Beautiful to the Bone (The Enuis Trilogy #1)

by P. G. Lengsfelder

  I opened the door. A tidal wave of light engulfed me in the windowless room. My ears began to clog. Forty or so people turned to look at me. Some gasped. My hand shook securing my shaded glasses. I hung my head. No, head up.

  “Mrs. Cloonis, how nice of you to grace us with your presence. Don’t bother sitting. You can speak first, if you have anything to say.”

  It was a restless crowd. As I passed them the undertow dragged on my thighs and feet. My chest wavered between panic and primitive hostility, as if I moved through currents of warm and cold water, trying to balance between benign and beast. But I wanted to lose myself in the savage.

  Somehow I kept moving toward the lectern. The energy inside and out was uncontrollable, that worst possible feeling, tossing me in waves, this way and that. To steady myself I grabbed for a chair and a shoulder. I was slapped away and cursed.

  The woman at the lectern was the woman from the elevator, the one with the Santa hat and the expensive jewelry and the laundry basket in the middle of the night. She’d inhaled Sam rotting and Malcolm shitting himself.

  “I’m Helen Dorward, President of the Homeowners Association,” I heard the woman say, though I couldn’t see her mouth move. “I’m glad you took the time to come here. Perhaps there is something about your behavior and the behavior of your friends that we don’t understand.”

  A few in the audience chortled.

  “Please, please come up here, Mrs. Cloonis. Tell us why allowing you into our home was not a terrible mistake.”

  I stumbled up the platform to the lectern, my legs slack, my usual physical strength missing. My eyes burned with dull, dry heat; a fish out of water, curling in the sun. Inside, a voice taunted me. Where’s the beauty now, bitch?

  A dry heave soured my throat and tongue. I blinked hard hoping I could steady myself, make sense of it. I thought of swimming in the lakes, but the room had its hold on me. It rippled in and out of focus. I lowered my head. So many eyes.

  The wet, diluted sounds didn’t match the audience. Grunts. Hissing. The clank and thud of heavy chains dragging around me. Dickinson would say you’re not waiting for Eternity; you’re close to it. A cough. The blur that must have been Helen Dorward moved quickly away and to the side, eventually inching her way off the platform.

  Through a scorching weariness, I stared at the floor, at the shoes in the front row.

  “Say something, you freak,” yelled a man.

  More rumble.

  I was so tired and so dry. I could barely lift the words. “I . . . I was trying to help . . .” There was laughter. Derisive.

  Eyes on the lectern. I searched for strength, anything that would return moisture to my body, to my spirit. I imagined myself in Minnesota, in the lake, swimming. Then I just let it fly . . .

  “I don’t know if any of you have ever been in the water with someone who’s drowning.”

  A shrill female voice. “You’re gonna give a lecture? What’s your point?”

  I lifted my eyes and turned her way but couldn’t pick out a single face in the crowd. They all looked up at me with disgust. Men, women, mostly white, East Indian, a few blacks and Asians. Afflicted with the same . . . anger.

  I took a breath. Eyes returned to the lectern. You’re swimming. “I know this sounds wild coming from someone who looks like me, but a lot of faces scare me.”

  A little laughter. It sounded like a few in the crowd were with me.

  “Yeah. But one of the scariest was of a man who lived 150 yards from you/us, in that old tower.” I swung my head in that direction. “That’s not a legend. Perhaps you’ve seen him, often dressed in a calf-length mid-Victorian frock coat. Have any of you looked?”

  “Again, what’s your point?!”

  I gathered myself. “That man was drowning, and he was only 150 yards away. Did any of you know he was calling for help?” I waited. “Did any of you know and look away?”

  Another voice in the crowd, gravely and deep for a woman. “What’s this got to do with you smearing excrement over our elevator and lobby?”

  The crowd swelled, guttural and agreeing.

  “And smelling like a rotted corpse.” Added a new voice.

  My gaze again on the front row feet. I continued, “Well, I looked away from that drowning man once, and I felt like shit.”

  “Ooh.”

