The Craigslist Murders - Brenda Cullerton [21]
“Don’t be stupid,” Charlotte had said with exasperation. “We get along famously.”
“Ah! But we Italians understand the virtues of being flexible with the truth. Americans don’t.”
“I do,” said Charlotte with a smile. “I know all about being flexible with the truth.”
Anxiously eyeing the numbers on her digital clock, Charlotte estimated the number of hours of sleep ahead. She’d tried television and hot milk. Now she was burning her way through James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime. Like a first-class surgeon pithing a frog, she thought, mulling over his brilliant dissection of a doomed love affair. It was two o’clock. If she fell asleep by three, she’d only get five hours. Every time Charlotte felt herself dozing off, her heart would race. Her eyes would pop open as wide as a child staring at a shark that brushes itself up against an aquarium window.
When her shrink had suggested that Charlotte’s insomnia might be a sign of depression, she’d agreed to try a cycle of antidepressants. But she was weaning herself off them. Charlotte suspected that the five-milligram pills were secretly stripping her of her identity; that the shrink was colluding in this conspiracy and that every time she swallowed a pill, another uniquely precious part of herself vanished.
Repositioning the pillow between her legs, she suddenly thought of the children’s room up at Rita’s house on the Vineyard; of opening a Dutch red enamel door to a room painted in blue and white stripes, the blue so translucent it seemed to glow from within and the walls of a nursery washed in the palest iridescent pink, a pink that shimmered like the inside of a spiral seashell. It was the optimism, the fearlessness, the certainty of color that astonished Charlotte. And this was precisely how she felt after completing her missions: fearless, astonished, joyous; as if the whole grey, desolate world had been drenched in buckets of pure, radiant color.
12
Rolling her neck to loosen the kinks, Charlotte lingered by the kitchen window and watched a cruise ship slip beneath the Verranzano Bridge. What was the name of that virus? The one that had hundreds of sunburned, drunken honeymooners retching all over the decks afraid to touch each other not to mention everything else from doorknobs to forks. All of these germs and viruses were getting nastier and nastier. Just like the world they’re mutating in, Charlotte thought, taking a last sip from her cappuccino.
Pulling on her old shearling jacket and pocketing the piece of paper with Amy’s cell phone number, Charlotte fumbled around in the hall closet. She was looking for her new Nikes. How long had it been since the last time, she wondered. Too long, was the answer.
It was all the schizophrenic struggling. The protecting, the serving, the listening. It was clients like Darryl and Rita, beeping, buzzing around in her head, bitching. And her mother calling. It was her credit card bills and waiting for news from the doctor. How much longer could she postpone the pleasure, the ecstasy that came with release? What if the woman with the Vuitton changed her mind? Tying the laces of her sneakers, Charlotte avoided looking near the fireplace.
Like ex-smokers who keep a single cigarette in plain sight, she was testing her will. Resisting temptation. The poker sat there, all gold and shiny, patiently waiting for the moment when she would finally give in. Closing the door and locking it behind her, Charlotte ran for the elevator.
13
Waiting for a break in the traffic, she crossed West Broadway and dug into her pockets for a quarter. Charlotte was hardly a fool. She knew that rich women were surrounded by more lackeys than most heads of state. They hated being alone. But the precariousness, the element of risk, even the danger of being caught, heightened the anticipation. Occasionally, when a tiny window of opportunity opened up, and Charlotte slipped through it to accomplish her task, she was convinced that she been anointed; that there was