CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Images painted the screen over Aaron's body inside the metal tube of the MEI machine. Images of a woman. A woman who tugged down on Aaron's shirt. We saw her through his eyes, young eyes. The shirt was too small. But she kept tugging down on it as if that would make it longer or make him shorter. His breath let out its own fog in the chill of winter. There was snow behind her. His mother. Her eyes were soft, but it was the only soft thing about her. Her face was too thin, all hard lines, weathered.
"You'll be okay. You will. You're full aren't you? The food made you happy." Her voice was raspy.
"Yes, momma."
She smiled and her teeth were yellowed, almost brown like she hadn't taken care of them in ages.
"You wait here for me." And suddenly everything was dark. The only sound was the rattling of teeth against the chill, until a noise, the crunching of snow, it moved toward Aaron.
"Momma?" The hope in his voice ripped something inside me.
I clutched the table where I sat, the screen big and broad in front of me. A face loomed over Aaron's.
It wasn't his momma.
It was a man.
This wasn't what I wanted. I didn't want to see this. I just wanted to see her.
Little Aaron cried while the man hurt him. He cried for his momma, over and over until I swore the words had melted into my brain. Aaron's body the real Aaron, that was here and now in the MEI machine, shook and wriggled, almost as if he was desperate to run from the memory.
But suddenly the memory changed and everything was bright. The sun was out. The snow was gone. A girl too thin, walked with older men. Her red hair shown like fire in the light. She glanced at us, at Aaron, and smiled, but there was something dead in her eyes.
Is that her?
But then the memory changed again. Aaron raking his hand over maggot-filled fruit inside a dumpster before holding it out to a small shadowy figure in front of him. "It's the best thing you'll ever taste. I swear." He paused. "I can't believe you've never had an orange before." The sound she made as she bit into the fleshy center of the orange was somewhere between a moan and a groan.
"Wow, you were right, A. This is awesome." It was her again.
The memory changed.
A dim light shed across red curls. "How did we end up here, A?" The voice belonged to red-headed girl, but she was older now. Light brown freckles covered her nose. She was close. So close, too close.
"Fate, maybe." Aaron's voice carried on a higher note, still young.
"I don't even know what that word means, A." She blinked, and for a moment I could see a little flicker of light in her previously dead eyes.
"It means that we are supposed to be here. We were destined to be here, right now."
"Here? In this crusty old warehouse? I miss being warm, A."
"Come closer, then, Ruby. You know I don't mind." There was a tremble in his voice. An innocent provocative tremble. I recognized it. The desire, the nerves.
"I know you wanna fuck me, A." Ruby giggled and moved closer. "Oh, don't give me that look. I don't know why you haven't yet. We've been toughing this shit out together for months now."
Aaron sighed, but since the memory was from his perspective, I couldn't see the look on his face, and I needed to. I needed to know what he felt, why hadn't he slept with her? Was something wrong with her? That had to be it.
"I love you, Ruby, and I don't wanna ruin that."
She snorted. "Ruin, what? There's nothing to ruin. I'm no virgin, you know." She smiled. "I think I'd like having sex with you."
He pressed his hand against her cheek, his thumb rubbing back and forth over her freckles as if he was trying to memorize them, to feel them right out of her skin.
"You would."
The memory changed again and again, each one including Ruby. From private moments as homeless teens, to an apartment, to drug deals, to standing in front of the justice of the peace for their wedding, to Aaron's college graduations. Ruby was there for all of those things. Ruby, with her red hair and red lips, stood next to him when Aaron used the obnoxiously big scissors to cut the ribbon on the opening day of the first Purgatory Brotherhood homeless shelter he opened. She covered everything with her red. She was an intricate part of him.
His wife.
I felt the wet on my hand first. My hands were balled into fists on my lap. Little droplets of water were on them. Water from me.
I'm crying.
You're fucking pathetic, Adeline.
My vision blurred. His whole life was Ruby. Ruby was everything. She was in everything. Even the more dim memories had her flash of red in them.
I stood to leave. I couldn't bear it anymore. I didn't even know how long we had been in there. The time blurred with red too.
But then something new appeared on the screen. Ruby sat in the passenger seat of dark interior on the inside of a car. She wore a yellow long-sleeved dress and dark leggings. Coupled with her red hair, she stood out, like a bloody flower.
"You don't love me. Not anymore!" She yelled the words at Aaron. His gaze swiveled viewing the road ahead of him. They were in the city somewhere. Snow covered the buildings in his view, piles of it heaped onto sidewalks.
