Her apartment was a hovel, filthy. She lived like a man, without a thought toward design or cleanliness. It was just a place she came to sleep, nothing but a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom, all featuring a grime and neglect particular to their functions.
He opened the keyboard on his phone, started tapping with his thumbs:
I DON’T WANT YOU TO THINK I DIDN’T LOVE YOU BECAUSE I DID. REMEMBER THAT I MADE YOU HAPPY FOR A WHILE, THAT WE WERE GREAT FRIENDS AND EXCELLENT LOVERS. AND THEN FORGET ME. MOURN ME LIKE I’M DEAD. DON’T TRY TO FIND ME OR TO ANSWER THE QUESTIONS YOU’LL HAVE. I CAN’T PROTECT YOU-OR YOUR FAMILY-IF YOU DO.
It was a foolish thing to do, close to suicidal, and he was surprised at himself for even considering it. It would be far better for her to suspect that he was dead. But he knew her, knew the lengths she would go to prove herself right or to prove him wrong. The things she would risk, just to answer the most inane question. She’d walk the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city, just to authenticate her writing. She’d go alone, just to feel the fear, to find the words to describe it. He realized that she wouldn’t be able to live with the ambiguity of his disappearance. And if she couldn’t, he couldn’t help her, wouldn’t be able to save her from herself.
“Do you ever lose control, Marcus? Have you ever just blown your stack?” Isabel wanted to know during a recent argument. “Don’t you want to know what it would be like to just let it rip?”
“No,” he told her with a smile. “It’s not fuel-efficient. An engine runs best warm, not hot.”
“And too cold, it seizes. It cracks.”
But he wasn’t as cold as she thought. It was just that her engine ran so white hot that everything else seemed frigid. Her temper, her passion, the heat of her desires, opinions, drives, that’s what drew him to her. She thawed him. His time with her had changed him in ways he hadn’t anticipated. He’d stayed with her far longer than he should have.
If he’d done what he set out to do and moved on, he wouldn’t be in the position he was in now, with more blood on his hands, forced to make changes in a hurry, enlist the help of people he’d hoped not to associate with again. He felt a simmer of regret and anger in his belly. He tamped it down; he’d need to ice over again, freeze like a still lake in winter, the summer of his time with Isabel just a memory.
His finger hovered a moment over the Send button, and then he pressed it. He felt a rush of emotion as he did so, sadness mingled with fear. Then he removed the battery and SIM card from the phone, flushed them down the toilet, and tossed the shell in the trash.
“What are you doing?” she called. “Come back to bed.”
He looked at himself in the mirror over the sink. Two days without shaving and already the stubble on this face was nearly as thick as his goatee. He had dark half moons under his eyes, a drawn, gray look to him. Not forty-eight hours ago, he was making love to his wife in their beautiful home. He had a successful business. Because of mistakes he’d made, betrayals he’d invited, it was all gone. He would go back to being what he was before he knew Isabel. Nothing. He barely took comfort in the great wealth he had amassed in his time with her, some of it earned, some of it stolen. It didn’t bring him the satisfaction he’d imagined. In fact, he’d never felt more hollow, lower.
Sara called his name and he hated her. He didn’t blame her. Without her, he’d be dead right now. He would never have been able to accomplish what he had in the last forty-eight hours without her help. Everything he had worked for would have been lost. But he still hated what she represented.
They’d known each other since childhood. Her body was the first place in his grim adolescence where he’d found comfort in another. But the world had treated them differently, and they had taken different paths. He tried to escape the place they came from, to take more from life than they had been offered. She, like Ivan, succumbed.
What she was now, he didn’t quite know. She was vague about the details of her life since he’d left her in the Czech Republic to come to school in the U.S. He just knew that she was much changed. The vulnerability she’d had when he knew her was gone, replaced with a raw power-sexual and otherwise. He had needed her various skills, and she had helped, never asking for anything except his affection. The one thing he couldn’t give her.
She pushed the door open.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said, moving behind him, wrapping her arms around his body. “I can take care of Camilla.”
“No. It’s my job to finish.”
He didn’t look at her or respond to her touch, and after a moment he felt her stiffen, then she left the bathroom.
“You’re weak when it comes to women,” she said, closing the door.
She was right about that. When he thought about Camilla and what she had done, how she’d wept when she confessed to him, he didn’t feel the kind of anger that he should have. He knew what he had to do. But he had no desire to do it.
She was waiting for him now, thinking he was about to make good on years of promises he’d never intended to keep. She was dead wrong.
When he left the bathroom, he saw that Sara had returned to bed. She was staring at him in the dim light. The sheet was pulled up to just below her perfect breasts. He felt heat in his groin, that magnetic pull from her body to his drawing him near. She didn’t smile; she rarely smiled. But she pulled him to her, wrapped her long legs around him. Her kiss was salty, urgent. Not sweet and yielding like Isabel’s. He was deep inside her, then, fast and hard. As he made love to her, he watched her face for that vulnerability to return when she was unguarded, had surrendered to pleasure. But it never did.
LINDA DIALED ISABEL, first at the apartment, then on her cell. Both calls went to voice mail but Linda didn’t bother to leave a message at either number. She knew when her sister was avoiding her; Izzy would call when she was ready and not before. So Linda sat, phone in her hand, debating about whether to call her mother, even though her sister had expressly asked her not to do so. Not until we’re sure what’s happening. There’s no need for her to worry. It’ll just add more tension.
Linda didn’t really want to call their mother, but still the temptation was strong, almost as though some dark motherly force compelled her to dial the number. She knew Margie was away, some spa trip with her friends, but she’d be reachable on her cell phone. A younger Linda would have called and then been angry at herself and her mother for doing the dance they always did. At some point, after becoming a mother herself, she realized that if you want to change the dance, all you have to do is sit down. So she rested the phone on the counter and walked away from it, went to the kitchen and poured herself another cup of coffee. Brown watched her from the couch, where he had no business being.
“Off the couch, Brown.” He stepped off resentfully and flopped on the floor, issuing a deep sigh.
Linda and her mother had never really gotten along, not that they didn’t love each other. And it wasn’t that there was anything wrong with Margie particularly; she had been an intelligent and caring mother, if not a particularly loving or affectionate one. Margie rarely raised her voice, had never struck the girls, was always there when she was needed-cupcakes for school, chaperone for field trips, help with homework. But the chemistry between Margie and her eldest daughter just wasn’t there. If they’d met on the street, they wouldn’t have chosen each other as friends. Linda’s mother claimed this was true from the womb. Though Linda was the good baby, the easy one, Margie asserted that Linda just never seemed to like her very much. How this could be true, Linda didn’t know. It seemed a ridiculous assertion, typically vain and narcissistic. Of course, none of that-whether they liked each other or not-really mattered, because Margie was her mother. And that relationship wasn’t designed for friendship necessarily; it didn’t need to be that to be successful. Even though they both had ugly memories of each other after the death of Linda’s father, they loved and accepted each other now; that was enough most of the time.