Maya is waiting inside the Mercedes when I get there. She looks like a vet suffering from PTSD. Her eyes are wide with shock, but her lips are tight and focused. She also looks extravagantly dressed up, like someone about to go to the opera rather than a hotel room. Just from what she’s told me, and from the time we spent going through shopping malls, I know her black dress alone is probably worth my days’ salary. I don’t factor in the diamonds around the throat or on her fingers or in her ears.
She stares hard at me when I get inside the car. It suddenly seems to me that after everything that has happened, and after being forced to spend the whole day alone in her room while her father negotiated the killing of another man, she’s probably got a lot she needs to get off her chest. When I look at her, though, the tight purse of her mouth shows absolutely no signs of opening. I’ll need to do the talking, and so I start by saying the first thing that comes into my mind. “Maya. You are absolutely beautiful.”
I don’t know why I choose now to say this. Over the past two months, there have been hundreds of opportunities to tell her that she was beautiful. But all of those times she must have known it herself because it just seems like the kind of thing girls recognize. Except now I don’t know. I don’t know how she thinks or if she’s even thinking of herself. She has this icy, faraway separate thing about her, almost martyr-like. Her hands are shaking.
“Thanks,” she says, clipped and sharp like she’s cutting and throwing away an old nail.
I start the car and blast the heater and wait for the defroster to defog the window. Maya is rigid as a statue, and she’s got her purse clasped like a baby on her lap.
“You can put that on the ground,” I say gently. She rounds on me like I’ve just suggested she jump out of a moving car. “Why?”
“You don’t need it right now. Everything’s fine.”
She holds on to the purse, frowns, and then drops it onto the floor. Her wallet, phone, and makeup utensils all spill out, but she doesn’t see them. She’s looking at the nails of her left hand, which are shaking and trying to tear off the tip of her forefinger.
“Are you cold?” I whisper.
“I’m fine.”
“Give me your hand.”
She drops it into my lap like a dead animal. The fingers are even colder than last time. They feel like tiny, frozen sticks, like the kind I’d seen before on the cold, dry days in winter at the parks on the… whaddya call them… Persimmon trees, which had these thin knobby branches that would freeze all the way through and click against each other when the wind blew. Sort of like wind chimes but without any tones or notes, just that dry sound of frozen wood that was like the muffled clack of a woman walking on floor tiles.
“Your fingers are frozen.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” she says without any emotion.
“Sure you did.” I’ve got big, boxing hands. Maya’s fingers against my palm come up just at the point where my fingers begin. So I sandwich her hand in between mine and just rub a little back and forth without applying much pressure at all, and I’m hoping that my callouses aren’t too rough because she’s got the softest hands I’ve ever felt. Especially given how scared and upset and weak she is, I’m worried that just by touching her I’ll damage her in some way and the last thing I want to do, right now sandwiching her hand in mine and trying to work some heat back in, is hurt her.
“There you go.” I give her hand back, trading her for the left one, and repeat the process. By now there are big, clear splotches in the windshield and I can see the street. I warm her hand quickly and put the car into action and drive. Drive and drive until we’re out of the city and going along the same highway route we took to reach Sunrise Apartments.
Westtown is Portsmouth’s business sector, but it’s not much. A few semi-tall skyscrapers and some decent restaurants, all of them closed by now, and some overpriced bars and our hotel. That’s it.
I ask Maya if she wants to get a drink or a bite to eat and get silence. Stone cold, angry, hurt, weird silence. It’s not like anything I’ve ever experienced with her before. I knew she could be moody, but I’ve never known her to be a robot. Whatever’s happened with Kit Holcomb, whatever she knows, has got her riled up.
So instead of going anywhere, I pull us into the valet of the Four Seasons and open her door and get her bag from the trunk. The driver takes my keys and hands me a number.
“Sleeping it off will be the best thing for you,” I say.
She doesn’t respond.
It’s around one thirty in the morning, and there’s some perky blonde at the desk. She confirms our reservation with smiles so big they take up half her face and even some of her upper body. They don’t go at all with the late hour or how both Maya and I are feeling. After a few curt answers, she stops smiling and runs through the reservation information as blandly and quickly as possible.
