TEN DAYS

by Jenna Mills

  Around us, businessmen and women hurried to lunch, while tourists took pictures and mingled among the psychics. An energetic teenage jazz band played on the steps of the cathedral. But with each second that passed, all that faded, leaving only me, and the woman my uncle referred to as Aidan's closest confidante.

  "No," I said carefully. "Not unless he has another reason for keeping me around."

  This time Adelaide laughed. It was low and throaty, warm. "Are you sure you've only been here less than a week?"

  Beautiful. There was no other word for her. Except maybe stunning. Her eyes were dark but luminous, her mouth large and soft, her cheekbones high and sharp. She wore a single gold hoop in one ear, two in the other, and when she looked at me, it was like being held in place by two very strong arms.

  "Does he know you're here?" I asked.

  "I have no secrets from Aidan."

  It was neither a yes nor a no, but I didn't want to shut her down by pressing for answers before I even got to my main questions. "Would you like to stay—"

  "I wasn't going to talk to you."

  That stopped me. She spoke so matter-of-factly, her gaze trained dead-flat on mine. I thought about telling her how glad I was she changed her mind, but decided to take a different direction instead.

  "Why not?" I asked.

  Those eyes. They stayed directly on mine. "Because I care about Aidan, and I wanted no part of what you're doing to him."

  The quick little twist was automatic. "Which is what?"

  Her mouth twisted. "Picking him apart."

  "That's what you think I'm doing?"

  "At first, yes. When he told me you were coming. When he told me why. When you called me. And when I saw you that first night, the way you were watching him, like you were starving, and he was your ticket."

  I stiffened.

  "And Sloan," she said with such obvious disdain. "He couldn't wait to get his hands on you, tell you his story, get you on his side."

  "It's not about choosing sides," I said, refusing to defend my actions. "All I want is to learn as much as I can, from as many people as I can."

  She slid her sunglasses back on.

  "So why are we here?" I asked. "What changed your mind?"

  She turned away from me, toward the warm breeze blowing in from the river. It was one of those crazy blue days, with fat white clouds heavy on the horizon.

  "I am here because I have been watching, and I no longer think you want to hurt him," she said. "But no, to answer your earlier question, I did not tell him I was coming to see you."

  That surprised me. "Why not?"

  She still wasn't looking at me. "Because he would have asked me what I was going to say, and I knew he wouldn't like my answer."

  "What are you going to say?"

  "That this story of yours is a bad idea," she said, turning back toward me. "That those walls he's built around himself don't need to come down. That no one needs to know what's on the other side."

  The protective edge to her voice, her words, sent something uneasy twisting through me. She wasn't the first to voice that sentiment. "Why not?

  "Because I don't want to see him hurt again."

  So many questions hit me at once. "How would my article hurt him?" I asked as two little girls in white sundresses ran up beside us. "My intention is the exact opposite."

  Adelaide watched the girls a long moment before looking back at me, and answering. "Have you ever stopped to think about what your little project is doing to him? What it will do to him? Have you not seen his eyes when he thinks no one is looking? The torment?"

  This time it was me who looked away. Me who looked toward the girls, the fountain, the spray of water toward the blue, blue sky.

  But it was Aidan who I saw.

  Aidan's eyes.

  When he thought no one was looking.

  Aidan's eyes.

  The night before.

  When he took the blindfold from mine.

  When he ran into the bathroom.

  When he touched me....

  "He does not need to be hurt anymore," Adelaide said quietly.

  My throat tightened. My heart squeezed. "That's not what I want either."

  "But you will." Her voice was sad. "You already are."

  Six days.

  It wasn't even possible.

  Wasn't possible that he was hurting.

  That I was the one responsible.

  "Some say you're lovers," I detoured, ripping out one of the questions I'd jotted weeks before, when I'd first begun investigating the name my uncle had given me.

  There hadn't been much to find.

  The first night she'd been elegant and poised, the fourth, hip and urban. Today she looked like an exotic gypsy, with a white cotton top and a brightly colored maxi skirt.

  "Some do," she said. "Yes."

  Again, neither a denial nor an affirmation.

  This time, I pushed.

  For the article, I told myself.

  Only for the article. "Are you?"

  She smiled, lifting her hands to toy with a black, rosary-like chain hanging from her neck. "Do I love him? Yes," she said. "With all my heart."

  My breath caught.

  I made myself release it.

  "Are we intimate?" she continued, and though her glasses were back on, and they were dark, I could feel the laser-burn of her stare. "I'm sitting here, with you, aren't I? I'm still alive."

  The implication was clear, and it cut to the bone.

  Laurel.

  Danielle.

  Both lovers.

  Both gone.

  "How long have you known him?" I made myself keep going, wanting as many answers as I could get before she clammed up.

  But also aware that anything she said could be nothing more than yet another page from Aidan's script.

  "All my life," she said.

  Which, by the looks of her, had to be only a few years less than mine, twenty-one maybe, nineteen.

  Which meant... "You knew him as Nicky." When he was still a boy, the same boy I'd known, the scrawny one who loved to play basketball.

