The Night Archer

by Michael Oren

  That love was reciprocated, the need entirely mutual. For Marci, a jockey in search of a horse, he was the foal she could break, train, groom, and bridle. The thoroughbred that she, alone, could stroke and mount, spurring him across the finish. The races, she believed, were endless.

  Until she received the prognosis. “Poor boy,” was Marci’s first reaction. “How will you survive?”

  Roman didn’t know. His anguish over Marci’s fate was often overshadowed by fears for his own. Life without her would be worthless—worse, unbearable. Prodding was unnecessary when he pledged never to look at another woman, ever. He even purchased the plot next to hers.

  “I’ll always be there, right by your side.”

  “Promise?”

  “With all my heart.”

  “Good,” Marci, possessive even on her deathbed, croaked, “And I’ll hold you to it.”

  She didn’t have to. In the months after the funeral, it was Roman who acted dead. Sure, he still dressed himself each morning, but in mismatched suits and ties, sometimes shaved, and shuffled to an office to pass the hours insensibly. He returned to an apartment once painstakingly clean but now chaotic, with dishes stacked in the kitchen sink and junk mail on every surface. He drank two beers and watched as many hours of television, indifferent to the channels, before falling into a sleep tussled by dreams of Marci excoriating him for all he’d forgotten, for destroying her life’s greatest work.

  Weekends, rather than going out with his remaining friends or even taking in a movie alone, Roman visited the gravesite. Fresh bouquets replaced the ones barely wilted; winter weeds were clipped. With a meticulousness that would have impressed her, he scraped the ice from the stone. “Come!” he imagined the inscription barking at him, “Join me!” as he laid his head on the frosted grass, on the spot where her heart might’ve been.

  Springtime merely renewed his torment, and while the rest of the world thawed, Roman’s resolve solidified. He would put an end to it, right there in the cemetery, stretching out next to her and fulfilling his final pledge. Lacking a gun, he tried it with a razor only to falter, bleeding and berating himself. Without her, he couldn’t even do this.

  One such Sunday, after yet another failed attempt at reunion, he staggered out to his car and drove sobbing through the surrounding neighborhoods, straight through stop signs and intersections. Unfortunately, there was no policeman around to arrest him before he bumped into a smaller, much older car—or it hit him, Roman wasn’t sure—and snapped into consciousness.

  “Jesus, I’m sorry!” he burst from his vehicle shouting.

  But “No, I’m sorry,” the other driver interrupted, “I’m such a ditz,” and broke into tears.

  Roman was flummoxed, wondering what Marci would’ve done. “Look, lady, it’s nothing. Hardly a scratch.” He reached for his wallet and held out some bills. “This should more than cover it.”

  But she wouldn’t take the money, wouldn’t stop bawling. Roman tried to comfort her and even patted her wrist while slowly realizing that the woman was young, blonde, dressed in breezy linen, and pretty. The sensation was strange, confusing, unseemly, this attraction. Without thinking, he stammered, “Then at least let me take you to lunch.” Which was shocking enough, but not as unnerving as her reply.

  Smiling, suddenly, with teeth as white and aligned as cemetery’s stones, she murmured, “I know a quiet place nearby.”

  While he barely touched his sandwich, she virtually inhaled hers, a big-haired woman, feline-eyed, fleshy. So unlike Marci, the gamine. And as talkative as she was taciturn, within this single meal he heard about her failed attempts at acting, designing, and running a home delivery service, about multiple relationships that came to naught, and successive trips to Hawaii. At some point—he couldn’t remember which—he learned her name, Olivia, her address, and phone number, and how delighted she’d be to go out with him that Saturday night. “You pick the place,” she said. “I’m terrible at making decisions.”

  Marci, of course, had always chosen where they’d go out and when, and it surprised Roman to discover that he was capable as well. Also astonishing was his ability to select the right clothes for the evening and to spruce himself up on his own. Any guilt he felt about violating his pledge was quelled by a denial of the date’s significance, a temporary escape from his gloom. He would never see Olivia again, he assured himself, not even kiss her goodnight.

