Mardi Gras Mambo

I had just stuck my head under the shower jet when Colin said something I couldn’t hear.

I pulled my head back, wiping water out of my eyes, and said, “Huh? Sorry, I didn’t hear you.”

The hot water felt incredibly good as it streamed over my body. The water pressure was almost strong enough to knock me down, tired as I was, but he was standing right behind me. I leaned back into him for just a moment before balancing on my own feet again. The water pooling in the bottom of the tub was gold with flecks of glitter floating on the surface. Colin was scrubbing my back with a bar of soap. It felt really good.

“I said, it’s really scary when you go into one of your trances,” he repeated, as he massaged soap into my butt cheeks. “I mean, you’re not out for very long—thirty seconds, maybe, tops—but it scares the piss out of me still, you know? Your whole body twitches, your eyes roll back in your head, and you mutter a lot. It’s almost like you’re having an epileptic fit. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.”

“Really?” I hadn’t given it much thought. Of course, I’d never witnessed one of my trances, just experienced it. It’s been happening to me for almost ten years; I had the first one when I was nineteen. I was by myself when it happened, in my apartment in Nashville, when I was going to Vanderbilt. It had been scary for me; when I came out of it, I had no idea what was going on or what had caused it. I’d been reading the tarot cards for years, since a friend of my parents’ had told me I was psychic and had sent me a deck, but that was the first time I’d ever had a direct communication of any kind with the Goddess. For a while, I’d been afraid that I might have one of the trances in a public place, but the Goddess was far kinder than that. She always managed to wait to talk to me until I was either alone or in the company of friends or family.

This time had been different, though. It was the first time I’d ever gone into a trance and come out of it not remembering anything—but I felt a lot calmer. “I don’t foam at the mouth or anything, do I?” I asked. That would be all I needed.

This provoked a laugh. “No, you don’t.” He turned me around so the water was rinsing the soap off my back. “But it always gives me a jolt—I mean, what if something was seriously wrong with you and we just assumed it was another trance? How would we know?”

I’d never thought about that and shivered, despite the hot water. “I don’t know. . . . Everyone always says they last less than a minute, so if I’m ever out for longer than that, better get me to the emergency room.”

“Okay, you’re paint free.” Colin stepped back and grinned at me. “My turn.”

I moved aside and let him step past me into the stream of water and brushed against his side as we switched places. He winked at me as he handed me the bar of soap and faced me. He leaned back and let his head go under the water. Streams of steamy water cascaded down his torso, leaving tracks in the gold paint I’d spent so much time putting on him. I soaped up my hands and started rubbing on his chest. The body paint washed off, exposing his olive skin, but I kept kneading his chest. Colin’s body is thickly muscled, but he isn’t ripped the way Frank is. When Colin flexes his muscles, the muscle cords become defined and the veins pop out, but when he’s relaxed, his skin and muscles are smooth as silk. His muscles are hard and don’t give when you push on them or squeeze them. It’s like trying to squeeze a rock in your hands. I ran the soap over his smooth, flat stomach, and then down the legs. The soapsuds on my hands began to take on a golden, frothy hue, so I rinsed them off and started again. Colin moaned a little bit, and then I turned him around and started working on his back.

“Can you believe this?” I asked, as I slipped the soap into the crack between his cheeks and then out and down the back of his legs.

“That feels nice,” Colin said, half drowsily. “Believe what?”

“This whole crazy triplet thing. Isn’t this insane?”

He turned around and looked me in the eyes, laughing. “I think there’s never a dull moment with you or your family, is what I think.”

“I know. I cannot believe Papa Diderot—” I stopped myself.

“I think there’s more to this than we think,” he interrupted me and pulled me close so that our bodies were pressed up together, the water splashing into my eyes. “But we’re better off out of it. If it’s the Russian mob we’re dealing with, we’re better off leaving it to the cops. You don’t know what they would do.” He shuddered.

“How do you know what the Russian mob would do?” I reached around him and turned the water off.

We stepped out of the tub, and I handed him a towel. I started drying off my legs. “I’ve dealt with the Russians before.” Colin shrugged, wiping the towel across his chest. “They aren’t—they aren’t nice people, Scotty. They kill first and ask questions later. If they even think you’ve betrayed them, they kill you. Bim, bam, boom.” He rubbed the towel through his curly hair. “And I don’t quite believe Sasha’s story.”

