KILLING SARAI(45)

He didn’t move his hand away…, I keep thinking to myself.

Tears brim my eyelids, but I breathe them back quickly.

“I am sorry, Sarai,” he says looking me in the eyes as his churn with conflict and indecision.

I get the feeling that he doesn’t want to leave me here. I feel it…I know it….

Slowly he stands up from the bed. I sit here, frozen in a chasm of self-defeat and anger and fear. Fear! How can he accuse me of fearing nothing?! I want to shout at him, tell him how wrong he is as he shoulders his bags and takes up the gun suitcase in one hand.

Instead, I wipe the few tears that did manage to fall from my eyes and I say across the room to him softly:

“Victor, you were wrong.”

He turns only his head to look back at me.

“You were wrong when you said I fear nothing. You were so wrong….”

He holds his gaze on me for only a second and then turns and walks away, closing the door and letting the darkness of the room consume me again.





~~~





Samantha left me alone for the next hour and a half. I guess she wanted to give me time to myself because when she did finally come into the room with me minutes ago, I could tell that she felt something for me as I lay curled up on the bed, staring at that window. It makes me wonder what they talked about in her bathroom earlier, makes me regret not staying longer to have found out.

I would hate her for knowing more than me, if she was an easy person to hate.

But I realize I like her too much for that.

“You know, Victor does this stuff all the time, Izabel.” She pats me on the hip with the palm of her hand. She’s sitting in the same spot next to me where Victor last sat.

“He’ll be fine.” She smiles. “And I’m sure he knows you’re grateful to him for helping you.”

“What can you tell me about him?” I ask.

She inhales a deep, concentrated breath and her eyebrows rise with that loaded-question sort of look.

“Well, I’m guessing you know what he does for a living already, so you can probably imagine that I’m sworn to a certain amount of secrecy that if I break could get me in a lot of trouble.”

True, but she’s smiling and really seems kind of itching to talk to me, regardless. It may not turn out to be much, but something is better than nothing, I suppose.

I sit upright, dropping my legs over the side of the bed to sit like her. I rest my hands within my lap.

She smiles over at me in a short glance and reaches out her hand. “Let’s talk about it over a cup of coffee.”

She stands up and I put my hand in hers and accept.

“I swear it’s perfectly poison-free,” she jokes as I follow her out the door and into the hall.

“I believe you.”

I believe her mostly because if Victor trusted her enough to leave me alone with her then that’s enough for me.

I sit down at the kitchen table while she gets the coffee ready at the counter where the coffee pot sits next to an old giant microwave.

“I suppose it’s OK to tell you that he’s been the way he is pretty much all his life.” She scoops a few tablespoons of coffee into the filter and shuts the top of the coffee maker. “But I really only know the things he’s told me. Nothing more than that.”

“What kinds of things?”

She pours the water in the back of the coffee maker while allowing the different conversations she’s had with Victor to materialize.

“Well, I know he loves his coffee black.” She smiles. “He loves Thai food and he won’t touch tuna fish with someone else’s tongue. He prefers a good beer over a fine wine, but only the best beer, preferably German.” She sits down at the table with me and props the side of her face in one hand, looking thoughtful. “To tell you the truth, Victor would rather go all the way to Germany for a beer than to drink the beer here.” She waves her hand at me once, removing it from her cheek. “He’s a very particular man.”

“But what about his family?” I ask. “He told me he had a sister and that he killed his father and something about his mother being in…Budapest, I think?”

Samantha shakes her head, smiling and maybe even finding what I told her a little amusing. But she’s not gloating about it.

“No, doll,” she says. “If that’s what he told you, it was probably just to get you to stop talking. (Well, she’s right about that much, I know.) He would never tell anyone else anything too personal about his life, especially his family. Not even me. I don’t even know if he has a family.”

I stay as far away from the topic of the two of them as I can.

“You need to know, Izabel,” she looks at me intently so that I’ll meet her gaze, “that Victor is risking a lot…no, he’s risking everything by helping you. And even though he left tonight and doesn’t intend to come back for you, what he’s already done where you’re concerned, though I have no idea what that might be, it could have already sealed his fate.”

My stomach tightens and I get this horrid feeling in the center of my throat.

Her gaze shifts softly and I feel as if she’s mourning me, or my feelings in some private way.

She leans her back against the chair. The coffee gurgles and drips into the pot behind her.