Читать книгу The Undoing - Averil Dean - Страница 10
ОглавлениеCELIA WAS BURNING. From the minute he walked into the room and settled his gaze on her, from the first sunshiny flash of teeth in his smooth, tanned face, the squeak of floorboards under his weight, getting closer. From even before that. Years before that. This longing had simmered in her belly since childhood, when she would admire the straight line of his shoulders and the thrilling vertical channel between the muscles of his abdomen, and feel some unnamed stirring that made her long for the bright swing of his attention, as if without it she were standing underdressed in a storm. Now the fire raged between them in waves of all-consuming heat. It was him inside her, both of them in the heart of the Blackbird, a crackling hot inferno that exploded down her thighs and raced beneath her skin and tore through her throat like a flame.
In the hour before her death, Celia had never felt more alive.
* * *
If Celia ever had to explain what it was like to be living out her childhood dream, she would talk about the walls. Miles and miles of walls, the Blackbird had, and every one of them covered with wallpaper or cheap vinyl paneling, or spiderwebbed with tiny cracks, or pockmarked with holes in the plaster or the doors. Sometimes, as here in the kitchen, all of the above. She imagined the listener—a sympathetic motherly type like Mrs. Kirby at the post office—who would someday come to stay in one of the rooms they were renovating. You wouldn’t believe such a small hotel would have so many walls, Celia would say. I never thought we’d see the end of them.
Some of the rooms had been too much for her. In Two, she’d seen right away that the wallpaper was not going to budge and had papered over it with nubby grass cloth the color of summer wheat. That was Rory’s room, calmly masculine, with a punched tin lamp and curtains made from lengths of painter’s cloth, a pinstripe in chocolate brown that Celia had sewn around the edges.
“I’m still gonna throw my socks on the floor.” Rory had run his hand over the walnut dresser and the Hopi blanket across the foot of the bed.
“You can lead a boy to a hamper,” said Eric, whose room even in high school was aggressively neat, “but you can’t make him use it.”
In Eight, where Julian Moss was staying, joined some nights by Kate, Celia had started strong but been foiled halfway through. Some of the wallpaper glue had hardened over time to the color and consistency of amber, and no amount of chemicals or steam would remove it. She was forced to leave the clover-green wallpaper in ragged vertical patches, but had discovered by trial and error that she could glaze those walls with a tinted wax and leave them as they were, with the pine boards showing through the strips of paper. The effect was strangely pleasing. She hung a huge copper clock over the headboard and some unframed oils on the walls and moved on to other projects.
The kitchen, though, was special. It was Celia’s space, her private sanctuary, a big shabby square room with open shelves above and cavernous cupboards below, and for this room nothing would do but walls of robin’s egg blue. She had stripped every last shred of the wallpaper here—a tedious, finicky job that took a solid week—and now the cans of paint stood ready on the floor, the dishes and crockery shifted to the countertops in order to clear the space. Tomorrow she would open the first can of paint and roll it over the naked wall, a luxurious task she had long anticipated.
She scooped up a dollop of spackling paste and pressed it into a nail hole next to the pantry door frame, smoothing it over with the end of the putty knife. She stood back to inspect her work, pushing a strand of hair from her forehead with the back of her hand.
Miles of walls. I had help, of course. I had Rory and Eric.
Always when she thought of her stepbrother and his best friend, their names went in that order. Said quickly, the syllables blended into one word: Roreneric. You couldn’t say them the other way around. She wasn’t sure why.
Rory and Eric could do anything. Together they’d repaired the roof, sealed the windows, replaced the gutters and the faucets, refinished the floors. Huge, impossible jobs, but they tackled them together, cheerful and undaunted. Celia would hear Eric’s tuneless voice ringing through the old hotel, the beat of his music thundering from the stereo: Do ya, do ya want my love, baby, do ya do ya want my love... A crazy falsetto, cracking over the high notes, punctuated by Rory’s rumbling baritone urging him to keep his day job. Eric would laugh, cranking up the volume just to piss him off. They filled the empty rooms with the sound of power tools, hammers, the clatter of boards and nails, heavy thumps of their boots on the floor. The most beautiful sounds in the world.
Rory and Eric. Their names formed an impression in her mind that was less about the way they looked than about the way they felt, their dual presence like a pair of moons swirling elliptically around her: one near, the other far, then switching, accelerating, swinging away and moving heavily back. She felt the weight of them physically, a cosmic tug that kept her always wobbling slightly off balance.
