Page 34

34

Black Widow

Jake

I tip my head back on the sofa and close my eyes. I can hear the murmuring of Dodi’s and Cat’s voices getting ready for bed in the other room, the splashing of water, the TVs of neighboring apartments, the elevator going up and down. I tune out. I hover in that space between consciousness and sleep. Then…the hairs on the back of my neck rise. I open my eyes and Dodi is leaning against the corner of the wall where the hallway opens onto the living room, considering me. She’s changed into her nightclothes, a long-sleeved black nightshirt just short enough that I can see the tattoo dangling down one side of her thigh—a dagger, right where a woman would tuck one into her garter. I try not to stare at it.

“Did you figure out someplace to go?” she asks.

“No.”

She doesn’t point out that I have a pillowcase full of money and could easily explore hotel options. Instead she glides to the kitchen and returns with a pair of wineglasses and a half-full bottle. She flicks on the TV, and the crime scene photo of a chalk outline on a downtown sidewalk fills the screen. She watches, and sips her wine, and I watch her. If I’m perfectly quiet and she forgets I’m here, I can stay another night. I could turn into a closet squatter, creeping out during the day to use her shower and kitchen, vacuum her carpet, cook her meals, and scurry back Gollum-like to the crawl space when she comes home. It would be a good life.

“You going to stare at me all night, you weirdo?” she says without looking at me.

“Yes.”

She mutes the TV and twists to face me, coiling her bare legs up on the cushion next to her.

“Are you going to tell me what your list is about?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you want me to.”

“I’ll need to know if I want to keep my job.”

“Why would you want to? You don’t have to work a soulless corporate job ever again. Use your winnings to start fresh.”

She frowns at me. “I want a soulless corporate job.”

“Why?”

“I like working downtown. I like the glitz, and the money, and the rush. I like stomping around in high heels and pencil skirts. I want to earn shitloads of money and have a corner office with a view and go shopping on my lunch break for overpriced silk scarves that I never wear and wind up in a tangled mess in a drawer. I want an assistant and a nice car, and I want to send my kid to a posh little artsy private school where I can pay the teachers to back off and just let her blossom into the spooky little goth girl she’s meant to be.”

I suppose it’s good for Cat that she has someone in her corner.

“You’re not like that, though,” Dodi says.

“Like what?”

Dodi places one arm on the back of the sofa, her fingertips coming to rest six inches from my shoulder. “You don’t care about shiny, expensive things. You don’t like tall buildings and fast cars, or world travel and penthouse apartments.”

I don’t. I don’t like any of that shit.

“What do you like?” she asks quietly.

I like you, I could say like a paste-eating child.

Apart from that, I have no idea what I like. There was a while there when I was younger when I was trying to figure that all out, before I realized it didn’t really matter in the long run, because there would be no long run. She doesn’t press me. She looks at me like I’m mysterious and fascinating. I’ve done and said such ridiculous things to get her to look at me like that, and here she is, giving me that look for slouching on her sofa after a day of playing homemaker. I wonder…I wonder if this evening was real life enough for her. What she thinks about me being a part of her real life. She takes a sip of wine and I do too.

“You have two hundred thousand dollars and a terminal illness. Some people would buy themselves a sports car and start driving across the country, or throw a massive party in the most expensive hotel room they can book, or hop on a plane and see the world. But here you are—in my crappy little apartment that smells like stale apple juice and dirty socks—cooking meals and folding throw blankets.”

Maybe not mysterious and fascinating after all. I’m the boring temp who blends into the walls at work. But Dodi melts across the sofa cushions toward me, and the hair on the back of my neck does its thing again.

“I’ve figured out what your MO would be,” she says, her voice lower now that she’s so close to me. She props her elbow on the back of the sofa near my shoulder and leans her face into her hand, and the line from under her ear to the curve of her bare shoulder where her shirt has fallen to the side is one long, sinuous stroke.

“Yeah?”

“You would be known as ‘The Caretaker.’ I’m imagining a job interview mix-up: you’re hired by the mob to ‘take care’ of some people, so you do just that—you break into their houses one by one and take care of them . You clean, fold laundry, and feed them up.” As she says all this she’s not smiling, but she’s not not smiling. I’m meant to crack first.

“How would I kill them?”

She sighs loftily. “Haven’t figured that part out yet. All I know is by the time they get to the dinner table with the good china laid out, they realize they’re goners. They know something terrible is waiting for them.”

“Cleanliness, nutrition, and evening leisure time.”

