“Tell me what you know.” I still didn’t touch it, but he knew my acquiescence was a foregone conclusion. Over the course of our benighted relationship, I came to love his mom more than I ever loved him.
Sometimes I missed him; sometimes I hated him. I hadn’t thought I’d see him again. My life tends to run by chapters, and when I close one, there are no recurring characters, mainly because they lie beneath six feet of cold dirt. So I suppose Chance did well enough with me; he was still breathing when I left him.
While he seemed to gather his thoughts, I knelt and fished from the minifridge a couple of old-fashioned Cokes, the kind that come in bottles that remind you of a sexy woman’s figure. Because I was shaken, the Cokes managed to feed me glimpses of the manufacturing plant and the truck that carried them to the store, the sweaty man with a comb-over who stocked them on the cooler shelf before I bought them.
Focusing my will, I shut it down, a TV show nobody’s watching. I have to choose to read something, or I’d be bombarded with images all day long; it takes pure focus born of necessity and habit to keep my gift in check. The more traumatic of a charge an item holds, the worse it is. I had a feeling that whatever his mother’s Buddha held would be bad.
As if even my soda pop felt nervous about my situation, the glass bottle immediately began to sweat. I set the drinks down and found a bottle opener.
“I was tracking you.” His voice carried a bare-bones quality, like it was all he could do to keep from showing me how deep he was cut.
“How’d you find me?” I thought I’d been so careful, honest to God.
His smile flickered in time to the tumble of his silver coin along the knuckles of his right hand. Fully ambidextrous, he could do it with his left as well, but I wasn’t interested in his parlor tricks. At one time or another I’d seen them all, and I missed only the wicked thing he did with his tongue.
“Luck,” he said, as if it could’ve been anything else. “I showed your picture, and a car rental agent in Shreveport remembered you. She looked up where you dropped the car off for me.”
Well, naturally she did. She’d probably have volunteered a kidney and her firstborn if he’d only thought to ask. I hadn’t used my real name or any of the aliases Chance knew, but that clearly hadn’t slowed him down much.
“So you knew I returned the car in Laredo.”
He nodded, eyes fixed on the pewter icon still lying untouched on my counter. “Didn’t take too much to figure you must’ve made the border crossing. Then I just had to figure out where you went from Monterrey.”
And that would’ve been child’s play, based on how well he knew me. I fought down the dead man’s hand creeping up my back, trying to consider the question with a cool head. If he found me, could someone else? Someone who meant more harm than Chance?
Right now I couldn’t let myself think about that.
“How does your mom figure into this?” Wow, I sounded remote.
“She went missing in Laredo,” he answered, his tone dull like the pewter of her pocket Buddha. “The police have no leads and I . . . I swear to God, Corine, before this happened, I had no intention of looking you up. I just . . . I wanted closure. I wanted to know where you were, wanted to be sure you were okay.”
Oddly, I believed him. He hated uncertainty, hated not being in control, so my taking off must have ruffled him some. So he needed to find me. If he chose not to see me thereafter, that was his call. To Chance’s mind, having power and not exercising it was far different than being left in the dark. Frankly, it surprised me that it took him this long to give in to the urge to search.
Maybe, just maybe, once upon a time, I had been disappointed not to find him hot on my heels. Sometimes a woman runs because she wants to be chased. But I was over all that. And him. Right now, I just wanted to find the fastest way to make him disappear.
One thing puzzled me. “What was she doing in Texas?”
“She came out to meet me. Closed up the store in Tampa and called it a vacation.” I heard the guilt lacing his voice like strychnine tea, smooth on top but razors going down, and I felt mildly disgusted with myself for wanting to comfort him.
To distract myself from disastrous impulses, I cracked open the two drinks. The Coke bottles sat in water rings that I smeared idly with a fingertip. He took his and drained half the soda in one go. My hormones clamored; why couldn’t I stop watching his brown throat work as he swallowed?
“Is this going to be bad?” I looked at the pewter Buddha like it was a coiled rattler.
He exhaled, the sound of someone letting the air out of a tire real slow. “Maybe. I’m as afraid of what you’ll find as you are.”
That made sense. Nobody wants to receive bad news any more than I want to deliver it. Goddammit, I thought I was done with this for good. Bracing myself, I reached for the token before I could think better of it. It burned a little before it kicked in and I felt the pain on my palm where the metal blistered my skin.
