Identical (40 page)

‘She is desperate,’ Teri had said.

So I will fuck her, Zeus thought. Desperation had cost Lidia the power to say no. But even so, she remains one of the few losses in his life. He never sees her, even now, without wondering whether he might have despaired less in himself if she had been his wife, if her strength would have made him less brutal.

Dita has departed without saying good night. Zeus climbs the stairs, pained by his life. Hermione is asleep. He steps into his pajamas and lies beside her. Hermione lets her arm come forward and rest sweetly on his flank. He touches her hand, grateful for its familiarity, and drifts deeply into the grip of his own troubled dreams until he is roused by a clamor down the hall. The rain has cooled the night and Hermione has opened the French door. From there, he hears what is surely glass breaking and soon after, Dita’s scream. There is often noise from Dita’s room, late at night. It is her revenge. But there is no pleasure in these sounds. As he struggles into his robe, he is certain he hears the front door slam.

He tries the knob on Dita’s door and is surprised to find it unlocked. He knocks and enters, asking if she is all right, but his heart clenches when he sees the blood. It is slathered on the French door and looks like a splatter painting on the wall.

“My Lord! What is this?”

Dita is on her bed, her robe parted to expose one long well-shaped leg. She is rubbing the side of her face, and greets her father with a baleful expression.

“What?” he asks again.

“You were right about them being hillbillies.”

“My God. What are you saying?”

“Cass’s mother was here.”

“Lidia?”

“And beat the hell out of me to get me to stop seeing her son.”

“Here. In my house? She beat my daughter?”

“She told me a pretty good story.” Dita at that point seems to recognize the flimsiness of her attire and grabs a quilt at the foot of her bed. “I mean really, Dad. Is there anybody around here you haven’t fucked?”

In him, something gives way, some sluiceway of raw emotion that is always contained for Dita’s sake. There is a clear implication in her words-‘anybody’-and he has always known that if she speaks, she will destroy him. Not because he wouldn’t lie. Zeus has long accepted that lying well is an inevitable attribute of power. But it would mean she has abandoned him forever. The thought of that fills him with both fury and terrible dread.

“Your filthy mouth,” he says. The closest thing to changing the past is to leave it unspoken.

“Oh, that filthy mouth used to suit you fine,” she answers.

He slaps his hand across her lips and slams her head back to stop her. For a time all he knows of himself is rage and strength. But he feels in that brief instant as he drives her skull back several times that she is offering no resistance because she knows this is what she deserves.

When he lets go finally, he takes a step back. His heartbeat is all the way into his shoulders and he is breathing like a horse under a heavy plow. She is winding her head, touching her brow, but finally focuses on him with scorching hatred. The worst has happened, he knows. He has lost her for all time.

“Fuck you,” she says. “Fuck you forever.” And then she does what Dita never will-gives way to tears. She wails, his child, as she did when she was young.

He steps forward to comfort her, his arms open.

“Get out,” she screams.

He has taken one step to the door when he sees the smear of blood on the headboard, and worse, a crimson bubble rising from her crown. She realizes he is staring.

“What?”

“You’re cut,” he says. He lifts a hand in warning. “Don’t touch it. Don’t infect it. I’ll get a towel.” He goes to the powder room across the hall. He is trying to explain what has happened in his own mind. But there is only one explanation, which he has always known. He is a bad man.

When he returns to Dita’s bedside, her look has changed. Her beautiful eyes no longer seem to move together. She is slumped to one side and from the desperate way her arm swipes out at the sight of him, he somehow knows she has lost the ability to speak.

He runs down to wake Hermione.

“Something has happened to Dita,” he tells her. Later, he knows, he will think of other things to say, a way to contain this in better words and entomb it in the past. He is Zeus and always finds a path. But not now. By the time they return to Dita, his daughter, his precious child, his treasure, is dead.

