Alice Close Your Eyes (16 page)

He smiles down at me, his cheek bulging over a bite of soft pretzel. “Sometimes I forget how young you are.”

“Why is it young to want to change things? Great men do that all their lives.”

“Great men think they have some insight the rest of us lack. They think they understand other people. Which is bullshit. And naive. No one has a fucking clue what other people are like.”

I accept this in silence, given how little Jack knows about me. Maybe he’s right, and the unknowing is a part of life. The architects Shulman photographed tried to dictate how their clients would live, down to the shape and placement of every chair and light fixture. But in the end, I suppose, people lived in those sternly designed homes the way they wanted to, sprawled this way and that across the hard-backed chairs, rearranging the sofas around the TV, dragging an old quilt in from the bedroom. It’s what I would have done.

“Do you miss it? Designing?”

He wobbles a hand back and forth. “Well, it wasn’t a calling or anything like that, not for me. It was a job I trained for, so it pisses me off to have wasted the education. I miss the life I thought I was building. I miss the money.” His voice sounds different, wistful under the breezy confidence. “I miss my mom.”

He rarely talks about his family. I know Jack was a wild teenager who fought almost constantly with his father, and I get the impression that his father was an abusive man. Jack has called him “hardhanded” and “pigheaded” and, with a little liquor in him, “an arrogant fuck.” His mother seems to retreat into the background, a gentle soul under her husband’s thumb.

“Can’t you call her?”

He shakes his head. “She won’t pick up. I sent a couple of letters. They both came back unopened. So that’s that.”

“Sounds pretty final.”

“Yeah. I think it is. But there are compensations. Fewer responsibilities means greater freedom. My dad was the one who insisted I study architecture. But actually I prefer carpentry. Being outside, working with my hands. I like assembly better than design, it’s more tangible.”

Ahead is a wooden cart inset with plastic buckets holding hundreds of flowers, a parade of color marching across our path. Daisies, roses, masses of tulips and frilled pink peonies. The scent draws me like a honeybee.

Jack crumples his napkin and brushes the salt from his hands.

“And I still have a couple bucks to buy flowers for a pretty girl.”

The vendor grins at us. He’s small, thick, with a fringe of dark hair and matching mustache. His smile is so sunny, so full of joie de vivre, that it’s almost a cliché.

I press my nose to a bouquet of lavender roses.

“Mmm... That’s what a rose is supposed to smell like.”

“Blue Moon,” the flower man says. “Nothing like it.”

Jack smiles, already reaching for his wallet, and the vendor takes the roses to his bench. With a wickedly sharp knife, he cuts a fresh end on each stem and wraps the bouquet in white paper. I like the quick precision of his blunt fingers, one firm strike through the fibrous stem. The sharpness of the blade seems like more than a respect for the tool and a wish to make the job easier; it’s a kindness to the flower.

“The lavender rose symbolizes mystery,” he says, waggling his eyebrows.

“Perfect,” Jack says. He’s looking at me with an expression I am coming to recognize.

Later, when I get out of the bath, I find that Jack has plucked the petals from the roses and strewn them over the bed. The room is heavy with fragrance.

“I’ve always wanted to do that,” he says, and lays me down.

* * *

The flower man’s house is not as I imagined. The tan carpet is matted and stained, and the furniture is cheap laminated stuff, peeling around the edges. There’s not a lot on the walls, but in one corner of the living room is a beautiful antique clock, half-hidden behind the tweed drapes on the front window.

It’s not a place I would associate with the cheerful flower man at the fair. It hurts somehow, to imagine him here. It’s disorienting.

The house is in an older neighborhood on the south end of Seattle, where the houses are huddled together in clusters as if for protection. Safety in numbers. Jack couldn’t find a key in the front yard, but we discovered a warped window where the latch doesn’t hold. By pressing the glass and lifting the pane, Jack was able to get the window open, and hoisted me through ahead of him.

I walk up the staircase with Jack on my heels. The walls are lined with photographs of young people in old clothes. I recognize the flower man in some of them, with a full head of hair and a dark mustache. There is a woman with him, and a young girl with hair so long and straight it looks as though she’s been dipped in water. Her nose is covered with freckles. In most of the pictures she is laughing, her head tipped back.

