by Alice Bell
Inside, a low murmur caught my attention. It sounded like a man’s voice upstairs. I couldn’t hone in. My powers were waning. I felt sick, like I had on the long bus ride up to Tikal, the night the woman in the back of the bus lifted her blanket and her skirt.
I thought of her breath in my ear, her ecstasy filling me with strength.
I gripped the banister as I went up the stairs. The man’s voice carried down the hall. Was it that bastard, Henry West? I had the idea to smash my fist into his face. I had told Scarlett to go to him but she should have known I didn’t mean it.
Or had I?
Her bedroom door was closed. I leaned against it and listened.
“Come here… sit next to me,” the man said. “Don’t be afraid. That’s nice, baby. Now let me see your pretty little stockings.”
I didn’t like the way he talked to her, like she was his plaything. But I was too weak to do anything about it. I stood there on the other side of the door, disgusted by what was happening inside and knowing I couldn’t do a damn thing to stop it.
A memory slammed behind my eyes. Zadie and I are in Nicaragua, in a dusty taxi on our way to catch a ferry. To where?
Maybe I didn’t want to remember. Maybe I wanted to feel nothing except Scarlett’s naked body next to mine.
Zadie and I miss the ferry. We catch a ride on a fishing boat. Huge waves rock the boat from side to side.
I heard Scarlett giggle.
The sicko is still talking, trying to seduce her. “The first time I saw those great big gorgeous… lips of yours, doll, I knew we had a real connection. They don’t make dames like you anymore.”
Dames? I could barely make a fist, let alone throw a punch, but I flung open the door.
My gaze bounced crazily off Scarlett’s empty bed, across the room and back to the bed, landing on her radio. “And that’s it folks. Join us next week for another episode of I Was a Private Dick.” Funky music blasted.
It was a stupid farce and that shit music was going to split my head open. I groped for the volume.
A slant of light from a door partly open cast a skinny rectangle across the floor. I crept closer. Inside I heard water splashing. I heard Scarlett’s intake of breath, felt her fear as she became aware she wasn’t alone. I put my eye to the opening.
She was in the bath, wide-eyed, waiting. Her breasts glistened. I pushed open the door.
“Scarlett, it’s me…”
“Oh,” she cried out, and reached for a towel and tried to wrap it around her body but almost fell. She grabbed the sides of the tub, losing the towel in the process. Water swept out of the tub and the sight of it spilling across the floor brought on another memory.
A boat rocks, water crashes through the windows. Little kids cry and hide under the seats. Zadie… Zadie clings to me.
I had to lean against the wall so I wouldn’t collapse. I slid down and sat on the cold tiled floor. My heart beat like it was going to jump out of my chest.
Scarlett sat down in the tub, drawing up her knees and hugging them. “Are you sick?” she said, finally. Her voice was tender.
“I needed to see you, that’s all.”
“You’re a wreck,” she said.
“I don’t think it’s contagious.”
“You don’t?” she sounded doubtful.
She had such a delicious pout, I longed to kiss her but for all I knew, I could turn her into whatever I had become just by kissing her, though she seemed to have survived the first kiss unscathed.
I lowered my head and heard the water being drained from the tub.
After a while, her wet feet came into my line of vision. My gaze traveled up her slender calves to the backs of her silky thighs. She wriggled into a white nightgown with a high lacy neck. I reached out to grip her ankle.
She turned to me. Her gown that clung to her damp skin showed me the outline of her nipples.
“Should I call an ambulance?” She knelt on the hard floor and put her hand on my face. “Did you take something dangerous?”
“Like what?” I said.
She looked uncomfortable. “Um, like heroin, or… I don’t know. You’re burning with fever.”
“I’m not on drugs,” I said.
I managed to stand up. The nausea had eased and it was from her being next to me in that see-through gown. But when I saw the pink towel lying at the bottom of the tub, my gut wrenched.
I remembered one more thing, and it felt like the last thing, the last thing that had happened before the black curtain of oblivion came down.
