Old Flames, Burned Hands Page 17

  “You think I’m lying to you? You think I’m just, what, making all of this up?”

  His hands went up, palms out as if showing that he was out of ammo. “I didn’t say lying. But you’re holding back. So take a breath and tell me what happened.”

  Her cheeks puffed in a long sigh and folded her arms. Stalemated silence crept across the kitchen floor. She turned away, gathering up the cutting board. “I told you what happened. Believe me or don’t. Your choice.”

  “Answer me!” His voice boomed off the tiles.

  Tilda dropped the big knife, letting it clatter into the sink, and then marched out of the room.

  His stomped after her. “Where are you going?”

  “Fix your own damn dinner.” She slipped on her shoes and pushed through the screen door to the porch.

  Molly and Zoe straightened up, perched on the wicker lounger. Zoe’s eyes immediately dropped to her lap but Molly gaped at her mother with big, almost cartoonish eyes. No pretence that she hadn’t heard every word.

  Tilda felt her anger wither away against the sheer power of her daughter’s gaze. “I’m going for a walk,” she announced and hurried down the porch steps to the street.

  WHERE ELSE WAS SHE GOING TO GO? Dusk was just settling in but even with the waning light she had a hard time retracing her steps back to Gil’s building. Entering the maze of alleyways was like stepping into some otherworldly barrio, sidestepping the broken glass and limp condoms. She held her breath against the stench of maggoty garbage and piss marinated in stale summer heat.

  She pounded his door. No answer, no sound of anyone rumbling around inside. She yanked the handle but the door was bolted. She had a stupid thought to leave a note on his door like she used to do. Back when Gil was… well, still Gil, she would leave nasty notes on his door when he wasn’t home. I dropped by to fuck your brains out, she’d scribble, but you weren’t home so I humped your neighbour. We are so over! She’d tape these little valentines to his door for his neighbours to titter over. Gil never saw the humour in it.

  If she had a pen, she could draft another love note.

  Go back to being dead. You’re messing up my life.

  Love, Tilda.

  How cruel that would be. But there was something about his locked door that irked her to irrational fury. How like him to be unavailable when she needed him.

  She took a step back and mulled her options; wait here in the hall or turn around and go home. Both lacked appeal. Back when they were still together, Gil used to keep a spare key hidden on the top of the door frame. Would he still? The lintel of the door was too tall to reach. Searching the hallway, she found an old paint can and used it as a step. Fingers trailing through the dust over the lintel and there it was. A key. Pushing the can aside, she unlatched the lock and went uninvited into Gil’s flat.

  Dark as all get out. She called his name, tossing it into the void but nothing sounded back. Knees knocking into furniture, she groped her way to the window and drew back the heavy curtain. Ambient light from the dusky sky allowed her to see the logistics of the space, crazy as it was. The furniture and shelves and crates made little sense in terms of living space, no areas marked out as rooms. Then again, Tilda supposed, he doesn’t actually ‘live’ here, does he? Her eyes picked out a few candles on a table, along with a box of matches.

  The quivering light from the tallow multiplied against the bank of dried up aquariums, the small flame reflected in the dirty glass. Her eyes fell to an old stereo stacked up on metal shelves. Tall speaker cabinets flanked both sides and a dusty armchair was set before it, as if Gil had recreated that old JVC ad of a listener being blasted by sound. She knew there was no electricity but hit the power button anyway. A dead click. Racked above the sound system were shelves of vinyl and she picked through the record sleeves. Floyd, The Replacements, Violent Femmes, Sleater Kinney. Stuff they used to listen to, as if Gil had recreated their old record collection. One sleeve, caught her eye and she pulled it out and studied its cover. The Gorgons first record, Bombs Away. The photo on the back cover showed a much younger Tilda, flanked by the band, each face a study of posed defiance or indifference. How old was she in this picture, twenty-six? Just kids, posturing for the camera with childish displays of world-weary cynicism. How silly it seemed now. Why were they so eager to grow up back then? Why was that bored indifference deemed so cool, as if they’d seen it all when they’d barely tasted anything of life? It seemed like such a waste of time now.

