Christabel

by Karin Kallmaker

  Please God, help me. She remembered that his God was no friend of hers and she prayed instead to Rahdonee’s great spirit. Great Mother. Deliver me, by any means.

  From the corners of her eyes she saw a shadow rise up behind him. Their largest cast-iron pan struck him on his shoulder.

  She was freed from his gaze and her helplessness. She shoved him away with all her rage and cast about frantically for a weapon.

  Her mother spat at the preacher, then slurred, “You are no man of God. My husband was right. You’ll not have my daughter!” She raised the frying pan.

  Christabel gripped the fire iron. “Get out or I swear I’ll kill you.”

  Unbelievably, the preacher laughed. She was suddenly aware of foul air, a stench like a blacksmith’s forge. “Mother and daughter lionesses. I told you we chased them into the river, didn’t I?”

  Christabel raised the fire iron higher, dreading anything he would say.

  “We pulled one very beautiful savage out of the river. Wounded, but she’ll live. As long as I keep her alive.” His hand went in his pocket and he drew out the strand of beads she had given Rahdonee. She had last seen them tying back Rahdonee’s hair. “Do you remember that I said you’d beg?”

  “No!” She lunged at him with the fire iron, catching him on his neck. But he sidestepped and tripped her, and kicked her as she fell.

  She could not breathe in. She raised herself from the floor, only to lose her balance. Pain radiated in her side and back. When finally her lungs sucked in air, the pain made her see gray, dancing rags. Her mother cried out as Christabel fell into darkness.

  Chapter 14

  I was startled when Liza sought me out. We’d all spent an exhausting morning being photographed for Women’s Wear Daily. Liza had probably had less sleep than I, but had managed, as I had, to make it through the session with the flawless grace required of us.

  She closed my bedroom door behind her, looking uncertain and wary. “I have to know.” She stopped, then seemed to cast about for words. “I thought you married him just to get ahead. I didn’t want to admit that...that you’d be a star without him. I didn’t really see it until last night.”

  She crossed the room toward me, clad in a bathrobe similar to mine. The scent of the same skin treatment I was wiping off clung to her. She perched on the edge of my bed, and we studied each other in the mirror.

  “You are beautiful,” she finally said.

  “Liza, I don’t need—”

  “Let me finish. You don’t need him. But I do. After I heard you last night I realized he’s hanging onto you, not the other way around. So I don’t understand why you don’t leave him.”

  Mostly curious and certainly not jealous, I asked, “So you can have him all to yourself?”

  “Like I said, I need him. Sure I’m a size two and I’m striking to look at. But there are a lot of women who look just like me, or near enough. I need him, or my career ends with the first wrinkle.”

  “I can’t leave him.” As the fame started to mount, as the immortality I had craved for myself and my mother, for all of us, became more certain I might have realized I could leave him. But now there was Dina, and he had brought Dina and me together in perfect calculation to strengthen his hold on me. I knew he would hurt Dina to control me, and I couldn’t think of a way out. There was no restraining order or threat that a man like Leo would obey.

  I expected anger or incomprehension, but Liza only pursed her lips. “I know you think he’s the ticket to the top. But as famous as he’s going to be, he’s not like a movie director or a producer. And you could have any of them with a flutter of your eyelashes.”

  “I don’t…” I was the one searching for words now. “You know that Leo and I don’t—”

  “Yes, he told me. He’s saving you for some big moment. He’s so superstitious.”

  That had never occurred to me. Leo, superstitious? “I don’t want to, not with him, not with any man.”

  Her lips parted and the hardness of her usual expression cracked. She stood abruptly, and then gently put her hands on my shoulders. Her lips brushed the tip of my ear. “God, Christa, do you think you’re the only one?”

  I let myself drink in the sweetness of another woman’s desire, just for a moment. After all the cruel bitchiness, the moment was healing. She turned my head and kissed me. It was almost chaste.

  She regarded me in the mirror again. “I’ve wanted to do that for a long time. I didn’t know how much until last night. You looked like someone had lit a spotlight inside of you.”

  Dina had done that and I was the instrument of Leo’s malice toward her. “Liza, if you feel this way, how can you be with him?”

  “That’s just business.” Her expression was hardening again, and a bitter twist ruined the beauty of her lips. “I’ve been trying to fuck my way to the top all my life. I have what men want, but they don’t get it until I get what I want. Leo’s as high as I’m going to go. You could go anywhere.”

  “If I wanted to fuck my way there, you mean.”

  She sat back on the bed, exasperated. “What makes you any better than me?”

  “I’m not better than you.”

  “You have the most fascinating body, a naturally beautiful body, that I have ever seen. You’re incredibly female without looking weak or cheap. But you are still just a body and a lovely face.”

  “I am more than that.” That was what I wanted to prove. I was more than something men used.

  “Marilyn Monroe thought so, too. Look where she ended up. Fucking presidents and their brothers. How much higher can you go? But she didn’t get a part—even after she was a star—that she didn’t have to fuck a producer to get first. What do you think she needed the alcohol and pills for? To forget that she was just a body to most of the world.”

