But that night at her apartment, Lottie told me to sit on her bed as she disappeared into her closet. I heard her moving boxes around and wondered – ok, hoped – she was looking for her favorite erotica novel. But when she emerged, she was holding tightly onto a wad of carefully wrapped cloths, taped closed, so that it formed a small lump the size of a golf ball. She handed it to me and sat next to me. I knew what it was. I tried to keep my fingers steady as they pulled at the tape to release the strips of cloth, then carefully lifted the white gold and platinum ring inside it. Set in the center was a Kashmir sapphire, surrounded by diamond accents. The intricate metalwork that held the sapphire and diamonds in place had been designed by me. It didn’t have any particular significance, other than the brilliant blue sapphire. I had simply looked at a dozen different jewelry stores and countless websites, and couldn’t find anything that looked like it had been made for Lottie. So I called a jeweler who could do custom pieces and had a ring made – a perfect fit for her delicate fingers, as luminous and unique as she was. And for once, I had caved and intentionally bought something for her that was the color of my eyes.
As I lifted her engagement ring from the cloths she had so carefully wrapped it in, the light reflecting from the stones as I held it between my fingers, I thought of the night I had given her this ring, the night I had asked her to become my wife. It was only a month before Christmas, and I had originally planned on proposing then, but once I had the ring in my hands, I knew I wouldn’t be able to wait. So I did something impulsive, something I had once thought I would never do again, something I had hardly thought about in the nine years since coming to the United States. I booked a surprise trip for us to Berlin. I don’t know why – I’m still not sure why – I had the overwhelming desire to take Lottie to Berlin then; maybe because I wanted to start this new life, to begin this new chapter of my own family, my own love and wanting, in the same place where I had been rejected, where I had never fit in. Maybe it was my way of saying “fuck you” to my mother for not loving me, for not wanting me, for blaming me for her own mistakes. And so I had proposed to her along the Spree River in Berlin, and it was there that Lottie had promised to become my wife.
And now? She was giving her ring back to me? I didn’t want it. How could I ever take this back? “Lottie,” I said, putting it back in the cloths she had taken such care to preserve her ring in, “this is yours. Why are you giving this to me?”
“Because one day, you will know for sure if you want to give it to me again. And you should keep it until then, because if you decide to propose to me, I expect another proper proposal.”
I smiled at her. “How am I supposed to top the last one?”
Lottie smiled back at me. “I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”
That night, the only thing we figured out was that keeping our relationship platonic was impossible. Lottie still didn’t understand why I had thought it was necessary in the first place and I was still too scared to bring up Kyrieana again, so I did something I was not very good at: I tried to stop obsessing. And the next few days were such easy ones; we were happy, elated even, to be together again, so that even doing laundry or dishes or helping her shop for groceries – which reminded me I still had no food in my own apartment – felt like an adventure. We didn’t talk about this man who was coming to judge her, or Abram who would be here soon; she would only ask occasionally if I heard from Eric and Mark and if they were ok.
Four days after leaving Baton Rouge, Eric called to tell me they were back. Abram had been brought to a rental house in a rural area outside of the city off of Greenwell Springs Road. They were ready for us. We drove there in silence, Lottie staring out her window as the sun sank lower casting a gray-blue haze over the city. She was fidgety, tense, and every red light that stopped us earned a disapproving scowl from her. She was anxious to find out why Abram wanted her dead.
Maybe my imagination sometimes got the better of me, too, because as I drove up to the house Eric had told me to come to, I realized I had been expecting some dark, tree-lined alleyway leading us to an old cabin or abandoned house or something that indicated we had just stepped into a Jean le Carré novel. But the house wasn’t too far off the street and was well kept, a small wooden home painted white with bright blue shutters that made me cringe when I saw them. Of all the worst times to make an eye analogy. But Lottie didn’t say anything. I looked over at her and squeezed her hand. “You’ll be safe. There are three of us in there, and he’s restrained.” Lottie twitched, as if she’d never really thought about what kind of scene she would be walking into. I didn’t even know what kind of scene we’d be walking into. Christ, this was a bad idea.
