SYMPATHY IN THE RED ROOM

From Woman with Dark Horses (Starcherone Books, 2004).

Eva settled into a barstool and watched Sammie pour a caipirinha into a chilled, old-fashioned glass filled with crushed ice. The jigger, the strainer, the bar spoon, the shaker, the citrus reamer, and the muddler were parts of speech in the cocktail of coded language they shared together.
  Tonight Eva wanted to test Sammie’s memory.
  “Do you remember me?”
  “There’s nothing worse than a foamy Bloody Mary. You have to go easy. It’s a drink that has to be rolled from one glass to another, never shaken.”
  After mixing a large Bloody Mary, Sammie refilled a pitcher of light beer. The jukebox was blaring Hendrix’s “The Wind Cries Mary.” Eva realized the song’s timing was an odd coincidence and wondered whom the drink was for. Two old men were playing darts in the far corner, smoking cigars. Sammie took a sip of the Bloody Mary herself, raising the glass to her mouth as she looked toward Eva.
Stilettos echoed on the pavement outside the open door as women leaped over gutters near The Recluse. Three false entrances were in plain sight. The real entrance was disguised from street view. Eva didn’t know why she kept coming back. The windows were boarded with wood planks, and she was afraid of Sammie.
  Eva made small talk about the drinks as Sammie mixed them. By speaking only of bartending and the local gossip traded by the regulars, Eva learned much about cocktails and almost nothing about Sammie’s new life with the woman who owned the bar and lived in the apartments upstairs.
  Lately, the owner had stopped coming out of her apartment. Even though the changes in the bar were odd, Eva couldn’t help watching Sammie carry food trays up the private stairway at the back of the building. Sammie had taken over the business of managing the bar so that the owner never had to leave her rooms.
  The owner was nowhere to be seen. Eva believed she was hiding, perhaps in a place where she could watch her customers without them watching her.
  On the other side of the bar, a large man in a dark blue suit was sitting alone at a table near the window, looking out at the rain. He was handsome in a sad way. His face was unshaven, and he seemed so lonely that Eva wanted to sit beside him and hold his hand, just to talk about the rain.
  “That’s Silas Scott, the psychologist,” Sammie said.
  “Never heard of him.”
  Sammie muddled the superfine sugar with the bitters, the orange slice, the cherry, and the soda with a generous amount of bourbon.
  “You know the owner, right? She claims he’s the wrong type. I’ll be glad when he’s gone. So will she.”
  “Why?”
  “She called the police, but they couldn’t do nothing. He had photographs of her. This is the weird thing – she could never figure out who the photographer was or even when the photographs were taken. She couldn’t even recognize the rooms in some of the photographs.”
  After wiping her hands with a rag and garnishing the glass with an orange slice and a cherry, Sammie walked to Silas’s table and set the Old Fashioned down. She walked away in a hurry, without speaking.
  When Sammie returned to her, Eva was pleased but struck by an awkward silence. This had been the most illuminating conversation she’d had with Sammie since the night they compared the shapes and colors of various tequila bottles lined up on the display shelf in front of the mirror. The cost of vodka was another engrossing topic, how to determine the best brands and the standards for their purity. Grey Goose was Sammie’s choice. Eva favored Pearl, which Playboy magazine had hailed as one of the best new vodkas of the year. Even though she preferred red wine to vodka, she knew which vodka fit her lifestyle – winter wheat and mountain water distilled five times, yet cheap enough to fit a schoolteacher’s budget.
  After drinking four glasses of the house red, Eva ordered another, against her better judgment.
  “This one’s on you,” she called out to Silas Scott, and began walking toward the window where he sat. Sammie mouthed “No.” Eva ignored her. Silas didn’t turn around to her. His confused expression in the glass seemed to change only slightly as her reflection moved toward his.
  “I’m not a smoker,” she said to him, sitting down in the empty chair at his table.
  “You look like a smoker,” Silas said, his voice soft yet gruff, husky as if his throat were damaged from years of cigarettes.
