The Scent of Shadows sotz-1

by Vicki Pettersson

  “Yes,” I said, thinking No as she took a turn at thirty-five miles an hour. No, to doing any of this. No to an apartment that reminded me of the last time I’d seen my sister’s beautiful, stricken face; no to being a superhero; and—as I ate glass on the next curve—definitely no to Cher!

  Maybe I could move north to Carson City. Or really north. Like Alaska. Yeah, I thought, that sounded good. What were the chances of running into evil igloo dwellers? I made a note to ask Micah about it later. Ice fishing sounded attractive right now.

  We arrived at the high-rise and ascended to the ninth floor in silence. Exiting into a deserted hallway, the only sound was the jingle of the keys as Cher fumbled at the lock. I took a deep breath as the door opened. She shot me a worried look, I tried on a reassuring smile, and Cher immediately pulled the door shut again. Shit. I’d probably grimaced.

  “Olivia, darlin’,” she said, her drawl even more pronounced with troubled sincerity. “Come on home with me. You know you’re welcome to stay as long as you’d like.”

  “I know.” I didn’t meet her eye.

  She tried again. “We can brunch every day, and get manicures and spray-on tans, and have that big guy you like, Trevor the Tank, rub très essential oils all over our bodies!”

  It was enough to have me reaching for the door. “It’s okay. I can do this.”

  I wanted to ignore the hurt that passed over Cher’s face. I wanted to push past her and just shut the door behind me, but something about it touched me. After all, I told myself, she’d lost Olivia too. She just didn’t know it.

  “Look, Cher,” Cher-bear, Olivia would have said, but I’d cut out my tongue before allowing that to pass my lips. I faced her squarely and said, “I loved…love this apartment. You know I do. The doctors say I have to reclaim this space for myself, and the sooner I do that, the sooner things will be…”

  What? I thought, searching for the right word. Normal? Better? Fixed?

  “I know what you’re saying, darlin’,” she interrupted, with a shake of her head. “But I worry about you being here alone.”

  “You don’t need to worry about me,” I assured her. “At all.”

  “At least let me go through the apartment with you,” she said, and noting my hesitation, flushed with indignation. “Just this time, for goodness’ sake. I’ll leave as soon as we get you settled, I promise. Just let me come in and show you what I’ve done with the place.”

  In truth, I was grateful for the company. Olivia may have had a plethora of pleasant memories to bind her to this apartment, but I had only a few, and the very last of these kept making guest appearances in my psyche. Cher kept up a solid monologue as we moved from room to room, a cheerful din that only added to the unreality of the neat and orderly apartment. It was bright, the January sun streaming in through the wide windows nothing like the black-skied storm I’d fled weeks earlier. It was clean too; freshly aired, and redolent with flowers that floated in crystal vases everywhere I turned.

  Cher explained that after the police and the repairmen and cleaners had all finished their work, she’d come in herself and added the small touches she knew I loved. Irises in the vase by the entryway. Vanilla candles for the thick candelabra on the dining room table. A cluster of daisies in the living room. Things I didn’t even know Olivia had liked. She’d even bought a replacement cell phone for the one that’d ended up on the ground the night of Butch’s attack. This one was encrusted with Swarovski crystals—bloodred lips pursed against a shining diamond background—and Cher informed me she’d already programmed it with all the numbers of “my” various contacts, liaisons, and lovers.

  I immediately turned the phone off, dropped it atop a chenille throw, and felt panic skirt through my veins. No wonder Cher kept looking at me like she didn’t know me. No wonder Xavier had been all too willing to let her drive me home, uncomfortable with the long silences that had never pooled between him and Olivia before.

  I don’t even know what kind of flowers she liked, I thought desperately. How the hell was I to know what she’d say or do? What she ate? Who she’d call? It was with a dull stab to the chest that I suddenly realized I’d never really known my sister at all.

  Then I spotted the package. Still aligned on the corner of the coffee table where Olivia had left it, it seemed to have been forgotten by everyone, until now. I reached for it and clutched it to my chest, eyes squeezed tight. My birthday present. The last Olivia would ever give me.

