The Girl, The Guard & The Ghost

She sat in the coffee shop waiting for Jonas to arrive and shifted nervously. It had been nearly two months now since he had learned the truth. She had deceived him. She had lied to him for eight full years and pretended to be someone she was not. She had loved him, loved him more than she had dared admit, but he doubted her because of her deception. She had nobody to blame but herself and yet as she sat there waiting, she felt a real sense of anger it had taken this long for him to get his head on straight. If it was even on straight, she considered. Sienna Lawrence looked up as the bells tinkled signaling the arrival of another patron to the coffee shop. She had questioned why he wanted to meet here. Shouldn’t their first heart-to-heart conversation take place somewhere less public? One of her three best friends, Darya had questioned whether he was going to deliver bad news and thought she wouldn’t make a scene in a coffee shop. The thought had been playing with her mind all night. Her eyes caught sight of the tall, muscly man approaching the coffee shop in the window and her heart skipped a beat. He was very handsome. Tall, dark with bright blue eyes. His face stoic per usual, the typical mafia soldier with his expressionless façade. She knew though when he smiled, his entire face lit up. He had a silly sense of humor and an ability to make her laugh without trying. In all the darkness of her mother’s illness, even though he’d known nothing about it, he had been her light. The lighthouse in the sea of calamity she routinely felt she was drowning under. Then he’d found out the truth and had walked away. He approached her, his eyes hungrily grazing her face and he took the seat across from her. “Sienna.” “Hi Jonas,” she took a breath, “do you want a coffee?” “No.” “Oh,” she was unsure what to say. She was usually terrible around men, a shyness she had never outgrown but with him she’d grown to be comfortable. He was like a sweater on a cold day for her yet as he sat in front of her, the sweater felt threadbare, and moth eaten. “Can you explain to me why?” he said after a few moments of silence. “From the beginning. I’m struggling Sienna. I’m trying to reconcile my feelings for a woman who may or may not have ever existed. I believed you to be one thing and it turns out you are another.” “The woman you know is the right one, just the wrong name.” She shifted her shoulders uncomfortably. “I’m a bookworm who loves the library, going to church and visiting the nursing home. Instead of visiting random patients, I was visiting my mom. None of it was a lie.” “Why?” “The money,” she whispered. “You lied to me over cash?” “I hid the truth,” she corrected, “to ensure Dimitra’s monthly spousal support still came through so my mom could get the healthcare she deserves.” He was silent and she wrapped her fingers around the ceramic mug in front of her. “When I was sixteen, my mom was diagnosed with early onset dementia. She had recently turned forty-one. She was a nurse. My dad was not a person I ever knew, and she never told me who he was. Her father died when I was a baby, my grandmother when I was a young teen. It was only us. She was smart and as a nurse for twenty years, she’d made very good investments with her money. She confided in me her father had gone through the same thing and she’d always been scared.” “Could you be at risk?” he asked interrupting her story. “The first thing she did when she got diagnosed was to have me genetically tested. She wanted me to know ahead of time if I wanted to have kids and potentially pass along the gene. I do not carry the gene marker. It’s not to say I’ll be of sound mind until I die but the specific gene for her condition and other variations of this disease, I do not have.” He nodded and stretched his legs under the table, waving his fingers. “Go on.” “The first year was rough as we adjusted but then it got increasingly worse. I was taking care of her as best as I could, going to high school and working part time but she deteriorated daily it seemed. We needed to keep the money in the account for nursing care because we knew there would be a time when I wouldn’t be able to take care of her on my own. We sold our house and banked the money. We had a small apartment we rented.” “You worked part time. Stripping?” The accusation slid along her spine making her cringe. He’d seen her dancing in a night club recently. It had been apparent she was experienced, “dancing, yes. A girl from high school had a boyfriend who was much older, and he let her dance. She was coming in with fancy Prada bags and Gucci glasses. She got me a job in his bar. I worked four nights a week and in a small town where everyone knew everyone’s business, I know I got extra tips from people trying to help my mom. I had done jazz, tap and acro dancing as a kid until she got sick. She made me take dance lessons to help overcome my shyness. I can get on a stage in front of a thousand people but to talk one-on-one is a problem still. In the end, I could do a no-handed cartwheel with my eyes closed so a death drop was nothing. I danced. I got paid. I went home. I went to school. Rinse. Wash. Repeat.” “Did you sleep with them? Your customers?” “No,” she looked at him with surprise. “No. I’ve never slept with a customer.” He raised his eyebrows in surprise, “just because I was an exotic