Inside, Robert was snoring on the recliner, wheezing a bit with every breath. I eased the door behind me. His face was peaceful, looking more like his old self in his rest. I watched for a moment. My chest felt heavy. I bit my lower lip.
Could I wish him better?
Could I ask for booze to taste like tar in his mouth? Or for every drink he touched to turn into a cold fish? Would that work? But what if it did and instead he became addicted to something worse, like heroin? Asking for an outright cure didn’t seem like an option, not given Faris’s five rules. He might be able to suppress the physical need for alcohol, but the rule against changing a person’s mind would make it impossible to eliminate the psychological dependency. Wouldn’t it?
I looked at Robert’s big hands interlaced over his chest. Those strong fingers had tickled me many, many times. Those palms had rub mentholyptus on my chest when I’d had a cold. He had been a wonderful, loving father while Mom was alive. Even if now he was only a shadow of the man I’d so loved and admired, he was here, trying to be my father again, fighting to stay sober for me. The hope to have him back, to keep him with me, grew strong. I wished we could be a family again.
I wish . . . I wish . . .
I ran to my bedroom, a final wish burning on my lips. My empty bedroom greeted me. I gripped the desk chair, while my lungs and mind worked overtime.
I had to do it!
What about Zet? Was he even real?
And if I did, what exactly would I ask for?
What about Faris?
He’d be gone forever.
I couldn’t bear the thoughts of my father failing or Faris being gone, trapped until I died. Anger hit me in waves. Caring for people sucked! I kicked my desk chair. When my heart quit thumping and my hands stopped tingling, I sat in front of my computer. After a moment, the hairs in the back of my neck prickled.
“Faris, are you there?” I asked.
He didn’t answer, but I knew he was here, could feel him, like sunshine on cold skin, like faith on praying lips. I whispered his name a few more times, but he didn’t make his presence known. Damn!
He wanted something from me. An apology? Well, I could manage that.
I took a deep breath. “Faris, I’m . . . sorry.” I started slow, then my words tripped over each other. “I’m sorry. All right? But you just took it the wrong way.”
I cringed, opening and closing my laptop three times. One, slam. Two, slam. Three, slam. I’d be lucky if the thing lasted another month.
“That was lame,” I muttered. His absence showed that he agreed. “If I said I didn’t want you to meet my friends, it’s not because of you.”
Oh great, the it’s-not-you-it’s-me routine. Double lame.
“I just want life to be normal, okay? I have enough to stress about as it is. I haven’t seen any of my friends in a while, anyway. It’s not something I’m looking forward to.”
Lately, I’d even avoided the neighborhood hangouts where many of my ex-classmates still met. I dreaded running into Jeremy and causing a scene, dreaded hearing everyone’s college talk and dodging their questions about my plans for the future. Avoiding them seemed perfectly reasonable. Besides, Faris didn’t need to meet them. Feeling dejected, I threw myself on the bed, buried my face in the pillow and fought not to scream.
“It’s that guy, isn’t it? Jeremy?”
I bit the pillow at the question, and only the deep, caramel sound of Faris’s voice kept me from going off on him.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, my voice muffled by the pillow. How did he always know?
“You don’t have to tell me about it,” he said.
I felt the foot of the bed sink with Faris’s weight. I turned around and stared at his back. He sat facing the window, elbows on knees, head low between his hands, spine bent like a sitting cat’s. A few vertebrae showed through his shirt. I wanted to touch each one of them, count them, make him shudder. Shaking the urge, I pushed my back against the headboard and hugged gummy knees to my chest.
“But if he has ever hurt you, if I find out that he hurt you . . .” Restrained anger rang in his tone.
A strange mix of emotions twisted in the pit of my stomach. Up until now, I’d assumed Faris worried about my safety for selfish reasons, because if something happened to his master, if I died, he would find himself back in his prison. Now his words made me consider there might be more to his protectiveness.
