She is strapped into a chair, her limbs bound, her head bound. Every bit of her bound, except for her eyes and her mouth. The music stand in front of the bench to which she is tied is incongruous, out of place in this dark room where military equipment beeps along the walls, like great cats waiting in the shadows with glowing eyes made of dials and buttons. The music stand holds lines upon lines--of troop movements, not compositions. Enemy movements. With furtive prodding from uniformed figures standing just out of her limited sightline, she tries again and again to read out each line. Gloved hands turn the pages when she reaches the end. These are educated guesses at troop movements in different places that are not yet war zones. The words snare in her throat. No one helps her when she gags on the untrue statements, unable to voice anything but her misery. Once in a great while, a line from the pages does make it past her parched, cracked lips. When that happens, she can hear orders barked out over a loudspeaker and the start of planes and drones even from her basement prison. The alert alarms ring and buzz even as she grapples with the next line stuck in her throat.
A movie cliché: my dreams incorporated the ringing phone that finally roused me. I was grateful for the rescue from my nightmares, until I saw the name flashing on the screen. My first attempt to answer reminded me too much of my nightmarish struggle as words failed to form in my dry mouth. I took a drink of the stale water on my bedside table. My numb fingers scraped the damp hair stuck in my mouth out of the way, and then I tried again.
“What do you want, Erin?” I tried to scold her, tell her it was three in the morning, but I couldn’t voice the words--a bleary glance at my phone’s too-bright screen told me it was actually three-oh-three. Damn it. I put the phone back to my ear as Erin began to speak.
“Tell me Dan is cheating on me.” I jerked my phone away from my ear. I pictured her in the apartment she and Dan shared, cupping her cutting-edge phone in her hands. I knew how she worried, what she looked like when she was demanding answers like this. Sitting in the middle of her living room floor, everything spotless because she cleans when she worries. Bent over the hands on her lap, the phone in her hands, as though it was something precious, and not just her friend on speakerphone.
"I would really rather we talked in person,” I said. I glanced around my room by the light of my phone. I’d slept in my clothes; they were damp with sweat. I thought there might be some folded laundry on my computer chair, but I didn’t want to do the ballet steps it would take to get to it without stepping on something breakable on the floor--not this early, not in the dark, and not for this reason.
“Dan has four days off after this. I need to know now,” Erin said. She was trying to plead. She wasn’t very good at it. I finally unearthed a pair of pants hidden in the tangle of blankets at the foot of the bed. I squished the phone to my shoulder with my head and wrangled off my damp jeans so that I could pull the almost-clean ones on.
“Would you like to meet me at the bakery in about twenty minutes?” I asked as I struggled with the fly on my pants. Finding a shirt was more difficult. I settled on a rumpled blouse I fished out from under the bed, over my sweaty tank top.
“No.” The line went dead. I imagined her, crying like she did. How her eyes squeezed almost closed, but the tears fell out anyway. Her lip curled up like some sorrowed sneer, and the red blotches… if her need to know got the best of her stubbornness, the blotches and tears would have gone away by the time she got there.
Rhiannon’s Bakery was just down the street from my apartment. Ree wasn’t here, but her son, Ronan, was cleaning tables. He looked up to give me a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. His eyes flicked to the space behind me. That smile faded.
"She’s meeting me here in a bit,” I reassured him. I was pleased that the words came out so easily--she was going to come. “I’ll take a hot chocolate now, no whipped cream, and a couple of the assorted. Erin’ll want coffee.” No real magic to that; Erin always wanted coffee.
I’d only had my hot chocolate for about a minute when Erin walked in; it wasn’t even cool enough to drink yet. And he’d put whipped cream on it.
I couldn’t blame Ronan. The American melting pot had outdone itself with Erin. She looked Spanish right now, in the winter, with olive skin and her dark hair. Erin’s skin darkened in the summer; she could pass as Native, as black, as hispanic, as white, depending on the season. Her hazel eyes could look dark--like they did now, reflecting her black winter coat--or light, almost green. High cheekbones, full, sensual lips… no wonder the poor Irish kid tripped over himself bringing her coffee.
It wasn’t that I begrudged Erin her face. Yes, I was scruffy, with blonde hair too fine and thin to grow past my shoulders that was rife with dead ends, with pale skin that showed bags under my eyes and bruises everywhere else. I looked chalky and unhealthy under the bakery’s fluorescent lights. But knew where Erin’s modelesque looks and height had gotten her. My looks weren’t why people wanted to speak with me, anyway. Including Erin.
“Where is Dan now, anyway?” I asked once Ronan finally ducked into the kitchen. Erin didn’t meet my eyes. She toyed with her coffee and then began tearing strips off of the paper placemats and making the ads on it more nonsensical than they started. “I’d thought he had today off, too."
“His boss asked him to come in today,” she said. “That’s what he told me. Somebody else got hurt, and he had to fill in. He’s getting overtime for it.” I tried repeating her words, but I couldn’t get them through my lips. Her green-black eyes snapped from the pile of paper in front of her to my spasming throat. “He is cheating on me, isn’t he?” she asked. Just to shut her up, I tried repeating that, too. It didn’t work. I tried something else.
“He’s running drugs for his boss,” came through my lips almost too easily. The prior attempts had roughened my throat. On reflection, the scalding hot chocolate probably wasn’t a wise solution to the problem. I coughed while Erin watched. “He’s not cheating on you,” I croaked. Something in Erin’s beautiful face broke, then. I didn’t understand. She loved Dan. He provided for her. Even if it took drug money to fuel the furnace of her luxury, shoveled in like cocaine. But the expression in her eyes…
"You cheated on him,” I said slowly, hoping the words got stuck in my craw. But they didn’t, and I saw the blotches start on her Spanish skin. “You cheated on him because you thought he already had, on you. Erin, he works constantly--if he isn’t with Bedloe, he’s with you! When would he have the time?” Erin had wanted justification, and I couldn’t give it to her. I began to speak again, but. I couldn’t make the words come out. I stopped before I gagged right in the middle of Ree’s bakery.
“I think,” I said finally, “That Dan will forgive you. I think you should talk to him, tell him, before another one of Bedloe’s lackeys finds out and uses it against him. You know what I think about the whole thing. So I would speak to him about it, let him know before something else does.” She continued to look blotchy and miserable, and she wouldn’t meet my eyes. Saying that it was one of those other drug lackeys she cheated with wasn’t possible; the words wouldn’t come. “You cheated with Bedloe himself,” I said slowly, hoping hard with every word that it wasn’t true, that the words would get trapped under my tongue or behind my teeth. I tried to hold back my voice as I continued to speak. “And now he wants you. Tonight isn’t just a drug run for Dan. Bedloe wants him out of the way because he wants you.” Erin looked up at me with those almond eyes, like a startled deer. She bounced out of the tired booth seat that I could have sworn had no bounce left in it, grabbed her coat, and raced for the door.
I wouldn’t have let her give me a ride home, anyway. I could only handle so many words that refused to be spoken.
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