  “I don’t want to end up that way. I’d rather end up on my own terms, with my legs together. So I’m afraid I’ll be staying married to Leo, for a while longer anyway.”

  “But you are planning to leave him?” Liza was speculative now.

  “Yes. I’d venture to say that he guesses I’ll try.” If I was dead he’d have no reason to hurt Dina. It sounded insane—it was insane—to think in those terms, but Leo was inhuman in his love of cruelty.

  She regarded me narrowly and said in a low tone, “I’ll help you if I can, if he won’t find out.” She cracked a lopsided smile, the first genuine expression I’d ever seen from her. “Besides, if I can convince you I’m an ally and you do hit the big time, maybe it’s you I’ll leech on to. I don’t change my goals, but my plans are flexible.”

  Leo was right. Liza was strong, very strong, born with steel for a spine and tempered by the world we lived in. “I’ll remember,” I said. “But I don’t think you can help.”

  She stood, and her hands stroked my cheeks lightly. “I wish...”

  She sighed and then left me to reach wearily for the eyebrow tweezers. That someone understood, even a little, what my life was like should have made me happy. But I felt even more depressed.

  My future plans now depended entirely on what Leo planned for Dina and what it would take for me to spare her from his malice.

  Away from the building, and with a huge quantity of eggs and toast in her, Dina felt rationality return. She’d been busy plotting how she would kidnap Christa, get her out of the city somehow, until she came to her senses over a third cup of coffee.

  None of her wild plans would work. She had the chutzpah of a potato when it came to intrigue. She’d look like a nut case, and she could kiss her partnership, her reputation, the work of the past decade, good-bye.

  Considering having a muffin, she decided it was all just a weird fantasy, some story her mother had told her when she was young, and she was remembering it, just like she remembered her mother’s warnings about the gift she would inherit and the debt she had to pay. Unfinished business, her mother had said.

  At the time her mother had first spoken about gifts and green, Dina ha
d been too busy holding back her grief to listen closely. Now it seemed like the wanderings of a woman on too many painkillers. Depleted, emotionally strung out and sitting in the freezing cold of an empty building had made her hallucinate and recall her mother’s dying words.

  The muffin consumed and her stomach finally saying she’d had enough, she decided it was all madness. She was going to go home, take a nap, maybe do some of the reading she’d brought from the office—since she’d sworn she would not go to the office this weekend—and then take a long, hot bath before dressing for George’s party. She was the guest of honor, after all, as the new partner. She would do him proud.

  She left the diner to discover a morning drizzle. No umbrella as usual, but she didn’t care. She’d just given her address when, to her surprise, the cab driver excitedly pushed open the dividing window.

  “It’s you! Like fate.”

  “I’m sorry?” Dina stared at the man, then abruptly recalled his face.

  “You remember. I did what you said, and didn’t get that fare. The cabbie who did, they tried to rob him. But he has gun and they run away. I don’t have gun and there’s no telling what they would have done.” His excited gaze met hers in the rear view mirror. “You are psychic!”

  “No, I’m not really—”

  “I thank you always. My mother thank you always. My wife thank you always. My two babies thank you always. We pray for you, all family.”

  Well, Dina thought, it wasn’t as if she couldn’t use positive prayers. It couldn’t possibly be real, she started to tell herself, but a whisper of her mother’s voice asked what more proof she wanted. “I’m glad you were safe and the other cabbie too.”

  “You get idea for lottery numbers, you share, yes?” He whisked them along Central Park West.

  “I don’t think it works that way.” She knew she should feel frightened and uncertain but instead she felt strong. She was Green. She fought back a giggle. Was this some kind of Faustian choice? If sanity wasn’t working, she should opt for insanity?

  “Forgive me, forgive me. I ask for too much good fortune.”

  He was still chattering when Dina got out of the cab. He refused her money. “I repay good fortune this way, maybe then I get more.”

  “Now that,” Dina said, “is the way it’s supposed to work. But here, if not for the meter, then for your babies so they’ll pray for me more. I need all the prayers I can get.” She pressed the bills into his hand and waved him away, cheered and energized by the encounter.

  She was Green. Mad as a hatter, but Green.

  Staring at herself in the bathroom mirror, haggard eyes and all, she thought she might be Green, but she still had a party to get ready for. George deserved her best and it was going to take a chunk of time to get there. She ought to have scheduled what Christa referred to as “a refurbishing” but her plain old moisturizer was going to have to do.

  She soaked in the bath, aware that she had no idea what she was going to do about Christa and Goranson, but she was Green, wasn’t she?

  “Well, mom,” she said to the shampoo bottle, “I’m waiting for a sign. It’s your turn.”

  George called just after she finished painting her final toenail. “I hope you don’t mind, but I invited Goranson to the party tonight.”

  “Ugh, George, why? You know how I feel about the guy.”

  “Because it was the only way I thought I could get Christa there as well. I made him promise she would attend so I could inflate my ego.”

  Dina didn’t know what to say. She’d mentioned Christa to George, but she thought she’d been closed about her feelings. “You have incredible instincts.”

  “I saw your face last night, and hers. And I know people.”

