She swallows hard, her skin pale and sickly-looking. The force of recollection nauseating her.
“Those were my best memories. When she sang to me, I thought she loved me. But later I realized . . . she just likes singing. It was never for me. Or if it was, only to shut me up.
“Randall would make me stand with my nose to the door for hours. I don’t mean it seemed like hours—I watched the time pass on the clock. If I annoyed him, if I was too loud, if I talked back to him—and talking back just meant answering any way he didn’t like—then it was an hour against the door. If I moved for even a second, if I had an itch or I just got dizzy, the hour started over again. No food. No drinks. No going to the bathroom.
“While I was standing there, I’d hear my mother singing in the house. In the kitchen, upstairs, out in the backyard . . .
“It would be two, three hours later, and I’d hear her voice drifting through the air, perfectly content. She wasn’t singing for me, to make me feel better. She forgot I was standing down there at all, legs shaking, trying not to piss myself or move my nose a millimeter from the door so the hour wouldn’t start again.”
Mara glances back toward the park bench, pale lips pressed together.
“The things she’s said to me. Always in that soft, sweet, voice . . . She poisoned it, like she poisons everything. I can’t even listen to a mom in a movie anymore. It makes me want to puke.”
We’re walking toward the marina. I can see all the way down to the water. The sun is breaking above the bay, blazing up the road, glinting on the chrome bumpers of the parked cars, flaming on glass windows.
It burns on Mara’s skin, in the tiny filaments of hair that float above the rest.
The sadness on her face doesn’t match her beauty in this moment.
And my disgust at her mother doesn’t match what I feel in my chest. I’m used to anger and repulsion. The emotion gripping me is something different. A heat in my lungs, a burning behind my eyes . . . a desire to squeeze her hand tighter in mine.
I don’t know what to call this one. I’ve never felt it before.
I look at Mara and I don’t know what to say.
My lips form the words anyway.
“I’m sorry.”
It startles her as much as me.
She turns and faces me, dropping my hand.
“What do you mean?”
“I just . . . I’m sorry.”
She shakes her head slowly, lips parted, eyebrows raised.
“You surprise me, Cole.”
I’m surprised, too.
Surprised at the sound of my name on her lips. How it rings like a bell, clear and true.
She stands on tiptoe, stretching up to kiss me. Soft and slow.
Warmer than the rising sun between us.
24
Mara
I have to work late at Zam Zam tonight.
I know I’ll be exhausted. I’ve been putting in long hours at the studio, sucked into my latest painting.
Cole comes to see it in the early afternoon.
The painting is steeped in deeply shadowed tones of charcoal, merlot, and garnet. The figure is monstrous with its gleaming bat-like wings and thick, scaly, muscular tail. But his face is beautiful—a dark angel, fallen from grace.
Cole stands in front of the canvas for a long time, a hint of a smile playing on his lips.
“Well?” I say, when I can’t stand it anymore. “What do you think?”
“The chiaroscuro is masterful,” he says. “It reminds me of Caravaggio.”
“Judith Beheading Holofernes is one of my favorite paintings,” I say, trying to hide how pleased I am at his compliment.
“I prefer David with the Head of Goliath,” he says.
“You know that’s a self-portrait, don’t you?” I tell him. “Caravaggio used his own face as the model for Goliath’s severed head.”
“Yes. And his lover was the model for David.”
“Maybe they were fighting at the time,” I laugh.
Cole looks at me with that dark, steady gaze. “Or he knew that love is inherently dangerous.”
I mix white and a fractional portion of black on my palette. “Do you really think that?”
“All emotions are dangerous. Especially when they involve other people.”
I dip my brush in the fresh paint, not looking at him. My heart is already beating fast, and it’s impossible to look at Cole’s face and form a coherent sentence at the same time.
“Have you always been this way?” I say.
“What way?”
He knows what I mean, but he’s making me say it out loud. He knows he can’t trick me as easily as other people -- which irritates him.