Sweetheart

by Chelsea Cain

  Archie leaned forward a little, hoping to stem the black burn of pain that had been building under his ribs. It didn’t work. Buddy’s ringing phone was driving him crazy.

  “You okay, Archie?” Henry asked.

  Archie looked up at Buddy. “Did you call Fergus?” Fergus had been Archie’s doctor from the minute they’d first wheeled him into Emanuel, after his ten days with Gretchen. He was one of the best trauma surgeons in the U.S. And he was discreet.

  “His answering service was going to send him over,” Buddy said.

  “I thought you were faking,” Henry said, coming around the sofa and kneeling beside Archie. “To get her to call.”

  Archie watched behind Henry as the hairline crack in the plaster wall began to spread, inching up the baby-shit wall, a tiny heart-shaped fissure. “Half faking,” Archie said.

  CHAPTER

  34

  Fergus moved his cold hand along the bare skin over Archie’s rib line. Archie’s shirt was open and he was sitting on the bed. Buddy had taken Debbie and the kids downstairs to get something to eat. Henry and Susan were in the living room.

  Fergus pressed his fingers into Archie’s scarred flesh. “Your liver’s failing,” Fergus said.

  She had to be right.

  Fergus moved his hands up and felt the lymph nodes under Archie’s jaw. His hands weren’t getting any warmer. He usually wore a bow tie, but today he wore khakis and a golf shirt. “Cirrhosis,” Fergus said. “I won’t know how severe it is until I run some labs.”

  There it was. There was a farmer’s market on Saturday in the park across the street and Archie could hear the faint sound of milling crowds and a Grateful Dead cover band. “The pills?” Archie asked.

  Fergus looked at Archie over his glasses. “You need to give them up.”

  “I’m in pain,” Archie said.

  “There is a chance,” Fergus said, taking off the glasses and rubbing the lenses with his shirt, “that if you stop taking the pills right now, your liver will be able to repair itself.” He held the glasses up toward the light streaming through the wooden blinds and examined them. Then returned to cleaning them. “If you keep taking the pills, you will either need a liver transplant or you will die.” He put the glasses on and looked at Archie, his expression grave. “And they don’t give liver transplants until you’ve been clean for six months.”

  Archie started buttoning his shirt. “That seems reasonable of them.”

  “This isn’t a joke.”

  Archie looked up at Fergus. Archie felt bad for him. He’d treated him since the beginning. Saved his life. Bent the rules. Written him prescription after prescription. “Slow it down,” Archie said.

  “Stop taking the pills,” Fergus said. “Stop drinking. Keep taking diuretics for the edema. Stay away from salt. If you notice swelling in the abdomen we can insert a needle through the abdominal wall to remove fluid from the abdominal cavity.”

  “How bad is it going to get?” Archie asked.

  Fergus rolled up Archie’s sleeve, pulled a rubber tourniquet out of his medical bag and tied it around Archie’s forearm. “If you start vomiting blood or notice changes in mental function, you call me or you go to the ER.”

  Archie nodded.

  “I can’t prescribe a medication I know is killing you,” Fergus said, tapping a vein in Archie’s arm. “I’ll write you a few more scripts, so you don’t go cold turkey. And I can get you the name of some treatment facilities.” He retrieved a syringe from his bag, popped the rubber stopper off the end, and slid it into Archie’s arm.

  Archie watched as his blood slowly filled the syringe. He’d seen more blood in the past few years than he’d ever thought possible. “I don’t want anyone to know about this.”

  Fergus slipped the syringe out and pressed a cotton ball over the bleeding needle wound. “You’re going to need someone to take care of you,” he said.

  Archie allowed himself a wry smile, but by the time Fergus looked up it had faded. “I have someone in mind,” Archie said. It was a relief, really. Because if he was going to die, he had nothing to lose. If he was going to die, he could catch her.

  CHAPTER

  35

  Susan was standing at the end of the hall watching a bee tap at a window that overlooked the street. Outside she could see people carrying produce from the market, walking dogs, riding bikes, circling for parking. The bee smacked against the glass again. The skinny cop with big ears from the night before sat in a chair under a painting of an ugly old man. He looked up and smiled. “He’s been at it for an hour,” he said. “The bee. It’s an old window.” He reached up and scratched at one of his big ears. “Bees use UV rays to see. New windows have UV protection. But old ones? The UV goes right through the glass. So the bee can’t see it.”