Zadie’s pink dress washed up on the shore.
* * *
Scarlett smoothed the sheets on her unmade bed. “Don’t you want to sleep?” she said.
“With you.” I took her hand and pulled her toward me.
She held back but I felt her hunger, like mine. I wrapped my arms around her waist and held her. Her heart fluttered, like the wings of a trapped bird. My lips grazed the crook of her neck. “Get in bed,” I whispered.
The sheets were cool. We lay facing each other.
I felt delirious with fever and yet I knew it wasn’t the flu or a virus because I was immune to those common human ailments. I didn’t contract them and I didn’t carry them. But I was still waiting for the kiss in the bar to show side effects.
All I wanted to do was kiss her again.
I resisted the urge by pressing myself against her. Sex sustained me, gave me strength when I was weak. This I knew, it had come instinctually, as a need, though I was beginning to realize it wasn’t the act itself I fed on. It was the surge of emotions that came with sex. And Scarlett’s emotions were so big, so uncontained that I wanted to inhale her very being, as if I couldn’t get close enough to her.
She tried to turn over, to face me, but I clamped my arm down tighter so she couldn’t move. “Stay where you are,” I said, in her ear.
It reminded me of the night in the bar, when she pretended to be Heathcliff telling Catherine not to look at him with her lying eyes. I didn’t want her to look at my eyes. And I didn’t want to be tempted by the sight of her trembling lips.
I pushed up her gown and she shivered. Her breath came fast. With every frantic beat of her heart, I felt my strength coming back.
I guided her hand to my jeans. She undid the zipper, like I wanted. I put her hand inside. I liked the way she seemed to be waiting for me to show her what to do next. When I paused, thinking of what would give me the most pleasure, pain sliced through my ribcage.
I cried out.
“Oh, no, did I hurt you?” she sounded panicked.
Another blow hit me in the stomach.
I clenched my jaw, as long lost images pounded at my subconscious. It was all coming back to me like a fever dream. I was sick with the onslaught of memories, just like the night… the last night I saw Zadie.
Oh, god, it hurts. It hurts to remember…
EIGHT
Devon
Nicaragua, Eleven Years Ago
The sun is going down, red and pink and orange. Monkeys howl and the sound echoes through the trees. Waves lap on the shore, leaving tiny bubbles, like white lace. Damp sand shifts beneath my bare feet. I push open a wooden door painted purple.
Zadie is in the four poster bed, naked. I pull off my jeans and lift the mosquito net to crawl in next to her. The diaphanous cloth flutters around us, moved by a fan that hangs from the beam of the thatched roof.
She turns over to face me. Her cheeks are flushed. She has soft brown eyes and a plain face made beautiful by something inside her. She’s often kind but can be harsh. If you hurt her.
She has naturally platinum blonde hair. Her breasts are small and perky, her legs won’t quit. She closes her eyes. We start kissing.
My hand goes down, between her legs. Her breathing shifts.
We do it slow and lazy with her making soft moans, until I can’t stand it anymore.
I roll her so I’m on top. She tilts her hips and opens for me. I push deeper, a little
at a time, covering her cries with my mouth.
We writhe and twist on the bed. She wraps her long legs around me and we come together.
Afterwards, I see myself reflected in her eyes.
She’s always restless afterwards.
“Come on, Devon. What are you an old man? Don’t go to sleep.” She bites my shoulder.
“Ow. Okay… in a minute,” I put the pillow over my head.
At some point, I wake and she’s gone. When she comes back, I’m awake and sitting up. She has a pineapple. She puts it on the hand-carved table, like a centerpiece. “There’s a mean monkey out there,” she says. “He threw things at me.”
“How do you know it’s a he?”
She giggles.
Later, when we take the same path to the bar, something small and hard hits me in the back of the head.
Zadie laughs and points up to a high tree branch. “That’s him,” she says. It’s a largish brown monkey whose eyes glimmer and whose testicles are glaring white. “That color doesn’t seem like the best idea,” I say. “Why call attention to your valuables?”