  “Must be the dark circles under my bloodshot eyes.”
  “Maybe.”
  “You’re a very sad man.” Standing up, Eva fell out of her chair. She had wanted to go back to Sammie, but she was suddenly confused, disoriented, and emotional from the wine. Silas caught her arm. She steadied herself by placing her hands on the floor, her face bent down to her knees.
  “You have a nice ass, honey, but you’re drunk,” he said, helping her back into the chair, “and I’m not paying for your drink.”
  He slipped a cigarette into his mouth and lit it quickly just as she opened her lips to reply. She had wanted to talk just to keep him from talking. For some reason, all the terrible things he was saying about her made him seem more attractive. He looked her directly in the eye as if her drunkenness and her rudeness didn’t put him off.
  “So you’re an ass man, not a breast man or a leg man?”
  “I’m just a man.”
  “I heard something weird happened with the owner, something really fucked up, Silas. Did she have a nice ass?”
  “A lot of fucked-up things happen.”
  “But I want to hear your side of the story.”
  “No.”
  “I’m just the opposite of a repressed person. I’m not that good at remembering names and places and numbers and things like that. But as far as actual experiences, I feel like I remember almost everything that ever happened to me, even the little things. Test me. Ask me anything about any time in my life.”
  “You could be repressing something right now, and you would never know it.”
  “But I just know that I’m not.”
  “You’re not listening. That’s what repression is. People who are really repressing something have no idea they’re repressing it. They feel just like you, like nothing’s wrong, like they remember everything.”
  He signaled to Sammie, pointing to Eva, and Sammie brought another Old Fashioned and another glass of wine to the table, taking away the empty glasses.
As Eva drank her wine, she ordered another.
  “It’s too much,” he said as Sammie held the glass out to her.
  Eva tried to stand again. Silas stood up, reaching out to help her. She tripped and spilled the full glass of wine on his boots. Without thinking, she let go of the glass and stood motionless to watch it fall. The wineglass shattered near her feet, splattering her stilettos.
  She felt her bra straps slip down her shoulders so that she had to adjust herself in front of him. Her face burning, she reminded herself she had inherited her large breasts from her mother’s side of the family. Even though she knew it was warped logic, she blamed her mother whenever her breasts got in the way – every time her nipple accidentally brushed against a stranger’s elbow in a crowded room, every time she felt a man’s eyes cautiously wandering away from her face to her chest.
Silas was a big man with a thick torso. She hadn’t realized how tall he was until he stood next to her. Tall men made her nervous. He smelled faintly of sweat and sawdust and beer and the cigarettes he had been smoking. She only glanced at his eyes before looking away.
  Sammie found a thin rag on the edge of the bar and bent down to pick up the shattered glass.
  “Careful,” he whispered to Sammie. “Don’t cut yourself. It’s my fault. Let me do it.”
  “No,” Eva said. “Let me.”
  “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”
  Sammie walked away, cradling the larger pieces of glass in a bundle of paper towels.
  Silas leaned against the railing near the doorway. Eva crouched down to wipe the wine off him. Even though she knew he was looking down her shirt while she leaned over his feet, she didn’t put her hand over her chest.
  As she dried his boots, the wet cloth deteriorated on the black leather, ripping apart under her fingers. In that helpless position, she felt her vagina opening, the way her feet were splayed under her legs, the weight of her hips resting on her heels, her narrow ankles buckling as she crouched over his boot tips.
  “Why are you shaking?” he asked.
  “I’m not.” She tried to look up at him, blinking hard.
  “You are. Look at your hands. They’re practically all over the place.”
  “They’re fine.”
  “Hey? Why won’t you look at me? You know it’s rude not to look at a man when he’s talking to you?”
  What kind of psychologist wears silver-tipped cowboy boots, she asked herself, and suddenly felt more comfortable. She handed him the rag.
  “I got most of the wine off. Your boots should be fine. If not, I’ll buy you another pair.”
