The Game of Love and Death (19 page)

H
ELEN
sped toward the Domino as though she had a death wish: too fast, with no regard for other automobiles. At one point, as she fished for a cigarette in her purse, she swerved into oncoming traffic, laughing hysterically. Flora hoped Helen would never take an interest in flying planes. It wouldn’t last long.

When they arrived at the Domino, Helen uncapped a tube of crimson lipstick and applied it as if she hadn’t a care in the world. “Shall we?”

“Shall we what?” Flora reached for the door latch.

“Go inside to fetch the bail money, of course.” Helen pressed her lips together and examined herself in the rearview mirror.

“This is where we part ways,” Flora said. “Thank you for the ride.”

Helen wouldn’t hear of it. “I’d love to go inside the club I’ve heard so much about.”

Flora wanted to refuse her on principle, but she also wanted Helen to see the Domino was something special. Something her family had built. Something that had survived all sorts of hardships. Something Henry admired.

“Fine.” She found her keys.

They headed into the club, past the portrait of her parents, down the stairs, and then turned left into the kitchen, where Charlie was already hard at work on the evening’s food. The air smelled good, a mixture of slowly cooking meat and corn bread.

“I’d offer you something to eat,” Flora said, “but I know you have other places to be.”

Leaving Helen for a moment, Flora went into the storeroom, opened the safe, and removed all of the bills, hoping Charlie wouldn’t ask what she was doing. When she returned to the kitchen, Helen was seated at the table, and Charlie was leaning against the countertop, a hand to his forehead.

His knees buckled, and he caught himself on the counter. Flora rushed to his side. She put an arm around his back and held him steady.

“I don’t feel well, Miss Flora.”

“You should go home, Charlie,” she said. “I can take it from here.”

“But Sherman isn’t back yet. There ain’t enough hands to get the work done, and if you don’t mind my saying, you’re a bit behind in the dining room already.”

“Charlie, please. You get on home. I know all your recipes and I’ll be back soon. I’ll call in some of the girls. We’ll take care of it. You can’t cook if you’re ill. And setting the tables is no trouble.”

Charlie looked chalky around his edges, and Flora hoped whatever he had wasn’t contagious.

“It came on so sudden,” he said.

“It’s all right, Charlie. You go on. Rest.”

“I think I will,” he said. “I appreciate your understanding.” He shuffled out of the kitchen and up the stairs. He rented a room a half block away, or Flora would have escorted him.

“Well.” Helen turned her head slowly to look at Flora. “How unfortunate for you. He looked fine when we walked in.”

“These things happen,” Flora said. “We’ll manage.”

Helen had removed her gloves. Apparently she’d planned to make herself at home. Too bad for her. Flora led her up the stairs, remembering as she did her own pair of gloves, sitting on a table next to Henry’s hat. She made a note to retrieve them after she sent Helen on her way.

At the exit, Helen said, “What, no grand tour?”

“No time,” Flora said. “I do apologize. Thank you again for the ride.”

Helen offered Flora her hand. Flora took it, mostly to end the exchange. But when their bare palms touched, she felt a startling coldness. Her body felt strange, as though she were underwater and sinking deeper, the pressure growing every second. The world dimmed, and she was no longer standing on the sidewalk, but inside the Domino — or at least a version of it from long ago.

The floor of the club hummed with noise and motion. A mustachioed man in a striped shirt and suspenders banged out a rag tune. Dice thumped on felted tables. Highball glasses plinked against each other, and beaded dresses rustled and clicked as women with bobbed hair leaned into the arms of men in suits and turned their powdered faces to the electric chandeliers. Laughter. There was so much of it. But then, it was clearly another time.

Flora wanted to look around, but she wasn’t in control of her gaze. It was as though she was inside someone else’s head. A man’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “What’s a pretty lady like you doing by herself in a joint like this?”

The view shifted to the bartender, whose sleeves were rolled up over his wide forearms. He leaned toward her across the polished slab of wood. A set of fingers, white ones, were laced a few inches away from her drink. The hands pressed flat on the counter and Flora felt something flow into her, something that felt strong and old and smelled like Douglas fir. It was almost as though she were sucking the life out of the bar.

Then there was a sudden lightness in the air, the way she felt when her airplane left the ground. The piano music stopped. People paused in their conversations, drinking, and gambling. The gaze turned to watch as the pianist began to speak.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I present … Miss Vivian Crane and the Starlight band.”

Vivian Crane. Her mother. Alive. How on earth was this happening?

Applause crackled like fire. Flora watched her mother emerge from the shadows into the finger of spotlight in the center of the stage, pivoting so that her back was to the audience. Even from behind, she commanded a person’s full attention. When her mother spun at last to face the audience, sparkling reflections of her filled every eye in the room. But she had eyes for only one person. The bass player. Flora’s father. Her heart lurched to see him, to see them both together like this, alive.

The music began, a shimmer of the hi-hat, a cry from the clarinet, the steady walk of bass strings played by expert hands. Vivian’s lips parted and the sound that emerged was more of a feeling than a voice, one that pressed love and longing into Flora’s borrowed ears, along her wrists, down her throat, and straight into her center. It was hard to breathe.

The view changed. Flora was still inside the Domino, but now she was looking at a man shooting dice. Somehow, she knew there was a police dry squad uniform beneath his overcoat. She also knew his pockets were fat with payoff cash, which he was spending at the dice table as he sneaked pulls of gin from the flask at his hip.

And then she was outside in the snow, waiting in a long and elegant convertible with high, round headlights and a many-spoked spare tire riding on its hip. Through the window holes, winter air sharpened its claws on her skin as she sat in the passenger seat. Time passed. Snow piled up. People wandered out of the Domino. Then, finally, the dice-playing man staggered out, supported by a much younger version of Uncle Sherman.

