Drake directed her south on the interstate. Little more than an hour later they were crossing the border into California. When Dru asked Drake where to go he answered, “Just follow the signs to San Francisco.” Then he turned over and went to sleep.
At about five o’clock they arrived in San Francisco. Dru didn’t know what to do or where to go. She leaned over and saw Drake was still sleeping.
“And he accused me of sleeping too much!” She muttered.
Her voice awoke him, though she had said it very softly. “Are
we there yet?” He asked.
“You sound like a little kid,” Dru commented.
“So what. Are we?”
“Yes.”
“Can you get back to the hotel we stayed in a few days ago?”
“Of course.” Dru had been in San Francisco a number of times with her mother.
“Do that and I’ll direct you from there.”
When they arrived at the hotel Drake told her to turn left. She turned on a number of streets and ended up in front of a gun shop. Dru turned to Drake in question.
“I bought a few handguns, but I had to wait for the waiting period.”
He jumped out of the car and returned in two minutes with three boxes.
“Well, what do we do now?” Dru asked.
“I don’t know. I’m thinking.”
“I have a friend that lives here. We could see if she wouldn’t mind us staying there tonight.”
“Then lets do that.”
“Hand me my purse,” Dru said.
When he passed it to her she pulled out her address book. Dru flipped through the C section and found Cydmyn. It had been over three years since she had seen Amy, so Amy would be thrilled to see her. Dru was sure Amy wouldn’t mind the hassle of Drake, either.
Dru found Amy’s apartment building without any trouble. When she stopped the car Drake said, “This is it?”
Dru nodded. “Don’t bring any of the stuff in now,” Dru said. “We should make sure she’s home first.”
Dru wondered what Drake would think of Amy. When they were younger, Amy had been quite normal. Lately, she had gone slightly awry. Amy’s long hair was dyed white in the last picture she had sent. Her hair was in about a hundred braids with beads on the ends. Her blue eyes had been covered heavily with make-up. The clothes she had worn in the picture were a brown baby-doll dress with sunny yellow leggings under and black combat boots on her feet.
Dru’s address book said she lived in 8-E. The correspondence the two had kept up had stopped in January when Dru forgot it. They had written a few times each since then, but nothing like it had been before.
Dru and Drake took the elevator up to the eighth floor. Getting out, they saw apartment E down the hall some ways. “Com’n,” Dru said.
Dru rang the doorbell. It took almost a full minute for someone to answer it. The someone was, of course, Amy.
“Dru!” Amy squealed as she hugged her. Amy pulled her into the apartment, leaving Drake standing in the hall. Dru motioned for Drake to follow.
“This is so cool! I never imagined you’d just pop up here. You’re always so polite and you always call before-- but, hey! I don’t mind. Come in and eat with us!”
“Sure,” Dru managed to put in before Amy started jabbering again.
Amy saw Drake, and said, “Dru! You didn’t tell me you had a boyfriend! This is great! You will stay for dinner, right?”
“We’d love to,” Drake answered Amy.
“Actually,” Dru said, “Drake isn’t my boyfriend and we were wondering if we could stay here tonight.”
Amy let the question sink in for about a millisecond and then answered. “Sure.”
Dru handed the keys to Drake and asked him to get the luggage. He left without a word. She could tell he was slightly surprised with Dru’s choice of friends.
“My, my, my,” Amy said.
“What?”
“Who is he? He’s gorgeous! He already has a girlfriend, right? That’s why you aren’t going with him, huh?”
“His name is Drake Burke and I have no idea if he has a girlfriend. Either way I wouldn’t go out with him.”
“Drake Burke?wasn’t it Drake who-”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to-”
“No mention of that tonight! Promise?” Dru had written to her of nearly everything that had happened between January and June when she had written. Amy knew everything, one of the few people who did!
“I promise. Why are you with him?”
“We are trying to find his father.”
“What is this all about?”
“Jill is dead. Mrs. Burke is dead. And his father did it. His father killed my father, and is trying to kill pretty much everyone else I know, too.”
“You know what, you can tell me about all that tonight. Now, you
have to come see Daisy!”
Daisy was Amy’s daughter. According to Amy, she was a little
darling (nothing like her father.)
They walked into the kitchen, which looked like the rest of the apartment: cluttered and dirty. Daisy was sitting in her highchair playing with spaghetti and getting the red sauce all over her.
“Daisy! You know what I said about playing with your food. No, no!” Amy exclaimed.
Dru burst out laughing. “You make a hilarious mother, Amy!”
“It’s fun, most of the time.”
Dru played with Daisy for a few moments and told Amy her child was delightful.
“Thanks!” Amy looked out the window and saw Drake pulling suitcases out of the trunk of the Ferrari.
