She turned her back to him, eyes wide and bright as she stared at a painting without looking at it. Why did he have to speak of such things? Now all she could do was picture herself in bridal white, or married to Valentín, cooking his meals and darning his socks. It was a thought that should not have terrified her, seeing as she liked him, even found him attractive in his country-boy way. But she shivered nevertheless.
Arturo went toward the piano and began to play. It was dark in that corner of the room, and he played by memory, his fingers dancing on the keys. He was playing a piece she liked, and she recognized this as an effort at a truce. Alba hesitated, biting her lip, then she grabbed one of the candelabras and went to the piano.
When he concluded his melody, Arturo rested his hands against the keys.
“I am sorry, Alba, for wounding you. I shouldn’t have spoken the way I did,” he said, his voice steady and low.
“You are forgiven.”
He gestured to the piano, but she shook her head. “No, you must play again. You’re better than me.”
“That can’t be. You play wonderfully, and you sing like an angel. You have such long fingers,” he said, and reached for her hand, carefully examining it.
She sat down next to him on the bench. “Tadeo has hairs on every knuckle. They look frightfully ugly. When he’s old I bet he’ll have hair growing out of his ears and nose. I hope you never have those ugly coarse hairs in your ears.”
“I hope you never have hair on your knuckles,” he said lightly.
They smiled in unison.
She gripped his hand now and examined it, as he had hers, first one side, then the other.
“Tadeo has dirt under his fingernails, and calluses. Even when he wears gloves, you can tell his hands are not a gentleman’s hands.”
“Well, he’s a farmer,” he said with a glib shrug.
“Valentín’s hands are hard, too. Most of the time he smells like horse. The women in Los Pinos, they can read palms and tell you your future. But you don’t believe in such things.”
“No, I don’t.”
Her lips parted to make a quip, but she felt a spark strike inside her chest.
“I like your hands best,” she said instead, the words hushed.
In the wan light of the candelabra the lines on his palm were faint, and when she looked at his face it was hard to discern his expression, though curiously his eyes seemed to burn bright. He looked down, shielding his gaze.
She shrank closer to him and turned her head. She thought she might put her lips against his ear and whisper…whisper what, she did not know. Her throat had been knit shut; her lips were parched. They had never been this close, this aware of each other.She thought she understood, for the first time, what certain words in her books meant. How Leda could have yielded to the swan, Persephone to darkness.
Alba stood up, her face burning, grateful for the poor illumination that Arturo would not see the blush on her cheeks or the wildness in her eyes.
“It’s late,” she said as an excuse, and rushed away. As she climbed the steps, she heard the notes of the piano again, a plaintive melody.
She lay awake a long time, unable to find a comfortable position on the bed, and woke up several times during the night. At one point, she thought she heard a thumping against her door, but when she opened her eyes the house had gone quiet.
In the morning, she rose belatedly and had to hurry downstairs to help serve breakfast. Tadeo was not at the table. She imagined he had kept his promise and left early to meet with Valentín.
After clearing the plates, Alba went back upstairs and began gathering the linens that had to be washed. When she walked into Tadeo’s room, she was greeted by a strange sight. The bed was unmade, although Tadeo was always tidy and made his bed early each morning. What was more, the bedsheets, the blanket, and the pillows were scattered around the room, as if he’d tossed them aside or stripped them off in a rush. The watercolor portrait showing Tadeo in his gray suit, smiling, lay flat upon the nightstand.
Alba slowly walked around the bed and saw that a pitcher had been overturned and broken. It lay in pieces on the floor. One of her brother’s boots had been tossed by the headboard.
It disquieted her, as if it were a coiled viper or a dangerous spider, and she held her breath as she reached for it. When she lifted the boot, she noticed that there was a patch of red on the floor.
It was blood.
1998: 4
Hideo was carefully stuffingthe homemade covershe’d printed into the plastic DVD cases. He planned to ship a dozen copies of a bootleggedBubblegum Crisisoriginal video animation the next morning. The big money, he’d told Minerva, was in hentai. He’d made a killing with a few fan-made VHS compilations of that kind.
Hideo’s true passion was first editions of Henry James and the occasional anthology chock-full of horror stories, like thatNorthern Frightshe’d gotten a hold of a few months before, but the bootlegs and Japanese manga he sold paid well. He’d considered getting into the toy collectible market, specifically the Beanie Baby niche—he knew a guy who smuggled them in from Canada, where the plush toys could be purchased at more attractive rates—but had found it both fiercely competitive and dull.
