“Let me see,” Parvesh said to Liz. He knelt down beside her and took her hand in both of his, unfolding it gently like an origami flower. There was a big gash across her palm, a smaller one at the base of her thumb. Parvesh winced when he saw the two deep cuts. “Well, I guess they’re probably disinfected already,” he said. “Vinegar’s an acid. But we’d better make sure there’s no glass in them. Have you got a first aid kit?”
Did she? For a second or two the answer wouldn’t come. The room made no sense to her, though she’d lived in this house for the best part of two years. She had to force herself to focus, drag up the information in a clumsy swipe like someone groping in the dark for a ringing phone.
“Corner cupboard,” she mumbled. “Next to the range, on the right.”
It was still hard to make all her moving parts cooperate—hard even to talk without her tongue catching between her teeth. She thought she might be drooling a little, but when she tried to bring her good hand up to her mouth to wipe the spittle away her body refused to cooperate. The hand just drew a sketchy circle in the air.
When your own body doesn’t do what you tell it to, Liz thought in sick dismay, that has to mean you’re losing your mind.
Parvesh got her up on her feet, the muscles in her legs twanging like guitar strings, and led her across to the sink. He ran cold water across the cuts before probing them with a Q-tip soaked in Doctor’s Choice. They were starting to hurt now. Hurt like hell, with no fuzz or interference. Liz welcomed the pain. At least it was something that was hers alone: nobody else was laying claim to it.
Marc was still cursing from the floor and Pete was still giving him soft answers while leaning down on him hard and not letting him move a muscle.
“The kids!” Liz mumbled. “Vesh, I’ve got to go get the kids.”
“Zac and Moll? Where are they?”
“In Marc’s car. Out on the driveway.” Or more likely on the street, parked for a quick getaway. Marc wouldn’t have had any expectation that he was going to lose this argument.
“Okay. But not bleeding like a pig, Lizzie. You’ll scare them shitless.”
Parvesh was right, she knew. She also knew that Zac must be getting desperate by now, only too aware that the long hiatus with both of his parents inside the house meant they were having a shouting match at the very least. But she had made him promise never to intervene, and she had made the promise stick. She hadn’t wanted either of her children to come between her and Marc’s temper. In the years leading up to the divorce, protecting them from that had been the rock bottom rationale for Liz’s entire existence.
Whatever happens between him and me, Zac, you just stay with your sister. Keep her safe. Let it blow over.
Only this didn’t seem like something that was going to blow over. Liz could hear sirens whooping a few streets away, getting louder: repercussions, arriving way before she was ready for them. When she still didn’t even understand how any of this had happened.
The iceberg. The alien emotions. The puppet dance.
The room yawed and rolled a little. Liz went away and came back again, without moving from the spot where she stood. One of the places she went to—just for half a heartbeat or so—was the Perry Friendly Motel. A suspect mattress bounced under her ass as Marc bounced on top of her and she thrust from the hips with joyous abandon to meet him halfway.
Okay, that was weird. That was nearly twenty years ago. What was she going to hallucinate next? A guitar solo?
The next thing she was aware of was Parvesh applying a dressing to her hand, bending the pad carefully around her open wounds. “What did he do to you?” he asked her, keeping his voice low so the conversation was just between the two of them.
Liz shook her head. She didn’t want to talk about it because that meant having to think about it.
“You’ve got bruises on your throat. Lizzie, did he attack you?”
“I’ve got to go out to the kids,” she said. Had she already said that? How much time had passed? Could she make it to the street without fainting or falling over?
Parvesh tilted her head back very gently with one hand and leaned in close to examine her neck.
“He did. He tried to throttle you. Oh Lizzie, you poor thing!”
Liz flinched away from his pity as if it were contempt. She had tried hard not to let anyone see this. To be someone else, a little bit stronger and more self-sufficient than her current self. And since she had moved into the duplex, she had felt like it was working, like she had sloughed off an old skin and been reborn. But here she was again, where she had been so many times before (although something strong had moved through her briefly, like the ripples from a distant tidal wave).
“How did it happen?”
“It’s his weekend. I was just … unhappy because he brought the kids back so late. I told him not to.” The kids. She needed to make sure they were okay: everything else could wait. Liz headed for the door.
But she still wasn’t as much in command of her own movements as she thought she was. She stumbled and almost fell. Parvesh caught her and sat her down on one of the chairs. She noticed that there was a dark streak of blood across the blue and yellow polka dots on its tie-on cushion.
The back of her head was throbbing. Putting a hand up to feel back there she found a lump like a boulder, its surface hot and tender. When Marc knocked her down she must have hit the tiles a lot harder than she thought. Another wave of nausea went through her but she fought against it and managed not to heave.
More talking. More moving around. The kitchen floor was still rising and falling like the deck of a ship. Liz lost track of events again, feeling around inside herself for any lingering traces of that presence. Her interior puppetmaster.
The outside world came back loudly and suddenly with the kitchen door banging open and then with Marc bellowing from the floor for someone to let him up because he was being assaulted and illegally restrained.
“So what happened here?” another voice asked. A female voice, calm and matter-of-fact. Liz looked up to find two uniformed cops in the kitchen, a woman and a man. She closed her eyes immediately, finding that the light and movement were making the nausea return.
Marc was talking again, or yelling rather, swearing that he was going to sue the Sethis for every penny they had. Pete told him to make sure he spelled their names right. “It’s Mr. Queer Bastard and Dr. Queer Bastard. We don’t hyphenate.”
“Her husband attacked her,” Parvesh said. “That guy over there. Him.”
“Ex-husband,” Liz muttered automatically. She opened her eyes again, as wide as she dared. “The kids. My kids are …”
“We’ve got an officer with them right now, ma’am,” the lady cop said. “They’re fine. Is it okay if we bring them around by the front of the house? We don’t think it’s a good idea for them to see this.” She nodded her head to indicate the smears and spatters of blood all over the kitchen floor, on the side of the counter, on Liz and on Marc.
Marc was sitting up now, his back against the fridge. The Sethis had retired to the opposite corner of the room but the man cop, whose badge identified him as Lowenthal, was standing over Marc and a paramedic was kneeling beside him, holding a dressing pad to his face. Blood was oozing out from under the pad, running along its lower edge to a corner where it dripped down onto Marc’s shirt. It didn’t make much difference to the shirt: you couldn’t even tell where the drops were landing on the blood-drenched fabric.