No one who knew them casually could believe they’d be such good friends. Eric seemed like the antithesis to Rory’s golden-brown solidity. His pale skin was the canvas for a collection of tattoos, an ongoing attempt to illustrate his identity in a way that Rory had never needed to do. Eric was dark, pierced, mercurial, with an IQ approaching genius and a blatant reluctance to use it, as if he were too smart even to think up the things that would challenge him, too smart to keep his own brain ticking. He could easily have become frustrated with Rory, who had struggled for years with undiagnosed dyslexia and hadn’t read a book cover to cover in his life. But Rory was not unintelligent, and he had a commonsense canniness Eric lacked. When Eric wandered off course, Rory provided ballast.
Celia set down the spackling paste tray and made a wide stretch. A hot ache pressed at the back of her eyes. She had lain awake the night before, her thoughts all scraps and snippets: a flash of someone’s face, a fragment of conversation, memories like the pieces of several different puzzles all laid out on a table, impossible to assemble. At dawn she rose and went up the narrow back stairs, through the dollhouse door to the attic—a long, slanted room with one dingy window at either end and a century’s worth of accumulated junk, once so thick you had to turn sideways even to get through the door. Over the months they had sifted through it, had carried down pieces of furniture, paintings with cracked frames or rips in the canvas, boxes of books and musty old clothes, an enormous elk’s head mounted on a wooden plaque. Eric had hung this in the kitchen, as a joke, because Celia didn’t eat meat—which had upset her at first because she didn’t realize it was a joke and thought he meant for it to stay. But he took one look at her face and laughed, kissed her head and hauled the poor thing down to the truck with the other flea market items.
From the mudroom, she heard the door open and close, a thud of boots on the floor and the nylon whisk of someone’s coat. A moment later, Rory came through the kitchen door, pulling off his cap as he ducked beneath the lintel. The ends of his hair were dusted with snow, his eyebrows threaded with ice. His bootless feet in purple socks made no sound, but the floorboards creaked a little under his weight.
He looked around the room, hands slung low on his narrow hips.
“Looks like a bomb went off in here,” he said.
Celia held up the tray. “I’m spackling. It’s a dirty job, et cetera...”
Rory hunted briefly for a glass, settled for a coffee cup and went to fill it at the kitchen sink. He drank off the water in five or six long swallows, his head tipping slowly back, then refilled the cup and stood with his hip leaning against the counter.
“Finally got the shed organized,” he said. “And I hung the new door. You would not have appreciated the spider situation out there.”
“Body count?”
“Twenty-six.”
“Yikes.”
Rory grinned. Nothing fazed him. Spiders, leaks in the roof, faulty plumbing, snarls of electrical wire. He tackled every job with the same easygoing confidence; it was all in a day’s work, whatever the day might bring. He had a way of jollying Celia and Eric along, his blue eyes crinkling around the corners, mouth curving open around the white gleam of his teeth.
Captain America, Eric called him. Here to save the day.
And Rory did seem unambiguously heroic at times. He radiated good intention and that comforting solidity a strong person brings into the room. It was almost impossible to imagine a situation Rory would not be able to handle, or that anything awful could happen while he was around. He made everything seem simple.
Celia waited while he drained his cup for a second time and set it in the sink. Now would be the time to bring up the topic of Julian. Knowing Rory—and her own inability to articulate the problem—this conversation could take a while. “I’m glad you’re here, because I want to talk to you.”
He came through the pantry doorway. She felt him approach and knew without turning her head that his mood had shifted. His cool cheek pressed against her temple.
“You can talk, but I’ll hear you much better in twenty minutes.”
He took the tray from her hands and set it aside, slid his hand around her head to turn her face to his. His mouth opened over hers, cold inside as if he’d been eating snow. His teeth felt sleek and hard under her tongue.
She shivered. “You’re freezing.”
“Warm me up, then.”
“Here? Don’t we know better than that?”
“Yeah, we definitely do,” he said.
She expected him to lead her out of the pantry and up the winding stairs. But he slipped his hand around her wrist, thumb to forefinger like a bracelet.
“They won’t be back for a while,” he said. “We have time.”
He pulled her against him so she could feel his erection at the small of her back. He traced the line of her neck with his lips and teeth, buried his nose in the hair behind her ear. His hands began a slow descent down the front of her body, then up again, under her sweater, a ticklish chill across her ribs. His palms were rough and calloused, so big that with both his hands over her breasts it felt as if she’d added a layer of chilled fresh clothing.
