Orphan X

50 The Ghost of Her Lips

In the cold, pale light of morning, Evan rides in the passenger seat of the dark sedan. He is a boy, early in his training with Jack, and they are headed to another surprise session. Acclimated to the vicissitudes of stress and adrenaline, Evan has learned not to brace himself. There is no point. In twenty minutes he might be shoved off a bridge onto a landing pad (fun), drownproofed in cold water with his hands and feet bound (not fun), or shot full of sodium pentothal (disorienting but ineffective).

A Volvo pulls up alongside them, and as he is prone to do, Evan watches the family inside. The kids are three across in the back, quarreling and coloring and pigging their noses against the windows. The car falls behind them.

The next block accommodates an elementary school. Parents are dropping off kids with backpacks and crumpled bag lunches and bright-colored thermoses. The students run to and fro and talk in animated cliques.

Evan wonders what they talk about.

After the day’s session (mace-spray training—not fun), they return home. Bleary-eyed, Evan stacks firewood by the side of the house, the rough bark scraping his forearms. He hears no rustle behind him, but when he turns, Jack is there in his 501s and flannel shirt with each sleeve cuffed twice, neatly.

“You need to talk,” Jack tells him.

Evan thrusts the logs atop the stack, scratches at his arms. “Just me, huh? Alone? Always? That’s how it’ll be?”

The setting Virginia sun frames Jack’s broad form, bestowing on him a celestial grandeur. “That’s right,” he says.

“Who said that thing about one twig can break? But a bundle is strong?”

“It’s attributed to Tecumseh,” Jack says. “But who the hell knows.” He studies Evan, his lips twitching. Evan has come to know that this means he is processing, rooting out the situation beneath the situation. Jack gestures to the brush along the side of the house. “Gather a bunch of twigs.”

Evan does.

Jack crouches, unties his shoe, yanks the lace free, and uses it to fasten the bundle. Then he unfolds his pocketknife, thumbs up the blade, and hammers it through the twigs. They crack uniformly at the midpoint. Jack grabs a single twig, lays it on the ground by itself, hands Evan the knife. “Have at it.”

Evan tries, but the solitary twig pops free from the steel point, scarred yet intact. He stabs and stabs but the twig keeps skittering away, unwilling to be pinned down. Evan finally looks up, defeated. “Okay,” he says. “I get it. But…”

“Talk.”

“Won’t it be lonely?”

“Yes.”

In his head Evan grasps for something to hold on to, a brass ring he can carry out of today’s journey past the Volvo and the school, through the clouds of mace, into the promise of solitude. In the face of the unknown, as always, he tries to be game. He polishes off one of Papa Z’s old chestnuts: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, I guess,” he says.

Jack’s eyes are as doleful as Evan has ever seen them. “Sometimes,” he says. “But the rest of the time, it just makes you weaker.”

The knocking inside Evan’s head became a knocking in the outside world.

Someone at the penthouse door.

Palming sleep from his eyes, he swung his legs over the side of the bed with less effort than he anticipated. Scattered on the floor, various syringes, depleted saline bags, wads of gauze. A glance at the clock showed that it had been two and a half days since he’d stumbled home. Ample time for his spilled blood to be discovered, surveillance footage reviewed, officials alerted.

He’d healed up quickly, the Epo working its modern medical magic. The shiny skin at the wound’s edge remained tender, and he still felt a nasty sting in his gut when he bent over, but the pain had mostly lifted. He wouldn’t be doing sit-ups anytime soon, but as of this morning he was generally mobile.

He pulled on a loose T-shirt and a pair of jeans, picked up his Wilson Combat pistol, and trudged up the hall. If it was the cops, he’d keep the front door bolted and rappel gingerly out the window.

The time had come, perhaps, to leave everything behind.

The inset surveillance screen showed Hugh Walters bristling in a Fila tracksuit. Evan tucked his pistol into the back of his jeans and opened the door.

“You have some explaining to do,” Hugh said.

“I understand,” Evan replied. “Before you do anything, can you just give me—”

“You precipitously left the HOA meeting before voting was completed. As a result I reviewed your attendance record, and do you know what I found?”

Midsentence, Evan froze. Poleaxed, he managed to shake his head.

