The Paper Swan(72)

“You’re not being fair, Damian.”

“Fair? You want to talk about fair? I pushed you away, Skye. Time and time again, but you wouldn’t stop. You kept tearing down my defenses until I couldn’t fight you anymore. I’m in love with you, Skye. Bare, stripped down, completely vulnerable, in love. And this whole situation kills me because I know it’s tearing you up. But I can’t help the way I feel about your father. I hated him then and I hate him now. Mark my words, Skye, I’m going to make him pay.”

My head throbbed; my heart throbbed. The vendetta between Damian and my father stood like a fang-baring monster, ripping to shreds everything good and true and precious between us. It was eating us up with dead, dark futility.

“You want to make someone pay for what happened to MaMaLu? Here.” I took the gun he was holding and pointed it to myself. “It was me. I ran into the room that afternoon. I’m the reason MaMaLu was there. I set the whole thing in motion. So shoot me, Damian.”

The gun was flush against my chest, rising and falling with every breath.

“You had it right all along,” I said. “It should have ended on the boat the night you abducted me. So let’s put a stop to this thirst for revenge. Once and for all. Shoot me, Damian. And when you’re done, shoot yourself too. Because I came looking for you, because I knew you were hiding in that hutch.”

Our hands stayed on the gun, our eyes locked. I could feel Damian’s thoughts, the force of his ragged emotions. I wanted to wrap my arms around him, to pull him out of the turmoil, but this was a web only he could untangle himself from. By going along with this, by doing nothing, I was essentially saying ‘yes’ to the darkness that had tormented him for years, a darkness that would only disappear when he let it go.

I lowered the gun and placed it back on the coffee table, next to the paper giraffe note that I’d tried to fold up again.

“It’s either this or that.” I pointed to one and then the other. “You can either choose love or you can choose hate, because where one lives, the other will die.”

Damian kept his eyes on the two objects, equally torn in both directions.

“Tomorrow morning, whatever you leave on the table will tell me, whether we part ways in Paza del Mar or not. Whatever you choose, Damian, know that I will always, always love you.”

He looked at me, with eyes that punched me right in the gut. “I told you I would only disappoint you.”

I cradled his face between my hands. “You told me ‘love don’t die’.”

I left him there, on the flamingo couch that was still stained with his blood, knowing there would be no sleep that night, not for him and not for me. And I knew with resounding finality that there was nothing fair about life.





I OPENED MY EYES AND reached for Damian. Morning had come, but he was gone. Today was the day we were going to visit MaMaLu’s grave, and sitting on the coffee table was an answer to the question I’d left Damian with. I sank back under the sheets, not sure if I really wanted to know.

Two brilliant yellow butterflies flitted through hazy sunbeams. Sometimes birds went in and out of the open windows, sometimes geckos and the kind of bugs that would have had me screaming bloody murder at one time. Damian had changed me, and I had changed him. We were like the shells we had once picked for MaMaLu—all the hard parts worn so thin that we could see right through each other. And no matter what happened today, no matter what lay waiting for me on that coffee table, we would always be like those iridescent slivers of light, pieces of a time and space removed from everyone and everything else.

I walked into the kitchen and poured myself some coffee. It felt too quiet, padding around by myself, avoiding the one thing that was screaming for my attention. I turned on the CD player. “Roads” by Portishead. Bleak, vulnerable, desolate, beautiful. It sent an icy chill running down my spine. Or maybe that was just the apprehension of walking into the living room. I scanned the walls, the fan on the ceiling, the indent on the couch where Damian had been sitting, until my eyes ran out of excuses, until I couldn’t avoid looking at what he’d left behind for me.

5, 4, 3, 2, 1 . . .

My gaze fell on the coffee table. I was doomed to cry either way, whether I found the gun or the paper giraffe. But Damian had spared me the dark, shattered tears. There, lying on the glass was his folded note, propped up on four spindly legs. His gun was sitting on the shelf, like a piece of retired memorabilia, along with dog-eared books and mismatched souvenirs.