The Last Goodbye

"Well.."

She smiles.

"I know, if the shoe fits. I've also had to unlist my home phone number. On the other hand, I' ve gotten a half dozen new clients just because they've heard about our story. And I've gotten calls for interviews all the way from Australia to Brazil.

"Our divorce actually launched my practice, but you couldn't buy publicity like this for a million dollars. Of course, I have to be put with being slapped by little old ladies in supermarkets, but nothing is free in this life."

She looks at the chair beside my bed. I've been stripped of most of the tubes and monitors they had me hooked to. They've still got a heart monitor on me, but other than that I'm almost a free man.

"Can I sit down?"

"If I said no? Go away."

She smiles and my heart wants to break all over. How could she be the cheating bitch I know she is and have that smile.

"I'd sit down anyway. Because we both know you don't want me to go away."

"Don't go getting a swelled heart -- I mean head -- just because of the last message I sent out."

"Freudian slip season, darling? You just can't help yourself, can you? I just -- I have to admit I'm not sure how to handle it?"

"What?"

"Most married women, if they're lucky, go their whole lives thinking or hoping their husbands love them because they work hard, take care of the kids, share the housework, give them diamonds on important dates, but how do you ever know for sure? But me, I know. I got no questions. But, where do we go from here."

I look at her, and the smile fades, because I'm not smiling. That question is the elephant in the room that neither one of us wants to look closely at. Where do we go from here?

"We could try to make it work again. Maybe date, move back in together, although I'd have to move into your place. My sister Jan, moved in with me after her divorce. She's got two kids, and I'd let her have my place and help her with the rent."

"I don't know, Mona. Just because I said I forgave you doesn't mean I forgave you and that I'll take you back."

She gives me a half smile.

"You're telling me you were lying in your deathbed confession? That is going to disappoint so many millions of romantics."

"I thought I was going to die, and I wouldn't have to actually do anything about what I said. You can say anything when you don't have to worry about following up on it. You can promise anything when you don't need to worry about waking up the next day."

She shakes her head in mock disappointment.

"That is such a lawyerly thing to say, darling."

"We don't have to do anything, Mona. We can just back to our lives and try to go on the way we've been. Of course, I won't be marrying Cyndi, and she won't have anything more to do with me, but I'll live. And you can go back to -- doing whatever you've been doing the past nine months. I've tried as hard as I can not to know anything about your life. Go back to fucking Norman."

"I haven't seen Norman in a year and a half."

I do the math.

"So, you kept fucking him for three months after I caught you. You obviously weren't too stricken with remorse for cheating on me. And you told Doc Myers in the counseling session that you stopped seeing him after that night."

She gives me a hard look, and it's difficult for me to read. She acts like she's angry at me, when I'm the one who has the right to be royally pissed.

"I lied to Myers.

" Until the minute you walked in that night, I was praying you'd find out. I wanted to see your face. You bastard, you're the one who left our marriage a long time before I did. It surprised me that I reacted the way I did. I really felt guilty when I saw the look on your face. But while I was in the bathroom, I remembered what led up to that night.

"And then, after what you said and what you did, I was even angrier at you. So yeah, I kept fucking him. He was a good lay. And I hated your guts. That's why I fought you for the divorce at first. Just to piss you off even more. And every time he came inside me I could tell myself I was sticking it to you one more time. That's the way I felt. What can I say?"

"You could say you're sorry?"

"I'm sorry I hurt you."

"That's not the same thing as saying you're sorry for what you did.."

"You want us to start off our new life with a lie?"

"No, and that's why we're not going to start a new life. Because you're not sorry, even now."

We sit there in an uncomfortable silence.

Finally, so I can break the silence, I say, "I never did understand. What did I ever do that was so terrible. That made you feel justified to fuck my friend and partner?"

"You never listened to much during those counseling sessions, did you?"

"I only went to finally get rid of you."

"I knew that. Do you really want to know, or would you be happier if you could keep telling yourself that I'm just a miserable bitch you're stuck loving?"

"Ease my curiosity."