You see, my gift springs from my mother’s sacrifice, dying for me in the fire, and every use of it carries me back to that night. But I didn’t let go. I accepted the price and let the vision come.
Fear subsumed me, bolstered by the resolve of a woman who made the better of two bad choices, a woman walking with a lesser devil. She definitely went of her own free will, though. No force, no physical coercion. But there’s no sound track; I can’t hear what’s been said; I just feel what they feel, see what they see.
Details were fuzzy, like I was looking through a dirty lens, but beyond the door, I saw a white truck parked. On the side it read Something Sanitation or maybe Salvation. My head throbbed, almost overwhelming the pain in my palm. Holding on, I watched while the pewter Buddha slipped from her fingers, bounced twice, where it lay until Chance found it.
Done.
The token clattered to the glass countertop as I let go and wrapped my wounded hand around my Coke bottle. It took a minute before the nausea subsided enough for me to speak, but I got it out in fits and starts, knees threatening to give and let me fall to the floor. Not the most horrific handling, but the mystery of Yi Min-chin reminded me of trees that grow in bayou country, miles of root hidden by dead green water.
I couldn’t figure why she’d left her luck. Did she think it was tapped out? She wouldn’t need it anymore? Well, if she’d known Chance was looking for me, she might have left it as a record. She’d seen me handle, and she knew the scars on my palms didn’t come from a self-mutilation fetish. So maybe that was why. Or maybe it was a map; maybe something I’d seen could help us find her.
Chance had probably been turning over similar thoughts. Without a word, though, he reached into his pocket and withdrew a tiny green tin. I felt a spurt of annoyance he’d been that sure of me, but at the same time I appreciated his forethought. His mom had made it for me: honey, aloe, and papaya—she is (or was) a certified homeopathy practitioner.
“Let me have your hand.” Delicate as butterfly kisses, he smoothed salve over my skin where scars crisscrossed until you couldn’t tell where one stopped and others began. The unguent soothed immediately, numbing the worst of the trauma. After all this time, I didn’t let myself consider it might be his touch; he’d always been able to make the top of my head tingle with just a fingertip.
“Thanks.”
I prefer handling textiles, where I feel like the item is afire in my hand but it never actually catches, and I don’t wear new marks afterward. But over the years I’ve been offered a lot of metal: rings burning in concentric circles, bracelets leaving welts, and larger items doing damage that it took a doctor to treat.
Why had I done it for so long?
Clients never did understand why I wouldn’t handle multiple objects the same day, why they had to pay for a second consultation. I have a pretty high threshold for pain, but that’s just beyond me, by and large. On occasion, I’ve pushed myself to two and effectively crippled both hands.
I won’t do that unless it’s dire; the last time it was to try to find an eight-year-old girl yanked out of her own yard. The swing was still moving when her mama missed her. They found her alive because of Chance and me. We did some good, back in the day, and it helps offset what came later.
Once upon a time, he fed me soup and ice cream after we saved the kid. We’d watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s in bed. He had a weakness for Audrey Hepburn, for polished, elegant women, and I never knew what he saw in me. He used to act like he could read my future in my ruined lifeline. I wondered what he saw now, bent over my palm.
At length he raised his head and folded my fingers back. My heart remembered how he used to pretend he was sealing up a kiss for me to save for later. It hadn’t all been bad or I wouldn’t have stayed so long.
We stared at each other, more than the expanse of a glass case between us.
The Devil Makes a Deal
“You’re going to help me, aren’t you?” Chance, vulnerable—that was something I’d seen only a handful of times in the three years we were together. This time, it might actually be genuine, and to cover my uncertainty, I took a sip of my Coke.
“I thought I just did.” I felt surprised I could sound so cold, particularly where his mother was concerned.
My burned palm tingled in anticipation of what he would ultimately ask me to do. Sure, he’d hem and haw, try to charm his way around asking outright, but the fact of the matter was, he intended to use me to follow her trail. I’m not a human bloodhound, so it’s stupid and awkward, but we’ve done it successfully four times before, including the salvation of that little girl, and the need had never been this personal.
“Not what I meant.” He tried on the old smile with a c*ck of his head, and I found it no longer rendered me witless.
“I know.” My answering smile felt touched with melancholy as I moved from behind the counter to flip the sign on the door to CERRADO. I surprised a mustachioed man on his way in, and Señor Alvarez offered an apologetic look, clutching a red plastic bag. He was a slight man of indeterminate age, always clad in tan pants and a white undershirt.