Sharp_Objects (29 page)

“You’ll never get over it,” I said. “It infects you. It ruined me.” It felt good to say it out loud.

“Why does everyone think it’s so strange that I should mourn Natalie?” John toppled the shaker and it clattered to the floor. The bartender sent over a disgruntled look. I picked it up, set it on my side of the table, threw a pinch of salt over my shoulder for both of us.

“I guess when you’re young, people expect you to accept things more easily,” I said. “And you’re a guy. Guys don’t have soft feelings.”

He snorted. “My parents got me this book on dealing with death:
Male in Mourning.
It said that sometimes you need to drop out, to just deny. That denial can be good for men. So I tried to take an hour and pretend like I didn’t care. And for a little bit, I really didn’t. I sat in my room at Meredith’s and I thought about…bullshit. I just stared out the window at this little square of blue sky and kept saying,
It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.
Like I was a kid again. And when I was done, I knew for sure nothing would ever be okay again. Even if they caught who did it, it wouldn’t be okay. I don’t know why everyone keeps saying we’ll feel better once someone’s arrested. Now it looks like the someone who’s going to be arrested is me.” He laughed in a grunt and shook his head. “It’s just fucking insane.” And then, abruptly: “You want another drink? Will you have another drink with me?”

He was smashed, swaying heavily, but I would never steer a fellow sufferer from the relief of a blackout. Sometimes that’s the most logical route. I’ve always believed clear-eyed sobriety was for the harder hearted. I had a shot at the bar to catch up, then came back with two bourbons. Mine a double.

“It’s like they picked the two girls in Wind Gap who had minds of their own and killed them off,” John said. He took a sip of bourbon. “Do you think your sister and my sister would have been friends?”

In that imaginary place where they were both alive, where Marian had never aged.

“No,” I said, and laughed suddenly. He laughed, too.

“So your dead sister is too good for my dead sister?” he blurted. We both laughed again, and then quickly soured and turned back to our drinks. I was already feeling dazed.

“I didn’t kill Natalie,” he whispered.

“I know.”

He picked up my hand, wrapped it around his.

“Her fingernails were painted. When they found her. Someone painted her fingernails,” he mumbled.

“Maybe she did.”

“Natalie hated that kind of thing. Barely even allowed a brush through her hair.”

Silence for several minutes. Carole King had given way to Carly Simon. Feminine folksy voices in a bar for slaughterers.

“You’re so beautiful,” John said.

“So are you.”

J
ohn fumbled with his keys in the parking lot, handed them to me easily when I told him he was too drunk to drive. Not that I was much better. I steered him blurrily back to Meredith’s house, but he just shook his head when we got close, asked if I’d drive him to the motel outside town lines. Same one I’d stayed at on my way down here, a little refuge where one could prepare for Wind Gap and its weight.

We drove with the windows down, warm night air blowing in, pasting John’s T-shirt to his chest, my long sleeves flapping in the wind. Aside from his thick head of hair, he was so utterly bare. Even his arms sprouted only a light down. He seemed almost naked, in need of cover.

I paid for the room, No. 9, because John had no credit cards, and opened the door for him, sat him on the bed, got him a glass of lukewarm water in a plastic cup. He just looked at his feet and refused to take it.

“John, you need to drink some water.”

He drained the cup in a gulp and let it roll off the side of the bed. Grabbed my hand. I tried to pull away—more instinct than anything—but he squeezed harder.

“I saw this the other day, too,” he said, his finger tracing part of the
d
in
wretched,
just tucked under my left shirtsleeve. He reached his other hand up and stroked my face. “Can I look?”

“No.” I tried again to pull away.

“Let me see, Camille.” He held on.

“No, John. No one sees.”

“I do.”

He rolled my sleeve up, squinted his eyes. Trying to understand the lines in my skin. I don’t know why I let him. He had a searching, sweet look on his face. I was weak from the day. And I was so damned tired of hiding. More than a decade devoted to concealment, never an interaction—a friend, a source, the checkout girl at the supermarket—in which I wasn’t distracted anticipating which scar was going to reveal itself. Let John look. Please let him look. I didn’t need to hide from someone courting oblivion as ardently as I was.

He rolled up the other sleeve, and there sat my exposed arms, so naked they made me breathless.

“No one’s seen this?”

I shook my head.

“How long have you done this, Camille?”

“A long time.”

He stared at my arms, pushed the sleeves up farther. Kissed me in the middle of
weary.

“This is how I feel,” he said, running his fingers over the scars until I got a chill of goosebumps. “Let me see it all.”

He pulled my shirt over my head as I sat like an obedient child. Eased off my shoes and socks, pulled down my slacks. In my bra and panties, I shivered in the frosty room, the air conditioner blasting a chill over me. John pulled back the covers, motioned for me to climb in, and I did, feeling feverish and frozen at once.

He held up my arms, my legs, turned me on my back. He read me. Said the words out loud, angry and nonsensical both:
oven, queasy, castle.
He took off his own clothes, as if he sensed an unevenness, threw them in a ball on the floor, and read more.
Bun, spiteful, tangle, brush.
He unhooked my bra in front with a quick flick of his fingers, peeled it off me.
Blossom, dosage, bottle, salt.
He was hard. He put his mouth on my nipples, the first time since I began cutting in earnest that I’d allowed a man to do that. Fourteen years.

His hands ran all over me, and I let them: my back, my breasts, my thighs, my shoulders. His tongue in my mouth, down my neck, over my nipples, between my legs, then back to my mouth. Tasting myself on him. The words stayed quiet. I felt exorcised.