dancer, doesn’t mean I was a prostitute.” “You worked in a s*x parlor.” “No.” She shook her head, “I did the bookings. I was the receptionist if you will. I tried one gig, and I couldn’t hack it. I vomited. Darya had to finish it for me.” “Dimitra, she worked there too?” “She did the books. She took the payments and stuff. She’s not very good with self-control. A guy would ask to be flogged and she’d whip him within an inch of his life.” “Darya and Magda?” “Magda did the soft stuff. Guys who liked to be yelled at or chastised. She had one guy who wore a diaper and she bottle fed him.” She shook her head curling her lips, “definitely not anything I could do but it paid our bills.” “You were getting cash from Miklos.” She sighed, “I graduated top of my class in high school. I had no extra curriculars and frankly, being the smartest one in a town of five thousand isn’t saying much. There were no scholarships. I had a small trust fund mom had put aside but the reality of the situation was, my school of choice was not offering me a full ride. I’m smart. I work hard. But I do not possess the brain power of Dimitra Laskaris or Darya or even Magda. I was lucky to get admitted to MIT.” She looked away, “my mom had always insisted I was to get out of our shithole town. She wanted me to go to college and make something of myself. I went to the city, Bangor, to the nursing company mom where mom had once worked part time. During her career, she worked at the hospital, and she worked with this company part time providing private care. The company promised me they would send the best for us because they loved mom.” She took a long sip of her coffee. “I met the nurse at the end of July, and she was lovely. She told me how her own father had dementia and how she had taken care of him until he’d recently passed away. She was happy to have a place to stay and take care of mom because it made her feel connected to her dad. I trusted her. When it came time for me to head to college in September, I was comfortable leaving my mom with her live-in caretaker and I went to Boston. It’s a three-hour drive in a car from home to Boston and even longer in a bus. I couldn’t get back and forth easily. In November I went home for Thanksgiving and mom appeared worse to me. She was quieter, not as lucid and she argued with me about bathing. The nurse told me it was an anomaly. She said she’d been great right up until the day before I arrived and perhaps it was all the excitement of me coming home which was causing the tantrums mom was having. I went back to school with mixed feelings. I didn’t like leaving her, but I knew it was what she wanted for me. I intended to make her proud by sticking it out in the big city.” She picked at a napkin on the table. “At Christmas, I stayed behind a bit at school. My roommate was Magda, and her mother was a pain in the ass. She didn’t want to go home as soon as midterms were done. Dimitra and Darya said we should all hang back a bit. I didn’t go home until December twentieth. I had been communicating via text with the nurse who said mom was fine.” She took a shaky breath. “I got into the apartment and the first thing I noticed was the smell. I thought she had died. The nurse had put her in a diaper, and she’d filled it to the point it was overflowing but it also hadn’t been changed in days. Mom was hypoglycemic and almost catatonic. I called an ambulance. Where we lived it took forever to arrive. While I waited for them to come, I noted the bank statements on the table and the eviction notice on the fridge. Despite me leaving postdated cheques for the nurse to give to the landlord when he came around, she hadn’t paid him in three months. The bank balance was at zero. Not even a penny,” she felt the anger rise. “She took my mom, according to the bank, fourteen times over a three-month period and withdrew all the money in her account. The last withdrawal was two weeks after Thanksgiving. The police interviewed the other tenants in our building, but nobody remembered seeing the nurse after mid December when a guy in a Camaro picked her up. My mom had been left on her own with no food, nobody to administer her medications, nobody to clean, bathe or tend to her most basic of needs for at least five days and possibly double that.” “f**k,” Jonas whispered angrily. “My first call was to Dimitra. I don’t know how she did it, but she managed to convince me to move mom to a nursing home in Boston. She was only eighteen but had a presence of mind to get her into a local hospital in Boston and said she wasn’t going to allow her sister to lose her life goals over what this asshole did to us.” She swallowed as he clenched his fingers on the table. “We had returned from touring four nursing homes, two of which, actual children of the patients warned us not to put my mom in them. They were not going to take great care of her, but they were the only ones I could afford. I had no money. Nothing. The only money I had was from my trust fund and when I went to MIT, all of it got sucked out the first year. I knew I was going to have to work. My original plan had been to make bank at a strip club over the summers but there was no way I could pay for mom’s care and go to school.” She sniffed, “then you walked up and told me you were my new bodyguard.” She twiddled her fingers around the mug and waited for him to say something. It wasn’t long coming.