The rain had stopped. She turned left when she exited and walked toward the Jardin du Luxembourg. She wanted to take her buzz and her tears and sit in the grass and try, try to forget. Forget Ethan. Dashiell. Her life. Her past.
But how? How was she going to do this? How was she going to pull off forgetting him? Their lives for the past year had been marked by such horror and sadness, it was overwhelming in its grief. She couldn’t imagine them ever being able to repair the damage. The things he’d said, the things she’d said... No, there was no going back. He’d never forgive her, and she couldn’t bear the idea of forgiving him. The fire of remembrance lit her from within and she pushed her scarf from her neck impatiently, feeling like it was choking her.
Look around. Observe. Forget.
French girls read Dostoyevsky for fun in the Luxembourg Gardens, sitting on rock-hard green chairs meant to blend into the grass. Two chairs per person, one for you and one for your feet, and of course, it works well should a friend come by and want to chat. Older men set canes by their chairs, take off their shoes, and put their feet in the grass, smiles of bliss on their faces. Even the pigeons relax, cooing gently, feet folded beneath plump gray bodies in the cool, damp green.
Sutton followed suit, taking care to make the same fuss she had seen the girl next to her do—a performance, really—adjusting the chair to the exact, perfect spot. Once she was as comfortably uncomfortable as she could be, she took off her shoes and dug her toes into the grass. There was something sticky in the green growth. Disgusted, she moved the chair, the rattle of the metal legs against the stone path as jarring and grating as the tacky grass.
The girl reading Dostoyevsky was laughing quietly to herself as she marked a passage in the book. Only a student could find humor in the horrors of those pages.
The trees moved slightly in the breeze, small leaves waving. A feather floated down from the sky. A mottled white pigeon flew away over her seat, and the man to her right played an Enya CD, and the smart girl with the short hair turned a page and sighed. The French around her sat at the edge of the green expanse, staring longingly at the grass as if they wanted to frolic but were held back by an invisible barrier. The girl sighed again, and Sutton thought, This is Paris.
WE MEET A FRIEND
Eventually, her legs fell asleep against the hard green chair, so she rose, stretched, rewound her scarf, and headed toward her flat.
The story, her dying Queen, reasserted itself as she walked past the École Militaire Metro. She was thirsty and hungry and needed the loo, so she stopped at the café down the street from her flat. Once she’d eaten, she ordered a coffee, brought out the notebook, and began to work again, amazed at how quickly she was able to slip into the scene she’d been working on.
So lost she was in this new world that the sirens didn’t penetrate her fugue until they were directly outside the bar, screaming.
Her back stiffened; she dropped the pen. Her mouth was suddenly dry, her heart pounding. The coffee at her elbow was cold, with a rime of brownish scum around the edge of the cup.
The flics, as she knew the Paris police were called, barreled down the street toward her, the alien sound of their sirens making chills run down her back. Her breath came short.
No, no, no, no, no.
She put her head down, let her hair hide her face. She felt the muse slinking away, drawing back into her corner, away from the biting, gnashing teeth of Sutton’s memory.
The cars rushed past; the sirens bled away. The vise in her chest loosened. She took a breath, then another.
“Are you on the run?”
The voice startled her; she jumped, knocked her cup with the back of her hand. The remnants of the espresso spilled across the table, onto the open page of her notebook. Words began to swim in a lake of black and blue. She patted at them frantically, knowing it was for naught. They were lost.
The man sitting next to her had jumped to his feet to avoid the splash. “Alors,” he said, “you are quite jumpy. Let me guess. You murdered someone and rushed off to Paris under a false name to stay out of prison.”
She forced herself not to stare. What sort of stranger says such a thing?
He wasn’t French, rather, he was, but she could hear an accent underlying his words. British, maybe?
“You frightened me,” she said casually in French, giving up on the notebook. There was no help for it; the words were well and truly gone. Three of the twenty handwritten pages were utterly ruined. She could only pray her imagination would keep the images on file until she could set up shop again.
She sat back in the chair. The waiter brought her a fresh cup, talking under his breath about clumsy customers. “And no, I am not a murderer. I’m on vacation. It’s my first time in Europe. I’ve never heard those sirens in person before, only in the movies.”
She was amazed at how easily the lies slid from her tongue. Then again, they weren’t really lies. She was trying on another persona, that was all. She wasn’t here to make friends.
“You speak excellent French for someone who has never been to Paris. And what a shame. Every woman should spend time in Paris. It is a prerequisite for a well-lived life, mais non?”
“I agree. That’s why I took several years of French in school.” She met the man’s eyes at last, found him smiling quizzically at her. He was handsome—of course he was, this was Paris, after all—with dark hair cropped close to his head, an imperious, hawkish nose, blue eyes. Very blue eyes, deep, the color of dark denim. He was young, in his late twenties, dressed in jeans and a gray T-shirt. A striking man, and she looked back at her ruined notebook quickly.
He stuck out a hand. “Raffalo. Constantine Raffalo.”
“Enchantée,” she said, shaking his hand. It was cool and rough, and held on to hers a moment too long. She stood and threw two euros onto the table. “Au revoir, monsieur.”