"You remember one night about five years ago, a couple of days before Christmas. It must have been about 2004. We were invited over to that attorney you'd met, Len something or other."

I try to remember and somehow I do.

"Len Murray, yeah I remember although God knows why."

"We went over for drinks. We'd asked them out for dinner, but they couldn't go because their regular sitter fell through that night. Remember, they had the little girl. She must have been about three years old. A pretty little brunette. And they had a six-month old baby boy.

"It wasn't late and the little girl insisted on coming out and showing you her computer game teaching her the colors and shapes. I sat and talked with Len and his wife, while you let the little girl sit in your lap and show you how the computer game went."

I look at her as the tone of her voice changes, and again, I'm caught off guard. Tears are flowing down her cheeks.

"Len's wife said, 'Isn't it funny. Jaimey looks so much like your wife. She could be yours'."

I hear a tone in her voice that I don't ever remember hearing.

"I will never forget it until my dying day. The look you gave me then. You were holding that little girl in your lap, and you looked at me, and it was if I had disappointed you somehow. That was the week we had come back from the fertility clinic, and they told us that your sperm were perfectly fine, but my eggs due to some genetic abnormality couldn't be impregnated and carried to term.

"After two years of fucking on a schedule and taking the hormones and the supplements and trying every quack remedy we could find. And it was all so simple. I just couldn't give you children.

"When we got home that night, I knew you were upset. I went on my knees, and I was going to give you the greatest blow job in the history of mankind. And then I was going to take you into the bedroom and give you the greatest sex of your life."

She leans toward me and stares into my eyes, and I see the rage boiling inside her.

"And you remember what you did, you bastard. You pushed me away. You pushed me away and zipped yourself up and said, 'I'm just not in the mood.' You walked away from me into the den.

"I just knelt there on my knees, and I cried my eyes out. It was more than just passing up on sex, although, God knows, that was hurtful enough. You were rejecting ME.

"So I went into the bedroom, got changed for bed and watched some late night TV. About midnight I got up and went into the den. You were sitting in that damned chair of yours. The big screen was off. You were just sitting there, sipping on a Scotch and staring at the ceiling. I think you had the Cranberries on the stereo.

"I woke up at 3 a.m. Couldn't sleep. You weren't in bed. So I walked back into the den. I don't know that you had moved. The Cranberries were still on, the bottle of Scotch was half empty, and you were drinking and staring at that same spot on the ceiling. You didn't even notice me. You were somewhere else. You were crying."

"You never came to bed that night. Somehow, I don't know how, you wiped out that entire bottle, managed to get a shower and got to work on time the next morning.You never said a word to me."

She wipes away her tears, coming back to the present.

"That was when our marriage started dying, Lewis. You went through the motions, and you probably thought you were being a good husband. But you started leaving me that night.

I try to remember that night. It comes back to me in pieces now. I thought I was just hurt and wanted to be alone It had hurt more than I had let myself remember. Maybe being an only kid had something to do with it. I never thought and hadn't until just now, how it must have felt to her when I walked away to drink the night dead and try to make the pain go away.

That was the night I came to the full realization that there would be no little dark haired girls or boys carrying our features that we could spoil and create dreams for. Friends helpfully suggested adopting. I'm sorry, but it would never work for me.

There would only be the two of us, growing older together, watching the children of our friends become elementary and then high school students and give their parents grandchildren. While we went on alone.

I was very drunk that night, but I think it was the worst night of my life, until I walked in on Mona and Norman. It was the night I gave up hope for the future and realized that what I had was all I'd ever have.

She interrupts my thoughts.

"And you want to know another reason why I loved fucking Norm?"

"Why not? Hit me with your best shot."

"Because he never once, I think, in his entire life, thought about making babies with anybody. They don't exist for him. Women aren't mothers. They're just pussy. And I loved that. When I was with him, I never felt for a second that I was disappointing him, that I couldn't make him happy. All he wanted to do was fuck."

I can understand that. Maybe that's why our sex life had gone away - because every single time was a reminder of what we'd never have.

