The Peacock Emporium(129)

He nodded, still leaning against the door.

“It’s not that I’m not flattered by what you said. Because I am. But so much has happened over the past days—stuff that even you don’t know about. To do with my family. And I’ve only just started to work things out. Things about me, about how I’m going to live.”

He was looking over at the display.

“So I just want you to know that you are—will always be—really important to me. In ways you probably don’t realize. But I think it’s time for me to grow up a little. Stand on my own two feet.”

She stopped sweeping. “Do you understand?”

“You can’t run away from this, Suzanna,” he said.

She was shocked by his certainty, by the absence of his previous reticence. Reticence she had always felt fueled by her own.

“Why are you smiling?”

“Because I’m happy?”

She made a sound of exasperation. “Look, I’m trying to explain something here. I’m trying, for once in my life, to be an adult.”

He tilted his head to one side. “Did you cut your hair like that to punish yourself?”

At first she didn’t trust what she had heard. “What?”

Suzanna’s heart was thumping uncomfortably, and now, given his bizarre reaction, all the rage of the previous weeks, all the emotion she had been forced to contain, came spilling out. “Have you lost your mind?”

“It’s not so bad.” He moved forward, lifted his hand as if to touch it. “I still think you look beautiful.”

“This is ridiculous!” She ducked away from him. “You’re ridiculous! I don’t know what’s happened to you, Alejandro, but you don’t understand. You don’t understand even half of what I’ve been working through. I’ve tried to tell you nicely. I’ve tried to make you understand, but I’m not going to save your feelings if you’re going to be too obstinate to listen to them.”

“I’m not listening to my feelings?” He was smiling now, and for some reason this enraged her more than ever. Almost unaware of what she was doing, she began to shove him, to physically force him out of the shop, knowing only that she had to be away from him, that she needed him far from her to restore her peace of mind.

“What are you doing, Suzanna Peacock?” he asked, as she forced him through the door.

“Go away,” she said. “Go back to bloody Argentina. And just leave me alone. I don’t need this, okay? I don’t need this on top of everything else.”

“You do—”

“Just go.”

“You do need me.”

She closed the door on him, her gasping breaths veering dangerously toward sobs. Now that he was actually there, a reality, she wasn’t ready for it. She needed him to be like he was before. She needed things to move slowly, so that she could be sure of what she felt, that she wasn’t getting it all wrong. Nothing felt secure anymore: all the elements of her life had swooped and fallen under her like the decks of a storm-ridden ship, threatening to overwhelm her.

“I can’t just—I can’t just be like you. I can’t let go of it all.” She wasn’t sure he had heard her through the door. She leaned against it, feeling his voice vibrate through it. “I’m not going anywhere.”

He was shouting, apparently unafraid of being heard. “I’m not going anywhere, Suzanna Peacock.”

The shop seemed to have shrunk. She sat down as it diminished around her, the sound of his muffled voice echoing through her, filling up the remaining space.

“I will haunt you, Suzanna,” he yelled. “I will haunt you worse than they ever did. Because they are not your ghosts. They are your mother’s and father’s and Jason’s and poor Emma’s. But they are not your ghosts. I am. I’m here to tell you to be happy.”

He paused.

“You hear me? I’m not going anywhere.”

Eventually she stood, and moved to the window. Through the small frames of curved glass, she could see him, a foot away from the door, addressing it with a kind of evangelical determination, his face relaxed as if he was already sure of the outcome. Behind him, she made out the distant figures of Arturro and Liliane, watching, bewildered, from the door of the Unique Boutique.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

His voice echoed down the cobbled lane, bounced off the flint walls, the water fountain. She leaned against the window frame, feeling the fight seep out of her and something give inside her.

“You are a ridiculous man,” she said. She wiped her eyes, and he caught sight of her. “A ridiculous man,” she said, louder, so that he could hear. “You sound like a lunatic.”

He looked right at her and raised his eyebrows.

“You cut your hair like this and I’m the lunatic?”

“A lunatic,” she yelled.

“So let me in,” he said, and gave a distinctly Latin shrug. He was still smiling.

She moved to the door and opened it.

He looked back at her, this foreign man from thousands of miles away, more strange yet more familiar than anything she could have imagined, a broad, uninhibited smile across his face, that spoke of freedom and uncomplicated pleasure, a smile that held promises it didn’t have to explain. A smile that was finally matched by her own. “You get it now?” he said quietly.