“You sure you don’t want a cup of coffee, sober up a bit?” Sherman asked.

The man shook his head. “Cold air’ll do the same trick.” He slapped at his own cheeks and walked toward his car just as her parents emerged from the alley. Her father pulled the collar of her mother’s raccoon coat snug around her shoulders. The moonlight bounced off the snowy street and lit them from below. Her father leaned in for a kiss; Vivian laughed and met him halfway, lifting one heel behind her before she finally came up for air.

“Happy Valentine’s Day, my love,” she said.

No, no, no.
Flora knew what had happened that night.

The white man slid into the car, reeking of gin. He turned the key. The car coughed. The engine caught. Trying to throw it into reverse, he cursed when the car bumped forward over the curb. Then he found his gear and accelerated backward into the darkness behind him, his tires sliding in the snow. He hunched over the steering wheel and gulped air. Flora tried to scream, but the mouth wouldn’t respond.

Flora’s parents stepped into the street. She tried to reach for the wheel, but the arm wouldn’t move. The man’s foot sank into the accelerator. Her parents heard its engine and turned to face the car, still holding hands. The headlights caught bright pieces of them: eyes, teeth, jewelry that twinkled like falling stars in the blackness ahead.

The man stomped, aiming for the brake, but his sluggish foot found only the gas pedal. And then Flora was outside the car, holding her father. She felt his life flow out of him and into her: the glint of candlelight off the shoulders of his bass, the crack of a bat meeting a softball on Saturday mornings, the smell of corn bread baking in the oven on Sunday afternoons. In a bleak moment, she saw the jagged silver blasts of explosions in the night, smelled the gunpowder, fear and blood, the flash of Captain Girard’s face lit up by a midnight firefight. And then a return to soft light, to the satiny patch of her mother’s skin between her ear and collarbone, the feeling of lips against it. And then her own baby-girl face, all brown eyes and pink gums and fat cheeks.

The arms released her father and gathered up her mother, and Flora drew in memories of trimmed Christmas trees, of steam curling from oven-hot pies, of spring tulips and green summer lakes, of the feeling of music rising from the tender space where her feet connected with the curving earth, soaring upward through her body and out her mouth. In each of those, even when Vivian was a girl, the small face of the baby was there. Flora’s own face, as though she’d been the one her mother always wanted, the love she carried with her until the day she was able to summon it forth in the form of a child.

And then she was dead.

The white man staggered out, tripping and flailing and breathing fists of clouds into the frozen night air. His hat fell off, revealing a pale, fragile-looking scalp covered with a few strands of silver hair. He knelt between the bodies and sobbed. Snow melted into his knees, darkening his pants. He put his hands over his face, revealing an inch of bare flesh and a leather-banded, gold-faced wristwatch that he’d forgotten to wind.

Then Flora was on her knees beside the man in the snow.

“Please,” he said, peering at her through his fingers. He’d bloodied a knuckle somehow and a knot was rising on his head. “I don’t know what to do. I can’t live with myself anymore.”

“You don’t have to do anything,” the mouth said. “It won’t be long now.”

“Thank God,” he said, lowering his hands to his lap.

The hand reached for the killer’s own. The images at first came in a jumble: the man himself in an undershirt and braces planting trees in a garden, wiping sweat from his tanned brow; him in a police officer’s uniform, giving a rag doll to a weeping, soot-covered child sitting alone in the station; the same man, younger, at his wedding, the stainless steel flask of gin just a bulge in the pocket of his Sunday best suit. The flask of gin that turned into tumblers and entire bottles … what had transformed the laughing man with the straight black hair and clean-shaven jaw into the bleary-eyed mess in front of her.

“What’s happening?” he said. “I’m seeing —”

“You’re seeing what I’m seeing,” the mouth said. The whole of her hand sank over his, and Flora was sick with sorrow and loss. The man’s eyes widened. There he was, an infant in a white linen christening gown. And there, walking across an emerald lawn, wobbly on year-old bare feet. Then he was a five-year-old boy riding a pony at the county fair. Then, ten years older, hiking up a snow-covered volcano. That boy, sixteen, on a twilit country road on a summer night, leaning in to kiss a girl who locked her fingers in his hair. And five years after that, marrying the same girl, the love of his life …

… unless you counted the gin in the bottle, which even the Prohibition hadn’t kept him from drinking.

“I did love her, you know,” he said. “Like breathing, almost.” The words had space between them, as though it was costing him the last of his strength to pull them out of his mouth.

“I know. But that’s the thing with love. It isn’t as strong as they say.”

“Not afraid,” he said. “Glad — glad you’re here.”

The voice replied: “Life is far more terrifying than its opposite.”

He grabbed her hands. “Wait. Don’t want to see all,” he said. “Not the last part —” His stomach heaved, costing him his last drink of gin.

“They didn’t suffer.” The gaze shifted to her parents’ bodies, their skin sugared with the lightest dusting of snow. “What’s more, I’m letting you carry that part with you when you go.”

“I’d carry it for the rest of time if … if it would make things turn out … different.”

“You will,” she said, closing her eyes for a moment. “But it won’t. Everybody dies. Everybody. That is the only ending for every true story.”

The sentence … Flora had heard something like it before. She fought her way back to herself. The skin on her face felt tight, as though it were being pressed against the bones beneath. She pulled her hand from Helen’s, opened her eyes, and was back at the entrance of the Domino, utterly wrecked. What had happened to her? How had she seen her parents’ last moments this way?

Helen stood next to her, even as she checked her watch. “Are you all right? You look as if you’ve caught whatever your cook had.”

“I’m fine.” Flora didn’t want to give Helen the satisfaction of seeing her like this. “Henry’s waiting for me.”

“We don’t always get what we want,” Helen said. “We play the roles we’re cast.”