“No.” I shake my head. “Please. Please don’t leave, Tom. Please come back and lie here with me for a while.” I can’t even look him in the eye when I whisper these words. A whisper of a whisper. When I look back up, he’s smiling at me in the glass. His smile like a sunrise in the dark.
He walks back to my bed. Moves my dolls away carefully, one by one by one. Not making a single sound. He lies right by my side so we’re face-to-face, Tom Cruise and I. I’ve never had anyone lie in my bed before besides Mother. And only when I was sick with pneumonia and couldn’t breathe so well in the nights. I opened my eyes and there were her pale eyes staring at me with a crumpled look. That was the last time. Even Stacey, when she sleeps over, sleeps on a blow-up mattress on the floor. Tell me a secret, she always says. And I never had any to tell besides the secret of me and Stacey, that she twirls for me in her basement to “Maniac.” Until now. Tom’s eyes glow from blue-green to red to blue-green to red in the dark. His face just like the movies I watched on Grand-Maman’s box TV. No screen of glass between us now. His smile shines like the stars on the ceiling. So beautiful. The way he looks at me, I can’t believe it. Like no one looks at me. Like I’m so beautiful too. Maybe I’m dreaming like Tom dreams at the beginning of Risky Business. The dream is always the same, he says in the movie. If this is a dream, I think, let it always be the same.
“You have to promise me,” he says, serious now. “Do you promise me, Belle? In a way, you know, you’ve already promised.”
“I have?”
He nods slowly. His jaw gets so tight, his cheek begins to tick like a clock. The most beautiful clock. “It’s the only way.” He reaches out and strokes my face softly with his squid hands. It sends such a chill through me. Again, I think of being plunged into cold, dark water. I shiver in the hot June night.
“Is it going to hurt her?”
And Tom just smiles at me in the dark, under the wrong heaven. “Those are pretty stars up there,” he says. “Pretty as you are. So pretty you are. God. To be here with you. I definitely feel like the luckiest guy in the world right now.” I die inside when Tom says these words to me. Like we’re in a movie. The girl’s been pushed out of the world, and it’s just me and Tom now. I picture her falling off the edge, her honey-colored hair floating behind her, her pale skin glowing like Mother’s. Can it really be you saying these words to me, Tom Cruise? Of course it is. This is your face like the sun. These are your eyes like the sea. I watch him turn his smile to the stars. He doesn’t say anything about them being in the wrong place. He looks up at the ceiling like everything is exactly where it should be. The stars up there, and down here, me and Tom Cruise. Leaning in so I smell the ocean of him. Cold and blue and deep.
“Do you promise me?” he says.
I watch a red jellyfish float across his face. “If it’s the only way,” I say.
He kisses me on the lips. Just once. So light, like a touch of a touch. This time it doesn’t burn. It burns, yes, but not in a bad way. It’s like that wrong heaven of stars up there are all in my body now. Little dots of fiery light. But it doesn’t feel wrong anymore. It feels exactly right. Just like the right heaven.
“It is,” Tom says, stroking my hair. “Trust me, okay?” He takes my hand, and then sees the gold bracelet on my wrist. A funny look passes over his face as he looks into Father’s eye. Like he knows it, though how could he? “What’s this?”
“Nothing. Just a gift.”
“It’s ugly,” he hisses.
“I know,” I whisper. “Mother makes me wear it.”
Of course she would, Tom’s face says. “It doesn’t belong on your pretty wrist.” His voice is nearly a growl. So I slip off the bracelet and push it between the pile of dolls. A twinge of some bad feeling as I slide it away. Like I’ve abandoned Father. His eye is sad and alone now. I’ll put it back on after Tom goes. For now, I push it away.
Tom smiles. Red jellyfish are floating through his body. Not just his body, but the whole room. My whole bedroom is lit up like we’re underwater, how strange. There’s mist all around us now, like we’re in a strange fog. Maybe I’m really dreaming. Or drowning. Doesn’t matter.
I’m in heaven with Tom. Seth, I mean.
It’s heaven either way.
Part IV
19
It’s the light that wakes me. Morning light from a window, searing the backs of my eyelids red. What a strange, strange dream I had. Can’t remember any of it now, funny. Must be those blanks again. But the feeling of it lingers in my body—like I went deep down into the depths of myself and to wake up was to swim a long way back up to the surface, to come up gasping for air. And now? Now, my heavy lids are still closed, and I hear the sound of chimes like a strange church is nearby. A very pretty mist over my thoughts. As I wander through the mist, I see the reddest roses in vases being arranged by white hands. Their downward-pointing thorns like shining spikes.