Page 26 of Breaking the Dark

“Oh, it was every bit how you’d imagine a week in Toledo in the middle of October waiting for your mother’s favorite sister to die would be.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

He pooh-poohs her condolences with a wave of his hand. “Yeah. It was sad. She was a nice lady. But at least now I have no reason to ever go to Toledo again. Anyway, what can I get you? Wine? Whiskey? Beer?”

“Oh, yeah. I kind of stopped drinking.”

“Oh, now there’s a curveball. What’s brought that on? You’re not pregnant, are you?” He asks this in humor, and she responds in kind. Even if she is pregnant, Julius is not the first person she would be telling.

“Nope,” she says. “Nothing growing in this dried-up old husk of a uterus.”

The words sound harsh as she says them, almost, she ponders, a betrayal of some sort, but not one she can quite define. “No. I just felt it was time to clean up my act, you know. I have a reputation, and nobody wants to have a reputation.”

“I’d like to have a reputation,” Julius replies.

“A reputation for being a boozer is…not good.”

“So what can I get you instead? A soda? Tea? Juice?”

“Juice, please, whatever you have.”

He heads to the kitchen and Jessica leans down again to stroke Speckles, who is still sitting by her feet. She thinks of what Luke said about animals being able to smell the essence of other creatures—their weaknesses and illnesses, their tumors and their auras—and she wonders if Speckles can smell pregnancy—assuming there even is one—and maybe it is this that the cat has been drawn to, rather than the scent of her latent powers.

“Oh,” she calls into the kitchen, “by the way, there was a kid waiting outside your apartment a few days back. A little girl. Do you know anything about her?”

“What kind of little girl?”

“Well, short. Obviously. Wears her hair in puffballs. Really pretty.”

“No,” he says, appearing in the kitchen doorway with a glass in one hand and a carton of juice in the other. “No idea.”

“You haven’t seen her in the building before?”

“Well, God, that’s another question entirely. I mean, there’s gotta be a hundred people living in this building. Maybe more. What did she want?”

“She didn’t say. I tried to get her to talk to me, but she wouldn’t. And I’ve seen her again since, out on the street, and last night I…” She pauses, not sure if she trusts Julius with what might in fact be evidence of her own imminent descent into madness. “I saw her in a taxi, down in Chinatown. On her own, and it’s…” She pauses again, to see if he’s listening enough to be concerned about her, but she senses not. “It’s all kind of strange.”

“Yeah. It sounds like it.” Julius passes her a glass of juice, then holds out his own glass of red wine to her and says, “Cheers, Jessica. To you, from me and from Speckles, thank you so much for coming to the rescue and saving the day. We’re very, very grateful.”

She smiles and touches her glass to his. “It was actually fun. I discovered that I like cats.”

“Well then, you should get one. Keep you company.”

She smiles. “Mad cat lady. That’s me.”

Julius gives a look of faux concern. “Then what does that make me?!”

“You have a boyfriend at least.”

“Well, yeah. But one who refuses to live with me.”

Jessica watches as Julius brings his wine glass to his mouth. She sees the glistening red of the wine tip toward the rim and the meniscus breaking as it slips between his lips. She shudders lightly with combined feelings of revulsion and compulsion. She wants a drink so badly. She craves the heat of alcohol, the warm amber of the dregs of whiskey in her apartment, the sultry ruby of Julius’s Merlot. She wants to feel her mind closing over with the soft drapes of drunkenness. She has not gone this long without a drink since…no, she can’t remember. But as Julius takes the glass from his lips, and she sees the brown stain of it on his teeth, smells the slightly meaty, bloody odor of it, she thinks suddenly, I’m good. I can do this.

She lifts her juice to her lips and drinks, enjoying the sharp clean tang of it.

Malcolm FaceTimes her a few minutes after she walks back into her own apartment laden with Thai leftovers from Julius’s feast. She drops the boxes on the kitchen counter, swipes reply on her phone, and is taken aback afresh by the nuclear glow of Malcolm’s hair.

“Malcolm. Hey.”