Mind Games (13 page)

I titter along. I dealt with women like her at the dress shop enough to know that the point of these anecdotes isn’t that mushrooms, dogs’ noses, and cartoon hands are revolting. Rather, she’s just showcasing her dramatic
distress, as if it adds to her personality. Her expired husband loved mushrooms, she explains. I tell her I’m sorry.

“I’m not,” she says.

She holds forth on other subjects, playing with the silver zipper on her shimmery silver cover-up as she speaks. The cover-up is a kind of sparkly minidress, bejeweled where the hood meets the collar. When the light hits it just right you can see the outlines of a silver bikini underneath. She’s paired it with silver kitten-heeled sandals for what I have to admit is a highly goddamn impressive outfit. A kind of space-age glamour look.

Aggie refills her glass, then leans across the corner of the glass table and tops mine off. “This is very exquisite and expensive champagne. Don’t you like it?”

“I like it very much,” I say.

“Yet you’ve hardly drunk any.”

“Yes, I have. It’s wonderful.”

“Don’t tell me,” she says sweetly, “that you
are
doing something when you
aren’t.”
She watches my eyes for an uncomfortably long time. “Worse than that,” she continues, “is if you tell me that you
aren’t
doing something when you
are.”

“Who wouldn’t hate that?” I say, wondering if she suspects.

She narrows her eyes. “I don’t like deception.”

I stare at her dumbly. My nervousness has gone right to my stomach, which is feeling unpleasantly floaty, like helium got in there.

“What was your name again?”

“Justine.”

“Carter tells me you’re in nursing school. What sort of nurse will you be?”

“RN. Concentrations on medical/surgical, burn unit, dermatology.”

“Oh, Justine!” She throws her head back in a weird silent laugh. “That is so funny, because I’m such a hypochondriac. You can’t even imagine.”

Actually, I can. Specifically, she’s just revealed to me that she is a social hypochondriac. The social hypochondriac makes her fears public, even if they’re under control. She gets a thrill out of discussing symptoms and diseases the way kids enjoy scary stories around a campfire. My approach to her spreads out in front of me like a mandala—intricate plays informed by a body of understanding I’ve been building all my life. Though certainly not for this purpose.

“There was a time when I would just flip out—just fullllliiiip out.” Platinum bracelets jingle as Aggie waves her free hand around. She always has to be the most dramatic one in the room. Soon, hopefully, she will be.

A splash from the pool. Carter’s in the water again.

“Aggie—” I look hard into her gray eyes. “Did you used to watch
The Brady Bunch?”
She nods. Of course she did. “Do you remember,” I whisper, “when Peter thought he had that tropical fever?”

She claps a hand over her mouth. This was a memorable episode for all child hypochondriacs. “Oh my God!” She sits next to me. “‘Look at my rash, Marcia!’”

We laugh and turn our attention to Carter, who’s splashing loudly in the pool, hoisting tubes over the side, and then he gets out, skin shining wet. I’m feeling proud of how I’m bonding with her, girl to girl.

“Mmm,” Aggie says. “God, he’s so pluscious. So pluscious and sexy.”

“Very sexy,” I say. “Especially when wet.”

Aggie turns to me slowly. Eerie smile.

I freeze. I forgot I was supposed to be his sister. “Speaking objectively,” I add. “Girls have always said—”

“That didn’t sound very objective to me, Justine. I don’t think you’re objective about your brother at all.”

“I’m just proud of him.”

“You’re more than proud.” She smiles saucily. “Do tell.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

She clutches my forearm. “I can smell when people are keeping secrets. I smelled it on you the minute I met you. Do you remember what I said about deception?”

I feel cold. Better the secret she suspects than the real one, I decide. So I go forward. “Some secrets are best kept.”

“You don’t have to be ashamed. You can say or do anything in front of me.” She presses her fingers harder into my arm. “People are so puritanical about sex in this culture. It’s just somebody putting a body part somewhere and moving it around a bunch, you know? It shouldn’t matter who those two or three people are.”

I nod. “There
is
a lot of emphasis on who the people are.” I should be using this opportunity to contact her energy dimension, just to make sure I can do it, but I can’t seem to pull myself together.

“We’ll get along just fine.” She releases my arm and together we gaze out at Carter. It’s here that I spy the pimply thing Carter mentioned. An irritated skin bump. Perfect.

