Red Leaves

He stared at her, perplexed. ‘When?’

‘Two years ago.’

A look of recognition passed over his face. ‘There is nothing they can do for toes. Besides, I had no money.’

‘So? I had money.’

‘I didn’t want your money!’ Albert yelled. ‘Do you understand?’

‘Perfectly!’ said Kristina. ‘Better than you think.’

‘Look, I don’t care what you do.’

‘I’m sure of that, Albert,’ Kristina retorted.

He ignored her comment, ‘don’t go to the doctor. Don’t go to the police. See if I care.’

‘I see already.’

Falling silent, Albert sat down in the lounge chair. Aristotle sidled up to him, dragging his tongue over his hand. It was a loving gesture, and Kristina, looking at them both, thought, Aristotle loves Albert. He’d gladly spend all his days with him if I weren’t around.

Bending down, Albert patted the dog on the head, and Aristotle, encouraged, licked his other hand. Albert sat next to the window and stared at Kristina with his impenetrable eyes.

Kristina hated fighting with him. Nowadays making up was harder and harder, and nothing felt worse to her than knowing they had argued and then weren’t kind to each other.

‘What are you looking at?’ Kristina asked him.

‘You,’ Albert replied. ‘God, you’re so beautiful. You’re amazing. Look at you.’

‘Yeah, look at me,’ Kristina said plaintively. ‘I’m a mess.’ ‘No, you’re all right. You could’ve died.’ His voice was peculiar. ‘You’re lucky you’re alive, you know.’

‘I know,’ she said weakly. ‘I know that better than anyone.’

Slowly she walked over and stood in front of him. He reached out and touched her lightly on the ribs. She flinched from his fingers. ‘It hurts a little,’ she said, trying to keep her voice even. ‘Albert, can you imagine it? Me, dying?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t. I can’t imagine living without you.’ Kristina wanted to tell him again that he was going to have to, but thought this wasn’t a good time.

‘Is the car a total wreck?’

She shrugged. ‘Who knows? You think I stuck around to find out how the car was?’

Quietly he said, ‘You should’ve gone to the hospital.’

‘What, and be even later?’ she asked. ‘I mean, they would’ve probably kept me there overnight. And look at what I got just for being two hours late. Can you imagine if I was away somewhere overnight?’

‘I would’ve thought something terrible happened to you. I would’ve been worried sick.’

‘Yeah, sure. You look really worried, sitting there.’

‘I’m sorry, Rock,’ he finally said. ‘I know you’re upset with me. Listen, please, let’s go to Canada. I’m asking you. Please.’

‘Albert, no. You, please. You have Conni, remember?’

‘I’ll work it out. Maybe I’ll pick a big fight.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ she said. Crouching in front of him, still naked, Kristina whispered, ‘Albert, please. I want to stop.’

He looked her over. ‘You’re naked.’

She got up and backed away from him. ‘I mean it.’

‘Let’s go to Canada and then you’ll tell me if you mean it.’ He smiled sexily.

‘No. I’m serious. I’ve had enough. I want us to be done. Okay?’

Kristina wasn’t smiling, and Albert stopped smiling.

‘You’re still naked,’ he repeated.

‘Clothes aren’t the problem, Albert. I can get dressed.’

‘Please,’ he said coldly.

‘The problem is us. We. We’ve got to stop.’ She looked away from him. ‘I want us to get over each other.’ She coughed, causing severe pain to her head. ‘I want to get over you. I want you to go with Conni to Long Island, and I don’t want to think about it anymore. I don’t want to lie, I don’t want to sneak around, I don’t want to worry about Howard. Or anybody.’

When he sat there impassively, Kristina said, ‘We’re not meant to be together.’

‘You’re wrong.’ His tone was flat. He could’ve been saying, ‘You’re right.’

‘We were never meant to be together,’ Kristina said firmly, knowing she didn’t sound firm, knowing she couldn’t shield herself from his eyes. She was stuck in front of him with nowhere to go.

