Bleeding Violet

by Dia Reeves

  When he pulled up to the curb on Lamartine and waited for me to get out of his truck, I finally spoke. “If you’re not over her, you should just say so.”

  “I don’t wanna talk about her.”

  “Why? Because she’s not into you anymore? Because she couldn’t care less if—”

  The volcano erupted. “You think she cares about that asshole? That he cares about her?”

  “You don’t know anything about him, Wyatt.”

  “You saw the way he spoke to her.”

  “He didn’t say anything worse than what Petra says on a daily basis,” I reminded him. “If you ask me, they’re perfect for each other.”

  “Nobody did ask you!”

  So unfair that my happy-dancing Wyatt was being held hostage by this sore-headed prick.

  He turned away from me and gripped the steering wheel so hard it creaked. “Something about that guy is wrong.”

  “And I know what it is,” I said. “It’s that he’s sniffing around your property, and you can’t stand it.”

  “I’m over her, Hanna.” He said it to the steering wheel. I was glad he was unable to look me in the eye when he lied to me.

  “You wouldn’t even admit that I was your girlfriend.”

  “Are you?” He looked at me then, and his eyes raked over me, a stranger’s eyes. “We never even talked about it.”

  “I didn’t think we had to. I thought you liked me as much as I like you. Am I wrong?”

  He muttered something that sounded like “Stupid fucking question,” but otherwise refused to answer.

  “You’ve shared all these hard-core secrets with me, secrets even your best friends don’t know. Or Petra or Shoko or any of the girls you’ve—”

  “Hanna, I like you, okay. There, I said it—I like you!” He glowered at the dashboard. “You can be my girlfriend if you want.”

  “I don’t need you to do me any goddamn favors, Wyatt!” I said, reduced to shouting at him. “What do you want?”

  He didn’t answer. Just sat, silent and unhappy. A herd of laughing kids zipped by the passenger-side window on Rollerblades. I hoped they never went from laughter to heartache as quickly as I had.

  “Indecisiveness is a very unattractive trait in a man,” I said, quoting my grandma Annikki. “Even when he’s just a boy.”

  “I don’t like to give up on people,” he said at last. And that was all he said.

  “Then don’t give up on her. She needs you. I don’t.” I grabbed my pack and hopped out of his truck, feeling as though I’d left a part of myself behind with him—hopefully, the part that gave a damn. To hell with him.

  To hell with everyone.

  I slammed into the house and then froze when I found it much too dark. All the windows had been shuttered. A dim beam of light from the floor lamp, however, was aimed toward the hall leading to Rosalee’s room. A deep, slow scratching rasped from the hallway, like a lazy dog begging to be let in, one scrape at a time.

  I crept toward the hall, unnerved by the odd scratching, and came upon Rosalee in her sweats, hunkered down on one knee before the door of the linen closet, as graceless as I’d ever seen her, caught in the single beam of light like a burglar picked out of the darkness by an intrepid homeowner.

  She even had a weapon, a knife she was using to carve a glyph into the door of the closet—a series of jagged peaks, like a child’s drawing of mountains or the sea. A name was also carved into the door: Bonnie.

  Rosalee lowered the knife and reached for the doorknob. It rattled briefly beneath her shaking hand, and with a quick twist, the door was open. Whatever she saw inside, or didn’t see, seemed to deflate her.

  “Rosalee?”

  The look she gave me startled me, her eyes like cat eyes, reflecting the light of the lamp; but then I realized her eyes weren’t reflective, they were blue, the same electric blue I’d seen after I’d made my wish.

  “Rosalee?” Fear made my voice sharp.

  “Bonnie?”

  She blinked, and between one blink and the next, her eyes were black again. Puzzled. She stood and turned on the hall light. “What’re you—?” She was brought up short by the knife in her hand. She flung it to the floor, just missing her bare toes.

  She scurried away from the knife, from the hall, brushing past me. “Uh … Hanna … you’re back early. How’d you like Dr. Geller?”

  “You’re possessed!”

