Lisa Miscione - Twice

“You won’t keep us apart,” Julian whispered fiercely. Lydia felt herself tip toward the ground, the sky tilting around her, the buildings dancing. And she felt an odd lightness as gravity pulled on her. She felt the fragile thread that connected her soul to her body stretch to the point of snapping and she wondered, Am I going to die here? She reached out and held on hard to Julian. The woman had a death grip on Lydia’s throat, and she felt like she was breathing though a straw. White stars had started to dance before her eyes.

Things seemed to be happening so slowly as Lydia felt the balance shift from most of their weight being in the building to most of their weight being out. And in the next second, she felt her feet lift from the floor and her body tilt more steeply toward the ground. Julian must have felt it, too, because her expression morphed from malice to surprise and fear. She loosed her grip on Lydia’s throat. It was then that Lydia felt strong hands on her ankles. Julian’s body started to slip over hers. Lydia tried to hold on, but the momentum of Julian’s fall was too great. Julian flipped over her like an acrobat, Ford getting to the window a millisecond too late. There was a shocked silence among them, as Julian fell, her scream like a siren ending abruptly as she hit the sidewalk. It was a gruesome sound; everyone who heard it felt the shattering of bones. Screeching tires, the sound of metal on metal, yelling voices from the street below carried up and filled the room.

Jeffrey pulled Lydia in the rest of the way and she sank to the floor, feeling every nerve ending in her body pulse with the relief of mortal terror. He held on to her as she buried her head in his shoulder, taking in the scent of his skin, the strength of his muscles, the sound of his breath. She’d never been so glad to be alive.

The ferry ride was grim and it was a journey she made alone. Jeffrey thought she was having her run and then going on to Central Park West, visiting her doctor for an early morning follow-up visit after her laparoscopy. And she would do that today, as well. But later.

It was six-thirty and the sky was a flat dead gray. The air was cold, and coming off the water it was downright frigid, but Lydia stood at the bow away from the cargo and near the workers, who were bundled in layers and drinking coffee from thermoses. Hector approached her.

“I don’t know why anyone would want to be here if they didn’t have to be,” he said, his Dominican accent heavy.

Hector, the morgue worker she’d met the night Jed McIntyre died, had been true to his word when she called to ask where the city would bury him. When a week later she’d called again and offered him a thousand dollars cash to take her to his grave, he’d said, “Lady, are you nuts? Go back to your life.”

“That’s just it,” she’d told him. “I can’t do that until I’ve seen the grave.”

He’d reluctantly agreed and told her to meet him at City Island in the Bronx and that he’d take her over to Potter’s Field on Harts Island when he took over that day’s Jane and John Does. She stood and watched as twenty anonymous pine coffins, branded only with serial numbers, were loaded from a van onto the waiting ferry. An old priest stood by waiting and she wondered if he started every morning like this, watching as workers loaded the bodies of God’s forsaken children onto a boat that would take them to their unmarked graves. She wondered how it didn’t shake his faith. But she didn’t ask. She had her own faith to worry about.

“I do have to be here,” she said.

And Hector just nodded at her. He had a thick brown face with wide features and sharp eyes. He was looking at her with those eyes that were neither warm nor cold, neither kind nor cruel. They were eyes that saw things the way they were and didn’t judge. She turned away from him and watched as the island approached, looking into the murky choppy water of the Long Island Sound. And she thought about her recent breakdown of motivations. She thought about Julian and James and their twisted love for each other. A love they thought excused them from moral behavior, a love that made it okay to lie and scheme and murder to be together. And how it had ended with Julian a broken mess of herself on a city sidewalk. James Ross was still at large.

She thought about Maura and Annabelle Hodge, so warped by a legacy of revenge and hatred, by jealousy and greed, that they allowed themselves to be drawn into a plot that would end lives they considered less worthy than their own and children to grow up without parents. The righteous anger of their ancestor so many years ago, thwarted and used for their own selfish means. Lydia still wondered about Annabelle’s father, who he was, why he had disappeared. Lydia had her suspicions, thinking perhaps it was Paul, Eleanor’s brother. It was the way Maura had talked of him, the dedication in her book. Maybe she knew Eleanor had killed him, maybe she knew no one would ever believe her even if she told. Maybe all of this gave her a nudge a little further down the road to insanity. But it was just a guess and Lydia would probably never know the truth.

She thought about Orlando DiMarco. Of all of them, he was the one who confused her the most. When he returned from Switzerland with the children for Julian’s funeral, Lydia had visited him at his gallery. He was in the process of closing it down and moving to Switzerland permanently with Nathaniel and Lola, of whom now he was guardian.

“I think part of me always knew it would end like this for them,” he said when he saw her.

“You knew,” she said.

“I had an idea.”

“But you never implicated her… or him.”

“I loved her,” he said simply. “And they were one. Anything I’d done to harm him would have harmed her. Did you ever love anyone that much… that you’d do anything, no matter how wrong it was? Even if you knew they could never love you the same way?”

She didn’t want to judge him or say to him that she didn’t consider that love. That when love asked you to betray yourself and betray others, it was only need or fear in a clever masquerade. She only shook her head.

Lola and Nathaniel were chasing each other around the empty gallery space, their laughter echoing against the walls. To look at them, one would never know what they had endured over the last several weeks of their young lives. They seemed happy, normal.

“Do they ever talk about that night?”

“They told their therapist that they were playing a game with their nanny that night. I don’t know that they’ve quite connected that event with the death of their father. They don’t blame themselves. Anyway, they’ll be in therapy for a while.”

“Why did Julian ask you to take the twins?”

“I don’t know, really. She came to the gallery a couple of months ago and asked me if I would take the twins should anything happen to her and Richard. I told her yes, of course. I thought it was odd, but I wouldn’t have considered turning her down,” he said, looking past Lydia at the memory of that day.

“I think part of her suspected that all this would end in tragedy,” he went on. “She wanted to be sure that they’d be cared for. That’s as close as I can come to a guess.”

“And what about James? Do you think he’ll come for them?”

“It would be suicide. They’ll be watched by Interpol for a little while and then by a security team I’ve hired in Switzerland. If he comes near them, he’ll be arrested and charged with murder.”

Lydia nodded.

“It’s funny,” he said as she began to leave. “In Lola and Nathaniel, I have more of her in death than I did while she was alive. They are so much like her… it’s a joy and torture. I think they’ll bring me great pleasure and great sadness for the rest of my life, just like their mother before them.”