Modern Mythology stories
BUTTERFLIES: A NOVEL
Continued...
I don’t know how I get through the rest of the day, how Echo or the others don’t immediately know what I plan to do just by looking at me. I find a flashlight in the linen closet and sneak it to my room and hide it in a pair of my socks. The gun is harder to find, but eventually I find a pistol tucked away in the basement; I spin the chamber and see all the bullet spaces are filled; I take out all but two and, checking to see that Echo and the others are busy, sneak it to my room where I spend a few desperate minutes looking for a place to hide it before choosing the a spot under the bed where I can easily reach it.
Once I hide the evidence, I take a novel and go out into the kitchen where the others can see me, as if everything is normal and I’m not planning to break the rules, look at my husband and possibly kill him with a bullet or two to the head. Izzy hasn’t taken my glass away so I sit at the table and take a sip, hoping it will make my hands stop shaking. I open the novel but I can’t concentrate properly; there is a screen between the book and me and I can see through the screen to the book but the words can’t get past the screen to my head. The book doesn’t say what it’s supposed to; the words, blurry, swim together and rearrange themselves into other sentences like kaleidoscopes; the stones, shaken, don’t make the designs they’re supposed to. I shut the novel with a bang as if the noise is enough to drive away my uneasiness.
My stomach contracts, feels hollow, and my hands start to shake again. I can’t believe it; here I am planning to possibly murder my husband, and I’m hungry. How can I be hungry? My stomach growls. It is so crazy I could laugh, but I’m afraid if I do I’ll burst into tears, so I just bite my lip and ask Anna for a small snack. She brings out an omelet, a green salad, and a glass of milk and I attack it like I’m in the middle of a famine. She brings me another glass of milk with a bowl of ice cream for dessert, which I eat so fast I get one of those excruciating right-between-the-eyes ice cream headaches and have to sit with my hands over my eyes and a warm cloth over my neck until the pain stops.
I run to the bathroom and take a shower, making the water as hot as I can stand, letting the spray hit me and bursting into tears. Getting out, I towel off, rubbing my skin almost raw, stopping only when I feel pain. Changing into my nightgown, I run under the covers and lay there shivering, my knees huddled against my chest, almost in the fetal position, wishing it was morning and that my sisters had never come.
When I hear him coming in I take a deep breath, closing my eyes, and try to compose myself. He lies beside me, his arms encircling me, kissing my neck softly, like butterfly wings. I turn to face him, kissing him back, another butterfly kiss. What happens next is strange. We usually greet each other, he breathing my name and I whispering some form of endearment, like prayers, then talk to each other in whispers. Then he’ll kiss me, brushing a few strands of hair from my face, and I’ll kiss him and lean into the hollow of his neck and gradually drift into sleep with another endearment on my lips. He stays awake a little longer, watching me, before putting his arms around me and going to sleep. But tonight he just kisses me, says my name once, turns over, and falls asleep.
I’m glad and scared at the same time. It’s like he’s inviting me to carry this out, but it’s also like he knew what I’d planned and wants to make it easy for me. I swallow, then carefully get out of bed, opening my dresser drawer; it creaks and I freeze. Has he heard? No. He’s still sleeping. I draw out the flashlight, bend down, feel for the gun, pull it out, and try to cock it at the exact moment I close the drawer. In spite of this, in cocking the pistol makes a sharp, clear sound, and I freeze again; surely he, surely Echo and the others can not have failed to hear that. I hold my breath, wait one, two, three minutes. Nothing. No husband awakening to see what is happening, no maids bursting in asking about the sound. I turn towards the bed, aim the flashlight, click it on...
And almost cry out loud. In the dim beam of light his skin glows a lovely rosy peach color tinged with grayish-black from the shadows, and his head has the most beautiful curls I have ever seen, like the pictures of the statues of the gods in my Mythology book, all tan and gold, reminding me of the wheat fields I always see when Dad drives us up to Verdigre. His nose looks chiseled out of marble and his nostrils flare slightly as he breathes in and out; his lips are slightly parted. Since he’s still asleep, I can’t see much about his eyes except that his lashes form sooty crescents on his cheeks. He is Connor, Vera’s son - this is my husband.
