by Cole McCade
Sometimes she loathed herself for that.
And she loathed herself for the tired, warm smile she gave him as she slid over to tuck herself close, fitting into the crook of his arm and resting her head to his shoulder. “You were great,” she said as his arms slid around her and he nuzzled into her hair. “I’m just overwhelmed. I can’t believe we’re married.”
“I know, babe. I know.” He caught her hand, lifted it to his lips, and kissed her ring. That precious, precious ring that reminded her always: she was now his legal property. “I’ve been waiting for this for so damned long. I love you.”
Her mouth didn’t want to move. If she was a puppet, then her heart was a ventriloquist, animating her, shaping her lips around words she didn’t want to say. But he needed to hear them. He needed to hear them to be happy, and so she pulled on all her puppet-strings and ignored how they pulled right back until they nearly ripped right out of her heart to leave it bleeding.
“I love you too,” she said, and tried not to choke on the lie. She felt his smile against her hair, and knew she had done her job.
Because her mother had said make a man like that happy, and you’ll never want for anything again.
But she did.
She wanted something she could never have, because it had never been real in the first place.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SHE COULDN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT the cat.
She’d signed the release form. So had the pawnbroker—Maxwell Manning in swoopy larger-than-life letters, big and bold as a woman named Maxwell. Leigh had watched while she’d locked the ring away in a combination safe. She had a guy, Maxi had said. He’d take a look at it, and she’d call Leigh with an estimate in a few days. But it wouldn’t be millions, she’d warned. She wasn’t going to pay even ten percent of the ring’s market value. Not when it’d sit on the shelf for years before someone took it off her hands, someone who wouldn’t even know what the stone was or care about its rarity—and that was a long-term investment she couldn’t afford to play fast and loose with.
Leigh had only shrugged. She didn’t need to tote a million dollars around in her backpack.
She just needed enough for a bus ticket somewhere far away from Crow City, Jacob, and kisses that tore into her with a serpent’s vicious bite.
She slept on a bench in the park that night, and imagined she could smell Elijah’s soft, slightly sticky little-boy scent on the wood, soaked in from the number of times he’d sat next to the perky little nanny and nibbled the crusts from his peanut butter and jelly until his cheeks were smeared in purple and brown. Once Maxi paid her for the ring, Leigh would never see him again. It was better for him, she told herself. His mother was a horrible person, and if she kept haunting him she’d find some way to ruin him.
Sometimes ghosts just needed to fade away, once and for all.
But still, as she curled up on the bench with her head pillowed on her backpack and the night breeze rustling in the trees overhead and the crickets filling the night with their song, she flicked through her thousands of photos of Elijah. The light of the camera screen cut into her pupils. Her eyes pulled too tight around the corners, when she thought of counting down the last three or four days he would be in her life.
Did it count as abandonment when, to him, she didn’t exist?
Leigh put the camera away. She couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t stand the feeling of scissors chopping pieces out of her paper cutout heart—and so she looked up at the sky and wondered about Gabriel Hart’s cat, and who was taking care of her if he really meant to stay at Gary’s for days. Every time she started to fall asleep, she’d remember that ratty orange face looking up at her and the feel of rusty fur under her fingers, and the way she’d purred like something was broken inside her but she had to keep trying anyway.
Leigh thunked her forehead against the park bench. She knew what she was doing. Fixating. Transferring this…this damned need to nurture something, to care for and love and comfort and protect, away from her son and away from Hart and onto a goddamned cat.
Worrying about the cat was better than thinking she shouldn’t have left him alone, with Gary working the front of the house and no one to keep him from his pills. She’d hidden them.
But had she hidden them well enough?
She dug her notebook out and flipped it open, tapping the page with the point of a pretty teal gel pen. There was too much in her head to banish with a few simple, bold lines, but after a moment she wrote:
Things were easier when I didn’t care.
But that doesn’t mean they were better.
Sometimes I wish I could peel the sky open and crawl inside.
She stared at the crooked points and loops of her handwriting, then groaned and mooshed her face into the cool, smooth paper.
