Sliding Past Vertical (17 page)

Chapter 28

That day, Sarah wasn’t going
home to her Emerson-less apartment, flowered armchair, and shot of Amaretto.

At least not right away.

Displaying a good
consultant’s knack for timing, a sandy-brown head and a well-cut suit appeared
in the doorway of the office Sarah shared with two other assistants, both of
whom had gone home to their husbands over an hour ago.

“Sarah, you ready?”

“Just a minute.” She put the
week’s haul of transcripts into her purse for Emerson, wondering why she still bothered.
“Okay, we’re out of here.”

Her first-date smile was a
little slow, a little tarnished.

He held up her coat. “Slight
change of plans,” he said with a twinkle in his voice, as she put in one arm
and then the other. “I hope you like Indian food.”

Sarah sighed. At least it wouldn’t
remind her of Emerson.

All during dinner he talked
about himself, confident in his highly valuable and expensively acquired
skills. Obviously groomed fingers dabbed pieces of fried bread into a dish of
tamarind masala. Green and red Christmas lights shaped like chili peppers blinked
on and off. He told her how successful he was, how busy. He told her about the
assignments he had to turn away, the holiday shopping he couldn’t find time
for, and the water skis and summer cottage he never got to use.

Sarah pretended to listen.

She longed to speed up time
and get this mistake of an evening over with. It had started with a short,
stupid thought a few days ago that maybe it was just sex she’d been missing.
Again displaying impeccable timing, the focus-group consultant had been in
town, wrapping up a project before all the suits in the office disappeared on
end-of-year vacations, and asked to take her to dinner. He seemed nice enough,
and handsome, in a rugged, un-Emerson kind of way, and she thought it would be good
for her to go out with him, as a distraction, or maybe an antidote, but it was
only making her desire for Emerson worse.

She never thought she would
miss him like this, so physically. As if he had done something to her body
beyond words or thoughts, tuned her to a specific key only he could play, and
she hadn’t realized how subtle and how profound the change had been until he
cut himself out of her life.

Cold
duck
. She
could use a few glasses of that herself.

After spiced tea and dessert,
the check came. The consultant pulled corporate plastic out of an
expensive-looking wallet. “It’s still early,” he said, twinkling at her.
“Anything in particular you’d like to do?”

Go
home,
she thought,
but that would be rude. While he didn’t have any sway over her job, she would
have to work with him again.

“Maybe go hear some jazz?” It
was about as un-Emerson-like an activity as she could imagine.

Although he was amenable to
her offer, and even knew a nice club a few miles away, her attempts at
inoculation still weren’t working, and she realized how foolish she had been to
think it would make any difference where they went, what they did, or how much
he talked about his success or his material possessions. It would still be
Emerson she wanted, not just a warm body with a handsome face and good
credentials.

After the first set, she pleaded
a migraine and asked to be taken home. She sent the consultant back to his
hotel with a handshake and a smile, a thank you and a promise to do this again
real soon, a promise she knew she would never fulfill.

* * * * *

No
more men,
Sarah decided. Except for Rashid, who didn’t really count, since he was
engaged, a friend, and therefore, safe.

Plus he was her only link to
Emerson.

The following Friday,
transcript file growing a little fatter, they met again at the pizzeria on
Westcott, where he told her everything Emerson had been up to. It was absolute
torture, but still she hungered for every detail. He’d had bronchitis, Rashid said,
and she worried if he was dressing warmly enough. Two of his patients had died,
and she wanted to call and offer her condolences because she knew how attached
he got to them. And a girl had visited Emerson at work, one day when Rashid
came by to pick him up and take him to where his car was being repaired.

“Girl?” Sarah swallowed her
beer the wrong way and coughed for a while. “What girl?”

Rashid chattered on. “A
granddaughter of a former patient. Friendly. Maybe a little too friendly.”

How
could he
,
she thought.
So soon?
“You mean she’s
cheap?”

Blood crept into his face. “I
think maybe that is the word.”

“Are they dating?”

He hesitated. “I’m not sure.
I think I remember him saying she has a boyfriend, but that he isn’t very nice
to her.”

