Alice Close Your Eyes (6 page)

“Watch your own self,” I tell him, picking my way across a cluster of damp rocks. “You keep watching me, you’re gonna wipe out.”

It was Jack’s idea to go hiking today, up the Chulapai Trail where the flat, loamy footpath wanders through an undergrowth of ferns, and gradually upward between slabs of mossy granite, rising like the ruins of a long-dead city in the forest. He is sure-footed as a mountain lion, graceful and swift, with an inaudible loping gait that makes it difficult to tell where he is when he follows behind me.

“Stop shaking that ass at me,” he says. “It’s distracting.”

“Go around. Problem solved.”

“Oh, hell, no.”

A few minutes later we reach the end of the path, a slender waterfall that twitches like a mare’s tail in the sunlight. The sound is soothing, steady, punctuated now and then by the squeals of a group of young children who are splashing in the cold pool below.

Jack and I set down our backpacks and settle on a low, flat rock. He digs out a bottle of water and tips his head back to take a drink. The knob of his Adam’s apple slides under his skin, framed by sleek ropes of muscle on either side. His hair is ruffled, curling around his ears, falling into the space between his eyebrows and the frame of his glasses. His hand, big and easy around the bottle, is dusted with shimmering strands of dark hair.

His attention is on the family below us. “You like kids?”

I take the water bottle. “Yeah. I like them a lot, actually.”

“Hmm. That surprises me.”

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t know. You don’t strike me as the motherly type. You said you were raised in foster homes?”

I begin to unpack our lunch.

“Yeah, but not until I was ten. I lived with my mom before that.”

“And she died?”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

“Does it matter?”

“To me it does.”

I lay out the cherry tomatoes, the sliced-up salami, cheese and crackers. Olives and apples.

“Asthma attack.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You and me both.”

“So then—”

“So then, nothing. Fast-forward twelve years, and I’m all grown up.”

“That’s—”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Fast-forward twelve years.”

“Right.”

“And you never met your dad.”

“No. My mom was fifteen when she had me. I think he was sixteen or seventeen. He went off to college.”

“And you lived with your mom’s parents?”

“With my grandmother and my mom, yes. Nana died when I was nine.”

“What was she like?”

I pop a green olive into my mouth and bite through to the almond inside. “She was a country girl from Australia. Five feet tall, really frail-looking, but she was tough. She had all kinds of stories about things she’d survived—tornadoes and drunken husbands, things like that. She was a great storyteller. She raised me, really, my mom was way too young.”

He doesn’t say anything, but I hear a question in the silence.

“She took me to the library the day after my ninth birthday. It was rainy, middle of winter, and the sidewalks were icy. And Nana had a shortened leg, from a car accident when she was young. So at the top of the steps she’s juggling this stack of books and hurrying me along, fussing because I had my nose in a book and she thought I was going to fall on my head. She was so busy yelling at me, she missed the top step herself. And she just sailed, in slow motion, from the top of the steps all the way to the bottom without touching down. Coat, purse, books, everything flapping... I think I laughed, she looked so Mary Poppins, sailing that way. I thought it was a joke.”

He lays his chin in the palm of his hand, shakes his head.

“But she landed headfirst at the bottom of the steps with this horrible thud, and her feet on the stairs but the wrong way, like the world had turned sideways and she was walking up the risers.”

I pause, remembering the soft quivering swell of her belly where her blouse had ridden up, looking down the steps and up her skirt at the crumpled triangle of her underwear. At her face, foreshortened, slack-jawed with surprise. I still can hear the dense mechanical gurgle of her breath, breaking the silence after my laughter died away.

“As soon as I heard her breathe I knew she was gone. Her body was just catching up.”

He looks at me, squinting in the sunlight. “Jesus.”

I reach for another olive. He reaches, too, then waits for me to choose first.

“I had a friend in foster care,” he says. “He said the foster families always had some dark reason for wanting him around. To work in the family business, or watch the younger kids. Once he ended up in the hospital with a couple of broken ribs.”

“Did you think there was some altruism involved?”

“Well, no, but—”

“The foster system is completely fucked. Any kid who falls into it is fucked. There’s no fine motive, no one gives a shit. The kid is the state’s responsibility until he’s eighteen. It’s nothing more than that.”

He doesn’t look at me. “My friend said he was glad he wasn’t a girl. He—”

“You know, one of the first things I learned as a writer is the value of negative space. Some stories don’t work when you jam them with facts.”

“You think we won’t work if you fill in the blanks?”

“I don’t know. But if you really want to find out, you can start by filling in some of your own. This falling-out with your parents. What was that about?”

He builds a sandwich with a cracker, a slice of salami, cheddar, then another cracker. He eats the whole thing in one bite. Swallows, wipes his mouth.

“Did your dad want you to go into the liquor business or something?”

