What do you suggest?
Tomorrow, she says. I will take care of it tomorrow.
Jude wants her voice to be cold, detached. She sighs and glances at her watch as if we are discussing the time and place for a lunch date tomorrow. But her voice is tinged with rust and her hand trembles.
Are you sure?
The art of hunger. Jude kisses me, a long penetrating kiss that pushes me to the edge of hunger and leaves me dizzy.
I’m going to kill him, she says.
Are you sure? I say.
I will find a way to get him alone, she says. To distract him. And when I give you a look, you’ll know it’s time to get Molly and the boy and run.
What kind of look? I say.
I don’t know, she says. A look that passes between us that only you can recognize.
The boy sleeps, barely. He is breathing so fast that he seems to rest on a fragile plane between unconsciousness and death. He sleeps in the velvet. My headache is soaring like a high-pitched sonic whistle that only dogs can hear. Blackbirds crash at the edge of my vision. Jude says that she wants to stay with him for the night and I agree.
I resolve not to sleep this night. I want to watch the house and I would sorely hate to be surprised by Miller. I am bitterly tired, though. I need something to keep me awake and I slip into Molly’s room, remembering that she has a stash of pot and coke in her underwear drawer. I touch her lightly on the shoulder and she moans, dreaming. I open the underwear drawer and search it silently, stopping once to press something fine and silky to my face. The smell of rain, of a storm coming. I find a short plastic straw and a little yellow envelope of coke, a gram or so. I glide through the silver wings and merrily chop out four fat lines on the back of the toilet. I am in a dangerously good mood, for some reason. It was that kiss, maybe. Jude can tear my head off with a kiss, sometimes. I pause, considering. Four lines is too many, perhaps. Perhaps perhaps. I hoover two of them, then wash my face with cold water. I bend over the toilet with the straw and snort the third line.
Phineas?
Molly’s voice. It sounds like she’s talking in her sleep.
Phineas. I’m bleeding.
I push through the silver wings, my head a rage of white noise. I go to the bed and touch her. She’s wet, the bed is wet. This can’t be blood. There’s too much of it. I fumble madly for the lights and they snap on with a yellow hum. Molly sits up in bed, her face pale. I don’t believe what I’m seeing. Her nightgown is bloody from the waist down and the sheets are soaked red, almost black. The mattress is a river of blood. I bend over her but she is not wounded and soon I have blood up to my elbows.
Where, I say. Where is it coming from?
From me, she says. It’s coming from me.
I fly downstairs to get Jude. I don’t know what else to do. The blood is too much for me. It takes me back to the amputees in Mexico City. The swinging shadows, the raw white light. The bloody plastic under my feet. The sponge in my hand, the bucket of blood. Jude in a white raincoat, wiping blood from her goggles.
I hover behind the silver wings with a glass of whiskey while Jude checks Molly out. I am tempted to smash the mirror but I don’t want to make things worse. After what seems like an hour, Jude pokes her head into the bathroom.
I need your help, she says.
Molly lies naked on the terrible bed, bloody and unconscious. Her short yellow hair is like a ring of pale fire around her face and she looks like Ophelia, dead and floating on her back. There are several towels on the floor, red with blood. Jude’s hands are bloody.
Don’t tell me she’s dead.
Not yet.
What happened? I say.
I need to get her cleaned up, says Jude. And I’m afraid if we put her in the bathtub, she’ll start bleeding again.
Who did this to her?
Jude frowns. I think she’s done it to herself.
What the fuck do you mean?
It may have been a miscarriage, she says. But there’s so much blood. It’s unlikely she would hemorrhage like this, with an early miscarriage. I think she might have given herself some sort of coat-hanger abortion.
You’re saying that Molly was pregnant.
Apparently.
It was John, croaks Molly.
She can’t open her eyes or lift her head but twice she whispers that it was Miller who did this to her, no mistake. My skull is ringing, ringing. Peripheral vision all but gone and I feel like my spine is twitching. I can’t wait to kill the motherfucker, and it makes me happy to think of it. But I have a feeling I may have to defer to Jude on that particular job. She calmly reaches for the whiskey and I go to the bathroom to soak washcloths. Together, we wipe the blood from Molly’s arms and legs and belly and wrap her in a clean sheet. I carry her out to the living room and stand there in the dark, holding her while Jude arranges a bed of pillows in the bay window. I lay Molly down and she looks ghostly in the moonlight.
Okay, says Jude. I’m going downstairs.
Her voice is weary. I reach for her and she lets me hold her for a moment and I don’t need her to tell me this might be the last time we will touch each other like lovers.
thirty-three.
BLINK AND MORNING IS UPON ME. I am staring, unhinged. I feel like I’m waking from a dream. But that was no dream. Jude and I have a child, a boy named Everson. He’s with Jude’s sister, and who the hell would have thought Jude had a sister? I always figured she was harvested in a lab, with all the other genetically enhanced ninjas. She named our son after my brother, whom I mentioned to her exactly once, the brother I haven’t seen in a thousand years. There is a cigarette in my left hand, burned down to the filter. Ashes on the table, dirty snow. The sound of a tea kettle. I look around the corner and see that Daphne is in the kitchen, wearing snug little boy shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt ripped in half. I don’t want to talk to her. I hold my breath until she takes her tea and goes outside. I want coffee, now. My muscles make unpleasant popping noises when I stand.
I have one complex objective now.
Jude and I must get out of this place, alive. I want to meet my son. But I have to get Sam out too, and Molly. I may have to kill Miller to accomplish this. I’m uneasy because the last time I saw him, some twelve hours ago, I shot him in the eye and he’s bound to be angry about it.
It’s early, maybe seven.
I start a pot of coffee and go to check on Molly. Her face is pale yet from the loss of blood, but her pulse is strong and she’s breathing normally. Blood is strange. Donate a pint of it to the Red Cross and you go home lightheaded but otherwise feeling fine. The nurses give you a cookie. But you spill that same pint into somebody’s bed and it’s a fucking freakshow. I fetch myself a cup of black coffee and return to the window. I’m not feeling so insane as last night and I want to sit with Molly. I want to watch her sleep. Irrational, no doubt. Drug related. But I am weirdly cheerful. I feel like a guy who’s on his way to the airport, like a guy who’s going home. I feel high. Molly sleeps.
I find myself floating around the house, peering aimlessly out the windows. On the west side of the house there’s a little Japanese rock garden overgrown with weeds and yellow wildflowers. There are a couple of wrought-iron chairs and a hammock. It looks like a nice place to think and I am about to go try out that hammock when Daphne walks into frame, carrying her tea. I immediately hunker down to watch her from the window. Daphne eyes the hammock, but I figure she’s afraid she will spill her tea because she sits in one of the chairs instead. She now wears the same gauze white dress she wore at the Paradise, thin and translucent and it clings to her in such a way that it could cause madness. I take a shivering breath and tell myself to banish evil thoughts.
But it won’t hurt to watch her. I light a cigarette and make myself comfortable.