Unseaming (20 page)

Behind him a snail trail of water led backward to the bathroom, where the overhead light still shone, the hot tub jets still bubbled. In the condensation on the mirror, the frantic streaks made by his fingers still remained, not yet filled in by the steam, the space he’d wiped clear to stare goggle-eyed at a figure with hair like snow.

He opened the door to the stairwell and groped for the light switch. Right as he found it, his wet feet slipped and he fell. His shadow thrashed before him, crazy partner in a dance of pain. The cement floor that broke his fall offered no other mercy.

He lay for some time on that surface that he had troweled smooth so many years ago. What he at first took to be the rattle of his own breath sharpened into a different sound, a creature scuttling toward him across the hard floor. He looked up, did a double take to see a young girl standing at the top of the stairs, peering down at him through a snow-white cascade of hair.

The apparition distracted him from the creature’s approach, until it flicked its tongue against his ear.

He cried out and turned his head, raised a pain-wracked arm to ward off whatever attack was coming, but the creature had scurried away. He caught a glint off shiny green scales as it sidewound into the darkness.

His eyes stayed fixed on the point where the creature had vanished. He didn’t move, his body an archipelago of pains small and large.

The thing had gone into the storage room, that tomb for hundreds of cast-off children born of pastels and pigment and clays and canvas and stone. His unfinished, imperfect offspring.

If he shouted, if he could manage even a scream, perhaps Galina would hear him, even in this house he’d built on the mountaintop with its sturdy stone walls.

Instead, after a long silence broken only by the voices that clamored in his head, he started to pull himself in the direction the creature had gone, dragging his broken body into the dark.

no place, no year

Dreaming, Galina shivers feverish on a metal floor, in the filthy cargo hold of a ship bound for South America, while her young husband holds her wrapped in blankets. He cries quietly, leaving only once to beg the hard-faced crewmen for a damp cloth.

She shivers naked on the stone in a freezing cold cave, hearing her sweet love call her name from a place she cannot see, the warmth of his arms denied her.

The abyss gapes hungry above her and the Queen slithers across it in her finery, scales of glittering emerald, eyes like lakes set afire. Talons flex, the curving gold weapons of a monster that listened to a boy’s piping in a mosquito-swarmed field, and longed.

Would that Galina had gone to him when he played, would that she had taken a rock and crushed the entranced lizard when it was small and distracted—when she was vulnerable, far away from her kingdom, green scales speckled by the sun.

Dreaming, Galina shouts, “Leave me alone!”

I give back what I took. I take back what I gave.

Then she’s no longer dreaming. Beside her the bedside clock flashes the witching hour. She knows immediately that Daniel’s not in the room, has never gotten into bed with her.

She pads from the bedroom, heart laboring faster as she calls his name and hears no reply. She peers down the lighted basement stairs, sees the blood at the bottom, and where that leads, hurries to the storage room as panic thrashes in her chest.

With long rows of metal-framed wooden storage bins to either side of her, she gropes in the center of the room for the pull chain that will throw on the light. She calls Daniel’s name again, hears nothing.

She finds the chain, pulls, and the first blinding arc of light reveals a girl with head haloed in white, standing just inches away.

Galina screams.

But the girl is gone—and her husband lies sprawled in an aisle between two of the bins, bone jutting from a torn and bleeding knee, naked flesh blackened with bruises. He raises his head, face frozen in an agonized scowl.

He found them: the paintings made by the students who saw the white-haired girl in the garden, who painted her portrait—always the same age, the same dress, the same oval face and snow-blond hair, no matter what the year. Twenty-one in all that Galina took from his confused hands. They’re strewn around him, some smeared with his blood.

She’d always known who it was who smiled shyly from the canvases, wanting so badly to be seen, to know she wasn’t forgotten. At first Galina had thought it cruel, how the Queen used their daughter’s ghost to taunt them. But she determined to never show rage, never weep. Why should she ever give her tormentor such gifts?

She had kept every portrait, stacked them on their sides on a bottom shelf It never mattered that they were in plain view. Daniel couldn’t see them, or if he did, he would forget they were there the moment his gaze wandered

How did he find them in the dark?

Running is beyond her at her age, but at the children’s insistence they had a phone installed downstairs, and that’s what she steps toward when the sudden pain in her belly doubles her over, forces her to her knees.

A flicker in the corner of her vision, a sinuous strand of green.

A superheated stone burns inside her. The pain surges, brings her to the floor.

The ceiling fades. Above it space shines black. She looks up at the figure unfolding its limbs in that space, and even in her agony she snarls defiance. She addresses the Queen in Russian, her voice that of a woman pierced by a spear. “I cannot fight your power. I never could. Whatever it is that your heart demands you do to me—do it. Then, please, trouble us no more.”

Like a flag the vision furls and slides away.

Despite the pebble burning white hot in her abdomen, she makes the journey to the phone, an ordeal of just a few feet that feels like hours, days, the remainder of a lifetime.

Epilogue

He lies in his bed, kept alive by tubes and tenderly held spoonfuls. Other hands move him, keep him free of bedsores. When he speaks, he hears the words in his head, but the sounds that come from his mouth are the unsculpted squawks of a baby.

