Girls in Pink Page 8

  I reached for Annie's plate, I took a spoon and served us both from the bowls of food, before it got cold. She picked up her chopsticks and looked at them.

  “You can use a fork,” I said. “It's okay. It's why they give you one.”

  “As long as no one minds.”

  “I buried him in the back yard,” I said. “Then I went back to my apartment across town and got drunk. I woke up sitting out on the fire escape . . . miracle I didn't fall off and end up splashed on the sidewalk.”

  I tasted the food. I was suddenly starving.

  “No one ever came after me about the man,” I said. “His neighbors didn't tell the police who beat him, if they knew. I heard later he stayed in the hospital for a month. I learned something about myself that scared me. There's a side of me that isn't good. Whatever I let loose that day was just as bad as he was, and I couldn't control it. I learned I wasn't what I thought I was. Maybe no one is.”

  “You should have killed him, and you didn't,” she said. “That’s the worst thing you ever did.”

  I put my fork down and stared at her. She met my look.

  “If you saw him for what he was, you should have killed him,” she repeated. “You didn't finish it, you let him go, so he could get better and cause more hurt. Maybe he did worse things later. You should have killed him.”

  I didn't know what to say, and she became absorbed with her food, so I let it go. For a little while we ate, and didn't talk. The waitress cleared plates and brought ceramic bowls filled with clear broth.

  “What is this?” Annie asked. “What's floating in it?”

  “I think it's an egg.”

  “I'll leave it alone, if you don't mind.”

  “I don't mind,” I said. “I think I'll join you.”

  An old Chinese woman sat quietly on a high stool beside the kitchen doors. Rubber bands trapped her gray hair, but it wanted to fly away from her face anyway. She watched Annie intently. When she caught my glance, her eyes disappeared in a brief toothless smile. Her mouth moved, forming words I couldn’t possibly hear from across the room. When she finished speaking, she went back to watching Annie.

  “Do you know her?” I gestured with a small movement of my chin.

  “I think I do…from somewhere. Maybe a dream.”

  She looked over at the woman. Something passed between them, though I couldn’t say what it was. Annie turned back to me.

  “When you were very small, what were you afraid of?” she asked. “What is it that scares you, even now?”

  I couldn’t tell if she was serious. Her eyes gave away nothing behind the dark glasses, so I looked at her mouth and the tilt of her head. I decided she was.

  “Who hid under your bed and who walked around in your dreams? When you looked out your bedroom window at night, what stood under the streetlight and looked back at you?”

  I thought about it.

  “I was afraid of the stars,” I said. “If I looked at them for too long, I realized that I was in space. It’s too big, black and empty, just too far from place to place.”

  She nodded. “I know. And if you make it to the next place safely, sometimes…”

  “…it’s too bright,” I finished. “The light is white, and empty.”

  “Sometimes, though, it isn’t empty at all,” Annie said. “Sometimes it’s wonderful.”

  She hesitated, looked around the restaurant, and then made a decision. She took off her dark glasses and put them into her purse on the seat beside her. When she looked up, her eyes were bottomless. I was astonished at my own words. They hurt my throat.

  “You’re going to break my heart. Maybe more than once.”

  Her smile was beautiful.

  “Good,” she said.

  After dinner, we left the car at the curb and walked the downtown streets. We found an open place that sold an Italian ice cream called gelato. I'd never tried it before, and I liked it. Of course, I'd yet to try any kind of ice cream I didn't like just fine. We both chose lemon, and we found a low wall to sit on while we ate.

  “You said you were afraid of the stars when you were little,” she said. “How about monsters? Did you have any?”

  I thought about it carefully. “Yes. My monster lived under my bed, like they usually do.”

  The night was warm, laden with the smells of the summer city, which was cooling down after the hot day. There was a fragrance of earth and flowers, sweetness beneath the exhausted odors of the street. Annie sat quietly beside me in the darkness. Her profile was improbably lovely, barely caught by the streetlights.

  “He lay on his back beneath me, looking up. My bed was a black pool, a drowning pool, and he looked up from the bottom. I floated on the top.”

  Annie shifted in her seat. Her voice was soft. “What did he look like? Your monster?”

  “I don’t know. I never saw him.”

  A breeze drifted across, rustling leaves. The soft air carried a dusting of music, a lonely soprano voice in a sad, perfumed opera. A siren, blocks away, played in the background.

  “He liked things to stay that way,” I said. “Black and quiet. If anything went past the edge of the mattress, like my hand or arm, or even the corner of my blanket, it showed up as red on the edge of the pool. It upset him. He didn’t like it, and I heard him shifting around beneath me. He swam up quickly to chop it off.”

  Annie turned her head to look at me. Even in the dark, I could sense her eyes, liquid and still.

  “Sometimes if I drifted off, nearly asleep, I’d hear him, on his back directly beneath me, starting to move around. I’d need to pull my hand or the edge of the covers in quickly, before he chopped it off.”

  The soprano voice floated by again. This time it brought some strings with it, some cellos and violins that told me how lonely I was. I thought about the cigar in my pocket, but left it where it was.

  “I had to be still so his pool would stay black, the way he liked it,” I finished. “All black and soothing. Do you see?”