“You have a Ferrari!” Amy exclaimed. “You have to let me try it out!”
“If we have time,” Dru said without giving permission or saying no.
Amy turned around, and Dru saw the bulge around the middle. Amy followed Dru’s gaze. “Oh, yeah! I’m pregnant again.”
“No!” Dru exclaimed. “Who is it this time?”
“Remember the boyfriend I had in December? We broke up in March, when I told him about the baby. His name was Jerry.”
“Amy, really, you should be more careful. With all of these diseases around now?“
“Don’t you start lecturing me, too. I get enough of that from Donna already.”
“She still keeps in touch with you? Do your parents know?”
“Yes, and no. No more lecturing me!”
“I promise not to lecture anymore. When’s the baby due?” Dru asked.
“In September. Speaking of babies, when is yours due?”
“The doctor said-”
“Doctor! I thought you weren’t going to inconvenience yourself.”
“One of my friends made me promise to see one.” Though Dru didn’t mention Cade, she thought of him. And Ivey. Dru wanted to visit Ivey soon, and maybe see Cade at the same time.
“Oh. Your problem, now. Well, get on with the info!”
“First of all, it’s a girl. And she is due on the twenty-second of October.”
“You know the exact date?”
“I knew the date of conception.”
“Yeah, that makes sense.”
“I have no idea what I’m going to do.”
“You said you won’t get an abortion, right?”
“Right.”
“Good. I’m strongly against abortion.”
“Me too.”
At that moment Daisy squealed.
“She agrees with you,” Amy said. They both laughed.
“You could give her up for adoption,” Amy suggested.
“I don’t want to. I’ll always wonder what happened to her.”
“So you’re going to keep her. Good. Babies are wonderful!”
Daisy squealed again.
“Yes, I want to keep her once she is born. But I don’t know what to do, other than that.”
“Why not find a job and get an apartment near here. We would have so much fun. And our babies are due around the same time.”
“You forget one thing. Someone is trying to kill me.”
“Oh, minor detail. Just don’t write any checks. Don’t use any credit cards. I’m sure you know the works. It’s extremely easy to get lost in this world! How do you think I got rid of Mom and Pops?”
“I don’t want to get lost, though. I want to find Mark Burke, and make him suffer for everything he has done to me.”
“Why bother? Let him do that. Drake, I mean. Speaking of Drake, does he know you’re pregnant?”
“Are you kidding? There is no way I’d tell him!”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m very afraid of him,” Dru admitted.
“Get over it. As I was saying, you should let him find his father. From what you’ve told me of this guy, it’s going to be murder trying to find him. No pun intended.”
“Very funny.”
“I mean it! You should get out of this while you can.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Good. In the meantime, I have a great book for you to read.”
“Not one of yours, is it?”
Amy was a writer. When she graduated from high school she decided not to go to college and her parents had a fit. She ran off to San Francisco and this is where she had ended. She wrote a manuscript while working as a waitress. The first editor that saw it loved it. Amy was one of the few writers published this young, at 22.
“What’s the matter, can’t take my books?”
“They scare me. You should try writing something a little less frightening.”
The two books Amy had already published were both about homicidal maniacs and serial killers. They were gory and chilled Dru to the bone, knowing that there were people that crazy out there.
“I like writing about crazy people. It’s probably what keeps me sane,” Amy joked.
“How are you going to feel when Daisy finds out what her mother writes?”
“Daisy already knows. I don’t keep secrets from her.”
“Good. No one ever should.”
“Are you going to tell your daughter about her father?” Amy asked Dru.
“What!” A voice came from behind them.
The two had forgotten all about Drake. They looked up at him to see his pale face. Dru’s face paled as she concluded that Drake now knew she was pregnant.
Amy, in an attempt to change the subject, said, “We were just wondering why you took so long. Come and have some dinner.”
Amy jumped up and put some spaghetti on a plate for him and made a plate for Dru, too. She cleared the mess off the kitchen table and put the plates on the table. Then she sat down and started eating the spaghetti she had been eating when they had arrived.
There was an awkward silence as Dru sat down in front of her plate and Drake reluctantly sat down beside her.
“So,” Amy said, “where are you from?”
“Tennessee,” Drake said gruffly.
“I’ve never been there. Do you like it?”
“I did.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-five.”
Twenty-five? Dru thought. Ivey said he was twenty-one. But then she also said Cade was eighteen, and he is really twenty-one.
“Did you go to college?” Amy continued her questioning.
“Yes.”
“What did you major in?”
“Physics.”
“Than sounds nice.”
“You don’t have to try to cover up the real problem here,” Drake said angrily.
“Drake,” Dru warned. “You have no reason to be angry with her!”
“No,” Drake replied. “But I do have a good reason to be angry with you.”