  Yet there he was, several hours and three martinis later, in his apartment which he had whimsically thought to straighten up that evening, on bedsheets changed for the first time in weeks, making love. Not only making it but determining how, which positions and what order, duration and recurrence. No less surprising was his request—more like an insistence—that she see him again the following Saturday, and every one after that, with sporadic liaisons between. Summer began and Roman could no longer deceive himself. He and Olivia were coupled.

  Co-joined was a better word, and by a bond he’d never experienced. He gave her a makeover, replacing her gossamer with pant suits and bobbing her cumulus of hair. He instructed her to cut down on sweets and improve her grammar, to stop nibbling her thumbnails, and try her hand at realty. Every “tell me how” and “you make up my mind” he relished, realizing, after years of being ridden, the joy of being in the saddle. Of creating and dominating a mate.

  “I’m a totally new woman,” Olivia announced to the mirror and to Roman’s reflection behind her. “How did you do that?”

  “Well, I had a good teacher.”

  Learning into the mirror, “The best,” she agreed, and applied the lipstick he preferred.

  Come September, Roman was ready to end his widowerhood. Not that his memories of Marci had faded, but they had mellowed from ominous to warm. In place of remorse for abandoning her for Olivia was a balmy gratitude for teaching him the art of control. Without it, he could never have continued living, much less found another love. Rather than damn his decision—so he inwardly averred—the dead woman would’ve approved.

  Which is why he brought Olivia to the cemetery, to introduce her as he felt he must and formally end his grief. The day was crisp, a tint of fall in the trees. Olivia was dressed as he instructed her, in an alpaca wrap coat and pumps, her hair respectfully veiled. Roman led the way, in his solid gray suit and tie, through the rows to the site where the last of the bouquets had long turned to crusts.

  “She would have liked you,” Roman began.

  “I suppose you’re right, dear. As always.”

  “Picked you out personally, if possible.”

  Oliva clapped white gloves. “And intuitive.”

  “Yet somehow I believed that she wanted me here, lying beside her, rather than standing with you.”

  “No…”

  “I even tried it several times—the day we met—but didn’t have the courage.”

  “I can’t picture it. Show me, please.”

  He did, mindless for a moment of his clothes, kneeling onto the empty plot and then straightening his back and legs. “Just like this,” he said, feeling the dankness penetrate his skin and the unkempt grass on his throat. Gazing up into a cloudless sky which in the next instant filled with Olivia.

  She reached into a fancy handbag that Roman didn’t recognize and produced the pistol he never imagined she owned. “Just as you instructed,” she said, but not to him. Then, lifting her veil, the woman he called Olivia took aim.

  Later, after placing the gun in Roman’s hand, she reopened the bag she’d bought with Marci’s advance and extracted a set of keys. Pulling off her gloves, she strode through the rows and out to the parking lot. Waiting there was the sportscar that she would now pay off with the balance. Leather interior, carbon finish, made to order.

  The Cookie Jar

  Three women flung off their coats and tottered in glittering heels as the black BMW approached. Their breath made gray clouds in the darkness and their skin contracted in the sudden cold, yet the expressions they flashed through the
lowering window were sultry. “Hiya, babe. What’s you up for?”

  They chattered their offers, singular and combined, only to turn away cursing. Scampering back to the curb, they collected their coats and spat, “He wants you.”

  The magenta-haired woman, the only one to remain shivering on the pavement, glared at them through clasped lapels of fake fur.

  “He’s not waiting on you all night.”

  She could have bet on it, but instead she just nodded and walked through them. The passenger door opened as she rounded the sports car and climbed in. The engine revved and the other women watched as its rear lights glowed cinder-like, winked, and faded.

  “Jesus, what’s that stuff you’re wearing,” the driver asked with an angry sniff.

  Her face still buried in the fur, the woman shrugged. “Stuff.”

  “I mean, is it supposed to make a smell or hide one?”

