Obsidian Butterfly - Laurell K. Hamilton [51]
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t love Donna.”
“But,” I said.
He turned slowly onto the main street. “She’s a mess. She believes in every new age bandwagon that comes along. She’s got a good head for business, but she trusts everyone. She’s useless around violence. You saw her today.” He was concentrating very hard on the driving, hands gripping the wheel tight enough for his knuckles to be white. “Becca is just like her, trusting, sweet, but. . . tougher, I think. Both the kids are tougher than Donna.”
“They’ve had to be,” I said, and couldn’t keep the disapproval out of my voice.
“I know, I know,” he said. “I know Donna, everything about her. I’ve heard every detail from cradle to the present.”
“Did it bore you?” I asked.
“Some of it,” he said carefully.
“But not all of it,” I said.
“No, not all of it.”
“Are you saying that you do love Donna?” I had to ask.
“No, no, I’m not saying that.”
I was staring so hard at his face that we could have been driving on the far side of the moon for all the attention I gave the scenery. Nothing mattered more right that second than Edward’s face, his voice. “Then what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that sometimes when you play a part too long, you can get sucked into that part and it becomes more real than it was meant to be.” I saw something on his face that I had never seen before, anguish, uncertainty.
“Are you saying that you are going to marry Donna? You’re going to be a husband and a father? PTA meetings, and the whole nine yards?”
“No, I’m not saying that. You know I can’t marry her. I can’t live with her and two kids and hide what I am twenty-four hours a day. That good an actor I’m not.”
“Then what are you saying?” I asked.
“I’m saying . . . I’m saying that part of me, a small part of me, wishes I could.”
I stared at him opened-mouthed. Edward, assassin extraordinaire, the undead’s perfect predator, wished he could have not a family, but this family. A trusting new age widow, her sullen teenage son, and a little girl that made Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm look jaded, and Edward wanted them.
When I trusted myself to be coherent, I said, “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
I couldn’t think of anything helpful to say, so I resorted to humor, my shield of last resort. “Just please tell me they don’t have a dog and a picket fence.”
He smiled. “No fence, but a dog, two dogs.”
“What kind of dogs?” I asked.
He smiled and glanced at me, wanting to see my reaction. “Maltese. Their names are Peeka and Boo.”
“Oh, shit, Edward, you’re joking me.”
“Donna wants the dogs included in the engagement pictures.”
I stared at him, and the look on my face seemed to amuse him. He laughed. “I’m glad you’re here, Anita, because I don’t know a single other person who I’d have admitted this to.”
“Do you realize that your personal life is now more complicated than mine is?” I said.
“Now I know I’m in trouble,” he said. And we left it on a lighter note, on a joke, because we were more comfortable that way. But Edward had confided in me about a personal problem. In his way he’d come to me for help about it. And being who I was, I’d try to help him. I thought we would solve the mutilations and murders, eventually. I mean violence and death were our specialties. I was not nearly so optimistic about the personal stuff.
Edward did not belong in a world with a woman who had a pair of toy dogs named Peeka and Boo. Edward was not now, nor ever would be, that cutesy. Donna was. It wouldn’t work. It just wouldn’t work. But for the very first time I realized that if Edward didn’t have a heart to lose, that he wished he had one to give. But I was reminded of the scene in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy and the Scarecrow bang on the Tin Man’s chest and hear the rolling echo. The tinsmith had forgotten to put in a heart. Edward had carved his own heart out of his body and left it on a floor somewhere years ago. I’d known that. I just never knew that