by M. O’Keefe
“Your hands are shaking.”
Honestly, I couldn’t see him. At all. The glow of that cigarette, the gleam off the flask and the white of his shirt at his wrist. He had nice hands. A jagged scar ran along the side of his thumb down to his wrist.
“What happened?” I asked, and I couldn’t believe it myself, but I touched his hand. My fingertip brushed the raised pink skin of the scar. The insanity of that made me light-headed, and I quickly took the flask. I cupped it in my cold shaking fingers like a flame.
“Jumped out a window,” he said, flexing his fingers out wide and then curling them into a fist. “My hand got caught on an eaves-shoot. Tore it open, like.”
“Why’d you jump out a window?”
“Because someone who wanted to hurt me was coming in the door.” He said it like a joke.
I took a sip from the flask. The booze burned down my throat and exploded in warmth in my belly, and I gasped. Another sip and the same effect until I could feel my feet and my fingers. Another sip, and my face was warm. Yep. This was what a person needed for a few minutes before jumping into the pool of piranhas. To feel alive. Warm. Bloody and real.
And another sip, the flask lighter in my hand.
“Slow down there,” he said and took the flask from me. His fingers didn’t touch mine, but I could still feel the heat of them. “I reckon you haven’t eaten.”
“That,” I said, “is a fair point.” When was the last time I’d eaten? Last night? Two days ago? I couldn’t remember being hungry or full. It felt like I was very tiny inside of my body.
From the shadows around him came one of the china plates from inside. There was cheese there. Little quiches. Asparagus in prosciutto. “Have something,” he offered.
“What else have you got over there?” I joked.
“You probably don’t want to know. But if you’re hungry.” The plate came closer. I reached for a piece of cheese but in the end didn’t touch it. My stomach was in knots.
“No, thank you,” I said.
“Suit yourself.” The plate disappeared, and I was suddenly ravenous.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“What makes you think I’m not from here?”
Laughter again. But this time, thanks to the flask, it didn’t hurt. It didn’t sound half like a scream.
“Something about your voice.”
“Northern Ireland.”
“Belfast?” That was the only town I knew in Northern Ireland.
“Eventually. Derry, too. I was born in a cow pasture you never heard of.”
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
He sighed, and I tried again to see him in the shadows, but they were too dark. Too complete. “Five hours.”
“I meant the States.”
“So do I. I flew into LaGuardia five hours ago.”
“And you’re here? At this party?”
“Do you know Caroline Constantine?”
“I do,” I said with a laugh. My mom’s best friend and a fairy godmother out of the dark when my dad died. We were in her house right now. I slept in her pool house. The net keeping us safe – she’d created. “Did she bring you?”
“In a sense.”
“Wow. Well, welcome.” It was comforting a little bit. If Caroline was a friend of his, he was one of the good ones. There were rumors around Bishop’s Landing that the Constantines were bad news, but those rumors were mostly started by the Morellis who were actual bad news, so I didn’t listen to them. And if this guy was attached to the Constantines, being out here in the dark wasn’t nearly so scandalous.
“What about you? Where are you from?”
“Here,” I said. “I mean, Bishop’s Landing.”
Just the thought of it brought it all back, what tonight was supposed to be. What I was supposed to do.
I’d like to jump out a window, I thought, but when he laughed I realized I said it out loud. I stepped back again, further into my shadows. The flask was a mistake. Leaving the party was a mistake. I had to keep my head down and swallow my screams, there was no alternative.
“Well,” he said quietly. Carefully. “If what’s coming through the door is bad enough, the jumping is not so hard.”
“I should go back in,” I said, turning towards the door but not moving. I took a deep breath, and I heard the snick of a lighter in the shadows. The acrid smell of a cigarette drifted over my shoulder. I didn’t smoke, but I suddenly wanted one with a bone-deep desire.
I could hear the scrape of his shoes as he stood up. I imagined him stretching out of the shadows and into the golden light spilling out from the door. I could feel him closer. Warmth against my back. If I turned, I would see him. And just how badly I wanted to see him was a warning.
This man with his charm and accent and flask – was not for me. Not ever.
My heart pounded against my ribcage, and I didn’t turn. Coward to the very end. Or perhaps I was just so used to giving up what I wanted. Even the small things. Especially the small things.
They were all I had left, and I was giving them up one crumb at a time.
“Who is coming through your door?” he asked, and I put a hand over my mouth to stop my sob. “Princess?”
“You going to beat someone up for me?” I asked, my voice wrecked.
“If it would help. Even if it won’t.”
Who could I set this man against? Which person inside that house if left beaten and bloody would free me from this situation? But even if that door was suddenly open to me . . . would I take it? Would I walk out? Would I leave? Risk poverty? Humiliation? My sister . . .
“I’m fine,” I said, straightening my shoulders. “What about you? Maybe I should beat someone up for you.”
“It doesn’t work like that. I’m the one who fixes problems.”
“Me too,” I said. “I am the one who fixes problems, too.”
I turned, thinking I was ready for the sight of him. Or had some kind of expectation about what he might look like. I expected handsome. Smiling and charming. Tall, maybe. I was surrounded by handsome men quite a lot.
