The Taker (51 page)

“Hey, you okay?” he asks, reaching for her hand. “What are you doing in here?”

She lets him help her out of the bathtub. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

“That’s what I’m here for.” He leads her to the bed and lets her curl up in his arms like a child. “I’m sorry … I’m just starting … to realize …,” she says in ragged bursts between sobs.

“That he’s gone,” Luke finishes for her so she can continue crying. It makes sense; up until now she has been concentrating on getting away, not being discovered. Now the escape is behind her, the adrenaline subsides, and she remembers how she got here, that she now has to deal with the fact that the most important person in her life is gone.

He thinks of the many times he walked past someone crying in the hall at the hospital, someone who had just been given bad news, a woman hiding her face in her hands and a man standing beside her, numb and struggling. Luke cannot count the times he’s stepped out of the operating room, pulling off his gloves and mask, shaking his head as he walks to the waiting spouse, stony in the face of her stubborn expectation of good news. He learned to build a wall between himself and the patients and the next of kin; you couldn’t let yourself be drawn into their pain. You could nod your head and share their sorrow, but only for a moment. If you tried to take on their burdens, you wouldn’t last a year on the hospital floor.

This girl shaking in his arms, her sorrow is endless. She will fall in her pit of grief for a long time, tumbling down with no way to stop. He supposes there is a formula for how long it takes for the pain to lift, but it’s probably tied to how long you’ve known the deceased. Of course, there is no relief coming for her. How long will it take for Lanny to tolerate the daily pain of Jonathan’s absence, let alone live with the fact that she was the one who dispatched him? People have become unhinged over less, carried away by sadness. There’s no guarantee of surviving something like this.

He’s going to help her. He has to. He thinks he’s uniquely equipped for this situation. With his training (“Mrs. Parker? We did everything we could for your son, but I’m afraid …”) he hopes her sorrow will shed off him like water off Teflon.

She’s eased up on her crying and is rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Better?” Luke asks, lifting her chin. “Want to go out and get some air?” She nods.

Within fifteen minutes they’re walking hand in hand into the dusky horizon. Lanny has scrubbed her face clean. She leans into Luke’s arm like a girl in love, but on her face is the saddest smile the world has ever seen.

“How about a drink?” he asks. They step off the street into a dark bar and he orders scotch neat for both of them. “I’ll be able to drink you under the table,” she warns him and they clink glasses as though they are celebrating. And sure enough, after one shot, Luke feels the warmth that comes at the beginning of drunkenness, but Lanny has had three shots and has only a half-tipsy smile.

“There’s something I want to ask you. It’s about—him,” he says, as though by not speaking the name, the question will hurt less. “After everything he put you through, how could you keep loving him? It doesn’t sound like he deserved you …”

She picks up her empty shot glass by the rim, like a chess piece. “I could make all kinds of excuses, like how that’s the way it was back then, that wives expected their men to fool around. Or that it was just the kind of man Jonathan was and I had to accept it. But that’s not the real reason … I don’t know how to explain it. I’ve always wanted him to love me the way I loved him. He did love me, I know he did. Just not the way I wanted him to.

“And it’s not so different for a lot of people I’ve known. One partner doesn’t love the other enough to stop drinking, or gambling, or running around with other women. One is the giver and one is the taker. The giver wishes the taker would stop.”

“But the taker never changes,” Luke says, though he wonders if this is always the case.

“Sometimes the giver has to let go, but sometimes you don’t. You can’t. I couldn’t give up on Jonathan. I seemed to be able to forgive him anything.”

Luke sees the ocean well up in her eyes and tries to distract her. “What about Adair? From what you’ve said, it seems that he could have been in love with you …?”

“His love is like the love fire has for wood.” She laughs ruefully. “He confused me for a while, I’ll give you that. One minute he was charming me, the next minute he’d humiliate me. It was all games and tricks with him. I think … he just wanted to see if he could make me love him. Because, I think, no one had ever loved him.” She becomes still, hands knotted in her lap, and the glassy surface of her eyes ruptures. “Look what you’ve done … I’m going to start crying again. I don’t want to cry in public. I don’t want to embarrass you. Let’s go back to the hotel room. We can smoke some pot.”

Luke’s face lights up, remembering the big plastic bag, the resinous high. “I’m prepared to smoke that entire bag with you, if that’s what it takes to cheer you up.”

“My hero,” she says as she tucks her arm under his. They weave up the street toward the hotel, a brisk wind slapping their faces. Luke wishes he could give Lanny a shot of morphine to dull her pain. He’d give her a tranquilizer injection to bring her peace daily, if he could. He clears his mind with a shake of his head. He feels like he’d do anything to make her happy again, but he doesn’t want to become the valet to her misery.

“What was it about me … will you tell me the truth? Am I unworthy of being loved?” she blurts out once they are in bed.

Her question takes Luke aback. “I can’t tell you why Jonathan didn’t love you back, but for what it’s worth, I think he made a huge mistake.” Jonathan was an idiot; only a fool would squander such devotion, Luke thinks.

Her look at him is disbelieving, but she smiles. And then she falls asleep. He pulls her against him, wrapping his arms around her sylphlike body, gathering up her elegantly splayed limbs. He can’t recall feeling like this, except for that miserable time in the pizza parlor with his daughters, when he wanted to bundle them into his rental car and take them back to Maine. He knows he made the right choice by not giving in to his sadness then—the girls are better off with their mother—but he will be haunted forever
by the act of driving away from them. Only a fool squanders such love.

And Lanny. He is willing to do anything to protect this vulnerable woman, to fix her. He wishes he could draw the poison out of her, like a leech with blood. He would take it on himself if he could, but knows all he can do is be with her.

