Theaella

11

Her eyes sharpened further, her brow twisting. For an instant her face wore a bare expression of unadulterated hurt, and then it hardened, locking down the softer emotion.

“Get him off my property,” she said.

Matthew said, “His life is at risk.”

“Yeah? So was mine.”

Vincent stared at the porch, at the tops of his shoes. Matthew could feel the heat from her glare, and he was certain Vincent could, too.

“I can’t believe you’d show your face here,” Violet said.

Vincent nodded and faded back off the porch, never lifting his gaze. He waited in the grass, a salesman afraid to approach.

Violet looked at Matthew, and he could see the strength in her. She was breathing hard, her neck flushed, her clavicles pronounced on the inhalations.

Matthew said, “He did a favor for someone, and now a crew of hit men are after him.”

Violet’s focus moved past Matthew’s shoulder to Vincent. Her blink rate had picked up. She pressed her lips together. Unrolled them. “I’ll give you this, Vincent. At least you don’t make the same mistake twice. You find yourself a whole new one.”

Her voice now was steady. Not a tremor. This is what pain looks like when stoked to a bright light, Matthew thought. It gets cold.

“If I don’t get him off the street and hide him,” Matthew said, “he will be killed. He said your parents are—” He almost said “slumlords,” corrected course. “Real-estate kingpins. With thousands of holdings in questionable neighborhoods. He said you work for them now.”

“Yes,” she said, each word diamond-hard. “I do. Now. It was the best option, and I took it.” She was going for a wounded kind of pride, but her misery at the admission was evident.

Matthew asked, “Can you find a place that’s between tenants in a”—shitty part of town—“lower-income area?”

“For what?”

“To hide him. To save his life.”

“Why should I put myself at risk for him?”

“You’re nearly three years divorced. And it wasn’t amicable. It’s incredibly doubtful anyone would think Vincent would come to you—”

“You can count me in that group,” she cut in.

“—and be able to connect the dots from you to the business of your parents—who dislike him—and then to one of countless places they own around Los Angeles.” Matthew paused. “Let’s just say it’s beyond a long shot.”

“You misunderstood my question,” she said. “I didn’t ask if I’d be at risk for him. I asked why I should put myself at risk for him.”

A patch of roses breathed a lovely scent that seemed out of place amid all the bitterness.

Matthew said, “I can’t answer that.”

She said, “Who are you?”

“Someone who’s helping him?”

“Out of the goodness of your heart?”

Matthew considered this. “Out of the badness of my heart, I suppose.”

She seemed to appreciate his candor. “It’s really life-or-death?”

“It is.”

“Fine. I’ll find somewhere. Somewhere really crappy. On one condition. Ask him what he did to me. You make him tell you. You should know who you’re helping.”

The breeze from the rose garden now smelled saccharine, a sickly indulgence.

Matthew said, “I will.”

“I’ll give you three addresses,” she said. “Unrented places. Pick whichever you like. Do not lose the keys. Return them when you’re done. And then I never want to hear from you—or him—again. Also? I don’t know anything about this.”

Matthew said, “Copy that.”

“And tell him…”

“What?”

“Tell him I’m sorry about Grant.” Her scowl returned. “Wait out here.”

The door closed abruptly. The footsteps padded away, more sharply than before.

Matthew exhaled through his teeth and eased back until he came level with Vincent on the front lawn.

Vincent said, “Look, after she … after she tried to commit suicide, I was lost. I remember going to the drugstore one day to buy shampoo and just standing there, paralyzed, because I couldn’t decide what to get. Like for twenty minutes, just frozen.” He wet his lips, swallowed. “We were gonna be parents. And then, all at once, we weren’t.”

“What did you do to her?” Matthew asked.

“I felt so f*****g helpless,” Vincent said. “Just … at a total loss, you know? She didn’t want to go on, and I didn’t know when she’d do it again. She was sick with grief. She was sleeping all day and throwing up when she ate, and I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t do anything but hold her hair, and she looked … she looked like she had nothing inside her anymore. Like she’d already gone and left a husk behind. I would’ve done whatever I could to help her, but I didn’t have the answers. I didn’t have any of the answers. Everything I tried just made things worse. I would have done anything. You understand? Anything.”

“You couldn’t handle it anymore,” Matthew said.

Vincent took in a breath. “I guess not.”

“So you left.”

Vincent plucked a glossy rose petal from the bush, ground it between his thumb and forefinger. “Sure,” he said. “I left.”

A silence ensued, nothing but the cheery chirps of songbirds on the scented breeze. The closed door confronted them like a moral rebuke.

Matthew felt Vincent’s eyes on the side of his face.

“Lemme guess.” Vincent’s tone was sharp, but it was clear that just served to hide the shame. “That makes you not like me.”

Matthew said, “I don’t have to like you to protect you.”

Take Names

Violet had seen through her promise to find a supremely crappy place for Vincent.

The ramshackle house was bedded into the side of a hill, the crumbling rear wall patched with fiberglass siding. A trash bag duct-taped over a smashed window fluttered with sporadic violence, a bat trying to tear free of a trapped wing. The plumbing appeared to be intact, the pipes visible at intervals in the decaying drywall. The few overhead lights hummed with exertion. A cracked sliding glass door let onto a narrow bog of long-sitting water in the backyard, the rotted fence spitting distance from the threshold.