  “Oh come on, you’ve heard that word before. It’s the same as ‘excrement.’” Another breath. “So the second chance I had, I offered him a shower and shelter for the night. One night. But without his meds he was in trouble, which is when you saw me taking him to the Metzinger next door.”

  “You shouldn’t have brought him into our building.”

  “One night. One night out of the killer cold. He was drowning and that’s what I did.”

  “Jeopardizing the whole building.”

  “The building?” A dark storm wailed out of my chest, a force I couldn’t suppress. “You don’t know how fucking lucky you got it here.” Silence.

  I left the room and the voices erupted behind me.

  I traveled up the elevator. Shards of my face circled me. The moment had been disastrous, but it had also been beautiful. Harold was with me, quoting Dickens, something about the safety of the simple truth.

  Into the apartment, I was on the phone:

  “Elizabeth, I’m okay. I’ll be at work tomorrow night. I’ll explain. Tell Warring I’ll explain.” What did that mean?

  I staggered to my bed, curled onto it. The drugs continued to dissipate. The reality of what had just happened began to sink in. Tiny tremors started vibrating, circulating, through my body, intensifying, treacherous currents in an endless sea, no land in sight, nothing to hold on to. Keep swimming. Keep swimming. Keep swimming. And when I could no longer stay above the waves, I plunged into sleep.

  ***

  “Eunis, would you like to explain, because I think I know what’s going on.” Carol Warring leaned back in her chair, sliding her fingers over the temples of her glasses the way you’d sharpen a blade. She’d drawn the blinds to ward off the morning light that would spread across me, but still I stood motionless, coat folded over my arm, unable to look Warring in the eye.

  I’d rehearsed different explanations, including the simple truth, but I was loath to mention the hospital, loath to offer any link to the psychiatric notes that might reveal my rash but documented suicidal thoughts. Loath to pull Elizabeth into it. And perhaps Ruchika had mentioned seeing me in the server closet, or . . .

  Warring filled the space. “Are you seeing someone? Because I think he, or she, is battering you.”

  “What?! No. No.” I almost giggled. I was so relieved.

  “Your welts, your bruises. Your odd behavior the other day. Now this disappearance. Look at your face.” I started to cover myself but thought better of it. “More scratches than the other day. I can get you help, but I can’t have you in my labs.”

  Explaining the first bruises would have exposed Elizabeth to serious trouble. And I couldn’t explain what happened at the hospital with Charles Dickens . . . Malcolm.

  “When I asked around,” continued Warring, “one of your lab mates said she didn’t know, but that you were often covered up. Quite a bit, actually.” She wouldn’t release her gaze. “These are all the signs of a battered relationship. I know because a family member had the same issues. You’ve got to be strong because I’m going to have to put you on temporary leave. It might explain why there are problems in the lab, with the results. But I can’t jeopardize my lab, our research. And you will need to seek help.”

  “But I’m not — ”

  “That’s the standard response. But you disappeared for three days without explanation. Not even a phone call. That alone is sufficient for me to put you on leave. I’m not going to terminate you because you seem to be a nice young woman, and you need help — for whatever is haunting you — but I will need to suspend pay until we have an explanation or you can provide proof that you’re stable enough to pe
rform. Do you understand?”

  I contemplated lying. But what was I going to say? I dropped chin to chest and started for the door.

  “Can I offer you a thought?”

  I turned and nodded.

  “Our work here, finding ways to impact beauty with our products, it’s premised on beauty’s finite coordinates.”

  “Yes.”

  “But there are infinite possibilities, and we shouldn’t lose sight of them.”

  I felt her support, even if I couldn’t process her words. “It’s complex, but it’s not what you think.”

  “Then what is it?”

  I waved my hands in futility. “You’re making a mistake about me. My numbers are good. Just because I can’t explain everything . . . Anyway, I appreciate your concern.”

  As the door of Warring’s office closed behind me, with all the ramifications of my suspension not yet even clear, my heart was oddly lighter.