  Susan extended her hand. “Susan,” she said.

  “Todd Bennett,” the cop said. “You can call me Bennett,” he added. “Everyone does.”

  “You know a lot about bees, Bennett,” Susan said, opening her cell phone.

  “I know a lot about windows,” Bennett said.

  Susan wasn’t in the mood to talk about glass, or bees, or even protopunk feminist singer-songwriter poets of the 1970s, and she was almost always in the mood to talk about them.

  She punched in a Herald number and extension.

  Ian picked up the phone at his desk. “Features,” he said. His voice made Susan’s skin crawl. She could taste him in the smooth timbre of it, his skin, his soap. Don’t sleep with the people you work with, her mother had told her. In fact she’d said, “Don’t shit where you sleep,” but Susan had known what she meant.

  Susan was trying to be better about that. It was one of the reasons she’d broken up with Derek.

  Susan turned away from Bennett and spoke in a low tone. “Ian,” she said, “when are you running the story about Castle and Molly Palmer?”

  Ian paused. “When the time is right.”

  The bee smacked against the window again. “Meaning?”

  “People are still grieving,” Ian said.

  Susan wanted to laugh or maybe jam the heel of her palm into Ian’s xiphoid process and drive it into his heart. “You fucker,” she said. “You’re not going to run it, are you?”

  His voice grew smoother. “Be patient, babe.”

  “Don’t call me babe,” she said. The bee was on the outside windowsill now, readying itself for another sortie. It fluttered its wings. “I’ll take it somewhere else. Someone will run it.”

  “You got a contract with us,” Ian said. “Break it, you lose your job. We’re the only daily in town.” He laughed and Susan decided that instead of his xiphoid process, maybe she would go for the bridge of his nose and blind him. That way he’d live to rue the day he’d crossed her. “Who are you going to work for?” Ian continued gleefully. “The Auto Trader?”

  Ouch. “So you’re going to let them kill the story? Just like that?”

  “He’s dead. What does it matter? You’re brilliant. The Castle story is over. Everyone wants Gretchen Lowell now. And you’re right in the middle of it.”

  “I’m trapped at the fucking Arlington,” Susan said, more loudly than she had intended. The bee smacked against the window again. “Give it up,” Susan said. “Shoo.”

  “What?” asked Ian.

  Susan covered her face with a hand. “I was talking to a bee,” she said.

  “Oh,” Ian said. He made a little clucking sound. “I’m covering the manhunt. Woman hunt. Whatever. But we’ll set up a blog for you on the Web site. You can update it every day from the Arlington.”

  “A blog?” As far as Susan was concerned, the Herald’s Web site was a wasteland. Susan glanced over at Bennett. He was reading a copy of Portland Monthly. The cover had a photograph of Oregon’s high desert and a headline that read THE BEST EXOTIC GETAWAYS. Maybe he was reading an article about windows.

  Gretchen Lowell or not, Susan needed to get out of there. She was not going to write a blog. Not i
f they were going to kill the Castle story. She owed that, at least, to Molly Palmer.

  “Listen, babe,” Ian said. She could hear the familiar tap-tap-tap of him typing on a keyboard. “I’ve got to run. I’ve got copy on the school siege to file.”

  The bee was gone. Maybe it was dead. Maybe it had given up and flown away to some pollen-swollen paradise. Susan didn’t know. “You know how I said your penis was average-sized?” Susan told Ian. “I lied.”

  She snapped her phone shut. She missed Parker. Parker would know what to do. Parker would make sure the story got published. Parker would get it on A-1. She dropped the phone back into her purse and walked back to her room, right past Bennett, who, she noticed, didn’t make eye contact, which meant that he’d overheard every word of her conversation. He was sitting directly across from Archie’s suite, number 602. And next to Susan and Bliss’s room, number 603. Archie and his family had a suite. She and Bliss were sharing a single room. Two twin beds. A desk. A TV. And a bathroom with no tub.

  Susan wanted a bath right now. More than anything.

  She opened the door to her room and there, in the small space between the end of the beds and the far wall, found her naked fifty-six-year-old mother standing with her legs together, arms raised, palms together. Her mole-dotted skin was pale, the flesh loose around the midsection and upper arms. Her breasts swung laterally as she reached down and touched her toes. Her bleached dreadlocks hit the carpet like a bundle of rope.

