Dangerous (39 page)

She seemed so fragile, so vulnerable. I resisted the urge to hug her. “No, I’m fine. Are you okay? I saw your house on the news—I’m so sorry…”

A forced nod. “Yes, most unfortunate. Thank goodness for insurance, hm? I managed to get the important items into storage…those that weren’t already. And a few last-minute things, here.”

She waved in the direction of a suitcase, a computer bag on the table, and four cardboard boxes stacked beside the curtained window. A sheet covered what must have been picture frames propped against the wall on the far side of the bed.

“I called, but you didn’t answer. I could have helped,” I said, more plaintively than I meant to.

“I know,” was her terse reply, filling the room with an awkward silence dark and cool as squid ink.

“Have you eaten?” I prompted, needing to fill the void. “There are restaurants across the way.”

Val pointed to the room’s small kitchen, where some cartons sat open on the counter, marked with blood-red Chinese characters. “Take out. There’s some left, if you want it.”

“No, I’m good.” I tucked my hair behind an ear and gazed into her gray-green eyes, those eyes which could root me to the spot, once upon a time. Now, they were dull, ashen. “I just needed to know you’re okay, Val.”

This amused her. “‘Okay’ is not a word people use to describe me, even in the best of times. But yes. Your Val is okay.”

My Val.
The phrase implied possession, continuity. Was she playing me, even now, with the one card left her, of yielding? Or simply acknowledging our past?

When Val excused herself to use the restroom, I sat on the bed and waited as the silent TV pulsed with a colorful ad for
Speed Racer
. I thought briefly of Paul. But there wasn’t room in my head for both his world and Val’s, so I put the thought aside.

My roving eyes fell on the stack of picture frames hidden beneath the sheet. Curiosity got the better of me. Furtively, I stood and lifted the cloth to see what Val had considered so valuable.

Stephan’s photos of me, from that shoot on Groundhog Day, so long ago.

I replaced the covering, adrift in turbulent emotions. I was moved that she counted these among her treasures, but I’d wanted to kill her two months ago, at their unveiling. The memory gave me gooseflesh.

Still no sound from the bathroom. Almost against my will, I walked around the bed to raise the flaps of the top cardboard box, and peer inside. A manila envelope lay flat on the bottom. On top of that rested an inlaid wooden box about nine inches square, and in the narrow space that remained were two photo albums, spines facing upward.

The lid of the lacquered wooden box came off easily, and its contents were so strange it took a moment to process them. The largest item was a coiled, foot-long braid of silver-blond hair, surely Val’s. Each end was held together by a ribbon of black silk. I couldn’t imagine the story behind this memento, but knowing Val it involved innocence lost, a painful metamorphosis.

A small clear plastic box, tinted pink, contained several irregular objects: baby teeth, I saw, after bending for a closer look. Hers, or someone else?

The Elgin pocket watch was there, with its serpentine chain.

A scattering of foreign coins. Two small pumice rocks; one black, the other a deep rust color.

A tiny glass bottle with a penny trapped inside, one of those cheap theme-park curios. Another lock of that pale hair tied around that bottle’s neck, suggesting a private symbolism I couldn’t decipher. There were other items as well, but time pressed.

The coast was still clear as I replaced the lid on the box and began to flip through one of the photo books. It contained photos of a very young Val, some from before puberty, and people I didn’t know. Two family portraits, showing a painfully tender child-Val flanked by a skinny blond woman with Farrah hair, and a clean-cut man in his late twenties. Maybe I was projecting, but the man’s eyes were quietly creepy, like the wolf in Milton’s fairy tale.

I found photos of the Keeper I knew so well, posing with Millie and other women. Scandalous nude photos, too, with that crime-scene look created by flash photography in dim rooms. Overblown, blurred closeups of thighs, breasts, arms. A few bore bruises or the stripes of a lash, but most did not. Blindfolds. Gags. Handcuffs. And interspersed among these, cheerful outdoor portraits of the very same women, no worse for wear.

There were photos of me as well. I hurried past those, uncomfortable with seeing myself from that viewpoint.

Then the toilet’s flush made me jump, and while Val ran the sink I hastily slipped the album back into the box, closed the flaps, and sat back on the bed.

“Well, Koishi,” Val said, upon emerging, “It’s certainly nice to see you again. I had planned on a thrilling night of internet surfing, but if you care to stay we can watch television.
Time Twister
’s on at eight, I believe.” Val despised television, but the offer didn’t seem to be a trick or test, as it would have been if uttered by the Keeper.

“No, I—” I began, when something in the box shifted with a soft thud. I gave a start, and Val’s eyes shot to the source of the sound, the way a cat’s hunting instincts take control when a bird lands nearby. My heart clenched. In my haste, I must have put the photo album back wrong, and it had just tipped over onto the wooden box. She would surely know I had been rooting around in her things.

I barely resisted the urge to drop to my knees and confess all, tearfully begging Ma’am’s forgiveness. Instead I blurted the first distracting thing that came to mind.

“You…shouldn’t stay here alone, Val. You can come stay with me until you get things sorted out.” Well crap, that came out wrong.