The flower man’s bed is small and rumpled on one side. I stare at it from the doorway, imagining him in it, reading and sleeping, alone at the end of a dark rainy day. The room smells strongly of cigarettes, so cold and depressing I don’t want to go in. Instead, I cross the hall to what looks like a child’s room. There’s a small bed with a pink quilt and next to it a white desk with brass pulls, and here the walls are covered with posters. Shawn Cassidy, the Bee Gees, other young idols whose faces are not familiar. They are the heartthrobs of decades past, faded and curling on the walls.

I recognize the imprint on this house. It’s a home where someone died young and took a living soul with her. Unsettling to imagine the flower man living here. If I hadn’t seen his face in the pictures on the wall, I would have sworn Jack brought us to the wrong place.

We return downstairs to the kitchen and I turn to Jack. His eyes are glassy and there is a hectic flush across his cheekbones. He traces my jaw with his fingertips, runs his thumb across my lip.

Then he takes off his belt.

His hand on top of my head, he gives me a push and sits me down on a wooden chair at the flower man’s kitchen table. As he binds my wrists to the back of the chair, I stare at the glasses on the counter, the crumbs around the toaster, the pale areas on the cabinet doors where the varnish has worn away. There is a water stain on the ceiling. A paperback, facedown. Envelope by the phone with writing on it. Magnet on the refrigerator. Cobweb, spoon, tomato, vodka. My eyes dart around the room. My heartbeat thrums in my ears. The grandfather clock ticks softly from the living room, then chimes the quarter hour: 2:15 a.m.

Jack leans over me, his hand in my hair, and pulls my head back as he kisses me. Softly at first, then slanting, deeper. His lips are hot and dry as if with fever. He runs a hand down the length of my neck and cups my breast through my shirt, passing his thumb across my nipple.

“What do you think about all this,” he says, unbuttoning my shirt and drawing the two halves aside. “What are you thinking when you look at me like that.”

I don’t answer. My face is carefully still. A thick, heavy pulse throbs between my legs.

He circles the chair, slipping through the shadows. He pulls my shirt over my shoulders, as far as it will go down my arms. I shiver when he stops behind me and traces the edge of my bra, along the swell of my breasts.

“So cool, aren’t you.” His face is pressed to the top of my head. My breasts sink heavily into his palms and my nipples draw up tight. He weighs them, considering, then moves away. He returns a moment later with a dish towel. I watch him fold it diagonally, then around and around to form a long strip. He lays it over my eyes and ties it behind my head.

My lips part. I sigh and inhale again. The dish towel smells richly stale, of old water and detergent. Of someone else. Another shiver breaks inside my chest, icy and sharp.

“I want you to think about where you are, sweetheart,” he says. “Spread your legs.”

His voice is deep, seductive. But I can’t do what he says. I can’t, though I want to. My body is wound too tight, and opening myself would take more strength than I have. I don’t know what I need. I don’t know how to explain.

Please.

I hear his footsteps cross the room, and a familiar sound: a chilling shush of metal on wood. Then he is back, my hair in his fist.

And he has a knife.

He presses the blade flat against my throat. My heart leaps and heat flashes over my skin. A searing ache begins between my thighs.

“Let me make it easier,” he says. “Spread your fucking legs.”

The fear and heat release me, as though he’s burned through a hinge that’s been holding me together. I walk my feet apart until they are planted on either side of the chair. Cool air licks at my inner thighs.

The tip of the knife trails down the bones of my arched throat, slides under a bra strap. He cuts one, then the other. He unhooks the clasp between my breasts and pulls off my bra, lets it drop to the ground beside me.

My breath has grown swift and shallow. My heart is tumbling like a rock down a barren cliff. The scent and vibration of another man’s home crowd my mind, drive home the incomprehensible wrongness of what we’re doing.

Criminal,
I think, and the word clicks into place. This is criminal behavior; we are criminals.

