Page 81 of That Weekend in Paris
?Oscar Wilde
I AM JUST ABOUT ready to leave the house for the hospital when a knock sounds at the front door. I’m not expecting anyone, so I look out the window. Curtis’s car sits in the circular drive. I open the door, figuring he’s stopped by just to check in on me. “Hey,” I say.
“How are you?” he asks, walking into the foyer.
“Feeling a lot better.”
“Glad to hear it,” he says with a weary sigh. “We need to talk, Klein.”
I hear the concern in his voice and wonder if the doctor might have gotten back to him, but then doctors don’t do that. They communicate directly with their patient. “Come in, Curtis.”
He walks through the foyer and into the living room, coming to a stop in front of the fireplace. His hands are shoved inside his pockets, a look of unease on his face.
“I can tell something is wrong, Curtis. Just go ahead and say it.”
“I hate to be the bearer of this kind of news, but there’s no way to get around it. You have to know about this, and then you can figure out what to make of it or what to do about it.”
“What is it?” I say, feeling an awful sense of dread.
“Pete stopped by to see me a little while ago. He’d been to the hospital to see Riley and apparently had an enlightening conversation with her.”
“About what?” I ask, deadpan.
“He knew the guy Riley dated before you, Aaron Rutgers. I think you probably met him a few times.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“He seems to think Riley played a part in Aaron’s suicide.”
This is the last thing I expect to hear. Shock reverberates through me. “What do you mean, ‘played a part’?”
“He says he saw texts from her telling Aaron he should kill himself.”
“What? Wait a minute, Curtis. There are a lot of things about Riley that wouldn’t surprise me, but that she would do something like that, I can’t imagine.”
“Neither can I, but maybe you should talk to Pete. It’s pretty convincing. He said he actually read the text. It wasn’t just hearsay.”
I have no idea what to say. It’s as if a bomb has gone off inside me, and all of a sudden, I’m thinking that Riley, a woman who might do something as cruel as this, is the mother of the baby I already can’t imagine living without.“So, why are you telling me this now?”
“Because that’s not all there is to it, Klein.”
“What else could there be?”
Curtis drops his head back a couple of inches, staring up at the ceiling as if looking for inspiration and then says, “Pete thinks she might be behind whatever has been making you sick.”
If the information about Aaron had been a shock, I have no words to describe the effect this bombshell has on me. “That’s just crazy.”
“I know it is,” Curtis admits, shrugging a little. “She hasn’t even been around you, has she?”
“No. Not for a good while.”
“Then maybe Pete’s just overthinking it.”
But then I remember the textfrom Riley when I’d been in Paris, a reminder to take my vitamins. Could she have put something in them? I can’t imagine. But.
“I’m sorry, Klein. Whatever I can do,” Curtis says, slapping a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “You know I’ll do it.”
“I do,” I say. Curtis lets himself out of the house with a bit of a dip to his shoulders. He’s a bright, sunshiny kind of guy, and I know this kind of thing upsets the natural goodness he likes to afford people. I’d like to believe there’s nothing about this that could possibly be true, but something in my gut knows it is. There’s only one way I’m going to find out, and that’s to talk to Riley in person.
