The Peacock Emporium(91)

“You are not listening to me!”

“Because you’re wrong! You’re wrong!” she said with a forceful desperation. “You can’t just—”

“?Carajo! You’ve got to listen to me!” His voice exploded into the little room.

Suzanna flinched. “Are you saying you drove the van? You beat her up? What?”

“Suzanna, I bring bad luck to everyone.”

She stopped, as if to make sure she had heard him correctly. “What?”

“You heard me.” His face was turned away from her, his shoulders rigid with contained fury.

She moved toward him. “Are you serious? Oh, for God’s sake, Ale. It’s not about luck. You mustn’t—”

But he interrupted her, one hand raised. “You remember Jess asked me why I became a midwife?”

She nodded dumbly.

“It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst, you know. When I was born, I had a twin. A little girl. When she was born, she was blue. My cord had wrapped itself around her neck.”

Suzanna felt the familiar internal lurch. “Did she die?” she whispered.

“My mother never recovered from it. She kept her cot up, bought clothes for her. She even opened a bank account for her. Estela de Marenas. It still exists, for what it’s worth.” His voice was bitter.

Tears welled in Suzanna’s eyes. She tried to blink them away.

“They never said it was me, not to my face. But the fact is that she haunts my house, my family. We are all suffocated by her absence.” His voice quietened. “Maybe if my mother had been able to have another child . . . perhaps . . .”

He rubbed at his eyes, and anger crept back into his voice: “I just wanted some peace, you know? I thought, for a while, I had found it. I thought by helping to bring in life, by giving life, I could make it—make her go away. And instead I have this thing, this fantasma following me around . . . I must have been a fool.” He looked at her. “In Argentina, Suzanna, the dead live among us.” His voice was slow now, with the controlled patience of a teacher. “Their ghosts walk among us. Estela lives with me always. I feel her, a presence, always reminding me, always blaming me . . .”

“But it wasn’t your fault. You, of all people, should know that.” She took his arm now, wanting to make him see.

But he kept shaking his head, as if she couldn’t understand what he was saying, lifted his hand to push her away. “I don’t even want to get close to you, don’t you understand?”

“It’s just superstition—”

“Why won’t you listen?” he said despairingly.

“You were a baby.”

There was a long silence.

“You—were—just—a—baby,” she insisted, her voice choking. Then, slowly, she put her coffee on the table. She leaned forward and tentatively placed her arms around him, feeling his body rigid against her, desperate to lessen some of what he felt, as if by sheer proximity she could shoulder part of it herself. She heard his voice from somewhere by her hair.

Then he pulled back and she felt her own resolve stagger under the visible weight of his grief, the pain and guilt in his eyes. “Sometimes, Suzanna,” he said, “you can do harm just by existing.”

Suzanna thought of her mother. Of beautiful horses and sparkling slippers in the moonlight. Briefly, infected by the night and the madness, she wondered whether she contained her mother’s soul, whether it was this that so disturbed her father. She tilted her head, her voice cracked with new grief. “Then . . . I’m as guilty as you.”

He took her face between his hands then, as if he were only just seeing her, lifted his bandaged hand and wiped her cheek with his thumb, once, twice, unable to stem the flow of tears. Frowning, he brought his face to hers, his eyes so close that she could see the flecks of gold in them, could hear the uneven tenor of his breath. He paused, and then slowly placed his lips on her skin where the tears had been, closed his eyes and kissed the other side, making their salty path his own, winding his hands into her hair as he tried to kiss them away.

And Suzanna, her eyes tightly shut, lifted her own hands to his head as she wept, feeling his soft dark crop of hair. She felt his mouth upon her, breathed in his old leather jacket, and the slight antiseptic hint left over from the police station. Then her lips were on him, searching for his with a kind of urgency, a desperation to obliterate what had gone before. Listening to her own words, as they echoed in the silence around her, the furious, misplaced spirits circling around them as they embraced.

I’m as guilty as you.





20


It took the building company two days to make the front of the shop safe, for the surveying team to make their official assessment of damage, and another three for the rebuilding work to begin. Fortunately, the insurance company hadn’t quibbled. It was two more days before Suzanna was allowed in to begin the laborious process of cleaning up.

During this time, a halting, irregular procession of people had come bearing flowers, small posies, bouquets wrapped in cellophane, which they placed outside the police tape. Many found it easier to mark Jessie’s sudden end with a floral tribute than the trickier business of words. At first there were just two, tied forlornly to the lamppost on the day after the accident, their messages making those who stopped to read them exchange glances and mutter sadly about the unfairness of it all. Then, as the news spread through the town, the flowers came in greater numbers. The local florist struggled to keep up, and they formed a cluster, then a floral carpet outside the shop.