‘You’re wrong,’ Albert repeated, in the same tone.

Kristina continued, undaunted, ‘Never. We screwed up real bad, but there’s still time to have a life - good lives. Don’t you want one? Conni loves you so much.’

‘I know. So? Jim loves you so much.’ He sounded bitter.

Shaking her head, Kristina said, ‘No, he doesn’t. No, he doesn’t. Not the way Conni loves you. And you know that.’

Albert got up out of his chair and stood, loomed, before her. ‘Kristina, this is absurd. I cannot not have you in my life.’

She rubbed her face with her good hand, but it was more like closing her eyes at the sight of him. ‘Albert - please. We can’t. We can’t continue.’

‘You’re wrong.’

She sighed deeply and then groaned from pain. She wasn’t wrong, she was just so tired of standing, of being naked, of this conversation falling again on his deaf ears.

There was a knock on the door. Albert looked at Kristina and sat back down in the armchair. Kristina looked at Albert. Aristotle barked once and started to wag his tail.

‘Hold on!’ Kristina said loudly.

‘Kristina?’ The door opened a notch. It was Jim.

‘Jim, hold on!’ Kristina repeated, throwing some clothes on.

‘Is everything okay?’

Jim couldn’t see her, for she was behind the door and out of his line of vision, but she knew he could see Albert sitting in her chair. Thank God he wasn’t sitting on her unmade bed. Aristotle ran to the door, and his behind started to move from side to side just like his tail.

‘I’m fine,’ Kristina said. ‘Come in.’

Jim came in, looking at them suspiciously. But Kristina knew Jim wouldn’t act on an emotional impulse; he didn’t trust emotional impulses. Jim glanced at Albert,.then at Kristina again. She was wearing her pink tank top and a pair of pull-on Dartmouth green shorts. At first his gaze was hard, but then he saw her face. Kristina knew she was a sight. There was a bloody gash where the glass had been, and her eyes had a glazed look that she knew was from alcohol. Jim could easily have mistaken the look for signs of concussion. Her tank-top collar was dark with dried blood.

‘God, what happened to you?’ Jim said, giving Albert a stare that made Kristina suspect Jim thought Albert had beaten her.

‘Nothing,’ she answered, touching her face. ‘I was in an accident. My car crashed. Everything’s okay. I’m fine.’

‘You look terrible.’

She felt terrible. The alcohol was wearing off.

‘I feel pretty good,’ she said, trying to smile.

‘Did you go to the hospital?’

Kristina remembered clambering up the hard ground, just to avoid going to the hospital. ‘No, I felt okay, so I came home.’

Jim became agitated. ‘You felt okay so you came home?’

Kissing Jim on the cheek, Kristina said in her nicest voice, ‘I’m okay, Jimbo.’ But her arm, swollen by her side, betrayed her. She tried to move it to show him, and failed. ‘Really,’ she said. ‘I’m fine.’

Albert got up. ‘I’d better go and see how Conni’s doing.’

‘She’s okay,’ Jim said, not looking at Albert. ‘She’s waiting for us. Maybe we should all go down.’

Kristina managed a pasty smile. ‘Why don’t you two go on ahead? I’ll be right down.’

Albert didn’t say anything, nor look her way; he just walked out of the room, taking Aristotle with him. Jim looked at her accusingly for a second and said, ‘Yeah, fine,’ and then left, too.

Kristina waited a few seconds to make sure they were way down the hall and couldn’t hear her before she locked the door and collapsed on the bed.

She lay there for what seemed like hours. Her eyes were opening and closing and she was looking at the lightbulb burning in the middle of her ceiling and wishing it would shut itself off, so the room could be dark, dark like it was in the car, in the middle of nowhere, when she thought she was dead. Now as she lay on her bed, she wondered why God had spared her, why he had spared her certain death in a collision of such suddenness.

