Chapter Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Eight
The cottage where I will be held indefinitely has three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a beautiful sunroom. The walls in the entryway are painted a soft canary yellow, and the “Welcome” rug is faded in the middle, as if feet have been stamping out mud and snow upon it for years.
“It’s…” I say, surprised as I whirl around the living room, gaping up at the admittedly pretty high beamed ceilings, “homey.”
Julian looks down at me, and I can see the hopefulness in his gaze.
“Ritika and I will unload the car,” he says. “You should look around. Pick a room.”
I give him a rueful look. He sounds like a dad who’s moved his family across the country and is trying to convince his despondent kids to feel less horrible about it.
Which, to my surprise, I do. For some reason, I expected Julian’s safe house to be a cold concrete bunker, but this home feels lived-in.
There are cat posters on the walls, a plush sectional that I can sink into, a huge, slightly outdated television hooked up to a DVD player.
Everything is a little worn and well loved, and I can see signs of a life once lived: a feather wand toy once used to entertain a long-gone cat, a chest of blankets once cuddled under, a lacquered wood coffee table with overlapping water stains.
Next to the kitchen, I find a sliding door that I assume leads to a formal dining room and shove it open. When I see what’s inside, I snap it shut again.
“Tell me the truth,” I say, when Julian and Ritika return with their boxes of supplies. “Has the Steinway always been here, or did you have it brought in?”
It’s a baby grand. It gleams in the dining room, the keys unyellowed by the passage of time. Not just that, but there’s an entire shelf of books and sheet music.
“Of course you’d find it immediately,” Ritika says with a long-suffering sigh. She places her box down, gives Julian a knowing look, and marches back out into the cold.
We’re alone. It feels strange to be, after a whole day with Ritika, even though it used to be the most natural thing in the world.
Compared to his assistant, Julian seems so large suddenly, and the breadth of his shoulders and height as he leans against the kitchen counter bestow him a potent, primordial power.
“I had it brought in,” he says, softly.
“For me?” I ask.
“For you,” he confirms.
It takes time to source, buy, and ship pianos.
I know, because before I realized a baby grand wouldn’t fit in my apartment, I’d inquired after one myself.
Nearly a year to build if buying one custom, but still a hassle to ship a premade one from a showroom to a little house in the middle of nowhere.
It confirms what I’ve suspected since the second I could think after Julian whisked me off that bloody gallery floor—Julian has been planning this for some time, and he’s been planning it for me. His plan B, just in case things go to shit.
I walk past him and into the dining room and plop myself on the bench.
I run my fingers along the keys. The seat faces a large French window that has a direct view of the backyard, and I imagine sitting here on a spring day, watching hummingbirds flit by, spotting deer gather at the salt lick, and feeling at peace.
Julian watches me from the doorway. I can feel his gaze on the side of my face like sunshine pouring from a window.
“You were right, you know,” he says. “About when we first met.”
I hum in acknowledgment. My fingers have chosen to play “Für Elise,” the first “hard” song they learned by heart, and I decide to follow their lead.
“I did target you,” he continues. “You were single. Childless. Not particularly close to your family. By my accounts, a person who very few people would miss. You kept company with Brandon, who was so clearly simple, and I assumed you would be simple too. And Leila was fine with it, because it was supposed to be quick. Wasn’t going to get in her way.
I take you out, show you a good time, skim a few years off the top, and then leave you a little confused, a bit disappointed, but not too worse for wear. ”
Hearing Julian talk plainly like this—as the hunter he is—is oddly relieving, even as it sets off a thunder drum against my sternum. Like he’s been wearing an unconvincing disguise and has just torn it away to reveal the wolf I’ve always known was peering out underneath his wool.
“So I was disposable,” I say quietly, thinking back to those early days, the moments when I’d turn away from him and feel like I’d just made a narrow escape. “But I’m not anymore. So what changed?”
“I heard you play in that room,” Julian confesses.
“Saw how you cared for your goddaughter. Watched you live by your own terms. You intrigued me, at first. Then inspired me. And I…I don’t know.
I just realized one day that I enjoyed you.
That I wanted to be around you, then be with you, then be yours. ”
My vision blurs with a whirlwind of emotions: rage, because of the many times I’d chosen to believe his words over my intuition.
Hurt, because he’d still initially seen me the way the world so often did: as a woman of a certain age who, having eschewed the positions of wife and mother, was inherently less valuable.
Sorrow, because the enormity of his betrayal aside, he sees me in a way that no one ever has.
“What do you want from me, Julian?” I whisper.
I can see his reflection in the window. His arms are crossed, but his gaze doesn’t lift from mine.
“Right now?” he says. “To keep you safe.”
“And after?” I ask.
Julian doesn’t move, but the air in the music room thickens, crackles.
“It’s just like you said, Sean. I’m a greedy piece of shit.
I want all that you’re willing to give me, and even more after that.
” Before I can ask him what he means by that, he launches himself off the doorframe and turns back into the kitchen.
“I’m going to finish helping Ritika unload the car. You should pick a room.”
The bedroom I choose is on the first floor.
It’s the smallest of the bedrooms but has the biggest bathroom and a sizable closet—and most importantly, a window big enough for me to climb through.
It means both an easy escape for me and easier entry for someone else, but I can’t imagine anything worse than negotiating a leap from the second floor, and so I take my chances.
There are more paintings here, old, worn paperbacks in dusty bookshelves, but there are also signs of life: a pastel-pink corded phone next to a Tweety Bird alarm clock, bits of tape left on the walls from posters that have been torn down and not replaced.
