Chapter 19 — Oxblood
◆
The quiet days ran October twenty-eighth to October thirtieth, two full days folded into the garage loft while my body finished stitching itself back together and the city went on without me.
I slept in pieces, ate what Felix brought up the stairs, kept the blanket close and the window cracked an inch for cold air, and by the second morning the ache behind my eyes had thinned to a dull three-out-of-ten weight I could think around.
Felix drove me up the highway in daylight with rain needling the windshield and traffic snarled past the Loop, and then the parking garage elevator lifted me to my floor with its tired groan.
My apartment met me at six in the evening with the overheads warm and the early dark pressed flat to the glass.
Rain washed the street below into smeared color, brake lights dragging red across the wet, and the panes ticked faintly with each gust. The radiator under the front window gave off its low steady tick, metal expanding, a sound so ordinary it tightened my throat.
Vanilla hung in the air from the candle I had left half burned on the counter.
Under it came the thick perfume of fresh lilies bowed over the vase by the sink, heads gone brown at the edges after two days without fresh water.
Under both, sharp and clean, the bite of kitchen bleach from the counters I had wiped the morning I left, before the last job, before the loft, before everything narrowed to blankets and tea and an unlocked door.
I stood with my hands on the back of the kitchen chair and listened to the rooms prove they were empty.
No hum but the refrigerator. No draft but the window seams. The bedroom doorway showed a dark rectangle of still air, the hall closet shut, the bathroom door ajar on tile smelling faintly of old steam.
I wore a charcoal sweater with a soft rubbed nap, black jeans, ankle boots still damp at the seams from the garage puddles.
My hair was twisted low at my neck, a few strands stuck to my cheek with rain.
I had wiped the Huntress red off in the loft bathroom mirror before we left and had not put it back on, and my mouth looked pale and plain without it.
The cut at my brow had closed to a thin pink line.
The old crescent scar at my knee tugged when I bent.
Inside the tote on the chair were the things I carried now without deciding to.
The champagne clutch with the burner phone zipped inside its satin pocket.
The brass key from Ophelia on its ring, heavy as a coin.
At my throat the vintage gold locket lay warm on its fine chain.
Against my thigh, under the denim, the mother-of-pearl stiletto rested in its sheath with the handle angled for my right hand, familiar as a knuckle.
I checked each one by touch the way other women checked for wallet and keys, clutch, ring, locket, blade, and then I pulled the chair out and sat down to prove a normal evening still fit.
The table was cold under my forearms when I pushed my sleeves to my elbows.
I emptied the tote in piles and made myself deal with the paper first. A power bill.
A flyer for a dry cleaner on stock so thin the ink showed through.
A postcard from a gallery on Superior I had not visited in a year.
A folded grocery list in my own hurried print, eggs and lemons and the crackers Ophelia liked.
Catalogs I dropped to the floor by my boots.
The radiator ticked and the rain kept its low wash on the glass and the lilies breathed too sweet from the counter, and I squared each small pile with my thumbs and told myself this was what women did on rainy Thursdays.
At the bottom of the tote, under the clutch, was the heavy cream envelope I had been avoiding without admitting it.
My name ran across the front in sloping dark script, and my stomach dropped half an inch before my brain named the hand.
Julian Corvine's thank-you note from the gala.
I had slipped it into the tote that night between champagne and photographs, and then the loft and everything after had buried it under more urgent paper.
The stock was thick, cotton-rich. The letters caught the overhead light and held it, dark rust red with brown edges where the strokes pooled.
I stared at it longer than any envelope deserved.
Something in me did not want to open it at the table where I ate cereal standing up on work mornings, as if the gala and the kitchen belonged to different women and the envelope knew it.
Which was stupid. It was paper. I drew the stiletto from its sheath with the practiced roll of my wrist, set the tip under the flap, and slit it with a soft snick that sounded loud in the warm room.