He remembers now—he remembers Tamara, the stone baby, the girl with hair of snow. When Galina sits beside him, keeping him company, reading to him from the paper or from a long Russian novel, the girl is there too, resting her head on her mother’s shoulder, listening.

He wants to tell his wife that the long-delayed birth did not banish their first child, it freed her, and now wherever Galina goes she follows. She is waiting for the end, when her mother will see her, and at last they will embrace.

But he cannot tell her. There is a wall between them, a barrier of stone and cold silence. There is a wall between his mind and his useless tongue, between his anger and his limp hands. He cannot carve the wall, cannot shape it in any way.

He remembers now—he remembers that he played the reeds. He could play again, if his body would move. He is frozen as he was in the cave, unable to speak as his beautiful and beloved Galina lowered her hood to reveal her wind-burned face and made her impossible demands of his pitiless, envious jailor.

But now, in his fugue of memory and delusion, her eyes find his in the cave wall, and she says without speaking,
It was a terrible sacrifice I made for you, my Danilo, but in the end it was just one of many, so, so many.

Without letting up on the gas, Kyle held the box of business cards out the window and shook it open, dumping his name in the gutter a thousand times over.

He circled the entire block, drawing a line around the abandoned office buildings, a regiment of eyesores built in the 1930s and left to decay as industry shifted to the suburbs. Cornices grinned ragged, the bricks of their teeth fallen away. Crumbling gargoyles made for sad guardians, jutting lumps long divested of wings and heads. Below columns of broken windows, along the fissured sidewalks, the gaping doors whispered darkness, the plywood that once hushed them rotted to tatters.

Circuit completed, box emptied, Kyle parked in the middle of the street. He left the engine idling as he stepped out of the pickup. Its headlights provided the sole illumination—clouds smothered the stars, and city hall had allowed the corner streetlamps to die.

He marveled at how evenly he’d distributed the cards, how by wondrous accident they formed something akin to a dotted line demarcating the curb, staking out this entire godforsaken block as
his
. Fine, then—no one else wanted to admit what goes on here. He’d lay claim and shout its truth so it couldn’t be ignored.

A cops reporter knows a city in a way few others do. Whenever Kyle drove through the slums, he marked his progress not by landmarks but by crime scenes. Here’s where the city worker, bent over with his torso half inside the freestanding electric box, got crushed by a drunk driver in the middle of the day. Here’s the duplex where a gang tortured and strangled two middle-aged sisters for their payout in a disability settlement. Here’s the vacant lot where once stood a three-story home, that burned to the ground with the wheelchair-bound family matriarch trapped inside.

And now Kyle stood before the spot where the city prosecutor insisted that sixteen-year-old Jeremy Sellars had bled to death.

Kyle called to the shadows behind the broken glass. “I’m back! Where are you?”

He’d imagined this moment over and over, what he might do when an answer came, and his scrambled brain replayed options, unable to decide between them. In one scenario, he ran. In others he dashed to the truck for the pipe wrench hanging in the gun rack, or the three full cans of gasoline waiting on the passenger side floorboards. In another he stayed put and tried to talk the boy into coming out into the light.

No sound. No shapes emerged. Nothing moved.

Spikes of pain pricked behind his eyes. A bad thing he’d done to himself, mixing booze and blow to screw up the courage to come here. Booze was an ex-lover he’d begun to court again as his marriage went south, but the cocaine—he’d stayed clean so long, but after everything that happened this day…it had been so easy for him to find a street corner dealer, as if the city itself wanted him to backslide.

For a blink, a hallucination assailed him: as if he spied on himself from one of those high windows, a shaggy string bean with wild eyes, staring up from a bruised face at the derelict floors. Another blink, the vision vanished.

Sober thoughts trickled in. Suppose one of the cops he knew pulled up right now? Made him walk heel-to-toe, smelled the whiskey sours on his breath, noticed his bloodshot eyes, the way he couldn’t stop fidgeting. Worse, what if it was Detective Roache? He couldn’t trust Roache anymore. Kyle’s face still bore the marks of their encounter at the diner.

And once Penny got wind of the police report…well, what the hell else could she do to him? She already had full custody of Aaron.

When Kyle was a kid, a brash bespectacled geek daring enough to push the big swing to the highest it would reach and let go, whether the ground below was turf or asphalt, he had thought a newspaper reporter would be a damn cool thing to be. Dammit, it
was
a cool thing to be. Whatever Kyle’s other problems were, he always had his job. What he did
mattered
. It bewildered him that doing his job the way it
had
to be done could set him at odds with so many people who should have been on his side.

He took a couple more steps, winced at the vise clamping his temples. “Jeremy?”

The soft thump came from his left, around the corner of the cross street. Had there been any other sound, a distant car engine or even a slight wind, he would have missed it.

He started for the corner, following the trail of his own discarded identity. In the morning, he could imagine some angry busybody, a scowling city elder with face elongated to Puritan dimensions, scooping one of the stray cards from the walk and glaring at the name and number there.