Via Dolorosa(74)

For a split second, he thought he saw Isabella standing at the far end of the hall, staring at him. Blinking his eyes, he took a quick step forward and realized that he was, in fact, alone.

Yes, he thought, I am most certainly losing my mind.

He walked down the corridor, too conscious of the absolute silence. Was the whole floor empty? The entire hotel? He stopped outside Isabella’s door and knocked. Thinking he heard movement on the other side of the door, he pushed himself back on his heels to see if the tiny pinpoint of light behind the door’s peephole would suddenly go black. It did not. His eyes dropped to the floor. He thought, too, that he saw the shifting of shadows in the strip of dull light beneath the door. But he could not be certain.

Knocking again: “Isabella?”

No one answered.

Something moved at the end of the hallway. Again, he thought it was her…

“Isabella?”

Yet he was alone.

Outside, he searched futilely for her along the beach. The droning chhhh of the cicadas was unrelenting. Yes, she had complained about the mural. Yes, he was certain of it. Though not for the reasons she had allegedly given—she was not offended by any such violence, Nick knew—but because it was all part of her game. Yes. Isabella Rosales’s game. It was nothing new—was, in fact, part of the same game that required her to alter her personality whenever Emma was around; the same game that found her taunting and teasing him since the day of their initial meeting; the same game that thrived on the total contradiction of who Isabella Rosales really was. This was one more rule of the game. Did she feel she owned him? Did she find some sort of perverse fulfillment in the manipulation of him, and in facilitating his own personal destruction? Had she set out from the very beginning to bring ruination upon him? Pausing by the edge of the sea, feeling the slide of the icy water lap at his toes, he thought of the way she had beaten the man known as Pygmalion last night on the street—the glowing embers of her eyes flaring as she slammed the ukulele down on him, down on him, down on him, and kicked her feet at him as Nick dragged her away. He had thought her to be crying when he finally got her tucked away safely in the alley between the shops…but no, she had been laughing. So was he also part of her game—perhaps the most important part…the only part?

Though the day was pleasant, the beach was not nearly as crowded as he had anticipated. It was just starting to get cool now, too; he could see the gray threat of thunderclouds just beyond the horizon. Perhaps it was the cicadas that kept everyone indoors. The giant, blind bugs stuttered through the air, frequently thumping into his chest, legs, the back of his head. He batted them away with his one good hand; it was like swatting slow-motion bullets from the air. They congregated, too, on the sand, many of them having already been crunched dead in the center of an errant footprint. Mostly, they clung to the reeds and azalea bushes, the trees and magnolia blossoms. He couldn’t walk five steps without stepping on one—couldn’t hear the sea without first hearing their radio-hiss din in the air.

Isabella was not on the beach. He walked about a mile south from the hotel and could not find her. He could not find Emma, either. He could find no one. Everything was immersed in that eerie quality of silence that comes just before a storm. He wondered if Emma had become disgusted by the cicadas and had gone back to the hotel room. Cicadas, it seemed, would disgust her…

Walking back toward the hotel, cresting one of the many ribbed dunes, he could see the faint silhouette of the Harbour Town lighthouse hovering just slightly above the trees. Out on the water, he could see the Kerberos, a dull glowing light coming through the pilothouse windows, rocking peacefully beneath the steel-gray sky.

He walked quickly through the lobby. It was empty—evacuated. As if afraid to be seen, he hurried across the lobby until he disappeared within the bank of elevators at the opposite end of the foyer.

On the sixth floor, he found a notice taped to the door of their hotel room:



LIMBO!



How low can you go?



Every night this week in the Riviera Room!





The hotel room was empty. No room service tray sat on the writing desk; no opened bottles of wine or carafes of coffee. Emma’s clothes were still here, as were the keys to the Impala…but all her seashells had been cleared away from the bathroom countertop. Had they been there this morning? He couldn’t remember…

There were a few books on the writing desk. The room’s Bible, as well as Emma’s poetry books. Absently, he picked one up, thumbed through the dog-eared pages. Byron. He picked up a second—Dante’s Inferno—and, without thinking, brought it up to his face, smelled the paper cover. They smelled of sand and the beach, the pages themselves sticky with sea salt. Eyes closed, he was back in Iraq, working over rough sketches in one of his sketchpads as the Eastern sun settled behind a caustic archipelago of ruins. Joseph Bowerman was again at his side, asking broad questions about love and life, of women and God, of faith and sex. Karuptka telling them to shoot the bitch. Myles Granger, silent, stoic, too young and too green and just about the wettest damn thing Nick had ever seen. Angelino and Hidenfelter flipping over cards, attempting to outdo each other with the most outrageous binge-drinking story from their own personal catalogues…

Nick opened Emma’s book. Flipping the pages, his thumbs smearing the print, his eyes scanned the text. Then something fell out of the book: a folded slip of paper. Outside, cicadas kamikazied the patio doors.