“We aren’t going to talk about this right now!”
“Fine.”
They ate the rest of the meal in silence. Dru felt horrible for making Amy sit in the tension between them.
When they were finished eating, Amy said, “I have to give Daisy her bath.”
To make amends with her, Dru offered to do it.
“Thank you,” Amy said.
Dru took the smiling Daisy to the bathroom and turned the water knobs.
Amy took that opportunity to talk to Drake.
“I have to go to my yoga class tonight,” Amy started. “That will give you a chance to talk to Dru.”
For the first time in her presence, Drake smiled.
“Be easy on her, okay? The only reason she didn’t tell you is because she’s afraid of you. And of what your reaction would be.”
“Afraid? Why?”
Amy raised her eyebrows. After what he had done to her, Amy was surprised Dru would come within seeing distance of him.
“Oh,” Drake said. “That.”
“Yeah, that,” Amy said sarcastically.
“I would have thought that after these past days she would have seen I’m not really like that.”
“I’m guessing she assumes you’re putting on a show right now. I’m also guessing the only reason she agreed to being with you is because having her revenge is more important to her than her own safety.”
“Safety? She thinks I’d hurt her again!?”
Amy nodded.
“Are you sure she said that?”
“She didn’t tell me. I picked up on it the first time she said your name. It is quite obvious, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know.”
“Look, Dru’s a friend of mine, and I protect my own, okay. She’s a very confused woman right now and a lot of things have been dumped on her all at once. Don’t confuse her anymore.”
Drake nodded.
They heard Daisy’s happy squeals from the bathroom.
“She’ll make such a good mother,” Drake said wistfully.
Amy didn’t comment but stood up and started cleaning up after dinner. Normally she would have left it until after she got home, but it gave her something to do now. After she was done cleaning up the pan, she joined Daisy and Dru in the bathroom.
“You are sure you don’t mind that I popped in like this?” Dru asked her.
“No trouble at all. Except that the two of you ate our dinner for tomorrow night.”
“Sorry.”
“No prob. By the way, as soon as you are done giving Daisy her bath I have to leave for my yoga class.”
“You aren’t going to leave me alone with him tonight, are you?”
“You aren’t used to it? I was under the assumption you were traveling together.”
“In separate rooms. Maybe we should just find a hotel.”
“Nonsense. You can sleep in my room with me and he’ll sleep on the couch. My door has a lock, and there are two twin beds in there.”
“It has a lock?”
“Yup.”
“Then I guess I’ll be okay. How late are you going to be?”
“Probably twelve. We always go out for a movie after the class.”
“What do you do with Daisy?”
“There is a daycare center while the class is in session. We always bring our kids to Janet’s house while we see the movie.”
“Daisy can stay home since I’m here.”
“No, she’ll miss being with her friends.”
Dru did not say anything, knowing Amy was taking Daisy with her no matter what excuse Dru threw at her.
Amy left ten minutes later. Before going she had cleared the clutter off her couch and informed Drake he was sleeping there. She didn’t know Drake already knew that, having heard the entire conversation in the bathroom.
Drake sat on the couch, waiting for Dru to join him. For the first half hour after Amy left, Dru bustled around the apartment, trying to look busy. Finally, Drake said, “Sit down, Dru. Now.”
Dru hesitantly sat down, knowing the coming conversation was inevitable. But, just to show Drake she didn’t want anything to do with him, she sat on the far edge of the couch. He was on the other.
“When is Amy due?” Drake asked.
“Sometime in September.”
“When are you due?”
“Figure it out yourself,” Dru challenged him.
“End of September to middle of October,” Drake said without a second of hesitation.
“October twenty-two,” Dru said. “How did you know so fast?”
“I knew you might be pregnant. I figured it out and had Ivey watching for any signs of pregnancy.”
“She didn’t see any,” Dru said, coming back to the subject of him having Ivey watch.
“Correct. I guess you covered them up well.”
“I didn’t cover up anything. I was sick, though you wouldn’t know that. I was sick and depressed and sleep deprived.”
“I know.”
“Oh, so Ivey told you that, too then.”
“Don’t get mad at Ivey. She only told me because I begged her to tell me.”
“It’s hard to imagine you begging.”
“I wanted to know how you were. After you threw your dinner at me in the hospital I knew you wouldn’t respond well to seeing me, so I kept out of your way. Believe it or not, I cared about how you were.”
“I don’t believe that. There is no way you could have?hurt me the way you did and make me believe you cared about me!”
“I only did what I did because I thought that would be better than being dead!”
“You could, well, I don’t know! But you didn’t have to get me pregnant!”
“I don’t like to think of it as ‘getting you pregnant’.”
“Then what was, Drake? You did whatever it was that resulted in my condition. Not me.”
