“Oh.” She cleared her throat. “So the phone?”
“It’s in the top drawer of my desk in my office. You can take it. I’ve scrubbed the contacts off but I didn’t erase your photos.”
“And none of those contacts were in any way dangerous or threatening to you.” Her voice turned sharp enough to cut glass.
“Nevertheless, they are erased.” His voice was icy. Then he ended the call.
****
Sabrina hated that the spell, that brief moment of togetherness was broken with a sentence. Back to square one. It was as if for a moment he’d forgotten he hated her but had all of the sudden been pulled back to reality. She wished she had kept her mouth shut. If she was to be allotted one phone call a day from him, she’d rather not fight during it. No, she’d much rather be in the perpetual state of sexual readiness his calls engendered, where her limbs were languid and her blood ran hot as she simply let his low voice wash over her. At some point in these past few days she realized that for her, these daily check in phone calls had taken on the aura of phone sex.
And wasn’t that completely pathetic? Where was her spirit? Why was she such a drip? What the hell, Sabrina! Pull yourself together, girl.
Sabrina considered how she had spent these last days without him. Even though Vlad had said they
would all live together, that seemed to be a fuzzy, far into the future goal because he’d not yet returned to the apartment. Sabrina found herself needing to fill every waking moment with some sort of activity to stop thinking about him, to keep her mind off what she wanted but couldn’t have.
She had gotten into the habit of spending the entire afternoon with Alex, exploring the city in a way she had never been able to do before the services of Sergei, who whisked them home the moment Alex became cranky or the weather turned on them.
In the mornings and the evenings, she worked for several hours on her college course work, and she was confident she would have her credits approved well before Thanksgiving, way ahead of her snail’s pace schedule of the past two years.
She realized that she could start looking for a job immediately. After more than two years of piecemeal days and nights working and catching up on her studies when she could, it seemed slightly unreal to her that she would finally be finished. She would actually get her degree. It felt good.
Especially since she’d never wanted the damned graphic design degree in the first place. It had been a compromise. Her mother had balked; no, Lily had gone ballistic when Sabrina had initially expressed interest in pursuing art.
She’d rolled her eyes. “Sabrina, please, painting or whatever you will be doing, that won’t pay the bills. Your father never made any money at it. Unless you mean to paint houses.”
Sabrina’s myriad teachers had encouraged her. In every high school she’d attended, they’d seen promise
in her. For Sabrina, the lure of art class and the confidence it was beginning to give her had taken the sting out of the constant moving and lack of friends in her lonely adolescence. But Lily was having none of it. Then when Sabrina had barely begun college, Alex had been on the way, and then they had another mouth to feed.
“Get your degree, honey, and then we’ll see. Get something that’ll let you get a paying job, and then you can do your art on the side, hmm?”
That conversation seemed so long ago now.
Reality today saw her spending all of her time inching her way toward that degree and palling around with a three year old. As a result, Sabrina had seriously let herself go. Lacey would have a fit if she could see her right now with her wild hair and purple smudges under her eyes.
She would be married in a few days and as Tomas, Vlad’s planner had boasted, all aflutter and practically hyperventilating, their wedding was destined to be seen around the world. Vlad wanted it that way, and Sabrina had yet to see something he wanted that he didn’t get.
So, she searched out the number of the full service spa Tomas had recommended and made an urgent appointment for the works.
With that done and the last of her papers and projects submitted, she turned from the college work to her pure indulgence, photography. She couldn’t explain the charge it gave her to capture the emotion of the moment with a camera but it was a fix she knew she couldn’t do without.
She had taken photos of Alex on her new cell, a
state of the art device Vlad had bestowed upon her shortly after she had arrived at the penthouse. It had every bell and whistle and was a pleasure to use.
But when she lined up her recent photos of Alex, she realized she had never retrieved some of the earlier photos taken on her old phone back in their former life. Now she would get the latest few snapshots of his life printed and framed.
Sabrina went into Vlad’s office realizing she had been avoiding even looking in through the door. It reminded her of him, it held the faint trace of his scent, and she didn’t need to go in there because it was his space and the penthouse was enormous.
Besides, their last, uncontrolled, never-to-be- forgotten encounter, which had no doubt sounded the death knell on their physical relationship, such as it was, had taken place in his office. She didn’t need to be a pathetic mess and remind herself of that fact by lingering inside of it. She would get her cell and leave his office pronto.
Opening the top drawer of the desk as he had instructed, she didn’t see her cell right away. Had it slid to the back of the drawer? Pulling the drawer out further, she saw her cellphone in the upper right corner, and she reached in for it.
Pulling it out, her hand also caught and pulled out a folder. Emblazoned on the front of it was a photo of…her mother?
Lily’s professional smile beamed up from a real estate brochure, the kind she distributed to clients with the pertinent facts about their residence and her summary of why she and her firm were the company to get the job done, be it a purchase or a sale.
Had Lily been the agent for the purchase of Vlad’s apartment? She recalled he said he had moved in a few years ago. Had Lily met Vlad then? The lower Manhattan area had been her assigned territory.
Paper clipped to the brochure was a separate picture of Lily, a small wallet sized photo. Sabrina pulled it out from under the paperclip, stroking her finger along the surface of it as if she could stroke her mother’s face. Memories flooded of her mother’s bouncy brunette bob, her petite, lithe figure, her boundless energy, her big smile.
It was only recently that Sabrina began to appreciate how lonely her mother must have been for some romance in her life. Sabrina’s father had been totally absent from their lives for ten years before she had met the man who was Alex’s father. In between, there had been a boyfriend here and there, but they hadn’t led to any kind of relationship. Lately, Sabrina found herself wondering about the things her mother hadn’t said, things Sabrina had no patience to hear as an eighteen year old but now wished she knew.
Life as a college student had been exciting and a bit scary for Sabrina, and she had been too self- absorbed to pay much attention to her mom’s equally busy life until her mother told her she was pregnant. As always, Lily tried to be upbeat and told Sabrina that she could only hope that the new baby would bring as much joy to them as Sabrina had to her.
Lily hadn’t realized she was expecting Alex at first. When she did, she was four months along, and she’d contacted the baby’s father. Lily said he traveled a lot for his job but that he would be back in New York very soon. Very soon turned out to be never.
And Lily had just gone on as she always had. Few things got her mother’s spirit down but the weeks leading up to Alex’s birth had been difficult. Lily tried her best to remain positive in the face of no word from her boyfriend and the necessity to figure out how best to support her family.
Ever since she could get working papers, Sabrina had held a part time job somewhere after school hours and during summers, but there was no way her mom would hear of her leaving school to take up a full time position to help meet their expenses. Completing her college degree was non-negotiable and Sabrina was in truth happy to stay in school, even pursuing the graphic design degree. So she had enrolled in her sophomore year at city college, and they juggled the childcare after Lily’s all-too-brief maternity leave had run out. Lily had embraced the challenge and they both welcomed her little Alex into their world.
The most obscene part of losing her mom the way she had, was the suddenness of it. In the busy fullness of their lives, it always seemed there’d be time for everything they wanted to do, time to say everything they needed to say.
But time ran out.