FORTY-THREE

B
OSTON
, 1819

A
n ashy light tugged at my eyelids, waking me from sleep one evening. Uzra appeared next to my bed, a small oil lamp swaying in her hand. It must have been very late, for Adair’s house was still as a crypt. Her eyes implored me to get out of bed, so I did.

She glided out of the room in her usual silent way, leaving me to follow behind her. The sound of my slippered feet on the carpets was scarcely a whisper, but in that quiet house, the sound echoed down the halls. Uzra shielded the lamp as we walked past the other bedchambers so we threw as little light as possible, and we were undiscovered by the time we reached the stairs to the attic.

The attic was divided into two sections, one made into the servants’ quarters and a smaller, unfinished space for storage. This was the area where Uzra hid. She led me through a maze of trunks that acted as her barrier against the world, and then down an impossibly narrow corridor to a diminutive door. We had to crouch and twist to fit through the door and emerged inside what looked like a whale’s belly: rafters for the ribs, a brick chimney instead of a windpipe. Moon-light
seeped in from uncovered windows, allowing views onto the unadorned path to the carriage house. She chose to live in this hollow space to get away from Adair. It was a sad place to live, too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter, and lonely as the moon.

We passed what I assumed was her nest, curtained off by the iridescent winding sheets of organza she wore as sarongs, hung from the rafters like laundry on a line. The bed itself was made of two blankets from the parlor, twisted together in a circular pattern, not unlike a bed made by a wild animal, frenzied and makeshift. A heap of trinkets was piled next to the bed, diamonds the size of grapes, a veil of thin gold mesh to wear with a chador. But there was also bric-a-brac, things a child might covet: a cold, lovely dagger, a memento from her birthplace, its serpentine blade like a snake in motion; a bronze hand mirror.

She brought me to a wall, a dead end. Where I saw nothing, though, she dropped to her knees and pried a pair of boards away, revealing a crawl space. Taking the oil lamp, she plunged fearlessly into the darkness like a rat used to tunneling between walls. I took a deep breath and followed.

After traveling on hands and knees for about twenty feet, we emerged in a windowless room. Uzra held up the lamp so I could see where we were: it was a small finished space, part of the servants’ suite, with a tiny fireplace and a door. I went to the door and tried it, but it was held fast by some means on the outside. The room was dominated by a large table covered with bottles and jars and an array of odds and ends. There was a hutch, and it, too, was stocked with containers of all sizes and shapes, most covered with waxed cloth or stoppered with cork. Baskets tucked under the table were filled with everything from pinecones and branches to inscrutable parts of various animals’ bodies. A few books, ancient and crumbly, were tucked between the jars. Candles stood on plates on the edge of the table.

I inhaled deeply: the room held close myriad smells, spices and forest and dust, and others I couldn’t identify. I stood in the center
of the space and looked around, slowly. I think I knew immediately what the room was and what its existence meant, but I didn’t want to admit it.

I took one of the books down from its shelf. The cover was stretched blue linen embellished with handwritten letters and intricate diagrams of symbols within symbols. Turning the heavy pages, I saw there wasn’t a printed page in the entire book: every bit was done in a careful script, annotated with formulas and illustrations—the proper bit of a plant to keep, for instance, or an ornate dissection of a man’s internal workings—but all in a language I didn’t recognize. The drawings were more telling, for I recognized some of the symbols from childhood as well as from the books in Adair’s libraries—pentagrams, the all-seeing eye, that sort of thing. The book was a wondrous piece of work, the product of hundreds of hours of labor, and it reeked of years spent hidden, of secrets and intrigue, and had undoubtedly been coveted by other men, but its contents were a mystery to me.

The second book was older still, with wooden slabs for covers, laced together with a leather thong. Inside, the pages were loose, not stitched together, and by the variety of the papers it seemed to be a collection of notes rather than a tome. The writing appeared to be in Adair’s hand, but again in a language I didn’t know.

Uzra shifted, restless, shaking the tiny bells on the chain around her ankle. She didn’t like being in this room and I didn’t blame her. Adair had locked it from the outside for a reason: he didn’t want anyone to stumble across it. But as I reached up to return the second book to its place, Uzra stepped forward and grabbed my wrist. She held the lantern close to my arm and when she saw the tattoo—that I’d long since forgotten—she let out a moan like a dying cat.

She thrust her arm under my nose, palm turned up. She bore the same tattoo on the identical place, a slightly larger version but executed more crudely, as though the artist’s hand was not as sure as Tilde’s. Her look was accusatory, as though I had done this to myself,
and yet there was no mistaking her meaning. Adair had chosen to brand us in the same way. His intentions for me could not be far from his treatment of her.

Holding the lantern high, I took in the contents of the room one more time. A description I had heard from Adair’s own lips came back to me—that of the room within the physic’s keep that had been the prison of his youth. There was only one reason he would need a room like this and hide it away in the farthermost corner of the house. I understood what this place was and why he kept it, and a chilly wave passed through me. The woeful tale Adair had spun of his capture and indentured servitude to the evil physic came rushing back to me. Only … now I wondered which of the two men I had been with, these many months; who was the man whose bed I had taken and, indeed, to whom I had given the life of the man who meant most to me in the world? Adair wanted his followers to believe that he was a wronged peasant boy who had vindicated himself and was merely enjoying the reward of having deposed a cruel and inhuman tyrant. When in fact, inside that handsome youth was the monster from the story, the collector of power and the despoiler of lives, able to move from body to body. He’d left his own decrepit husk behind, sacrificed it to the villagers—no doubt—with the peasant boy trapped inside, as he spent his last minutes in terror, paying for the physic’s cruelties. This lie worked well with his monstrous design and appeared to have hidden him for hundreds of years. Now that the truth was known to me, the question was, what would I do?