She studied his face, his shoulders, his long heavy arms. She wanted to tell him, We have to find a safe place now. We can’t self-destruct anymore. Fate doesn’t have to be all gloom and sorrow. Fate can be happy, too. You and me, Danny, happy again, my God, what a concept. Maybe fate is love, and love requires nothing more than the courage to be seen for who you are. Maybe they could teach each other that. Maybe they could handle that, show each other, it isn’t so terrible or hard, letting someone see you.
Without thinking, she stood up in the tub. As though to be seen. Looking down self-consciously at the soaked wrinkling of her flesh, her bruises, she said, using a Betty Boop voice, “Such a dainty little rose.”
Abatangelo toweled her dry, produced a sweatshirt and boxer shorts for her to wear and wrapped a dry towel around her head, fussing it into a turban. Missing her, wanting her from afar had become so ingrained a habit that her reflection in the mirror seemed strangely more real than she did. To dispel this illusion, he gave her his arm, led her back to his bedroom and set her gently onto the narrow bed.
She looked up at his face with a plastered smile, sniffing the cologne in his chest hair. Fingering his scapular, she said, “I had hoped, sir, you wouldn’t go churchy on me.”
He removed the cloth medallion, hanging from his neck by a satin thong, and let her hold it. She took it as though it were a shrunken head.
“Oh Danny, you worry me with this stuff.”
“Chaplain at Safford handed them out like suckers.”
“That explains how you got it. Not why you wear it.”
On one side, assuming the foreground, was the picture of an arch-backed man, bound to a cross. Christ Crucified predominated the background, wreathed in purplish storm clouds and attended by disciples. On the reverse side, the inscription read: “Jesus, remember me when you enter upon your reign. Luke 23:42.”
“St. Dismas,” Abatangelo explained.
“There’s a saint named Dismal?”
“Dismas,” he corrected. “The Good Thief.”
Shel fingered it a moment longer then handed it back. “The guilty are so sentimental.”
Morning had come. The curtains flared with light. Abatangelo retrieved another bottle of vodka from the kitchen, this one warm, so he brought ice back with him, too. He filled both their glasses. Shel set her cheek on her knee, watching him.
“In all the time you were gone, all those years,” she said, “a day didn’t go by that something didn’t come up. Some little thing, you know? A smell. A voice somewhere. Reminding me of you. I began to think I’d never forget you. And I needed to. Sometimes. You understand?”
A hint of relief, even joy, flickered beyond the heartbreak, like a promise. It showed in her eyes, her smile. Abatangelo waved a fly from his glass. “I came as fast as I could,” he said.
She laughed softly. “Not fast enough. Sorry.”
They stared themselves into self-consciousness. Then, gently, she leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth.
“I am so looking forward to it,” she said.
“What?”
She gave him a little shove. “Sex, you asshole.” She ran her hand across his hair, his face, his throat. “Soon as I’m in better shape.”
The same fly scudded angrily across the ceiling join. The sound of morning traffic escalated outside. Shel eased back onto the bed and closed her eyes.
Abatangelo stroked her hair and watched as she drifted off. Her palm closed and opened, as though in a dream she was reaching for something. He studied her eyebrows, the chewed nails, the wrinkled flesh middle age had engraved around each eye, around her mouth. With his fingertips he traced the line of her shoulder, her arm.
A sense of well-being settled in. Images segued through his mind, scatterings of film in which she laid her head on his stomach, knees drawn up, as though she intended to nap there. He imagined her rising, straddling his hips and placing him inside her, eyes closed, quivering slightly as he rose to her. She would lift her chin, no sound, rocking with him gently. Something long-lost and forbidden. Strangers on a bridge, someone saving someone else. In his fantasy she came without cries or moans the way she often had, simply lowering her head and shivering as he slowed his rhythm. Bringing her down to him. Kissing her hair.
Every hour through the morning, he shook her awake, told her this was a precaution against concussion and checked her eyes, her pulse, her breathing. At first, Shel accepted this attention compliantly. He was a man who knew his beatings. After the fourth roust she grew irritable. By noon she was fending him off.
In the kitchen Abatangelo fixed himself coffee, his third pot of the day. Cup in hand, he dialed Lenny Mannion and begged off coming in that afternoon, resorting to the same excuse he’d concocted that morning: He said his eye was swollen shut from a spider bite. Mannion, from his tone, found this too weird to disbelieve. Abatangelo hung up, went into the front room and sank into the sofa, thinking things through.
His hourly calls on Shel had not been inspired solely by a desire to monitor the healing process. Every time he nudged her awake, Abatangelo grilled her a little further about what her life had been like the past few years. He kept it simple and innocent, blamed it on lost time, they had a lot of catching up to do. Little by little he gained a much clearer view into who this Frank character was. He learned in particular that though the dead boy had not been Shel’s, she’d felt a special devotion for him. The guilty are so sentimental, he thought. No joke.
He’d also learned a lot more about Frank’s friends, who they were and what they were up to, how Frank fit into all of it. Now that Shel seemed well enough to leave alone for a few hours, he intended to step out, make some calls. He had the beginnings of a plan.
There was something to this story about dead twins, he decided. Shel had been noncommittal when he brought it up. That was as good as a yes. Regardless, an inquiry or two seemed in order. Train a little light on the action, put Frank in the oldest bind of alclass="underline" the law on one side, revenge from his pals on the other. Turn up the discomfort level. Help Frank find out what scared really feels like.
The alternative to this plan, of course, was to sit still. Wait and see. Do as Shel asked: nothing. Abatangelo considered this alternative, such as it was, unacceptable. He’d found himself pacing, and soon a feeling of being trapped arose. He’d thought it through all morning, weighing the various strategies, unable to choose the best, fussing over pointless distinctions, until it dawned on him he was doing exactly what he’d been warned against his first day out. How had the cab driver put it: Just because you can think deep thoughts, that don’t mean they ain’t got you right where they want you. Shel lay asleep in the next room, lucky to be alive, and he traveled the confines of a small room, pacing. Thinking. It’s a trap, he realized- the mind, it’s the perfect trap, a brilliant, beguiling, captivating trap. It was prison.
Get out, a voice said. Do something. Remind yourself what freedom feels like. Because if freedom doesn’t feel like the power to protect the person you love, what good is it? She wouldn’t have come to me for shelter if she didn’t, on some level, want me to make sure shelter meant something real. Frank wasn’t just some hapless loser- maybe once upon a time, but not now. Something had snapped. He was a killer.
He went back to the bedroom and knocked lightly, pushing open the door. Hearing him enter, Shel drew her covers tight around her head, peering out whale-eyed as he approached the bed.
“Don’t touch me, Danny.”
Abatangelo sat on the edge of the bed and settled his hand on her haunch. She squirmed away. “You poke at me one more time, I swear to God.” A frantic plaint pitched her voice, half mocking, half not. “I don’t want to be pissed at you, Danny. I love you, you’re driving me crazy, leave me alone.”