Give Me Your Answer True

by Suanne Laqueur

  “Black cake,” Camille said. “You soak dried fruit in rum for three months beforehand. Then the essence is mixed in with the batter. It’s religious.”

  “How much essence,” Daisy asked, already composing a recipe for Francine. “Few tablespoons?”

  Camille smiled. “The whole bottle, sister. And a dozen eggs.”

  “Jesus,” David said.

  “My aunt is a perfumer,” Daisy said. “She made my scent for me when I was sixteen but I don’t know what’s in it.”

  “Well if the formula’s ever lost you can dab a little of that shit behind your ears,” David said.

  “I have many friends who do,” Camille said.

  “What do you think?” Omar said, turning the paper around to face Daisy.

  Daisy put her hand over her mouth. A little burnt sugar essence had spilled on her fingers and the smell filled her head as she took in Omar’s design. The letters of Svensk Fisk cunningly drawn to evoke the shape of a fish. The first K making the dorsal fins, the last K made the tail. The letters hinted at runes yet they had movement. The little fish swam before her eyes. “It’s perfect,” she said.

  David nodded, a smile playing around his mouth. “Will you color them in?”

  “Red,” Omar and Daisy said at the same time.

  It took a half-hour for Omar to ink the fish into the hollow of Daisy’s right hip bone.

  “He usually works much faster than this,” Camille said, a loving hand on the artist’s head. “But he’s crying too much.”

  “Two things make me cry,” Omar said, turning his head to press his shoulder to his damp eyes. “Love and bravery.”

  Daisy’s eyes were streaming as well, more from emotion than pain. She’d endured worse. She didn’t need the hand David offered but she held it anyway because she knew he wanted to feel useful. His eyes were dry, but he looked a shade green. Every now and then he unscrewed the cap from the bottle of burnt sugar essence and waved it under his nose like smelling salts before passing it to Daisy. Like the hand-holding, Daisy let him think it helped, touched by how he was caring for her today.

  When all was done, Omar folded Daisy into his arms and held her a long moment. He smelled like sandalwood and strength.

  “Take care of your boy,” he said. “And come see me again soon.”

  “Come around Christmastime,” Camille said as she hugged David and gave him the bottle of sweet extract to keep. “And have black cake with us.”

  “OH, DAIS,” Erik said.

  They were in her bedroom at La Tarasque, Erik kneeling at her feet. First his fingers traced the tattoo, then his mouth. Her pores were wide open and aching for his touch.

  “Do you like it?” she said.

  “I love it.”

  Her hand caressed his hair. “I thought a long time about where to put it. Somewhere only you could see.”

  “Only me.” His forehead against her belly, arms around her legs. He exhaled. Now his cheek was wet against her skin.

  “Nobody loves me like you,” he said.

  WILL CAME BACK TO SCHOOL SHORN, his magnificent tresses cropped down to the scalp. His strong cheekbones leaped from his face like knives. With nowhere to hide, his beautiful eyes took center stage, liquid brown and haunted under thick lashes and brows.

  He never spoke of James. Nobody did. Will never apologized for the affair or for his attraction to men, and nobody expected it of him.

  But his eyes told a different story.

  “I told him I trusted his hands,” Erik said to Daisy. “I told him sometimes his hands were the only thing between you and a ten-foot fall to the stage and I trusted them. I trusted him with you. He could barely look at me in the hospital. He kept crying and saying ‘I dropped her, I dropped her…’”

  “He was shot through the back and nearly had his hand blown off,” Daisy said. “It would’ve been a miracle if he hadn’t dropped me. I don’t blame him for this, I know you don’t. Nobody does.”

  “It was nobody’s fault,” everyone said. “It was only James’s fault.”

  Will wouldn’t talk about it. His inner experience spoke through his sacrificed hair, his troubled eyes, and a fierce obsession with Daisy’s recovery. His dire need to know the whereabouts of his loved ones surpassed even Erik’s. Will wanted Lucky, Daisy and, especially, Erik, where he could see and touch them. He wanted the four of them together, all the time.

  The circle pulled tight: the boys at Colby Street, the girls at Jay Street. David around the corner with Neil Martinez. And John dropping by with carte blanche.