The flashlight drops from my fingers and I wince, expecting it to clatter and roll to a stop on the floor, waking him, but there isn’t any sound, because of the carpet. I bend down to pick it up and I guess my finger tightens around the pistol because I hear a click. And then a shot. And then a scream.
I leap to my feet and shine the flashlight on my husband. His eyes, open, are the color of the sky in summer, that clear, clear blue, like water in sunlight. His right hand clenches his left shoulder; I can see blood trickling down his arm. My legs turn to rubber, and the rubber turns to water. My mind tells me to scream, to run, to get help, but I just stand there, staring…
“No,” I whisper. Connor gasps, clutching his shoulder, staring at me. I stare back, dumbly watching the blood run down his shoulder and arm onto the sheet, at the embroidered roses turning darker with each drop. Connor removes his hand to grasp the bed sheet, pulling it slowly but firmly on to his shoulder, pressing hard, wincing audibly but never taking his eyes off me. He struggles to sit up, then swings his legs over the bed, gets up, and, ignoring me, runs out of the room. I run after him, calling his name, but he doesn’t stop until he’s out the door and heading to his car, a gleaming Cadillac, where he finally turns and looks at me.
“Paige,” he says quietly, “because I loved you I betrayed my mother. She wanted me to give you an admirer’s note from the school outcast, but I couldn’t do that; I loved you, so I gave a rose. I even...” - he laughs slightly - “I even pricked your finger with one of the thorns and held your hand so I could...” - he gets even softer - “so I could let your blood mingle with mine. See?” He holds up his left hand; on his thumb is a short scar. With a sudden thunderbolt realization, my mind flips back to that day in the library and the itching needle-like feeling I’d had on my own hand.
Connor doesn’t stop looking at me, his blue eyes softening. “Love can’t dwell with suspicion, Paige. I trusted you. Now we can’t see each other anymore.” He sighs and immediately stiffens in pain, gingerly touching the hole on his shoulder, encrusted with blackened blood, where my bullet went through. He looks at me as though he’s going to say something more, but instead turns away to walk to his car. He gets in and drives away, leaving me to watch the swirls of dust that rise in protest from his tires.
I stare, watching the road, hoping he’ll drive back. I’m empty inside. Around me, robins are trilling and twittering to one another, oblivious to my pain, and I register the sounds but not the songs. I watch myself look at the gun at my feet. I pick it up, wishing it was a knife so I could cut the wrist that held it, watch my life seep out of me in red streams. The gun is an oily blue-black, strangely heavy, and shining sleek like wet tar. I cock it and raise it to my temple. Do I have enough courage to pull the trigger? No. I am a coward. I throw the gun away and start to walk down the road, following the path to my sisters’ houses.
***************************************************************
How long do I walk? I don’t know. Time blurs, stands still, maybe even stops as I walk. I sweat in the afternoon sun, shiver slightly when the moon rises, stopping only when I tremble with exhaustion and my traitorous body forces me to sleep. I am watching myself walk. I pass fields of wheat and see only blurred patches of tawny yellow; I pass clusters of trees and see only green and brown. Houses are red blurs, cows are black. I watch myself stumble on as though I were drunk, putting one foot in front of the other, walking mindlessly, automatically, heedless of cars. I do not stop for food unless I shake and nearly collapse, and then I routinely knock on strange doors asking for handouts like a beggar, my voice coming like mist from some faraway place.
I reach a large house. Red brick. Small statues at the doorway. My mind registers that this is Pamela’s house. I knock; it sounds as loud as an earthquake and I am surprised the house does not collapse from the force of it. The door opens and Pamela is standing there in a fancy dress. Green silk. Low cut. Matching shoes and a gold necklace. Her eyes widen. “Paige!” Her voice sounds hollow in my ears, like empty eggshells. I imagine her voice falling to the floor and smashing to pieces like a porcelain jar. I think I hug her, the gold necklace chafing my skin. “I’m getting ready to go out,” she says. Or at least I think she does. “Doug has reservations at Di Coppia for seven thirty.”