  She didn’t answer, and turned her head to look out at the street. After a while, she reached over and touched my mouth. Her fingertips were warm.

  “All black and soothing,” she said. “I see your world. I recognize it.”

  We sat together and watched the city, and for a long time we didn’t say anything else.

  “How about you?” I said. “Did you have a monster when you were small?”

  She was silent, and I didn't think she would answer. I was searching for something to say when she spoke.

  “I have monsters now,” she said. “There are monsters everywhere I go, everywhere I look. They follow me. I'm never safe from them . . . ever.”

  I was startled by her vehemence.

  “Only my pictures help,” she said. “When I can capture them, keep them on paper in pencil and paint, then I feel safe for a little while. I am safe for a little while.”

  “I'm sorry,” I said, and wondered why I said it.

  “Don't be sorry. I've made a lot of money from my monsters. It's why I'm in so many picture books for children. Children know about monsters. They understand my pictures. I guess the money keeps me safe, too. It means I don't have to go outside.”

  Headlights flooded the dark street. An automobile rolled slowly by us. It was a big car, and I had a sense that the driver looked over at us when he passed. I didn't think he could see us in the shadows.

  “It isn't all monsters,” she said. “It's wonderful and magic, too. It's all so beautiful that it makes me cry sometimes.”

  “Do you think so?” I asked. I was interested.

  “Yes,” she nodded. “I try to remember the colors, and numbers can be so beautiful that it's overwhelming . . .”

  She trailed off, and she seemed to be deciding whether or not to tell me something else. I waited.

  “I'm not just in children’s' books,” she said. “I have two paintings that are in museums. I've never seen them, not hung in the museums, I mean. I'd like to go someday, but I
probably never will.”

  “Someday, I'll take you to see them. Deal?”

  She stared at me. I could see the gleam of her eyes in the low light. Finally, she made a decision and nodded. “Deal.”

  I leaned over and kissed her. I kept my hands in my lap, and the kiss was nearly chaste. It was more than enough for the moment, though. When we broke it, I felt cool air on my cheek. Her tears were drying on my skin.

  -Ten-

  “I had a swell time,” I said.

  We stood at the top of her steps. There were yellow bulbs in glass shades on either side of the front door with a cloud of moths trying to get to them.

  “Tomorrow is Saturday,” I said. “I'm not doing anything, if you'd like to go for a ride or something.”

  She was looking at the street, and didn't seem to hear my question.

  “I wanted to tell you something else,” she said. “About my sister. And I want to show you something.”

  I felt a flash of hurt. “Sure.”

  I heard the clink and clatter of brass as Annie fumbled with her keys and got the lock open, and then we were inside the coolness of her hallway. I smelled orchids and clean water and old wood. She didn't turn on the lamps, but enough illumination came through the windows that I could see to follow her.

  At the far end of the hall, a door showed a crack of gold at the bottom. When we got there, she hesitated for a moment and then pushed it open. We went in.

  We were in a long, narrow room that ran along the back of the house. I had no idea what the space might have originally been used for. Floor lamps and table lamps were lit on every surface, a mismatched collection of bulbs joined in yellow force to keep the room’s natural darkness checked. The effect was radiant, soft, like firelight. The high ceiling was a lattice of exposed wooden beams and joists, rising and disappearing upwards into shadows the golden light couldn’t reach.

  The walls were wood, too, although I could see very little of them. Every inch of space was hung with art, ranging from enormous painted canvases to colored sketches not much larger than postage stamps. Drawings lay stacked in corners, and tacked to the doorframes. Watercolor washed every surface. A red-checkered jester looked down at me with enormous black eyes, a little girl with a yellow balloon chased her dog, and lush volcanic slopes wrapped themselves in mist. The moon was everywhere.

  “What do you think?” Annie asked.

  She stood with her back to me, looking at an easel that held a blank sheet, suspended and waiting. Crayons and tubes of color covered the surface of her table. There were brushes and pens, bottles of ink, tins of oil and turpentine.

  I looked around me, turning my hat in my hands. “Did you do all this?” I asked.

  She looked back at me, surprised. “Of course,” she said. “No one comes in here but me. You’re the first to see it.”

  I wanted to look at a painting hanging behind the work table, directly in my line of sight. It was very dark, and amid all the gold-washed color it drew my eye.

  “May I?”

  “I knew you'd go right to that one,” she said. “I painted it for you, I think.”

  I saw a small island in the middle of a vast winter lake. A full moon caught the snow-covered branches of the pines on shore. Yellow lights filtered through the trees, perhaps the lit windows of a cabin.

  “Do you remember?” she asked. “You've been there. We've both dreamed it.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about. I peered more closely at the image. The lights I thought I had seen on shore were gone now, and the island was dark. The surface of the lake had been so beautifully rendered that the water seemed to sparkle.

  “I'd like to go there,” I said.

  “It's all still there,” Annie said. “It hasn't gone anywhere.”

  She had come up beside me and watched raptly, as though she expected something to happen. In repose, her face was beautiful, clean, and elegant. Her profile belonged on ancient money. Her voice was hardly more than a breath.

