Hemlock Grove (22 page)

“Did you dig up Lisa Willoughby?”

“I said we didn’t,” said Roman.

She looked at him.

“Yeah,” he said. “We did.”

“Why?”

“It was a ritual or something. Some Gypsy thing. I don’t know.”

“Roman, desecration of the dead does not fall under the rubric of ‘some Gypsy thing.’”

“It wasn’t desecration.”

“What was it?”

“Peter … thought he could help her.”

“She’s dead.”

“Peter marches to his own beat,” said Roman.

“Upstairs you used the word
vargulf
. Why did you use this word?”

“Because I don’t want you to bother my sister.”

“Why do you think I would bother her?”

“I don’t want you to think she’s the
vargulf
.”

“When you use this word, what exactly do you think it means?”

He looked down and fussed at his already smooth lapels.

“It’s a kind of sickness,” he said. “It’s like … hunger with no appetite.”

She was bemused.

“Where did you learn this word?” she said.

“I don’t know where I learned it.”

“Where did you learn this word?” she said.

“Peter,” he said.

“Can you tell me anything about an experiment being conducted at the Godfrey Institute for Biomedical Technologies called Ouroboros?” she said.

“I know that symbol means something. I mean, all symbols mean something, but that one means something—I don’t know, something … happening.”

He picked up his glass and drank and set it down. His fingertips missed it so he picked it up again. The ring of condensation from where it had first been placed joined the ring from where he lifted it and made a ∞.

“I see things sometimes,” he said.

She nodded.

“Do you know what it means?” he said.

She regarded the boy: a narcissistic, insecure, oversensitive, and underparented adolescent heir to a Fortune 500 company with a substance abuse problem and homoerotic tendencies—it would have been more surprising if he
didn’t
“see things sometimes.”

“I can’t know what it means to you,” she said.

He hunched and ran his thumb up and down the sweat of his glass.

“I can help you,” he said.

“Your cooperation is very helpful.”

“I can do more. The White Tower. Ouroboros—I can find out what it is. My father built that place. My name is Godfrey.”

“A name is only a name,” she said.

He was doubtful of this premise.

“It’s good that you want to help,” she said. “It’s very good of you. But you can’t.”

She observed him try inexpertly to conceal how deeply this cut and had intimacy with this pain. No insult to the heart like being not needed yet.

“Why not?” he said.

She looked at his watery eyes with impatient compassion. She knew what he needed to hear, the first and fundamental tenet on which the rest of her training was founded, though it was unlikely the boy was any more ready to hear it than she herself at enlistment age, when the fight was more important than understanding why you fought. Teenagers. How thankful she was to be needed for something other than maternity.

“God doesn’t want you to be happy, He wants you to be strong,” she said.

Roman’s native response was to send an acid-tipped barb straight in the exposed heart of this display of conviction but his tongue was silenced by the sudden uncertainty whether this was the most shit-for-brains or most important thing he had ever heard.

She reached for her badge. Staying any longer would be redundant: there was nothing to take from here but pain.

“Roman, would you like to introduce our guest?”

They both looked up to find the boy’s mother in the entryway, holding a grocery bag. Chasseur looked out the window and saw the black pickup. It had not been there moments ago but its silhouette in what was by now a shower gave it a quality like some monolith from a primeval age. The mother stood in a white velour track suit and sunglasses and both were dry.

“May I ask your business here?” she said politely.

“There are certain inconsistencies in this investigation,” said Chasseur. “I’m just dotting t’s.”

“Say no more,” said Olivia. “Of course we would be thrilled to offer whatever you would find of assistance. Not a pleasant business at all, anything we can do. May I offer you a tea or perhaps a brandy? Things are getting frightful outside.”

Chasseur could imagine no climatic condition more forbidding than the smile on the lady of Godfrey House inviting her to stay. Chasseur made her excuses and gave Roman a parting look and that look was really a prayer.

Once they were alone Olivia took the glass from Roman and sipped. Her eyes flicked down to the beaded rings on the table, which she wiped with her sleeve.

“You know,” she said, “there is no shortage of coasters in this house.”

