Craving

by Kristina Meister

  She shrugged one shapely shoulder.

  “Do you know a young lady by the name of Eva Pierce?”

  She slid away from the door and took a step forward. The dress slinked around her narrow hips and at her ankle, a few crystals clinked together atop expensive-looking sandals.

  “I did.”

  It was too late to retreat, even though I was beginning to feel more than anxiety. Beyond her was a rectangle of darkness, where anything could be lurking.

  “Past tense,” I noted quietly. “Did Moksha tell you?”

  Her lush red mouth exposed incandescent teeth. “It was only a matter of time, really.”

  “Before he’d tell you?”

  She shook her head in a slow, deliberate way, “Before she did it.”

  I swallowed the lump in my throat, but my voice still sounded choked. “Committed suicide, you mean?”

  Her arms unwrapped, long thin appendages that looked like the branches of a gray birch tree. A thick, heavy gold bracelet dropped to her wrist and shimmered in the sunlight.

  “How well did you know her?”

  She smiled again and for some reason, I felt threatened.

  “Better than anyone,” she said with a laugh in her voice.

  My heart skipped a beat. “Did she tell you she wanted to die?”

  But my charade was wearing thin. The woman took a step back and her smile reverted into the stern line. “Credentials?”

  I stared into her knowing eyes as adrenalin flooded my body, and shared an understanding with the mind behind them. A penciled eyebrow arched playfully. She stepped backward through the door and pushed it shut. The last thing I saw of her was a green eye and the curl of a red lip.

  “Go home, sister dear.”

  * * *

  At the apartment, I spent almost ten minutes on hold while Unger extricated himself from his real business to come speak to me. When he answered, I could already hear the polite withdrawal in his voice.

  “Ms. Pierce . . .”

  “I know!” I took a deep breath and before he could interrupt me, I pushed ahead. “Just hear me out! After you drove away, Moksha came out of the building and drove to a warehouse by the river.”

  “You followed him?” Unger almost shouted.

  “What else was I supposed to do, just let him walk away when he told us he had a meeting?”

  I heard the change of background noise as he covered the mouth of the phone and dropped his voice into it. “You were supposed to do nothing! You told me that you wouldn’t fly off the handle! I trusted you!”

  “I know! Okay, I’m sorry! I just . . . he looked upset and after what he said about her, I wanted to see if . . . just let me finish, please?”

  I could picture him pinching the bridge of his nose, or leaning his head on his hands in frustration. I heard a few papers shuffled.

  “I know that what you’re going through is tough, Ms. Pierce. I know you’re looking for answers or connections, but doing crazy stuff will only get you hurt. You just have to accept that sometimes people lose hope.”

  “You can find hope all the time without stuff like that, but I needed it, and you always knew it.”

  But a person couldn’t find hope for someone after they were already dead. He was right, I realized. I wasn’t doing this for her. I was doing it to assuage my own guilt. It wouldn’t work, because the only thing that would do that for me was to hear her say that she forgave me, and that was something that would never happen.

  “You’re . . . right. I’m sorry, but I think I’ve just caused you some trouble and I thought you should know, since I won’t ever see you again after all this is settled.”

  He sighed. He was probably recalling that people in desperate situations with no one else to cling to would reach for the only person that seemed stable, and that to friendless, family-less me, he was that person. I had no right to demand it from him, but it was part of his job description.

  “What happened?”

  I told him about the club, that Moksha had to have seen me, the questions I had asked the woman in the blue dress. “She knew who I was, Unger, even though I gave her the fake name. I don’t know if it means anything, but I thought at least, it might mean that Moksha knew we were lying. I didn’t want that to come back and bite you.”

  He listened in silence and, when I finished, took a few moments to think about it before he cleared his throat. “I appreciate that.”

  I hesitated. That wasn’t what I had really felt. What I had really wanted to know was if he thought it was significant that the man who said he didn’t know Eva, knew exactly where she might have been spending her free time, or knew the woman who said she was Eva’s closest friend. It didn’t surprise me that the woman knew me, Eva carried a picture of us in her wallet and if they were friends, she might have seen it, but it did bother me that she hadn’t been more forthcoming.

  It was obvious she had no loyalty to Moksha, yet she had told me nothing. Perhaps she wasn’t able, perhaps she was a victim of Moksha’s too. What I wanted was Unger’s badge and the authority to compel her to speak, but I realized then that I would not have it.

  “Ms. Pierce.”

  “Yes?”

  “If you promise to drop it and let me handle it, I’ll go to the club and speak to the woman you saw.”

  My chest seemed to open finally and I could breathe. Sitting in the happy face beanbag, I finally allowed my shape to conform to its cushy insides.

  “I just want to know why he lied, if it was because I was standing there.”

  I heard him massage his five o’clock shadow. “So would I. Promise me you’ll let me do the legwork.”

  “I promise. I’m sorry. I knew I was fucking it up, I just . . . when she saw me standing there, I had to.”

  “It’s alright. You’ve just gone through something horrible, in a way most people don’t usually have to suffer it.”

  “So we’re back to that, are we?”

  He attempted a chuckle. “It was pretty crazy; cut me some slack here.”

