Alligator - Lisa Moore [29]
That’s not a skill, he’d said.
Sentient beings, she’d whispered, staring up into the branches of her trees.
He would burn the house down, Isobel Turner’s house, and when she collected the insurance money he would take most of it from her.
Valentin asked how much money she would collect and she said $82,000. She answered him without realizing she had spoken, so absorbed was she in the mail.
This $82,000 was definitely the right amount. He would not stay in St. John’s for another winter. He had been in Newfoundland for more than a year and he hated the place as he had never hated any place in his life.
He told Isobel Turner what he was going to do and he said she would get a cut and he threatened to kill her.
You must have someone you can visit around the bay for the weekend, he’d said.
He had gone to her several times during the week and said these things over and over, sometimes cajoling, sometimes threatening, and one night she turned her back on him and took a bottle of pills from the cupboard and tapped them into her palm while the water ran and he saw she was taking too many and he slapped her hand so they bounced all over the floor and she crumpled slightly.
He took her in his arms and she was absolutely still, except a gentle heaving of her shoulders, and he could feel the front of his shirt getting wet. He could hardly believe how moved he was by her crying. He almost cried himself.
Instead, he reached his arm along the wall toward the light switch and snapped it off. He began kissing her and she kissed him back and they had sex on the kitchen floor and she came several times and was slippery with sweat and she felt very strong in his arms.
When he got off the floor, there was some kind of grit, perhaps dried breadcrumbs, imbedded in his knees and elbows, which he brushed away, and his legs were watery and he was full of a spiritual freshness. He reached down and helped her up. She gathered up her clothes, held them against her breasts, and left the room and he could hear her bare feet on the stairs and he counted her footsteps.
He felt he had attained, through the lovemaking, clarity of thought. He decided Isobel Turner would benefit from the fire too. As a gesture of goodwill, because she was such a profound lover, he would drag her out of the entropic dreaminess she was mired in and get her started on some venture. She could sell luxury items of one kind or another. He was certain she could convince older women to pay great amounts of money for things they didn’t need. That was a skill.
He realized, then, that the water was still running in the sink. She had turned the water on so she could swallow the pills he had knocked from her hand. She had put a finger under the tap and flicked at the stream of water waiting for it to get cold and she had tapped all the pills into her palm. A whole handful of whatever they were.
He turned off the tap and thought about the extreme heat of her body, she was like a furnace, and the fresh slick of sweat that had glistened on her chest in the street light from her kitchen window and how she gripped him so tightly with her thighs and how she had shuddered after each orgasm, and how the whites of her eyes had shown in a thin silvery line through her lashes — he understood all of this had to do with the fact that she was close to eating those pills. She had reached around with one hand and held his ass, her nails digging into him, and the palm of her other hand squeaked on the cold kitchen tiles.
When Valentin turned off the water, it became silent in the kitchen and he couldn’t hear her walking around upstairs, but knew she was awake. He knew she was lying in her bed in the dark with her eyes open and she was probably very afraid. Afraid was good, he thought. Change requires fear, he knew this too. He wanted her to change for her own sake. Part of him had fallen in love.
He put his clothes back