Lottie followed me onto the porch and took my hand again. I thought about taking her back home, but she had wanted to be here. She felt she owed it to Lydia. So I knocked. Eric opened the door immediately. He must have heard us drive up and was probably waiting on the other side of the door. We stepped inside. The home was fully furnished, and by the looks of it, hadn’t been updated since the early 1980s. Mark was sitting at the kitchen table, picking at something in a Styrofoam container. It smelled like curry. Where had they gotten Indian food around here? He smiled at Lottie when we came in and pushed the bag on the table over toward us.
“Want some?”
I shook my head. Lottie turned paler. I couldn’t imagine what she must have been thinking – after what they’d done, after what we were going to do, these men were just sitting around eating chicken tandoori and … actually, I didn’t know what Mark was eating. “What is that?” I asked, leaning over the table and wrinkling my nose. I liked Indian food almost as much as I liked vegetable juice.
“Lamb vindaloo.” He picked through it again and held a chunk of lamb up triumphantly. He dropped it back in his Styrofoam bowl and looked at Lottie seriously, carefully. “How’s Lydia?” he asked.
Lottie looked away from the bright orange-red lamb in front of him, a brief moment of shock and uncertainty morphing her features before recognition transformed them again, softening them. She offered him a small smile. “Great, actually. She really likes having all of you in town with us.”
Between the Indian food and Mark’s obvious crush, this small home was becoming unbearably cramped and confining. “Eric,” I prodded, “we don’t have all night.” Technically, we did, but the only thing that made me more uncomfortable than having to confront or talk about my own emotions was listening to someone else talk about theirs.
Eric pushed his chicken tandoori away and stood up though. He looked between us, at our hands still woven tightly together, and I knew that look in his eyes. “Yeah, I guess you don’t.” Asshole.
There were only two bedrooms in this house, and we followed him into the first one where Abram Mirowski sat bound and gagged in the middle of the room.
Abram was a short, fat man, in his early 60s, and by the way he was squinting at all of us, he probably normally wore glasses. I quickly scanned him and could tell Mark and Eric had gone to a lot of trouble to hide the fact that Abram Mirowski had not reached Baton Rouge unharmed. Eric crouched in front of him so that they were eye level. “Remember, old man,” he warned him, “remember what happens if you get too loud.”
Lottie pressed closer to me. Eric reached out and removed the tape over his mouth with a sickening ripping noise. I could see the strands of hair and snow-white specks of skin stuck to the side; his mouth and cheeks were red and raw. This wasn’t the first time Abram Mirowski had had his mouth taped shut recently. He spit out the wad of cloth that had been forced into his mouth. “Water?” he asked, his voice scratchy and small. There was always a danger of allowing someone to drink too little or too much. Too little and he would die. But a prisoner who continually pissed all over himself was a smell that was hard to forget.
Eric stood up. “Not yet. Answer her questions, don’t waste our fucking time, then you can have it.”
Lottie was trembling. This had been a really stupid fuck
ing idea. But Lottie wasn’t just Lottie anymore, and as so often happened now, she surprised me. Lottie would have done anything to keep her friends safe, but this would have unsettled her, nauseated her, pained her to see another person – no matter how despicable he was – suffering. Kyrieana apparently didn’t share those reservations.
“You sent David to kill me.” Kyrieana was pissed.
Abram squinted at her, perhaps realizing for the first time who she was. He tried to swallow but there was nothing left in his mouth. “Yes,” he said simply. God, I wanted to hurt him.
“Why?” Lottie’s hands had balled into fists again and I wondered if she was going to do it for me. No one would have stopped her.
“Because you shouldn’t exist.” He said it so matter-of-factly. I thought about being a smartass and pointing out that, really, none of them should exist. I didn’t think Lottie, or Kyrieana, would find me funny.