“By doing what I did, I saved my life, and I saved your life.”
“And my humiliation means nothing to you?”
He was silent.
Dru continued, “Besides, if you are the way you say you are, you wouldn’t have done that even with the threat of death. From what I’ve been told, I’m guessing Cade was supposed to do what you did. But he didn’t, and he is still alive.”
“Cade is also naive. Up until about a month ago, he still believed Dad was really good at heart!”
“That doesn’t change anything! What you did to me was wrong! And now you know the consequences of it. Which, I might add, I am suffering, not you!”
“Don’t you think I know I was wrong? I do! Why do think you are here, on this mockery of a chase? Because I feel guilty and I’ve ended up letting you do anything you want.”
“You still don’t get it, do you? You don’t have a choice of where I am, and you can’t stop me! I am not under your control!”
“I know that. The fact remains that if I really tried to get rid of you, I could.”
“But you won’t, because you feel guilty, right?” Dru said sarcastically.
Drake nodded. “Now I have another problem. Do you think I’m going to let you put our child in danger?”
“No, you aren’t going to let me put my child in danger. I’ve decided not to continue on with you. So you don’t have a say in the matter. I’ve been thinking about the matter a lot in the past couple of days. I don’t want my daughter to be born weak and sick because I didn’t take care of her.”
“Speaking of taking care of taking care of her, why aren’t you showing yet?”
“I am.”
Drake looked at her stomach and said, “No, you aren’t.”
“I’ve been wearing clothes that cover it up.”
“So you are six months along and you can still cover it up. Shouldn’t you be showing just a little bit more?”
“The doctor said there was nothing wrong with me or the baby. Some people take longer to start showing.”
“Then the baby is fine.”
“Yes, though it’s no business of yours.”
“Correction: this business is half mine.”
“You aren’t coming near my baby!”
“Our baby. You didn’t make it yourself, remember.”
“I don’t care. You don’t have any right to her!”
“I do so.”
“Not according to the law. As far as the state of California is concerned, you aren’t the father. Therefore, you have no right to her!” Dru said smugly.
“So you’re going to try to keep her away from me!”
“Of course. I don’t want any of your bad influences to rub off on her!”
“Bad influences! Like what?”
“Selfishness, for one. Swearing for another. Let’s see, then there is arrogantness, and I can’t forget your argumentative state. Then there is possessiveness. And then-”
“You argue just as much as I do.”
“But then she’ll be getting it from me. As long as it’s not from you, I’m fine.”
Drake’s face suddenly looked defeated. “You really don’t like me,” he stated.
“Of course not. I would never like someone like you,” Dru said bluntly.
“I thought that after these past couple of days you’ve seen I’m not really like how you first thought I was.”
“You only get one chance to make a first impression.”
“I know, but I thought that you’d be smart enough to realize that the first impression was wrong this time.”
“Why is it so important to you that I realize I was wrong?”
“You just admitted you were wrong.”
“I--what?”
“You just admitted you were wrong,” Drake repeated.
“Oh, well, yeah, I guess I was.”
Drake’s face lit up a little.
“But you’re taking me off the subject. Why is it so important to you that I realized I was wrong?” Dru repeated.
“Two reasons. The first one is because I don’t want my child thinking I’m a terrible person,” Drake said, and then his tone softened. Drake scooted closer to Dru without her noticing. “And? I love the baby. I want her to know me, and to love me. I want to play with her and teach her how to ride her bike, just like any normal dad.”
Dru’s expression remained indignant.
“And, Dru, I love you, too. I’d love for us to get married right now and raise her together.”
Dru was suddenly overcome by a pounding headache. Her hand drew up beside her temple and she shook her head trying to clear it.
Drake took the shaking of her head to mean something else. “Yes, Dru, I do,” he said.
“You-I-what,” Dru stuttered. “You shouldn’t have said that.”
Drake ignored that comment and started leaning toward her.
Dru tried to move off the couch, but ended up falling on the floor. She quickly stood up and started backing away. When Drake got up and moved toward her, she shook her head lightly and said, “No, Drake, don’t come any closer.”
Dru shoved her suitcase to Amy’s bedroom and turned around to see Drake still staring after her.
Dru said, “I’m going to bed now because you have just given me the worst headache I’ve had in six months. When I wake up, this whole night is going to be a dream. You won’t know I’m pregnant, and I won’t know you love me. And it’s going to stay that way, because I don’t know if I can handle it any other.”
Dru turned around and fled into the bedroom, fiddling with the knob
so Drake would hear it and think she locked the door. It was barely
seven and she was going to bed already. Dru lay down on the made
bed, assuming the unmade one was Amy's. She changed into the pajamas
she had bought and climbed onto the bed, falling into a fitful sleep.
.
Get your free homepage today!