Sanso turned up the radio in his car and thumped his thumb on the steering wheel, more energized than he had felt in years. Janeal’s fiery spirit would be good for him, and he wouldn’t snuff it out. He called her.
“What?” Her tone was distracted rather than typically brusque.
“I must see you, my dear. I don’t think I can wait until tomorrow.”
“You need to wait. Tonight is not good for me.”
“Which makes it all the better for me. That is, if you’re not putting me off because you’re entertaining our friend Robert.”
“Our friend Robert is in love with you, Sanso. He’s off chasing you again, as far as I know. I doubt he’s still in town.”
“Wonderful, wonderful. Listen, we must speak, but I refuse to do it over the phone. So much has . . . changed in the past few days. So many new opportunities await us. I’ll come to you.”
“Not tonight.”
“I’ll come when I want.”
“You’ll come when I tell you!”
Sanso howled, delighted. There was the Janeal he needed. “That’s my girl. That’s the one I want to speak with. I’ll wait for you. Call when you’re ready.”
Janeal hung up on him.
While he waited for her call, he’d pay a visit to Katie Morgon.
Janeal reentered the cabin and listened to the still house, wondering where Katie had gone. It was too hard, too painful, to think of the woman as herself, the self she could have been if she’d only made different choices.
She padded into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water, then wandered out through the dining room before noticing Katie asleep on the living room sofa.
Her wig was on the cushion next to her, a mound of sleek black curls. Seeing her without her hair for the first time, Janeal saw the heart-shaped face that looked so much like her own—that was, in fact, her own—but had been cloaked by the hairstyle.
Janeal set the water on the coffee table.
Katie’s body was still seated but leaning sideways onto the arm of the couch. Janeal’s eyes filled with tears at the sheer mass of scars that crisscrossed the left side of Katie’s scalp and deformed her ear. She stood behind her and reached out to touch the lumpy skin. Her hand froze in place an inch away from Katie’s head. Janeal couldn’t do it. She had plenty of desire to know what this meant, to touch her alter ego, to verify that she lived and breathed and was made of soft warm flesh. Did she doubt it? Even if she did, she had no right. Janeal had divorced herself from goodness years ago.
She sat in a chair and studied Katie sleeping, curious about the foreign emotion that crept up from the bottom of her rib cage into her lungs.
Envy.
As ugly as the scars were, as repulsive as that hairless head might look to others, Katie had so many things Janeal had never been able to possess. The unconditional love of a man. The fearless admiration of people. The confidence to act without ulterior motive.
Katie didn’t envy Janeal a minute of her life, she had said a short time ago. Could it be possible that Janeal was jealous of this blind, bald, scarred woman sleeping with salt trails running down her cheeks? Janeal had never envied anyone, let alone such a pitiful figure.
Janeal slipped off the chair onto her knees, inches away from Katie, feeling regret for the first time in years. Regret for every decision she had made since deciding to broker a deal with Sanso for his money. And for the decisions that had led to that one. She reached out and touched Katie’s shoes, which had walked such a different path. A path Janeal could have taken.
What good was regret on a day like today, after so long?
The sun began sinking and the room dimmed. She rose and turned on a table lamp in the corner. Katie stirred and Janeal thought she had awakened, though she kept her eyes closed. Maybe she was listening. Janeal walked back to her chair and sat.
“I thought you left,” Katie said.
“I don’t have a car.”
Katie sighed and straightened into a sitting position. Her hand brushed a lock of her wig. She picked it up and held it out toward Janeal, then shrugged.
“It must get uncomfortable in the summer,” Janeal said, hoping Katie could hear some lightness in her voice.
“My one vanity.” Katie dropped it back onto the cushion.
“You’re gorgeous without it.”
“That’s a vain thing to say.” This time Katie smiled.
They fell into a silence that was, miraculously, comfortable. A clock ticked in another room.
“I’m sorry,” Janeal eventually said.
Katie cocked her head to one side—a gesture that Janeal recognized as once belonging to the Katie who had died.
“For leaving you—for leaving Katie in that nightmare.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t save her,” Katie said.
“That’s nothing to be sorry about. I mean, it’s not a true offense on your part. What I did was unforgivable.”
“Nothing’s unforgivable, Janeal.”
“I’m beyond forgiveness.”
“God’s grace is never out of reach.”
“I don’t have a single cell of goodness in me anymore.”
“That doesn’t matter. God is bigger than you, than the sum of your choices. He can overcome anything.”
“I’ve spent fifteen years living like I could never be forgiven.”
“What are you going to do with the next fifteen?”
The question came across as a challenge rather than a curiosity. Janeal had no adequate answer. The next decade and a half of her life seemed as disconnected from this place as her New York office. It was hard to think of any of it as real now.
“Tell me what happened the night Katie died,” Janeal said. “Tell me about the choice you made.”
“If I hadn’t waited so long to make it, maybe she would have lived.”
“I’m not interested in the ifs. Just the actuals.”
Katie touched the scars behind her left ear and told her story, interspersing the tale with apologies for the blur of her memory. And though the account took only a few minutes to tell, Janeal was in such tears by the time Katie finished that she could not speak.
Katie pushed herself up off the sofa and walked to Janeal’s chair. She tugged at the ring on her finger, their mother’s ring, until it slid off into her palm. Bending at the waist, she located Janeal’s hand and placed the jewelry in her palm.
“You take this for a while. We can share it.”
Janeal let go of a sob and grabbed Katie’s hand—her own, unscarred hand— squeezing it between her palms. She pressed it against her cheek, right where her tears would douse Katie’s fingers. Katie didn’t pull away. Instead, she rested her other hand on the top of Janeal’s disheveled hair.
Janeal felt like a child and didn’t resist the sensation. She leaned into the security of being so small in the presence of someone so much stronger than she. Janeal closed her eyes.
“How do we fix this, Katie?”
“What is there to fix?”
“I don’t know what to do next. I don’t know where to go.”
“You can go anywhere except back to where you’ve been.”
“What does that mean?”
“You have to pick a new path. You’re dying, Janeal. Inside, I mean. Your heart is dying. Will you choose to keep it alive?”
Janeal shook her head. She didn’t know where to begin looking for an answer to that question. But her mind was clear for a change, and her headache nonexistent, and that gave her somewhere to start. She let her mind begin to drift and fingered the perfect circle of her mother’s ring, allowing it to remind her of the place where all this had begun, a place she might somehow be able to get back to. A place of innocence and purity and openness to the idea that anything was possible.