Chapter Text
It was sunset by the time he parked across the road from Debbie's. She couldn't tell whether it was a house or a low block of apartments, but it had the marks of youth. Uncut grass, poorly lit facade, but a warm ambience, from behind, as though the music that carried to the street, illuminated the brick from within. An arrangement of seating on the front porch. Chairs on chains. Glass coffee tables. Debbie.
Must've heard the car coming. She'd know it on sight. Her head raised from her book in shameless curiosity. Hair trailing down one side of her shoulders. If their previous encounter had done a number, it wasn't showing.
Carmen itched at her cast.
"I booked the tickets," said Holden. He put the car in neutral, pulled the handbrake. Turned, physically, in his seat. Like he was making sure he secured a mental image of her before she departed from the car. The lack of faith that she would return. "I'll pick you up. And I can walk you in ..."
"I need a break from your face," said Carmen.
"Understandable."
She flinched: "Don't do that. I don't like it when you do that."
He paused. Rearranging to the front. Then, turning his head, as though her knee were the object of fascination: "What am I doing?"
"Self-abasing," she said.
"You'd prefer I didn't."
"Sure."
Holden cast his gaze over the neighborhood, sweeping, sweeping, then stumbling, as if by chance, on their location. The presence of his ex-girlfriend, their third set of eyes. Who did he think he was fooling? He raised a hand, palm splayed. A movement that was wave shaped. Even from a distance, Carmen saw the face Debbie pulled. Could imagine what she was thinking. What? Oh. Right. Ha.
"She cheated on me. I know it's easy to be charmed by her. To think she's an angel," said Holden. "I ended it."
Is that what he'd thought of women? Cherubs painted on a stained glass windows. The Bible was as much scythes as it was wives. Carmen could've told him that without speaking. All he'd have had to do was really look.
So Debbie had cheated. So Elias's wedding band had had a line from Rumi engraved on its underside. 'The wound is the place where the Light enters you.' If he'd been true to form, he would've chosen 'Today I am wise' and left it there. After all, it was an exception that proved the rule: most people were wrong.
"An affair is the least of my concerns," Carmen said. "Maybe you need to talk to a therapist about it."
A strange air developed about him, like he'd cleaved himself, momentarily, from view of her. A look that seemed to say he had as much idea of what was to happen as she did. Carmen needed to leave. She reached down for the overnight bag he had packed her. Pushed out into the night.
Holden wound down the window as she crossed the street: "I'll see you tomorrow?"
Carmen nodded.
Stepping onto the footpath awoke something within her. A sense of texture. Like her body had remembered sensation. Carmen stopped just short of the gate. In her chest, a bee's hive. It seemed so stupid. She had been sleeping in a strange man's bed. A woman was a different beast. No sleepovers for the foster kid, no best friends, no invisible ink. She looked at the stairs, and the muted porch light, wrapping around the metal beams. Debbie was watching her, Holden was watching her. There was no getting back in that car.
Debbie picked up the cigarette pack from the table and waved it. Peace offering. Carmen nodded and ascended.
The cigarette caught dry on her inner lip, bobbing with the flow of Debbie's words: "You know he's still here."
"What?" Carmen said. She dropped her bag at the foot of a wicker chair, suspended as Debbie's was, from the ceiling.
"Don't turn around. He doesn't need the satisfaction," Debbie swung forward on her wooden bench, using the tops of her feet to prop herself in place. She lit it in her own mouth, embers flaring, then passed it to Carmen. Faint ring of saliva, the trade of a bodily fingerprint, without the middle man. "Yep, he's checking the steering wheel."
The nicotine smoke hit the back of Carmen's throat. Two days had left her too clean. She coughed. Debbie smirked.
"Really?" She said.
"Mmhmm," Debbie relaxed against the wood. She blew a clean ring into the air above. "In my defense, he was interested in Durkheim. Well, in hearing me talk about Durkheim. I thought he would be different. I guess I liked the sound of my voice too much."
They were similar, Holden and her. Not on first glance, but she could sense the rhythm, of their relationship, how she had stepped into memory. The brief, wistful glaze in Debbie's eyes. Light, like his. Carmen felt the nerves creeping back in. Accepting this invitation so she wouldn't face him. Hadn't thought about the fact his scent would still be around. The engine started up.
She couldn't help herself looking over her shoulder as he pulled off into the night.
"I've been there," she said.
"Looks like you still are."