She could have killed the
little slut. “So she’s using Emerson to get back at her boyfriend?” A more
painful thought occurred to her. Perhaps he was using this girl to forget about
Sarah.

Rashid looked distinctly
uncomfortable. “Perhaps we shouldn’t be talking about him like this.”

Sarah sighed.

“We will talk about something
else,” Rashid said. “Like the dinner I will make for you this weekend. Better
even than the last.”

He told her what he would be
making, how his cousin who owned a restaurant taught him how to prepare it, and
where he had to go to find all the ingredients. But Sarah wasn’t really
listening.

Chapter 29

Emerson weathered the holiday
season at the infirmary, scooping up all the extra hours he could, content to
scrub, fetch, carry, and let Charlie beat him at game after game of checkers. He
did everything he could to avoid thinking about Christmas. And Sarah. And
Christmas without Sarah.

By the middle of January he
was exhausted and more than ready for a Saturday off. It was his first decent
break in a week of double shifts, Medicare screw-ups, and more new patients
than any county infirmary staff should have to handle.

He slept until noon and then
hit the shower. While fumbling half-blind for the shampoo, he sliced the pad of
his left index finger on a pastel-colored, razor blade foot-callus-shaving
doohickey that used to be hers.

He swore blue steam at the
dangerous personal grooming device and its former owner while he squeezed the
cut halves of his flesh underneath the shower spray, letting the hot water and
the bleeding clean the wound.

It never failed. Just when he
began to feel optimistic about one day getting past Sarah, something she’d left
behind kicked his ass—a carelessly placed bottle of vitamins, a forgotten
book underneath the sofa—forcing him to think about her all over again.

But this was the first time
she’d drawn blood.

After bandaging his finger,
he buried the implement beneath a wad of tissues in the trash can in the room
he still thought of as hers, in the process uncovering a spent lipstick and a
pair of mint-green nylon panties with sprung elastic that he had to restrain
Dirk Blade from taking.

Declaring himself mentally
incompetent to be in the house a moment longer, he dressed quickly, grabbed his
wallet, keys, and a stack of overdue library books and then fled.

Miraculously, his car started,
and he thanked God for sparing him at least this one symbolic nose-tweaking. He
drove to the bank and deposited his overtime pay in the savings account he’d
started for nursing school. While there, he took out enough cash to keep him
afloat until the next month, when he would start seeing checks from the
magazines again. It wasn’t much money, but he didn’t need much. Sarah had been
his only extravagance.

He picked at the bandage as
he waited for the light at Westcott to change. He’d planned on starting Dirk that
evening, after meeting Daisy for coffee, but typing was going to be a bitch: a
literal pain on the finger that handled most of the important hard consonants
of the trade.

Damn Sarah for leaving her
stupid razor! As if she’d known about Dirk. And Daisy. He wanted to grab the
plastic infidel out of the trash, drive it over to her apartment and tell her
to stick it, along with all of her other things that had been assaulting him
since she’d left.

He hadn’t even reached the
library, but he pulled his old Honda into a screeching U-turn and headed back
to the house.

Once there, and with a liberating
sense of glee, Emerson snatched a brown paper bag from the pile of them beside
the refrigerator and began filling it with Sarah’s things. First to go was the
bottle of vitamins that had fallen from the top shelf and dented his forehead. Then
a box of herbal tea, her favorite mug, and the book he’d stubbed his toe on.
Then he stomped upstairs. In went the panties, the lipstick, the evil razor, the
Penthouse
T-shirt she’d slept in, a
Rolling Stones tape, and a plastic tortoiseshell hair comb he’d found behind
his bed, a tooth of which had jammed underneath his fingernail when he reached
for it. Ditto an earring that might not have been hers but he didn’t care. And
the silk pajamas he hadn’t given her for Christmas.

He might as well be rid of
those, too.

The bag was full. The car died
once. Twice. He started it a third time; it sputtered hopefully for a few
seconds and then conked out.

“Screw it,” he said, and decided
to walk.

