The Elementals (17 page)

He lifted the hem of my nightgown up over my thighs and kissed my legs slowly. I felt the roughness of his unshaven chin against my skin. I was slippery wet, entirely ready, when he got up between my thighs. He parted them gently and rested his hand there. His cheek lay against the place where the marks from the concert still showed on my belly. I had gotten used to the increased sensitivity around the shadowy prints but I flinched a little and he moved his head to look. “What’s this?” He squinted at the marks. “It looks like a bruise or something. Does it hurt?”

“I think it’s from you.”

“What?” He sat up with a start and I reached to bring him back where he was.

“They just won’t go away. They came after the concert.”

He looked into my eyes. The candlelight reflected so that there was a thin shimmer beneath the rim of his eyelids. “They’ve been there the whole time?”

I nodded.

“I don’t know what those marks are or how you got them but I promise I would never hurt you.” He paused. “Ariel? Do you hear that?”

“Yes.” I pulled him back to my belly and this time he let me, careful not to lean on the bruises. We lay quiet for a while. I could feel the pulse beneath my hip beating against his cheek. Slowly his fingers began to move over my abdomen.

“Is this all right?”

We were both panting.

“Yes.”

“You tell me if something hurts now.”

I felt his fingers touching me in ways I’d never known anyone could touch, soft but with just the right amount of pressure, tips circling on the small hard knob of me, then sliding down and up inside where I was opening to him. He found a place I’d never felt before, a soft, padded, aching spot and he played it again and again like an instrument that gave off different notes, which came out through my mouth.

That was when the otherworld and the room with the canopy bed became the same place. There was nowhere further to go than this.

*   *   *

It was night when I woke from a fitful dreaming. More candles were lit around the bed and the flames were reflected in the many mirrors. They reminded me of the eyes of spirits. I smelled a sweetness—night-blooming jasmine?—through the open casement window. John wasn’t there. I wondered for a moment if I’d dreamed the whole thing between us.

My skin was sticky and damp, I realized, as I threw back the covers and got out of bed. I wanted to shower. My dress was on the floor and I put it on, but my underpants were gone.

I walked out of the bedroom and into a dimly lit hallway with faded green-and-gold wallpaper. As I took a step into the hall something scuffled away among the shadows. A cat, I thought, but I couldn’t see it. I could hear soft voices speaking somewhere below me.

My heart still beating from the surprise of the creature in the hallway, I leaned over the banister and listened. I could hear Tania’s laughter—or maybe it was Claudia’s?—and the deeper voices of the men. I couldn’t make out the sound of John, though.

I suddenly felt abandoned by him. Why hadn’t he stayed? The thought of him down there with the others made my face heat up with shame, although I wasn’t quite sure what I had to be ashamed of. The memory of his touch made my thighs watery so I steadied myself and then I walked as quietly as I could down the staircase.

I could see them through glass doors, sitting in the large room with the paintings. They were drinking wine and laughing. Claudia and Eamon lay on one sofa, legs tangled. Tania was there, too, sitting on the ground while Claudia stroked her hair. Fallon sat on Demitri’s lap in an armchair. Perry was cross-legged on the floor beside them. John sat in another armchair a little bit away from the others. He was reading, his head lowered, glasses on.

My heart was trying to rush to him.

I moved closer. They didn’t see me.

Then I noticed a tiny painting on the hallway wall I had missed the night before. How had I missed it?

Because the painting looked exactly like Jeni.

I stepped into the room. “What the fuck!” Everyone turned to look at me. “Is this why you brought me here?” I shouted. “Because of this?”

John jumped up. “Ariel, what are you talking about?”

“Jeni!” I said. “What do you think?” I pointed to the painting. “Where did you get this image?” I demanded.

Eamon observed me coldly. “It upsets you? I’m sorry.”

“Where did you get it?”

“The obits, the papers, missing-children posters. I don’t recall with that one. I make so many.”

“What are the chances you’d actually have seen my best friend? And drawn her?”

Tania stood and approached me carefully, her voice a caress of sound. “It’s okay, Ariel. I promise. Everything’s okay.”

“Don’t talk to me!”

