Alice Close Your Eyes (4 page)

Below his name, he’s written his phone number.

I set the note aside and peer into the box, lifting things out one by one and setting them on the counter. A set of spiky metal jacks with a few clinging fragments of blue and red paint; a business card, embossed with the name of an architectural firm in bold letters over the faint design of a blueprinted floor plan—Taylor & Fitch; a pair of heavy, unmistakably authentic handcuffs; a key on a plastic Motel 6 key ring; a piece of wax paper, folded into a square, and inside a perfect four-leaf clover; an old pair of eyeglasses with a crack in the lens; a black-and-white photograph of a dark-haired woman on the beach, winsome and laughing behind heavy sunglasses; a folded-up piece of paper with part of a handwritten Neruda poem; a man’s wedding band, which I slip over my thumb; and on the bottom, facedown, a last photograph. I pick it up and turn it over. A square of yellow window light on a dark wall, softened by a sheer, wavy curtain—and behind that, a wraithlike figure peering out from the space between the curtain panels. I recognize the tattoo on the girl’s arm before I know her face.

It’s me. Looking right into the camera without seeing it, as if at something very far away. He must have taken the picture from the forest behind my house. He must have been there, watching, for a long time. In fact, seeing the top I’m wearing in the photograph, he must have been there more than once. I haven’t worn that shirt in three days.

Awareness swells inside me. My skin is shivery-thin, barely able to contain me.

This is a language I understand. The language of secrets.

I’ll show you mine.

My gaze trails away, over the countertop and past the entryway corner, where I see my reflection in the hall mirror. The photo is pressed to my lips, and the expression in my eyes, caught in a wedge of late-morning sunlight, seems suddenly, vibrantly alive.

I smile, and my reflection smiles back.

CHAPTER FIVE

“How did you find this place?” I ask.

It’s 8:30 p.m., and we’re seated at a tiny table inside an
equally minute Thai restaurant in Seattle, across the Sound from Vashon Island.
The restaurant’s narrow facade is deceiving. Inside, the ceiling opens to a
second-floor dining room with space for only six tables. We have a bird’s-eye
view of the kitchen below, where a cloud of steam rises from an ancient hammered
pot as the cook ladles up two bowls of soup.

“I came here with a friend,” Jack says. “And left with the
waitress.”

A young woman appears at the top of the steps and deposits our
dinner on the battered wooden table. When she’s gone, I give him a look.

“
This
waitress? She looks about
sixteen.”

“Different one, actually.”

“And is this safe to eat?” I lift a spoonful of soup. “You know
better than to piss off the person feeding you, I hope.”

“What makes you think I pissed her off?”

“Seems likely, let’s say.”

He lowers his head with an amused twist of his lips and begins
to eat.

“It wasn’t like that. Her father was the cook. He went down on
the job. Right there.” He points the top of his ceramic spoon at the kitchen
below. “Had a stroke apparently, and fell into the wok on his way down. Spilled
hot oil all over himself. The ambulance came for him and I gave his daughter a
lift to the hospital.”

His expression doesn’t change, but I sense the reproach.

I drop my gaze to the table. “You do have a way of making me
feel like an asshole.”

“Eat your soup.”

The liquid slides down my throat, tangy and unctuous. Slices of
sour cucumber float in the broth.

“What happened to the old man?”

Jack pours out some fresh tea. A thread of steam rises from my
cup.

“Dead,” he says. “Probably never felt the burns at all.”

He seems to consider this for the first time.

He didn’t ring the doorbell when he arrived at my house earlier
this evening. By tacit agreement, we’ve already abandoned the notion of privacy.
I left the door unlocked, and he simply walked in and came looking for me as if
he owned the place, as if his previous visit had not been an illicit one.

I was at my dresser, clasping a fine silver chain around my
neck.

He came to the bedroom doorway, leaned his shoulder against the
wall, his sweater pushed up over his forearms. Clean jeans, clean work boots. I
wondered what he thought of my clothes, which an old boyfriend described as
having been “put together by a twelve-year-old gay boy with a boot fetish and
twenty bucks to spend.” Lots of vintage and secondhand. Little discretion.

I cut my own hair, too. With the straight razor from my
kit.

“So what’s that about?” he says now. “You follow guys, break
into their houses and steal shit that has no value to anyone but them. Why?
What’s so interesting?”

“Everything.”

He leans back, waiting.

I set down my spoon and cup my tea in both hands, prepared with
my story this time, set to deliver it on cue with a face full of rueful
honesty.

“Have you ever been in a crowd—at a concert, maybe, or on the
street—and noticed the way all the faces seem to blend together? But when you
pick out a single person, suddenly he’s not this anonymous guy anymore. He’s
somebody. An individual. You know?”

