Reunion Blues

"Hello, Brian,” Neoni says, beaming. She rings up the departed woman’s purchases on her cash register, then turns to me, “Let me close up and we can go to lunch."

"Take your time," I say. "It's early yet. I've got reservations at the hotel for one o'clock."

"The hotel. My, aren't we going high-class."

I smile at her. She quickly closes up.

We cross the street and walk the two blocks to the hotel. We get there early, but they sit us anyway. Once alone at our table, I place my hand on Neoni's leg just above the knee. Thankfully, she doesn't move it.

"Neoni,” I say. “I was awake for hours last night, thinking, and the conclusion to all the thinking is that I’m in love with you. I want you to be my wife. I don't want to lose you and I have this terrible feeling that things are very much out of control. I fear I am going to lose you?"

"Brian, I just don't know what we can hope for. I love you too, very much. I feel lucky to have you, but I still have to get away from all these complications. Away from Charlie. I have to get a divorce."

"I know you do, hon, but there's got to be a way."

The waitress came and took our order. We sip champagne while we wait for her to leave.

"Why don't we just take off?" Seeing the fear in her eyes, I press on anyway, "Simply take off. Just go home this afternoon and get allyour stuff, or don’t, we can buy new stuff. Separate from Charlie. We'll worry about the divorce later."

"I don't know, Brian. Won't he accuse me of deserting him or adultery or something?"

"I don't see how he could without getting burned himself."

"There is that of course. Oh, I just don't know," she responds as the waitress delivers our salads.

While we ate neither of us spoke. The food tasted like cardboard to me, but I knew it was my emotions running rampant, not the quality of the food.

After lunch, we walk back to her shop. I notice she keeps glancing at her watch. She seems deep in thought.

She opens the shop door and we enter. As soon as we’re inside she turns to me and comes into my arms. "Okay, Brian, we'll do it your way. I'll go home and get some things. I'd like to do that before Charlie gets home. I don't want a scene."

I interrupt her, "Neoni, you don't have to get anything from home. We'll buy whatever you need. New things."

She laughs good-naturedly and kisses me. "Brian, that's wonderful. I know you can afford that and that's great, that you can make all that money. But there are some things I have to get. Things from my family. Things for my business.” She signs.

“Where shall I meet you?"

"You know my mother's house?"

"Yes, of course. Will you be there?"

"I'll be there."

She closes up her shop and we exchange several kisses before we leave in two separate cars.

Neoni doesn’t come that afternoon. She doesn’t come that evening. She doesn’t come at all. Finally, I leave my mother's house, depressed and angry. I drive around. As if on auto-pilot, I head towards their place, a thousand fears running through my mind. Has she changed her mind? Did Charlie come home and make promises, or beat her again? Did they put their marriage back together? How could she? How could they?

When I approach their house, it is nothing like I imagined. It is worse.

There are several police cars and an emergency vehicle, an ambulance I guess, in their driveway.

I park on the street and sit there, feeling low, wanting to know and not know what is going on.

After a few minutes, a uniformed policeman leads a handcuffed Charlie out of the house. I am dumbfounded. What has he done. He looks up and sees me in my rent-a-car.

"You bastard," he screams. "You thief. You cheat. You son-of-a-bitch. See what you’ve . . . "

His voice dims when the officer bends him over and shoves him into the backseat of the police car. He slams the door on Charlie.

Through the rear window of the police vehicle, I see him turn his head and give me a red-eyed stare. I can see his mouth working as he screams at me but I can't hear him any more and it is both heaven and hell. What is going on?

After a little while, the police car with Charlie in the rear drives away, but the other police vehicles remain. My heart increases its hammering in my chest.

Two men in white come out and get a stretcher out of the ambulance and carry it in the house. I get out of the car. I am in a state of anxiety now, my pulse running rampant, my heart leaping in my chest, my eyes blurring. I wonder if I’m having a heart attack.

Te attendants from the ambulance bring a body out of the house on the stretcher after a minute. I am rooted to this spot, beside my car. A white sheet is covering the body, pulled up over the face.

I can finally move. I rush forward. A police officer blocks me but he’s off balance and I push right through him. He falls away in a grotesque openness of mouth and wide eyes surrounded by blue. I pass him by and reach the stretcher. The attendant’s stop, looking at me with fear in their eyes. I kneel beside the stretcher, rip away the sheet that cover’s Neoni’s dead face. I see blood. I crumble there my head in my hands, blind from the tears of anguish that flood from me.

I had so hoped that this wonderful love could be. This union. But, the woman who taught me what love is really about, what it means, is dead on a stretcher in her yard.

That is the last I remember for some time.

Finis

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