About 6:30 Saturday morning, Evon was awakened by a flat-handed thumping on her apartment’s front door. She needed sleep, and nearly ignored the racket, but the sound was authoritative and urgent, and she finally jolted awake at the thought of fire. By the time she had her robe on, she realized who it had to be. Cleverly, Heather had stepped to the side, so she was out of sight of the fish-eye in the door. For the sake of her neighbors, Evon had no choice but to open up, albeit with the chain secured.

“Please,” Heather said, as she stepped forward, “please.” She pressed her face to the breach between the jamb and the door. On her breath, Evon could smell the stale reek of alcohol. As so often, Heather had affected her look of reckless dishabille. A slinky sleeveless top of iridescent fabric, which she’d donned for her night in the bars, hung off one shoulder, raising the inevitable question of whether it had been shed in pleasure a few hours earlier. From one finger a pair of glittery six-inch heels rocked, along with a ring of keys, on which Evon could see the garage fob. The doorman was on notice and would have barred Heather, but she’d sneaked in through the building’s subterranean parking garage. The code for the electric door was still programmed into her car, and she’d used the fob to get upstairs from there.

“No,” Evon said. “That’s my line. ‘Please.’ Please, let go. Please. For both our sakes. You’re making both of us totally miserable. You know I have a protection order. Please don’t do this to yourself or to me.” She spoke with a kinder tone than she’d managed in several weeks, but she still closed the door. Heather slammed it once with the flat of her hand, then hammered several times with what sounded from the sharp impact to be the heel of one of her shoes. She stopped after a minute.

Evon went through the useless exercise of lying down in her bed, but she remained wide awake and heard her phone buzz. There was a text. “Look downstairs,” it read.

She thought of replying, “No,” then decided that no response was better. But after lying still another second, she recognized an omen in the message and went to the living room window and peered down to the distant street. From this height, the avenue always reminded her of a scale model, with inch-high people and cars like crawling scarabs. She didn’t spy anything at first. At this hour, traffic was sporadic and on the sidewalk there were only a couple of pedestrians, both out walking their dogs, joined by early-morning runners who flashed by.

Then she saw what she’d been intended to notice. Her BMW had been nosed into the street from the garage driveway. Heather still had that key, too, apparently. But even at that, Evon was confused. Was she supposed to beg to save her Beemer?

In a second the car moved, inching forward at first. Then it shot straight across the breadth of the street in a blur and rammed into the old-fashioned iron lamppost on the other side of Grant Avenue. Heather had floored it. The front end of Evon’s sedan crunched like a soda can underfoot, and the lamppost leered to the side. The orange electric cables below it, which had been abruptly jacked out of the ground, appeared to be all that was keeping the streetlight from toppling. If Heather hadn’t put on her seat belt, which she frequently refused to do, she might be seriously injured.

Barefoot and still in her robe, Evon descended in the elevator, completely uncertain about what she was hoping to find. There was smoke coming from the front end of the Beemer, but that was because the engine was still running, grating against some part of itself. When Evon pulled open the driver’s door, Heather was pinned in the seat. The airbag had deployed and the seat belt, which she’d fastened after all, had also retracted to hold her in place. Heather had clearly terrified herself and was crying with abandon. But her soft blue eyes were wide open and she turned them on Evon, even though she seemed slightly dazed.

“Just tell me you never loved me. Just tell me that and I’ll leave you alone. But you can’t,” said Heather. “You can’t say that.”

“I can’t,” Evon said. Then she crouched down so Heather and she were more or less eye to eye. She actually held her hand, a disconcerting act after not touching for months this woman whose every caress once had so thrilled her. But she folded her fingers tenderly over Heather’s. She had blamed Heather since January for being all kinds of crazy and hiding that from her, but something else was suddenly clear to Evon. “I can’t say that. But I shouldn’t have. I shouldn’t have fallen for you. And that was my fault. Not yours. I couldn’t accept you as you are, so I wanted to pretend you were someone else. And even worse, I wanted to believe I was somebody I’m not. It was so exciting. But I can’t be that person. I can’t. So you have to forgive me, baby. I wish I had known myself better.”

