Page 65 of Poe: Nevermore

For a seemingly endless span of time, neither of us said anything. A single raven alighted on a naked tree nearby and croaked down at us. I may have smiled at the irony if the occurrence was not so foreboding. Something about the raven seemed too wise, as if it were trying to warn us. Finally, Frost said, “If you’re done, let’s go.”

“Go where?”

“To Justin’s apartment. He’s spent Christmas with my family since we took him in. He’s invited Liz too. We’ll want to get there soon to help out…he’s an awful cook.”

TWENTY

The first thing I noticed about Justin’s apartment was that there wasn’t a single Christmas decoration. The second thing was that I was glad for it. I wondered if someone as serious as Justin never decorated or if it was a gesture to the three souls who had been destroyed gathering decorations from their attic.

Liz was already there when Frost and I arrived, wearing a heavy red turtleneck and elegant jeans. She smiled tightly at us when we entered the small apartment, an attempt at a welcome that was shadowed by fear of being too welcoming. I made an attempt at a smile and rolled my eyes at her. “Why can you look attractive in a massive turtleneck and socks? It’s not fair to us ugly people.”

Her smile turned more genuine and she glared at me teasingly. “If you ate more, you’d be just as attractive, Poe. A little sleep would do you good, too. You look like a vampire.”

“Who said I wasn’t?” I retorted with a wink. Frost took my coat from me, his hand lightly brushing my arm as he did. Liz raised an eyebrow at me, eyeing Frost’s behavior, but didn’t say anything.

“Justin’s trying to kill the squash,” she said nonchalantly. “He’s scaring me a little.”

Justin’s laugh echoed from the kitchen around the corner. “It’s your own fault for bringing it. Did you really think I’d ever cooked a squash before?”

Liz just rolled her eyes and beckoned to Frost and me. I took a seat at the little island in the middle of the crowded kitchen, enough out of the way that I wouldn’t interrupt traffic. I knew that I would be useless trying to cook anything more complex than Ramen noodles. Frost took over peeling the squash from Justin and Liz moved the stuffing she had been working on to the island to talk to me while she finished. “Do I want to know?” she asked quietly. Her voice was low enough that the two men would not discern her words over the racket of the cooking.

I shrugged and shook my head wearily. “Everything’s coming apart at once. I’m having nightmares that are opening up all my closets full of skeletons. He’s a wreck. I’m a wreck. It’s a huge ugly mess. I don’t know what this is, but it’s building up to something awful.”

She nodded her understanding, then looked quickly over her shoulder to be sure neither Frost nor Justin were paying attention. They were affixed on the turkey’s progress. She leaned closer to me over the island and whispered, “Does he know about Lex?”

I gritted my teeth and shook my head. “Nothing.”

“Is that wise?”

I shook my head again, answering, “No, probably not, but I don’t know if I can bear to tell him.” I shuddered slightly, my stomach muscles clenching and creaking in protest to the idea. “Do you really think he could handle it if he knew?”

Liz stared down into the ready stuffing for a long time, her face dark and grim. Finally, she said, “I don’t know. But I think it’ll be a hell of a lot worse for him if it doesn’t come from you. Imagine if someone from your past were to turn up and let it slip to him or if Lex ever came out of the woodwork again.” I could hear my teeth grinding together of their own volition and one hand went to my stomach to try and ease the growing tension in the muscles. Liz frowned sadly. “I’m so sorry, Poe. Reading your file…it kept me from sleep for days. I’m so sorry. But you have to consider what you’re doing to yourself keeping it bottled up and what you could do to him by keeping it from him. I’ve seen the way he looks at you, the way he touches you. Eventually, you’ll have to explain why you are the way you are or you’ll only hurt him more.”

I looked at Liz levelly, heat in my cheeks and eyes, and said, “If I tell him, one of two things will happen. It will destroy him, or he will be forced to leave me. No one could be with me knowing that.”

“Hey, is that stuffing ready?” Justin asked. Liz gathered the mixing bowl of stuffing into her arms and brought it to him without another word.

----

I was so shaken by the conversation with Liz that I did not realize the strangeness of the meal until we sat down at Justin’s four-person table. I had seen movies in which some of the foods were featured, but I had never eaten most of them. Mashed potatoes and turkey were familiar dishes, but stuffing, squash, and cherry pie could have been native cuisines of the planet Mars for all I knew of them. I was very wary of the stuffing and squash in particular, but in the end ate more food than anyone else at the table. As I took a third helping of stuffing, I began to wonder not for the first time whether I was genuinely starving.

The cherry pie was both too beautiful and too delicious. I didn’t want to eat it because of its beauty but couldn’t resist a second slice. Frost had ‘thrown it together’ when he had found a can of cherry pie filling in Justin’s pantry. I remembered what he had told me about baking being his therapy, but also wondered if cherry pie was a Christmas tradition in his family.

As we sat together, eating, laughing and talking about things more pleasant than I had ever spoken of before, I realized the less superficial reason why that Christmas dinner was so strange to me. Not only was there a lack of decorations or festivity, not only was the food new to me, but the most substantial thing was that none of us were blood relatives. Justin and Frost had grown up together since they were nine, but I hadn’t discovered yet whether Justin had even been formally adopted by the Frosts. Liz and I had only just met each other and the two men a month ago. Despite that, though, the four of us had no one else and were spending an important holiday together.

In my head I analyzed the group. Frost had never mentioned non-immediate family and I hadn’t seen anyone that looked physically similar or emotionally close to his family at the funerals. Justin had been taken in by Frost’s family, implying that he had no relatives either. And Liz…

I hesitated at that thought and looked across the table covertly at Liz. Frost and I were not the only broken ones in this group. Justin’s family had been lost to some sort of tragedy when he was very young and he had clearly been exposed to awful experiences as a marine. And something equally dark and ancient, something festering, was lying behind Liz’s dark eyes. I remembered her question to me the first time we had all met at Tony’s.Does it ever get easier?...To what?...To live.

She met my stare with her strange black eyes and I wondered if she knew what I was thinking.

Because I still didn’t have an answer for her.

----

The red is back. It is everywhere again. It is all over the floor, it is splattered on the walls, on the ceiling above me. It has stained the couch upon which I lie sobbing, immobile, in a thousand levels of agony. My wrists and ankles are bound, my body pinned beneath IT and I can’t stop it, I can’t fight, I can’t escape, I can’t kill, I can’t die…

The scalpel slices slowly down from my sternum to my waist and I’m screaming so hard my eardrums pop and blood runs down my throat and the beast’s laughter drowns my scream. Its eyes are red, blood-red like the ceiling, like the couch, like my skin, like my exposed insides…

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