  “Both.”

  His own car had a resinous scent that seemed to emanate from the glove compartment or perhaps from his hair, slicked-back and dark. His cashmere jacket was the same color, as were his turtleneck and slacks. His complexion, compared to hers, was swarthy.

  “Not here,” he said when she reached into her coat for a cigarette. “We’ll be home soon. You can clean up, eat, get some rest.”

  “You know what I need.” She spoke to the windshield. A pale, dull-eyed face stared back.

  “You do what you want, just as long as Regina doesn’t see it, and the kids.”

  “The kids…”

  “The whole back of the house is yours. No one will bother you there. Only one condition: no strangers.”

  By which he meant customers. She huddled inside her coat. “As Mom always said, good girls never talk to strangers.”

  A half-hour later, an electronic gate swung open to a crescent driveway lined with shrubbery and hidden cameras. Another code unlocked the front door. Large, abstract sculptures loomed over them in the foyer, and vividly splattered canvases. She shielded her eyes from the halogen lamps and tried to shuffle, her heels clacking like gunshots.

  He led her into the kitchen with an island as large, she thought, as her rented room. The sinks, the appliances—everything looked industrial. Hard to imagine that food actually emerged from this place—more like auto parts. Except for the ceramic jar.

  Half-hidden behind a stainless-steel toaster, the jar nevertheless stood out with its octagonal design and tapered lid. Emblazoned with a clown dancing merrily with balloons in blue, green, and red, it recalled a time when those colors felt warm and clowns were not yet creepy. Its icing-like lacquer embraced, rather than reflected, the light.

  The jar caught their gaze for a moment, before the woman whose co-workers called Zeena but was really named Ruth, sighed, “ah.”

  “The kids never touch it,” Paul replied. “They think it’s for teabags.”

  “Teabags,” she chortled, and pinched the little green pine tree sprouting from the lid. Lifting, Ruth effected a gasp and plucked out a sparkling cookie.

  “They’re ninety percent sugar,” Paul explained. “Just the way you like.”

  “Just the way I need.” Ruth smiled, and took a bitter bite.

  Later, after her bath, she would find silk pajamas laid out on her bed and, in the morning, a closet-full of designer clothes just her size. Ruth padded to breakfast—lunch really—looking almost refreshed and allowed the cook to dole her pancakes that she doused with syrup. And then, throughout the afternoon when Paul was at work and Regina out with her friends, the children still at school, she would visit the jar.

  She could empty it within an afternoon. Though she indeed needed its contents, Ruth cherished the jar itself, as though it held far more. Another life, a different world, the past.

  The next day, invariably, the jar would be filled again. She ate and slept, ate and slept, holding out for as long as she could. Knowing that there would be cookies and, should those run out, the one thing she needed more. On that she could depend on her brother.

  * * * * *

  And he could rely on her, too, once. Back when she was the darling of her class, their parents’ favorite. Their den looked like a gallery of her prizes. Boys lined up to date her and peers vied with each other to call her friend. The sort of person who, if not so charismatic, could be easily hated. But in addition to her gifts, Ruthie was kind, especially to her younger brother.

  For kindness was demanded by Paul. Otherwise, he was untouchable. Plagued by dyslexia and other disabilities, fat and socially inept, he was the family embarrassment. A dark-skinned dud compared to his sister, blonde and brilliant. He, alone, occupied his room, where the world seemed pleased to keep him. Only Ruthie took him out.

  To the parties that whirled around her and the high school dramas in which she starred, Ruthie always brought Paul. People would wonder why a young woman so beautiful and admired would chain herself to this repulsive child. Yet she not only tolerated him, she virtually showed him off. As if to say, “Here is my brother, can you believe how compassionate I am?” Another badge of merit.

  So their relationship remained for years, with Paul playing leper to her saint. But then, in a remarkably short time, their positions reversed. At sixteen, Paul shed his flab and determined to overcome his handicaps. He learned the keys of human interaction and gradually became popular. He returned to his room only to sleep at night, when not out with girlfriends or on skiing trips or visiting the campuses of which Paul would soon have his pick.

