Swoon 02 - Swear

by Nina Malkin

  Then tap, tap, tap against the boy’s boot. His face ignites, and obscuring his half smirk with a napkin, he glances down like he dropped something. With a quick dip he leans over, scoops up my foot, and tucks it in his lap. This requires scrunching on my part, which naturally I do, tenting my fingers in front of my chin and spacing out dreamily.

  First, I’m treated to gentle, diligent massage. Ball, arch, heel, and tendon, then each little piggy gets a sweet, insistent squeeze. I’d be purring right now if I had the equipment. It feels so divine, my other foot promptly gets jealous. Sin being Sin, he moves on to tickle. I bite my tongue—technically the tickle is restricted to my sole, but I feel it surge electrically up my thigh and then some. My head lolls left as I feel myself go damp. This is too good, too good, too good. I can barely bear it, and then I can’t bear it at all—I squirm, wriggle, blurt a giggle.

  This puts a bump in Momster’s nostalgia lane; she glances at me. But Sin abruptly stops, so I smile guilelessly. Then he starts in again, all at once, surprising me—my next thrash more pronounced. Now Antonia gives me the eye—and chills me to the spleen. Once more Sin quits, planting both elbows innocently on the table. “Dice,” he asks with faux concern, “are you feeling all right?”

  “Mm, perfectly . . .” Fun’s over, I assume, only to have Sin seize, then pull. All I can do is scrunch further as he nestles my size seven to indicate precisely how much he’s digging this.

  Which elicits a gasp heard round the table. I’ve sunk so far in my chair, I’m visible only from the clavicle up. The heat rising to my skin is surely evident in the waning sun. My eyes flash at Sin to cease and desist, but he refuses, and like a curtain falling on some bizarre tragicomedy, Antonia lowers her lashes to gaze in her companion’s lap. Sin, still focused on me, adjusts with a thrust to drive home the dimensions of his pleasure once more before finally relinquishing his hold.

  I take back my foot, then sit up in my seat. Busily, I reach for water, have several cooling sips. “Well,” I say. “Wow. That was so good. Uncle Gordon, that steak, yuh-mee!” I push my plate. “But you know I left room for dessert!”

  “Oh!” That reminds my aunt. “Wait till you see the pièce de résistance!” She looks to her daughter. “Penny, won’t you help?” My cousin starts to grumble, but Tosh gets up, and so do I; Pen concedes and we follow Lainie like ducklings. In the kitchen she reveals two miniature braziers; on a tray she has graham crackers, chocolate, and marshmallows set up. “What’s a cookout without s’mores!” Aunt Lainie asks rhetorically as we hustle back to the guests.

  The children cheer. So do the adults, as if tipsy from more than wine. In fact, the whole vibe on the patio has changed.

  Nothing like Sin Powers exercising a foot fetish to loosen things up. A sultry dusk is upon us now, and the blue flames rising from the roasters add a mystical tinge. Pen’s brother Silas, in his excitement, starts clambering onto the table.

  “No, no, let me help you.” Laughing as she scolds, Pen moves into supervisory mode. I join her—the sooner we get s’mores into their paws, the sooner we can indulge.

  “I want one with lots of mush-mellow!” Jordan squeals.

  “Okay, okay,” I tell my cousin. “Here you go, this one’s major mush-mellowy.”

  With the single-digit set attended to, Pen prepares an especially gooey goody for Tosh, then taunts him with it. He goes for a grab, but she parries, painting his lips with melted chocolate. He flicks his tongue, then snatches her wrist to eat the treat from her fingers. Their sexy s’mores-play gives me a pang—these same confections happened to be on the menu one special night last fall—but now I’m aware of a gunmetal glare aimed at me with menace. And the air grows ripe with night-blooming jasmine. And the wildflower centerpieces stir in their pots, ready to stretch off their stems. And just as I jerk away from the latest weapons in Antonia’s floral arsenal, deadly scamps of blue spring off the grate of the brazier to set my braids on fire.

  LII

  Stop, drop, and roll. You know that—you learned it in grade school. Ever find yourself on fire, kiddies, just stop, drop, and roll. Trouble is, you find yourself on fire, you can’t remember a damn thing you learned in grade school, much less your name, your species, your planet. Plus, what’s happening fast and right here feels slo-mo and far away—it takes forever to register that someone is on fire and that someone is you.