  I could tell our conversation, and thus my last tie to this man, was going to come to an end, and the knowledge that I was depending on him too much did nothing to make me agree to set down the phone. In a last ditch effort to keep his companionship, I segued into another topic with all the expertise of a drunken tugboat captain.

  “I don’t know the city. Do you have any ideas on funeral homes?”

  “There’s Park’s over on Grand. That’s where the county sends . . .” He stopped and like the good psychic I was becoming, I knew what he was about to say.

  “The people who die without family.”

  “I’m sorry, but it’s a good place.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “The M.E. says he’ll be finished with the post by tomorrow. I was going to call you.”

  My eyes were blurring and there were tears in my throat as I tried to laugh. “Yeah well, you know me.”

  “I’ll have it released to Park’s then. There’ll be paperwork.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Get some sleep,” he advised gently. “You need to put all of this in perspective, to see that all things come to an end.”

  “Unger,” I whispered, “do you believe that everything means something?”

  “To somebody, I guess. Are you talking about fate?”

  “I don’t know what I’m talking about,” I mumbled. “Again, I’m sorry. If anyone gets upset with you, just tell them I’m crazy.”

  “Wouldn’t help.”

  “Yeah, probably not.”

  “Good evening,” he finished.

  I didn’t bother to say anything back. I just put the phone down and felt the structure of my life erode from beneath my feet. It wasn’t a real foundation. I had built it out of wild conjecture and fear. I wanted it all to make sense, just like she said it would. The lack of control was miserable, especially for someone who polished their silver and was too organized to have a junk drawer.

 
; Instead I got up, got out the chemicals, and began to scrub.

  * * *

  I wanted rain. I wanted it to be like the movies, where there are slick black streets, rolling clouds of moody fog, umbrellas like sealskin, and a somber parade beneath a weeping sky.

  It was seventy-five degrees and a bit muggy. The sun was forcing me to wear a pair of her sunglasses.

  I thought there might be someone from her work, Moksha, or the woman from the night club, but no one came. I thought maybe she’d have a friend she’d kept from me because of the multi-purpose criticism I had in my back pocket like a Swiss army knife, but no. I thought even Unger might come, but I could feel him detaching himself from the grieving family and wondered if I’d ever hear from him again.

  Instead of the crowd I’d wanted, it was just me, two ever-efficient gravediggers, and a man from the funeral home.

  The casket was pearlescent. I picked it because as soon as I saw it, I thought of the tiny grain of ugly, annoying sand, mulled over and gnawed until it became something priceless, trapped inside a horribly plain shell.

  There were no flowers. I didn’t need any symbols, those were for people who didn’t accept reality or were searching for meaning in something pointless.

  “Would you like to say a few words, ma’am?”

  I looked up at the man, thin, just the type of person who knew when to disappear. “No, thank you. Saying it now will make me feel less responsible, but it won’t change anything.”

  He stared at me, but not in a confused way. I’m sure, as a man who was constantly comforting others he had seen a full spectrum of grief. Sobbing, saying farewell, raging at the universe were all old hat to me. I probably was as unmoved by it as he was, and I think he understood that.

  “Shall I say a prayer?”

  “No.”

  Thankfully, he didn’t apologize or insist that something be done to commemorate the event. He smiled sympathetically and walked slowly back to the hearse.

  “You can do it now.”

  I watched them lower it in with their mechanized pulley. I gathered that they didn’t get many people who stayed to watch them work after enduring such defeat. They kept glancing at me, probably wondering if I’d throw myself onto the casket like Hamlet to take her into my arms once again. It reached the bottom with a soft, hollow sound and graciously, they walked away.

  I looked at it, set in its shell, and felt nothing. The longer I looked, the less painful it became. It was an ending, just like the divorce. I almost felt relief and for that, I hated myself. They say that that’s what shock feels like, but I was pretty damn sure I’d had time to get over shock.

  “Empty handed, I entered the world. Barefoot, I leave it,” said a voice.

  Something in the way he said it kept me from seeking him out. She was most important at that moment. Like whispering an “Amen” at the end of a prayer or bowing the head at shame, I stood and waited for a reckoning.

  “My coming, my going . . . two simple happenings that became entangled.”

  I wanted to know more. A man who could come to think of all the pieces of his life as things that meant nothing to anyone but him, was a man whose life was interesting. That was the trick really. What made someone else sad was nothing to me, but that sadness was equal to any I would suffer. No one got away clean, so why acknowledge any of it? Life was just a blur bookended by two things a man would never remember about himself.

  I looked up finally.

  He stood where her headstone would eventually be, a book open in his hand. He wasn’t wearing black, but somehow that didn’t matter. His face had the smooth planes and high lines of Persian extraction, but his skin was no darker than a cup of tea with milk and had a golden hue in the sunlight. Thick, dark hair was smoothed into a ponytail; long, heavy lashes hid his eyes from me; full lips respected me enough not to smile in empathy no matter how badly the mind behind them wanted to.

  “Excuse me?” I said lamely.