Debbie brushed a hand through her hair, catching on the light snags. She took the cigarette from her lips and wriggled it over the ash tray. They dipped into silence. It was not unpleasant. She needed a moment to let this all wash through. Bill's house, the hospital, the ward. They were lodged in her throat like bones from a fish, and after all this, New York waiting in the distance. When had the people of Pompeii known to look to the sky? She closed her eyes. To hold on, to analyse, threatened to plummet her to the depths of dread. She focused on her breathing: listening, sensing, building the image of the air's pathway to her lungs.
Eventually, Carmen's eyes opened and found the splayed book spine. Totem and Taboo.
"You're reading Freud," said Carmen.
Debbie nodded. "That I am."
"Why?"
"I hate myself." A shrug. "I hate decency."
"Uh huh," said Carmen. "My analyst was a Freudian."
"Oh?" Said Debbie.
"I fucked him."
"By the sounds of it," she gestured to the book, "he would've wanted to you."
They both laughed. A feeling close to relief, only to reveal the bottom of itself. Carmen felt like she owed her an apology. The sneaking suspicion that Debbie had not offered this arrangement but that Holden had demanded it.
"Should I cook for you?" Carmen wondered out loud. Debbie pulled a face.
"Why would you ever do that?" She said. "We can order pizza."
"Okay," said Carmen.
Debbie snorted: "So, has he done the routine to you as well?"
Carmen didn't want to answer. This switch in the tracks had invoked vertigo. Weren't they just on pizza?
"The ..."
"The trying to read your mind. Playing Sherlock. You're holding your cigarette, because this and that, because so and so," Debbie mimed a hand movement. "I just, when I hear you talk, I hear me talk, and it's wigging me out."
"I think we talk different," said Carmen.
"We do now, yes," Debbie said. "Maybe that's proof, that rehabilitation really does work."
Before Carmen could reply, Debbie had ashed out her cigarette. She rose. Walking to the door, not missing a beat. Carmen hurried to follow. As she opened the door, she turned to look Carmen up and down.
Narrowed her eyes: "Do you smoke ... Other things?"
Suspicion on the ground of May '68. Carmen knew Debbie would've burned a bra or two if they'd both been a little older. Neither of them were perfect, though. They had, after all, both shacked up with a G-man.
"Not since college."
"Okay." Debbie nodded, stepping up and propping the door open with her back. "Well, I'm still in college, so."
Carmen nodded, and passed her by. Once in the foyer, the door closed and sealed them into an artificial dark. Debbie gestured to a door on the left, opened it up with a creak. A wedge of light, dissected on the floorboards. Their arms and shoulders, brushing, nudging. After you, Debbie said with the notion of her head. Flat affect and alert eyes. Carmen hadn't known she would be like this.
Neither could she have guessed the life that teemed within. Debbie's quarters were vast and storied. Layered textiles. Lamps, ornamental and functional. A great big Persian rug. Books stacked on books. A well worn couch, hookah in the corner. Typewriter. Notes. Velvet and the attempts to mask marijuana smoke with incense.
"Make yourself at home," said Debbie. "You wanna take a bath, take a bath. You wanna tell me your pizza order, you can do that too. The spare room's ..."
She continued further in. Carmen caught herself distracted by a pack of tarot balanced on an antique silver platter. She rushed to keep up. Debbie opened up the bathroom, turned on the light. Three paces down the hall, did the same for the end.
"Here. Sorry it's a bit cramped. I gave you the clean sheets. You can eat whatever's in the fridge. Except the orange juice. That's mine."
"Thank you." Carmen muttered, putting her bag at the foot of the bed. It was, indeed, cramped, but Carmen was glad. She would've more readily called it snug, part-linen closet, part-daybed. "I think I should probably have a shower."
"Don't have a shower, have a bath. Easier to not get your cast wet." Debbie paused. "You fucked up Bill's car pretty good, by the way."
Carmen winced. "Yeah, Holden said he would pay for it."
A snort: "Yeah, he will. Probably won't live it down until retirement." She chuckled. "I'll be in the kitchen."
It occurred to Carmen, as the tub filled, that she had wanted to hate this woman.
There had been a part of her that had accepted Holden's command, in order to step inside and confirm her suspicions. That Debbie was not like her. And that she was better. This venom caught her off-guard, not it's presence but the full formation of it in her psyche. She had hated someone without knowing that she had ingested them. Holden had given her a perfect reason. She still couldn't think of their date, even that word wanted to rot on her tongue. Carmen had refused to linger. Insisted everything started and finished with him. She had been anything but neutral. She felt that, now.
