Fuck me.

  Luz smothered me as soon as I entered. She smelled of sweat and baby powder and it turned my knees to smoke.

  “Jesus, you asshole,” she said, the bite of hops riding her breath.

  I mumbled something into her neck.

  “I thought there was an accident or something. Did you forget how to use a telephone?”

  “No, sorry, it’s just—” my world collapsing, everyone I’ve ever known attacking at once, my boss and supplier of our livelihood becoming increasingly belligerent because I couldn’t help but flit away at the beck and call of two affluent sociopaths that had reattached themselves to my side like tumors, “—this job has been really involved.” I took a swig from her warm beer. “I’m sorry I missed dinner.”

  She batted away my apology as if it was a piece of dust and this was part of the reason I fell in love with her. She said she was just glad I was okay, then pinched my nipple and asked me to remember the phone if I was going to be late.

  In the kitchen, she sung softly to herself while stirring the pot of soup, took occasional swigs from a bottle of mineral water. I grabbed another beer from the fridge, then collapsed into a chair and ground my palms into my eyes. She set a bowl of noodles and vegetables in front of me. Slivers of scallions and ginger floated on the surface. The scent of Chinese pepper. She told me about her yoga class, about how the little kids would inevitably fall into one another during downward-facing dog, how it made her heart sing to know what they went through on a daily basis but still were able to goof off like kids should.

  “You get any more of those calls?”

  She shook her head, sipped from my beer. “Still don’t understand why we got them.”

  “You used to belong to one of those CD mail-order clubs, right?”

  “When I was seventeen.”

  I shrugged, slurped soup. “Fascists have long memories.”

  “Fascists? Really?” She tucked her legs underneath her thighs, sitting Buddha-style on the chair. For some reason, I found it incredibly cute.

  “You cannot run one of those companies and not be a fascist. It’s a moral impossibility.”

  “Fascism is your answer for everything bad that happens.”

  “Because it’s always true.”

  My soup spilled when she smacked me. As I blotted my lap with a napkin, she took my hand and brought it to her lips. “Are we okay?”

  My skin felt amphibian. Some blade of guilt stabbed between my ribs, but without any reason. I hadn’t done anything wrong. A quick snap, a synapse in some remote crevice burning out below the echo of Chance’s voice, a tiny twist of smoke and silverfish scattering, hiding in the shadows I would never let Luz know exist.

  “Of course. Why?”

  “I was just making sure. I mean,” she began to stammer, search for words and blood sloshed through my veins, “with babies and all.” She trailed off; the flick of her wrist addressing all the minutiae of our quaint little life sent fissures through my heart.

  “Luz.” I took her hand in mine.

  She stared at me as if looking through me, measuring auras or thoughts. “Then where have you been?”

  The tiny crackle of icicles forming, falling, breaking inside my skull. One winter, when I went to Nebraska with Chance’s family, I stood in the middle of a corn field. Snow and ashen sky, punctuated by the occasional silhouette of a silo, like the spike and valley of a dying EKG. I’d never been out of Boston and the space was too open, so empty that it crushed me. Chance’s parents found me an hour later, sky and skin the same color.

  That field compressed to the internal dimensions of my skull.

  “At the job.” I told myself that if Chance’s parents were right, and there was in fact a God, that he would’ve struck me down at that moment. Not for lying, but for deception. For wanton reminiscing for a past that existed but would never return. Could never return.

  “You’ve felt really distant.” She tapped a finger on my temple. “I know that having a, um, schedule for making love—” she laughed at her own embarrassment and I wanted to punch myself in the face, “—isn’t excessively romantic, but—”

  I spilled my soup when I leaned across the table to hold her. “I’m here, Luz. I’m here.”

  She yanked me closer, smashing her face against mine.

  She pulled down her yoga pants and brought me into her on the kitchen table. Her leg kicked out and knocked off the beer and soup, and as they shattered on the floor, I wasn’t sure if it was sweat or a Russian waiter’s blood dripping down my forehead.

