Affairytale : A Memoir Read online

  AFFAIRyTALE

  Copyright © 2015 by Charmaine English

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner without the permission of the author except in brief quotations or book reviews.

  Cover Design: MSPIRE

  www.mspire.com

  Cover Photo: Shawn Rode

  www.shawnrodephotog.com

  Digital Productions: Lewis Grant

  Editor and Interior Designer: Hannah Kiges-Hutton

  www.writeawaypublishing.com

  In order to maintain anonymity, in some instances, places, the names of individuals, identifying characteristics, and other recognizable factors have been changed. The details and events in this memoir are based on my unique recollection and perception with no harm intended to anyone. I recognize that individuals involved in these events might have memories that are not the same as my own. Much of the content has been taken from original journal entries and other written correspondence. The text messages are the originals. So that the reader is not confused, spelling and grammatical errors within text and journal entries have been corrected in some instances.

  www.affairytalebook.com

  Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9863042-0-0

  E-Book ISBN: 978-0-9863042-1-7

  MY LOVE,

  YOU WERE SO WORTH THE WAIT.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  “IF A MAN COMMITS ADULTERY

  WITH THE WIFE OF THY NEIGHBOR,

  BOTH THE ADULTERER AND THE ADULTERESS

  SHALL SURELY BE PUT TO DEATH.”

  —LEVITICUS 20:10, 538

  Prologue

  I didn’t mind flying, but not like this. I hadn’t prepared for this. I wasn’t supposed to be taking this long trip alone. Nausea rolled through me in waves.

  “Now boarding all passengers on flight twenty-two fifty-six to Kahului. Please have your passes ready at the gate.”

  I stood up, stretched my legs and got in line at the gate. I was dreading the grueling flight.

  The gate attendant scanned my pass. “Thank you, Ms. Summers,” she said.

  I walked through the narrow jetway, tugging my carry-on stuffed full with bikinis.

  It would be the first time I put on a bikini since the surgery. The scars across my stomach and back were still numb and jagged. They still looked fresh. I would stare at someone who had scars like mine. Scars that ran along a spine like a two lane highway, scars that were out of place on a youthful body.

  Nightmares about my joints shattering into a million pieces still kept me awake at night. I would crumble brick by brick until I was nothing but a pile of broken rubble.

  Normally I wouldn’t be scared to travel alone, but on this trip, I feared I would collapse again and not be able to get back up. I would have to crawl on my hands and knees down the narrow aisle, pushing my suitcase in front of me just to get off the plane.

  I tried to get comfortable, but my back hurt, my ears rang, and tears wet my eyelashes. I stuffed a pillow between my seat and the window, closed the shade, and squeezed in purple earplugs. I gagged down a Dramamine, but it got stuck, adding to the large lump lodged in my throat already. Loneliness tucked me in with a thin red blanket and offered me its cold shoulder in the place where his should have been. Emotionally exhausted and on the brink of a meltdown, I was a felony disaster.

  A few months ago, he’d asked me if I was up for an adventure, and I always was. I loved our adventures, like the time we’d shimmied across that rickety footbridge over the raging Temperance River, or when we had thrown human body–sized logs into a rushing gorge just to see how we might die. The adventures I loved the most were the ones at sunset, like the time we’d laid concealed among the tall grasses looking up at the sky. We watched in awe as one, two, then three bald eagles soared overhead. I adored the many nights we’d slept outside under a millions stars, and made love.

  We’d made extraordinary love.

  We’d hidden when we had to. Those had been the sultriest nights. Locked in his candlelit bedroom where he’d taught me the tango and the rumba, and played his guitar as I lay naked under his cool sateen sheets. I’d been longing to lie between those sheets for nearly a decade.

  Now, after all that, the empty seat next to me wasn’t my idea of an adventure. It was a heartbreaking reminder of how desperately I needed him in my life, a flashback of how painful it was to live without him. We’d come so far, overcome the impossible, now the grand finale was me, alone.

  Maybe I was finally getting what I deserved for what I had done.

  The loud speaker crackled, “Ladies and gentlemen, from the flight deck, this is your captain speaking. Our flight time today is seven hours and fifty-one minutes. Looks like clear skies all the way to Maui.”

  ***

  U are my wish:)

  Chapter 1

  Twelve Years Earlier

  The pink neon sign glowed “Psychic” in the midnight darkness.

  I had been driving home after a long shift of serving bar food and beer when I saw it blinking in the window, like a beacon calling for lost souls. Souls like mine, discontent souls looking for answers and comfort within a life of uncertainty and dis-ease. Something urged me to turn around.

  The psychic’s face was youthful, and her hair bounced with voluminous curls as she walked toward me.

