Because It Is My Blood (22 page)

There were so many things to be sad and worried about, but at that moment, I couldn’t be sad and worried. I felt brave and sturdy and better around Win. It would be so easy for me to love him again. Abruptly, I pushed him away.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Win … What Imogen’s sister said at the funeral is true. The people around me do tend to get hurt. You know that.” I touched his hip with my fingertips. “We don’t have to start this whole thing up again. Just because you met a girl you liked in high school doesn’t mean you have to stay with her forever. I mean, no one does that. No one with any good sense at least. I”—I had been about to say something about how I considered myself to be a person with ample good sense but then I said something else—“I love you.” I did; I was certain. “I love you but I don’t want—”

Win interrupted me. “Stop,” he said. “I love you, too.” He paused. “You underestimate me, Annie. I’m not blind to your faults. You keep too many secrets, for one. You lie sometimes. You have trouble saying the things in your heart. You have an awful temper. You hold a grudge. And I’m not saying this next one is your fault, but people who know you have a disturbing tendency to end up with bullets in them. You don’t have faith in anyone, including me. You think I’m an idiot sometimes. Don’t deny it—I can tell. And maybe I was an idiot a year ago, but a lot has happened since then. I’m different, Anya. You used to say I didn’t know what love was. But I think I learned what it is. I learned it when I thought I had lost you over the summer. And I learned it when my leg ached something awful. And I learned it when you were gone and I didn’t know if I’d ever see you again. And I learned it every night when I’d pray that you were safe even if I never got to see you again. I don’t want to marry you. I’m just happy to be near you for a while, and for as long as you’ll let me be. Because there’s never been anyone else for me but you. There will never be anyone else for me but you. I know this. I do. Annie, my Annie, don’t cry…”

(Was I crying? Yes, I suppose I was. But I was still so awfully tired. You can’t possibly hold this against me.)

“I know that loving you is going to be hard, Annie. But I love you, come what may.”

I looked him in his eyes, and he looked me in mine. His eyes were not the blindly adoring ones that had looked on me a year ago. They were clear. So were mine except for the fact that tears were starting to make everything blurry.

“So, do you like anything about me?” I asked.

He considered my question. “Your hair,” he said finally. “And you were a semi-decent lab partner last year. When you were around, that is.”

“I had to cut most of my hair off. It’s only half grown back.”

“I know, Anya. It’s a great loss.”

“Hair’s not much to build a relationship on anyway,” I said.

I rose up onto my tiptoes and I kissed him on the mouth. The first kiss was soft, but then I kissed him again. The second was so hard, my teeth cut into my lip and I could feel myself start to bleed. I lapped up the blood with my tongue and laughed. Win moved in to kiss me again. “Stop, Win!” I said. “I’m bleeding.”

“I didn’t think there’d be bloodshed this soon,” he commented.

I admitted that I’d hoped to avoid it.

“Maybe we should take it slow,” he said, as he pulled me to him again. “Make sure no one gets hurt.”

“Let’s do that,” I said. And then I took off his hat. He’d been wearing that silly hat this whole time. And I touched his hair, which was springy and silky and clean.

The heart is so very peculiar. How light and how heavy it can feel at the same time.

How light.

*   *   *

Re: the remaining twenty-nine days of house arrest. I couldn’t go out, which meant I couldn’t begin to address all the problems in my life. Win came over every day, and Scarlet came over most days, and the month passed quickly enough.

We played Scrabble, and Natty and I cried some, and I basically ignored everyone who tried to contact me. I didn’t know what I wanted to say to anyone yet.

About three weeks in, there was a snowstorm, the kind that makes everything stop in the city. Win somehow made it uptown and he stayed for three days.

I had been having trouble sleeping at night, thinking of Leo and of Theo and of Imogen and even sometimes thinking of the man I’d likely killed in the grove, and I was glad for Win’s company.

“Unburden yourself,” Win insisted. “Confess.”

“I can’t.”

“You’ll die if you keep it all in, and I want to know these things.”

