VIII

The first time Lilah swore, she was fourteen. This was the year before mascara, that last year when she still thought nothing of wearing sweat pants to school. Roberta was still a year or so away from the Fernwood house, and Carl had left. They had moved, the three of them, into the basement apartment of an old house in Oak Bay. There were spiders. Lilah shared a room with Roberta and pretended not to notice the muffled sobs, the shaking that came from the other bed. Usually, Timothy would crawl into bed with her at some point in the night. He burned as he slept — a human furnace that smelled of snow and dirt and air.

That day, she walked home from school to the rhythm of her times tables. Eight times eight is sixty-four. Eight times nine is seventy-two. She’d always had trouble with these, and she was concentrating so hard that she missed the curb. Her foot buckled and down went the rest of her. Her face smacked against the stone.

She lay still for a moment, and then stumbled to her feet, the copper taste of shock warm in her mouth. Raised a hand and felt it, warm beneath her nose.

“Say fuck,” said a voice. She turned — slowly, still unsure of the world — and saw a boy. He was breathing hard; he’d been running. Later, Lilah would realize that he’d run to her. It had been a spectacular fall.

“Are you all right?” he said. Sixteen? Seventeen? She couldn’t tell.

“I think so.” Her words were slurred.

“Say fuck,” he said again. “It will make you feel better, I promise.”

“Fuck,” she whispered into the air. The word took shape and danced. Not good, a word brought to life with dirt and blood. But she didn’t know that then. She wouldn’t know until years later. Fuck and blood, linked forever.

—

She dreams of light that isn’t warm.

“This doesn’t hurt.” He hits her again.

She squirms underneath him, and uses her fingernails to scratch a white furrow in his arm. “Fuck you.”

“Delilah,” he says. He makes her name a benediction, a prayer. “It doesn’t hurt you. It can’t hurt you. How can I show you that you are so much more than your body?”

I don’t want you to show me. It would be so easy just to say it. But she doesn’t say it, because it isn’t true. Get off. She doesn’t say that, either.

“I won’t.” He kisses her, a lovely kiss that makes her think, for a moment, that none of this has happened. “Tell me. This doesn’t hurt, no?”

She weeps. “Please, Israel.” Or has she said anything at all? Maybe all of this is a dream, one small dream of a man with hands that could crush her. If he wanted, he could snap her arm, her neck. She is nothing but an extra layer of silk against the mattress.

“Let me go,” she whispers. “Please.”

He pulls his hands away from her wrists and sits back, then watches her in the dark. “You can go,” he says. “Emmanuel will drive you home.”

Her breath comes in short bursts — even her lungs hurt. Israel shifts so that he sits completely apart from her, dark at the end of the bed. Lilah doesn’t move.

“Well?” Even as he says it Lilah knows what her answer will be. She raises her arms above her head and rests them against the headboard. She looks at him, and says nothing.

“I thought so,” he says. She can hear the smile in his voice. He moves toward her, bringing darkness over her head like an angel, come to end the world.

And then she balls her fist and hits him, so fast it surprises them both. Her hand meets the hard curve of his cheek and keeps going, so that as Israel falls back her fist thuds into the bed. Her knuckles hit the mattress, crack. She breathes in and hunches, still. She can’t see. The room is so dark she can’t see.

Silence. Now — now — Lilah’s hands start to shake. Blue-white energy shoots through her arms, through her fingers. She throws her head back and sucks in air, opens her eyes and there he is, against the bed. She imagines that she can see the imprint of her hand on his cheek, the energy from her palm glowing soft against his skin. Were she to walk outside, right now, that same hand would write her name across the sky. She’s never been more certain of anything.

Israel laughs. “I thought so,” he says again. All of a sudden his hand is around her throat, solid and strong. She closes her eyes and thinks of nothing. Everything that she is has shrunk to this bed, and she is incandescent, suddenly, with the knowledge that she could die here, in this apartment, and no one would ever know.

—

Another dream, this one of death. A darkened road that glistens with new fallen rain, and Lilah, running across. Headlights. A flash of light greater than anything she’s ever known, and then she’s on the ground, and her ribs poke through her skin and she can’t breathe, she can’t breathe.

A man swims in front of her eyes. In the shadows his face is hollow and long. It is a kind face, creased with sorrow and some twitchy, unnamed fear. She reaches out to touch his cheek but nothing moves.

He shines. She is not imagining this. He is iridescent, shimmering with some uneven power. She tries again to reach his face, but the hand that stretches up is not hers. It is not even a hand. It is a hoof, broken and bleeding. She screams. The man reaches out to touch her and through his fingers she sees the sky splinter into countless shards. Behind them, oblivion. Death. Hers.