She sighed and turned her cheek to his lips. Easier—much easier—to set aside the conversation about Julian and just go along. Later she would tell him everything and they would figure out together what to do. It could wait a few minutes longer.
He reached down and unbuttoned her jeans. Hand-me-downs from Kate, painting clothes, so baggy that they dropped to her hips before Rory had even touched the zipper.
“Don’t turn around,” he said.
* * *
The lifts had been running sporadically all afternoon, stopping and restarting as inexperienced skiers skidded over the ice trying to round the tight corner at the end of the ramp. A wall of clouds poured like wet concrete across the sky and hardened around the mountaintop, leaking tiny pellets of hail that stung Eric’s cheeks and clattered over the vinyl seat of the chairlift.
He shouldn’t have come out today. It was Julian really who wanted to ski. He said that Kate was getting clingy and he needed a third wheel.
“I keep thinking I’ve got to cut her loose, but I’m not ready to have that conversation. I need a reason to procrastinate. You know how it is.”
Eric wasn’t eager for the day. There were a hundred projects waiting for attention at the Blackbird, and he’d barely gotten home after almost a month away. He’d felt guilty about it this morning, but Celia had only kissed his cheek and told him to go, have fun, nothing was so urgent that it couldn’t wait another day.
He had explained his reluctance to Julian as they sat in the mudroom pulling on their boots.
“Stay if you want, man,” Julian said. “But if she’s telling you to go...”
Outside they could hear the thud of Rory’s ax chopping wood. From the kitchen, the splash of running water and the clatter of dishes. Eric hesitated, elbows on his knees. Julian had paid for his trip to Alaska, for the cabin and the helicopter and the tickets and the food. It seemed ungrateful after only a few days back not to do him this one favor in return.
His thoughts spun in circles: go, don’t go, a dozen chattering reasons for and against. Impossible to think through the noise.
Julian got to his feet and pulled his cap down over his ears.
“In my experience, if a woman really wants to put you to work, you’ll know it. Today you’re getting a pass. I’d take it if I were you.”
He opened the door in invitation. A gust of frigid air blew into the room.
“Arctic,” Eric said. “Go ahead. I think I’m gonna add another layer.”
“Sure you are.”
“Give me five minutes. I’ll meet you at the bottom of Prospect.”
Julian went out, shaking his head.
Eric sat for a minute after he left, listening as he said goodbye to Rory. When the sound of chopping resumed, he kicked off his boots and went into the kitchen, where Celia was drying the last of the breakfast dishes. She was wearing a cotton nightgown and an ancient, enormous cardigan of moss-green wool. Her hair trailed down her back in a day-old braid.
He stole up behind her and slipped his hand under the sweater to cup her breast.
“Come upstairs,” he said.
The side of her cheek curved upward as she turned off the faucet.
“I’ve got exactly one hundred and forty-two things to do today,” she said.
“Hundred and forty-three.”
He kissed her warm ear. She tucked up her shoulder and turned to face him, smiling, but with one hand flat to his chest.
“Later, okay?”
“That’s what you said last night.”
She wobbled her head, acknowledging this.
“Are we fighting?” he said.
“No.”
“Then come upstairs and prove it.”
A flash of impatience crossed her face, so quickly he couldn’t be sure it had been there at all. She had pressed a kiss to his cheek and shooed him along, and he’d let himself be sent away because of the kiss and the smile—but now, on the stalled ski lift, it was that swift exasperation he couldn’t get out of his mind.
He tried to remember the tools of self-control: Think before acting. Count to a hundred, or five hundred. Talk it out. Call for help if you think it’s going sideways.
He peeled off a glove with his teeth and pulled out his cell phone. He dialed Celia’s number. It rang four times and went to voice mail. And not even her voice, but the canned response the cell came with.
He shoved the phone back into his pocket.
One, one thousand, two, one thousand, three, one thousand, four...
The lift hummed to a start. It traveled a few yards, then stopped again with a jerk that set the chairs swinging. Eric could just make out the lift operator in his box at the top of the run—only forty yards to go, but it may as well have been a mile.
“Goddamn it,” he muttered.
Julian sat back comfortably, his arm around Kate’s snow-dusted shoulders. If Eric was there to circumvent trouble with Kate, he was doing a fine job; she had been bubbly and easygoing all day, in spite of the weather.
