Haunted Honeymoon (6 page)

“Me, too,” Mercedes said, turning her head from her computer screen to listen.

My friend was a sturdy woman who’d inherited her Cuban mother’s cocoa complexion, her Scottish father’s freckles, and both parents’ immigrant work ethic. She’d shared her passion for music with me, introducing me to dazzling bands and genres, and she’d taught me how to salsa dance.

Her short dreads were pulled back with a headband and she wore a black T-shirt with a purple graphic that said
Attack of the Rat Dogs
, the title of the album she was producing with the band.

“Can I have a few of those T-shirts?” I asked. Oswald had always liked funny T-shirts. Maybe I could give Gabriel one to pass on to him.

“You have to pay for them.”

“
Serio
, Mercedes, I work here for free all the time.”

“You drink and watch shows here for free all the time.” She wasn’t smiling, but her brown face had an affable, intelligent expression that I loved. She kept pulling off her new glasses, rubbing the bridge of her nose, and putting them on again.

“I contribute substantially to the ambiance,” I said. “I just got hit with a monster fee from my co-op. They’ve got to do electrical work.”

“¿Cuanto cuesta?”

When I told her the amount, she let out a whistle and then said, “You can’t keep living off payoffs for failed murder attempts.
What would you do if no one ever tried to kill you again?
No cojes los mangos bajitos
. If you had a regular job, you’d qualify for loans to pay for the assessment.”

“I love that so many Cuban aphorisms involve food. Now I want a mango daiquiri. Anyway, writing takes up all my time.”

“I have a problem believing that you’re slaving away in front of your laptop when you’re so tan in April. You should consider writing something marketable.”

“Like stupid stories about stupid girls and their stupid obsessions with stupid boyfriends and stupid handbags? Bitch, puhleeze. I’m dedicated to my craft, to literature.” I lifted my leg to show Mercedes my rocker-girl heels with silver stud details. “Do you like my new shoes? They make me four inches taller. I’m practically Amazonian.”

The corners of her mouth twitched upward, but she was already focusing on solutions to my problem. “If you got a roommate, you could use her rent to pay for the assessment, or maybe you should expand your gardening business full-time.”

“Your suggestions are shockingly soulless for the daughter of musicians.” I reached into my handbag to pull out a bottle of red-black nail polish.

“Real musicians have day jobs, which is why my parents still teach.”

“What I need is corporate funding. Ian’s neighbor’s father is a sci-fi geek who has multiple graduate degrees in science, and all he does is hang out in a lab,” I said, dabbing polish over the chips on my nails.

“No one just ‘hangs out’ in a lab.”

“He won’t clone his wife’s dead cat, Señor Pickles, or build her a robot maid, which seems like a very churlish attitude. If I was a scientific genius, cloning pets and building robot maids would be on the top of my to-do list.”

Mercedes knew I still missed my old dog, so she was silent for a few seconds and then she said, “If you got a Daisy clone, you could give me Rosemary. He’s a great dog and I’ve been thinking I could use a pet. I could also use a few robot bartenders.”

“If I ever meet the scientific genius, I’ll get him right on that,” I said. “Gabriel and I went shopping and had dinner this week.”

Mercedes and Gabriel had bonded over their enthusiasm for computer hacking. “How’s he doing?”

“He’s going to a Vampire Council confab about someone who wants them all to come out. I think Ian is perfectly happy living in a crypt. Thus
cryptic
. Cryptology. Cryptography. Those are all excellent words.”

“So is crap,” she said. “Milagro, I know you want to talk about what’s going on with you and Ian, but I can’t get involved, because he’s my business partner. Please don’t ask me to play sides, because I like you both.”

“But you like me better, right?”

Now she laughed and said, “Don’t try me when you know Ian paid for the club’s renovation. If you go to the corner store and pick up two jumbo bags of M&Ms for the Green Room, I’ll give you a T-shirt.”

“Fine,” I said, swinging my legs over and standing up. “Peanut or regular?”

The show was great and afterward I went home and took Rosemary out for his last walk of the day. He was a good dog, but I still didn’t love him the way I’d loved my first dog. Even now I noticed that Rosemary didn’t perk his ears the way Daisy used to perk hers.

