Kiss Kill Vanish (23 page)

“
Tourtière
is pork pie. You'll like it.”

I'm about to tell him he has no idea what I like, when I realize he might. And I'm ravenous from nearly swimming myself to death again. “What are you getting?”

“Ground sheep eyeballs.”

“Maybe that's why you're getting faster and I'm staying the same,” I say. “Mutton protein.”

“You do realize you're only slower because you're a girl, right?”

“That sounds like an insult.”

“That sounds like science.”

I take a step forward as the line moves up. “Okay, what are you really getting?”

“Charcuterie.”

I nod.

“It's a plate of cured meats,” he says. “Sausage, pâté, foie gras, whatever else they decide to throw on there.”

“I knew that.”

“No, you didn't. Have you thought about learning some French?”

“I
did
know that, and learning French would be a waste of my time.” I'm too hungry to care how ignorant I sound. “I'm not going to be here long enough to make it worth the hassle.”

“So you have definite exit plans then,” he says.

I hesitate. “No.”

“Good.”

The other customers buzz around us in line. Some wander to fill the tables up front after they make their purchases, but most leave the charcuterie with their food wrapped in brown bags and string. We're even farther north of the city now, a twenty-minute drive from Marcel's house, but not really in Montreal anymore. It seems we've moved back in time too. This could be rural France a hundred years ago if it weren't for the cash register up front and the cell phone under the cheek of the woman behind us. I close my eyes and lose myself in the noise and smells. Salami. Foreign chatter. Salted pork. Yeast.

I don't want to think about what it means that I'm confiding in Marcel, or about whether disclosing my uncertainty about when I'm leaving is disloyal. It feels disloyal.

“I could teach you a few basics,” Marcel pesters on. “Small talk, swearing. You know, the necessities.”

“Everyone in Montreal speaks English. Besides, I don't trust you not to switch around the small talk and the swearing.”

“That's fair. I wouldn't trust me either. Speaking another language might be useful, though.”

“I speak Spanish.”

“Well maybe you should order your food in Spanish then and see how that goes.”

The line moves forward again. It's our turn. Marcel puts the menu on the stack and smiles at the pretty, gap-toothed girl behind the counter. He opens his mouth, but before he can say a thing, I blurt, “
Tourtière, s'il vous plaît
.”

She stares at me. Blinks.

I don't look at Marcel. He's undoubtedly smirking at my pronunciation, so instead I keep my eyes straight ahead and pretend he's never been so impressed.

I'm almost ready to congratulate myself when the girl opens her mouth and emits a perfectly strung chain of sounds. There are no separate words, just one giant unrecognizable mass of language. Based on inflection and how she's staring at me, I'm pretty sure it was a question.

In the corner of my eye, Marcel folds his arms. I can feel him grinning without actually looking at his face. This situation might not be beyond repair. “
Pardon?
” I ask the girl.

She says it again slower, but it's just as meaningless, and when it's over, she's still staring at me, waiting for a response. I decide to gamble and say, “
Oui
.”

She stares at me a second longer, then turns to Marcel and says, “
Parlez-vous français?
”

Marcel shrugs at her and turns to me. “The people behind us are getting a little antsy. I think I'll go find a place to sit.”

I roll my eyes. “Seriously?”

“What?”

“A little help.”

“What was that? I didn't quite hear you.”

I breathe through my nose and turn back to the girl, who is now saying something else, something just as incomprehensible as the last thing she said.

“You need help?” he asks me. “Did you ask her if she speaks Spanish?”

I turn around. With a long line of potential translators to choose from, I start with the man directly behind the woman on her phone. He's old and sour-looking, and when I say “
Anglais?
” he puckers and puts up his hands like I'm aiming a weapon at him.

“Anybody?” I call.

“We're not in Montreal anymore, babe,” Marcel mutters.

“
Espagnol?
” I try.

Marcel laughs. “Okay, this isn't going anywhere. She wants to know if you'd like anything else.”

“That's all?”

