Josie And Jack: A Novel Part 26

"I'm on my way home, but it won't take long." She opened the zippered case and out came a sharp-looking silver instrument. She didn't wait for my consent. "One thing my mother always told us was keep your nails nice," she said, picking up my hand. "You keep your nails nice, you can get away with almost anything."

I smiled. It felt almost natural. "Is that the secret? If only I'd known."

"You stay away from those ferrets," she said. "You'll be okay."

That was all she said. We sat in silence, both staring at my hands, as she cleaned my fingernails, trimmed and filed them, and then buffed them down with a flat rubber stick. She was sure and fast. When she was done, my hands looked like they belonged to someone else.

"That's amazing," I said.

"That's seven months of beauty school." She grinned at me as she zipped her tools back into their case.

I grinned back. "Whatever it is, it's impressive."

"Doing my nails always makes me feel better," she said.

And it helped. I didn't think it would, but it did.

When I woke up the next morning, my pale roommate was gone and Jack was stretched out on her newly made bed. I woke him up, told him what the doctor had said, and asked him what I should do. He rolled his eyes and said, "Can't they take care of it?"

I said, "I suppose."

He seemed restless and didn't stay long. When he was gone, and the wide-hipped nurse came in, I asked her what had happened to my roommate. She clucked her tongue. "Poor thing. We brought her up to the isolation ward this morning."

"What was it?" I said.

"TB," she said. "The doctors never even thought about it. She wasn't the type."

"How'd she get it?"

The nurse shook her head.

"Some outlandish college trip she took last year-Bangladesh or Sri Lanka or somewhere. If her mother hadn't mentioned it on the phone, we would never have known. We'll probably be able to control it, but what an awful disease. Such a pretty thing, too." She gazed at me for a moment, and then said, "You, too." She patted my arm. "Well, you're young yet."

I stretched the fingers on my right hand experimentally and watched the way the light shone on my fingernails. The only thing that hurt was the needle in my hand. Even the ferret bite was beginning to heal.

When Jack came to get me later that morning, he brought me some of Lily's clothes and the high leather boots she'd bought for me. The other bed was still empty and he sat on its edge as I put my old clothes into the plastic I NY bag that Lily's things had been in. As I packed, he talked. He seemed jumpy; his hands moved constantly, plucking at his shirt, pushing his hair back behind his ears.

He wanted to rent a car, he said, but he had realized that we'd need Lily's driver's license for that. Besides, it left too many traces. So instead we were going to take a bus somewhere. "I wish it were more glamorous, but every other way we could do it leaves too much of a trail. What do you think?" He leaned over and ran his hand down the side of my throat and said, practically purred, "Is your brother an evil genius, or what?"

I could see the quick beat of the pulse fluttering in his neck and a fine sheen of sweat on his forehead. "You've been taking Lily's pills, haven't you?"

"I needed to stay awake and think. Haven't slept since it happened." I stared at him, taking in the bright green eyes and the fine high cheekbones as if for the first time. "I needed to take care of you." He touched my nose lightly with the tip of one finger and said, "We've gotten away with it, little sister. What do you think of that?" There was pride in his voice.

"I think the girl who was in that bed had TB," I said.

He jerked away and jumped to his feet.

"Jesus, Josie," he said and shuddered.

Before they let me go, one of the nurses gave me another rabies shot and talked to me interminably about future appointments that I had no intention of keeping: one follow-up, three more rabies vaccinations, and a TB test (in April, because the sallow girl might have infected me). Downstairs, I had another endless conversation-this time with a sour-looking woman-about bills I did not intend to pay and payment plans I planned to ignore. By the time they put me in a wheelchair, I felt adrift in lies, as if there were a fathomless ocean of untruth surging beneath me and I was in a tiny boat with no sails. Jack would approve, I thought.

We both had to sign forms before they'd let me leave. As I signed Lily's name, I thought, no EAT ME or DRINK ME required; with a flash of ferret teeth and the flourish of a pen, I had become someone else. When I glanced at Jack's form, I saw that he had written "Carmichael Barrett." Our eyes met. He gave me a barely perceptible shrug. I had never known Carmichael's last name.

Jack had Lily's ATM card and he used it to get cash. We took a cab back to the apartment. In the back seat, I watched dispa.s.sionately as he filed the money away in his wallet, thinking vaguely of the time earlier that year when pulling five hundred dollars out of a cash machine would have sustained the two of us for months. And there was a time before that when we hardly thought about money at all. On the Hill, we'd only thought about each other.

Jack had Lily's ATM card. What did I have? I had her driver's license. Her ident.i.ty felt like a prize that I had won, through all the weeks of tense borrowed luxury that I'd lived in her apartment, through all the long months of loneliness with Jack and without him before that, and all the long years of Raeburn's housekeepers and geometry lessons before that. Because Lily had not worked for what she had, and I had done nothing but work in one way or another all my life, and what did I win? A healing ferret bite, a copy of Alice in Wonderland, and two weeks' worth of antibiotic pills the size of walnuts.

