Show No Fear Read online

  Richard was tall. She, at five feet three inches, felt physically intimidated by his size, his big voice and hands. She shook her head at Bob, who shrugged and continued watching the scene through the window with that fixed look that meant he would stow away this memory.

  Her mother always said, never let fear stop you and never show them you’re afraid. Nina would not think about the gritty mix presently turning her stomach acids into toxic waste. “What do you want?” She kept her voice steady. “I told you I’m in a hurry.”

  “Always in a hurry, huh, Nina? Some things never change.” The vague sexual innuendo of his words sent a chill through her. He raised his hand to touch her cheek. She stepped away.

  He said, “Listen up. I had a bout with cancer last year. Prostate. Doesn’t look like I’ll be having any more kids, so I want a relationship with my only child, okay? Don’t worry, I’m over you. But I want to start hanging out with my little boy. I have a legal right, Nina.”

  “He doesn’t know you.”

  “He needs a father’s influence.”

  “So I’ll date more,” Nina snapped back.

  “Ha-ha.” Richard didn’t move.

  Then he started walking back and forth in a semicircle, as if guarding her but, in fact, hemming her in. “Are you willing to sit down with me and work out a shared-custody agreement?”

  “What’s his middle name?” Nina said, looking Richard in the eye. “Bob’s? You know, the child you’re so interested in so suddenly? What’s his middle name?”

  “I don’t know. So fucking what?”

  She watched him flinch a little. “You’re not even on the birth certificate.”

  “A DNA test will remedy that. You lied. It’s common.”

  “You abandoned him!”

  “With good reason.”

  “And then? What about the last four—”

  “Good reason. But here I am, ready to make up for everything.”

  She looked inside the car, where Bob seemed utterly absorbed in their argument. Would he be traumatized his whole life by this conversation? “Talk to my lawyers,” she said shortly, handing him the Pohlmann business card. He squinted at it and put it away.

  “Let me talk to him, Nina. What’s the harm?”

  “He doesn’t know you. He doesn’t know about you. I prefer it that way.”

  “I’m his father.”

  “So get a court order.”

  “You weren’t always so hard-assed. No wonder you can’t find a husband.”

  Nina’s vision went red. Was there a pay phone nearby? She needed a cop. But then Perry appeared at her side.

  “Er,” he said to Nina, coming closer, “sorry to interrupt.”

  He stuck a heavy manila envelope toward her and her idiot hand took it.

  “Sorry, Nina. I’m Mr. Filsen’s attorney in the matter of an action for paternity and child custody, and I hereby personally serve you with a Summons, Complaint, and other pleadings—”

  “Child custody? Why you—!” She threw the envelope to the ground and kicked it.

  Richard smirked.

  “—you are no doubt familiar with.” Perry picked up the envelope and dusted it off, then set it on the hood of her car. “Please,” Perry said, “call me. I’m sure we can work something out. Richard, I believe our work is done.”

  “Go, then.”

  “We should really, you know, go together.”

  “Beat it,” Richard said without looking at Perry, and the junior associate said, “Take care, Nina,” turned his back, and walked away leaving Richard, Bob, and Nina alone in the parking lot.

  Richard now apparently felt free to express his true feelings, unfettered by a potential witness. “How many men this year, Nina?” he asked her, rough-voiced, angry. “How many summertime flings? You keep a list? With stars rating how hot they were?”

  “Go, Richard,” she said calmly, while fright cascaded down her body. If she understood one thing about sex, she understood its power to incite violence in the most passive people, and Richard was certainly not that. She did not want him to fixate on sex. “We’re not together, okay? I have my business. You have yours.”

  “You were okay in bed. I didn’t realize you were gonna make a career out of it.” He waited for her to react.

  She didn’t.

  “I hear things.”

  “Touch either one of us and you’ll regret it.”

  Suddenly Bob tried to open the door to the MG. Richard stepped between her and the car. Her heart pounding louder than the airplane roaring overhead, Nina pushed against him, attempting to dislodge him.