  “Well, I was planning to put on the party duds anyway. I just want you to know that I bought this dress for you.”

  “But she’ll enjoy it, I take it?”

  “I certainly hope so. And George, I don’t think Goranson is a jerk just because of Christa. He’s a jerk.”

  “I also saw his face last night. He reminded me of the kind of guy who’d kill his own hamster and then want to take yours.”

  Remembering the woman in the club Goranson had taken her to, she wasn’t sure it was hamsters that Goranson liked to torture. “We made him rich and it didn’t hurt our pockets any.”

  “That’s business.”

  She knew that, but it still pained her. She could do better with her talents than that. “Maybe we could endow some university’s business department with a chair for ethical studies and doing business with bastards.”

  He chuckled and hung up, leaving Dina to wonder how she could use this unexpected opportunity to see Christa again.

  It wasn’t until she was leaving, putting a lipstick and some cash in her evening bag, that she had a nearly irresistible urge to go back to the building. There was more she could learn, but there was not enough time, she told herself.

  It is time, a voice inside her head whispered.

  Maybe she could do the second best thing. She snipped a leaf from the growing plant on the windowsill and filled a Ziploc with cornmeal. As she tossed in a few packets of takeout salt, she shook her head. This was crazy, she thought. So what else was new? She was Green, and crazy came with the territory, it seemed.

  She was at the apartment door when thoughts not quite her own made her go back to the bedroom for her mother’s dreamcatcher. It just fit in the slender bag, and when she left the apartment she had the preposterous feeling of being girded for battle.

  Rahdonee felt her eyes straining to find some light, but there was none. She closed them again and concentrated for a moment on the smell of this place. Dank, of the earth.

  Was she even alive? Was she waiting for the Great Mother to return her to the Wheel of Life?

  She found she could move her arms, and she gingerly felt about her. Her fingertips encountered dirt, a thin web of root, a sleepy earthworm. She was not dead. She was alive and still with creatures of the Great Mother.

  After that, where she was didn’t concern her as much as the growing pain of her wounds. She had been tended and bandages had been wrapped around her upper chest where most of the musket shot had struck her. She would live, and life was always to be treasured.

  She woke some time later much clearer in mind, but still in absolute darkness. It was obvious that the men who had shot her had pulled her from the river, and she was most likely the prisoner of the demon preacher. The remainder of her life would probably be short and painful. She did not fear death, but the Great Mother would not begrudge her fearing the manner of it. Her death would be in such a way as to be of most use to the preacher.

  Christabel. With a gasp of horror, she realized that her failure to escape him had given the preacher what he needed to force Christabel to do his bidding.

  She clutched the dirt and made herself rise and explore the cell with eyes closed and fingers taking in every nook and cranny. The walls held echoes of suffering and despair, and she could not prevent these sensations from depressing her further. When she encountered several pairs of dangling manacles set in the wall higher than her shoulders, she understood. This was one of the places the traders kept their human cargoes before selling them at auction. There was no escape; these white men knew how to protect their property.

  She would not get stronger without food, and the idea of toileting herself in the same place where she would sleep was repugnant. She could feel herself fighting off the lingering anguish held in the walls. It was draining her as surely as her wounds and lack of food.

  She settled herself in a corner and reminded herself that her people were safe, and she tried to let that knowledge help her spirit float upward. She would not give the preacher the satisfaction of seeing her weep. In fact, the sooner he dispensed with her life, the less damage he would do to Christabel in the meantime.

  What wickedness could wrench love to make it the source of despair? She had known he was evil, and yet she had del
ivered herself into his hands, to be his weapon against the woman she loved. Stupid, she had been stupid and naive. Love did not guarantee happiness or safety, and just because she was Green did not mean she could not be someone else’s tool for evil.

  There was no way to tell the passing of time without light, so she was left alone with her foolish pride, her anguished love, and the certain knowledge that when she next saw the sky it would be for the last time.

  Chapter 15

  Just another cocktail party, but I was grateful at least that it was not in a hotel where the press could follow us. Leo told me to wear the latest in his line of little black dresses designed for me, and I suspected the lead feeling inside me showed in my face. In fact, there was no sign of press when our limo arrived in front of the palatial Central Park West apartment building. A liveried bellman helped me out while Leo looked around him with disdain.

  “I thought there would be press.” He groused about it as we went to the elevator. “There’s no point in going if it’s not a PR opportunity.” He glanced at me, his usual smugness turned up tenfold. “Well, something might come of it.”

  We took the elevator to the top floor, and it opened into the foyer of an elegant apartment with parquet floors and rich tapestries on the walls—a touch of the medieval. The view of Central Park could almost make me forget how many people were crammed onto this small island. A man turned toward us, and I recognized him from the fashion show—Dina’s boss.

  Leo tucked my shaking arm more tightly against his ribs. Of course he hadn’t wanted to give me time to prepare. I knew my composure wouldn’t hold when I faced Dina.

  I extricated my arm to shake hands with George Berkeley. He admired my dress, complimenting Leo’s design, then sweetly added, “And of course, Christa, you could wear a brown paper bag and give this old heart of mine a lift any day of the week. Let me introduce you to some special people.”