Scar Flowers (35 page)

“I thought she could find out what you were thinking. Then I’d know what to do.”

“And it didn’t matter how she felt about me, did it?”

A crease formed between her brows
, and she spoke deliberately, as if he might not understand. “She seemed interested in you anyway, and it was a public place. I didn’t think she’d mind going, no.”

He couldn
’t help laughing. “And you won’t answer me about today because you have to protect her?”

She
looked blankly at him.

“
You really are blind, aren’t you?” he said.

“
To what? So she had a crush, but . . .” Each word lost momentum, until she fell silent. The color drained from her face.

“
And the session today was her reward, wasn’t it?”

“Wait, wait,” she said under her breath and tried to shake her head as if to clear it, but his grip on her hair prevented her. She swallowed, started to speak, then laughed, a forced hiccup of sound.
“I see. I see. Well.”

Leah turned the corners of her mouth up in an attempt at a smile. Did she really not know about him and Faith? A trickle of water, thin as the track of a tear, glistened on
her cheek. A slow feeling of sickness entered his bloodstream, seeping in from his bones. Something ugly lurched inside him, reminded him that once he let go, he had to leave.

She must have felt her ability to direct him slipping away.

“What are you waiting for?” A note of scorn tinged her voice. “Aren’t you going to show me what you’re going to do with me?”

The breathy notes of a train whistle sounded far away, the clang of a crossing bell.
It reminded him of Europe, of another world in a different season, maybe winter. From where he knelt at the side of the tub, leaning on his injured arm, his weight pulled at his stitches. The front of his jeans and torn shirt had grown cold and heavy with water. There were no answers here. He rocked back on his heels.

“All this time you’ve had to trust me.” Her voice softened. The words echoed in the small tiled space around them. “I should have to trust you now.”

A mask beneath a mask beneath a mask. That’s all he would find.

He would let her go return to the frayed storyline of his own life.

As he withdrew, Leah caught the webbing of his thumb between her teeth, implacable when he tried to disengage himself. Green eyes, mascaraed lashes spiked together with moisture.

“What do you want?” Simon tried to stand, and she bit down to tighten her hold.

She let go this time as he pulled away.

“To trust you.”

Trust? He wanted to laugh, but the expression on her face prevented him—determined and scared, as though she were plead-ing for her life. She nudged her face back underneath his palm. She wanted him to push her into the water. Leah closed her eyes and pulled his hand under the surface, her lips soft against his fingers.

Bubbles rose from her mouth. Her ribs arched and her head sank, her features lost in the copper swirl of her hair. Her eyes opened, the seconds ticking by, then the pupils rolled back. Slowing pulse, her hands balled into fists and then loosening. Ophelia amid a sea
of flowers, Eurydice descending. Simon did not realize he had leaned so far forward until his breath sent ripples over Leah’s face, rings of warped magnification.

He was drowning her.

Simon jerked his hand back to pull her up. Water ran down the ropes of her hair, which opened underwater into waving tendrils like beds of kelp.

“Don’t.” He twisted his hand away, but her teeth held it. One more lungful of air and then she pulled down again, a ridiculous struggle with him trying to stop her. Simon pushed against her forehead to free himself but still she clung, feet braced against the sides of the bathtub and clasped hands pushing skyward at the end of their lengths of chain. When her strength gave out
, he fell forward, a confused few seconds of contact with her ribcage and right breast, then he came up sputtering.

“Fucking crazy,” he muttered, lifting her head so that she could not try it again. “You’re crazy.” Wasn’t he trying to save her? Did she want to die?

Leah unlocked her jaw, and a crescent of pain throbbed on his hand where she had held him. Her breath came in ragged gasps, like an animal crashing through brush.

“Trust me then,” she said.” If you don’t trust yourself.”

“What, I’m supposed to hurt you? Kill you? Just so you can feel you’re running things?”

“I know what I’m doing. Why can’t you believe that you do too?” She opened her mouth, then closed it, too late to hide how her chin quivered. “
I’ve made sure I never have to trust anyone anymore. Do you think—” she cleared her throat, swallowed. “Do you think you mean so little that it doesn’t matter to me that it’s you . . . You who’re . . .”

“That I’m what? What? Why won’t you talk to me, if you trust me so much?

“Talk.” Her lip curled, but the anger did not seem directed at him. “More words.”

“Words would be a start.” Why did white people invent their language
s and then refuse to trust them? That was the damage done by lies and half-truths, broken promises. Some of them her lies. Hers and Paul’s. “It’s my turn now, and I want to know all about you, like you know about me. Your fantasies, your lovers, your life.”

Her eyes grew hard. Yes, there it was. The anger was for him after all.

“You know enough already. Let me up.” The water was warm but she shivered.

“
I’m not through yet.”

She tried to sit up
, but he would not let her. Leah muttered something. A splash followed her movement as she pushed away from him with her feet.

“What was that? I didn’t hear you.”

“You,” she said, suddenly cold. “My lover. This afternoon.”

You.

It had been Leah after all. Part of him said
Yes, that fits
;
yes, I knew that
, but the rest of him wanted everything to freeze so that he could catch up, go back to the way things had been before.

“Why.” The word sounded odd to him, dull with repetition.

“If you never came back, I would at least have that.”

Her words entered his ears but carried no meaning. A weary anger, relentless as a dog barking, throbbed in his skull: Why had she lied? Why had she said nothing when he called her name in the middle of it, when she knew he wanted it to be her? As if she did not want to admit him, his very existence.