  But Ruthie turned the other way. In college she discovered that the edifice she constructed was unsustainable. Under its weight she swayed at first, teetered, then crashed. By the time she dropped out and reappeared on the streets, she was no longer beautiful nor even blonde, and her dates lasted only minutes. Everything had changed except for her need for Paul, which was deeper than ever. A badge still, perhaps, but of shame.

  * * * * *

  In the intervals when Regina was napping and the kids attending afterschool clubs, Ruth could slip into the kitchen and gorge. The cookie jar remained in the same place, tucked beside the toaster. The tri-color balloons delighted her, and the clown’s half-circle laugh tickled. Or taunted. How could she not remember, while pinching that little pine tree, her mother singing to her, “Here’s an extra one for you, for being so special,” and then slapping Paul’s hand away. Probably that’s why he kept it, she figured, to remind him as well. Why he kept her and saw to her needs—to show that he, too, could be kind and cruel.

  Paul understood that, or least had inklings, while pausing at his desk in the firm. He would lean back in his Eames chair and think about Regina, his pretty Brazilian wife, warm and dark in their bed. He would think about the children, deliciously chocolate-colored, growing up neither spectacular nor ostracized, but smart, fun, and centered. But mostly he would think of Ruth.

  “C’mon, let me enroll you again,” he recalled exhorting her in the kitchen, as her hands thrust trembling into the jar. “It’s the best in the country, they say. I have connections.”

  She nodded her head and swallowed. Sugar glinted on her lips. “Enough, Paul. Just leave it. Those things never work.”

  “It could, this time. I spoke with the doctors…” He was urging her, he realized, but not desperately. And he lied about the doctors. “Just give me the word.”

  Through ravenous chomps she replied, “Just give me another dozen of these, will you?”

  He’d given her the dozen, and the dozen after that. But in the end, he knew, the cookies would not be enough. The jar would be empty and so would Ruth’s room.

  True to his routine, Paul waited several nights before once again racing out to the corners where his sister was known to work.

  “No, no Zeena here,” one of the women, pressing her painted face through the BMW’s window, swore. “But I’ll do you better than Zeena and five bucks off.”

  That was the response, and the offer, at every curb. Paul was beginning to panic, or at least thoug
ht he should. He remembered something Ruth once told him, in another of their conversations by the jar. “The past is a drug, little brother. Get yourself clean while you can.”

  Finally, he sped to the nearest precinct and submitted a lost person’s request. It did not have to be processed. A woman meeting that description had been found only hours before in an alley not far from headquarters.

  Not yet tagged or undressed, she lay sheeted on the gurney. Exposed to the coarse light, she looked much as she had as a teenager, fine-featured and bright. Not even her wine-stained hair or hollowed cheeks could hide that. Paul made the identification and considered crying. But he merely motioned for the coroner to cover her up again.

  “Hold it,” he snapped without thinking. “Hold it,” he said and, unable to stop himself, wailed. He wept uncontrollably, more inconsolably than any time as a child, as he pried her not-yet-stiffened fingers. He howled at the sight of that little, cold hand coated with crumbs and sugar.

  The Innkeeper’s Daughter

  Welcome home! Hear the cedarwood sing as you cross the porch with its rockers, its wrought iron tables, and swing. Smell the lush country air outside and, within, the hints of camphor as the screen door sighs wistfully behind you. Here are the earthenware mugs your grandmother may have served cocoa in, the mantel clock noisily ticking the wrong time. The rag rugs and the wainscoting, the damask wallpaper, crochet and brocade. The music box that opens to tutued dancers pirouetting to Brahms. And mounted beside old farm implements, the same tennis racket you learned on and, crisscrossed, your first pair of skis. Welcome to the past you wished you remembered, to a time both precious and clean. Welcome to the inn where you can be the self you yearn to long for, and where, if only for a night, you’re safe.