“I didn’t hurt him.” James squints at her. “Did I?”
“You did. I think he has a scar. He’s probably still embarrassed over that incident.”
“Should I call him and make amends? I did that in AA, but I had so many other people on my list I didn’t even think of Ben.” James gives her a sidelong glance. “Are you two still together?”
“He’s getting married today. You really don’t have to worry about Ben. He’s fine without amends. How did you know we were together in the first place?”
“Who do you think he bought his drugs from back home? He never mentioned the Bambi incident, so I thought he was over it. But he was always whining about you when he picked up his weed.”
“Really?” Shelby is flattered.
“He was madly in love with you.”
“Well, not anymore. Now he’s marrying a beautiful Cuban woman.”
“I doubt that he loves her,” James says.
“He happens to love her a thousand times more than he ever loved me.” Shelby’s heart is racing. She doesn’t want to talk about love with James Howard. “Can we get on with it?” she says briskly even though her heart is fluttering. Perhaps she has arrhythmia, a syndrome she’s been reading about in a veterinary text that affects elderly dogs.
James brings out a book of lettering so Shelby can choose the style she prefers. “This isn’t invisible ink,” he warns. “What you write on your skin is there forever.”
Shelby notices the word Trust written across one of his wrists when he gives her the book. She loves the thin, Gothic lines. It’s just the sort of print she wants. Without thinking, she reaches for James’s other arm to see what’s written there as well. He pulls back; it’s a gut reaction, but a strong one. Shelby nearly topples off the table, until James puts an arm out to stop her fall. They’re both breathing too hard. Now she can see the ink. Someone is written across his other wrist. It’s the most recent postcard message she received. She looks at him and he looks back at her and she can feel something between them, but she’s not sure what it is. “You’ve been writing to me? Why would you do that? We hardly knew each other.”
“I was there that night. I was high and drunk,” he tells her, “and the road was a mess. I probably would have crashed if I kept driving, but you spun out coming the other direction. I stopped because your car was blocking the road. I was the one who pulled you out of the car.”
Shelby is half-naked and freezing. What she remembers most about that night is how cold it was. But she remembers there was someone who told her not to close her eyes. He told her not to fall asleep. He said Stay here and she did.
“What about Helene?” Shelby asks.
James shakes his head. “She was crushed. I couldn’t get her out. But you were breathing. What they say about saving a life is true,” he adds. “You’re responsible for that person forever. That’s why I wrote to you. Even though you didn’t really know me.”
“My mom saw you leave the cards. She thought you were an angel.”
“I’m not.” James laughs. “Far from it.”
It’s a good thing James gets up to put the book of lettering away. Shelby’s not sure what she might have done if the spell hadn’t been broken. She wants to stop her attraction to him before she does something she’ll regret.
“I had a brother who died when I was ten,” he tells her when he comes back. “Meningitis. The doctor said it was just a cold and he would be fine but he wasn’t. He died in the middle of the night, in the room we shared. I was there with him, in the next bed. We’d both gone swimming. We’d snuck away and biked all the way to Northport. Then he died and I didn’t. I shouldn’t have been saved. So I knew what you were going to feel. That’s why I stayed with you until the cops came. As it turned out, I happened to have some drugs in my possession, so I didn’t get to visit you in the hospital. The best I could do were the postcards.”
“They were good postcards,” Shelby says.
“Yeah?”
“Sometimes I thought you were the only one who knew I was alive.”
James reaches for his wallet. Inside there is a small black butterfly. The charm from her bracelet, broken that night. “I’ve been keeping this for you.”
Shelby takes it in her hands. Perhaps her luck has been returned to her at last. James leans in to rub on some alcohol. He runs one finger along her skin, and she shivers involuntarily. “I assume the name you want is Ben,” he says.
She shakes her head. “Helene.”
James stops, rattled. “You expect me to be a party to that kind of remorse and self-hatred?”
“You still feel bad about hitting Ben with rubber bands. I might as well have murdered Helene. At the very least I need to remember.”
