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“No. But you know you have to be careful.”

“Mom, c’mon. Enough.” Now I was starting to get irritated.

My mom had always been overprotective. When I was six years old, I fell off a jungle gym at the school playground. Those were the days before schools used recycled tires as mulch, or any kind of soft material. Other kids broke arms or legs. I broke my head.

I was in a coma for almost a week, suffering a brain edema, or swelling, that doctors hadn’t been able to relieve by standard methods. My parents had been on the verge of agreeing to an experimental brain surgery when I’d opened my eyes, sat up and asked for ice cream.

The lack of coordination or loss of limb use the doctors had predicted never happened. Nor did memory loss or any discernible brain damage. If anything, I had trouble forgetting, not remembering. I’d suffered no long-term affects—at least, not physical ones. On the other hand, I’d learned to get used to the fugues.

She and my dad had thought they’d almost lost me, and nothing I could ever have told her about that time in the darkness could persuade her I hadn’t even come close to leaving. I’d tried once or twice, when I was younger, to reassure her. To get her to let go, even just a little. She refused to listen. I guess I couldn’t blame her. I had no idea of how it felt to love a child, much less fear you’d lost one.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

The good thing was, my mom knew when she was getting out of control. She’d done her best to make sure I didn’t grow up a stilted, fearful child, even if it meant biting her nails to nubs and going gray before she turned forty. She’d allowed me to do what I needed to for my independence, even if she did hate every second of it.

“You could come up once in a while, you know. I’m really not that far. We could have lunch or something. Just you and me, a girls’ day.”

“Oh, sure. We could do that.” She sounded a little brighter from the invitation.

I didn’t think she’d actually take me up on it. My mom didn’t like to drive long distances by herself. If she did come, she’d bring my dad along. Not that I didn’t love my dad, or want to see him. In many ways, he was easier to get along with than my mom, because no matter what anxiety he had, he kept it to himself. But it wouldn’t be a girls’ day out with him along, and he tended to get cranky about staying too long when he wanted to be home in his recliner watching sports. I didn’t even have cable yet.

“I saw him a couple days ago, Emm.”

I paused with a large book on cathedrals in one hand. I’d have to adjust the shelves in one of the bookcases if I wanted to stand this book upright. It was meant for a coffee table, for display. I flipped through the pages, considering if I should just sell on Craigslist. “Who?”

“Tony,” my mom said impatiently.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Mom!”

“He looked good. He asked about you.”

“I’m sure he did,” I said wryly.

“I got the feeling he was wondering if you’d…met someone.”

I paused in unpacking, with another heavy book in my hands, this time one called
Cinema Americana.
Another yard-sale find. I was a sucker for a bargain, books my downfall. Even ones about subjects I had no interest in. I guess I always had the notion I’d tear out the illustrations and put them in frames to hang on the wall. Proof I really did have no appreciation for art.

“Why would he even think that?”

“I don’t know, Emm.” A pause. “Have you?”

I was about to say no, but a flash of striped scarf and a black coat filled my mind. The floor tilted a little under me. I gripped the phone tighter. The book was suddenly too heavy in my sweating hand; I dropped it.

“Emm?”

“Fine, Mom. Just dropped a book.”

No swirling colors, no citrus scent biting at my nostrils. My stomach churned a little, but that could’ve been the leftover Italian food I’d had earlier. It had been in the fridge a little too long.

“It wouldn’t be such a bad thing. For you to meet someone. I mean, I think you should.”

“Yeah, I’ll make sure every guy I meet knows my mom thinks I shouldn’t be single. That’s a surefire way to get a date.”

“Sarcasm isn’t pretty, Emmaline.”

I laughed. “Mom, I have to go, okay? I want to finish unpacking these boxes and do some laundry before I go to my friend Jen’s house tonight.”

“Oh? You have a friend.”

I loved my mother. Really, I did. But sometimes I wanted to strangle her.

“Yes, Mother. I have an honest-to-goodness friend.”

She laughed that time, sounding better than she had when the conversation started. That was something, anyway. “Good. I’m glad you’re spending time with a friend instead of sitting home. I just… I worry about you, honey. That’s all.”

