A Beautiful, Terrible Thing Read online

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Jennifer Waite

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  has been applied for.

  ISBN: 9780735216464 (hardcover)

  ISBN: 9780735216518 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9780525533177 (Canadian Edition)

  ISBN: 9780735216501 (ebook)

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  All names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

  Version_1

  To V.

  Everything. Everything. Everything. Is for you.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  A Note from the Author

  BEFORE

  AFTER

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  AFTER

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  AFTER

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  BEFORE

  AFTER

  BEFORE

  AFTER

  SMOKE

  BURN

  TRUTH LIKE FIRE

  RISE

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  But out of the mouth of the Mother of God

  I have seen the truth like fire,

  This—that the sky grows darker yet

  And the sea rises higher.

  —G. K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse

  A Note from the Author

  THIS is my personal, lived experience. Psychopath and sociopath are terms commonly used for someone on the spectrum of antisocial personality disorders. While I made several discoveries based on my intimate experience and observations, I am not a mental-health professional and this is not a clinical diagnosis of psychopathy.

  —

  THE air pulses. As I’m staring at the computer, the computer I share with my husband, and holding our screaming three-week-old baby on my lap, my stomach tightens. I read the first line of the e-mail and bile begins to rise into my throat. I try to take a breath, but I can’t get any air in. I have to breathe. And I have to make this baby stop screaming. What I am seeing must have a logical explanation. It must be a misunderstanding. As soon as I can talk to my husband, he will explain and everything will be OK. This is not an emergency yet. If I can just hear his voice, I will be able to breathe again. Balancing the baby in one arm, I reach for my cell phone with the other, unconsciously bouncing my knees to soothe my daughter’s screams.

  BEFORE

  MARCO. This man, I knew in my gut, was it. I finally understood what it meant, when you “just know.” I just knew about Marco. I met him at the Square, the restaurant where we both worked. I got a job as a waitress to make the money that did not seem to be materializing from my acting and modeling careers. Two years out of college, I had quit my job as an analyst at a hedge fund and decided to become a full-time actor, to “go for it.” It sounded great in theory.

  A year later, I’d gone to audition after audition, casting after casting, and the biggest job I had booked was starring in a holiday vodka commercial. The role called for “blonde, pretty, aspirational, Swedish-looking.” Check, and apparently check, check, check. A whole twenty seconds of staring dreamily into the eyes of the chiseled-faced man I had met a few hours before and clinking my glass against his. Having a restaurant job to pay the bills made me a cliché, but it was necessary, and besides, it gave the days structure.

  On the first day of training at the Square, a trendy burger restaurant a few blocks from my apartment, I sat with ten other new employees around a large, circular table, listening to Bruce, the tiny, energetic manager, go over the corporate “steps of service.” It was my second waitressing job—the first, a chain restaurant in midtown (the only place that would hire me with no experience) lasted just two months. As Bruce danced around the restaurant, demonstrating when to bring steak knives versus butter knives to a table, I scanned the faces around the table, landing on dark brown eyes belonging to one of the bartenders. He was tall and Latin with black, slicked-back hair and mocha skin. Judging by his accent when he asked a question about the bar setup a few moments earlier, he had been born elsewhere but had lived in the States awhile; the way he spoke was confident and fluid. Our eyes briefly locked, and he gave a quick, easy smile. I looked away, willing myself not to blush. I had learned long ago that the best way to survive in New York City was to keep my defenses up at all times. And anyway, I was happy with my long-distance boyfriend back home in Maine. Jeff had light blue eyes, curly brown hair, and a build comprised of the muscles he used every day in his construction job. When I saw him without clothes, it was like seeing a Greek god in the flesh. I had never seen a body like that in real life before. I had met Jeff while I was home for the summer helping my mom recover from surgery. When I went back to New York at the end of the summer, we substituted drunken nights on his couch for hours on the phone, and what was supposed to be a fun fling somehow turned into a yearlong romance. Our relationship of texting and sporadic weekend visits was easy, and he made me laugh.

  The meeting ended, and I gathered my notebook and pen and slid my sunglasses up to rest on top of my head. I was almost through the doors leading to the street before anyone else had even gotten up from the table. I felt someone come up right behind me, and suddenly the door was opening. It was the Latin.

  “Jen, right?” Except the way he said it, it sounded like “Gin.”

  “Um, right. Sorry, I was just—”

  “I’m Marco, the bar manager. Bruce asked me to hand out these employee packets to everyone at the end of the meeting, but you ran away before I could give you one,” he said, passing me some rolled-up sheets of paper.

  “Oh, sorry, I was just . . . thanks.” I couldn’t help but meet his open face with a smile.

  “Well, you’re obviously in a hurry,” he said with a wink, and then walked away before I could respond.