“No.”

“Your mother wanted you to marry her best friend’s daughter.”

He smiles. “No. Nothing like that.”

I peel the paper from a disc of sausage, wondering whether he’ll tell me the truth.

“I got into some trouble,” he says. “Spent eighteen months in prison.”

I raise my eyebrows. “Really.”

“When I got out, I went to see my parents. My old man had a fat check already written. Told me to take it and never come back. Said I had broken my mother’s heart.”

“Wow.”

He shrugs. “There are worse things in life. Think if he’d been a poor man.”

“So this is why you’re not working as an architect?”

“Yeah. No firm’s going to take me on with a prison record.”

“But you could work independently—”

“Yes, I could. And I will. Let’s say I’m trying to get my bearings first.”

We eat in silence for a few minutes. The children have quieted, as well. They are bundled into towels and gathered in a semicircle around a young blonde woman and a man I guess to be her husband.

“Shocked?” Jack says.

“No.”

“Concerned?”

I look at him. “Should I be?”

He doesn’t answer right away. When he finally speaks, his voice seems different and his eyes are fixed on the family below.

“Probably.”

“So what was prison like?”

“Loud. Crowded. Pretty fucking scary, if you want to know the truth.”

“Because of the other inmates?”

“Yeah, that. And also just the concept of being trapped in a room with no way out. I used to have nightmares about the prison being on fire and all of us left in there to burn.”

“A therapist would have a field day with that.”

I pop a tomato into my mouth and burst it with my tongue. The warm juice gushes over my tongue and trickles down my throat.

“Aren’t you going to ask what I did?” he says.

“I don’t need to ask. I can look it up online.”

“Yeah, I guess you can.”

I wet a napkin and wipe my hands. “But brownie points if you want to save me the trouble.”

He digs out his pocketknife and begins to peel an apple. The blade slides like a scalpel under the skin, around and around without stopping, until he holds the flayed apple in his hand and the whole peel dangling from the tip of his knife.

“Sexual battery,” he says. He hands me a slice of apple. “Now let’s talk about those brownie points.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

“She deserved it, I suppose,” I say.

He tosses the apple peel to a couple of chipmunks who are squabbling over an empty peanut shell.

“Oh, she deserved it, but just to be clear, I didn’t rape her.”

“You were convicted, though.”

“I pled out.”

“I see.”

“I’m not a rapist.”

“So then why did she accuse you?”

He leans back on one elbow and lights a cigarette.

“When you get into a long-term relationship, things change. For some people, the changes are good. You have a steady job, a couple of kids, a house in the suburbs, and you settle down. That’s what I thought I was getting.”

He drags on his cigarette.

“For Rosemary, marriage was a power play. She got what she wanted—the house, the new car, me, all of it. But nothing I gave her was enough. I started working long hours to keep up with all the shit she needed. The clothes, the vacations to Paris and Costa Rica and fucking Amsterdam. Jewelry, salon, God knows what else—it’s all a blur at this point. Anyway, about three years into our marriage, she starts with the drugs. And I’m not talking about marijuana. I’m talking crack and heroin, whatever else her boyfriend would give her.”

“Her boyfriend?”

“Yeah. This douche bag she took up with. A friend of a friend. She was running with another crowd by that point. I didn’t know them.”

“How long did this go on?”

“About a year. Finally this dude convinces her that she’ll get a better divorce settlement if she accuses me of hitting her. He figures I’ll pay up to get her to drop the charges.”

“But she didn’t drop them.”

“No. Because I refused to pay. I told Rosemary to go fuck herself and I filed for divorce.”

“So she accused you as payback?”

“Yeah. The next thing I know, I’m under arrest and she’s telling everyone I raped her.”

“But you didn’t. What kind of proof did they have?”

“Nothing. It would have been her word against mine. But my lawyer thought it was a risk, so I took the plea.”

His eyes are level and hold mine a shade too long. He hands me the cigarette and I take a slow drag.

“What was the boyfriend like?”

Jack raises his eyebrows. “What was he like? A fucking crackhead, that’s what he was like. How the hell do I know?”

“You’ve never been curious to find out more about him?”

“Why should I?”

I shrug. “If it were me, I’d want to know who screwed me over. You’ve never wanted to investigate? How do you even know it was his idea?”

“My buddy knew him. He said this guy told him all about how he was planning to make money off Rosemary’s rich father-in-law.”

“What happened to them? Your divorce went through, I assume?”

“Yeah, it did. Rosemary was long gone by the time I got out. I heard she left the boyfriend, too, but apparently he’s still on the island.”

“You never went looking?” I’m strangely disappointed in him, that he’s allowed himself to be made a fool of this way and has done nothing about it.

He sits up, takes off his glasses and begins to clean them with his shirt.