But I was not braced for him.
He was beautiful. I mean, like inarguably. It was simply fact. A law of nature. Dark hair. Blue eyes like the sky at noon. Dark scruff along his hard, square chin. He wore a tuxedo with the tie pulled loose. An angel kicked out of heaven for the trouble he caused.
There was blood on the collar of his white shirt. Blood from any number of wounds on his face. A black eye. A split lip. A tiny butterfly bandage over a cut on his cheekbone.
He was beautiful, and he was savage.
“What happened to you?” I whispered.
He touched the cut on his lip. “You should see the other guy.”
I stepped forward, drawn by the joke attempt. His eyelashes. The sudden urge to be on a side of kindness. Either side. Any side. Just to experience it however I could. “Who hurt you?”
His eyes snapped to mine, sharp and bright, and my skin prickled. Uncomfortable and aware.
“No one,” he said, ice cold despite the blood on his collar. The black eye and split lip. “Not for a long time.”
I thought he was joking, and I smiled, but his face was resolute. Calm in its strength. He wasn’t joking. He wasn’t being sarcastic. He’s been beaten, but he was telling me it didn’t hurt him.
Like he’d made a choice, and that was that. Pain didn’t matter.
“It’s that easy?” I whispered. Scared in my belly because it was only there that I could acknowledge that I knew what was coming for me was going to hurt.
“No,” he said, and his hand, the one with the scar, the one I’d touched, brushed my cheek, his thumb at the edge of my lip. “It’s not easy. It’s very hard. But it’s how you survive.”
His thumb pressed against my lip, and I gasped, my lips parting. I could taste the salt of his skin and everything in me screamed to leave. This wasn’t just foolish, it was dangerous. For him.
For me. Especially for me.
It hurt, and he kept pushing.
It hurt, and I stood there. Taking it.
Why was I doing this? Why was he? It felt like a warning and a lesson, and it felt real. Like the grass under my feet. Like the booze in my belly. Not at all like the threats inside that house, whispered and insinuated. The pain, the taste of blood and salt from his finger. The look in his eye willing me to stillness.
So. Real.
“Don’t let them hurt you,” he said.
His words broke the spell and heart pounding, I stepped back, but I didn’t leave. Like a fool, I stayed.
He didn’t have to be a Morelli to be trouble. Or to get me in trouble.
This man was lethal. And so attractive it hurt. It actually hurt.
“Who are you?” I asked, licking the blood off my lip. Hoping for a lingering taste of him.
He shook his head. “I am no one.”
Someone came to stand in the doorway, breaking up the light, casting a shadow across the stranger’s beautiful face. Both of us turned to look.
“Jesus, Princess,” my Irishman whispered when he saw who was standing there and he must have realized who I was.
“Poppy?” It was the senator, and I went cold. Tried so hard not to, but head to toe the chill settled over me. “Everything all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said and smiled to prove it. He always believed my smiles. Everyone did. They were very good smiles. Or maybe he just didn’t care.
“We’re about to make the announcement,” the senator said, and he summoned me with his fingers. A kind of snapping thing like you’d do with a dog, and I told myself, like I had for a while now, that it wasn’t personal. It was actually the opposite of personal. He treated everyone like that. That that made me feel better wasn’t something I was actually proud of. But I was seeking comfort from any corner.
“I’ll be in in a second,” I said. I wanted to say goodbye to this stranger. To these quiet moments of rest.
Or maybe I just wanted to pull my leash as taut as possible, to see how far it would stretch.
“Poppy?” The senator smiled when he said my name, but the steel was there. That terrifying sharpness. Turns out my leash didn’t stretch far at all.
“You heard her,” the Irishman said from the shadows. “She needs a second.”
“I’m sorry, who are you?” Jim stepped into the light; he was smiling but it was the razor’s edge. Jim was blonde and blue eyed. He wore glasses that made him look smart. He worked out just enough that the suits he wore looked good.
Everything about him inspired comfort and confidence.
Voters loved him.
I’d never been so scared of someone in my life.
“I’m coming,” I said, and I stepped into the light with Jim Maywell, the junior senator of New York who was 28 years older than me, and at midnight, we were announcing that I would be his wife.
Jim grabbed my hand too hard. But I expected it, and made my hand as small as I could in his. There was a trick to funneling my fingers, so he couldn’t grind the bones together. I’d learned that fast. I wondered if that would be interesting on my application to the catering company.
Experience: eating canapes off trays and mitigating the pain my fiancé wanted to inflict on my body.
We stepped off the small patio into the doorway with the sound of the party filtering through the walls.
Don’t do it, I told myself. Don’t look. He’s not for you. Not ever.
But of course, I couldn’t stop myself, and I looked back over my shoulder, but the Irishman was gone.
Nothing was left of him but the taste of blood in my mouth.
3
Two years later
The phone rang once, or barely, maybe. It barely rang, and I grabbed it.
“Zilla?” I tried to keep my voice calm. That’s what Dr. Anderson said I should do. Dr. Anderson actually said that it was the most important thing. Staying calm. Being calm. Sounding calm.
“You have a collect call from Belhaven Institution. Do you accept these charges?”
