We were on the floor and Noah was hard against my stomach and his fingers teased me, making me finally ask him for what I wanted, still not with words but with my legs wrapping around his waist as I pulled him to me and thrust up against him until he slipped inside of me.
I bit into the soft skin of his earlobe and my tongue licked inside his ear. He kissed my lips. Then pulled back.
“This, what we’re doing now, it belongs to you.”
And it did. Noah making love to me, with all of his body, with all of my body responding, with the smell of him, rosemary and mint flooding my senses, with the softness of his hair on my chest and the heat of his breath on my neck. There was just the two of us in that small space. In a normal room, where there would have been space, the ghosts of my patients and their issues and problems would have come along for the ride. But this journey was closed and tight, and there was no room for anyone but us. The two of us. Our bodies intertwined, my cries mixing with his one deep sigh that reached out and stroked me as softly as the fingers that were fluttering across my back.
And then, there, with only the two of us in a space that could barely contain us, I forgot that it was morning and that it was cold and that there were people who would be waiting for me, or that I was scared to let someone inside. Noah was already inside. It was out of my hands. And then there were no more thoughts.
Seventy
Dearest,
I am almost done. I thought I would feel some elation at my accomplishment; after all, everything has gone according to plan and I’m still not the one they blame. I should feel something, shouldn’t I? A sense of completion, at least? Or some satisfaction at having outsmarted the police?
But there’s nothing except a big gaping hole inside of me, and at the very pit of it is some feral forever-hungry animal-jaws wide open-ready to snap at every morsel thrown down. It sinks its sharp, pointed teeth into each chunk of flesh I feed it, and yet its appetite only grows.
Why won’t it stop? What else do I have to do to prove that I loved you?
Love is all I had for you. Yes, it was, and yes, it is. Don’t even whisper anything else. I would tear my guts out and eat them in front of you to prove how much I love you.
There’s nothing left I want to know, nothing left I need to do except make it up to you, make you understand that. There are only two days until your birthday. Eighteen years ago, I could never have guessed at the power of love and now I can only be amazed by its force.
When I lie in bed at night and think about you, what obsesses me still is the shame that you felt. What did I do to you that you never understood what you had, who you were, how much the world was open to you? How did I look right at you and not see that? It must have hurt you so much to have gotten through all the rest of it intact and then to have had me strip you so bare?
These women, who are not what we ever meant for women to be, rely on their bodies, their twisting, writhing, undulating bodies, and do their dances for the eyes that watch, and they never think about who is suffering because of their exhibitionism.
No one takes responsibility and no one can be held accountable because nothing is illegal and nothing is immoral, or if it is, it doesn’t matter.
You were a sacrifice to an idea and you were a dream that ended too soon. You should have been exempt and immune. You, of everyone, should not have been a victim of this, not with who I was, not with what I believed and fought for.
But you were and so I claim victims in your name because it’s not enough that they die. It’s almost enough that others watch while they die. Now all but one have been crossed off, and she will be the most satisfying because once I can cross her off, too, then I can burn the list and turn it into red-hot fire, then ash, and then from ash to dust, and it will all be done.
This I do for you.
Thursday One day remaining
Seventy-One
It was still dark the next morning when I left the apartment. According to the weather report, it would be yet another day without sun. Overnight, the snow had again dusted the roof-tops, the trees, the fire hydrants and the parked cars with one more layer. The details of the landscape were long buried. The street signs were mounded with snow.
Alan Leightman’s lies were hiding the real killer of those girls the same way. No one could see past the snow. No one could see past his confession.
Kira’s doctor was waiting for me in the lobby of the hospital. We shook hands-awkwardly for me, since it was my left-exchanged a few minutes of conversation about her condition, and then proceeded upstairs.
Alan had given me permission to talk to Kira. The morning he told me he was going to confess, he’d asked me to call Dr. Harris, and if I couldn’t get him, to go and be with Kira and help her process the news.
That’s all I was doing. Just a few days later. If I was crossing a line, it was a very thin one. I had to talk to her. Someone had to figure out what was going on.
For someone so tall and broad-shouldered, Kira Rushkoff was diminished by the chair she sat in. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen anyone become so small. I had still been expecting to see the handsome woman who never appeared rattled or wrinkled. She was all of those things now. Her hair was dirty and tangled. Her hospital gown was crumpled and stained. Her fingernails were broken and the polish was chipped off. Her eyes couldn’t focus and darted around the room.
No matter who she was, I would have known that this woman had only a tenuous hold on reality. One thin, silken thread separated her from being one of the lost girls.
“How are you feeling?”
She shrugged.
“Thank you for agreeing to talk to me.”
“Don’t thank me yet. I’m not sure I want to talk to you. I think I do, and then I don’t. I’m mad at Alan. But I’m in love with my husband.”
“I understand that and-”
“What did you want to see me for?” She picked up a green plastic straw, bending it forward and back.
For a second or two, I watched the movement. “I wanted to ask you if you could tell me why Alan confessed to crimes he didn’t commit.”
“How do you know he didn’t commit them?” She squeezed the opening of the straw closed, her fingers tight on the end of it.
“Because I’ve been working with him long enough to know he is not capable of doing what he’s confessed to. The only possibility, the only thing that makes any sense to me, is that he knows, or thinks he knows, who did kill those women and would rather take the fall for it than put the perpetrator through that.”
“Noble of him, isn’t it?” Her sarcasm only lasted for a moment and then she started crying.
I shot a look at Dr. Harris. He nodded, giving me permission to keep going, and remained where he was.
Her swing from forlorn misery to bitterness to tears didn’t surprise me. I knew from Alan how betrayed she’d felt by his addiction. Of all the vices he could have engaged in, he’d chosen the one that she felt was the biggest slap in the face.
“I know how angry you are. And you’re right to be angry. Alan degraded you. He broke every promise to you that he ever made.”
I was watching her carefully. Her posture became more rigid. She bit her bottom lip, holding herself back from speaking. A few seconds went by. Then she let out a breath and started to speak in the same sarcastic tone. “He deserves to be sitting in that jail. The great and lofty judge, behind bars.” Despite the tone, her tears still flowed, a total contradiction.
“I don’t know how you stood it for as long as you did. It must have been the worst thing you ever went through in your life. Having your husband turn to the Internet, turn to those young girls, abandoning you-”