What, though? I wondered, then quickly discarded the question, afraid of the electrifying feelings the possibilities unleashed within me. Instead, I chose to concentrate on an unrelated emotion—the fear that someone, even if it was Jeremy, could get seriously hurt because of me.
“You wouldn’t hurt anyone, you couldn’t . . .” Sure, I’d daydreamed about something awful happening to that jerk, but I couldn’t knowingly bring harm to anyone.
“I would figure out a way to make him pay,” he said with certainty. “I’ve many times wished I could physically injure a few of the people I’ve met throughout the centuries, people who really deserved it. Zet has discovered how to do it. Maybe I can do the same. And if I can’t, there are other means. I can turn his life into a nightmare.” He exhaled and turned to face me. “But we don’t have to worry about that, because Jeremy didn’t hurt you, right?”
“No, he didn’t.” I hated Jeremy, but I had no one else but myself to blame for what happened while we were dating. That was all done willingly, even if the way he treated me was hurtful. Of course, there was still the matter of his visit here when he tried to force himself on me. For that, he might deserve to be castrated like Faris said, but that wasn’t something either he or I could do. Calling the police was my only option, but at this point, it was probably too late.
After a quiet moment, I asked, “Could you cure . . . Robert?” I thought I knew the answer, but I had to ask anyway.
Faris lowered his gaze, hiding it behind a fringe of jet black lashes. “No.” He sounded embarrassed and sad as if he were letting me down, as if I was letting him down, too. It was my last wish, after all.
“Physically, yes. I could cure him. But it wouldn’t do much good. His disease is mostly up here.” He tapped his temple.
I exhaled, disappointed and oddly relieved at the same time. If he was to beat his addiction, he’d have to do it on his own. I wondered if there was anything else I could wish for to keep him with me, but I knew there was no easy fix.
Faris’s eyes remained downcast, pensive. His young, handsome face was spellbinding. It seemed impossible he had been alive for so long.
“I calculated it,” I said. “You’ve been here for at least 2,500 years, right? Cyrus the Great lived around 600 BC.”
He smiled, if a bit sadly, and pointed an index finger at me. “Don’t think for one second that I will forget this thing with Jeremy.” He stood and paced the width of the bed, back and forth. “Two thousand five hundred and seventy-one years, eight months, and two days to be exact.”
His gaze grew darker than ever. If pain had a face, I knew now what it would look like. I put a hand to my throat, wishing I hadn’t asked, but wanting to know much more.
“H-how . . . many times have you . . . ?”
“Been released? One hundred and seventeen times. But only you and Arthur will be worth remembering.” The finality of his words unsettled me. He sounded like a man resigned to life without parole . . . or an eternity in hell.
“Everyone else was vile,” he added. “Greedy. I was out and shortly back in, once they got their gold, a straight nose, and some more gold. They let me stay only long enough for me to realize that I was better off inside my prison.”
He stopped pacing and looked me in the eye. “Marielle, I don’t want you to feel any pity for me. I want you to know that I’m glad I met you. That I think you’re a wonderful woman.”
Woman? No one had ever called me that. I shifted on the bed, thinking of something to say that could take this conversation away from t
he awkward turn it’d taken.
“You may not want to hear any of this, but I want you to know it,” he pressed. “When we figure out what to do about Zet and I’m gone, I want you to remember that you’re smart and beautiful and worth all the attention and care anyone wishes to give you.
“Don’t push them away. Your father. Javier. Maven. Or anyone else who wants to get close and tell you how they feel about you. Because there’s nothing else in this world. Money, achievements, whatever it is, that can ever compare to connecting with someone, to . . .” His eyes grew soft. His lower lip quivered. I hung on his every word. Breathless. Expectant. “To sharing a feeling, to knowing that . . .”
He turned, breaking the intensity held by our gazes. My heart lurched toward him, searched for the severed link. His words seemed to echo over and over, pounding the undeniable truth into my head. He was right. This was what my heart had been craving.
A connection.
This was the reason my life, my world, held no meaning. I was an island. With Grandpa gone, the last anchoring tie had vanished, and I’d floated adrift. Dad was casting a line my way, but I’d tried swimming away from it, choosing to drown.