  “That won’t be necessary.” He reached out a hand to help her off her feet.

Like the horses in the fields outside her window, Eva was wary of strangers, easily spooked, even by her own shadow scaling the walls at night. She felt she had to be afraid of the darkness. While she was sometimes lonely during the days, she was often terrified during the nights that someone would find her and hurt her.
  Pain was all about seeing. If no one ever saw her, no one would ever think to hurt her. But if she lived her life unnoticed, she would also live her life alone. That was why painting fascinated her. Artists could create images from their imaginations, painting an image so fully it seemed real, but there was no way for anyone to reach the image, to harm the thing itself because it never really existed outside of the painting and the painter’s mind.
  Once when she was nineteen, as she unbraided her long hair, she sat across from her mother on her mother’s bed. That night, like many nights, she wondered why the man had broken into their house, what he had wanted, and what he had seen in the house that made him target her among all the other people in the town. What drew him to her and her mother? By the time she began to wonder about the real question – what he had done to her mother once he broke inside – Eva was thirty-one, sitting alone on the same bed in her mother’s house, and her mother had been dead for seven years.
  Most of all, she remembered the window glass shattering onto the carpet, the glittering shards in the lamplight as the lamp turned over, rolling across the living room floor until the cord stretched too far and came unplugged. Her mother’s screams trailed into silence. No one came to help. She didn’t call the police, but only sat quietly beside the dark lamp, the window glass cutting into the backs of her legs as she held her knees to her chest and went to sleep. As dawn broke, the gray light came through the windows, and she heard her mother talking on the phone. Her mother’s unmarried sister, Aunt Mellissa, arrived at the house soon after the call. Mellissa said for Eva not to worry, that everything would be all right if she would just go to her room, close the door, and leave her mother alone for a while.
No one ever spoke of that day, or the night before. And everything was all right, her life going on as it had before the window was broken. Years later, as she talked to her mother in the hospital room, she tried to ask her mother about the man. Her mother was in the last stages of lupus. She thought the disease might inspire some honesty during their long visits.
  “Do you remember the man?”
  “What man?”
  “The one who broke the window that night?”
  “What night? A boy from the neighborhood broke the window playing golf on his parents’ front lawn. Boy, was he in trouble. His parents made him pay for everything. He had to deliver papers all summer just to cover the damage. It was a nice, expensive window, antique-style beveled glass.”
  “Mom.”
  “He did.”

In her old high school, Eva often forgot she was a teacher and felt as if she were a student again. Feeling lost and confused, looking for Sammie in the halls, Eva was afraid to look into her students’ eyes after looking at their paintings. Sometimes she expected her mother to be waiting for her in the house when she walked back home. In her art class, she encouraged creativity, allowing her students to paint anything they wanted to paint, any image that came to their minds, never asking them to explain what the images meant or where they came from.
  When Eva and Sammie were students in the old high school, after painting each other into odd compositions, they couldn’t explain what the images meant. Sammie painted Eva with eagle wings soaring among gulls with dead presidents’ faces, the shadow of the wings spelling charlatan over an ocean of fire. Eva painted Sammie completely nude with a blue saxophone strapped to her back as she walked to a red phone booth at the end of a lonely highway.
  Their art teacher had taken them into his office and said, “I don’t get it. What’s going on here?”
  They looked at him for a long time, but didn’t say anything. He started laughing.
Afterward, Eva moved her easel to the opposite side of the studio, and Sammie stared at her canvas without painting. Eva avoided Sammie and stopped speaking to her.
  Twelve years later, Eva wandered into the bar and struck up a conversation with the owner, a small woman with long dark hair that hid her face as she stood in the shadows. Startled to find Sammie mixing drinks, Eva allowed the owner to introduce Sammie as if they had never known each other at all, and the owner seemed satisfied by their deception.
  Eva never understood Sammie’s willingness to participate in the lie. The owner’s nervous movements, suspicious glances, and strange, hawklike beauty were enough to fuel Eva’s desire to deceive her. She seemed to be a woman who did not want to know the truth.
