A Boat Made of Bone (The Chthonic Saga) (28 page)

She heard the sound of labored breathing. Her eyes scanned the room. In a far, shadowed corner, she saw him—knees pulled up to his chest and staring vacantly into the middle distance.

“Will,” she rushed to his side. 

“Kate. It’s good to see you, Kate,” he said, but he kept staring straight ahead. He wouldn’t look at her.

“Will,” she whispered, feeling awkward about interrupting whatever kind of moment he was having. “I—I was worried you weren’t here.” Something was bothering him, but she didn’t want to embarrass him by prying. “Did you—did you have to wait for me long?”

He shook his head slowly. “No.”

Her knees began to hurt from crouching, so she sat down beside him with her back against the wall. He was almost catatonic and she began to worry. “Are you—I’m—um, do you want me to go? Do you want to be alone?” she asked, hoping he’d say no, afraid he’d say yes.

He looked at her suddenly, and she saw the desperation in his eyes. “No, Kate, please stay.” He took her hand and didn’t let go. 

Thank goodness.
“Where are we?” she whispered.

“I didn’t mean to bring us here,” he said, shaking his head.

“Where is here? You don’t control it, do you?” That was a first. Kate hadn’t thought about who controlled their entry points, until now.

He hesitated and coughed a little. “This is where my mother worked.”

She laughed, then realized she shouldn’t. He was serious. Duh. “What is it, a hotel? Was she a housekeeper, because there’s no shame in that.”

“She wasn’t a housekeeper, Kate.”

“Did she work in the kitchen?”

“This was her room. She worked in this room.”

Kate looked around, wondering what sort of profession would work in a bedroom. A bedroom with so many mirrors. On the ceiling.
Oh. Wait.
“Oh,” she said, not wanting to name it, not wanting to shame him more.

“Yeah.”

That explained a lot. “But . . . Wait. Did you live here too?”

He shook his head and sniffed. “My dad died when I was five and my mom had no job, no skills, no income. We were destitute. When she began working here, the Madame let me stay in a little house that was next to it and the women took turns watching me.”

“Was it—was it horrible?” Her gut sank thinking about a little, innocent boy being taken care of by a bunch of prostitutes. Living in a place where less than fifty feet away women were being raped, basically. She knew they
chose
to do it, just like cattle chose to become Big Macs. Not that women were the same as cattle, but there were distinctions between how people made choices.

“Not so bad until I began to understand what was happening in the big house,” he answered. “I would see men coming and going as I played outside. They’d smile and wave at me, some of them, and some of them even began to bring me little knickknacks. A bouncy ball, a yo-yo. When I got older, I hated them. I swore I’d never be that kind of man.”

“You’re not—you weren’t,” she said.

“No,” he whispered. “I was worse.”

“That’s a bit melodramatic, Will. You were not. You were a decent man,” she told him, not knowing for sure if it was true. “Besides, it’s over now.”

“I’m not just being dramatic, Kate. I was. I was awful. I never let anyone get close to me. I kept everyone at a distance. And I used people for my own ends.” He was staring at a dresser vanity pushed up against the wall about eight feet away. There was a silver hair brush laying on its back upon it and a jewelry box. And the dragonfly ring. Kate let go of his hand, stood, and retrieved the ring.

“Am I close to you?” she asked, inspecting the ring and putting it on.

He sniffed and rubbed his temple. “Yes. You know almost everything there is to know about me.”

This made her warm inside. “Then it doesn’t matter that at one time, you didn’t let anyone close to you. Because you’ve changed.”

His gaze shifted to her. There was a penetrating intensity to it. “What about you, Kate. Am I close to you? Do I know everything about you?”

She shifted, staring at the dragonfly ring, feeling caught. Should she lie? That conversation with Ty was forcing her to confront the lies she’d been weaving. “Um, no. Not everything.”

“What don’t I know?”

“Don’t forget, Will, that I’m actually alive. And things change constantly.”