I don't realize that I'm shouting at him until I feel the eyes of the entire charcuterie on me.

He shrugs.

“Tell her no thanks, jackass. Just the
tourtière
is fine.” I leave the line to find a table.

“Wait,” he calls from behind me. “You want me to call her a jackass? Really?”

I don't turn around.

There's only one open table. It's right by the window, so I sling my bag over the back of the chair and sit, staring out into the depressed fairy tale. It should be beautiful, frozen branches and suspended icicles, but the sludge from the cars and deep gray of the sky paint a film of dreariness over the whole. A pang of loneliness rings through me. It makes me hate Emilio for being gone, and Marcel for being nice and mean in the same breath, and myself for being so difficult.

Marcel joins me without a word, sliding the steaming
tourtière
in front of me. He starts to eat, but I can only stare at my food. My food I didn't even pay for.

“What?” he says finally. “You can't seriously be mad at me.”

“I'm not mad at you.”

“You are. You're insulted every time I help you, but then when I won't help, I'm in trouble. Or am I in trouble for stepping in and helping?”

“You can't be in trouble. I'm not your mother or your girlfriend.”

“Yeah, well, I've never had that kind of mother or that kind of girlfriend.”

I'm a jerk. Remembering the hunger that was threatening to kill me just minutes ago, I pick up my fork and take a big bite. It's salty. It makes my tongue curl with its perfect saltiness, and it's so warm and filling I almost tear up. More. I need more.

I'm halfway through before the guilt creeps up my throat. I put my fork down. “Sorry.”

He doesn't look up.

“For being a jerk,” I add.

He keeps eating only a tiny bit slower, though, and I sense his surprise. Maybe I've embarrassed him.

“Would you accept low blood sugar as an excuse?” I ask.

He lifts an eyebrow and mumbles, “Sure.” It feels sincere. A single word, it shouldn't seem like a real pardon, but it does. That makes me feel bad too, though. Is he so quick to forgive because people are always asking his forgiveness, or because nobody ever does?

We eat in a warm sort of silence. He offers me a piece of cheese and prosciutto, and I lend him my knife after he drops his, but the rest is conversationless.

“That was really good,” I say as we make our way back to the car.

“Worth the drive, right?”

I nod, but I meant all of it, not just the food. Dread is starting to creep along my skin at the thought of being delivered back to my apartment. “Swimming wasn't bad either,” I add.

“Yeah.” He pulls out of the parking lot and onto the small highway that leads back to the city. “Could've been worse. I could've had my balls crushed again.”

“Why would you even bring that up?”

“Right. Sorry. Must be some posttraumatic stress disorder thing.”

“I'm still not going to apologize for it.”

“I still didn't think you were going to.”

“Good,” I say. Out my window rows of trees lift their skeletal arms upward like they're praying for spring. It's a pose of desperation, the way their skinny black limbs grasp at nothing and everything.

“Maples,” Marcel says.

“They're kind of ghostly.”

“I guess.”

I can't pull my eyes away from their stripped frames. To think that by the time they're covered again I'll be thousands of miles away should make me happy. I shouldn't have doubt pouring into me like sand, filling every inch. Doubt feels just as fatal as hope.

“So, swimming,” he says. “You want go again tomorrow?”

I turn from the maples, but I can still feel them scraping away at the sky. “Sure.”

I'm not dreaming. I can't be, because I'm not asleep. I'm lying in bed trying to sleep, which makes this remembering or imagining, even though it doesn't feel like either. It feels like my subconscious is forcing me to watch a movie of its own creation. If I was inside a dream, I wouldn't be aware of the saltiness still on my lips or feel the weight of the half-digested pig in my stomach. I'm definitely awake.

Only I'm not here. I'm in Key West. It's a ripe orange dusk, and my fingers are laced with Emilio's as we wander in and out of shops. It's all clutter—kitschy souvenirs and eclectic charms—but it's beguiling clutter. I want to look, but Emilio is leading me away from it, farther from the shops toward the thick smell of roasting meats and fried plantains. I let him.