  The owner hurriedly counted receipts behind the bar, perhaps willing to believe her employees and her customers were people with no pasts, even though their families had been living together for generations in the same, small, east Texas town.

“God, this is a disappointment,” Eva said in the parking lot, her stilettos soaked in a puddle of rain and motor oil. “Why don’t you just take a knife and shoot me through the heart?”
  “A gun, you mean?”
  “Whatever.”
  Silas walked to the passenger side of his car, unlocking the door and opening it for her. As he helped her get in, he slid his hand under her legs. She was too drunk to do anything about it, so she waited until he was under her, gripping her cheeks, and sat down on his hand.
  “Is there any way I can have my hand back? I need it to drive.”
  She shifted her weight slightly so he could free himself from her.
  As he drove through the dark streets, she gave him directions to her house, all along realizing something was wrong.
  “You might want to turn on your headlights so you can see the road.”
  “What if I don’t want to see the road?”
  “Suit yourself.”
  He helped her out of the car and approached her house by the side door, as if he lived there. Reaching into her purse, he took out her car keys and unlocked the door for her.
  “Come on in and make yourself comfortable,” he said.
  After following him inside to the living room, she stood in front of the fireplace.
  “Go ahead and make a fire,” she said. “The wood’s good and dry, and the matches are on the mantel. There’s old newspapers in the metal bin.”
  “All right.”
  “My horses are out there.” She pointed to the window that looked out onto the field. “But it’s kind of hard to see dark horses in the night.”
  He struck a match against the brick. The match broke. She wanted to see if he was capable of starting the fire on his own.
  In the powder bathroom, she carefully prepared herself for him. After removing all her clothes with the lamplight warm against the red walls, she turned in circles in front of the long mirror on the bathroom door. She bent over to admire her hips, to see what she looked like from behind. Sometimes when she forgot about the scar, she thought her rump was her finest feature, soft yet firm, and she thought it was a pity so few people had seen it this way.
  Standing near the marble sink, she ran water over a white cloth to wash her vagina, gently opening the lips after sitting on the tile to examine herself with a little mirror, just to contemplate the pinkness inside her that she rarely saw. Wanting to look nice for Silas, she considered the shape of her pubic hair. She could shave it off so that it looked like a little girl’s or she could shape it into a slim line or even a mohawk. Instead, she decided to leave it in the familiar V shape that pleased her most.
  When she came out of the bathroom in her red high heels and translucent robe,   Silas was nowhere to be found. His car was no longer in the driveway. So, after looking for him in the other rooms, she poured a glass of cheap wine and fell asleep in front of the fire. Sleeping fitfully, she woke several times, terrified by an odd sensation that there was someone else in the house, walking through the rooms above her. Every time she worked up the courage to investigate, she felt too tired to stand.
  When she woke Saturday morning, with a familiar dry mouth and headache, she searched her house, room by room, and thought her mother’s old room seemed different. The perfume bottles were out of order, the photographs that usually hung on the walls had been taken down and laid out on the bed, the window was open, and the record player was on. Although the jazz record was turning, the needle was resting on the hook, and the volume was turned down to the lowest notch.

Since her childhood, Eva had adorned her body in distinct ways, using odd methods of her own design. Disguising the curved scar on her hip, she accentuated other areas of her body, calling attention to the length and delicate shape of her neck and waist with crimson and gold chokers, coral necklaces, and woven belts made of cranberry leather. Red jewelry collected from antique shops had been her passion until she discovered she could make a paste of honey and water to glue petals to her skin.
  Shortly after her mother’s death, she had an affair with a body painter. Trading sex for transient art, she lay down on a wooden floor covered in white cloth. He stenciled her belly in overlays of blue-toned red, making long veins that led down her legs and back up to her breasts. Just before he finished, he etched black and gray shadows with a small airbrush over the stenciled leaves, adding orange-red splotches and gold tones where the light hit. For months after he left her, she was convinced that he had stained her somehow, and she was satisfied with her body until the stain began to fade away, leaving her skin clear again so that the scar stood out. She had no idea where the scar came from, so she didn’t like to answer lovers who asked her why the scar was there.
