Kiss of Evil (14 page)

The ploy works. Without a word, the man slowly drops his hands to his sides and begins to back his way up the sidewalk, not taking his eyes from her. When he nears the corner, he shakes the crowbar at her in a final, pathetic attempt at caveman bravado, before disappearing down an alley.

That is
it
, she thinks. One hundred percent friggin’
it
. Doesn’t matter what it takes, how it happens. Even if she does it with less than fifty thousand dollars. Even if she has to disobey a court order and live with Isabella on the run for the rest of their lives. She was
outta
here.

Fuck
this place.

She walks over to the passenger door. No damage. Well, no damage that wasn’t already there. All she can think about now is sinking into a hot bubble bath, a glass of herbal tea at her side, Andre Previn on the stereo, something in the oven on slow. Nearly heaven. Only Isabella frolicking amid the bubbles, her laughter echoing off the old fixtures, would make it so.

She brushes the snow off the door key, inserts it into the lock, turns it, and—

The first thing she smells, as the man’s hand closes around her mouth, is DL Hand Cleaner. Her father had been a tinkerer when she was very small, fixing the family cars himself, rebuilding lawn mower engines, and when he would hoist her upon his lap before dinner she would smell the rich, petroleum-based cleaner mixed in with his cigar smoke.

But this time, the smell does not make her feel warm and protected.

This time it is making her sick.

“Who the fuck you think you’re
talking
to, bitch?”

It is her car thief, back to assert himself for real.

She tries to scream but the sound is muffled by his grimy half-glove. She struggles, and, for her trouble, she is clubbed to the ground with a heavy forearm. The earth reaches up to her—icy and hard and unforgiving. She lands on her left shoulder, rolls to her right; dazed and disbelieving, thoroughly demeaned.

Then, she hears shouting.

Hey
, someone yells.

HEY
!

Footsteps approaching. She sees a pair of brown hiking boots, the cuffs of denim jeans. She hears more shouting, but the words are unintelligible, considering the steam shovel that had just begun work inside her brain.

Then, footsteps crunching the snow, staggering away.

Then, silence.
God
her head hurt. Am I alone? she wonders.

No.

Strong hands grab her by the arms; strong arms lift her to her feet.

A moment of vertigo, then everything comes swimming back. Center Street, in front of her. Her car, roughly where she’d left it before her quick trip to the ground. A total stranger beside her, holding her up.

“Are you okay?” the owner of the strong hands asks.

The words echo in her head for a few moments before registering. She takes a deep breath, and looks. It is a man. A nice-looking young man.

A
very
nice-looking young man.

And, it appears, he has just saved her life.

18

 

Lydia del Blanco sits on a thirdhand rattan love seat, by the front window of her small apartment on Lake Avenue, a glass of warming lemonade in her hand. It is just after noon on the Fourth of July and the sheers are blowing in the windows on gentle waves of sweet alyssum, followed by a lush duet of just-mowed grass and smoldering briquettes.

Fina is on the living room floor, teaching her little brother how to fold paper napkins for the picnic they will have later. A car cruises slowly up Lake Avenue and Lydia can hear the strains of a Def Leppard song float up from the car’s stereo. She begins to cry, softly, a strange habit of hers of late.

She cries because she has survived a brutal marriage.

She cries because her two children are healthy and bright and curious and beautiful.

She cries because they are safe here. It has been three years since she has seen her ex-husband. Two years since she’s had to hang up on him in the middle of the night and park herself by the front door, dozing off with a baseball bat in her lap.

She cries because, at long last, she and her children have a real life. Sure, the clothes are from Value City, not Higbee’s, and, true, she herded her little brood into McDonald’s more often than she liked, but they were making ends meet.

Plus, for the first time in her life, she has four hundred dollars saved.
Four hundred
. A miracle. It is stashed in the living room inside her favorite book of all time:
The Secret Garden
by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

The dream house with a yard? Now
that
is a still a few years away, she thinks.

She senses a presence, looks around to see that Fina is standing in front of her. A very
concerned
Fina.

