She rolls her eyes. “Not that it’s any of your business, but yeah, I’ll probably have a few drinks afterwards. You don’t have to wait up.”
She goes into the bedroom to get dressed, and I try not to dissect her words, but I can’t help it. We’re like two points on lines that look parallel but are actually moving infinitesimally closer, and one day, they’ll intersect. I want to keep going straight, to stop it from happening, but I can’t get off the line, can’t prevent the inevitable collision.
Eliza leaves looking like a girl who needs to get fucked, in a little black dress that barely covers her ass and looks like it’s made entirely of elastic with the way it clings to her body. I bite back a comment, bite back the urge to forbid her to go out in that. I’m not her father. I have my life, and she can have hers, separate from mine. That was the deal we made. If she wants to go get drunk with her new friends, that’s her business, not mine. I need to be sharp for a job as soon as I get home tomorrow.
But I can’t help but wonder, are we already following in my parents’ footsteps? Eliza is certainly no stranger to drinking too much, and she seems intent on doing only what she wants, on having fun and ignoring her obligations, just like my mother. And me, am I like my workaholic father who never had time for the family he created, so we had to fight each other for scraps of his approval? Not just by doing the regular things like being a football star or doing his job and looking out for the family, but by going to such extremes as colluding to fake our own kidnappings and fucking the wives of his enemies and rivals to ruin their families so we could pretend ours wasn’t already ruined.
Yeah, I’m probably more like him than I want to admit, and it’s not by accident. I made myself just like him because it was the only way to get a pat on the back. But I won’t be like that with my kids. I’d rather spoil them with all the love they could want, smother them with attention, than the opposite.
Like Eliza’s father. Is that the other option, the other script laid out for us? These are our examples. A hedonistic wife who escapes through the lid of a prescription bottle, or one who fled. A mother who denies reality or one who left her daughter to escape it altogether. An ambitious husband who always puts his wife last, or one with a reputation for all the mistresses he’s taken. A father who uses his children as pawns, or one who’s attentive and did his best.
That’s the one good point in all of this. Our parents have plenty in common. Our fathers are unfaithful. Our mothers left. But out of the four of them, one of them seems to have gotten the parenting part right.
I had a suspicion, for a moment, that he abused her. But now I know she’s not scarred from that kind of trauma. She’s scarred from losing her brother, just as I’m scarred from losing my sister. She hates me for it the same way I hated the family responsible for my sister’s death. Her hang-up isn’t about her. It’s about me.
I think about what Little Al said about Eliza, how she’s sheltered and spoiled and how she was trying to pull one over on me. I think about her dress that clung to her ass like a fucking advertisement for sex. Her words on the beach after our wedding, when I overheard her bragging to her friends. On the boat after that, her words to me, her crocodile tears. How different she is with me and with other people. She’s a vivacious, flirtatious, sexy woman in public. In private, she’s a frigid, hateful brat.
I understand why. If she was Eliza Darling, I would despise her. I would want to hurt her.
I don’t want to blame her for treating me the same as I’d treat her if the roles were reversed.
But I do.
seven
Eliza
After a couple drinks, I know I should stop. I’m not looking to get wasted, and I’m too smart to get drunk by myself in a strange place. But, like, I know it will end. I know King won’t let me go on like this forever, so why not enjoy every minute I can before he takes it all away? Tomorrow we’re going back home, and he’ll want to play house. So, I might as well make the most of tonight.
Some guys want to buy me and the waitress shots, and it’s her night off, and we became fast friends my first day here, so why the hell not? No one knows who I am unless they read the gossip columns religiously. It’s not like I’m famous. I’m pretty well known in New York, but outside of the city, I’m practically anonymous. And as much as I enjoy the attention I get at home, it’s nice to be somewhere that no one will know me or judge me or take pics of my drunk ass and sell them toYour Celebrity Eyes.
So we take some more shots, and dance the night away, and it’s nice. It’s nice to lose myself, to not be myself. It’s nice to be free and young and wild and take shots with strangers on a tropical island with my new best friend whose name I’ll probably forget by my first anniversary. I don’t even care that I’m not with a guy. I’ve spent most of my adult life making sure I don’t get too wrapped up in a man and let it cloud my judgment and make me stupid. Marriage doesn’t change that.
Sometime after midnight, the luster wears off, though. If King’s not going to fight me on this, what’s the point? Why bother rebelling if there’s nothing to rebel against?
I keep thinking about my parents, and how hard I rebel while also working to convince myself they’re heroes. Have I been living in an illusion all along? Maybe I’ve been holding onto the notion of freedom because it’s the only one I can bear to look at, the only reason for my mother’s leaving that I can stomach. At least she had something to run to, something worth leaving her family for. I have nothing.
I slide off the barstool and turn to the nearest guy, determination giving me strength. This isn’t for nothing. It’s not. If I keep acting, keep pretending, it will eventually be true. I’ll figure it out if I keep going. Meaning will emerge eventually. It has to.
A few songs later, the guy I’m dancing with is all over me, his hands groping my body until I have to push him off me. A minute later, he’s back at it. I’m about to push him away again when someone grabs him from behind, wrenching him away from me.
“What the—” the guy yells, reaching for me as he stumbles backwards.
Through the haze of smoke and pulsing lights, I make out my husband standing still in the crowd of writhing bodies, wearing low-slung sweatpants and a white T-shirt like he just got out of bed. The guy tries to shove him off, but King pulls back a fist and decks the guy. Several girls around me scream when the guy goes down like a ton of bricks, crumpling to the floor in a heap. King towers over me, his eyes flashing with rage, his jaw set tight.
For one drunken moment, pride snaps through my brain. My husband can throw a fucking punch. I smile before my brain catches up with my body, but King’s not having any of it. He grabs me by the arm and marches me off the dance floor like I’m a bad little girl who snuck in on a fake ID, and he’s my daddy coming to give me a lecture and haul me out of the bar. Not that my dad ever did that. I was partying from the time I turned thirteen, and he couldn’t do shit about it. He didn’t bother to, anyway. With his wife gone and his son dead and the families at war, he had enough on his plate. So he just let me do what I wanted as long as I kept my bodyguard and human chastity belt at my side at all times.
“Eliza,” crows my waitress friend. “Where are you going?”
“My husband,” I say, gesturing wildly toward King with my free hand, since he still has my other arm in a death grip.
“Oh,” the waitress says, frowning from me to King. “Okay, then. Have fun!” She waves and disappears into the crowd of writhing bodies and pulsing music. King stares at me a second, then bends and scoops me up, throwing me over his shoulder.
“Put me down!” I yell, but he ignores me and strides out of the bar. I pummel his shoulders with my fists, but he pretends to be oblivious as he carries me kicking and screaming all the way back to our room.
He strides into our suite and slams the door so hard the pictures of sunsets on the wall tremble. Only then does he set me down, his eyes blazing with fury as he faces me.
“I told you at the wedding, youwillcome back to me,” he says, his voice low and deadly.