Nightmare:
The sun slants through my bedroom windows, backlighting Mara as she draws in my bed. She wears my shirt—a shapeless black and white plaid thing that I wouldn’t normally notice but with her inside of it, it is beautiful.
The skin of her bare thigh glances against my arm as she shifts in my sheets. My hand holds a book: Invitation to a Beheading. I’m trying to read it, but I can’t get past this passage:
“In spite of everything I loved you, and will go on loving you—on my knees, with my shoulders drawn back, showing my heels to the headsman and straining my goose neck—even then. And afterwards—perhaps most of all afterwards—I shall love you, and one day we shall have a real, all-embracing explanation, and then perhaps we shall somehow fit together, you and I . . . we shall connect the points . . . and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn.”
I can’t get past it because I keep wondering what Mara’s thigh would feel like against my cheek.
Her graphite pencil scratches the thick paper and it is the soundtrack to my bliss. That, and her sound—dissonant, aching. Her breath and heartbeat and pulse are my new favourite symphony; I’m beginning to learn which notes will play when, and to interpret them. There is wrath and contentment and fear and desire—but she has never let the last get too far. Yet.
The sun sings in her hair as her head tilts, dips toward the page. She arches forward, her shape slightly feline as she draws. My heart beats her name. She glances over her shoulder and smirks like she can hear it.
Enough.
I toss the book on the floor—a first edition, I don’t care—and I lean into her. She coyly moves to block her sketchbook. Fine. It isn’t what I want, anyway.
“Come here,” I whisper into her skin. I turn her to face me. She knots her fingers in my hair and my eyelids drop at her touch.
And then she kisses me first, which never happens. It is light and fresh and soft. Careful. She still thinks she can hurt me, somehow; she doesn’t grasp yet that it isn’t possible. I have no idea what’s going on in her mind but even if it takes her years to let go, it will be worth it. I would wait forever for the promise of seeing Mara, unleashed.
I pull back to look at her again, but something is wrong. Off. Her eyes are glassy and blurred, shining with tears.
“Are you all right?”
She shakes her head. A tear spills over, rolls down her cheek. I hold her face in my hands. “What?”
She glances at the sketchbook behind her. Moves out of the way. I lift it.
It’s a sketch of me, but my eyes are blacked out. I narrow mine at hers.
“Why would you draw this?”
She shakes her head. I grow frustrated. “Tell me.”
She opens her mouth to speak, but she has no tongue.
When I wake, Mara is no longer in bed.
I lie alone, staring at the ceiling, then at the clock. Three minutes after two in the morning. I wait five minutes. After ten, I get up to see where she’s gone.
I find her in the kitchen. She is staring at her reflection in the dark window with a long knife pressed against her thumb, and suddenly I’m not in Miami but in London, in my father’s study; I am fifteen and completely numb. I skirt the desk my father never sits in and reach for his knife. I drag it across my skin—
I blink the memory away and whisper Mara’s name in desperation. She doesn’t respond, so I cross the kitchen and take her hand and gently put down the knife.
She smiles and it is empty and it freezes my blood because I’ve seen that smile on myself.
In the morning, she remembers nothing.
It is March 29th.
I couldn’t breathe when I read the date. March 29th is today.
43
I WAS A SEETHING CAULDRON OF THOUGHTS, NONE OF which I could process before I heard Daniel calling my name.
I rushed to put the notebook back where I found it and slipped out of the guest bedroom and into the kitchen. Daniel was twirling his keys.
“We’re going out,” he said.
I glanced at the hallway. “I don’t really feel like—”
“Like staying home. Trust me.” Daniel flashed a cryptic smile. “You’ll thank me later.”
I doubted that. I needed to sit still, by myself, and just think. About what I would say to Noah when I finally saw him. What I would tell him after what I read.
The entries about me were one thing. Noah wrote them for me, meant for me to see them, someday.
But the rest. The rest was his. His. I felt sick.
“I got you out of seeing that awful-looking movie with Mom and Joseph. Come on,” Daniel said with an exaggerated arm-wave. “COME ON.”
He was relentless so I followed him sulkily into the car. “Where are we going?” I asked, trying to sound casual. Trying to sound okay.
“We are going out for your birthday.”