  She pushed the record back into the stack and poked through more of the shelves. Tucked behind a chainsaw was a familiar sight; the old homemade flamethrower. They had torched a few of Gil‘s paintings that last night they were together. Remembering that, she threaded her way through the clutter to the back where the paintings were propped against the wall. Was it too vain to look at these? She didn’t care if it was and leafed through Gil’s renderings of her. Some were meticulous in their execution, others slapdash and hurried, as if Gil had attacked the canvass in anger. The expressions varied too. In some, Tilda appeared demure or serene but in others she sneered or glared at the viewer as if in accusation of some crime.

  At the back of the stacked frames she uncovered one that didn’t show her at all. She plucked it out and tilted it towards the candlelight. It was ghastly. Three figures against a backdrop of darkness, their blasted-looking faces barely human. Pale as fish bellies, the faces hung like brittle paper stretched taught over their skulls. The eyes were black hollows, pinpricked with a dark red glow. Their mouths hung open as if aping Munch’s famous screaming figure, the collected maws no more than dark wounds in their faces, punctured by sharp yellow teeth. Terrifying and lurid, almost obscene in the revulsion it stirred in Tilda. She wanted to hurl the picture away but couldn’t tear her eyes from it.

  These obscene wraiths were not some fantasy from Gil’s imagination. They could only be one thing and a shudder pulsed through her at what these monsters were.

  “Don’t look at that.”

  Gil hovered at the edge of the candlelight. He took the frame from her hand. “Why are you looking at that?”

  “Is it them?” Her eyes ping-ponged between him and the painting. “The coven?”

  “I forgot about this. I should have burned it.”

  “They’re repulsive.”

  “They’re not human.”

  She watched him slip the picture into the end of the stacked frames. “But they used to be?”

  His head bobbed gently. “A long time ago. The longer you exist as one of them, the more you change, becoming less and less human.”

  “But you don’t look like that.”

  “I’m a baby compared to them,” he said. “The old ones go back two, three hundred years. Colonial era. You survive long enough, this is what you become.”

  “How can you even look at them?”

  “You learn to deal. Your intolerance for things diminishes after you’ve died.” His shoulders popped in a shrug. “You know that thing about vamps and mirrors? It’s kinda true. They hate them.”

  Her eyebrow arched in disbelief. “They don’t cast a reflection? Come on.”

  “Of course they cast a reflection. But they avoid mirrors at all costs because they can’t stand seeing what they’ve become. The price they’ve paid for cheating death. Kinda like what’s-his-name in that Oscar Wilde story, with the portrait. His sins and decay only showed on his painting, not the man. You want to scare the shit out of a vamp? Hold a mirror up to one.”

  He laughed but Tilda made no response, no noise at all. “Til, you all right?”

  “No. I’m not.”

  “What is it?”

  “I need some air.” She straightened her back. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  THEY meandered out of the alley and onto the side streets, stepping around the pools of light cast from the streetlamps. She told him about the police coming to her house, about how the man he tossed through the window had died later in hospital.

  �
��I had no idea,” he said. “That guy was an asshole but I didn’t mean for him to die. I’m sorry you got grilled by the cops. Did they believe what you told them?”

  “One did, one didn’t.” She folded a hand over her belly but it did nothing to quash the sick churning within. “I still can’t believe that poor man died.”

  He didn’t respond. Hands in his pockets, as if they were discussing the weather. Didn’t he care or was he just letting her get it all out? Tilda couldn’t tell and her brain felt too fried to sort it out. There was more she needed to get out. How conflicted she felt about him, about being with him the night before. As wonderful as it had felt and as hungry as she was for more, she couldn’t stomach the queasy residue it left at betraying her husband. How seasick this whole thing made her and how she couldn’t go through with it anymore.

