Turning Angel

  “I’ve never done that,” Mia says softly. “Have you?”

  “No.”

  “Is he in her front or back?”

  I study the picture. Kate’s pubic area is trimmed to a barely visible shadow. What must be a third of the shaft of Drew’s penis is visible below her vaginal lips, but the slight downward angle of the shot makes it difficult to see the point of entry.

  “Front, I think.”

  Mia shakes her head again. Her breathing has gone shallow, and there’s a tension in her body that wasn’t there before. The photo is shockingly erotic, and it makes me wonder whether Drew and Kate shot this photograph, or whether someone else was indeed in the room. It’s hard to believe they staged this shot with a timer.

  Mia leans closer to the screen. At some level, I know that viewing this material with her is inappropriate, but I also know that I’m not about to stop.

  “What do you think about that?” I ask.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “Is it?”

  “He’s hot.”

  I can’t help but feel a pang of jealousy. “And Kate?”

  “She’s so long. I’ll never look like that.”

  “Why would you want to look like that?”

  Mia shakes her head. She doesn’t want to answer. But neither does she take her eyes from the picture. As she stares, I decide to ask something I’ve wondered about ever since the murder—and especially after last night’s conversation with Caitlin.

  “Would you do something like that, Mia?”

  “What? The sex?”

  “No. Would you do what Kate did? Get involved with an older man. Like Drew.”

  She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. Then she turns to me and opens them. “Do you want me to be honest?”

  “Of course.”

  “Will you be honest?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever thought about kissing me?”

  In one moment my face is burning. I can’t be honest with her about that. Maybe not even with myself.

  “That wasn’t a discussion question,” she says. “It’s yes or no. True or false.”

  “Mia…”

  She looks down. “It’s all right. I already know.”

  “Do you?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well?”

  She shakes her head and looks up again. “You asked if I would do what Kate did. My answer is yes. With the right man.”

  “Why would you?”

  She looks back at the screen and covers her mouth with her hand. Then she closes the file and turns to face me, her eyes bright with intensity. “Because I’m ready to experience more than I have up to this point. I want to know the essence of life, and of myself. I want to learn what I’m capable of. And the boys I know can’t help me do that.”

  She pauses, but she seems to have more to say.

  “I realize that I could be hurt by an older man,” she goes on. “But that’s what you do when you’re my age, isn’t it? You get your heart broken, and you learn. You try to figure out who you’re supposed to be with.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “I’m not Kate. I’m not even like Kate. I’m my own person. I’m eighteen, and I understand what that kind of choice means. It’s a risk, but it’s one I would take. It’s something I’d like to experience before I leave for Brown. And my feeling is that the consequences of that kind of relationship don’t have to be negative.” She gives me a tight smile. “I’m not a Fatal Attraction kind of girl. No dramatic scenes, no pregnancy, no suicide attempts, no diseases. Just intimacy.”

  Her dark eyes are only inches from mine, and they seem almost bottomless.

  “Mia—”

  “I’m not the angel you think I am, Penn.”

  “You’re more of one than you think.”

  She raises an eyebrow in answer, then lays her right hand over my left. “Will you answer my question?”

  “Which one?”

  “You know which one.”

  As blood suffuses my cheeks again, it strikes me that only truth will resolve this situation. “Yes, I’ve thought about what it would be like to kiss you.”

  She acknowledges my words with a nod, but she already knew the answer.

  “But that doesn’t mean it’s all right for me to do it,” I add.

  Mia’s smile is as serene as the face of the Turning Angel. “I’ve thought about it, too,” she says. “I thought about it during the drive out to Oakfield. And during the drive back.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Don’t say anything. Just kiss me.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  She smiles as though we share some intimate secret. “Did you know that Humphrey Bogart married Lauren Bacall when she was twenty?”

  “No.”

  “He was forty-six. That’s more of an age difference than we have.”

  “Not by much.”

  She laughs softly. “Just giving you a little history. I wasn’t saying we have to be together forever. You already have a life, and I’m going to Brown in the fall.”

  Before I can speak again, she takes my other hand in her free one and squeezes. “Look at me, Penn. Not your idea of me, but me, the mortal girl. The flesh-and-blood Mia. And don’t say anything—please.”

  I can’t obey her. Because to look into Mia’s eyes for too long would send me straight down the road Drew has already traveled. The reality of a stunningly beautiful and intelligent young woman explaining why it’s all right for you to make love to her is enough to make any male lose all capacity for rational thought. In my mind I hear Wade Anders telling me that the hardest thing he ever did was turn down the girls who’ve come on to him in his office. Those girls, I am certain, were not even in Mia’s league. But what refuses to leave my mind is the image of Drew and Kate making love before the camera. Mia viewed that photograph with me and felt no embarrassment at all. On the contrary, she wants to experience the same intensity she saw there with me. More than that, she’s telling me beforehand that I’ll have no obligation to her.

  Evolutionary nirvana, Caitlin called it. God, was she right.