“I did what you said,” I say mechanically, like I’m reciting lines I memorized from a script. My voice sounds far away again, misty, like it’s coming through a long and narrow tunnel. “I took a flashlight and a gun, I turned on the flashlight and looked...”
Pamela stares at me, her eyes greedy. She licks her lips once, her tongue a sharp contrast to the deep redness of her lipstick. “Yes?” she asks. “And?”
“He wasn’t a leper. And he definitely didn’t have AIDS...” I trail off again. My voice is molasses. I can feel it drip from my tongue in slow, dark traces.
“Well?” she says.
“He was Vera’s son” - I see Pamela straighten, her eyes widening - “Connor.” I breathe his name in a half-whispered prayer. I swallow. Pamela is still staring at me, her mouth open so I can see her teeth. I swallow again and say slowly, “Do you want to know what he told me before he drove away?” She nods. I close my eyes as though to check the accuracy of my memory, then open them and say, “Connor said, ‘Guess I’ll have to find another woman who’s more trustworthy.’ ” I gaze at her; her eyes are greedier than ever. I turn and start to walk away, feeling her staring after me. I picture her eyes as two lasers, piercing my clothes, burning a hole in my skin. I walk faster until I can turn without seeing her behind me.
Time melts again. I have no knowledge of minutes or hours. Occasionally I register lightness and darkness, but it is only for a second or two, like an afterthought. I sleep little and eat less. I come to Patsy’s house. Smaller than Pamela’s. Yellow like an egg yolk. I imagine the paint dribbling down the sides of the house in runny pools. There is a small front porch, shaded, painted white with a white swing. Patsy has seen me from the window and comes out, a smile plastered on her face. She wears blue. Short sleeves and a skirt. No jewelry.
“Paige!” she cries. Like Pamela. Same tone. I hug her. “What are you doing here?”
I remember my lines. “I did like you said. I took a flashlight and a gun. I looked at my husband.” She leans forward eagerly: “Go on.” I say, “He wasn’t diseased. He was Vera’s son Connor.” She takes a sharp breath, like she’s in pain, and her mouth opens slightly. “Before he drove away he said something to me,” I say. “Do you want to hear it?” She nods. “Connor said, ‘Guess I’ll have to find a woman who’s more trustworthy.’ ” I turn and walk away, leaving her on the porch.
****************************************************
I am watching myself walk down the street. The sun is hot on my back and my legs and lungs are complaining pretty loudly. I hear a car honk at me but I ignore it and keep walking. Then someone calls my name and I turn, hoping it’s Connor, but it’s not, it’s Zach. I stop as he pulls up beside me and rolls down his window. “Did you hear about your sisters?”
“No,” I say, deciding not to mention that I don’t care. But Zach says, “They each went down to Délice crying at the top of their lungs, ‘Connor, I’m trustworthy, here I am!’ and waiting for me to come pick them up. I didn’t come, of course, so they started running out into the streets looking for me, shouting at the top of their lungs and waving their arms out in front of them” - he demonstrates - “...they were two of the loudest things on the street, believe you me...I think a horse trampled them to death,” he says thoughtfully. He looks at me, cocking his head: “Need a ride to anywhere?” He opens the door for me, holding it like he had the first time.
Everything falls into place beautifully. He knows where to find Connor. “Yes,” I say, getting in and buckling up. “Vera’s mansion.”
He stares at me, absently letting the door slam shut. “You sure?”
I match his stare. “Positive.”
He whistles softly through his teeth, shaking his head a little, but comes around to the driver’s side, turns the key, starts driving. I stare out the window until he stops.
