Scar Flowers (36 page)

Simon got up, dropping her a little too roughly to the pillows. Still, he could not walk away. A voice whispered to him that it was only a touch, that she could not feel it and would never know. Wasn’t he already looking, memorizing every contour? Even that, to be able to look at her as long as he liked, as he never could when she was awake. To stay magically hidden in darkness while she filled the screen. Like watching the ocean at noon or late at night: the eye
is dazzled by the light reflected on the surface, and by the meaning underneath.

She was so unguarded like this, naked and
wet; the voice suggested that she might be cold. He pulled the covers over her but stopped as his wrist brushed her hip. Simon knelt by the bed. Cotton, laundry soap, goose down. Fabric stretched taught over the mattress. That was all.
Walk away
. He slipped one hand under the sheet, ran his palm down Leah’s belly. The knotted well of her navel, a stretch of smooth skin, a tangle of coarse curls.

At that touch, all the anger he
had ever felt for her turned back against himself, burning and strangling as he closed his eyes.

How had he come to this place, to these two doors in a dead-end hallway? A door for each of his choices: be the ravished or the ravisher. One certainly led to weakness, to him having to crawl for her amusement. He hoped he could master whatever drooled and snuffled behind the other door. Is this how it felt for her when she ran things—like a barely controlled thirst for more, a jolt of heat to the groin?

He unlocked her restraints, tossed them aside. Numb, he left the room.

Wednesday, September 27, 7:07 p.m.

Simon walked through the gallery, out the wrought
-iron gate and downstairs to the ground-floor foyer. The spotlighted fountain of beseeching mouths rippled and splashed in the corner. Two doors stood opposite each other: one opened onto the yard and one led to the rest of the house.

He unlocked the front door, which opened on a small library with a love seat and two armchairs. A coffee-table art book on the female nude through the ages
lay open to a black-and-white photo of a woman in her sixties. The woman stood in a diner kitchen with a cigarette in her hand, wearing only an apron over a body shaped by childbirth and gravity. Simon scanned the titles on the library shelves—art, philosophy, sexuality, and fiction, includ-ing a few paperback mysteries—but did not touch anything. His damp, blood-stained clothes and the unfamiliar weight of the keys in his hand reminded him that he did not belong here. Toward the lake side of the house were the living and dining rooms, all picture windows and watery vistas. The beech furniture was modern and spare, all curves and angles, and the walls were covered with silk-screened fabric murals of giant leaves and stems. Four thick glass sculptures, like stylized tree trunks, stood sentry in the corners, and each held reservoirs of water filled with long-stemmed calla lilies. Simon touched the nearest sculpture; the sharp edges had been crudely polished, and the depths held cracks, fissures, and bubbles. Fading afternoon light shone in long squares on the living room carpet, making spokes of shadow from the railing of a spiral staircase. Around the corner, a refrigerator clicked and hummed.

Simon passed through the
dining room, where polished metal chairs formed of sculpted bones ringed an oval glass table. A bowl of pears sat on top, their thin skins freckled with tiny bruises, their voluptuous forms piled high like an offering. Someone had left a bendable wire toy, a stylized female stick figure with braids, perched on the rim of the fruit bowl, as if she had climbed up there to look inside. A single white athletic sock and a pair of frayed cutoff jeans hung jauntily from the ribs of one gleaming chair.

He entered
the kitchen, a well-equipped room of brushed stainless steel and glass separated from the rest of the house by a swinging door. A narrow pantry held wine, dried mushrooms, spices, a box of sugary breakfast cereal. Each drawer was pristine, as if everything inside were new: identical nested plastic containers with matching lids and gleaming silverware all from the same set. Inside the refrigerator sat bottles of mineral water, salad greens, half a lemon in a sealed plastic bag with yesterday’s date written on it in felt-tip pen. A backpack full of psychology and mathemat-ics textbooks slouched on the counter next to a set of keys on a
Rocky Horror Picture Show
key ring. These things, along with the toy and clothes in the dining room, he imagined to be Faith’s.

A
metal door studded with rivets stood in the far corner, a light switch beside it; must be the door to the basement. He tried the knob, then saw that the deadbolt was locked. Just as Leah had said.

His glance fell on a shallow silver dish of water on the floor
, and he remembered the dog. Back upstairs, he opened the door to find the animal lying on its side. It raised its head to look at him. Simon took a few steps into the room as the dog sat up. He called its name, but it did not move.