"What the fuck are you talking about, Ruby?"
"You don't love me. You never have any time for me anymore. I'm just stuck at home waiting for you to come home and fuck me, like some sort of whore."
"You know, damn well, that isn't the truth." There was hurt in Aaron's voice, an unfamiliar ache. "You're never that. Never."
"Then what am I good for? You don't let me do anything. I'm just your fucking eye and cock candy. You don't let me do anything business-wise anymore."
Aaron sighed. "That's not true, and you know it. You do all sorts of things for the company. Plus, I wanted you to help run the new home we're opening."
"Oh yeah, sure, boring things. I don't want some sort of nine-to-fucking-five bullshit job, A, we've talked about this before. Hundreds of times."
Aaron reached out and grabbed her hand. "I know, but we have a real chance here, Ruby, a chance to be legit. To leave the darker parts of Purgatory behind. That was always our end goal. I don't want to be in crime forever. It's not safe. I mean, fuck." He looked away from her and thumped his hand on the wheel. "We're lucky we've lived this long in this world, and you know that. It's time. We can't do that stuff anymore. We've got to get out while we still can."
"I don't know if that's what I want, A. You fucking know that. I've told you every time we've ever talked about it. I like our life. Fuck, I've always liked our life. I like the rough, the dark. The drugs, the illegal liquor, they may not be a legitimate honorable income to you, but look where they got you. We have more money doing this, than we could have ever made without them. We would still be out there on the streets if we hadn't gotten in the business all those years ago. We need them. Selling these things are the definition of who we are. They made us. And I like us just the way we are." She squeezed his hand. "And I don't want anything to change." She sighed. "And you don't know me at all if you just expect me to accept a legitimate life after over a decade of this life."
"Ruby—"
"You don't love me anymore, A. You've changed. All that schooling, all this fucking charity bullshit. It was supposed to be a cover for our real work. But I should have known you would try to change things, to destroy the empire we built."
"The empire?"
"The fucking Purgatory Brotherhood, A. That shit exists because of us. I won't let you give all that up. Nope. Not with me, not if you want us to stay together." She peered at him, there was a sort of pleading in her gaze, but that dead thing, it was still there. Still eminent behind her irises. "I love you, A, but I'm not sure you love me, not anymore. I don't know who you are anymore."
Aaron glanced at the road and back at Ruby. "I—"
Whatever he planned to say was taken right out of his lips, overpowered with the sound of a loud crashing noise, and crunching of metal. The screen went black. Noises came. Yelling. Screaming. The sounds pierced my eardrums, but the screen remained dark.
"Ruby?" The word echoed in the sudden silence.
Aaron opened his eyes revealing chaos.
"Ruby?"
But then there she was. She laid next to him, amongst the torn metal. Her perfect, yellow dress, torn, ripped and covered in blood.
"Ruby, baby, no." The words were a sob from Aaron's lips. Red clouded his vision. His own blood. "Wake up." He shook her shoulder. "Baby?"
Sirens sounded somewhere far away.
"You've been warned, Mr. Whitman." A deep voice spoke. Aaron glanced up and met the gaze of man peering through the sun-window. His face was distorted, blurry from the blood in Aaron's eyes. "You should have listened."
"You did this." Aaron's words were weak, and his vision blurred. He blinked and the man was gone.
"Ruby, baby, please." He tried to shake her shoulder, but his hand hardly pressed against her, too weak to move.
The screen went dark.
"Ruby," he whispered into the darkness.
She's dead.
The reality of it. The truth of it poured into me like burning alcohol. It enflamed my insides. It tore at every corner of my being. Ruby was dead. Something inside me wanted to rejoice – something sick and twisted and wrong. But I couldn't. I couldn't be happy Ruby was dead. I had hoped to watch Aaron's memories. To look at his past so I could see how awful Ruby was. So I could prove to myself that she was nothing. Nothing but the past.
I never imagined that she could be dead. That had never crossed my mind.
And that's when it hit me.
"I wasn't supposed to ever want anyone – not again." Aaron's words that night in his room while I laid on his bed. He'd been talking about her. About Ruby.
I can't compete with a dead, perfect Ruby.
There was something more crushing about that than anything else.
"Dr. Violet?" Calvin's voice was somewhere far away.
My legs moved. My body carried me forward.
Where am I going?
But I didn't know. I just had to be away from there. Away from Aaron. Away from Ruby.
Far away.