23
The Lake Sumner motel, room number five
Wesley helped me to my feet and into the bathroom.
“Do you want me in there?” he asked when we stumbled upward, his voice rough with tears.
“Please.” I turned to offer him the zipper of my dress.
He opened the shower and took off his shirt as I peeled out of my dress, my underthings, my ruined stockings. The pain was there, but I could feel none of it.
Wesley tested the water with his hand before steadying me in ahead of him. He scrubbed carefully at my skin—working the dirt away, rinsing the blood from my knees and elbows and heels of my hands in small, steady passes. When he turned me to face him so he could start rinsing my hair, I found he had a few bobby pins in his teeth.
His eyes flicked up to meet mine, raw and miserable. The water had gotten him just as wet. It wouldn’t have mattered if he cried, but still he insisted on holding himself together.
“I want him to die, Wesley,” I said, without knowing I was going to say it.
“So do I,” he said around the pins, lathering a dollop of shampoo between his palms.
“I want to kill him.”
With his hands stilled in my hair, cleaning me of the horror I would never be able to shake from my body’s memory, not entirely, Wesley stared at me; into the awful hunger in me, awakened.
Over his shoulder, I found the Lady watching from the mirror above the sink. Her hair was unbound and her nightgown stained red by the pathways of her bloodied palms. Conviction lived deep in her eyes.
Devour.
I closed my eyes and sank into the feeling of Wesley gentling the mud from my scalp.
Devour, sang my racing pulse, my shuddering breath, the awful rhythm of defiance. Devour. Devour. Devour.
We dressed in our pajamas. I pulled Jesse’s knife from its place in the vanity drawer without ceremony. Wesley balked at the sight of it.
“Is that yours?” he asked lightly, tinged with alarm.
“It was a gift,” I said, and levered it open before setting it on the floor to sit vigil beside it.
I pulled my legs in to my chest by the shins and settled back against the side of one bed, in the alley between them. The red enamel of the knife’s handle shivered each time I blinked.
“Come sit, Wes,” I said without looking up, my chin balanced on both knees over the slippery silk of my nightgown.
“I don’t—”
“You promised.” I looked straight at him. “ ‘Say the word and it’s done.’ Did you mean it?”
Wesley stared at me, wrung out and dog-tired in a fresh undershirt and shorts. From the floor, the shadows cast longways across his body made him look carved from fine-veined marble. He didn’t blink for a very long time.
“You swore,” I whispered. “Our wedding night, Wesley, you swore—”
“You think I can do it?” he cut in, the hint of a manic chuckle making him pause. He put a hand over his mouth and stared at the knife. “Jesus, Jack, you think I can even— Can you?”
He gestured broadly at me with a flat hand. I stared at him.
“Who do you think I am, Wesley?”
He swallowed, his throat sticking wetly to itself. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
The heavy silence compounded with each passing second.
Reluctantly surrendering, Wesley sat down next to me. I gathered him up against my side and began to imagine.
I rambled aloud, softly—the theater, late at night, just the three of us; a chance to seize back from him what he’d taken from me. It moved through me like a current, not of my mind but of my instinct. My spirit.
The spirit was all that mattered.
I went silent when I reached the end of it and dwelled on the bloody dream-shapes making space in my head.
Wesley was a heavy, mortal weight on my shoulder.
“Alright,” he whispered. “It’s your show, Jack. Whatever you need.”
I let the silence settle overtop of us again, sealing us in together with the decision made.
“You ever dream up a way to do it before?” I asked.
Wesley made an ironic sniff. “Sure, plenty of times. But I never made a plan.”
I stared at the knife, the arch of the shoe, the liquid sex of the handle’s calf curve. “Not even Andrew?”
“I don’t have your conviction.”
“Nonsense.” I elbowed him gently. “You got plenty of conviction, Shoardie.”
He gave me a miserable smile. I searched his face.
“Do you wanna go over it again?” I asked. The crown of dawn was threatening outside by now. Not even the coyotes were still out yipping.
Wesley dragged both hands down his face. “Sure.”
“You’ll invite him to the theater,” I said. The pocketknife really was beautiful. “For dinner. Dessert. I’ll put on my best face, pretend all’s forgotten.”
“You’re sure you’re okay to do that?” Wesley asked.
“I’ve played harder roles for less important reasons.”
Wesley drew his knees up and ran a thumb over his lower lip. “How will we get away with it?”
“The stage already looks like someone’s been slaughtered.”
Staring at me, Wesley’s brow twitched. “Jesus,” he said.
“What?”
Wesley didn’t look away from me as he swallowed. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing, I just. Thought about it again.”