She wakes with icy fingers and an abdomen that aches. In her own bed, her own home, the ride back through Vancouver a silent memory, Emmanuel at the wheel. She climbs out of bed and into her bathroom, pees and then crawls back into bed. She snuggles deep into the duvet. Then she does the unthinkable, and calls her mother.

“Delilah,” Roberta says, before Lilah has even said hello. “It’s Timothy, isn’t it? Is he in the hospital? Have you found him? Is he sick?”

“Mom.” Impossible that her heart could break any more but it does. “No. I don’t know where he is. I was calling . . . about me.”

“You?” You. What is there to say about you?

“I mean — I need.”

“What, Delilah? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she says, finally. “Never mind. It’s okay, I’ll deal with it.”

“Are you sure?” Now she’s suspicious. When Lilah calls Roberta expects disaster, as easily as she might expect absolution from her priest. But Lilah can’t tell her about Israel, this man who took her for dinner last night and then beat her in his bed. This will terrify her. And then it will terrify Lilah, and who knows what happens then.

“I’m sure,” she says. She hangs up, and she looks at herself in the mirror. Her mouth is swollen and her eyes are red, wounds that will fade by tomorrow.

—

In the afternoon, she pulls herself out of bed and heads to the diner on Nicola. She has a lunch date with Joel. An apology. She wants to cancel, but instead she washes away the smell of Israel and counts her bruises in the mirror. She wants to be normal. To have a normal day, to remember what exactly it is that other people do. She spends as much time dressing today as she did the night before. She does her hair. She wears long sleeves. She picks a blue scarf that hides the bruises on her neck, and a hat to match. And as she walks to the diner Lilah imagines that, yes, she could love the haphazard, messy, charmingly idiotic Joe-with-an-L. Done. She could say it. She could make it true.

But even as she thinks this, she remembers the energy in her hands, that wild sense of freedom on the mattress. Her fingers, writing a name across the stars. And the fact that she did not die in that bed after all. So instead they dance for space in her head, the two of them. Joel, who finds her Catholic schoolgirl background a huge turn-on and thinks that the George Sand volumes on her bookshelf were written by a “homo.” Joe-with-an-L, who manages despite all of this to be charming, to make her laugh. And Israel. Israel Riviera, the boss, who has yet to say anything funny, who took her for dinner and then held her life like a seed in his hand.

Joel is late. He is also hungover, and quite possibly high. He squeezes half a bottle of ketchup onto his burger and massages the inside of Lilah’s thigh as if he thinks it’s her vagina. His hands feel small and girlish. In the harsh light of the diner he looks — not unfit, exactly, but softer than a man really has any right to be.

“I really like you,” he says. He talks with his mouth full and sprays hamburger onto the table.

Lilah thinks of Timothy, who had a seizure two days before he left home and vomited his dinner over Roberta’s best china. “Thanks.”

“I should move in,” Joel says. “Don’t you think so?”

“You don’t call me enough.”

“But if we lived together, I wouldn’t have to call you.”

“Maybe.” She eats the rest of her salad in silence, and wonders what Israel is doing. Graphing management charts? Drinking wine? Reading in his apartment, intellectual and harmless?

“I don’t love you.” She blurts the words with her mouth half full. Now it is her turn — milk sprays across the table and sprinkles Joel’s lap.

“Love?” he says. He is surprised. “Who said anything about love?” He wipes his mouth and misses a piece of lettuce that sticks in his stubble. For some reason, Lilah thinks of Timothy again and fights back tears. “Love is a farce, Lilah,” Joel says, suddenly serious. “All you can do is find someone to hold on to — that’s it.”

“I don’t want to hold on to you,” she says. Because she’s a bitch, because this is what she was meant for. Hearts broken around her like glass.

Joel is unfazed. Not for the first time, she realizes how much she’s underestimated this man. “You will,” he says. “I might have to wait a few years, but you will.”

“Why the fuck would you think that?”

He shrugs. “You’ve got no one else, Lilah. Don’t tell me you can’t feel your life falling away. Sooner or later you’ll want to do something with it. And I’ll be here when you do.”

“That’s pathetic,” she snaps, and she’s up from the table fast enough to make it shake. She opens her mouth to tell him about The Actor — no one else, fuck you — and then remembers that The Actor is gone, that she sent him away.

“It’s not,” Joel says. “It’s not pathetic at all.” He wipes his face again and gets the lettuce. “You think I can’t tell how much you hurt?”