“How does that have anything to do with what we’re talking about now?”

“I don’t know.”

“So are you saying that you’re hiding something from me?”

She considered Ty and her mouth went dry. She didn’t want to bring real-life into this, it didn’t fit there, in the logic of the dream world. It would only upset the balance, she thought, and it might scare Will away. She suddenly felt like she was two-timing him. His eyes were narrow and staring hard at Kate, so she looked away, aware at once of the aura of the room.

“Let’s get out of here, Will. Unless there’s something you want to show me.”

“You’re changing the subject.”

She shrugged and waited for him to decide they could leave. With a sigh he stood up and took her hand. He scanned the room, his eyes focusing on the bed, then the mirrors, the dresser, and then, without warning, he let go of her hand and charged the bed. In one motion, he tore the bedspread and sheets off and tried to claw through the mattress, which was an old, striped design. Kate averted her eyes when she began to notice all the stains on it. She didn’t want to know and she backed up until she bumped into the wall. Will upended the mattress and it fell against the wall on the opposite side, and then he rushed the dresser and yanked the drawers out, scattering the contents—lingerie, fishnet tights, lace nightgowns and bottles of cheap perfume—and then knocked the dresser over. All the while he yelled and grunted, and screamed as though exorcising the demons of his past.

Kate waited for the storm to pass, a bit frightened, actually. She never knew he held such fury at bay. She asked herself who she would be if her past was Will’s past. She thought of him as a little boy, drawing on her experience with her two little brothers—twins, four years younger than her—growing up fatherless, forced too early into a premature knowledge of the violent, corrupt world, and she wanted to cry for him. She didn’t think about kids too much because she wasn’t married yet and she didn’t really know if she’d ever have them. But as she watched Will destroying the room that destroyed his innocence, it dawned on her how hard she would fight to protect a child of her own from such sorrows of human existence.

Finally, as the blizzard of emotions waned, she rushed to him and wrapped her arms around him from behind.

“It’s gone now, it’s done, Will. It’ll be alright,” she said in a soothing voice.

The wind of fury left him in a low, soft whimper, a howl that sounded almost like a newborn puppy calling for its mother. His shoulders curved in and his knees gave out until they were both kneeling amidst the wreckage. Pillows covered the carpet, feathers drifted slowly in unpredictable paths in the slight breeze of the ceiling fan that had been stirred by flying debris, pink and red lingerie hung from the bed posters and old-fashioned sconce lighting on the walls. A musty odor of an old life disturbed filled the air. The only sound was of Will’s ragged breathing and Kate’s calming whispers.  

***

Time passed. How much, Kate didn’t know. Maybe twenty minutes. Maybe twenty years. Dream years. They left the brothel behind. She transported them to a beach in Barbados that she saw in the window of the travel agency by Amir’s restaurant.

“So tell me, Kate. Are you married? Do you have kids? I mean, what, what’s your life like? Please, just tell me,” he said. He was sitting on the edge of the dock that surrounded the little huts. The resort was something Kate would never be able to afford in real life. The water there was clear green and the huts had glass floors so Kate could see the fish swimming beneath her feet.

She thought he’d successfully moved past the anguish of revisiting his past. “Come on, Will, if I had kids, don’t you think I would have gotten around to mentioning them?” she laughed and pushed away from the dock. She floated on her back and stared up at the unblemished sky. She could hear her pulse thundering. What if he found out something about her that he didn’t like? Would the dreams stop? Would she never see him again? She just couldn’t tell him anything that might upset him. Not after the brothel. It would be too much.

She heard a muted splash and just as she was lifting her head from the water, she felt his arms encircle her and his head popped out of the water next to her. Sunlight danced in his blue eyes. He smiled. A loud ache began in her gut and spread through her.
I don’t want to live without him,
was the refrain of the ache.

“So come on then, tell me. About you,” he whispered. She could feel his fingertips slipping across her belly.