“Join the club.” I pulled on a pair of gray sweatpants and tied the drawstring. “If Mom hadn’t had the DNA test done, I’d be willing to bet the farm every single word he said to us was a lie. I mean, it was a good story and all, but I don’t know. . . .” He has your grandfather’s eyes, Scotty. You know he’s family.

Colin put on his black sweatpants. “I don’t trust him either. He knows more than he’s letting on. Come on, let’s go to bed.”

We’d decided to stay at Mom and Dad’s and take a nap before heading home. I hated the thought of Frank out with someone else—but I just needed to get over that. We didn’t own each other, after all.

Sasha was being put up in Rain’s old room for the night. The sun was just starting to come up as we walked out of the bathroom into my old room. The rest of the apartment was dark and silent. I switched on the overhead light. Mom and Dad had kept my room exactly the way it was when I’d moved out, which always kind of creeped me out a little. It was like a Scotty shrine—which was just plain weird.

But whenever I had to sleep there, it was kind of comforting.

Well, Mom had cleaned it, so it wasn’t exactly the same. It had never been tidy when I’d lived in it.

On one wall was a poster of Mark Wahlberg from his Marky Mark days, wearing just a pair of Calvin Klein briefs and a big inviting smile. Over my desk was a poster of Scott Madsen, the original Soloflex model. My high school wrestling trophies and medals were scattered over the top of the bookcase holding all the books I’d read as a kid—everything from the blue spines of the Hardy Boys to Patricia Nell Warren’s The Front Runner. Sleeping in my room was like stepping back in time. I turned down the covers and slid underneath. “I can’t believe Frank didn’t have the decency to tell me he was leaving,” I said, pouting a little. Grow up, Scotty!

Colin reached into his little shoulder bag and pulled out his cell phone. “You weren’t there, Scotty. We looked for you, but we just couldn’t find you, and Frank did tell me, you know. I never knew you were so jealous.”

“I’m not jealous!” Liar.

He dialed a number and just gave me that infuriating grin. “Hmmm. He’s not answering. Obviously, he’s otherwise occupied.” He lay down next to me and put his arms around me. “Guess you’ll just have to settle for me tonight.” He nuzzled my neck. “Am I not enough for you?”

I pushed him away. “That’s not it; you know that. But I’m not in the mood, okay? This has been a really weird night.”

“Sure. Okay.” He shrugged.

“Colin—” I stopped, not really knowing how to say it.

He put his hands behind his head. “What?”

I hesitated, trying to think of the right way to say it, and then plunged ahead. “How do you . . . how do you know the things you do? I mean, you said you’ve dealt with the Russian mob before. You know how to fix engines, you can hack into the INS computer, you can . . .” My voice trailed off.

He gave me a sad smile. “I also speak five languages fluently: English, French, Hebrew, Arabic, and German.”

My jaw dropped. “How?” I grasped for words. “I mean, you never talk about your past, your family, anything.” It was true. When he’d moved into the apartment upstairs from mine, there was nothing really personal there. No pictures of family—Frank had plenty. You couldn’t turn around up there without bumping into Frank memorabilia. Photos of his dead parents, his sister and her family, his graduation picture from Quantico—there was no escaping it. But Colin had nothing—no college diplomas, nothing of a personal nature, like high school yearbooks and photo albums or anything. It was like he’d never existed before he came to New Orleans. He’d just moved in with his clothes, some CDs, and some books, but other than that, nothing. I’d noticed it—Frank had even said something about it to me once—but we decided to let Colin open up to us about his past in his own time.

“I wondered when you were going to ask. With your curiosity, it must have been driving you crazy.”

“Actually, no.” I shrugged. “I figured you’d talk about your past whenever you were ready to. But I really want to know.”

He leaned back against the headboard and closed his eyes. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”

“Yes, I do.” I sighed. “I mean, this whole thing with the triplets, I mean, I can’t believe Mom and Dad kept this from me. I don’t want us to have any secrets, okay?”

