Kiss Kill Vanish (13 page)

Plop.

But the same dread that pushed me into Marcel's room turns my head now, drags me toward the perfect, echoing sound, pulls my eyes into the yellowed bathroom light where a painting has been brought to life. It's a grotesque version of Michelangelo's
The Creation of Adam
. Half of it, at least. Just Adam, no God.

Plop.

An arm, thin and purplish, juts out over the edge of the bathtub, manicured fingers dangling in the air, lifeless. His rippling torso is not the muscled perfection Michelangelo painted, but sallow skin stretched over rows of ribs, slumped sideways, marred with nipples like bruises.

Plop.

It's Lucien and it's not Lucien.

His eyes are glassy and frozen in their narrowness, staring into death. The signature smirk is now a slack-jawed gape. Dried vomit covers his chin and trails down his chest in a thin line like an old man's beard. The stench. It swallows up every other detail. The water level in the tub barely covers his thighs and crotch, which I now see are covered in vomit too.

Plop.

It's the faucet. The bathtub faucet is leaking, drops landing in the putrid water between his two spongy feet. Clumps of bile float between them, around his calves, and behind him, little islands in a sea of fetid water.

I shudder.

Around the sink, several empty pill bottles lie scattered like seashells.

Plop.

That sound is death's heartbeat, and it's making me insane. I have to stop it. I take two steps forward so I'm close enough to crouch beside the tub and twist the faucet, but in those two steps the sweet stench intensifies, clouding everything else.

Plop.

Gagging saves me. That first back-of-the-throat spasm hurls me out of my daze and into Lucien's suicide. I can't throw up in here. I can't leave anything of myself in here. My clenched fist opens, and Lucien's tuxedo pants fall to the marble tile with a
swish
. It's the sound a wave makes as it peels off the beach.

I have to get out of here.

Plop.

I stumble backward out of the bathroom, tripping on a men's dress shoe, giving Lucien's agonized body one last look before I turn and run.

I run to the door, down the hall, down eleven flights of stairs because I can't wait for the elevator, through the basement parking garage because I can't face the doorman, and into the outside world. The noon sun paralyzes me. It's cold. I'm hot. And the glare is so white and blinding, I have to stop at the sidewalk and wait for my eyes to adjust, heart thumping and body swaying from the dizzying speed of blood.

A plan. I need a plan. I'm gripping something foreign in my pocket, something that feels technical and deadly, like a grenade, but then I realize it's just my phone. I must be losing my mind.

Blasts of wind sting my cheeks as cars shoot past.

Maybe I don't need a plan. I can't go to the police—they'll figure out who I am, send me home to my father. And I have no way of getting ahold of Marcel. Besides, he'll come back here eventually and find Lucien, whether I track him down or not. I think of Lucien's glassy, unblinking eyes. Calling 911 isn't going to save him. Dead is dead.

Lucien is dead.

My knees will give out if I stand still, so I walk. I walk in the opposite direction of my apartment, still not feeling the cold, even as the wind picks up. I'm out of my body, but my mind is clear as glass as my feet carry me up the icy path on the north side of the Saint Lawrence River. Every detail is sharp, magnified to that dangerous point where distinction between important and unimportant is lost. Too much. I'm seeing too much, but I'm feeling nothing.

There are people—people walking their dogs, dogs walking their people, children making snowmen, couples strolling with fingers intertwined and fingers wrapped around steaming cups, people smoking cigarettes, cigarettes smoking people—but they're as random and plastic as movie extras.

Maybe nobody is real but me. This tableau of happy people doing happy things has an artificial sheen. They wouldn't be smiling if they knew how close death was, and what it looked like. Bloated, purple, twisted, vomit-covered.

Laughter and the mingled aromas of cappuccinos and warm croissants waft over from cafés, but I keep walking. I'm still smelling Lucien's stench. I'm still seeing his body slumped sideways like an accordion with his ribs fanned out, and how the whites of his eyes were cracked with crooked red lines.

