Chapter 5

I wound up at Danielle’s house. I hadn’t wanted to go to the home my daughters and I shared; I was too upset. I spent an hour pacing up and down the length of Danielle’s patio when she and my daughters came walking down the lane. It wasn’t really a street. There weren’t any cars or trucks on the island. Most people just walked or road bikes to get around.

“Your mother’s here,” I told Megan and Evelyn bluntly. They were both wearing bikini tops; Danielle wasn’t, but she wasn’t my daughter. I wasn’t in a mood to discuss with myself why I didn’t want my daughters topless, but I was perfectly OK with Danielle not wearing ... well, not wearing anything, actually.

“We know,” Megan replied a little sadly. “We saw her,” she added.

“She saw you two...” I said. I didn’t have to complete the thought. They knew what their mother had seen.

Megan sighed. “Yeah, we know, Daddy,” she replied. “But there weren’t any girls in the marketplace who had tops on, Daddy. So we just...” She let her voice trail off instead of explaining further.

I shrugged and let out a long breath. “It’s done. Nothing we can do about it, now.” I sat down on the stoop, twisted my body around and stretched my legs lengthwise across the step. That allowed me to set my back against one of the pillars holding the roof up and relax. Danielle sat down on the top step, a couple higher than the one I was on. She put a couple of sacks down beside her and folded her hands in her lap.

“Your mother didn’t file a rape report and she didn’t file for divorce, either,” I said quietly. “I’m so very sorry, girls. I got you involved in all this and it was absolutely not necessary—none of it!” I explained. “All for nothing...” I repeated sadly.

Megan sat beside me, but one step down and leaned against me; Evelyn did the same on the step above. They both hugged me tight and I hugged back.

“Daddy... , “ Evelyn began. She stopped, gathering her thoughts. “Daddy, I really don’t think us moving around and stuff was bad. I mean, we had lots of fun in that village in Mexico until ... well, until ... and being here is great!” she explained. Megan nodded her concurrence, smiling.

“Yeah, but shooting bad guys and throwing napalm bombs down on other bad guys aren’t exactly the kind of things your mom would be inclined to approve of,” I pointed out.

“What did Mom say when you told her... ?”

I shifted uncomfortably. “I ... may not have told her about those things ... didn’t have enough time,” I replied.

Both girls sighed and looked forlorn. “So the Wicked Witch of the West is going to be...” Megan commented.

“ ... Making strafing runs on me head straddling her broom, and taking no prisoners,” I confirmed. It wasn’t that I was exactly concerned with Allison’s opinion about things, but she could use those events to go to court to make sure I’d never see my daughters again.

“Couldn’t we go home and get our go bags and... ?”

I shook my head. “ ... No airport to catch a plane, honey ... no trains or busses on an island ... the ferry that came in this morning is already gone. The next one to the big island isn’t due ‘til next Monday, and we don’t have a boat that’ll get us over there. We’re stuck on the same island with your mother.” I said sadly.

“Where is she now?” Danielle asked, breaking the silence that built up between my daughters and me.

“Ahhhhh, I don’t know,” I replied. I hadn’t thought about where she might be. “But, if she found us here, she’d be able to find our house,” I concluded unhappily. “and if she couldn’t, all she’d have to do is ask someone. Everyone knows where we live,” I said.

“How did she find us, Daddy?” Megan asked.

“ ... Don’t know,” I answered shortly. “She didn’t say.”

The three of us wound up walking home in the early evening, none of us looking forward to what we were very certain was going to be a confrontation of the worst kind. Danielle chickened out. She stayed home, saying she would watch a movie and offer up a prayer for us at the intermission.

Allison was sitting on a lounger on our front porch when we arrived, carrying the booty Megan and Evelyn had liberated from the open-air market. The girls suffered through the obligatory hug and air kiss routine from their mother. They didn’t really know how to avoid it but their bodies were stiff and they didn’t return their mother’s embraces.

I was surprised. I’d more than half expected Allison to launch into a tirade about the proper attire young teenage girls should wear in public, but she didn’t even bring it up. Instead, she sat our daughters on the living room sofa and stood in front of them to deliver an apparently heart felt apology for being such a bitch—her word, not mine—for so long and ignoring the ones she loved the most in her life. She explained she’d quite her position with Holcomb Industries so she could concentrate on making up for the things she’d done ... and not done over the years.

Quitting her job was news to me. She hadn’t told me when we met in my office. I couldn’t help but wonder what her leaving the CEO chair might mean. She sat down on our coffee table with Megan and Evelyn on the couch, leaning forward and talking to them earnestly in a low voice. The girls slowly began leaning back into Allison’s personal space. They were very clearly responding to things their mother was saying. Slow, sweet smiles began blooming on their faces and their faces lost their guarded expressions. They listened to what she said and responded to her quietly.

I couldn’t hear but one word in ten, and I was damned if I was going to ask Allison to speak up, so I went out back to the patio and got the BBQ grill ready for some steaks and assorted vegetables.

The steaks were a sizzling medium rare when I heard a very loud, “HE WHAT!”

I knew what that meant. Allison had just found out about one of our more intense experiences while we were hiding from nothing.

