It seemed to Lore on nights like this that she had had no other life before right now, here, every pore open to the wild night’s feel, every follicle attuned to changes in the air, every taste bud and nerve cell hot and fluttering. She knew that sometimes Spanner made money from other people’s suffering, but she did not have to see that, and she had suffered, too. Everyone suffered. It was just a question of making sure she was using them, and not the other way around. She would not be fooled again, not the way Oster had fooled her. Never again. And in the middle of sex she would look up at Spanner moving over her and wonder if those half-closed eyes were laying the newstank images of a naked, weeping Lore on top of the real Lore.
On nights like that, too, when Lore slept she often dreamed of being back in the bar, only now when she cried for these strangers it was for good reason, and she would wake up sweating in the hollow of the brightly colored quilt, remembering Tok, or Crablegs; her mother; Stella screaming in the fountain; and she would wonder which parts of her life were real.
Sometimes, Spanner still went out on her own. Lore pressed her face against the glass, watching until Spanner was out of sight, and wondered where she went. Although it was getting easier to go out with Spanner at night, she still did not have the courage to do it on her own. And when they were out, it was Spanner who dealt with the world. Lore hid behind her: not literally, of course, but behind a cloud of aloof silence. It had always worked when she was a child, a van de Oest. It never occurred to her that it might not work now, when no one knew or cared who she was. Spanner had snapped at her a couple of times to not stand up so bloody straight, she was drawing attention. So she learned how to move like Spanner, alert and upright, but withdrawn, ready and wary. She learned how to slide together the beginning and ending of her words, to cut out the crystal pronunciation of her childhood. She gradually learned to become someone else, someone who recognized the thin, hungry face in the mirror, the red hair and naked vulva. But she still never went out into the open on her own.
There was nothing specific of which she was afraid, just… everything, as though the world were a gelatinous beast that would fall upon her and suffocate her. The open spaces, the feeling that her back was naked, that people could see through her clothes; that someone would recognize her as that heiress who was kidnapped three or four months ago. And her heart would kick under her ribs, and the muscles behind her jaw and in her throat would tighten as though someone had a thick, soft ribbon around her neck and was pulling very, very slowly.
On good days, she managed to get out into the garden. The hard part was getting past the front door. She would put her hand to the wood, and suddenly think, Have I got my gloves? And so she would check her coat pockets. Yes. She had her gloves. She would open the door a crack, think, Are my roots showing? and have to close it again, go to the bathroom and check her hair. And then she would have to stand by the door, breathing deep, telling herself it was only a few seconds on the street. Only a few seconds. Sometimes she hated herself for this fear. But then, if it was a good day, she would rip open the door in a rush and shut it and run down the steps, into the passageway, through the wooden gate that now had a new, shiny lock and a bolt she could push from the inside, and she would be safe.
Sometimes she spent hours in the garden, breaking concrete with a pick, hauling it into the barrow, sorting the bricks by hand into two piles: one to throw away, one to keep to make a raised flower bed. Many of the weeds she left alone. They had fought to be there; she wasn’t going to be the one to pull them out. Besides, they were green and growing, and most of them would flower in spring and summer.
Today she took a spade and started turning over the hard dirt. She leaned her weight into the spade, enjoying the way the steel bit into the black dirt, trying hard not to slice any worms.
Something rustled in the undergrowth by the west wall.
Lore went still. Listened. Nothing. She must have imagined it. She bent to her digging. Heard it again.
She put her spade down carefully, not wanting to startle whatever it was, but when she got near the tangle of weeds and dead wood and what looked like it might once have been a bicycle frame, there was a flurry of movement. She squatted down, peered under the foliage. An eye gleamed, and a tail lashed in the shadows. A cat.
They stared at each other. The cat was not pretty. Its ribs were showing, and one eye was closed, probably missing altogether. She could smell its breath, a thick, hot stink as though it had been chewing on dead things.
Lore backed away carefully. It needed feeding, that was obvious, but if she left now, would it ever come back? And if it did, did she really want the responsibility of caring for a verminous, ill animal? It was probably dying. And if she went inside to get food, she would have to come out again. Run the gauntlet twice in one day.
The cat was pushed as far back against the wall as it could get. It hissed, hissed again. Its upper right canine was missing. Maybe it was old, and had come here to die. It moved its head back and forth, looking for a way past Lore.
She wondered what was in the kitchen that a cat might like to eat, and visions of the poor starved thing wolfing down cold rice, or scraps of two-day-old sushi or beans, trying to lick its whiskers afterward, made her sigh. Now she would have to feed it.
She brought out two saucers, one with raw egg, the other with defrosted ground veal. The cat was gone. She put the dishes down in the undergrowth anyway, and went back to her spade. She did not see the cat again that afternoon.
When it got dark, she went out one more time. The plates were empty. She smiled.
She watched the net but there was never anything about her kidnapping, no stories about bodies. Not surprising. She was old news: she had been taken at the end of August and it was now December. What was unusual was the absence of information about the van de Oests. Nothing.
She scanned the business then environmental sections—still nothing. It did not make sense.
And then one day, on the news, there were her father and Tok, standing shoulder to shoulder by the fountain at Ratnapida. Tok, she noticed, was taller than her father now.
“We know she’s out there somewhere,” Oster was saying, “and we want her to come home.”
Tok, circles under his eyes and a broken air to his stance, nodded. “Please,” he said directly to the camera, “Lore, come home. It’s… Everything’s sorted out.” He looked utterly defeated.
Four months ago, Tok, with just a few breathless sentences about why Stella had killed herself, had destroyed the image Lore had built of Oster over the years. She had loved her father; she had thought he loved her. But he was a monster. It had all been a lie. And now Tok—Tok, her brother, Stella’s twin—was siding with him, telling her to come home, it was all sorted out. She did not understand.
Although she and Spanner slept together, although she might owe her life to Spanner, Lore knew instinctively that letting Spanner see chinks in her armor was dangerous. So the afternoon Spanner called from the kitchen that they had run out of bread, and suggested that Lore go to the market because they needed some other things, too, Lore knew she would have to go, would have to conceal her fear and saunter casually out into the daylight on her own.
The day was thinly overcast. The clouds spread the light into an eye-aching blanket that made her wince. It was colder than it looked. Her breath, coming in great panicky gusts, froze like gauzy sheets in front of her face. She wished she had worn a hat. She did not go back for one; she knew she would not be able to leave again.
The market sign flashed three hundred yards away. Lore started walking. If she kept her eyes on the s she would be all right. She crossed at the ceramic safeway she and Spanner always used when going to the Polar Bear. Safe territory. Known. But then she was walking north along the pavement and people were walking in front of her and across her path and toward her. There was nowhere she could look where they would not be able to see her face. She walked faster.