Kiss Kill Vanish (5 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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S
even minutes.

I'm under my synthetic blanket, fully clothed, still shivering even though I've been back from the cemetery for over an hour.

I could show up at Soupe au Chocolate late. Jacques will wait, pretending to be just locking up whether I'm there right at midnight or twenty minutes after. He gave himself away with the box of chocolate; he doesn't hate me. He might even be nice.

Lola says niceness is a liability, which explains why she rarely attempts it. She's catty with friends and cruel to guys, who are revoltingly eager to lick up whatever garbage she tosses their way. She treats them like scum and they love her for it, until she's done with them, and then they love Ana, who thinks she's won because she ends up with the prize, until even the nice guys get tired of her neediness and slink away. Poor Ana.

Lola probably doesn't miss me—she's too self-consumed to miss anybody—but Ana might.

I pull the blanket over my head, but that doesn't help. It's thick but weightless, so I can't breathe and I'm not any warmer. It was a dollar at the thrift shop where I bought everything I own. The only other blanket cost four dollars, and I needed that extra three bucks for the boots fund.

Six minutes.

Leaving Key West with nothing but a stolen mandolin and my passport was stupid. I see that now. But I had rage and terror to grapple with, and I'd never felt so much of both at the same time. I couldn't risk going back to the house in Miami first. Emilio or my father might already be there.

The four-hour drive from Key West to Miami airport felt like ten minutes. I guess I was shaking and crying so hard that time melted down into a puddle. I stopped once to get gas (the last time anything was charged to Valentina Cruz's Platinum Visa), and a second time to hock my diamond earrings and tennis bracelet. I only got two thousand for both, which still makes me cringe. I know for a fact they were worth five times that, at least, but I was desperate, a pawnshop's dream customer.

During the rest of that drive, still shaking and crying, gripping the steering wheel, I had the strangest, clearest thought: I wondered if my mother had been shaking and crying when she left too.

Five minutes.

Lola and Ana hate her. I should too, but she was never quite real enough to hate. They remember the holes she left, remember missing her. But she didn't leave a hole in me—I was only a baby. I grew up with nannies who cuddled and scolded and bandaged, while subtly planting the ideas that have always protected me:
What kind of woman does that? Who would abandon three daughters and a husband and all that money? She must have been sick, mentally unbalanced.

But now that I've fled too, I wonder. When did she find out what art really was?

My phone buzzes. It's a text from Lucien.

   
Tomorrow at 2. I'll bring clothes. Don't wear makeup.

I shiver. It's purely reflexive, involuntary as gagging.

Four minutes.

The chocolate. I need it. But it's under the cot, and I don't want to get out of my synthetic-fiber cocoon until I have to. Only the junk bars are left: the hazelnut, which I'll eat even though hazelnuts taste like sweaty socks, because they're perfectly good calories and food is expensive; and the white chocolate, which I'll trade for real food the next time I smell something palatable being prepared by a roommate. Or I'll melt it down and use it as a moisturizer.

Maybe Jacques will give me more tonight.

Food costing so much—that goes on the embarrassing list of things I should have known. That and things getting dirty. Who knew that you have to clean constantly just to keep filth from swallowing you? Probably most people, which is why the list is embarrassing. But it's not my fault that the various nannies and housekeepers and paid mother-replacements did everything, and that none of them thought teaching us to cook, clean, or do laundry was part of their jobs. I guess it wasn't. And is it terrible that I never wanted to know?

Three minutes.

I'm getting what I deserve now, sharing a nasty little bathroom with five other people, living on generic-brand ramen noodles and pity chocolate. I learned to wash my clothes—my ratty secondhand clothes—at a Laundromat with no English instructions. I'm proud of that. It was humiliating, fumbling around with the knobs and the quarters and the detergent, but I figured it out with the help of a Korean woman who didn't speak English or French or Spanish but knew what she was doing and felt sorry for me.

Nobody felt sorry for Valentina Cruz. There was nothing to pity, except maybe ignorance. Up until three months ago, I was too busy spending dirty money on vintage couture to stop and wonder about the things that had always been. I grew up with Papi's business associates coming and going at all hours—young guys like Emilio, driving Porsches and wearing Gucci, happy to joke and flirt with Lola when Papi wasn't around, and older men with the same dangerous toys and fewer smiles. But the problem with growing up with a thing is that you never question it. It's normal.

Until nothing is normal.

Two minutes.

I should just leave now.

But it's too late. I'm already thinking about Emilio's closet.

From the crack, I saw Emilio let them in, my father and the man I recognized from the docks the day before. I remembered his sparse beard, his sloping shoulders and sagging belly. He'd talked to Papi and Emilio while Lola and Ana scoured the marina for guys.

From the closet he looked different than he had at the docks. His face was the color of cigar ash, and when he spoke I could hear the trembling. My father's face was full of things I'd never seen there before. Disgust. Cruelty.

They spoke in Spanish, their voices too muffled for me to decipher their words, even when I pressed my face right up against the crack. And then the talking stopped. My heart thundered louder, faster, fuller, because it knew something about that silence that my mind didn't. It had to have been my heart that told my eyes to look down.

But I couldn't.

Papi nodded to Emilio and crossed his arms over his chest. The man started whimpering, and I felt the
why?
swirl faster and faster inside of me. Why would Papi and this man come to the yacht at two a.m., and to Emilio's room, and why was my father staring at Emilio like that?
Look down, look down, look down.
My heart thundered it, but I couldn't.

Papi's eyes commanded something.
Prove yourself.
Yes, that.

One minute.

I can't do this anymore. I'm not waiting for the alarm.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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I
'm late again, but Jacques waits. Of course he waits. He scowls, complains, drags a chair I haven't seen before—a soft, high-backed, brown leather dream—from the back office over to my radiator. And before he goes, he leaves another box of chocolate for me.

