“This is way too creepy to have in the bedroom,” Gillian informed her niece. “We’re taking it down.”
“Maria is not creepy,” Kylie said. Kylie’s hair was growing out, leaving her with a brown streak half an inch wide in the center of her head. She should have looked odd and unfinished; instead she was growing even more beautiful. In fact, she resembled Maria; side by side, they might even appear to be twins. “I like her,” Kylie told her aunt, and since it was her bedroom, that was that.
Gillian claimed she would be too nervous to sleep with Maria hanging above them, she’d have nightmares and perhaps even the shakes, but that’s not the way it’s turned out. She’s stopped thinking about Jimmy completely and no longer worries that someone will come looking for him; if he owed money or had cut a bad deal, the men who’d been wronged would have been there by now, they would have come and taken what they wanted and already been gone. Now that the portrait of Maria is on the wall, Gillian has been sleeping even more deeply. Each morning she wakes with a smile on her face. She’s not as frightened of the backyard as she used to be, although every now and then she drags Kylie to the window, just to make certain Jimmy hasn’t come back. Kylie always insists she has nothing to worry about. The garden is clear and green. The lilacs have been cut so close to their roots it may be years before they sprout again. Once in a while something casts a shadow across the lawn, but it’s probably the toad who has taken up residence in the roots of the lilacs. They’d know if it was Jimmy, wouldn’t they? They’d feel more threatened and much more vulnerable.
“No one is out there,” Kylie has promised. “He’s gone.” And maybe he really is, because Gillian isn’t crying anymore, not even in her sleep, and those bruises he left on her arms have disappeared, and she’s started to date Ben Frye.
The decision to take a chance with Ben came upon her suddenly, as she was driving home from work in Jimmy’s Oldsmobile, which still had beer cans rattling around somewhere under the seat. Ben continued to call several times a day, but that couldn’t go on forever, even though he had amazing patience. As a boy, he had taken eight months to teach himself to escape from a pair of iron handcuffs. Before he mastered the art of putting a match out under his tongue, he burned the roof of his mouth, again and again, so that for weeks afterward he could consume nothing but buttermilk and pudding. Illusions that lasted only seconds on a stage took months or even years to understand and execute. But love was not about practice and preparation, it was pure chance; if you took your time with it you ran the risk of having it evaporate before it had even begun. Sooner or later, Ben was bound to give up. He’d be on his way to see her, he’d have a book under his arm in order to pass the time while he waited for her on the porch, and he’d suddenly think, Nope, just like that, out of the blue. All Gillian had to do was close her eyes and she could see the expression of doubt that would spread across his face. Not today, he’d decide and he’d turn around to head for home and he probably wouldn’t ever come back.
Speculating about the time when Ben finally stopped chasing after her made Gillian sick to her stomach. The world without him, without his phone calls and his faith, didn’t interest her in the least. And who was she protecting him from, really? That careless girl who broke people’s hearts and asked for nothing more than a good time was gone. Jimmy had seen to that. That girl was so long ago and so far away that Gillian couldn’t even remember why she’d thought she’d ever been in love before, or what she’d thought she was getting from all those men, who never knew who she was in the first place.
On that evening when the sky was pale and blue and the beer cans were rolling around each time she stepped on the brake, Gillian made an illegal U turn and drove to Ben Frye’s house before her nerve failed her. She told herself she was an adult and could handle an adult encounter. It wasn’t necessary for her to run away, or protect someone at her own expense, or do anything more than take one baby step at a time in any direction she chose. All the same, she thought she might faint when Ben came to answer his door. She’d planned to tell him that she wasn’t looking for a commitment or anything serious—she wasn’t sure if she was going to kiss him, let alone get into bed with him—but she never got to say any of it, because once she stepped into the front hallway, Ben wasn’t about to wait.
He’d done enough time with patience, he’d served his sentence, now he didn’t intend to look past what he wanted. He started kissing Gillian before she could mention that she was still thinking it over. His kisses made her feel things she didn’t want to feel, at least not yet. He got her up against the wall and slipped his hands under her blouse, and that was that. She didn’t say “Stop it,” she didn’t say “Wait,” she kissed him back until she was too far gone to think anything over. Ben was driving her crazy, and he was testing her, too—every time he got her really hot, he’d stop just to see what she would do, and how much she wanted it. If he didn’t take her into the bedroom soon, she’d find herself begging him to fuck her. She’d wind up saying, Please, baby, which is what she used to say to Jimmy, although she never really meant it. Not back then. It’s never possible for a woman to concentrate on making love when she’s that scared. Too scared to breathe, too frightened to consider saying, Not like that. It hurts too much when you do it like that.
She talked dirty to Jimmy because she knew it helped to make him hard. If he’d been drinking all night and couldn’t get it up, he’d turn on her so fast she’d be reeling. One minute everything would be fine, and the next second the air all around him would be set on fire from the fury of whatever was inside him. When this happened, either he’d start to slap her or she’d have to start telling him how much she wanted him inside her. At least he’d have something to do with his anger when Gillian told him that she wanted him to fuck her all night, she wanted him so much she’d do anything, he could make her do anything. And didn’t he have a perfect right to be angry and do whatever he pleased? Wasn’t she so bad she needed to be punished, and only he could do it, he could do it right?
Talk and violence always turned Jimmy on, and so Gillian always started talking right away. She was smart enough to get him hard fast, to talk nasty and suck his dick, before he started to get really mad. He’d fuck her then, but he could be mean about it, and selfish, too, and he liked it when she cried. When she cried, he knew he had won, and for some reason that was important to him. He didn’t seem to know he’d won from the start, when she first saw him, when she first looked into his eyes.