“Oh, you like sharp things, don’t you,” he says. The knife traces a pattern around my breasts, the outline of my missing bra. The dull side of the blade clicks against my nipple ring. He inserts the tip into the ring and tugs gently.

I shudder and turn my wrist against the edge of the belt.

He twists the knife and whispers in my ear. “I’m gonna cut you.”

My entire body freezes—breath and speech and even my rolling heartbeat. Every cell is awash with fear and longing. For a second I can see us from someplace outside myself, as though I’m looking at the scene through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.

He kneels between my knees, the knife pressed to my throat. He hikes up my skirt and runs the backs of his fingers over the fabric between my legs, the last flimsy barrier.

“You think I don’t know what you are,” he says. “Like I didn’t know the first time I laid eyes on you.”

A choked cry lodges in my throat. I want to hide my face but the knife is hard against my skin. When his thumb slips under the fabric, I press my lips together, ashamed at the slickness he discovers. I want to close my legs, cover my breasts, conceal my reactions, and am perversely glad that the choice is out of my hands. Jack is here. He’s in control. I don’t have to figure it out, don’t have to decide; I couldn’t turn back if I wanted to. His hips are between my knees; his belt is around my wrists. I am not responsible.

The blade leaves my throat, and a thrill of fear rises like a zipper up my spine. He cuts the straps of my underwear. Muscles deep inside my vagina begin to open, up and out, already contracting, already weeping.

Please
.
Oh, please.

The knife is back, under my chin. He sweeps his four fingers up my folds, then slides them into my mouth, hooks them around my lower teeth. I taste myself, my salty tang, and the sleek texture of my fluid on his skin, now a cool wet trail from my mouth to cunt.

“Look at you,” he says, pushing my thighs apart. “Spread your legs. I don’t want to tell you again.”

He rocks the heel of his hand over my clitoris, and I moan.
Please, please
. He presses inside me, two fingers, then three, and four, muttering threats and insults into my open mouth.
Whore, bitch, slut, mine. Think where you are, Alice, think what I could do.
I inhale the venom in the words, grinding upward as he forces me down. The ache is so intense that I begin to cry, a long inarticulate plea for something, something. The blade bites at my throat. A quick, fiery snap of pain under my chin, and I am coming, in burning convulsive waves that lift me to a crest of agonized pleasure. I would die for him now; I would die for him willingly, gratefully, because he knows. He knows, somehow—

He nicks me again along the inner curve of my shoulder, and as his mouth closes over the wound, I hear the knife clatter to the floor. His hands slide beneath me and he lifts me to him and pushes inside.

“Oh, fuck,” he groans, and he sounds like someone else. “Oh, you don’t know.”

He reaches up and slips off the blindfold. I open my eyes and see his expression, so wild and primal and male, and I watch the climax gather in his eyes—the inevitability, the fracture. His thrusts grow ragged, so deep and so relentless that I can only be swept along with him, bound with the leather man’s belt to a stranger’s chair, and when Jack comes I don’t even recognize him. I don’t recognize myself.

We are strangers, too, faceless and frightening.

All this time I have asked myself the question:
Would you kill for me?
Now I see the answer in his eyes.

Before he withdraws, Jack unties me. He soothes my nicks with soft strokes of his tongue and murmured apologies. I take his face in my hands and kiss him. His mouth tastes like blood.

“Let it burn,” I tell him.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I can’t sleep. A cat is hidden under my front porch, meowing. I walk around outside, peering under the newly painted floorboards, trying to see if I can get her out and take her to the vet. I see a pair of jade-green eyes, but can’t persuade the cat to leave the shelter of the porch. I coax, cajole, offer a can of tuna and a bowl of water. In desperation, I poke at her with the end of a broom. But she won’t move and she won’t stop crying.

I return to bed and lie there listening. The cries blur into a thick, continuous yowl, muffled by the rain but inescapable. The sound becomes eerie, stretched, the auditory version of Edvard Munch’s
The
Scream
. A shiver sweeps over my skin and prickles at the nape of my neck. I put on my headphones and go to the living room, try to ignore the cat and get some sleep. But the noise goes on. Every time there is a break in the music, I can hear her—even with the volume turned up, it seems the cat’s voice is embedded under the electric guitar. There is something ominous about her persistence, something witchy and foreboding.

