Love Is Red

by Sophie Jaff

  But the lord would not heed their words, for he had seen the Maiden’s eyes and thought they were as bright jewels. He made her many gifts, a pretty little mare with a bridle of silver, and a fine sparrow hawk. As the season passed she was seen much in his company and he insisted she should be adorned befittingly in silks and satin and the finest of pearls and gems of great value. They went hunting together and stayed away longer than was modest or good.

  8

  It is sunny in Central Park on this Sunday. Hot. Humid. There is tension in the air, fear and sex humming like low voices on the radio. Picnics sprout up like mushrooms. All over the grass, pale skin meets the sun. Hairy men lie determinedly on their stomachs, and a couple of guy friends throw a Frisbee, a little too hard, to one another.

  You see couples draped all over the lawn—what better than to be in love and be slightly inappropriate about it? What is the point of affection if not to rub it in everyone else’s face? Friends shimmy up a tree. A redhead with generous breasts, her white tummy spilling over her pink jeans, is surprisingly quick; there’s a bearded guy and another man who would be good-looking if not for a flush of terrible acne.

  You see amazing amounts of food—potato chips and baked pita chips, potato salad, tabouli salad, hummus and a block of cheddar—and there’s Brie, homemade cookies, a pan filled with gooey brownies, their surface finger-swiped, plastic knives and plastic forks and the usual surreptitious search for a bottle opener, but that’s for the later part of the day; it’s still too hot to drink. There’s the obligatory fruit salad, watermelon quietly wilting. There’s orange juice and lemonade and water in big plastic bottles, even ice, though it’s melting. The guy who comes from Colombia bonds with the Frenchman over the stupidity of having to conceal one’s alcohol.

  There are people in the park passing out pamphlets. One guy holds a sheaf out but he’s not looking at you, only gazing at those two girls on the beach towel. He’ll make his way over there. The blonde in the pink bikini is particularly fetching.

  You take one of the pamphlets from his unresisting hand. The front says “Heaven’s True.” There’s a single tree in the shape of a cross. A solitary leaf grows on the lowest right-hand branch, but the leaf is red and shaped like a drop of blood. Nice touch, you think. Eye-catching.

  Inside the pamphlet declares the world has become an evil place, that sin and suffering abound. The pamphlet says that the Antichrist is coming, that soon the Beast will be upon us and all will have to take the mark or die. The pamphlet says that only in the love and the blood of Jesus Christ will all be saved. It speaks not only of love but also of sacrifice, and asks, “What would you sacrifice for the Lord?”

  Yeah, Heaven’s something, I don’t remember. I’ve seen a bunch of pamphlets stuck up in the subways. End-times shit, “only a few shall be saved,” “the marks he carves are the signs of the Beast” kind of thing. Fucking fanatics, it’s probably one of them.

  Thanks to you, faith is questioned and reaffirmed and questioned again. Why does such a thing happen?

  I hope they knew Jesus, I hope they got right with God.

  At least it got one thing right.

  You casually make the pamphlet into a paper plane and sail it softly out onto the still air. You lie back down. You shade your eyes with a book. The sun is warm on your face and neck, soaks through your shirt. The air is filled with the shrieks of laughter; the grass is springy under the towel beneath your back; your legs are bent, your toes spread.

  A breeze springs up, and so do two policemen. One group of furtive-looking thirty-somethings near you mutters as the police draw closer—If you have booze put it away, put it away!—but the policemen are not looking for stray bottles. They are looking for a little boy. Have you seen him?

  The cops don’t ask you; you appear to be sleeping, lying back on the towel with a book over your face. But you never sleep.

  The parents must be going crazy.

  And that’s not the only thing either, what with, what with—

  They don’t even want to say your name, as if by mere mention they’ll conjure you up.

  In a way, that’s true. You are called; you are summoned.

