The Venus Fix (8 page)

“Hot chocolate or hot cider?” I asked.

“Hot chocolate. Definitely.”

I took out the milk and grabbed the powdered mix from the cabinet.

“Can’t we make it the real way?” She meant the way Nina taught her—melting quality chocolate and then adding enough milk to give it the right consistency.

She was already pulling out the double boiler. When I had remodeled the kitchen, I updated all the pots, pans and utensils. Everything was state-of-the-art. The appliances had stainless fronts, the floor and splashboard were white tiles with black diamond accents, and the countertops were granite. It was all very elegant. A chef’s dream. Except I wasn’t a chef.
Far from it. In fact, I could barely manage to broil a chicken and hardly used a double boiler.

That’s the problem with being a Martha-wannabe but not having any intuitive homemaker skills. Sure, everything gleamed in my kitchen. You just stepped inside and imagined fresh pies cooling on a rack and homemade tomato sauce simmering on the stove. In reality, I ruined tuna fish out of a can with too much lemon juice, and overcooked frozen food.

Dulcie, on the other hand, was gifted in the kitchen, a talent she’d inherited from her paternal grandmother, and which her aunt Nina encouraged. Since the play had opened, I’d missed having her in the kitchen, egging me on, teasing me and saving dinner on more than one occasion.

“I don’t have any chocolate. You’ll have to settle for powdered chocolate,” I said, putting the tin on the counter. Dulcie took the milk out of the fridge and went over to the stove, where she poured it in a saucepan and turned on the burner.

“That’s my job,” I protested.

“You’ll burn it, Mom, you know you will.”

While she stirred, I sliced two apples and opened a package of Pepperidge Farm Milanos. Even though they were Dulcie’s favorite cookies, I wished I were one of those mothers who bake for their kids.

“So,” I said once we were back at the island with our steaming mugs, “how was your day?”

Ever since she was little, it’s been our tradition at dinner to talk about what had happened that day, but with caveats. For everything that had gone wrong or that you complained about, there had to be one thing that had gone right or that had made you happy. Always a balance.

Dulcie took another cookie and chewed it, thinking. “Well, I don’t like our new teacher. At
all.
” Major emphasis on the word “all.” My little drama queen.

“Why?”

“She wants us to read a book called
War and Peace.
Do you have any idea how big a book it is? I’ll be fourteen before I finish it.”

I laughed. “No, it won’t take that long. The hardest part is keeping track of all the Russian names, but you’re good with languages.”

She rolled her eyes.

“It’s been years since I read it. How about I get a copy and we read it at the same time? Then we can talk about it together.”

She sort of shrugged an okay, but clearly I was more interested in the mother-daughter reading concept than she was. “So what was good today?”

She gave me her slightly shy look from under partially lowered lids. It was an expression she’d fall back on when she didn’t want to brag but still was proud of herself. “Six curtain calls.”

“That’s wonderful.”

She broke into a smile. “Isn’t it?”

I smiled back.

“And you, Dr. Sin, how was your day?” she asked.

My daughter had never come right out and said she was embarrassed by what I do for a living, but she didn’t need to after the day, three years ago, when she introduced me to her friend’s mother as a heart doctor. The moniker Dr. Sin had been coined one night when we’d been arguing about her curfew and she’d accused me of not trusting her.

“Why are you so worried I’m going to fool around or something? You’re Dr. Sin. You’re supposed to understand about this stuff.”

She rarely called me Dr. Sin when anyone else was around, but she did it often enough at home for it to annoy me.

“Should we start with what was wrong today?” she asked me. “Or what was right?”

I drank some of my cocoa to buy myself some time. All I could think of was how badly the group-therapy session had gone that night and how worried I was that those kids were in more trouble than I could help them with. Since I couldn’t tell her that, I told her that nothing bad had happened and that the good thing had been going ice-skating with Nina at lunchtime.

