The Space Between Suns

Boston 1924

It was the time when we surrendered our lives to the night. When darkness fell over Boston the real world opened her wide, dark eyes and smiled. And she came to mingle with us in overlooked speakeasies full of glitter and gray smoke.

I left a bit of dark red lipstick on the glass of bourbon he bought me. The first time I met Charles Truman. He had a black suit, a fresh cigarette, and dimples so innocent I almost believed he was the car salesman his business card claimed him as. He had a nice laugh.

From the moment he sauntered into my life, I knew that Charles was real. He didn’t slip through my fingers like acquaintances and grains of sand. He wasn’t the kind of person you held onto. He was the kind of man who brought you into his life and promised you that you belonged there.

“Tell me your story,” I asked that first night.

“Let me show you instead,” he answered, and we escaped the glitter and followed the real world out the door. His hand in mine didn’t lead me forward. But it did promise me adventure. And a strange sense of safety amongst the secrecy I could smell behind the tobacco.

We drank champagne fresh from the boat that night. On the roof of his warehouse, we looked out over the lights of the city. As he poured the foaming liquid into my glass it caught the blue light of the moon and stars. And for a moment that was more brilliant than all the glittering lights accenting the space below us. He smiled as if he knew.

“What is your dream, Miss Stanton?” His green eyes didn’t leave mine even as he sipped at his champagne.

“What do you mean?” I knew what he meant.

“I mean the things you think of right before you sleep.”

“Paris,” I answered, swaying to the music the city made.

“What is in Paris?”

“Peace. A chance to experience my last name not meaning anything. I can make it mean what I want.”

“And what would you have it mean?”

“I want it on the front of a display,” I answered.

“Fashion.” He finished for me.

“Yes,” I said, “A real career. No secrets or hiding.” He finished off his champagne and refilled both of our glasses.

“I understand.” His voice had a clarity to it. As if he truly did understand. And for all the elusive reasons that made up Charles Truman, I believed him.

“You have secrets,” I said, tipping the champagne glass towards him. “You do a lot of hiding.”

“That’s true.” He didn’t sound apologetic. “And it’s a life I chose. Nobody forced me into bootlegging.”

“You enjoy it, then?”

“To an extent.” He admitted. “I make my own rules. I control what happens to me.”

“Until you get caught,” I whispered, to which he nodded in plain acknowledgement.

“Until I get caught.”

For some reason, I couldn’t resist smiling then, and I shook my head. The action made the sequins on my headband catch the light.

“What am I to do with you, Mr. Truman?”

“Let me tell you my secrets.”

~~

And he did. Charles showed me every secret from the freshest smuggled barrel to the oldest scars on his back. They had beaten him in the orphanage. But I didn’t see those until later. They were the very last secret he showed me: on a hot summer night when my white linen dress wasn’t enough to wick away the heat I felt from him.

We were driving through the city, and no matter where I turned my eyes or placed my hands, they always went back to him. He was supposed to be taking me to the speakeasy. The one on Causeway Street where we had met only months before. But we never made it there. He took me to his apartment and gave me a gin on ice. I had been there before, but this time was different. This time it wasn’t a casual social visit with our friends. It was only him and me.

Everything around me seemed to ebb and flow and fall through my hands. But not him. The gin and ice became forgotten on a side table as my mouth burned not with the liquor but with the touch of his lips. Charles and I had shared kisses over the months, many of them. But never had they been so consuming that the entire world felt like a sea of gray outside them.

I was pulling at his tie, and his hands were buried in my hair, tugging the waves loose from their pins.

“Will you stay with me tonight?” He barely moved his mouth far enough away to murmur the words.

“Yes.” I wanted him to kiss me again, but he swept me into his arms instead.

His bedroom smelled like wood oil and whisky. A large four-poster bed stood in the middle of it, flanked by deep rugs that our clothes began falling onto. My shoes were long gone, and my black finger waves were now loose around my shoulders. The sequin detailing on my dress brushed my skin as the garment fell away.

I found the scars when my fingertips first brushed the bare skin of his back. I was a bit ashamed that it startled me, enough to make me draw back from his kiss.

“Oh, I’m sorry…” He quickly let go of me and almost took a step away.

“No, wait.” I gingerly took his hands and pulled him close again. My voice was low with worry and wanting. “May I see?”

He took a deep breath.

“Yes.”

There were more than I thought, and thicker. As if it was a cane that had caused such damage. I wondered briefly what he had done, what had happened as a means of justifying this. But the world whispered lowly in my ear that you can’t understand those things. So instead of asking him I lifted my hand and traced each scar, ever so lightly, with the tip of my finger. And I followed that with kisses. Along each scar; every inch of every memory of pain. I didn’t realize I was weeping until I saw one of my tears rolling down his skin.

“Amelia Grace?” His voice was barely above a whisper, and yet said everything he could’ve ever needed to tell me.

“Yes?”

“I never hurt when I’m with you.”

I somehow smiled at that, through the grief and anger and desire, and moved back in front of him to see the expanse in his green eyes. I knew he could see that he had spoken the very words I’d wanted to tell him for so long now. He smiled because he knew, and kissed me until we were the only thing to ever exist.

~~

To this day, there is still much I do not know about what my father did. Money was always pouring in, and until I was old enough to wonder where it came from it never phased me. He kept my mother bathed in the latest fashions, and it was always the same for me. We went to every big party and social event in Boston or New York.

I remember a day when I was perhaps sixteen. He took my mother and me to one of these big gatherings swarming with the people who made the sun rise and set. We were both dressed in the latest thing from the biggest designer, not a hair out of place. We arrived amid much glamour and excitement. My father beamed with pride before leaving us in the care of some politician’s wife. He retreated through a door with her husband and a few other men in pinstripe suits and didn’t come back out until it was time to leave.

And that was when I realized that he didn’t do this for us. He did it for himself. It didn’t matter to him what we thought, as long as we looked the way he wanted us to.

It was never the same after that.

Before I had somehow been able to believe that with every escape into a dark corner or closed room my father retained some kind of dignity. But that moment showed me just how very foolish and naïve I had been to believe that. To even want to believe that. It was the moment I grew up.

He saw the difference in my eyes, I think, but it was only a flicker of recognition before he retreated into his successes. The most that ever came from that flicker was years later when I was old enough to begin some kind of life for myself. It was different for the blue-blooded girls, of course, but since my moment of recognition, I’d stop thinking of myself as rightfully one of them. I knew that I was not.

He stopped me one day as we passed in the hallway. He was on his way out, wearing the dark suit he saved for darker occasions. Normally it was gray. Roy Stanton looked at me as though surprised to see me there, and then seemed to remember that he’d been meaning to tell me something.

“Amelia Grace,” His voice got lower, but it wasn’t soft, “I’ll always take care of you.” It didn’t sound like a finished thought.

“On what conditions?” I didn’t mean for my voice to come out the way it did, or for a sharp arch to appear in my eyebrow. But to my surprise it only made him laugh and shake his head.

“You’re more like me than I gave you credit for, my dear.” he answered, lighting a cigarette and blowing the blue smoke out lazily, “Just don’t ask too many questions. I know you see much more than your mother does, but that doesn’t entitle you to any kind of explanation. Don’t look too much into where you aren’t wanted, and you’ll never have to ask for anything. Understood?” Our eyes locked in one second of battle. A battle I had long waged but had no chance of winning. So I only nodded and watched him walk away wearing a satisfied smile.

“I’m not like you,” I whispered to his back. It was the only weapon I had.