Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Nathalie
Iwake up smiling even before I am fully conscious, before I have remembered where I am or checked the state of things, my body arriving at happiness ahead of my brain, and I lie there for a moment in the clean sheets and the clean clothes I don't remember changing into and I let it stay there.
He is beside me and he is fully dressed, sitting at the edge of the bed with his hands loosely clasped and looking at me with those pale green eyes.
I remember last night in pieces. I remember what he said about keeping me. I feel the smile pull wider before I can moderate it.
"How do you feel?" he asks.
I reach up and touch my neck. The marks are tender, the belt and the bites. I press my fingers against them and feel the specific pleasant ache of it.
"It hurts," I tell him.
"I know."
"It feels so good though."
He leans down and presses his lips to my forehead and stays there for a moment. I close my eyes and feel him breathe me in, his hand coming up to push the hair back from my face.
I could stay in this exact moment for a very long time.
He straightens up and reaches to the nightstand and picks up a glass and holds it out. "Drink."
I look at the glass and then look at him.
His face is blank, like the first time I met him. I ignore the faint knock of unease beneath my ribs and I take the glass because he is handing it to me and because I am trying not to be the girl who ruins a good morning by looking for problems in it.
I drink and he takes the glass back and his thumb moves across my mouth, wiping the corner, and he looks at me and he says. "It was nice hosting you, Miss Keller."
I look at him.
His face suddenly starts to blur and then I realize, he is giving me back. He is returning me. I reach for his arm and my hand won't grip properly and I hear myself saying,
"Wait! Where are you going?—" and my voice is coming from somewhere far away and he steps back. I try to follow him with my eyes but I feel myself falling and then the cold hits me. Everything is gone and then I jerk up. I am no longer in the room, I am in the middle of the road and it's cold.
The road is enormous and stretches in both directions further than roads should stretch. I am standing in the middle of it on bare feet.
I look left and I see two cars, one of them I recognize without knowing how I recognize it, something about the color, and then a truck comes.
It comes from nowhere, from a bend in the road that wasn't there before, and it is enormous and it is fast. Then there is a sound that isn't a sound, more a pressure or wall of displaced air that hits me before the impact does.
The truck smashes into the car and I am screaming but I cannot hear myself scream because the noise of it takes everything. I am standing in the middle of it and nothing touches me.
Then the road is gone and I am on the ground and my mother is in my arms.
She is here, I pull her closer and I pat her face with both hands and I sob, "Mom. Mom. Mom, wake up, wake up, Mommy please—"
I am sobbing, great heaving sobs that I can feel in my whole body, because she is here, she is warm and she is in my arms, and I have not been able to touch her in twelve years.
"Mom," I say, softer, because she is stirring, her lashes are moving, "Mom, it's me, it's Nathalie, I'm here, I've got you, you're alright—"
Her eyes open. They are her eyes. Exactly her eyes, the same brown, the same warmth that I have spent twelve years trying to reconstruct from memory and failing.
She looks at me and she asks, "Why can't you get your father to like you?"
I go still.
"Mom—"
"Why can't you?" she says again, and her voice is wrong now, not her voice.
Her face starts moving, the features rearranging themselves like water finding a new shape, and I hold her tighter because if I hold her tight enough maybe she will stay, maybe she will stay as herself.
She doesn't stay, she is gone and it is Alana looking up at me from the ground with my mother's brown eyes turned contemptuous.
"Why do you always make things worse?" Alana says.
"That's not—you're not—" I pull back and look at my hands because I need to look at something that is still itself. "That wasn't you, she was just here, my mother was just—"
"Why, Nathalie?" Alana says, and sits up and her face is doing something wrong, the mouth moving at a different speed from the words coming out of it. "Why do you always, always make things worse? Why can't you just—"
"Stop," I say. "Stop it, please—"
"Miss Keller."
I turn around.
Gerald is standing behind me on the road that is back again, the road that has no end in either direction, and he is in his usual suit with his sour face and he says, "Miss Keller."
"Gerald where is she," I say, "Where did Mom go, she was just here, I was holding her—"
"Miss Keller."
"Gerald please, just tell me where—"
"Miss Keller."
He says it again and again, the same two words, and his face is doing the same wrong thing Alana's face was doing, the mouth slightly out of time, and I take a step toward him, and his face changes and becomes my father's face.
I stop.
My father looks at me.
He looks at me the way he always looks at me, he looks at me the way you look at something you have noticed in your peripheral vision, something that is not relevant to where you are going. His eyes move across my face without finding anything worth stopping for.
"Dad," I say.
He frowns. The frown isn't at me, it is at something behind me or beyond me, something I am in the way of.
"Dad, please—"
He looks away the way he did when I was twelve years old standing in the doorway of his study after the funeral. He was at his desk and he didn't turn around and I stood there for so long my feet went numb and he never turned around.
