“I heard her lie. She said you had a deal and I was on my way to L.A.”
“She gave you an alibi.” Christ. How awful and disturbing and wrong. She pictured Nellie on the phone, winking at Tom while purring in her lovely voice at Leah, unwittingly giving her killer an alibi. Not a great alibi, but one that would buy him enough time. Time to do . . . this. Which was all he was living for anyway.
She would have known. At the end. Realized what he would do in a day or two or a week or two. Remembered how I predicted my murder when I was five. Remembered dismissing it, ignoring it, all those years. Put herself in his way. She was ready for him to ruin her face, destroy her beauty. He never touched her face but she couldn’t have known. She put what she loved the most on the line to save what she loved the least and oh Mother I am SO SORRY.
“You pathetic piece of shit.” Her voice sounded so distant to her ears, distant and distasteful. Like hearing about a nasty story in the news but not feeling how awful it was. “You ridiculous awful man.” She was once again surprised yet not surprised at how evil could look like a frail sniffling man huddled in a cheap coat.
“She lied,” he whined. He was still closing the distance, inching toward her. She was still letting him. “The lies kept us apart all those years. It’s her fault, all that wasted time. And his fault.”
“His?”
“Your idiot boy, the one you’ve taken up with.”
“First, he took up with me. Second he’s not my anything, third he’s not an idiot, and fourth, I’ve had boyfriends before now, what’s so special about Archer?” Dumbest question ever. Everything about him was special. His smile, his eyes, his laugh, his toenails, his morning breath.
Hmm, I get quite sentimental when I’m about to be murdered. Who knew?
“He’s a young fool, not worthy of—”
“He’s not young,” she corrected, “he’s rasa.” Somehow saying it—defining it—out loud to someone else made it even more real than it had seemed in her head. Which made sense, because it was true. She’d seen glimpses over the past couple of weeks, but now she saw the entire portrait of Archer: a clean slate, a new beginning. All past-due accounts squared up, firmly in the black. A fresh start . . . for both of them.
Tom, meanwhile, had let out a disbelieving snort, for which she could not blame him. “I know. Absurd to contemplate, much less pronounce. Which makes it no less true. Archer is the man you’ll never be: someone who could face what he’d done, and become a better person for it.”
“Shut up!”
“It’s all right. I had no expectation you would understand.”
“You’re mine, you’re for me, and Nellie lied and now I have to—don’t you understand?”
“I do understand. Understanding is irrelevant. Shall I compile a list of all the fucks I don’t give about your pain?”
“I’m tired,” he said. “I’m tired all the time.”
“Well, so am I!” she snapped back. “What, you think waiting around for you to kill me in every life isn’t exhausting?”
“I’m tired of thinking about you and needing you to bleed on me. I feel like I’ve been tired for a thousand years.”
“Oh my God, enough sniveling! And yes, that’s about right, that’s how long it’s been, give or take a century. Is that my cue to feel pity for you? ‘Poor killer, ultimately he was a victim, too’? Tom, you’ve known me most of this life and in an awful lot of others. When, in any of them, did I ever feel sorry for you?”
Except she did, a little. A very little. He was as locked into his pattern of murder as she was in hers to be murdered. She knew he was in his forties, but he could have passed for sixty. She wondered what it was like, stumbling through life after life with the same maddening itch, never being able to rest until it’s scratched, even knowing the scratch will destroy you. And then returning again and again, waiting for Leah each time, and then being alone again and again, until the next time.
She would have let him kill her a thousand more times before admitting such a thing aloud.
His hand was glittering. The knife, of course. In his hand, of course, he had pulled it from somewhere in one smooth motion she hadn’t noticed. That was bad, because she was paying attention to the proceedings but still hadn’t seen it. He would be good with the knife, quick with it. Of course. He never minded getting his hands dirty, which made him perfect for Hollywood.
