Freindametz gave her a nasty look when they came downstairs. They quickly left the house.
They walked to the cemetery and shuffled between the shady patches. She showed him where Delacroix was buried, and then Jacques-Louis David, Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, and Gertrude Stein. Each grave had its own little crowd of pilgrims. Grace and Alls toured the tourists. Walking by the Americans and hearing their accents, she felt a rush of daring, as though a flicker of recognition on her face might give her away to these strangers. She and Alls kept going, wandering away from the people, and she felt the warmth of being with him, the invisible tether that kept them moving in the same direction, despite the crowds of strangers. Together, alone.
At one point, he took her hand in his, and she was so shocked at the feel of his skin that she stumbled forward, half-witted with lust and disbelief.
Neither of them spoke of his leaving, and when they got home and he went to the bathroom, she thought this was it, that now he would pack up and leave to make the last Sunday train. But he did not go and instead ran his hands up the backs of her thighs, under her skirt. He pressed his nose into her belly and slid his fingers behind her underwear, moaning when he felt how slick she was. I have been waiting for you, she wanted to tell him, knowing you would never come. She pushed him down on the ancient flowered couch and told him that she didn’t want him to leave, she never wanted him to leave, every way she knew how to.
You still haven’t learned any other way to get what you want, she thought, but she pushed the thought away. All she wanted was him, and all she could do was give—show him how badly she loved him and hope to make him want her even half as much in return.
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Afterward they sat at the table, radiant and profane, and Grace fed him greengage plums and buttered toast and wine. Alls didn’t talk and so neither did she. She didn’t want to disrupt whatever fragile balance was keeping him in the chair across from her.
“Someone will search your house,” he said.
She pushed the crumbs on her plate into a line. “She can’t call the police.”
“Then someone else, someone worse. It won’t be nice.”
“She’s going to think it was Hanna,” she said.
“I don’t know your boss, I don’t know what kind of people she’s with, but you can’t stay here.” He rubbed his eyes. “I thought I’d leave your life in shambles,” he said. “I planned on it. But not like this. Where can you go?”
She shrugged, trying to swallow her dismay. “Anywhere,” she said. “Anywhere I haven’t been yet.”
“This isn’t how I thought it would be,” he said.
She waited. She didn’t know what he meant yet.
“I thought you would have figured it all out now,” he said. “I thought you’d be telling redneck jokes for Europeans at dinner parties. I thought you’d be a well-dressed alcoholic. I thought you’d have just what you wanted and then I’d come and take it from you.” He laughed sadly. “I thought you’d be the collateral damage—some revenge on the side—on my way to get what I wanted.”
“What do you want?”
“Fuck if I know. I never did.”
“I knew,” she said. “I wanted you.”
“I wish I believed you.”
No, she’d misheard him. I wish I’d believed you, he’d said.
“Then,” she said, making sure.
He nodded.
“I do too,” she said.
“You haven’t destroyed anything,” she said. “I needed to leave here anyway. This isn’t any life I wanted either, and I think you know that now, right?”
He sighed, almost imperceptibly, and she felt an opening.
“Let’s go together,” she said. “This time. I know you can’t love me, not like you did. I can do jewelry, swap out the stones, I can—”
He was shaking his head. “No fakes. We’d be caught in a week.”
“Precious for precious,” she said. He was listening. “Nothing fake. But if you switch amethysts for emeralds and put in a diamond where there used to be a topaz—everything would check out with any jeweler. We could steal and sell for years and years, and nothing could be traced, as long as I changed enough. I could do that,” she told him. “I’d be good.”
He laid his head on the table.
“We’ll sell the trillions to get started,” she said. “To buy stones for these pieces from the safe. And then we’ll use the stones I pull from these in the next pieces. Not all at once, there are sizes and shapes and all that to consider, but we could move them a little at a time, as much or as little as we needed. The rocks from bracelet A into necklace B into brooch C into ring D. Nothing would be recognizable, as long as we only use mass jewelry. Nothing one of a kind. Gold, platinum. We’ll go everywhere. I’ll get a job as coat-check girl when we run out, or a maid, and you can sneak in and open their safes. There’s jewelry everywhere,” she said, running out of breath. “The harvest would be endless.”
“You’ve been wrong before.”
“I’m not wrong this time.”
He had closed his eyes hard, shutting her out. Now he lifted his head. “Where is Riley?” he asked.
She hadn’t checked since Alls had come.
31
The story was two days old. NY AUTHORITIES FIND MISSING PAROLEE, the headline read.
U.S. marshals say they have found a Garland man who left Tennessee while on parole as part of a robbery sentence.
A parole warrant was issued on August 19 for 23-year-old Riley Sullivan Graham, who went missing from his place of employment the day before. Graham was arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct in a Queens, New York, bar on Tuesday. Upon his arrest, the U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force ordered him returned to Tennessee, where he will reappear before the court for sentencing.
Graham had served nearly three years for the robbery of the Josephus Wynne Historic Estate in Garland in 2009.
He had been looking for her. She saw that Alls was reading the page again and then again. She sat down on the bed and crossed her arms tightly. Her throat began to seize.
Everything she touched, she thought.
“I should have told him,” he finally said. “I should have made him hate us both.”
Grace closed her eyes. She couldn’t look at him. “Where did you think he’d gone?”
“I thought he needed to start over as someone else, away from his family.” He shook his head. “I didn’t care what he did.”
She dug her palms into her eyes. “He was looking for me. I knew he would.”
“I thought he was over you. I was the one who wasn’t.”
The air between them was thick and human. She felt drugged. “Don’t you see? I ruined everyone. One bad apple. This will never end.”
“Who’s the fucking apple? Don’t you see?” he said. “This is the end.” He pulled her hands from her eyes. “We have to leave him behind. He has people to take care of him.”
“You don’t get it,” she said. “I’m poor. I mean, I’m poor like this”—she looked around the kitchen—“but I’m poor, here.” She thumped her open palm on her chest. “I’m a vacuum, just sucking up everything I can.”
“Take it,” he said. “Give me what you’ve got, and I’ll give you what I’ve got, and that will have to be enough for us.”
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