“Fuck you.”

He shrugs. “Fine, then. If that’s what you want.” He shakes his head as she reaches for the bill. “Never mind that. I’ll get it.”

Lilah stays bent over the bill for a moment — frozen, seething with rage. Then she straightens, and as she stalks away the clack of her shoes on the hardwood floor gives the only kind of comfort she can find.

She walks down Hastings before she goes home, as always. It is an oddly empty day — air damp, first fall leaves on the ground. She shoves her hands into too-small pockets. Main, Gore, Columbia, Abbott. Eyes open for a tousled head, a ragged heap rocking on the ground.

At one point, she sees a figure crouched in an alleyway; a flutter stays in her abdomen even after seeing a face she doesn’t recognize. A man bent on his knees, his hands pressed against the wall and his forehead touching the brick. He mumbles into the wall. He might be praying. He might be mad.

She stops staring and turns. This time the sound of her shoes on the pavement is hollow, and the echoes follow her as she hurries away.

—

All great men are terrified — this is what Timothy told her, all those days ago. He’d been reading The Inferno in the months before he’d left their mother’s house.

“Dante was frightened,” he told her, once. “He was really frightened.”

“Of what?” The two of them, a nice coffee shop in Victoria. Time away from the office job. She watched a couple at the patio table across from them laugh.

“Of failure. It seemed to me that I had undertaken too lofty a theme for my powers, so much so that I was afraid to enter upon it, and so I remained for several days desiring to write and afraid to begin. Even he felt it.”

“But you’re not failing,” she said. Careful, suddenly terrified. “You’re not failing at anything, Tim.”

“Aren’t I?” He rocked back and forth in his chair and wouldn’t look at her. “I think I’m failing all the time.”

“At what? We’ve talked about school — you can go back when you’re ready — ”

“School,” and there it was, just for a moment, a flash of the Timothy she remembered. “I’m not talking about school.”

“Then what are you talking about?”

He stared at the table and smoothed his napkin down against the wood. “But you shouldn’t be afraid, Lilah. You shouldn’t be afraid.”

“Afraid of what?” she said, exasperated and so cold all at once. The couple looked over at their table, then away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Timmy. I don’t understand.”

“Don’t call me that. I’m not ten years old anymore.”

“Timothy.” Deep breath. “I shouldn’t be afraid. Of what?”

“Me,” he said, and this time he did look at her. “You shouldn’t be afraid, Lilah. I won’t hurt you, ever.”

“Of course you won’t,” she said. She held his hand and marvelled at how warm he was, how hot. “I know. I know that.”

Two weeks later he left, and hurt her anyway.

—

When she does find him, later that day after leaving Joel, he’s sitting at the western edge of Georgia, bedraggled and alone. She brings him water, and chocolate, and another goddamned hat. He lets her pull the flaps of the hat over his ears. She ties the hat strings beneath his chin, just as she did when he was a child.

“I don’t have a fever,” he says. He breaks the chocolate and sucks a large piece into his mouth, and speaks as though the flight from her house hasn’t happened. “I’m fine.”

“Timmy.” She crouches beside him and rests her hands against the sidewalk. “Timmy, come home.”

“That’s not my name,” he says. “You know that’s not my name, Lilah.”

“I don’t understand,” she says. “Tim — I don’t know what to do.”

She watches uncertainty flash across his face. “You’re not supposed to know. It’s not your life.”

“But what about my life?” Israel Riviera, above her, and blue-white energy in her hands. “What if it’s just . . . too big?”

He sucks his chocolate and stares at her for so long she feels the world recede. “We’re all small, Lilah,” he says. He takes another bite of chocolate and lets it melt, dribble down his chin. Her sweet maniac. “You have to know that, if you don’t know anything else.” He offers a bite of the bar and she takes it, hurt.

“I know plenty of things,” she says. “Don’t take that tone with me.”

He hiccups, laughs. “Don’t take that tone with me.” Then he stares at the ground. He wipes the chocolate against his sleeve. “I’m just trying to keep you safe. You and Mom both.”

“We’re not the ones who need to be kept safe!” She’s said this too many times. She grabs his arms and steels her heart against the sudden rush of panic in his eyes, the despair. “Tim. There are people who can help you.”

He screams. “Don’t touch me!” Then he hits her. Smack, once more in the mouth. She rocks back on her heels just as he scrambles to his feet — a slender young man made huge by the gathered shadows at his back. “No one can help me but God, Delilah. No one.” Then he runs down the street like a terrified rat, quick and small.

