Kiss Kill Vanish (22 page)

But I can recognize that he's a real person and not just vile caricature without wanting to be his friend.

Still, if he hadn't answered my phone, I wouldn't be in this position with Emilio. If I ever see him again, I'm going to kill him.

Three minutes.

I pull my knees to my chest and stare deep into the water stain. If it's the Virgin Mary, she has chosen the wrong ceiling to appear on. This is not a sacred place. I am not devout or even good. But I'm not sure if I ever had a chance, if there are even redeeming choices to make now. I can be less bad, but that gets hazy. Abandoning my family seemed less bad than staying and pretending I didn't know the human cost of my wealth. Although, if I'm causing Emilio to put his family in danger, that seems unconscionably selfish. If anything happens to them, I don't see how I could forgive myself, or how he could ever forgive me.

But Emilio's no saint, either. Thinking through his crimes makes me cringe, and once I'm cringing I can't stop, my fists and shoulders and stomach clench on and on. Everything can be explained, though. So why am I still cringing?

Two minutes.

One of Emilio's girls. What does that even mean? Obviously I know what it means, but I need the salient stats—heights, weights, relative attractiveness, degree of sluttiness—for every single one of them. I already know their hair color, thank you again, Marcel.

Marcel. He knows. I have to make him tell me exactly what he's seen before I can force myself to believe it was all part of the game Emilio had to play. Surely, that's a girlfriend's prerogative: sordid details for me to stew over.

I do want to believe. Emilio's always made me feel like I was the only girl in the world, but how hard would it have been to fool me? All he had to do was ignore my sisters and I was his. The thought of him running his hands over someone else's skin makes my fingers curl into fists and my stomach drop. How am I still cringing? It's supposed to be a wave. There's supposed to be a limit on how long you can be stuck mid-recoil.

One minute.

Time to go. I pick up the phone and drop it into my purse, because even if I wish I was strong enough to be on a break, I'm not. He could call again.

I pick up the mandolin case and glance around the room, struck by its bareness. I've kept it this way on purpose, a reminder to myself I'm not going to be here long enough for comfort or art or anything close to beauty. Apparently I should've reminded myself harder. I'm still here. It's still naked. Worst of all, I'm used to it.

I go.

I practice too long. I practice until the music is just music, and that nauseates me. I put the instrument in its case and stare at the heater.

Of course it's just music. My body is a plucked string, still shaking. I've been lied to by everyone, and even, strangely enough, by the mandolin. The rambling folk tunes convinced me they could recreate Emilio, but they can't. They can only use him up. I've been spending the magic little by little without realizing there was a finite amount.

I pull the lid from Jacques's kindest gift ever—a box of truffles—and put one in my mouth whole. I can't even taste it.

I tip my head back, close my eyes, and try to imagine what Emilio is doing right now. I can't. Here I thought the memories were triggered by melodies in a self-renewing loop, but this whole time they've been seeping out, drop by drop, note by note.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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“S
o do you want to come with us?” Nanette asks.

“Hmm?” I'm not listening. Whatever she's been saying has not been as interesting as watching my mug of soup twirl around through the microwave door. The can said heirloom tomato bisque, but it looks like your standard tomato soup to me.

“To the Jello Bar?”

I pull myself away from the microwave. Nanette's eyebrows are raised hopefully (her version of a smile), and she's wearing a sequined tank and tight jeans. I barely recognize her out of her scrubs. She should be annoyed with me for pretending to listen to her for the last minute or two, but Nanette's emotions don't seem to exist in extremes.

“There's live music tonight,” she adds.

“Oh. Thanks. I have some stuff I have to do.”

“Okay.”

“Have fun, though,” I add as an afterthought.

She nods and leaves.

I'm a jerk. And I really need to buy her a bag of pretzels to replace that one I borrowed.