  The next day at work we did speed drills at the bar to see how quickly the bartenders could churn out drinks during a rush.

  “Send three drinks on different tickets, right now, bam, bam, bam,” Bruce whispered to me, and rubbed his hands together. I put in the order for three drinks.

  “Ah, a jalapeño margarita for . . . Gin,” Marco said as he read the first bar ticke
t. My face flushed with color. The next ticket printed. “And a mojito for . . . Gin,” Marco said with a half smile. I smiled back as the third ticket printed. “Martini straight up with a twist. Wait. Don’t tell me.” He scrunched his face up. “For Gin!”

  “I’m sorry.” I laughed, walking over to the bar. “Bruce made me,” I whispered when I got close enough.

  “Don’t be sorry,” he said. “At least I have something nice to look at while I make these drinks.”

  “Oh. Ha,” I said, and forced myself to breathe in and out steadily through my nose.

  On the last night of training, before the restaurant opened to the friends and family of the owners the next day, everyone decided to go for a drink at the dive bar two blocks away. I finished my side work and walked to the bathroom to change out of my black uniform.

  “Are you coming to Doyle’s, Gin?”

  I looked up to see Marco walking toward me with his small work duffel bag in hand.

  “Umm . . . yeah. I just have to change.”

  “I’ll wait for you at the bar. Everyone else already left,” he said with a smile.

  “Oh, OK . . . I’ll be right out.” My heart pounded as I quickly pulled on jeans and a loose T-shirt.

  I walked back through the main room of the restaurant. Marco was waiting by the big glass doors.

  “After you.” Marco held the door open, and we walked through.

  “Who said chivalry is dead,” I said with a small smile.

  “Oh, that’s my Latin charm. It’s been bred into me over generations and generations,” he said seriously.

  “Oh, really, is that so?” When our shoulders touched for an instant on the way to Doyle’s, I momentarily stopped breathing.

  At the bar, we settled in with our coworkers. I sat down next to Andrew, a server with a gleaming bald head and oversize bright white teeth, who immediately began telling me about his relationship troubles with his current boyfriend. Marco ordered two vodka sodas and placed one in front of me. “Double vodka soda for Gin.” His smile swept over me. As he walked to the other side of the table, I thought, I am going to marry that man. It was a quick, involuntary thought, and I recoiled as soon as it had passed through my mind. I took a long drink through the straw in front of me and focused on the cool liquid sliding down my throat.

  For the next hour I talked and joked with Andrew and Karly, a tall, blonde waitress. I’d always thought Karly was icy, but after two beers she melted into a sweet, goofy girl from California. Karly confessed she put on a “bitch face” to fend off advances from the bussers who seemed particularly drawn to her even though she hovered almost a foot above them. I was aware of Marco sitting across the small table from me the entire time, and even though we were both involved in separate conversations, I felt myself speaking every word and making each gesture only for him. As the double vodka soda settled into my bones, loosening my limbs and flushing my cheeks, I pressed my knee into his under the table. For half a second, there was nothing. And then I felt it. A slight returned pressure. Neither of us acknowledged what was happening under the table, and it went unnoticed by all our coworkers.

  When everyone else said their good-byes around 2:00 A.M., I turned to Marco and said, “Are you sure you ordered me a double? It was a little weak.” Instead of leaving with the others, he grinned and made his way to the bar, saying, “In that case, I better get you another drink or you’ll leave dissatisfied, and we wouldn’t want that.” Karly paused at the door and asked, “Are y’all coming?”

  “No, we’re gonna have one more. See you tomorrow!”

  Pull up, a voice whispered in my head. Instead, I took a large gulp of the drink Marco had just set in front of me.

  He wanted to know everything about me. There was something about the way Marco looked at me; his eyes were so intense, like I was the only person in the bar. I told him about growing up in a small town on the coast of Maine. My childhood filled with sandy beaches and freezing-cold water that gave me ice-cream headaches when I dunked (but I always dunked anyway) and playing tag at night with the neighborhood kids. I told him about my parents. How they were the parents that my friends wished were their own parents: affectionate, warm, and funny but also just strict enough. My mom worked her way up the corporate ladder as a manager at L.L.Bean, and my dad was a computer engineer. I told Marco about the moment my dad announced that he had quit his job to start his own company. How, even as an eleven-year-old, I knew it was something special and something to be proud of, but the uncertainty made me nervous. After his first two start-ups failed, we saw less and less of him as he worked longer and longer hours. My mom started getting migraine headaches. There was a tension in our house that had never been there before. And then, after four years and three failed start-ups, my parents brought my sister and me into the dining room and told us to look at the newspaper lying on the kitchen table. The tiny little blurb circled in pen read, “CIMARON SNAPPED UP BY AMCC.” My sister and I shrieked in delight. My father’s start-up had been bought by a larger company—we were never told the details, but after that morning, the tension in our house dissipated.