  Where are you, Beto? Where are you?

  Chapter 6

  I pulled the hat low over my face and canvassed the house before entering. The promise I’d made Chance stuck to my skin as if covered in tacks and though he could find me whenever he wanted, I still tried to avoid him if possible. I spent almost a week undercover. Each time Dwaine tracked me down, he brought the Inquisition with him, sliding probing remarks between dry wall tape and layers of plaster. After four days of comments seeking out soft tissue, he finally broke me down.

  Crouched inside a cabinet, one of my hands held up a garbage disposal while the other tried vainly to put it back together. I heard the clomp of Dwaine’s boots and attempted to ignore him while matching threads with a screw. They stopped inches from my knees, towering over me.

  “How’s it going, Picasso?”

  “Fine.” I continued fixing the disposal, readying myself to weather his barrage of inquiries, but they never came. For ten minutes, he stood quiet in the same place. Not shifting positions, not asking questions. Not even scratching his nuts. I wasn’t sure which was more disconcerting: the silence or the static.

  “Anything I can help you with?” I said. My skin itched, and I just needed some type of sound. Still, he stood quiet. I slid the last washer in place, fumbling with the nut a few times. Finally, I slid out from beneath the cabinet. His face looked carved from granite, his expression as if he’d just watched a truck run over his pet turtle. Somewhere inside my chest, I felt an echo, a drop of regret plinking into the acid in my stomach.

  I let go a long sigh. “We grew up down the street from each other. In Massachusetts.” I shrugged, made the you fucking happy now? gesture. He barely blinked. “We used to be pretty tight. Really tight, actually.”

  He might’ve grunted, or it might’ve been some internal vibration.

  I continued. “But some bad shit went down, a while back. I haven’t seen them since. Until now, I mean.”

  He took a step forward, trying to create a sense of kinship through proximity. “Keep going.”

  “Dunno,” I said. “It’s strange seeing them here. Strange seeing them now. Things are a lot different for me now than back when we were close.” I tossed a spare bolt into the sink. “You know what I mean?”

  “Ain’t no one perfect, Beto. We all done some shit in our time.” He shoved his hand under his shirt. The scratching of nails on stomach hair was audible. “Ain’t how a man does things. It’s how he deals with what he’s done.” He tilted his head back, proud of his profundity.

  The house groaned and creaked around us. The apex of joists pulling away from each other, the concrete foundation settling atop its fissures, the floorboards separating the rooms into hundreds of solitary islands; around us, the house spun in a constant cycle of self-destruction and reassembly.

  I spat on the floor and raised my eyes to Dwaine. “His dad molested me,” I lied.

  If that fazed him, he initially did well to disguise it, showing little more than a blink and a quick exhalation through his nose.

  “I never knew for sure, but I always suspected that Chance and Delilah knew. It happened for a while. Sometimes when they were home, sometimes when they weren’t. But it was always kind of, I don’t know, convenient, I guess. Convenient that we were alone and out of earshot.” Words poured out of me and, almost like an out-of-body-experience, my brain registered only shock at the lack of control over my tongue. “Eventually I threatened to tell his wife. That got me this.” I lifted my shirt to show him the wormhole through my gut.

  “He tagged you with that rebar?” Dwaine’s voice wilted with incredulity.

  In a shadowed corner of my skull, probably the same place from where the words oozed, a single cackle echoed. I nodded my head, muttered yeah.

  “Goddamn, boy. Goddamn.” He stepped forward and hugged me. The gesture struck me as the most wholly inappropriate reaction to my fictional molestation. At least he wasn’t sobbing. He pulled back, clapping my shoulders with his hands. “Friend or not, he always seemed like a weird fucker to me. Now I ain’t gonna say if you ever need anything, you can talk to me and I won’t say shit, because you already know that.”

  I shook his hand. “Thanks, Dwaine.”