  “Hanna—”

  “You are!” I yelled, following her as she went all over the house, turning on lights. I grabbed her arm at the stairs, brought her to a stop. “Did you hear me? You! Are! Possessed!”

  She gripped the banister, as if it were the only thing that could keep her upright. “I know.”

  “You know?”

  “After you hit me on the head, it came back to me.” Her voice was small. “He came back. You woke him up.” But she didn’t say it accusingly; she was more bewildered than angry.

  I was afraid to ask, but I had to. “Who did I wake up?”

  “Runyon Grist.”

  The name hung in the air between us, like poison.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Rosalee fled the house, seeking more light than a hundred-watt bulb could provide, but once on the porch, she slumped into the corner, hiding there like a shadow.

  I sat across from her beneath the shelf of red chrysanthemums and tucked my feet under my dress, waiting for her to speak. I waited a long time, watching her face slip from composed to exalted to scared and then back. Weird seeing such emotions on a face normally devoid of all feeling.

  “I guess I was about your age,” she began haltingly. “I snuck out with this boy. Billy. Or Benny. Whatever. We drove to Houston to go to this Digital Underground concert, and I didn’t get home until maybe two or three in the morning. I didn’t have a house key, so I had to sneak in through my window. But I couldn’t. Daddy was at my window, waiting for me. Told me he’d slut-proofed the house and that I’d have to spend the rest of the night elsewhere. I remember it was raining that night, because Daddy stuck his hands out the window and said he washed his hands of me. He was always saying stuff like that.”

  She trailed off in thought, perhaps remembering other stuff he’d said.

  “Since he wouldn’t let me in,” she continued, “I just walked around, letting the rain fall into my eyes and down my throat, hoping I’d catch some sickness from the clouds and die. But I didn’t die.” I couldn’t tell if the thought amazed or saddened her.

  “You went to Runyon’s house,” I prompted her.

  She began to fiddle with the key on her red bracelet. “Not on purpose. I don’t think so. I just ended up there. This was right before the Mortmaine put down the wards to keep people out. I knew the Mayor had forbidden anybody to go inside, but that’s why I went inside, because it was forbidden. I figured the Mayor’d strike me dead or something. I was hoping she would.”

  The Mayor who, according to Wyatt, could force a man to stick around even after he was dead. “What did she do?”

  Rosalee snorted. “I never even saw her. It was Runyon I saw, sitting in the living room like something from a daguerreotype, old and sad and faded. I’d heard all the stories about him.” She grimaced. “How he raped and tortured some transy woman.”

  I thought of Anna and what I’d been told. “Is that what everyone thinks? That she was a transy?”

  Rosalee removed her sweatshirt; she kept it a lot colder in the house than Portero probably ever got, even in winter. “Well, she wasn’t from around here, that was for sure; nobody knew where she’d come from.” She looked at me. “Why? You know something different?”

  “No,” I said quickly. The Ortigas and the Mortmaine had to be keeping Anna’s origins secret for a reason. At any rate, it wasn’t my secret to tell.

  “So I knew all this bad stuff that Runyon had done, but seeing him just sitting there in his little house, it was hard to imagine him hurting anybody. He was just so average, you know? Not to menti
on he’d been dead for a zillion years already.”

  “Was he … rotting?”

  “No.” She thought about it. “He looked the way he had when he’d been alive, I guess. Except not as fit. He used to be Mortmaine, but when he was confined to his house, he let himself go. So by the time I saw him, he looked like an accountant or a file clerk. Pudgy and white, like somebody who sits inside on his ass all day. He had these long sideburns down to his jaw, and an old-fashioned Oliver Twist outfit—all he needed was a top hat.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “Yeah. I said, ‘You must’ve really loved your daughter.’ Because the idea of it blew me away, the lengths he’d gone to just to make a way to get her back.

  “He said, ‘I still love her.’ So I walked to the couch and sat next to him.”

  “You sat next to him!”

  “He was a ghost,” she assured me. “He didn’t have a real body, just an image of one. He didn’t even make a dent on the couch. And anyway, I had this big thing inside me I had to say, and I knew I needed to be sitting down when I said it.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘I wish Daddy loved me.’ And then I started crying.”