He mumbled an apology.

“What happened to your face?” she said.

“It’s just a scrape,” he said.

She smiled sadly.

“Silly monkey,” she said.

His phone then rang and he stepped into the next room and answered.

“Marie is hysterical,” said Dr. Godfrey. “But this place has been a zoo all day and I just can’t get away yet. Do you have any idea where Letha might have gone?”

He stood by the hall window looking out at the rain and the trees.

“Yes,” said Roman. “I have an idea.”

*   *   *

“You smell nice,” said Letha. “You smell sweet like a puppy.”

She was sitting astride him on the couch and his shirt had made its way off but they were otherwise clothed. He ran his fingertips down the back of her arm.

She shivered and smiled and said, “Goose bumps.” She walked her fingers down his chest hair to his navel and lay her hand flat. He was hairy and his belly gently convex like a glass filled just to the point of overflowing.

“Tell me a story about being a Gypsy,” she said.

“Do you people realize I’m half Italian?” said Peter.

“Right, but who cares!” she said.

Peter thought about it.

“One time Nicolae caught a fairy,” he said.

“What do you mean, a fairy?”

He was annoyed. “I mean a fairy, what the heck am I supposed to mean?” He went on. “I was at his house one night in the summer, I must have been eight or nine, and Nic said he wanted to show me something, and he turned out the lights and gave me this jar with a little light inside. I say, Nic, that’s a lightning bug. He says, Look closer. So I held it up and it wasn’t a lightning bug, it was a person, a girl, no taller than a thumbnail, with wings like a dragonfly. And she had this little light.”

“What was she wearing?”

Peter arched an eyebrow.

“I say, Holy shit, Nic, where did you find her? and he says she was just flying around the porch light with the moths. First he tried to catch her with his hands, but she stung him.”

“Fairies sting?”

“Are you kidding? Fairies are meaner than fucking hornets.”

This news pleased her.

“What did you do with her?”

“Kept her. For a while.”

“What did you feed her?”

“Flies.”

She was indignant. “Pretty fairies do not eat flies!”

“Yes they sure do. Get ’em right in the air and tear ’em apart. It’s better than watching a tarantula go after crickets.”

She was thoughtful.

“What happened to her?”

“She died. They don’t last so long in captivity. One day there was just this tiny old woman at the bottom of the jar. Her wings had fallen off. At first I thought she was just taking a nap so I shook it a little. Definitely dead.”

“You didn’t clap your hands?”

He gave her a look.

“Well it’s a fairy!” she said. “They’re magical.”

Peter shrugged, philosophical. “Death is fucking magical,” he said.

Letha was quiet. Then abruptly she pushed herself up so she was straddling him. “I’m sorry, these things are killing me.”

She pulled her shirt over her head and reached behind her, biting her tongue in concentration, and unclasped her bra. Her breasts fell free, the undersides bitten by wire. She made a relieved noise. Peter ran his hands along the swell of her belly.

“Are you serious!” she said.

She moved his hands over her breasts, leaving her own atop his and slowly kneading. She exhaled with contentment. Peter watched this surprising gift of his hands on these swollen tits with ambivalence.

“You should know I’m not any good being a boyfriend,” he said.

She looked at the ceiling in wonder. “Tell me how such a big hairy retard can smell so good?” she said.

“What I mean to say is that what you’re talking about is a whole deal and everything,” said Peter.

“Fucking?” she said.

For a young man who devoted a predictable amount of mental resources to who and in what manner he would like to fuck, he did not like this business of her using this word. It wasn’t girly and made him ill at ease.

She sat on top of him and enjoyed his discomfort. She could pinpoint the exact moment that she decided Peter would have sex with her today and it had been this morning, when she had attempted and discarded in frustration numerous ensembles and realized it was completely for his benefit and if he was going to cause her all this hassle he had better hold up his end of the bargain.