  “What will you do, little girl?”

  “Mince you,” she said in a low voice, “with the sharpest knife I can find.”

  Big, strong, and unafraid, Richard laughed.

  Adrenaline blasted through Nina. Her balled fist hit his square jaw. His head snapped back. He let out a grunt. He stepped away as she stood next to Bob’s door, now holding her heavy bag by its strap, ready to swing it and hit him with it as hard as she could.

  A long moment passed. She prepared for retaliation, stepping back, trying to protect herself from direct attack. Let him try. She could feel her chin sticking out, her breath quickening, her body bending a little for better balance. She had never struck another human being before, but she seemed to be ready to do it again, no problem.

  Richard shook his head slightly and then cocked it, smiling a mean smile. Rubbing his jaw, he said, “You have a lousy, juvenile temper. Want me to beat the hell out of you now? Maybe you’d enjoy that? Or maybe you just thought it would help you in a custody fight.” Nina ran around to the driver’s-side door, and as she tried to open it, he snatched her hand away so hard she could feel the bruises forming. Then just as suddenly he let go.

  “Not me,” he said, opening the door for her. “I’m a perfect gentleman in front of our boy.”

  The hem of her jacket caught in the door as she slammed it, then turned the key in the ignition. She pulled hard and her jacket ripped. The tearing sound was the other thing she heard as the rough engine coughed, moving Nina and Bob back onto the calm Methodist streets of Pacific Grove.

  CHAPTER 3

  GINNY REILLY HAD NOT WANTED TO MAKE THIS MEDICAL appointment, but Nina had insisted, making all the arrangements. Useless, all of it, Ginny thought, sitting in the familiar waiting room, each spot on the rug already memorized.

  At only fifty-two, she felt too young to be so sick. For a long time, almost two years now, she had felt weak or anemic or something. Her joints hurt and she began to worry about arthritis.

  At first, she suspected the problems between her and her husband, Harlan, were making her sick. She had read about that phenomenon in a magazine she’d found at the organic-food store in downtown Pacific Grove. More correctly, she believed their marriage, grown from fresh joy into a moldy thing, might be making her sick; the conflicts, always repressed by her, between his extravagance and her frugality, his lies and her secrets, his crudeness and her sensitivities, his betrayals and her coldness, his shouting and her silences. Harlan never held back an emotion. He thrived on drama while she preserved her dignity and calm for her children and the world.

  Had she become sick right after he said, “I’m leaving you, Ginny,” one night in their bed? He had refused to explain, turning over, snoring within five minutes. The next morning he had packed up while she watched, stony with scorn on the surface, trembling with seismic emotions she hid from him. He moved into a condo by the Del Monte Golf Course. Within a month a much younger woman who apparently had some money moved in with him.

  Harlan bloomed.

  Ginny took aspirin and stayed home. She had put her extreme fatigue down to the fallout from the end of a long marriage, experiencing a numbing grief similar to what she had felt when her folks died. She decided she was simply exhausted from drama, loss of love, intrigue, desperation. Making a choice to settle gracefully into solitary middle age, she took up pottery making and tr
ied a jazz dancing class. Vague aches and pains came and went. She tried not to pay attention.

  Then her fingers and toes, which had always been sensitive to cold, bothered her too much to ignore. She wore socks to bed. Some of her fingertips began to actually look bluish at times. One morning she saw herself in the mirror and got a shock: the skin on her face, once mobile, alert, smiling, felt tight and looked stiff. Over a few months the joint pains intensified and her skin continued to pull over her bones. She looked different. Trying to compensate for the grimace that naturally appeared, she adopted a small smile at all times.

  She told her kids, “Well, at least my wrinkles are disappearing.” The frozen mask was a metaphor for what she felt like inside.

