“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Gregory screamed, staring at the cat in Ema’s hands, black with white paws, its belly slit wide. The animal’s mouth opened and a hideous gurgling squeal came out.
Dragna Negrescu dropped the cat into the sink. Her hand scrabbled to her bodice and pulled the shining pendant from between her breasts. “Mănâncă mamaliga dvs, Grigor!” Negrescu stepped to Gregory with the pendant held high. “Pot¸i să-l miros?”
Eat your mamaliga, Grigor. Can you smell it?
“WHAT are …” Gregory’s voice stopped. Only his lips moved.
“Grigor,” Negrescu said. “Mirosul mamaliga.”
Smell the mamaliga.
The smell of the dish filled Gregory’s mind. The cat trap fell from limp fingers and opened, the kitten dashing away. He stared past the woman, past the wall, past the house. All he could do was stare.
Negrescu calmly studied Gregory as she washed blood from her hands, seeing dilated pupils and recalling his fast and sometimes incoherent speech at their last meal. Some kind of drug, probably inevitable. She sighed: this part of her journey was ending.
Last year she’d realized money would become an issue: live well and burn through the inheritance in a few years, or keep the money in stable investments supplemented with mindless labor, or …
Get more money.
“Come into the living room, Grigor,” Negrescu said, drying her hands on a towel. “It’s time we talked seriously. It’s been too long.”
Walking as mechanically as a robot, Gregory followed Negrescu into her pink-hued living room. She sat on the white frilly couch and patted the space beside her. Gregory sat. Dragna Negrescu smiled at Grigor with a beatific face found in a Cooking Light article: How to Make Heavenly Pie Crusts. She reached behind her neck and unbuttoned the pendant.
“Ce este lumina, Grigor?” she said, the orb of light rolling between her fingers. “What is the light?”
“Uh …”
“Cred, Grigor. Ce este lumina? Think … what is the light?”
“Esti lumina, Ema. You are the light. My light.”
“Good boy. You’ve been in my house, haven’t you? Ema’s house. Go ahead, Grigor, talk.”
“Da, Ema,” he said, staring straight ahead. “I was looking for your records. Your money.”
Negrescu leaned against Gregory and stroked a strand of hair from his forehead. “What a good boy you are, Grigor. Such fine and useful instincts. What happened next?”
He paused, his mind ticking through events like a clock. “I killed Harriet Ralway. Her filthy, lying daughter said terrible things to me.”
“You’re going to kill Ema next, Gregory? Is that the plan?”
Gregory frowned. “When it’s time.”
Negrescu smiled. “You’ll not kill Ema yet, Grigor. You have unfinished business with the police. Remember how they humiliated you with everyone watching? Made the rahat pour down your legs? Laughed as they stole your manhood?”
Gregory’s eyes stared through Ema, through the wall behind her, through the walls of the house. “The police laughed, Ema. Everyone laughed at me.”
“What happened next?”
“The big policeman pulled a stick. He w-waved it at me and, uh …”
“Look in your head, Grigor. What happened next?”
Gregory’s eyes tightened in anger. “He hit me with the stick. He insulted me.”
“Good. What happened next?”
“They … um, he, uh, I don’t remem—”
Negrescu’s hand lashed out and slapped Gregory’s face, sounding like a gunshot. “We’ve been through this a hundred times, Grigor. I put it in your mind: Look at it and get angry. What happened next?”
“People called me a freak,” Gregory hissed through clenched teeth. “A pervert. Shit boy. The police threw me to the ground. They insulted me.”
“They told you to go home and learn how to use a toilet, didn’t they?” Dragna Negrescu said. “Just like all those years ago. When you’d poop yourself when you ate too much on special nights.”
“Yes.”
“Their insults made you angry enough to kill, didn’t they? To regain your honor.”
“Yes. Yes!”
“It’s been such fun, Grigor, seeing my … our work on the television, in the papers. We can keep going. Would you like that?”
Gregory slitted his eyes and made a buzzing sound with his lips. Negrescu stared at him, then stood. She put her hands on her hips and studied herself in the mirror, pleased with its report. She returned to Gregory and slipped her fingers through his hair, leaning until her teeth were at his ear.
“Do you know who I am, Grigor?” she whispered. “Can you see beneath my mask?”
“Ema.”
“Ema? Not Dragna Negrescu, the records clerk from so long ago … the woman who rode you across the sea and into her dream?”
“You’re Ema,” Gregory said. “My Ema.”
Negrescu licked Gregory’s ear, her whisper growing husky. “There never was an Ema, my sweet little project. I made her from a few pieces of paper. Popescu showed me how to present her to you.”
“Popescu,” Gregory repeated. It was a word he thought he should know, but it seemed far away, on the other side of a towering rock wall. Ema planted a kiss on Gregory’s head and the pendant flashed once again, followed by a few words in Romanian.