“I’m not a complete pussy, if that’s what you’re thinking. I did go see the guy while I was out on bond.” He glances over at me, his lips twisted in a wry smile.

“And?”

“I went to his house—this miserable piece-of-shit little place—and when he came to the door I more or less barged in. Rosemary was there. Strung out, clearly. Looked like she hadn’t seen the inside of a shower in days. And her hair...I don’t know what happened to her hair but it used to be glorious, really long and shiny and thick. That day it looked like she’d cut it herself with a pair of poultry shears, right to the scalp.”

A muscle twitches in his jaw.

“I lost it. I would have beaten that cocksucker to death with his own fucking fire poker. Actually had it in my hand, as a matter of fact.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. Because a fire poker’s not much of a weapon when the other guy’s got a gun.” He pauses, holding his glasses up to the light.

“And now?”

“Now, I stay away from him. Only a goddamned idiot would get caught up in that shit again. And besides...”

He looks at me. His eyes trace the line of my hair, over my neck and shoulders.

“Rosemary wasn’t really worth killing for.”

I watch his fabric-covered thumb swirl across the lenses. Around and around, a methodical circular motion from earpiece to nose. A shadow plays along the curve at the base of his thumb, and I sense the power in his hands and remember the scrape of his callused palm up the contours of my waist, across the sensitive tips of my breasts.

There was a moment when we were together this morning, with my hair twisted around his hand as I rode his lap at the edge of the bed. He looked down my naked body, between my legs as I took him, back again to my face. And there was something in his eyes. A fierce need, barely contained. Beyond a normal man’s desire. His fingers tightened in my hair until I put both hands up to stop him, and with the climax building in his eyes, he drew back his hand and smacked me, hard across the ass.

I don’t know what he saw in me, the way the pain brought me to him, the contraction of my whole body around him as I whimpered into his open mouth. But he slapped me again as he pulled at me, again as he came. Harder each time. And there it was, his singular kink—in the wild light in his eyes and the sheen on his brow and the way he swallowed up my cries as he dragged me down on top of him.

He wants to hurt me.

I wonder what Jack would look like if he ever got really angry. He’s got to be at least six-three, with the lean, hard build of a soccer player and a soldier’s no-nonsense economy of movement that makes each motion seem choreographed. I can’t imagine him being clumsy. I can’t imagine him ever losing a fight. No matter the opponent, Jack would find a way to win, and he’d have no scruples about keeping it fair.

Rosemary wasn’t worth killing for.

But I’m not Rosemary.

I collect our trash, stow it in the backpack and get to my feet.

He rises, as well, and stands eye level to my perch on the rock. With one graceful shrug, he settles the backpack over his shoulders, then wraps his arm around my waist and pulls me closer until we are nose to nose. His eyelashes are thick and dark, almost as long as mine, curving toward his brow.

“Did I lose you?” he says.

I lay my hand over his heart and he covers it with one of his.

* * *

We stop for dinner on our way home. I’ve never eaten so much in my life as I have since meeting Jack. My body has never felt so hollow.

Afterward, in the passenger’s seat, I watch the scenery flash by and think about Jack’s story, and the level way he held my gaze as he told it.

I look at his profile with the light sliding over it, his arm stretched out to the wheel.

“Lean the seat back,” he says.

I lift the lever and push with my shoulders, until the headrest is practically in the backseat. Jack looks over as we stop at the last red light before we leave town. A neon sign is reflected in his glasses, the letters inverted like a child’s handwriting. His eyes are obscured for a second, then he turns back to the road and the truck starts to move. He curves his hand around the inside of my bare thigh and pulls my legs apart.

“Unbutton your shirt,” he tells me, and I do that, too, letting the thin cotton plaid fall aside in the breeze from the open window. I slide a hand into my bra and lift my breast free of the cup. He reaches past the hem of my shorts and strokes me through my underwear. I prop my right foot on the dash and lean my knee against the door.

He adjusts himself in his seat, then unsnaps my shorts. His fingers are cool, slippery. He glances at me, then the road, back and forth. I watch his wrist moving as the streetlights glide over my bare skin and the silver hoop in my nipple. I move under his touch, thinking,
He wants me, he wants me.

He explores me that way, unhurried, and because I know what he wants I don’t try to come. I just let him look at me, dip inside, taste my liquor on his fingertips. I know when we park in his driveway that he will follow me up the walk and pull me through the door, and he’ll take off my pants and bare my breasts to his mouth. He’ll kick my feet apart and bend me over the sofa or the dining room table, or he’ll push me to the floor and bury his face between my thighs. He may even pull me on top of him right here in the truck, or fuck me standing up against the door that he held closed when I tried to walk away. I will wait and see. He can do whatever he wants.

I watch him and let the pressure build under his fingers. The question echoes in my mind:

Would you kill for me?