  You know exactly where that little boy is. You can smell him. All the way across Sheep Meadow. You think about it and then you slowly get up; you amble over and ask the group if they’ll keep an eye on your stuff, your friends haven’t arrived yet (roll of the eyes). Want to see if you can spot them. Maybe they’re lost.

  Sure, no problem. You seem nice. Reading the New York Times and you have a book, a bottle of water, a little basket. You’re like them. Maybe slightly better-looking but a sweet smile; you’re shy. They think about asking you to join their Frisbee game when you get back.

  You walk away, hesitant at first, still in their vision, and then you veer a little; the cops go one way and you another.

  The cops are old, older than most. It’s not a hard post, Central Park. Under the midday sun on the weekend no trouble is (was) expected.

  You walk deeper into the park; there are balloons, and a large group of children, a birthday party? Even two. The parents young, determinedly cheerful, showing off their parenting skills to other parents, calling their children old-fashioned names. The girl’s names start with vowels, Olivia and Elizabeth, Ava and Amelia—Isabelle, come here! The boys are biblical, Jacobs and Noahs and Matthews and Elijahs, all stomping and running and crying and laughing, and rolling around in the grass and eating bits of dirt. The parents are exhausted. They long to sleep. They do not see the little boy who is playing a little game in the shadow of a giant gnarled oak. This little kid is good at blending in.

  But you see him. He is not like the others. You wonder what he is. You call out to the boy with your mind to see if he can hear you. He turns to you without a sound, away from the other children, and gazes at you with his huge shining eyes. You gaze back. You are enthralled. It is wonderful, like coming across an animal you have not seen before. You hold out your hand.

  He comes over, looks but doesn’t take it.

  You walk together side by side and there is the distraught woman dragging her own bewildered son. She sees the boy with you, shrieks, draws him into an embrace. “Lucas! Oh my God!”

  Pure relief is the color of a ripe peach.

  Bystanders clap; the heaviness stealing over people’s hearts evaporates as the air lifts, the wind wandering elsewhere to stir up trouble. You smile, give half a shrug, no big deal.

  She turns to you, still hugging him. “Oh my God, thank you. Where did you find him?”

  “Just over on the other side of the hill near a children’s party. He was fine.”

  “Bless you.” Her shoulders droop. Her relief is now giving way to defensive embarrassment, a smeary shade of puce. “I swear they were just here playing and when I looked again—”

  “I totally understand.” You are sympathetic, nonjudgmental. “My sister’s having a heck of a time with her own.”

  She smiles at this, blinks back tears. “Well, thank you again, really, from the bottom of my heart.”

  She turns to the two small boys. Her voice has a wheedling, cheery note. “Well, that was an adventure, wasn’t it? I think we’ve earned ourselves some ice cream!”

  Please, please don’t make this into a big deal. Please don’t tell your mother.

  You watch as they head off down the slope of grass toward an ice cream cart. Once more, you call silently to the little boy. Again, he looks back at you. You waggle your fingers at him as you whisper, “Bye-bye, Lucas. See you soon.”

  His thumb finds his mouth as he turns back around.

  Your actions have earned the admiration of another woman sitting on the grass, who has taken her headphones off and is shading her eyes to look up at you.

  She’s ironic, dry, her method of flirting like mustard, a trifle sharp with some bite, but underneath she’s impressed.

  “Wow. New sheriff in town, huh? Superman?”

  You joke back, with
a straight face, “Shucks, ma’am, weren’t hardly nothin’.” You tip an imaginary hat.

  She wants to know how you knew. She’s impressed with the way you helped the child to reunite with the adult. How modest you are. And good with children. “Do you have kids? That was awesome.”

  You say how you heard the cops talking about it; it was sheer dumb luck, good timing. Luck and timing. How true this is for so many things.

  The police have drifted over, only to be told that the work is done; you wave and smile. You’re already walking back to your towel. There’s no question of you taking the child. They saw you sleeping. They give you the thumbs-up, thumbs-up from the police. The law, as necessary as salt. The moment you don’t have it, you notice its absence.

