Vivian Divine Is Dead (8 page)

Chapter Ten

O
UR EYES LOCK, AND MY
chest burns with fear as if I’ve just pressed it against a hot stove.
Is Nick going to kill me?
Sweat pops up across my forehead, dripping off my eyebrows and stinging my eyes.
Was he just being nice to lure me into the woods and shoot me?

“Why do you have a gun?” My voice is quaking so much, I can hardly make out the words.
How could I be foolish enough to trust him? It all seems so absurd now: coincidently meeting on the bus, following him through the woods, him being so protective of me.

“How’d you think I was going to get us food?” Nick asks. “Beat it with a stick?”

The burn in my chest lets up a little, and I wipe the sweat off my forehead and rub my wet hands on my jeans. “You use it to hunt?”

“And for protection. What else would I use it for?” he asks.

Relief floods through my body, relaxing my muscles and soothing my burning chest. “Why didn’t you tell me you had a gun?”

“I didn’t want to scare you,” he says. “But I guess I did.”

“I guess,” I say, like it’s no big deal, like people pull guns on me every day.
Actually, they do, but it’s in a studio and the guns are loaded with blanks.

“Would you feel better if I took the bullets out?” Nick asks.

He has the bullets in?
I nod, not able to get my voice back yet. Doesn’t he know he could shoot his private parts off carrying it in his pocket? (It happens, at least in movies.)

Nick takes the bullets out and puts them in his back pocket. Then he smiles, and to my surprise, it’s a beautiful, better-than-Hollywood smile. Despite his macho attitude and the gun in his hand, my heart melts a little.

“By the way,” he grins. “Nice butt.”

By the time we stop again, the sun is setting over the mountains. Billowing clouds of fog soak the tops of the trees, making the entire world glow a deep orange. The air is thick and damp on my bare skin, and it smells moist and new.

The forest floor is a soft orange rug, whispering in the slight breeze. Even the trees look like they’re wrapped in orange silk. I’ve never seen anything like it: it actually looks like the trees are breathing.

“Let’s stop here,” Nick whispers, stepping into a small clearing and gesturing for me to sit beside him in a patch of grass. “This is a good place to build a fire.”

“Why are you whispering?” I ask, my voice booming through the forest.

Suddenly the whole forest floor shifts, lifting in one fluttered movement, like a magic carpet. Then millions of orange wings burst into the air, stripping the trees and fields of color.

For a moment, the world fills with butterflies.

I feel wings flutter against my cheek as thousands of butterflies surround me. I feel like I’m in a remake of
Cinderella
where butterflies have arrived to sew my dress and escort me to the ball.

“Where did they all come from?” I whisper.

“You don’t have to whisper anymore.” Nick laughs. “They know we’re here.”

I raise my arms, palms up. In the deepening light my skin looks exactly how photographers airbrush it to be: golden, limber, supple. I hold as still as I can as countless butterflies land on my arms with their soft, tickly feet, covering me from shoulder to wrist.

“I think they like me.”

A slow smile creeps over Nick’s face. “Smart butterflies,” he says, sitting close beside me on the forest floor, his gaze locked on mine. It feels like butterflies have inhabited my chest, beating their wings unbearably fast. “They fly thousands of miles just to rest in this forest every winter,” he says.

“Why here?” I ask, noticing how my arms, still extended straight out, are starting to shake. Butterflies are jumping off my quaking skin, joining the circling orange-and-black sky.

“Nobody knows,” Nick says. “But when the locals look at them, they see angels.”

“What do you see?”

“Something even better,” Nick says, looking right at me.

After the butterflies have resettled, covering the forest in rich orange velvet, Nick helps me start a fire. And when I say help, I mean he does the whole thing and gives me credit.
Just the way I like it.
If Pierre was here, he’d pretend he knew how to do it, burn himself, and then make me start the fire. In the end, he’d take all the credit anyway. But not Nick; his praise is so believable I almost think I did it myself.