She stepped out of the tangle of chairs and small tables. The French had such an ability to sit on top of one another and never notice what the people next to them were saying or doing; their discretion amazed her. She started off down the street, in the opposite direction of her flat.
Her hands were shaking. How he’d come so close to the truth was beyond frightening. Had he known? Worse, had Ethan sent him? Even worse, could he be some sort of private investigator? How had they found her so quickly?
She forced herself not to run.
“Hey, wait up.” Constantine Raffalo was suddenly striding next to her.
“I’m not interested,” she said. “Please leave me alone.”
“Not interested in your notebook? I know it was ruined, the pages you were working on, but the whole thing isn’t a loss.”
She stopped. Damn. He was grinning, charmingly so. “You ran off so fast, you left it behind.”
She held out her hand and he started to pass her the notebook. When it was in both her hand and his, he said, “I have a price.”
“I said—”
“Come on, I’m not hitting on you. Well, maybe I am, a bit. I’ll stop. Promise. But let me buy you a coffee. I’m here on an extended vacation, and I don’t know anyone. You’re the first one like me I’ve met.”
“Like you?”
“A writer. You are a writer, aren’t you?”
She’d forgotten herself. She was supposed to be... Well, it didn’t matter.
“I appreciate you returning the notebook, but I’m afraid I do have to go. Enjoy your vacation.”
He respected the rejection this time, and she was surprised to feel the tiniest bit of disappointment. It was nice to be pursued, even if that meant absolute danger.
She felt his eyes on her back.
Murderer. It was such a horrible word. And it described her so very well.
A murderer would run, Sutton. You’re acting suspicious. Now he�
�ll remember you. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
She turned back. He was still watching her.
“One coffee, Constantine Raffalo. Then I have to go back to work.”
AND SO IT BEGINS
Sutton felt the attraction begin between them almost immediately. She was no stranger to this emotion. As a girl, she’d been perpetually half in love with every boy she laid her eyes on. Tall, skinny, short, fat, straight, gay, brunette, blond—she had no type, only a need to be near them, to touch them, to talk to them. She was very tactile; it got her into trouble.
Constantine held out her chair. His hand brushed hers as she sat down, and she had to fight the urge to take it and examine it closely for signs of kindness or hatred. It was a good hand, the fingers long and elegant, like those of a pianist. She tried not to think about the length of them, the feeling they’d create inside her, how deep he could go.
She ordered a fresh espresso. He ordered a Scotch and smiled at her quite charmingly.
“It’s the middle of the day,” he said. “We’re on vacation, you and I. Have a real drink with me. Just one.”
“Champagne,” she amended to the waiter, who turned away with a brusque nod. “I am not on vacation, though.”
Drinking champagne with a stranger on the sidewalk of a Parisian café in broad daylight. This couldn’t lead anywhere good.
Oh, but it might, Sutton. Two drinks and you might be on your back with your legs in the air, Constantine Raffalo straining above you with a look of adoration in his eyes.
The doctors had told her the preoccupation with fantasy, with imagination, with sex, was a symptom of her disease. It helped with the writing, certainly, but sometimes, she wondered if that was all she was. A disease. Her ability to create, to evoke a scene, a scent, a feeling, was all part of the disordered chaos in her brain. They’d claimed it was something to do with serotonin reuptake, and the way it didn’t allow the neural pathways to connect properly, leaving her out in the cold with an overactive, obsessive imagination and a frightening sense of exhilaration, an inability to stop her mind and her thoughts from racing, to the point that she often felt the world was rushing headlong forward, the pedal all the way to the floor. Sometimes, when things were just about to turn very, very bad, she could actually feel the earth rotating on its axis beneath her feet.
Sutton knew she was only partially of this world; the day-to-day life of mankind, the commutes and the news and the seasons, time passing gently to mere mortals. When she was on the verge, she could tap into some sort of collective unconscious and see the truths of the universe.
Which, of course, to some—including her bitch of a doctor—made her textbook, bona fide, certifiably crazy.
So Sutton wrote. She felt better when she wrote. The doctor had once told her it was simply a method of controlling her psychosis, how she was able to corral the multitude of voices in her head by putting words on the page.
Sutton didn’t take this dark gift for granted for a second. She knew that if she didn’t have the outlet, hadn’t found a way to channel her inner demons, she’d be mumbling to herself as she shuffled along the side of the road, hair in greasy hanks, clothes tattered, her feet rubbed raw from too-small shoes found at the local junk store, her life shortened by her brain turning to Swiss cheese inside her skull.
Happily, there was a pill for that. She took them religiously. She’d brought a year’s supply with her. She didn’t plan to stay away quite that long, only long enough to assuage some of the guilt and give her tired mind some room to relax. Time to get Ethan fully out of her system.
Goodbye, Ethan.
She had no doubt that if she hadn’t been cursed with all the extra mental goodness, the words would be gone, too. Would she be happier without them? Would she be normal? Would she have had a cadre of girlfriends and they’d have wine and cheese parties and girls’ weekends and send their men off to play golf and talk about periods and breastfeeding and the latest innovations in diapers and swill champagne by the bucket at book club meetings?