When he picked up the leash, the dog followed him down the stairs and out into the backyard, the long shadows on the lawn drifting with clouds of gnats. It was drawing into dusk.
Magic time
, Brian would call it: the twenty minutes after sunrise and sunset, when the sun’s glare faded and the world was saturated with color. Cool grass bent under Simon’s bare feet, the lawn a carpet sprinkled with patches of tiny pale-blue flowers and white spherical blooms of clover. A motion sensor light, too wan to illuminate anything, flicked on as he made his way to the chain-link pen and put the dog inside. A few yards away, the lake slapped waves against the shore.

It wasn’t until he filled the dog’s food dish from a plastic-lined wooden bin outside the pen that he look
ed back at the house.

The house. Leah was still trapped there, upstairs.
If you never came back, I would at least have that
. The scene in the bath-room replayed itself in flashes, interspersed with the blind sensations of mingling with her in the red room, the catch in her breathing and the small sounds she had made. Not knowing it was her. How he held a chain around her throat, dropped her into the bathtub. Held her under the water, felt her struggle in his arms on the bed. And she had gone to Paul, to save his film—

The ground came up to strike Simon’s knees and palms, and he heaved up something sour and burning. He closed his eyes but could still see her face, looking up at him from below the surface of the water. He crawled away and
lay facedown on the lawn.

No, not just two doors, two choices. Nothing was that simple or that dead-end. He did not have to play by those rules.

The dog sat beside its full dish watching him while the air grew cooler by degrees, raising goose bumps on his arms. The house loomed over him, and the lake grasped at the shore. Prickling grass, bruised and sweet, muffled a rushing hum somewhere underneath him. Like the wind from a passing flock of birds. Simon’s temples and fingertips pulsed in time with his heart, the sort of quiet moment when he could almost feel the earth’s ro-tation and see how small he was, a mote in the eye of the universe. The leaves of the giant cottonwood tree beside the house mur-mured and rattled. Telling rumors it had sucked up from the ground, sung in the voices of a thousand generations.
Conduit. Storyteller.
The thought did not make him laugh this time. Eva’s voice rose to the top of the throng of whispers:
All stories and all people are of the earth. You can’t change the history of your blood. You only have the moment in which to change the present or to just be.

Underground, a great maze of roots, some gnarled and thick as an arm, some as fine as a hair, gathered and linked the buried dead things of the earth.
It amazed him, the depth to which story was imprinted in creation. Reason insisted that a scene in a film was a carefully constructed lie, that actors mimicked true feeling, but several days he had stumbled home mute and ex-hausted from filming
St. Sebastian
, sometimes to bad dreams—or elated, unable to sleep. The subconscious latched onto narrative, real or imagined, and absorbed each event—otherwise no one would cry or laugh in a movie theater. DNA, history, reality, script: all part of the pattern.

This same piece of ground he
lay on had seen a million years of change and would be here long after a tree just like this one exhaled the last of him into the sky. All this time, the intensity of moment that he tried to re-create in film, to pin his name to as a defense against living and dying unnoticed, was right here clamor-ing against his skin. If only he could feel it, like he did now. Like he did when he was with Leah.

It’s
my
life, for me
, Kyra had said years ago.

Simon raised his head. The house pushed its dark bulk against the violet-blue sky, and the cottonwood’s leaves nodded. Faith would be there too, locked out of the
upper part of the house. Faith who had only used him to get at Leah. As he had used her. He stood and wiped his mouth, then drank lukewarm metallic-tasting water from the hose.

Back inside, he passed through the dark living and dining rooms to the kitchen. He unlocked the basement door and pushed it open.

Faith. Still in her Leah costume, she sat on the top step, leaning against the wall—she must have been there this whole time. Below her in the gloom at the foot of the staircase stood two metal doors, one propped open so that he could see inside: a bed, part of a closet door. Damp air seeped out, rising cool from the stairwell.

Faith got to her feet. Her face, luminous with powder and etched with precisely drawn brows, a smudged red mouth, floated in the gloom. She could almost be Leah, copper-haired, her dress glowing with red dragons.

“Where is she,” she said, cracking the silence, her voice toneless.

“Upstairs.”

Faith’s expression did not change. He did not want to open his mouth but had to offer something, even though all he had were stones, dry grass, dead leaves: pleasantries she would not want. “Are you all right?”