Once the fire is roaring, Nick extracts his gun from his side pocket and holds it out where I can see it, careful to point it away from me. He’s so nervous about scaring me.
How could I ever have doubted him?

“I’m gonna use my gun now,” he warns, “to get us dinner. Unless you want me to head butt a bunny.”

“I’d really love to see that,” I say, “as long as I’m not the bunny.”

We grin at each other before he heads off into the forest to hunt.

Seconds later, I hear a gunshot, and then Nick returns, swinging what looks like a dead squirrel by the tail. I’m so grossed out I can barely speak.

“Did I mention I’m never eating again?” I ask, staring at the squirrel’s furry body as Nick skins it with his small pocketknife. I have to look away as he cuts it open and impales it on a stick, and then hangs it over the fire, inches from the flames. “Seriously,
never
again,” I repeat.

Despite my protests, within minutes the squirrel is roasting over the fire with bits of its flesh crackling. A few butterflies are swirling in the smoke over the flames, but the rest have settled into the forest, still as ghosts.

“Just try it,” Nick says, blowing on a piece of the steaming cooked squirrel hanging from a stick. “One piece won’t kill you.”

I seriously doubt that. You don’t just eat a squirrel and live!
“No way.”

“Scared?” Nick taunts.

“Okay, gimme that.” Aware that I’m going to spend the rest of the night waiting for food poisoning to kill me, I grab the stick from him and bite off a piece of meat. It practically melts in my mouth. “It tastes like chicken,” I say through another mouthful.

Nick grins at me, and his smile is almost worth eating rodent intestines.
Almost.

After we’ve eaten, we settle back into the darkness of the forest, our shoulders lightly touching in the dark. I’m surprised at how safe I feel, now that I’m really hidden from the world for the first time in my life. Besides Nick, no one knows I’m here. No paparazzi, no police, no magazines looking for their next story.
Not even that horrible man could find me here.
The thought of him sends beads of sweat down my back.

“You look nervous,” Nick says. In the firelight, his eyes flicker from dark green to light green, and I feel like I’m being hypnotized, his irises a swinging watch at the end of a long chain. His eyelashes are longer than mine (not fair!), curling up a bit at the ends, and his eyes seem to breathe me in,
all
of me, not just little useful pieces like Pierre’s used to do.
But maybe I’m just imagining it.

“It’s just . . . I’m glad you’re here,” I say, praying he won’t laugh at me. “I mean, there must be lots of girls wishing they were in my position.”

Hiding from a killer with an armed stranger in Mexico? Am I crazy?

Nick looks at me in surprise. “Not really. I pretty much stay to myself,” he says. “I like being alone.”

Here’s a major difference between us: I can’t imagine what’s possibly fun about being alone. In fact, I can’t think of a time when I was. My life is scheduled out for me, every hour penciled in with journalists, photo shoots, interviews.

“This is the first time I’ve ever been alone,” I say quietly.

Nick pretends to pout. “Am I that bad of company?”

“No, it’s actually the opposite,” I say, a blush spreading up my cheeks. “I feel like I can tell you anything. I haven’t felt this way since—”

“Since when?”

“Since my mom died.”

Nick turns and gazes into the fire, as if he’s searching in the flames for something to say. “You were really close?” he finally asks.

“She was the only person who ever really knew me,” I say softly, remembering the way Mom and I would blurt out the same thing at the same time. Then she’d laugh and say,
You’re thinking that?
Like I was the only one thinking it. “It’s like . . . she knew what I was going to say before I said it.”

I expect Nick to look confused, like Pierre did when I told him, but he’s nodding like he understands.

“Without her, I feel so, I don’t know, hollow,” I say.
Okay, so that was embarrassing. Stop talking!
But I can’t, because something beyond my control is pushing the words out of my mouth. “I guess I’m just . . .” I bite my lower lip to stop talking, but the words come rolling out, stinging and raw in the air between us. “I’m just afraid I’ll never feel happy again.”

