The Last Orphan -
Chapter 30
The guest room looked like a sophisticated boudoir. Floral wallpaper and elaborate drapes. A spray of silver-dollar eucalyptus branches rising from a Murano vase atop a Tiffany-blue nightstand. The mattress, elevated to a pharaonic summit atop a formidable box spring, nearly required a running board to mount and was princessified by a dust ruffle and a puffy duvet weighted for a Siberian winter. A reed diffuser breathed a suffocating blend of holly berry and spruce, the aroma thick enough to glaze a doughnut.
Tassels abounded.
Evan sat on the floor. Fully dressed. Leaning against the rucksack he’d retrieved from the car.
It had been roughly twenty-four hours since he’d dispatched Folgore in a Manhattan alley. Forty-eight since his ankle had been ensconced in an explosive device at the behest of the federal government.
And now? He was asphyxiating on the civet of a Winter Mantel reed diffuser.
Which somehow seemed worse.
He wanted to hurl the diffuser out the window. Lacquer over the rose-vine wallpaper with a pleasing gunmetal gray. Pull the duvet onto the floor to make a nest at a breathable altitude.
From downstairs he heard a creak of warped wood grinding.
He thumbed up the ecobee system. The cameras had been placed with amateurish dipshititude, offering limited vantages of key areas.
But sure enough, one of the kitchen windows had been shoved open.
Evan was on his feet, through the door, padding downstairs.
His ARES 1911 gripped in both hands, pointed down at the floor.
He swung around into the kitchen and spotted Deborah curled up on the cushions of the bow window. A cigarette projected from the knuckles of one slender white hand, and she was leaning to exhale through the gap she’d opened in the sash pane. She wore slippers and a white bathrobe secured high at the throat.
The muted television displayed a youthful Caucasian couple with vigorously bright faces kissing in a haze of soft falling snow before a Christmas-drenched house.
He holstered the pistol before she turned around.
“Caught in the act.” She offered him a smirk, her lips pale, bare. “I smoke and my husband pretends not to know about it. I have to be respectful to maintain his suspension of disbelief, you see. No hard evidence.” She closed her eyes into another drag and shot the smoke expertly out into the night air. That winning grin, ever so slightly compromised on the left side. “I’ve come a long way, baby.”
The magazines had accompanied her onto the cushions. Soap Opera Digest, US, Star. One cover featured her leaving this very house; the wind had drawn back her hair, which looked brittle and thinning, and her face had been captured in an unflattering light, the stroke damage evident. The headline read BEAUTY TURNED TO BEAST!
She followed his gaze down. “Ah,” she said. “They’re awful, sure. But it’s not them. It’s everyone who … gobbles this up. There’s been renewed interest in yours truly since they’re doing a reboot of my show. Winds of Time.” She took in his blank reaction. “You’re not exactly the demographic.”
“No, ma’am.”
On the TV a Hallmark Channel logo popped up briefly. Now the couple were at some sort of festival outside a barn among townsfolk sporting an array of holiday sweaters. Everything soft and warm and soothing like a not-too-hot bath. Evan could understand why Deborah might want to slip into this well-lit world devoid of shadows and sharp edges.
“Another paparazzo caught me at the Whole Foods perusing artisanal mustards. I told him, ‘Darling, make us look younger. It’ll sell more rags.’ And see?” She tugged another magazine from the stack, already open to an internal spread of her grinning coyly: LOOKING GREAT AND LIVING LIFE AT 60! “To be clear, I am fifty-nine. They’re shocked to report that I’m still ‘living life’ rather than just slowly decomposing after the midcentury mark as women are wont to do.” Her eyes held a kind of soulful depth. “That’s the cost of being an icon. Even a low-rent one. You see the disappointment on their faces, everywhere you go. They’re angry with you.”
“For aging?”
Another draw set the cigarette crackling. “For not staying a fantasy.”
