Pretty Scars

by CD Reiss

  She stood. My vision was clearing. “Well, I wasn’t leaving you alone with Gabriel until I knew you were all right.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “He’s in the living room.”

  I remembered him then, in flashes of wrestling blurs and a strong arm under me. I couldn’t smell his sanded wood over the stink of vomit still on my shirt. Ugh. I was gross.

  “Am I sending him home?” Andrea asked. “I probably should after last night.”

  “No. No, I’m fine. He’s fine. It’s okay.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Just tell him to give me a minute to get the puke off me.”

  Andrea went for the door and stopped with her hand on the knob. “I was scared shitless for you last night.”

  “I’m fine.” I swung my legs over the side of the bed.

  “It was my fault. I should have gone with you. It’s a girl rule for a reason.”

  Wobbly, but in enough control to get to her, I put my hands on her shoulders. “It’s life, and life sucks. Embrace the suck.”

  She kissed my cheek and left. Through the door, I heard her speak to Gabriel. He was right there. I knew he’d come one way or the other.

  As I stood under the shower, I remembered Emerson’s theory of entangled atomic particles. How he thought he and I were a law of physics. How wrong he’d been. How very wrong and how very convinced he was of a very wrong thing.

  And yet, how right he was about Gabriel and me.

  Chapter 11

  LOS ANGELES - 1995

  Aiden Klerk asked me to meet him in an unmarked warehouse next to his office.

  “Mrs. Thorne,” he said, coming out from the back area in a gray suit and blue tie. “This way.”

  The hall was glass on one side, overlooking a space as big as an airplane hangar, with three-walled rooms populated with people-shaped plywood cutouts. In one room, the cutouts were bullet-riddled.

  “Don’t worry,” he said with a perfect smile. “We’re training security personnel. Assassination attempts are a big business. Right through here.”

  He showed me into a windowless conference room with a white screen at the far side of the long table, and indicated a seat. A week after Peter had used the brush on me, I could finally sit without pain.

  “Can I get you something?” he asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Let’s get to it then.” He slid a blue folder marked CONFIDENTIAL toward me. “We aren’t finished, but there’s enough here for a status report.”

  I opened the folder to a picture of three men getting out of a car. I knew Adam Brate by the scarf around the bottom of his face and the eye mask at the top.

  “When we’re given a case like this,” Klerk said, “we have two ways we can work. Forward and backward. Working forward from your theory of his identity, or backward from the man in front of us now. We sent someone to Italy to go forward for a death certificate, but Italians get to things when they get to them. So we went backward, starting with the man you want to identify.”

  Flipping through the folder, I found more pictures. None were revealing. None gave a definitive answer.

  “Adam Brate is quite a mystery. He covers his face, and we’re pretty sure he has his suits padded differently every time he plays so we can’t get a bead on his stature. His agent doesn’t even know who he is. His manager stonewalled. His lawyers are retained by a corporation, not a man. Overseas travel is by charter jet.”

  “Always?” I asked. “From the beginning of his career?”

  “As far as we can tell.”

  That was expensive. The Gabriel I knew didn’t have that kind of money. Even if he’d made millions as a masked cellist, he would have started with nothing.

  Doubt crowded out hope. The burst of song was looking more and more like a coincidence. I flipped through the folder, trying to spark the hope again, but all the forms and reports were noncommittal.

  “We’re not done,” Klerk said. “We’re still conducting interviews, but as you can imagine, he doesn’t surround himself with people willing to reveal anything.”

  A soft knock came from behind me.

  “Come in,” Klerk said.

  A woman entered. In contrast to everyone else in the office, she dressed like a hip twenty-something with a striped sweater, jeans, and boots. Her diamond nose-ring shone against her dark skin, and her hair was perfectly-shaped into a halo of tight curls.

  “Mrs. Thorne, this is Danika James. She’s a scholar of musical styles.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said as we shook hands.

  “We had Ms. James do an analysis of Adam Brate’s style and form.”

  “I have some video cued up for you.” She tapped a black box at the center of the table. The lights went down and a projector I hadn’t noticed before lit up. “Technique can change over time, so I went to the earliest known video.”

  He appeared, straddling his instrument, face covered by a linen veil. Creepy. Mysterious. And once he started playing, completely irrelevant.

  Danika froze the video and approached the screen. “So I’m going to focus here on his bow hold during a legato. Here, you can see his thumb is placed on the frog join. His fingers are open, and his second finger rests on the bow at the second carpal bone. This is a little unusual, but it’s a signature of students from the Royal Danish Academy.”

  “Always?” I asked.

  “No,” Danika replied.

  “We’re looking for clues, Mrs. Thorne,” Klerk said. “Not certainties.”

  “Right. Okay. Go on.”

  Danika leaned over the table and pressed another button and navigated to another video. I recognized Bing Theatre, and without even thinking about it, my eyes sought out the front row of the violin section, where Gabriel sat. It was the concert where I’d met Peter.

  Danika said, “This is violin, so it’s not fully analogous.”

  I barely heard her. I swallowed a lump in my throat, but it stuck.