  Nina made her go to the general practitioner in Pacific Grove who had always treated her. He told Ginny the not-fresh news that she was depressed and needed to get out more. “Take a vacation,” he suggested. “Find somebody to laugh with.” Ginny sure laughed when she told Nina about that encounter.

  But then her joints really started to ache, sores on her legs didn’t heal, a brown, painless rash spread across her face over her nose and cheeks. She needed better help. Her physician got serious and recommended Dr. Lindberg, a rheumatologist.

  On her first visit, while waiting to meet her new doctor, she was wearing mittens, having one of these strange attacks of coldness in the tips of her fingers.

  She trusted Dr. Lindberg immediately. He examined her thoroughly, telling her stories about his children in college the whole time. Later, he sent her next door to the lab he used.

  Three days later, Dr. Lindberg put his head through the inner door, then ushered her into his office. He looked at her, expelling a brief sigh, then pulled X-rays and papers from the manila folder the nurse had left.

  “I think you have something called mixed connective tissue disease, Mrs. Reilly, several different syndromes that appear together now and then.” He listed them, using his well-manicured fingers.

  “Raynaud’s phenomenon. It’s a vascular—a blood-circulation problem that means your fingertips and toes get cold and painful sometimes. Rheumatoid arthritis. Polymyositis, quite possibly. Lupus, judging from the butterfly rash on your face and some of the test results. Scleroderma that seems to be quite progressive.”

  She felt overwhelmed and for once could not control herself. Dr. Lindberg motioned to his nurse, who came back in with a box of tissues.

  “I’m very sorry, Ginny. It’s a lot to hit you with.”

  Ginny squared her jaw. “Thank God. Just what I was hoping to hear. I’m gonna walk out of here and dance like a pretty young girl again.”

  He looked up from his clipboard, frowning. “Um, Ginny—”

  “Am I going to die? I mean, I know I’m going to die, we’re all going to do that, but what I mean is,” Ginny said, leaning forward and letting the tears start to flow, “am I going to die now?”

  “I didn’t say—no, I don’t think you’re going to die now. I’m going to give you a lot of information about this, but let me say this right now: you may have years yet.”

  “All right. All right,” Ginny said, turning her head away. They sat in silence for a moment. Finally Ginny blew her nose and said, “What exactly is scleroderma?”

  “A thickening, a hardening and tightening of the skin and internal organs.”

  “Hardening?” She touched her face, which had once been so soft. Harlan used to love her skin, called it baby silk. “I’ve never heard of these things.”

  “They aren’t well-known or even well understood.” The doctor shuffled through the lab tests.

  “Will I be crippled?”

  Dr. Lindberg sighed. “To be honest, I don’t know how this illness will progress. Think of it as chronic, something to manage. But there may be remissions, sometimes. And we can give you medicine that will slow down the—the sequence.”

  “What sequence?”

  “Your internal organs will likely become more involved over time. You may suffer kidney or liver failure much later in the game. Steroids are the treatment of choice at present. The medicine you’ll be taking will slow things down.”

  Ginny sat back in her chair. The office became a bathysphere, silent in its descent into some terror she had never dreamed of. “Are you telling me there’s no cure? My poor kids. I’ll be disabled. I’ll get steadily worse over time.”

  “We’ll take the best care of you we can.”

  “But what causes this? Did I catch it somewhere?”

  “We don’t know. It’s called an autoimmune disorder because the theory is that some of your protecting cells have begun to attack your other cells, mistaking them for invaders. We don’t know why this happens sometimes. Women who are aged forty to sixty are most likely to develop it, we do know that. I can put you in touch with some groups that you might find helpful, other people with chronic or progressive ailments, who don’t let it stop them from living.”

  “What else can I do to slow it down? I mean aside from the traditional treatment? Yoga? Meditation?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Biofeedback helps some people.” He took out a pen and wrote down a name and phone number on his prescription pad.

  His nurse came in and whispered loudly enough for Ginny to hear, “You have another appointment waiting. She’s in pain, or I wouldn’t interrupt.”

