He had nothing to lose. If he was going to be a sinner, he might as well enjoy the sin.
He knotted his fingers in her hair and moved her head up and down at his own rhythm. He watched her face the whole time, her eyes tearing, her cheeks flushed, saliva glistening at the corners of her mouth, as she took him again and again, and when her hair fell in the way, he moved it, so he could see her lips, so he could see himself fuck her. He hated her. He loved her. She started to lift her face when he came, but he held her head firm.
“Swallow it,” he said.
CHAPTER
52
Susan brought in the mail: a copy of The Nation, a flyer from the co-op, two bills, and a packet of return address labels from the ACLU. She dropped them onto the table inside the door, along with her keys. Her mother’s house was stifling. All the windows were closed. That’s how they kept it during the day. It was the only way to combat the heat. You kept the windows and drapes closed until the sun went down and then you opened them all up and prayed for a light breeze. Susan didn’t know how the Victorians had survived.
Susan’s eyes burned with exhaustion. A few hours’ sleep, and she would be ready to get back to work. She walked upstairs into her mother’s room. She wasn’t going to sleep in that hammock if she didn’t have to. Her mother’s room was painted red and she had what was probably the last water bed in the Portland metropolitan area. Susan turned on the oscillating fan on Bliss’s dresser to get the air moving.
It had been years since she’d pulled an all-nighter and Susan had forgotten what it felt like. She actually felt sick to her stomach. She stretched out on Bliss’s bed but the rollicking motion of the water under the plastic just made her queasier. She lay there for a while but every time she turned over a tidal surge would roll up and down the waterbed. She had a headache now. It felt like someone was squeezing a steel cap around her skull.
There was only one solution: a bath. She glanced at her watch. It was almost 11:00 A.M.
She got up, went into the bathroom off the upstairs hall, and turned on the faucet in the cast-iron tub, filling it with cool water and a healthy gob of eucalyptus foaming bath gel. There were dozens of candles along the perimeter of the tub, an assortment of different colors and scents that Bliss had carefully arranged to create the perfect bathing experience.
Susan flicked a lighter on and held it to one of the wicks. It caught fire for a moment, and then went out. She tried again. It went out. She tried another candle. It went out. Susan indulged in an indignant groan. That was just like her mother, to buy the cheapest candles at the import store. She stared at the lighter in her hand for a moment and then shrugged and set it back down next to one of the candles.
It felt good to shed the clothes she’d been wearing for twenty-four hours. She stuffed them into the Guatemalan basket her mother used as a bathroom laundry hamper. Her head really ached now. Even her eyes hurt. It wasn’t just the lack of sleep, she realized, it was stress. Parker. Archie Sheridan. She needed to take it easier. Not push herself so hard. She wasn’t going to be any good to anyone like this.
She stepped into the tub and sank slowly into the cool water, letting the pleasing menthol aroma of eucalyptus wash over her. She was noticing that her toenail polish was chipped when she heard the bee. It buzzed over her head and alit on the bathroom sink, which was strange because the house had been closed up for two days so a bee couldn’t have gotten in. She was pondering this, her head resting against the back of the tub, when the bee did something else strange. It flew up into the air, buzzed around in a circle, and then stopped midair, and dropped to the floor.
Susan sat up in the tub and looked down. Bliss had painted the bathroom’s wooden floor light blue and there, on the blue floor, like a boat at sea, was the bee, legs in the air, dead.
Susan felt woozy. She couldn’t remember, for a moment, what she was even doing there, why she was home. Archie Sheridan was missing. She had to get back to the task force offices. She had to find Henry.
Where was her mother?
She looked down at the bee. She’d done a story on a family of five in Lake Oswego that had narrowly escaped a carbon monoxide leak. Odorless. Tasteless. The pets had dropped dead. A hamster and a bird. The mother had been smart enough to get everyone out of the house. Another half hour, the cops had said, and the whole family would have been dead.