  “And here’s a legato section…” She froze the video. Gabriel was a blob of pixels, but to me, he was as clear as a living man. “So the bow hold is more curved and farther down, but the grip, with the fifth finger slightly raised? This is full-on American school.”

  My entire brain function was taken up with Gabriel, his body, his head as it leaned into the music with pure love. I knew that look. He’d directed it at me. I wanted it again so badly I could barely sit still.

  “When you put them next to each other…” Danika flipped to a side-by-side. “What I see is a host of physical cues in their stance. The body positions, the thumb work on quartertones, the way they work the glissandos…” She stopped it again and faced me. “These are two different people with different core training.”

  The lump in my throat hardened to a stone.

  “Thank you, Danika,” Klerk said.

  She nodded and left. I was left alone with the detective and the image of two different people on the screen.

  “Mrs. Thorne?” Klerk said softly. “I need to know if you want us to continue the investigation.”

  If Adam Brate wasn’t Gabriel, it didn’t matter who he was. A privacy-obsessed celebrity. A talented stranger who had played a famous Whitney Houston song on a whim. A mystery everyone wanted to know but no one really wanted to solve. A marketing genius. Maybe he was more than one guy, but if one of them wasn’t Gabriel, it didn’t make a damn bit of difference.

  None of it mattered.

  Nothing mattered.

  What was the point? What did I want out of it besides a second chance to live a life I’d lost?

  How could it be anyone else? Why play that song in the middle of a concert unless I was the target?

  Maybe the world didn’t revolve around me, but my world was all I had. Even if it was a different person, I had to know why he’d played it.

  “Yes,” I said, standing. “I want you to continue. I want to talk to him.”

  I had nothing to call my own. I hadn’t go
ne to grad school or found anything to give my days meaning. I wasn’t good at anything. I was twenty-two, with a lifetime ahead of me and nothing to look forward to.

  Margie called when I was feeling most listless. The sour shitdump of my voice must have been audible all the way to New York.

  “Come visit,” my sister said. “Drew’s playing some dive bar on Ludlow Street. You can slum it for a few days.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Sure. Come anyway. We have wine.”

  “I’ll ask Peter.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  “He doesn’t trust you. Not after last time.”

  Last time I’d tried to run away and failed, Margie had covered for me.

  Janice Joplin sang about the power of having nothing left to lose. Compared to most people, I had plenty to squander, but not caring about it was about the same as not having it in the first place.

  Peter had been an absolute prince since opening the skin on my ass with a hairbrush. He didn’t apologize, but was sweet and tender—treating me like a well-loved doll he’d snapped the head from, calling me his most treasured thing.

  I tried to remind myself of the goodness in him when I met him at his office with a hot lunch our cook had prepared. Meatball sandwiches. His favorite. I set it up on the little table by the window while he finished his morning’s work.

  The reminders fell flat. They echoed in the empty shell of my heart and went silent. Sitting at the table, waiting for my husband to join me, I knew for sure what I hadn’t dared to suspect.

  I was unhappy. I’d always been unhappy. Since the day Gabriel was killed, I’d walked around like a zombie.

  What did I have to lose, really?

  A life as a dead person?

  Peter leaned down and kissed my forehead. “This looks great.” He sat across from me. “Thanks for bringing it.”

  “Sure.”

  “Have you watched the news today?” He took a big bite.

  “No.”

  “Wentco CEO resigned over junk bonds in the portfolio. Stock dumped thirty-two points.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “We shorted it.” He waggled his eyebrows and took a slug from his water bottle.

  I pushed my sandwich around the paper as if that would help me digest it. “Hm.”

  “You all right?”

  “I talked to Margie. She wants me to come visit.”

  “In New York?”

  “Her boyfriend’s playing a show this weekend.”

  “Ah, sorry. We have the Capstone thing. Next time.” He took another bite.

  We had to go to that. It was a huge event. We’d gone the past two years, and since Peter was a board member, it was expected.

  “You can go without me,” I said, looking at food I had no appetite for.

  He didn’t answer right away. When I looked up, he was staring at me with bold curiosity.

  “How would that look?” he finally said.

  “It would look like you in a tuxedo, having a good time.”

  “People talk. Why would you miss this to go to see your… not even brother-in-law at what? Another piss-smelling shithole playing music no one wants to hear?”

  I wrapped my sandwich up as if I wanted to get revenge on it.

  “Come on. What’s the problem?”

  “Peter…”

  “Tell me.”

  Moments like this, when he was in a decency loop, I’d tell him how I felt. I’d open my heart and he’d make it all better. He’d be great until the next thing came up to make him jealous or suspicious.

  “I want to see Margie. In New York.”

  He raised an eyebrow—and like that, the decency loop was derailed.

  I packed my lunch back up. I didn’t want this anymore. None of it.

  “Carrie,” he said without a shade of emotion in his voice. He was completely flat.

  I paused with my hand in the bag, hearing that tone as if for the first time, then I took my hand out. “I told her I was going.”

  He grabbed the phone from his desk and placed it on the table. “Call her and tell her you can’t.”

