February 8
Have you ever seen something glow black? It’s not impossible. Black is an absence of light; it’s what happens when all visible wavelengths of light are absorbed by the material in question. Most of the time, light passes through air without being changed; air doesn’t absorb any of the wavelengths of the visible spectrum except when there’s a lot of it between your eye and the edge of the air. That is why the sky is blue in the daytime. But at night, the sky is black because there’s no light coming fron the sun; the starlight and the moonlight aren’t sufficient to illuminate the canopy of the sky. Their light is absorbed into the world and becomes black.
What is hovering around Lucas Reynolds’ heart is black; so very black that it looks like a piece of the night had been torn off of the sky and pasted onto him. It’s amorphous and evaporating, but it never seems to diminish in size; instead it looks almost like it’s going to flare up and out, consuming him in some unholy fire. It is fire of a sort I’ve never seen, because in the center is a color deeper than black, which I guess I could only describe as “Rage Red”. I swear that as I look deeper into the center of that flame, something in there is looking back at me. I’m looking at it like a cat looks at a new toy, curious. It’s looking at me like a cat looks at a mouse, venomous.
February 7
“Maybe it’s the issue of waking up,” he says. He slips his hand into the front pocket of his coat and pulls out a small green gift-card box. “This should keep you in venti vanilla caramel macchiatos for a good two weeks.” Starbucks. The man knows how to treat a girl.
Wait. A gift card is a pretty risky thing to accept; if I double-cross him, he’ll just cancel it and call the cops on me, claiming it’s stolen. Or will he? He doesn’t look like the type to want to attract too much attention, especially not from the police. He might have some other way to track me with it. No, it’s too dangerous to accept. But I still need to convince him that I’ll take his offer.
“Oh,” I say, frowning. “That Starbucks? Out by Liberty?”
“The same,” Reynolds says. “Cute waiters there, if you’re interested.”
“So I hear,” I say, “but Libby Schraeder, she’s in my Portugese class, she’s always complaining about the card readers there. They never take her cards the first time, and she always winds up paying with cash.”
“I see,” he says, slipping the box back into his pocket. “They did give me a little trouble when I got it. Very well, fair enough. We have a deal, then? Eighty dollars to keep you a regular Starbucks customer for a fortnight?” I nod in silence. He stands up, and his right hand brushes his coat open to reach for his wallet. I see it at that instant.
February 6
“And you’re saying that if I keep going to the Beanery,” I say, “I may meet with an ‘accident’?”
“Nothing so sinister,” he says. “No, you’ll be perfectly safe. But it’s like pulling on a thread, or scratching a scab. It might satisfy your curiosity, or sate an itch, but it’s only temporary, and it always leads to more trouble than it’d have been to just leave it alone. Believe me when I tell you that it’s for your own good.”
“I’m still not so sure.”
“I’ve seen your future, Fran Minervudottir,” he says, smiling. “I see you walking the earth, meeting people from everywhere, from this time forward, for a very long time. I see you doing a great deal of good with the gift you have been given, Fran. But the choice is yours. I can’t make you do something you don’t want to do.”
I peer at him. That damn coat is still tightly wrapped, but I have to know what’s under it. I can’t take the suspense much more, and I can take the elevated heat in the room even less. He still hasn’t shown the first bead of sweat. If he doesn’t take it off soon, I’m going to rip it off him and feed it to him. I have no intention of doing anything he says, and I think he knows that.
February 5
“Shoot,” I say.
“That promise I need from you, Fran, it’s so very simple. I need you to stay away from the Beanery for a couple of days.”
That tears it. You can come into my house, you can stalk me, you can ask me nonsensical questions about people who are just barely above strangers in the sorting order of acquaintances. But if you mess with my caffeine supply, I will make you suffer. End of story. “I don’t know,” I say.
“Today is Ash Wednesday,” he says, off-handedly. “I have to get to Mass later on myself, but I would encourage you to consider giving up coffee for Lent.”
“I’m Episcopalian,” I say. Lapsed. So very lapsed. “Why do you need me to stay away?”
“Well, I don’t need you do to that,” he says, “but it would be in your best interests to do so. It would basically put you securely on the near shore, in that swimming analogy we were using just a little while ago.” He leans forward, but his coat stays closed. What are you hiding? “You see, Fran, the weird things you’ve seen and heard today, they’ll all go away if you stop chasing them. You’ll be able to just sit back and live your life like any normal human being. You’ll be able to go to grad school, see the world… you could even prosper.”
February 4
“I’ll bear that in mind,” Reynolds says, grinning. Oh crap. Did I just help him more than I meant to? Or is he trying to make me think I’ve screwed up? Just how badly can I overanalyze this? “Okay, last question, and then we get to the promise. Fair enough?”
“Sounds good,” I reply. Definitely can’t give him a straight answer on this one.
“I think you saw Mrs. Sanders talking to a gentleman in the Beanery this morning,” he says. “Have you ever seen that man before today?”
The generic guy. Well, generic is generic. I could have seen him a thousand times over and he’d never have registered. And yet, he was familiar. Like he’d been in there every day, and I just didn’t notice him over the generic genericness of his generic clothes. God, that’s the only thing I can think of, the genericness. It’s not even a standing-out generic, but I suppose that would defeat the purpose of being generic. Two answers, both true, neither one I want to give. I shrug. “He didn’t make an impression, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Reynolds’ smile creeps further across his face, until I think he resembles nothing more than a Pez dispenser in a bad coat. Something I said made his day, and I think that I am going to need a very long cold shower after this is done. “Excellent,” he says. “Very, very good. All right. I have something to ask of you.”
February 3
“I don’t know,” I say. “I never really thought about it until just now.” Well, it’s the truth. It doesn’t answer his question in the slightest, but it is the truth.
“Could you, maybe, hazard a guess?”
“I could, but it sounds to me like you would be looking for something more substantial than a guess,” I say. “I wouldn’t want to mislead you.”
He scowls for just a brief, imperceptible moment. It’s enough for me to catch the foul expression, and I think for that instant he knows I’m studying him as closely as he’s studying me. Then, as if nothing had happened, he relaxes his face, and the smile comes back. “Well, you’re right, of course,” he says. “I suppose we can just leave that for now. Moving on, do you know if Mrs. Sanders has any children?”
She does, a son. She doesn’t. She’s never talked about kids. That seems like the best course of action to take. Again, they’re all somehow true, but I think that last one might be the safest answer. Besides, if I weasel out of every question, he’ll know something’s up. “I don’t remember her ever mentioning any children,” I say, feigning nonchalance. “Really, for something like that, you might want to talk to Lou.”
February 2
“First, how long have you known that Katie was married?” he asks.
That came out of left field, even though I knew he was probably going to ask something like that– just not that exactly. The thing is, I can’t help but tell him something I don’t want him to know. I can’t say “just this morning,” because that would tell him about the disappearing ring thing. On the other hand, maybe he knows about the ring thing, so if I tell him “since I’ve known her,” he’ll know that’s a lie. But then again, I don’t think I ever really found out she was married, and I’m not entirely convinced by the ring thing, so I could say “she isn’t,” but that would either be a lie or tell him I don’t buy the ring trick.
What makes it more infuriating is that I have the distinct feeling that all three of them are the truth. It’s a bizarre feeling. They are all true, but they can’t all be true because they’re contradictory; and even so they are still, all three of them, the precise, perfect, God’s truth.
“A difficult question?” he asks. “I understand. Take as much time…” he trails off, a slight smirk curling the right side of his mouth. “…as much time as you need.”