I had going for me, in accepting the lie, in forgetting the past, was that he loved me.

I thought he loved me and he didn’t. I gave up my ghost for him—my plan, my revenge, everything that I was. Right or wrong, I had given up a large part of me to be with Javier, to overlook the things he did and continued to do. I did all of that because I thought he loved me. I believed in it, in him, in my bones, in my core, in my very soul. But here was the truth, her shapely ass staring me right in the face.

He lied. I lied. Any love that starts out under a lie is bound to kill you. I just didn’t want to die on my feet.

I backed away from the door, careful to not get caught, and quietly made my way downstairs, picking up the beer as I went. I started my car and only made it halfway down the street before my vision got blurry, the tears spilling over. I pulled over and quickly wiped them away, trying to stay calm, trying to stay focused. I adjusted the rear view mirror so I could watch the house, cracked open my beer and waited. I waited until she walked past the truck to her own car, not even glancing my way. I guess Javier had made her park up the street to hide the evidence. I guess Javier didn’t want to get caught with someone like her.

She was gorgeous and sensual and walked with a confidence I severely lacked. She was everything that I wasn’t, providing Javier with the things that I couldn’t. I didn’t even know what I lacked, except that it wasn’t enough to keep him faithful. This woman was unblemished, unscarred. She looked real. She looked like she used her real name.

I watched her drive off, the chrome of her Mercedes glinting under the streetlights. And that’s when it all hit me like I’d been punched in the face, in the stomach, in the chest. The anger, the pain, it erupted from somewhere deep inside, rushing forward and taking over my body and my mind. Things were going black, my ears throbbing with pressure, my limbs shaking with the rage that spread over me.

I thought about him fucking her. I thought about him fucking me. I thought about every look he ever gave me, everything he ever said. I thought about how beautiful he made me feel, how good he’d been to me, how happy I was when I was with him. I thought about being in love, making love, living in this love we shared, this life we created. Even if it was a false life, it was still my life
, and now suddenly, in an instant, it was gone.

It was all gone.

There was a cavern in my chest where our love used to be.

I screamed like
a dying animal, thrashing in my seat. I stuck the seatbelt in my mouth and clamped down, biting as hard as I could, letting the screams roll through me, shaking the car, shaking me to my very being. This was my soul crying, my heart fighting, and they all were losing. I screamed and hit the dash with my fists until all I felt was pain, the real pain that felt so much better than the claws that were raking at my heart, making me bleed inside, making me feel like I lost myself for good. I screamed and bawled and convulsed and kept at it for hours, buried by the pain, unable to keep from feeling it. It would go away for one second, enough for me to get air, and then it would come crashing back down, that merciless wave that wanted to drown me. And every time I thought about giving up, about letting my lungs fill, about being too weak to take on any more, the reality wouldn’t let me. I was stuck on this endless loop. That was the truth then, this is the truth now. That was the truth then, this is the truth now.

So many lies leading to so much loss.

I stayed in the car until I didn’t have anything left in me to give. I was numb, and even when I tried to think about it, it didn’t sting.
It just ached, dull, like a tooth that needed pulling.

I drove away to a coffee shop, ducking from people’s curious glances,
then made up my face in the bathroom. My makeup was ruined, my eyes red and puffy—dead giveaways. I washed my face, dabbed cold water under my eyes, and ignored the knocks on the door from impatient customers. I made myself look presentable, then leaned forward on the sink, having a staring contest with myself.

“You are Ellie Watt,” I told myself. “And that’s something he’ll never take from you. Eden White is dead.”

Then I left, brushing past the people, and went back to the house. I’d already stopped calling it home. I parked in the garage and took my four beers upstairs.

Javier was in the living room watching television. He smiled when he saw me and I was sure he saw through everything. But he didn’t question the extra time it took me to return the smile. He didn’t mention the extra makeup I had on my eyes to cover up the puffiness. He didn’t notice the darkness in my eyes while I had to look at him.
His beautiful face. I couldn’t have hated him more.

I gave him the beers, sat by him on the couch
, and we made small talk about work and I pretended I was playing a role. He never knew me, the real me, he never loved me and therefore he never hurt me. Ellie Watt was unscathed. Ellie Watt would survive the night. Ellie Watt would leave.

We kissed goodnight and I refused to enjoy it. I refused to miss those lips or remember that last kiss or remember anything about us. I kissed him like I’d kiss a snake.

In the morning, he got up and went for his jog. I declined, pretending I had a bit of a headache. And then, in thirty minutes, I packed up everything I could. I took a gun of his from the study. I took a load of cash from his safe. I took the car keys to Jose. Like hell I was going to let him track me this time.