In the emergency room he was gone from her. In a curtained cubicle she was kept captive. Never would she see him again. Hands restrained her. The Asian girl was wiping away blood, applying disinfectant to Alma’s wounds. Ridiculous superficial scratches they were, laughable. Like her pleading God don’t let him die. God I will be good all the rest of my life I will never ask another thing of you God—
As if God was listening, what a joke.
Listening to Alma Busch, what a joke.
Nights when Alma couldn’t sleep in this house which was nearly every night she prowled the rooms upstairs and down. In her soiled nightgown, barefoot. It was crucial to keep the house brightly lit. All the rooms, three floors. Why, Alma was trying to think.
“So, if he sees it . . . He will smile and think somebody is home.”
Tonight she was wearing the Venetian glass necklace, too. Carefully she’d lowered the strands of beautifully sculpted jade-green glass over her head, carefully she’d untangled the beads. No one had ever given her such a gift. No one had ever valued her as Seigl had. She knew, if Seigl saw the necklace around her neck, he would smile.
We’ll go to Venice, Alma. On our way to Rome.
She would surprise him, too, by enrolling in a course. The lawyer, what was his name, who’d stared at her in such contempt yet had called her, yes he’d called her on the phone to . . . warn her? He had seemed to like her, then. He’d been the one to speak the word beneficiary. It was a new word, a very special word, and it applied to her, Alma Busch. It did not apply to anyone else, no one in her family and not to Dmitri Meatte that bastard. It applied to Alma Busch and it meant that the estate will pay for your tuition, room and board at . . . secretarial school, nursing school . . . There was a nursing school in Rochester. She would go there.
Seigl would like that, she’d become a nurse. She could imagine him smiling. Well, Alma! Very good.
Almost, she could hear his voice now. She could hear him in the front hall. A subtle vibration of the floorboards, his footsteps approaching her.
She smiled. Hastily she set aside whatever she’d been eating (a heel of stale French bread sloppily smeared with raspberry jam, the kind of jam where the damn seeds get stuck between your teeth) on a counter, and she left the kitchen, forcing herself to remain calm, she was making her way barefoot through the brightly lighted yet so strangely empty dining room, and the hall, and she would have entered Seigl’s brightly lighted study which was his special place, and had become her special place, except a shadow-figure of about Alma’s height moved swiftly at her. So fast!
Before Alma could draw breath to scream, the knife blade was flashing.
“You! You killed him! My brother.”
Astonished, Alma tried to ward off the blows with her hands, her forearms. She had an impression, rushed and blurred as if undersea, of a woman’s grim cosmetic face, mask-like, the lipsticked lips drawn back from the very white teeth. Still the knife stabbed, sank into the flesh of her left shoulder, and into the upper left side of her chest, and into the side of her neck, as now short bleating cries issued from her, cries of surprise, shock, bewilderment more than terror or even pain, for it seemed she felt no pain exactly, these were quicksilver flashing blows like lightning, even the sudden spurting of blood was painless, or nearly. Alma was backing away, stumbling, crying No! no don’t hurt me! though lacking the breath to articulate the words as she would lack the strength to ward off her maddened assailant. They were in the front hall. They were staggering toward the living room. Still the knife flashed, rose and fell unerringly, thirty-two stab wounds in all, deep bleeding wounds in Alma’s upper back as she fell, at the nape of her unprotected neck and the back of her head as she tried desperately to crawl away, whimpering, sobbing, but there was the woman close behind her, straddling her, panting, cursing elated, “You killed my brother!” until finally Alma Bush fell to the carpet and lay writhing, moaning, still trying to ward off the knife’s blows but more feebly now, bleeding from dozens of wounds and her right thumb nearly severed, bleeding from gashes in her breasts, in her belly, cruel fierce blows between her thighs, and Jet struck the final blows as you’d strike with a hammer gripping her fist tight around the handle of the knife, an eight-inch stainless steel German blade she’d purchased that afternoon for this purpose in an Army-Navy outlet store in Rochester, and as Alma shuddered bleeding to death Jet stooped to remove the necklace, her mother’s beautiful Venetian necklace . . .