  So I simply stand there ablaze as Sin comes leaping across the table, tackling me to crash on the paving stones. He lathes me onto the lawn, smothering Antonia’s soldiers of flame. At least, that’s what I’ll state for the record—I can’t really keep up in a linear way. Like when, exactly, do I notice the screams, my mother’s loudest among them? When do I realize that acrid smell isn’t tar being laid down the road?

  And when does it all go impossibly still, Sin’s full weight on me, his face so close, his eyes frantic?

  I say his name.

  He says mine.

  Next thing I know, I’m in the shower, fully clothed, then soaking wet across the ivory damask duvet of my aunt and uncle’s bed. Snippets of my mother’s ongoing freak-out—

  ambulance! emergency room! provincial country doctor!—filter in. As it happens, one of the Leonards’ dinner guests is a provincial country doctor, and he’s already deemed my burns minor—no charring, no blistering. He phones in a prescription for ointment (me) and tranquilizers (Momster). It’s cool. I’m fine. The main thing bothering me right now is how badly I’m bound to look like a poodle.

  “I look like a poodle, don’t I?”

  It’s late afternoon on Sunday in the backyard of 12 Daisy Lane and I’m surrounded by mostly supportive female energy.

  Mostly, since Antonia Forsythe is here and her energy has already been tried and convicted in the supreme court of my cranium. Not that I’ve outright accused her of anything. What good would that do? Antonia has her own agenda and she was heeding it. I need to take responsibility for my own actions: I’m the one who chose to play some very dangerous footsie. I’m the one who let my guard down around the girl hell-bent to kill me. Now, having submitted to Pen’s scissors, I’ve got to take responsibility for that, too.

  “Oh, sweetie . . .” is the best my mother can muster.

  “You don’t look like a poodle,” Pen insists, admiring her handiwork. “You look like the kick-ass frontwoman of the most righteous neo-blues-rock-pop-soul-punk band in northwestern Connecticut.”

  Marsh nips a cuticle and studies me. “It’s . . . different,” she says. “It’ll take some getting used to.” Antonia says nothing, sitting removed at the picnic table, her own locks hanging limply to veil her expression.

  “All right.” I huff a brave sigh. “Let me see.” Pen offers a hand mirror. Schizo side part. Choppy spill of tendrils across my right eye. Much of the left side got scorched to cinders, so what could be salvaged now reaches only to the bottom of my earlobe. Hmm. Well. The new length shows off my bone structure, while the long, asymmetrical bangs effectively conceal the red zigzag burn on my jaw. Around back, I finger-comb what feels like a picket fence designed by Salvador Dalí on an absinthe binge. “I don’t look like a poodle,” I say at length. “I look like I could scare poodles . . . pit bulls too.” I pass the mirror back to Pen. “Thanks,” I tell her. “You did your best.”

  My mother slings an arm around me, gives it another shot.

  “I think you look fabulous, Candice.” There’s a tense, tight catch in her tone; I’m her only child, and I’ve cheated death more times than she cares to count. “Up here you might be considered a bit outré, but soon you’ll be back in the city, where you belong.”

  Where I belong. Right. Need I mention whose idea it was to move my ass to Swoon in the first place? I do not. Once Pen leaves, Antonia in tow, and Marsh goes to the Double K, Momster and I whip up a simple dinner and pop in a chick flick. She hasn’t said word one about Sin’s impending marriage to Pen’s strange, awkward friend—clearly she’s trying to respect my boundaries. Which
I appreciate; I haven’t got the strength to spin a convincing story for her.

  “Don’t forget to contact those moving companies,” she reminds the next a.m. Then a hug—careful of my healing skin—and she gets in her rental to brave the long commute.

  I sit on the porch alone. Few Swoonies make the daily drive to New York for work, but plenty go to Hartford and Stamford, and soon Daisy Lane is a-purr with luxury vehicles.

  On the heels of the husbands, the real housewives of Swoon, off to Pilates and pedicures and other idle errands. Everybody in a car—windows up, AC on, satellite radios programmed to preferences, carbon footprint be damned. Momster’s right: It will be good to get back to the city—sidewalks, pedestrians, subways, straphangers. Even the noise pollution will feel welcome after this, the country lane gone quiet again, the morning reassuming its lazy summer serenity, the only sound breeze through the trees and the intermittent enterprise of insects.

