Gregg Hurwitz - The Survivor

She seemed to break, as if someone had snipped the cords that held her upright. She sagged, boneless, her mouth spreading to emit a gut-deep moan.

“Many years, many times, I was in prison,” he said. “I am of prison. Not my daughter. I would kill the world before I let my daughter go into a box.”

She clutched at him. “That’s not your choice.”

He flung her back. “It is all my choice. Everything!” Spittle flew from his lips. “For you I betrayed who I was. I betrayed my code. In prison I remained unbroken, but for you-for you -I went against my own skin.” He slapped a hand to his wrist, shoving up his sleeve, revealing the blue ink of the Zone. “Not for you to live a life behind bars like me. Like your dedushka in Babi Yar, starving and weak, made to carry a sack of wet salt across the yard and back. Across and back. A mockery of existence. A celebration of horror. You cannot understand. You will not live as we have lived. Every relative reaching back. All of us, filthy and marked. But not you.”

“I am filthy,” she sobbed. “I am marked.”

“No. You are pur e.” Vehemence seethed in his words. “If I have to destroy the world, you will not go. I will bring war. ”

“I have no say,” she wept, a hoarse whisper. “I have no choice. Stop, Papa.” She’d switched to Ukrainian, something about his native tongue bringing the words home right to the pit of him, lifting the hairs on his arms. “For me.”

“It is all for you.”

“Please, Papa. Please.” Pleading quietly, she pawed at him in desperation, pressing her palms to his chest. “Stop, Papa. Please.”

“Stop this!” he roared. “Do not question me. I gave you life. I took you from the street. You breathe because of me.”

She froze against the cushion, a startled animal. Not a sound. Not even the soft rasp of her crying. He was trembling, his powerful hands clenched. He loosened a fist, reached for her. At his touch she softened. Drew a shuddering breath. And then another.

He stroked her hair. She shifted so she was lying across his lap, the tension slackening in her neck.

“You will listen to me,” he said gently.

She settled into him, her muscles surrendering. “Okay.”

“It will be all right.”

“Okay.”

“I will take care of you.”

“Okay.”

“You will see.”

She rustled a bit and then rose. Her face had gone flat, expressionless. “I’m tired. I need to go to bed. I need to forget all about this.”

“Good. Forget all about this.”

She paused before him. Holding his face, she leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. “I know you love me, Papa.”

“Yes,” he said.

She stepped out of her high heels, leaving them empty on the pile carpet before her father, and floated into her room on stockinged feet. She put her back to the closed door and stared out her picture window at the magnificent view. Hollywood, the pulse of the universe. All those dreams and hopes bartered or bought for cents on the dollar, ground up and fed into the machine, fuel to keep the lights burning. People the world over drawn like moths to this strip of incandescence, yearning for a place, a home, an identity.

Her razor blade was out of her Coach wallet, in her hand, pressed to the top of her thigh, just shy of breaking the skin. She’d made no conscious choice, hadn’t even known what her hand was up to while she’d taken in the view. She applied a bit more pressure, nylon and flesh yielding, freeing a quick endorphin rush. What a relief to feel something. To cut through the edge of herself, to reclaim her body as her own. Eyes watering, she bit her lip, an expression of ecstasy. Then she let the blade fall from her hand. She breathed, felt the thin tributary snake down the inside of her knee.

With effort she peeled herself off the door. She cleaned herself up, tissue and styptic pencil, a midsize Band-Aid. The care and healing were as much a part of the ritual as the cutting itself. She had promised her father she’d keep her body unmarred, and she would do so, even now, to the best of her ability.

Using her brightest pink lipstick, she wrote across the window, NO MORE. Then she drew her heavy shades across the brightness, blotting it out. Beneath her mattress she retrieved a hidden trove of papers, artifacts of her failed search for her mother. Genealogy trees with broken branches, chat-room threads that knit into nothing, leads that went nowhere-she let all the dead ends spill across her puffy duvet.

Her sturdy desk chair fought the carpet as she shoved it to the middle of the room. Swaying, she tilted her head, letting her long hair brush her arm. With a distant smile, she ran her knuckles up her swanlike neck, taking comfort in the smoothness of her skin. Her fingertips rose to the scar tissue, traced its faint ridges. She unbuckled her thin studded belt and snapped it once.

Then she stepped up onto the chair and tested the sturdiness of her ceiling fan.

When Nate pulled off his T-shirt, grimacing, Janie regarded the fresh slice in his shoulder with disapproval. “Because between the ALS, the letter opener stab, and the butterfly stitches in your forehead, you didn’t have enough problems.”

“Price of entry,” Nate said. “It was an exclusive club.”

Aside from the reading lamp angled to spotlight the cut, the Silver Lake house was dark. With the heat turned off and the abundance of windows, the floor in the great room turned frigid. Janie stayed bundled up in a sweater. Nate sat in a leather armchair, Cielle and Jason dozing on separate couches in front of the TV. Nate had returned a few hours ago and shot off a text to Abara, updating him on his conversation with Nastya at the club. No response yet.

Though the cut had bled nicely, it was superficial. Janie patched it up with a few more butterfly stitches, Nate squinting at her through the glare.

She finished and said, “How’re the symptoms?”

He rolled his head back, looked up at the dark ceiling. “Getting worse.”

“Joints? Muscles?”

“Yeah. And I’m … I don’t know, fatigued. Especially at night. Dizzy. Nauseated at intervals. Hands and wrists are bad, as you know. The ankle goes in and out.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“Regular laugh riot.”

She regarded him, again with that bittersweet smile. “Can I get you something to eat, Husband?”

The old game. “No thanks, Wife.” He matched her grin, though the exchange made his heart ache a little, too. “Being on the lam always makes me lose my appetite.”

She set a hand on his cheek. “Maybe we should go to Paris. That honeymoon we never took.”

“Dunno. I’m falling apart here. Not the best guy to be on the run with.”

She leaned forward and kissed him. “Now the illness is going to your brain.”

His cell phone chirped across on the kitchen table. Text message.

On the couch Jason groaned and sat up.

Nate said, “Abara,” and tried to rise, but his leg complained and he winced and sat back down.

She moved toward the phone. “I’ll get it. Maybe Nastya already got a confession from her old man. Maybe Abara’s calling to say the whole gang’s in jail and we won the Powerball, too, and NIH is announcing a cure for ALS-”

She stared at the LED screen, her words sticking in her throat. Her mouth came slightly ajar.

“What?” Nate said. “What?”

Jason stood and cracked his back, the sound loud in the quiet house. Cielle turned over and mumbled, “Gross.”

Nate’s focus stayed on Janie. Speechless, she crossed to him and held out the phone. “We gotta leave,” she said.