The Game of Love and Death(69)

In another blink, Death was back in Helen’s room. Numb. Alone. Waiting for the light of day to wash over her.





ETHAN gasped himself awake, sweaty and shaking. It was too early even for birds. He heard nothing but his own rushing blood. His dream had felt like a murky pond with something vital beneath its surface. The edges of the memory felt just beyond his fingertips. Something about a book. A book, open in James’s hand. A book in which James was writing.

Ethan sat up.

What did James write in his little book?

He swung his legs over the edge of the bed. His pulse was everywhere: in his ears, in his hands, boiling beneath his skin. If the book contained stories about what they’d done, if it listed his name … Ethan threw open the window. Somewhere in the distance, a bird opened its beak and sang a few lonely notes.

The book contained Ethan’s ruin. He knew it as surely as he knew the feeling of a line drive hitting his glove. It made him wish not for death but for something beyond, to have his existence erased so thoroughly that it would not even echo in memory.

Someone knocked. He stood still. Please let whomever it was think him asleep.

“Knock knock.” Helen opened the door.

She was dressed for the day already in a red frock with black polka dots, and she carried a tray of breakfast offerings. Coffee. Buttered toast. A wedge of flesh-colored melon. Juice from a fresh-squeezed blood orange.

“What’s all this?” Ethan sneered at her to hide his worry.

“I had an inkling you’d be up,” she said. “Can’t a girl bring her favorite cousin breakfast?”

Ethan sat on the deep windowsill. “Henry isn’t here anymore.”

“You and your self-loathing. Besides, Henry and I aren’t blood cousins,” she said. “Careful there. You might fall out the window.”

“Yes, and then who would you have to torment?” It was a rude remark, but he couldn’t summon the grace to apologize. Instead, he slid off the sill and picked up the toast, smearing it with jam. “Thank you for breakfast.”

“My pleasure. Let’s spend time together soon, all right?” She smiled as she left the room, her dress swishing around her calves.

Ethan ate in silence. There was something he had to do. He just had to figure out when.





DEATH sat at a rolltop desk in Helen’s room. A sheet of creamy stationery lay on a red blotter, by a bottle of ink and a fine fountain pen. She closed her eyes, willing the tears to rise. One was almost certainly enough. But to ensure the job was thorough, she produced three. These, she transferred to the bottle with a trembling fingertip. The tremor — that was new. No doubt a sign of strain. This Game, unlike the rest, felt slippery, a fish pulled with a bare hand out of a swift and frigid river.

The tears hissed as they fell into the bottle. And there was an odor: sharp, tinged with decay. The blank page before her contained infinite possibilities. But not for long. The moment she set the pen to the flesh of the page, certainty would return. Certainty. It was her kingdom.

She dipped the pen. Her fingers shook again — damn them. A spot of ink made a fierce little shape on the page. She rocked the blotter against the wayward ink. She’d gotten ink in the space between her second and third fingers too. And on her dress, another drop. The lack of control it indicated thrilled her, as if in this body she’d finally become someone else, someone unpredictable.

She did not wad up the page, but put her pen to it again. The words flowed. Scandalous. Reckless music. Dangerous mixing of the races. Not what God intended. She would send this letter to the editor of the newspaper — Ethan’s father, Henry’s employer. It would reach the eyes and hearts of concerned citizens, moving them to close the Majestic, to end the spectacle of a white boy singing a love song to a dark-skinned girl. Flora and Henry would lose it all: their livelihood, their hope, their friends. Their love would die. Flora would run from him. Or, more likely, fly.

It was a shame, really. Most humans laid waste their hours to the superficial, to the transitory. Great oceans of passion poured over smoke, while the actual fire burned elsewhere. Henry was one of the rare men with a firm grasp on the important. She set down the pen and blew on the glistening ink. Ah, well.

She sealed the letter in an envelope and sensed a presence behind her. Annabel.

“What are you doing?” the girl asked.

“Writing a letter.” She showed Annabel the envelope. “Would you like to learn how to send one?”

“Yes,” Annabel said. She set down her doll. “Yes, I would.”

Death taught her.





WITH the money from his first paycheck, Henry had moved into a boarding house on Capitol Hill. The room was simple, in an old Victorian run by a tiny tyrant named Mrs. Kosinski. Henry shared a bathroom with eight other residents, but the room itself was his own and infinitely better than Hooverville. It came furnished with a bureau, a twin bed, and a narrow closet. His bass was the most beautiful thing about the place, kept by the west-facing window where the light would grace it during the late-afternoon gap between work at the printing press and performing.

His new life felt full and right. Flora’s band had picked up other gigs here and there. But it was their opening act at the Majestic that shined. The crowd loved “Someday,” as Flora’s uncle had predicted. It had become a duet featuring the two of them.