  “I didn’t know what you wanted to do with it.” Cher’s voice made me jump. I turned to find her wringing her hands nervously, a wary expression on her face. “It didn’t seem right to open it, or throw it away.” She hesitated. “Was I right to keep it?”

  Her uncertainty, as sweet and fragile as any of Olivia’s objects, was what broke me. I nodded, but couldn’t speak, my throat astonishingly thick with tears. I hadn’t realized I had any left to shed. My face crumpled.

  “I don’t think I can do this,” I said, sitting heavily. “I don’t know how.”

  “Why, of course you can.” Cher rushed to my side in an onslaught of concern and perfume. She finally had something useful to do, some way to help. “And I’m going to help you. You’re gonna reclaim this space you love so much and erase all the bad memories. Fill it with good ones again. New ones. Jo would want you to.”

  I wondered about that. Would I? Would I want Olivia to get on with her life? To forget that anything evil had ever touched her inside these walls? “Yeah,” I sniffed, and glanced at the present in my hand. “Yeah, she would, wouldn’t she?”

  “Sure she would,” Cher encouraged. “Why, I remember the first time I met Joanna. She kicked us outta her bedroom, and never let us back in. Remember? Never was one to look back, that Jo Archer.”

  “You were making out with her four poster bed.” I stood, wiping away the tears with the back of my hand. “You were demonstrating how to French kiss on her headboard.”

  “Well, she needed the lesson. Before Ben, she was useless when it came to boys.”

  She was right, and that irked me enough to have my tears drying. I put the package down and stared out the window where cars and pedestrians passed below us in miniature. I felt like reaching down and picking one of those people up, then putting them down in an entirely new location. I felt like changing someone else’s fate forever. I felt mean and small, and I didn’t even have to wonder which side of me—Light or Shadow—was talking. I closed my eyes to the view.

  “You never liked her,” I said, before I even knew I was thinking it.

  “Oh,” she said softly, joining me at the window. “Is that what this is about?”

  “This what?” I peered over at her.

  “The way you’ve been acting. The way you keep putting Joanna between us, like a ghost challengin’ my every step alongside you. Like she’s still alive.”

  If only you knew, I thought, turning away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do,” she said, too softly. Her gaze was uncomfortably hard upon mine. “Now I don’t expect you to get over something like this in a minute, but you’re holding onto Jo like she’s the only person you ever lost. And while she always was a strong pillar for you to lean on, she was by no stretch of the imagination perfect.”

  “I never said I was!”

  Shit.

  Cher blinked once, then again. “Well, no sugar, you’re not either. But at least you don’t pretend nothing’s ever touched you. That no one ever will again.”

  My jaw clenched. “Neither did Jo.”

  “The fuck if she didn’t,” Cher said, surprising me. “She was like a clock, dropped the day she was attacked. Outside she looked normal, but inside she no longer worked.”

  I sucked in a breath so deep and quick that it was as if I’d been punched. “You bitch.”

  Cher’s chin shot up, pointed and perfect. It made me wonder if she and Olivia practiced that look in the mirror together. “I’m going to ignore tha
t comment because I know you’re under severe mental stress, but I need you to keep going, Olivia. Don’t stop working. Find a reason, a purpose, to get up in the morning. Don’t you remember how good that feels? To have a goal? It used to be your computer work, or the semiannual sale at Saks, but you have nothing motivating you now. And do you want to know why?”

  “No.”

  She told me anyway. “Because you think you are nothing. You feel guilty because she died and you didn’t.”

  “That’s not true! I have nothing to feel guilty about. I tried to save her,” I said, not knowing if I was saying this as Olivia or myself. “I tried but I couldn’t!”

  “So stop kickin’ yourself over it!” she said, and forced me to look at her. “It’s like you died that day too, right along with Joanna, who never did learn how to live again—”

  I gasped.

  “—after the attack.” She drew away, as if just realizing what she’d said. Shaking her head, she said, “I’m sorry, sugar, but I have to say this. We swore we’d always be honest with one another.”