He sighed. “Okay. I was born in San Francisco. My parents were Jewish—Italian Jews whose families had gotten out of Italy before, well, before the war. I had an older sister and two younger brothers. When I was ten, my dad was killed in a car accident. My mom’s brother had relocated with his family to Israel right before I was born, and my mother decided to move us there too after Dad died. She couldn’t take all the memories in San Francisco, I guess.” He gave me a sad smile. “I was fifteen when they all died.”

“They died?” I felt a knot forming in the pit of my stomach.

“It was my brother Noah’s birthday,” he went on, his voice an emotionless monotone. “I had a test the next day, so Mom made me stay home. I was furious. They were all going to a movie and then out for pizza after. I was so angry I yelled at her, but she wouldn’t budge. School was the most important thing to her, you know? So I stayed home to study and off they went. When it was time for me to go to bed, they weren’t home yet—which was odd. It was a school night, after all, and Mom was always adamant about making sure, you know, that we all got a good night’s sleep before school. After a while, I started to get worried. I called the pizza place they were going to but couldn’t get through. I turned on the television. There was a special news bulletin.” He closed his eyes. “A fourteen-year-old Palestinian girl had strapped explosives to her chest and detonated herself in the pizza place. And I knew, I just knew, they were all dead. A little while later, the police showed up and told me.”

I opened my mouth but nothing came out. Anything I could say seemed so trite, so foolish. “I’m so sorry, Colin,” I finally said, patting his leg.

A single tear spilled out of his right eye and down his cheek. “She was flirting with Noah, witnesses said, at the counter, and then she came right over to their table and just . . . blew herself up.” He shuddered. “And I was angry, Scotty, so fucking angry. I hated them all—the Palestinians, the Arabs, all of them. And I wanted to make them pay. So I trained. I studied hard in school, worked out, studied self-defense and martial arts. After I got out of school I was in the army for two years. The Mossad saw something in me—I didn’t care if I lived or died, and I was smart and I was skilled, so they recruited me as an agent. I went undercover, infiltrating their terrorist cells, killing when I had to. . . .”

“How could you go undercover?” The horror he was telling me—the only way I could handle it, digest it, was to keep my mind blank. I couldn’t imagine how it must have felt . . . how I would have felt if Mom and Dad and Storm and Rain had been killed. “You don’t look . . .”

“Arab?” He laughed a little bitterly. “I told you—I am fluent in Arabic. Yes, I have blue eyes, but contact lenses can change that. A little base make-up, grow out my facial hair a bit, and speaking the language . . . oh, yes, Scotty, it’s very easy to pass. For seven years, I was the Mossad’s best agent. I took the toughest assignments, the ones where the odds were so against my surviving, because I just didn’t care whether I lived or died. I kept hoping that one day they’d find out and just kill me . . . so the pain and the hate would go away. But I was too fucking good at my job. I kept thinking, ‘If I succeed, I’ll be saving Israeli lives.’ I was dead inside, not capable of feeling, and then one day I was caught—and I had to kill or be killed.” He closed his eyes again. “I was caught talking to my superiors on a cell phone. My cover was blown . . . by a fourteen-year-old boy . . . and I had to kill him. As I held my gun on him, all I could see was Noah’s face . . . and the boy was so frightened . . . and I couldn’t do it, Scotty. I just couldn’t do it. All I could see was my brother’s face. He was such a bright kid, so sweet and kind and loving, and to die the way he did . . .” He wiped at his eyes again. “I couldn’t kill this kid. I couldn’t. So, I just knocked him unconscious and got the hell out of there.”

“Of course you couldn’t do it.” I was taking deep breaths as emotions washed over me. I felt nauseous. My eyes were filled with tears.

