Blood Soaked and Contagious (37 page)

“Thank you.” I didn’t have to force those words out of my mouth, but they had the strength of my whole being behind them. I doubt I would have been able to do anything with concepts and utterances that carried less meaning than those two words.

“You’re welcome, sweetie. Are you okay to move? Maybe go back to the store and get you cleaned up?”

Masculine pride might be salvaged in that sort of situation if the man in question had been able to brush off her embrace or deny (loudly) that he needed any assistance of any kind. Then again, I could be mistaken, and all that would have done is throw my collapse into a brighter, less compassionate light. At that juncture, there wasn’t any clarity to hold the thought up to, much less the will to do so.

She helped me to my feet and got me steady and ready to walk. Shawn was on his way back from depositing the last corpse he carried and saw the two of us about to head off. With no small amount of surprise on my part, the brute hugged me.

“Frank, I just wanted to say I’m very sad for all you went through today and that I feel very brotherly toward you.” He stepped back, still holding me at arm’s length, and looked into my eyes with no small amount of compassion showing in his own. “I also wanted to say that, unlike your biological brother, I will never, ever want your ass for anything... ” Charlie and I stared at him, mouths gaping like unfortunate bigmouth bass at a sport fishing tournament. A sane man might have stopped where he was upon such a vision, but not Shawn. He continued with, “... unless we all got stuck on a desert island with no food. Then I might want your ass, but only after you were no longer with us and had no use for it. It’d be really small BBQ, but somebody would live one more day because of your buttocks.”

He actually had water welling up in his eyes. I was moved, clubbed over the frontal lobes, but moved, and I gave him a hug in return. He mussed up my hair, told his sister to be nice to me, and nudged us along. I just wanted to wail.

As we walked, she leaned into me and gave me a little insight into that moment of surreal interpersonal interaction.

“Don’t let it worry you too much. Shawn really sucks when it comes to expressing affection.”

My emotions were still too far sideways to find that information at all comforting.

It seemed like it took forever to go back up the street to my store. Even more forever seemed to pass by as we walked down the lonely aisles toward the Spa in the back. Dimly, I remembered she was going to help me clean up, and a slow glance down at myself revealed how much I needed it. I was caked with remains.

Even in my hollow-minded state, I had enough presence about me to stop before I could begin to consider where all the dried effluvia came from. Nothing good could come of that exploration, especially if I wanted to return to some kind of reasonable state of mind. Besides, there was another pressing issue that needed to be handled.

It wouldn’t wait any longer. If I was going to fall apart any further than I already had, this was certainly the time, because I couldn’t have survived much more.

“Charlie. I need to tell you something.”

She turned back from the Spa door and looked at me, still holding my hand. “Yes, hon?”

“My name isn’t Frank Stewart.”

“I know. Most everyone here knows that isn’t your real name, but don’t worry about it. Everyone really loves you here... ”

“Charlie,” I interrupted her because I didn’t think I’d be able to say any of it if I had the chance to stop. “I want you to know who I am and I don’t want to hide from you. I won’t be able to, soon, anyway.”

“All right. You can tell me anything you need to say.”

“My name is Warren Francis Hightower, III.”

Charlie froze for a moment, took a really deep breath, and gave my hand a squeeze.

“I appreciate you needed to tell me that. I can also see how much it must have been weighing on you to hold that in for so long.” She hugged me.

She actually hugged me.

I know I was back into bigmouth bass impression-mode, and that the noises I was making were very simple ones, almost pre-human vocalizations. “Duh,” I said. I followed it up with, “dur?” and “muh?” My expectations for the End of the World did not come to pass, and that added immense confusion to the top of my Existential Horror Sundae.

She smiled. It was a tiny, wry, little quirk of the lips, and it did not give me enough information or hint at anything that I could build into the End that I was expecting to have.

“I guess you’re wondering why you’re not going through even more horrible stuff. Am I right?”

“Ur!”

She nodded. “Feel like you’re going to bust a seal if I don’t explain why I’m not screaming and flippin’ out?”

“Ourg!”

“All right. It’s like this. When I first showed up, and you were busy locking yourself away from the world because you thought Shawn hated you after busting you in the chops, my brother introduced me around to people.” Charlie squeezed my hand again and seemed to change her mind about what to say next. “Tell you what! Standing here, full of crud, talking about this stuff, is not going to get us cleaned up. Let’s do them both at the same time. Okay?”

“Merp.” It wasn’t my best of replies, but she nodded and led me into the Spa. She leaned me up against the wall like a human plank and started fiddling with the water heater. Once she got it started, she filled up a bucket and sat it on top of the heater to warm up.

Charlie came back, sat down on the floor, and gestured for me to join her, which I did.

“All right. Shawn introduced me to everyone, like I said, and I spent a couple of days helping out Jaya. After Baj left, she was a little shaken up.”

The story she shared with me went a bit like this, with my elaboration, of course:

They were a study in contrasts, sitting in the lounge chairs on the sun deck. Jayashri Sharma, a slight, delicate woman with skin the color of roasted cinnamon cream and long black hair that fell in a dark river from the top of her head to almost the backs of her knees... Charlotte Marie Cooper, a curvy, almost quintessential American Girl who sported colorful half-sleeve tattoos on both arms, with a pale complexion that showed every blush or approaching storm of feelings... drinking tea.

For Jayashri, serving tea was central to hospitality, civilized behavior, and comfort, and gave her a familiar ritual to ground some of her anxiety. Only 24 hours had passed since she had nearly lost a dear friend to a hand grenade because of his own suicidal need to protect other people, and she had endured her husband’s need to do what he considered the right thing. While she understood Bajali’s reasons, as well as the logic behind them and even the feelings that ran so deeply within him, the simple fact was that his actions were potentially as suicidal as turning one’s back on a live grenade.