******************************************************
My father was right. Vera’s mansion is huge, rising like a giant from the middle of her ten-acre plot. As I stumble toward it, I think back to all the stories I’ve heard about her, and my mind inexplicably latches on to the fact that even though Vera does have more money than G-D, there is still hope for mere mortals. Vera’s relationships with men are soap-opera material: the one great joke we have about her is that she can hold onto money but not to a man. She’s had exactly three marriages and all of them have ended disastrously. She divorced Vinnie, her first husband, because he limped and always smelled of soot. She left Marcus when her brother Merrill found them in bed together and called in Vinnie and her father Jacob to come and watch. Andrew was history after she had his son and found out that the whole marriage was just a bet her father had made. People gather in M’s Pub and the Fox and Hound to laugh about this over their cups of coffee and mugs of beer.
Coffee marriage stories aside, no one is really sure what Vera actually does, not even my dad. We catch glimpses of her at the Joslyn, making notes on the paintings in a silver bound black pad with embossed paper, and see her spouting flames into her cell phone as she hurries down 18th and Harney, and Mary Kate Conway is pretty sure she saw an aquarium attendant at the Henry Doorly give Vera some money; she could hear the crinkle and see the green-and-white edges of the bills. And Allison Jane says she climbed the gate this one time to peek into Vera’s house and she says it was like Moses and the Israelites on Mount Sinai; there were crowds of people bringing libations of paintings and birds and printouts and Borsheim’s jewelry. Vera was floating among them like she was on roller skates, passing from one to the next with almost liquid ease, smiling here and talking there, and that’s all Allison saw before the guards threw her out; she says she’d sure like to know what happened to that jewelry. Probably most of it got locked in a safe somewhere.
Coming closer, I strain to look inside the house myself and think I see the yellow-and-blue outline of a macaw, the pale-white of a cockatiel and the pearly gray of a mourning dove. Also the pastel sheen of a Monet painting and a hint of the blue-and-black chaos denoting a Van Gogh. And then Vera is looming over me like the menacing shadow of an eclipse, blocking out all the light. She looks down at me, her face disfigured by a sneer, as though I am something unpleasant sticking to the heel of her sequined Prada shoe. “You!” she snarls. “You…you little murderer!”
I shiver with cold despite the heat. I thought I’d just grazed his shoulder, but if I’d done something worse...no, please...ohpleaseohpleaseohplease...I sway unsteadily, almost falling over, my legs turned to rubber and water again. I dig my nails into the hand that had held the gun, maybe I can claw it off…
I stammer: “Murder...I didn’t...He can’t be dead!”
“He’s not dead, no thanks to you...you wanted to kill him!”
In spite of myself I shrink back, then swallow noisily and stammer, “No I didn’t! My sisters lied to me, made me look at him, but then, when I saw him --” I stop, swallowing noisily, and start again. “I...I’ve come to apologize, to make things right. I’ll do whatever it takes.”
Her eyes narrow into two pinpoints of angry ice blue light. “I wanted my son to give you a note from the most disreputable boy in school...and instead he has the audacity to fall in love with you!”
For a minute the original cause of all this escapes me; I’m still reeling over finding and then losing Connor. “What?” I say, blinking and cocking my head. “What?”
“Yes, you stupid girl, credit me with some imagination!” She laughs, and I imagine shards of glass cutting my skin, leaving me raw. “The quickest way to ruin a teenage girl is through her social life. Once people make up their minds that a popular girl has some horrid secret, they make sure she’s ostracized for the rest of her career. I knew that all I needed to do was get Connor to give you that secret admirer’s note from the most unpopular boy on campus - skinny, nerdy, whatever - and then spread rumors saying you’d received it. No decent person would have wanted anything to do with you then.” She laughs the glass laugh again. “But no, he had to fool around with roses and limos, thinking he was in love with you. You! Some little tramp of nobody whom everyone thinks is better than me. Me, Vera D’Espumalette! Well,” she says, glaring at me, “now I’ll see what you’re really made of; you want my son, you’re working for him! Come on!”
