He reached across the table with his left hand and caught the neck of the bottle and tugged it out from under her arm. His right hand continued to grip the gun.
“I told you these needed to be kept someplace dry,” he said. “The cork swells. I told you it was a mistake to just stick the reds in the cabinet.”
I told you had to be some kind of karmic opposite to the words I love you. He had always found it much easier to say “I told you.” It would’ve been something to resent, if she didn’t feel all the breath go out of her. Because now Jakob had the corkscrew. She had let him take it without a struggle, without an objection, the only weapon she had.
He squeezed the bottle between his thighs, hunched and pulled. His neck reddened and cords stood out in it. Those fat blobs of wax split and the cork began to move. She looked at the gun. He still held it with his free hand—but it shifted a titch, to point more toward the bookshelf behind her.
“Get your glass,” he said. “It’s coming.”
She picked up her goblet and scootched forward, so her knees bumped his. Time began to move in small, careful increments. The cork moved another centimeter. And another. And came out with a perfect little pop. He exhaled and set the corkscrew down by his knee, where she couldn’t reach it.
“Have a taste,” he said, and spilled a trickle into her outstretched glass.
Jakob had taught her how to drink wine when they were in France, had instructed her in the subject with great enthusiasm. She stuck her nose into the cavern of the glass and inhaled, filled her nostrils with peppery fumes so strong it was possible to imagine getting drunk off them alone. It smelled good, but instead she flinched and frowned.
“Oh, damn it, does everything have to be wrong?” She lifted her gaze. “It went over. It’s complete vinegar. Do we get another one? We’ve got that one from Napa. The one you said all the collectors want.”
“What? It’s not even ten years old. That doesn’t seem right. Let me see.” He bent toward her, coming halfway out of the Egg.
His eyes widened the instant before she moved. He was quick, almost quick enough to duck out of the way, but that little lean was all she needed.
She smashed the glass into his face. The goblet shattered with a pretty, tuneful sound, and glass fangs tore open the skin in bright red lines, carving across his cheekbone, the bridge of his nose, and his eyebrow. It looked like a tiger cub had swiped at his face.
He screamed and lifted the gun and it went off. The sound of it was a shattering slam, right next to her head.
A shelf of books behind her exploded and the air filled with a snowstorm of flying pages. Harper came to her feet, pitching herself to her left, toward the door to the bedroom. She smashed a knee against the edge of the coffee table, coming around it, registered the impact but felt no pain.
An awesome silence gathered around her, the only noise in it a high-pitched whining, the sound of a struck tuning fork. A torn sheet of paper, part of some book, floated down and caught against her chest, stuck there.
The recoil flipped the Great Egg straight back, with Jakob still in it. The bottle flew as he fell backward, sailed across the room, and clubbed her in the shoulder. She kept going, crossed the den in three steps, and reached the door to the bedroom. The doorframe exploded to the left of her ear, throwing white chunks of wood into her hair, into her face. The sound of the gun going off was so muffled, it was like hearing a car door slam in the street. Then she was through, into the bedroom.
She snatched thoughtlessly at the sheet of paper stuck to her chest, pulled it back, stared down at it, saw a handful of words:
his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history.
She flung it aside, behind her, back into the den, and slammed the door after it.
15
There was a lock on the door that she didn’t bother with. No point. It was a button lock and he’d kick right through it. She wasn’t even sure the door would stay shut, half the doorframe missing where a bullet had smashed into it.
She grabbed the wooden chair to the left of the door and flung it down, something to put in the way. Her carpetbag was at the foot of the bed, clothes stacked inside under The Portable Mother. She caught it by the leather handles and kept going, on to the window that looked over the backyard. She flicked the lock and shoved it up. Behind her, the chair shattered with a muffled crunch.
The hill behind the house dropped steeply, a long grade that led down to the trees. The bedroom appeared to be on the first floor, if you were looking at the house from the front. But when you came around back, it was possible to see the bedroom was really on the second floor: a finished, walk-in basement was beneath it. From the bedroom window, it was a fifteen-foot drop into darkness.
As she threw her legs over the sill, she looked down and saw she was pouring blood, the whole front of her white halter soaked with it. She couldn’t feel where she had been hit. She couldn’t take time to think about it. She jumped, dragging her bag. The window exploded outward behind her as Jakob put a bullet in it.
She fell and expected to hit the ground and didn’t and fell some more. Her stomach flipped inside her. Then she hit, her right foot folding under her with a breathtaking flash of pain. She thought of pianos falling in silent movies, shattering on impact, ivory keys spilling over the sidewalk like so many scattered teeth.
Harper lunged off balance, fell forward, hit the dirt, rolled, and rolled, and rolled. She lost her grip on the carpetbag. It tumbled along with her, flinging its contents into the darkness. Her right ankle felt as if it had been shattered, but it couldn’t be shattered, because if it were, Jakob would catch her and he would kill her.
She flopped to a halt two-thirds of the way down the steep slope, the smoke-filled night sky whirling overhead. At one edge of her vision, she could see her tall, narrow house looming over her. At the other, she could see the edge of the woods, the trees half shed of their leaves, skeletons in rags. All she wanted to do was lie there and wait for the world to stop moving.
But there wasn’t time for that. It would take him all of twenty seconds to get down the stairs into the basement and out the back door.
She pushed herself up. The ground tilted precariously beneath her, felt as unsteady as a dock floating on a turbulent lake. She wondered if some of the dizziness was blood loss, looked at her soaked blouse, at the deep red stain down the front of it, and smelled wine. He had not put a bullet in her after all. It was the honeymoon Bordeaux; she was wearing it. All of France’s wine country was nothing but ash now, which meant the stain on her blouse was probably worth a few thousand dollars on the black market. She had never worn anything so expensive.
Harper put her left hand on the ground to steady herself and planted it on some shirts and something wrapped in crinkly plastic. The slide whistle. God knew why she had packed it.
She shoved herself up and off the ground. Harper left her carpetbag and her scattered clothes and The Portable Mother, but she held on to the slide whistle. She took her first step toward the woods, and her right leg nearly folded underneath her. Something grated, and there was a flash of pain so intense her knees buckled. She might not be shot, but she had fractured something in her ankle, there was no doubt about it.
“Harper!” Jakob screamed from up the hill behind her. “Stop running, Harper, you bitch!”
The fractured bone in her ankle grated again, and a flash of pain, brilliant and white, went off behind her eyes. For a moment she was running blind and close to crumpling, passing out. In action movies, people dropped out of windows all the time and it was no big deal.