“Maybe the girls like it,” she says.
There’s a party having tapas at a long table in the courtyard, mostly men, and they’re foreign, like us. You can always tell. There’s only one woman sitting with her back to us. I recognize her instantly. She sits so straight, hyper-alert, like a cat watching a mouse. The sheen of her lustrous dark hair and the way it falls around her shoulders is exactly the same, as if I’d seen her yesterday.
She follows the gaze of her male companions and turns.
“Oh my God,” Zadie says. “Heather? Heather…”
They squeal, like the girls they’d been together, falling into each other’s arms and hugging for too long.
But I feel hollow, as if things are about to take a dark turn…
* * *
Everyone wants to party. The bar is open-air, lit by torches. Heather’s friends think of themselves as musicians. They have guitars and bongo drums. I can’t get down any more beer and the night has just started.
Heather is dancing. She locks eyes with me, crooning, and I’m embarrassed, not drunk enough. She’s coming on strong and Zadie doesn’t seem to notice I guess because she’s actually having fun, which is kind of annoying.
Zadie tries to get me to dance. I’m half tempted because she’s wearing my favorite dress. It’s pink and very short. But I shrug her off. She puts her face next to mine, her breath full of whisky. “Devon’s being a grumpy,” she pouts.
It’s not like her and there’s that look in her eyes again, like the lights are on but no one’s home. She’s been weird since we got down here; jumpy, restless, disappearing for hours and then acting like no time has passed. “You’re drunk,” I say.
She spins away and starts dancing with Heather and the guys drool, which is the whole point, I figure. “See you later,” I head down the path, back to our casa.
Moonlight spills through the trees. I’m not tired but I peel off my jeans and T-shirt and get in bed. As I lay there, staring up at a hole in the mosquito net, a mosquito whines in my ear. I slap at it.
My mind conjures unsavory images of what’s going on back at the bar. But that’s not what’s really bothering me.
I suspect Heather’s stalking us. It’s a small island in a small country, way off the beaten track. She shows up randomly in a bar known only to backpackers? Where’s her damned backpack?
I first met Heather at camp. She was cute but didn’t reach her full beauty until later, in high school. On the last night, during campfire, we sat by each other and she passed me a note with a map that told me precisely where to meet her after ‘lights out’.
We had a thing that summer, an eighth grade type of thing; secret glances, accidental touching and awkward kid stuff. It culminated into one big make-out session the last night. She was the first girl who let me put my hand down her pants.
In the fall, when we ended up at the same high school, she acted like we were engaged, waiting at my locker, calling me constantly. One night on the phone, I asked her to stop.
The next morning at school, she was holding hands with some other guy and I was relieved. I didn’t consider how strange it was that she had, in a matter of hours, taken up with someone else.
Zadie was in three of my classes, Heather in none, as fate would have it. Zadie was quiet but not shy. When she spoke in class, which was seldom, she was forceful about her opinions. She always sat on the edge of the classroom, in an outer aisle, near a window. Her uniform barely concealed her creamy upper thighs. And she didn’t notice me, so I thought about her a lot, concocting ways to capture her attention.
We met officially through Heather.
Heather was the leader of the hot girls. Like she did in class, Zadie stayed on the fringes. She was a head taller than the other girls and not nearly as pretty in the way they were with their long shiny hair and glossy lips. But she gave me the aches.
So when I saw Heather and Zadie together in the hall, I took the opportunity. “Hey, Heather,” I said. “How’s it going?” But it was Zadie’s eyes I was staring into.
That’s was it for me. It was only Zadie all through high school. Except for one rainy winter…
Senior year I was living in my parents’ guest house and one night, in January, I had the thermostat turned up too high. Sweating, I tossed and turned. On the edge of waking, I heard what sounded like footsteps outside. When a key turned in the lock, I shot up in bed, heart pounding. The door swung open, letting in faint light from the street. I saw a dark figure before the door was shut and the room went black again.