  “Would acupuncture help?” Ginny asked him on her way out. She had seen something intriguing in the newspaper that very morning. Strange how at the time she had dismissed it without much thought, but now she clung to the image from the advertisement: “Live long. Live healthy. Be well.”

  “Good idea.” He ripped a sheet off his prescription pad and handed it to her. “It can’t hurt.”

  Ginny began taking the prednisone. At first, she was unbothered by side effects, though she did feel angrier, but who knew if it was the drug. She tried biofeedback, but disliked the damp hands of the practitioner and didn’t go back.

  Eventually, she dug up the old newspaper and called on Dr. Wu, or, as she called him in her mind due to his advertisement, Dr. Be Well.

  Then came the pain, the surgery, the mutilation.

  More than a year had passed since the incident with Dr. Wu, and here she was back in Dr. Lindberg’s office, sicker than ever.

  “There’s continued degradation of the system,” Dr. Lindberg began, and went on like that. She listened, her heart hurting, trying hard to show nothing.

  He added little to what she already sensed after a year of living with this diagnosis. Degradation. Yes, the word that rankled above all others, the word that expressed what her husband had done to her. She, proud and dignified, reduced to a life of doctors and deformation, while he—

  Then Dr. Wu had taken advantage of her, hurting her when she was so far down she couldn’t imagine anything worse. As she sat with Dr. Lindberg now, she began to experience unfair feelings she had never known before: envy at his smiling, lined face and healthy, hairy-knuckled hands, jealousy at the thought of Harlan and his new wife, hopelessness, rage—so many things.

  She had always thought of herself as a nice person, and these ungovernable emotions challenged that image. Some mornings she woke up hating herself for what she felt. However, what kind of example would she set for her children if she couldn’t stand up for herself this one final time?

  She picked up her prescriptions at the downstairs pharmacy, paying with the health-insurance card from Harlan’s plan that she had made him keep for her, went outside, and checked her watch. Matt must be running late. He must have gotten tied up, and of course he was always so hard to reach. Or maybe Zinnia had him laughing too hard to remember her.

  Several minutes later, she gave up waiting and climbed back upstairs to the doctor’s office to use the phone, remembering the first time Matt had introduced them, briefly. Good for him, she had thought, because the girl was pretty and he rarely brought his girlfriends around. Almost instantly, she had changed her opinion. She didn’t l
ike the sly looks and giggling, as if Zinnia and Matt shared a hilarious secret and everyone else be damned.

  Oh, she felt so frazzled by all these unresolved problems, and as a result, after making her call, negotiating the steps down, not paying enough attention, she stumbled.

  And then she fell.

  She fell forward and, in that instant, saw herself tumbling to her death on the hard concrete below, visible to those crows up on the telephone wire, and casual gawkers, and who knew whom else.

  Splayed like a dead squirrel on the street. Pecked by those big black birds.

  This graphically unpleasant image helped her. Her good arm flew up to grab the railing and stop her from going down all the way.

  She sat down three steps up from the street, gasping with pain, feeling bruises forming on her legs. Nobody came out of the silent offices. Nobody passed by on the street.

  Her children were busy. The love of her life had remarried. She was on her own. She thought of Nina and Bob. She hardly ever knew what was going on with her daughter anymore, although to be fair, she held tightly to her own secrets, and one in particular that made her cringe, that would certainly make Nina hate her.

  Ginny only wanted for Nina what any mother wanted—for her daughter to have a comfortable home and a loving partner. But Nina had shown no talent so far in making a home or marrying a good person.

  At least Richard Filsen was out of the picture. Ginny had done what she could to drive a wedge between Nina and that man. She knew Filsen hated her for it, but so what?

  She checked her watch and looked up the street. No Matt, no cab. No rescue. Then she buttoned her sweater against a growing afternoon sea wind that held just a hint of mist. Another idea began to grow within her about how to right the injustices that had been done to her.