The microwave groans on. I stare out the tiny window over the kitchen table, where more snow is muffling the world beyond. Montreal's silence is denser now that Emilio has come and gone, piling up like that windowsill snow, filling minutes and hours that have become weeks, until there's nothing but white silence. Every day I don't hear from Emilio my view shrinks, my prison wall thickens.

It was better before. I'd left a murderer in Miami, and the heartbreak was deep, necessary, and final. But then he showed up and told me things, and made me . . . what, forgive? More like hope, and hope sucks. Hope has made the heartbreak deeper, unnecessary, and unending.

The microwave beeps. I take my mug to my closet, sit cross-legged on the cot, and take a sip. It's tepid. That microwave sucks. Not going back to heat it on the stove may be the best evidence of the depth of my pathetic state, but realizing this doesn't make me any more likely to fix it. So it's not hot. So what.

The mandolin is beneath me. Sometimes I can ignore it, but today I feel it pulsing under the bed like the telltale heart, and I'm half tempted to chuck it out into the hall so I can drink my lukewarm heirloom tomato bisque and stare at the wall in peace. I don't bring it to Soupe au Chocolate anymore. I just clean. The job isn't fun, but it's a job, and it's better now that Nanette has clued me in on the correct ratio of bleach to water. Turns out it's more like one to fifty—another valuable life lesson I managed to dodge. I didn't tell Nanette that I mixed it half and half that first time, since she already must think I'm the biggest idiot. The upside: I've made enough money to buy a skirt.

I wonder if Lola and Ana know about diluting bleach. I'd be surprised.

It's been over a week since I saw Marcel, over a week since Emilio tried to call, but it seems more like a month. I've done enough worrying to fill a year. The worrying hasn't helped me decide what to do, though. I could go back to Miami. My father would welcome me with open arms, and I'd go back to school like I never left, purposely ignoring the things I need to ignore in order to sleep at night.

Emilio's in Miami. I could be with him. Who am I to have principles, anyway?

But my brain can't just leave it at that—the decision isn't the end point. I have to imagine what it would be like, knowing the things I know and living in my father's house, surrounded by beautiful artwork but suffocating under the ugliness of his crimes, knowing that Emilio is off doing whatever it is my father makes him do.

All of those things I wish I could forget—maybe forgetting them would be much worse.

So I'm still here, pretending to wait for someone who isn't coming back.

I pick up the mug and take another sip. Room temperature now. I put it down and lay my head on my pillow, and at some point I fall asleep.

It's hard to say whether it's the phone that wakes me, or the rush of hope that sweeps through me after it rings. Hope. Didn't I talk myself out of that?

I grab the phone and see Marcel's number. I shouldn't be surprised—it had to be one or the other—but I was sure we'd outgrown each other, or out-used each other.

“Marcel,” I say.

“Hey.”

“Hi.”

“Sorry, did I wake you up?” he asks.

I glance at the clock. 3:17. “I don't know. I was sort of in between. Don't you ever sleep?”

“Not lately. I wasn't sure you'd still be in Montreal. You are still here, aren't you?”

“Yeah.” I don't explain that Emilio hasn't called or shown up or tried any other way to contact me. I don't want to hear anything more he has to say about Emilio.

“Good,” he says. “Do you want to come swim again?”

“What?”

“Come swim.”

“I heard you. I just . . .”

“What?”

“I thought maybe we'd both . . .” I pause and wait for the right words to come. “I assumed that knowing who I was would be enough for you.”

“I'm over it. Don't you want to swim?”

I'm startled. “I still don't have a bathing suit.”

“You still don't have to wear one.”

“I guess I could steal my roommate's again.”

“Whatever. I'll be there in a half hour.”

I get dressed, braid my hair, and go hunting for Nanette's navy suit again. It's not hard to rationalize more borrowing. If she were here, I'd ask her, and I'm sure she'd say yes, so I stuff it in my purse and go down to the street to wait. As for swimming with Marcel, it's not hard to rationalize that either. I've barely spoken to a soul or left the apartment in a week.

