Tangerine(65)

“What are you talking about, Lucy?”

She let out a small laugh. “Alice. I know you pushed her.”

I could feel my blood rushing, could hear the noise whooshing through my ears, pulsing against my eardrums. “I didn’t, Lucy. I didn’t push that woman.”

“You mean Sabine?” she asked.

My stomach dropped at the mention of her name, but I forced the panic down.

I had puzzled over that day already, wondering at what had happened a dozen or so times, never arriving at any explanation. I had seen it play out in my mind, over and over, sometimes imagining that I saw her face in the moments before she fell, the look of terror that shrouded her features, knowing what was happening and unable to stop it. Had I relished it? I wondered, trying to conjure up that feeling again, knowing somehow that I had realized who she was, even then. I looked at Lucy and I fought for words that would not come.

“I don’t blame you, Alice,” she said, moving away from the window. “I would have done the same. After all, when someone betrays you like that . . .” she said, letting her words trail off, her eyes glowing in the darkness.

I felt my pulse quicken, felt the shadows in the corners begin to grow.

“I’m headed to bed now,” I said, feeling my voice as it reverberated throughout my body. “I’m afraid I have a terrible headache.”

That night I locked the door to my bedroom. I pushed and pulled the heavy wooden dresser from its regular place beside the door, listening with satisfaction as its wooden legs scraped and scratched at the floorboards beneath, thinking about the absurdity of the situation, of the circularity of the whole wretched thing. It took me the better part of an hour—pushing and pulling—but I did not stop, not until at last it formed a barrier, a divide between my room and the hallway, between Lucy and me. I looked down—deep rivulets were now carved into the floorboards beneath. I was glad for the marks, for the permanency of my actions, a record of my resistance. I would show them to Aunt Maude when she arrived, so that she could see everything I had done in order to free myself from Lucy’s grasp.

She would understand then—and together, we would find a way out.





Fourteen


Lucy


I WAITED SEVERAL DAYS BEFORE RETURNING TO THE PLACE where I had hidden his body.

I made the journey as much to reassure myself that it was real—that it had happened, that John was well and truly dead and would not somehow reappear, a specter sent to haunt me—as to ensure that Youssef had not meddled with it in the meantime. I waited until Alice was asleep, until the city at last began to doze, before moving quickly through the darkness. My head full, my ears ringing, the humidity seemed to rise with each and every step, ones that brought me, inevitably, closer to him.

And yet, despite knowing that I would find him where I had last left him—his body wedged beneath a boulder so near the cliff’s edge that not even the locals dared to stray there—it was still a shock to see him, the visceral evidence of my anger. I tilted my head. Under the fractured moonlight, he could almost be mistaken for a tourist sleeping peacefully under the Tangier moon. After it had happened, time had swept by curiously fast, so that I had found myself unusually unsettled, panicked as I strove to move him, his body, toward my intended hiding place—a spot that had once seemed perfect but in that moment felt too far away, too exposed.

I stood, looking down at him—my former opponent, now defeated, now vanquished. He posed a threat no longer. The ringing in my ears began to ease and the feeling of fullness began to dissipate, as if with my previous thought went all the worry, the anxiety, that had plagued me since my arrival in Tangier.

I moved closer and, averting my face, began to pull—trying now to unwedge what I had so determinedly wedged only a few days before. I gave him a hard shove, his body already rigid, putrid. My eyes resisted gazing at his skull, at the hollow I imagined there, from the rock that I had hidden behind my back that night, its edges sharp, filled with intention.

It had made a dull thud when it landed on the crown of his head, the movement itself forcing me to reach up—up and up and up, it seemed, beyond my natural height—so that I had wrenched my shoulder in the process, so that afterward I had reared back, unsteady, worried I had just given him the upper hand. But no, he had already fallen to his knees—in surprise, in hurt, I didn’t know, couldn’t recall, that insistent buzzing had, by then, grown to deafening heights, so that even if he had said something, anything, I most likely wouldn’t have heard it at all. His last words, if there were any, were lost. Only Tangier knew, and I suspected she would keep her secrets.

Afterward, I had looked at the rock in my hand, at the cold mass smeared in blood, and wondered whether it was a rock at all, or a piece of a tomb that had once housed the dead. I had been forced to suppress a laugh.

John had stirred then, his face contorting with rage at the realization of what was happening, the ferocity of his emotions somehow managing to knock us both to the ground, so that the rock slipped from my hand. Perhaps he did speak then, my memory suggested. A couple of short declarative sentences, nothing worth remembering—his speech had been slurred, as if he had had too much to drink.

He had taken the rock, holding it high above his head so that he looked like some grotesque version of a dancer, trying to execute a pirouette. He had started to move toward me, unsteady, the gash on his forehead bleeding heavily, streaming down the side of his face, cloaking him in a slick darkness.