“I know you do. And I know you always will.”

We said our goodbyes, exchanged I-love-yous. I had friends who never told their parents they loved them, who’d never said the words after elementary school. It was something I was glad I’d never grown out of and that my mother insisted upon. Even if I knew it was because she was afraid not saying it would somehow mean she’d have lost her chance to tell me one more time, I liked it.

The book I’d dropped had opened to someplace in the middle, cracking the binding in a way that made me sigh unhappily. I bent to pick it up and stopped. It had opened to chapter called “Seventies Art Films,” on a full-page, glossy black-and-white photo of an unbelievably gorgeous face staring directly at the camera.

Johnny Dellasandro.

Chapter 02

“W
hich do you want to watch first? What are you in the mood for?” Jen pulled open the door on what proved to be a cabinet full of DVDs. She ran a fingertip along the plastic cases with a ticka-ticka-tick and stopped at one, looking over her shoulder at me. “Do you want to ease into it or plunge right in?”

I’d brought along the
Cinema Americana
book to show her and it lay open on the coffee table in front me, opened to the page of Johnny’s gorgeous face. “What’s this picture from?” Jen looked.
“Train of the Damned.”

I looked at it, too. “That picture is from a horror movie?”

“Yeah. Not my favorite of his. It’s not very scary,” she added. “But he does get naked in it.”

Both my brows raised. “Really?”

“Yeah. Not quite full frontal,” she said with a grin as she bent and plucked a movie from the shelf. “But, man, those seventies foreign movies were pretty graphic sometimes. It has a lot of blood and gore in it—will that bother you?”

I’d spent so much time in hospitals and emergency rooms that nothing much bothered me. “Nah.”

“
Train of the Damned,
it is.” Jen pulled the DVD from its case and slipped it into the player, then tuned the television to the right channel and grabbed the remote before taking a place beside me on the couch. “The quality’s not so good, sorry. I found this one in the bargain bin at a dollar store.”

“You’re a super Dellasandro fan, huh?” I shifted to keep the bowl of popcorn from spilling and leaned to take another look at the picture.

I hadn’t told Jen about letting the door slam in Johnny’s face, or how I’d already spent an hour staring at this photo, memorizing every line and curve, dip and hollow. His hair in the picture was pulled back into a thick tail at the base of his neck, longer than it was now. He looked younger in the picture, of course, since it had been taken something like thirty years ago. But not much younger.

“He’s aged well.” Jen peered over my shoulder as the first wobbly sounds of music filtered from the TV’s speakers. “He’s a little heavier, has a few more lines around his eyes. But mostly, he still looks that good. And you should see him in the summer, when he’s not covered up with that long coat.”

I sat back against the couch and pulled my feet up beneath me. “Haven’t you ever talked to him?”

“Oh, girl, hell, no. I’m too afraid.”

I laughed. “Afraid of what?”

Jen used the remote to turn up the sound. So far, the only thing on the TV screen had been a title dripping blood and a shot of a train chugging along a dark track winding through tall and jagged mountains. “I’d word-vomit all over him.”

“Word…ew.”

She laughed and put down the remote to grab a handful of popcorn. “Seriously. I met Shane Easton once, you know him? Lead singer for the Lipstick Guerrillas?”

“Um, no.”

“They were playing at IndiePalooza one year down in Hershey, and my friend had scored backstage passes. Ten or fifteen bands, something like that. Hot as all hell. We’d been drinking beer because cups were a dollar fifty and the water was four bucks a bottle. Let’s just say I was a little drunk.”

“And? What did you say?”

“I might’ve told him I wanted to ride him like a roller coaster. Or something like that.”

“Oh, wow.”

“Yeah, I know, right?” She sighed dramatically and popped the top on a can of diet cola. “Not my most shining moment.”

“It could’ve been worse, I’m sure.”

“What would be worse is if instead of never having to see him again I bumped into him all the time at the coffee shop and the grocery store,” Jen said. “Which is why I’m keeping my mouth shut around Johnny Dellasandro.”