“Yeah, well, I believe you that you had fun skating. But I don’t believe that nothing bad happened.” She stared at my face: my little gnome with electric blue eyes and dark curly hair and an impish smile playing on her baby-pink lips. “You’ve got the listening look, Mom.”

“The listening look” was another of Dulcie’s sayings. She claimed that sometimes, even though I was home and focused on what was going on with her, I got an expression on my face as if I was still hearing what my patients had said that day. “It’s like you can’t stop listening to them. Like if you do, it will be your fault if anything bad happens to them.”

I used to get up and check in the mirror when she told me she saw the look, but I couldn’t recognize it the way Dulcie could. She was always right, though, when she called it, and she was right that night.

T
imothy sat in his room, at his desk, staring at his computer, supposedly reading a friend’s movie blog. The ambient glow from the screen was the only light in the room. For the past fifteen minutes, he’d been nursing a beer and was teasing himself with the idea of going online. He was swollen just thinking about it, but he was trying to hold off. Dr. Snow had talked about control. He had control. He knew he did. He had it with all sorts of things; he could have it with this. Especially now. After what he’d seen last week. It was so disgusting. It was still bothering him. How sick had that girl been? What had happened to her? When he’d told Amanda about her, she’d gotten all quiet. Freaked out. He knew why. Knew he never should have said anything.

He took another gulp of the beer. He’d just go online for a few minutes. No one would know. His parents were out— again—and the apartment was quiet and still.

Through the window he could see the snow falling, falling as if the heavens had an endless supply of the white flakes.

Dr. Snow said he should call someone when he felt like this. It was eleven-thirty and there was no one he wanted to
talk to, and nothing he wanted to do except go online, find some girl and have her get him off. Maybe he’d find a chick who was into tea-bagging. His erection stiffened. He typed in the porn site’s address, but that was as far as he could get.

The image of Penny from last week, writhing in pain, stopped him. He’d dreamt about her every damn night and woken up drenched in sweat, because even in the dream, he didn’t do a thing to help her.

What had happened to her?

He needed to see that she was fine and back at work, didn’t he? That was a reason to go online: to make sure Penny was fine, even though the small secret voice in his head was telling him something bad had happened. He was afraid she had died.

If she had, she would be the second woman he’d known who had died. That’s what Amanda had said to him. Reminding him. As if he needed anyone to remind him.

He put his head in his hands and tried to picture Simone. It was getting tougher to remember. The images had lost their edges. Her face had become less distinct. She was fading. That scared him, too. Is that what happened to you after you died? You just faded away until no one remembered anything about you anymore? He could remember the girl on the Internet from Thursday night better than Simone. But Simone had been flesh and blood and he had touched her. He had smelled her skin and felt her lips on his cock.

He tried to shake off her ghost, but he couldn’t. She wouldn’t go away.

Sometimes he fixated on her like this and got himself all worked up over what had happened. His heart would start to race and he’d feel nauseous and panicky. He didn’t want to feel all that shit tonight. There was nothing he could do about Simone. It was too late.

Timothy clicked on the hard-drive icon, and then the document
file icon. Next he clicked on the term-paper file. Inside of that he clicked on the American History file. And within that he clicked on the folder called “Presidents.” Inside were a dozen JPEGs, labeled GW1, GW2, GW3, GW4. And there was one MPEG. He moved the cursor over it and let it hover there.

No one knew he still had this. He’d lied and told Amanda he hadn’t kept it, and she’d believed him. Since last spring, he hadn’t opened it, afraid that if he did it would alert some spyware somewhere, and his headmaster and his parents and the girls’ parents and every college he had applied to would know that he was watching it.

That was ridiculous. He was a computer geek. He knew as much as anyone else about how the Net worked. There was no such thing as what he was imagining. But still, he couldn’t do it.

He wanted to click on the MPEG damn bad. He knew what he’d see if he hit the key. They’d fill his screen. The two of them naked, touching each other, the one pale, the other darker. He knew the way they’d lean toward each other to kiss and…

His erection strained against his jeans.

