Part 8 (1/2)
69.
”I know that, and maybe that other girl, maybe she never saw any wolves either, but that's not the point. She believed she saw wolves, Niki, and in the end that's all that mattered.”
”Yeah, I know,” Niki says, thinking of the things Spyder thought she saw, not wanting to see him cry, and he squeezes her hands tighter. It hurts, but she doesn't say so; she squeezes back instead, gazes past Marvin at Danny Boudreaux staring at them from his corner. Some wild expression stretched like a latex Halloween mask across his cold and irrefutable ghost's face, jealousy or hope or a wicked, secretive smile, no way for her to be sure, and then he's gone and there's nothing but a smudgy bit of shadow left behind.
”I can't believe what you told me, Niki, so I'm just gonna have to take your word for it. If I can't see what you see, then I can at least trust you. I'm not going to let you do this alone.”
And when he finally lets go of her hands, releasing them slowly like he's afraid she's going to run, all the dark blood that's leaked through Niki's torn st.i.tches and raveling bandages spills out between their fingers and trickles onto the bed. Marvin's face goes slack, then taut and sick, realizing what he's done to her, horror vying with apology for control, and he opens his mouth to say something, but ”No,” she says, places her good hand over his lips and smiles a smile she doesn't have to fake. ”I'm okay. It doesn't hurt all that bad. I think I'm going to be okay now.”
While Marvin packs and calls the airline, Niki goes back to the upstairs bathroom to look at her hand. Down the hall, past the room where Daria keeps her record collection and her guitars, and the bathroom is big and white and smells faintly of Dow Scrubbing Bubbles and strongly of the bowl of lavender potpourri on the back of the com-mode. Clean smells, and Niki wonders how the bathroom would smell if Daria hadn't hired Marvin. The lion-footed, cast-iron tub and all those little hexagonal tiles on the 70 floor, a narrow, stained-gla.s.s window above the tub so she can see the last of the day, and she sits down on the toilet seat and begins unwrapping the gauze. Marvin wanted to do it, but she refused, so he fussed with the b.l.o.o.d.y bedclothes instead, carting them off to the laundry hamper and apologizing over and over even though she asked him not to; the st.i.tches torn before he squeezed her hand, anyway, and it's something she wants to do herself.
The entire palm side of the dressing is stained, some of the blood already gone dry and stiff, and she unwinds it slowly, winces when she gets near the end and some of the gauze has stuck to her skin, stuck to the crusty edges of the hole in her hand. Niki lets the bandage fall to the floor, a sloppy pile of crimson and maroon and white at her feet.
The st.i.tches have come loose, all eight of them, and she knows that Marvin's probably going to insist she see a doctor again before they leave town. Niki stares at her hand, trying to remember exactly what did and didn't happen in the restroom at Cafe Alhazred: the swelling and whatever grew inside it, the thing that had burrowed into her flesh, Danny, and then someone shouting and pounding angrily on the door.
Niki reaches for a coral pink washcloth hanging on a rack near the tub and wraps it around her hand, squeezes it and grits her teeth against the pain.
Was any of it real, the squirming, transparent child of her infection, something she saw or only something that she thought she saw?
Do you really think there's any difference? and she hopes that voice is only hers, her own voice from her own sick head, because she honestly isn't in the mood for Danny Boudreaux right now. No time for anything that might slow her down, no hope but movement, and she stands up and goes to the sink, twists one of the bra.s.s k.n.o.bs, and in a moment hot water is gurgling into the porcelain basin.
”You wanted her, and now she has you, forever,” exactly what Danny said at Alhazred, and that's what the face in the mirror says when she looks up from the sink. But it
71.
isn't her face in the gla.s.s, and it isn't Danny's either, this haggard young man with eyes like stolen fire, eyes like the last breath rattling out of a dying man's chest, but then he's gone, and she's staring into her own dark and frightened eyes.
Niki raises her left hand and cautiously places her fingertips against the mirror, half expecting her hand to pa.s.s straight through, nothing solid there to stop her. But it's just a mirror, and the silvered gla.s.s is smooth and cold and reflects nothing but the lost girl she's become, the lost woman, and she looks back down at the water filling the sink.
”All I have do is make it to the airport,” she says, wis.h.i.+ng she were already in Boulder, and so many opportunities to back out had come and pa.s.sed her by; over the Rocky Mountains and safe for a while with Mort and Theo before she has to see this s.h.i.+t through to the end. Niki shuts off the tap and lowers her right hand slowly into the clear, steaming water; it doesn't hurt half so much as she expected, and she wonders whether that's good or bad, watches with more curiosity than concern as her blood starts to turn the water red. Just like Moses, she thinks, and it annoys her that she can't remember which number plague that was.
”How are you doing in here?” Marvin asks, and she turns her head towards the bathroom door, making sure he's really there and really him before she answers.
”I think I'll live,” and he comes closer, then, scowls down at her hand, and by now the water looks more like cherry Kool-Aid.
”d.a.m.n. You realize we're going to have to get that st.i.tched closed again before we leave.”
”That's what I thought you'd say,” and she lifts her hand out of the water so he can look at it more closely.
”Yeah, well, bleeding to death would probably be a lot more inconvenient. G.o.d, Niki, how did you even do this?”
”I already told you that,” and she did, but Marvin shakes his head anyway.
72.
”Well, at least it doesn't look as if there's any infection setting in,” and he opens the medicine cabinet, his own little ER stashed away in there, and takes out a sterile gauze pad and a roll of surgical tape, a plastic bottle of hydrogen peroxide. ”This will probably do until we can get you to a doctor, if you'll go easy on this hand.”
”The flight's at nine,” she reminds him.
”We're not going to miss the flight, and if we do, we'll get another one.”
”I want to ask you something,” but then he pours the peroxide over her hand and it stings, foams the ugly color of funeral-parlor carnations. ”s.h.i.+t, Marvin,” she hisses and tries to pull her hand away.
”Don't be a p.u.s.s.y. What do you want to ask me?”
Niki waits until the stinging starts to fade, until he's rinsed her hand and dabbed it dry with a fresh washcloth and has started bandaging it again.
”It's kind of personal,” but he only shrugs.
”s.e.x, drugs, or politics?” he asks, and ”Neither,” she says, and he glances up at her.
”Then it has to be religion, right?” and Niki nods. ”I was Catholic,” he continues, ”once upon a time. Ancient history.”
”So you don't believe in G.o.d anymore?”
”I believe we'll find out when the time comes,” he says and takes a small pair of scissors from the medicine cabinet to snip the sticky white surgical tape. ”Whether we want to or not.”
She doesn't say anything for a moment, watches him working on her hand while she weighs words in her head, words and their consequences, and she can tell it makes Marvin feel better that there's finally something he can do for her.
”What if you're wrong, and we never get to find out? It's kind of presumptuous, isn't it, a.s.suming that dead people get all the answers? Maybe they don't know any more than we do.”
”My, but we're in an existential mood today, aren't we?”
73.
”It's just something I was thinking about yesterday morning, that's all. How terrible it would be to be dead, to be a ghost and know that you're dead, and still not know if there's a G.o.d.”
”Is that how you think it works?”
”I don't know what I think anymore,” Niki says, and then Marvin's finished, has started putting everything back into the medicine cabinet, and the b.l.o.o.d.y water is swirling away down the drain. ”But I've seen ghosts, and they don't seem very happy about it. Being dead, I mean.”
”Are you afraid of them?” he asks, not exactly changing the subject, and he closes the medicine cabinet; Niki looks at the mirror, but the only reflections she can see there are hers and Marvin's.
”There are worse things than ghosts,” she replies.