She grabs the champagne bottle. “Come on.”

I snatch my fanny pack and follow her through arched French doors into a huge room with a blinding white and silver color scheme. A silver fireplace chimney soars up a full three stories above thick white carpeting that’s unbelievably soft on my bare feet.

“Incredible,” I say.

“I redecorated last spring.” She leads me through several more white and silver rooms, up a white carpeted staircase and into her bedroom, a menagerie of white
silks and crystals. I wonder if Carter’s seen it. I don’t know him very well, but I think all this white would freak him out. All that white would freak any man out.

Aggie smiles. “This is gonna be great.” She pours herself more champagne while I eye her blemish.

“What?” she says.

“Oh, nothing. Sorry.” I’m laying groundwork. I know exactly how to work with her. It’s like I was born for this. As long as I can contact her energy dimension.

“Right. Nursing school. But it’s just an arm bump.” She doesn’t touch it or even look at it. She knows damn well it’s there.

“Good,” I say. “You’ve had it checked out.”

“No. But believe me, I’d know if it was skin cancer.”

“How long has it been there?”

“Too long for a piphis infection. It’s nothing. I know it.”

“I agree it’s not piphis,” I say.

“Justine—” She widens her eyes. “Have you ever seen a flesh-eater piphis?”

“In my volunteer work at county, yeah. I worked with a young guy, maybe eighteen, who lost his leg from it. It was all over his face and scalp, too.”

She settles into a chair, bottle in hand, repulsion and fascination playing across her plump features. “What was it like? What did it look like?”

“Like acid ate his skin away. And entire chunks of his leg. He had to be in a special chamber.”

She parts her lips. Her face glows. She wants more.

As I go through the more graphic details I have this flash of intuition: she watched her husband struggle and die. She watched with this same shudder, this same glow.

“Enough!” She raises a hand, bracelets jingling. She crosses the room and flings open a door while I dump my champagne into a crystal vase of white roses.

“Come here, Justine. We’re going to surprise Carter.”

I follow her into a huge walk-in closet lined with hanging clothes, shoeboxes, and suitcases frilly with airline tags. A white marble table stands in the middle, piled high with scarves and jewelry and shoes. Most everything is in whites and silvers.

“So I guess it’s safe to say you’ve decided you’re a winter.”

“I like everything fresh. You know …” She wipes her hand across the space in front of her face, as if to wipe her personal windshield. “Pure.” She turns her attention to a corner rack, explaining how she buys three of everything. “You can lose one, shrink one, and you still have one. But sometimes maybe …” She gives me a playful look, then pulls a garment from a rack—a swim-suit cover-up identical to the one she’s wearing. She holds it out to me. “A present for you, Justine.”

“Oh, I couldn’t!”

“Try it on, go ahead.

“Really, thanks, but I couldn’t.”

She frowns. “You don’t like it?”

“No, it’s gorgeous.” I touch the fabric.

She throws it on the table and points at my shirt and my shorts. “Off and off.”

I strip down to my matronly black one-piece bathing suit and pick up the shimmery cover-up, but then she snatches it away. “Hold the presses. You have got to be kidding.”

“What?”

“That suit.” She rummages through an enameled chest of drawers and pulls out a silvery bikini just like hers.

“Oh, this is way too generous,” I say.

She pushes the wad of silvery fabric into my hands. “Put it on.”

I look around. “Do you have a—”

“You don’t have anything I haven’t seen before.” She snatches it back. “Out of that suit.”

She waits, and I wait, feeling awkward. She’s pushing me. Why?

I peel off my suit like I don’t care. Aggie stares at my naked body, which makes me feel vulnerable. This is a woman who immobilized her husband and let ants eat his brain, after all.

“You’re very fit. Do you work out?”

Maybe I’m a little slow, because I’m only now getting the idea that she aims to have sex with Carter and me, at the same time. “I rollerblade and stuff.” I hold out my hand for the suit; she playfully raises it above her head, out of my reach. I grab for it, briefly touching her arm, and right there I contact her energy dimension. She feels dense, oddly like metal. “Come on,” I say sternly.

She drops the fabric into my hands. “Somebody needs more champagne.”

I feel better once I’m zipping the shimmery cover-up over my new suit.