I felt so guilty about my ambivalence that I gave Rosemary a splash of my chicken blood nightcap before bed.

During the next few days, I caught up with my Stitching & Bitching group at the Baltic, a German bar with a delightful
Mexican owner named Carlos. He let us use the stage to have an impromptu poetry slam on knitting and politics, and then my friends tried to help me with my latest project. I was trying to knit a scarf with a bluish gray alpaca-wool-silk blend that matched Oswald’s eyes. I didn’t know if I’d ever give it to him.

Early one morning I drove north to the posh wine country town where Oswald had his plastic surgery office, offering succor and sutures to the wealthy and imperfect.

As I went past the hillside winery with a funicular, I thought ruefully of a disastrous lunch there with Oswald’s parents.

I parked my truck a few blocks away from Oswald’s office and snuck into a café that had a good view of his parking lot.

I nursed a double latte for an hour and had started on my second when I saw Oswald’s dark blue Lexus drive into the lot. I slunk low in my seat, the latte halfway to my mouth, as I watched him get out of his car.

Oswald’s chestnut hair was longer and brushed back. His expression was solemn and he wore a gray suit and pale blue shirt. There was the broad brow that I’d kissed. There was the lovely mouth that tugged up in a crooked smile. There were the marvelous long-fingered hands that had cared for me when I was ill and delighted me when I was well.

I stared at the building’s back entrance long after Oswald had gone inside. I was fumbling in my handbag for a tip when I heard someone say, “Hi, Milagro.”

I looked up to see Vidalia, the doctor who’d joined Oswald’s practice. She was a petite woman with tiny hands that did precise work. Seeing her in her prim suit, most people would never believe that she’d been the bat-shit-crazy scorned woman who’d tried to kill me.

“Hi, Vidalia,” I said cautiously.

She sat down. “I’ll wait here while they’re making my protein
shake. We’ve got a long day ahead, and I’ll need some energy.”

“You’re acting very nonchalant for someone who cut the wires in my car, buried my engagement ring, dragged my wedding dress through the mud, and attacked me in wolf form.”

She shook her head and smiled regretfully. “I was out of my mind with jealousy and I really believed that you were having an affair with my ex. Of course, the drugs I took to shapeshift messed me up, as did the transformations. I wanted to be a she-wolf, but just became a megabitch.”

“I never even kissed your ex. Oswald thought I was losing my mind because of your sabotage.”

“I’m really sorry about that, Milagro.” She glanced through the window and across the street to the parking lot.

We watched as a van turned into the lot and parked in the shade. The side door slid open and two young men and a woman got out. One was leaning on a cane. Another’s empty sleeve was pinned to his shoulder. The woman’s face was a rough, red mass of scar tissue. The driver and passenger got out and helped them to the building’s entrance.

“Your patients?” I asked.

She nodded. “We’re doing their evaluations this morning for surgery on the weekend. Oswald and I are spending most of our free time with wounded vets. Most of them need psychiatric counseling, too, though, because they’ve got post-traumatic stress. But we do what we can.”

My feelings softened a little. “I’m glad you’re helping.”

She smiled and said, “It’s funny how things turn out. If I hadn’t been stalking my ex, I wouldn’t have come here and learned that Oswald was looking for an associate. If I hadn’t attacked you, I wouldn’t have been forced to do this pro bono work. It’s been the most rewarding thing in my life.”

“A happy chain of incidents,” I said, half sarcastic and half serious.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “So many things happen around you.”

“I didn’t ask you to be a crazed stalker. You made those decisions all on your own.”

“True, but I think you’re a catalyst for things happening. I think that there is individual choice in our lives, but we operate in a larger framework. Within that framework, there are certain pivotal people, and you’re one of them.”

“Vidalia, if it makes you feel better about your behavior, go ahead and think that,” I said. “But I’m not going to accept that it was okay for you to do what you did because of bigger forces. You were one of the reasons my relationship with Oswald ended.”

The waitress brought over Vidalia’s protein shake. The doctor popped a straw in the top and took a sip. She stood up and said, “Milagro, it tears Oz apart every time he sees you. Sometimes you have to let someone go.”

“Our feelings for each other were real,” I said. “I’m not like you, Vidalia.”

“Then why are you stalking Oswald?” she said. “’Bye.”

