Part 26 (2/2)

”Close enough,” he said. He began to take pots and pans out of the cupboard. ”Poor little Josie. Always so serious. Tell me this, young sister: where do you want to go? We're free as birds and we have all the money we could possibly want. Pasta okay?”

”You're high,” I said. ”It'll be easy enough to trace us with the camera from that ATM machine, and you want us to keep using the card? Why don't we carry her down to the police station now and throw her on the front desk? Say, 'Here, looky what we did?' ” Distantly, I thought, I would never have spoken to my brother like this. I would never have needed to. I would never have wanted to. I would never have dared to.

For a moment Jack didn't answer. He put the big pot in the sink and turned on the faucet. As he stared down at it, watching it fill, all I could see of his eyes were his long, thick lashes. ”First of all, it's not what we did. It's what I did. Second of all, I did it for you.”

Now he looked at me. The pot was overflowing. ”I told her, if she wanted to watch me f.u.c.k another girl, I'd do it. But not you.”

I walked around the island, reached out, and turned off the taps.

”Why not?” I said, and his eyes flashed.

”You know why not.”

”Do I?”

”Because n.o.body else has what we have,” he said. ”Because we belong to each other in a way that n.o.body else will ever understand, and I refuse to share that. I refuse to share you.”

I turned away from him, lifted the pot out of the sink, and carried it to the stove.

Jack followed me. ”We'll sell her stuff. This place is a gold mine. We'll loot her and run, and we won't ever have to think about her again. It'll all be over.”

”Is there sauce,” I asked, knowing that it would never be over, ”or should I go ahead and make some?”

”It was just because I love you,” he said. ”That's all it was.”

There was no bottled sauce, but I found a plastic container in the refrigerator that contained the leftovers of the sauce that Lily had made the night she died. There was almost enough, but not quite. I would have to make more.

I cut up the last clove of garlic, dumped it in the frying pan with some olive oil, and watched as it sizzled and snapped.

The two vases of lilies of the valley sat on the island bar, as they always did.

The old questions were chasing themselves around and around in my head. Where would we go? What would we do? How would we survive? Jack was right, there was enough loot in Lily's apartment to keep us for quite a while, and if we sold a little here and there as we traveled, it wouldn't really be traceable. But we couldn't run forever, and the money from Lily's jewelry and crystal and silver would run out eventually.

And then where would we go?

What would we do?

How would we survive?

They'd find us. I didn't believe for a minute that they wouldn't find us.

I dumped the leftover sauce in the pan and tossed its plastic container in the sink, considering these questions as if they were a math problem and all the variables waited only for the application of the right theorem.

He had done it for me.

There was a can of crushed tomatoes in the cupboard. I opened it and mixed the contents with the bubbling sauce on the stove.

n.o.body else has what we have.

Jack was moving around in the other room. He was already sweating and unable to sit still, but he had taken another one of Lily's pills as he carried a gla.s.s of wine-his third-from the living room to the kitchen and back again. A small pile of jewelry and trinkets was ama.s.sing on the coffee table. I knew that he was trying to find things that we could sneak past the doorman without arousing any more suspicion than we already had. So that we could sell them as we fled, and have some money when we got to the next city, the next apartment, the next girl-or maybe it would be a guy, and it would be my turn again, as it had been in the beginning, with Kevin McNerny. Because, I realized, that was what was going to happen, over and over again. That was what our life would be.

I chopped onions and sprinkled them over the surface of the sauce. I took pasta from its jar on the counter and put it in the pot of water Jack had filled, which was boiling on the stove.

When I looked up, Jack was gazing at me across the room.

”You're beautiful,” he said.

I smiled. It was almost painful.

He came to stand behind me, put his arms around my waist, and kissed the side of my neck. ”We're not doing so badly for two crazy kids against the world, are we?”

I didn't answer.

”Say something,” he said. His voice was desperate now. I had never heard him sound like that. He buried his face in the hollow of my shoulder and I felt his breath, warm and moist, against my skin. In my head, a younger Jack, supremely confident and not at all desperate, said, ”We're not like them,” echoing Raeburn. I was thinking of the pond, of the warm sun on the rocks. Jack's wet, cool hands on my back. ”We'll never be like them.”

A vision of a sun-dappled park, green and shady and cool, came to me. Tattooed legs stretched out in the thick gra.s.s. Other hands in my hair and uncomplicated kisses that were nothing more; the couple with the highlighters looking back at us as we kissed, thinking, ”Look at that girl and her boyfriend, look at that couple.”

Jack took plates from the cupboards and silverware from the drawers and went to set Lily's gla.s.s-topped table.

When I was a kid I had a cat that died from eating them.

In a flash, I saw again, clearly, how everything that I had been through, everything that I had done, would repeat itself. Because of Jack: because of the way he was, and because he was right-he was the only person who loved me. His love was written indelibly on what was left of my soul.

Suddenly, although I knew that it was far too soon, I felt the still-living thing beating inside me like a second heart.

Watching Jack steadily, I took the fresh lilies of the valley from the two crystal fishbowls and carried them dripping to the cutting board. I chopped them, quickly, with the big knife.

My brother finished setting the table and lit a cigarette.

”When you and I get our place,” he called to me, ”I don't want to have anything white in it at all. Not even white sheets.”

”Fine,” I said and laid the fragrant and mutilated flowers in a soft sinking heap on top of the sauce. I picked up a wooden spoon and stirred them in, watching as the remains of the white bells disappeared into the red sauce and the glossy green leaves softened. Soon there was no trace of them.

For a moment, I thought I saw the words EAT ME floating among the tomato and onion. I tasted; the sauce burned going down. A sprinkle of red chili flakes took care of that. Jack liked spicy food. We would eat heartily.

”Let that simmer,” I said to him as I rinsed the scent of the lilies from my hands. ”Don't stir it.”

We sat together over twin plates of pasta piled high with sauce. There was good wine. Candlelight played romantically over the polished silver; it cast interesting shadows around my brother's jaw and cheekbones, making him look dramatic and otherworldly. He told me that he was glad that we were still together, that he had never regretted rescuing me from our father's house, and that he couldn't imagine life without me.

I said, ”Me too,” and stared at my first forkful of pasta, with its hot, glistening strands wrapped round and round in a neat knot. The fork seemed to float independently in midair, unrelated to the hand holding it or the person to whom that hand belonged.

I could not bring myself to put the food in my mouth.

No. That's not the truth. The truth is that I chose not to eat it. The truth is that when Jack put the first bite into his mouth, I felt some dark place in me opening, some place that had never seen sun, never felt fresh air.

When I put my fork down, Jack said, ”Are you still feeling bad?”

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