The Venus Fix (27 page)

“Are you going home?”

“No, I’m going to stay in the living room. The couch there is more comfortable than a lot of beds I’ve slept in. I’ll be fine.”

“No, that’s crazy. Why don’t you—”

“Shh. I don’t want to roll over and smash into your wrist. Don’t worry about me. Just go to sleep. No alarm, no ugly buzzer set to wake you up. I’ll do it, just tell me what time, and I’ll do it.”

I closed my eyes and listened to the movie soundtrack. My wrist still hurt, just enough that I was aware of it, and it was awkward to find the right position for the cast, but I fell asleep more easily than I had in a long time.

Wednesday
Two days remaining

I
woke up to the sound of music playing—bluesy jazz that somehow fit a cold winter morning. First I thought it was a CD, but then realized it was Noah, playing on the small upright piano that had been my grandmother’s and then my mother’s and was now mine, stuck in a corner of the den— not a worthy instrument, but a sentimental one.

He played for ten minutes and I stayed under the warm comforter, thinking about him, about how he’d slept on the couch, thinking mostly about the fact that he’d stayed.

“Good morning,” he said when he came in a few minutes later with a mug of steaming coffee that smelled stronger than what I made. Even though coffee was my finest hour in the kitchen, compared to Noah’s mine was only passable.

While I drank the coffee, Noah ran my bath, and when it was full and steaming, he helped me into the bathroom.

“I can take my nightgown off.”

“Okay, just holler if you need any help.”

I pulled the nightgown over my head, eased it over my right arm and then carefully got in the tub, resting my right arm on
the ledge, hoping it would stay dry. I’d just sunk down under the hot water when I heard the knock.

“Yeah?”

“Can I come in?”

“Sure.”

“If you sit up, I’ll wash your hair. I know how tough it is to do this stuff with only one hand.”

Grateful, I sat up, leaned forward and shut my eyes.

Noah massaged my scalp with shampoo. It was an utter indulgence to lie there in the fragrant water and have this strong man minister to me. I’d never be able to go to work after this, I thought. After he rinsed my hair, he took the washcloth, squirted my fragrant lime and verbena body gel on it, and then he washed me. It was gentle, helpful, and not erotic at all. And then he was done.

“I’ll leave your towel here,” he said, putting it on the hook near the bath. “Or do you need help getting out?”

I wasn’t sure. “Maybe. I feel a little off balance.”

He picked up the towel, threw it over his shoulder, then held out his hand. As soon as I was out of the water, he wrapped me up in the big terry-cloth sheet.

Standing behind me, he patted me dry. I’d never felt so indulged in my life. Then, taking a fresh towel off the rack, he used it on my hair, gently squeezing out the excess water.

It was warm and humid and smelled so good in the bathroom, and Noah’s hands were so large and sure of what they were doing. I couldn’t remember anyone ever having done these things for me before. My mother certainly had dried me off after bathing me when I was a very young child, but that memory wasn’t accessible. Besides, she was my mother, and as avuncular as Noah was being, he was still a man. A man who had once been my lover. He was standing in my bathroom without his shirt on, and under my bath towel I was naked.

Over at the sink, Noah turned on the dryer and worked the hot air through my hair, using his fingers instead of a comb.

“That’s dry enough. We have to get you dressed now and make you breakfast,” he said, leading me out of my own bathroom as if I were the guest and didn’t know where to go next.

We stood in my walk-in closet and Noah unwrapped the towel. Now, finally, his eyes moved over my flesh. I felt the look as if it was a touch, but he didn’t acknowledge either his appraisal or my reaction. Instead, he let me stand there naked as he went hunting through the drawers, finding first a black bra and then a pair of black lace underpants.

Then he started to dress me.

Noah pulled the bra up over my right and then my left arm, lifted the straps into place, snugged the cups around my breasts, and then pulled the two ends around my back and hooked it. I let out a long breath. My flesh goose bumped. My nipples hardened. I wondered what he was thinking. If he had any idea how he was making me feel.

