Via Dolorosa (11 page)

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t.”

“Nicky—”

“Don’t you blame this on me.”

“I’m not blaming you…”

“Don’t you do it.”

“It’s me,” she said. “It’s me, all of it. I’ll take it all, Nicky. Okay? I’ll
take all of it.”

“I don’t need you to be the martyr here, either,” he said.

“Oh, Jesus Christ…”

“Stop it. And stop calling me Nicky.”

“What do you want from me?”

“What I want,” he said, “is for you to stop asking me that. Goddamn
it, there is nothing I want from you except to be left alone, for
God’s sake. Can you do that? Just for a little while, so I can pause and
think? Okay? Do you think you could try? Please? Please?”

In practically a whisper, Emma said, “I don’t know if that’s the right
thing to do anymore…”

“It is,” he insisted. “Trust me. It is the most right thing in the world
at the moment.”

“I love you, Nicky.”

“Goddamn it, Emma.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I love you,
Nick.
I love you, Lieutenant
D’Nofrio
. I just want you to know that.”

He closed his eyes and set the hotel Bible down on the bed. Before
leaving the room, he pulled his pants back on and went over to the writing
desk and grabbed the bottle of Red Truck by the neck.

—Chapter V—

The backup generators kicked on just as night approached. Nick was up on the ladder, ushering a stroke of green paint in a horizontal line across the bottom half of the mural when, above his head, the light fizzed, popped, and came on. A muffled early evening cheer could be heard from both the lobby and the adjoining ground-floor restaurants. Nick, who had been painting mostly in the dark since after lunch (except for the flashlight given to him by the concierge that he’d propped in place on one of the ladder’s steps, affixed by a length of packaging string), sighed and climbed down the ladder. He wiped his hands on an old rag that smelled of turpentine then picked up the bottle of Red Truck, which was half empty now. He took a drink from the bottle then packed up the rest of his equipment. At one point during the afternoon, the young bellhop had returned (reeking of marijuana) and set Nick’s trunk on another dolly for him. There were plenty of dollies, the bellhop explained, and it made sense just to leave the trunk on this one so Nick could easily roll it back and forth from the lobby to the storage closet and back again at his own discretion. Nick thanked him and, this time, insisted the kid accept a five-dollar tip.

Nick rolled the dolly and the trunk into the storage closet and locked the door. Carrying the wine, he went to the bank of elevators at the other end of the corridor and rode up to the sixth floor. Emma was not in the room.

He set the wine on the nightstand next to the Holy Bible and a couple of colored leaflets then disappeared into the bathroom to take a long, hot shower. The scent of Emma’s body, fresh and undeniably female, still lingered in the bathroom air. He turned the water as hot as it would go, filling the bathroom with steam in an attempt to sweat Emma’s female scent from the air.

He stood naked before the mirror over the sink. His body still looked tight and to be in good shape. His calves were well-defined, his chest broad and masculine and sprouting a vague T of hair at the upper portion of his chest. His waist was narrow and pale—much paler than the rest of him, which was mostly tanned and naturally dark—and his shoulders came out like twin hubs, strong, tanned, and only vaguely pimpled. His arms were not big or overly muscular, but they were certainly good, healthy-looking arms…except, of course, for his right arm, beginning just at the elbow and tracing down the length of his arm to the wrist of his right hand, his palm, and the front and back of his hand. His fingers, too. Tracing down. It wasn’t the arm that was so bad and the arm itself never bothered him. Cosmetics meant nothing to him. There was a deep, puckered, raw-looking tract of pink skin running from the crook of his elbow down to the center of his palm where it dispersed in an eruption of jagged, pink tributaries, the discolored flesh startlingly in evidence, nearly obscene, against the dark pitch of his natural flesh-tone. The scar was not very wide, but it was long and it was visible. But that was all, and the arm itself was not necessarily bad. The hand, though, was not pretty and was not—and never would be—the same. It was not good.