There were sirens already. One of the dog-walkers, apparently, had called 911. A police cruiser arrived only seconds after the big square ambulance, both vehicles with lights flashing and their sirens sounding discordantly at two different pitches. The combined wailing was sharp and disturbing, like something used to keep prisoners awake during interrogations. Evon’s neighbors were going to be pissed.

In instants, the paramedics had Heather out of the car and strapped to a stretcher, while the officer remained behind to question Evon. As the EMTs lifted Heather inside the rear of the ambulance, she cried out Evon’s name, then the doors closed and the ambulance screamed off toward County Hospital, the nearest facility.

Evon responded to the officer tersely, but told him the truth. She shared as much of the story as the cop asked for. Yes, it was her car. No, she hadn’t given Heather permission to drive, but yes, she hadn’t bothered to retrieve the key, or the garage fob, so she wouldn’t file a complaint for auto theft, or break and enter. Her reluctance was not an obstacle for the cop. He had already had a whiff of Heather, and they’d be required to take blood from her at the hospital in order to treat her. Heather would be charged with DWI, reckless driving and malicious damage to county property. Then there was the protection order, which the cop learned about after recovering Heather’s purse from the car and calling in the information from her driver’s license to central command.

“She’s also walked about a thousand bucks in parking tickets,” the cop told Evon. He was a tall black guy, calm by nature. He was going to bring Heather’s purse over to the ER while he waited for her to be checked out. If she was discharged soon, he’d take her in cuffs straight to County Jail.

“I’d bet you’ve seen the last of her. Violating a protection order means she can’t just sign a recognizance bond. She’ll have to wait in a cell for a bail hearing. In the tank, she’s going to be meeting some different kind of chicks. The judge will tell her straight out they’ll jerk her back in there if she comes anywhere near you. That’ll be part of her sentence, too.”

Wearing a used jumpsuit was probably going to be the worst part for Heather. Yet whatever the deterrent, Evon knew the cop’s prediction was almost certainly correct.

She thanked the officer for his efforts, then went upstairs. She waited until nine to call Mel Tooley at home. Mel groaned sympathetically as she told him the story. He said he’d send an associate over to the jail. It was early enough that, assuming Heather wasn’t held too long in the ER, they’d probably be able to get her a bail hearing by late afternoon. Those hearings, these days, were conducted by TV, with the judge in a courtroom upstairs in the jail, and the prisoners below parading before a camera.

“And her with no makeup,” said Evon.

Mel chuckled, but Evon, as it turned out, couldn’t laugh at her own joke.

Nella and Francine had a cabin on Lake Fowler and Evon spent Saturday and Sunday with them. Nella, another former jock, had been trying to convince Evon to take up golf. She’d thought initially that the game was too sedentary, but she was starting to warm to the challenges, and they ended up playing both days.

Driving back into town Sunday night, Evon decided to pay a call on Aunt Teri. It was past 9, but Evon had been waiting to see the old lady. The doorman downstairs put Evon on the phone and Teri invited her up. The old woman in a brocaded caftan was at the door with her cane, her face averted so she could hear the sound of Evon’s approach. Teri’s face was a glistening pond of cold cream, and she’d put up her hair for the night. The tiny pink plastic curlers were wrapped tight, exposing the elderly woman’s pale scalp, except on the back of her head where she’d covered the mess with a sheer net. Without her sunglasses, Teri’s eyes proved to be surrounded by pouches of brown flesh that looked like used tea bags.

Teri touched her head. “Well, I suppose if you came to get laid, this jinxed it.”

Despite herself, Evon laughed. “Sorry, Teri. Timing is everything.”

She didn’t mind the banter with the old lady, but the truth was that Evon had always been slow to get to the point of sex with anyone. The bar scene never held much charm.

Teri used her cane to orient herself and clumped along to her golden living room. German had apparently roused himself when he heard Teri moving about and was standing there in his paisley silk robe, still looking tidy with his fuzz of cropped gray hair. Teri told him he could go.

“Watches those ridiculous reality shows,” she told Evon once he left. “People eating goats’ eyeballs and seeing who can stand the most paper cuts. So fucking stupid. What about a drink?”