You . . . this afternoon.
He saw her again in the hotel lobby, her face drawn, walking with her head down. He pressed his fore-head to the cool marble of the bathtub to wait for his brain to clear. Water dripped from a dozen places in the room.

“
Teach me.” Her voice was small and distant, a child’s voice. The voice of something he had killed in a dream, that had come back alive. For a moment, he was away looking down at them both, where they lay crumpled like dirty clothes.

“Teach you what.” His voice came out a croak.

“You can still feel.”

A bark of laughter escaped him. What vast kingdom of accumulated wisdom did she think he had, if he was here now like this?

“And you want that?”

Her voice shrank to a whisper. “Yes.”

“First I want to know the rest. You know all about how Faith is in bed; you showed me that today. How? Do you sleep with her?” He thought of the two wineglasses, the discarded underwear on the bedroom floor.

“Fuck you.” She tried to twist away from him again.

“I’m not your teacher. Not a shaman or a guru, or . . . what’d you call it? A conduit, here to give you catharsis. I deserve answers.” He loosened his grip and asked again: “Do you sleep with her?”

“Yes.” Leah kept her head turned to the wall.

“And Angel?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, I
fuck
him. Are you happy now?” She writhed away from him, a loop of wet hair clinging to her face.

“And Paul? I saw you meet the little blackmailer in
that hotel. I was in the lobby when you left.”

At first he thought she was crying, the slow twisting of her body as it closed in on itself, pulling against her bonds. Her words came out shaking, her lips pulled back in a smile of pain or maybe laughter.

“Jesus,” she whispered, hugging her knees. Water leaked from the faucet in a slow series of drops that hung shivering, growing, before they ripened and fell. “He was a client. Black-mailing me. He was going to make sure no one released your film. So I went there to give him what he asked for. To save your work.”

Drawn and quartered. He
had seen an illustration in a history book of how it was done: four chains, one for each limb. It had always fascinated him, and now he understood it, only in his case it was a neat divide right down the middle, into two pieces, not four. Not painful, just a flood of ugliness, an unwanted glimpse of what he was capable of: violence, playing at humiliation games like a small boy torturing animals.

“What’s this all about? What do you want? Say it.” He turned toward her but could not make himself meet her eyes as he slid toward a precipice of exposure. She must not want to give in and go there either
. She turned her head toward the wall.

“You want to trust me, you can start by trusting yourself.” Simon stood.

She was quiet, still kneeling, eyes aimed at the ground. He left her there while he went back to the medical room, picked up the bottle of tranquilizer and a syringe. Dangerous, what he wanted to do. Doubts crowded his brain, but he pushed them aside.

When he returned, she was still there in the bathtub. He told her to come out.

“I have a truth test for you.” He sat on her bed. “You’re going to tell me what dose I should give you of this, enough to keep you out for a few hours, and we’ll see what it really does. If it is a tranquilizer or not.”

If she had lied about the contents of the bottle or whether she had used it before, she would have to confess.

He motioned for her to join him. She hesitated, maybe because to reach him she had to crawl over the bed; the ankle chain was too short to allow her to walk around. Her chains clinked as she placed her knees and palms on the bed.

Leah trembled as he pulled her back against him, her head on his shoulder, and tucked her wrist between his knees to expose the inside of her arm. Her wet hair soaked his already damp shirt. When he ripped open an alcohol packet
, she spoke.

“Can I see the label?”

He held up the bottle, and Leah nodded. Her gesture reminded him of a little girl forced to trust an adult who had lied to her. But who had lied? Not him.

He had given animals injections before, when he lived with his father. It should be pretty much the same: Plunger depressed, poke the tip through the rubber barrier, and start filling.
Make sure there are no air bubbles, or you might kill her.
The thought gave him another moment of doubt, but there was no one to stop him and no rules left. If he thought too much about any of this, he would not be able to continue.

“How much more?” he asked, holding the needle where she could see it.

“There. Stop.”

After her drowning trick in the bathtub, for all he knew the bottle held poison, and she was too proud to admit it. She
lay against his chest, tense but not panicked, as he put the bottle down on the table and swabbed her arm. The smell of her hair, shampoo mixed with incense, filled his mouth. Most of the freckles on her arms were reddish brown, but a few were stark white, paler than the rest of her skin. He leaned forward so that her ear pressed the side of his face. Leah tried to pull away but did not have enough leverage.

“When I put your dog outside, does she need to be fed?” he asked. There—the question distracted her enough
so that she calmed a little. She wasn’t in mortal danger.

“Yes. Her food’s in a shed behind the dog run.” Still, her voice was a wisp. Like he had many times in this house, she would be wondering what would happen while she was helpless, imag
-ining things far worse than he could ever devise. A trick he had learned from her.

He poised the syringe over her skin as he looked for a vein, but it wasn’t until the needle went in that she tried to wrench free, an undisciplined reflex of panic. Simon held her firm until her head lolled, eyelids drooping as her mouth went slack. She tried to form a word but only managed to push out a gasp, and then she relaxed in his arms like a lover. Was it his hand that reached out to trace the outline of her temple and cheek, to touch her lips, or was it the intruder’s, the one who grew warm at the thought of her
laid open to him? It must have been the last thing she felt as she went under.

He put the needle down and listened to her breathe, then said her name. No response. She was heavier than he expected, limbs slack and fluid. He went to lift her up so
that he could ease himself out from underneath her but stopped when he felt the underside of her breast against his hand. The desire to touch was too strong, to trace the nipple and watch it come alive in response. That part of her was not asleep yet. His hand moved on its own, to cover and hold what it had found.