  "I did."

  Which also meant she likely knew Sloan. And Laurel.

  "Then you must be very close," I said.

  The strangest look drifted through her eyes. "I can't imagine life without him. He is the rock my grandmother counts on."

  And her? The question was right there, burning the back of my throat. But I didn't give it voice. I didn't need to. I knew.

  Yes.

  He was the rock in her life, too.

  It hit me then, what I should have realized sooner. "Your grandmother...." I said. "Dauphine."

  She smiled. "Yes."

  They spoke with the same lyrical tone.

  The same light shone from their eyes.

  And...they both loved him. Wanted to protect him.

  From me.

  The pieces were falling together faster now, how Adelaide could be his confidante, but not necessarily his lover.

  Or...she could be.

  The two didn't have to be mutually exclusive.

  But with the knowledge came a new set of questions, questions only a handful of people could answer.

  "How has he changed?" I asked, "since he started selling books?"

  "Selling books is not what changed him. That was her."

  Again, disdain dripped from her voice. "Who?" I asked, even though I thought I already knew.

  "His wife. Laurel. What she did to him. He has never been the same."

  What she did to him. No one had spoken of that before.

  "I can't even imagine," I murmured, inviting her to go on.

  "My grandmother has done her best to take care of him. She tried to warn him. She saw the darkness. She knew the mistake he was making."

  All the little pieces of Aidan's life swirled around me. I knew some. Adelaide would know others.

  "He didn't listen to her?"

  "Have you found Nicky to be a man who list
ens to others?"

  She had me there. "I thought maybe with your grandmother's..." I searched for the right word.

  Adelaide gave it to me. "Knowledge."

  "Yes," I said. "I thought he would listen to her."

  "Nicky listens to Nicky," she said, still toying with her necklace. "That is why my grandmother keeps a close eye on him. In the days following Laurel's death...what he was like.... We thought we'd lost him, too."

  "In what way?"

  "He was broken. Lost. He blamed himself." Her fingers closed around the dark beads. "Don't make him go through that again."

  "That's not why I'm here."

  "Maybe not, maybe that's not your intent. But you are, Kendall. I've seen the look on his face. You're tearing him apart. Exactly like she did."

  Everything inside me stilled.

  "The sooner you leave, the better."

  Except my heart. It strummed low and hard and deep.

  "Until then," she kept on, "my grandmother asked me to give you this," she said, lifting the necklace from around her neck. "She says it is important for you to keep this with you at all times."

  Wordlessly, I took the rosary-like beads into my hands.

  "For your protection," Adelaide said. "You must never let his shadows touch you."

  And then everything was rushing, cold hitting heat. "Your grandmother thinks he's going to hurt me?"

  Adelaide frowned. "There is a funny thing about darkness. Just because a man walks in shadow, does not mean he is the one who took away the light."

  And again my breath caught.

  "Grandmother, she has always picked up that darkness around Nicky. That is why she has held him so close. She thought Laurel was the reason, but after her, the shadows deepened. Recently, she can barely breathe around him. The darkness is growing."

  Cold. It suddenly seeped from all directions.

  "This is why he brought you to her," Adelaide continued. Adelaide, who was the granddaughter of a voodoo queen. Adelaide, who loved Aidan. "Because of you. His research that morning was about you, not a book. He needed Grandmother to meet you, and tell him if you were the beautiful nightmare she has long feared."

  "And did she? Did she pick up darkness?"

  "She does not believe you are the one he needs to fear, but rather, the one he needs to fear for. She told him to keep you close—not let you out of his sight."

  Memories flashed, of the night before, the way he'd held me, looked at me.

  The way he'd stepped back, and slammed the door.

  "Why are you telling me all this?" I asked.

  "Because you must always beware of nightmares masquerading as dreams." Adelaide took my hand into hers. "The past, it is always in motion."

  Another Summons

  The text from Aidan came later that afternoon.

  Be ready at 6.

  Night 6

  Dark Waters

  "When are you going to tell me where we're going?" I asked over the soft jazz drifting through his car.

  Aidan kept his gaze straight ahead, a single hand draped over the steering wheel, as if I wasn't even there.

  In some ways, I wasn't sure that I was.

  At least not for him.

  Seconds passed.

  Silence pushed against the music.

  "Aidan—"

  Beneath a dark henley, his shoulders rose, fell. "Does it matter?"

  The city was gone, along with it strip centers and gas stations, busy roads—and light.

  "No," I said, but even as the word hung there, unease needled deeper.

  Trees towered up on both sides of the narrow, substandard highway. Ahead, what looked like a drawbridge loomed.

  "More research?" I asked.

  Finally he shifted, sliding me a look somewhere between amusement, and contempt. "Does that matter?"

  We'd been driving for close to an hour. I had no cell service.

  "No," I said. Except, that was a lie. Research was all we'd done together. His. Mine. If this wasn't research...

  The urge to reach for the beads under my shirt made me swallow a little harder.

  "You don't have to know everything," Aidan said, offering words of his own, unprompted, for the first time since we'd left the Garden District. "Just let what's going to happen...happen."