How could he? What kind of animal was he that he could still get a hard-on even now that she was dead? But he needed to come. Besides, it wasn’t his fault. He hadn’t asked them to make the movie. That was their idea—to entice him and show him how sexy they were and how much they were willing to do for him. And Hugh. And Barry. For all of them.

His head was fighting with his cock.

Hit the key, watch it.

Don’t watch it.

Don’t touch yourself.

I have to.

I have to.

Their images appeared on the screen. He fast-forwarded to
the kiss, to where he couldn’t see their faces. He didn’t want to see their faces. Just the fucking kiss.

There it was. A long, slow kiss. A kiss that went on and on. He was transfixed. Under its spell. Lost in the sensation it aroused. He didn’t even know he was stroking himself. He was too far gone. The pressure was building.

When he came, exploding into his own hand, the clip was still running. He hit the stop button quickly. He hadn’t even gotten through sixty seconds of it.

Wednesday
Sixteen days remaining

B
ob was early for his second appointment of the week, but Allison kept him waiting as per my instructions. When she finally let him in, he just stood glaring at me.

“It’s worse. Everything is worse,” he barked.

“I think you should sit down.”

“What difference does it make? Sitting? Lying? It won’t change anything. My wife doesn’t talk to me anymore, and when I’m out, she’s in my office snooping around. I found papers on my desk out of order, a framed photograph broken on the floor.”

“What was it a photograph of?”

He looked at me as if I were speaking in tongues. “Of her. On some trip.”

“What trip?”

He thought for a moment. Frowned. “Our honeymoon.”

I nodded.

“Have you talked to her about being in your office?”

“I’ve tried. But she just shakes her head and leaves whatever room we’re in.”

He walked to the French doors that led to my tiny balcony
and stood there with his back to me. Beyond him, the solid gray sky was unrelenting. Bob opened one of the doors and a fresh blast of freezing air, mixed with some snow, flew in.

“Bob, can you close the door?” I got up, ready to rush over, ready for anything, but Bob shut it himself and started to talk to me.

“There is a story in the newspaper this morning about a young woman who was found dead in her apartment. She’d been there for days before anyone found her.”

He turned and faced me.

I nodded. He was talking about the case Noah had been brought in on. Noah had called me the night before and told me about it, though not much detail; he was still at work and was only taking a short break to fill me in.

“The young woman…” Bob hesitated. “There was a picture of her…”

In silence, he returned to the couch, sat down, clasped his hands together and leaned forward. The lines in his forehead looked as if a sculptor had deepened them over the weekend.

“According to the newspaper, her name was Debra. I knew her as Penny. Do you understand?”

Bob had a habit of doing this to me, trying to get me to do the hard work for him. “No, I’m not sure I do.”

“She was someone I watched, Dr. Snow. On her Web cam. I can’t even count how many times I saw her. And now…” He was speaking softly, and I had to lean forward to catch every word.

“There were people watching her on the night she died, the article said. Men who actually saw her getting sick online—” He broke off again. Shook his head. Closed his eyes.

“Were you watching her?”

Thirty seconds went by. Forty. Sixty. Then: “There were
people actually sitting there, online, watching her, not even realizing that she was dying.” Bob didn’t sound upset so much as astonished.

“What bothers you about that?”

He shook his head.

“Have you ever seen your wife ill like that?”

“Of course.”

“What did you do for her?”

“I took her to the doctor. I gave her medicine. Food. Whatever.”

“How did you know what she needed?”

“What do you mean? It’s what anyone who’s sick would need. What I would need.”

“How does it feel when you’re sick and your wife brings you what you need?”

“I don’t get sick.”

“Never? No flu? No cold?”

“Sure, but that’s not serious.”

“Okay, but still. Tell me. How did it make you feel, the last time you were under the weather and your wife brought you soup, or tissues?”

“I wouldn’t let her stay home from work to wait on me. I’m a grown man.”

“What about at night, when she came home?”

He thought about this.