By that time, I was standing, fists ready. If I had to, I’d kill with my bare hands. I listened, on high alert. There was the soft sound of breathing. Covertly, I reached behind me for the light switch. In the next second, I was practically blinded by the harsh glare of the overhead light.
“Hi, Devon.”
Shit. It was only Heather. My hands unclenched. “What the hell?” I said. “Sneaking into someone’s house in the middle of the night is pretty fucked up, Heather.”
She just smiled. She wore a black overcoat, her legs bare, red high heels. She dangled a key from a small chain, twirling it. “Did you lose this?”
It was the key I’d given Zadie. How did Heather get her hands on it? My mind raced. “That’s Zadie’s,” I said finally.
“I guess she lost it,” Heather tossed the key onto the table.
Maybe Zadie misplaced her key or maybe Heather stole it from her but it didn’t matter. Zadie hadn’t noticed it was missing. And I realized Zadie hadn’t been around much, lately. I wondered if we’d run our course.
Heather slid off her trench coat and was completely naked in the span of seconds. She had the body of a Playboy centerfold, soft and curvy, while Zadie was all long limbs and sharp angles.
Heather did things Zadie wouldn’t. She was hungry and dirty and beautiful.
We lost track of time with the days almost as dark as the nights.
Later, I figured Heather would tell Zadie and braced myself for the fall-out. But Heather apparently never mentioned it. I don’t know why but the whole episode brought Zadie and I even closer. I felt more possessive of Zadie, to the point my mother declared our relationship unhealthy.
We were both headed for the same college back east. At the last minute, Zadie changed her mind. “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t waste four years of my life. I’m going to California.” And that was it. Not a single email, voicemail nor ‘drink and dial’ marred what seemed like a clean break.
I was stunned. There was a sharp pain when she was gone. And then, I felt nothing. I didn’t even care my mother may have been right about us.
Heather was the one who connected us again, though I’m pretty sure it wasn’t what she intended.
For years after high school, Heather had a way of showing up all the time. A few months into my first term at college, we met at a house party. Then w
e ran into each other in Sun Valley. The summer I interned in the city, she dated my roommate, and found her way to my bed.
Our random hook-ups were becoming more and more frequent. They were starting to interfere with my other relationships. It seemed like whenever I got serious with someone, Heather would appear.
When I was teaching upstate, after I got my PhD, she showed up on my doorstep every weekend. Years were slipping by and she never expressed wanting anything other than sex. I hated myself for not being able to say no to her.
Without warning, without leaving any trace Heather could follow, I headed for California. I didn’t even tell my parents.
I’d heard bits and pieces about Zadie. She’d modeled, tried acting, she’d signed with an agency, had done a few commercials… she was writing a screen play. I honestly doubt we would have seen each other again until our fifty year high school reunion if it wasn’t for Heather. My constant, empty trysts with her had opened a hole inside me only Zadie could fill.
Heather drove me back to Zadie. At least, that’s how it felt to me.
By then, Zadie was living in Venice Beach. I caught up to her at a party. She was in a short pink dress and I saw her all the way across the room with her white blonde hair. Our eyes met. Her surprised smile lit the room and I wondered why we’d ever parted.
* * *
Like that first night with Heather back in high school, I toss and turn, looking for a cool spot on the sheets.
A nightmare has me in its grip. I’m running and the monkeys are screaming and swinging from the branches above me. Red smoke billows and rises into the sky. The sound of beating wings fills the air.
I wake with a gasp and lurch out of bed. My eyes are hot coals. My whole body aches with fever. Sunshine streams through the window.
Zadie isn’t here.
The act of dressing in jeans and a T-shirt turns my stomach. I run to the bathroom, where I throw up in the toilet. After purging myself, I stand up on shaky legs. When I wipe my mouth, there’s blood. It’s coming from my nose. I splash cold water on my face and hold a towel to my nostrils until the bleeding stops.
