The Power of Love (11 page)

Then it stopped. Everything was still. He saw in front of him a glossy picture of a motorcycle. Eric had awakened.

It was a dream, thought Tristan. He was still inside, but Eric didn’t seem to notice. Maybe he was too exhausted, or maybe his fried brain was too used to strange feelings and thoughts to respond to Tristan.

Did the bizarre events of the dream mean anything? Was there some truth hidden in them, or were they the wanderings of a druggie’s mind?

Caroline was a mysterious figure. He remembered how they had no will to resist her invitation to a ride on the merry-go-round. Her face was so welcoming.

He saw it again, the welcoming face. It was older now. He imagined her standing at the door of her own house. Then he walked through that door with her. This time he was in Eric’s memory!

Caroline looked around the room, and they did, too. The blinds were opened in the big picture window; he could see dark clouds gathering in the western sky. In a vase was a long-stemmed rose, still tightly curled in a bud. Caroline was sitting across from him, smiling at him. Now she was frowning.

The memory jumped, like a badly spliced movie, frames dropping out of it. Smiling, frowning, smiling again. Tristan could barely hear the words being spoken; they were drowned out by waves of emotion.

Caroline threw back her head and laughed. She laughed almost hysterically, and Tristan felt an overwhelming sense of fear and frustration. She laughed and laughed, and Tristan thought he’d explode with the force of Eric’s frustration.

He grabbed Caroline’s arms and shook her, shook her so hard her head rolled backward and forward like a rag doll’s. Suddenly he heard the words being screamed out at her:

“Listen to me. I mean it! It’s not a joke. Nobody’s laughing but you. It’s not a joke!”

Then Tristan felt a pressure squeezing his head, compressing his mind so intensely he thought he would dissolve. Caroline and the room dissolved, like a scene from a movie disintegrating in front of his eyes; the screen went black. Eric had pressed down on the memory. His own bedroom suddenly came back into focus.

Tristan got up and moved with Eric across the room. He watched his fingers open a knapsack and pull out an envelope. Eric shook brightly colored pills into his quivering hand, lifted them to his mouth, and swallowed.

Now, Tristan thought, was the time to take seriously Lacey’s warnings about a drug-poisoned mind. He cut out of there fast.

11

“Capes and teeth are selling big,” Betty said, glancing through the sales receipts for ’Tis the Season. “Is there a convention for vampires at the Hilton this week?”

“Don’t know,” Ivy murmured, counting out a customer’s change for the third time.

“I think you need a break, dear,” Lillian observed.

Ivy glanced at the clock. “I just had dinner an hour ago.”

“I know,” said Lillian, “but since you’ll be closing up for Bet and me, and since you just sold that sweet young man who bought the Dracula cape a pair of wax lips …”

“Wax lips? Are you sure?”

“The Ruby Reds,” Lillian said. “Don’t worry, I caught him at the door and got him to trade them for a nice set of fangs. But I do think you should take a little break.”

Ivy stared down at the cash register, embarrassed. She had been making mistakes for three days now, though the sisters had graciously pretended not to notice. She wondered if the cash box had come out right Sunday and Monday. She was amazed that they would trust her to close up that night.

“The last time I saw you like this,” Betty said, “you were falling in love.”

Lillian shot her sister a look.

“I’m not this time,” Ivy said firmly. “But maybe I could use a break.”

“Off you go,” Lillian said. “Take as long as you need.”

She gave Ivy a gentle push.

Ivy walked the top floor of the mall from one end to the other, trying once more to sort things out. Since Saturday she and Gregory had been doing a sort of shy dance around each other: hands brushing, eyes meeting, greeting each other softly, then backing away. Sunday night her mother had set the table for a family dinner and lit two candles. Gregory looked at Ivy from across the table as he’d often done before, but this time Ivy saw the flame dancing in his eyes. Monday Gregory had slipped away without speaking to anyone. Ivy didn’t know where he had gone and didn’t dare ask. Maybe to Suzanne’s. Maybe Saturday night had been just a moment of closeness—a single moment, a single kiss, after all the hard times they had shared.

Ivy felt guilty.

But was it so wrong, caring for someone who cared for her? Was it wrong, wanting to touch someone who touched her gently? Was it wrong, changing her mind about Gregory?

Ivy had never felt so mixed up. Only one thing was clear: she was going to have to get her act together and concentrate on what she doing, she told herself—just as she ran into a baby stroller.

“Oops. Sorry.”

The woman pushing the stroller smiled, and Ivy returned the smile, then backed into a cart selling earrings and chains. Everything jingled.

“Sorry. Sorry.”

She narrowly avoided a trash can, then headed straight for the Coffee Mill.