  Now, she thought after dismantling the hibiscus flowers and gluing the petals down in large patches like a second skin over her body, at least she would smell like honey and her skin would look more attractive. Out of habit, she dressed in black slacks and a black sweater, making sure the pasted petals were disguised under her clothes.
  In the fireplace, local newspapers from her hometown, the headlines dated back twenty years ago, burned to black ash, rustling like dark feathers under the flames. Eva stood in front of the green-glass mirror, smoking a cigarette, whispering to herself in a dusky voice that reminded her of her mother. Her lovely Aunt Mellissa was in the black-and-white photographs, looking as young as Eva’s mother and standing next to the man who had gone missing. He was never found. Even though Eva had been burning photographs of him for hours, the day was not yet wasted. Black horses trotted through the fields outside her window, flicking their sleek tails in the rising winds before the dust storm settled over the grasses.
  The lace curtains filtered the pale light of evening, soft enough to make her face look like a young girl’s in profile. When the shadows fell right, after gently touching the white powder under her eyes, she stuffed hibiscus petals into her bra, dismantling the flowers in the royal-blue vase slowly as if peeling ripe fruit.

Sammie called Eva just as the sky began to darken that evening, but their conversation was interrupted by a loud knock on Eva’s front door.
  “I have to go,” Eva said to Sammie.
  Through the window, Eva saw Silas and realized that he was determined to see her. She opened the door. The pale-blue sky had given way to an indigo so true it blotted out the leaves of the neighboring oak trees.
  He smiled when she didn’t say anything. She didn’t smile back. He coughed nervously into his large hand before flicking his gold lighter. The spark flared. The little flame began to shudder like her fingers. She scratched the back of her neck.
Holding the cigarette expertly in his full lips, his mouth worked under the shadow of his beard. Moving his lips to the side, he blew the smoke away from her face. Standing casually on the porch, he leaned against the brick wall. A bottle of red wine in a brown paper bag was tucked under his arm.
  “Would you have some wine with me?” he asked, taking a deep drag from his cigarette.
  “Yes.”
  God, she thought, he’s going to touch me. His hands will be all over me. The petals will fall from my breasts to the floor, fall from my body to his feet before I fall, and then I will be afraid to stand up, even though his hands have been all over me. But no, he hasn’t touched me yet, hasn’t even spoken my name.
  “I mean no,” she whispered.
  He held the wine bottle out to her. “Which is it? Yes or no?”
  “You went through my rooms last night. You were in the house when I was asleep. You looked at things when I didn’t know what you were doing.”
  She switched on the outside lights, on the back of the house, over the garden, so that in the formal living room they could see the floodlights on the leaves outside the picture windows. Large white moths beat against the long glass panes. Their wings left traces of gray powder like the nervous brush of her hands across her face. Her fingers tapped her mouth and chin. The lipstick stained her. When she saw the burgundy streaked across her palm, she worried that she had smeared her face into a harlequin’s mask.
  Using his eyes as a mirror, she gauged her appearance. He cast pensive glances at her. Through his heavy beard, his tongue swiped across his lips before he smiled. He crumpled the paper bag into a ball and tossed it into the fire. Setting the bottle on the edge of the table, he pulled a silver corkscrew from his jacket pocket.
  “You have a very nice house,” he said. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you last night. I got nervous and left without saying good-bye. Then I came back and found the door unlocked and wanted to see you. You were so drunk, I couldn’t wake you. I found you passed out in front of the fire. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done what I did.”
  “Why did you go through the rooms?”
  “I wanted to find out more about you.”
  “Did you?”
  “I’m not sure. But I like the pictures of you and your mother. She is a very beautiful lady.”
  “Was.”
  “You take after her.”