It was an idiotically beautiful
day for winter in Syracuse: forty degrees and all blue and sparkly, which made
Emerson feel ridiculous, storming over to Sarah’s place with this bag of stuff,
fury puffing off him like smoke. As if on a day this perfect, he had no right
to be angry about anything, especially a piece of pink plastic, especially
because he was the one who had told her to leave. The students he passed looked
too damned happy—hatless, freshly scrubbed, ski lift passes dangling from
open coats—and if he were another type of person he might have kicked one
or two of them. Instead he shoved the feelings down deeper, where they would
hurt no one but himself.

Supposedly, she lived in the
first house on the right after the second stop sign on Lancaster. It was brick red
with black shutters. Her entrance was on the right side. He’d pointedly ignored
the information when he’d first heard it, telling Rashid he didn’t need to know
where she’d moved. He’d decided that the only way he could get Sarah out of his
head and body was to have nothing to do with her for a good long time. But his
brain, reptilian bastard, had neatly filed the directions away.

It was a tidy house, freshly
painted, the abbreviated front yard bracketed by whip-twigged forsythias poking
out of the snow. It looked so normal, but still he was careful as he approached
the walk and the stairs, on guard for broken paving stones and patches of ice
or loose boards.

Sarah lived there, after all.

Reaching the porch unscathed,
he rang her bell and waited. He forced a smile at the mailman, who eyed Emerson
suspiciously, deposited a wad of envelopes in the box, and moved on. He rang
again. He thought he heard noises from inside, but no one came to the door.

As
if I’m going away that easily.

The front door—a
windowless slab of oak—hung ajar, and perhaps, like her old apartment in
Boston, this was an outer entryway and her front door was at the top of the
stairs.
Well, fine
, he thought. He’d
go up and pound and pound until she had to let him in. He refused to leave
without telling her off, or, at the very least, without leaving the damned bag.

He pushed on the door. As
he’d suspected, it opened onto a small vestibule and a set of sagging wooden
stairs. He caught an odd combination of aromas as he climbed the first stair,
the second, and the third. It smelled like wet wood and cheap cologne, cigarettes
and something sickeningly familiar…

Then he heard a creak.

He never made it to the
fourth stair.

“Who the fuck are you?” a
male voice growled. Before Emerson could turn, he was yanked off his feet by
the collar. He tried to yell but his shirt and jacket squeezed his windpipe and
all that rushed out was an impotent huff of air. The bag flew from his hands.
Items spilled out and landed with a series of crashes and thumps.

As easily as a rag doll,
Emerson was spun around and slammed against the wall, the end of the stair rail
just missing a kidney. His foot landed on something plastic that crunched
beneath his boot.

Then a face appeared nose to
nose with his. It was a man’s face, with hard edges like cut glass. His thick
black hair looked stiff with some kind of unnatural goop. He had dark blue
eyes, bloodshot and swollen, one of them luridly bruised.

Emerson knew the other smell.
The alcohol on the guy’s breath was as familiar to him as his mother’s perfume.

“I asked you a question, blondie.”

Then he grabbed the front of
Emerson’s shirt and shoved him harder against the rail.

The second impact made him
nearly black out. Later he would have a bruise the size of a baseball. Emerson gasped
out the first syllable of his name, two or three times. It was all he could
manage with the pain and from being scared out of his mind. He saw a flash of
something shiny inside the guy’s leather jacket. Obviously his assailant wasn’t
guarding Sarah against intruders but had meant to rob someone.

Emerson just happened along
first.

He thought about his wallet,
fat with bills, and how he’d gladly work double shifts again for a week to earn
the money back, if the guy would simply take it and leave. “It’s Emerson. I
don’t want any trouble, just—I mean, I’ve got a little cash, it’s not
much, but...”

A leer spread across the
man’s face and danced into his damaged eyes. “Emerson.” He drew the name out,
as if he were tasting each syllable, and then sized him up with the remnants of
that mocking smile. “No, I’m not after your grocery money,
Emerson
. I got bigger fish to fry. Gimme your key.”

“Wh…what?”

He snapped his fingers and
held out his palm. “The key, ace. Lady’s got something I need.”

“I don’t...” Emerson
swallowed. “I don’t live here.”