“Two fourth floor suites with views?” she says.
“Actually,” Maya interjects, her eyes sliding to the receptionist’s nametag, “Sara, we were actually hoping to upgrade to a single grande if possible,” Maya interjects. “Even if it’s not possible. Maybe you could just kick somebody out.”
Sara laughs, but Maya doesn’t. I’m not convinced that she said it as a joke.
What are you doing? I mouth at her.
Protection, I’m pretty sure she mouths back. That makes sense, but only in a scared and paranoid “they-are-gonna-get-me-in-my-sleep” kind of way. From what I’ve learned of Maya, she’s not the kind of girl to get scared easily. What the hell has happened?
“Sure is.” Sara clicks away at the keyboard and pulls up the results for vacant rooms. “Seventh floor okay?”
“Sure. What room?”
“Seven…twenty…three”
“Okay.”
Another two minutes. Sara prints our room cards and directs us to the elevator where a tired lift operator wearing a red uniform presses the button for us.
It’s not until we actually get to our floor that we have a chance to talk to each other in private. Maya’s behavior, the shared suite, and the situation with Kit—all of it has made me just as nervous as her. My heart’s going a mile a minute. My fingers trail along the barrel of my glock as I work my keycard out of my pocket. When the lift goes back down, I tell Maya to wait by the lifts. She obeys without any questions. It would have made me a lot more comfortable if she’d had objections.
My fingers trail the barrel of my glock, and I get my keycard out of my pocket and press it into the lock, but instead of opening the door I put my ear against the wood and listen. If anyone were hiding out inside, there would have been movement from the sound. Nothing so far. My heart eases but only for a second as I swing the door open.
The light is dim and golden, with the suite bright and sumptuous, which puts me more at ease but not by much. Sure you worry more if the place you’re going into is as dark as the Godfather’s office, but the light is unsettling. You don’t expect as much in the light.
I take out the glock and flip off the safety and hold it stretched out and comb through the rooms three times before I’m satisfied.
“Can I come in now?” Maya asks after ten minutes.
“Yeah.” I set the gun down on the bedside table and put my coat over it, making sure it looks natural so that she won’t suspect anything.
“Force of habit,” I say. I’m really hoping the whole inspection hasn’t frightened her. From the looks of things, she seems about the same as before. Maybe even a little calmer. She takes off her fur and sets it on the zebra-skin sectional sofa and sits down as straight as a razor.
“Look,” she says like she’s beginning a speech. Her bottom lip starts to shake, but she holds herself steady. “I’m exhausted. I feel like someone’s gone through me with a fucking leaf blower and now there’s nothing left inside of me. And I think I’ve never hated Daddy more than I do today, and that it’s my fault he’s going to kill Kit Holcomb even though everyone has already told me it’s not but what the hell do they know anyway? And now part of my brain is terrified—just morbidly fucking terrified—that I’m going to walk into a room, and Kit’s just going to be sitting there waiting for me. He might even say something creepy like, ‘I’ve been expecting you, Maya,’ like horror movie bullshit because I was the one who was always nice to him and never called him Kitty or any of that bullshit like Andrei and Ikov or fucking Michelangelo. You can say all the rational stuff you want, but it’s just how I feel—like my brain is just gone, just rooted out because I’m done thinking, and I’m just tired tired tired. And it has just been the longest day in the world, and when we got to this hotel I started asking myself how was there any way in hell that I was going to sleep in my own bed tonight? So if you’re wondering why you’re here, that’s the reason, and you can sleep on the sectional or wherever you want, but I just need you in the same room with me, for God’s sake. Just tonight, Quinn. Just until things are better.”
There are tears on her cheeks, little black tears from her mascara spidering down to her lips and neck. Her hands are on her lap making her dress into a little ball. Her eyes look like they could burn someone.
I get up from the bed and sit down next to her on the sectional and put my arms around her and say, “Okay, okay” just like that. For five minutes, ten maybe. And the whole time I’m looking for something nice to tell her but I know that after her whole spiel there’s probably nothing she wants to hear except what I’m telling her, so I keep on saying it even when the bellhop comes up with her giant, pink bag and lays it on the floor and tiptoes out fast as he can go. Even then, just her and me.