The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [239]
“Tal!” I screamed into the crack of light. “Please let me in! I won’t hurt you! I won’t hurt anyone! I just want to see Lydia!”
“Why?” she snapped. “Are you going to smash anything or bite anything?”
“No! I’m a new man! I promise! I’ve changed! My days of smashing and biting are behind me! Please—,” I whispered, “please trust me.”
Tal slammed the door again, unhooked the chain and slowly opened it. I slipped inside, suitcase banging against the doorjamb, roses crinkling to my chest. I stepped into the foyer and shut the door behind me. Tal was wearing boots, now, and she was holding a big kitchen knife.
“That’s not necessary,” I said. “I won’t hurt anyone.”
Tal spat out a reverse-gasp of sardonic laughter. “You’re too late for that,” she said.
I let my head dip down in shame at this comment.
“Where the hell have you been?” she said. “What do you want? I can’t believe you came back here. How did you even get back to Chicago?”
“In time,” I said (sagely, I hoped), “all shall be explained. But, Tal, please…” I knew my voice had a tearful tremor in it, now.
I was still standing in the dark and muddy foyer of that apartment I knew better than almost any set of rooms in the world, feeling less even like a guest than an intruder, wondering if I should take off my shoes or presume enough even to unbutton my coat, still awkwardly juggling in my arms flowers, hat and suitcase as I said: “Where is Lydia? Please… I want to see Lydia.” I felt tears surging up beneath my cheeks, threatening to cloud my vision.
“Are those for Lydia?” said Tal, pointing at the bouquet of green roses in my hand with her knife.
I held the flowers out a little from my chest. For a moment the crinkling of the cellophane and paper they were wrapped in was the loudest sound in the room. I couldn’t answer her because I was afraid that I would cry if I tried to speak. I only nodded yes.
Tal sighed through her nose as she looked down at me, holding the green roses. She backed into the apartment and set down the kitchen knife she had wielded at me on the dining table with a click of metal on wood and beckoned to me to enter the apartment.
Everything inside the apartment had changed. All the furniture was different except for the dining table. There were new pictures on the walls. The living room wall had been painted over with sunflower yellow paint. Some of Tal’s disgusting lacquer-faced wooden puppets were sitting in a row like spectators on the fireplace mantel.
Tal stood with her back leaning against the edge of the dining table as I came inside, not taking off my shoes or my coat. I walked into the middle of the room. She crossed and uncrossed her arms, then braced her palms against the edge of the table behind her. She crossed her arms again, uncrossed them again, and then took a few steps toward me. She bent down to me until her face was level with mine. She was also close to tears.
“Bruno—,” she began. I already knew by then what she had to say to me. By the time she began to say it—by the time the information had actually begun to exit her lips—I had already endured the four or five longest and worst seconds of my life. I knew already what she had to say, and I did not want to hear her say it, and yet I knew that it had to be said. By the time she was actually saying it, I could not even see her face because my eyes were so blinded by tears of rage, nor could I hear or understand a word she said, because my ears were so deafened by the volume of my emotion, it was as if they had been plugged with wax.
XLVIII
Lydia had died six months before I arrived in Chicago. Somehow this had never even occurred to me—in my conscious mind—as a possibility, even though I guess I did know she had been deathly ill when I was taken from her. It never occurred to me that someone I had loved as much as I loved her—and there has only ever been