  The dark green glass against the white of his knuckles startled her. For a moment, she saw her mother’s hands, not his. Around midnight, she often drove her mother across the lake roads so her mother could see the dock lights reflected on the dark water. Wasted away to almost half her normal body weight, her mother had grown so slight that in her last days Eva could carry her from one room to another and from the house to the car at night. The frail body in the back of the black car as Eva drove away had seemed like a prepubescent child in the rearview mirror. Those same lights shone on her open eyes, so blue Eva could hardly bear to close them. But she did close them, her hand shaking as the slender shadow of her fingers trembled across the white forehead.
  Sex, she thought, would make the sadness go away.
  Silas began to pour the wine into two antique high-stemmed glasses rimmed with gold. Striking a long match, she lit the tapered candles, molded rose and violet wax. In the mirror above the mantel, she saw her lip liner was still remarkably intact. In the windowsills, leaves glimmered. Concentrating on the new flames as they lengthened while exposing the wicks, she felt his hand on her shoulder. He held a wineglass to her mouth. The wine sloshed near the edge.
  “Why don’t we just take our clothes off?” he asked, looking out the windows where the leaves rustled in the wind.
  She drank the wine in her glass as fast as she could before reaching for the bottle to pour herself another, knowing how badly she would need it. She gestured to him with a dismissive swipe of her hand, realizing how lonely the night would be.
She would have been the first to admit that she didn’t know what she was doing, but he hadn’t asked her what she knew, so she acted as if this behavior were perfectly normal to her. Communication was easier this way – no words, just her eyes staring at his body. He looked back at her as he undressed, expecting her to follow.
  After his shoes were laid out neatly on the woven rug, he folded his slacks and shorts on the sofa and draped his shirt and jacket over the high-backed chair. Still fully dressed, she sat on the hearth, waiting for him to come to her. Watching him from across the room, she admired his patience. He was a careful man, thorough and graceful in his movements. She liked the belly on him and thought it would be nice to rub against it. Even though she was relatively certain she wanted to make love to him, she also wanted to run out of the house before it was too late to change her mind. After crossing and uncrossing her legs, she needed a closer inspection. She had to examine his body in the firelight before she was certain.
  “Are you sure about this?” he asked, walking toward her with his head tilted to match her sideways gaze, his arms hanging loosely at his sides. He shrugged his shoulders when she didn’t answer.
  Keeping her eyes on his face, she rested her hand on his. Leaning down, he moved his face closer to hers, his eyes just above her eyes so their lashes were almost touching. She leaned in closer to his mouth. “My mother murdered a man once,” she whispered over his parted lips, “in this house.”
  “If you’re joking, it’s not funny. Don’t talk right now. I’d just like to enjoy your body. Your breasts are wonderful.”
  “There was blood everywhere, in the bathroom.”
  “God, your ass.”

The man’s hands were pale and bluish, still and cold, rigid in their grasping as if reaching out to her. Her mother lit the fire in the fireplace with dry wood and stoked the flames day and night so that it burned for weeks at a time. There was a loud, metallic sound of the hammer hitting the concrete porch in the backyard near the garden. After wrapping rubber bands around brown paper bags, their contents rattling like stones, her aunt took the bags outside and smashed them with the hammer like she did in the winters to break the shells off pecans for Christmas cakes.
  As Silas kissed her mouth, Eva wondered why she had been able to tell him the very thing she never had the courage to mention to anyone. After the body was disposed of and the house was in order, she knew not to speak about the man to her mother or her aunt, both of whom were well aware of what had happened upstairs when she was a young girl.
  Red was her favorite color after that night. Ever since that summer when she turned eleven years old, she wore red stones in her pierced ears. She begged her mother to let her paint her bedroom and bathroom red, the walls as well as the ceiling, a bright crimson that wouldn’t fade away. Some people dreamed in black and white, and some dreamed in color, or so she had been told. But she dreamed in red and white, with various shades of pink and lavender. The red walls were always there as a reminder that she couldn’t remember what had happened in that room. When she began to menstruate later that year, her mother was relieved. The night Eva saw startling dots of blood on her legs, she felt a cleansing inside.