“Everything I am here is who I am there,” she said, blankly.

“But the details, Kate. What do you do?”

“Why do you need to know?”

“So I can
know
you.”

She pushed away and began swimming toward the shore. He followed her, doing a lazy, but impressive, breaststroke. She hurried away with her crappy front-crawl, hoping the chase would distract him

It didn’t. Once on the beach, she plopped down in the sand and watched him striding up the wet sand with the waves crashing behind him. Sun-filled drops of water cover his tall, lean-muscled body. He wore blue, 1960s swim trunks, which turned out to be really flattering on him. She stared, more certain than ever that she didn’t want to do anything to lose him.

She wanted Will.
Damn him for only being in my dreams.

His eyes narrowed as he sat down next to her. He bent his knees and folded his arms around them. Sand caked his tan ankles. “Go on, then,” he prodded.

“Fine. OK. You want to hear about my ‘life,’ great. I’ll tell you.” She motioned air quotes around
life
just to demonstrate how irritated she was with his probing.

“Good,” he nodded. She caught the hint of a smile beginning in his eyes, but he managed to stifle it.

“Fine,” she repeated, hoping he’d stop her before she even began. He didn’t, so she finally just plowed ahead, knowing that if she didn’t get it over with, she’d chicken out. “I work at a store that sells vinyl, right? You know that. It’s real retro. And great. So great. I don’t have a boyfriend—well, I had one, but we broke up six months ago. I’ve been seeing other guys. Well, just one guy. His name is Ty. I met him four weeks ago. I graduated from college a month and a half ago, but I haven’t gotten a job. I mean a real job, anyway. I’m looking. The economy is bad right now. I have a few close friends.”

“Ty, eh?” Will said, staring out at the sea. His eyes were squinted against the sun.

“Yes.”

“But you’re not married?”

“No.”

“But, do you guys share a bed together?” he cleared his throat. “You know, have sex?”

And there it was. Will, who presumably slept with everyone indiscriminately when he was alive, was jealous of Kate’s relationship with another guy.

She shrugged. “Not yet. But would it matter if I did?”

He pursed his lips, which had turned down at their corners. A lot. “No, no. It wouldn’t. Do you love him?” His eyes flickered toward her and away again, rapidly. She saw fear in them. Uncertainty and it made her innards knot up.

She gathered her hair and squeezed the water out of it, watching a wave gather far away and begin to roll in, gaining speed and becoming frothy. “No. I don’t think so. I don’t know. He’s nice. But what if I did? Would—would it matter?”

Will’s laugh sounded hollow and fragile. “You
don’t
think so? Have—have you kissed him?”

Now she just felt like a pariah. “No.”

From the corner of her eye she saw him visibly relax. “But you had sexual intercourse with your old boyfriend?”

And now she felt like a slut. “So?”

“You did?”

“Once or twice.” A lie.

“Wow,” he whispered.

“What? It seemed right at the time,” she said defensively. She didn’t even try to turn the tables on him and accuse him of being a man-whore when he was alive. At first she thought she didn’t do that because she was mature, but then she realized it was only because she felt like she deserved his judgments, because she felt guilty for having slept with Tom. “Does it matter, Will? We’re in a totally different world, you and I. You’re not alive. I can’t have you in real life. This is it, for us. I fail to see how having had a boyfriend several months ago and dating someone now matters to you. To us.”

“It doesn’t. No. It doesn’t matter.”

He avoided her gaze. She was hot all over in frustration. She wanted to run away. Her chest was caving in. This was it, the beginning of the end.

“Where are you going?” she asked, nearly shouting in astonishment. Will stood, dusted the sand off his swim trunks and thighs in quick, angry motions.

“Nowhere. I just need to get some air.” He walked away, down the beach.
Some air?
Kate thought,
what the hell is that supposed to mean?
They were outside. In a dream, yes, but some air? Horrible lie.