Part 26 (1/2)

”I'm on my way home, but it won't take long.” She opened the zippered case and out came a sharp-looking silver instrument. She didn't wait for my consent. ”One thing my mother always told us was keep your nails nice,” she said, picking up my hand. ”You keep your nails nice, you can get away with almost anything.”

I smiled. It felt almost natural. ”Is that the secret? If only I'd known.”

”You stay away from those ferrets,” she said. ”You'll be okay.”

That was all she said. We sat in silence, both staring at my hands, as she cleaned my fingernails, trimmed and filed them, and then buffed them down with a flat rubber stick. She was sure and fast. When she was done, my hands looked like they belonged to someone else.

”That's amazing,” I said.

”That's seven months of beauty school.” She grinned at me as she zipped her tools back into their case.

I grinned back. ”Whatever it is, it's impressive.”

”Doing my nails always makes me feel better,” she said.

And it helped. I didn't think it would, but it did.

When I woke up the next morning, my pale roommate was gone and Jack was stretched out on her newly made bed. I woke him up, told him what the doctor had said, and asked him what I should do. He rolled his eyes and said, ”Can't they take care of it?”

I said, ”I suppose.”

He seemed restless and didn't stay long. When he was gone, and the wide-hipped nurse came in, I asked her what had happened to my roommate. She clucked her tongue. ”Poor thing. We brought her up to the isolation ward this morning.”

”What was it?” I said.

”TB,” she said. ”The doctors never even thought about it. She wasn't the type.”

”How'd she get it?”

The nurse shook her head.

”Some outlandish college trip she took last year-Bangladesh or Sri Lanka or somewhere. If her mother hadn't mentioned it on the phone, we would never have known. We'll probably be able to control it, but what an awful disease. Such a pretty thing, too.” She gazed at me for a moment, and then said, ”You, too.” She patted my arm. ”Well, you're young yet.”

I stretched the fingers on my right hand experimentally and watched the way the light shone on my fingernails. The only thing that hurt was the needle in my hand. Even the ferret bite was beginning to heal.

When Jack came to get me later that morning, he brought me some of Lily's clothes and the high leather boots she'd bought for me. The other bed was still empty and he sat on its edge as I put my old clothes into the plastic I NY bag that Lily's things had been in. As I packed, he talked. He seemed jumpy; his hands moved constantly, plucking at his s.h.i.+rt, pus.h.i.+ng his hair back behind his ears.

He wanted to rent a car, he said, but he had realized that we'd need Lily's driver's license for that. Besides, it left too many traces. So instead we were going to take a bus somewhere. ”I wish it were more glamorous, but every other way we could do it leaves too much of a trail. What do you think?” He leaned over and ran his hand down the side of my throat and said, practically purred, ”Is your brother an evil genius, or what?”

I could see the quick beat of the pulse fluttering in his neck and a fine sheen of sweat on his forehead. ”You've been taking Lily's pills, haven't you?”

”I needed to stay awake and think. Haven't slept since it happened.” I stared at him, taking in the bright green eyes and the fine high cheekbones as if for the first time. ”I needed to take care of you.” He touched my nose lightly with the tip of one finger and said, ”We've gotten away with it, little sister. What do you think of that?” There was pride in his voice.

”I think the girl who was in that bed had TB,” I said.

He jerked away and jumped to his feet.

”Jesus, Josie,” he said and shuddered.

Before they let me go, one of the nurses gave me another rabies shot and talked to me interminably about future appointments that I had no intention of keeping: one follow-up, three more rabies vaccinations, and a TB test (in April, because the sallow girl might have infected me). Downstairs, I had another endless conversation-this time with a sour-looking woman-about bills I did not intend to pay and payment plans I planned to ignore. By the time they put me in a wheelchair, I felt adrift in lies, as if there were a fathomless ocean of untruth surging beneath me and I was in a tiny boat with no sails. Jack would approve, I thought.

We both had to sign forms before they'd let me leave. As I signed Lily's name, I thought, no EAT ME or DRINK ME required; with a flash of ferret teeth and the flourish of a pen, I had become someone else. When I glanced at Jack's form, I saw that he had written ”Carmichael Barrett.” Our eyes met. He gave me a barely perceptible shrug. I had never known Carmichael's last name.