The sound reminds me of my mother, the night she died. The cries are almost indistinguishable.

I was ten the last time I heard my mother’s voice. I’d been listening for hours with my cheek pressed to the pillow and a blanket wrapped tight over my head. Earlier I’d heard my mother fighting with Ray through the open window on the back side of the gray house, and after he was gone I had crept inside, through the back door to my room, while my mother sat alone in the living room, crying. Crying, on and on.

I lay there in an agony of indecision. She didn’t like to talk when she was upset; she wanted to be left alone. But surely she knew I could hear her—would she think I didn’t care?

I got out of bed and went to the door, drawn by my mother’s sobs to the living room down the hall. All the pictures had fallen or been thrown to the floor in the hallway, and I picked up a shard of glass in my heel as I passed. It bit into my skin and hung there, but to remove it I would have needed the light and my mother. I crept closer, hovering at the end of the hall. Her crying frightened me. Adults didn’t run in street clothes, they didn’t wipe their mouths on their shirts and they didn’t cry. Not this way, not with this kind of ferocious abandon. Her voice had grown tight and hoarse. There was no sign of Ray.

I walked to her on tiptoe, keeping the weight off the glass in my heel.

“Mom?”

Her face looked ugly, twisted and swollen with tears. I realized immediately that I’d made a mistake; she didn’t want me there. She waved me off with one hand, flipping her wrist. She had a photograph of Nana in her lap and was picking away the chips of glass inside the frame.

“Go back to bed.”

It’s the last thing she said to me.

The cat’s cries are growing feeble. She must be under the porch again, but the meows have grown so faint it’s hard to tell. I sit up, listening. Nothing.

I grab a flashlight and go outside. Moving around the porch, I sweep the light back and forth, looking for the glowing pair of eyes. I have almost given up when at last I see them. The cat is lying against the side of the house, eyes half-open. She is very still and doesn’t respond when I thunk the end of the flashlight against the wooden rail.

I set the flashlight aside. The damned cat has died under my porch. I need to bury her, or there will be one hell of a stink in the weeks to come. With a shovel from the shed, I dig a cat-sized hole at the tree line, then return to the porch with an old burlap sack.

The ground is muddy, cold and wet on my belly as I crawl under the porch with the sack in my hand. There’s a little more room near the house, though, and when I reach the dead cat I’m able to sit up. I lay a hand over her ribs, just to be sure. Her fur is still warm but she’s not breathing and her face is unmistakably vacant. I shudder and begin to gather up her limp remains when I see a small movement from the cat’s flank.

A kitten, struggling under the weight of its mother’s dead body. Its eyes are shut tight, its lips drawn back in a tiny unknowing grimace of effort. I lift the mother cat’s thigh. The umbilical cord is still intact, so I find a sharp rock and cut it, lift the kitten by the scruff of its neck and cradle it against my chest. It wriggles against me, weak and bloody and fiercely alive. I search the area carefully but can see no other survivors.

With the kitten curled in my palm and the mother cat’s body draped over my arm, I struggle out from under the porch into a fine mist just beginning to gather into rain. I lay the kitten at the front door, wrap its mother in the burlap sack and carry her to the grave. Her body is still warm inside the sack as I lay her in the damp soil.

When I return to the porch, I find the kitten squirming in a vaguely circular motion across the mat, looking for its dead mother, its head moving side to side. I scoop it up with both hands and carry it to the kitchen, where I give it a gentle bath with a warm washcloth, working carefully around the umbilical cord, trying to get the blood out of its fur. The kitten’s small body curls with pleasure, and I feel a soundless ticking vibration in its throat.

When I have rubbed its fur dry, I wrap the kitten in an old T-shirt and feed it warm milk from a dropper. It has a healthy appetite, surely a good sign.

“You’re a fighter, you are.”

The kitten opens its mouth but no sound comes out. I place another drop of milk on its tongue.