  They rarely went out. Crowded, noisy places made them uneasy. The world was unpredictable and strangers untrustworthy. Instead they gathered close at the girls’ apartment and kept company, eating, studying or watching TV. They stayed up too late, delaying bedtime. All their sleep was sketchy and unpredictable, laced with nightmares they compared with a macabre one-upmanship.

  John, who had knelt on the stage floor inches from Will’s severed fingers, dreamed of dismembered hands in grotesque piles.

  Neil dreamed of being lost in the caverns of Manhattan. Skyscrapers like teeth and the streets below full of blood.

  Lucky, so heroic and competent in the theater, now dreamed of walking wounded, of having to make life or death decisions which were never right.

  Will ran in his dreams. Ran and ran from an invisible looming danger behind him. He could feel its breath on his cropped head. Hear its accusatory laughter inches away. Sometimes he turned to fight, only to find the terror was still behind him.

  Erik took a shot point-blank in the chest in his nightmares. He sat dying in the aisle as James went back to the stage to finish what he started.

  David wouldn’t tell anyone his dreams.

  Daisy had two. One she told, the other she kept.

  The shared dream was of blank space: a cavern of dark, yawning nothingness before her eyes. She could sense its dimensions but not its boundaries. It was endless and predatory. A gigantic oubliette determined to feed on her sanity.

  The untold dream repulsed her: a bizarre sexual encounter with Erik where she devoured him. Her vulva unfolding like a Venus flytrap, sucking him inside. He went willingly to his death. His expression was one of happy relief while Daisy screamed in a helpless rage because assuming him into her body wasn’t enough to save him.

  It was never enough.

  Her libido had been low during the summer but now it came back to her with a strange desperation, an almost frenetic direness to it. But she couldn’t come. It was as if she wasn’t allowed. Sex wasn’t about frivolous pleasure, it was about protection. She had a job here: to save her man. And after making love, she felt sick to her stomach with a pervasive sense of failure.

  Sex was playing strange tricks on Erik, too. He wanted it all the time, hungrily grabbing Daisy at every opportunity. He was edgy and passionate before, tender and loving during, but as soon as sex was over, anxiety came for him. Galloping over the hill of his mind like a pack of beasts on the hunt. And he fell apart in her arms, unmanned and shaking to his bones.

  “Four A.M. when the wolves come,” Daisy said.

  She lay tight against his back, pressing his pounding chest with the palm of her hand and feeling responsible for his panic-laced body. Feeling helpless to stop it, feeling she missed the one chance to stop it.

  Now, do it right this time, her body chided the next time they had sex.

  It was always the same.

  She didn’t know what she was doing wrong.

  The two couples slept at Jay Street every night and the house was rarely quiet in the darkest hours. Erik woke up shouting. Daisy woke up screaming. Down the hall Will bolted upright with a cry. Lucky thrashed in dreams and fell out of bed.

  “I broke the lamp,” she said one morning. “And for no fun reason.”

  They were brave in the light of day. They tried to laugh off the bad dreams, find the funny in the anxious vulnerability.

  They were all sitting around late o
ne night, watching a movie. Lucky went upstairs to get a sweater and came back down a minute later.

  “Look at you,” she said from the foot of the stairs. “One, two…three…five guys, and every single one of you has a hand down their pants.”

  As one the boys looked up and mumbled, “What?”

  Daisy burst out laughing.

  The boys exchanged mild glances, but not one hand moved from its place.

  Lucky swung around the newel post, her curls bouncing. “All of you holding your thing like it’s going somewhere.”

  “Hey, you never know,” John said.

  “These are tenuous times, Lulu,” David said. “You keep your friends close and the junk even closer.”

  “I was being polite because ladies were present,” Neil said. “But hell, now that you outed everyone…” He slid his other hand down his jeans.

  “Both hands,” David said, nodding approval.

  “Get over here, Luck,” Will said. “Get your hand down here too. For Christ’s sake.”

  Erik said nothing. He’d toppled over with his head in Daisy’s lap, laughing and laughing. One hand over his face, the other still down his pants. Peal after peal of laughter, and soon the knee of Daisy’s jeans was damp with his tears.

