Killer's Cousin (8 page)

She seemed entirely earnest. She had already pocketed my card. I had a fleeting moment of suspicion … but what would the tabloids want with my supermarket card? “How do you trade?” I asked. “Do you just walk up to strangers and ask them?”

“Yeah.” She smiled. “Like I just did.”

Slowly, I put the
ALAN BAWDEN
card away. I was unable to find anything else to say. I looked at her. She looked back at me.

And then she seemed to come to some decision. “Want to come in for some tea? I'll tell you how to get through the college application stuff. You'll benefit from my mistakes.”

I didn't think I would, but that hardly mattered. I couldn't understand why any girl would invite me anywhere. Any
sane
girl, that is. Maybe she really didn't recognize me; maybe that careful examination of my face was just the kind of thing artists did. I opened my mouth to say no. “Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”

I'd been wrong; her living room was not completely empty. There was simply no
furniture
in it. Instead, the two main walls were occupied by large canvases on which paintings—huge, colorful faces—were in progress. One short and one tall stepladder stood open in the middle of the room. The dining room was in exactly the same state, except it held three paintings and no ladders. The faces in the paintings were all different and yet they were not.

I stopped to look for a long time at one of them, a woman with calm opaque eyes and gaunt green cheeks.

“Do you just paint portraits?” I asked finally.

“Except for school assignments, yes. I'm obsessed with faces.” My own face burned at that comment. Raina nodded toward the portrait at which I'd been staring. “That's my best friend's mother. Her name's Georgia.”

I couldn't stop myself. I said, “She's very sick, isn't she?”

“Yes,” said Raina. She sounded surprised.

“It's a good picture,” I said. I looked away from it, and the others. I met Raina's eyes for an instant, until hers flicked away. I knew with deep certainty, then, that she did recognize me.
I'm obsessed with faces
. And I knew why she had invited me in.

“I promised you tea,” said Raina. “And college advice. Come on.”

I should leave now
, I thought. I could feel the portrait watching me. I wondered how that woman felt about being painted with her fate naked in her eyes.

I wondered why people—Raina, that photographer
who shot the picture of my parents—wanted to capture such things. I wondered why people wanted to look at them. Did it make them feel safer somehow? Removed? Did it make them feel they could see the other side of the abyss that separated people like them from people like me? Did they
want
to see it?

Or did they not understand what they were seeing at all?

I followed Raina into the kitchen. There was some furniture there: a scuffed folding table and two mismatched chairs.

“That chair's not so steady,” said Raina. She was running sink water into a couple of mugs, which she placed in the microwave. “Try the other one.” The oven roared into tinny operation. “Do you take milk in your tea?”

I didn't know. I never drank tea. “Black's fine,” I said.

She went rummaging in the refrigerator anyway, and emerged bearing a quart of milk and a plastic lemon. She tossed the lemon at me underhand. She sniffed the milk and then poured it down the sink. “Go on, sit down,” she said.

I sat.

The microwave beeped. Raina grabbed the mugs and plunked them down on the table. A second later she had teabags floating in them. She sat down on the rickety chair and looked at me while stirring her tea idly with a fingertip. Apparently her household goods did not extend to spoons. “So, right. College,” she said. “I guess my advice is to remember that it's not as important as they make it seem. If you listen to other people,
you'd think it's all over if you make the wrong move. Well, it's not—”

“Please stop it,” I said quietly. It just came out. I wasn't angry at her for the stupid college talk. I just wanted her—wanted someone—to be honest.

Silence. Finally I looked up. Raina was watching me calmly, curiously. I thought I should go. I wanted to go. And I didn't. I looked at my tea. I sipped it. It tasted horrible. “You know who I am,” I said. “You invited me in because you want to paint me. Right? Just say it. It's okay. I just—I can't stand the small talk.”

Raina still didn't say anything. She picked up her mug. She sipped it and watched me, and oddly, it wasn't so uncomfortable, not once I had spoken my mind.

Then she said, “David Bernard Yaffe.”

