The Halo Effect

58

After I was finished giving a statement at the precinct house, Nina took me back to her apartment, put me in her bed and sat next to me, waiting for me to fall asleep. But I couldn’t.

In the morning I called Dulcie and told her only as much as I had to so that it wouldn’t alarm her that I was asking her to stay with her father for a few more days. And then Nina and I took a long walk to Central Park and continued walking. All the way up to the reservoir, and then we worked our way down, stopping at our favorite spot: the Conservatory Garden, which was ablaze with flowers-roses and delphiniums, foxgloves and begonias. We sat and watched birds pecking at the dirt, but we didn’t say much about anything that mattered. Not yet.

I just sat and took in the summer scents and let them erase the other odors from my head. The sun burned in my eyes and almost obliterated the images that had been seared there.

Afterward we took a taxi to the hospital where Cleo had been taken the night before. Gil was there, holding vigil, and he told us that she was fine and the doctors thought she might be able to leave in another forty-eight hours.

“And then I want to get back into therapy with you,” she told me.

“Not with me. After what we’ve been through together, I can’t. I have no objectivity left.”

“You saved my life,” she said, and took my hand.

“I wish I had. But it’s really the reverse. You saved my life. You stabbed him.”

I couldn’t say the words without shaking. Without shutting my eyes against the sight of Elias falling back and pulling me with him, from the feeling of his fingers around my neck. My hand instinctively went there now. When would I stop wanting to touch my own neck? When would the black-and-blue necklace of bruises go away?

“We saved each other.” She smiled.

Nina and Gil went downstairs to get coffee and we were alone. Two sisters, related by blood, but not ours. A maniac’s blood, which together we had spilled.

“How did you do it, Cleo? You’d been bound and gagged in that closet for almost two weeks. How did you do it?”

“I wasn’t there. Not me. I played a part. The part of a prostitute being held by a madman. She’s the one who takes over when I’m with clients.”

I nodded. I knew about that. It was acting.

“I really want to get back into therapy,” she repeated.

I couldn’t help her with the scars she had left and the questions she would need to ask and answer. “You can see Nina. She’s the best therapist I know,” I told her.

“No, you are. You saved my life. I can’t do much better than that.”

“What saved our lives were those shoes. Weapons. You told me that the first time you came to see me.”

She took my hand and held it. I watched us from a distance. She was skinny and exhausted. Held captive by a man who was sure he could take a whore and turn her into a Madonna. Even if it killed her.

And it almost had.