The train—I assumed it was of the damned—let out a shrill whistle and the movie cut to an interior scene of people dressed in the height of late-seventies fashion. A woman in a beige pantsuit and huge hair, gigantic glasses covering half her face, waved a hand heavy with rings at the waiter pouring her a glass of wine. The train shuddered, he spilled it. It was Johnny.

“Watch what you’re doing, you damned fool!” The woman spoke in a thick accent. Maybe Italian? I couldn’t be sure. “You spilled on my favorite blouse!”

“Sorry, ma’am.” His voice was dark and thick and rich…and totally out of place in the movie with that New York accent.

I giggled. Jen shot me a look. “It gets better when he takes her into the sleeping car and bangs her.”

We both giggled then, and ate popcorn and drank cola, and made fun of the movie. As far as I could tell, the train became damned when it entered a tunnel that had somehow become connected to a portal to hell. There was no explanation for why this happened, at least none that I could figure out, but since at odd times the movie shifted into Italian with badly translated English subtitles—with Johnny’s voice being oddly dubbed in a much higher, swishier voice—I might easily have missed something important.

It didn’t matter, really. It was entertaining, with lots of blood and gore as Jen had promised. Lots of eye candy, too. Johnny ended up stripping out of his waiter’s uniform to battle foam-and-latex demons. Shirtless and covered in blood, his hair slicked back from his face, he was still breathtaking.

“I said, ‘Get the hell back to hell!’”

It was a classic line, delivered in Johnny’s thick accent and accompanied by the blast of his shotgun exploding the demons into tiny, dripping bits. And followed, incongruously, by a long, explicit love scene between him and the woman in the pantsuit, set to bouncy porn music and ending with the woman somehow getting pregnant with a demon baby that tore up her insides and tried to attack its father.

“So…Johnny was…the devil?”

Jen laughed and scraped the bottom of the popcorn bowl. “I think so! Or the son of the devil, something like that.”

The credits rolled. I finished my drink. “Wow. That was something.”

“Yeah, bad. But the sex scene. Hot, right?”

It had been. Even with the porny music and stupid special effects, even with the discreetly placed cushions that blocked even a glimpse of Johnny’s cock but left the woman’s hairy bush in full view. He’d kissed her like she was delicious.

“Good acting,” I said offhandedly.

Jen snorted and got up to take the DVD out of the player. “I don’t think it’s acting. I mean, I think he’s a much better artist than he ever was an actor. And the way he kisses…he fucks someone in just about every movie he’s in. I don’t think there’s much acting going on. It’s all pure Johnny.”

“When did he make all these movies, anyway?” I got up to stretch. The movie had been short, only a little over an hour, but watching it had felt like much longer.

“Dunno.” Jen shrugged. “He made a bunch in the seventies, then stopped for a while. Fell off the face of the earth. Then came back with the art and, so far as I know, only acted in one or two things after that. Mostly guest spots on TV shows. He was on an episode of
Family Ties,
if you can believe that.”

“Did he fuck someone?”

“He did!” Jen laughed. “But I don’t think they showed his cock. For that you have to watch…this.”

She pulled out a DVD with a plain red-and-black cover, one word on the front.
Garbage.
She was already putting it in the player as she talked.

“Okay. I’m not going to tell you anything about this movie in advance. I don’t want to ruin it.”

“That sounds scarier than
Train of the Damned!
”

She shook her head. “No. Just watch. You’ll see.”

So we watched.

Garbage
had even less of a plot than
Train of the Damned.
From what I could tell, it was about a group of misfits living in an apartment complex a lot like the one on the TV show
Melrose Place.
The kind seen in so many movies shot in California—a few buildings painted teal or green surrounding a pool. In this movie, the complex was called the Cove. Run by an office manager who I was pretty sure was a three-hundred-pound man in drag, the Cove’s other residents included the slutty heroin addict Sheila, mentally disturbed porcelain figurine collector Henry, unwed mother Becky and a bunch of other random characters who didn’t seem to have names but came and went in the background no matter what else was going on.