“Do you think you’re the only one who’s ever done something terrible? I assaulted people and robbed them. I did these things on purpose. It wasn’t an accident like what happened to you with Helene. Anyone could have crashed that night. In AA it took me three weeks to get through the list of people I had to make amends to. But I couldn’t call my brother. I couldn’t make amends to him.”
One of the other guys in the shop moves the curtain aside and starts to come into the room.
“Get out,” James growls at him.
The guy slinks away.
“I’m not sure whose idea it was to go swimming on that day,” James says, “but I’m pretty sure it was mine.”
It’s then Shelby realizes the printed Lee marking his forearm isn’t the name of a girlfriend or a lost love. It’s his brother. She vaguely recalls him. He was a year older, wild, always in trouble. “I remember. He shot off fireworks in the gym.”
“It doesn’t help to carry them around, Shelby. That’s something I know for sure. It helps to let them go.”
But Shelby is the customer and she sticks with her choice. Before James begins to work, he tells her to breathe evenly and deeply. He’ll do his best not to hurt her. “The first one’s the worst,” he says. Shelby turns her face away, but she tears up at the first stab of pain. She can’t believe she’s crying in front of him again. This time she can’t stop. “It’s okay if you cry. Just don’t move,” he tells her. On the night of the accident she did exactly as he said. She stayed alive on the road. Her skin burns, the way it did then, and by the time James is done Shelby has stopped crying. He deftly drapes the fresh ink with surgery cloth dipped in lidocaine, which he tapes to her skin. Then he gives her some tablets of Vicodin from his own stash. “To use sparingly,” he warns. She’s to leave the bandage on for several hours and not shower.
“I hope you’re happy with it,” he says. When Shelby takes out her wallet at the counter, he won’t let her pay. “No. Not this time. It’s on the house.”
“I’m glad you shot those rubber bands at Ben,” Shelby confides when he walks her to the door. “He deserved it. You don’t have to feel bad about it anymore.”
“Just to be totally truthful, when I found you that night, you tried to get away from me. But then I told you, you could trust me.”
Shelby has no memory of this. “Really? And did I?”
James laughs at her, and there’s the glimmer of who he was before his life came to grief. “I don’t know, Shelby. You tell me.”
The snow is melting and Ben’s wedding most likely wasn’t ruined after all. When Shelby reaches her apartment she hears voices inside. Maravelle has a key for emergencies, and there she is with Jasmine, making themselves at home.
“Where have you been? We’ve been calling and calling. Don’t you ever answer your phone?” Maravelle hugs Shelby before she can take off her raincoat.
Shelby grimaces and pulls away. The tattoo is killing her. There’s an itch under her skin, and she can tell it’s only going to get worse.
“What did you do to yourself?” Maravelle asks.
Shelby slips off he
r coat and pulls down her shirt to expose the bandage.
“You idiot!” Maravelle says. “How is that going to look when you’re eighty?”
“I’m trying to be in the here and now,” Shelby responds.
Jasmine chimes in. “I want a tattoo!”
“Not on your life.” Maravelle throws Shelby a warning look. “You see how you influence her?”
“Hardly,” Shelby says.
Jasmine has turned out to be everything Shelby was not: the prom queen, the valedictorian, the good daughter. Now Jaz has a big announcement, one she wanted to tell Shelby in person. She’s been accepted to Yale. She found out at the start of the week. Shelby throws her arms around Jaz. “I can’t believe you waited a whole week to tell me!”
“It was so hard not to tell you, but Mami and I thought you would need some positivity today, considering Ben and the wedding.”
Maravelle announces they intend to spend the night to cheer Shelby up. They’ve brought pillows, bags of candy, flannel pajamas. Maravelle will sleep on the couch, Jasmine on a quilt on the floor. They’ve also brought the ingredients for chocolate chip cookies, and Maravelle begins the search for mixing bowls and a cookie sheet.
“I don’t own a cookie sheet,” Shelby informs her. “I don’t cook. I order. I think you’ve mistaken me for a normal person.”
“Fine. We’ll use aluminum foil instead. My mami used to do it that way.”
