“Pea,” she says, on our last evening together. We’ve emptied a bottle of wine over a dinner of acorn squash and coq au vin and fresh-baked rolls. Tamara’s freshened up for dinner, but Pea is still at her most country. Blue headscarf, a gingham apron that smells of vinegar from the watermelon rinds they spent the day pickling. “Pea, let’s go dancing.”
Pea pulls the cork from the second bottle and points it in my direction.
“Dev doesn’t dance.”
“Sure he does! We danced plenty of times, didn’t we, sugar?”
I laugh. “I think once or twice I even did it without stepping on your feet.”
We take our glasses to the salon. By the record player, Tamara selects a fast Beiderbecke number and holds out her hand to Pea.
They dance lindy, dissolving into laughter when one or the other takes the lead. Joyous in each other’s presence. I had wondered how it would be to touch and smell my old lover again. But we fit, as we have always been meant to.
Pea finds and uncorks our last bottle of wine, an unknown local variety. It’s thick and sweet and slides down the glass’s curved side in Ws and Vs. I stare at the liquid that looks nothing like blood.
“Dev?” Pea says.
“Let me get my cards,” Tamara says. Her voice fades out as she wanders out of the room. Pea takes the glass from me and drains it in a gulp.
“What do you need, Dev?”
She smiles that way she does. That self-lacerating crescent. I take her hand. Its scars, for the moment, mark nothing more than mistakes we have made. I stand unsteadily.
“Dance with me?”
Surprise and laughter and a low-throated murmur in my ear, “Don’t even try to lead.”
The feel of our bodies sweating and moving in rhythm. The smell of her hair when the scarf falls to the floor. I don’t even realize Tamara is watching until the needle scratches the end of the record.
“You’re … Anyone want to ask the cards something?”
She holds up her old deck wrapped in an ivory silk handkerchief, monogrammed with some old lover’s initials. There’s envy in that sweet face. And desire. It suddenly comes clear—it’s not only for me.
We turn down the lights and share the last of the reefer Walter left with us.
Tamara unwraps the deck and starts shuffling, tossing the cards from her left hand to her right at a rapid clip. Pea watches her in silence for a moment and then snatches a card from the air. She balances it on the end of her index finger and then throws it back into the deck that Tamara hasn’t stopped shuffling.
Tamara laughs, delighted. “Girl, you show off like that—” She stops. A wave of pain is passing over Pea’s face and her fingers are rigid claws against her thighs. I reach for Pea but she shakes me off.
She takes a gulping breath. The force, whatever it was, subsides. “Go on, then, Tammy.”
Tamara puts the cards down, half-shuffled. “And what the hell was that?”
Pea sighs. “A debt. Or a broken promise.”
“Your hands?”
“I don’t think they were ever—wholly—mine.”
I frown. I had dismissed this, before. It was easy to pin it on panic or paranoia, her own guilty conscience. But this time—this time, for a sliver of a second, I had felt something threaten her. My hands had touched an inverted echo: bright and angry and scented with marigolds.
“And since when have they been…” Tamara gestures helplessly.
Pea leans back against the couch and folds her arms tightly across her chest. I watch her, but I know better than to touch. “Since Victor,” she says shortly.
Tamara makes a small, high-pitched noise from behind pursed lips. “But I thought…” she tries. She looks at me, a little desperately.
“I killed him,” I say, in a tone so matter-of-fact, it could have come from another throat entirely.
Pea’s expression is murder. “Oh, did you?”
Tamara swallows. “But Pea, even if your hands are, are—”
“Turning against me?”
“That. Why would they turn on you after you didn’t kill Victor? When you’ve”—Tammy takes another gulping breath—“killed so many others?”
Her voice fades into a questioning whisper. I’m surprised she made it this far. All the time I’ve known her, Tamara has had a champion ability to unnotice the violence surrounding her. I don’t know if it’s curiosity or her love for Pea that has prompted her to, at last, acknowledge out loud what the rest of us know.
“I reckon,” says my lover, with furious self-mockery, “that they wanted me to do the deed. Not our sainted Dev, now fallen, poor thing, in my low company.”
I don’t respond to this; it would be too cruel. I know why she let me do it. I remember how she seized in my arms at the thought of another kill. On the job, we passed around the story of a prison guard, one who pulled the switch on the hot squat. Man woke up one day and could no longer pull that lever. It did not matter that the prisoner would die anyway. It did not matter for what crime. Sometimes a human soul can no longer mete out death, no matter how justified, without destroying itself entirely.
“But there’s got to be a way to stop this!” Tamara says. “Why do they want to punish you now? The man’s dead, anyhow.”
Pea closes her eyes. “Oh, why don’t you ask them, Tammy? Lord, but you are getting on my last nerve.”
A second dream had come to her back in New York. She never told me the details, but I suspect it had involved killing Victor. And she tried. Oh, maybe we had doomed ourselves a decade before, from all our terrible choices, all our flawed love. But she still tried.
I reach out to trace the tight coils by her hairline. She stiffens, then sighs and leans into my hand.
Tammy has picked up her deck again, shuffling so fast you’d think she had the hands herself. Her tongue is poking a tent in