  Her red was a fire color, trapped inside the flames. It calmed her to look into the heat, the embers burning bright as Silas stood before her, stroking her hair. Red was the color of the bathtub when she came home from school and found her mother and her aunt completely nude, cutting off the man’s fingertips with a butcher knife taken from the kitchen. Later, she found one of his fingertips, soft yet wrinkled, drying and curling in on itself on the tile in the corner behind the bathroom door.
  “Mom, what’s this?”
  “What’s what? Where did you find that? Throw that away and wash your hands.”
Usually, whenever she thought about sex, that man was the only man she saw. The man was lost and no longer visited her in the darkness, although when she woke she could still remember the paper bag wrapped around his head with packing string. Even though she could only remember him as dead, she was becoming more and more certain that she had seen him at least once while he was still alive. The memories felt farther away from her now, less jumbled, calmer, slowly ordering themselves as the red faded away, cooling down like the fire behind her.
In a child’s voice that sounded so much like her old voice, she could almost hear herself calling him. She had no idea who her real father was, and no one ever spoke of him, although she had never thought that strange before.
  “Mother, do I have a father?” she once asked when she was a child.
  “Everyone has a father.”
  “Where is he?”
  “He’s in the fields and in the air, on the horses’ breath and in the trees, nourishing their roots. But don’t ask me where he is now. It’s impossible to say. He doesn’t move like other men. He’s never in one place at one time. There’s no telling where he’ll be tomorrow, but wherever he is, it won’t be with us.”

The phone was ringing when she removed her blouse and bra. She decided to let it ring, even though she was worried about Sammie, whose voice had sounded so strange earlier that evening. The petals were stuck to Eva’s skin so that Silas had to peel them away from her nipples. He suckled her like a child before sliding her slacks down to her ankles. She took off her stockings and let him run his fingers through her coarse, dark hairs. In shocked silence, she felt him slip his pinkie inside her, then watched as he put his pinkie in his mouth as if to savor the flavor.
  He began to peel the petals away from the scar.
  “No,” she said.
  He lifted her in his arms and carried her away from the fire before laying her on the rug.
  “Open your legs,” he whispered, taking her ankles in his hands.
  Suddenly, she felt panicked, shy. He didn’t force her. Instead, he began to coax her in a tender voice.
  “Please,” he whispered, “a little more.”
  Raising her knees in such an awkward way while he stared down at her, she felt uncomfortable. Slowly, she began to relax. Shifting out of that slightly protected position, she let her legs fall apart so that she was spread wide, his eyes focused on her.
  His face moved closer to her until she could feel his breath on her vagina just before he began to explore her with his tongue. Even though she wanted to protect herself by crawling away from him, she couldn’t move. Her legs began to shake like the branches of a young oak tree in the wind.

In the middle of the night, she felt him wake in her arms. She pretended to be asleep while he drew away from her, dressed, and walked out the front door. She heard his car start and the crunch of tires rolling over the fallen acorns in the driveway.
  After she bathed at dawn, the red room seemed vacuous to her. Without the photographs on the walls, there was nothing to catch her eye but the old bed. The ivory shadowboxes and tiny women her aunt had carved above the mantel were gone. In the living room, Eva looked into the fireplace where the last embers were dying out near the old fragments of bone that had slowly resurfaced from the ashes after the burning. That much of the dead man would always be with her. She supposed there were parts of him scattered throughout the fields, decayed long ago, enriching the earth under the oak trees where the horses roamed.
  The room would always be red for him because she couldn’t help blaming herself for what her mother and aunt had done. His blood was always on her hands, although she had washed it off long ago.

At The Recluse that day, Eva ordered glass after glass of Sangiovese while Sammie poured pitchers of dark beer for the regulars.
  “Sam,” Eva whispered into her wineglass.