My sisters are on the yacht, resting after too much sun and wine, and my father too, all lost in their own worlds. So Emilio and I concocted separate excuses to go into town, not that anybody was listening, and now we're pretending this is allowed. We're pretending that he isn't my father's employee and that I'm older than seventeen. We're pretending he can pull me to him suddenly and kiss me on the sidewalk without looking around anxiously before and after.

No, I'm not asleep. This isn't a dream, or my imagination. I remember.

I remember my green cotton sundress, limp from the humidity, and I remember that Emilio tastes like tequila. His cheek scratches my skin when he leans down to kiss my collarbone. Right there on the street, he does it like he's allowed to, his fingers sliding under the thin green strap. The terror of it is still delicious enough to make me shiver, even now.

He lifts his head, smiling, like he only just realized where we are. He kisses my lips again, but only for a second before someone bumps into us and we break apart. I glance around us. Tourists are everywhere, tipsy and sunburned, getting louder every second.

He turns me around and we walk, this time with me in front, his hand gripping my waist. I'm sticky from the mugginess of swarming bodies. The crowd thickens around us as people spill from the shops and restaurants and tiki bars into the streets, but we aren't part of it. We're two cool stones in a hot river of leering, sweaty faces and groping hands. They leave their wetness on my skin, and this is when I start to feel that familiar helplessness of a nightmare.

Is this part still a memory? I don't think so. I can't remember. Why would I be imagining it, though?

Emilio pushes me on, farther into the crowd, but I don't want to go this way anymore. I'm drowning in music from too many restaurants that's no longer music but a tide of pulsing noise. The colors around me have turned lurid. I don't trust these faces and bodies, but Emilio's hand is like an anchor. I can't float away.

Until the anchor lifts.

I spin around and he's gone, swallowed up by the crowd.
No.
Panic fills me, tastes like salt, smells like meat sweating over a fire. I was wrong. I'm the one who's been swallowed up by the crowd, and Emilio has delivered me to them.

The phone rings. I sit up in the dark, weak and wounded from my dream, and the imaginary betrayal. It rings again, and this time it hits me. It's him.

I hadn't realized—not until this moment—that I'd stopped believing he was going to call.

Fingers shaking, I pick up the phone. “Emilio.”

He sighs. “It's you.”

“It's me.”

Neither of us can speak. I'm in shock; he's too relieved. At least I think he's relieved. A sigh can mean other things too.

“Where were you when I called?” he asks. The heaviness of his voice startles me. It's so severe, it barely sounds like him. “Someone picked up your phone, and I thought . . . I thought a lot of things.”

“I'm sorry. I didn't know until after.”

“After what? What happened?”

“Nothing.” I close my eyes. I sound like a cagey teenager trying to wiggle out of trouble.

“
Something
happened. Who had your phone? I could hear someone breathing into the receiver, and I've been sick ever since, imagining the absolute worst scenar—”

“It was only Marcel,” I blurt.

There's no sigh this time. No gasp, no cursing, no laughter. His voice is lower and expressionless. “Why did Marcel have your phone?”

“We were hanging out. But why didn't you call again? Or text?”

“Since when do you
hang out
with Marcel? I couldn't call because I thought someone had your phone. And why did Marcel have it?”

“He didn't,” I say. “He just picked it up when I was changing.”

“What?”

“Nothing. He . . .” I trail off, muddled and sweating. I put my hand to my cheek. I'm flushed even though my room is cold. This conversation isn't how I imagined it would be. He's supposed to be supplying the excuses and the apologies. I'm supposed to be forgiving him.

“What are you doing, Valentina? Why are you spending time with the brother of your father's dead informant?” he asks. “I shouldn't have to explain how dangerous that is—we don't even know for sure that he's not working for your father!”

“Marcel isn't working for my father.”

“You sound awfully certain. Is that what he's been trying to convince you of while you've been
hanging out
?”