To be continued...
Continued...
I don’t know how I get through the rest of the day, how Echo or the others don’t immediately know what I plan to do just by looking at me. I find a flashlight in the linen closet and sneak it to my room and hide it in a pair of my socks. The gun is harder to find, but eventually I find a pistol tucked away in the basement; I spin the chamber and see all the bullet spaces are filled; I take out all but two and, checking to see that Echo and the others are busy, sneak it to my room where I spend a few desperate minutes looking for a place to hide it before choosing the a spot under the bed where I can easily reach it.
Once I hide the evidence, I take a novel and go out into the kitchen where the others can see me, as if everything is normal and I’m not planning to break the rules, look at my husband and possibly kill him with a bullet or two to the head. Izzy hasn’t taken my glass away so I sit at the table and take a sip, hoping it will make my hands stop shaking. I open the novel but I can’t concentrate properly; there is a screen between the book and me and I can see through the screen to the book but the words can’t get past the screen to my head. The book doesn’t say what it’s supposed to; the words, blurry, swim together and rearrange themselves into other sentences like kaleidoscopes; the stones, shaken, don’t make the designs they’re supposed to. I shut the novel with a bang as if the noise is enough to drive away my uneasiness.
My stomach contracts, feels hollow, and my hands start to shake again. I can’t believe it; here I am planning to possibly murder my husband, and I’m hungry. How can I be hungry? My stomach growls. It is so crazy I could laugh, but I’m afraid if I do I’ll burst into tears, so I just bite my lip and ask Anna for a small snack. She brings out an omelet, a green salad, and a glass of milk and I attack it like I’m in the middle of a famine. She brings me another glass of milk with a bowl of ice cream for dessert, which I eat so fast I get one of those excruciating right-between-the-eyes ice cream headaches and have to sit with my hands over my eyes and a warm cloth over my neck until the pain stops.
I run to the bathroom and take a shower, making the water as hot as I can stand, letting the spray hit me and bursting into tears. Getting out, I towel off, rubbing my skin almost raw, stopping only when I feel pain. Changing into my nightgown, I run under the covers and lay there shivering, my knees huddled against my chest, almost in the fetal position, wishing it was morning and that my sisters had never come.
When I hear him coming in I take a deep breath, closing my eyes, and try to compose myself. He lies beside me, his arms encircling me, kissing my neck softly, like butterfly wings. I turn to face him, kissing him back, another butterfly kiss. What happens next is strange. We usually greet each other, he breathing my name and I whispering some form of endearment, like prayers, then talk to each other in whispers. Then he’ll kiss me, brushing a few strands of hair from my face, and I’ll kiss him and lean into the hollow of his neck and gradually drift into sleep with another endearment on my lips. He stays awake a little longer, watching me, before putting his arms around me and going to sleep. But tonight he just kisses me, says my name once, turns over, and falls asleep.
I’m glad and scared at the same time. It’s like he’s inviting me to carry this out, but it’s also like he knew what I’d planned and wants to make it easy for me. I swallow, then carefully get out of bed, opening my dresser drawer; it creaks and I freeze. Has he heard? No. He’s still sleeping. I draw out the flashlight, bend down, feel for the gun, pull it out, and try to cock it at the exact moment I close the drawer. In spite of this, in cocking the pistol makes a sharp, clear sound, and I freeze again; surely he, surely Echo and the others can not have failed to hear that. I hold my breath, wait one, two, three minutes. Nothing. No husband awakening to see what is happening, no maids bursting in asking about the sound. I turn towards the bed, aim the flashlight, click it on...
And almost cry out loud. In the dim beam of light his skin glows a lovely rosy peach color tinged with grayish-black from the shadows, and his head has the most beautiful curls I have ever seen, like the pictures of the statues of the gods in my Mythology book, all tan and gold, reminding me of the wheat fields I always see when Dad drives us up to Verdigre. His nose looks chiseled out of marble and his nostrils flare slightly as he breathes in and out; his lips are slightly parted. Since he’s still asleep, I can’t see much about his eyes except that his lashes form sooty crescents on his cheeks. He is Connor, Vera’s son - this is my husband.