The blade went back into the sheath before I had fully decided to move it, the handle seating with a small click against my thigh.
Inside was a single folded card on the same cream stock, the fold crisp enough to stand open on its own.
Two sentences in that practiced sloping hand, gala polite start to finish, thanking me for attending, for the conversation about the donation, for brightening a dull evening of speeches.
Warmth in every curve. And in the middle of the second sentence, set like a stone in a ring, the words my girl in the same oxblood ink, written the way older men from that world wrote about any younger woman they had claimed for an evening in public, fondness and ownership braided too tight for anyone at the table to separate.
The bleach smell rose off the table as I leaned in.
My forearms rested on the cold wood and the sweater wool scratched faintly at my elbows.
I read the two sentences three times, my eyes snagging each pass on the color rather than the words.
That dark rust red, brown at the pooled edges, black at the center of each downstroke where the pen had pressed hardest. I had seen that exact shade at the gala when he lifted his champagne and his right cuff turned back half an inch and a thin wet line marked the white, still shiny under the chandeliers, half an inch long.
He had smiled without pausing in his sentence about the hospital wing, tugged the cuff straight with two fingers, gone on talking while the mark dried.
I had filed the smear away the way I filed everything, a loose thread tucked behind a button, without knowing why it mattered.
My fingertips felt light, then strange, as if the blood had decided to run somewhere else first. I set the card down carefully and laid the torn envelope strip beside it, edges aligned without my telling my hands to do it.
The radiator ticked under the window. The vanilla candle gave off its warm sugar smell whenever the heat draft moved across the jar.
The lilies were too sweet, headache sweet, their perfume stacking on the bleach until the back of my throat ached.
I pressed my palms flat to the table edge until the wood bit in, and the wood felt colder than the room had any right to make it.
What surfaced then was a bedroom twelve years old, a girl of fourteen cross-legged on a quilt with a cereal-box magnifying glass, studying a sympathy card until her eyes watered.
The card that had come to the funeral with no return address, cream stock gone soft as cloth from handling, the message kind in the empty way strangers were kind when they did not know what else to write.
Sorry for your loss. Such a bright family.
Be brave and cry quietly, or some version of that polished sorrow.
I had memorized every loop because it was the only piece of that week that felt chosen, deliberate, meant for us instead of merely happening to us.
I had kept it through every move since, through dorm rooms and sublets and finally here, in cedar, under folded scarves.
I pushed back from the table so fast the chair legs shrieked on the tile.
Six steps across the kitchen, boots loud then hushed on the hall runner, into the bedroom where the overheads were off and the rain glow laid wet stripes across the unmade bed.
The dresser drawer slid with its familiar wooden groan.
Under the folded scarves, green and gray and the wine-colored one Ophelia had given me, the flat cedar box my mother had varnished herself the winter before everything went bad sat cool and smooth.
I lifted it with both hands, carried it back down the hall on foot with the wood warming against my palms, and set it on the table beside the thank-you note with a soft solid thump.
The lid lifted without sticking. Braid of baby hair tied with thread.
Hospital bracelet gone yellow. Three birthday cards with my father's blocky hand.
Under them the sympathy envelope, soft as laundry, the flap long split at the crease.
I drew the card out by its edges the way I handled prints I did not want to smudge, though twelve years had set the ink past smudging.
The paper had faded a half shade where sun had found it through a crack in the box lid one summer, but in the shadows of the loops the color sat dark and true.
Oxblood. Dark rust red. Brown at the pooled edges.
I laid it next to Julian's note, side by side under the overheads, and squared the edges with my thumbs so the writing ran parallel, old card on the left, new card on the right.
Then I leaned down until my nose was a foot from the paper and the bleach fell away and all I could smell was old paper and vanilla and the faint iron-sweet chemical ghost that rose off fresh ink and, impossibly, off this old ink too when the light warmed it.
My pinned hair slipped forward and brushed the table. I tucked it back without looking up.