We drove through the park. As the cab threaded its way between the stone retaining walls of the Seventy-second Street Transverse-walls I'd always liked, because of their age and dignity-Jack told me that the only thing that he would miss was the leather jacket that Lily had bought him. It was hanging in the coat closet. I told him I liked his old one better anyway.

My brother. I had my brother.

And I had the twisted version of family that we'd built together, and I had a pair of fabulous drop-dead boots. I had Lily's jewelry, her diamond solitaire necklace and the blue topaz ring, and Jack told me that I could keep them or sell them, whichever I wanted. For now, they were in the pocket of my jeans. So I had them, too.

Lily, on the other hand-I told myself-had lazed her way through life in a manner befitting her elegant surroundings, and if the thought had ever occurred to her that money came from work and not from accountants, it hadn't stayed long. She'd spent her short, luxurious life doing nothing, and now she was in a closet. There were a mult.i.tude of other Lilys living in the city. Perhaps one among the many wouldn't be missed.

So, really-I told myself-things weren't so bad. We were moving again, and we were finally going to leave New York. In the cab, Jack was singing softly along with the radio. I told myself that the good times he'd promised when he left the Hill were finally coming, that we'd have money and a place of our own. We'd be safe.

But I was also thinking, as we headed back toward Lily's apartment and the locked closet door, that things that should have been very difficult-like lying, like stealing, like killing-had become very easy very quickly. My eyes kept moving between my beautiful brother and my own faint reflection in the window. We were very much alike, Jack and I.

Something stirred deep inside me.

Lily's apartment was cool and the scent of lilies of the valley was thick in the air. The florist must have come while I was in the hospital. I wondered what Jack had told him.

As we walked in the door, the phone was ringing. We ignored it. "Has it been doing that a lot?" I asked.

"Afraid so. I talked to your old friend Carmichael, told him that she'd left for Maine already. Then I stopped answering it." He shrugged. "Her parents left a message on the machine."

"That's a problem."

"Not really. I guess they're in Florida. They didn't know until the last minute that she was headed up to the house in Maine."

Jack had prepared for my homecoming. There was soft music playing in the background, airy and dark and a long way from his adored Wagner. He had also moved one of Lily's overstuffed white armchairs against the closet door, placing the tall lamp on one side of it and one of the gla.s.s occasional tables on the other. The closet was tucked away in the corner; it looked as though someone had deliberately created a cozy little nook, maybe for reading.

"I've got wine chilling," Jack said. "I thought we'd go all out, this one last night." He placed a bottle of wine on the center island and then went to the cupboard and brought down two of Lily's crystal wine gla.s.ses. There was a conspicuous gap in the cupboard where one of the gla.s.ses was missing.

I stood on the other side of the island and watched him. "This one last night before what?"

"Before we hit the road."

"And then what?"

"You," he said, coming around the island and putting his hands on my shoulders. "You never trust me." He kissed my forehead tenderly. "We have this conversation every time we do anything new. You always have to know where we're going, what we're doing-I thought you wanted to leave the city. Haven't we always come out all right in the end?"

"We're not at the end of this yet."

Jack stood back. He gave me a long, hard look. Finally he reached for me.

I stiffened.

His hand fell on top of my head and he shook my head back and forth, softly, as though I were a dog that he was rea.s.suring.

"Close enough," he said. He began to take pots and pans out of the cupboard. "Poor little Josie. Always so serious. Tell me this, young sister: where do you want to go? We're free as birds and we have all the money we could possibly want. Pasta okay?"

"You're high," I said. "It'll be easy enough to trace us with the camera from that ATM machine, and you want us to keep using the card? Why don't we carry her down to the police station now and throw her on the front desk? Say, 'Here, looky what we did?' " Distantly, I thought, I would never have spoken to my brother like this. I would never have needed to. I would never have wanted to. I would never have dared to.

For a moment Jack didn't answer. He put the big pot in the sink and turned on the faucet. As he stared down at it, watching it fill, all I could see of his eyes were his long, thick lashes. "First of all, it's not what we did. It's what I did. Second of all, I did it for you."

Now he looked at me. The pot was overflowing. "I told her, if she wanted to watch me f.u.c.k another girl, I'd do it. But not you."

I walked around the island, reached out, and turned off the taps.

"Why not?" I said, and his eyes flashed.

"You know why not."

"Do I?"

"Because n.o.body else has what we have," he said. "Because we belong to each other in a way that n.o.body else will ever understand, and I refuse to share that. I refuse to share you."

I turned away from him, lifted the pot out of the sink, and carried it to the stove.

Jack followed me. "We'll sell her stuff. This place is a gold mine. We'll loot her and run, and we won't ever have to think about her again. It'll all be over."

"Is there sauce," I asked, knowing that it would never be over, "or should I go ahead and make some?"

"It was just because I love you," he said. "That's all it was."