“Listen, sweetie, I know you’re upset. But there’s an explanation.” Perry was behind Tania now.

“We won’t let anything bad happen to you,” John added.

“It already has!”

He went up to the painting and examined it. “I’m sorry, Ariel. It looks a little like her but it could be anyone.”

“Oh, Ariel.” Tania shook her head; her eyes looked like the oil paint of an Italian master in the candlelit room. “It could be her,” she said. “Eamon paints every missing child he can find. I’m so sorry, Sylph.”

“It’s a sick world,” Eamon said. “I try to see the beauty.”

Tania pushed his shoulder and hushed him with her masterpiece eyes.

I wanted to vomit. “Shut up,” I said. “Stop talking about her. You have no right!”

John put his arms around me and I let him, but stayed rigid. How could they have brought me here?

“Let’s go,” he said.

On the car ride home they tried to explain to me that—if the image were even Jeni at all—Eamon painted everything he could find for inspiration; how Jeni’s picture had been in the papers a lot for a while; how they had not meant to upset me, had not known this was there, would not have brought me if they had. I let them talk but I felt myself drifting away from them.

It’s better,
I told myself. I needed to stay focused on my task. When I got home I looked up Eamon on John’s Facebook page. Eamon R. Collins. There was a Web site of his art—all those dark, candlelit Caravaggio-esque portraits of young faces. The Missing, they were called. Jeni’s portrait wasn’t there and, for a moment, I wondered if I’d imagined it. But I e-mailed the link to Rodriguez anyway, asking if he had any concerns about what I’d seen.

John texted me five times the next day but I didn’t respond; I had to clear my head. The following day I wrote back and said that I was going to be spending the rest of the vacation close to home, to be with my mom, and that I’d be flying back before school started. (By then I’d also received an e-mail from Rodriguez politely dismissing my latest “clue.”) John tried calling me but I didn’t answer. His voice on the message sounded worried and he said he hoped everything was okay and that if I changed my mind he’d be happy to drive me. But I ignored him. I couldn’t get the image of Jeni’s eyes, depicted in oil paint, both luminous and dark, out of my mind.

19. As if we were starving

But she wasn’t the only one who haunted me; when I got back up north I was missing John so much that my whole body—bones, joints, sinews, tissues, even weirdly my blood—ached with it.

I was almost always swollen with wanting but no matter how long I touched myself I never quite found relief. It only exhausted me and made me miss him more. My fingers traced one of the marks that still showed on my lower belly. I hated them and, at the same time, hoped they would never fade.

I did okay in school, using my studies as a way to block out everything else. I was going to be spending the summer in Berkeley, staying in the dorms again, taking a Shakespeare in film class and European art history and looking for signs of Jeni. I had made the decision a few months before, with the thought that I’d get to see John, and now I wondered if it was a bad idea. I had found no trace of my friend and any interaction with John had taken me more off-course. The incident at the house in Los Angeles had disturbed me; even if the explanations were true, there were so many things about John and his friends that I didn’t understand and I still couldn’t face them. But being back with my mom and dad wasn’t really an option, either. It had felt too strange to curl up in the bed where I’d been as a child, just down the hall from where my parents slept, half-listening for my mom’s moans even in my dreams. I missed her but I really missed the mommy I’d had before she got sick, even though I hated to admit it. The mommy who was always able to take care of me and who seemed invincible and who was never in pain. And I couldn’t help Jeni from Los Angeles, even if Kragen was somehow involved in what had happened. I decided that until I figured out what to do next I’d stay with the summer-school plan and just use some self-control when it came to the house in the hills, even though I could feel it singing to me every night.

I might have been able to keep away from that singing siren house longer if Lauren hadn’t done what she did.

*   *   *

A few weeks after I got back I opened my drawer and found the underwear covered with dark red stains.

When I looked closer I saw that the blood had to be fake, ketchup probably. But it brought tears to my eyes anyway and my heart started pounding like an animal’s under attack. Just the fact that Lauren had gone to the trouble of taking my underwear out, pouring anything on it and putting it back in made my whole body feel as red as the mark she’d left.