The ugliness is its own tragedy, a surface tragedy separate from death. Appearance and effect meant so much to Lucien. There's nothing poignant or poetic about being found naked, caked in vomit. It's unlike him.

He must have picked it for its ambiguity. Drug overdose is a choose-your-own-adventure death: suicide to outsiders, accident to loved ones. But which of the two am I? Outsider or loved one? Neither.

I never would've guessed he was suicidal. But for all the hours we spent together, I barely knew him, and he certainly didn't know me. All those opaque pill bottles scattered on the counter—why didn't I think to look at their labels?

A bundled child and parent hurry past me, the little boy being pulled along by the mitten. He's laughing, she's scolding, and I'm overwhelmed by a sudden desire to be him. I want to be led by the hand and scolded. I want to trust the person leading.

I feel something. Finally. It's a low-pitched sadness, heavy and dull. Guilt. I should have known. Of course the king of self-love would be the king of self-loathing too. Seeing his rival's collection must have made him feel like a failure and a fraud, and fighting with Marcel about working for their father would've made it worse.

And when he kissed my cheek, I may have shuddered.

It's not just guilt, though. The more I think about him, the more this feeling starts to hurt like anger. He treated me like I was nothing, then let himself be damaged by me. What a self-centered bastard! Being friends was never part of our arrangement. I never consented to having the power to injure him.

Rage and regret push me upriver, my feet pounding the ice-and-salt-crusted path, until I stop and look behind me. Shaking from the confusion, I see how far I've gone in a direction I never wanted to go. A mile. At least.

My fingers ache. They're still wrapped around my phone, and my memory supplies the number in Emilio's accented voice.
786-555-3548.
Emergency only
. He was adamant, but if this isn't an emergency, I don't know what is. My shock is wearing thin, and fear begins to edge its way back in. What will my father do? Emilio shows up saying nothing about seeing me, and Lucien, his little informant, is suddenly dead. He might even think the two are related.

Which.

No.

No.

Not possible.

But Emilio said it.

I have to pack up, and take care of a few things.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

H
ours. They've passed. The shock has bled out of me, and now I feel empty and scraped raw. Gutless, guilty Valentina.

I'm curled on my cot like a fetus, still steaming from the shower, naked except for the stiff towel wrapped around me. With the draft and my sopping hair, I should be freezing, but my scrubbed skin is burning hot. Nothing is the same. Even the air I'm breathing has a strange, bitter flavor, and a web of new truths is forming in my mind: Everyone lies. Love is a tool. I am a tool. Love is a lie. Isn't that where I started? It doesn't even make sense.

None of it makes sense, but neither does the fact that Lucien is dead, and despite having no evidence to prove it, I know it was for me. A gift I wasn't supposed to know about.

At first I thought the clock was keeping me sane, but I've decided it's holding me captive. It's calmly swallowed hours, one apathetic minute at a time. I need to make a decision, many decisions really, and with every changing number the likelihood of me being the one to get to make those decisions shrinks. Taking a shower was supposed to break the spell, but I'm only weaker, and if I lie here naked and folded up for long enough, someone else will decide everything for me. My father. Or Emilio. But maybe that would be best.

I still haven't called Emilio.

Five. That's the number of times I've typed his number into my phone. It's also the number of times I've hung up before pressing call. Before I talk to him, I have to decide how much of what he said to me last night was a lie.

When that idea first slid into place—that Emilio killed Lucien—it felt like his lock-picking tool glided into my brain channels and clicked. Steadily. Definitively. Of course Emilio killed Lucien.

But then I remembered that my evidence is a whiff of cigar smoke on a lapel, which I'm not even sure I'm remembering correctly, and a motive that may be a lie. Maybe it was Papi who did it, or had it done. Maybe it was both of them. Or it could have been exactly what it looked like. Suicide.

Again, my mind cycles through what I know, what I've ignored, what a girl with a brain and an inkling of intuition should be able to see about the men she loves.