  You should get back to your friends.

  Wave of disappointment. Typical. Girlfriend, so obvious.

  She jokes with her friends that men smell need. In her heart she knows it’s true.

  Why is it always the good ones?

  In this city where it feels like there’s a million women for each single man she feels like a fool.

  But then, as you turn, you say something to her. And everything changes. Funny how the world tips and spins on a series of syllables.

  You feel her eyes upon you as you slowly stroll back to the group of people who were watching your stuff, the ones who will ask you presently to join their Frisbee game. Clearly you’re a popular guy with all those friends, no loner, no creep. Not that guy dominating the news, the knife guy, what’s his name? Scythe Man? No, it’s on the tip of her clever tongue. Anyway. Nothing bad can happen on a Sunday in the sun, not when she’s spending the day stretched out, melting like gum and rocked gently by the music in her ears.

  Wistfulness is apricot, the color of the rose that your crush wore to the dance and the last patch of the sky above you when you sat alone at a white linen table, pretending to have a good time; it feels like the smallest, tiniest toe of a baby’s foot, a baby who isn’t yours; it tastes like the fuzzy warmed skin of a summer fruit; it echoes like the tap of a microphone being tested.

  She holds what you said close, teases it out like the last bite of brownie, sweet and dark in her mind.

  I might have to come back to check on you. Clearly it’s easy to get lost in this park.

  She had smiled. “Just in case I go missing?”

  She’s right. You’d hate for that to happen. And after all, who knows who’s lurking around in this huge and sunlit expanse of green. Who knows?

  You know.

  At the tree you get ready to join the Frisbee game, and just before you do, you turn and give her a quick thumbs-up. She smiles; she’s been waiting, getting a little nervous; she won’t have to wait much longer, though.

  Thanks to you.

  9

  You love going to the gym, feeling your muscles stretching and straining, the way sweat prickles, gathers underneath your armpits, beads on your forehead, collects and then slides down your flushed skin, your breath filling your lungs with oxygen, the rapid fire of your racing heart, the effort of pushing through the pain, and, finally, relishing the release as the endorphins flood through your nervous system, all in this glorious body. The gym is a great place to feel human.

  There’s a fat girl at the gym. The fat girl at the gym wears a long gray T-shirt. Even here, she’s hiding what she can. She runs doggedly on the treadmill. Her pink cheeks pinker, her mouth pursed with effort. She breathes in. She breathes out.

  The fat girl is watching TV. She’s watching Susie Ranford get interviewed again. Susie Ranford, who started the organization DWHA (Don’t Walk Home Alone) after her sister Emily, “Emmy” to her loved ones, was killed late last month.

  Susie Ranford is the kind of person whom the media loves. Susie Ranford, the unofficial spokeswoman for the victims’ families. A petite, pretty redhead, she’s earnest but not boring; she’s been touched by tragedy. And is she thin? Why yes, she is. Thin, thin, thin.

  The fat girl tries to envision how in maybe ninety days she will look like that; she will stop being a “well, at least.” She has been someone’s “well, at least” for as long as she can remember. She’d probably be a “well, at least” to Susie and her now-dead sister Emmy, who probably wouldn’t have looked twice at her, or maybe only gratefully for making her appear even more beautiful.

  The concerned host, Cynthia—a pretty Asian woman whom the fat girl thinks of as “America’s favorite aunt,” with her apple-cheeked face, her chic, streaked black bob and tasteful tailored dresses—has asked Susie to explain the concept of DWHA for the benefit of the viewers, although the fat girl already understands that this service is, in fact, reserved for thin, pretty girls who actually have somewhere to go at night.