  I close my eyes, slip my hands from beneath Mia’s, and grip her upper arms. “Listen to me, Mia. Do you have any idea of the power you possess? You sitting there saying that—the way you said it—makes me believe in witchcraft. It’s like a spell. And I know you’re telling the truth. You have outgrown this town and its people. You are ready to taste a deeper level of life. You’re ready to explore yourself, and you probably do need a man for some parts of that journey.”

  “But you’re not that man?” she says.

  I nod slowly. “We both have to tell the truth here, okay? That’s the only way to be fair to each other. Do I want you in this moment? Yes, I do. Do I have any idea of what it would be like to experience with you what we saw in that picture? I think I do. Do I have any inkling of the connection you and I could have, despite our age difference? Of course I do. Because we already have it. I’ve been forcing myself to ignore it for weeks. It’s a cliché, I know, but I feel as though I’ve known you all my life. But the thing is…I haven’t. I couldn’t have. Because you’re half my age. You are literally young enough to be my daughter.”

  “But I’m not your daughter,” she says, laying her hands over mine again.

  I breathe slowly, trying to stay focused. “In some ways, I feel you are.”

  Mia shakes her head, her eyes anxious now. “Don’t say that. Because it’s not true. I’ve seen things in your eyes that a father doesn’t feel for a daughter.”

  “Of course you have. I’m a man, and I respond to all that you are. But I also feel things that a father feels for a daughter. Mainly, I feel very protective of you. And my first duty is to protect you from me.”

  She stares at me in silence, trying to process what I’ve said. In this strange lacuna of time, I feel the shattering intensity of the moment that Drew stepped over the line with K
ate. He looked into a face this beautiful; he gazed into eyes like twin pools in some mythic grove; he touched skin this flawless; he listened to the siren song of eternal youth falling from bloodred lips, and then he leaned forward—not back. And from that moment forward he was lost.

  Mia reads my eyes with the precision of a clairvoyant. Sadness touches her lips for a moment; then she blinks three times and looks back at the computer screen.

  “Forget I said anything,” she says, clicking the mouse to open a WordPerfect document. “I was being retarded.”

  “No, you weren’t. You were just…” I stop talking. I’ve lost her. The walls have gone up, and nothing is going to bring them down any time soon.

  “Look at this,” she says. “It looks like e-mail from that guy you talked about.”

  “Who?”

  “The drug dealer. Cyrus?”

  The name shocks me back to the present. Mia’s right. The letter is three paragraphs long, and incredibly enough, it’s signed: Peace+, Cyrus. I read it aloud, searching for a sense of Cyrus White in the way his words feel in my mouth.

  Dear Kate, I’ve been thinking about you a lot. I don’t want to freak you out, but I don’t think you’re the kind of girl who freaks out too easy. I’ve been looking at that picture, the one Jaderious took. You look so fine in that, girl. You look like a movie star in a magazine, when they catch them coming out of a theater or something. I mean it. I saw a girl on the cover of “US” magazine that made me think of you. I looked inside to find out who she was. Her name is Katie Holmes. Y’all even have the same name, so I rented two of her flicks. You’re kind of like her, only with blond hair and blue eyes, and more together. Not silly or flighty or anything.

  I hope what I gave you did you right. I can’t see you doing that myself, but I don’t really know you yet. Everybody carries some pain around, and I’m sure you’ve been through your share. You told me your old man was never around, and I can relate to that. I didn’t even know who my father was. The guy I thought it was, turned out he was just some guy, you know? My mama’s boyfriend. But that was a long time ago.

  I just want you to know I’m thinking about you. That I see you’re different from everybody else. I know you already know that, but I want you to know I know it too. I know it cause I’m the same way. I live in a different world, of course. But I always knew I was different. That’s how I got where I am now. When the plants closed down around here, a lot of guys just gave up. Some took shit jobs, but others just sit at home with their head in a bottle, or smoke weed, whatever. I guess that’s all right for them. But not me. I got screwed out of my living, so I give it right back to the bastards who did it. I’m not letting them take me down. I’m getting enough money to do anything I might ever want to do. I got big plans, I want you to know that. I know you got plans too. If you ever want to talk, like you said, just mail me back, or call me, whatever. I’m open to it, you know? That’s all I want to say. You be cool. Peace+, Cyrus.

  “Let’s look for the picture he’s talking about,” Mia says.

  “Look for ‘CW’ in the file name,” I think aloud. “Or ‘CK.’ ”

  “Snap!” says Mia. “There it is.”

  She clicks on another .jpeg file, and a new photo fills the screen. A large, sullen-faced black man stands before a gray wall with his arm around Kate, almost crushing her against him. Kate has a smile of sorts on her face, but it’s the smile of someone making the best of a bad situation. She looks like a girl being molested by a customs official while trying to get out of a hostile country; she has to play along to get out of the situation, but she’s not okay with it. But then again, maybe that’s just prejudice coloring my view of the photograph.

  “Does she look happy to you?” I ask.

  Mia shakes her head. “That’s one of Kate’s fake smiles. Everybody has one, of course. Kate has about five, and that’s one of them. She looks scared to me.”

  “I agree.”

