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I start down the aisle when I remember something and turn back. “Hey, is Mrs. Z still living in town?”
Lila’s mother. I think of how I hung up the pay phone at the sound of her voice, about the way she looked at me when she found me in the hotel room at Lila’s birthday party.
How for years I thought she saw some secret darkness in me that even I hadn’t seen.
“Sure is,” Annie says. “Can’t leave Carney, or that husband of hers is going to come after her.”
“Come after her?”
“He thinks she knows where that daughter of theirs got to and won’t tell him. I told her not to worry. She’ll outlast him. Even the Resurrection Diamond can’t work forever.”
“That stone he got in Paris with Lila?” I remembered the diamond had something to do with Rasputin, but I didn’t remember that it had a name.
“Supposed to hold a curse so that the wearer never dies. Sounds like a load of crap, right? That would mean a stone could do more than deflect curses. But it seems to work. No one’s killed him yet, and plenty of people have tried. I’d love to have a look at it.” She tilts her head to the side. “You were in love with his girl Lila, huh? Now that I think of it, I remember you mooning after her. You and that brother of yours.”
“That was a long time ago.”
She leans up to kiss my cheek, which startles me into flinching. “Two brothers in love with the same woman never goes well.”
* * *
Barron dated lots of other girls while he dated Lila. Girls his age, girls that went to his school and had their own cars. Lila would call and ask for Barron, and I would tell some obvious sloppy lie that I hoped she saw through, but she always believed. Then we’d talk until either Barron came home in time to say good night to her or she fell asleep.
The worst times, though, were when he was home and he talked to her in a bored voice while he watched television.
“She’s just a kid,” he told me when I asked about her. “She’s not my real girlfriend. Besides, she lives, like, two hours away.”
“Why don’t you dump her, then?” I thought about the sound of her breath on the phone, evening out into sleep. I didn’t understand how he could want anyone more than her.
He grinned. “I don’t want to hurt her feelings.”
I slammed my hand down on the breakfast table. Stacks of plates and junk quivered. “You’re just dating her because she’s Zacharov’s daughter.”
His grin widened. “You don’t know that. Maybe I’m dating her just to mess with you.”
I wanted to tell her the truth about him, but then she’d have stopped calling.
* * *
The yakuza put pearls in their penises, one for every year they spend in jail. A guy makes a slit in the skin of his penis with a strip of bamboo and pushes the pearl inside. It must be spectacularly painful. I figured it couldn’t be nearly as bad to shove three tiny pebbles under the skin of my leg.
In the backseat of Grandad’s car I fold up the left leg of my jeans to my knee. I bought what I thought were the necessary supplies at the nearby mart, and now, in the parking lot, I dump them out of the plastic bag and onto the seat. First I shave a three-inch spot on my calf with a disposable razor and splash it clean with bottled water. It’s slow going. The razor’s cheap, and by the time I’m done, my skin is red and bleeding from tiny cuts.
I realize I don’t have anything to mop up what’s likely to be more blood than I expected. I take off my shirt and press it to the skin, ignoring the sting. I have a bottle of hydrogen peroxide to sterilize with, but I don’t. Maybe I’ll have the balls to use it at the end, but right now my leg is hurting enough.
Sliding a razor blade out of a box of them, I look guiltily out the window of the car. Families are walking through the lot, children pushed in the baskets of carts, men carrying trays of coffees. Don’t look, I tell them silently, and slide the sharp edge over my leg.
It goes in so easily and with so little pain that it frightens me. I feel only a sharp sting and a cold strangeness move through my limbs. It even seems to trick my skin, because for a moment there’s only a line on my leg where the flesh parts. Then blood blooms along the cut, first in spots, then welling up in a long strip of red.
Pushing in the pebbles is the agonizing part. It feels like I’m ripping off my own skin as I slide in the three pebbles, one for every year I thought I was a murderer. Each one hurts so much that I have to choke down nausea as I thread the needle, bend it, and give myself two terrible, sloppy, agonizing stitches.
I’m going to go home and get Lila and we’re getting as far away as we can. Maybe we’ll go to China and find someone to turn her back into a girl, maybe I’ll take her to her father and try to explain. But we’re going tonight.
I’m no further along in figuring out who the memory worker is than I was before the visit to Crooked Annie, but I’m more sure than ever that I’ve been worked. I’m guessing it’s Anton, since obviously he and Philip and Barron are conspiring together. I thought Anton worked luck, but he might have messed up my head to think that. If he is the memory worker, he sure messed up Barron’s.
And Philip just let it happen.
As I watch the hydrogen peroxide froth, I tell myself that it’s okay to be light-headed now, okay for my hands to shake, because it’s done. It’s over. Nobody is going to be able to make me forget one single thing. Not ever again.