  That was the verse she had scripted on the way to his place. She had it all drafted in her mind and rehearsed. A firm resolve to lay down the law and do the right thing, no matter how much it hurt. But scripts are flimsy things, as brittle as the resolve that conjured them, and created solely to be broken, adapted, shredded. Walking next to Gil, close enough to touch him, that carefully plotted script had shredded long before they had even left his building. Small bargains were scratched up. One more block, and then she would lay down the law. Just around this corner. Just past these pedestrians.

  They sauntered out of the market, a slow shuffle past College Street and north into the outer fringe of the Annex and still her declaration remained stifled in her throat. Jesus Christ, she thought. It’s now or never. “Gil, we need to talk.”

  “Check it out,” he said, turning bright eyes on her. Whether he hadn’t heard or simply ignored her, she couldn’t tell. He wagged his chin at the buildings lined up on their west flank. “Do you remember this street?”

  The street looked unremarkable. A mix of Victorians and four-squares, buttressed with three story walk-ups. An auto garage that had been there since forever. Tilda shook her head. “What about it?”

  Pointing out a grey brick building two doors up, he said “Sicky Vikki’s apartment. Our dream place.”

  A head-smack of recognition. Sicky Vikki was an adorably deranged friend of theirs famous for hair-brained schemes and fevered art projects. She changed careers the way other people changed underwear, flirting from music promotion to gallery owner to set design, often leaving a trail of wreckage and burned bridges in her wake. Sweet and generous to a fault, Vikki’s true vocation was narrowly escaping disasters that would have ruined saner people. Vikki also had a magic touch when it came to finding gem apartments, always snatching up these lofty spaces with tons of room for next to nothing. At a time when everyone they knew lived in overpriced dumps, Vikki was sniffing out charming and spacious finds that left all of them green-eyed. With this building, Vikki had outdone herself, landing the entire top floor of an old tenement for peanuts. Her decorating style ran to the insane, somewhere between Dali and Japanese kitch, which appealed to both Tilda and Gil. A step outside the north window, the adjacent flat roof had been transformed into a massive patio.

  Best of all, Vikki was moving out. After tracking down another sweet deal down on Queen, she had offered the place to them. In their two years together, Tilda and Gil had never shared a place and Vikki knew they were holding out for just the right space. “Ta-da,” she had told them, waving her hand over the apartment. She was moving out in two months. If they wanted it, they could move in first of October.

  They were over the moon, already making plans and figuring out how they would use all that space. There was enough square footage for Tilda to have a huge rehearsal space and for Gil to turn another room into a studio. The accident of course had deep-sixed all those plans.

  Standing on the sidewalk, Gil looked up at the third floor windows. All dark. “Whatever happened to Vikki?”

  “She had this massive breakdown,” Tilda said. “Couple years after you died. She just melted down and her parents came and got her. I think she was hospitalized at one point.”

  Gil whistled. “Is she still at her parent’s?”

  “Oh no. She recovered, moved out west. Last I heard, she was a realtor. Married, three kids.”

  “I wonder what kind of palace she’s living in now.”

  “I’m sure it’s fabulous.” Tilda studied the building before them, trying to gather her thoughts and screw up some courage. She needed to level with Gil but kept letting the opportunities to do so slip away. Do it now, she scolded. Now or forever.

  “Let’s go have a look,” he said, striding towards the building.

  “What? We can’t just walk in.”

  “The place is empty.” He reached back for her hand and guided her to a side entrance. The door was locked. He slammed his shoulder into it and the bolt splintered away.

  Three flights up, the apartment was stuffy and smelled stale. Tilda found a lightswitch while Gil opened the windows to air the place out. Their footsteps echoed off the bare walls as they toured each empty room. No furniture or debris, just a little dirt swept into tidy piles in the center of each room, waiting for a dustpan.

  “This was supposed to be our first place together,” he said.

  Tilda wandered into the kitchen. The stove had been removed, leaving an outline of clean paint against a dirty wall like a ghost image. It made the kitchen feel like a tomb.