He bent over, lifted my right foot, and put it through the leg opening of the panties, then did the same with my left foot. Using both hands, he pulled them up over my calves, my knees, my thighs, my hips, and then smoothed them into place.

I shifted, rotating my hips involuntarily.

Noah was looking through my clothes again. I willed him to turn around and touch me more. Nothing happened until he grabbed a dark gray cashmere sweater off the shelf, turned back to me and manipulated the sleeve over my cast and then up the rest of my arm, adjusting it with his hands, smoothing it with his fingers so that I wasn’t sure what created the sensation—his fingers or the soft wool. Then the other arm. Done, he buttoned the sweater from the bottom up and tugged at it so that it lay smoothly around my waist and over my hips.

Once more, Noah went looking through my clothes, now
finding a pair of gray flannel slacks. I put my hand on his shoulder and he pulled them slowly up to my waist. He zipped up the fly and snapped it closed.

Except for his shirt, we were both dressed then, standing in my closet, face-to-face. My hair was still damp. His hands were still on my waist, and then there was no space between us anymore. We were wrapped up in each other, Noah’s lips smashed against mine. My good hand was on the back on his neck, pulling him even closer to me.

His hands moved to all the places they had just been, no longer innocent and helpful; now they probed. Over my sweater, cupping my breasts, running up and down my spine, slipping between my thighs, tickling me though the flannel.

There is a kind of want that takes over your consciousness, that blocks out time and logic. Your body responds to it involuntarily. You stop thinking. You don’t care about anything but the touching and the feeling. Wings flutter inside your rib cage. You are lifted up.

My hips ground into him, his arms went around my back, his hands grabbed me and pulled me closer, until there was no closer that I could get.

Slowly, in the same order he put my clothes on me, he now took them off. He unbuttoned my pants, unzipped the fly, pulled them down around my ankles and helped me step out of them. Then he got down on his knees, I thought to help me take off my underwear, but he buried his head between my legs, blowing hot breath through the lace, making me squirm and thrust forward.

I gasped. I couldn’t get a deep-enough breath. I couldn’t get what I wanted fast enough. I wanted it to take forever.

Noah unbuttoned my sweater and pulled it off of me, going very carefully when it was time to manipulate it over the cast.

While he unhooked my bra, I went to work on his jeans with my left hand, fumbling with his fly but managing.

Finally, all of our clothes out of the way, his glorious bare skin was pressed against mine.

“You need to understand…” Noah said in between kissing me on the neck and behind my ear “…that it’s not wrong to want to feel something other than pain.”

Did I answer? Nod? Say yes, you are right?

I don’t think so.

It was all in the movements. All in the sensations. There was nothing I needed to put into words. There were other ways to tell him that he was right—with my lips, with my fingers, the way I opened my legs to him.

We were on the floor and Noah was hard against my stomach and his fingers teased me, making me finally ask him for what I wanted, still not with words but with my legs wrapping around his waist as I pulled him to me and thrust up against him until he slipped inside of me.

I bit into the soft skin of his earlobe and my tongue licked inside his ear. He kissed my lips. Then pulled back.

“This, what we’re doing now, it belongs to you.”

And it did. Noah making love to me, with all of his body, with all of my body responding, with the smell of him, rosemary and mint flooding my senses, with the softness of his hair on my chest and the heat of his breath on my neck. There was just the two of us in that small space. In a normal room, where there would have been space, the ghosts of my patients and their issues and problems would have come along for the ride. But this journey was closed and tight, and there was no room for anyone but us. The two of us. Our bodies intertwined, my cries mixing with his one deep sigh that reached out and stroked me as softly as the fingers that were fluttering across my back.

And then, there, with only the two of us in a space that could barely contain us, I forgot that it was morning and that
it was cold and that there were people who would be waiting for me, or that I was scared to let someone inside. Noah was already inside. It was out of my hands. And then there were no more thoughts.

