It's One of Us(98)
He grins, a pirate’s smile. “Wanna take a ride?”
43
THE WIFE
Blood. Olivia smells blood.
She drags herself to the surface. She is nauseated, in pain, and the thick, coppery scent makes her want to roll over and put her head in a trash can. Gorge rising, she goes to do just that, but finds she can’t move. She swallows hard, twice more, then realizes her eyes are open and it is dark, so dark. Has she slept all day? This doesn’t feel like her bed. It feels hard, and smells of gas and oil.
She tries to piece together what’s going on, what’s happening, but there’s a huge blank space where her memory of how she got here should be.
Is she moving? The thwack, thwack, thwack of tires on concrete permeates the din of horror and she thinks, yes, I’m in a car. A car’s trunk, she realizes.
All of this has processed in the space of three heartbeats, and now comes the panic, rising like a tidal wave through her body.
Breathe, she coaches herself. Breathe.
When the panic subsides a bit, when she feels like she has a grip on the reality of things, she assesses her body. Her hands are tied in front of her, not behind. A small mercy; her collarbone feels like it’s taken on a load of shrapnel. She can’t imagine how much it would hurt if her arm was twisted back. She is wearing her silk top and soft fleece pants from this morning—assuming this is the same day, of course. It’s possible she’s been drugged into oblivion for hours, days, she has no idea.
He’s going to kill her. He’s just marking time—
A horn sounds, sharp, loud, and Olivia jerks awake with a massive gasp, heart thundering in her chest. It takes a moment to right herself.
She’s been dreaming again.
She’s had variations of this nightmare since she came to Alys, but this one was by far the worst. The scent of blood commingling with oil, and the terrible pain in her collarbone, which has been mending well these past few weeks, these details are new.
She is healing. All of her. Mentally. Physically. She had her first period since the miscarriage, and it was as sad and awful to start bleeding again as she expected. But being alone, consumed with the work on Annika’s house, helped dull the pain in her heart. Next month, she’ll have an idea of when her cycle is going to start and be ready for it. It is freeing, in a way, to know that there is no possible chance of being pregnant outside of an immaculate conception. That was the hardest part of the past several years of trying to get and stay pregnant—the damn hope of it all. Hoping that this was the time. Hoping that the two lines on the stick would turn pink. Praying that they were. And when they weren’t, waiting longer, three minutes, five, ten; dragging the stick out of the trash can hours later to examine the blank space under the light for any hint of color. Olivia had always stuck with the old-fashioned pregnancy tests. Somehow the ones that screamed Pregnant or Not Pregnant seemed too in her face. The two lines system was gentler on her psyche.
But no more of this emotional roller coaster. Next month, she’ll bleed, and there will be no tests, no fears. No hoping and praying. Just a regular woman’s body doing its monthly biological duty.
But these nightmares are getting worse.
She rolls out of the bed with a small yelp; the pain from the dream is explained—she’s woken up on her right side. Her collarbone aches, her shoulder feels stiff. But it’s progress that the pain didn’t wake her in the night. It’s felt better since she got the stitches out. She does her exercises quickly just to loosen things up.
The sun is rising, and she follows the liminal brightness to the kitchen, setting water to boil so she can take a cup of green tea out onto the deck and enjoy it. The days are growing incrementally shorter, and she knows vitamin D is the best possible remedy for dipping moods. Coming off the failed pregnancy, she was already living clean, but she’s stuck with it. No caffeine, no alcohol. She’s off the postsurgery pills, too. Loads of water, sunshine, fruit and green tea and exercise, and she’s feeling more like herself again.
She hasn’t been alone for such a long time. Hasn’t been self-sufficient like this since she was a kid, between the Perry breakup and the Park reconciliation.
When she finishes the tea, she goes for a walk. This has become her routine—early to bed, early to rise, tea, walk. She’s doing some of the best work of her career on Annika’s place. Design is an art form like any other, and she recognizes the stages. She’s moving into a new phase of her career, and she likes how it’s going. If Picasso could go blue, so can she.
The sand is soft under her feet, packed perfectly for walking but fine-grained, like sugar. There is the tiniest hint of chill in the morning air, dew sparkling on the webs strung between the sea oats. Soon enough she’ll need shoes for her rambles, but for now, she relishes the cool water and delicate sand. Seagulls swoop and scold overhead, and the sand pipers are out in force, tearing madly across the strand, zigzagging to and fro; there must be a huge field of periwinkles for their morning feast. She’s been using the soft translucent pastels of the tiny mollusks’ wet shells as her inspiration for the colors in the renovation. The breeze, gentle when she started out, has picked up, shifting to a more southern flow, eliminating the chill but causing her hair to whip, tangling around her neck and into her mouth. She’s forgotten a ponytail holder, tucks it behind her ears and down into her shirt and soldiers on.