  He closed the book and his fingers captivated my attention, but even as I marveled at how attracted I was, and why on earth I could be thinking of something like that at a time like this, I knew a certain amount of embarrassment. He was handsome, yes, but it was not the looks that mattered. It was the calm way he stood. It was the graceful way he both came near me and yet kept his distance from my thoughts.

  He could not be a man constantly surrounded by death or the miseries of others, but someone living behind a big wall, listening to hymns, reading metaphysics. He had a presence, and though I’d always heard people talk about that kind of thing, I had never before felt it.

  In a moment of disquiet, I could have sworn I knew him, but I was positive that if I had ever seen someone like him, I would have remembered it clearly. It felt strange to be so enthralled, just that quickly.

  His eyes lifted with the corners of his mouth. They were blue like the sky and gave him an exotic look. “A Japanese poem, written by a Zen master at the moment of his death.”

  His arm moved away from his body casually and the book landed on top of Eva’s casket. Then, he turned and started for the large, iron gate to the cemetery, walking as if he really had no reason to be going anywhere in particular. Something about that demeanor made me think that he might not mind if I admitted not wanting to be alone for once.

  “Excuse me?” I called after him, cringing that I hadn’t put my years of crossword puzzles to better use.

  What was a five letter word, beginning with “I,” for an incredibly stupid individual who tripped over her own thoughts as they rolled off her tongue?

  “Did you know my sister?”

  To my amazement, though, he turned and strangely, even though he seemed relaxed, the glance over the shoulder did not come off as austere. He looked at me as if he had to be sure I could understand him when he spoke.

  “Did you?”

  Taken aback that he could be callous while seeming so genteel, I stared after him blankly as he walked toward the street. One of my chief regrets in my life thus far was my temper, but even though I tried to manage it, it somehow always took hold of my spine and operated my limbs like a remote control car. I chased after him, forgetting all about the pearl in the ground.

  “Excuse me?” I asked angrily, and to my credit, it did come out sounding different from all the other times.

  He stopped in his tracks and the proximity warning in my mind beeped until my anger management issue got fed up and stormed off. I came to an abrupt, lurching halt and waited to see what he’d do.

  “It’s all there, you know,” he said with a sigh. “Every answer you’ve ever wanted, but sometimes it’s the reason for asking that is the most questionable thing.”

  I couldn’t say it a fourth time, I was sure that was far too many, so I settled for, “What?”

  “The only way you’ll see the answer, is if you already know what’s important to you.”

  “A lot of things are important to me,” I defended, and instantly heard my petulance.

  He shook his head. “Do you love the sadness you feel, to protect it so viciously?”

  I scowled at his back. “Everything that meant anything to me is dead. How about you let me grieve in peace?”

  He turned around completely and once again, looked through me.

  “You had her within reach for so long and never once asked how she felt, what she knew, who meant the most to her. Now she is gone forever. You do not grieve for her, but for the lost chance.”

  His honesty cut through me to the core. For some reason, I felt insanely angry that anyone could question my devotion to her, even as I was there cleaning up her final mess.

  “She hated everything, thought that the world was out to get her, and only cared about herself! She was the guilty one,” I shouted at him, a real total stranger, who probably hadn’t even met Eva and was just being nice in some twisted way.

  “You speak so of someone you loved?”

  And then it hit me. I did hate her, not for leaving me
, but for making me do the heavy lifting, for relying on me to be the person I was. I was mad at her when she had given up everything. What the hell was wrong with me?

  “What is this?” I said under my breath, but somehow, he heard me. “What the hell is wrong with me?”

  He smiled and passed through the gate to continue on his way. “‘Coming, all is clear, no doubt about it. Going, all is clear, without a doubt. What, then, is ‘all?’”

  Chapter 7

  I thought about the stranger’s words for the rest of the day. They kept repeating in my mind, overlapping what Unger had said about accepting that everything ended eventually. It wasn’t about why I was asking; it couldn’t be. I knew why I was asking, and even if it was a shitty reason, I already knew. Yes, it was because I felt badly, but so what? Should I feel badly about that too? Should I hate myself because hindsight was twenty-twenty, or should I simply seek out the truth that made me comfortable?

  If there was someone else to blame, then it couldn’t be my fault and I wasn’t the horrible sister I’d never set out to be.

  It wasn’t her home, her life, or her misdeeds that I was hunting anymore. I was taking them over and soon, they would bear my mark. Or leave their mark on me.

  I sat in the happy face, staring at her bookcases: four rows of black, one row of blue, two volumes of green, and a long row of fat, red tomes. There had to be a significant reason they were divided, but there was nothing to distinguish them from each other except their bindings.

  Never judge a book by its cover.

  I pulled out the black book I had gone through before and flipped through its patchwork pages. Her feelings, long essays on the meaning of life, sketches, and even a few song lyrics crowded there. I set it down and picked out one of the green books. This was entirely different. It contained numbers in columns and rows like a ledger, but what the numbers meant was not indicated in any kind of legend. Some had obvious markers like “lb” or “$,” but there were no totals, or any kind of averaging. Confused, I set it aside and went for the last blue volume. Lists, dates and locations; it was an appointment book. I flipped to the last entry and promptly dropped the volume as if stung.