She glances around the room self-consciously, any prospect of a smile gone. I’ve insulted her. She’s like a porcupine, always curling up tight around her tender underbelly at the first sign of a threat.

Backtrack, backtrack, backtrack…

“But you always have to do it all yourself,” I say. “You don’t get any help.”

She considers my attempt to rectify. “This is not the way I pictured it, you know,” she says.

“The way you pictured what?”

“My life.”

“How did you picture it?”

Against all odds, she uncurls for me. “There was supposed to be a house near a good school. We were going to have a dog—something fluffy and stupid. There was supposed to be a pair of grandparents helping out. I grew up with my grandparents in the house with us. Cat was supposed to have a dad. I was supposed to have a husband.”

One for six. We sit in silence for a minute.

“What happened?”

“You know that old saying—‘When you off your husband, you find out who your friends are.’?” She scratches the stem of her glass with her thumbnail. “We had a down payment for a house saved, but I ended up living on that for a few years after Cat was born. No life insurance, of course. Neil had lots to say about the house odds of life insurance. And I wouldn’t have been able to cash in, anyway.”

“You didn’t do time,” I conclude.

She considers me. “You didn’t look it up?”

I haven’t searched online. It felt like cheating. I like her the way she is, a hazy question mark, revealing herself to me in shocking flashes. The way she looks at me right now tells me I did right.

“The laws around medically assisted suicide were changing even as the DA was forming his case,” she says in a low voice, eyes on her glass. “And the prosecution of a young widow—a pregnant young widow, as it turns out—was poised to become…how do I put it? A full-blown media circus and emphatically not a good look. I’m lucky. The media coverage died down almost before it began.”

She swirls her wineglass. She’s ready for a subject change. “Why was Cat playing with a pair of Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses?”

“She found them in the car.”

“Can I have them?”

“I already gave them to Cat.”

“I thought you were allergic to kids,” she says.

I wonder how big of an idiot I’d be in her eyes if she knew I thought Cat was an actual cat all along.

“I’m allergic to people.”

“Relatable. And I guess she’s not really a kid, is she?”

“Not like any kid I ever met. Does she float when you give her a bath?”

Her lips twitch. “I do sometimes wonder if I shouldn’t burn her at the stake to be safe.”

“Couldn’t hurt.”

Dodi’s face goes serious. “Most nights it’s not like this. It’s not easy. She’s not easy. She’s so…prickly.”

“It can crop up randomly in a family.”

Another lip twitch. “She’s impossible.”

“Have you tried an exorcism?”

The lip twitching is outright dangerous now. “I don’t have any credit with the priesthood.”

“I think you’re doing great with her.”

She’s rendered silent for a moment.

“I want better for her than this,” she says quietly.

I look around the cozy little apartment. I like it better than Grant’s. I like it better than the cold, immaculate house I spent my teen years in with Andrew and Laura. A memory has been slowly surfacing all day.

“I lived in an apartment like this with my mom. Just the two of us. I never thought twice about the things we didn’t have. I had a good childhood.” I think of that calendar on the fridge. “You’re giving her a good childhood.” Another memory rears up. “I fucking loved Kraft Dinner.”

My words land somewhere in Dodi’s psyche where I can’t see them. She watches me for a beat.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around this new Dodi who is a mother. There’s something about the very idea that changes everything about her. It’s that cliché of a vase giving way to the two profiles on either side. A framed picture on a wall turns out to be a window to an entire world upon closer inspection. All the softness and tender care in this messy little apartment—the basket of folded laundry, the cozy furniture, the snack food, the toys—all of this is Dodi seen from a different angle, Dodi keeping something behind her and out of view. The dark side of Dodi’s mysterious, remote moon.

Mostly it’s been fascinating listening to her go a whole three hours without dropping an f-bomb.

“I’m a bit older than you,” she says suddenly and randomly. Her voice is quiet and serious.

“I already knew that.”

Dodi is the sort of person who spends their twenties looking ten years older than they are and their thirties looking ten years younger. She’s a mystery. But she’s been married and widowed, and she has a six-year-old kid.

“You’re a lot older than me,” I point out.

She frowns and sits up straighter.

“What are you, five…six hundred years old?”

The corners of her lips spasm and she takes a quick sip from her glass to cover. “Are you done with the vampire jokes?”

“I have a few in reserve.”

She creeps closer, until I can practically feel the warmth radiating from her. I never drink, but it’s not the wine that’s making me feel flushed and weird. My understanding of the moment shifts, and this time I realize in advance where we’re heading.