It was the closest she had come to death. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had come to her, looked into her face, and galloped away. It wasn’t the first time she had seen them. When she was twelve, she had fallen off a wall into cold water. She was a good swimmer, but fear paralyzed her. She couldn’t move her arms or legs, couldn’t even scream for help. She just went down without a fight, gulping for air and feeling her lungs fill with water.

And last year she had seen them again on her bridge, when she tumbled down to what she was sure was certain death. She had survived that too, but lived her life prepared at any moment to meet God, adding up the tally of her life every time it snowed, and she, drunk beyond reason, praying under her breath, walked the ledge on the bridge, her hands outstretched.

She didn’t want to die. However, most of all, she was scared that it wouldn’t be God’s face she would see upon meeting her master. ‘I have only one master on earth,’ she whispered, ‘and I’m trying to exorcise him from my life because he’s no good for me, but he won’t let me, he’s stronger than me, and he won’t let me leave him.’

She opened her eyes and touched the temple that had had the piece of tempered glass wedged in it. I feel pain, she thought. Do dead people feel pain? Do they feel tenderness, anger, regret? Profound regret?

Do they feel love? A love more overwhelming than summer air?

I’m alive, Kristina thought, because I still feel pain. ‘I’m not ready to die,’ she whispered. ‘I’m not done living, I don’t want to die…’

I need a drink. I need another, and another and another. I need to pour it all over my wounds to numb them, to forget them, to not feel pain.

Leaning over she reached for Southern Comfort and then fell back on the bed. With her good hand, Kristina unscrewed the cap and lifted the bottle Comfort over her head. Closing her eyes, she poured the liquor over her face. Some of it got into her mouth, and some of it got into her nose. But some of it got on her cut, too. It stung then numbed her bruise, and that’s what she wanted. She poured the rest on her shoulder.

Kristina dragged her aching body from the bed and put on a track suit. The track suit’s biggest advantage was that it wasn’t the same jeans and sweatshirt in which she had faced the darkest unknown. Kristina had always believed one should be well rested and nude - as newborns - to face one’s darkest unknown, and she had been neither.

Her friends were waiting for her downstairs in the Hinman lounge. Albert was reading a textbook and taking notes. Jim was writing. Conni was biting her nails.

‘Hey,’ Kristina said weakly.

They looked up at her.

‘Krissy, what happened to you?’ Conni got up immediately and went to Kristina, peering up into her face. ‘Jim told me you were in an accident. I was so worried.’ But those were only words. Conni didn’t look worried. She looked bitter. She looked as if she was trying to contain anger with a fixed smile.

‘I’m all right,’ Kristina said. ‘Really. I’m fine now.’

‘Accident?’

‘Yeah,’ Kristina said. ‘I crashed the car.’ Kristina figured if she said that often enough, she soon wouldn’t want to cry.

She tried not to show she was unsteady on her feet. She felt herself moving with deliberate slowness toward the cake, as if in a fast-forward search on a cheap VCR, with all the horizontal lines on the screen. And soon maybe someone would say, ‘Geez, this is awful; I want a four-head model.’ And turn her in.

They all stood up, Aristotle barked, somebody lit the candles. Kristina didn’t count them, but it looked like a lot of candles. About twenty-two, she guessed. She noted that no one had baked her a cake. This cake had been bought at the Grand Union on Main Street. Pepperidge Farm German Chocolate Cake. So what if it was her favorite and everyone knew it. Nobody had baked her a cake.

Last September when it was Jim’s birthday, Kristina had knocked herself out to make his favorite lemon meringue pie. The egg whites took an hour and three attempts because she wanted to show Jim she cared.

Kristina stood in front of the lit candles, in front of the kind of cake she bought often for herself, and dimly heard someone say, ‘Make a wish, Kristina.’

She thought of her Mustang, and of Albert pressuring her to go to Canada and about to be three hundred miles away from her for Thanksgiving - about to be three hundred miles from her forever, really - and of Jim, wanting her all to himself and not wanting her at all, and of Howard in New York, and of her mother, lost, a million miles away, and of her dead father, and of herself nearly dead too, without a decent coat.