“God damn it,” she muttered. The crickets chirped back at her, cheerfully oblivious.
Fucking crickets.
The stars had gone out by the time she just…gave up, dragged to her feet, and hit the streets again. She had a few days to kill until Maxi called.
Might as well take care of the fucking cat.
She made her way through the Rooks, streets silent save for the whisper of birds roosting in the trees and the scuff of her boots on the pavement. Windows rose around her with the blankness of sleeping eyes closed to shut away the lives behind them, put on hold until the waking hours. She took a path that would skirt around the old townhouse, avoiding the aching pull of knowing Elijah was just on the other side of that wall and yet miles and miles away.
Her roundabout trek took her past the Greyhound station. She paused, looking into the squat glass-fronted building. If waiting could be a substance, that’s what the Greyhound station was: a giant glass jar of waiting, people frozen in moments in their lives that had no meaning other than the transitory pause between anchor points in their memories. No one ever counted these waiting moments as part of their lives, when they looked back. Every hunching figure in that transit station, bent over books and iPods and phones and laptops, thought they were in stasis, on the way to or from something better.
While just outside the glass, second after second still ticked on, and Leigh had no idea what they were for anymore.
In a few days she’d be loitering inside this station, adding her imprint to the patina of waiting built up behind the glass, frozen like a fly in amber. She’d never ridden a Greyhound before. Never even left Crow City, save for those aimless four years at college—just out of state enough for her mother to brag about her Ivy League daughter, but not so far as to be out of reach, out from under her mother’s thumb.
Surprise weekends. Girls’ days, taking little Clarissa Leigh out for manicures and hair treatments and spa rubdowns while probing her for information on eligible bachelors whose last names were written in the same font as the Fortune 500 list. Spring breaks where her shallow social circle went off to Cancun or Spain or Ireland, while Leigh went home to country club dinners and society parties, and pretended it didn’t hurt when he wouldn’t even look at her. Holidays where a chauffeur picked her up in a glossy black car and drove her home across state lines, always watching her in the rear view mirror like a jailor transporting a prisoner. She’d never been allowed out of the car, except to go to the bathroom. Everything had been brought to her. Food, water, all her basic needs.
Just like a pet in a cage.
There was a whole world outside Crow City. And as she watched several people get up in listless synchronicity to file toward their boarding gate, tickets in hand…for the first time she wondered where she could go, when her life for the last four years had been a series of aimless and apathetic circles.
Stasis. Even if she wasn’t waiting behind glass, she too had been in stasis.
She made herself pull away from the moving pictures behind the window, this television show of life, and wound her way through the lonely streets toward the docks. Even the Upper Nests were asleep, people huddled in blankets under the open
sky, tattered brown lumps like herd beasts settled down in the grass. Now and then, as she passed, a gleaming eye would look out from inside a tent or blanket or cardboard box, tracking her path down the sidewalk until she turned off at the pier where Hart’s boat bumped up quietly against the piles.
It was easy to vault the railing onto the swaying deck. Harder was picking the lock with a tine snapped off from the metal-bristle brush in her backpack. She’d never picked a lock before, and it gave her a little thrill of excitement, like staying out past curfew to go to a concert or palming a tin of lip balm from the shelves at Lush. But she had no idea what she was doing, and it was likely only the fact that the houseboat was probably older than Hart himself that she even managed to spring first the wheelhouse lock, then the front door lock. Hell, she probably could have tripped it just by jiggling the knob hard enough, if she’d really tried. Master spy, she was not.
The door swung open on a darkened room lit only by faint shafts of moonlight, shifting with the subtle sway of the curtains in the gentle rocking current. Leigh lingered warily on the threshold, half expecting Hart to appear out of nowhere and slam her back down onto his bed, wrap her wrists in his fingers, kiss her lips like she mattered. Her lungs constricted as she held perfectly still save for fingers that drifted to her throat, and her necklace of pretty, pretty bruises. If this one was a constellation it was Orion’s Belt, collaring her to thoughts she didn’t want.