I gathered him back to me with my arm around his shoulders. “You don’t have to think.”
“Good,” he murmured, staring at the blade as though the answers to every question he didn’t know how to ask were etched onto it.
I kissed him on the forehead. “Good man,” I said into his hairline.
If I’d thought my nails were a mess before Haas’s violence, they were a wreck now. I sat on the floor in the center of the room and filed them as I waited for Wesley to be done with his errands, put on his breeziest, most unassuming air, and stop by Haas’s room to invite him out to the theater that night for one last private romp.
We were leaving for New York tomorrow morning. I had tried packing to distract myself, but all I could do was stare at my hands and be reminded.
I didn’t want my body to be a mirror in which I only saw its horrors.
I looked up at the vanity. Only my head and shoulders reflected back, my hair dried in a wavy riot from leaving it wet last night. Wesley and I had hardly slept, but we managed.
The vague formants of speech burred in through the wall our room shared with number six. I put down the nail file and crept to press my ear to the faded wallpaper.
Tonight, I heard, unmistakable in the clip of Wesley putting on his shy-but-pretending-I’m-not-trying-to-be smile. We’re…to go…off without you.
I clenched my jaw and did my best not to vomit as I heard Haas’s voice, low and intrigued.
I couldn’t bear it. I stalked back to the opposite side of the room and glared at the wall in silence.
The door opened two, three minutes later. I watched Wesley latch the deadbolt and the safety chain, and then I went over to examine both locks myself to ensure they were done to my liking.
“Is he going to come?” I whispered.
Wesley took his time sliding off his shoes and rubbed fiercely at his eyes with the heels of his hands as he sighed heavily. “We’re taking him to a picnic at the theater tonight as a last hurrah,” he murmured, not uncovering his eyes. “Well after dark, just the three of us. He asked if you agreed, I told him you loved the idea. He has a key to the front of house.”
There was still a snarled piece left at the edge of my torn thumbnail. I chewed at it with my front teeth for a long spell of silence. “Does he know you know?” I asked around my knuckle.
Wesley ran a hand through his hair. The bags under his eyes were bruised and sallow. “About what, last night?”
I nodded, still chewing.
“No. He seemed perfectly unfazed, although he definitely had a hangover. Offered me some hair of the dog.”
“Prick,” I spat, wanting to yell but keeping it soft.
“Understatement,” Wesley said, and rooted into his bags to hunt out whatever was left in his own flask.
With nothing else to do before dark then, I set back to packing. We moved in silence, not even the radio buzzing along, and separated our things from their muddled piles—his clothes from mine, my toiletries from his, packing our lives back into our separate bags.
“If nothing lets to make us happy both,” Wesley announced out of the blue with his stage voice, shaking out a pair of my slacks, “but this my masculine usurped attire, do not embrace me till each circumstance of place, time, fortune, do cohere and jump that I am Viola.”
I gave him a tired look. “Those are my lines,” I said. Wesley raised his eyebrows and pitched the trousers at me. I barely caught them.
“Which to confirm,” he continued, digging through the dresser drawers, “I’ll bring you to a captain in this town, where lie my maiden weeds; by whose gentle help I was preserved to serve this noble count.” He carefully exhumed my folded underthings. “All the occurrence of my fortune since hath been between this lady and this lord.”
I watched him flatly for a long moment before Wesley glanced over his shoulder at me and gave a go on, then look.
“Be not amazed,” I said, assuming Orsino’s role with my voice weary-weak; “right noble is his blood. If this be so, as yet the glass seems true, I shall have share in this most happy wrack.” I pulled one of Wesley’s ties from the back of the armoire and crossed over to flick it up and around his neck. “Boy, thou hast said to me a thousand times thou never shouldst love woman like to me.”
Wesley flashed a tired smile. “And all those sayings will I overswear,” he insisted, “and all those swearings keep as true in soul as doth that orbèd continent the fire that severs day from night.”
I pulled one of my wrinkled dresses from its hanger and examined it briefly—one of the first I’d worn here in Sumner, a bright linen blend that knew nothing of what awaited. I returned to Wesley and held it up to his body. “Give me thy hand,” I said, pretending to appraise the fit of it, “and let me see thee in thy woman’s weeds.”
Wesley raised his eyebrows and twisted his face up into a saucy look that had never failed to make me laugh.
I tried to, truly, I did; but there was no quarter inside me for joy. Where I wanted so badly to do nothing but laugh with my dearest friend, all I could do was hold in another weary tide of tears.
Wesley held me, pressing the dress between us, and let me collect myself with the last of my dignity. I relented to my sorrow only briefly, one last time, in the perfect privacy of our safe haven.