He held it up now and looked at it, holding it far enough away from his face to not truly see everything about it. The last two fingers were misshapen. The soft and tender flesh of his palm was a corrupt and inhospitable terrain, marred by jagged flecks of poorly-healed flesh and bisected by the crooked, railroad track scar that originated at his elbow. Likewise, the back of his hand was ridged with scars, like large ball bearings stitched together just beneath the surface of his skin. He ran his good hand over the back of his ruined hand, fingering the disarrangement and discord of fleshy mounds and bumps and scars. It did nothing for him to feel the skin; he did not necessarily care what it looked or felt like. But making a fist forced him to care, as it took all his effort to bring those twisted and gnarled fingers around and to press them in and together and against the ruined flesh of his palm. Similarly, it was with much difficulty that he was able to bring his thumb around and to close it over his fingers. A fist: something that should have been so goddamn simple…and here he was, learning how to do it all over again. He felt helpless and like a child. And the painting—or, more specifically, the
difficulty
of painting—was only one aspect. There were many others, each
a silent but stealthy reminder, a blow to his character and his pride. Specifically,
he could not lift what he was once able to lift; he could not open
what he was once able to open; he could not hit as he had once been able
to hit. He could not make love to his wife the way he used to, either, and
he recalled one time in particular, hovering above her, sliding his ruined
hand beneath her and pressing his deformed fingers against the small of
her back, attempting to raise her up off the bed but finding it impossible,
and how she relaxed and eased herself down on his hand and his arm,
and the white-hot agony that had exploded and raced, inferno-like, all
through him, causing him to cry out once, sharply, painfully, before he
even knew he was doing so, like a goddamn child. He had never been
more aware of the injury, and had never been more aware of the pieces of
metal and the half dozen twists of steel screws that were in his arm and
in his hand keeping it all together. Most of all, he had never been more
aware of his vulnerability.

But he did not want to think about that now. He did not want
to think about Emma, and being with Emma in that way. Not right
now…

Steam filled the bathroom, clouding over the reflection of his body
in the mirror and creating fresh blossoms of condensed fog on the glass.
He felt the water and made it cooler before stepping beneath the stream
and forcing himself to forget everything around him for the time being.

Later, back in the room, wet and toweling off, Nick peeled back the
shade over the windows and glanced out into the night. Suddenly, and
for whatever reason, he felt trapped, unable to free himself and leave the
room, leave the hotel, leave the island. It was an island, after all; perhaps
to leave would be impossible. And it would not just be leaving—it
would be
escaping
. Could he escape? Perhaps to get away from the hotel
and the island and everything he now—and so recently—associated
with the hotel and the island would be tantamount to an innocent’s
escape from a nightmare and nearly as futile and useless as a pillager’s
salting of the Sahara.

He dressed with little enthusiasm. Looking around, he noticed that
the keys to the Impala were not on the nightstand where he usually left
them. There was nothing there except the Bible, a folded leaflet, and a
rectangular handbill, glossy and colorful. With graffito treble staffs and
the bellbottom S of a hand-drawn saxophone, the handbill advertised
an establishment called the Club Potemkin, which professed itself to be
the island’s premiere venue for live blues and jazz. And tonight’s feature
musician, he saw, was none other than Goat-Man Claxton and His Aged
Trio. Nick let the handbill flutter to the floor. He reached out and picked
up the leaflet. Unfolding it, Nick saw that it was on hotel stationary. It
read in large, damning black letters:

LIMBO!

How low can you go?

Contest tonight in the Riviera Room!

He looked away and found himself helpless, unfortunate, staring at the empty bed jarringly empty, which had been recently attended to by housekeeping. He looked at the pillow and looked at the vague dimple in its center. Had she been sleeping on that pillow just moments ago? Had she perhaps reentered the hotel room while he was in the shower, crawled atop the bed to rest and, no doubt, to think…and then slipped quietly back out once she heard the shower shut off? His wife?

I have got to stop doing this to myself,
he thought.

A half hour later, Nick found himself hunting out a stool at the restaurant bar. The bar and the restaurant itself were not very crowded as the storm had just begun to let up. The more adventurous guests had donned thick, waterproof coats and hats, having grown determined following two days of boredom and inactivity to champion the waning storm. Nick did not mind the silence. He selected a stool at the bar, uninterested in sitting very close to any of the other patrons.

“Well,” Roger said, sliding down the bar. “Looks like we survived the worst of it.”

“I guess that’s lucky for some of us,” Nick said.

“It’s always sad, no matter how many times it happens a season, when the bar empties out and the guests go back out into the island.”

“They’ll always be back, though,” Nick said. “Eventually.”

“Scotch and water?”

“Thanks.”

“Just so you know, Mr. Granger left an open bar tab for you with me. I’m supposed to put all your drinks on it.”

“Damn it,” Nick said. “Don’t do that.”