Jack had Lily's ATM card and he used it to get cash. We took a cab back to the apartment. In the back seat, I watched dispa.s.sionately as he filed the money away in his wallet, thinking vaguely of the time earlier that year when pulling five hundred dollars out of a cash machine would have sustained the two of us for months. And there was a time before that when we hardly thought about money at all. On the Hill, we'd only thought about each other.

Jack had Lily's ATM card. What did I have? I had her driver's license. Her ident.i.ty felt like a prize that I had won, through all the weeks of tense borrowed luxury that I'd lived in her apartment, through all the long months of loneliness with Jack and without him before that, and all the long years of Raeburn's housekeepers and geometry lessons before that. Because Lily had not worked for what she had, and I had done nothing but work in one way or another all my life, and what did I win? A healing ferret bite, a copy of Alice in Wonderland, and two weeks' worth of antibiotic pills the size of walnuts.

We drove through the park. As the cab threaded its way between the stone retaining walls of the Seventy-second Street Transverse-walls I'd always liked, because of their age and dignity-Jack told me that the only thing that he would miss was the leather jacket that Lily had bought him. It was hanging in the coat closet. I told him I liked his old one better anyway.

My brother. I had my brother.

And I had the twisted version of family that we'd built together, and I had a pair of fabulous drop-dead boots. I had Lily's jewelry, her diamond solitaire necklace and the blue topaz ring, and Jack told me that I could keep them or sell them, whichever I wanted. For now, they were in the pocket of my jeans. So I had them, too.

Lily, on the other hand-I told myself-had lazed her way through life in a manner befitting her elegant surroundings, and if the thought had ever occurred to her that money came from work and not from accountants, it hadn't stayed long. She'd spent her short, luxurious life doing nothing, and now she was in a closet. There were a mult.i.tude of other Lilys living in the city. Perhaps one among the many wouldn't be missed.

So, really-I told myself-things weren't so bad. We were moving again, and we were finally going to leave New York. In the cab, Jack was singing softly along with the radio. I told myself that the good times he'd promised when he left the Hill were finally coming, that we'd have money and a place of our own. We'd be safe.

But I was also thinking, as we headed back toward Lily's apartment and the locked closet door, that things that should have been very difficult-like lying, like stealing, like killing-had become very easy very quickly. My eyes kept moving between my beautiful brother and my own faint reflection in the window. We were very much alike, Jack and I.

Something stirred deep inside me.

Lily's apartment was cool and the scent of lilies of the valley was thick in the air. The florist must have come while I was in the hospital. I wondered what Jack had told him.

As we walked in the door, the phone was ringing. We ignored it. ”Has it been doing that a lot?” I asked.

”Afraid so. I talked to your old friend Carmichael, told him that she'd left for Maine already. Then I stopped answering it.” He shrugged. ”Her parents left a message on the machine.”

”That's a problem.”

”Not really. I guess they're in Florida. They didn't know until the last minute that she was headed up to the house in Maine.”

Jack had prepared for my homecoming. There was soft music playing in the background, airy and dark and a long way from his adored Wagner. He had also moved one of Lily's overstuffed white armchairs against the closet door, placing the tall lamp on one side of it and one of the gla.s.s occasional tables on the other. The closet was tucked away in the corner; it looked as though someone had deliberately created a cozy little nook, maybe for reading.

”I've got wine chilling,” Jack said. ”I thought we'd go all out, this one last night.” He placed a bottle of wine on the center island and then went to the cupboard and brought down two of Lily's crystal wine gla.s.ses. There was a conspicuous gap in the cupboard where one of the gla.s.ses was missing.

I stood on the other side of the island and watched him. ”This one last night before what?”

”Before we hit the road.”

”And then what?”

”You,” he said, coming around the island and putting his hands on my shoulders. ”You never trust me.” He kissed my forehead tenderly. ”We have this conversation every time we do anything new. You always have to know where we're going, what we're doing-I thought you wanted to leave the city. Haven't we always come out all right in the end?”

”We're not at the end of this yet.”

Jack stood back. He gave me a long, hard look. Finally he reached for me.

I stiffened.

His hand fell on top of my head and he shook my head back and forth, softly, as though I were a dog that he was rea.s.suring.