  Susan quickly closed the door behind her. “Bliss,” she asked. “What are you doing?”

  Susan’s mother jumped back into a plank position, so that her body was flat, her arms and toes on the floor. Her nipples brushed the carpet. “Sun salutations.”

  “You’re naked. You’re naked in the Arlington.”

  Bliss stretched into upward dog, keeping her toes on the floor but stretching her torso up, so her arms were straight and she was looking up at Susan. “I always do naked yoga,” she said. She bent back into downward dog, lifting her dimpled bare butt cheeks in the air and arching her back, and then moved one leg up between her hands, bent her knee and sank into warrior pose, so she was in a lunge with her arms extended above her head. “It’s very freeing.”

  Susan’s mother had a tattoo of English ivy that began below one breast and snaked down to her upper thigh. As Susan followed the tattoo with her eyes, her jaw dropped. “What did you do to your pubic hair?”

  Bliss lowered her arms into the proud warrior pose, extending one in front of her and one behind. “I had it waxed,” Bliss said. She spread the flesh of her abdomen so Susan could make out the design that had been carefully created in the rounded thatch of gray pubes. “It’s a peace sign. Bodhi did it at the salon.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  Bliss lifted her arms up again, sank a little lower into the pose, and closed her eyes. “It’s an illegal war, honey,” she said.

  Susan spun around and opened the door to the hallway. There was Henry. And Debbie. And Archie’s two kids. They all turned and looked at Susan. And beyond her, clearly visible through the open door, Susan’s lunging naked mother.

  “Namaste,” Bliss said with a wave. She stepped forward and bent all the way over, her dreadlocks piling again on the carpet.

  Henry, Debbie, Ben, and Sara all stood motionless for a minute.

  “I like your tattoo,” Ben said to Bliss.

  “Thanks!” said Bliss, stepping back into plank position.

  Susan stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind her. Bennett still sat in the chair, the Portland Monthly open in his lap. Ben and Sara each held on to one of Debbie’s hands. Henry raised an eyebrow.

  “Nice lunch?” Susan asked, trying to sound casual.

  “Try the smoked salmon salad,” said Debbie. “It’s delicious.”

  The hallway was quiet. The only sound was the noise of the cop’s magazine pages turning too fast for him to actually be reading.

  “Where are you going?” Henry asked Susan.

  Susan was wearing skinny black jeans, a black tank top, and a black belt. Her purse and her shoes were red patent leather. “To work,” she said.

  Henry shook his head. “You can’t leave. You’re under protection.”

  “I have stories to write,” Susan said. Her voice sounded too desperate, so she tried to rephrase it, make it sound more important. “Journalism. Newspaper journalism.”

  “Write in your room,” Henry said. “Where you’re safe.”

  Susan glanced back at the closed door that separated them from her naked mother and then back at Henry. “I need to get out of here,” she said between clenched teeth.

  Henry sighed. “I’ll talk to Archie.”

  Great. Trapped at the Arlington. Gretchen gets out. And Susan gets locked up. That was fair. Susan stole another glance at Bennett. She couldn’t get past Henry. But maybe that guy. “Okay,” she said.

  Henry looked at her for a minute, then nodded. He put a hand on Debbie’s lower back and led her and the two kids through the door to Archie’s suite.

  “Was that a peace sign?” Susan heard Debbie ask Henry as they disappeared through the door.

  CHAPTER

  36

  Archie held Sara in the crook of his arm on her bed, amid a menagerie of stuffed animals. Henry had brought them from the house and they were wedged in every available space, a rolling topography of faux fur, paws, and tails. His body felt light and relaxed from the pills and it was all he could do not to doze off next to her.

  “Read it again,” she said.

  He had just finished reading Sara the Winnie-the-Pooh book Now We Are Six.

  “It’s time for bed,” he said.

  Ben was in the next bed, reading a Lemony Snicket book.

  Archie kissed Sara on the head. Her hair was the same shade as her mother’s. He loved the smell of her and he kept his face against her head for a moment, savoring it. He couldn’t remember the last time Ben had let him kiss him good night.

  “I love you,” he said. There were moments, like this, when he was perfectly, beautifully happy. And he still didn’t know if it was real. Or the Vicodin.