  “I don’t know why I’m here,” I said.

  Without another word she led me to a small rectangular table where I sat down, pulled my tip money out of my pocket and laid out twenty crumpled up one dollar bills on the table, her fee for half an hour.

  The psychic talked with her hands. “Something is wrong with your car,” she said.

  I shrugged and shook my head, “I don’t think so.”

  “Yes,” she insisted. “Something wrong with your car and you need to get it fixed.”

  I rolled my eyes. This is already a waste of my time and twenty bucks.

  I didn’t care about my car. I wanted to know about what every nineteen-year-old girl wanted to know about—my love life. “My boyfriend. Is he t
he one?” I asked.

  Without hesitation and with a sense of absolute certainty, she said, “This man you are with is a fine man, and if you want to make it work with this man, you can.” She leaned over the table toward me, her eyes commanding my full attention. She continued, “but if you stay with this man, it will be difficult, very difficult.” She paused, and then what she revealed next made my heart beat in wild thumps, “the man you are destined to be with is still out there.”

  It was enchanting—the idea that there might really be one true somebody for everybody. That maybe my somebody was still out there, waiting for me, and that just maybe, she was going to lead me to him.

  She reached over the table, wrapped her warm, soft hands around mine, and held them as if she were extracting information from my skin.

  “You haven’t met him yet, but you will. He has dark skin like yours and dark hair. He is very handsome.”

  I tried not to show how enthralled I was with her prediction. I didn’t want to give any obvious signs that I was buying what she was selling, but involuntarily, an enormous smile grew on my face at the thought of him.

  She closed her eyes as if to admire him and collect further information from the ether.

  With a look of surprise and delight, she continued, “You will know it’s him because of his eyes. They are the color of ice. It would be a great love, a rare love, with this man.”

  Then, as if my body knew something my mind did not, a shiver came over me, and my heart pounded even harder against my chest as she divulged more thrilling information.

  “If you choose this rare love,” she went on, “it will be the greatest love you have ever known. You are one of the lucky ones.”

  Every hair on my forearms stood up like I’d been zapped with electricity.

  She spoke faster now, information quickly coming to her, “You will have three children with two different men, but this path can change. It has not been decided yet.”

  Great. Several children with different men? I can’t wait to tell my mom.

  “If you decide to make it work with the man you are with, it will be hard. Your love will grow cold, and you will become bitter. You will never be truly happy.”

  Blood pooled in the soft pith of my throat, the way it does when my heart flutters out of rhythm. I didn’t want to make the wrong decision. I couldn’t dump my new boyfriend because of the prediction of some psychic lady.

  What if she’s is wrong? What if Levi is the one?

  I wanted Levi to be the one. I needed him to be the one. I didn’t want to wait anymore. I hated being alone. I liked being loved, and Levi did love me. If he proposed, I would say yes. I would make it work. Like she said, it might be hard, but if anyone could make it work, I could.

  Crazy gypsy. What does she know?

  The bells on the door jingled as I walked past the neon sign and outside into the night. My mind raced with thoughts of my future, of my here and now, of my car.

  My car was parked under a tall, dim streetlight. As I walked up, I took a quick look at all four tires to make sure they weren’t flat.

  Nope.

  I slid into the driver’s seat and quickly locked the doors. I fastened my seat belt and wiggled the key into the ignition. After half-expecting it not to start, I was relieved when the engine fired up without a hitch.

  Huh. See?

  I punched the gas and fled the shady, run-down neighborhood. It was the kind of neighborhood that was eerily silent and dark at night, the kind of neighborhood that allowed an old, white house to become a psychic’s studio.

  I was heading for the safety of the streetlights when I saw it.

  Is that a crack?

  It was a crack, one that hadn’t been there before, and now, there it was, a lightning bolt that zigged and zagged horizontally across the center of my windshield.

  I’ll never know if the crack in my windshield was what she had been referring to, but if it were, she was right about that, and a few other things, too.

  Although I didn’t know it was him when it happened, the man with dark hair and eyes like ice showed up in my life only a few months later.

  However, I wasn’t single, and he was far from being available. In fact, I walked right into his wedding.

  ***

  It was late summer when my older brother Dylan married his high school sweetheart. Lacey was an intelligent blonde beauty, and he was an aspiring bodybuilder with a gigantic laugh that matched his mountainous muscles.

  A wildflower garden of yellow sunflowers and lavender hollyhocks stood tall around the well-manicured lawn. Rows of white chairs lined each side of a weathered boardwalk that weaved its way to the altar. Everything that could be was adorned in satin bows and burgundy lilies.