“Your attendance record falls below the requirements—requirements, not suggestions—of the HOA guidebook.”

Evan stepped out into the corridor. No blood drops on the carpet, nor finger streaks along the walls. It had been cleaned already? Without Hugh’s finding out?

“As such,” Hugh said, “you’ll be assessed a fine, per the regs, of six hundred dollars.”

“A fine,” Evan repeated.

Their amateur-scientist rapport had clearly evaporated, but that was the least of Evan’s concerns. He needed to find out if he’d been compromised — and by whom.

With a sigh, Hugh pulled off his black-framed eyeglasses and rubbed his eyes. “Look, Evan. I know this stuff isn’t a priority for you. Believe it or not, it’s not for me either. To be frank, I don’t really give a shit about revamping the carpets or a new noise ordinance.”

Evan blinked at him.

“But for a lot of us, a sense of community is important. And here in the big city? For some of us? This is all we have. So just … think about it, okay?”

Caught off guard by Hugh’s sudden detour, Evan nodded. “I will.”

A ding down the hall announced the elevator’s arrival. Mia and Peter emerged, Mia with a bag of groceries clutched in her arms, the requisite French loaf poking out of the top.

“Ah,” Hugh said. “Perhaps I judged too soon.” Offering Evan a sly tip of the head, he moved off down the corridor, acknowledging Mia and Peter as they passed.

Evan waited in the doorway for them to approach. Peter tugged on the straps of his backpack, seating the weight higher on his shoulders.

“Can we come in?” Mia asked.

Evan stepped aside, letting them enter. Peter scooted around the kitchen island, Mia spinning in a slow three-sixty to take in the great room. “Wow. Serious digs.”

It occurred to Evan that no one had been inside his place socially. Ever.

“We wanted to bring you this.” She set the grocery bag down on the counter. “And to make sure you’re not … you know. Dead.”

Peter was leaning with both hands and his forehead against the Sub-Zero, exhaling in an attempt to fog the stainless steel. Mia and Evan moved farther into the condo, edging into a relative privacy. She drifted by the kickboxing station and gave the heavy bag a little poke.

“So how exactly did you wind up with your stomach…?” Her hands came up. “Wait. I don’t want to know. I can’t know.”

He walked over, leaned against the opposite side of the heavy bag. “It was you. You cleaned up the blood for me.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Why? You didn’t owe me anything. What I did for you and Peter—”

“It’s not because I owed you, Evan. It’s because I wanted you…” She wet her lips. “Well. Maybe you’ll know what it means to need someone now.”

A sensation tugged at him, decades old. Something he’d seen in the faces of those kids he used to watch in passing cars. The bundle of sticks, vulnerable to Jack’s knife. Bright thermoses and bag lunches. He thought about that moment in Mia’s bedroom, the softness of her lips, the piano trill that straightened her spine. What makes you happy? How different from Katrin with her passion tattoo and bloodred mouth, all allure and high stakes and porcelain skin, intoxicating right up until the moment she slipped a knife beneath his ribs. What makes you happy? What if that moment with Mia, laced with a hint of lemongrass and scored by “Hymn to Freedom,” had taken a different course? Argue with me. Make it my fault. Get angry.

“Consider it a parting gift,” she said.

His face must have shown more than he wanted it to, because her eyes welled and she said, “I’m sorry, Evan. But I—we—can’t have you around. It’s too dangerous.” She reached out, her fingers resting lightly on his chest. “I’d be an irresponsible parent if I—”

“Thank you,” he said. “For what you did.”

She inhaled, her chest rising. “This is it, then.”

“Okay,” he said. “This is it.”

She turned to go, then paused. “Your forehead,” she said. “It’s cut.”

He lifted his fingers. A nick from the blowback when he’d shot out the window. “It’s nothing.”

“Nope,” she said, digging in her purse. She came out with a colorful Band-Aid and stripped off the wrapping. Kermit with his gaping grin.

“Really?” Evan said.

“’Fraid so.”

He bent to her, and she smoothed it onto his forehead with her thumbs. She hesitated, then kissed his forehead. “Good-bye, Evan.”

“Good-bye.”

He heard her shoes tap over to the kitchen and then two sets of footsteps moving to the front door. It opened and closed.

For a time he stood there, the ghost of her lips lingering on his face.