  ***

  On the way to the apartment, Warring’s words rolled over and over in my head. If beauty was agreeable to most because of its determinate qualities, wasn’t ugliness, with all its possibilities, a genus of bedlam? Warring may have meant it as a salve, but instead I reconsidered the enormity of my task and how emphatically I was failing. It would take a cocktail of DNA genes from the swamp to create beauty and I hadn’t even isolated one ingredient. Not one!

  In something of a daze I met Zoe at the coffee shop. We stood in the coffee line without looking at each other. I slipped her the money.

  “Well I hope it was worth it, the research,” she said looking straight ahead, pocketing the envelope, now a bit more taciturn.

  “Disappointing. Nothing clear cut.”

  “With that large sampling? Maybe it’s simply eye of the beholder and all that. Subjective.”

  “That’s always been one of the arguments. But there’s plenty of contradictory data, a 2008 Tel Aviv University study—”

  “I gotta go. Don’t call me again. Good luck.” She headed uptown through the heavy pedestrian traffic. I guess we would never be friends.

  Without work I felt aimless. I tarried at a large newsstand, searching newspaper headlines for an update on the hunt for the notorious Times Square Hacker. I scanned cover photos on the rack of celebrity magazines. I stopped for more coffee, and by the time I got to The Octagon it was late, and all I remembered of the trip was that some idiot left a wad of gum for me to sit on in the subway.

  Agitated, I couldn’t make the damn key work in the lobby door. I was sure they’d changed the lock until I realized I was forcing one of my lab keys into it. Then I spilled the remaining hot coffee over my blouse.

  Once in the apartment, I switched on my small TV as a distraction. Stupid sitcom reruns, a cooking show, a cop show, and the nightly news.

  “. . . What’s so frightening about this breach,” said the female executive pointing to the massive billboard above her, “is that if hackers could stop Kate Upton, terrorist hackers could do much more serious harm.”

  The caption showed the woman speaking as a Vice President of A.C.E. Media. She looked earnestly at the reporter holding the mike. The frame cut to two in-studio news anchors, one male and one female, a static photo inserted to the upper left of the female.

  “Well,” said the female anchor, an Asian woman in her forties, as the camera returned to the two-shot, “it seems a long way from Kate Upton to terrorists.”

  “Does it?” said the male anchor, a man in his fifties, merriment circling his mouth.

  “Paul.”

  The male anchor made an attempt at seriousness, speaking to the camera. “Police have asked anyone who was in Times Square Christmas Eve between 7:30 and 9:30, and who saw anything suspicious, to please call this number. Also . . .”

  The image over the anchorwoman’s shoulder flew to full screen.

  “. . . anyone with knowledge of any of these three suspects caught by various security cameras should also call.”

  He described the blurry photos. “A Caucasian woman, twenty five to thirty-five, five-three to five-six, brown hair, wearing a dark green or charcoal jacket.”

  The frame changed. “An African American man, thirty-five to forty-five, possibly six feet or taller, wearing an embroidered brown dashiki pant suit . . .”

  The frame cut once more. “And an albino woman, also thirty-five to forty-five, although possibly younger, five-six or so, white hair, wearing dark clothing.”

  “Shit.” The photo, a high-angle shot from above, could have been me, was probably me. My face had betrayed me again.

  He shuffled papers. “When we come back . . .”

  I switched off the TV but my reflection stared back from the vacated screen. “Shit!” There, hanging on the wall, was my friggin’ reflection in my framed diploma, its smug inviolability leering back at me. I went over to it and hurled the friggin’ thing across the room, where it hit the front door and splintered, spraying the floor with crystals and shards. It felt good!

  Rage overtook me. Storming across my fucking impeccable little space, I pulled the small tube TV with me, off the counter, out of its socket, releasing a muffled implosion as it hit the floor. Success! Turning to the large plate glass window and, again, my reflection, I picked up a kitchen stool and, with more strength than I knew I had, heaved the friggin’ stool at the floor-to-ceiling window. It refused to shatter, barely budged, it mocked me.