  “So what happened with the psychologist?”
  “It’s a matter of perception.”
  Sammie leaped over the bar and grabbed Eva’s hand, and they were gone, running behind the buildings, through the brick-walled alleys full of old furniture burned by cigarettes and stained by cats and rain.
  Eva followed Sammie up a wooden staircase to what looked like a large apartment full of furnished playrooms for children. There was an old-fashioned lace cradle full of porcelain dolls and a kitchenette with a small, plastic yellow oven and a tiny green sewing machine and a short table near shelves stacked with Playdough. The shelves displayed blue, yellow, and red sculptures of people and animals, snowmen, octopuses, and elephants.
  “This is where it happened, where all his patients went to pretend they were children, to remember what they had forgotten. The owner of the bar stayed here for days, and by the time she came out, she said she really thought she was a child. I guess that’s why she got so scared – when she saw the photos, when she looked at herself in the mirror.”
  “Was Silas in the photographs?”
  “I know it sounds strange, but every time I go here, I start remembering things I didn’t know I could remember.”
  “What’s behind that door?”
  “That’s what I wanted to show you.”
  Eva opened the door and saw paintings of herself displayed on the walls. In the paintings, she looked like a young girl, her face reflected in windows of familiar houses as she looked in at other girls she used to know years before. Sometimes her face was unrecognizable, superimposed onto the other girls’ faces. Her black wings carried her over the dark hills into the night, wherever she wanted to go. Other paintings showed her carrying straw in her mouth to build her large nest, where other girls were hatching from eggs.
  “I haven’t seen these for so long,” Eva said, “I had forgotten what they were like.”
  “They’re like the dreams I used to have long ago,” Sammie whispered, “before I stopped remembering my dreams.”
  “What dreams?”
  “And then the dreams are real, and I remember my life is stranger than my dreams.”
  “What dreams?”
  “I dreamed the owner was floating above me, and then I heard a creaking and found her swinging like a doll on a wire in the dark room.”

Through fields, darkness fell. Eva combed the horses’ manes, smoothing out the tangles while she felt the horses’ hot breath on her face. She led the horses through the dry grasses before riding them to the edge of the property line and back, one at a time, until she was exhausted.
  When she walked into her house, she felt as if she couldn’t breathe and became light-headed, trying to catch her breath, waiting for the air to fill her lungs. Someone had broken in, window glass shattered on the white carpet as it had been years ago.
  The door to the red room was closed as usual. When she opened it, Silas was waiting inside, wearing a gray suit, his jacket strewn across the bed.
  The room was changed. The curtains were a deep, rich blue and so were the bed pillows. On the walls, he had hung landscapes of the ocean and sky, the blue of his eyes reflected on the water. The bluebirds and the jays stood out on the canvas, textured with real wings built up in layers under the oils along with sand and crushed leaves.
  “I had to see you,” he said. “I want to tell you what happened with the owner. It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t do anything.”
  “Well, here I am.”
  “No. I mean I want to show you.”
  After leading her to the bed, he motioned for her to lie down, then looked at her for a long time, never touching her. He whispered in a voice so soft, so tender, she could barely understand his words.
  “I want to be with you all the time.”
  Even though she knew he was taking photographs of her while she slept, she drifted in and out of consciousness with the camera flash. She forgot about the camera in her dreams where she saw sugar cubes glisten on her father’s fingers in the moonlight and watched the horses’ tongues swipe over his hands. She could never really see the rest of his face. Darkness disguised him along with the shadows that seemed like bruises. She bent over the post of the barbed-wire fence, and he carved his initials into her hip so that he could always claim her. But the scar changed over the years as her mother sanded it down with rough paper so no one could read the letters.
  When she heard the hurried click-click of Silas’s boots on the hall tiles just before he walked out the back door, she didn’t feel as if he were running away. She felt as if he were traveling toward a life she would never know. He moved like a criminal, like every man she had ever loved. No one could understand him or track him down, especially not her.