Jack nods.

“Well, I became sort of fascinated by that. I’d ask myself
questions about the guy. Like, I wonder where he lives. I wonder what’s in his
refrigerator. Or his sock drawer or DVD collection. What’s his name? How strong
are his glasses? What’s in his medicine cabinet? It was a game. But after a
while, I started to wish I could check my guesses to see if they were
right.”

“So you started breaking in.”

“Yeah. I knew this girl once who taught me how to get into
houses. Where people hide their spare keys, how to break a window quietly. She
could get in anywhere.”

“Who was this?”

“Just someone from the foster system. I roomed with her at the
Center for a while. She’s a wizard, smart as hell. Anyway, I discovered that
it’s actually really easy to get in and out, provided no one’s around.”

“You never got caught before?”

“No.” I raise my chin. “And I wouldn’t have with you, either,
if you hadn’t picked that day to forget your phone or whatever.”

He looks at me skeptically. It’s impossible to tell which part
of my story he isn’t buying. I pretend not to see the doubt in his eyes. I’m
locked into my bluff now and need to ride it out.

“And is it only men who interest you?” he says.

“Yes.”

“Never followed a woman?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I already know about women.”

“Hmm. So what did you find out?”

“That most men are perverts. That they collect weird things
like agates and toy race cars and Asian porn. That every guy has at least one
picture of his dick—God knows why.”

He laughs, and I find an odd, sagging comfort in the sound.

“That they always hang their pictures too high—present company
excepted—are strangely attracted to futons and can’t keep their houseplants
alive.”

I take up my chopsticks.

“That’s it?” he says.

“Pretty much.”

“And what do you leave with?”

“Just the box.”

“Not the stereo, not the TV. Just the box?”

“Right.”

He tips back in his chair, watching me eat.

“You’re an odd little chick, Alice Croft.”

I shrug. “Everyone’s odd.”

“So how long were you following me before I found you in my
closet?”

“I don’t know. Two or three weeks, maybe?”

The corner of his mouth twitches. I feel his gaze on me and a
tumbling fullness in my stomach.

“So for three weeks,” he says, “I’ve had this gorgeous little
thief following me around, just dying to get into my bed, and I didn’t even know
it.”

I set down my chopsticks and wipe my mouth. Take a sip of
tea.

“Your bedroom, maybe. Not your bed.”

His gaze slides from my face, down the front of my Pink Panther
T-shirt and up again.

“My mistake,” he says.

By the time we leave the restaurant, the ever-present clouds
have dissolved into rain. Jack opens his umbrella and pulls me underneath, his
arm around my waist. His sweater feels comforting against my cheek, a nubbled
cushion over the firm bump of his shoulder. The city around us vibrates with the
energy of a million lives, with ten million boxed-up secrets. I feel myself at
the center of them, small but protected, my feet slapping the rain-sluiced
sidewalk and Jack’s falling into step as he shortens his stride to match
mine.

“My friend has a boat,” he says. “Would you like to see it? We
could walk there.”

A warm, fragile bubble of happiness swells inside my chest.

“Yes, I would.”

* * *

The boat turns out to be a small motor yacht, moored in
a slip at the end of a long wooden dock. With a long sleek nose and shining
chrome rail, it bobs on the dark water like a shard of wet ice.

“You have some fancy friends,” I say as Jack reaches out to
help me on board.

He grins. “This one thinks so. I keep having to remind him
about the time he pissed his pants in second grade, just to keep his ego in
check.”

I turn in a slow circle on the wooden deck, looking around. The
rain has subsided, leaving a blanket of fat raindrops over the seats and metal
railings. Jack unlocks a metal box under one of the benches and takes out a rag.
He wipes down a seat and part of the railing, then tosses the rag back where
he’d found it.

“I have some weed,” he says.

“So do I.”

He laughs and pulls a plastic-wrapped joint from his pocket.
“Well, make yourself comfortable.”

We settle on the vinyl seat, half facing each other. The seat
is too high for me and my feet dangle, so I curl one leg up and tuck my foot
behind my knee. He gives me the joint and lights it with a yellow Bic. We pass
the weed back and forth as we talk.

“Where did you grow up?” I ask.

“Upstate New York. My dad owns a chain of liquor stores in the
city. I came out here to go to school.”

“Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“A brother. Much older than me. He was already in high school
when I was born.”

“You were an afterthought.”

He squints at me through a curl of sweet-scented smoke. “Yeah.
Thanks for noticing.”

“I’ll bet you were spoiled.”

