Susan Phillips - It Had To Be You

"What'll you give me for it," Reed said.

She knew she couldn't let Reed see how precious the photograph was or he would do something awful to keep her from having it. "I already have lots of pictures of her," she lied, "so why should I give you anything?"

He held it up in front of him. "All right. I'll just tear it up."

"No!" She leapt forward, the protest slipping through her lips before she could stop it.

His dark eyes narrowed in sly triumph, and she felt as if the sharp jaws of a steel trap had just closed around her.

"How much do you want it?"

She had begun to tremble. "Just give it to me."

"Pull down your pants and I will."

"No!"

"Then I'm going to tear it up." He clasped the top between his fingers as if he were getting ready to tear it.

"Don't!" Her voice was shaking. She bit the inside of her cheek, but she couldn't stop her eyes from filling with tears. "You don't want it, Reed. Please give it to me."

"I already told you what you have to do, Lard Ass."

"No. I'll tell my dad."

"And I'll tell him you're a stuck-up little liar. Which one of us do you think he'll believe?"

Both of them knew the answer to that question. Bert always took Reed's side.

A tear dripped off her jaw onto her cotton top, making an amoeba-shaped smear on the leaf of the strawberry. "Please."

"Pull down your pants, or I'll tear it up."

"No!"

He made a small tear at the top, and she couldn't hold back a sob of distress.

"Pull 'em down!"

"Please, don't! Please!"

"Are you going to do it, crybaby?" He lengthened the tear.

"Yes! Stop! Stop and I'll do it."

He lowered the photograph. Through her tears she saw that he had made a jagged rip through the top inch.

His eyes slithered down over her and settled on the point where her legs came together, that mysterious place where a few strands of golden hair had begun to grow. "Hurry up before somebody comes."

An awful vomit taste rose in her throat. She worked the button at the side of her shorts. Tears stung her eyes as she struggled with the zipper.

"Don't make me do this," she whispered. The words had a wavery sound, as if her throat were full of water. "Please. Just give me the picture."

"I told you to hurry." He wasn't even looking at her face, just staring at the place between her legs.

The bad taste in her mouth got worse as she slowly worked her shorts down over her tummy and thighs and then let them fall. They circled her ankles in a crooked figure eight. She was cold with shame as she stood in front of him in her blue cotton underpants with tiny yellow roses all over them.

"Give it to me now, " she begged.

"Pull down your panties first."

She tried not to think about it. She tried just to take her panties down so she could have the picture of her mother, but her hands wouldn't move. She stood in front of him with tears running down her cheeks and her shorts snagged around her chubby ankles and she knew she couldn't let him see her there.

"I can't," she whispered.

"Do it!" His small eyes darkened with fury.

Sobbing, she shook her head.

With an ugly twist to his mouth, he ripped the precious photograph in half, then in half again before letting the pieces float to the ground. He ground them beneath the sole of his sneaker and ran toward the house.

Tripping on her shorts, she stumbled blindly toward the ruined photograph. As she fell to her knees, she saw a set of widely spaced eyes tilted up at the ends just like her own. She gave a little shuddering gasp and told herself it would be all right. She would smooth everything out and tape it all back together again.

Her hands shook as she arranged the four crumpled pieces in their proper order, the top corners first and then the bottom ones. Only after the photograph was reassembled did she see Reed's final act of malice. A thick, black mustache had been inked in just above her mother's soft upper lip.

That had been twenty-three years ago, but Phoebe could still feel an ache in her chest as she stood at the window staring out over the grounds. All the material luxuries of her childhood had never been able to compensate for growing up under the shadow of Reed's cruel bullying and her father's scorn.

Something brushed against her leg, and she looked down to see Pooh gazing up at her with adoring eyes. She knelt to pick her up, then gathered her close and carried her over to the sofa, where she sat and stroked her soft white coat. The grandfather clock ticked in the corner. When she was eighteen, that clock had stood in her father's study. She buried her pink-lacquered fingernails in Pooh's topknot and remembered that awful August night when her world had come to an end.

Her stepmother Lara had taken two-month-old Molly to visit her mother in Cleveland. Phoebe, eighteen at the time, was home packing for her freshman year at Mount Holyoke. Normally she wouldn't have been invited to the Northwest Illinois State football team party, but Bert was hosting it at the house so she had been included. At that time Bert hadn't yet bought the Stars' franchise, and Northwest football had been his obsession. Reed played on the team, and Bert's generous contributions to the athletic fund had made him a highly influential alumnus.

She had spent the day both anticipating and dreading that night's party. Although much of her baby fat had melted away, she was still self-conscious about her figure and wore baggy, shapeless clothing to conceal her full breasts. Her experiences with Reed and her father had left her leery of men, but at the same time, she couldn't help but daydream that one of the popular jocks would notice her.

She had spent the early hours of the party standing on the fringes trying to look inconspicuous. When Craig Jenkins, who was Reed's best friend, had walked over to ask her to dance, she had barely been able to nod. Dark-haired and handsome, Craig was Northeast's star player and not even in her wildest dreams had she imagined that he would notice her, much less put his arm around her shoulders after the music ended. She had begun to relax. They danced again. She flirted a little bit, laughed at his jokes.