“Mom?”

“Yeah, honey?”

“You okay, Mom?”

Am I okay? Lydia thinks. What does she mean? Lydia looks behind her daughter. Her son is standing there, grave apprehension narrowing his small face. Then it hits her. The tears. They think she is crying because she
hurts
.

“Come here.”

The children crowd around. She wraps her arms around them, holds them close. Her daughter, the tall, slender tomboy. Her son, the solid little man.

“Hey,” she says, breaking the huddle, wiping her tears with the back of her hand. “Who wants ice cream?”

The boy and the girl both raise their hands. She finds her purse in the dining room, hands them two dollars.

“Come right back,” Lydia says. “We’re leaving in an hour.”

“Okay, Mom,” her daughter says.

As the back door closes, Lydia walks to the front window. She looks out, watching her children walk down the steps, hand in hand, then down the sidewalk toward Dinardo’s Superette, two blocks away. In an hour, the three of them will head to Edgewater Park to stake their place on the beach in order to watch the big fireworks display later.

Lydia busies herself, retrieving the basket from the hall closet, counting out napkins, plastic forks, paper cups. They will have hot dogs, potato salad, and root beer, her children’s favorites. Hers too, if she had to confess. Of all her talents, the culinary arts were screamingly absent. Maybe one day.

Let’s see, she thinks, is that everything? No. They’d need mosquito spray, of course. On the windowsill over the sink. She closes the wicker picnic basket, lugs it to the kitchen. When she turns the corner, her heart leaps into her throat.

Anthony del Blanco is standing just inside the back door. He is older, heavier, clean-shaven, and well dressed, but the demon is still in his eyes. Cocaine is still his bottom bitch, as he used to be fond of saying. She could smell the Early Times bourbon from ten feet away.

“Hi, babe,” Anthony says, closing the door behind him.

“Please,” Lydia says, her voice sounding small and weak and nothing like it had sounded in her dreams for the past three years, that booming, powerful voice of vengeance she had used as she pummeled her ex-husband to a bloody pulp.

“I need a couple of bucks, Liddie. Can you help me out?” He begins to cross the kitchen.

“Anthony . . . please. The kids will be back any second.”

“The
kids
. How are they?”

“Anthony.”

“Kinda hard to find you guys, you know?”

“It’s over between us,” Lydia says, taking one step backward for every step forward her ex-husband takes. “Over.”

“I understand that, sweetheart. And I’m willing to work with you on it. I really, truly am. Today, though, I need a couple of bucks. Okay? Today it’s about finances. So, why don’t you, for the first time in your
stupid
fucking life, do the smart thing?”

“I don’t have any money, Anthony. Look around. Does it look like I have money? We’re eating hot dogs for God’s sake.”

“You save, Lydia. You always did. Don’t know how you did it, but you always managed to put a couple of bucks away.”

“Please. Can’t you just be a man and walk away?”

The fire spreads in her ex-husband’s eyes.

She’d said the wrong thing.

Anthony pins her to the wall, holding her by the neck with his powerful left hand, a hand that easily wraps all the way around her throat. “I’m the
only
fuckin’ man you’ve ever
known
, Lydia. The
only
man.” His right hand goes to his belt buckle. “Want me to fuck you right now on the goddamn kitchen floor? Want me to show you what a man I am?”

Before Lydia can stop it, the revulsion rises within her, then boils over. She spits in his face.

Anthony rears back, sets himself, and explodes her nose with a pile-driver right hand.

Lydia sags, her vision clouded by a thick, crimson fog. Anthony holds her up with his left hand, threatens her again with his right, the timbre of his voice rising with his rage, his breath a warm breeze over a landfill.

“You gonna tell me where it is? Because there’s plenty more. You know that, right?
Plenty
more. I got
all
fuckin’ day.”

Lydia, at the very brim of consciousness, cannot speak. But she can raise her eyes. And her eyes speak volumes to a man with whom she lived for four years.