She thought of the pipe music from Edinburgh, and she closed her eyes, bent over the cake, and blew, thinking, I hope Donald and Patricia Moss let Evelyn keep her babies…

Then she sat down.

Aristotle nudged her in the calf. Kristina sluggishly cut the cake. She gave the first piece to Jim with a labor-camp forced smile. She gave the second piece to Conni without a smile. The third piece she gave to Albert without even looking at him.

Aristotle nudged her in the calf again. She smiled down at him under the table, cleaned the knife off with her thumb and index finger, and put the fingers under Aristotle’s nose to lick.

‘Krissy, aren’t you having any cake?’ Conni asked her.

The alcohol’s magic was wearing off. She wished she had some with her. Pursing her dry lips, she sat silently staring at the cake, feeling Aristotle’s tongue licking her fingers. After he was finished, she gave him some more. The dog liked store-bought German chocolate cake as much as the next Labrador. And Aristotle never got offended that someone hadn’t baked him a cake for his birthday or that he wasn’t going to Canada. Aristotle’s life was very simple. Three walks a day and a comfy bed to shed all over.

Kristina saw a card on the table but didn’t move toward it. Conni pushed the card across the table to Kristina.

‘This is from all of us,’ Conni said, smiling open-mouthed and happy. ‘Go ahead, go ahead, open it.’ Reaching under the table, she pulled out a bottle of Southern Comfort with a red bow taped to the side of it. ‘This is a little something from all of us, too,’ Conni said. ‘We thought you might like it.’

‘Conni’s idea,’ said Albert.

‘Not!’ said Conni in a high-pitched voice, laughing. ‘Yours!’

‘Not!’ said Albert, smiling.

‘Totally yours,’ said Conni again.

Why are they squabbling over whose idea it was? thought Kristina as she stared at the bottle. ‘You guys got me a bottle of liquor?’ she said incredulously.

Albert said, ‘We thought you might like it.’

Shrugging, Kristina opened the card, wishing she hadn’t shrugged. Her left shoulder burned with pain.

‘Wow,’ Kristina said without enthusiasm. Yesterday she would have been grateful for a fifteen-dollar bottle of Southern Comfort that would keep her going through Thanksgiving. If it hadn’t been for Kristina’s turning twenty-one, if it hadn’t been for the fact that she and Albert couldn’t go to Canada, and if it weren’t for the fact that she had almost died, Kristina Kim would have been delighted to get Southern Comfort from her closest friends.

‘No, guys, really,’ she said, staring into three drawn, disappointed faces. ‘Wow. I’m sorry. It’s a great present. I’m just hurting, my body hurts, you know. I had a little to drink a while ago to dull the pain, and it’s made me seem ungrateful, but it’s fantastic, really.’

She leaned over to one side and kissed Conni on the cheek. Then she leaned over to the other side and kissed Jim on the mouth. Albert was sitting across from her at the table, and she wasn’t about to get up, and he did not move either, so she just said, ‘Thanks, Albert,’ and he said, ‘Don’t mention it. It’s our pleasure.’

Conni asked, ‘Krissy, how are you going to play basketball? Look at your arm. What are you going to do? I’d go to the hospital or the infirmary if I were you, really, something, you know? ‘Cause you don’t want to just collapse or something, I mean, I’m just trying to be helpful.’

Kristina waved dismissively with her good arm. ‘This is my dribbling arm. I don’t need the other arm.’

‘You need it to shoot the ball,’ said Albert.

‘I’ll shoot it with one hand,’ said Kristina. ‘UPenn needs a handicap.’

‘You’re not that good,’ said Jim. He had said little.

‘Oh, yes, I am,’ said Kristina, managing a small, genuine smile. She didn’t want to tell them how badly frightened she was about her injuries, about what they might mean for basketball.

Livening up a little, Kristina talked about the Christmas tree going up in the middle of the Dartmouth Green, though Jim was Jewish and didn’t care much about the tree, so they talked about Schindler’s List

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.