D
earest,

I am almost done. I thought I would feel some elation at my accomplishment; after all, everything has gone according to plan and I’m still not the one they blame. I should feel something, shouldn’t I? A sense of completion, at least? Or some satisfaction at having outsmarted the police?

But there’s nothing except a big gaping hole inside of me, and at the very pit of it is some feral forever-hungry animal—jaws wide open—ready to snap at every morsel thrown down. It sinks its sharp, pointed teeth into each chunk of flesh I feed it, and yet its appetite only grows.

Why won’t it stop? What else do I have to do to prove that I loved you?

Love is all I had for you. Yes, it was, and yes, it is. Don’t even whisper anything else. I would tear my guts out and eat them in front of you to prove how much I love you.

There’s nothing left I want to know, nothing left I need to do except make it up to you, make you understand that. There are only two days until your birthday. Eighteen years
ago, I could never have guessed at the power of love and now I can only be amazed by its force.

When I lie in bed at night and think about you, what obsesses me still is the shame that you felt. What did I do to you that you never understood what you had, who you were, how much the world was open to you? How did I look right at you and not see that? It must have hurt you so much to have gotten through all the rest of it intact and then to have had me strip you so bare?

These women, who are not what we ever meant for women to be, rely on their bodies, their twisting, writhing, undulating bodies, and do their dances for the eyes that watch, and they never think about who is suffering because of their exhibitionism.

No one takes responsibility and no one can be held accountable because nothing is illegal and nothing is immoral, or if it is, it doesn’t matter.

You were a sacrifice to an idea and you were a dream that ended too soon. You should have been exempt and immune. You, of everyone, should not have been a victim of this, not with who I was, not with what I believed and fought for.

But you were and so I claim victims in your name because it’s not enough that they die. It’s almost enough that others watch while they die. Now all but one have been crossed off, and she will be the most satisfying because once I can cross her off, too, then I can burn the list and turn it into red-hot fire, then ash, and then from ash to dust, and it will all be done.

This I do for you.

Thursday
One day remaining

I
t was still dark the next morning when I left the apartment. According to the weather report, it would be yet another day without sun. Overnight, the snow had again dusted the roof-tops, the trees, the fire hydrants and the parked cars with one more layer. The details of the landscape were long buried. The street signs were mounded with snow.

Alan Leightman’s lies were hiding the real killer of those girls the same way. No one could see past the snow. No one could see past his confession.

Kira’s doctor was waiting for me in the lobby of the hospital. We shook hands—awkwardly for me, since it was my left—exchanged a few minutes of conversation about her condition, and then proceeded upstairs.

Alan had given me permission to talk to Kira. The morning he told me he was going to confess, he’d asked me to call Dr. Harris, and if I couldn’t get him, to go and be with Kira and help her process the news.

That’s all I was doing. Just a few days later. If I was crossing a line, it was a very thin one. I had to talk to her. Someone had to figure out what was going on.

For someone so tall and broad-shouldered, Kira Rushkoff was diminished by the chair she sat in. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen anyone become so small. I had still been expecting to see the handsome woman who never appeared rattled or wrinkled. She was all of those things now. Her hair was dirty and tangled. Her hospital gown was crumpled and stained. Her fingernails were broken and the polish was chipped off. Her eyes couldn’t focus and darted around the room.

No matter who she was, I would have known that this woman had only a tenuous hold on reality. One thin, silken thread separated her from being one of the lost girls.

“How are you feeling?”

She shrugged.

“Thank you for agreeing to talk to me.”

“Don’t thank me yet. I’m not sure I want to talk to you. I think I do, and then I don’t. I’m mad at Alan. But I’m in love with my husband.”

“I understand that and—”

“What did you want to see me for?” She picked up a green plastic straw, bending it forward and back.

For a second or two, I watched the movement. “I wanted to ask you if you could tell me why Alan confessed to crimes he didn’t commit.”