“You are tainting everything the industry stands for, you’re betraying your own kind. Nellie Nazir made a lot of money for you and you do this. No Agent of the Year wall plaque for you.” Hmm. Did I just defend Mother?
“I loved you so much.”
“I don’t care,” she replied evenly, “so much.” She remembered thinking how tedious meeting with him was. How she would give him ninety seconds. His time was up. Hers, too, maybe.
She began to move to his left, opposite his knife hand. She knew she would get cut; several clients had told her that anytime the other person has a knife and was within five feet, you will get cut. She didn’t mind that; she minded bleeding out.
“So is that it? You come here, babble your insipid woes, and then on with the stabbing—ah!” She jerked back in time, felt the air displaced as the blade hissed past her cheek. “I guess so. What a surprise, you’re not original in this life, either.” Hysterical laughter bubbled out of her nose as she dodged another swipe. He’s here to kill me and I still find this meeting tedious! And why, exactly, am I goading him? Oh. Yes. So I can do this.
She was too jittery to try a martial arts move, and to be honest, she liked the symbolism of the blade. So she popped the balisong knife free from her bra and the handle was snug in her palm one second later. “You aren’t the only one who practiced, Tom. And unlike all the times before, I will fight. Do you know why?”
They were circling each other like alley cats. “Because you love me,” he said with a shining smile.
Ugh. “I love the idea of killing you,” she corrected. “I’ll be honest, Tom, the idea of slicing you into cat food makes me salivate. But if I can’t, I’ll be a pragmatist and at least take you with me.”
“Together,” he breathed. “We’ll go together.”
“Ugh. Just . . . ugh.”
He swiped and she lunged, and felt a line of fire streak along her temple. Going for the face this time, no head or belly wounds for you. Did not ruining Nellie’s looks make you want to ruin mine, stupid man? My mother was a thousand times more beautiful. I don’t CARE if you ruin my looks. Archer loves my looks; Archer thinks I am a sexy shark, which should be off-putting but is endearing.
Don’t think about Archer now.
“You do not get this, any of this, and you never did and you never will. It’s 2017; do you think I mind a few scars? With all the surgical advances? Idiot.”
Despite her words, perhaps he thought she did. He remained stagnant, always seeing her as a past victim instead of the person she was now. She had been able to force change within herself this time; he could not. Or would not.
Perhaps he recalled how Nellie fought him. He had expected Leah to pull back, to flee from him. Instead she jerked her head out of the way and as his knife zinged down the side of her face, she planted hers in his breastbone.
“If this were TV,” she shouted, her spittle speckling his reddening face, “I would say something clichéd like ‘this is for my mother,’ but this is for me, you festering poisonous penis!”
Triumph filled her like a drug, but then she looked down and saw what she had done, and cursed her rookie mistake.
So comforting to know about the error that kills me. After all that time, wondering . . . at last I know.
FORTY-TWO
Archer was out of the cab before it stopped moving, sprinting into Leah’s apartment building. He’d shouted—babbled—at the driver to call the police, but the poor guy was just relieved t
o get the hysterical nutjob out of his cab. And Archer wouldn’t wait for the cops. In TV, as in real life, they often arrived too late.
He would have needed a key to get through the outer door and into the lobby, but all he had to do was bull past the young mother with her arms full of kids and groceries. Any other day he would have helped. Any other day he could have repacked her groceries for her (part-time job number nineteen, bagger at Dominick’s).
Any other day but not today and, thank God, she couldn’t fumble the toddlers and the food and her key fast enough. He had plenty of time to race past and ignore her startled, “Hey!”, glance at the elevator and see it was on sixteen (Leah was on four), and plunge into the stairwell.
There was an old horror movie that scared the crap out of him when he was a kid, A Nightmare on Elm Street. A babysitter let him watch it and he never forgot it.