“No point stressing, man,” Julian said. “You have somewhere else to be?”
Eric ground back the answer with his teeth. Though they’d been sedentary for almost an hour, his heartbeat was tripping like a snare drum. His eyes burned with cold, with the chain of sleepless nights that had started in Alaska and continued at the Blackbird Hotel.
From his breast pocket he pulled out a flask of whiskey, unscrewed it and took a burning slug. Julian and Kate waved it off, so he took a couple more swallows himself, then more after that since the flask was nearly empty.
The exchange with Celia nagged at him, became tangled in the threads of previous conversations, as if the words had come untethered from their context. He couldn’t remember who said what, or when, or whether certain comments were a response to something someone else had said. He couldn’t put the pieces together. He couldn’t think. That was the problem—he couldn’t think. His mind was a freight train, fast and unsteerable, pushed by its own weight and momentum with Eric like a panicked conductor trying to keep the fucker from jumping the tracks.
He stared into the whiteness, rocking back and forth with the energy leaping in his chest.
That impatience on her face. She wanted him to go, didn’t she? Wanted to be rid of him. He remembered standing in the hallway—was that last night or the night before? He couldn’t be sure. But definitely he remembered standing in the hallway with his hand on the doorknob, and finding it locked.
At least...he thought he remembered.
He blinked into the snowstorm. On every side, the snowflakes whirled and dissolved into a fine white mist, like a cloud.
I’m losing it, he thought helplessly.
Kate was chattering on the seat beside him. Her voice was painfully bright, a needle in his ear.
“I’ll bet Celia was glad to see you,” she said.
“Got that right.” Julian laughed. “I thought there was an avalanche last night, but it turned out to be Celia’s headboard banging on the wall.”
Eric’s racing mind skidded to a halt. A hard tremor shook his body, locked his jaw.
Last night.
Time had gotten slippery again. He couldn’t remember whether it was last night or some other when he’d awakened to find himself on the couch downstairs, blinking into the dying embers of the fire. He’d gotten very drunk—he remembered that. All of them sitting around the hearth, and Celia plucking out a melody on her guitar while Julian lounged back in his chair, laughing with Rory and Kate. Eric had watched with a drink in hand, but he’d kept himself distant. Once he’d met Celia’s eye and she’d smiled—a blank kind of smile like she meant it for someone else and Eric just happened to be in the way.
He must have fallen asleep soon after. Someone—Celia, of course—had covered him with a blanket, and they all went upstairs and left him alone beside the cooling hearth.
He’d never gone upstairs last night.
If it was last night.
He glanced over the edge of the chair at the crazy swirling flakes. Surely there weren’t enough snowflakes in the sky to fall this way for so long; they must be cycling around, like the inside of a snow globe, the same flakes falling and rising again—how could you tell?
He dragged his mind back to Celia, trying to focus through the haze. But her face appeared again with that fleeting glance of impatience, that thousand-yard smile, turned away and with her eyes shut tight as he fucked her, like she was imagining someone else in his place. The memories rose like specters in the storm.
Panic rose to bursting in his chest. He had to see her.
Right now.
“There’s no place like home.” Kate was laughing. Shrill peals of hilarity, driving the needle into his brain.
As if she knew.
As if they both knew. And thought it was funny.
Maybe everyone was in on the joke. Maybe Celia was making a fool of him. Celia and Rory both, making fun, making other people laugh at him.
Eric pressed his hands over his ears, rocking back and forth. The chair swung wildly through the snow. Overhead, the cable creaked in protest.
He had to see Celia. Now, right now, right fucking now.
He could just make out the surface of the run thirty feet below the lift. The snow was falling up, burning cold against his face.
He swung himself out of the chair, dangling over the snow by one hand. As he dropped to the ground, he heard voices from the white mist overhead, disembodied, calling his name.
* * *
Julian heard Eric land with a muffled thud on the snow. The kid didn’t pause to pop into his rear binding, just slid into the whiteout without a backward glance. The snow folded behind him like a curtain.
“Something tells me that wasn’t Eric in Celia’s bed last night,” he said.
Kate turned to him. Her eyes were hidden behind silvered goggles that reflected his own image back to him, warped as a funhouse mirror.
“As if you didn’t know,” she said.
* * *
Always afterward, with the blaze of orgasm retreating into embers, Rory expected relief. Temporary, maybe, and only physical, but there should have been some period of minutes or hours when his skin felt tougher, when his mind stopped chasing itself in circles and found a reason to rest.