Allison came through the patio door almost before it slid all the way open. “YOU WENT OUT THERE AND KILLED PEOPLE IN FRONT OF MY DAUGHTERS? WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING, RUSSELL? THEY’RE OUR BABIES, DAMN YOU!” she raged.

I handed Allison the platter of grilled ears of corn. “Don’t drop that, okay? Fresh corn is hard to get out here in the middle of the ocean,” I told her. She took the plate automatically, still glaring at me.

“Why didn’t you wait for the navy or the marines or whoever to come bomb the boats, Russell?” she asked.

I looked at her blankly. “OH! I thought you were talking about the Mexican sex-slave traffickers,” I said. “the ones I had to kill in front of Megan and Evelyn so we could get by in the truck...”

I had time to reflect on the fact that I probably shouldn’t have babbled that until she’d put the platter of vegetables on the table. It took half an hour, working between screaming fits and plaintive sobbing from Allison, to get the mess cleaned up on the patio. Thank goodness I hadn’t trusted the plate full of steaks to her. Good beef was even harder to get than ears of corn out here.

There were no hotels on the island, so Allison wound up staying with my daughters and me. I gave up my bedroom and slept on the living room sofa, or at Danielle’s house, so Allison would have a bed to sleep in. It was a week before Allison stopped shooting daggers at me with her eyes every time she learned something new about the time our daughters and I spent apart from her.

But, by the end of that week, learning Megan had wandered the desert around the little Mexican village with a 9mm strapped to her waist while she looked for weathered cactus to photograph was almost anticlimactic. The tale barely caused a mildly elevated pulse rate.

After that, Allison hardly reacted at all when she found out that Evelyn carried her little .32 pistol in the pocket of her coverall when she helped me work on car engines in the garage in the village. I wasn’t sure whether it was the pistol that concerned Allison more, or the fact that her darling baby girl liked working on engines.

Eventually things began settling down. There were no more revelations for Allison—at least, no major ones anyway and the three of us could sit down to dinner without wondering if Allison’s face would suddenly turn a pale shade of astonishment at some new surprise bit of information. I was the one who was surprised now—that we were sitting down to dinner together.

Because she was in our house virtually all the time, there was no way to avoid Allison’s campaign to get her children and husband back to the home in the U.S. She was up front about it.

“You fell in love with me once,” she told me. “ ... And I fell in love with you. We can do it again!” she maintained. When she caught me looking at her a trifle skeptically, she admitted, “So I got a bad case of the stupids—I already told you that.”

She worked hard toward her goal, giving me back massages that hit all the places I needed and liked the most. She knew those spots because she’d learned them before the children were born. She brought out picture albums she’d carried in her luggage with pictures of me and her before we were married, of our wedding itself, and one of our lives in what began as a really good marriage. There were pictures of each of our daughters as babies and tons more chronicling how cute they were at all the stages of their young lives.

As the weeks passed, Megan and Evelyn grew comfortable around her; they began enjoying just being around her. After a while, they included their mother in their shopping trips and tours around the island. Every so often I would hear, “Dad ... come on ... she quit her job, you know what that means, right?” and other, sometimes subliminal, suggestions that I should give Allison another chance. The girls began making sure there was nowhere in the room for me to sit except next their mother.

To my total astonishment, Allison and Danielle were either a pair of the finest actresses in the universe or they actually became friends. I hadn’t stopped having sex with Danielle, though it had decreased drastically, and Allison was fully aware of the relationship Danielle and I had. Allison ignored the boyfriend/girlfriend thing, behaving as if Danielle was no more than a friend of the family.

Allison was playing dirty. She knew every button to push, she knew every time a sweet smile would melt my heart, all the favorite foods, TV shows, movies, songs ... everything. She played her cards well, never overstepping her boundaries and never getting so clingy that I could react by putting distance between us.

I resisted. I’d been through this before with another of the McMasters women. I hadn’t really wanted to get married to Allison’s sister, Tricia, but it had seemed there was an inexorable current moving the Tricia and me into marriage. I was able to break away when I caught Tricia having sex with an old boyfriend.

This time around, I was resolved to not fall for Allison’s apparent change of attitude and focus of her life. As the old saying goes, once bitten, twice shy.

One afternoon, I came home after settling a dispute between two old neighbors in my capacity as the island Jondee. I heard raised voices, young girl squeals, and much laughter coming from the living room. I walked in to find all the women in my life there in bikinis. My daughters and Danielle were bent over, closely examining Allison’s lower abdomen.

I thought that a trifle strange and was going to ask what was going on when Evelyn caught sight of me and squealed, “DADDY! DON’T ... GO AWAY, DAD!” She positioned herself between me and her mother, holding her hands up as if to push me away. I was prepared to get a little pissed off. I hated anyone keeping a secret from me.

“It’s all right, Evie,” Allison said in a matter-of-fact voice, “your father’s seen every thing I got a thousand times.” It was another dig at me, reminding me of our past together.

Megan and Evelyn’s faces were full of suppressed excitement. Allison was calm. Danielle watched me appraisingly.