Most of it was cheesy and silly (he still didn’t understand why Nancy got so freaked when she unplugged her phone from the wall and it still rang (good Lord, was this movie made in the 1800s?) but there was a part at the end that terrified him. Nancy, the last (wo)man standing, was running down the stairs to flee the bad guy when the stairs became all gooey. They were carpeted on top but like giant marshmallows inside and the faster she tried to go and the harder she struggled to wrench her feet free of the mess, the more her feet got stuck in the goo.
He’d slept with the lights on for a week and refused to use the stairs for a month. This proved problematic as the only bathroom was upstairs, but that was why, eight-year-old Archer reasoned, God made backyards. During the course of that month, he spent so much time in the yard it eventually led to part-time job number three, lawn boy.
This was just like that. He knew the stairs were concrete but he also felt like his feet were sticking to them, preventing him from making any headway. He knew he was taking the stairs as fast as he could, but it felt like he was stuck in goo. Like he wasn’t moving at all and somewhere Leah needed him and he knew no matter what he did or how he did it, he wouldn’t be there in time.
He made it to four after a thousand years and barreled through the door and into the hallway right outside Leah’s apartment, slumping against the door
(breathe you’ve got to breathe you’re no good to Leah if you pass out in the hall so for Christ’s sake breathe and then get in there and take that fucker apart starting with his eyes if he can’t see her he can’t knife her come on come on COME ON)
for half a second.
And in that half second, the door to Leah’s apartment opened and Tom Winn stumbled out. Archer had never been more horrified in his life, and that included part-time job number nine, the month he spent working on a Wisconsin dairy farm (some of the things livestock did, like give birth, were so gross). Awful enough that Tom was here. So much worse that he was leaving. Because if Tom was leaving, that meant Leah was dead.
There was also something wrong with him, besides the psycho killer thing. It was so obvious, but so startling, Archer’s eyes had a tough time processing the image and reporting it to his brain: Tom had a knife in one hand (to be expected) and a knife sticking out of his chest (unexpected). Quivering out of his chest, to be specific; it looked like it was only in partway, half an inch or so, and it wiggled back and forth when he moved.
He realized at once what had happened, and as if Leah were standing beside him, he remembered what she said when she’d stabbed him.
It’s just as well I could not ram it home in your heart. All those ribs to get through—ugh. Most of the time the blade just glances off them. In the end it’s often too much trouble.
She’d gone for a kill shot and the knife had gotten stuck in the guy’s breastbone. It must have hurt like a bitch, but wasn’t fatal. It was barely slowing him down. But it had served to scare him off—for the first time in all her lives, Leah had finally fought back.
“I loved her,” Tom the Psycho was saying, sounding amazed and hurt, like he couldn’t believe Leah had the gall to actually resist being murdered. His trembling fingers kept coming up and trying to pluck at the knife, but would skitter away at the last second and he’d let out another whimper.
Awwww, poor baby. Don’t like the pain of getting knifed? Buck up, little camper, just make sure you take your antibiotics! Take it from one who knows.
“Do not touch him!” Leah, screaming from very far away. The most beautiful sound in the world, the universe, the most beautiful sound in the history of sounds. No one screaming like that was dying, not if they were getting that much oxygen. (Part-time job number eleven: EMT.) Her shrieks sounded like a seagull set on fire, which, for some reason, he found sexy.
I’d like to love you in your tower, so bring me there. The thing she said to him he’d loved the most (so far). The thing he replayed in his brain before going to sleep. Or getting out of bed. Or fixing breakfast. Or mowing the lawn (part-time job number seventeen). Or in the shower. Especially in the shower. Several times in the shower.
Hold that thought, Archer promised himself.
“I loved her,” Tom said again, irritatingly lively for a stabbing victim. He said it like he assumed Archer gave a shit. He said it like Tom was the victim.
“You don’t know one goddamned thing about love.” Archer kicked the other man’s legs out from under him. He didn’t have much of a plan, he just wanted the man on the ground. What happened was kind of spectacular: Tom fell over Archer and plunged face-first into the stairwell. He and Leah heard the “crack” as the weight of Tom’s falling body punched her knife through the bone. He lay crumpled at the bottom of the stairs and didn’t get back up.