Nick is silent for a moment. I’m expecting all the usual things: She’d Want You to Be Happy, Life Goes On, Keep Your Head Up. But Nick gives me something I’d never expect: “I’m afraid of the same thing.”

I’m shocked that Nick’s afraid of anything. He carries a gun, and he can skin a squirrel with a pocketknife. What could he possibly be afraid of?

“You are?”

He nods. “I was really close to my mom too. It was just the two of us for so long.”

“What happened to your dad?”

“He just handed me and Mom off to my godfather, and left. He didn’t love me enough to stick around, I guess.” Nick shrugs. “And if my own father couldn’t love me . . .” Nick picks up a piece of gnarled wood and feeds it to the fire’s hungry mouth. As the flames devour it, his voice drops to a barely audible level. “Then why would anyone else?”

“I’m sure, if your dad saw you now, he’d love you.”
If he saw what I see
, I want to add.

I can barely hear Nick’s voice when he speaks again. “Not after what I did to my mom.”

“It can’t be that bad,” I insist, scooting a little closer to him.

“It is.” He hesitates for a long time. I know he doesn’t want to talk about it, but for some reason, I need to hear.

“What happened?”

“I left her to die,” Nick says.

“You
what
?”

“I convinced Mom to cross
la frontera
with me. She didn’t want to, but I thought there had to be a better life for us there, where we made our own money, and we didn’t have to depend on my godfather.” Nick adds another piece of dry wood to the fire. “But then—when we were crossing the desert in the middle of the night, a car drove up. I thought it was Immigration, so I started to run.”

“Didn’t she run too?”

“I thought she was with me, but then I heard a shot. Someone fell, and I just knew. I knew it was Mom.”

“What did you do?”

“I kept running,” Nick says, his voice so choked up he can barely get the words out. “I was such a coward. And when I finally went back, she was dead.”

I want to tell him it’s going to be okay, but it will never be okay, for either of us. Beside me, Nick’s tears are quiet, like drops of water at the bottom of a well. I can feel the hole inside of him—it’s as big as mine.

We sit in silence for a long time after that, until the fire has simmered down to a layer of muted red and the pops of the dying branches poke holes in the empty space inside of me.

“It’s not your fault,” I whisper. Each word reverberates inside my body, like someone beating on a hollowed-out stick.

“It
is
my fault,” Nick says. “I’m the one who wanted to cross the border. I’m the one who ran away and left her to die.”

“You can’t blame yourself,” I insist, thinking of the hours Mary’s spent trying to convince me of the exact same thing. And it’s true: Nick may have led his mom across the border, but he didn’t kill her; and despite all the guilt I’ve put on myself, despite the note Mom got before she was kidnapped, the one that said, “I’m coming for the girl,” I wasn’t the person who killed my mom.
It’s not my fault. I have to stop blaming myself.

“I just wish,” Nick continues, “I wish I had been shot instead.”

“Don’t say that!” I exclaim, and I desperately need him to believe me, to not blame himself, so I can stop feeling all this guilt too. “You couldn’t have known what would happen.”

“Logically, I know that. But inside . . .” Nick takes a deep breath. His chest rattles as he breathes it out. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“But I
do
understand. When my mom died, I blamed myself, too,” I blurt out, “but it wasn’t my fault.” I take a deep breath to keep my voice from shaking. “And it wasn’t your fault either.” I stare into the dying fire, thinking about how our moms’ deaths happened
to
us, but not
because
of us
. It wasn’t our fault.

Nick slides his arm around me and draws me closer. “I miss my mom every day.”

“Me too.”

All of a sudden, the dark isn’t so dark. I nestle against Nick’s shoulder, letting silence and the crackling of the fire fill me with his words. I feel like there’s a cut straight through his soul, and I’m looking into it.