I wasn’t a teenager in the nineties, but the nostalgia still hits me like a ton of bricks, not least of all because, just like then, we have no internet.
Someone lived here, I’m sure of it. This place isn’t just one of Julian’s many safe houses. It was a home.
“So, did you kill the previous owners?” I ask after I’ve finished unpacking my meager belongings and sauntered back into the kitchen.
It’s dark out. Ritika and Julian have made quick work of the supplies, and the bags and boxes of household essentials that had piled the kitchen counters are now neatly tucked away.
Ritika’s dead to the world, collapsed on the couch, and Julian sits, cross-legged, at the dining table.
He’s sipping from a bright-red mug and reading an aged green book; on closer inspection, it’s an old Danielle Steel novel. At my question, he lowers it.
“You harbor a very uncharitable view of me nowadays,” he says sardonically. “No, I did not kill the previous owners. They were actually great friends. Do you want some tea? There’s hot water in the kettle on the stove.”
I’ve been so out of it that I didn’t hear it whistle.
I open up cabinets, pick out a caffeine-free peppermint variety, and make myself a cup.
The only source of light is a standing lamp in the living room and a flickering candle that makes the room smell like lavender, and I catch myself about to fuss at him about straining his eyes.
He looks so normal right now, in his black hoodie and sweats, his knuckles chapped from carrying boxes in and out in the cold.
We’ve had nights like this before, reading in silence next to each other at dining tables or on couches or in each other’s beds.
Rolling over to turn off the lights then into each other’s embrace, swapping thoughts on what we’ve just absorbed before drifting off to sleep.
The contentment I’d felt in his arms, in feeling desired and understood.
How sure I’d felt that this wasn’t just a honeymoon phase, emphasized more by the fact that we weren’t having the sex that I desperately wanted to have.
When I sit back down with my tea, he wordlessly pushes a book on the table in my direction.
It’s a photo album, the old kind with plastic sleeves.
I open it and am greeted by a two-by-two grid of photographs of a family: a middle-aged man and woman, and a little girl.
All three of them are wearing Mickey Mouse ears, and the little girl is dressed as Minnie.
In the first photo, they beam at the camera, the picture of a normal, happy family on a trip to Disney World.
The woman is white, with a shock of strawberry-blond hair and freckles that dust her entire face and down her arms. The man is racially ambiguous, with hair that is more salt than pepper, a straight nose, skin that looks more prone to burning than tanning, and monolid eyes that hint at Asian or Native American ancestry.
Between them, their adorable daughter, with her chestnut-brown hair in pigtails and a giant, dripping ice cream cone clutched in her hand.
“Are these the previous owners?” I ask, flipping through pages of backyard barbecues, pony rides, science fair volcanoes, and Christmases, watching the little girl grow across the pages from a toothy-grinned child to an elegant, if serious-looking, young adult as her parents age alongside her.
“Yes,” Julian says.
“How did you know them?”
Julian gives me a brief and disappointed glance.
“I’m surprised you haven’t figured it out yet,” he says. “You’re usually more observant than that.”
I frown, flipping through the pages as I sip my tea, scouring the photographs for the secret I am meant to unveil.
The moment I see it, I’m shocked I couldn’t before.
“Is that…” I say, stunned, “Alphonse?”
Julian nods, turning a page in his novel.
“One and the same,” he says.
The photograph I’m on now was taken at least a decade after the first. Alphonse’s hairline has receded some, and he leans into the shot from the passenger seat of a car, laughing as his daughter gives a thumbs-up from the driver’s side.
He’s still very much a handsome man, but he’s got a little paunch and he’s wearing a polo shirt and is teaching his daughter how to drive, looking like the dadliest dad I’ve ever seen.
I scan the table, see that Julian has laid out three more albums, and I flip through them voraciously, absorbing the life of this incomprehensible person.
Pets—Alphonse and his family seem partial to cats and bunnies—come and go, as do friends and seasons.
They have a family garden; there are countless pictures of their handsome yields, images of a tomato canning process that must have become tradition and a blue ribbon awarded at a county fair for the largest cabbage.
At some point, a young man joins them in their photos, and a few holiday seasons later there is his daughter again, wearing a hospital gown and holding a small pink baby.
By the last album, Alphonse is old, white-haired, and kyphotic, and by the last page, he is gone altogether.
When Julian told me his friend had died, I assumed he meant that he met an early and unfortunate demise. But Alphonse went the way most of us want to, at a ripe old age, surrounded by loved ones.
“Was he human?” I ask. I feel both immensely moved and intensely unsettled, like I’m sitting among ghosts. So much of the house has remained unchanged, from the furnishings in what must have been Alphonse’s daughter’s room to the soft yellow of the walls. “Or was he…like you?”
Julian finally looks up from his book. I realize that the bleariness in his eyes isn’t fatigue, but emotion. He’d probably brought the albums out for himself, to remember his friend.
“Is it an either-or?” he asks. When I don’t answer, he closes his book. “He was like me. Only braver.”
The swirl of my thoughts begins to congeal. I point to the woman, Alphonse’s lover. In her later years, she took to dyeing her hair lavender, and her smile is shallow with the chronic sorrow of a person who must navigate the rest of her life as one half of a former whole.
“Did she know?” I ask.
“Mary?” Julian says. “Yes. She did.”
I become hyperaware of my breath, the inhale and exhale that is supposed to be automatic now requiring an intention it didn’t before. Outside, the wind rustles through naked trees, and the old bones of the house shift and groan.
I’m so glad that he found you, Rose had said. I hear the rest of her words now, the ones left unspoken because of the man who drove a knife into her back.
Someone worth dying for.