“But I didn’t mean for any of this to happen!” She was trying to keep herself from shouting. He was irritating. I couldn’t blame her.
“Doesn’t matter.” If he hadn’t been so tightly restrained, he probably would have even shrugged when he said it. At some point, I was coming back just to beat the shit out of him.
“How? How does it happen? I never thought about it… about …bringing her back, I mean. I felt sorry for him, I felt sorry for them all, but who doesn’t? It’s a fucking funeral! Someone was dead!”
“I don’t know. I never had the kind of power you must have had.”
He was lying. We all knew it. Even Lottie knew it. Eric stepped closer to him. “You’re wasting our time,” he reminded him. Abram’s eyes widened but he shook his head. “No, I’m serious. I couldn’t have done it. We don’t know how she did.”
“He’s lying,” I said. Abram started to protest but Eric cut him off.
“Dietrich, take Lottie out in the back. I’ll come get you.”
Abram had started to make gurgling animal noises, that primal fear overpowering him, and I grabbed Lottie’s arm and led her into the backyard. The mosquitoes were out in their full summer force. Fucking Louisiana mosquitoes. As I swatted at them, Lottie kept looking back toward the house. “Lottie,” I said gently, but I didn’t know what to tell her. She knew what was going on in there.
She looked at me, and in the dark, it was so hard to read her expression – disgust? Repulsion? “Do you do that, Dietrich?”
Shit. This had definitely been one of my worst ideas ever. I could have lied to her, but this was Lottie … sort of. I couldn’t lie to her. “Sometimes.”
She was quiet again except for the occasional slapping of a mosquito as it landed on her skin. God, I thought, what is she going to think of me now? She exhaled slowly, and stepped closer to me, pressing her head against my chest and I immediately wrapped my arms around her. “I guess,” she said, “the world must be a much more horrible place than I’d ever imagined. You and Eric … you’re the best men I’ve ever known.”
I kissed the top of her head. I wanted to tell her it wasn’t, that this was such a rarity, that really we spent most of our time tapping away at a computer like most of the industrialized world now, that this world she had been born in, the world she had chosen to come to, was a good place, a safe place, a mostly benevolent place. But I still couldn’t lie to her. “It can be,” I said instead. A half-truth was better than a lie. We waited without talking anymore until Eric opened the backdoor of the house and beckoned us inside. I hoped they wouldn’t have to do this again. I hated these fucking mosquitoes.
Abram looked sickly and ashen, but again, whatever they had been doing in here, they had disguised it for Lottie’s sake. She hesitated only briefly before asking him again. “How did this happen to me?”
Abram looked warily between Eric and Mark, then tried to swallow again but his mouth was still pasty and dry and made a sticking sound when he opened it to speak. “We’ve never been able to find out. The few times it’s ever happened, they were just …” he trailed off, looking at the men again much the same way Jackson had watched me, wondering if the wrong words would bring about the same pain.
“Killed?” I finished his sentence for him. Abram nodded. A sudden thought occurred to me, and it seemed meaningless and trivial but I asked him anyway. “Why were she and Lydia allowed to come in the first place? Isn’t this usually a men’s only club?”
Abram’s brow creased, his eyes narrowed. His nostrils flared so slightly, almost imperceptible, but Mark and Eric had surely noticed it too. Eric was about to remind him about wasting our time again, but Abram answered. “It’s my understanding she had a lot of money.”
Eric looked at me curiously, but truthfully, I wasn’t even sure why I had asked him. The story Lottie – or Kyrieana – had told me about her engagement to a man she hadn’t wanted to marry, Lydia’s being sold into a marriage because she had been expendable when she had lost her job, bribing someone to get them both here, and then this?
“These doctors,” I continued, “can they fuck something up when they’re healing these bodies?”
Abram looked confused. “Something can always go wrong, but having a doctor present is relatively new for us. The doctors don’t heal anything. We heal our own bodies.” He was getting hard to understand now. Dehydration and repeated pain will have that effect on a person.