I took a deep breath and cursed the fear that made me want to be so alone, so disconnected from the world, from love. I looked at Faris, my heart suddenly hungry for a deeper meaning, for much more than I’d allowed it.
“You can meet them,” I said. The words flowed easily, like water through a parched throat. It surprised me.
Faris’s lips stretched into a small grin. I didn’t even need to elaborate. He knew what I meant, had probably been manipulating me to accept his plan of meeting my friends all along.
Damn his conniving soul!
In spite of that, I didn’t regret my decision.
***
Later that evening, as I took a package of homemade stew out of the freezer, the sound of Faris’s voice and the possible significance of his words rang in my ears.
A connection.
“Any supply orders expected tomorrow?” Dad called from his kicked back spot in the recliner.
I popped the frozen stew block into the microwave. “Not tomorrow.”
“I think I got the hang of everything at the nursery.”
“Good.” I placed rice and water in the steamer, then pressed the “on” button.
“Everything all right?” Dad asked from the threshold. He’d caught me tapping my fist against my forehead, thinking of Faris’s advice.
“Uh, sure. I’m . . . heating up the stew.”
He shrugged and headed for the bathroom.
Without thinking, I blurted out the question that had been eating at me ever since he offered his help. “Will you stay sober?” I tried to hold his gaze, but he didn’t make it easy. He looked straight at the humming microwave, maybe wishing the stew would explode if he couldn’t come up with a lie.
“I’m trying,” he said.
No lie? Maybe there was hope still.
“When was the last time you had a drink?”
He turned gray and scratched his eyebrow. “Two weeks ago.” He forced a smile.
So here was the lie. “Bullshit!”
He frowned, looking offended, whether by my vocabulary or my accusation, I didn’t know.
“You’ve gone out almost every night since you got back. You even had that . . . woman in here,” I pressed.
“We talked about her. I tried to explain, but you didn’t want to hear about it. I thought it was clear.”
The microwave beeped. “Clear as mud,” I said, taking the container out and stirring the meat and potatoes into a puree.
“This is embarrassing,” he muttered, then sighed in resignation. “I’ve been going to AA meetings, all right?”
I stopped stirring, stared down at the frozen icicles in the gravy.
“Janet is my sponsor. I . . . was having a rough time that night and she helped me get through it. That’s all. She’s a married lady with two kids around your age. She’s a decent person, you hear?”
“Oh . . .” I resumed my mad stirring, unable to find the words to apologize.
“I’m doing my best, Marielle. It’s hard to talk about it. I’m just not good at . . . expressing stuff. I never wanted you to have to deal with any of this.” As he went on, his voice seemed to grow in clarity and conviction. “That’s why I went away. I know you think I left because I didn’t care about you, but that’s not true.” He paused, then emphasized each word. “Quite the opposite. Still, I promised myself I would be here if you needed me. That’s why I gave Dad my number. Though I made him promise not to tell you. I thought that would make things easier for you. I just wanted you to be safe and happy.”
“You had your Grandpa,” he continued. “He was far better for you than an alcoholic father could ever be. But now he’s gone, and I’m all that’s left. Well, I’m here, and I want this to work.”
I bit my lip, trying not to cry and look back at him with the watery eyes of the Daddy’s girl I used to be. Because here, within my reach, was a connection I’d been missing for years.
Dad squeezed my shoulder.
“I intend to make this work,” he said resolutely. “Because you’re all I’ve got and because . . . well . . . because I love you, kiddo.”
Something deep inside my chest seemed to crack open. Tears spilled down my face. I shook slightly under the weight of Dad’s hand. Gently, he turned me around and peered into my face.
“Wow,” he said, “it felt good to say that.” He pulled me into a tight embrace.
