Broken (18 page)

Laila shuts her eyes and opens them again.

A painting on the wall looks the same as it did earlier in the morning and late last night. Just a painting. No mirror. No
mirror with a laughing ghost of herself dying away.

She gets to her hotel room and locks it and can hear the voice of the woman outside. “The black pit of night won’t rest until
it pours its way into your soul. You need to leave this place. This city. You need to leave and go back home.”

But even if the old woman knows something more than she should, she got it wrong.

Laila doesn’t have a home to go back to.

•   •   •

Lex knocks on the door for the third time. A part of him wants to kick it in, but he knows it will do little good if Kyle
isn’t there.

The guy told him to meet him downstairs in the lobby around ten. Lex ventured out and got some coffee at a shop down the street
and then came back and waited. It’s thirty minutes after ten now, and Lex wonders if he’s been abandoned.

He asks at the front desk if Kyle checked out, and the clerk says no.

He waits for another half hour before feeling restless enough to head out onto the streets.

Perhaps he won’t be able to find Kyle or to find Laila but at least he can do something.

He tries to stifle the voices inside him as he walks the streets and feels the sun on his forehead.

He knows that if he doesn’t find her in the next day, he will have to go back home. He can’t keep doing this to his family.
He can’t just stay away from them with no hope on the horizon.

No matter how much time passes, guilt still comes with each sunrise. And even though he knows his sins are taken care of,
he can’t escape his own reputation and his own past.

Regardless of whatever he does for the rest of his life, Dena will always wonder. She’ll always worry, and she’ll always wonder.
And he could try and tell her to get over that (and he’s even done so before), yet Lex knows she feels like this because of
him. Because of the past mistakes.

He deserves it.

His wife deserves better. And he’s promised her she will get it.

Lex decides to try and pick up something for them. He wanders into stores trying to find a small gift that would show he’s
thinking of them. One of the stores has an assortment of local handcrafted items from watches to ashtrays to belts. It’s dimly
lit, and he can’t see anybody in the stifling, narrow space. It smells like tobacco and spices.

A chill covers him even though the morning is already sticky and hot. He’s cold enough to feel the prickles on his skin.

As he leaves, he sees a square vintage camera on a little shelf. He stops because it looks completely different than anything
else in the shop.

Lex picks it up and sees it’s the same Leica brand that Laila used to carry and take pictures on.

There isn’t a price tag on it. Lex goes to the back where the desk and counter sit, and he calls out to see if anybody is
there. A woman with thick dreadlocks comes out and glances at him and then at the old camera he holds.

“Where’d you get this?” he asks.

“Got it somewhere but not sure where.” Her Jamaican accent is thick.

“When’d you get it?”

“Not sure of that. Things come and go around here.”

“How much is this?”

“How much you willin’ to pay?”

Lex shakes his head. “I don’t know. I don’t really want to buy it.”

“Okay then.”

He wants an answer or an explanation, but the woman simply looks at him with no sign of giving him one.

“You have no idea where you got this?”

“Should I?” she asks.

“No, I just thought—it looks very familiar.”

“Take it then.”

“Take it?”

“Sure.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Then don’t.”

He looks at the camera and knows it’s got to be the same brand. Not just the same brand, but the exact same model. And just
like many things on this trip, it cannot be a coincidence.

“Do you know if this works?”

“Don’t know.”

He puts it down on the counter and pulls out a twenty. “How about this?”

“That looks fine to me,” the woman says.

He gives it to her, and the woman lets him take it without a bag or anything.

Just as he’s walking out the door, the woman tells him good-bye, then adds, “Make sure to tell your sister where you got it.”

As he stands in the doorway wondering if he indeed heard her say that, Lex turns around and finds the woman gone.

He wants to go back inside, but that cold feeling is still there. A chill
along with a panicked, closed-in feeling. He knows he needs to get out of the shop and back onto the street where he can
think and breathe.

He looks at the camera and wonders if he should take it.

Is it cursed just like the rest of this ill-fated trip?

Lex keeps it and walks on.

•   •   •

She can’t believe Kyle’s come this far. She never expected when she called his cell phone this morning that he was already
here. Nor could she believe that her brother came with him.

Laila watches him step out of the café and into the bright sun. He squints his eyes and then looks down each side of the road.
For a moment it appears that he’s still waiting for her even though she said she’d meet him there a long time ago.

There’s something so endearing about seeing Kyle standing there.

She watches from inside a bar with the window painted on the outside to make it impossible to see in. She wanted to see if
he was really there, somehow still not believing that Kyle had actually driven all this way to see her. Even as he arrived,
Laila was in a state of disbelief, watching him enter the café alone. Just as she had asked.

For almost a half hour, Laila fought staying over on this side of the street. She wanted to see him in person. Now she has.

He walks away, glancing around as if he might find her any moment. Laila remains inside, watching him, watching him go.

She doesn’t understand why he would drive all this way just to find her again.

Laila waits in the bar for a while, drinking nothing and just looking out the window. Then she heads back out into the blistering
sunshine and starts walking back to her hotel several blocks away. As she walks, she thinks of Kyle, then thinks of what he
told her on the phone about her brother following him.

She thinks of what she might say to Lex when she sees him. But every passing comment that fills her mind evaporates because
she
knows herself. She knows how she won’t say the things that need to be said. Too much time and distance has taken up the space
of their relationship. She won’t say anything because there’s nothing left to say.

Laila stops to look at an old church that has a rusted gate and an overgrown garden with a sidewalk leading up to a few short
stairs. The old wood is worn with remnants of white paint spotted throughout the brown and black. The walkway leading to the
steps is cracked and uneven. The windows are covered with boards. Yet the door to the church is open.