There was no bottled sauce, but I found a plastic container in the refrigerator that contained the leftovers of the sauce that Lily had made the night she died. There was almost enough, but not quite. I would have to make more.

I cut up the last clove of garlic, dumped it in the frying pan with some olive oil, and watched as it sizzled and snapped.

The two vases of lilies of the valley sat on the island bar, as they always did.

The old questions were chasing themselves around and around in my head. Where would we go? What would we do? How would we survive? Jack was right, there was enough loot in Lily's apartment to keep us for quite a while, and if we sold a little here and there as we traveled, it wouldn't really be traceable. But we couldn't run forever, and the money from Lily's jewelry and crystal and silver would run out eventually.

And then where would we go?

What would we do?

How would we survive?

They'd find us. I didn't believe for a minute that they wouldn't find us.

I dumped the leftover sauce in the pan and tossed its plastic container in the sink, considering these questions as if they were a math problem and all the variables waited only for the application of the right theorem.

He had done it for me.

There was a can of crushed tomatoes in the cupboard. I opened it and mixed the contents with the bubbling sauce on the stove.

n.o.body else has what we have.

Jack was moving around in the other room. He was already sweating and unable to sit still, but he had taken another one of Lily's pills as he carried a gla.s.s of wine-his third-from the living room to the kitchen and back again. A small pile of jewelry and trinkets was ama.s.sing on the coffee table. I knew that he was trying to find things that we could sneak past the doorman without arousing any more suspicion than we already had. So that we could sell them as we fled, and have some money when we got to the next city, the next apartment, the next girl-or maybe it would be a guy, and it would be my turn again, as it had been in the beginning, with Kevin McNerny. Because, I realized, that was what was going to happen, over and over again. That was what our life would be.

I chopped onions and sprinkled them over the surface of the sauce. I took pasta from its jar on the counter and put it in the pot of water Jack had filled, which was boiling on the stove.

When I looked up, Jack was gazing at me across the room.

"You're beautiful," he said.

I smiled. It was almost painful.

He came to stand behind me, put his arms around my waist, and kissed the side of my neck. "We're not doing so badly for two crazy kids against the world, are we?"

I didn't answer.

"Say something," he said. His voice was desperate now. I had never heard him sound like that. He buried his face in the hollow of my shoulder and I felt his breath, warm and moist, against my skin. In my head, a younger Jack, supremely confident and not at all desperate, said, "We're not like them," echoing Raeburn. I was thinking of the pond, of the warm sun on the rocks. Jack's wet, cool hands on my back. "We'll never be like them."

A vision of a sun-dappled park, green and shady and cool, came to me. Tattooed legs stretched out in the thick gra.s.s. Other hands in my hair and uncomplicated kisses that were nothing more; the couple with the highlighters looking back at us as we kissed, thinking, "Look at that girl and her boyfriend, look at that couple."

Jack took plates from the cupboards and silverware from the drawers and went to set Lily's gla.s.s-topped table.

When I was a kid I had a cat that died from eating them.

In a flash, I saw again, clearly, how everything that I had been through, everything that I had done, would repeat itself. Because of Jack: because of the way he was, and because he was right-he was the only person who loved me. His love was written indelibly on what was left of my soul.

Suddenly, although I knew that it was far too soon, I felt the still-living thing beating inside me like a second heart.

Watching Jack steadily, I took the fresh lilies of the valley from the two crystal fishbowls and carried them dripping to the cutting board. I chopped them, quickly, with the big knife.

My brother finished setting the table and lit a cigarette.

"When you and I get our place," he called to me, "I don't want to have anything white in it at all. Not even white sheets."

"Fine," I said and laid the fragrant and mutilated flowers in a soft sinking heap on top of the sauce. I picked up a wooden spoon and stirred them in, watching as the remains of the white bells disappeared into the red sauce and the glossy green leaves softened. Soon there was no trace of them.

For a moment, I thought I saw the words EAT ME floating among the tomato and onion. I tasted; the sauce burned going down. A sprinkle of red chili flakes took care of that. Jack liked spicy food. We would eat heartily.

"Let that simmer," I said to him as I rinsed the scent of the lilies from my hands. "Don't stir it."

We sat together over twin plates of pasta piled high with sauce. There was good wine. Candlelight played romantically over the polished silver; it cast interesting shadows around my brother's jaw and cheekbones, making him look dramatic and otherworldly. He told me that he was glad that we were still together, that he had never regretted rescuing me from our father's house, and that he couldn't imagine life without me.

I said, "Me too," and stared at my first forkful of pasta, with its hot, glistening strands wrapped round and round in a neat knot. The fork seemed to float independently in midair, unrelated to the hand holding it or the person to whom that hand belonged.

I could not bring myself to put the food in my mouth.

No. That's not the truth. The truth is that I chose not to eat it. The truth is that when Jack put the first bite into his mouth, I felt some dark place in me opening, some place that had never seen sun, never felt fresh air.

When I put my fork down, Jack said, "Are you still feeling bad?"