There was a jasmine and white tea bath oil in the cupboard. Carmen poured it into the spray. The mirror had acquired a layer of condensation. Music crept beneath the door, distorted but evident. She stripped to her skin.
The evidence of disaster on her body. Holden must have caught her just in time. Her arm had had its own path. She might've died. But she hadn't, she was alive. Alive and in the bathroom of someone he might have loved. Love. Carmen wondered if that's how he would've labelled it. It seemed like something Holden would say to placate. It sounded like something Debbie would've known better than to believe. But she'd admitted to her own weakness. He'd listened to Durkheim. He'd humored her. The Achilles' heel of an intelligent woman. He might think I'm actually someone.
But who was Carmen?
She sunk into the tub, despite the fact it was too hot. That bite, a deep heat that went to the bone. She worked up a lather to keep her thoughts at bay. Because she hadn't hated Debbie on principle. No, much worse.
Debbie was her opposite. She couldn't have realized to what extent, but it didn't take a genius. Brunette and blonde, even if the truth had been delayed. Easy versus uptight. Debbie's home and Carmen with her air of vagrancy. Normalcy and ...
Without meaning to, she had begun to cry. Not with tear. Dry, wracking sobs. Sobs that tore away at her chest. That she clung to, despite their jerk to escape. Debbie was a human. What did that make Carmen? A project. A condition. Holden's key to a case, his happy accident, a genius intuition that spiralled deep. And she had accepted that. Why had she accepted that?
She didn't hate Debbie. She didn't hate Holden either. She hated herself. For the fact she looked back. She'd wanted to see him drive away, because it stung. He'd taken something from her. Not stolen, gifted. This was kid logic. There were no take backs. She wanted to feel it, all through his skin.
Disgusting. She was mad. This was madness. She sunk beneath the water.
A sense of stability had reconfigured itself after she had dried off, as though she'd scrubbed her skin hard enough, and all the rest had leaked out. She used the little yellow hair dryer on high, running a hand through her hair. The last of the dye had disappeared down the drain. No strawberry, all her. But it had gotten long. Now it looked bedraggled. Debbie probably oiled hers, it was like a mane. There were a pair of scissors in a cup that held three toothbrushes. She ran one under the steaming tap as she considered her predicament.
"Can you cut it off?"
Debbie pushed back from her desk and swivelled in her chair. She folded her arms over her chest, a discerning squint. She motioned with her hand to her jaw, tapping it with the flat of her fingers. Carmen gestured a little lower.
Debbie hit the spot. A little halfway down her neck.
"Alright."
She had a Chaka Khan record spinning as she folded the corner of the carpet to make space. Carmen drew the towel around her shoulders and straightened up against the metal bar stool. Debbie had a spray bottle she used for ironing and a wide toothed comb.
"You have pretty hair," said Debbie.
"It makes me look ..."
"Pretty," said Debbie.
"Fine, fine," Carmen's laughter was shy. "We can go with that."
The first cut was brutal. She felt the clump fall to the ground. Never had it been that long, or this short. She knew that Debbie was finding this quite amusing, but she refused to confirm. After a few more snips, she faded into the background, a fragrant shadow falling over Carmen's shoulder. You're like my fairy godmother, she wanted to say, but didn't want to find out how it would land. The doorbell chimed. The pizzas, steaming on a table that Debbie dragged over. Cheese and vegetarian supreme. Carmen had gone off of meat for the time being.
"You need to close your eyes for the reveal. I can't spin you around, I didn't have the foresight. But we can make do."
The towel came off. Carmen shook the itch off her shoulders. She obeyed, covering her eyes. "When you're ready." Debbie held the mirror up at an angle. Oh. Was that her?
Carmen's fingers groped at the empty air. It was gone. Cut to the throat, just like they'd said. She'd done it. She'd let something go.
Debbie took a step forward and ruffled it up. "You'd look like Wendy if it's straight. Lucky you have a wave, I guess."
She laughed. Still in shock. "Should you give me bangs?"
A snort, shake of the head. "That'd be trying too hard."
"Can I ask something?" Carmen said, suddenly. Her hesitation was met with silence, a silence that told her to go on. "What did he say to you?"
Debbie lowered the mirror, turning around to prop it up against the bookcase. She slanted her forearm against her brow. A sigh that merged on a raspberry. "Ah, whatever. You've been through enough," she said. More to herself than Carmen. "He was just, saying he was pretty fucked up. That he'd had this panic, episode, thing, and that he couldn't sleep. Wanted advice. Wanted something. You can see why I didn't want to say."
