Never Have I Ever(103)
He appeared. He’d been around the corner, listening. He was still only in pajama bottoms. They had SpongeBob on them, I saw now, and they hung off his fragile hip bones. His arms were crossed protectively over his narrow, lithe chest. It was nearly hairless. I could hardly bear to look at him, and he couldn’t seem to meet my gaze. His cheeks were flushed, a bright, hot red.
Roux said, “Start loading the car. We have to go.”
He stared back and forth between us, and then he seemed to notice the gun for the first time.
“Buh,” he said, a small, sharp noise, surprised.
“Get the Picasso and the cash. Put a shirt on. And shoes. We’re leaving in ninety seconds,” she said. He was frozen, still staring at the gun, and she raised her voice and barked, “Now!” at him. He jumped, started moving.
“Ezra,” I said. The name made him stop. He turned to me with such wide eyes. I could see blind panic in them. “Don’t. Your mom is on the way.”
His hands came up to cover his mouth, and tears started in his eyes.
Roux said to me, “Shut up or I will shut you up. Luca? Go. Now.” The gun wavered off me, almost wobbling in his direction as she gestured him toward the stairs. “Get as much as you can in the car. You know what to prioritize. Ninety seconds. I mean it.”
He shook his head no, but his body stuttered into action. He turned and ran between us, through the gun’s field of vision and her own, headed for the stairs. I should have moved then, but he was by me in a flash. I had missed the moment.
“I can’t let you take him,” I told Roux.
She laughed outright, a bitter snarl of sound. “You think you’re saving that kid? You don’t know what you’re trying to send him back to. You have no idea. But I do. I know. I know exactly what his life was like.” Her eyes closed, hardly more than a long blink, but I believed her. I’d seen the Polaroids. She’d lived with horror, and when her eyes reopened, I could see it reflected in her gaze. “I’ll shoot you in your head before I let the boy go back to that.”
I nodded, hands up, compliant, but I didn’t think she would shoot me. Not yet. Not in front of Luca. Not even with him upstairs. She’d get him out of the house first.
She said, “Jesus, how’d you find out? Your fucking stepchild?”
I shook my head, lying on instinct. “Luca let it slip. He said Seattle.” She was staring me down, skeptical, so I kept talking. I didn’t want her thinking too hard about Maddy, tucked into bed, reading or texting, only a few blocks away. “I thought I was looking for a man. I thought a man was after you. Someone dangerous. Because of the Polaroids.”
“Those are old,” Roux said dismissively.
Luca came down, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt now, a half-full duffel in his hands. His eyes darted back and forth between us.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
“Nothing, baby. Go behind me and get the laptop,” Roux told him, moving forward, closer to me. The gun got so much bigger.
He hurried around her to the coffee table and stuffed the computer into the bag.
“Who was he? Mr. Polaroids, I mean,” I asked, to keep her talking.
She stared at me over the gun, eyes like ice chips. “My husband. He’ll never do it again, though.” She let her eyes drift to the gun, then back to mine. “You understand me?”
I did. Perfectly. She was saying I wasn’t the only person in the room who had once taken a human life. She was warning me that she’d do it again if she had to. Maybe not even if she had to. Maybe I had made her just angry enough, and she knew she’d never get my money now. I still didn’t believe that she would shoot me with Luca in the room, though. I hoped.
“Are you—” Luca said, then stopped.
“It’s fine,” she told him. “We’re just gonna ghost. Get the money.”
Luca came over and knelt by me, pulling out the Risk box and dumping the money and the IDs and other papers into the bag. This close, he wouldn’t meet my eyes.
Roux said, “Go on out to the car. Start it. I’ll be right there.”
My mouth went dry. If Luca left, if he was all the way out in the car . . . How loud was a gun? Roux’s gaze flicked off me to the sofa, just for a moment, and I knew then that she was going to do it. She would send him out, then wrap the gun in one of the ugly brown couch cushions to muffle the sound. She would shoot me, then coolly grab some clothes and make a run for it. How long would Faith Wheeler’s detective take, explaining the situation to the local cops? How long before they came? I heard no sirens in the distance. Nothing. But would they use sirens, given the situation?
Luca stood up and took the Picasso down from the mantel. He got a towel out of the duffel and began wrapping it up.
“You’re not going to shoot me,” I said to Roux, my voice shaking. “You need me to wire you the money. And I will. You can text me a bank, an account number. I’ll wire it anywhere you want, all of it, if you only leave him here.”
That paused Luca’s hands, and he turned wide eyes to Roux.
She didn’t even think about it. “Fuck you. I love him.”
He shuddered under the weight of those words, then finished wrapping the Picasso. And maybe she did love him, in some sick and awful way. Loved him like a lioness loves zebra. Loved him like a cannibal. I remembered her disdain for men, how she found boys so sweet. When I reminded her that boys grew up, she’d said, But at that point don’t they also get the hell out of your house? It made me wonder if there had been boys before Luca. It made me wonder where those boys were now.