She studies me. “You’ve been so strange with me. Sometimes you look at me like…I don’t know. Like Jeffrey Dahmer doing some meal planning in his head. But then I throw myself at you, and you’re the nerdy kid who flinches and turns his back to the football. I can’t tell what you want from me.”

I never knew what I wanted from her. I just wanted . Maybe it is hunger. From the moment she stepped into that elevator, it was like not realizing you were starving until you were offered something to eat.

She leans closer. “Is it your illness? Does that—?”

“No,” I say quickly. “It’s not like that.”

She cocks her head to one side. “You need zip ties and duct tape to get turned on.”

“No.”

She presses her lips together. “So it’s me.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t do it for you.” Her tone has already changed. Lofty, could give a fuck. She pulls away, picks up the remote, eyes back on the TV, where there’s a vista from the top of a downtown skyscraper.

It came out wrong, but the idea that Dolores could think she doesn’t do it for me after literally all of everything is a brand-new, previously unlocked level of head-assery.

“I know it’s been a while since you’ve been able to see your own reflection. You do it for me so well you scare the shit out of me,” I clarify, and it’s true. I’m running on stress hormones whenever I’m around her. I never know how an interaction with her is going to go. Her cheeks turn faintly pink, her eyes still on the screen, where there’s the image of a paper airplane.

“This is probably a shocking twist, but I haven’t been married that many times before.”

The corners of her lips move again.

“And obviously you have several centuries’ worth more notches on the lip of your coffin than I do.”

“Fuck off.”

“What was sex like before showers?”

She tosses the remote onto the coffee table with a clatter and turns to face me.

“Go long, nerd,” she whispers, and then she bites my neck.

My brain blinks out, all color contracting into a dot before vanishing, like an old TV turning off. My mouth finds hers, and it’s pure brain stem action after that. Touch and taste and basic functions, like breathing and pulse and, beyond that, nothing except a mayfly’s instinct to at least check this off my list before the clock’s done ticking.

I like her on top, like she’s going to take care of the important decisions, so I hook her behind one knee and pull until she’s straddling me, her long hair spilling onto me, and she runs her hands over my shoulders, my chest, my throat. My hands find her knees. I don’t remember ever noticing a woman’s knees before, but when a woman dresses the way Dodi does, like her body is privileged information, the bits you can see take on significance. Her neck. Her knees. And now above her knees, up the sides of her thighs, under the fabric of her nightshirt…on the right I can feel bumps. Lines. Scars in the skin from a part of her tattoo that went too deep. I want her to show me all her tattoos.

She bends her face to mine and kisses me like an animal licking its wounds. Brain activity completely flatlines, and if I were in a hospital bed plugged into a monitor, the only humane thing to do would be to remove the feeding tube. Not give me a shot of adrenaline directly into the heart, which is what it feels like right now. I could run a minute mile. She kisses me harder, and one of us makes a sound, or maybe it’s both of us, and it feels for a moment like she’s everywhere, and there’s nothing else, and then she takes my hands and puts them where she wants them—which is also where I want them—and she’s soft and warm—

“Your hands,” she says suddenly, and the moment skips and stumbles and crashes.

My fingers are completely white. Cadaverous. They look awful. I shove them between my thighs and the sofa cushions.

“Do they hurt?”

I shake my head. “They just go numb.”

I feel stupid for ruining the moment again. I try to slow my breathing. I look everywhere but at her.

“Jake.”

She pries one hand out from where I’ve hidden it and holds it between her own hands, warming it. I finally look up at her. Her face is serious and stoic, and the mood is completely gone, I know it. How could it not be?

She licks her lips. “How much time do you have?”

My dad was dead by thirty-four, but for the first time it occurs to me I don’t know when his symptoms started, or at what point life became unbearable for him. Only one person in the world has that information. I open my mouth to explain all this, but—

“Hey, what about my chocolate bar?”

It’s Cat, glaring at me from the end of the sofa in an old-fashioned nightgown that makes her look like a Victorian ghost. Dodi leaps off me and straightens her nightshirt, and I burn with gratitude that my hands were somewhere G-rated.

“You have to leave,” Dodi says abruptly.

She doesn’t need to tell me twice. I throw on my coat and go, down the stairwell, out the fire exit. As the door snicks shut behind me, I realize I forgot my bag. I step out into the street, no idea what happens next.

The car is half a block away. I click the key fob, and the entire city blinks out into darkness.