  As Dylan kissed his new wife, wedding guests holding small plastic bottles wrapped in silver tulle blew thousands of multicolored bubbles into the air. The shimmering bubbles floated down, landed on our posh attire, and then exploded into a soapy mist. The wedding party, myself included, trotted down the boardwalk and disappeared behind the tinted glass of a polished white limousine.

  An entourage of stretch limousines took the wedding party from bar to bar and dance floor to dance floor, with champagne flutes and shots of Grey Goose in between. My limousine shuttled me immediately to the reception for fizzing, tangy punch until some distant relative was kind enough to by an underage girl a drink to celebrate her brother’s wedding.

  When the bride and groom arrived at the reception they walked through the doors of the Crystal Ballroom where hundreds of well-dressed guests greeted the regal couple with roaring applause. Lacey was stunning in a timeless princess gown entwined on the arm of my brawny brother as she floated effortlessly through the ballroom. They looked and seemed like a perfect match in every way possible.

  I wanted that. I wanted to find someone who belonged with me like the stars belonged with the sky. Someone I could get lost in, who would make me forget about reality for a while, who would adore me second to none.

  I wanted the fairytale. Perhaps I could have that with Levi. I didn’t know. It was still too new to even invite him to my brother’s wedding.

  A thin partition split the chandelier lit ballroom down the center, and I could hear music coming from the other side. With my burgundy bridesmaids dress bunched up in both hands at my sides I wandered over to check it out. From the hallway the door pulsed with music. It was another wedding, another bride getting her fairytale.

  I had to peek inside and see how beautiful and beaming she was on the happiest day of her life. I wanted to see how enamored her groom was by her. I wanted to see the magical way a man looked at his new wife on their wedding day, like she was the only woman on earth.

  Just before I was about to intrude something caught my eye. Handwritten in elegant calligraphy and centered inside an ornate baroque frame were two words:

  ENGLISH WEDDING

  I gripped the oversized door handles, slipped inside, and was greeted by the warm glow of hanging glass. This room was also ultra-posh and filled with its own luxurious amenities, like glittering champagne flowing from two tiered fountains, elegant ice sculptures, and chocolate rivers. The tone was set for an unforgettable night of celebration. The crowd was jubilant and tipsy, and people seemed to move as one organism across the polished wooden floor. Bliss lingered heavy in the air.

  It only took a moment for me to spot the bride and groom. He was a dashing gentleman with his arm around the waist of his new wife. They smiled and laughed as they moved through the crowd, exchanging pleasantries and receiving congratulations.

  Jealous of their jovial fate and feeling the intrusiveness of my presence on their most beloved day, I slipped out and closed the doors.

  Eventually, I would learn that on that inauspicious summer night, nothing was as it’d seemed.

  ***

  We’re still on for

  2morrow night, right?

  Mwah!

  Chapter 2

  Thr
ee Years Later

  At the top of the stairs of our tiny twin home, an argument of gargantuan proportions ensued. Every muscle in my body wanted to push Levi down the stairs.

  We’d met on ladies’ night. I had been underage, using a fake ID, and he had been the guy swinging hand over hand from the rafters above the dance floor. Levi was spontaneous and daring. I didn’t have to try to have fun with him, he had enough fun for the both of us. He was the perfect escape from loneliness. He showed up with a carefree spirit and lived in the moment, but his recklessness was contagious. Being with Levi had become destructive and addictive.

  Looking back, it had been volatile from the beginning. Although it was that very volatility that had made us want to kill each other that had also kept us together. Our personalities clashed, but the clash gave us variety and excitement.

  I’d once read couples fight about three things—money, sex, and parenting. In the three years after Dylan had gotten married, Levi and I had become engaged, and we regularly battled over the latter two.

  Our first two years together had been great, filled with sex, parties, and enough quality time to meet double my emotional needs. It wasn’t until year three when I’d found out I was pregnant that things became complicated.

  I was twenty-one when I had Danielle, and I’d quickly realized that our party lifestyle wasn’t how I wanted to raise a child. I’d vowed to become the best mom I could, finish college, and do something productive with my life. So that was exactly what I had done. My priorities had changed, so I had changed.

  Through college I excelled, checking off one degree then starting another, always sprinting toward another life challenge. I had quickly established a booming career working for myself consulting with private clients and corporations on health and wellness, as well as teaching part time at a local University. I was well spoken, on my way to receiving a master’s degree, and employable with a plethora of credentials in health and nutrition. Despite the success, I was hopelessly discontent.

  Through the lens of Levi’s hazel eyes, all he wanted was for me to be content, for me to slow down, stop bouncing my knees and for once, be happy with what I had in front of me. He was the guy who could stay in a job for two decades with a yearly three percent raise and be satisfied.