“His eyes haunted me,” Colin went on, like I hadn’t said anything. “I took a leave and went away. To Greece. I hadn’t felt anything in so long, Scotty. I’d been dead inside . . . but that kid . . . all I could think of was Noah, and my mom, and Rachel, and Abram. What would they think of the way I’d turned out? Would they be proud of me? And I knew. I knew they’d be ashamed. I was ashamed. I thought I was avenging them, protecting other families from what had happened to us, but the truth was I’d turned into a killer—and my job required me to kill their children. There was so much blood on my hands . . . I knew I couldn’t go back. I knew I couldn’t keep doing my job. I couldn’t. Where was it all going to end? Hatred breeds hatred, violence only breeds more violence, and you just keep piling hate on violence and it can only end in a bloodbath, with everyone on both sides dead. On Mykonos, I met a Greek boy, nineteen, named Alexandros. I always knew I was gay, you know, but I’d never ever acted on it.” He laughed. “I was a twenty-six-year-old virgin, if you can believe that. All I’d ever done was jack off when I got horny, but this kid . . . he was beautiful and he was very aggressive. . . wouldn’t take no for an answer . . . and I wound up spending a couple of weeks with him. He taught me how to live again, how to feel—that life was something to be cherished and enjoyed. I called my superiors and told them I was resigning my commission and staying forever on Mykonos. I wasn’t going back to Israel . . . and it was on Mykonos that Angela Blackledge approached me.”

My head was spinning. I couldn’t absorb it, take it all in. Colin, my sweet, loving boy with the big smile and the devilish sense of humor, was a killer—had killed. This same guy, who could make awesome brownies and always fixed my sister’s car, in whose arms I’d lain and slept, whose warmth I’d cuddled up to in bed at night, and always, somehow, managed to make me feel safe and protected, had killed mercilessly—who knew how many people? How many innocents?

I remembered David once mockingly saying to me, “You know, you’re the fag most likely to sleep with a serial killer.”

He’d meant it as a joke, but he’d been right.

“So I went to work for Angela,” Colin said. “And it was great, you know? Being a private eye, righting wrongs, and you know what? I’m good at it—and I can be proud of being good at it—but I could never really be proud of myself before. Oh, sure, I could always tell myself about all the lives I’d saved, but I was a killer—that was the bottom line. But all the skills I’d learned, to survive, actually came in handy for this line of work. And I never killed again, Scotty.” His voice broke. “And then I met you . . . and Frank, and I found that I was capable of loving again, of falling in love and having some kind of normal life. And your family . . . taking me in and treating me like a member of the family without question . . . it was almost as though it were meant to be, you know?”

“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?” My voice was hoarse.

He looked at me. “Because . . . I never wanted you to look at me the way you are right now—like I’m some kind of monster.” His voice broke, and he started to cry. He put his hands over his face and his body shook.

I sat there for just a moment and then threw my arms around him and pulled him in close, kissing the top of his head, my mind racing. I didn’t say anything because I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. He put his arms around me and we just sat there for what seemed an eternity in silence. He’s a stranger; you don’t know him at all, kept going through my head. This man you’ve loved, you’ve made love to, been intimate with, has killed Goddess knows how many people, the hands that have explored your body have blood on them, and how many of them were innocent?

And then a kind of calm came over me. Imagine yourself in his place. Imagine being a teenager and finding out that your entire family was killed, blown up, for no other reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time . . . that you could have been with them, but for the random choice of fate. How would you feel? What would you have done differently? Yes, he’s killed, but is it any different from him being a soldier? Can you love someone who’s served in a war and killed? Of course you can. Try to be a little more understanding. He’s suffering, and he is a good person. He’s proved that to you over and over again, and you couldn’t have loved him if that were not the case. He needs you. He’s just revealed himself to you, opened himself up the way you’ve wanted him to, and you can’t just reject him—after everything he’s been through in his life, you can’t do that.

I turned his face up so he was facing me. I reached over and wiped the tears off his face and gave him a smile. “Colin . . . how awful for you. How absolutely awful.”

In a small voice, he said, “I do love you, Scotty.”

I leaned in and pressed my lips against his and smiled. “I love you, Colin.” I brushed my hand against the side of his face. “How horrific it must have been.” I struggled to keep my voice steady. “How you must have suffered . . . it breaks my heart.”

And once those words were out of my mouth, I knew I was right. He didn’t need judgment; he needed compassion and love; he needed me.

One of the basic tenets of my belief system is that love and intimacy are the ultimate healing power. And if anything, Colin needed that healing.

“I love you so much,” he finally said, stroking my hair.

“I love you too,” I said. “I’ll always love you, no matter what.” I kissed his cheek again. “You can always count on that.”

We lay down and I slid my arms around him.

I held him until he fell asleep.

And then I allowed myself to cry for him.