Would she want that from her life? She thought not. She thought—and it was one of those wonderful lightning flashes of epiphany, the kind that leave you slightly breathless and perfectly content—that no, she wouldn’t like a normal life at all, thank you very much.
Besides, how do you trade a gift—Sutton always felt her writing ability was a gift, dark as its biological genesis may be, no doubts there—for sanity and normality? How? Wasn’t it a slap in God’s face? He’d made her in his image. Did that mean God was suffering from some sort of mental disorder, as well?
Feeling mildly sacrilegious and quite pleased with that thought progression, which had taken less than ten seconds, exactly enough to take a single sip of her champagne and cross her legs, she gave Constantine Raffalo a genuine smile. He was pleasant to look at; his teeth were white and straight when he smiled. She often wondered if she could judge a person solely by their teeth. An inversely proportional ten to one scale. The straighter and whiter (a ten) they were, the lower on the scale of trustworthiness they went. Straight, white teeth meant money spent to make them that way. Money meant coming from a world she hadn’t been familiar with.
Her own teeth suffered from an odd dentition, the canines eagerly pushing forward so her front four teeth lay back, flat against her lips. It would only have taken a retainer to fix, but there was no money in her childhood household for such luxuries. Ethan’s crooked front tooth...
The voice that lived in her head and called so many of the shots in her life said, Stop it. Engage. You’re drifting again.
“Where are you from?” she asked.
A plain Midwestern voice, now unaccented, spoke. “Ohio, originally.”
“Really? I thought you were British, or Parisian. Your French is quite cosmopolitan. And Raffalo...”
“I went to school here for a while. I’ve lived all over. My dad’s military, and of Greek descent. He was the one who saddled me with Constantine. No American kid should have more than two syllables in their name. It’s an open invitation to be a target.”
She could hear the various influences in his speech pattern. It was almost disconcerting. One minute American, then words laced with French, and some with straight-up British.
And military orthodontia. Her estimation of him rose a notch. Not a trust fund baby, then.
“Tell me your name,” he said, leaning forward slightly at the tiny table.
“Justine Holliday,” Sutton replied without missing a beat.
HELLO, MY NAME IS...
Justine Holliday.
It was the identity she’d set up for herself before fleeing.
Sutton had spent a great deal of time thinking about her escape. She’d had the week in the hospital—against her will, the idiots, she was quite fine, only looking at the bottle’s directions, it was a fluke the bottle had opened and the pills had gotten into her mouth, she’d only wanted a moment of bliss—to decide what she wanted to do with her life. Life after incarceration. A moment in her life marked forever. Before incarceration, and after incarceration. BI life was odd and unexplainable, with careers and husbands and babies. The pressures of being happy, happy, happy, oh, we’re so very happy, can’t you tell?
AI life was more manageable. It was just her. Abandoned, castoff, alone but not adrift, no, never adrift. She could be whomever she needed. Whomever her mind dictated at that moment.
Justine Holliday was a combination of two names picked out of a board of directors’ listing on a pamphlet for the Christian organization that sponsored a halfway house where the doctors had wanted her to stay for a few days once she’d been discharged. Like being saved on her way out the door was going to change how her broken, adrenaline-flooded mind worked. Please.
Justine Holliday. That’s who she’d become. Her progenitor was brilliant at creating cha
racters, remember. She tried on the persona, felt it mold to her body like cashmere.
Justine Holliday was young and single, in Paris to follow the dream. She was a fan of Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. She knew her way around the City of Light. She was writing a memoir—can you imagine that? Trying to, at least. She had money, some from her family, some that she’d saved, a minuscule amount from an advance against the sale of the book, and had taken a flat in the 7th Arrondissement, which was more affordable than some of Hemingway’s old stomping grounds, but still expensive enough for an expat to be safe and anonymous.
Justine Holliday was from Hollywood, Florida (how silly of my parents—we were known as the Hollidays from Hollywood). She’d grown up in a normal, middle-class house with a screened-in back porch with a pool, the only way to keep their two small dogs safe from alligators. They’d had a normal, middle-class, know-everyone-in-your-town upbringing. Her mother made cookies for the school bake sale. Her father coached the Little League teams. Her older brother was a high school football star who worked at a car dealership now, was married to his prom queen date, a girl he’d known since they were thirteen, and had a baby on the way.
Justine Holliday was blissfully, completely, emptily normal. She had her whole life stretched out in front of her. She was in Paris to write, had a handsome young man named Constantine Raffalo buying her champagne, and was currently experiencing a decidedly non–Justine Holliday emotion, a small tingle squeaking up her spine that said, “Go to bed with him. It will be fun.”
Perhaps the enjoyment of sex with relative strangers should be part of Justine Holliday’s life. Yes, an enjoyment, but plain-Jane vanilla missionary sex was Justine’s thing, with maybe a hint of tie her up and ride ’em cowgirl, if she knew you very, very well and had been charmingly overserved.
Yes. There. That worked.
Justine was simple and carefree and looking for a good time, and shook her black hair off her face.
Lie to Me Page 21
