Via Dolorosa(61)

“Gracias, hombre dulce,” Isabella said.

“De nada, mi Isabella,” said the proprietor—and vanished.

Isabella poured the shots. The drink came out cloudy and tinted green beneath the dim lights of the bistro.

Nick looked at Emma from across the table. There was a tumult in his gut. She looked youthful and eager sitting across from him, her face refreshed and open. Again, he was reminded of the way she’d spun the Impala on the Pennsylvania dirt road, kicking up dust while veiled in the stink of exhaust. How she had laughed.

“What?” she said to him now, catching his stare.

“Nothing. Just looking.”

“I can see that, yes.”

“That’s all,” he said. He could tell she was already very drunk.

The slightest lift of her small shoulders. “It’s a free country, last I heard,” she said. “Look all you want.”

By the bar, the zydeco band concluded one number then struck up another on its heels.

“It is traditional to drink absinthe with water and sugar. It is traditional that way,” Isabella explained. “The water dilutes the alcohol. It is strong alcohol. It will hit you like a wave, and it will drag you under and not let go. It never lets go. The water makes the alcohol muy estúpido—makes it very stupid. And the sugar makes the oils less bitter. We can drink it short—it is called short, drinking it short—with the water and the sugar, if you like, or we can be las personas valientes and drink it neat, without water or sugar.”

“Las personas valientes,” Emma volunteered. “Whatever that means.”

“It means ‘the brave persons,’ which is who we will be if we take it neat.”

“Take it neat,” said Emma.

“Here and here and here,” Isabella said. She lifted her drink. “Vivas!”

“Sí, mi amante,” Emma said in her poor Spanish.

The two women drank the shots while Nick looked on. Emma grimaced, pulled a face, and her eyes immediately clouded as she set the rocks glass back down on the table. An abrupt flush of blood blossomed beneath the surface of her cheeks.

“Bebe, Nicholas,” Isabella told Nick. “Drink, drink.”

“Nick won’t drink it,” Emma said. “It’s illegal.”

“It is bought and paid for from the bar,” Isabella said.

“I mean he won’t drink it because it’s absinthe.”

“It is good, strong absinthe,” Isabella said.

“He won’t drink it,” Emma went on. Her eyes were locked on him now. Something inside her had turned over. There was a predacious air about her. “We can sit here for an eternity but he won’t drink it. Will you, Nick?”

“My Nicholas,” Isabella sang.

“He is a very noble man, didn’t you know?” Emma said. “Did you see how he stood up to those men? Very noble. Aren’t you, Nick? Isn’t that right? You are quite the noble gentleman.”

“Cut it out,” he said.

“No. Listen—it isn’t a bad thing, to be so noble. I wouldn’t think so, anyway. But I wouldn’t know.” She shook her head and, thankfully, turned her gaze on Isabella. “I wouldn’t know,” she said again. “How could I know? I couldn’t be so noble. Such a thing is beyond me.”

“You are noble, Nicholas?” Isabella asked him innocently enough. “I never knew it…”

“I’m not going to play any games,” he said.

“No games,” Emma said. “What games?”

“What games?” echoed Isabella.

“You see,” Emma went on, her eyes back on her husband, “once Nick and I were married, after he’d come back from the war, I was keeping a secret from him. I didn’t want to keep it, and it hurt me to keep it, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I could feel it building and building inside me like a volcano, and I knew I wasn’t strong enough, wasn’t noble enough, to keep it inside. So then a few days ago, I told him my secret. Finally. I told him all about my lousy, dirty secret. It hurt me even more to tell him because I knew I was hurting him by telling it, but I couldn’t keep it a secret any longer. Is that selfish? It was killing me on the inside, burning up through me like a fire in the center of a house, and I had to tell it. A volcano. I had to tell it. Maybe I am weak that way and maybe I am selfish. Maybe it should have been my cross to carry for the rest of my life. But whatever the case, I am certainly not noble. Not for the telling of the secret, and certainly not for the secret itself.”

“Stop it, Emma.”

“Stop what? This is just talk, Nicky, just talk.” She laughed. “Stupid drunken talk.”

“Well I don’t like it.”

“Yes,” she said, “I know. You don’t like it and you never want to talk about it. You prefer the pregnant, ugly silence, don’t you? We’ll just stay as we are, right here and right now and for all eternity, while everything falls apart around us both. Isn’t that the plan, the new plan?”

“All that poetry has made you too goddamn dramatic.”

“What is the secret?” Isabella asked.

“That I’d loved someone else,” Emma said. “Not in my heart, though, but in my bed. That while my Nicky was fighting in Iraq, I’d received a letter telling me his entire squad had been killed. I was told he had been killed, too.”