  I’m not usually in the habit of revealing much about my childhood, but when Marco looked at me, he saw me, who I really was, and my self-consciousness evaporated. His questions came one after another, and, when I got to the part about my long-distance boyfriend, I blushed but plowed on. Marco just smiled and started talking. He told me about growing up in Argentina, about his grandfather’s house in the countryside where he would go for the summer and take care of his grandfather’s bunnies (only much, much later would he confess that many of those bunnies ended up on their dinner plates), about his trip to the United States with his mother, father, and older sister when he was eighteen. The trip that changed his life. They came for a family vacation after his graduation from military high school. After spending a week in New York City as a tourist who spoke five words of English, he fell in love with the excitement and energy of the city and refused to board the plane back home. It was a split-second decision that resulted in a brand-new life in a foreign country and the most exciting city in the world. Then, five years later, when he was just twenty-three and had worked his way up from a busser, to a server, to a bartender, and had become fluent in English, he got his Polish girlfriend pregnant. The girlfriend broke up with him when the baby was a year old, and he had stayed in New York to be close to his son. He had begged her to try to make it work for their new family, but she had already moved on to someone else. She gave him a week to get out of their apartment so her new boyfriend could move in. That had been seven years earlier.

  “I’ve never told anyone those details before,” he said slowly, looking up from his hands.

  “I’m so sorry. That’s . . .” I reached out and touched his arm.

  I wanted to know everything about him, but in the next moment, he cleared his throat and smiled. “I think they’re closing up. You better finish your drink.”

  I leaned forward to take in the last of my vodka soda through the straw.

  “Don’t do that.”

  “Do what?” I asked.

  “Lean over like that.”

  I looked down to see cleavage, a lot of cleavage. “On that note . . . it’s probably time for me to go home.”

  Marco walked me home, and we hugged in front of my building. When our bodies pressed together, electricity coursed through my body.

  “Well, I think you better go inside right now,” Marco said with a laugh. “Because if you don’t get out of my sight soon, I might try to kiss you. And I don’t want to embarrass myself.”

  My cheeks flushed with pleasure.

  “Good night, Marco.”

  “Good night, Gin.”

  AFTER

  LOUISA’S screams fill my ears and penetrate the deep recesses of my brain where my decision-making neurons lie. My mind, usually quick and sharp, now feel
s vast and hollow. I have trouble thinking a single thought clearly. My phone is still in my hand; Lulu is still cradled in the other arm. I scroll through my recent calls and find “Mi Amor,” but before I hit call my brain jolts back into action. I place my phone on the coffee table. I look at the e-mail again. It is dated almost two weeks ago, January 9. Two weeks ago I was in Maine with Lulu and my parents in my childhood home. Marco’s boss was taking vacation the first couple of weeks of January, and Marco was going to be working nonstop at Angel’s Wing, the trendy downtown restaurant he manages.

  “Baby, you should go home to Maine with Louisa. I’ll barely be able to help you, and I’ll feel terrible knowing you’re doing everything alone.” And I’d thought, My sweet, workaholic husband, he’s going to make himself sick trying to provide for us. I was proud that my husband wanted to give his family everything, even if he had to work fourteen-hour days. That morning, January 1, when I left with Lulu for Maine, I kissed Marco good-bye and started to cry as our lips met.

  “Baby, don’t cry; you’ll be back soon. Please don’t cry,” he said.

  I gasped out between sobs, “I know, I know. I’m sorry. It’s just hormones. I love you so.”

  “I love you, too. So much.”

  I couldn’t explain in that moment that sometimes, out of nowhere, my love for him filled me up and overflowed my body, and it had nothing to do with hormones. That sometimes I would have dreams that I had lost him. I would wake up with a start, relief flooding my body as I felt him beside me and then memorized the freckle under his eye as he snored softly. That the reason I started saying “I love you so” to him years ago was because I couldn’t fit all that love into the word much.

  This is the first time in the three weeks since Louisa was born that I have opened a computer. I look back at the e-mail. My eyes flick up to today’s date in the top, right corner of the screen. January 20. I clumsily move the mouse up to the subject line of the e-mail. “Appointment,” it reads. Marco has forwarded the e-mail to someone—a woman. The sick feeling in my stomach is growing and twisting, and there is still a disconnect in my brain; the neurons are sitting complacently, glancing at one another nervously instead of connecting and dancing like they usually do. Through my brain fog, I manage to bring up Facebook. With my free hand, I type the foreign letters of the name into the search bar: V-I-K-T-O-R-I-J-A. I tap the last letter, and a profile pops up. One mutual friend. My husband. This is not good.