My daughters took my hands in theirs and pulled me closer to Allison, and then urged me to bend over in front of her. Allison pulled the front of her bikini bottom down a couple of millimeters and...

Very near the top of her slit was the single word, “ RUSS’ “ tattooed in blue. What was labeled as belonging to me, was Allison’s private parts, her pussy and vagina. The tattoo said Allison’s sex belonged to me; it was grammatically correct too.

I stood up, stunned. I simply had no words that seemed appropriate.

“Whatta you think, Daddy?” Megan asked excitedly. “ ... Pretty cool, huh?”

I looked at her and took in a deep breath. “So long as there is absolutely no way we might start talking about tattoos for anyone too young to have a drink in a bar, then yeah ... very ... striking,” I admitted. Then it struck me. “Where ... when... ?”

“Last month,” Allison said cheerfully, “at Mama BeBe’s!”

“Mama BeBe’s?” I blurted. “Mama BeBe doesn’t use real tattoo equipment ... she uses...”

“And it hurts like blue blazes,” Allison replied far more cheerfully than the moment warranted. “But I wanted you to know,” she added softly.

The tattoo—the really painful tattoo—explained why Allison had been a little out of sorts for a long while, all the way up to last weekend, actually. I almost commented on that, but a stray lightning bolt of intelligence flashed through my mind. I zipped my mouth shut.

“Wow, Daddy!” Evelyn gushed, very impressed with what her mother had done. “Who does that, huh, Daddy? Who DOES that?”

I didn’t have an answer.

***

“Oh, come on,” Allison said teasingly, sipping her iced tea. Dinner was over and the girls had gone off to the beach to swim. Allison and I were sitting on the patio watching the sun take a header for the far horizon.

“Even Danielle said it was pretty,” she added, chuckling softly.

“Ahhhh, was she talking about the tattoo ... or your ... pussy?” I asked with a smile.

She didn’t answer for a moment. She looked at me quizzically.

“You DO know,” I asked quietly, “ ... Danielle’s bisexual, right?”

Allison’s eyes grew rounder and her jaw dropped.

I couldn’t help but laugh. After being blindsided this afternoon so effectively, I’d finally gotten a little payback ... Not much, but a little.

***

I no longer feared arrest for what I’d been ashamed of, and fled from because of my children. From everything she said, Allison seemed not to have thought it was a rape, even at the time. We weren’t divorced either, not legally. The other side of that coin was that we were far from any jurisdiction that might even be inclined to enforce a piece of paper signed by the two of us more than a decade and a half ago. Marriage, after all, was a state of mind.

The relationship between myself and Danielle was cooling, and grew more so after Allison’s exposure of her tattoo. Danielle’s tattoo had been painful when she got one on her shoulder. It seemed Allison had made a deep impression on Danielle, considering how excruciating it must have been to get one on her lower abdomen.

... And truth be told, what Allison had done to her body, indelibly marking her vagina as belonging to me, couldn’t help but hit me hard. My daughters’ mantra was having an impact on my thinking—”who the hell does that?”

I called her on it one evening after dinner, accusing her of playing dirty.

Allison laughed at me. She reminded me she’d told me before we were married she wouldn’t fight fairly when it came to me. Didn’t I remember she’d set her sister up for a big-time fail when she invited a number of Tricia’s old boyfriends to the informal engagement party way back when? Did I really think that she wasn’t going to fight for her husband now, no matter what had happened in the past?

I suggested—I carefully did not accuse—that she was perhaps bending the truth a little when she told me she’d not actually engaged in sex with anyone when I caught her that day. I may have also wondered if that day was the first time she’d given in to the impulse.

Allison almost exploded. She demanded we find someone with a lie detector and ask her questions to which she couldn’t do anything but tell the truth.

I watched her while she fumed. In my career, I’d interviewed—interrogated—thousands, of criminals who had a vested interest in hiding the truth. Some would even demand polygraph examinations, which they invariably failed. After so many years on the job, I knew when a suspect was bluffing, and when one was not. There were always revealing signs, “tells” that the bad guy wasn’t even aware of.

Allison was telling me the truth as she believed it to be and wasn’t running a bluff. She was ready and willing to get back to the U.S., starting tomorrow morning, find someone to administer a test and have it done with. A psychopath might have been able to fool me, but I’d lived with Allison for many years. She couldn’t have hidden that kind of personality. So ... she was telling the truth about the sex thing.

As we talked, I became convinced Allison was telling me the truth when we discussed how she’d drifted into a state of mind wherein her total focus was on her professional life to the detriment of her family, and marriage. She said she just didn’t know why it had happened. She was perfectly willing to find out; she was ready to go into counseling to determine the reason if I really wanted to know, but she wasn’t terribly concerned about it. She just didn’t care why she withdrew from her daughters and me, because she’d quit the job that had created the situation, and that was that. A chapter in her life had ended and wouldn’t—couldn’t—be revived.

I understood what was happening to me. By even discussing these things with her, I was buying in to her contention that she’d reformed and wanted nothing more than to rebuild her relationship with her daughters and me. Knowing what was going on didn’t help. Allison’s earnest approach to everything concerned with her family and her willingness to listen, and change what was wrong, made an impact.