Snow falls around me, melting on my hair and shoulders. I don't mind. I'm excited to swim. I'm excited to go somewhere. I'm excited to talk to someone. That's all.

Like last time, we bypass the main house, driving directly to the pool house.

“Are your parents around?” I ask.

“No.”

I refuse to dig. He'll elaborate if he wants to elaborate, which he clearly doesn't. A girl can wonder, though.

I change and meet him at the head of the pool, where he's waiting with extra goggles.

“Let's warm up for a few laps,” I suggest.

“Fine by me.”

I hesitate at the edge, remembering how cold the water was. He doesn't, though. He dives in headfirst, so I watch him for the first lap. His stroke isn't better than mine, but his limbs are so much longer and he looks tireless. He'll beat me every time.

I follow him in, slipping in like a sliver. It doesn't take long to lose myself. I do breaststroke for the first couple of laps, then freestyle for another two. I know I've found my rhythm when I'm thinking about absolutely nothing except how the water feels sliding over me. When my fingers touch the wall and I look up, Marcel is sitting at the head of his lane watching me, goggles pushed up on his forehead.

“So where did you learn to swim?” he asks.

“The ocean.”

“What, the dolphins taught you?”

“No. I had a human teacher, but you asked where. Are you not warming up?”

“I already did. You've got a more natural stroke than I do.”

“I know. I watched your first lap.”

He smirks. “So you're going to beat me today, then.”

“Probably not. Let's do it.” I climb out and join him.

The first part of the race is similar to last time. I hold a respectable half lap between us for a while, then the distance begins to grow and my limbs turn to jelly. But this time he pulls ahead even more in the second half and ends up finishing much faster than last time. I hit the wall and collapse against the pebbled ledge.

“I feel like I've been hustled,” I say between gasps. “Again.” I'm too exhausted to pull myself out of the pool, so I rest my forehead on my arms and wheeze like an asthmatic.

“If I was hustling you, I'd have insisted we bet on it.” His voice is above me, but I can't lift my head. All I see are his calves. They're muscular and fuzzy with wet blond hair.

“Do you need a hand?” he asks.

“No.”

Marcel doesn't move, though, and after a few seconds his hand appears in front of my face. I take it and let him pull me up so I'm sitting on the ledge.

“You're welcome.” He stands beside me, hands on his hips, staring at the pool. “You have no stamina.”

“And your stroke is pretty weak.”

“Yeah, but you have so little stamina, it doesn't matter.”

“Let me guess,” I say. “You got the sportsmanship award back in your swim team days.”

He snorts.

The swimming pool at Trinity Prep bubbles up from my memory in vibrant color: the electric-blue tile, the yellow lane dividers, the cherry swimsuits. Last year's caps for our final tournament were gold. I wonder what color they are this year. “So what's the deal?” I ask. “Have you been swimming every day since last time I was here?”

“And lifting.”

“Are you training for something?”

“No.” He pauses. “It's something to do.”

I open my mouth and close it. I want to tell him I'm impressed, not so much with the working out, but with the changes. It's obvious he's staying clean. Since Lucien's death, Marcel has morphed into something altogether different. He's lost that greasy, haggard look, and today, even more than the last time I saw him, he seems alive.

I have the feeling nobody else is going to congratulate him. “Good for you.”

He grunts, and a swollen silence follows. Fair enough. I didn't need help getting out of the pool. He doesn't need someone to care.

“Hungry?” he asks.

“You have no idea.”

“Get that,” Marcel says, pointing to the fifth item on the menu.

Tourtière.
I don't say it aloud and embarrass myself. “Why? Is it ground sheep eyeballs or something?”

“Interesting guess.”

I squeeze my braids, dripping water on the hardwood floor of the charcuterie. Braids made sense for swimming, but now I'm feeling four years old. Not being able to order on my own doesn't help.

I eye the deli case of cured meats and sausages at the front of the line. All those slabs and cylinders of marbled fat and clotted blood look too freshly dead. At least for breakfast. “Maybe I'll just get a croissant.”