“And a thief. You’re a thief, too. Murderer!”
Seeing that the necklace was slick with blood Jet let the knife fall onto the bleeding body. She rose shakily to her feet and stumbled away reasoning it must have been the necklace she’d come for, somehow in a dream perhaps she had known it was stolen. Gently she would wash it in warm soapy water in an upstairs bathroom sink.
Seeing then in the mirror, in surprise: blood in her hair? And on her white silk blouse, and on her belted, beige linen trousers? She removed the soiled clothing hastily and tossed it into a heap. She had no choice but to take another bath, her second of the day. Running water noisily into a tub. She was lavish with bath salts, always Jet was notorious for her lengthy fragrant baths. Last time she’d stayed in this old house she’d bathed in this tub and used these lavender-scented bath salts missing her Jacuzzi back in Palm Beach. Still she would bathe luxuriantly in the hot steamy restful water and afterward she would sleep. She was so tired! Her eyelids kept closing. Thousands of miles she’d traveled to complete this task and how many years—all of her life?
She would sleep. But before she slept she had to return downstairs. She knew there was something she’d left undone . . . She was barefoot, naked inside a quilted white satin robe. She’d washed her hair but had neglected to comb it out. More important for her to return downstairs. In the living room she righted an overturned cane-backed chair. She saw a trail of blood on the thick-piled Chinese carpet but chose not to follow it. She set up the chessboard on its little cherry wood table near the fireplace. Their grandfather’s exquisite carved ivory chess pieces. She and Joshua had played chess as children, it was one of the bonds between them. Later, she would sleep. There was time for that. She called Aunt Trina and told the confused-sounding old woman that she wouldn’t be returning to the house that night, she was staying elsewhere. She called her friend Daryl Meyer who’d been a lover a long time ago and told him her plans had been changed for the next evening, unavoidably. She called Crossman at home and told the lawyer he should come over to Joshua’s house.
Crossman, surprised to hear from Jet, asked why?
Jet said he’d know when he arrived.
Crossman began to ask another question in his bossy-lawyer way and Jet interrupted, “It’s over. There’s justice now.”
About the Author
Joyce Carol Oates, the author of over eighty-five volumes of prose, poetry, and drama, co-inaugurated the first HarperCollins e-book list with her short story collection, Faithless: Tales of Transgression (2001). It received the Frankfurt HarperCollins e-books are: Middle Age: A Romance (2001); the novels I’ll Take You There (2002) and The Tattooed Girl (2003); and, for young adult readers, Big Mouth & Ugly Girl (2002).
Ms. Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction; she is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
BOOKS BY JOYCE CAROL OATES
With Shuddering Fall
A Garden of Earthly Delights
Expensive People
them
Wonderland
Do with Me What You Will
The Assassins
Childwold
Son of the Morning
Unholy Loves
Bellefleur
Angel of Light
A Bloodsmoor Romance
Mysteries of Winterthurn
Solstice
Marya: A Life
You Must Remember This
American Appetites
Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart
Black Water
Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang
What I Lived For
Zombie
We Were the Mulvaneys
Man Crazy
My Heart Laid Bare
Broke Heart Blues
Blonde
Faithless
Middle Age: A Romance
Big Mouth & Ugly Girl
I’ll Take You There
The Tattooed Girl
The Faith of a Writer
I am No One You Know
The Falls
Uncensored: Views & (Re)views
Missing Mom
High Lonesome
After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away
On Boxing
Black Girl/White Girl
The Gravedigger’s Daughter
The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates
Wild Nights!
My Sister, My Love
Dear Husband
Little Bird of Heaven
In Rough Country
A Widow’s Story
Sourland
Mudwoman
Patricide
Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You
Black Dahlia & White Rose
The Accursed
Carthage
Lovely, Dark, Deep
The Sacrifice
Credits
Jacket design and illustration by John Lewis
Copyright
THE TATTOOED GIRL. Copyright © 2003 by The Ontario Review, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Epub edition June 2003 ISBN 9780061755262
FIRST EDITION
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