  Lowering my gaze to the phone, I considered it. Just to make life easier. Why push a rock up a mountain if it was only going to roll back down and crush you?

  Peter picked up the receiver and handed it to me, watching every muscle in my face. I didn’t want to die on this hill, but I didn’t take the receiver. Because if not this hill, which one?

  A knock at the door was followed by the sound of it opening.

  “Mr. Thorne?” his secretary whispered.

  “What?”

  “I have Mr. Drazen on line two.”

  Peter broke his gaze and put down the receiver. “Fine.”

  “I’ll let you work.”

  “Carrie,” he said with a hint of warning, but the interruption had snapped the tension.

  “I’m not—” Running for my life. “I learned my lesson last time, honey. I swear it. My sister needs me.”

  He bit the inside of his cheek, considering. I had a few seconds to convince him.

  “She…” I took a deep breath as if the next part was hard to explain. “You know her. She’d never tell me something’s wrong. Not directly. I’m just worried about her.”

  The phone beeped again. He didn’t reach for it.

  “You have my passport,” I added. “How far can I go?”

  “Mr. Thorne?” His secretary said over the intercom. “Mr. Drazen’s on hold.”

  “Four days,” he said. “On day five, I’m coming to get you.”

  “Thank you.” I kissed him on the cheek, grabbed my stuff, and left. My plane would be in the air before Peter got home.

  I’d been saved by Daddy.

  Chapter 12

  LOS ANGELES - 1993

  Emerson’s attack had left me with a scrape on my chin that washed down to a light brushing of tiny scabs. I wanted to be my most beautiful and intimidating self when I saw Gabriel, but the scrape was a reminder that I could be broken.

  I smelled the toast and coffee coming from the kitchen before I saw Gabriel there. I was showered, mostly sober, and as insecure as I’d ever felt.

  “Good morning,” he said, dividing four pieces of toast between two plates. He didn’t look at me when he spoke.

  “Good morning.” I slid onto a stool on the other side of the island, letting him run my kitchen.

  “You look better.”

  “Smell better too.” I peered into the mug in front of me. Already coffee in it. “Thank you for rescuing me last night.”

  “I would have done it for anyone.” He looked at me for the first time. “I stayed because you were calling me.”

  Was he saying I meant something to him? Or that I was just another victim that, like Andrea, he felt somehow personally responsible for? I didn’t want to know the answer. I wanted him to be in my kitchen because he cared, not because he felt obligated.

  “You need milk for that?” he asked.

  “Nope.” I lifted the hot liquid to my lips, letting it burn my tongue and warm my throat.

  “Nice place.” He swiped crumbs off his fingers before he opened a drawer and closed it.

  “Butter knives are over there.” I pointed at the drawer with the expensive silverware he’d note but not mention.

  In the moments of silence that followed, he scraped butter on the four slices of toast. The crackling sound was hypnotic. Every sound he made was music.

  “I never asked you your last name,” he said, eyes on the kkkch kkkch of the knife.

  “It’s Drazen.”

  “Well, yeah. I found that out at the concert.”

  Kkkch, kkkch.

  “Does it bother you?” I asked. “The money?”

  “I’d be an idiot to say it bothered me now.” He sprinkled cinnamon pensively. “You dropped a hundred-dollar bill like it was loose change.”

  “So?”

  “So.” He put the toast in front of me. “So put
something in your stomach.”

  I ripped a corner off the toast and ate it. He lifted the entire square to his mouth and bit into it. We ate pensively. I’d been constructing questions and demands for days, but with him right in front of me, I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Your chin looks pretty good,” he said, breaking through the stone wall of silence with a gentle tap.

  “What happened?” I blurted. “Just tell me. I can take it.”

  He chewed, unhurried, thoughtful, as if choosing words and throwing them away.

  “My father was in corporate litigation.” He opened the refrigerator door and scanned the contents. “He started his own firm. Small-to-medium-sized in the grand scheme, I guess.” He found the milk and shut the fridge, occupying himself with the spout so he wouldn’t have to look at me. “He had a lot of clients, but his biggest one was a building supply company. See-Safe Windows and Doors. It doesn’t sound like much, but I’d bet my right arm every window and door in this building is See-Safe. They’re huge. Or they were.”

  He dropped milk into his coffee, clouding it, stirring. “They got sued all the time. This and that. Whatever. Dad never seemed stressed out about any of it. We had a nice life.”

  He sipped his coffee and put the milk away, letting his hand rest on the refrigerator door for a moment before coming back to the counter. “In Atlanta, this kid, four years old, Brandyn Rolando fell out a seventh-story window that didn’t lock properly.”

  “Oh.” The syllable was an expression of surprise and sorrow. “That’s terrible.”

  “Pretty much. The parents sued See-Safe, and in discovery, they found out that the windows weren’t installed to code. So the building co-op sued the developer, Piper-Sands, for the cost of replacement. See-Safe maintained Ronaldo fell out the window because of the installation. So basically, it was all landing on the developer.”

  He finally looked at me as if checking on my attention.

  “Go on.”

  “When all records of the build were subpoenaed, Piper-Sands lost their financing and closed their doors.”