I guided him into me and came fast and hard and then again. I could feel his tears on my shoulders while he shuddered inside me. We fell asleep twisted around each other (a leg jutting out here, an arm behind a head there) and a single word hummed once:
omen.
Good or bad I didn’t know. At the time I chose to think good. Foolish girl.

I
n the early morning, dawn made the tree branches glow like hundreds of tiny hands outside the bedroom window. I walked naked to the sink to refill our cup of water, both of us hungover and thirsty, and the weak sunlight hit my scars and the words flickered to life again. Remission ended. My upper lip curled involuntarily in repulsion at the sight of my skin, and I wrapped a towel around me before I got back into bed.

John drank a sip of water, cradled my head and poured some into my mouth, then gulped the remainder. His fingers tugged at the towel. I held tight to it, hard as a dishrag on my breasts, and shook my head.

“What’s this?” he whispered into my ear.

“This is the unforgiving light of morning,” I whispered back. “Time to drop the illusion.”

“What illusion?”

“That anything can be okay,” I said, and kissed his cheek.

“Let’s not do that yet,” he said, and wrapped his arms around me. Those thin, hairless arms. A boy’s arms. I told myself these things, but I felt safe and good. Pretty and clean. I put my face to his neck and smelled him: liquor and sharp shaving lotion, the kind that squirts out ice blue. When I opened my eyes again, I saw the red twirling circles of a police siren outside the window.

Bang bang bang. The door rattled as if it could have easily broken down.

“Camille Preaker. Chief Vickery. Open up if you’re in there.”

We grabbed our scattered clothes, John’s eyes as startled as a bird’s. The sounds of belt buckles and shirt rustles that would give us away outside. Frantic, guilty noises. I threw the sheets back on the bed, ran fingers through my hair, and as John placed himself in an awkwardly casual standing position behind me, fingers hooked through his belt loops, I opened the door.

Richard. Well-pressed white shirt, crisply striped tie, a smile that dropped as soon as he saw John. Vickery beside him, rubbing his mustache as if there were a rash beneath it, eyes flitting from me to John before he turned and stared at Richard head on.

Richard said nothing, just glared at me, crossed his arms and inhaled deeply once. I’m sure the room smelled of sex.

“Well, looks like you’re just fine,” he said. Forced a smirk. I knew it was forced because the skin above his collar was as red as an angry cartoon character’s. “How’re you, John? You good?”

“I’m fine, thanks,” John said, and came to stand at my side.

“Miss Preaker, your mother called us a few hours ago when you failed to come home,” mumbled Vickery. “Said you’d been a bit sick, taken a tumble, something like ’at. She was real worried. Real worried. Plus with all this ugliness going on, you can’t be too careful. I suppose she’ll be glad to hear you’re…here.”

The last part asked as a question I had no intention of answering. Richard I owed an explanation. Vickery no.

“I can phone my mother myself, thanks. I appreciate you looking up on me.”

Richard looked at his feet, bit his lip, the only time I’ve ever seen him abashed. My belly turned, oily and fearful. He exhaled once, a long hard gust, put his hand on his hips, stared at me, then at John. Kids caught misbehaving.

“C’mon John, we’ll take you home,” Richard said.

“Camille can take me, but thanks, Detective Willis.”

“You of age, son?” Vickery asked.

“He’s eighteen,” Richard said.

“Well fine then, you two have a real nice day,” Vickery said, hissed a laugh in Richard’s direction, and muttered “already had a nice night,” under his breath.

“I’ll phone you later, Richard,” I said.

He raised a hand, flicked it at me as he turned back to the car.

J
ohn and I were mostly silent on the ride to his parents’, where he was going to try to sleep in the basement rec room for a bit. He hummed a snatch of some old ’50s bebop and tapped his fingernails on the door handle.

“How bad do you think that was?” he finally asked.

“For you, maybe not bad. Shows you’re a good American boy with healthy interest in women and casual sex.”

“That wasn’t casual. I don’t feel casual about that at all. Do you?”

“No. That was the wrong word. That was just the opposite,” I said. “But I’m more than a decade older than you, and I’m covering the crime that…it’s a conflict of interest. Better reporters have been fired for such a thing.” I was aware of the morning sunlight on my face, the wrinkles at the edges of my eyes, the age that hung on me. John’s face, despite a night of drinking and very little sleep, was like a petal.

“Last night. You saved me. That saved me. If you hadn’t stayed with me, I would have done something bad. I know it, Camille.”

“You made me feel very safe, too,” I said, and meant it, but the words came out in the disingenuous singsong of my mother.

I
dropped John off a block from his parents’ house, his kiss landing on my jaw as I jerked away at the last second.
No one can prove anything happened,
I thought at that moment.

Drove back to Main Street, parked in front of the police station. One streetlight still glowed. 5:47 a.m. No receptionist on call yet in the lobby, so I rang the nightbell. The room deodorizer near my head hissed a lemon scent right on my shoulder. I hit the bell again, and Richard appeared behind the slit of glass in the heavy door leading to the offices. He stood staring at me a second, and I was waiting for him to turn his back to me again, almost willing him to, but then he opened the door and entered the lobby.

“Where do you want to begin, Camille?” He sat on one of the overstuffed chairs and put his head in his hands, his tie drooping between his legs.

“It wasn’t like it looked, Richard,” I said. “I know it sounds cliché but it’s true.”
Deny deny deny.

“Camille, just forty-eight hours after you and I had sex, I find you in a motel room with the chief subject in my child-murder investigation. Even if it’s not what it looks like, it’s bad.”

“He did not do it, Richard. I absolutely know he didn’t do it.”

“Really? Is that what ya’ll discussed when he had his dick in you?”

Good, anger,
I thought.
This I can handle. Better than head-in-the-hands despair.