Advice. Carmen chewed on her lip. Couldn't sleep. She hadn't considered the impact on him. The temptation to, growing. Pretty fucked up. A guilty conscience? A feeling that he was doing wrong, by her?
"Don't get ahead of yourself. Seriously," Debbie said. "I can tell what you're thinking. I've literally been in the same spot. I don't want to spoil the ending for you, but when I say he doesn't care ..." She clutched at her brow, shaking her head. "No, it's not that simple. You're smart enough to figure that. But that's the problem, do you get me? He will drive you crazy, trying to guess at the version of you he has in his head, come to realize, actually, that version only matters as far as he can throw it."
"I wish this would sink," Carmen said. She bent her knee against the stool. "I want it to. I really do."
"I know," said Debbie. "But that's not gonna happen. Because you're in his world. And his world is work. And you don't escape work." She shook her head. "You're not listening to a word of this. I'm wasting my breath. Since when has a person ever done something they were told to do? Never. But if you're gonna do anything else while you're here, and out of the net, take a walk. There's a lake nearby. Go first thing in the morning. You'll need to sleep on it first."
After that, the blunt came out. They passed it back and forth on the porch, keeping the conversation light. Grad school complaints, the politics of academia. A rant about Freud and the orthodoxy wars. "But I've heard a lot coming out of France about this Lacan guy." Carmen, showing her institutional blind spot, ignorance to anything European. By 10, they retired. That should've been the end.
It was, for the most part. She had been unable to sleep. Dragging out the bag he'd packed, still unopened: she'd opted to sleep in her underwear than to hazard his competence, or lack thereof. This scene was not unfamiliar. The trips with boyfriends, asking them to remember that one specific thing, we all know how it ends. Holden certainly came off as Type A, but he wasn't above curation.
Carmen could put all the asterisks on this decision, but it didn't matter. She was going to open it anyway.
And what was inside? Her clothes. Laundered, by the feel, and folded like hospital edges. Like origami. Carmen inhaled deeply. Had he spritzed his cologne inside? Her socks in neat little rolls. Spare change of shoes, all wrapped up in plastic. Toothbrush, paste, chapstick in a ziplock bag. Hairbrush. A box of tissues and q-tips, what was this?
And, oh. A bra. Her underwear. At the very bottom, untouched by her mad path down.
She closed the bag, bright red in the face. Sinking onto her haunches, clutching her lower belly. She formed a fist and pressed her lips against her knuckles. The waves of heat broke against her on all sides. Flashes of their time together, when the temperature had ramped up, and she had been convinced he had never seen her naked. That it wasn't her body he had been touching.
He had laid her bare. She had wanted it. These parallel lines converged.
Carmen took the walk the next day in clothes that Debbie offered her, without clarifying whether she would give them back.
It was a distance until she found the lake. No foot traffic, and the roads were quiet. She'd clipped Debbie's transistor radio to a belt loop on her jeans. It was the size of a chocolate bar and it bumped with the pace of her feet. The local station. Lido Shuffle, The Beatles. Stevie, going her own way. Lindsey, at the top of the track. The wind was terse. It swept the leaves with a flat palm, baring them to the sun, in and out of saturation. The traffic that passed sounding like waves crashed up against the shore. Carmen pictured herself standing in the middle of the road. Jolted in and out. She stuck to the part of the path that gave way to the grass. Safety. From the cars. From herself.
Gordon Lightfoot. If you could read my mind. The melancholy in the croon. Men singing ballads about books without endings, now that would have been brave. Turn her back on this story, and run off, to begin again. And she could have. She would have. If she'd had the stones.
Eagle Rock. Fernando. She walked the circumference of the lake. It was a stretch past dawn and the sun was rising. Golden hour, the trees lit up like toffee apples. Passing beneath nature's arches, leaves soft on her bare shoulders. High reeds rising from the lake, cattails split open from the cold, insides falling in slow motion, waiting for the breeze. Walking, accidentally, into the dried fingers of a leering branch. Life, teeming at the edges. Crackle, like a Geiger meter. Yes, she was radioactive. But when she drew away, the sound remained its constant.
Existing, affecting, being.
On the way back, Angie played. The Rolling Stones. She felt it playing on his car radio. She felt the window roll down and her arm, floating alongside herself, drifting in the pull. She felt herself look toward him. She felt him smile, crinkle his eyes. She felt the sun hit him in all the places he might've wished it wouldn't. She felt herself refuse to look away.
Today, she would leave by his side, on a plane bound for New York. She would find herself in front of Elias and threaten to break. And after that, she would keep on living. It would simply be another day.