Shelby has a sink full of unwashed dishes and no clean sheets and her tattoo is killing her. It’s not the pain, it’s the itch, like something is trying to get out of her skin. “You should leave,” she tells them.
“We’re not letting you be alone tonight,” Jasmine informs her. “Not on Ben’s wedding day.”
“Seriously. I’m fine,” Shelby insists. “I’m happy for him.”
“Get real,” Maravelle says. “Nobody’s happy for their ex-boyfriend.”
“Now that my mom finally has a boyfriend she’s an expert,” Jasmine quips.
“He’s not my boyfriend.” When Shelby gives Maravelle a look, Maravelle grins and says, “In the first place, he’s not a boy.”
It’s all very proper, but Maravelle has begun to see Teddy’s attorney, Isaac Worth. He’s taken her to dinner several times, and he was recently allowed to come to Sunday night supper with the family. He brought potato salad, his mother’s recipe, which Shelby hears was delicious. Mrs. Diaz put Maravelle’s new beau through his paces, questioning him, and he rated a not bad, which is excellent in anyone else’s book. Last Saturday, Isaac drove Maravelle upstate to visit Teddy. When they sat down to lunch together, Teddy narrowed his eyes and asked, “Do I get free legal services from now on?”
Maravelle reports that Isaac Worth quickly said, “No. Because you’re not going to need an attorney again.”
Ever since, Maravelle has been on cloud nine, though she’s downplaying the situation. “I hardly know him,” she claims.
“Should we refer to him as your beau?” Shelby teases.
“How about your steady?” Jasmine suggests.
“Just a friend,” Maravelle insists. “Thank you very much.”
While the cookies are baking, Jasmine and Shelby take the dogs out for a walk. It is freezing on Tenth Avenue, with a wind rising off the cold, half-frozen river. They head across the West Side Highway. Shelby carries Blinkie while the other dogs enjoy what’s left of the snow. The black butterfly charm is in her pocket. Soon it will be spring, maybe tomorrow. As evening falls, the wet street glows as if sprinkled with diamonds. Shelby remembers the angel crouching down on the pavement on the night of the accident. She didn’t know who or what he was, but she let him cover her with his coat.
“Ben’s a great person,” Jasmine says as they trek along the riverside. “He just wasn’t right for you.” Jaz is much smarter than Shelby ever was at her age. “You have a different path.”
“Yeah.” Shelby laughs. “Alone.”
Jasmine laughs. “You’re not alone.”
Shelby hugs Jasmine, and then they take off running, the dogs leaping beside them, Blinkie in Shelby’s arms. Shelby never wanted to get involved with Maravelle and her kids. She wasn’t looking for friends. Tonight they will sit up till all hours and watch movies; they’ll finish the chocolate chip cookies and order Chinese food. If there’s a fortune, Shelby won’t read it. She can see the future without it: Jasmine will grow up. Maravelle will fall in love. As for herself, she’s still not sure she wants to know.
When Jaz and Maravelle have fallen asleep, Shelby locks herself into the tiny bathroom. She tugs off her T-shirt, then eases the tape away from the bandage, even though James told her not to fuss with it until the following day. When she sees what he’s done she feels tears stinging her eyes. Instead of Helene’s name, he’s inked a black butterfly. It’s the exact image of the charm from her bracelet, the one he held on to ever since that night. He’s telling her what happened isn’t something she has to pay for, for the rest of her life. And then she knows she trusted him on that night, and that maybe, possibly, she’ll trust him again.
Shelby is waiting outside when he gets off work on a Friday night. It’s late, nearly midnight. James is wearing a black coat and a knitted cap and is almost invisible in the dark. “You,” he says when he sees Shelby standing there.
“I didn’t get the tattoo I asked for.”
“Did you come to get your money back?” James grins since the tattoo was free. He starts to walk toward Broadway. Shelby keeps pace alongside him.
“You can buy me dinner if you want to apologize,” she tells him.
“Apologize?” He glances at her and frowns. “Helene’s name isn’t your story.”
“You know my story?”
James shrugs. “I know what it isn’t.”
They’re passing by a Chinese restaurant that doesn’t look half-bad. Shelby pauses to gaze at the menu posted in the window, then she realizes James has walked on. She has to dash to catch up with him. “What was wrong with that place?”