Ivy took her cup of cappuccino to the far end of the mall. The two big stores that had been there were closed, and several lights had burned out. She sat on an empty bench in the artificial twilight, sipping her drink. Voices from shoppers at the other end of the mall lapped toward her in soft waves that never quite reached her.

Ivy closed her eyes for a moment, enjoying the solitude. Then she opened them, turning her head quickly, surprised by three distinct voices to the right of her. One of them was very familiar.

“It’s all there,” he said.

“I’m going to count it.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

“I said I’m going to count it. You figure out whether I trust you.”

In a dimly lit tunnel that led to the parking garage, Gregory, Eric, and a third person were talking, unaware that anyone was watching. When the third person turned his head into the light, Ivy could hardly believe her eyes. She had seen him outside the school and knew he was a drug dealer. But when she saw Gregory hand the dealer a bag, what she really couldn’t believe was how she had forgotten about the other side of Gregory.

How had she gotten so close to a guy whose friends were rich and fast? How had she come to rely on someone who, bored with what he had, took stupid risks? Why did she trust a person who played dangerous games with his friends, no matter who it hurt?

Tristan had warned her once, before that night at the train bridges, before the night that Will was almost killed. But Ivy thought that Gregory had changed since then. In the last four weeks he’d—Well, obviously, she was wrong.

She got up abruptly from the bench, spilling cappuccino down the front of her.

Tristan! she cried out silently. Help me, Tristan! Help me get my head straight!

She ran down the hall to the brighter area of the mall. She was hurrying for the escalator when she slammed into Will.

The girl with him, an auburn-haired girl whom Ivy recognized from Eric’s party, swore softly.

Will stared at Ivy, and she stared back. She could hardly stand it, the way he looked at her, the way he could hold her captive with his eyes.

“What are you doing here?” Ivy demanded.

“What’s it to you?” the girl snapped.

Ivy ignored her. “Don’t tell me,” she said to Will, “you just had the feeling, you just thought—somehow you just knew—”

She saw a flicker of light in his eyes, and she glanced away quickly.

The girl with him was squinching up her face, looking at Ivy as if she were crazy; Ivy
felt
a little crazy. “I—I have to get to work,” she said, but he held her still with his eyes.

“If you need me,” Will told her, “call me.” Then he turned his head slightly, as if someone had spoken over his shoulder.

Ivy brushed past him and hurried up the escalator, climbing faster than the steps moved, and rushed to the shop.

“Oh, dear,” Lillian said when Ivy burst through the door.

“Oh, my!” said Betty.

Ivy was panting, from anger as much as running. Now she stopped to look down the front of her pale green dress. It was mud-colored.

“We should soak that right away.”

“No, it’s okay,” she said, trying to catch her breath, breathing slowly and deeply to calm herself down. “I’ll just sponge it off.” She moved toward the rest room in the back, but Betty was already going through one rack of costumes, and Lillian was gazing thoughtfully at another.

“I’ll just sponge it off,” Ivy repeated. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

Lillian and Betty hummed to themselves.

“It’s an old dress anyway,” Ivy added.

Sometimes the old ladies played deaf.

“Something simple,” she finally begged. Last time she had ended up as an alien—enhanced with batteries that made her blink and beep.

The sisters did keep it simple, giving her a soft white blouse, gathered and worn off the shoulders, and a colorful skirt.

“Oh, what a lovely gypsy she makes,” Lillian said to Betty.

“We should dress her up every day,” Betty agreed.

They smiled at her like two doting great-aunts.

“Don’t forget to turn out the light in the back, love,” Betty said, then the sisters went home to their seven cats.

Ivy breathed a sigh of relief. She was glad to be running the shop alone for the next two hours. It kept her busy enough to keep her mind off what she had just seen.

She was angry—but at herself more than at Gregory. He was who he was. He hadn’t changed his ways. It was she who had made him into the perfect guy.

At 9:25, Ivy was finished with her last customer. The mall had become virtually empty. Five minutes later she dimmed the lights in the shop, locked the door from the inside, and started counting the money and adding up receipts.

She was startled by someone knocking on the glass. “Gypsy girl,” he called.

“Gregory.”

For a moment she considered leaving him out there, putting back the glass wall that he had erected between them last January. She walked toward him slowly, unlatched the store door, and cracked it open three inches.

“Am I disturbing you?” he asked.

“I have to total the register and close up.”

“I’ll keep quiet,” he promised.

Ivy opened the door a few inches more and he entered.

She started toward the cash register, then turned back quickly. “I may as well get this out of the way now,” she said.

Gregory waited; he looked as if he knew something big was coming.

“I saw you and Eric and the other guy—that dealer—making an exchange.”

