Kiss Kill Vanish (41 page)

We left the auction house that day with the Degas wrapped in a tube, my hand tucked under Papi's arm.

It's mine. Legally, who knows, but I feel no moral qualms as I slip out of bed, reach up, and lift the sketch from the wall. I know enough to at least estimate what it would go for. Two hundred thousand dollars. Maybe even three. That's more than enough to go somewhere new, start over again, be anyone I want to be. Not Jane and not Valentina, or at least not the Valentina I've been. I'll know exactly who it is once I get where I'm going.

There.
Even before I've thought about it, I know where
there
is.

“Here you are,” Señora Medina says, handing me the cardboard tube.

I give her the check. “Señor Lopez will love these. The last ones sold quickly, and these ones are so beautiful.”

“I'm glad. You have an eye for beauty, don't you?”

I smile. I do.

I slide the tube into my satchel. Four small watercolors of Girona: a Mediterranean beach, a Catalonian meadow, a young girl playing with a dog, and my favorite, a boy in front of an easel. Unframed. Originals. I handpicked them all.

I couldn't go without real art again. That had been a mistake in Montreal, my barren walls, my refusal to go into the museums I passed. Lucien's amateurish attempts were the closest I came to seeing art, and the result was emptiness and loneliness.

Here in Girona, my walls are covered with my postcard prints—a poor girl's gallery, as Rosa calls it. Rosa, my only roommate, has her own poor girl's gallery, except hers alternates between French and Spanish
Vogue
pages, and the torn-out pages of a firemen's calendar. She's studying fashion at the university. Her study of firemen is somewhat less official.

“Where are you from?” Señora Medina asks.

I hesitate. I've come up the hill to buy her watercolors several times now, and we've always conversed in Spanish. But she must hear that mine is slanted with South American tones. There's no need to lie, but it takes an effort to tell the truth these days. “America,” I say.

She frowns, eying my short cotton shirtdress and brown sandals. I bought them here.

“You don't look American,” she says bluntly, “but you don't sound Spanish.”

It wasn't a question, so I don't try to explain. I intentionally bought my clothes here so I would at least blend in when I wasn't speaking. Spanish clothes were a carefully weighed expense, and worth every penny.

Señora Medina stares harder at me. Smooth-faced and beautiful. “I'll see you next week, then?”

“Next week,” I say, and slip out the door into the sunlight.

I slide the tube into my satchel and pull the strap over my head. Like the clothes, the sturdy leather bag was a bit of a splurge. The Degas sketch brought in more than I expected, but every purchase I make now has the feel of finality. There's plenty of money, but once it's gone, the only thing replenishing it will be my own earnings at the art shop, which are . . . not huge. Last I heard from Lola and Ana, the trial was underway, but all of Papi's assets have been seized now. If I'd wanted his money—which I didn't—I couldn't have it.

I start the walk down the hill and through the park, bag swinging on my hip. Señor Lopez's operation is small, but beauty doesn't have to be big. I sell prints and postcards (the tourists love their Dalí), as well as the work of local artists. Most of them stop by the store to replenish the stock themselves, but Señor Lopez sends me out to pick up also, and sometimes, like today, to buy. My shifts there earn enough money to pay my rent at the apartment building across the plaza and for food, but not much else.

Not that I need much else right now. I'm drunk off freedom and anonymity. I had that in Montreal, but fear washed it with gray. Fear chilled me more than ice or wind, left me lonelier than I'd imagined possible. But I'm not afraid anymore.

The walk from Señora Medina's is fifteen minutes, but it's oddly warm for January and the sun slows my feet. We're closed for siesta for another hour anyway, so I take my time, wandering Girona's now familiar cobbled streets.

Girona was unplanned. I'd been sure I wanted to be in Madrid. But then I got there and realized it was too much, or I was too little. I was too frazzled for bustle, too overwrought to be inspired by the buzz of a thriving city, no matter how beautiful. After one day of anxious wandering, I knew that I needed to be closer to the ocean. I needed a place to think. So I took the train to Barcelona and then kept riding farther east and farther north, vaguely aware that I was getting closer and closer to France, but not ready to decide exactly where I was going. The coast. That seemed good enough. Minutes before we arrived in Girona's station, I realized it was my last stop before Spanish become French, so I disembarked.

Crinkled and exhausted and suddenly brimming with self-pity, not to mention the broken heart I'd been running from, I probably should've hated it. But Girona wouldn't let me come and keep my fingers entwined in my grief. It made me let go. Something about the depth to its romance, the stoicism to its prettiness. Right away, it felt like a painting.

I stayed the first few nights at a hostel, exploring the spiderweb of Girona's cobblestones by day. By the time I found Señor Lopez's shop, I'd already decided I would stay. The bright abstract prints propped in the display window, the mustard-yellow awning like a gold frame itself, the
SE NECESITA EMPLEADO
card taped to the door—they were all confirmations of what I already knew. This could work. Maybe this was even meant to be.

I wasn't looking for home. I'm not so naive or optimistic to think that home is a place, but in Girona I recognized something scrubbed clean and quaint and earnest that make it perfect for starting anew. Alone.

Finding Rosa and the apartment across the plaza made me certain. She's silly and honest and warm, but nosy and messy too, which makes her an average roommate and a better-than-average friend. Rosa actually likes it when I play the mandolin. She isn't sweeter than Nanette, but I'm better than Jane, so it works.

After my first paycheck, I mailed a stack of my favorite postcard prints to Nanette. It's surprising, the relief of saying thank you, even if the thank you is anonymous.

I called Lola from a pay phone to let her know where I was and tried not to listen as she informed me of the latest pretrial injustices they had been subjected to. The credit cards, the cars, the jewelry, all gone.

The art too. Seized. All of it.