For an instant, it all seemed like too much to bear. Dad’s arms around me, his cheek pressed to the top of my head, the knowledge that he actually cared and I wasn’t alone anymore. But most of all, my own emotions, beating desperately inside my chest, transforming me into a tiny, helpless thing. Like ice melting, walls crumbling, rays of sunshine seeping in. Like hearts touching, swelling, connecting in spite of it all, I gave in.
“I love you too, Daddy.”
21
I watched the cozy, familiar bar and grill, Ben & Bayou, from the safety of my car. It was a place I’d visited many times during my school years at East Jefferson High School, a place full of memories that all my ex-classmates still clung to—the neighborhood hangout and rite of passage for the older kids.
Abby had been harassing me about coming for days. Several of our old classmates were in town for Labor Day weekend and wanted to hang out before going back to their respective colleges. It made me nostalgic and jealous and many other things. My world, full of responsibilities, could never compare to their carefree ones with their frat and sorority parties and the whole “college experience.”
An Open neon sign glowed in the window. It was 8:12 P.M. Abby was probably already wondering where I was. On the sidewalk, a small group of guys and girls stood, smoking and acting too cool to care. I recognized a couple of them. They were part of Jeremy’s crowd—the ones who, like my ex—didn’t think much of college and its experience. I frowned, realizing their lives were also carefree, just in a very different way.
“It’ll be okay,” a voice said from the back seat. I jumped and looked in the rearview mirror.
“Didn’t I tell you to . . .” I stopped and turned around. The back seat was empty, except for all the junk I never found time to clean. Well, disembodied talking was certainly a new trick. I was beginning to regret my weakness, his hold on me. I didn’t need him here.
“A cat couldn’t find her kittens in this mess,” he teased.
“Well, clean it then.”
And he did. The soda cans, hamburger wrappers, empty plastic bags. All gone, just like that. I tipped my lips into a smirk, trying to sound as smug as possible. “Why would I want to get rid of you when you’re such a good maid?”
“Hi there,” Abby said, as she tapped on my window and looked toward the back seat. “Who ya talking to?”
I got out of the car and smoothed my knee-length, organza dress. “Just mutte
ring to myself.” I grinned. “New hair-do?” Her blond extensions had been replaced by pink ones.
She shrugged, dismissing the comment, and stared at me, brow furrowed.
“What?” I asked, feeling self-conscious.
She wavered for a moment, then a smile—clearly forced—spread across her glittery lips. “I saw your friend.” She elbowed me, leaving me with the impression that she’d intended to tell me something else.
My eyes darted around, looking for Faris. “What? Who?”
“Maven. He looks great. I don’t remember him being so . . . delicious,” she finished cautiously. “You guys . . .” She wiggled her eyebrows.
“What? Maven and I? No, not at all. We’re just friends.”
Abby smiled, looking pleased, and started toward the entrance.
“He’s here?” I asked, full of suspicion.
“Oh, yeah. More people than I thought showed up. Mostly the ones going to school in-state. Oh, and the bums studying to be mafia members.” She looked pointedly at the group by the sidewalk. “Word got around, I guess.”
I hoped Jeremy hadn’t shown up. The last thing I wanted was another scene, especially with Faris here. Trying not to worry, I followed the thread of our other conversation. “Why do you care about Maven anyway? You’ve got Kurt.”
Abby twisted her lips and shook her head. Her pink extensions swayed. “About that . . . we broke up.”
“What? When? Why didn’t you tell me?!”
“C’mon, Elle. What kind of friend do you think I am? You have real problems. Your grandpa, your dad. Kurt and I . . . well . . . that’s just stupid crap.” Her brown eyes didn’t match her careless tone. There was a connection here, one which I hadn’t been tending properly.
We walked down the sidewalk, past the pack of smoking hoodlums. She was struggling with the right thing to say when one of the guys broke from the group and stepped in front of me. He was good looking and seemed pleasant enough until he opened his mouth.
“Hey, sweetheart,” he drawled. “Marielle, right? I’ve heard so much about you. Let me buy you a drink?” He waggled a studded tongue and winked.
One Wish Away (Djinn Empire Book 1) Page 16