* * *

Late afternoon. The sun is sinking over the roof of the gray house, casting long shadows that reach across the street to the park where I’ve been waiting, rocking gently, with the kitten tucked inside my shirt, its velvety head under my chin. It’s been a while and I’m ready to give up, when finally my patience is rewarded. Big sister comes out the front door, looks both ways from the sidewalk of Cooper Street and crosses the road.

The girl is dressed in a pair of sturdy jeans, a little too short, and a Minnie Mouse T-shirt with a stain on the front. She’s the most beautiful child I’ve ever seen, all legs and spindly arms, and a new haircut that makes her hair look like a cartoon drawing, each curl separate and springing out from her head.

She sees the kitten in my lap, and gives me a sloe-eyed glance before plopping down into the swing next to mine. I catch her eye and wave the kitten’s paw in her direction.

She croons. “Oh, he’s so little.”

“He’s brand-new, his eyes are still closed. Do you want to hold him?”

Her face lights up. We sit on the grass in the sunshine, cross-legged, our knees touching. I give her the kitten and she accepts him gingerly, cradling him against her chest.

“What’s his name?” she says.

“He doesn’t have one yet.”

“Well, you should give him a name before he opens his eyes, or he’ll run away.”

“Hmm, you may be right. But I don’t know what to call him.”

She cranes her neck to look at him. “Smokey?”

“Every gray cat is a Smokey.”

“Well, maybe Cloud? He’s soft like that.”

“In Vashon? Don’t we have enough of those?”

She laughs. “How about a person name. Jasper?”

“There you go. Jasper. I like it.”

She cuddles the kitten to her chest. She’s humming something I don’t recognize, a lullaby.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Amanda.”

“I’m Jennifer. I used to live on this street when I was your age.”

“Oh, really?” she says, clearly uninterested in this fascinating bit of information.

“Yeah, down at the other end.” I scoot back a few feet, light a cigarette and take a long drag. “All my friends used to say your house was haunted.”

Her head springs up. “Haunted?”

“Yep. Apparently someone died there or was murdered or something. My friend said she saw a woman in a white dress one night, looking out the window. But when she asked who the lady was, nobody knew who she was talking about.”

Amanda is at full attention now, still rubbing absently at the kitten’s ears.

“Another person told me he heard someone moaning late one night. Or crying, maybe.” I begin to worry that I’m laying on the ghost story a little too thick, but she answers me honestly, wide-eyed.

“I’ve never heard anything like that.”

“Good to know. So what’s it like inside? Creepy?”

“Not really. It’s just a house.”

“Mmm. And you live with your mom?”

“My mom and my little sister, and Ray. My mom’s boyfriend.”

“Awkward,” I say, putting on a voice.

“Yeah. I mean, at first.”

“Not now?”

“No.” She lifts the kitten to her cheek. “It’s okay now, everything’s calmed down.”

I’m not sure what to make of this.

“So, things were weird at first, huh? New house, new boyfriend and all that.”

“Yeah. But Ray’s really nice and my mom says I’ll like the school.”

The kitten’s nose twitches and he sneezes. Amanda laughs, and the sound rings like music in the stillness. “Do you think I’ll see a ghost?”

“I don’t know. Do you want to?”

She considers this, her eyebrows drawing up like ribbons toward the bridge of her nose.

“No,” she says. “Dead people should get their own houses.”

I look at her, at the kitten, at the gray house across the street. The fence is gone and there are flowers in the front yard and lace curtains in the windows. When we lived there, my mother didn’t change a thing. We simply moved in with the clothes on our backs and a few cardboard boxes.

The thought startles me. Frightens me somehow, as if I’ve forgotten some piece of crucial information.

I get to my feet.

“Are you leaving?” Amanda asks, disappointed.

“Yeah.”

She holds out the kitten reluctantly.

“I can’t keep him,” I say. “He should stay with you.”

A flicker of hope crosses her face—and longing. It’s a look no mother could refuse. Especially not the kind of mother who plants petunias in the front yard.

“I have to ask my mom,” she says.

But I’m already walking away.