  “It’s not that funny, Fish,” David said.

  “Yes it is,” he said, his voice squeaking.

  Daisy looked around, suffused with a hysterical happiness. The little living room was full of laughter as invisible golden threads knitted the circle together.

  Knit one, purl two. Don’t forget I love you.

  We have to stay together, Daisy thought, stroking Erik’s head, her lap full of his chuckling. Hold onto these moments, make it last. If we stay together and find what’s funny, we’ll be all right.

  “WERE YOU DANCING yet?”

  “No,” Daisy said. “Not in the fall. Still on disability, so to speak. Impatient as hell but I knew one reckless risk could blow everything. I started to teach, which was eye-opening.”

  “Teach what?”

  “Mostly the beginner and intro ballet classes but whatever Kees needed me to do. We didn’t have a replacement for Marie so he was running both divisions.”

  Another closed door materialized in her mind. Painted fresh and white but spots of rust seeping through. A pretty grille overlay, choked with dry, crumbling leaves. A pot by the jamb filled with dead flowers.

  Ciao, fiorella.

  Good morning, little flower.

  Rita’s head tilted, the light catching the lenses of her glasses. “Where are you right now?”

  Daisy closed her eyes. “Marie used to say… If I was tired or slow in class she’d tease me. ‘Margarita, darling, why so lazy today? You sleep with the fishes?’”

  Rita’s smile was sad.

  “When you think about it, I never got any closure. I didn’t go to the funerals. Marie didn’t even have one to go to. Her husband had her cremated and took her ashes back to Italy. I never saw her in the hospital. Never got to go to her bedside and hold her hand or anything. I never saw her again. She disappeared. It didn’t really hit me until I got back to school. It was like I almost forgot…”

  She breathed in. Let it out, creating a bubble. “I kept looking for her. Looking for Taylor and Aisha and Manuel. It would hit me at odd moments. Come out of the dark to slap my face. They were gone. My tribe.”

  Rita nodded.

  She touched her fingertips under her eyes. “Over the summer, David found one of Taylor’s knitting needles backstage. I wrote to her mother and asked if I could keep it and she said yes. I have it on my dressing table. And I have the hat she made me freshman year, I keep that on my table, too. I like having her near me while I’m getting ready.”

  “She must like that, too,” Rita said softly.

  “Do you believe in spirits?” Daisy asked, not expecting a personal answer.

  But, “I do,” Rita said. “I believe they manifest as an energy around us. And I believe they are drawn to the little shrines we make for them.”

  “Will got a new tattoo for Marie. A wheel. That’s how his name sounded when she said it. ‘Wheel, darling…’ What could I get for her? A margarita glass…”

  She pulled at the fringe on a throw pillow. “I missed her so much. We, all of us in the ballet division, it was like we were mourning our mother. And when Kees asked me to teach some of her classes, I was terrified. Not so much of not being able to do it but of… I don’t know, somehow intruding on her memory. It felt disrespectful. I balked and Kees said, sort of joking but not, ‘teach the class or I’ll flunk you.’ And I saw how stressed and hurt and bleeding he was, and I realized he needed me. So I went in and I taught.”

  “And?”

  She smiled. “I loved it. In a way it was the final touch on all my rehab. We have a saying in dance: to teach is to learn twice. When you’re breaking down a movement or a step and explaining it to someone else, you’re learning it fresh. Learning it better. And in November, when I finally got the green light to go back to class myself, I was ready and man…”

  Her chest went warm with memory. “I walked into the studio that day and everyone gathered around me. Like I was the sun. Hugging me and kissing me and high-fiving. It was like coming home. It was the beginning of this little interlude, about two months, November into the first weeks of January, when it felt like things were turning around.”

  “In what way?”

  “For starters, all the catty, cliquish bullshit in the studio was over. I walked back in and the place was completely shuffled. No more freshmen barres or unspoken rules. Seniors were next to sophomores, mentoring the new kids. It was a family. And I felt at the hub of it, the center of this galaxy of loving, creative energy. It spilled over onto everything else. Will and I were back in partnering class, figuring out how to work with his maimed hand. It was frustrating, but by that time we ate frustration for breakfast. Yeah, whatever, it’s a problem. We’ll find the solution.”