“The hell I was. My dad was a hardhanded son of a bitch.”

“But your mother stuck up for you, didn’t she. A middle-aged
Italian lady with a baby? Don’t tell me.”

He leans back, drapes an arm over the back of the seat.

“You’ve had a head start. You’ve already been in my place,
sniffing around. What did you learn?”

“Not much. I wasn’t there very long. I found the ships, the
blueprints. Are you an architect?”

“Used to be.”

“So what are you now?”

“A carpenter.”

I frown. “That’s kind of a step down, isn’t it?”

“You could say that.”

“Did one of your buildings collapse or something?”

He smokes the last hit and tosses the roach overboard.

“No, actually I was a very good architect. Everything I
designed is still standing, as far as I know.”

“Then what—”

“Curiosity killed the cat,” he says. “Something you might want
to consider.”

“She had eight more lives if I remember right.”

I get up and move to the end of the rail, letting the buzz wash
over me. The waves slosh languidly against the side of the boat.

“I looked you up,” he says. “Alice Croft, author of
Zebra Crossing
. ‘A beguiling, gripping read.’ ‘Dark
and dazzling.’ Very impressive.”

I shrug. I hate talking about my work, and especially about
reviews of my work. No one ever asks the right questions, and my answers always
seem stilted and inadequate. As soon as the books come out, I stash my copies in
the closet and try to forget about them.

The
Zebra
series was a fluke as far
as I’m concerned. Something about the motley collection of boys—albino, meth
addict, freerunner, clairvoyant, all trapped inside a Scottish neo-Gothic
boarding school—captured the public’s attention. So much so that Gus Shiroff has
signed not only the foreign rights but film and TV, as well. Nothing has been
done with them so far, but there is talk of a cable series and wild speculation
about who might be cast in the lead roles.

For me the whole thing is bewildering. Before the
Zebra
books I had never written for anyone but myself.
I sent out my original queries on a whim, expecting a much longer apprenticeship
before any of my writing became publishable. But Gus liked the first book right
away, and suddenly I found myself with a career and what seems like a
never-ending procession of deadlines—all good things, but for a loner with a
serious lack of business sense, it’s a bit much. On Gus’s advice, I’ve tried to
isolate myself as much as possible and concentrate on finishing the series.

“A lot of loneliness in those books,” Jack says.

I accept this in silence. It’s a common observation.

“What about your family?”

“Dead.” The word seems flat, so I keep talking to fill the
silence. “My grandmother died when I was nine, and my mom a year and a half
later.”

“And your dad?”

“Don’t know him.”

“So who do you hang out with, then? What do you do?”

“Write.”

“That’s it?”

“Pretty much. Very glamorous, this lifestyle.”

“No boyfriend?”

“Not at the moment.”

He is quiet, looking at me. When he speaks, his voice sounds
different, lower in pitch.

“Not at the moment,” he repeats, as if to himself.

He gets to his feet and moves toward me, hands in his pockets,
his face lost in shadow. For a second I forget what he looks like. His features
won’t come together in my mind.

He stops, leaning against the rail.

“Last night you had a knife in your hand. Now look at you.”

I glance around at the deserted docks, where rows of boats bob
silently in the inky water.

I don’t like this,
I want to say.
Take me home, I want to go home.

My empty fingers curl into a fist, pressed to my thigh.

“You wish you had one now,” he says softly. “Don’t you.”

He closes the distance between us, lifts his hand and traces
the column of my neck, down the front of my T-shirt—the barest brush with the
tip of his forefinger.

A bone-deep shiver breaks inside me, as though my gears have
slipped and are juddering for purchase.

He turns away and disappears through the cabin door. I close my
eyes, waiting. A minute later, a familiar song seeps into the cool night air, a
haunting, languid groove, and he’s back, his hand outstretched toward me. He
pulls me into his arms.

My home feels very far away now, across the water and another
divide I have not yet measured. Jack’s heartbeat is more than idea or even a
sound—it’s a vibration under my cheek, a relentless drumbeat driven by something
I don’t understand. More than sex, darker than seduction. This is pure male
impulse.

On the last thread of music, he begins to undress me, his
fingers cool and rough as stone against my skin. He unbuttons my sweater, slips
it over my shoulders and drops it to the deck. He pushes me before him, a step
at a time, down the narrow staircase to the tiny bedroom. I feel the mattress
behind my knees, and he puts a hand behind my head to keep me from bumping it as
he lowers me to the bed. This small kindness blooms at the base of my throat and
burns my eyelids and the bridge of my nose.

Silence closes around us, broken only by the hollow sound of
the waves lapping against the side of the boat, and the eerie flow of the music
around us.