Worst of all the blood reminded me, as blood always did—though I didn’t let myself acknowledge the thought—that whatever had happened to Jeni must probably have involved it in some way.

I sat down on the bed, trying to figure out what to do. Then I picked up my phone and texted John.

He wrote back right away.

Come over. Do you want me to get you?

Yes,
I wrote.

I met him in front of my dorm and he drove me to the house. We hardly spoke the whole way. I was afraid I’d start crying or screaming if I even looked over at him. When we got to the house I looked at it with almost the same relief and trepidation that I had felt when I had seen his face as he pulled up in the dark. Its windows were glowing, heavy-lidded eyes and its front door was open, pouring out music like a mouth. John took my hand and I let him; we walked inside and up to the room with the damask drapes and the carved bed. He shut and locked the door, flicked on the green shaded art nouveau lamps and came to sit with me on the mattress.

“Talk to me, lady,” he said. “I was worried.”

I had to resist the impulse to put my head in his lap. I wanted him to stroke my hair forever, feel his fingers moving through the strands, touching my scalp. I would have shaved off all my hair to feel him hold my head even more closely.

“I still don’t get what happened at that house,” I hissed.

I thought that by being away from him the intensity of my feelings would have dulled, but instead they seemed even sharper. John paused, tugging on a lock of his hair.

“I know. I’m sorry. It’s really strange. I asked Eamon more about it but he just said he wanted to paint the image when he found it. He literally has hundreds of clippings of those things.”

My body was studded with goose bumps in spite of the warmth of the room. “Those
things
! That was her!”

“I’m sorry, Ariel. I’m sorry you’re in pain but none of us meant to hurt you. It was just a really horrible coincidence.”

I wondered again if what had gone wrong was my own mind, warped by a tragedy that I did not understand. My sinuses prickled.

“Are you upset about something else besides the painting?” he asked. “About what happened with us?” I couldn’t see his face but I knew I’d find the anxious expression if I looked up.

“No,” I whispered. “Not that.”

I felt his hand on my shoulder and my whole body relaxed. I hadn’t realized how much effort I’d been using to hold myself rigid, how much tension there was all the way down into my bones.

“Ariel,” he said. “What happened to your friend must have been so scary. It’s going to haunt you for a while. But it gets easier. I promise. I’ve been there.” He hesitated and it was as if I could feel his thoughts forming before he spoke them. “I’ve been better just since I met you.”

He stared off into the distance. I couldn’t help it; my hand reflexively reached up and played with the strands of hair at the nape of his neck. His hair was always so cool, no matter how hot everything else was.

Then I let myself slide down so my head was in his lap. My cheek rested against the thick denim of his jeans as he stroked my hair.

“Why did you want to talk to me tonight?” he asked.

I drew my arms around his thighs and squeezed. I felt a tremor run through his body.

“I fucking hate my roommate,” I said. “I’m sorry; I sound like such a baby but I hate her. She’s a total bitch and I can’t get away from her and I don’t know why she hates me so much.” I rambled on, not making sense, and he listened and made compassionate sounds.

“You didn’t tell us,” he said when I had finally shut up.

“I didn’t want to sound like an idiot. Like I do now! I didn’t want to bother you with it.” I thought, but only fleetingly,
Why did he say you didn’t tell
us
instead of you didn’t tell me?

“Look,” he said. “Humans are cruel. They just are. I don’t really get it but you have to accept it on some level and then just stay away from the ones that won’t stop. It’s like if you look at animals. They’re stuck with people most of the time; they have to put up with it. But if they are with someone cruel they find ways to shut it out.”

I nodded, my cheek against his thigh, and he went on.

“This sounds random, as they say, but it’s not … There was this llama I saw once, at a petting zoo. It was so beautiful and perfect with these little cleft hooves and these long eyelashes and beautiful, long legs. She looked a little like you, actually. And she was in this pen with flies buzzing around her feet so she had to keep lifting her knees. And people were trying to pet her and feed her and she was staring off into space, ignoring them, not getting near to them, making this sad, high-pitched sound. I wanted to set her free so badly. I felt sick about it. But I saw that she was protecting herself in her own way. At least I hope so.”