  I collected the stool again. Thinking of all the abuses my face had engendered, I rammed that damn stool hard against the window. Pain blossomed through my ribs and drove me back to the floor. I slid across like a child playing water Twister, my palms and face drawing daggers of glass. But as I closed my eyes, that friggin’ window: nothing, nothing but a little crackle!

  ***

  Lying on the floor of splintered glass, looking up at the array of blues that met New York’s silver and gray skyline, I was oddly peaceful, like lying in the Bemidji sunshine, on that grassy hillside. No need to move, no need to struggle.

  Like Papa Karl in the hospital, in his vegetative state, following the rail yard accident. I held on to him —no one else cared to— and those few hours each week cradling his powerless hand . . . somehow he knew I was there, and being there with him made his slow journey to the sky more —more orderly. More complete. Unconditional. No need to struggle. Like the Kris Kristofferson song Lyle sang, nothing left to lose.

  Perhaps the building or its inhabitants had released me.

  Something poked into my waist. I reached into my pant pocket. Not glass, a piece of thin, stiff cardboard. I turned it over: Nan’s phone number.

  Nan’s touch, her pitch-black hair, trailing along my cheek. Most of all, those jade eyes, those generous natural pools drawing me in to that stunning face, that perfect skin, those miraculous genes. Nan. And her husband. Spectacular too? DNA worthy of my search?

  Perhaps the answers lay in my bloody hand, shards of crystal rising out of it. Disappearing for a while seemed like a good idea. What did I have to lose?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Down five steps from street level, I arrived at Nan’s apartment with nothing more than my laptop and genetics textbook in hand. I rang the bell marked only as “Basement.” Nan came immediately to the door, arms and eyes wide open, like she was ready to assimilate me. “Welcome, sweet Eunis,” she said before I stepped closer and she noticed the remnants of my recent encounters with glass. “Oh no, come in. It’s worse than you said.”

  She snuck a look to the street and closed the door. She stroked my shoulders and made me sit on the wide burgundy sofa while she rounded up medical supplies.

  “I’m fine,” I called to her.

  “I’m sure you are,” she called back. “But we’re going to take care of you anyway.”

  The apartment was dark despite the glorious sunshine outside. Larger than one would expect in the city, it had a grand L-shaped room rolling out in almost every direction, minimized only by its low nineteenth-century hamm
ered-tin ceiling.

  The room was festooned in Utrecht velvet and thick fabrics, the sort Momma coveted but could never afford.

  “What d’ya think?” Nan arrived with an aluminum bowl of warm water and a washcloth. She sat on the settee opposite me.

  “Pretty big.”

  “I know, we’re lucky. We have supporters.”

  “Supporters? You mean benefactors?”

  “Sure.” Nan started to say more but stopped.

  I didn’t pry. Watching her beauty, I was hopeful. “Thank you so much for having me here. Just for a few days.”

  “Well, we’ll see.” She attended to my cuts and a few remaining splinters, carefully picking each one out, dropping them all into a large cobalt blue ashtray, and running the warm washcloth over my face in comforting circles. I shut my eyes. Whatever residual rage I may have had was washed away. I had no desire to open my eyes. Her touch was better than the cold on my skin, which had been my only option since Harold’s death. Go away, Harold.

  Next, she tenderly manipulated my palms, then a finger at a time. I reopened my eyes, made sure I wasn’t dreaming. I soaked up the splendor of the apartment —scrollwork and mahogany and braided sashes framing the archway into the dining room. Muscular framed, deep-cushioned chairs embroidered in indigo and saffron. A side table covered in scarlet taffeta. I’d never seen a room like it except in drawings and a few old photographs.

  “It’s beautiful.” A palace.

  Nan paused, a consoling smile. “I’m glad you like it. It’s your new home.”

  “Well, for a few days anyhow. Till I figure out what to do.” Till things cool down. “I’m very grateful, of course, but why are you being so kind? You hardly know me.”

  “Do I have to know you to be kind? Did you know that man, the one you brought to the hospital?”