Cody McFadyen - Abandoned

Marriage is different. It’s a choice, a stand, an act of defiance against a life of loneliness. I took that stand once without fear, but the water of life has run far and deep since then.

“What can I say, sir? I’m terrified all the good stuff is going to come crashing down again. I took it for granted once. It was an invulnerable life. Alexa would grow up and make me a grandmother. Matt and I would watch each other’s hair turn white. That all changed in an instant.”

“You want my advice?”

“Kind of.”

He laughs at that, something just south of a chuckle. It pulls a reluctant smile to my own lips. “My advice is to go down fighting. Life kicked your ass once, and almost for good. You survived; now you have a husband again and not just one child but the possibility of another. So shout it out. Be proud of it. Challenge fate and flip a bird toward heaven. Hold what you got tight, and tell the world it’s yours. Whatever you decide, stop shying away. It’s just not your style, and it’s boring as shit.”

I grin at my mentor, at my quasi-friend. “Pretty good pep talk, sir.”

“I have my moments. Now, I’m sure you’re wondering how this will go over with the director.”

“A little, sure. I don’t think a big, fat pregnant agent is what he had in mind for the poster.”

“Probably not. My advice is not to tell him, for now. He’s going to be out there selling his idea to the President and various budget committees. He’s going to use you as a key selling point. Hopefully, by the time he finds out you’re pregnant, it’ll all be too far along for him to switch horses.”

“Pretty devious.”

“That’s the world at this level. Better get used to it. Anything else you need to talk about?”

“I don’t think so.”

He waves me away, his voice gruff again, impatient again, not as an insult to me but as a way of showing that nothing’s changed between us, that I revealed what I revealed and am regarded as I was before. “Then get going. Catch this loony.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“My pleasure, Smoky. And that carries forward into the future, even when I’m not your boss anymore. Maybe especially then.”

I get on the elevator to head back to the office, feeling cleansed. The things inside me had built up pressure. I was unaware of just how much until I let fly with AD Jones, a lobbing of emotional hand grenades that he’d taken with assurance and aplomb.

Maybe we’ll be real friends when he’s not my boss.

I touch my belly. I like that idea.

I like it a lot.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“Attention, everyone,” I say. “Before we go any further, I have an announcement to make.”

“Do tell,” Callie says.

Alan puts down his pen and waits. James gives me a sour glance and continues working.

“Tommy and I got married.”

Alan’s eyes widen. “God damn!” he says, laughing. “That’s great! When?”

“We did it in Hawaii.”

“And just how long were you going to keep this a secret?” Callie asks, her tone and expression severe. “Just until now.”

“I’m displeased,” Callie says. “Very displeased. You’ve cheated me. Us.”

“How exactly did I cheat you?”

She looks heavenward, a prayer for patience with fools. “Do you not remember my wedding?” she asks. “Picking out dresses, flowers, a cake, a ceremony? Don’t you think we’d enjoy doing something like that for you?”

“Maybe. I guess.”

“No. No maybe.” She shakes a finger at me. “It’s a fact.”

“After all,” Alan snorts, “look how great your wedding turned out.”

“Keep quiet,” Callie orders him. She turns back to me. “You need to have a real wedding.”

I shrink, dismayed. “What? Why?”

“Because that’s the way these things are done,” she says, her voice frosty. “We don’t gallivant around, slipping rings onto each other’s fingers and getting some civil servant to sign a paper, and call that ‘married.’ It’s not right.”

“Love is just a chemical reaction designed to encourage propagation of the species,” James declares, without looking up from what he’s doing. “Weddings are a colossal waste of money.”

“Really?” Callie says. “If it’s all about propagation of the species, then how do you explain homosexuality, honey-love? Those of you who wear the ruby slippers?”

He shrugs, continuing to work, not missing a beat. “I don’t know. My theory is that it’s a chemical imbalance or some kind of genetic abnormality.”

Callie says nothing to this. Alan and I stare at him.

Is that what he thinks about himself? That he’s defective?

James senses our attention. “Oh, are you all feeling sorry for me now? Worried about my self-image? Don’t be. I have a lot of value to the species. It’s just not in the baby-making area.”

“This is all very uplifting,” I say, “and I appreciate the offer, Callie, but it’ll have to wait.”

She points a stern finger at me. “This isn’t over.” Now she smiles. “Having said that, and now that you’re properly chastised: congratulations. It’s about time he made an honest woman out of you.”

“No kidding,” Alan says. “Congratulations.”

“Yes, yay, wonderful,” James says, exasperated. “Let’s get back to work.”

For once, James and I agree on something. “Alan, did you talk to Leo?”

The door to the office opens before he can answer, and Leo walks in. “He’s going to tell you he has all the information from Hollister’s computer,” Alan tells me.

“LAPD CCU did a good job,” Leo affirms. “They scoured his hard drive and were able to resurrect quite a bit of data. People make the mistake of thinking a simple delete means the file’s gone.”

“So?” I ask.

He points to the computer at Alan’s desk. “May I?”

He sits down, connects to the Internet, and opens a browser. He types in a URL: http://www.beamanagain.com.

“This is the website Douglas Hollister spent the most time on.”

“ Beamanagain?” Alan says. “What the hell is that?”

“You have to separate the words,” Leo explains. “Be a man again.”

The layout of the site is simple, not graphics-rich. A menu of options is listed on the left side. I read them aloud.

“Forum. Bitch Stories. Brother Stories. Bitch Photos. Bitch Chat. Brother Chat. Books. Wow.”

“I spent some time looking through this already,” Leo says. “The site is built around a pretty simple philosophy: American men are being emasculated by American women and the radical feminist movement. It says that American women have, over time, been changed by the feminist movement into narcissists and ballbusters—their words, not mine—and that American men have bought into this and accepted the idea that they are fundamentally bad. They call it the brute paradigm.”

“Which is?” I ask.

“Essentially that men are brutes. They’re genetically programmed to be brutes, and they can’t be trusted to be masculine men because masculine men rape and subjugate women.”

I scan the menu. “Let’s see the photos first.”

He clicks that option and a new page loads, filled with thumbnails.

“From what I could tell, there are basically two reasons photographs are posted here,” Leo explains. “One is simply to put a face to a story.”

“This is her, the bitch that ruined my life,” Callie fills in.

“Exactly. Then there’s a whole other kind of photo, and it dovetails with another point that gets brought up on this site a lot: the idea that American women let themselves go.”