  “Honesty doesn’t mean being hurtful,” I shot back, knowing even as I said it that sometimes it did.

  “It means being truthful, the way you wanted to be truthful with Jo. You were just too afraid she’d tune you out, or turn you off, or do whatever it was she was doing to the rest of the world.”

  “She’d never do that to me!” Would I have? If Olivia had pushed me? If she’d tried to get me to be more open and exposed…more like her? And Cher?

  “How do you know? You never tried! And now that it’s too late, now that you’ve been gravely hurt, you’re wondering—”

  “What are you, a psychoanalyst?”

  “—if she was right,” she continued, ignoring the acidity of my words. “If it’s just easier to shut everyone and everything off. To feel nothing—”

  “I’ve been isolated at the hospital if you haven’t noticed!”

  “—and so you’re becoming just like her. An empty shell. A broken clock. Pretty soon, you’ll be just another ghost walkin’ around, haunting the world with your empty presence.”

  It was too close. Too close to what I’d felt like. Too close to what I’d believed.

  “Get out,” I said through clenched teeth. “Get out of my apartment.”

  She offered up a small, bitter smile, as if I’d just confirmed all she’d said. “That’s just fine, Livvy-girl. I’ll give you the space you think you want, but at least I won’t regret not speakin’ my mind. And there’s one more thing…”

  I heaved an impatient sigh.

  “No, don’t turn away. I want this to be like crystal between you and I. Your sister did not like me, she did not respect me, and she did not treat me well. I want to help you, Liv, but I’m not…” She pursed her lips, fighting for control. “I mean, I refuse to be your punching bag too.”

  I thought she might break there, even hoped for it a little, but she didn’t. She took a deep breath and finished what she had to say.

  “If you keep comparing me to Joanna, you’re not going to like what you see. I’m just me, same as always. And I’m not going to change. Not even for you.”

  “And what would you know about change?” I said, my voice gravelly and low. “What could you change if you really had to, Cher? Your nail polish? Your hair color? Your wardrobe?”

  She whitened at that. “Well, congratulations.” She swallowed hard. “Looks like one of us has Joanna down to a T.”

  And she whirled away, heading for the door in a blur of color and scent and indignation.

  I closed my eyes and clenched my teeth together so hard my jaw ached. “I don’t understand what you want from me!” What anyone wanted from me. “I watched my sister die, Cher! I almost died!”

  “Well, we’re all gonna die, darlin’. Until then—” Cher flung the door open and threw me a hard look over her shoulder. “—you’d better learn to fuckin’ live.” And the door slammed behind her.

  The bitch.

  Though no sooner had Cher left than I wanted to call her back. Isolation crowded in around me, silently shaping itself to my body, Olivia’s frame. I turned one way and then the other, sniffing, before I relaxed. There was nothing and no one there. I was quite simply alone. Just as I wanted to be. Right?

  “Paranoid,” I muttered, zeroing in on the bedroom. It was the one room Cher and I hadn’t gotten to yet. I kicked the wall as I headed toward it. “Let’s get this over with.”

  The room was shadowed, but pleasantly so, and there were flowers, as well as one of those spider plants even I couldn’t kill. Now that I thought of it, Olivia had given me mine, and I wondered if this was its sister plant, if they’d both taken root at the same time, and if the other still lived among those things that used to be mine.

  The carpeting was new. Butter cream and berber, it gave stiffly beneath my feet as I crossed to the bed and looked beneath it. Not a dust bunny to be found, never mind a scimitar or severed hand. The sheets were new too, I could smell that, and the glue that held the full-length windows in their oblong frames had only just lost that overtly pungent smell. I suppose I should have been uneasy in a room where I’d witnessed so much violence and carnage. A room, I thought, where I’d committed even more. But it was too tidy, too pink, and too benign.

  I was just about to leave when I saw the closet door slightly ajar. Nothing strange in that…except that the rest of the house was obsessively ordered. I frowned, took a step toward it, another, and realized my heart was outpacing my feet five to one. I found myself wishing for my weapons, any weapon, before shoving the thought impatiently aside. Silly, I thought, reaching for the handle. It’s just an empty closet.