I am crying. I can feel it on my face. I look up because I cannot look at him anymore, I cannot stand looking away.
I look up at the sky and my mother is there.
She is up high, very high, standing in light that doesn't have a source, and she is herself again, completely herself, and she is looking down at me.
"Mom," I say, and I reach up, though she is too far, miles too far, she is unreachable and I know it but I reach anyway. "Mom, please, come back, please, I need you to come back, please—"
A figure steps in front of me. I lower my arm.
Luca is standing between me and the sky where my mother is and he is looking at me with his face completely closed, every door in it shut, and he says, "Miss Keller. I'm done with you."
"No." I grab his jacket with both hands. "No, Luca, please, I'm scared, I don't want to stay here, please don't leave me here, I'm scared—"
He starts to walk. I hold on and I am dragged two steps before I lose my grip and he keeps walking. I run after him and the road has no end and he keeps walking and I keep running but I cannot close the distance, it only grows.
I am screaming his name and the sound of it fills the whole road and comes back to me from both directions doubled and tripled until it is just sound, just his name, over and over—
"Luca—"
I jerk upright from my feverish dream.
"Luca—"
My voice breaks on it and I am crying. I open my eyes and the ceiling is white and the light is white and the smell is antiseptic and wrong and I turn my head.
My father is in a chair with his jacket pressed and his face in the expression he uses in public. The one designed to read as concerned from a distance.
Beside him were Alana and her father and Gerald.
They are all looking at me.
My father turns to Alana. "Get the doctor," he says.
Alana rolls her eyes and stands and goes and I lie there in the white room and I think, no, no, this isn't right, this can't be right, no please, with a desperation that has nowhere to go.
The doctor comes in and takes my pulse and checks my eyes and says, "She's alright. There was a light sedative in her system but nothing lasting. She'll be perfectly fine."
His eyes move to my neck. He looks at the bruising there for a moment. "That will heal within a few days," he says.
My father looks at it. "Can it heal faster?" he asks. "She may need to be photographed for press rounds."
"With the right cream, possibly."
"Make-up can cover it in the meantime," Alana says, from her chair, examining her nails.
The doctor glances around the room once with an expression he keeps very carefully neutral. Then he leaves without another word.
My father stands.
He walks to the bed and he looks down at me and I look up at him and I wait. I don't know what I am waiting for. What would a father do when he finds his daughter in a hospital bed?
He looks at me and turns and walks out.
My uncle follows, saying, "I'll go and talk to your father," and Gerald goes with them and the door swings shut and the room is left to just Alana, who resettles in her chair with her bag on her lap.
"I hope you're happy," she says. "This wasn't worth the bag.
Not even close." She smooths her skirt. "I had my allowance cut, Nathalie.
Gerald asked me directly and I told him the truth because I am not going to lie to Gerald for you.
I said that from the beginning." She looks at me with aggrieved energy.
"I cannot believe you dragged me into this. I genuinely cannot—"
"How did I get here?" I ask.
My voice comes out wrong and there are tears running down my face that I am not doing anything about and Alana stops mid-sentence.
"Hey." She shifts in her chair. "Stop crying. Don't try to guilt-trip me, that doesn't work on me and you know it."
"How did I get here?" I ask again.
She looks at me for a moment. "We got a call," she says, slower now. "That you'd be here. We came and you were already in the room." She pauses. "Some cab driver apparently brought you in, paid for the room, and left. That's all anyone knows."
I stare at the ceiling.
I reach out and take her hand.
"Alana." My voice is shaking. "Do you know who brought me? Do you know anything about who—"
"Ew." She pulls her hand back immediately and reaches into her bag for a wipe. "I don't know where you've been, don't grab me." She wipes her hand with focused distaste and drops the wipe into the bin beside her. "I don't know. A cab driver. That's what they said. He's gone."
She sits in her chair and looks at me.
"You need to get tested," she says. "I can see the marks on your neck, it's honestly embarrassing, what were you thinking.
And what if you're—" she drops her voice, "—pregnant?
Have you thought about that? Did you even think about protection or were you just—" She sighs. "Oh my God, Nathalie. Oh my God."
Her voice goes on. I stop hearing it.
Of course he got rid of me, he drugged me and put me in a cab, and sent me back to my life because that is what I am to him. I had lain in his bed smiling before I had even opened my eyes. I ignored the thumping in my chest and the coldness in his eyes, because I always do.
I always, always do. I turn my face into the pillow.
He promised to keep me and I believed him.
And that, in the end, is the most Nathalie Keller thing I have ever done.
I pull the pillow close and I cry into it and Alana's voice washes over me from somewhere far away and I let it. I try to forget about pale green eyes and him pressing their lips to the top of my head and breathing me in like I was something worth keeping.
I clutch my chest and I sob.