“She’s never locked this door before.”
Faith’s chin trembled, and she turned to him as if she were about to protest Leah’s unkindness. Then her gaze fell on the stitches on his arm, his wet clothes. Her wounded expression vanished, and she plucked at the torn hem of his T-shirt. Though she affected a casual manner, her words came out pinched and sharp. “You’re into medical scenes now? Playing doctor?”

“What about you? Dress-up parties and boozy tête
-à-têtes with your cruel mistress must be hard when you’re not allowed to speak unless spoken to.”

She tried to push past him, but he braced the door with his foot. “Faith, wait.”

“Let me in.” The girl threw her weight against the door then fell back. She banged her fist against the metal. “Bastard! I live here.”

“She locked you out, not me.” Technically true, but how cruel was it to keep her out like this?

Only as cruel as they had both been behind Leah’s back last time they met.

The girl surged forward and clawed at his face, sudden as lightning out of a clear sky. Simon pulled back but not before her nail grazed his lip, a quick searing scratch.

“Why should I believe you? Where is she?” A note of fear entered her voice. “Leah!”

He had to tell her something, enough to satisfy her curios
-ity. Simon fumbled in his pocket and his fingers closed on the silk bag—Leah’s necklace. He could show it to Faith as a sign of . . . what?

Not of Leah’s trust, for he had taken it by force. And the girl would run and tell Angel about it. In his other pocket he found two neatly folded squares of paper—the notes
that he had made Leah give him.

“She wrote this to you.” He handed one to Faith, who snatched it away and jerked it open.

“I can’t see in here. Let me out.”

He flicked the stairwell light on. She slid along the door, trying to push into the room, and then she fell still, the only noise her labored breathing followed by the sharp crumpling of paper. Faith cursed and threw the note past his head but took her weight off the door.

“Will you . . . will you ask her to let me talk to her?” She sagged against the wall. When he was silent, she raised her eyes to search his face. “Then will you tell her I didn’t mean it? That I want to stay here, be with her always?”

He said nothing.

“What do you think you’ve won besides the right to be her dog? She’ll be finished with you soon enough, like she is with me.” She snorted, then sniffed. “You don’t think you’re the only one, do you? Angel’s in love. He’s sick over her.”

“What about you?” His chest burned at the thought of Leah and Angel.

Faith looked at the wall behind him and squinted, then shrugged. Her voice thickened. “I hate her. You’ll hate her one day soon too. I’ve seen it before.” She laughed and ran the heel of one shoe against the lip of the step. “I have nowhere to go.”

“Nowhere? No family or friends? What’d you used to do?”

“Nothing. Being my family’s dirty little secret. Their black sheep rebel girl.” Faith plucked at the embroidery on her gown. “She’s got me taking classes at the UW. So I won’t have wasted my time here. Trying to give me reasons not to hate her.”

Her shoulders shook. She stayed silent as she cried, lips pulled back in a grimace and eyes pressed shut. She clapped one hand to her mouth, and a tear ran over her knuckles. The im
-pression that it was Leah crying there in the dark flashed in his limbs as an impulse to reach out, but underneath the girl’s perfume she still smelled like leather jacket and grass-stained jeans. She was not Leah.

“I’m sorry.” The words fell leaden from his lips.

She laughed and wiped her nose with the heel of her hand.

“Don’t be. I’m not crying over
you
.” As though pulling the shreds of a once-fine shawl around herself, Faith flashed him a look over her shoulder as she turned and went downstairs. The heavy door swung shut.

Simon threw the bolt. He bent to pick up the crumpled note, which he had only glanced at before:
Faith, stay with Drew for a few days while I pack your things. I’ll let you know when to come pick them up. Consider our contract cancelled and yourself free. –Leah.

9:16 p.m.

Leah woke as though surfacing from a muddy lake bottom. Something soft pressed down on her legs. Bandages? No, blankets. She opened her eyes on a room strewn with clothes and shoes, an unplugged lamp toppled on the floor. Dusk, or maybe early morning. She did not want to remember.

She would think about the house instead: this was her bedroom. Before the remodeling, it had been the sewing room, and the room next door had belonged to her parents. Her bedroom, in what was now the medical room and part of the gallery, had had a yellow flowered bedspread with ruffles, a beanbag chair, stuffed animals.