My family never used my middle name, but the newspapers did. “Yeah,” I said.

She said, quietly, “Since you bring it up, do you want me to paint you?”

“No!”

She looked at me with those eyes that saw death in her best friend's mother and painted it so anyone could see. “That's that, then,” she said calmly. “Let me know if you change your mind. More tea?”

She smiled, and reluctantly I noticed again how beautiful she was. Not like Emily. No one was Emily, or ever again would be. But still beautiful.

It was in my mind and I couldn't help myself. My mouth opened. I blurted out: “Aren't you afraid of me? Don't you think I'm probably some monster?”

Raina smiled a little, as if I were far younger than I
was. “No. Not at all. It was pretty clear what had happened, by the end. Don't you think?”

I looked away from her. Was she blind? Stupid? Were they all?

She said, “More tea?”

I said, “Yes. Okay.”

No one feared me—except me.

I so much wanted to believe them.

U
nless you counted that weird challenge from Frank Delgado, Raina Doumeng was the first new person I'd met with whom I'd had anything approaching a truthful conversation. I was conscious of that, even as we moved on to innocuous subjects. And later, when I mentioned Dr. Walpole's medieval history seminar, she invited me to go to a museum with her on Saturday, to look at medieval art.

Not a date, I told myself. Just a museum. “Okay,” I said.

“Excellent,” said Raina casually. “You'll like this stuff.”

Saying good-bye to her, going upstairs to the attic, I felt better than usual. That night and for the next few nights, I even slept fairly well, undisturbed by—or perhaps simply used to—the humming shadow. Even Lily's knowing glance, directed at me whenever I ran
into her over the remainder of that week, could not spoil my mood.

I was amused to notice that Raina had been right about the supermarket card swapping. Once I knew to look for it, I saw it all over the city. A cute girl silently swapped with a guy at a bus stop, and then turned and walked away, swaying flirtatiously. Inside a convenience store, two harassed mothers traded almost absently, by the dairy case: “Swap?” “Sure.” All you needed to do, it seemed, was take out a supermarket card in any public place and dangle it. Within a few days I had swapped
ALAN BAWDEN
for
AMY CONKLIN
and then for
SUZANNE WERTHEIM
. This last swap occurred right at the supermarket checkout; the clerk grabbed my card for scanning and switched it with another so rapidly that I almost missed it. I did, however, catch the barest smile on her lips.

Friday was my eighteenth birthday. It passed uneventfully, the occasion marked only by a phone call from my mother and the arrival of a massive check from my father. I was relieved that Vic and Julia didn't know, or had forgotten, the date. I wanted it to be over as quickly as possible.

On the next day, Saturday, I woke up early and went for a long run through North Cambridge and around Fresh Pond. I was supposed to meet Raina in Harvard Square at noon, in front of the Fogg Museum. “I have to work in the morning,” she'd said. “So let's just meet there.”

I wondered where she worked. I wondered if she could possibly be a friend. She was so beautiful. If things were different …

But they weren't.

The fact that Raina and I were meeting in Harvard Square instead of at the house we both lived in gave the outing a clandestine feel. But I was also relieved. For some reason I didn't want to conduct this …
friendship
with Raina in view of my relatives. Particularly I did not want to expose it to Lily.

Lily the minefield.

On the way back upstairs after my run, Vic called my name, so I had to stick my head in the kitchen door. Vic and Lily were at the table with identical bowls of cereal; Lily's head was bent low over hers as, ignoring me, she carefully drowned individual Froot Loops in milk. Julia stood by the counter with a cup of coffee and the sales circulars; her lips pursed sourly at my greeting. Her eyes were alert.

She barely waited for Vic to finish speaking. “About Thanksgiving,” Julia said. “Tell your mother that
I
will roast the turkey. And we'll eat down here. You haven't enough room for all of us. And also …” She had four or five other things, ticked off on her fingers, that I was to communicate to my mother.

“Sure, I can tell her,” I finally interrupted. “But maybe it would be better if you just called her yourself to make plans? I might not remember everything.”