  She paused again for a long time, like the words were still big enough all these years later to choke her. “I cried for a long time. But it was the last time I cried. Cuz Runyon told me—I’ll never forget it—‘Love is a trap. Don’t ever get caught.’

  “When I asked him how to avoid it, he said, ‘I can show you.’ His eyes got huge like tunnels and sucked me in, but he was the one who came into me.

  “Almost right away I felt a change. I walked out of his house, and it was like I could do anything. I didn’t care what Daddy thought or what the neighbors thought. Not even the Mortmaine, who were out in the dawn light carving glyphs into the sidewalk to make the ward. You should’ve seen how they looked at me. Normally I would’ve been apologetic, but I just walked right by ’em. From then on, I was gone do what I wanted when I wanted.”

  Rosalee’s lip curled humorlessly. “That lasted about five minutes. While I was walking home, a car lost control in the rain and plowed right into me. I fractured my skull. I think I was in a coma for two months? Something like that? I forgot all about Runyon and my trip into his house, but I never forgot what he said: Love is a trap.”

  I picked at the porch screen. “Pop Goes the Weasel” tinkled merrily in the street as the ice-cream truck made its daily rounds. “Do you still feel that way? That love is a trap?”

  “Yeah. But I can’t seem to make it apply to you.” She nudged my knee with her foot and smiled tiredly at me. “Maybe because I carried you inside me. Maybe that shit really does make a difference. Even Runyon agrees; it’s different when you have a kid.”

  Runyon agrees?

  “He’s talking to you?”

  “Yeah.”

  Her insouciance was mind-boggling.

  I sat forward and grabbed her ankle. “Isn’t that a bad thing? That you’re possessed ? Shouldn’t we tell someone?”

  “It doesn’t feel bad,” she said, using her other foot to pry my hand off her ankle. “He’s not a monster, you know. Like I said, he used to be Mortmaine; it’s just that when he lost his daughter, he went off his head.”

  I looked for any sign of strangeness—a forked tongue, slit pupils—but I saw only Rosalee, with her big, dark eyes and unhappy mouth, awaiting my judgment.

  “Is he the reason you’re being nice to me? He misses his daughter and it’s just … rubbing off on you?”

  Rosalee looked offended. “He doesn’t control my feelings. He doesn’t control me.”

  I exhaled a deep, relieved breath. “Then I guess you know what’s best for you … but just know, if your head starts to spin around, I’m calling a priest. Deal?”

  “Deal.” Her smile nearly singed my eyelashes.

  When she smiled like that, it was hard to care that she was sharing her body with someone else, impossible to care about anything but making her happy.

  As long as she was happy, what else mattered?

  The following Sunday evening, I was in my room taking Rosalee’s measurements as she hummed along to her Billie Holiday CD. I listened to the morbid recitation of “Gloomy Sunday,” uneasy as I noted Rosalee’s hip size, handling her like nitroglycerine …

  … wondering whether Runyon was looking out at me through her ear.

  I’d barely thought about him since she’d told me her story, but these weird imaginings crept up on me at the most random moments.

  When I’d finished with her, she went to the dress form near my sewing machine and stroked the black jersey fabric that draped it. “I can’t believe you’re almost finished with this. How can you sew so fast?”

  Since my hair was twisted into an intricate knot atop my head, I could only pretend to flip my hair over my shoulder. “I’m extraordinarily gifted.”

  “And extraordinarily big-headed.” Rosalee’s expression turned thoughtful as she fingered the dress. “This don’t really seem like me.”

  I followed her to the dress form and sat before it. “It is you. You’re beautiful. Why not wear beautiful things instead of …” But I didn’t have to finish the sentence—she knew how slutty her clothes were. “I’ll make you some other things too.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Sure I do. I need something to take my mind off stupid Wyatt. He wasn’t in school Thursday or Friday. I was all prepared to freeze him out, but he didn’t even have the decency to show up.”