“Oh, that,” he said, as if it were nothing.

“Oh, that?” she repeated.

“I thought you were going to tell me something like, from now on, we were never to see each other alone.”

Ivy looked down, pulling and twisting a tassel on her skirt. It would probably be better if they didn’t.

“Oh,” he said, “I see. You were going to say that, too.”

Ivy didn’t answer him. She didn’t honestly know.

Gregory walked over to her and laid his hand on top of hers, keeping her from yanking off the tassel.

“Eric does drugs,” he said, “you know that. And he’s gotten himself in deep, real deep, with our friendly neighborhood dealer. I bailed him out.”

Ivy looked up into Gregory’s eyes. Against his tan, they looked lighter, like a silver sea on a misty day.

“I don’t blame you, Ivy, for thinking I’m doing the wrong thing. If I thought Eric would stop when he ran out of money, I wouldn’t pay up for him. But he won’t stop, and they’ll go after him.”

He let go of her hand. “Eric’s my friend. He’s been my friend since grade school. I don’t know what else to do.”

Ivy turned away, thinking about how loyal Gregory was to Eric and how disloyal she had been to Suzanne.

“Go ahead. Say it,” Gregory challenged her. “You don’t like what I’m doing. You think I should find myself better friends.”

She shook her head. “I don’t blame you for what you’re doing,” she said. “Eric’s lucky to have you for a friend, as lucky as I am. As lucky as Suzanne is.”

He turned her face toward him with just one finger. “Finish up your work,” he said, “and we can talk some more. We’ll go out somewhere, not home, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Are you going to wear that?” he asked, smiling.

“Oh! I forgot. I spilled cappuccino on my dress. It’s soaking in the basin.”

He laughed. “I don’t mind. You look … uh, exotic,” he said, his eyes dropping down to her bare shoulders.

She tingled a little.

“I guess I’ll have to find a costume for me.”

He started looking over the wall of hats and wigs. A few minutes later he called out to her, “How’s this?”

Ivy looked up from behind the register and laughed out loud.

He was wearing a frizzy red wig, a top hat, and a polka-dotted bow tie.

“Dashing,” she said.

Gregory tried on one costume after another—a Klingon mask, King Kong’s head and chest, a huge flowered hat and boa.

“Clown!” said Ivy.

He grinned at her and waved his feathery stole.

“If you want to try on a whole outfit, there are fitting rooms in the back. The one on the left is large, with mirrors everywhere. You get all angles,” she told him. “I’m really sorry Philip isn’t here to play with you.”

“When you’re done, you can play with me,” Gregory replied.

Ivy worked a little longer. When she finally closed the books, she saw that he had disappeared into the back.

“Gregory?” she called.

“Yes, my sveet,” he answered with an accent.

“What are you doing?”

“Come here, my sveet,” he replied. “I’ve been vaiting for you.”

She smiled to herself. “What are you up to?”

Ivy tiptoed to the dressing room and slowly pushed open the swinging door. Gregory had flattened himself against the wall. Now he turned quickly, jumping in front of her.

“Oh!” she gasped. She wasn’t acting; Gregory made a startlingly handsome vampire in a white shirt with a deep V-neck and a high-collared black cape. His dark hair was slicked back, and his eyes danced with mischief.

“Hello, my sveet.”

“Tell me,” she said, recovering from the surprise, “if you put in your fangs, will you be able to pronounce
w’
s?”

“No vay. Thees is how I speak.” He pulled her into the room. “And may I say, my sveet, vat a lovely neck you have!”

Ivy laughed. He put in his long teeth and began to nuzzle her neck, tickling her.

“Where do I thrust in the wooden stake?” she asked, pushing him back a little. “Right there?” She poked him lightly where his shirt gaped.

Gregory caught her hand and held it for a long moment. Then he took out his teeth and lifted her hand to his mouth, kissing it softly. He pulled her closer to him. “I think you’ve already done it, thrust it straight through my heart,” he told her.

Ivy looked up at him, barely breathing. His eyes burned like gray coals beneath his lowered lashes.

“What a lovely neck,” he said, bending his head, his dark hair falling forward. He kissed her softly on the throat. He kissed her again and again, slowly moving his mouth up to hers.

His kisses became more insistent. Ivy answered with gentler kisses. He pressed her to him, held her tightly, then suddenly released her, dropping down before her. He knelt in front of her, reaching up to her, his strong, caressing hands moving slowly over her body, pulling her down to him. “It’s okay,” he said softly. “It’s okay.”

They clung to each other and swayed. Then Ivy opened her eyes. To the left, to the right, reflected in front of her, reflected from behind her—from every angle in the mirrored dressing room—she could see herself and Gregory wrapped around each other.