The man cocked an eyebrow.
“No? I thought for sure you and her had that whole fucking happily-ever-after
deal down pat by now.”

This had to be Jay. He
matched Sarah’s description. Minus the bruises, of course, but it would be
fitting for a guy this obnoxious to get popped now and again. If not for the
possible weapon in his jacket and that he seemed to have a pharmacy’s worth of
chemicals in his bloodstream, Emerson might have tried it himself.

“I don’t have a key,” Emerson
said, eyes narrowed.

Jay smiled, showing perfect,
straight teeth. “So I’ll wait.”

* * * * *

An hour went by. Sarah didn’t
return. Jay slouched against the same wall he’d slammed Emerson into, smoking
the occasional cigarette and flicking the ashes into Sarah’s favorite mug, now
minus a handle. He seemed to have fallen a couple of degrees from whatever high
he’d been on, appearing to Emerson’s experienced eye more bored than dangerous,
but still he kept his guard up, remembering the effects of drugs and alcohol,
as well as the pain in his back.

With the toe of a tanned
leather boot, Jay poked at a box of herbal tea. “What’s all this shit, anyway?”

“Nothing.” Whatever Jay had
come for, it was between him and Sarah and none of Emerson’s business. He knew
he could simply leave. He could have left an hour ago, opened the door and
walked out into the stupidly blue afternoon, and said good riddance to the two
of them forever.

He just didn’t seem to be
able to do it.

Jay plucked the green panties
from the carnage on the floor. He held them up by the sides of the waistband
and wiggled them in front of his pelvis like a marionette hula dancer. “I
remember these,” Jay said. “She was wearing them when we—”

Emerson snatched them away.
“Do you mind?”

Jay shot him a hot glare.
“No, do you?”

Emerson glared back. If Jay
wanted something in Sarah’s apartment and was as desperate as he’d first
seemed, he could have broken in six times over by that point or intimidated
Emerson into helping him.

Obviously he’d come for
something else.

“Look,” Emerson said, “she doesn’t
want to see you anymore. Why can’t you just accept that and leave her alone?”

Jay smirked. “Why can’t you?”

Of course, if all Emerson
wanted was to get Sarah’s things out of his house, he could have thrown them
away. Or given them to Rashid. “It wasn’t like that,” Emerson grumbled.

 
Jay swept a hand over the wreckage. “Come
on. I know what this stuff is. It’s the leftovers. All the stuff she
left over
at your place.” He guffawed at
his own joke, until he saw something on the floor that seemed to interest him.
He reached for the Rolling Stones tape, partially crushed when the sole of
Emerson’s boot had landed on it. “Oh, man. I was wondering what happened to my
Sticky Fingers
.”

Emerson smiled. At last, a
little bit of justice.

Jay plopped onto the floor in
the middle of all the junk, folding his long legs under him, a seemingly
impossible feat in skin-tight jeans. He popped the tape out of the broken box
and evaluated the damage, staring at it as if it held the secret yet
unattainable solution to all of his ills. “You know, just once I want a bag
like this. I never get any of my shit back. Babes, they keep it, you know? Like
fucking trophies or something.”

Emerson also stared at the
tape, thinking. He wouldn’t mind if a woman wanted something of his as a
trophy. Even that Sarah had kept the copy of
Dune
he’d given her because she hadn’t read it yet had touched him.
But a guy like Jay wouldn’t understand. “So that’s what you drove all the way
here for? Slamming me around was just a bonus?”

Jay rolled his eyes. “Yeah,
Gomer, I’d drive fucking hundreds of miles to the middle of nowhere in January
and get in your face for a Rolling Stones tape. Sorry to burst your ego
balloon, but it wasn’t anything personal.” He got up and slapped dust off his
jeans. “Guys are after me. I think one of them followed me here. I can’t be too
careful.”

“Then you’re both wasting
your time,” Emerson said. “Aside from that tape, there’s not a damned thing
here that belongs to you.”

Jay shot him a threatening
look and blew smoke out both nostrils like a bull. Emerson swallowed. “Oh, I
beg to differ.” He pointed to his shiner. “How do you think I got this beauty?”