First, Emilio. Emilio is perfect. Emilio is slippery. He's always what I need him to be, except when he's what my father needs him to be, but otherwise he molds himself to my cravings effortlessly. But too effortlessly?

And Papi. Papi is a monster. That I used to love him is irrelevant, because even if Emilio is lying about other things, he isn't lying about who Victor Cruz really is. No. Nuggets of truth about Papi glitter from the murk and grime of my memories, things from my childhood, details that make sense like they've never made sense before. And I can't forget what I saw from the closet.

Lucien's death is the smoke dancing between the two of them. If only I could see whose cigar is lit. I close my eyes and remember the scent in my father's den, that taste on Emilio's lips, that smell fresh on Lucien's lapel.

Did Emilio kill him for us? He didn't have to, or at least not for reasons that I know of. Then again, I don't know anything anymore.

Or Papi could've had Lucien killed as a warning for Emilio. Maybe it was a punishment for something Lucien did, but I know even less about Papi's relationship with Lucien than Papi's relationship with Emilio.

Need food
. I'm so dazed, the sensation confuses me. But I am starving. I'm instantly crazy with hunger, trembling as I rummage through my things for Jacques's chocolate. I can't remember the last time I ate.

The oyster? Yes, that was it.

I find the box of chocolate bars and pry it open, knowing already only one kind is left, knowing already that I'm going to do what I swore I would never do again, not after the White Chocolate Mousse Incident of Christmas Eve 2010.

Desperate times.

I claw the paper off like a wild animal, do the same to the foil, then snap off a square, ignoring the slippery, waxy feel on my fingers, and put it in my mouth without looking at it. It doesn't melt. Not at first. It's smooth and sharp-cornered and as tasteless as plastic. I might be sucking on a toy or small piece of electronic equipment. But eventually the surface separates into that familiar granular stickiness, so sweet and oily my tongue puckers and my gag reflex triggers and all the excess saliva pools, creating some sort of sugar-spit slurry. I've almost convinced myself to swallow when the unexpected happens and saves me.

My phone buzzes.

I spit the white chocolate mess into my wastebasket and stare at the black flip phone. It's set to vibrate, so when it rings for the second time it bounces along the surface of the crate toward the edge. It has to be Emilio. I have to pick it up. It rings a third time, and I grab it before it clatters to the floor. The number Emilio made me memorize, the one I've almost called five times now, is scrolling across the screen.

I can't.

I wait out the rings, trying not to picture him holding his phone, wondering why I'm not answering. Instead I picture Lucien. Dead, bloated Lucien. Before I talk to Emilio, I have decisions to make.

I bring my fingers to my temples and press hard, but it doesn't make my head ache any less. Emilio and Papi spin silk around my thoughts. Two spiders, one web, connected by common threads—art, drugs, money, ambition, power. And a common prey. Me.

But that's not quite right. I'm not prey, because my obliteration isn't anyone's objective; I'm not that important.

This feels more like a game of chess.

The image of Papi's chessboard appears in my mind, hand-carved characters in ebony and ivory, each individual piece its own work of art. He taught all three of us girls to play as soon as we were old enough to remember the names of the pieces, but by the time they were teenagers, neither of my sisters could be talked into a game. Lola refused because it was too boring, and Ana had become a perpetually sore loser.

Papi was the only one I could convince to play with me. He'd look like he was about to say no, then his face would soften and he'd say,
Fine.
Pick your king, Valentina.
He was the perfect opponent—always losing, but only by a move or two—though now I see, he was winning all along.

I'm not under the illusion that I'm winning anymore. If this mess is a chess game, I'm not even playing. I'm the piece Papi and Emilio want to win with. I can be sacrificed by either, and the game still won.

Pick your king, Valentina.

He would say it like he didn't already know which color I would choose to play with, and I'd consider both slowly, like I didn't already know too. I picked black. Every time.

Pick your king, Valentina.

Like he doesn't already know who I'll choose.