  “So, you can talk to me, you ever need anything. My lips are tighter than a nun’s asshole.”

  I just nodded, because I had no idea how to respond. From outside the front door came a flurry of hurried Spanish. He hooked his chin in that direction, said, “Think that means I gotta mosey.”

  “Thanks for talking. I feel better.” If there was a God, he should’ve collapsed the upstairs flooring, hurtling a joist into the crown of my skull.

  “You’re a good man, Beto.” He laid his hand on my shoulder again. “You’re a damn good man.”

  I just nodded, because there was no appropriate way to respond.

  I’d assumed that Dwaine made an offer the workers couldn’t refuse to motivate them to finish the job in time, because the top two floors only needed to be cleaned before they’d be livable. Impressive for a few days of work. Knowing how anal-retentive Chance was, I even had Dwaine lay three extra coats of floor varnish to avoid undue scratching. Me, Dwaine, and the brother-in-law of Santo Sangre were the only souls who came by the house, and those two were mainly for appearances. Will Watkins took the rest of the crew to another job.

  I stuck to the basement, leaning wooden studs against the concrete walls while framing the room. We could’ve almost made the basement completely soundproof with another concrete wall: Typical Dwaine, his Spanish wasn’t what he thought it was and he told the guy to order cuarenta bags—forty—instead of catorce—fourteen. The extra ones sat piled along the walls.

  The echo of the nail gun was Delilah clucking her tongue. The tink of steel on tin was Chance breaking the coffee pot. The grunt of the router was guttural Russian. I felt an irrational longing to share a beer with Dwaine, just for normal human companionship, a relic of life three weeks ago.

  “Hey.”

  A frigid spike in the base of my spine that spread to warmth, then went supernova inside my skull. I set down the nail gun, in the event I was tempted to use it.

  “Hey, yourself.”

  Black Mary Janes covered with dust, black tights with striated lines. The edge of a black skirt peeked below her pea coat. Delilah looked like a vixen undertaker, or the member of some bestial cult. Either way, I was glad my work pants were heavy, and she wouldn’t notice anything.

  What are you doing, Beto?

  “You guys did a really good job with the house. It’s beautiful.”

  Luz would say the same. After all, I used her design sensibilities. I just nodded my head, thanked Del.

  “I never realized how big this basement was, either. You could live down here.” The tone of her voice held a baiting edge and after seeing the bags of cement along the walls, I only wanted to offer her a taste of Amontillado.

  She traipsed around the basement, an unassuming predator circling. A few times she picked up tools, played with them like a child might, then set them back on the ground as if they were porcelain. I couldn’t help but watch and wonder which of us was the moth, which one the flame.

  “My brother tells me you’ve come to a decision.”

  I swallowed, snapped my fingers as if striking a phantom lighter and why the Hell was I doing that? “More like he forced me into a corner.”

  She shrugged, smiled, picked up the nail gun. “Can I try?”

  “Are you going to cut off my wedding finger?”

  Two steps forward before I could blink, her warmth tactile on the back of my hands. She smelled of static electricity. “You can’t cut something off with a nail gun.”

  I placed the frame’s bottom beam on the floor and took the pencil from behind my ear to mark the fastening spots but before I could crouch next to it, she’d driven two dozen nails into the board.

  “Where the fuck did you learn to use a nail gun?” I asked it before realizing I didn’t want to know.

  “I’m glad you’re coming with us, Beto.” She laid the gun on a sawhorse and stood in front of me, so close I could feel the tiny vibrations between her cells, feel the exhalation of her pores without touching. “Really glad.”

  “And why is that?” The dank air pressed heavy on my skin. The basement walls shivered.

  She breathed a quick laugh. “You haven’t listened at all, have you?”

  I arched an eyebrow, fought the urge to check behind me because that would give her the power, and Delilah needs power like a child needs attention, like a dictator needs fear.

  “I told you we missed you,” she said. “I wasn’t lying.”

