“Why kill me?” Bennie asked. She tried not to panic. The two-by-four lay less than five feet away. Almost close enough to her right hand. She kept her eye on Georges. “I don’t have anything to do with it.”
“Because I know you are onto me, my dear. You tell me you don’t believe the police theory. You are talking with Julien, secretly, outside my building. When I ask you about it on the phone today, you lie. You say it is business, and I know it is not. Julien doesn’t get upset about business. He doesn’t care enough.” Georges’s eyes narrowed over the gun. “Does he suspect me also? Is that what you two were discussing?”
Bennie’s heart sank. She was going to die because she was a lousy liar. It didn’t seem fair. “Georges, put the gun down. You can’t get away with this. There’s no reason to do this.”
Alice laughed abruptly. “I don’t think you’re gonna talk him out of it, girl.” She raised her gun and aimed it dead-on at Georges’s forehead. “And right now, I got this clown in my sight.”
“Ha!” Georges raised his gun, pointing it at Alice’s forehead. “And I you, madame.”
“Everybody stay calm,” Bennie said. She edged toward the board. Four feet away. No time left. She was about to lunge for it when suddenly she saw a murderous flickering in Georges’s eyes. He was going to shoot Alice. A voice told Bennie what to do. She knew that voice. She recognized that voice.
“No!” Bennie dove in front of Alice as both guns exploded into fire and earsplitting sound. Smoke filled Bennie’s nostrils. Georges’s shoulder erupted in blood. He collapsed to his knees, his gun clattering to the concrete.
Bennie found herself in her twin’s arms. She blinked once, then twice. There wasn’t a mark on Alice. Georges must have missed. Thank God.
Then Bennie felt herself slipping from Alice’s grasp. The room began to whirl. Her stomach turned over. The only sound was a hideous gasping. It took her a moment to understand why. Pain stabbed through her back like a hot steel spike. She couldn’t breathe. “Huh huh huh,” went the gasping. It was her. She fell to the concrete, her head slamming against the floor at Alice’s feet.
Bennie gasped for air. Her chest seared with pain. She struggled to function. She looked up at Alice, her eyes welling with tears. She tried to speak but she choked on her own blood, bubbling hot in her mouth.
Help me help me why aren’t you helping?
Alice aimed the gun down, hot smoke curling from its barrel. She cocked the gun and took aim. “Why did you save me, you idiot?” she asked, standing over her twin.
Bennie tried to scream. Blood sputtered from her mouth, falling back on her face like a warm spring shower.
Don’t kill me don’t kill me don’t kill me don’t
And then the world went dark.
37
But it wasn’t dark, in the dream. In the dream it was light and sunny. Not the rumored white light of heaven, nor the sunniness of a clear sky, but the incandescent amber glow of a small lamp bought long ago at Woolworth’s and set on a bedside table. Its paper shade had yellowed, its tiny flowers faded to the thinness of a butterfly’s wing, their colors impossible to discern. The shade rested askew on its base of cheap yellow glass, shaped like an oversized tulip bulb, fluted at the top but too coarse to be pretty. A thick brown wire that ran from the back of the base, still bearing its round “UL Approved!” tag, stamped in authoritative black ink onto soft, thick paper.
Bennie remembered the lamp, recognized the lamp, it was one that had sat on her mother’s nightstand, atop a cotton doily crocheted by hand. By her mother’s hand, from when she had been well. A time Bennie could never recall in her waking moments, but which came back to her in the dream with a clarity remarkable in its detail.
The lamp rested always next to an empty perfume bottle of lead crystal, not Waterford but a quality her mother could have afforded so long ago, when she was well enough to place it, even empty, on her nightstand, in a storybook understanding of the way rich ladies lived. It was a naive fantasy her mother had, of privileged women who owned lovely items like French perfume bottles and other luxurious things, strands of lustrous pearls and gold bangles and long-handled brushes of sterling silver, engraved with monograms in incomprehensible swirls. It was Hollywood’s version of wealthy women that stayed with her mother, and she would envision these lovely women who sat at vanities before bedtime, brushing their long hair until it shone-one hundred strokes, she always said, and no cheating.
And in the dream Bennie’s mother became that woman at the movie vanity, her round, dark eyes serene, her lips full with dark lipstick, and she was brushing her long wavy hair in the mirror, letting her curls bounce back shiny with each stroke of the gleaming brush, a great lady of a great house, surrounded by beautiful bottles of real crystal, full of heavy, fragrant perfumes from Paris, their amber glowing like liquid gold in the lamplight and somehow shooting light like sunbeams, suffusing the place with the warm golden orange of a late afternoon in summer.
In the golden light Bennie went up to her mother, her shining mother, now seated at her vanity of light, and stood behind her for a minute, enjoying the vision she’d never had, of her mother happy and whole and finally getting everything she wanted, becoming at last the woman she always wished to be. And in the next moment her mother’s dream became Bennie’s own, for her mother turned glowing from the mirror, set down the precious shiny hairbrush, and smiled at Bennie with the sweetest of smiles.
“Benedetta,” she said, her voice soft and familiar.
And she raised her loving arms to embrace her daughter in the light.
38
When Bennie opened her eyes, everything around her was white. White walls, white bed, white cotton covers. It was either a hospital room or a cloud with a three-thousand-dollar-a-day bill. She had an ache in her chest that seemed to encompass her entire upper body, a profoundly deep pain kept only reluctantly at bay by something more powerful than Tylenol, and infinitely more pleasant. Bennie felt surprisingly happy, but maybe that was the being-alive part.
“Welcome back, sleepyhead,” said a man’s voice. It was David, and he was moving from a chair in the corner of the dim room to one closer to her bed, then rolling away a tray table with a brown Formica top. Bennie caught his smile before her eyes closed again. She swallowed with difficulty, her throat so parched it hurt. She opened her eyes to find some water, but David was already raising a Styrofoam cup.
“Thirsty?” he asked, and she smiled. Or at least it felt like a sort of smile.
“You’re good,” she said, her voice so hoarse it was more like a whisper.
“Wait a minute.” He pressed something on the side of the bed to raise the top half slowly. “High enough?”
“No. More morphine.”
David smiled. “Let me hold the cup,” he said, but Bennie was already reaching for it herself. A bolt of pain shot through her chest, and IV tubes she hadn’t noticed tethered her arms to the bed.
Okay, so much for the independent-woman part.
“Please, let me do it.” David looped his right arm around her back, cradling her while he brought the cup to her lips so she could take a small sip of lukewarm water. Then he eased her back onto the pillows.
“That was good for me, was it good for you?” Bennie rasped, and he laughed.
“Congratulations, by the way. You’re not critical anymore.”
“I’m always critical,” Bennie said, testing out her new throat. It still hurt like hell, but at least now it was wet.
“The associates just left. Too bad you missed them.” David set the cup of water on the rolling cart, eased onto the orange plastic chair beside the bed, and hung a forearm over the molded bedrail. “How do you feel?”