The Game of Love and Death(58)

The arms released her father and gathered up her mother, and Flora drew in memories of trimmed Christmas trees, of steam curling from oven-hot pies, of spring tulips and green summer lakes, of the feeling of music rising from the tender space where her feet connected with the curving earth, soaring upward through her body and out her mouth. In each of those, even when Vivian was a girl, the small face of the baby was there. Flora’s own face, as though she’d been the one her mother always wanted, the love she carried with her until the day she was able to summon it forth in the form of a child.

And then she was dead.

The white man staggered out, tripping and flailing and breathing fists of clouds into the frozen night air. His hat fell off, revealing a pale, fragile-looking scalp covered with a few strands of silver hair. He knelt between the bodies and sobbed. Snow melted into his knees, darkening his pants. He put his hands over his face, revealing an inch of bare flesh and a leather-banded, gold-faced wristwatch that he’d forgotten to wind.

Then Flora was on her knees beside the man in the snow.

“Please,” he said, peering at her through his fingers. He’d bloodied a knuckle somehow and a knot was rising on his head. “I don’t know what to do. I can’t live with myself anymore.”

“You don’t have to do anything,” the mouth said. “It won’t be long now.”

“Thank God,” he said, lowering his hands to his lap.

The hand reached for the killer’s own. The images at first came in a jumble: the man himself in an undershirt and braces planting trees in a garden, wiping sweat from his tanned brow; him in a police officer’s uniform, giving a rag doll to a weeping, soot-covered child sitting alone in the station; the same man, younger, at his wedding, the stainless steel flask of gin just a bulge in the pocket of his Sunday best suit. The flask of gin that turned into tumblers and entire bottles … what had transformed the laughing man with the straight black hair and clean-shaven jaw into the bleary-eyed mess in front of her.

“What’s happening?” he said. “I’m seeing —”

“You’re seeing what I’m seeing,” the mouth said. The whole of her hand sank over his, and Flora was sick with sorrow and loss. The man’s eyes widened. There he was, an infant in a white linen christening gown. And there, walking across an emerald lawn, wobbly on year-old bare feet. Then he was a five-year-old boy riding a pony at the county fair. Then, ten years older, hiking up a snow-covered volcano. That boy, sixteen, on a twilit country road on a summer night, leaning in to kiss a girl who locked her fingers in his hair. And five years after that, marrying the same girl, the love of his life …

… unless you counted the gin in the bottle, which even the Prohibition hadn’t kept him from drinking.

“I did love her, you know,” he said. “Like breathing, almost.” The words had space between them, as though it was costing him the last of his strength to pull them out of his mouth.

“I know. But that’s the thing with love. It isn’t as strong as they say.”

“Not afraid,” he said. “Glad — glad you’re here.”

The voice replied: “Life is far more terrifying than its opposite.”

He grabbed her hands. “Wait. Don’t want to see all,” he said. “Not the last part —” His stomach heaved, costing him his last drink of gin.

“They didn’t suffer.” The gaze shifted to her parents’ bodies, their skin sugared with the lightest dusting of snow. “What’s more, I’m letting you carry that part with you when you go.”

“I’d carry it for the rest of time if … if it would make things turn out … different.”

“You will,” she said, closing her eyes for a moment. “But it won’t. Everybody dies. Everybody. That is the only ending for every true story.”

The sentence … Flora had heard something like it before. She fought her way back to herself. The skin on her face felt tight, as though it were being pressed against the bones beneath. She pulled her hand from Helen’s, opened her eyes, and was back at the entrance of the Domino, utterly wrecked. What had happened to her? How had she seen her parents’ last moments this way?

Helen stood next to her, even as she checked her watch. “Are you all right? You look as if you’ve caught whatever your cook had.”

“I’m fine.” Flora didn’t want to give Helen the satisfaction of seeing her like this. “Henry’s waiting for me.”

“We don’t always get what we want,” Helen said. “We play the roles we’re cast.”

“What are you saying, that I’m trying to be something I’m not?”

A look of confusion flashed across Helen’s face, then understanding. “I can see how you’d say that.”

“Henry’s waiting for me,” Flora said again. “So if you’ll excuse me.”

“What makes you think he’s still there?”

“Who would have paid his bail?”

“I might have left a note for the Thornes,” Helen said.

Flora thought she might be ill. That would make things infinitely worse for Henry. She’d have to reach him first.

“Don’t tell me you love him,” Helen said.

“I said no such thing.”