  “It's all still there,” she said, again. “Waiting.”

  I didn't have a clue as to what she talked about. I saw the old manuscript on the corner of her table. I touched the top page.

  “One sister's name is Secret . . .” I read.

  Annie's hand slid up my shoulder and then around the back of my neck. Her palm felt warm. She turned me to her. I saw dark eyes, and then we were kissing. She was like cinnamon, the taste of her…her lips on my mouth, my hands in her hair, kissing her cinnamon neck…we were together, entangled until there was no more air between us and none in the room…all the oxygen had turned to cinnamon.

  At some point, there in the lights and colors, I realized she was crying again. I wiped at a tear with the pad of my thumb and tried to ask her what was wrong, but she shushed me and led me up the long hall to her bedroom.

  I didn't understand her, and I didn't understand what was happening to me. I wondered if I was getting myself lost. I decided that if I was, I couldn't get there fast enough.

  Sometime in the night, I woke up. Sleep didn't seem much different than being awake right then. I looked over at Annie. Even in the darkness I could tell she was awake and looking at me.

  “You said you had something you wanted to tell me about your sister,” I said. “And show me. Then we were busy, and I forgot.”

  My voice hurt my throat. She slid over in the dark and reached up to turn on a table lamp beside the bed. When she turned back, she was smiling.

  “We were busy, weren't we?” she mused.

  Her long hair fell wild around her face. I wanted to touch it, so I did. She pulled me to her and we didn't speak again for a little while. I might have slept again, because I smelled the ocean and felt the rocking of a boat beneath me in the dark. I felt the beginnings of some kind of deep peace.

  When I opened my eyes Annie's face hovered over mine and she spoke to me.

  “I know something about the woman in the car,” she said. “The one at the ranch.”

  I came awake.

  “The woman that got killed?” I asked. “What do you know about that?”

  “I saw her.”

  I sat up and propped myself on an elbow. Annie's face registered fear, and I reached out and touched her while we talked.

  “How do you mean, you saw her?”

  “I was there.”

  “You were . . . there?”

  I had an image of Annie wandering an unlighted twist of canyon road with nothing nearby but an unlighted property; only a burned out house and not another soul for miles.

  “What in the world were you doing out there?”

  She looked at me, eyebrows raised.

  “Why wouldn't I? The ranch is mine. I'll always keep it, because it's all I have. My mother left us when I was very small, and June was a baby. It was always my job to look out for my sister. I used to pretend that she was my baby.”

  She propped her chin on a bare knee, and remembered. “I was the only mother she ever had,” she said. “When I turned seventeen, there was trouble, and my father sent me away to keep me safe.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  She shook her head.

  “I can't tell you, not now. Later, maybe. Anyway, I left. I lived with my aunt in New York. That's where I first started taking art classes. I liked New York, even though I missed June. I got a telegram that my father and sister were both dead. There wasn't even a funeral to come to. They found the remains of my father in the kitchen of the burned house. They never found June. They said the fire burned hot, and there was nothing left.”

  I watched Annie's face as she spoke. Her eyes were dry. This wasn't a fresh grief.

  “The property is mine,” she said. “I paid the back taxes on it a long time ago. I moved here to be close, but I never wanted to do anything with it. My father's ashes are mixed in with the ashes of the house. It's a tomb, right?”

  I understood, and nodded.

  “I go out there once in a while, and talk to t
hem, mostly to June. I never went in the barn, though. Why would I? Then one night, June's ghost came and—”

  “Her ghost?” I interrupted.

  She looked at me and nodded.

  “Could you get me a glass of water?” she asked.

  I got up, and took my bare feet back up the hall. It wasn't hard to find the kitchen, since the floor plan was a lot like my own house. I snapped on the light and looked. A big white combination range and a matching lacquered sink looked back at me. The floor was black and shiny. Like the rest of the house, everything showed apple-pie order, but it had the air of a kitchen that got used, often and well.

  I found a nest of glasses behind a cabinet door, and filled one of them with cold water at the sink. I took it in to her. She held the glass in both hands, like a child, and her throat worked as she finished the whole thing. I went back and filled it up again. She sipped at it, and then didn't want more, so I set the glass on the bedside table.

  “Her ghost came, in a dream, I think. She wanted to play, and said she was hiding in the barn. I don't know why I never thought of it before.”

  “Why was she hiding in the barn?” I asked.

  “My father always needed money,” she said. “Always. He had a kind of business partner, a man who used the ranch to do things and hide things when he needed a quiet, secret place. We had a lot of liquor there sometimes, barrels and barrels of it. Sometimes there was trouble. He brought people there to hurt them. My father denied it, but June and I heard things at night.”

  Her eyes were glossy, haunted.

  “We had an understanding, the three of us. If serious trouble started, I would take Junie out to the barn and hide there, behind a kind of false wall. We wouldn't come out until my father called us that it was safe. We weren't to come out for anyone but him.”

  “Did you ever have to do that?” I asked.

  “Once or twice,” she nodded. “After I dreamed June's ghost, I started to think. If my father had serious trouble, he would have sent June to the barn, and she wouldn't have come out, no matter what. If my father died, what happened to her?”