  Except what’s that clattering madly up the road? Too tall, too wild, too magnificent for anything made by man. Sleek and so alive, a symphony of muscles under gleaming ebony hide. Black Jack, with Sin astride, spurring him on. Pounding hooves at full gallop. A stuttering, high-pitched announcement as boy reins beast to a rearing halt. His eyes are lit, his breathing a rasp, as his boots hit the drive with a clunk. He’s looking more gaunt than ever. “God!” he says. Followed by “Damn!” And then “Carburetor!”

  Yeah, well, a vintage ride can be finicky. So Sin found alternative transport. Every morning since the s’mores incident, at the stroke of nine, he’s come to check on my condition. At first, I was barely aware. Then I got all insecure, sweating my appearance. Oddly, today, with Sin about to view my new ’do, my vanity vanishes, my ego gone with it.

  He lets the stallion graze on the lawn and mounts the porch steps. I stand to face him. Without a word he sweeps aside my tumbledown bangs. He examines the zigzag on my chin, lowers his gaze to the Rorschach on my shoulder. Then his eyes return to mine.

  “You were never more beautiful,” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Right.” Then I say, “Coffee?”

  Heartened by my resilience, he smirks and nods, and while he ties Black Jack to the rail, I go inside to brew a fresh pot. Sin and I sit in the kitchen, splitting one of Aunt Lainie’s fresh-baked muffins, a get-well gift. Conversation flows like, well, coffee.

  We chat about the cranky car. The fawn at Walden Haven.

  The incongruous coupling of Tosh and Pen. Even the weather.

  Briefly we discuss tonight’s rehearsal—my first in four days, the last before Chest-ah-Fest. We get around to everything and anything, except the one topic we lack coherent language for.

  It’s almost as if the upcoming show is our last hurrah. Antonia in her lunacy must see it as leniency, a concession—she’s allowing Sin to sow this one last wild oat. Once it’s over, there’ll be no more forestalling the long, slow walk to the electric chair—I mean, altar. And then what? A speedy annulment after Antonia delivers Crane? If she delivers Crane? I push the thoughts away.

  All I want is this morning, this muffin, this moment with my man. Lapsing into copasetic silence, we polish off the pot.

  Sin thanks me for the fuel, and then dips into the sugar bowl. “Come with me,” he says.

  Out on the lawn, he clicks in his throat to alert Black Jack.

  “His turn for a treat,” Sin tells me, placing two cubes in my palm.

  Nervously I smile as Sin unhitches his ride, then offer up the squares of sweet. Black Jack gives me an equine grin, his yellow teeth the size of matchbooks, and bows his humongous head. Lips like velvet on rubber, with spiky whiskers attached.

  A tongue like a totally separate animal, squishy and persistent, that resides inside him. It’s all kind of icky and sticky and wondrous, and I love it like a big horse loves sugar.

  Mouth against my ear, Sin translates. “He says, ‘Mmmm.’” Then it’s as though he hits a wall. “Damn it, Dice, I’m no good at this!” he thunders. “You know me. I was born for pleasure; I was built for bliss. I’m like him!” He slaps the stallion’s rump, gets a whinny of agreement. “Yet here I am, serving a demented sovereign who thinks she owns the rights to my very soul. Her digging roots . . . her clinging vines . . . I want to do the right thing, Dice, I do . . .” His fingers curl to strangle an intangible.

  “But I want you . . . I want us . . .” He has what he wants then, wary of my wounds but with no less abandon, his broad-daylight front-lawn kiss incredible.

  “I am so in love with you.” He says it to me, through and through me. “Yet if the force of my love is not enough to damn Antonia Forsythe to the hell she has earned, I fear nothing will be.”

  He is so in love with me. He said it, he did. He means it, he does. Long as I’d yearned to hear those words, much as I ache to return his ardor, I press pause. “Sin, come on—it’s the caffeine talking,” I say, reaching up to train his face on mine. “Look at me, Sin. Listen to me. You haven’t said ‘I do’ yet—so you don’t. You don’t. Just keep your head, okay.”

  He holds my gaze an instant longer. Then he says, “Quite right,” and is up in the saddle and on his way. What else can we do but get on with our day, do the things that suck up our seconds, murder our minutes, devour our hours. Time, something we can kill.

  Later, at the studio, music is my medicine, rhythm my salve.