  “You missed me, so you came to Baltimore to try and ruin my life. To ruin my marriage.”

  “Marriage is just a legally binding contract.”

  “Not to me.”

  “There are things that run deeper. And besides,” she offered me a cigarette and I actually declined, “you could’ve told us no.”

  “Really?” I opened and closed my mouth like a dog chewing air. “How many times did I say no?”

  She shook her head. “Saying and telling are two different things.”

  “So, you came to Baltimore for me. Not because of Endor, not because of housing.” I didn’t know where Dwaine was and fought to keep my voice down. “And certainly not because Chance is Russian fucking Mafia.”

  “All incidental. And he’s not really in the Mafia. You know how he likes to play.”

  “You came here for me.” The words were bleach and honey in my mouth, or maybe it was just the crushing sensation of nostalgia, of belonging, of being near someone who knew everything I’d done and would still hold my hand if I was ill. I wondered if Luz would still love me if she knew what I’d done. I wondered if I really wanted to know the answer.

  “You’re family, Beto,” she said. “No contract changes that.” Her lips parted, just enough for breath to pass between them, for her exhalations to carry the strands of memory and seep through my cavities, absorb into my bloodstream, assimilate to my body.

  My mouth began to move without my brain as governor. “The night we stole the swan boats in the Common, and Chance rocked back and forth to make you sick, and when you tried to tackle him, and he moved, and you fell overboard, I remember the way your hair shimmered. It looked like the girl in that movie we used to watch. Do you remember her name?”

  “I have no idea,” she whispered.

  “She was covered in the dust of jewels and enchanted everyone who touched her.”

  “I don’t remember that.” Her voice was distant, lost somewhere beneath the murky Boston water.

  “And I remember holding your hair back while Chance yelled at you because you were puking out the window of his car—that Honda he bought, the one he waxed every morning—because the guy who worked the counter at the duckpin place under Fenway gave us free beer after you showed him your tits.”

  Her smile spread like a stain. “I do remember that.”

  “I was jealous,” I said. My arms tingled as if I’d slept on them for weeks. “Riding in that car during the summer, with the windows down and your Run DMC CD blasting, hurtling from one disaster to the next.” I trailed off, something like tar boiling inside my stomach, threatening to bubble up my throat until it consumed my mouth and spilled over, making me a shadow, nonexistent. I was either about to vomit or kiss her. I said, “Sometimes I miss that.”

  She blinked, and a single tear made a wet streak through the dust on her cheek. She brushed her lips on my ear and set my flesh to flame.

  “Come home, Beto,” she breathed. “Come home.”

  She moved her mouth from my ear to my cheek. Needles shaped like lips, arms wrapping around my shoulders. I shuddered at her momentary touch. She turned and walked upstairs, footfall above me.

  The house fell silent but for the thrashing of blood in my ears. The walls wavered, a mirage, fumes. The studs bent and contorted, groaning under the weight of whispers. The cement floor I’d spent two days pouring and leveling, it wept. Clouds swirled over the city in dizzying patterns you could feel without seeing: the horsemen come early, stretching time with their entrance.

  Footfall above me again, faster this time. She was hurrying back for more, racing back to finish off the scraps. To my side, I saw the nail gun and heard the phantom whump of driving imaginary nails echo in my skull. Her temple or mine, either.

  “Holy shit!”

  Luz’s voice, slicing through the air.

  I blinked.

  “Holy shit holy shit holy shit!”

  Arms extended like a heron about to take flight, she clomped down the steps and hurried across the floor. She wore a grey skirt and black boots that licked at her knees.

  “It worked!”

  I mumbled something as she wrapped herself around me, crushed her face against mine. I tasted the salt of her tears.

  Breathing ragged with sobs and giggles, tiny flecks of spit touched my ear as she whispered, “I’m pregnant.”

  Chapter 7

  “I don’t think you can actually hear the heartbeat yet,” Luz said.

 

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