  She leapt the moment I opened the door. There was a growl—hers, mine?—then a blur of white fur streaked through the open door and out into the living room. Cursing, I put a hand to my chest. Luna, my new feline roommate.

  “Luna-tic, is more like it.” I sighed, sagging against the doorjamb. “I need a drink.”

  In the kitchen, I grabbed the vodka I knew lived in the deep freeze and poured it straight over ice. Leaning against the counter, I closed my eyes and sipped, but my mind kept seeing the still-wrapped present sitting on the coffee tray. I leaned against the granite counter, fighting the urge to go to it. I both wanted to open the gift and I didn’t. To know what Olivia had gotten me, yet keep not knowing. Opening it would not only reveal the object inside, but it would cement it too. No more silly surprises in my future, I thought, sipping again. No more present tense. Only Olivia, dead in the past.

  I poured another glass to the rim. One thing was certain: whatever I was going to do, I wasn’t doing it sober.

  Back in the living room, I kicked off my shoes, the first marring of my sister’s space, and wondered briefly if she’d have done that. I had no earthly way of knowing.

  Letting the vodka fill my mouth, holding it there to numb my tongue, gums, and soul, I stared at the package. From the corner of my eye I saw Luna slinking behind the couch, crouched low as if that somehow encouraged stealth. The ice in my glass rattled as I sat it on a glass-top table and reached for the gift.

  Thin, expensive wrapping, a girly bow, a card nestled securely beneath. I didn’t rip it open as I normally might, but tugged at the ribbon until it loosened, then lifted the paper until it fell away. I put the card aside for later. Inside was a pristine white box. Why, I asked myself as I took another swig, was I suddenly noting the most mundane things? Luna sat directly across from me, gold eyes unblinking, apparently wondering the same thing. I lifted the lid and sorted through the tissue paper until I recovered the first item, and lifted it free.

  The photo was recent, the last one taken of us together. The occasion was the opening of a new restaurant in Valhalla, and I remember being annoyed with my father for making us attend, and with Olivia for insisting we pose with a group of helmeted and horned Vikings. I’d felt silly already, dressed in expensive black silk. I didn’t want some model with a
long sword pressed up against me.

  “Please, Jo,” she had begged, her pout in place, lashes fluttering. “You look so beautiful…for once.” She knew to soften any compliment for me with a mild insult, otherwise I might not believe the whole of it. No, not might not believe. Would not believe. I took another drink.

  Funny thing, though, she was right. I did look pretty. Or perhaps I just missed my old face. My hair was a sleek and shining dark bob, tucked behind my ears, and a reluctant smile played at my lips, glossy and somehow knowing. That had me dropping the photo to my lap with a wry laugh.

  I had known nothing.

  The second gift was both smaller and larger than that final captured moment. A simple disk, something she’d probably spent hours fiddling with on her beloved computer, but not, I knew, something downloaded and burned and offered up for my listening pleasure. Olivia would never give me something that common. “How the hell am I supposed to watch this?” I murmured, closing my eyes.

  But I did watch it. After retrieving the vodka bottle.

  Luna had been sitting beside her. The television went from blank to bright, and she was suddenly there, absently stroking the cat, rubbing perfectly manicured fingers along its temples and ears and brow as she waited for the recorder to engage. Only belatedly did she realize it already had. I laughed aloud at her expression—surprise, pleasure, and chagrin all at once—but instead of rewinding and starting again, she simply shrugged it all away, as was her way.

  “Hiya, sis! Now get that sour look off your face, this is a great idea, and just wait until you see how smoothly I’ve edited it. I’m an absolute star!” She giggled, sipped from a wide-bowled martini, a movement I echoed with my own drink. “So, I figure we can do this every year from now on, commemorate the year just past, and, you know, look forward to the next year and stuff. I’ve been doing it for myself for a few years now, kind of a video diary, and it’s a great way to keep track of where you are, and who you are, you know?”