Being without him was not a future she wanted to contemplate, much less be a part of.

Underneath the serenity of her face, lurked a secret wish that they could have sent Frank instead. They could have pinned a note to the sutures that said, “Dear Warren, your senseless megalomania has nearly taken the life of your firstborn son. Please let us alone, and many sons and families will be spared the tragedy you nearly suffered by your own orders.” Behind closed doors, she had said as much to her husband, as she tearfully beseeched him to choose a different path.

“My darling, such a thing would make no difference at all to this man. You would sacrifice the life of your friend and betray the trust I have placed in you by telling a secret that was not even mine to tell. That would be the horrible karma of my sin in telling you what I should never have mentioned in the first place.” He shook his handsome head. “I would still... we would still be hunted for the knowledge I have. Frank would only die before his time.”

While his voice was calm, the words were like acid on bare flesh. She knew he was right and resented that he was nobler than she was.

Charlotte spoke her name, and it made Jaya’s attention shift from the painful reverie that threatened to pull her downward.

“Yes, Charlotte?”

“I am not going to lie to you. I am absolutely here to pry into your business.” Jaya found the girl’s direct approach to be endearingly fresh and utterly American.

“Why would you wish to do such a thing on a lovely afternoon when there is tea to be enjoyed and sunshine to warm our bodies?”

“Your husband has gone to do something beyond brave, and you’re left here to wait and see if he will come home. Jayashri, you’re so upset I can smell it, and you are changing the track of your thought patterns by a force of will. I can see it. Please, talk to me. I am here to help you if you let me.”

More poison! More acid on the wound in her heart!

“How dare you invade my privacy when I have invited you into my home and shown you every hospitality?!”

“I hear you saying you feel as though I’m invading your privacy.” Charlotte nodded, not even raising an eyebrow in the face of Jayashri’s sudden outburst. “This is a situation within your power to change. You can ask me to leave, and I will, if you feel that is the solution to the pain you are feeling.”

“You have no idea what I am feeling!”

“You’re right. I don’t have any idea what you are feeling. All I can do is tell you what I am observing. You, on the other hand, can tell me what you are feeling. If you are angry at me, I am willing to listen to that, too.”

“I am feeling that you are prying into my life when I have not given you permission to do so. You are new here and I have no reason to trust you, or to unburden myself on you.”

“Then you aren’t angry at me?” Charlotte’s voice was soothing, and her manner seemed both genuine and slightly remote. It was the sort of thing Jayashri had come to associate with deeply religious or spiritual people, like gurus and Buddhist priests in India.

“I am not angry at you. I am very frightened and upset.” Those two simple admissions were enough to make the walls she built around her feelings slide out of place. Tears started to collect in the corners of her eyes, and she felt entirely humiliated that they would reveal her to be so weak in the presence of a stranger.

Charlotte’s hand found hers where it was, wrapped around the handle of her tea cup, and simply rested there. It was enough to shatter the walls and leave her weeping freely.

“I wanted to escape with him,” she whispered between the silent heaving breaths, “and leave this place, so that bastard would never find us again. Then his own son inspires Bajali by risking his life to save the children! How could Bajali think of doing anything less than risk his life as well? He was so inspired by the love of this madman’s son!”

She clapped both hands to her mouth, realizing that she had betrayed the trust placed in her a second time. From that moment on, she wept in silence, terrified there would be another moment when secrets would escape her.

In time, the tears slowed.

“Jayashri, will you listen to me?”

“You do not need the attention of someone as horrible as I am. I betray my own husband’s trust and question the love in his heart. I am a heartless, selfish thing!”

Charlotte got up, walked around the table, and pulled her into a close embrace.

“Jayashri, I know you feel these things and it is all so huge. You are not any of those things. Just breathe with me. Slow. Easy. In. Out. Come on.”

They breathed together, and Jayashri felt the woman’s heart beating within her chest. It was something to focus on that was not the agony of her feelings. It gave her a measure of peace.

“I want you to keep breathing just like you are right now,” Charlotte said, mere inches away. “When life brings you experiences that inspire fear that someone you love will leave us or die, it is so intense it can swallow you whole. If people feel powerless in situations like that, they often lash out at everyone and everything as a way of processing the agonizing things they are feeling. We tell ourselves stories to explain and justify our actions, because the honesty would be too much in combination with the pain that is already there.” She stroked Jayashri’s hair, like one might do with the sad daughter who came home from school in tears.

“We expect so much of ourselves when we love someone, and sometimes we try so hard to be perfect for them that we forget we are nothing more than human beings.” Jaya felt Charlotte laugh silently. “We treat our men as if they were our little boys. Women, sweetie, do not like to be afraid when it comes to their men.”

“No,” Jayashri said, nearly sotto voce, “we do not like that at all.”

“I’m not going to tell you more about that conversation. I treat it as therapist-patient confidentiality.” Charlie stood up and went to check the water heating across the room. “Now, shuck your duds, Frankie the Face, because I’m going to sponge you off.”

I did what she asked, silently, because too many thoughts were flinging themselves around in my skull. A two-part question came to mind that I needed to voice.

“Baj has always known who I am? How did he find out?”

Charlie walked back over, bucket in hand, and smiled at me.

“Honey, Baj worked for your dad. Don’t you think a businessman, no matter how bent, would have a family photo
somewhere
around his office?”