But it had the desired effect: Val’s pupils relaxed as she powered down from attack mode. As if waking from a dream she said:

“You’re kind to offer, dear, but in light of all that’s happened, it might be premature.” A weak refusal, a test of my sincerity.

“My couch folds out into a really comfortable bed,” I said, backpedaling to make sure she understood the offer didn’t include intimate benefits. “You won’t be any trouble at all.”

She processed that. “Thank you, but I’ve already booked this room for a week.”

A second refusal. Here was my graceful exit, offered on a silver platter. I’d discharged my duty and could walk away with honor.

But—dammit—my extra mirror-neurons chose that exact moment to hijack my speech centers. Disbelieving, I heard myself say, “You can get the charges prorated. Come on Val, let me help. It’s the least I can do.”

Based on months of experience, my words were delivered with the exact note of insistence and pleading required to sway this woman. An amazing performance, especially considering my conscious mind played no part. I mentally kicked myself while watching Val’s firewall give way.

“All right, Koishi. Thank you. But let’s wait until tomorrow. It’s late and I’m rather tired.”

We did actually watch
Time Twister
then, sitting on the bed with our backs against the headboard, the thin hotel pillows folded double behind us. Despite the narrow bed, we kept a chaste twelve-inch gap between us. When my tummy growled, Val reheated her leftover Kung Pao Chicken and made me eat, then fetched me an iced tea from the vending machine in the hall.

“Oh my god,” I muttered, awash in a memory sparked by clips of burning homes, during a teaser for the late-night news.

“Hmm?” she said, one eyebrow raised.

“My first night at Milton’s. I dreamed the house was on fire.” The vividness of the memory was staggering. “You saved me. Woke me up and made me climb down the drain pipe But then you disappeared. I thought it was real…I thought you were dead.”

She found the tale curious, but entirely coincidental. Just like Brent.

§

Val crashed around nine-thirty, hardly a surprise given what she’d endured. So I shut off the TV and eased her into a more comfortable sleeping position, then tucked her in.

Should I stay the night, or go home?

On impulse I stroked Val’s hair, and her eyes opened sleepily. It was a cat’s heavy-lidded gaze, inscrutable, and she didn’t smile.

The damned mirror-neurons said
stay
.

In the bathroom, I washed my bare face, and used an index finger to brush my teeth with Val’s toothpaste. Then I stared into the mirror, wondering just how big a mess I’d gotten myself into.

I stripped to my underwear, then slipped under my side of the covers. Reached up to turn off the bedside lamp.

And lay fretting in the dark for what seemed ages, listening to the air conditioner and the roar of fresh fire trucks, relieving one another.

Exactly when the velvet abyss of sleep finally swallowed me, I do not know.

30     
halcyon

WE WOKE EARLY, neither of us sleeping well on the hard bed, in a strange place. The endless rush of emergency vehicles outside didn’t help. With dawn came new sounds: swarms of helicopters and a low-flying tanker, growling overhead twice an hour with its belly full of pink fire retardant. The bass note of its engines made the windows rattle.

Val rose first, dressed, and left the room without a word. While she was gone, I put on yesterday’s clothes and surveyed the damage in the bathroom mirror: I was a catastrophe. But I’d wait to shower at home.

Some vacation this was turning out to be. What day was it, anyway? Friday? Christ almighty.

Val returned with a paper plate of croissants and diced fruit, and some remarkably average coffee from the lobby. In The World According To Hilton, this was known as a Continental Breakfast. And so we broke our fast, listening to the mindless prattle of a Fox morning show while speaking fewer than a dozen words between us. It occurred to me that Val had seen more television in the last few hours than all the months I’d known her.

Val called work to report her status and ask for the day off, which she received. Then, after making arrangements with the front desk, we carried her things to our cars and set out for home.

§

Fitting Valeria Stregazzi into my condo, after lunch, proved a greater challenge than expected.

It wasn’t the amount of stuff. The few boxes, the suitcase and the other things from the hotel fit easily in my second bedroom, which I used as a studio.

No, it was her
presence
that took up so much room. She was a one-woman mass exodus. The fire had not only claimed her home, but the resulting shock had also knocked loose the personae within her.

I saw the Guardian first. Like a cat entering an unfamiliar home, she made a detailed survey of each room, every corner, the closets and balcony, mapping it all, securing the perimeter. She’d been here before, of course, but only as a visitor. For the near future, it must also serve as her safe zone.

Next appeared The Keeper, whom I expected to maintain a low profile after my recent defection. But I soon caught her looking through Val’s eyes, and it was she who frowned at the newspapers left on the coffee table, the pile of worn clothes on the bedroom floor, my unwashed dishes. The bra hanging over the shower curtain rod finally pushed her over the edge. Had I still been her doll, she would have surely punished me, but now she only demanded the key to the coin-operated laundry room downstairs, and did the wash—hers and mine—herself, without a word of reproach.

Her silent anger
did
give me an initial spasm of fear, until my conscious mind remembered Val was no longer the boss of me. At that point it became somewhat amusing, for I was witnessing a passive-aggressive reboot of the fierce Mistress I had served with shock and awe.