Nothing. No silver-eyed silhouette, no menacing figure towering over her. Just the faint creak of the boat—and a loud, demanding MIAO that made her flinch back, scrambling back against the doorframe with a little shriek.
“Jesus Christ!”
She fumbled for the light switch and flicked it on. The tabby sat on her haunches at Leigh’s feet, looking up at her with another demanding yowl. Leigh stepped fully inside and closed the door, laughing.
“God, you scared the shit out of me. Christ. I get it, you’re hungry.” She crouched to scratch behind those ragged, chewed-up ears, and smiled as that rickety purr shook up into her hand. “Sweet girl, aren’t you? Not afraid to ask for what you want.” She rubbed under her chin; the cat closed her eyes with pleasure. “I like that,” she murmured. “I like that a lot.”
She filled the cat’s half-empty food and water bowls, and left her to eat while Leigh looked for something to carry her in. She didn’t feel right digging around in Hart’s things, this lived-in place where he didn’t seem to fit, and she suddenly wondered with a sharp and cutting pang if this boat had belonged to his sister.
She found a battered cardboard pet crate tucked in a corner behind the pantry, big enough to fit both the cat and a half-empty bag of kibble. She’d figure out what to do for litter at Gary’s. As she sat on the bed and watched that orange tail switch back and forth while the clack of crunching kibble filled the air, she wondered…should she bring some things back for Hart? A change of clothes. Something. He’d be pissed enough that she’d broken in. Might as well get as much as possible out of the trip.
Maybe then she wouldn’t feel guilty about leaving, when she had absolutely no reason to feel anything at all.
Before she could talk herself out of it, she opened the only door in the room besides the bathroom and peered into the closet. That militant ordered precision she’d seen in his shop was here; wooden IKEA cubbies divided the closet into cubes with shirts and jeans and underwear folded into razor-sharp squares and tucked away, shoes lined up precisely on the floor. The only hanger in the closet held up a formal set of Marine dress blues too heavy for the hanger’s narrow wire shoulders. She brushed her fingers over the shiny gold buttons, then the rows upon rows of bars and stars dangling with gleaming medals. Everything he’d been, everything he’d done, locked away in this closet, perfectly preserved but never touched.
She backed away, and pulled down a folded canvas military duffel from the top shelf. Behind it she caught the gleam of gunmetal, and looked away quickly, shoving a few sets of comfortable clothing in the bag and firmly shutting the door. His toothbrush from the bathroom next, tucked away in a Ziploc bag, before she stood in the middle of the room and wondered what she was forgetting. She hadn’t done anything like this since the one time she’d tried to pack Elijah’s diaper bag herself only for his first nanny, a snotty little former sorority girl with a round freckled face, to take it from her hands with an indulgent, almost patronizing smile. It’s okay, Miss. I’ve got it. You don’t have to worry about it.
She checked the kitchen and bathroom again, then eyed the massive bank of cabinets over the bed. A key dangled on a cord from one of the handles; she fitted it to the first keyhole and turned it, and wondered what was so precious that Hart had to keep it behind lock and key.
Books, she discovered. Dozens upon dozens of books, stacked two deep and two high along the shelves. She opened every last one of the cabinets. Every door swung open on more and more spines weathered by the care and the touch of many hands, and she shivered with a sweet little thrill of delight as she ran her fingers over a row of heavy tomes. Everything from Jane Austen to George R. R. Martin, Rudy Rucker to the collected fairy tales of The Brothers Grimm; books on mythology and neuroscience, children’s books with colorful illustrations bumping up next to horror novels patterned with the macabre detailed art of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood.
A silhouette on one book caught her eye—clothbound with ragged edges, blue, with the imprint of a girl with her skirt blowing in some unseen wind, just like on the sign over Hart’s garage. The Witch of Blackbird Pond gleamed in faded gold leaf on the spine, worn off in tiny little patches exactly where the crease between thumb and forefinger would cradle the open book. She tugged it out gently and flipped it open, but paused as she glimpsed handwriting on the inside cover page, swooping and neat and feminine.
