Mind Games - Page 230

“That’s right, Ray. Here I am.”

She walked to the single chair across from the steel table, sat, crossed her legs.

“I’d give you a hug and a big, sloppy kiss, but…”

He lifted his cuffed hands to the end of the steel wires that secured him.

“You got all slicked up for me. I’m touched.”

“Obviously you couldn’t do the same.”

The prison blues made his eyes look only more faded. His hair had continued to thin and straggled its way to his shoulders. Pale as a ghost and saggy with it, his face bore scores of deep lines.

He seemed smaller, somehow smaller here, in the room, in the flesh. As if he’d been whittled away by the jagged knife of his own rage.

“Remember this, Ray?” She held up her arm, wrist turned to him, and tapped the watch.

She saw the way his eyes lingered on it. He still had that lust, that toxic envy.

“Bitch got what she deserved. So’d your old man.”

“They weren’t old.” As she spoke, she began to slide in, slowly, like smoke through a crack in the window. “Barely thirty-two when you killed them. Only a few years older than I am now.”

“You’ll be lucky to make it that long. But you’ll do yourself. Put on some weepy girl music, light some candles, fill the tub. Drink some wine. Slash your wrists.”

“Now, why would I do that, Ray?”

“Because your life is shit. Everybody knows you’re a freak, a fucking freak of nature. I know what you want. A man to bang you, stick kids inside you. Big house with pictures of snot-nosed kids on the wall. Pool in the yard, fancy cars in the driveway.”

A little deeper now, just a little, and he didn’t know she’d put that image—her family home in Virginia—in his head.

“Is that what I want, Ray? You know me so well. What do you want?”

Those faded blue eyes chilled, like ice over a dying lake.

“To watch you die. Maybe I can’t do it myself, but I can watch.”

“I think you want that big house, Ray, and the pool, the fancy cars. Fancy watches like this.” She drew his eyes and attention back to it, turning it so the stones glittered.

“You never had that. Just an ordinary house, an ordinary life, nothing special. But you were special. You knew you were so very special. Your parents were afraid of you, weren’t they? Not so much because you knew things, though they’d’ve prayed that away if they could have. But it was the things you did. The awful things. To stray cats, to birds, to other kids, especially the ones smaller than you.”

“You don’t know shit about my life.”

“But I do, Ray. I’ve read your life like a book. One I can’t wait to toss in the trash heap, but I read it, Ray. Start to finish.”

“There ain’t no book.” He shrugged his shoulders as if trying to dislodge a weight. And his fingers began to drum on the steel table.

“But there is. It’s a sad, ugly book, but I’ve read it through. Why don’t I pick a chapter now? Remember this?”

She pushed, and hard. He actually jerked back in his chair as if she’d used her hands.

He was eight on a hot, sticky day, sitting in the stupid, half-assed tree house his father had built for him.

But it wasn’t so stupid because his mother never came up here. Afraid of heights, afraid of him.

Afraid of everything.

She always called him down when she wanted him for something. Mostly something he didn’t want to do.