Scar Flowers (37 page)

Back then Justine woke her every morning, cigarette in one hand,
a Bloody Mary in the other. Leah could still see the pair of black-and-white photographs, professionally framed, that once hung on the stairwell. The one on the left showed her as a toddler, rapt in her crib, her face turned toward the streaming source of light outside the frame. The image on the right, taken moments later, showed her crying, with eyes screwed shut and mouth open, a shining track of tears on her cheek. “How beautiful you were, even when you were unhappy!” her mother said when she looked at the photographs. “I was so proud of you.”

Leah had treasured the photos until her mother told her how she got them. “Your father and I came into your room after your nap, to let you out of the crib. I took the first picture, then we pulled the shades back down again and said
nighty night and started to leave. How you cried! Like we’d abandoned you at the North Pole.”

The memory stood out for the fact that her mother and father did something together. Everything else she recalled pitted her and her brother against Justine, or her and her brother against her father. When had her parents’ marriage fallen apart? It must have been before her brother was out of diapers, yet they were probably still together.

She tried to raise her head, but it was as heavy as a stone. Tranquilizer. The afternoon’s events sprung to memory. Making love to Simon in the red room, too frightened to feel it. Her argument with Faith. Like Angel, the girl would be gone now, and perhaps Simon along with her. She had no one left to pair up with against anyone else. Hadn’t she used Angel and Faith as proxies, with Simon and with others?

Just like her family.

Leah got out of bed and walked unsteadily to the bathroom to splash her face, rivulets trickling down her arms to the floor. The overhead light that flicked on flashed blinding white, and she winced and turned it off.

Had she always been like this? Believing that gestures meant something other
than what they seemed, from staged baby photos to birthday gifts returned to the store as punishment—
I give you this now, but I can take it away at any moment
.

Some of her wiring she could not change. At
seven, she grew warm contemplating comic-book heroes struggling in their bonds, as they helplessly watched some diabolical villain’s trap close in on them. At eight, she asked her cousin to tie her up during a game of Cowboys and Indians—after he refused to let her tie him. No one taught her that.

Gestures
. . . Were Simon’s actions what they seemed?

Yes. From the beginning, he had
had reason to suspect her intentions, not the other way around. He had been consistent. She gazed into her own heavy-lidded eyes in the mirror. As she reached up to push her hair back from her face, she realized her restraints were gone, along with the padded shackle attached to the bed.

He must have taken them off her as she slept.

What for?

She had slept for hours. Plenty of time to do whatever he wanted.

But he had pulled her from the water. Words could be said by anyone for any reason, basic actions could have any number of intentions behind them despite the surface meaning. Visceral responses were true. He did not want to hurt her.

Leah twisted the taps shut. Simon had not lied, with word
s or otherwise. But had she done to Angel what her family did to her? Made him dance at the end of a string and, if he protested, made him doubt his own perceptions? The very thing she swore, after Luis, that she would never do. Hardening her heart, thinking he was never enough, so that she could not desire him even when she wanted to.

She returned to the bed and buried herself under the covers.

9:03 p.m.
 

In the dining room, the glow of daylight leach
ed from the walls. Shadows lengthened on the lawn and a splash sounded from the pool, followed by a flash of ruby fins. The spiral staircase in the living room twisted like smoke but was cool to the touch as Simon climbed up.

Back in Leah’s office, he read the names on the shelf full of alphabetized report folders: Chris, Jim, Rodney. There were dozens of them, filled with pages covered in black ink. He switched on the snaking silver desk lamp and sat in the circle of its halogen glow at the desk, which had razorblades inside its glass top. The leather office chair creaked under him as he turned the pages. Maybe he would tell her what he had seen in this room after his second visit here, through the gap in the curtain.

He skimmed the scant pages in Rodney’s file: notes on the equipment used during domination sessions and comments: “Welts okay; no bruises,” and “feet, shoes, PVC, some cross-dressing.” The dates indicated that she had been doing this for at least seven years. There was no mention of how or why she had started, no personal comments. The folders read like what they were: records of a business. A few of the scenes she described were comparable to the night in her hotel room in L.A. and his first visit here, but the similarity to his experience ended there. He found nothing about her having sex with any of her visitors. Though he had intended to read everything in order, he soon found himself skimming entire notebooks to find recent entries or mentions of Faith or Angel.

There was nothing about him, no folder with his name on it. Faith was mentioned rarely, if indeed she was the “F” alluded to. Simon emptied the slotted cubbyholes in Leah’s desk and found an address book, some letters, an envelope full of old photographs: of the house when the cottonwood was smaller, a few posed shots of a much-younger Leah in ballet costumes, alone or with
a middle-aged woman. He studied the images to see if he could find the Leah he knew in the face of that ballerina. Most of her self-possessed bearing was there, except for her shoulders, rounded forward with adolescent self-consciousness. Her eyes looked larger, liquid and wary as a deer’s. As if she expected some hurt at any moment.

Simon put the folders back and emerged into the long dark
ness of the gallery, haunted with muffled shapes pressed against the walls. A patch of brightness from some neighbor’s house or streetlight fell from the skylight, edged with the shadows of leaves. He entered the tiled room, where he pulled off his damp clothes and showered. Though he tried to keep it clear of the spray, his injured arm throbbed and stung when the hot water hit it. There were no towels. Dripping, he eased himself into his jeans but left his ruined shirt on the floor. Leah’s ring of keys rode in a lump in his pocket.