I’m going to make you keep reading it till you learn to love it, little brother.
-A
Toward the middle of the book, a subtle gap prompted her to flip through pages that had that thick, soft, beautiful texture that only really old books had. The book fell open to page one hundred and twelve with an ease that said it had been cracked to that spot a thousand times; the white-framed black of the back side of a Polaroid thrust up between the pages. She picked it up gingerly and flipped it over.
Gabriel Hart looked up at her from the plastic film with a wide rogue’s smile that clutched brutal fingers around her heart, his silver eyes fierce and bright and warm with laughter. He couldn’t be any more than twenty in the photo, if that—a lean and wild boy leaning next to an equally lean and wild girl with features the mirror of his, beautiful and brown and somehow delicately ferocious, her long black hair spilling over her and tangling with him as if binding him to her. They’d been caught in the middle of shoving at each other, his arm draped around her neck, her hand pushed against his face, their eyes alight with laughter, and God, Leigh…Leigh was jealous. Leigh was jealous, that bitter poison apple growing inside her heart, because of the two people she’d ever loved with such pure and innocent fire, one had never been worth it…and the other was worth so much more than she could give him.
But she couldn’t help lingering to trace her thumb along the stark plane of Hart’s cheekbone. Could he even smile like that anymore? Or had it been cut out of him, bled through that twisted wound in his thigh?
Would she have liked the man he’d been, before the warmth had faded from those pale silver eyes?
She sank down to the bed, still staring at the photograph. She couldn’t look away. Not when it pulled on her—that smiling face, the keen wild brightness of him, things that were barely a shadow trailing after him now. It didn’t matter if she’d have liked the man this boy had grown into.
She liked the man he was now, or she wouldn’t be here, worrying over his cat and packing his bag while her pulse labored over the picture in her hand.
What kind of masochist was she? He’d done nothing but mock and disrespect her. He treated her like she wa
sn’t a beautiful lofty thing, heroically lost, heroically found, but like he’d plucked her out of the gutters and had the nerve to ask her why she didn’t pull herself up, why she didn’t stop being the whore he clearly thought she was.
Yet when he’d trembled with pain and laid his head in her lap and asked her to stay…when he’d kissed her…
When he’d kissed her she’d felt like a woman again, a woman wild in everything that meant to be, full of that fire that frightened her with its destructive power and lifted her up so high she felt like she could fly.
She curled forward with a low moan, pressing the photograph against her chest and resting her brow to her knees. God, she couldn’t be attracted to that bipolar, arrogant, presumptuous, infuriating asshole. No more than she was attracted to anyone hard enough and rough enough to get her off. She didn’t even know him, any more than these little clippings of his life she’d learned from everything and everyone but him.
The last thing she needed was to get fucked up over someone like him, just because he’d gotten under her skin and had, with his agony and the hard lines of suffering that bound him in the shape of a man, roused some mothering instinct she’d thought she’d destroyed when she’d turned her back on her only son.
Mothering instinct. That was fucked up, wanting to fuck a man one minute and nanny him the next.
Almost as fucked up as a girl who’d called her first love and lover Daddy, the man who’d shown her what her body was good for—and taught her that having a heart would bring her nothing but trouble.
The cat bumped against her ankle, followed by a low mewl; the tickle of a fuzzy tail brushed the underside of her thigh. She opened her eyes, then smiled weakly and stroked a hand over the top of her little orange Brillo-pad head.
“Let’s get out of here, yeah?”
“Miao,” the cat said, and Leigh figured that was close enough to yes.
She slipped the photo back into the book right at page one hundred and twelve, then tucked the book safely into the bag along with several others, grabbing a few series that looked familiar and shoving them on top of his clothes before closing up the cabinets again. With the carrier swaying heavy in her hand and the cat shifting restlessly inside, Leigh took one last look around the houseboat and then let herself out, locking both doors behind her and stepping out onto the deck. The last of the moon’s light glimmered on the water all around, ripples like flowing oil casting back the night, and she tipped her head back to look up at the deep, pure blue of the starless sky, the darkest the night would be before dawn.