  Rita smiled. “I like that.”

  “Then we all went to La Tarasque for Thanksgiving. Erik, Will, Lucky. And David. Mamou made a beautiful dinner and the next day, everyone went with Pop to cut down the Christmas tree. Except Erik and I—we stayed behind and ended up having amazing sex.”

  Rita’s chin lifted but she said nothing.

  “Out of nowhere,” Daisy said, a little sweetness creeping into her mouth. “It came back. The way it used to be before the shooting. We fell asleep afterward, completely peaceful and relaxed. Got up for dinner and then we all decorated the tree. Pop put Christmas music on and Mamou was baking—she found a recipe for these cookies Erik’s grandmother used to make when he was little. David was singing funny words to the carols. It was the most perfect night ever. Erik and I made love again and didn’t stop. We were stuffing our faces with it and crying in between, we were so happy.”

  Rita steepled her fingers beneath her nose. “Why do you think it was that way? At that time?”

  “I don’t know. Lucky always said La Tarasque had some kind of magic in it.”

  “A place where you could go and be safe, yes.”

  “Maybe that was it. We were away from Lancaster and in the safest, most loving place imaginable. No bad memories associated.”

  Beautiful, tactile images beaded the windows of Daisy’s memory. Erik pressing her up against the shower wall in the carriage house’s little bathroom. The tiles cool against her back. Thick steam in her lungs. Wet, soapy skin. The hot, hard slide of his cock, filling her up to her eyes. A Roman candle orgasm rippling through her belly, squeezing and pulsing. Then the softness of sleep afterward, snow beginning to fall outside the window. The butter-yellow walls of Francine’s kitchen. Red wine and candles on the table, pine boughs and sparkling ornaments. Laughter up and down the table. Nat King Cole being drowned out by David’s dirty lyrics to “The Christmas Song,”

  Roast nuts chesting on an open fire. Nipfrost jacking off your nose…

  Spicy orange c
ookies from Erik’s childhood prying a name from his memory.

  “Pepparkakor,” he said, slapping a hand on the table. “I can’t believe I remember.”

  Not only delicious but laden with magic. You put one in your palm, made a wish and pressed on the center. If it broke into three pieces, you were granted. If not, you still had a cookie.

  “When we were in bed that night,” Daisy said. “Erik asked if I ever thought of marrying him.”

  Rita nodded.

  “We’d never talked about marriage. Not even hypothetically or jokingly. But he asked.”

  Do you ever think of marrying me?

  “I said, ‘If I marry anyone, it’ll be you.’” She stared down at her lap. “Which still feels like the truth to me,” she said. “I don’t know who else I can love. You know, when I was in rehab, the fear of not dancing again motivated me. Because the alternative was unthinkable. I didn’t know who else I was or what else I could do. I had one thing and it had been the only thing since I was five. I had no backup, no other hobbies or interests. No plan B. Nothing. Looking at my life without dance was utterly terrifying, and sometimes it feels like losing Erik is no different. Facing that fear in this rehab feels the same way, except now the alternative is all I have. I fought like hell to dance again and I won. And I fought like hell to get Erik back and I lost. I’m lost. He left and I don’t know who I am. I don’t know who else I can love. Jesus Christ, I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.”

  “You’re finding out.”

  “I’m so afraid,” she said, crying. Was this what her life was going to be—pining and longing and mourning and crying?

  “You’ve been afraid before. It’s a problem. And we’ll find the solution, Daisy.”

  Daisy sniffed, wiping her eyes. “Stop quoting me.”

  “You have good lines.”

  “Lines,” she said. “I haven’t talked about that yet, have I?”

  Eyebrows wrinkled, Rita shook her head.

  Daisy chewed on her bottom lip. “Over Thanksgiving, Lucky got pregnant. Of course we didn’t know until weeks later. Meanwhile December continued on this easy, pleasant trajectory. Life stayed sweet, nobody was having nightmares. Everyone was having sex.”