It's taken weeks here in Girona, but now I can think about it without tears. I can do this—walk down the hill, satchel of art bouncing on my hip, and acknowledge without crying that the paintings and sketches and silk screens and sculptures that decorated my childhood aren't mine. They never were. Somebody else is looking at them now, and me, I'm finding my own.

I don't go straight to the shop. Instead, I head across the plaza in the direction of my apartment to grab some lunch, pausing at the window of the café on the corner. I've got crusty bread and mozzarella at home, but those pastries behind the glass look divine.

“Valentina,” a voice calls from behind me. “Or are you going by something else now?”

Even out of context, Marcel's voice doesn't surprise me. I've been hearing it in my head for weeks. Every day I have at least one an imaginary conversation with him, and even now, as I turn around, I half expect to see nobody. But it's him, sitting at a café table no more than ten feet away, that smirk on his face. Exactly the same.

“I wasn't sure,” he says. “I thought you might be Jane again.”

“Not Jane.” I walk toward him, suddenly off balance, like the cobblestones are sinking in places. When I go to pull out the chair across from him, I can't. It's weighted by a large gray boot. A cast. Crutches lie at angles beneath the table.

He leans to the side and swings a chair from a neighboring table with his left arm. His right is in a sling and looks to be casted too, wrist to shoulder. He pushes the chair toward me. “Here.”

I sit. “You're okay. I mean”—I glance at the mammoth medical boot—“you're not okay, but you're alive.”

“More or less. You thought I was dead?”

“You didn't return my calls.”

He laughs, and he looks good. Happy. Strong. “A guy doesn't return your calls, and you automatically assume he's dead? That's confidence.”

“I just . . . the last time I saw you, you weren't exactly in good shape. I didn't know how badly you were hurt. I didn't know anything. Did you drive all the way back to Montreal?”

“I made it to Atlanta, then called my dad.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Some story about partying with friends and getting jumped outside a club. He flew me home from there.”

I swallow, wanting to ask him why he didn't call back, but not wanting to bare my desperation. “You should have called to let me know you were okay.”

“I hardly remember those first couple of weeks. Two surgeries on that one.” He points to his left leg. “A cracked rib and collapsed lung. Dislocated shoulder. Fractured ulna.” He lifts the cast on his right arm. “I didn't know Victor had been arrested until after I was out of the hospital, and by the time I was with it enough to get your messages, you weren't picking up. By the way, your sister says to hurry up and get a cell phone here.”

“Lola told you how to find me.”

“Yeah,” he says.

“If I get a cell phone here, she'll be able to call me whenever she wants.”

“So will I.”

I smile and it feels right, in the same way that Girona and the shop and Rosa all feel right. But dreaming and imagining someone is here puts a strange shadow on reality. Did I wish it true? His real face is clearer and brighter than in my imagination.

“Miss me?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Good. I'd feel like an idiot if I came all this way and you didn't want me here.”

“I want you here.”

He smiles. That feels right to me too.

“Your parents—I can't believe they let you come,” I say.

“That's only because you don't know them. I have to be back in two weeks to get a walking cast. That'll be on for eight weeks, at least, then physical therapy for a year or something ridiculous like that.”

“A year.” I stare at the row of toes peeking out of the end. He has nice toes. I've never really looked at them before, but now I'd kind of like to examine them.

“It wasn't your garden-variety fracture,” he says.

“But do they expect you to make a full recovery?”

“Mostly. They think. The bones in my ankle were totally shattered, so I've got steel rods and stuff in there now. Don't look so horrified—it's not like I had a career as a professional runner ahead of me or anything. You should've seen me setting off alarms at airport security. They practically strip-searched me right there. Apparently, wearing two casts is the same as asking to have every body cavity thoroughly examined.”

I laugh.

“You're too far away.” Before I can inch forward, he reaches out and pulls my chair toward him so our knees touch.

Being so close to him, so suddenly, it feels like the breath has been sucked out of me. I stare down at the cast on his leg. “Does it hurt?”

“Not anymore.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You didn't do this,” he says gently. His hand drops to my leg, where cotton meets skin.

I shake my head. “I made you bring me to Miami, and I made you set fire to the yacht, and then my father—”

“Both of those were my idea, and you aren't your father. Besides, being temporarily crippled has its perks.”

“Such as . . .”

“Hot nurses.”

I roll my eyes.

“Actually, my nurses were mostly old and hairy. Seriously, though, my injuries are the only reason my parents didn't ship me off to military school.”

“You would not do well in military school.”

He snorts. “You're telling me.”

“So instead of getting sent to military school, they let you come to Spain?”

“I told them you'd reform me.”

“In two weeks? Not possible.”

“I know.”

“But you can start by going to my apartment”—I pause to point at the tall, red building across the plaza—“and making me dinner while I work my shift at this shop right there.” I point to the yellow awning.

“I've already been to your apartment. Rosa is probably rifling through my suitcase right now.”

I narrow my eyes. “What makes you so sure I'll let you stay with us?”

“Rosa already said I could,” he says. “And because you're glad I'm here.”

He's got me there. I am. I put my hand over his hand, and he turns it palm up, circling my wrist with his fingers.

The clock tower rings. I stand, pull my key out of my satchel, and give it to him. “I have to go to work.”

“You aren't going to make me stand up to kiss you, are you?”

I blush. There's no reason for the sudden shyness. It certainly isn't the people wandering past in the plaza. This is Spain. Kissing is breathing.

I sit back down, close my eyes, and lean into Marcel's lips. I'm right. Kissing Marcel is breathing. His hands move up my arms, pulling me close, and I'm suddenly sure of what's happened to me. I'm free. I belong to myself. I'm Valentina.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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[acknowledgments tk]

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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