“Laila.”

It is a slight whisper that comes from behind her. Or maybe above her. She looks around her but doesn’t see anybody. It’s
just a side street where the buildings on each side tower over her.

“Come inside, Laila.”

It’s the voice of a woman. An elderly voice with a deep accent.

She knows she’s imagining it just like so many things in the last week.

She can’t help her body’s tremble.

Laila walks down the cracked concrete to the old, wooden steps and then stands at the entryway to the church.

“It’s okay. You’re home now.”

She feels pulled by an unknown force as she enters, the floor of the old sanctuary creaking.

Slivers of light leak in from slits in the planked-up windows. There are old pews still inside here, perhaps ten rows on each
side of the small room. Each pew is gray with dust. There is no stage but rather a modest pulpit with a table in front of
it. As she gets closer, she sees that it’s a baptism table, with a large bowl on top used for the ceremony.

The air tastes musty, the echoes of her steps bouncing off the narrow walls and ceiling. She feels cobwebs against her face.
More than anything, she feels out of breath, as if there is no air inside here to breathe.

“It’s time—we’ve been waiting for you. So nice to have you stop by.”

She stops and knows the voice is real. It was loud, and it echoed.

“Who’s there?” she calls out.

As she glances at one of the pews, she sees a small round object on it. She steps over to pick it up and then stops.

It’s a small head of a toy. A Barbie or something like that. Just the head and nothing else. It stares up at her, smiling
and dumbfounded.

Laila keeps walking toward the pulpit.

Another voice whispers, but she can’t make out the words.

She knows she shouldn’t be in here, but running away feels like she’s losing. Running away would feel like she’s giving in
to the pressures of her mind and to her fears.

She knows there’s nothing in here besides the remnants of an old church.

The voices she hears are in her mind and that’s all.

Laila keeps walking.

Yet the voices don’t stop.

“You can pay for your sins right here and right now with the blood of the lamb.”

She nears the table with the round bowl, and she looks inside.

There is still water in the bowl. It is still, and for a second she thinks she can see herself reflected.

“Go ahead, look inside. Look at the face of evil, the face of death. The face of a dirty, filthy, smelly whore.”

Laila looks and sees herself, but she sees herself at fifteen with a wide smile as she poses for a picture. She sees herself
at seventeen in love and naive and stupid.

There is laughter in the room. Not from one but from a hundred.

She turns and sees them all. The ghosts of the parishioners are behind her, laughing, mocking, taunting. They’re pointing
fingers and smirking and judging.

Laila touches the water and sees the ripples and watches the picture disappear.

She looks up at the pulpit and at the cross on the wall behind it.

Yet as she stares at it, she notices it’s actually not a cross but rather two long serpents stretched out in the shape of
a cross.

They begin to move and slither off the wall and onto the floor toward her.

Laila gasps and grabs her mouth to try to squelch it.

Then she smells the blood.

Her hands are drenched not in old, stagnant water from the baptism basin but in blood.

The laughter continues.

On the floor she can see more snakes writhing as they near her.

Her outstretched hands drip blood.

“You will never get it back. Never, Laila, not ever, and you will forever carry the mark. Forever carry the pain and nothing
can take it back. Nothing.”

She turns around and sees the room full of people. But now they are all men. Several hundred, some sitting in the pews and
some standing next to them. Lining up on the walls and in the back.

All faces she recognizes.

They are all men she’s been with.

All men she’s given herself to.

They howl with jeers and laughter, mocking her with deep-rooted heckles. She hears a few whistles, the sound of mock kissing,
even an evil and whiny groan. The sound slaps her over her face with its contempt.

Their laughter continues and gets louder, and she feels something wrapping itself around her legs.

Laila shuts her eyes and runs through the church. She holds out a hand like a blind person until she ends up slamming against
the back wall.

She sees the glare from outside, and she rushes through the door and trips over the stairs and lands on the dirt next to the
walkway.

Dazed and dizzy, Laila looks at her hands.

They’re still covered in blood.

It was no hallucination.

Staring back at the front of the church doorway, she sees a snake slowly making its way out. It slithers over the entryway
and back around the side of the church.

Then the door slams shut.

Her heart beats, and she can taste the sweat on her lips. She wipes her hands on the grass and then stands and leaves the
garden.

She can still hear the laughter coming from inside the church.

On snowy days we’d stay inside Tyler’s town house that looked out on the frozen Chicago skyline and make love and listen to
the wind howl and watch the snow swirling four stories high. And I almost believed. Almost. I almost gave myself over to the
fact that it could happen and that it was happening. That love could find its way into my heart. But ultimately I ran away
from it just like I run away from everything.

There are daily reminders of Tyler that I’ve never let go. A dollar key chain bought in the park. A CD that he made for me
in its special case that I still carry around, though I can’t bring myself to listen to it again. A blue topaz ring I can’t
wear again. My heart that was once handcrafted clay shaped with his hands but now is hard and cold and unmovable.

He was never a client, and he never said anything once he found out. A few times he tried carefully and delicately to tell
me what I already knew, the dangers inherent in my profession. It wasn’t a profession but something short-term. That’s how
I reasoned and rationalized even though a week became a month that became a couple of years. The short and beautiful time
we had belonged to us, and he said he could take care of me, but I told him I didn’t want anybody taking care of me. I told
him he needed to start by taking care of himself. And that was the start of the inevitable end.

Some days I dream of those times. When the world howled outside like a wild animal and we held onto one another. When the
simple act of love wasn’t just an act but more of a deep breath of fresh air. When the joy came of knowing someone was there
waiting and willing and still wanting something beyond what they had taken. When they were willing to give me so much more
than I could give them.