  I glared at the green angora coat I’d made him, hanging on the metal clothes rack against the wall. I’d like to put him against the wall, with a firing squad at his back. “I hate boys.”

  “That’s my fault.” Rosalee sat on my platform bed, watching me pin the hem of the dress. “Boy hating is genetic.”

  I gave a heartsick sigh. “So I won’t grow out of it?”

  “I haven’t, and I’m thirty-six. Maybe by the time I’m forty?” She gave me an ironic look. “Or maybe by the time you stop being so chickenshit about going to therapy.”

  I pricked my finger on one of the pins.

  “Don’t think I didn’t notice that you missed your appointment last Wednesday,” she continued. “You know when you miss your appointments, I still gotta pay for ’em?”

  She did her Easter Island thing, waiting for an answer. “I’m sorry,” I told her. “I’ll go this Wednesday. I promise.” An easy promise—Wednesday was days away.

  My cell beeped.

  “You gone answer that?”

  “After I finish this hem,” I said. “People who hang up quickly—”

  “Never want anything important.” Rosalee snorted. “Järvinens.”

  I finished the hem and snatched the persistently beeping phone off the nightstand, falling onto the bed next to Rosalee.

  “Who is it?” she asked, looking over my shoulder.

  “Wyatt.” I showed her the text message.

  “What’s RUT?” she asked.

  “Are you there,” I explained. I typed NO!

  The phone beeped again. “IMS?” Rosalee asked.

  “I’m sorry.” I typed SO!

  When he texted me back, Rosalee said, “Jesus, ain’t the boy ever heard of vowels?”

  So I translated for her.

  “‘You don’t need me, but I need you. Only girl I trust. Only girl I can talk to. Only girl who understands my freakish ways.’”

  “Freakish?” Rosalee sounded intrigued.

  “Long story,” I said, then continued translating. “‘Please be my girlfriend? You won’t have to share me.’”

  “Share him with who?”

  “Petra,” I explained. “His ex. He’s having trouble letting go.” I frowned down at the cell’s glowing screen. “But that’s just it. How can I know he’s really over her?”

  “Make him invite you to church,” said Rosalee. “No guy invites you to church in front of God and his folks and
everybody unless he’s serious about you.”

  I typed Rosalee’s suggestion, and Wyatt immediately responded, with OK.

  “No hesitation, see? That’s a good sign.”

  “‘Next Sunday,’” I read. “‘Eleven a.m. Mass.’”

  Maybe I wouldn’t make him face that firing squad after all.

  “Come to church with me and meet him,” I said, tossing the cell on the nightstand.

  Rosalee raised her eyebrows. “I already met him.”

  “When?”

  “On the porch.”

  I had to think back. “You mean after you kneed that snake in the groin and breezed into the house without saying hi or even looking at Wyatt?”

  She shrugged. “That’s how I meet people.” When I just looked at her, she said, very ungraciously, “Fine. I’ll meet him.” She fell onto her back in an elegant sprawl, plumping the comforter. “I ain’t been to church since I was your age. I don’t even have any Sunday clothes.”

  I pointed at the dress form. “The little black dress?”

  “I don’t want to waste it on church. Besides, you can’t wear black to church.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s the one day of the week when it’s okay to draw attention to yourself, okay to sparkle. Reasoning is, if you can’t be safe from monsters in the Lord’s house, you can’t be safe nowhere.”

  “Then I’ll make you a red dress.”

  She lit up. “I love red.”

  “I noticed.” I grabbed a notebook, stretched out beside her, and did a sketch to show her what the dress would look like. But the more I sketched, the more her face fell. When I finished the design, she looked like someone had died.

  “I’m gone look like Carol Brady in this thing.”

  “It’s church.” I brushed her cloud of wild hair to the side and gave her the bad news. “You’re supposed to look like Carol Brady.”

  She shied away from my hand and stood, pursing her lips. “I don’t know. Maybe it’ll look less prissy on a full stomach. You hungry?”

  “Starving.” And spurned. Why would she never let me touch her?

  “Smiley’s makes these chili cheese corn dogs.” She made a yummy sound. “Want me to pick us up some?”