Or maybe I’m overthinking it. One date shouldn't change everything—but I still take another pill when he walks away. Rules let me survive. Rules keep me safe.
Michael has already enticed me to break one of them.
A few hours later, Michael takes me to dinner at Antoine’s, the oldest French-Creole restaurant in the city. It’s far more upscale than I find comfortable these days. It makes me remember a life I won’t ever live again. But this is about Michael. He’s trying his best to figure out how to charm me.
It’s working despite his efforts, not because of them.
I shake my head at how silly it all is. It’s quite possibly the least honest date I’ve ever been on. He shoves his real motives aside and flirts with me. I hide my awareness of why he’s sought me out and my memories of being naked with him. It’s possibly the least honest date I’ve ever been on.
“What?”
I stare at my dish, weighing words as I study my pommes de terre soufflées.
Part of me wants to tell him that he’s trying to buy me with a high priced meal instead of just giving me the cash, but I settle on a softer truth than the raw words I would usually use: “Dinner and stories of your movie, your tours, your carefully dropped hints about your success . . . most women probably say yes before the main course, don’t they?”
“Maybe I don’t want sex.”
He’s not lying, but like most good mistruths, there is a lie and a truth all twisted up together in his words. Someone told him about my episodes, and he is intrigued. If you ask him, press him hard enough, I suspect he’ll claim that the curiosity is simply part of his avocation.
That, too, is not a lie.
It is, also, not the truth.
He wants to know, wants to collect stories and characters because it gives him power, but I’m not easy about parting with my truths. Some truths lead to blood. Reid taught me that, too.
I’m done bleeding for anyone.
I finish my wine, and then I lean closer. “It is a shame that you’re not interested. I had every intention of fucking you.”
He grabs my wrist, and I see a hint of darkness, telling me that he’s not as polished and civilized as he tries to be. That does more for me than any meal or story of his travels ever could. Maybe because it’s familiar, but I like that threat the way a junkie likes a fix.
This is why we break the rules, this rush, this easing up on the precipice. I can see disasters looming if I stay on the path I'm approaching.
Outside, Michael shoves me against a wall and kisses me. Crudely, carelessly, like I mean nothing and everything in that moment.
It is exactly what I need.
3
Juliana
I never wanted to be in a house that smells like death—and there is a smell. I know it. I'm proud of the work I do, but I can't ever escape the feeling that I smell like a mix of bitter coffee and too sweet flowers. Not every death is that. Sometimes, there's cologne. Sometimes, there's the bite of cigarettes from the grieving who quit years ago, but couldn’t resist the calm of nicotine during the pre-funeral days. No matter what else, though, the ceremony around death smells like flowers and coffee to me.
When I was a kid, my uncle was actually the fun one in the family. He told the silliest jokes, and he was the first to go play in the rain with me and my sister—and the last one to add new rules to our lives. Uncle Micky was happy to have a tea party with us, but when he did so, we had proper tea and scones. My sister and I loved him, but as an adult I realize that his need to play was a result of the things he saw in his job.
My job, too, these days.
I guess I realized that Uncle Micky was lonely. It was just him in his big house in Durham, and sometimes when we visited, plans changed last minute because someone had died.
When something bad happened, he was the only one who ever knew what to say. Maybe that's the truth of why I do what I do. I want to be like Uncle Micky because he was the only one who could help me when I thought I'd rather crawl in a hole and give up on living. I wanted to be that person for someone else.
When my sister died, Uncle Mickey was one of the only two people who wanted to talk. No one else seemed to get beyond "I'm sorry to hear about Sophie" or "Sophie and Tommy are with God now." And maybe they are. I want to believe that.
"He's going to go too far one of these days," Sophie says.
"Should I ask?" I don't like Darren, but I'm cautious. Everyone who says anything negative about Darren gets kicked out of Sophie's life when she takes him back. My hand tightens on the phone. I want her here where I can see her and protect her.
"I love him."
"Uh huh."
"We just fight so much . . ."
"Sophie? Did something happen?"
My sister pauses long enough that I open my mouth, but then she says, "No. It's okay. He's just . . . upset a lot."
I have come to realize that I couldn’t save her. Sometimes people are beyond our reach. I think about the things I could've done, the things I could've said. Maybe there was nothing. Logic says nothing I do today will bring her back, but every so often, I can't stop thinking about her voice. I hear her voice, and I think about the women the Creeper kills. Did they have sisters they'd call? Do they have kids at home?
Tommy is harder to think about than my sister. My nephew was the only person Darren treated like he was fragile. For all my issues with my brother-in-law, I never doubted that he loved his son. He claims he still does. Hell, he claims he still loves my sister. He writes to me sometimes, long rambling letters that remind me that the human capacity for self-delusion is incredible.
And every once in a while, I am terrified that he's not completely wrong. Some of them I've read and re-read:
Sophie would forgive me. I know she would. Someday I'll be with her again, and she'll tell me. With God's grace, we'll live together in his kingdom with our son. I can't be angry with you, Juliana. Sophie would disapprove. I wish you could understand what happened.
But after a certain point, I asked not to receive them. They are turned over to the police, to Henry. I can't read them anymore. It makes me feel weak to admit that—so only Henry and Uncle Micky know.
I'm not sure why I can handle the grief of mourners or the heartbreak over the women the Creeper has killed, but my own grief is too much to unpack even now. I haven't seen or spoken to my sister's killer since the trial. Sophie’s husband. Tommy’s dad. How do men kill their children? Their partners? How do they do the things that I see written on bodies?
"Jules?"
Uncle Micky is in the room. The little girl in me still looks at him and sees home. My parents are good people, but my uncle's the one who kept me safe.
“Rumors are already starting.” Uncle Micky stands far enough away that I don’t feel crowded.
“About?”
“The body you and the Revill boy—”
I shake my head. “He’s thirty-eight.”
Uncle Micky ignores my attempt to redirect. “Are there things you aren’t telling me, Jules?”
If I listed all the things I hid, we’d be in this stand-off a while. I walk over and wrap my arms around my uncle. It’s not exactly an answer, but for a moment, I want to be a small child, safe from the monsters in the world. I used to think that the bad things were the stuff of stories, and I believed that things that go bump in the night skittered away when the lights cut on.