She’d been wrong about me before. She was wrong about me now.

The next day, my
amiga
Nancy Carrington and I went to an Yves Saint Laurent exhibit at the museum and then for a lunch of salads and rosé. Nancy looked like a privileged, chic girl about town, which she was, but all you had to do was peer into her twinkly blue eyes to see her essential wackiness.

She tossed back her golden blond hair and said, “I went to a blow job class. Isn’t my hair fabulous?”

“A blow
what
class?”

“I learned all the tricks of professional stylists. You must take one. As Sun Tzu says in
The Art of War
, know thyself, know thy hair type, and you will have naught to fear in a thousand fab ’dos.”

“I love that you can draw fashion tips from ancient military strategy.”

“It’s one of my talents. I spent my entire senior seminar on Adam Smith thinking of ways to apply his economic theories to skirt trends. If you start seeing wool dirndls, invest in new technology,” she said. “Do you ever think about your old beau, Oscar, the plasma sturgeon?”

“Oswald, and, of course, I still think of him, and I prefer to experiment with my hairstyle.” I tossed my head to swing back my hair. “Our relationship feels unfinished. It didn’t die a natural death, beaten lifeless by a million arguments, or mutual animosity, or boredom. It was that damn wedding.”

“How tragic, because that flip is trés Farrah, may she rest in peace, without the crucial new millennium update. You know, you’ve never quite explained how you met him.”

“Didn’t I?” I said. “My hair is post-new-millennium, and I met Oswald at that party for Sebastian Beckett-Witherspoon.”

“Your first love,” she said. “Go on.”

“Sebastian was awful when he saw me, and Oswald was so fabulous, but he was engaged.” Oswald had neglected to tell me about his fiancée or his vampirism when we’d lip-locked and I’d accidentally been infected.

“You home-wrecking bitch,” she said as she waved to the waiter for refills of our water.

“Oswald’s first engagement was not a love match. They were marrying to please their families, like you and Todd.”

“Honey-bunny, I loved Todd, as implausible as you think that is,” she said. “Orville is kind of a wiener for getting engaged if he wasn’t in love.”

“That’s why Oswald ended it. But while he was engaged I met Ian and had a brief, torrid tryst.” I’d walked out on Ian when he tried to give me a willing thrall as an after-dinner mint.

“Lord Lustalicious,” she said. “When he looked at me, I swear I could feel my panties magically evaporating. I have a theory that he can make a girl orgasm by uttering some seemingly banal phrase, like ‘What a lovely basket of bananas.’”

I started laughing. “Ian thinks that you are one of the finest thinkers of our time.”

“He’s a perceptive man,” Nancy said. “But why did you bring Ian as your date to my wedding if you were living with Orwin?”

“Ian wasn’t my date. He was my escort. I told you that Oswald was away on his annual vacation repairing cleft palates for children, but you didn’t believe me.” That night was as indelible to me as the scar on my arm where I’d been slashed. Afterward, no matter how hard I tried, I’d been unable to let Oswald taste my blood.

“Milagro, you with a plastic surgeon is unbelievable, since you have Major Issues with your mother, Regina’s, makeovers,” Nancy said. “Will you ask Ogden if he’d rent his ranch to me for one of my parties?”

“Not a chance. Oswald needs time to get over me.”

“That’s why I adore you. You’re as mature as an excellent wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano,” Nancy said. “How are things going with Sir Sexalot? Is his new house party-worthy?”

“It would be excellent if you were throwing a
Scarface
party,” I said. “It has a mirror ball and a pool. Ian is …”

“Sexeriffic?”

“Yes, but also too much the continental roué, I think. All mysterious and imperturbable and debauched and pleased with being Ian Ducharme.”

“I’ve never heard you be so critical about anyone in possession of a penis.”

“Oswald raised my standards. Now I have higher expectations of those in possession of a penis.”

“Osgood was
nice
, but are you really a
nice
girl, Milicious?” Nancy narrowed her blue eyes.

“I think we should marry someone we admire, someone who brings out our best qualities,” I said. “Do you ever miss Todd as a friend?”

She considered before speaking. “Actually, I do. I spent so long with him and we really grew up together. It’s almost as though the memories of your life are less real because you can’t share them with someone who was there. I miss Todd’s family, too.”