Julia opened her mouth again, but I cut her off with an ostentatious glance at my watch. “Gotta run,” I said, which was true. “See you later.” And I pounded on up the stairs, relieved that at least Lily had had nothing to say. She hadn't actually said a word to me since our encounter over the rakes, and I was glad. It was odd, though. Lily's personality, which I felt so
strongly when I was alone with her, seemed to disappear in the presence of her parents.

I took the subway to Harvard Square and got to the museum ten minutes late. Raina was sitting on the steps outside, wearing clothes nearly identical to those she'd had on earlier in the week.

“Sorry,” I puffed. I followed Raina as she picked up a floor plan of the museum and then decisively led me into the first of several rooms containing medieval art. There were triptychs and icons and panels, mostly of saints and martyrs, all very colorful and rather flat in appearance. She stopped right in the center of the room. “I love this stuff,” she said. She nodded toward a triptych that was brilliant in reds and blues and golds, and we went closer.

The center panel depicted a beautiful, skinny man bleeding luridly from the wounds of a dozen arrows. He was wearing a sheer white cloth around his loins, a lofty, almost silly expression, and a deep golden halo that sat behind and on top of his head like a paper circle. On the left and right panels a richly dressed man and a woman knelt in prayerful profile.

“St. Sebastian,” Raina said with satisfaction. “You can always tell by the arrows.” She gestured at the profiled couple. “Bet these folks commissioned the piece as insurance against plague. That's Sebastian's job.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“There's a saint for everything,” explained Raina. “You can pray to St. Apollonia to cure a toothache, or to St. Blaise when you've got a sore throat.” She paused. “Maybe, today, people pray to St. Sebastian for protection against HIV.”

I watched the side of her face. “You Catholic?” I asked.

Raina shrugged. “No. I'm not anything.”

I don't know why I asked. But I did. “Do you believe in God?”

Raina turned and looked me full in the eyes. “Yes. Absolutely.”

I was surprised. Almost shocked. I don't know why.

Raina asked, “What about you?”

“No,” I said. My voice came out a little too loud for a museum. I lowered it. “I just don't,” I said. Why had I brought this up? Thankfully, Raina did not pursue the subject.

We moved from room to room together, casual. It was comfortable. I liked her. But whenever we were quiet, I kept thinking of Emily. It had been foolish to imagine, even for a moment, that I might not.

T
hanksgiving morning. I opened one eye at a rustling in the kitchen, and then closed it quickly, turning over on the sofa to present my mother—should she look at me—with my back. Surreptitiously, I maneuvered my wrist into position and peeked at my watch. Six
A
.
M
.

My sofa was not long enough to accommodate six-footers, and I had slept uneasily, too aware of my parents' presence. They had arrived fairly late the night before, tired from the trip, and had tumbled almost immediately into bed in my room. Vic had offered me the pullout sofabed downstairs in their apartment, but the last thing I wanted was to wake up in the Shaughnessy living room. I didn't want to be so near Lily. For the last couple of weeks, she'd been watching my arrivals and departures like a sharpshooter, making me very nervous as well as superconscious of the few times Raina treated me to tepid tea. I wondered if either my
mother or my father would notice the too sharp way Lily sometimes eyed me.

Or maybe they'd be too busy eyeing me themselves to notice.

No sooner had I had the thought than my mother spoke. “David? Are you awake?”

I was about to emit an artistic little snore, but abruptly decided it wasn't worth it. I sat up slowly. “Yeah. I guess.” I inhaled deeply: orange rind, lemon rind, and sherry. Also coffee.

“Good,” she said. “In a little while, I'll need some help getting the bird down the stairs and into Julia's oven. Your father's still asleep.”

I nodded, and my mother smiled at me over the kitchen counter. I made a similar facial motion and broke eye contact, feeling awkward.

My mother had of course won her battle with Julia to prepare the turkey. One of her hands was holding a twenty-five-pound bird steady; the other was spooning in stuffing. Ingredients for the stuffing littered the counter. A large brown paper bag waited to encase the turkey during roasting.