  I pour my heart out. I give my bandmates goose bumps. I give myself goose bumps. I may be powerless in half a million ways, but I am ready for this gig.

  Assuming, that is, I live through tomorrow night. Tomorrow night is bound to be the most challenging of my entire existence. I fear tomorrow night with every fiber of my being, but I will face my fear. A fear, in fact, that has nothing to do with Antonia Forsythe; a primordial fear that precedes Antonia Forsythe. Tomorrow night, much to my dread and against my better judgment, I’m going camping.

  Part IV

  The Gig

  LIII

  Bruise Blue snagged a most excellent eight o’clock slot on the second night of Chest-ah-Fest. Because the promoters were so blown away by our demo? No, because the promoters are socialists who elected the lineup by lottery. Originally, we were all to drive up the day of, dig the scene, do our set, bask in rapturous applause, and head home. Then Pen and Marsh concocted the camping scheme, presenting it to me as an escape from all I’ve been through. Like peeing in the woods is this huge reward. I must’ve been delirious, under the influence of prescription-strength Tylenol, when I agreed.

  Me, sleep all fresco in the wilderness? Technically there’ll be a tent, a thin scrap of polyester that hardly constitutes shelter in my book. In my book, doors don’t have zippers; doors have knobs and, more important, locks. The one saving grace?

  The tent sleeps three, and Antonia—dear, dear Antonia—isn’t invited to this girls’ night way out. If she wants to attend the festival, she’ll have to drive up with the guys and the gear tomorrow, the Pinch Me Round catering van pitching in as tour bus.

  “It’s going to be great,” Marsh assures as we load Pen’s car.

  I do mean load. Marsh might have been some Girl Scout superstar, merit badges on top of merit badges—she really can start a fire by striking flint against steel. Pen, however, believes a happy camper is a pampered camper, and the Leonards own all the latest top-of-the-line equipment. I’m like, Yay, Pen!

  Soon as Swoon recedes behind us, my apprehension gains a sort of excitement. Not over the show, though—that’s still a day away. Definitely not about sleeping on the ground. More a sense that something awaits me, something inevitable, destined.

  Of course, my improved mood might simply be due to the growing distance between myself and a certain monstress.

  “So, Pen, regale us with tales of you and Tosh,” I say. It’s the first time us three are together to feast on the details.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she demurs. “There’s not much to tell.” I get her: hesitant to flaunt with Marsh and me mi
red in romantic miasma. I swivel to the backseat for affirmation, then poke my cousin. “Look, we want to know, blow by blow. Your happiness is our happiness. Chicken soup for the lovelorn soul.” A modicum of arm-twisting and, “Well, I guess it began the day we met—how could I not like a boy who called me Ben?” Pen says. “Only I didn’t want to like him. I didn’t want to like anyone. I put a lot of energy into not liking him.” She fiddles with her dashboard devices. “Then . . . it was the night Sin came through the fissure with you-know-who. Tosh and I got to talking. Stuff started spilling out. About Sin and what went on around here last fall. Things he did, things I did, not nice things.” She leaps for the HOV lane. “Then I told him about you, Dice, and how you kept it together, never losing yourself, but never giving up on Sin either. Tosh took it all in and was sort of speechless for a while.”

  Which must’ve freaked her out. Tosh has a ready opinion on everything. The silent type the dude is not.

  “Finally, he goes, ‘She believes in him.’ ‘She’ meaning you.

  ‘Always did. Still does. Never quit for a heartbeat. That’s some true love right there.’ Then he looked at me. ‘The kind of love that makes you believe in love. Hard, maybe. Scary, yeah. But true.’ And . . . you know how Tosh’s eyes change color?” Uh-huh, I do know.

  “Well, they were the warmest honey-gold when he said, ‘I want to be in love like that.’ I looked straight back at him. And then we knew.”

  Pen gets a whole lot of “awwww” for that, and then proceeds to prattle on about their first touch and their first kiss and their first fight—yeah, it happened already. She talks so much, so ebulliently, we almost whiz right by our exit.

  “Chester!” I yelp, oddly panicked that we’ll pass it. “Pen, Chester!”

  “Oops!” My cousin slices three lanes, nearly causing three accidents, that could’ve got us killed three times. Still, we take the ramp unscathed. Clearly, I’ve got a date with fate in Chester.