  The air conditioner blew, but heat swirled, sliding like a caress deeper, deeper. "You take this whole man of mystery thing pretty seriously, don't you?" I said, because I had to, I had to say something to break the moment that kept trying to lock around me. Around us.

  "And you don't know when to quit asking questions."

  I was quiet after that. I let the silence build against the backdrop of a slow saxophone. We crossed the bridge. We drove a little further, until land became water and then we turned on a road that was more a path winding through a dense gathering of trees rising from the swamp.

  We stopped when the road stopped, and Aidan got out and rounded the car to open my door. "Come on."

  I followed him to the water's edge.

  I followed him onto the small boat he retrieved from behind a skeletal cypress tree.

  I sat as he launched us into the inky, stillness of the night.

  And all the while I tried not to think too far ahead.

  I tried to be only in the moment, with him.

  Around us, trees loomed like shadowy sentinels against the night, stretching up to the dark velvet of the sky. "It's like Colorado," I said without thinking. "The stars...when you're up in the mountains."

  The boat had a motor, but Aidan used a paddle. "The sky is the sky," he said. "It's only a matter of seeing it."

  Stars twinkled and danced, nearby and faraway. The moon, the thinnest of crescents, hung low. "When are you going to tell me why we're here?"

  He slid the paddle into the water, lengthening our glide. "Sometimes there isn't a why," he said in that smooth, black magic voice of his. "Sometimes things just happen."

  My heart thrummed.

  "You can think you know where something is going, or why it's happening...what comes next..." Nearby, something jumped, creating an unseen splash. Toads sang. "But then something happens, and what you thought you understood, that you could trust, blows up in your face."

  Everything inside me stilled. His voice was too quiet, the words too raw. Something, I had to wonder.

  Or someone.

  "That's when I come here," he said, "when I need to get away."

  Look at me, that place inside me breathed. Look at me, that place cried.

  But he didn't.

  So I asked the question burning through me. "What do you need to get away from?"

  He guided us around the remains of a cypress tree, only a trunk now, no branches. And then he spoke, his eyes still straight ahead, on the night, but his words like soft strips of silk drifting back to wrap around me, and squeeze.

  "Last night," he said. "You."

  The words, the admission, did cruel, cruel things to the objectivity I was trying to maintain. The objectivity I had to maintain. The words pierced. They punished.

  "Then why did you bring me with you?"

  Around us the night sprawled like a still-life in slow motion.

  A soft breeze blew through the trees, against a medley of toads and crickets, and the refrain of distant splashing.

  "Am I who you thought I'd be?"

  Just a question, that's all it was. I'd asked him countless, probing, grilling, peeling back layer after layer of his life. Of him. And he'd answered them.

  Answering his should be easy.

  But it was like reaching out to touch the sky. It looks simple, like you could do it. But the second you try, the second you reach up, you realize how far away you are.

  "I didn't know who you would be," I told him.

  "But you had an idea." We were stopped now, the boat stationary against the dark water and sky, and he was twisting back toward me. "You had memories from when we were kids—you've read my books..." His eyes, oddly glitt
ering despite the absence of light, met mine. "You've heard the news. You did prep work. You had to think something."

  My mouth was dry, so dry. Because he was right. "I thought I needed to treat you like a stranger," I tried to explain. "To pretend everything I remembered and everything I'd heard wasn't true. I wanted the canvas blank, so I could discover you for myself."

  "And have you?"

  My throat tightened. My chest hurt. "I don't know."

  "I think you do."

  My mouth opened, closed. Words wouldn't form.

  "I think you're forming a picture, and you're fighting it—because your canvas wasn't really blank, and the picture you're seeing is not the one you'd already begun to paint."

  And then I realized what he'd done. We were in a boat in the middle of nowhere. I was there and I was his. And there was no way to get away from what he was saying.

  "I saw it in your eyes," he pressed. "Last night, at the old house. When I took off the blindfold."

  I'm not sure I've ever felt so naked in my life—even when I was.

  "And when I found you in that room, I saw it then, too," he said. "And now. I see it now, in the way you're looking at me. Something's changed."

  I looked away, toward the slow eddy in the water.

  "You're scared."

  My breath was so shallow it was all I could do to open my mouth for air. From the day I arrived, he'd been asking me that, if I was scared. "No, I'm not—"

  But that was a lie, and we both knew it. We'd known it all along.

  "Do you really think I would hurt you?" he asked. "That I hurt the others?"

  The agony in his voice ripped through me. I looked back at him and saw it, the way he'd been looking at me the night before, in those fragile moments after he found me in the marble bathroom.

  "Jesus," he muttered, still watching me. "You don't know."

  "Aidan—"

  "She used to look at me like that, too, when we'd argue or I'd drink too much, if I'd stay up late working—anything that upset her, her eyes would flash and she'd back away like she was terrified I was going to hurt her."

  She.

  Laurel.

  "It was the same way you looked at me last night, when I took off the blindfold, as if for a second, maybe longer, you had no idea who I was or what I was capable of. If everything you'd heard about me was true. That I was going to hurt you—"