But as to her virginity. In her view the reason most of the time a girl was a virgin amounted to she wanted to feel special and not like just any old whore. Letha had never considered this her own motivation. She thought it was the height of dumb that anyone could look at this nonchoice as some kind of accomplishment and if a girl wanted to have sex with a bunch of boys or a bunch of sex with one boy and that made her happy, what could be wrong with that? What could be wrong with wanting what makes you happy? So she had told herself that when she met the person she really really wanted to get to know without her clothes, all bets were off; she was just waiting for when it felt right.

Letha did not know if it felt right to have sex with Peter Rumancek; she could in fact find no shortage of reasons why it wouldn’t. But something had happened. An angel with a halo of every color had brought her a miracle and after that happens you don’t get to tell yourself lies anymore, the right has been revoked. And if Letha was honest with herself, there had been plenty of boys she wanted to get to know without her clothes—she wanted to feel their breath on her skin and to hold their penises in her hand and believably pull off lines like, Are you going to try to fuck me—but the thing that was really holding her back was the idea that this nonchoice was some kind of accomplishment, that she was special, not just some whore. And this was not acceptable anymore; lying about her deepest self was not an option in a world that had reached into her and left grace behind.

*   *   *

Roman watched.

Sheets of rain washed over the glass and Roman watched the two of them inside. They were on the couch. She was facing down and he was on top of her. Her arm was outstretched and his fingers laced through hers. Roman stood in the hemlocks with his hair matted to his forehead and arms dead at his sides and watched. Peter worked his hand under her and up her clit and her mouth made a moan and his hair brushed her face and her mouth closed. Sucking on it. Sucking his fucking rat faggot hair.

Rain hit a puddle by his feet like a thousand damned mouths wailing
O.

Roman turned away and walked around front and got into his car. His wet clothes suctioned him to the leather and he tried counting the worms of rain racing down his windshield but they all ran together. It was nothing but a measure of disorder. That was all it was.

The shadows dancing in the corners of his eyes laced gently together now, forming a merciful black.

*   *   *

The walls went white as there was another
CRACK
, the kind like it’s all coming apart, and Ashley Valentine yelped as the lights went out. Her heart calmed in the dark and she laughed. We can’t know if we laugh at ourselves for being silly or to forget that we’re not and that we are still here only by a sufferance that can be no more predicted than appeased. Like most things, probably a little of both. Ashley went to the window and looked out to see who else the outage hit. The whole block was dark and it took a moment to notice a strange shape in her yard. A person. A man. A strange man standing in her yard, unmoving. Her heart clutched and now she emitted no sound. Her parents were out and would not be home until much later. She fumbled for her phone, unable to take her eyes off the man in the rain and his weird stillness. She began to dial the police but it was then she noticed the car in the street, a Jaguar. She flipped her phone shut and went downstairs and opened the front door.

“Roman?” she said.

At first she thought he hadn’t even noticed; he remained queerly still like a kind of retarded lawn gnome. But then he looked at her and said, “No light.”

“Roman—are you all right?”

He turned his palms up and regarded the waterburst.

“It’s just rain,” he said.

“Roman, I think you better come in.”

He did not disagree but did not move and she stretched her hand outside. There was a low roll of thunder. He took her hand and she led him upstairs to the bathroom and gave him her pink Victoria’s Secret kimono.

“You have the legs for it,” she said.

He handed her his wet clothes through the door and she put them in the dryer, then lit several votive candles in her room. When he entered she put a hand to her mouth to stifle laughter—that baby pink and his pale, skinny thighs.

“Here,” she said. She sat him on her bed and pulled her comforter around his shoulders and sat on her rocking chair looking at him. Here he was, Roman Godfrey, cross-dressed and swaddled on her bed. Her heart was a flicked mold of gelatin.

Not that she had a thing for Roman. He was not just the worst kind of conceited jerk but a genuinely sick person, the kind who would come up to you at a dance and give you a corsage made of tampon wrappers—which he had in the ninth grade—and she had always prided herself on being immune to whatever inexplicable attraction he seemed to hold for other girls. But here he was. This poor soaking creature staring distractedly at a candle’s flame—and even if you were absolutely immune to the charms—as if—of Roman Godfrey, how could your heart not go out to such a pitiful display? What a loser!