I looked at Win. I could not visit a priest and I was tired of keeping secrets. And so I told him everything. I told him about growing cacao. I told him about the marriage proposal. I even told him about slicing off someone’s hand with a machete. What it had felt like to slice through human bone. What the hand had looked like there, lying in the grass. What the man’s blood had smelled like. I now knew that not everyone’s blood was the same.

“Do you think Yuji Ono was behind the killings?” Win asked.

“He said he wasn’t. And I think I believe him.”

“So was it Mickey? Or Fats? Or someone else entirely?”

“I think it was Mickey,” I said after a bit. “I haven’t heard from him since I got back to New York. And I imagine once I lost favor with Yuji Ono, Mickey might have thought he was avenging his father’s shooting by killing Leo.”

“You think the other shootings were just meant to scare, not kill?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Nothing has happened since then,” Win said. “Maybe all of this is over.”

But it wasn’t over. If Leo was dead, I had to make someone pay. I furrowed my brow, and Win ironed it out with his fingers.

“I can read your mind right now, Annie. If you go after whoever you think killed Leo, they’ll come after you or Natty. It won’t ever end.”

“Win, if I don’t go after them, they’ll think I’m weak. Why shouldn’t they just come back at me and Natty to finish the job? I’ll be holding my breath forever. I don’t want to seem like a person who can be trifled with.”

“What if you said you had no interest in the chocolate business? What if you said you were going back to school and then to college to become a crime scene investigator and good luck to everyone else?”

“I wish I could…”

“Why? Why can’t you? I don’t understand.”

“Because … I’m a convict, Win. I have a record. I’ve missed tons of school. And no high school, let alone college, will want me. I’m stuck.”

“There’s one somewhere. We’ll find one. I can help you, Annie.”

I shook my head.

“Okay, what if we just go somewhere where no one knows us? We take Natty and leave. We could change our names, dye our hair.”

I shook my head again. I had tried running and I didn’t want that kind of life for Win, for Natty, or for me.

“It’s more than that, Win. When I was in Mexico, something changed for me. I realized that I will never escape chocolate. And so there was no point in running away from it or even hating it anymore.”

“Dad’s always saying that it should never have become illegal in the first place.”

“Really? Charles Delacroix says that?”

“All the time. Usually just before mentioning that it would be terribly convenient for him if I never saw you again.”

I laughed. “How is my old friend?” I asked.

“Dad? He’s awful. He’s completely depressed. He’s grown a beard. But who cares about him? Let’s talk about me. I’ve never been happier in my whole life that Dad lost an election.” Win paused to look at me. “You really sliced off that hit man’s hand with a machete?”

“I did.” I wondered if it had been a mistake to tell him that, if he would love me less, knowing how violent I could be. “I don’t regret it, Win. I don’t regret shooting my cousin when he shot you either.”

“My girl,” he said, just before he took me in his arms.

I offered to show him my machete, and he said he’d like to see it, so I led him into my bedroom. After Mr. Kipling had returned it to me, I’d hidden the machete between my mattress and the box spring.

“Close the door,” I told him.

“This is starting to feel like a trick,” he said.

“Now, turn off the light.”

*   *   *

On the final morning of my confinement, just as I was about to leave the apartment for tracker removal, I received a phone call from Mickey Balanchine.

“Annie, how are you?” he asked. “I’m sorry. I haven’t had time to contact you, but I wanted you to know that I’m awfully sorry about what happened to you and Natty and especially Leo. Poor kid. It’s insane is what it is.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know whether I believed him.

“That’s not the reason I’m calling, however. I just wanted you to know that Yuri’s dead.” Mickey sniffled loudly. “I want to be able to tell you that Dad didn’t suffer much, but I don’t know. I just don’t know. This last year since the shooting has been horrific, Annie.

“Dad mentioned you not long before he passed. He said that you were a fine girl. I think he liked you better than me.” Mickey laughed weakly. “I think you reminded him of his little brother.”

He meant Daddy.

“I know … I know that things are strange right now, but it would mean a lot to everyone if you came to the service.”

I told him I would try and then I hung up the phone. Mickey did not sound as if he had just arranged for the murder of my brother. Then again, I did not sound like a girl who could slice off someone’s hand with a machete either.