And then it had all turned sour. He'd had too much to drink and tried to feel her breasts. Even when she'd told him to stop, he hadn't listened. He'd grown more aggressive, and she'd run outside in the middle of a thunderstorm to hide in the small metal shed near the pool.

That was where Craig had found her and where, in the thick, hot blackness, he had raped her.

Afterward, she'd made the mistake so many rape victims make. Dazed and bleeding, she had dragged herself to the bathroom, where she'd thrown up and then scrubbed away the signs of his violation in a tub of scalding-hot water.

An hour later, sobbing and barely coherent, she'd cornered Bert in his study, where he'd gone to fetch one of his Cuban cigars. She still remembered his disbelief as he'd run his fingers through his steel gray crew cut and studied her. She stood before him in the baggy gray sweat suit she'd climbed into when she got out of the tub, and she had never felt more vulnerable.

"You want me to believe a boy like Craig Jenkins was so hard up for a woman that he had to rape you?"

"It's true," she whispered, barely able to squeeze the words through her constricted throat.

Cigar smoke had coiled like a soiled ribbon around his head. He drew his shaggy salt-and-pepper eyebrows together. "This is another one of your pathetic attempts to get my sympathy, isn't it? Do you really believe I'm going to ruin mat boy's football career just because you want some attention."

"It's not like that! He raped me!"

Bert had made a sound of disgust and stuck his head out the door to send someone after Craig, who had arrived minutes later accompanied by Reed. Phoebe had begged her father to send Reed away, but he hadn't done it, and her cousin stood at the side of the room sipping from a bottle of beer and listening as she haltingly repeated her story.

Craig had hotly denied Phoebe's accusations, speaking so convincingly that she would have believed him herself if she hadn't known differently. Even without looking at her father, she realized that she had lost, and when he ordered her not ever to repeat the story again, some part of her had died.

She'd run away the next day, trying to flee from what had become her shame. Her college checking account contained enough money for her to get to Paris, the place where she'd met Arturo Flores, and her life had been changed forever.

Her father's flunkies had visited her several times during her years with Arturo to deliver Bert's threats and order her home. She had been disinherited when the first of the nude portraits had gone on display.

She rested her head against the back of the couch and drew Pooh closer. Bert had finally bent her to his will. If she didn't do as he had dictated, she wouldn't receive the one hundred thousand dollars, money that would let her open a small art gallery of her own.

You're my only failure, Phoebe. My only goddamn failure.

Right then, she set her jaw in a stubborn line. Her father, his one hundred thousand dollars, and the Chicago Stars could go to hell. Just because Bert had set up the game didn't mean she had to play. She'd find another way to raise the money to open her gallery. She decided to take Viktor up on his offer to spend some time at his vacation cottage near Montauk. There, next to the ocean, she would finally put the ghosts of her past to rest.

"There's no other way to look at it, Ice," Tully Archer said, speaking to Dan Calebow out of the side of his mouth as if they were Allied spies meeting in the Grunewald to exchange military secrets. "Whether you like it or not, the blond chicky's in the driver's seat."

"Bert must have had his brains in his ass." Dan scowled at the waiter, who was approaching with another tray of champagne, and the man quickly backed off. Dan hated champagne. Not just the sissy taste, but the way those silly glasses felt in his big battle-scarred hands. Even more than the champagne, he hated the idea of that blond bimbo with the drop-dead body owning his football team.

The two coaches were standing in the spacious observation deck of the Sears Tower, which had been closed to the public for that evening's United Negro College Fund benefit. The floor-to-ceiling sweep of windows reflected banks of flowers grouped around trellis arches, while a woodwind quintet from the Chicago Symphony played Debussy. Members of all the area sports teams were mingling with local media figures, politicians, and several movie stars who were in town. Dan hated any occasion that required a tuxedo, but when it was for a good cause, he forced himself to go along with it.

Beginning with his years as the starting quarterback for the University of Alabama's Crimson Tide, Calebow's exploits both on and off the field had become the stuff of legends. As a pro, he had been a bloodthirsty, hell-raising, in-your-face barbarian. He was a working man's quarterback, not a glamour boy, and even the meanest defensive lineman failed to intimidate him, because in any confrontation Dan Calebow assumed he was either stronger than the other guy or smarter. Either way, he planned to come out the winner.

Off the field he was just as aggressive. At various times he had gotten himself arrested for disturbing the peace, destruction of personal property, and, in the early days of his career, possession of a controlled substance.

Age and maturity had made him wiser about some things but not about others, and he found himself studying the newest congresswoman from Illinois as she stood in a cluster of formally dressed people behind Tully. She wore one of those black evening gowns that looked plain but probably cost more than a new set of Pings. Her light brown hair was pulled to the nape of her neck with a flat velvet bow. She was beautiful and sophisticated. She was also attracting a considerable amount of attention, and he didn't fail to note that he was one of the few people at the gathering she hadn't sought out. Instead, a flashy brunette in a tight silver dress came up to him. Turning her back to Tully, she regarded Dan through eyelashes so thick with mascara he was surprised she could still bat them.