“I don’t eat Chinese food.” James keeps going.
“Seriously? Never?”
“Nope. I lived behind a Chinese restaurant in Queens for a couple of years. I ate there every day. How about this place?”
It’s a bar that serves hamburgers. They go inside the dark tavern and get a booth. Shelby orders a cheeseburger and a glass of white wine. James asks for a Diet Coke and a salad.
“I’m a sober vegetarian,” he explains. “It sounds terrible, I know. Like I’m in a cult. But if you eat the crap they call meat in jail long enough you never want to see the stuff again. And if I drink, I let the monster out of the cage.”
“If I feel, I let my monster out,” Shelby says.
James leans forward. “I’d like to see that.”
While they’re waiting for their food they discuss the best death scenes in their favorite movies. Shelby thinks it’s the bloody death in Alien. She could watch that moment over and over again. James insists it’s Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now.
Then Shelby realizes there’s an even better one. “Actually, the best death scene is Bambi’s mother.”
James laughs. “Did you have to bring up Bambi?” He gulps some Diet Coke. “Did Ben get married that day?”
“I assume so. Why? Do you care?”
“Do you?”
She’s no longer sure. By the time their meals arrive Shelby has realized there is something seriously wrong with her. She can’t eat and she’s ordered another glass of wine, which will make her more tipsy than she wants to be. “Don’t tell me you still want to make amends to Ben?” she says.
“No. I just want to thank him for being stupid,” James says. He has this way of looking at her that gives her chills. Shelby can’t even drink after that.
They leave together and wind up walking down East Seventh Stree
t. This is where he lives. “Can you wait here?” James sounds unsure. Maybe he expects her to take off running. Maybe she should. He’s warned her that he has a monster inside him, but she has one too. She nods and waits on the stoop. She has a shivery feeling, as if she’s stepped into a dream from which she can’t wake. When James comes back outside he’s got a white German shepherd with him. It’s the sort of dog you would find in a dream.
“You didn’t say you had a dog.” Shelby sinks down to pet the shepherd, who is aloof but tolerant, just like the General. Her favorite type. She had always found dogs that dance around desperate for approval annoying. This is a real dog. Dignified, but willing to accept Shelby’s praise when she tells him what a good and gorgeous boy he is.
“His name is Coop,” James tells Shelby as they meander down the deserted street. “I found him near Cooper Union. He was dumped out of a car, half-dead, and there I was, so I figured it was fate.”
The trees look black and the sky is dotted with blue-black clouds. Shelby feels strangely happy walking along in the dim night. There are bats in the tower of a church overlooking a small park. There’s a sprinkling of gold-tinged stars in the sky. They’ve entered a moody, tattooed world, but they laugh as they talk about their worst days at school. For Shelby that day was when she forgot her homework and humiliated herself by crying in front of her entire fourth-grade class. She locked herself in a stall in the girls’ room and wouldn’t come out until the principal asked her mother to talk to her. For James, there are so many horrible incidents he has to list them. The day he was suspended for shooting rubber bands at Ben, of course, and the day his brother set off a cherry bomb in the gym and he took the blame, the day of their fourth-grade photo when the photographer tied him to the chair. There you go, you little shit, the photographer had told him. I was in the navy. See if you can get out of these knots.
“Believe me, I tried,” James tells her. “That bastard knew his knots.”
When the dog has finished with his business, they go up to James’s apartment. It’s bigger than Shelby’s place, but not by much. It’s certainly emptier: a bed, an old couch, and a long trestle table littered with drawing paper and bottles of colored ink. There are intricate tattoo patterns taped to the wall, all blue and black. A heron in flight, a rose that never blooms, a constellation of stars. Alongside are original illustrations for a graphic novel, Nevermore, just published by a small press in Queens. Several copies are stacked on the table, fresh from the publisher. The images are vivid: a young man called the Misfit, who dons a black coat like the one James wears. A raven is perched on his shoulder and a monster looms before him. All in shades of black and blue, grim and heartbreaking and glorious.