Lottie had caught on to what I was getting at though and she took a step toward Abram. The rest of us tensed reflexively. He couldn’t touch her. He would probably never get out of that chair again but we didn’t like her being so close to him. “Can someone have done this to me?” she asked. There was something in her voice. She wasn’t angry about the possibility that someone had tampered with her body, her mind; she sounded hopeful. She needs hope; she knows this isn’t her fault. How can they hold her responsible for something that isn’t her fault?
Abram’s eyes were struggling to stay open now. They would have to let him drink, sleep, maybe even eat some chicken tandoori and lamb vindaloo if they were feeling really charitable. We would have to come back. Abram knew more than Jackson and getting him to talk to us wouldn’t be a process of beating information out of him but wearing him down. These things had a tendency to take a while. But Abram reopened his eyes just long enough to look at her and mumbled, “Impossible.”
Lottie crossed her arms defiantly and mumbled back, “Story of my life.”
Chapter 14
We didn’t get a chance to go back to the little house where Abram Mirowski was being held because the next morning, the Judge arrived in Baton Rouge. I thought it had been a clichéd title Jackson and Abram had bestowed on him, but as it turns out, Willis McGrath actually was a judge. He sat on an appeals court in Delaware and had graduated from law school forty years ago. Willis had been here a very long time. He was older than Abram, tall and dignified, with thick gray hair that was neatly combed. Everything about Judge Willis McGrath seemed orderly, clean, polished. And he did not look happy about being in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Lydia was at work, so it was just the three of us in their apartment. And Lottie was not afraid. She sat across from him, her eyes blazing with such an intense hatred that teetered on the edge of defiance and righteousness. He was trying to get her to retell the same stories she had told before, the same ones he had probably read a hundred times and knew by heart, and she wasn’t playing along. Last night had changed Lottie. And I was incredibly proud of her.
“Why are you here?” she shot back at him, after he had asked her for the third time in a row if she believed she was really Charlotte Theriot.
Willis was unfazed. “You’ve been told why I’m here. You’re not helping your case, Lottie.”
“Fuck my case.” God, I wanted to kiss her.
“Do you even want to remain a part of our community, Lottie?”
“What I would like is for people not to try to kill me. That would be a good place to start.” She crossed her arms over her chest, not so much defensive this time but w
ith a new kind of confidence both in herself and in me. She couldn’t unlearn what she had discovered last night; Lottie felt like she was sitting next to Superman and it stroked my ego more than a little. Quite a lot actually.
“Nobody’s trying to kill you.” Unlike Jackson, Willis never flinched or looked away; the tone of his voice never even changed. He was a much better liar. But Lottie was unfazed.
“Is that why you sent David here? Why else would he be here, as some sort of messenger in training?”
“I didn’t send David. And I’m not the one on trial here.”
Lottie leaned forward, just slightly, just enough to let him know she wasn’t intimidated by him. “I’m not on trial either. And you can go back to Delaware and leave me and Dietrich and Lydia alone. Leave all of my friends alone.”
Willis just shook his head. Not a single hair moved. I wondered if he used hair spray. Or maybe it wasn’t real. “No, Lottie, that can’t happen. I’m afraid even if you wanted our help, we couldn’t help you. And it’s not in Lydia’s best interest to stay here.”
For the first time that morning, Lottie’s confidence faltered. She looked at me expectantly. “Lydia can decide for herself what’s in her best interest,” I told him. “That’s how it works here. You should know that by now.”
“That’s how it works in some places here. We don’t throw acid on women who reject our sexual advances. Don’t try to make yourselves sound so superior.”
He had me there. “Fortunately for Lydia, she’s not in south Asia. And don’t argue every single fucking instance of gender inequality in the world. At least some of us have tried to change. And Lydia is going to be allowed to decide what she wants. She can stay with us, or go wherever it is you want her to go, but it will be her choice.”
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