"But why Norm? Why a friend. You're a beautiful woman. You could have hooked up with anybody. Why my friend?"

She shrugs.

"He was there. I know that sounds cold, but you want the truth, right. I never went out looking for strange, even when I decided you'd never want me again. But Norm, he never stopped. You know how he was. He acted like he was playing around you, but he'd been hitting on me ever since we got married. We both knew if I said yes he'd been in me before I finished saying yes.

"And for a long time, I said no. He was just old Norm. He was good looking enough, but he never sent me wild with desire. Until one night a year before you caught us.

"Funny thing, it's pretty much the way he told you. He had been at loose ends that night, and I didn't have anything to do and you were out of town, as usual, and he said, 'Why not grab a supper. Nothing funny. Just two friends. Lewis wouldn't mind.' And of course after we were drinking for awhile he started hitting on me.

"But this time, this night, I looked at him, and I remembered all the women he'd fucked over the years. He must have something going for him, I told myself. And I asked myself, who am I saving my pussy for? Lewis doesn't want it any more. I don't get any action pretty soon it'll rust shut. And so I said yes.

"And he literally fucked my brains out. I didn't remember it ever being that good before. I think part of it was that it had been a long time, and part of it was that he was so enthusiastic, and part of it was that he was pretty damned good. Practice makes perfect and all that."

She saw the expression on my face and said, "I'm sorry, Lewis. I'm trying to be honest with you. I can tell you that I never loved him. Not like I loved you. But you weren't around and he was and I did. And it's history now. It happened. I can't make it go away, no matter how much you love me."

We sit in silence for a long time.

"If this were a romantic novel, at this point we'd both break down into tears of regret, clutch each other and promise to do it right the next time out," she says finally.

"A bad, really trashy romance," I say, and somehow we can both smile at that.

"There will be millions of people bitterly disappointed if we don't get back together."

"They don't actually have to live with either one of us," I say. "For two pretty intelligent, high dollar professionals, we have managed to really screw up our lives, haven't we?"

We both sit mulling that over

I don't know why, maybe it's because I can't think of anything else to talk about, but I remember Carl Cameron's story and that unusual wording he had used.

"What does incoherent mean?"

She gives me a puzzled look.

"In the TU story, when Cameron told you what had happened, he said you became 'incoherent." What happened?"

A blank mask descends over her features, and I know I've hit a sensitive spot. Whenever she is hurting, or doesn't want to talk about something, that mask slips down. I have no earthly idea what nerve I've touched on.

She drops her gaze to the floor, then inspects the room, shows a great interest in the monitors that are checking my heart, but she won't meet my eyes, Now I'm really getting curious.

She begins talking without looking at me.

"You always surprise me, Lew. Because I'm so damned smart, I forget that's one of the things that turned me on about you when we met in college. You're about the only guy I've ever met that might be smarter than me, How in the hell you picked up on that one word I'll never know."

She finally looks at me, and I'm surprised to see something almost like embarrassment on her face.

"I'd lie to you, but now I've got you suspicious so you'd track down my sister or her kids and sooner or later you'd figure it out.

"I was just getting home from a case when Cameron called. It was 9 p.m. I'd been putting in some long hours but the money is good. Jan was getting ready to put her youngest down and her older daughter was watching tv.

"When Cameron identified himself, I didn't think anything about it. Sometimes reporters call me for on or off the record stuff about court cases they're covering. A couple of times they've called me about your cases. Then he started telling me about your crash. And your last goodbye.

"I heard someone screaming, and I wondered what had happened with Jan and the kids. It was only when she came in one door and her daughter came in the other way to kitchen where I'd answered the phone that I realized I was the one who was screaming.

Jan was holding me and her daughter was trying to pry the phone out of my hand and I was screaming and crying and Cameron told me later I was calling him a goddamned liar and telling him there was no way you'd die in a plane crash. You were too good a pilot."