Anthony steps to the side and smashes her in the kidney with his right fist. Once. Twice. Three times. Hard, leveraged punches, expertly thrown. Anthony del Blanco was once a promising amateur middleweight boxer. “I’m sorry, what did you say, Liddie? ’Cause I coulda swore I just saw the cunt look and I don’t remember asking you no questions like
Are you a cunt? Please show me
.” He tightens the grip on the bloodied bodice of her dress. “Now
where’s
 . . . the
fucking
 . . .
money
?”

Lydia tries to lift her head, fails. Instead, she succumbs to the nausea. A foamy river of pinkish bile leaks out of her mouth, onto her ex-husband’s pantleg and shoes.

Anthony del Blanco now becomes the full animal, and the beating begins in earnest.

Primal. Methodical. Complete.

At the moment when Anthony begins to wonder if he has finally gone too far, he remembers. He walks into the living room, finds
The Secret Garden
on the bookshelf, removes it. He laughs, wipes his bloody, damaged hand across his mouth. “Shoulda known,” he says, extricating the stack of bills from the book. “Nothin’ ever changes around here.”

He stuffs the four hundred dollars in his pocket, already tasting that first line of coke rocketing up his right nostril. A sensation he will surely reward with a second line, this one up the left. Toot, toot, he thinks, and tosses the book onto the kitchen floor.

“
The Secret Garden
,” Anthony del Blanco says to no one in particular, stepping out into a dazzlingly bright July day in Lakewood, Ohio, dropping his mirrored aviator sunglasses in place. “Yeah. Right.
Big
fuckin’ secret, Liddie.”

Lydia del Blanco is prone on her kitchen floor. Her jaw is broken, her right cheekbone is shattered. The first punch had demolished her nose; the cartilage now hangs from her face in a corrupt red mass. Three ribs on her right side are broken, two on the left. The ulna of her right arm is fractured and there is a laceration that runs from the middle of her forehead to the left side of her mouth—the result of being thrown through the glass door of the dining room china cabinet—a deep cut that will require nine hours of surgery in order to repair the muscles, and more than two hundred stitches to close.

She is unconscious and bleeding heavily.

Her son and daughter stand in the doorway, holding each other, trembling in the suffocating summer air that is suddenly brassy with blood, their all-but-destroyed mother lying before them, a trio of melting Eskimo Pies at their feet.

But no tears.

The girl lets go of her brother for a moment, steps forward, kneels on the floor. She makes the sign of the cross, then places her right index finger into the pool of warm blood near her mother’s left ear. She returns to the doorway, considers her brother’s face, the way he stands, now, with his hands clamped tightly over his ears, as if to blot out the silence of this horror.

Without a word, she places her finger gently to her brother’s mouth, leaving a small slash of bright scarlet blood on his lips. It is how she would think of him for years—his dark, frightened eyes; his sweat-matted shock of russet hair; red lips giving him the appearance of a sad little girl. She glances down at her mother one last time, then kisses her brother delicately on the lips, their mother’s blood all that they would ever say of this day.

Nine years later, when Lydia del Blanco dies, a jaundiced stick figure in the charity ward at St. Vincent’s, it will finally free her two children of this moment, free them from all the responsibility of the coming horrors in their lives, free them from the life of an addict mother who will live with a half-dozen men, sleep with ten dozen more, eventually running from heroin fix to cocaine fix to alcohol fix, her face a twisted, scarred mess, never again to resemble the slender young flower in the one photograph her son would keep forever.

A moment, the boy and girl would come to agree, that would free them from fear.

19

Mary says: “I have to meet someone.”

She
thinks
: What’s happening here? Two beauties in a row. First the jogger in front of my building. Now this guy. My knight in shining armor. I’m going to have to jump onto one of these boxcars soon. One of these days the train ain’t gonna
run
this way.

He is in his late twenties, early thirties maybe. When he had helped her to her feet she had supported herself against his right thigh and found it was rock hard.

The pain on the left side of her head, where the man had struck her, was minor compared to the wounding of her pride, the swelling of her embarrassment. To be lying facedown in the snow on a city street, humiliated and violated by a common thug, was far worse.