—

Tonight, in another dream, she stands before the ocean, on a cliff that sits several hundred feet above the sea. Her palms are filled with grass and sand. Her dream-feet are bare and the shirt she wears belongs — belonged — to her mother. Reclaim the Night! A relic from Roberta’s frog-marching days, when she was filled with rage and estrogen and Lilah was her unwilling partner in crime. The shirt disappeared years ago but tonight, as she stares out over the water, it is threadbare and soft on her shoulders. In some places the material is so thin you can almost see through it.

A man stands in front of her on the cliff. A slender man, taller than she is, who faces into the sun so that he is a silhouette, his arms stark against the sky. His shoulders remind her of Timothy. Were he to turn his head his eyes would be deepest blue.

“Timothy,” she says. The wind blows her hair into her mouth and the words come out clogged.

The man does not turn around. Instead, he raises his hands until they touch, palms inward, over the top of his head. All Lilah can hear is the ocean, and she watches as the waters rise up to her feet. The man pushes his arms out and the water begins to recede. Lilah stands behind him until the tide is far away and there are rocks at the bottom of the cliffs. Now she hears the air, the faint rustle of wings. She opens her own hands and lets the grass and the sand blow away until they are nothing. Would that she could break and blow away this easily — but even in this dream, she remembers that she’s made of sterner stuff. She is the rock below that breaks the water.

She wakes weeping, and she can’t remember why.

—

On Monday, she wills herself invisible behind the desk, and buries her head in spreadsheets. She steadies her hands as they shake over the keyboard, and counts her times tables, slowly, as one minute moves into the next. Not sure quite what to think, what to feel. Is it fear, that twist in her stomach every time the door opens? Excitement? The flu?

“What’s with you?” Debbie asks, exasperated, as Lilah blinks into focus for the eighteenth time that morning. “Hello?”

“I’m sorry,” she says, quickly. Statistics. Figures. Absence reports. A moment on a mattress, the certainty that her life was about to explode with power. Or a daydream, and more words lost on her keyboard. That’s all. “What did you say?”

Debbie has green eyes, young but shrewd; they have looked through Lilah more than once. “I said — how was your weekend?”

“Fine,” Lilah says. “And yours?”

“Fine,” Debbie mimics. “That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“How was the date?”

“It was fine, Debbie.”

“You know you’ll have to tell me about it eventually.”

“Maybe,” Lilah says. She doesn’t look up. “Does Penny have any errands for me today?”

Debbie’s snort echoes through the front office. “Not that I know of.”

“I’m sure she’ll think of something,” Lilah mutters.

“She wouldn’t be Penny if she didn’t,” Debbie says, absentmindedly. She flicks her chin at Lilah and frowns. “Why is your neck all red?”

“It’s nothing,” Lilah pulls her scarf tight around her neck. “I’m cold. Have I told you how much I hate winter?”

“Multiple times.” Debbie pinches her lips together in a gesture that reminds her of Roberta. Lilah stifles a giggle and turns back to her computer. Spreadsheets. Numbers and lines.

At a quarter to ten, Debbie gets her notepad and goes into the inner office, ready for the morning minutes. But no sooner has the door closed than she’s out again, looking both perplexed and highly amused.

“Mr. Riviera wants you to take the minutes,” she says. “That must have been some date.”

“What?”

“He wants you to take the minutes,” Debbie says patiently. “Do you need my steno pad?”

“I can’t take minutes,” Lilah stammers. “My shorthand is crap.”

“Really?” Debbie’s voice is pointed, still amused. “I thought it was okay.”

Lilah shakes her head. “I don’t want special treatment, Debbie. Just — tell them that I’ll fuck it up. Screw it up. Whatever.”

“You want me to disobey a direct order from the boss?”

“He won’t be mad at you. If he gets angry about anything, he’ll be angry at me.”

“Right. And that’s supposed to make me feel better.”

“I don’t want to be in there. With him. In front of everyone else.”

Debbie does not move. “He can’t very well ream you out in front of the entire senior management team.”

“It’s not that,” Lilah says wearily. “Could you please just do this for me, Debbie?” She looks up into the other girl’s troubled face. “Everything’s fine — just tell him I don’t see why anything has to change.”

“All right.” Debbie does not look convinced. “And if Penny says anything?”

“Oh.” Right. Penny. “Well, I’ll survive.”

Another snort from Debbie’s corner. “I’m sure.” Then she goes back into the office. She doesn’t come out for two hours.