But I had been that kind of girl, and if the situation called for it, I knew I could be again.

XIII

I ENGAGE IN RECREATIONAL CHOCOLATIERING; RECEIVE TWO NOTES AND A PACKAGE

M
R. KIPLING WAS MY
DATE
to the tracker-removal party at the East Ninety-Third Street police station. The police station had sentimental associations for me, as it was the same place I’d been detained after I’d been arrested for poisoning Gable Arsley. As for the tracker? Though it wasn’t supposed to be painful coming out, it was. The officer said I should go to a doctor to have it checked out in case it was infected. “These little buggers are supposed to be thrown away, but,” he apologized, “occasionally we do use them twice. Budget cuts, you know.”

As I was leaving, another police officer handed me a note:

Congratulations on your release. Please come see me at Rikers. I have information for you.

Fondly,

Your Cousin

I assumed it was Jacks, though—let’s face facts—I probably had more than one cousin in prison.

Outside, the snow had melted, and the day felt positively tropical for the end of February in New York.

“So, now what?” Mr. Kipling asked me.

The prior evening, I had lain awake in my bed, thinking of the things I needed to do once I was free. The list was so long that I had to get up to write it on my slate:

  1. Find a boarding school for Natty.

  2. Find a school for me.

  3. Find out who killed my brother and Imogen.

  4. Avenge my brother’s death.

  5. Figure out how to get my brother’s ashes from Japan.

  6. Figure out what to do with my life post–high school (should I ever manage to graduate, that is).

  7. Call Granja Mañana to see how Theo is doing (not from a traceable line, of course).

  8. Get a haircut.

  9. Go through Imogen’s things.

10. Buy birthday present for Win (Saturday market?).

But I didn’t want to do any of that just then. “Mr. Kipling,” I said, “would it be all right with you if we walked around for a while?”

We went the long way, going west to Fifth, which took us past Little Egypt. Little Egypt looked as decrepit as ever. “When I was a kid,” Mr. Kipling said, “I thought this was the coolest place in the world. I loved the mummies.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Everyone and everything went broke. And no one thought the mummies were worth saving, I guess.” Mr. Kipling paused. “And now it’s this idiotic nightclub.”

I knew it well.

In front of Little Egypt, I could already detect that there were more black market products being hawked out in the open than when Charles Delacroix had been acting as district attorney. I walked past a chocolate dealer. You wouldn’t have known chocolate was being sold, as there was no product in sight. The table was covered with a dark blue velvet cloth and approximately one hundred matryoshka dolls sat atop it. Everyone knew what matryoshka dolls meant. I walked over to the table. Mr. Kipling asked me if I was sure I wanted to do that. “What if someone is watching?”

We’d paid off Bertha Sinclair so I thought I was pretty much in the clear.

“You have Balanchine Special Dark?” I asked the vendor.

The vendor nodded. He reached under the table and produced a single bar. I could tell from the wrapper that it wasn’t real. The colors were off, and the paper had an unappetizing, gritty matte finish. It was probably some cheap, 1 percent cacao chocolate in a counterfeit Balanchine wrapper. I bought the bar anyway. Ridiculously, the vendor wanted ten dollars for this knockoff.

“Are you serious?” I asked. A bar of Balanchine Special Dark was usually three or four dollars, tops.

“Supply’s been scarce,” the vendor replied.

“You and I both know this isn’t even Balanchine,” I said.

“What are you? Some kind of expert? Take it or leave it.”

I put the money on the table. Despite the cost, I was curious to see what was being sold in my father’s name.

Mr. Kipling stood a bit away from me while I was making this transaction. He didn’t want to be disbarred, I suppose.

I slipped the chocolate into my bag, and then Mr. Kipling walked me back to my apartment.

“Should we talk about schools?” Mr. Kipling asked.

What was there to talk about? “Homeschooling seems like the only option at this point. I’ll study at home and try to get my GED before summer.”

“And after that? College?”

I looked at Mr. Kipling. “I think we both know that I am no longer college material.”

“That isn’t true!” He argued with me for a while, and I ignored him. “Anya, your father wanted you to go to college.”