Too bad. Archer would have liked to pull the knife free and reinsert it somewhere else twenty or thirty times.
Maybe in the next life.
FORTY-THREE
Leah was on Archer like a hurricane with shark eyes. “Are you all right?” she cried, stumbling, falling to her knees and then wrenching herself back up. Blood was trickling down the side of her face, which for some reason she hadn’t noticed. “Did he hurt you? There’s blood, Archer. Are you bleeding? Are you? Ohpleaseareyouallright? Where’s your phone? The police. Where is—”
“It’s your blood, Leah, I’m fine. You’re the one bleeding; c’mere and sit down with me,” was all he managed before she reached out.
She groped for him, clutched at him, then ran her hands over him to assure herself he was unharmed. She rained small kisses on his face, the backs of his hands, his palms, his neck. “I did not you must know I did not mean what I said I did not I said those hateful things to drive you away and I am so sorry so sorry so sorry it always worked before so I thought I would do it to you and I didn’t mean a single world of it, I swear, I swear, not one word, not ever any of those words oh please I am so sorry.”
He was trying to blot the blood off her face with the tail of his shirt and saying, “Of course not I know that Jesus are you okay I can’t believe that fucker are you okay did he hurt you are you okay?” Stupid questions, stupid comments, she was bleeding, of course Tom had hurt her, it’s what he does/did. Archer wished the pathetic fuck was still alive so he could trip him down the stairs all over again. “C’mon, let’s go call an ambulance, the dispatcher will put out a Code 3 and we’ll get cops, too.”
She nodded tearfully, still clutching him. “All right, that sounds—what? Code 3?”
“It doesn’t look deep,” he said, still wiping her face. “Good job dodging.” He kissed her on the cheek. “And also stabbing.”
“A shit job stabbing. I couldn’t get through the breastbone and I know better, so frankly I deserve to be dead.” She batted his hand away. “I’m fine, are you all right?”
“You’re the one bleeding, I’m just out of breath. Ran all the way up the stairs.”
They both heard approaching sirens.
“Hey, the cab driver called the cops! Or Cat did,” he added,
remembering. “She was yelling at me about that when I left to get here.”
“You galloped to my rescue in a cab?”
“The bus I needed wasn’t due for another fifteen minutes.”
Leah let out a hysterical giggle, then clapped a hand over her mouth. Archer reached for her wrist and gently pulled her hand down. “That’s an okay sound. Any sound you’re making right now is gorgeous. I’m pretty sure you’re in shock, though.”
“I am not.” All hysteria had fled; she was again Leah the Insighter, firmly in control. “He’s dead. We killed him. We did.” She looked at Archer as though she couldn’t believe he was there, right there, within touching distance. Hugging and kissing distance. “He’s dead and we’re still here.”
“You’re still here,” he corrected. “That’s the most important thing.”
“It is not.” He could see the cuts were already clotting; she likely wouldn’t need stitches. “I can’t believe you came for me. After those things I said. I can’t believe you’re here. And my mother. She tried to help me.”
He was rubbing small circles beneath her shoulders. “Yeah, hon, I know that, remember? I was there when she called—”
“No. She knew what Tom was going to do. She put herself in his way. She put her face and her body in the way of his blade. To help me. And when he left, she found the strength to call me, knowing I wouldn’t talk to her. She used up the last of her life trying to warn me, and died knowing I wouldn’t care.”
“Is that so incredible, so hard to understand?” Frankly, it was the first time Ms. Nazir probably acted like a real mom.
“Yes,” she said bluntly.
“All right. That’s fair, but maybe she was ready to change her next life, too. Maybe the weight of always hurting you was too much this time around.”
Leah leaned against him, looking down at Tom’s sprawled, broken body. “Maybe so.” She took a long, shuddery breath. “For someone who’s lived over a dozen lifetimes, I’m still learning.”