The flashlight drops from my fingers and I wince, expecting it to clatter and roll to a stop on the floor, waking him, but there isn’t any sound, because of the carpet. I bend down to pick it up and I guess my finger tightens around the pistol because I hear a click. And then a shot. And then a scream.
I leap to my feet and shine the flashlight on my husband. His eyes, open, are the color of the sky in summer, that clear, clear blue, like water in sunlight. His right hand clenches his left shoulder; I can see blood trickling down his arm. My legs turn to rubber, and the rubber turns to water. My mind tells me to scream, to run, to get help, but I just stand there, staring…
“No,” I whisper. Connor gasps, clutching his shoulder, staring at me. I stare back, dumbly watching the blood run down his shoulder and arm onto the sheet, at the embroidered roses turning darker with each drop. Connor removes his hand to grasp the bed sheet, pulling it slowly but firmly on to his shoulder, pressing hard, wincing audibly but never taking his eyes off me. He struggles to sit up, then swings his legs over the bed, gets up, and, ignoring me, runs out of the room. I run after him, calling his name, but he doesn’t stop until he’s out the door and heading to his car, a gleaming Cadillac, where he finally turns and looks at me.
“Paige,” he says quietly, “because I loved you I betrayed my mother. She wanted me to give you an admirer’s note from the school outcast, but I couldn’t do that; I loved you, so I gave a rose. I even...” - he laughs slightly - “I even pricked your finger with one of the thorns and held your hand so I could...” - he gets even softer - “so I could let your blood mingle with mine. See?” He holds up his left hand; on his thumb is a short scar. With a sudden thunderbolt realization, my mind flips back to that day in the library and the itching needle-like feeling I’d had on my own hand.
Connor doesn’t stop looking at me, his blue eyes softening. “Love can’t dwell with suspicion, Paige. I trusted you. Now we can’t see each other anymore.” He sighs and immediately stiffens in pain, gingerly touching the hole on his shoulder, encrusted with blackened blood, where my bullet went through. He looks at me as though he’s going to say something more, but instead turns away to walk to his car. He gets in and drives away, leaving me to watch the swirls of dust that rise in protest from his tires.
I stare, watching the road, hoping he’ll drive back. I’m empty inside. Around me, robins are trilling and twittering to one another, oblivious to my pain, and I register the sounds but not the songs. I watch myself look at the gun at my feet. I pick it up, wishing it was a knife so I could cut the wrist that held it, watch my life seep out of me in red streams. The gun is an oily blue-black, strangely heavy, and shining sleek like wet tar. I cock it and raise it to my temple. Do I have enough courage to pull the trigger? No. I am a coward. I throw the gun away and start to walk down the road, following the path to my sisters’ houses.
***************************************************************
How long do I walk? I don’t know. Time blurs, stands still, maybe even stops as I walk. I sweat in the afternoon sun, shiver slightly when the moon rises, stopping only when I tremble with exhaustion and my traitorous body forces me to sleep. I am watching myself walk. I pass fields of wheat and see only blurred patches of tawny yellow; I pass clusters of trees and see only green and brown. Houses are red blurs, cows are black. I watch myself stumble on as though I were drunk, putting one foot in front of the other, walking mindlessly, automatically, heedless of cars. I do not stop for food unless I shake and nearly collapse, and then I routinely knock on strange doors asking for handouts like a beggar, my voice coming like mist from some faraway place.
I reach a large house. Red brick. Small statues at the doorway. My mind registers that this is Pamela’s house. I knock; it sounds as loud as an earthquake and I am surprised the house does not collapse from the force of it. The door opens and Pamela is standing there in a fancy dress. Green silk. Low cut. Matching shoes and a gold necklace. Her eyes widen. “Paige!” Her voice sounds hollow in my ears, like empty eggshells. I imagine her voice falling to the floor and smashing to pieces like a porcelain jar. I think I hug her, the gold necklace chafing my skin. “I’m getting ready to go out,” she says. Or at least I think she does. “Doug has reservations at Di Coppia for seven thirty.”