Something on the television drew Evan’s focus. There she was, Deborah Seabrook, among the other actors at the snowy festival, wearing a whimsical scarf and pristine winter gloves. She gave the young man from the previous scene a maternal embrace and leaned close to offer him what seemed to be a few words of wisdom. Watching her perform the bland if tender role, Evan felt something twist inside him.
“Sounds claustrophobic,” he said.
“That’s a good word for it,” Deborah said. “One needs to have a face to the public that seems personal but really isn’t. You don’t want it to be truly personal, and turns out they don’t either.”
She caught the direction of his focus, her own eyes ticking to the television. A cruel hall of mirrors: Deborah watching Deborah twine her sweatered arm in that of her fictional son as they traipsed through fake falling snow.
She gestured at the kitchen chair nearest, and Evan sat. “And then something happens that … rips a hole in the universe, and you realize that you’ve only been playacting all along.”
She stubbed out the cigarette on the outside of the windowsill and then balled it up in a tiny preserves jar she produced Houdini-like, from a bathrobe pocket. “When those two police officers knocked on our door, I was holding a cup of coffee. I had to tell myself to set it down. My hand was trembling, so I knocked it over. Then I had to tell myself not to worry about the spill. It was dripping onto the carpet there”—a gesture through the wall—“and I had to tell myself not to worry about cleaning it up. Or the stain. That nothing I had ever worried about before mattered anymore or ever would again. How foolish and petty all my thoughts and concerns were. Pain just … skinning me alive, unwrapping me. I felt bare. And I could see the world with all its terribleness everywhere around me.” She studied him. “I’d imagine you see that now and again. With your work.”
“Yes.”
“People at their most naked? Their most real?”
“I don’t see people any other way.”
“What a blessing.”
He did not respond.
“And how lonely.”
He said nothing.
“That is unless you have someone to look into you that way, too,” Deborah said. “That’s the most powerful thing.”
“Being understood?”
She shook her head. “Men want to replace someone who understands them. Women know they’ll never be understood.” She took out another cigarette, sniffed it, stuffed it back in the pack. “No. They want to be known. It’s different. It’s … hmm, intimacy. And when you have a child, the fierceness of feeling …” She shook her head, at a loss before the infinite. “I’m sure you had that from your parents.”
Evan thought of the mother he’d known a few short weeks. Then of Joey’s search for his biological father, a rodeo cowboy who ran up bar tabs in Blessing, Texas. The man had never once laid eyes on Evan.
He resisted the urge to shake his head.
“To love like that, it’s a kind of ache,” she continued. “Because you hate every bad thing the world could ever hold for them. And you hurt for them all the way through even when nothing’s happened yet.” A single tear clung to the tip of her nose, a perfect jewel. “And how many times does it not happen? The fall from the tree house. Choking on undercooked bacon. The not-too-bad car crash. And then? One day it does. And it’s like you’ve been braced for it your whole life.” Her voice lowered with a kind of awe. “But it’s so much worse than anything you could have imagined. It makes you rethink hell. And heaven. You know what heaven would be for me now?”
Evan looked down at the table. In the mound of loose puzzle pieces, he made out a bright blue eye—Johnny’s.
“To see him for one minute more doing something mundane,” Deborah said. “Something I never bothered to pay attention to. Eating an apple. Picking at his dirty fingernails. To watch him watching TV. That’s all heaven is. It was right there, every instant of my life before. And I couldn’t see it.”
Now in the mess of jigsaw strays, Evan spotted the outer edge of one of Ruby’s almond-shaped eyes.
“Mason had that made,” Deborah said of the puzzle. “One of those custom ones. He wanted Ruby to be able to put the family back together again. Thought it would be … hmm, therapeutic. But it just sits there. And sits there.”
She looked back out at the darkness, and it was clear that she was done talking. On the television the holiday tale came to a soft-focus close, the end credits rolling in fast-forward.
As Evan rose silently to leave, Deborah’s name flashed by, there and gone.
He left her with her thoughts.
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