“Thank you,” I say.

“You look terrible.”

“Just tired.”

“Maybe you should sleep.”

“Maybe,” I say.

He shrugs and pulls gloves over his hands, a hat over his head.

Again, I have to wait while he warns me against every possible danger, but it's worth it. The longer I play here alone, the more intimate the music becomes. It seems unreal to think that I used to play outside the Metro where anyone could hear. Where Lucien could see.

But Jacques does leave, and once my fingers are pulling at strings, I'm somewhere else. The music teases the real Emilio back to life. Like magic. And the other Emilio, the one with the floating arm and tight grip, the one with the dead eyes, doesn't even exist. I'm plucking from sweet memories only.

Like the night near the end of the summer that my father went into Key West for drinks with old friends and stayed overnight at their home, and Emilio and I had the deck to ourselves.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” His voice tickled my ear, making it hard to concentrate on the words. Cocooned in his arms, in a blanket, wrapped in a breezeless night, we were smaller than small, nearly invisible. Just specks on a boat, two heartbeats. The ocean could roll and swallow us if it wanted to. Thick black mist hid the stars and the moon, clung to my skin, made his skin cling to mine. We were waiting for the rain.

“I'm not grown up to you?” I teased.

He kissed my shoulder. “You know what I mean.”

“I want to do what my dad does.”

Did I feel his arms stiffen, or is that a detail my memory added later? I wish I knew, but this memory is too well worn to be purely truth, so maybe I've slipped that in since. Maybe he was only silent, waiting for me to continue.

“I want to buy art,” I said.

“You want to be like him.”

I did, but admitting it seemed childish. “Art makes me happy.”

“Of course,” he said softly. Sadly, I think. Yes. That detail is definitely true.

I turned my head and spoke into his neck. “Art and you.”

There. The words out, I suddenly felt the urge to move, to wiggle out, to fidget, but the weight of his arms and his silence kept me still as the seconds passed.

Finally, he spoke. “If your father had any idea about us—”

“Stop. You know he's not coming back till tomorrow. Why are you so serious tonight?”

When he wouldn't answer I tried to tickle him, but he caught my wrists and wouldn't laugh, so I nuzzled his neck until he caved and started kissing me. And then, of course, I forgot about whatever it was he wouldn't say. What he whispered between kisses was enough.
“You're mine.”

His. That hadn't occurred to me. Beneath my name and my clothes and my skin, I'd always belonged to just myself. Being his was better.

I tipped my head back onto his shoulder. The first drops of rain wet my cheeks. Neither of us said anything else.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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L
ucien's grim reaper has cleavage. Of course. Why wouldn't she.

I discover this disturbing fact while squeezing into the charcoal velvet dress in the back of his Range Rover, fogging up the windows with exasperated growls and strings of expletives. It's way too tight and has a scoop neck the size of China. Hopefully his grim reaper is supposed to be scowling.

I rub a circle in the window fog with my fist and peer out. Lucien is setting up the easel, shifting it an inch right, an inch left, an inch right again, looking back and forth between two crows on the naked tree branch above him. Naturally, he's wearing head-to-toe wool—coat, scarf, hat, and gloves. It is, after all, winter. Nobody with a brain would be exposing a China-sized stretch of skin to the elements.

I grit my teeth and turn to the next task: bleaching myself. Staring up from my lap is a picture of the cadaver-faced model I'm supposed to copy. Her skin is geisha white. My Spanish mother and Colombian father didn't make pale anything, but today, apparently, I'm defying genetics by four or five shades because Lucien commands it. I check the cosmetics box he brought and find foundation shade 00, Palest Ivory. At least it's not Halloween face paint. I slather it on.

Next I paint thick black eyeliner across both lids and add smoky red shadow so it looks like an anemic poppy is blooming around each eye. Once the fake eyelashes are glued into place and my lips have disappeared beneath concealer, there's nothing left to do. I stare into the mirror to examine the whole.

Horrifying.

I pull the cloak over my shoulders, the hood over my head, and tie the gray satin ribbon at my neck. It's heavy. I feel weak under its weight, like hands are pushing down on me.

Snow crunches beneath my feet as I make my way toward Lucien. The crows fly away.

Lucien examines my body and face with fascination. “Perfect. Disturbing, but exactly how I envisioned.”

I set my eyes over his shoulder, on the sharp edges of a mausoleum in the distance. I'd hate for my body to be laid in something so austere to freeze for eternity. I'd rather be cremated and have my ashes tossed into tropical waters. But then I remember the man from the docks and imagine the splash his corpse must have made after Emilio and Papi heaved it over, and my blood chills. Maybe not tropical waters.

“Cold already?” Lucien asks.

“What?”

“You're shivering.”

“Oh.” I make myself stop. “Where do you want me?”

He points to a spot beneath the tree, around six feet from the trunk. I find it and face forward. “Here?”

“A step backward.”

I obey.

“A little to the left.”

I obey.

“No,
my
left, and turn to face the tree.”

I obey, I obey, I obey, shuffling one step at a time, until he takes a seat in his chair and says, “Good enough. Now look at me without turning your body.”

I almost obey. I stare over my right shoulder, not at Lucien, but through the stained glass of the cathedral behind him and into memories of home. The massive window facing Biscayne Bay, framed by two stained-glass panels, stretching from floor to ceiling. As a little girl, I thought magic flowed through those slices of color and light. Why else would the room glow like that? How else could I feel rainbows wash through me?

“The scythe!” Lucien growls, chasing the colors from my thoughts. He drops his brush and jogs back to the car, pulling his knees up as he runs but still breaking through layers of crusted snow with each stomp. A surge of some emotion I don't even recognize rises up my throat. He's such an idiot. I think I pity him.