  I lean closer to the screen and try to read Cyrus’s eyes, but the flat-panel model doesn’t have the fine resolution of a CRT. Still, his whole appearance and posture radiate a sense of threat. Sonny Cross told me that Cyrus was thirty-four, but the drug dealer looks about twenty-eight in this photo. He’s built like an NFL cornerback: his bullet head is shaved clean, his neck is corded with muscle, and his biceps are thicker than Kate’s thighs. His skin is the color of café au lait—I’m guessing a quarter of his blood could be Caucasian. He’s wearing a black wife-beater tank top and tight white painter’s pants. A solitary gold chain hangs around his neck, but the links are thick enough to pull a truck out of a mudhole. I wonder if the chain is meant to symbolize the chains of slavery.

  “Look for more letters,” I murmur.

  “Definitely,” says Mia.

  She begins opening WordPerfect files. Most of them seem like diary pages that didn’t make Kate’s handwritten journal. Ironically, these entries are of the more casual sort:

  Ate crawfish pasta at Pearl Street Pasta…

  Got an acceptance letter from Colgate—too late, people…

  Grandma sent me a check for $10. What does she think I can buy with that?…

  Steve almost cracked his skull today on his 4-wheeler. He made a huge deal out of it, but I couldn’t pretend to be too worried. It’s not like there was much risk of brain damage…

  For some reason, Kate chronicled the most sensitive events of her life by hand, where they could easily be discovered, while her quotidian record was saved to a password-protected disk. Why? The password was to protect the pictures, I realize. The person most likely to discover Kate’s journal was her mother, and Kate wasn’t worried about that. She simply wanted to spare her mother from the explicit visual evidence of her sexual life.

  “That looks like the only letter from Cyrus,” Mia says.

  “I’m going to have to find a way to get a look at Kate’s actual computer.”

  “Would Mrs. Townsend let you do that? She gave you the journal.”

  “I think she would. But the police probably have it by now. I’ll get Quentin to request access to it.”

  “Wait! Here’s another letter!”

  As I read the next e-mail from Cyrus, my face grows hot. The chatty tone of the first letter is gone, replaced by seething anger. This time Mia reads aloud:

  What the fuck, huh? You said you were going to write me back, talk to me, but you just leave me sitting here like I don’t exist. And that’s the truth, isn’t it? In your world, I don’t exist. I only pop into your head when the dope gets low. Yeah, I know how it is. I know more junkies than I can count, and they’re all the same. You just look better than the rest. But the beautiful people got the monkey on their back too, baby. You’ll see that when you get to Harvard. You can bet your ass those rich kids are snorting and mainlining and everything else. The only difference is, they got better dope. If you ever come down off that high horse, write me back.

  “Cyrus thought Kate was getting the pills for herself,” Mia says.

  “She was protecting Drew.”

  Mia shakes her head. “I don’t like Drew too much right now. He was really taking advantage of her.”

  I’m disgusted myself, but I’m also excited. If Cyrus White didn’t know Kate was buying the Lorcet for Ellen Elliott, then Shad Johnson can’t possibly learn the truth behind Kate’s visits from any members of Cyrus’s crew. Quentin will be ecstatic over this.

  “Look,” says Mia, reading another note from Cyrus. “You see what Kate was doing? She was playing Cyrus to keep the pills coming. He wanted her, so he held the dope over her head, and she played the game. I wonder how far she went?”

  “Too far, I’m afraid,” I reply, reading farther down.

  You played me, didn’t you, bitch? You made me feel like you saw past my skin and my trade. But you don’t. You made me believe you see me the way you see yourself. But you don’t. To you I’m just another nigger. After you get to Harvard, I’m going to be that big bad black dope dealer y
ou tell colorful stories about, while your spoiled-ass friends laugh. Well, fuck you, bitch! You knew I wanted you, and you held out that pussy like bait to get what you wanted. Just like every other bitch tries to do. But women don’t play that shit with Cyrus. Hear? I got some bitches you ought to talk to about that. They learned quick. You will too. You can hide all you want. You can ignore my e-mail, not answer my calls. But when that dope gets low, you’ll be back. And don’t be trying to get it from Marko. I own that motherfucker. Your best bet is to fake a toothache and go to a horny dentist. You can probably play him for some of what you need. But you won’t make it through the summer, baby. You’ll be back to me. And this time you’re going to pay like all the other bitches. With pussy.

  “Holy shit,” Mia says softly. “This is scary.”

  “This is dynamite is what it is. Are there any more like this?”

  “Let’s see.” She opens another folder containing WordPerfect documents. Most are to-do lists relating to admission to colleges. There are five drafts of essays written for applications.

  “Look at this hypertext document,” Mia says.

  The saved Web page is a visual encyclopedia of medications containing hydrocodone. There’s a picture of each brand of pill, and beside each the pharmacological information about it—how much hydrocodone it contains, how much acetaminophen, etc.

  “Kate was a comparison shopper,” I comment.

  “She wanted to make sure Cyrus didn’t screw her.”

  “In the drug-dealing sense.”

  “In both senses,” says Mia. “I feel so sorry for her.”

  “What’s that?” I ask, pointing to a Microsoft Notepad document.

  Mia opens the file. “It looks like she copied the text from an e-mail and posted it into Notepad. Holy shit. Look at that.”