“I did what you said,” I say mechanically, like I’m reciting lines I memorized from a script. My voice sounds far away again, misty, like it’s coming through a long and narrow tunnel. “I took a flashlight and a gun, I turned on the flashlight and looked...”
Pamela stares at me, her eyes greedy. She licks her lips once, her tongue a sharp contrast to the deep redness of her lipstick. “Yes?” she asks. “And?”
“He wasn’t a leper. And he definitely didn’t have AIDS...” I trail off again. My voice is molasses. I can feel it drip from my tongue in slow, dark traces.
“Well?” she says.
“He was Vera’s son” - I see Pamela straighten, her eyes widening - “Connor.” I breathe his name in a half-whispered prayer. I swallow. Pamela is still staring at me, her mouth open so I can see her teeth. I swallow again and say slowly, “Do you want to know what he told me before he drove away?” She nods. I close my eyes as though to check the accuracy of my memory, then open them and say, “Connor said, ‘Guess I’ll have to find another woman who’s more trustworthy.’ ” I gaze at her; her eyes are greedier than ever. I turn and start to walk away, feeling her staring after me. I picture her eyes as two lasers, piercing my clothes, burning a hole in my skin. I walk faster until I can turn without seeing her behind me.
Time melts again. I have no knowledge of minutes or hours. Occasionally I register lightness and darkness, but it is only for a second or two, like an afterthought. I sleep little and eat less. I come to Patsy’s house. Smaller than Pamela’s. Yellow like an egg yolk. I imagine the paint dribbling down the sides of the house in runny pools. There is a small front porch, shaded, painted white with a white swing. Patsy has seen me from the window and comes out, a smile plastered on her face. She wears blue. Short sleeves and a skirt. No jewelry.
“Paige!” she cries. Like Pamela. Same tone. I hug her. “What are you doing here?”
I remember my lines. “I did like you said. I took a flashlight and a gun. I looked at my husband.” She leans forward eagerly: “Go on.” I say, “He wasn’t diseased. He was Vera’s son Connor.” She takes a sharp breath, like she’s in pain, and her mouth opens slightly. “Before he drove away he said something to me,” I say. “Do you want to hear it?” She nods. “Connor said, ‘Guess I’ll have to find a woman who’s more trustworthy.’ ” I turn and walk away, leaving her on the porch.
****************************************************
I am watching myself walk down the street. The sun is hot on my back and my legs and lungs are complaining pretty loudly. I hear a car honk at me but I ignore it and keep walking. Then someone calls my name and I turn, hoping it’s Connor, but it’s not, it’s Zach. I stop as he pulls up beside me and rolls down his window. “Did you hear about your sisters?”
“No,” I say, deciding not to mention that I don’t care. But Zach says, “They each went down to Délice crying at the top of their lungs, ‘Connor, I’m trustworthy, here I am!’ and waiting for me to come pick them up. I didn’t come, of course, so they started running out into the streets looking for me, shouting at the top of their lungs and waving their arms out in front of them” - he demonstrates - “...they were two of the loudest things on the street, believe you me...I think a horse trampled them to death,” he says thoughtfully. He looks at me, cocking his head: “Need a ride to anywhere?” He opens the door for me, holding it like he had the first time.
Everything falls into place beautifully. He knows where to find Connor. “Yes,” I say, getting in and buckling up. “Vera’s mansion.”
He stares at me, absently letting the door slam shut. “You sure?”
I match his stare. “Positive.”
He whistles softly through his teeth, shaking his head a little, but comes around to the driver’s side, turns the key, starts driving. I stare out the window until he stops.
