Part 33 (1/2)
”Keep them, doofus,” she said. ”You might have a daughter someday, you know.”
They were words that conjured no image but were unaccountably soothing.
PEACE CAME AT AROUND EIGHT O'CLOCK, and despite the chaos of the room and the singular strangeness of the day, Henry found himself quietly delighted that he had been right to sense something in her eyes.
”Mary Jane Harmon,” he said. ”This is Peace Jacobs.”
”Peace? Jacobs?” Mary Jane repeated. Her look was quizzical, pressing, possessive, defiant: Henry could have drawn it from memory.
”Henry and I met at the funeral,” Peace said, looking around and clearly trying to make sense of the room.
”You met at the funeral,” funeral,” Mary Jane repeated. Mary Jane repeated.
Peace shrugged.
”Peace was a practice baby,” Henry explained.
”You're kidding,” Mary Jane said.
”Her name was Hazel,” Henry said.
”Hazel. You're not the one he saved, saved, are you?” Mary Jane asked. are you?” Mary Jane asked.
”Saved? What do you mean, saved?” Peace asked.
”Oh, I didn't actually save you,” Henry said. ”We were just locked in here together one time.”
”Really? Just the two of us?”
”That's the story I always heard,” Mary Jane said. ”And heard. And heard.”
”So what did he save me from?”
”I didn't save you,” Henry said with a short but well-aimed glare at Mary Jane. ”I just didn't do anything bad to you.”
”Well, I'd take that deal most days,” Peace said. She smiled directly at Henry, as if Mary Jane was not in the room.
Henry smiled back in much the same way.
Mary Jane looked at both of them. ”Fine,” she said, as if Henry had actually asked her to agree to something. In fact, the request had been entirely implicit: Leave, so that I can forget everything by charming this total stranger. Leave, so that I can forget everything by charming this total stranger.
”Will you be here tomorrow?” Mary Jane asked, a question that had its own tacit meaning: a warning to Peace about the man she was eyeing with such unconcealed eagerness.
Annoyed, Henry gestured to the room at large.
”You think I have elves coming?” he asked her.
”I never know who you have coming,” Mary Jane replied, and even through his annoyance, Henry had to admire her wit.
It was ten o'clock when Mary Jane left, and ten-thirty when Henry kissed Peace for the first time.
She tasted of the brownies she'd brought and proffered and-once Henry had eaten one-proudly explained that she'd laced with has.h.i.+sh.
”I baked them this afternoon,” she said. ”My mom was right there in the kitchen when I put the stuff in the batter, and she didn't have a clue.”
Henry started to mind, and then he didn't, because Peace added, with unexpected and captivating pride: ”And I baked them from scratch. I didn't even use a mix!”
PEACE JACOBS'S REAL NAME WAS SARAH, but she had changed it even before she'd decided that she wanted to be an actress. ”Peace” went with the whole hippie aspect of her. She was just seventeen, and her appearance by her parents' side at Martha Gaines's funeral had been entirely anomalous. She had not been in touch with either of them for months beforehand, having dropped out of high school in search of herself. A trip home for funds had prompted a truce, and Martha's funeral had occasioned a show of good-girlism that no one with any insight could have taken seriously.
”I don't know why,” she said to Henry, leaning back on Martha's pillows and lifting her arms up over her head. ”But it feels like I don't like to stay in one spot very long.”
Henry felt the giddy fog of the hash brownies overtaking him. He watched his hands move as he spoke, and found them newly fascinating.
”Me neither,” he said.
”My parents say I'm crazy,” Peace said. ”Really, they always have. They say I should learn how to stay in one place. But what's the point of staying in one place? You can't learn anything. You can't meet anyone. You can't go anywhere.”
Henry smiled, then started laughing.
”What?” Peace said.
He laughed harder, a being-high laugh.
”What?”
”That last one,” he managed to say, ”is pretty much the definition of it, don't you think?”
”Huh?”
”'If you stay in one place, you can't go anywhere'?”
She was embarra.s.sed for a split second, and then she started laughing, too. He liked that about her.
”Well, I love things that are new,” she said, finally, when they had caught their breath.
”And people who are new,” he said, and kissed her again.
HE STAYED SIX DAYS AT THE PRACTICE HOUSE, ostensibly to tidy up Martha's things, but really to explore Peace's considerable s.e.xual talents and her unexpected mystery. Mary Jane, having sized up the situation perfectly, gave Henry a withering look and a halfhearted hug and left just two days after she had come.
”Why's she wearing that eye patch?” Peace asked after Mary Jane had left.
Henry hesitated. ”She lost an eye when she was little,” he said.
”b.u.mmer. Couldn't they fix it?”
”They tried, but it turned out they'd waited too long.”