He could go back into the office and read the folders again, but the photograph of Leah the ballerina would still be propped up on the desk where he had left it, staring at him as if it knew
that he was stalling. It was long past time to check on Leah, and Faith still might go looking for Angel to bring him back here and confront them both.

The light in the bathroom—which had not been on when he left—threw a bar of yellow across the carpet and the foot of her bed. Clothes and books
lay strewn across the floor next to the bed-side lamps, still tipped on their sides and unplugged. Leah lay under the covers, her back to him.

He sat down on the edge of the bed. “Sasha’s been fed. She’s in her pen.”

Leah traced her closed eyelids with her fingers before opening them. Reflexively, she reached toward her collarbone as though to grasp something, but her fingers closed on nothing. He thought of the silk pouch that he had taken from her.

“Did you find what you were looking for?”
She felt around in the drawer for a lighter, touched it to the candles on the nightstand, and let it fall.

“Some of it. But there’s more I want to ask you about.”

“Faith.” Her speech was slurred, coated with sleep, so that he could not tell if she were asking a question or addressing someone she thought was in the room with her.

So the girl was the first thing on Leah’s mind.

“I gave her your note. She wasn’t happy about it.” He watched a candle flame shudder and dance, then added, “No, not Faith. I want to know about you.”

Her back to him, Leah pulled her feet away.

“How old were you in those pictures? In your desk.”

“You looked through my desk?” She raked her hair back from her face, then hugged her shoulders. “Seventeen. That was forever ago.”

Simon traced the lump of a seam at his knee with his fingernail. “I’m sorry about Paul.
I never would have wanted you to give him anything.”

Leah flexed her hands so that her nails pressed into her arms. “What I gave him ended up not being what he bargained for,” she said. “He didn’t get what he wanted.”

“Do you want me to make him regret it?”

“I think he already does. He didn’t ask for
. . . Well. It could have been much worse. He thinks he loves me. I pity him more than anything.”

Simon pulled the necklace out of his pocket, held it out. After a moment
, Leah closed her hand around the silk pouch, then set it on the nightstand, where the cord made long, swaying double shadows against the wooden table. She half-turned toward him, her eyes still fogged, like smoked green glass worn by the tide.

“It’s not pity that you feel for Angel, is it?” he asked. A lamp from a boat on the lake sent bands of light tilting through the blinds, across the wall.

She rolled away from him and lay without speaking. He stretched out on his back next to her, hands propped under his head. Patterns slid across the ceiling, to send reflections chasing after each other. All he had left to do was give her her keys back, collect his boots from the foyer, and go. After he rested just a moment longer. In the wake of everything that had just happened, the remorse that he had thought would prevent him from even talking to her was not there; he felt absurdly lightheaded, his stomach glowing with warmth. In the flickering candlelight, everything appeared new again.

“Why do you want to know about him?”

Even the mention of Angel did not bother him. “Because he matters to you. Do you love him?”

Her words came out more sad than surprised. “Not in the way I should.”

“Does he love you?”

“Yes.”

From where she lay, facing the windows, her eye held a single pinprick of reflected light in the hollow under her brow.

“What do you see in him?”

“Strength. Loyalty. Beauty.”

Even more odd, that she should be talking about such things. All this time he had had no idea who or what she cared about.

“Tell me about him.”

That
seemed to make her wary.

“You said you sleep with him; how’d it start?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Leah pressed her forehead to her arm. “Except to say that he left me a couple of days ago.”

The elation that rose in his chest was wrong, inappropriate, but he could not contain it. His brain warned him to leave her alone, but his body had caught scent of her, remembered their afternoon in the velvet room.
He put his hand on her shoulder, which rolled loosely away from him. She stayed limp as he gathered her back against him so he could speak directly into her ear.

“If you’d rather, you can ask me something, and I’ll answer you. Then we’ll come back to my question.”

She gazed out the window, her expression blank. But her heart thumped against his chest. She had heard him.

“You were there too this afternoon. I didn’t imagine it.” He pulled the blankets out from between them
and ran his hand over her shoulder, under her hair, which had dried in a bracken of curls. Surprising, how slight she felt next to him. “You offered me something today. Why? Besides power.”

The silence lasted so long
that he almost forgot what he had asked her. But the tapping against his chest had not slowed down.

“Because it’s a satisfying way of enjoying male beauty. It’s precise and unlimited in the delivery of sensation, easy to control. You can keep a man on the brink for a long time.” Her words came out cool and polished, like the Leah he was used to. She looked over her shoulder at him. “You see? Power.”

“And did you offer that to Angel too?”

“Sometimes, yes.” Another pause. “He thought I was debasing myself too. Like you did. When I tried the first night, he didn’t want me to.”

“You like giving pleasure?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And who gives you pleasure?”

She turned her head away just enough that her hair fell forward to hide her eye.

“Was it him?”

She made a sound between a laugh and sigh. Freckled shoulder blades and an articulated spine, partly concealed by coils of hair. “I never really let him.”

“Then who?”

Silence drifted past, as Leah folded and unfolded the same few inches of sheet.

“You,” she finally said.

He had never seen her vulnerable. Something kept him aloof to watch the conflict stretch across her face, her body, like clouds moving through the sky. He tucked the hair back from her cheek; the skin around her eyes had grown translucent, ripe with tears. A crack in the armor opening up to reveal her shivering inside, angry at the light filtering in. Her features reflected a flash of rage or fear,
and then she was waiting, uncertain.