“Um, no.” She comes up to me and, looking into my eyes, lowers the zipper ever so slowly. “I think he’d like it better like this, don’t you?” She hovers close, like she might kiss me. I’m thinking I’d better zing her fast, while there’s still the promise of sex in the air. Once the promise is gone, she’ll turn.

“Now. Shoes. Can you take an eight?”

“Oh, Aggie …”

“Look, you and me and Carter, we are having a champagne luncheon together”—she tilts her head in a way that indicates a lurid world of meaning behind
champagne luncheon
—“and you must wear a champagne outfit.” She yanks a shoebox from the bottom of the stack. “These ones have some crystals missing. I was going to toss them.”

I slip them on. They look awesome. She takes my hand and leads me out into the bedroom and we stand together in front of the full-length mirror, looking like a mentally unbalanced supergirl team. She’s the hot sexy one and I’m the sassy jock who cleans up moderately well. I’m actually thinking here that I really want to show this outfit to Shelby and maybe wear it some other places. There are no pools in my life, but that could change.

The Silver Widow’s next operation involves me undoing my ponytail and her sitting on the corner of the bed and brushing my hair with long, deep, firm strokes. If I wasn’t so tense I’d enjoy this; when you’re a medium-pretty woman, it feels wonderful to have a very pretty woman fawn over you. “The color of golden honey.” She puts down the brush and smoothes my hair.

“Sort of a boring color,” I say.

“No,” she says, lips to the upper edge of my ear. “It’s not boring at all.”

“Oh, it is,” I say.

It’s time.

“I’m thinking of changing it, actually,” I continue. “I have a magazine photo to show my hairdresser. I would love to get your opinion on it, actually.”

“Let’s see it, sister.” She flops back onto the bed and lies there, hands folded behind her head.

My fanny pack is by the door. I walk over, pull out the magazine, flip to the article, and skim frantically, stoking my fear. Misdiagnosed headaches, the vein star a ticking time bomb.

“Let’s see!”

“Hold on,” I say.

“He’s very diligent, isn’t he?”

I’m almost there. I scan further: “Three weeks ago I was swimming in the sparkling ocean. Now I’m hooked up to four different machines. I’ve placed a seashell I
found on the beach next to the blue plastic sputum tray on my bedside table. That is the closest I’ll ever get to that beach again.” My heart beats like crazy.

“I asked you a question,” Aggie said. “Is he diligent? Is your brother
diligent?”

I stalk toward her, vibrating with fear. She’s stretched out on the bed, dangerous, yet vulnerable to my power. This crazy dark excitement washes over me. “Very diligent,” I say, sliding onto the edge.

She sits up and grabs the magazine.

I look over her shoulder. “No, this page.” I turn the pages until I find a hair color that strikes me as pretty. “Here.” My natural brown, before I went blonde.

“Nah. I like you as a blonde.”

“Just a thought,” I say, staring breathlessly at the blemish on her arm.

“What the hell kind of outfit is this woman wearing?” Aggie flips the magazine over to see the cover. “This issue’s from 1998. Why are you reading a magazine from 1998?” She catches me staring at her arm. “Don’t look at it,” she says.

I give her my impression of a nurse trying not to look concerned. My fear is stoked so high, I’m trembling. I touch her arm. “You need to get it checked out.”

“No!” She pulls away.

I nod gravely, picturing the airline tags on the suitcases in her closet. “You wouldn’t have spent any time in Atlanta recently. …”

Her eyes widen. I’m hoping Carter doesn’t interrupt us now. “Just the airport.”

“When?”

“Last month.”

I look down.

“What?”

“Atlanta is a major Osiris virus cluster.”

“A what? I never even heard of that.”

“Do you ever have any sensation around your upper arm? Skin sensation?”

She tightens her lips, shakes her head. “Never,” she says. “Never.” She claps her hand over the pimple.

I happen to know she’s lying. Skin is always flooded with sensation; you only have to draw your attention to it. It’s one of those things the human brain filters out.

“It’s just a pimple.”

I move closer, place my hand over hers. “Let me look at it. I’m sure it’s just a pimple.”

“No.”

I gaze into her eyes. “Let me rule it out.” I slide my hand down to her forearm and push my awareness onto the surface of her cool, hard energy dimension. I can’t believe I’m doing it. She tries to pull away, but I tighten my grip and burn the hole.