Oh god. Good. Belhaven. My hands shook.
“I do,” I said. “Of course.”
“I’m fine.” My sister’s voice, exhausted and thin, was the best thing I’d heard in the seven long days since I’d spoken with her.
I pulled the phone from my ear and covered my mouth, trying to get myself under control.
“Poppy?” My sister pulled me back. “I know you’re crying. You can cry.”
That was not what Dr. Anderson said, but I collapsed backwards in the very uncomfortable armchair in the front sitting room. “Are you okay?” I asked her.
“I said I was fine.”
“You were gone. You weren’t—”
“I checked myself back into Belhaven.”
I folded over my legs, a pain in my stomach that was spreading to my chest. I heard from her a week ago and then silence. No answering her cell phone. Emails. Texts. I went by her apartment, and it was empty. Like . . . empty empty. And I’d spent the last week sure she’d . . . done something horrible.
“You don’t have to be in Belhaven. You can come—”
“To your house? You know that’s bullshit. Your husband made it pretty clear how he feels about me.”
To my incredible shame, I could not argue with that. But if she was in Belhaven, it was only because I would be paying for it. And paying for it only happened because of the senator. She knew that and punished me anyway. I knew it would be this way when I accepted the proposal. Oddly, that didn’t make it any better.
“You used to tell me what you were thinking,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re thinking.”
“That I’m glad you’re safe.”
“I’m fine. I’m safe. I . . .” I could hear her take a deep breath. “I went after that fucking asshole who raped the twelve-year-old.”
Of course she did. This was how her psychosis worked. She was judge, jury, and executioner in her mind. “Did you . . . hurt him?”
“No. I didn’t even get close to him.”
But she would have hurt him. This was my nightmare four years ago, all over again.
You can’t do this, I thought. You can’t do this to me again. I can’t do this again. There is no other part of my life I have left to give up to save you.
“What stopped you?” I asked.
“Not what . . . who. That fucking guy you hired to watch me.”
“I didn’t hire anyone.”
“Then your prison guard husband did.”
I took a deep breath, because I didn’t know that, and it was entirely within the realm of possibility that the senator would do that. And not tell me. “You know that what you do . . . it reflects on him.”
“Yeah. I fucking know that. And frankly the best thing for that asshole is if he’d just keel over and die.”
The ceiling in the front sitting room had a mural on it. A sky at dawn kind of thing. A warm glow around the edges. The lights hung in the middle of clouds. It was ridiculous. I paid a lot of money for it.
This was the part I could never say out loud but part of last week, part of not knowing where she was, was hoping she might be here. Hoping the evil person she was stalking was the senator.
Which was worse, I wondered, the weapon or the person who wanted to use the weapon?
“I’m sorry, Poppy,” my sister said.
“I know.” I took a deep breath and let it out slow.
“No really, I am. I know . . .”
“Just stop doing this.” This vigilante revenge thing my sister could not stop herself from on her own. If left to her own devices and brain chemistry, she would right the wrongs perpetrated on young girls all over the world. And there was a lot about it that was admirable, but she did it with a knife. With violence. She wanted justice in blood.
“You know it’s not that simple.”
Yeah.
I knew it. I’d been living with my sister’s psychosis since she was sixteen and I was eighteen. Managing it. Cleaning up after it. Trying to find ways to funnel it into something useful.
Zilla was a genius, and by rights she should be able to do anything she set her formidable mind to. When it was healthy. She tried law school, thinking that might help her find the justice she craved. But the stress sent her into a manic phase that nearly killed her. I urged her to apply to the police academy and when she didn’t pass the psych eval, social work. But when she left in the middle of her second week of school, I settled for keeping her safe.
And contained.
Belhaven.
The last two years she’d been in and out of care between Belhaven and her apartment I paid for in Brooklyn.
“Remember that pond at the back of the property in Bishop’s Landing?” Zilla asked.
“Of course.” That pond had been magic in a childhood without a lot of magic. The willow tree beside it had been a fort and a secret play place and safe. Safe most of all. More home than our actual house.
“Dad wanted to drain it. Said it was a breeding ground for mosquitos and that we would wander down there and drown.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “So Mom taught us how to swim in it.”
“He was so mad.”
“But she won the fight, right?”
“Yep. And she won the fight with all the staff that tried to keep us away from it, too,” I said. The housekeepers and tutors, even Monsieur Belleville the chef who tried to tempt us away from frog-catching with cakes and cookies.
“I’m fighting for the pond right now,” my sister whispered.
“What’s the pond in this scenario?” I asked.
“You. Us. The willow tree. The frogs. The way things used to be.”
I let out my breath as slow as I could, curbing the rising tide of tears. “I know,” I said. “I know.”
“Don’t be mad at me,” Zilla whispered.
“Me? Mad at you? I can never be mad at you.”
“Well, that’s a lie.”
“Fine,” I said with a laugh because that was what she wanted. “I can never stay mad at you.”
“You can come see me in two weeks,” Zilla said. I was silent. Because the senator wouldn’t allow it. Not without some wild story and help from the staff, who would eventually turn on me, resulting in some painful punishment.