Via Dolorosa(81)
“Is this…for…?”
“Yes, my friend.”
“How did you get it?”
Quite simply, the Palauan said, “There is something for everyone.”
“How much?”
“Two dollars.”
Nick dug around in his pocket and came out with two weathered bills. He laid them on the dais.
“Ke kmal mesaul.”
“Thank you,” Nick said, and quickly headed toward the elevators.
Back upstairs, standing outside Isabella Rosales’s door, he used the keycard to gain access to her room. He expected it to be unchanged—that her clothing would be everywhere, and that her bathroom would be suffused with glossy photographs, her tub a cryptic puzzle of random items. But no—much like the rest of the hotel, the room was empty, deserted. All her belongings were gone. Had she left? Had she checked out of the hotel?
“Isabella?” He called out her name nonetheless, as if in doing so would force her to materialize before him. “Isa—”
The first thing he saw was the painting he had done of her, still tacked to the wall beside the bed. It was the first time he’d seen it, and in that instant he did not know what it was or what to think of it. Then it settled into him, and he could see it for what it was. In painting it, he had only used one color—green. This struck him as odd, for he clearly recalled using a multitude of paints. Had he simply (and mistakenly) dipped his paintbrush in the same tub of paint each time he went down to refuel? Surely…surely…
The second thing he noticed was that it was not a portrait of Isabella Rosales. The lines were more delicate, the expression less defined, the details and features more close to the center of the face. It was his wife, Emma. He had attempted to paint Isabella and it had come out being Emma.
Paint with your heart, he could hear Isabella whispering now at the base of his skull. Paint what comes.
Paint what comes…
The next thing he noticed was a stack of eight-by-ten photographs in the center of the bed. Nick walked around its side and gathered the photographs in his one good hand. His unsteady right hand coming up, he shuffled through each photograph one by one, digesting them all.
The first was Emma on the beach with Leslie Hansen. They were talking, looking cheerful, and it was a candid shot, presumably photographed from some distance with a telescopic lens. Each subsequent photo revealed different stages of Emma and Leslie Hansen’s conversation. Finally, in the last chill moments, the final few photographs caused in him a blossom of cold anger and trembling fury, as he saw Emma on the bow of the Kerberos, Leslie Hansen grinning, shirtless, in sunglasses, standing behind her.
He felt well up inside him the gritty tornado of helplessness, followed by a moist wave of panic.
Like a shadow moving through darkness, her voice filtered back to him now: We won’t let little things ruin us, will we, baby?
He’d promised her they wouldn’t. In a time so unlike now, he’d promised her they wouldn’t. And he had let her down.
Again—a coward.
He was out the door before he even knew what he was doing. This time, for the first time, he could not wait for the elevators. He rushed through the stairwell and burst out the fire exit onto the outdoor veranda. The wind was icy cold and flecked with rain. The rain was strong and hard, pelting him like bullets fired from a gun. He struggled through it, one hand up shielding his vulnerable eyes, too conscious of the angry bite of the rain against his hand, along his arm. Then he realized it wasn’t the rain: it was the cicadas, rebounding off his body in their blind, stupid angst, straight from nearly two decades of hibernation and into furious oblivion. Almost blind himself, he shoved his weight off the veranda and dumped his wracked body into the wet sand. The wind was like heavy breathing into a microphone. Tears streaming his face, his teeth rattling against the chill, he was able to raise his head enough to look out over the black sea. He was closer to the shore than he’d originally thought. Black, rocky crags stabbed the sky; all around him sounded the crash and sizzle of the waves breaking over the shore. Out on the sea, he could see the distant yellow light glowing from the pilothouse windows of the Kerberos.
He pushed himself to his feet and flung himself forward, propelling his legs into motion. Cicadas drummed against his skull, his face, his chest and thighs. Several were caught in his hair, and he could feel them needling against his scalp, and could hear their futile, hopeless twitter as they struggled to free themselves from his wet hair. One shuttled into his left ear, and for the brief moment it lingered, all he could hear in the world was the zzzt-zzzt-zzzt of its furious decree.
Gathering speed, feet pounding the sand, he raced toward the sea. With his eyes open, he could see the shaky visage of the single golden light out on the water; with his eyes closed, he could still see it, projected like a filmstrip on the undersides of his eyelids. Each inhalation seared his throat; each exhalation secured in him the notion that his lungs were two tiny, shriveled raisins, and that he would die of asphyxiation before he ever even reached the water, before he ever even reached the boat—
Lieuten—
And then he was there: crashing through the freezing surf, soaking his pants and suctioning his shoes to the sand. At one point, both his shoes were sucked off his feet, but he hardly noticed. He continued to run, not slowing down until the freezing water was too high, too high and hugging his waist, and he pushed on until he could lift his legs no more. The crash of the ocean thundered around him and filled his brain as he dove beneath the waves. Sounds filtered out; he was caught inside his own head, trapped, unable to escape. The turbine struggling to turn over was his heart in his ears. He had become nothing but heart, nothing but a single kinetic mechanism furious with the pump of blood, the grind of muscle, the contraction of impulse after impulse after impulse. The world slowed to a single frame. He could not tell if he was moving, swimming, breathing…or if he was dead and watching himself from somewhere just to the left of him…