"I realized later that I thought he had said you had died in that crash. He thought I'd gone crazy on him. Because I did. Jan wrestled me to the floor and her daughter was holding my right hand down with both of hers. They told me later I'd grabbed one of the short knives from the knife set we keep in the kitchen drawer. I got a few cuts on my wrists and hands but they kept it away from my throat."

I look at her as she holds out her hands and wrists. There are bandages on both hands and wrists that I hadn't noticed before because they're flesh-colored and small. I can't believe what I'm seeing.

"They got the knife away from me, and Jan basically sat on me while her daughter, Jillian got the real story from Cameron. They made up some story for him and hung up, and then Jan kept telling me you were alive and had been brought to Shands in Jacksonville, until I stopped screaming and crying.

"Jan and Jillian stayed up all night with me. Jan didn't' want to call the police or a hospital because she was afraid that if it got out I'd tried to kill myself, it would kill my career. So they fed me valium all that night. Jan told me I kept talking to you all that night, and the only thing I said over and over was, 'I'm sorry. I'm sorry'."

I stare at her and for a guy who basically makes his living talking, I can't think of a thing to say.

"Come on, Lew," she says finally. "It has to be like shooting fish in a barrel. Like you said, hit me with your best shot."

"I -- I"

" You want to know why I was trying to cut my own throat? Because in those moments, I thought you had died and there would never be a chance to tell you that you didn't deserve what I did to you. I remembered the man I married and the man I loved, and I knew I'd have to live the rest of my life hearing your goodbye in my head and remembering the look on your face that night.

"I was hysterical, because I would never have the chance to tell you that even though I forgot for awhile that I loved you, I never stopped. No matter what it looked like, I never stopped.

"I know I don't deserve you, and I don't deserve to be loved the way you love me. And if I could, Lew, believe me, if I could find the words or the magic, I'd set you free."

I extend my left arm to her, and for the first time in two years she's in the same bed with me. I wrap my left arm around her, and she wets my hospital gown with her hot tears.

#############################

"Did you ever hear what happened with Norm?"

"No. I hadn't heard much about him lately. What happened?"

She's laying up against me. Still clothed, but it's nice. Every once in a while there's a flash from the direction of the doorway and I know some nurse is making a little spare change snapping a picture that will probably be viewed around the world.

"I don't know how, but the rumor around the courthouse is that somehow someone got pictures of him banging a young Assistant Public Defender about six months ago. She was only 23 and fresh out of law school. As usual, Norm banged and ran. But, I hear that unfortunately this girl was named Gwen Case. She turned out to be Charlie Case's baby sister. You know, Judge Herring's bailiff."

"Charlie Case? That doesn't seem like a very smart thing to do."

She looks up at me with a question on her face. I give her a look of ultimate innocence.

"No, it didn't turn out to be too smart. Somebody broke into his apartment one night and broke both his arms, legs, every finger on both hands and for good measure beat him so bad that they had to surgically remove one of his testicles. Norm was in the hospital for a month, and when he was released, he vanished by the next day. They say he's set up a practice in Seattle."

I look into her eyes to see if there's any regret about what happened to the man who'd been her lover for more than a year. She gives me a look as innocent as the one I'd flashed.

"Funny thing is, two street people gave cops a description of a huge guy that seemed to match Charlie's description as the guy they saw entering Norm's apartment building two hours before police received an anonymous call about Norm being beaten."

"Doesn't sound good for Charlie."

"Probably wouldn't have been, but Judge Herring confirmed Case had been in his house in Deerwood playing poker and drinking at the same time the street guys said the big man was entering Norm's building. And with a circuit judge as his alibi, the cops couldn't go forward."

"Norm couldn't identify his attacker?"

"I guess not."

I can move my right arm enough to tip the corner of her chin up so I can see her eyes.

"I can't say I'm sorry, but there's a part of me that remembers the guy who was my friend. I told him a long time ago that you couldn't go around screwing anyone whether they were somebody's wife or sister or mother and not have it catch up to you sooner or later.

"He should have listened to you. You were a better friend than he deserved."

She gave me a sad look.

"And a better husband than I deserved."