  Gil came up behind her, slipping his hand around her waist. “Do you think we would’ve been happy here?”

  “I don’t know.” She slipped out of his grip and crossed to the window. “We’ll never know.”

  “I think we would’ve been.” He leaned back against the wall and slid down to the checkerboard patterned floor. “We had so many plans for this place. Rooms for both of us to work in, that huge rooftop for a deck. It’s a shame really.”

  “That’s life.” Tilda looked down at the street below.

  “That’s death,” he countered. He folded his hands in his lap and looked up at her back. “Do you think we’d still be together? If the accident hadn’t happened?”

  She shrugged without turning around.

  “Come on, we were meant to be together.”

  “I can’t answer questions like that, Gil. I hate ‘what if’ questions.”

  His eyes narrowed to slits. “You okay?”

  Tilda nodded. A dog was barking somewhere below on the street.

  Gil snapped his fingers. “Didn’t we leave a mark here? We carved our initials into a door frame or something. To mark it as ours. Do you remember?”

  “No.”

  He shot up to his feet. “I wonder if it’s still here. Let’s find it.”

  “I don’t want to,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because. I don’t want to talk about the past anymore. Or what might have been. Things have changed but you don’t seem to realize it. You live in the past.”

  That blew the wind from his sails. “It’s all I got, Til.”

  Silence crept in. Then the dog outside started up again. Tilda turned halfway. “We can’t do this anymore.”

  “Do what?”

  “This. Us,” she finally blurted. “I just can’t do it, Gil. The guilt is too much. And it’s not fair to Shane.”

  She watched him lean his head back against the wall and close his eyes. She didn’t know how he’d react but this wasn’t helping. She should have known he wouldn’t react at all and leave her guessing.

  When his eyes opened, he said “Don’t do this, Tilda.”

  “I’m sorry. But it’s not right and it’s eating away at me.” She groped for something to ease the blow, grasping the first thing that came to mind and immediately regretted it. “We can still talk and spend time together. We just can’t, you know, be lovers.”

  Gil’s laughter boomed through the empty kitchen, loud and cruel. “What, we can still be friends? Gimme a fucking break.”

  “Don’t get nasty.”

  “You’re break
ing up with me?” he guffawed. “Now? After twenty years?”

  “Oh, don’t be so bloody stupid.”

  He was suddenly on his feet, inches from her. “You can’t do that. I still love you. That’s never changed. And I know you love me too.”

  She seethed. He could be so obtuse. “What am I supposed to do? I’m married. I have a daughter. A family!”

  “I know, I know,” he rumbled. “And I’m sorry about your husband but I loved you first. You were mine before he came along. It’s not like we broke up.”

  “No. You died. And I was destroyed.”

  “And I’ve spent all this time staying away. But I can’t anymore.” He gripped her arms and bent low to search out her eyes. “Don’t turn me away now. Not after I found you again.”

  She pushed at his hands but had no strength to get free. She hated that weakness, hated the tears welling up unwanted in her eyes and her frail whisper for him to stop. He pulled her into him. How was she supposed to fight this? “I don’t know what to do anymore. What’s the right answer here?”

  He whispered back, telling her things that lovers always say. That they would figure it out, find a way. How all that mattered was that they were together. The stuff that young people say, when they’re young and stupid as bricks and are convinced that they’re the only ones who have ever felt this way. It was past it’s sell-by date and they both knew it but he kept breathing it into her ear and she kept listening to it. Believing it.

  Who was the bigger fool?

  Tilda shivered, her arms quivering around his waist. She assumed it was the last of the sobs shuddering out of her system but it wasn’t. Her flesh goosed, prickled cold. The temperature was dropping fast.

  “Shit.” He pulled away.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “They’re here.”

  “Who?” Her first thought was the police.

  Gil crossed to the window and cocked his head to listen. He sniffed the air. The fear in his eyes was something she hadn’t seen before.

  “The coven.”