  Susie’s doing fairly well. Her face is drawn and her eyes are red but she’s still speaking coherently. So far, so good. Her parents are too devastated to give interviews. Her mother is tranquilized up to the gills; her father turned into a ghost overnight. She must be their mouthpiece. She’s a sister, not a mother or a father, not a fiancé, and yet the whole world is reaching out to her. And Susie Ranford has reached back. It’s given her a reason, a purpose. She’d rather act than sit in that house; she’d rather be doing, doing, doing so she doesn’t have to think about how often her big sister had irritated her, how often Emmy had driven them crazy. How Emmy was too needy, too insecure, how Emmy floated, couldn’t commit, couldn’t settle down, couldn’t be happy. How Susie should have reached out, checked in, how she should have been a better sister, a nicer human being.

  Susie Ranford sits in a comfortable off-orange armchair, on a set inspired by a middle-American living room, and speaks in a careful, overly controlled voice. She’s intent on getting her message through, intent on saving somebody, anybody, maybe herself.

  “If a woman knows she’s going back to an empty apartment she should contact DWHA. A volunteer, or a group of volunteers, will come and walk her to her door; then they’ll wait for her to check that her apartment is safe before leaving her.”

  Cynthia nods, then leans in, confiding. “Despite the support and praise you’ve received from starting this, there’s also been some criticism.” She wrinkles her nose apologetically to indicate that she, Cynthia, would never criticize.

  Susie Ranford doesn’t rise to the bait. “Yes, that’s true.”

  Cynthia waits but Susie just stares at her so Cynthia will have to gently prod a little further. “Some would say that it creates potentially dangerous situations, that women trying to protect themselves are inviting strangers into their homes.”

  The fat girl thinks about letting a strange man into her apartment, of any man wanting to stay in her apartment.

  You would.

  Susie Ranford’s lips tighten; her right hand grips the chair arm.

  “Look, we can’t guarantee your safety one hundred percent. It’s not a perfect system, but at least it’s something, okay? We try to do the most thorough background checks possible on our volunteers. Ideally there’d be a police officer accompanying every woman in the city”—now she speaks with a hint of sarcasm, perhaps suppressed fury—“but of course that’s impossible, so we’re doing the best we can. We always try to send a group of people so it’s not just one person having to safe-walk. Even police officers on their time off have offered to help out.”

  “‘Safe-walk’?”

  “The word ‘escorting’ has some negative connotations so we call it safe-walking.”

  The fat girl is used to euphemisms. The fat girl knows something about political correctness. The fat girl who has a “great personality,” who has “beautiful hair.”

  “We have the volunteer check in with us before and after the woman has arrived at her destination safely. We also check in with the woman who made the call to make sure she’s safe. We try and send at least two people on any walk.”

  Because there’s a psychopath on the loose, using women as his human canvases. You carve their skin with the
ancient tool of the Harvest, a sickle knife, so they call you the Sickle Man. The forensic pathologists concur: no other blade could render those cuts.

  Each one bears an individual symbol: a leaf, a cat’s eye, concentric circles, three interlocking triangles, their carvings determined by their colors. But all your victims are marked with the small crescent moon, a half curve in a darker circle (always over their left ovary, but that information has not been given out), and all suffered a final slash across their throats.

  The fat girl thinks she’s safe. The fat girl is sure you only kill the beautiful ones. Her fat has hidden her once again, padded her against the outside world and your attack. Unlike Emily “Emmy” Ranford, who, like all the others, was found naked on her bed. Amid your bloody Morse code alphabet, her personal letter swirled like a seahorse above her right breast.

  She’s wrong. You like the fat girl. She sees you using the weights, quiet, efficient, focused. You don’t grunt, don’t make noise. When you see her, your eyes don’t slide away in embarrassment, as if to say, Really? You?

  She is pink, which is the color of determination, of a bawling infant’s face. It tastes of sweat and it smacks and cracks like bubble gum, it shrieks like adolescent laughter, it feels like early mornings, it feels like pushing upward and through, it is a color that pushes back.

  “And what do you think of the steps that others are taking? Of the neighborhoods that are enforcing curfews and the groups organizing phone and text check-ins?”

  “I think the more people are involved, the more communities come together, the better. We can’t just hide in our apartments forever.”