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My father was right. Vera’s mansion is huge, rising like a giant from the middle of her ten-acre plot. As I stumble toward it, I think back to all the stories I’ve heard about her, and my mind inexplicably latches on to the fact that even though Vera does have more money than G-D, there is still hope for mere mortals. Vera’s relationships with men are soap-opera material: the one great joke we have about her is that she can hold onto money but not to a man. She’s had exactly three marriages and all of them have ended disastrously. She divorced Vinnie, her first husband, because he limped and always smelled of soot. She left Marcus when her brother Merrill found them in bed together and called in Vinnie and her father Jacob to come and watch. Andrew was history after she had his son and found out that the whole marriage was just a bet her father had made. People gather in M’s Pub and the Fox and Hound to laugh about this over their cups of coffee and mugs of beer.
Coffee marriage stories aside, no one is really sure what Vera actually does, not even my dad. We catch glimpses of her at the Joslyn, making notes on the paintings in a silver bound black pad with embossed paper, and see her spouting flames into her cell phone as she hurries down 18th and Harney, and Mary Kate Conway is pretty sure she saw an aquarium attendant at the Henry Doorly give Vera some money; she could hear the crinkle and see the green-and-white edges of the bills. And Allison Jane says she climbed the gate this one time to peek into Vera’s house and she says it was like Moses and the Israelites on Mount Sinai; there were crowds of people bringing libations of paintings and birds and printouts and Borsheim’s jewelry. Vera was floating among them like she was on roller skates, passing from one to the next with almost liquid ease, smiling here and talking there, and that’s all Allison saw before the guards threw her out; she says she’d sure like to know what happened to that jewelry. Probably most of it got locked in a safe somewhere.
Coming closer, I strain to look inside the house myself and think I see the yellow-and-blue outline of a macaw, the pale-white of a cockatiel and the pearly gray of a mourning dove. Also the pastel sheen of a Monet painting and a hint of the blue-and-black chaos denoting a Van Gogh. And then Vera is looming over me like the menacing shadow of an eclipse, blocking out all the light. She looks down at me, her face disfigured by a sneer, as though I am something unpleasant sticking to the heel of her sequined Prada shoe. “You!” she snarls. “You…you little murderer!”
I shiver with cold despite the heat. I thought I’d just grazed his shoulder, but if I’d done something worse...no, please...ohpleaseohpleaseohplease...I sway unsteadily, almost falling over, my legs turned to rubber and water again. I dig my nails into the hand that had held the gun, maybe I can claw it off…
I stammer: “Murder...I didn’t...He can’t be dead!”
“He’s not dead, no thanks to you...you wanted to kill him!”
In spite of myself I shrink back, then swallow noisily and stammer, “No I didn’t! My sisters lied to me, made me look at him, but then, when I saw him --” I stop, swallowing noisily, and start again. “I...I’ve come to apologize, to make things right. I’ll do whatever it takes.”
Her eyes narrow into two pinpoints of angry ice blue light. “I wanted my son to give you a note from the most disreputable boy in school...and instead he has the audacity to fall in love with you!”
For a minute the original cause of all this escapes me; I’m still reeling over finding and then losing Connor. “What?” I say, blinking and cocking my head. “What?”
“Yes, you stupid girl, credit me with some imagination!” She laughs, and I imagine shards of glass cutting my skin, leaving me raw. “The quickest way to ruin a teenage girl is through her social life. Once people make up their minds that a popular girl has some horrid secret, they make sure she’s ostracized for the rest of her career. I knew that all I needed to do was get Connor to give you that secret admirer’s note from the most unpopular boy on campus - skinny, nerdy, whatever - and then spread rumors saying you’d received it. No decent person would have wanted anything to do with you then.” She laughs the glass laugh again. “But no, he had to fool around with roses and limos, thinking he was in love with you. You! Some little tramp of nobody whom everyone thinks is better than me. Me, Vera D’Espumalette! Well,” she says, glaring at me, “now I’ll see what you’re really made of; you want my son, you’re working for him! Come on!”
To be continued...