  He put his feet on the floor and searched for his shoes.

  Sara’s flat little hand gripped his arm. “Stay with me,” she said. “Until I go to sleep.”

  “Sure,” Archie said, happy to stretch the moment out. He leaned back on the bed, crossed his feet, and put his arm back around his daughter. A plastic nose from some buried stuffed animal pressed against his back.

  Her eyes didn’t waver from him as she fell asleep, her eyelids growing heavier and heavier until, with a sliver of white, she finally gave it up.

  Archie waited another few minutes and then disentangled himself and put on his shoes.

  Ben put his Lemony Snicket on the bedside table and rolled over so he wasn’t facing Archie. “Good night, Dad,” he said to the wall.

  “Good night,” said Archie.

  He expected to find Henry and Debbie where he’d left them in the suite’s main room, but they weren’t there.

  “I’m in here,” Debbie called from the bedroom.

  She appeared in the doorway, clad in the white Arlington robe she’d taken to wearing. Archie bet if they ever moved back home, the robe would find its way into her suitcase.

  “When did Henry leave?” he asked, coming into the room and sitting on the bed.

  She walked into the bathroom and started brushing her teeth. “Fifteen minutes ago,” she said, the toothbrush in her mouth. She scooped some water into her mouth, rinsed, and spat in the sink. “He said to say goodbye.”

  He watched her reflection from where he sat. She was beautiful. Sara would be beautiful like that, too, when she grew up. The brown hair, the freckles, the watchful eyes. Debbie rinsed her toothbrush and dried her mouth with a white hand towel. Then she saw him watching her and turned around, resting her back against the sink.

  “What?” she said.

  “Nothing.�
��

  “I’m glad you’re all right,” she said softly.

  Archie shrugged. “Just stress, I guess,” he said.

  “You scared me,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He finished the sentence in his head: For everything.

  She gave him one of her concerned crooked smiles. Debbie would survive him. It would be hard. But she would be okay. The kids would be okay. They would probably be better off in the long run.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” Debbie asked.

  He held his arms out toward her. “Come here,” he said. Maybe it wasn’t the pills. Maybe he was actually happy.

  She walked barefoot over to him and he reached out and untied her robe and let it fall open. He stood and reached inside the robe and slid his hand down the bumps of her ribs to the round curve of her hip.

  She inhaled sharply and bit her lip. “It’s been a long time,” she said.

  Archie pulled her toward him and kissed her on the neck, inhaling her. “Tell me about it,” he said. He pushed the robe off her shoulders and it fell behind her on the floor and she stepped away from it into his arms.

  He knew her. Her breasts, the left one just a little larger than the right. The constellation of moles on her pale stomach. The small pad of pregnancy fat on her upper abdomen.

  He kissed her on the mouth and backed onto the bed, pulling her on top of him. She tasted like peppermint toothpaste. She moaned and reached down to unbuckle his pants. He stopped her, taking her hand by the wrist and lifting it to his mouth so he could kiss her fingers. He willed himself to respond. He wanted to make love to her. He did love her. But his body resisted. It had been like that since Gretchen. He didn’t know if it was the physical trauma of what he’d been through, or if he was just so poisoned by his lust for Gretchen that his body wouldn’t betray her, wouldn’t get hard for anyone else.

  He was going to make love to his wife. He was going to do this one last time. Even if it meant cheating just a little. So he decided to let Gretchen into his mind just for a moment. He closed his eyes. And there she was. God, she was beautiful, her blond hair and milky white skin, her mouth open, wanting him. He tasted Debbie’s earlobe, and it was Gretchen’s earlobe. He ran his hands through Debbie’s hair, and it was Gretchen’s hair. He felt instantly hard. He could feel Gretchen unbuttoning his pants, slipping her hand inside his underwear, taking hold of him. It was good. He wondered why he hadn’t done this before. She covered his neck with butterfly kisses like Debbie used to do. But that wasn’t what he wanted. He pushed his tongue into her mouth, pushed the waist of his pants down, and flipped her over and pushed himself inside her. He was rough and the force of him caused her to take a breath and it turned him on more. He thrust as hard and as deeply as he could. He couldn’t stop it. He wanted to fuck her harder than anyone ever had before. Any of the men she’d had. The men who’d killed for her. The men she’d killed. He wanted to reach the center of her.