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Maybe she is helping a friend in trouble.
Maybe she is catching up on laundry because she gets peed on by dogs all the time.
Maybe she is announcing our—sort of?—quick engagement to her family on the phone.
Maybe someone in her family had a heart attack as a result.
Jesus, that’s not a good beginning to a relationship.
I find myself springing back to my flat by foot, my phone pressed against my ear. The fact that I haven’t spoken to her all day is making me slowly lose my mind, and I make a mental list of the people I could ask about her.
Aussie lass.
Rude French chef at the coffee shop she works for, who looks like a walking, talking, sexual harassment case.
But that’s it.
I reach my building in record time and take the stairs three at a time. There is a zero percent chance I am waiting for anything, let alone the elevator. My heart is pounding against my ribcage, and again, I find myself inwardly giving myself a slap on the wrist and a punch to the bullocks for getting attached quite so soon.
I push the door to my flat open—it’s not locked, I notice, with a mixture of further horror and relief—and stop dead in my tracks.
I can see them sitting on the patio. The living room bleeds into the outdoor area, and the glass door is open wide, so you can’t miss them.
Reggie is sitting on the wooden floor with her legs curled under her, blinking up to my neighbor, Pierre Caron, the one with Parkinson’s whom I help during the weekends. Basically, I make the pottery while he shouts directives. He’s sitting on one of the chairs in my patio, holding his walking cane with a trembling hand that’s wrapped with layers of gauze, and I wonder if he fell and hurt himself again.
I say nothing.
I don’t make myself known.
It’s not a calculated decision. I’m just mesmerized by the way they talk to each other, so quietly, yet you can see the air sizzling between them with something that’s almost tangible. It’s like if I reach between them, the air itself will slice me with the tension and warmth.
“I still can’t believe it,” Reggie murmurs, wiping a lone tear from under her eye. Her back is ramrod straight and her voice is hoarse and croaky. I feel this incredible sense of pride, even though I don’t even know exactly what it is she is doing right now. Why they are talking like this, so close, so intimate, like the rest of the world doesn’t exist. “What are the odds? And like this? Right now? It is almost... I don’t know. It is almost like a dream
.”
“I wanted to send you a letter. To approach you. Many times,” Pierre admits solemnly, rubbing at his chin with his free hand. “I dreamt about meeting you. About you spending the summers in Paris with me. About us talking into the night. All the time. I love you and your mother so much, Regina. I still do. But that’s exactly why I stayed away, even when I suspected I could reconnect with you.”
“If you loved me, you wouldn’t have left.”
“If I’d stayed, your mother and you would have been saddled with a life of shame and embarrassment. I’d be in prison—which I deserved, of course, for what I did—and you’d be penniless and known as the daughter of the bastard who conned hundreds of people. I left because I didn’t want this stain on your name. In your lives. And sure enough, your mother moved on—with a doctor, no less—and you grew up to be one of the most wonderful young women I’ve come to meet.”
“Then why didn’t you reconnect with us? With me?” Reggie frowns, her voice marred with bitterness. It’s the first time I hear a trace of that emotion in her tone. I can’t even blame her.
Pierre is her father.
Pierre is Ruben LaPenus.
Pierre is the man who turned his back on her and left her and her mother when she was a kid.
He lowers his head, that’s shaking, too, along with the rest of his trembling body.
“I wrote you a letter. I can show you. The week I wrote it, I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. It was really bad, and they said it will only get worse. They weren’t wrong. I can barely function. That same week, I bought envelopes and stamps. But when it came down to sending you the letter, I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t throw this at you. My disease. My issues. My deteriorating state. How convenient for me, a family-less man with no one in the world, to reach out to his daughter just when he finds out that he cannot function like a normal human being? I didn’t want you to feel guilty, or worried, or upset. I didn’t want my problem to turn into your problem. I didn’t want you to be tempted to visit me, or worse—take care of me in one way or the other—and I didn’t want you to pity me, either. It was best if you just remembered me as the healthy bastard who left you. Being that healthy bastard then, and a sad, rotting old man who can’t even dial a phone number before trying seven times, was too much to take. I did it for you, Regina. I promise you. I stayed away for you.”
It’s a backward logic, but it makes some kind of sick sense, what Pierre is saying. Really, though, I’m just happy Reggie is alive and probably got lost in talking to her father, as opposed to being kidnapped, raped and dismembered, and scattered in the Mediterranean Sea.
Reggie shakes her head to herself at the same time Pierre notices my silhouette from his periphery and angles his face toward me.
“Reggie,” I manage to say. I don’t care about Pierre right now. Only about her mental state. Her head darts up and she catches my gaze, smiling a sad smile.