Mondays are usually quiet, and today is no different. No one calls, and because Penny is in the meeting, Lilah passes the time between her spreadsheets and the Internet. For two hours, she is once more administrative sludge — unremarkable, unimportant. The kind of woman who does her time and counts down the minutes to her break. The employee who doesn’t think beyond the weekend.

But it is pretending, only that. As she types she listens for the rise and fall of his voice — there’s an entire wall between them and yet she can see him, clear as clear, sitting calm at the head of the table. Talking figures, talking power. The cadence of his accent holding everyone in rapt attention. If she closes her eyes she can smell him, feel his hand around her throat. He’s so close that when the door opens, two hours later, and she turns to it like a flower following the sun, she isn’t the least bit surprised to see his face. He marches over to her desk and stares down at her.

“Are you avoiding me?” he says.

“No.” She hates the sound of her small voice. “Good morning, Mr. Riviera.”

Israel laughs. “Delilah, I should think we are past that by now.”

Behind him, in the doorway, Penny stands murderous. “We’re at work,” Lilah says, her voice low. “I don’t want to lose my job.”

“No?” His own voice dips. “Because it is such a wonderful job?” Then he leans against the top corner of her desk and takes her hand. His palm is rough and warm. “Your mother. How is she?”

Lilah blinks, surprised. What is there to say about Roberta? “She’s fine. As fine as she could be, I guess.” Her hair grown back now, her thin hands poking holes in Victoria dirt.

“Ah.” His eyes are also shrewd; dark eyes, eyes that have no bottom. “Fine, but not well.”

“She’s fine,” Lilah says again. She’s confused. Where has this come from? “We’re all fine.”

“‘We,’” he says. “You, and your mother. And Timothy.”

“Yes.” She sneaks a glance at Penny, still waiting. “And — Timothy.”

“You are loyal, even though you’re angry. Even though they frighten you.”

Lilah scoffs. Debbie, who has come back to her desk, is typing furiously into her computer, her eyes cast low. “They don’t frighten me.”

“You would do anything for them,” he says softly. “Even now, you are trying to protect them, to keep them happy. That is a very rare thing.”

“It’s not. Anyone with a family would do the same.” She wants to yank her hand away. This is so much worse than taking minutes.

Israel shakes his head. “If you did not have them,” he says, “you would be nothing.”

She stands abruptly and pulls him with her, out through the front door. They walk a few paces away from the office windows, and she turns to face him. “What is it with you and these stupid statements?”

He laughs, clearly delighted. “It’s been so long since someone has spoken to me the way you do, Delilah. I am — I am utterly enchanted.”

“Well, that’s just fantastic,” she snaps. “And I’m mortified. What the fuck are you talking about? My family isn’t gone.”

“Not yet. But if they were? You would need something else. You would fight for it the same way, protect it just like you try to protect your brother.” He touches her cheek. “Even if it threatened to break your heart. Even then.”

She’s suddenly dizzy — she stumbles on the sidewalk and braces herself against his arm. “I’m going back inside now,” she says. Does Penny sit inside, waiting? “Let’s not make a habit of this.”

“A habit of little displays in the office?” he says. Has she ever heard a more beautiful voice, ever? “Or a habit of strange conversation?”

“How about both?”

He chuckles. “Are you going to avoid me?”

“Is that what this is about? One date and I’m supposed to be your office lap dog? One date and it’s okay to ask me personal questions in front of the entire office?” She stares into his face and does not blink. “Well, I won’t. I won’t be that girl.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to.” Now he is smooth, and just the tiniest bit smug. “It was merely a test.”

She opens her mouth, and nothing comes out. She wants his face beneath her hand, the skin of his ear between her teeth. Blue-white energy pulsing swift between her fingers.

“I thought so.” He nods once. “So if I say we’re going to have dinner, again, this Friday night, you won’t say no.”

“Ah . . . no.” Could she avoid this man, even if she wanted to? Even if she tried?

“Friday night,” he says, again. “I will cook for you this time.”

He cooks. “Friday night,” she repeats slowly. “At yours.”

“Yes.”

She has bruises like a necklace along her collarbone. Of course she should say no. But the air around them is sharp, heightened. Everything around her is sharpened when he’s around. She pauses for a moment and summons her will. “Should I bring anything?”

“No.” Again, the uneven smile. How does a man this sure have a smile this crooked? “Just yourself.”

“All right.”

Israel nods. “Good. I will see you then.” He walks back into the office. She does not see him for the rest of the day, or the day after that, or the next one. By the end of the week, if it weren’t for the bruises still fading from her skin, she’d be tempted to say it was all just a dream.