“Insanity,” Eric once said, “is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Or maybe that’s stupidity. They’re not that far apart...”
Not that he was talking about Rory when he said it.
Under his palm, he could feel Celia’s heartbeat, quick as a bird’s wing, her slender collarbone at his fingertips. He nuzzled into the downy hair behind her ear. The scent of her flooded his nose.
Minutes passed with neither of them moving. Celia would always wait, as long as he wanted, letting him soften and slide away before she’d ever make a move to free herself. He traced her spine, his fingertips rasping gently against her skin. His jaw had left pink stains on her shoulders and neck, but his fingers were too rough to soothe them away. He used his wrists and the backs of his hands.
She was waiting, patiently, not complaining about the hard floor or the chill in the air, or the work she needed to get back to, or the way he’d been just now—too hard and fast, too eager to get inside her and not at all eager to leave. She didn’t talk about Eric, but Rory wondered if she’d been with him, too, that morning, whether she was exhausted trying to keep up with them. Exhausted by the secrets they were keeping.
Eric was their friend, after all. The three of them had been together since they were children. He remembered the first time they came here, hearing Celia run up and down the hall overhead and Eric’s footsteps racing up the steps to join her. Rory had stood in almost exactly this spot, plucking at the peeling wallpaper and failing utterly to understand what Celia saw in the place.
To her it was magic. She said no one would ever leave a place like this.
It didn’t seem that way to Rory. Not at the time and not now. The only magical part of the Blackbird was the girl who lived in it.
He helped Celia to her feet. She lifted her face and kissed him. It was a woman’s kiss, openmouthed and generous. Her lips were cool and fresh; her arms twined delicately around his neck. It was like being kissed by a flower.
It almost decided him. The words crowded up to the base of his throat.
He couldn’t say it. He had to say it.
The decent thing would be to leave Jawbone Ridge. Just get in his truck and keep driving. In the summer, on his way back to town, spent and filthy from his job with the forestry service, he’d sit behind the wheel at the foot of the mountains and think, Turn around. Go the other way. But somehow he never could do it.
He should never have let it come to this. He should have stopped, could have stopped a hundred times. They could have gone on being family to each other, the way his mother always intended. He could have found someone else.
But those possibilities were behind them. This was where they were, and he wanted Celia with a single-mindedness that wiped away any mental image of his life but the one that included her. His desire had become laced with a possessive greed, so powerful that he’d lain awake night after night, twisted in the sheets, pulling at his dick like he could milk out some peace of mind, some resolution at the thought of Celia in the room next door, asleep in his best friend’s arms. He’d allowed the jealousy to grow, sick with shame at his own weakness. It was unfair to change the rules, he told himself. This was how they’d always played it. He understood that. He tried to accept his role in her life. In the beginning he’d even encouraged it.
“This is a small town,” he’d told her. “People think of us as siblings. They won’t tolerate it. Go and be with Eric. No one has to know about...this.”
“We won’t be able to hide it,” she had said.
But he had overridden her, patronized her. So sure always that he knew what was best for Celia.
Now he had to admit that she was right. He couldn’t hide it. Every time he glanced in her direction, it was like looking through a mask, a parody of brotherly affection. He had to keep his eyes on her face, forget the live feeling of her nipple in his palm, the texture of her skin, the damp heat of her mouth. He had to watch with gritted teeth as Eric teased her, kissed her publicly, while Rory could only wait and scheme and smile, smile, smile.
What Celia felt about it he never could guess. On the surface she seemed unchanged, but he gathered small evidences in the things she said, in an indecipherable expression or sidelong glance, in the way she clung to him and cried his name. (Had she held him that way the last time? Had she come as hard? Did she want him more or less than before?) He examined every word and gesture, aware with each passing day that the unfairness of the situation had begun to rankle: he was tired of being the odd man out. He wanted to know where he stood.
He wanted her to break a promise. It was selfish and unreasonable and unlikely. Celia didn’t break her promises.
He’d rehearsed this moment so many times in his head, piecing together what sounded like a convincing string of words until he said them aloud, alone in his room, the reproachful hotel groaning and snapping around him as if it knew he was scheming to steal its mistress away.
Fuck the Blackbird. Fuck Jawbone Ridge and brotherhood and promises. He had to put it out there. He needed her to himself.
The words that had long been boiling in his chest surged upward. As they spilled from his mouth, Eric walked through the door.
