What Strange Creatures (21 page)

“This is where Marge starts to make people feel a little uncomfortable,” I said. “Talking about Jesus like that.”

“Does she make
you
uncomfortable?” Nathan wanted to know.

“No,” I said. “I think maybe Marge misunderstood some aspects of the mystical experience. I mean, not that I’m a good one to dictate the terms. But that’s partly what makes her interesting. How many of us have a perfect understanding of what it means to be a person of great faith?”

“But it sounds like what annoyed people is how overconfident she was about it,” Nathan pointed out. “
She
would never admit to misunderstanding.”

“She was quite self-righteous, yes,” I said. “But she had a fair amount of self-doubt, too. That’s why she was often traveling around and speaking to various priests and anchorites about her experience—to reassure herself of its validity. Anyway, give me bumbling Marge over a real saint any day. Saints are perfection, and it can be difficult to learn anything from perfection. Marge is real. She can at least show us some of our spiritual folly.”

“Okay, I get that.” Nathan finished his beer. “What has Margery taught you, then?”

I thought about the question for a moment. The more I thought about it, the more it felt like a kick in the stomach. Seven years later, maybe she hadn’t really taught me anything.

Thankfully, Nathan didn’t wait for an answer. Instead he beckoned our waitress so we could order second drinks. After that I segued from Marge’s wedding into questions about his wedding videography. And after thirds he asked me to his place. I tried to be coy about agreeing, and he gave me his address. We drove in our separate cars.

I couldn’t see the color of Nathan’s house in the dark. But the property looked pretty well kept. Leaves raked. Light glowing on the front porch. Neither of these things necessarily disqualified him from being a sociopath, but they were comforting nonetheless.

Not that there had been signs that he
was
a sociopath. But I didn’t usually move quite this fast, and it was fear of sociopaths, more than morality or reserve, that kept me from it.

I met Nathan on his porch.

“Before you come in,” he said, “I think there’s something you should know.”

I had to bite my lip to keep in a nervous giggle.

“Why are you smiling?” he asked.

“I’m not smiling.”

Nathan stroked his George Michael shadow. “Well, you should know that I have a snake.”

“A snake?”

“Yeah. I realize that can be a problem for some people.”

“I can imagine.”

Nathan bit his lip. “Is it for you?”

“Well . . .” I was still feeling my last drink, I was pretty sure. “How big is the snake?”

“Almost five feet. Which is on the long side for a ball python.”

“Oh? Bonus.”

He stared at the key in his hand. “Do you still want to come in?” Bashfully sly or slyly bashful. Either way I found it attractive.

“Hmm. Does this snake have a cage?”

“Of course. It’s very secure.”

I hesitated. “Maybe I ought to go in and have a look.”

“Good for you.” Nathan grinned and unlocked the front door. He led me through a decent-size kitchen. Clean, I noted, but not compulsively so. Country-cottage cabinets painted a cheerful yellow. His style or a previous owner’s? An old girlfriend’s?

“Here she is,” Nathan said when we arrived in the living room.

The glass cage took up nearly all of one side of the living room wall. It had reddish wood chips on its bottom and large rocks in the corners. In the middle were plants that resembled bonsai trees. I couldn’t see the snake at all.

“Big cage,” I said. “Lucky snake.”

“I wouldn’t agree to have her unless she had a nice big enclosure.”

“Uh-huh,” I murmured. I wasn’t sure if this was standard python-owner braggadocio or what. I stepped closer to the cage. Curled up under one of the plants was a tight spiral of white reptilian skin with soft yellow-orange blotches—wrapped in a disk about the diameter of a teakettle. Her head wasn’t visible.

“What’s her name?” I asked.

“Peaches and Cream.”

“Oh, my.” I sighed.

“She’s an albino. I didn’t name her. She’s a secondhand snake.”

“You couldn’t rename her?”

“I didn’t feel right about it. She had that name for seven years before I got her.”

“How long do these things live?” I asked.

“Twenty to thirty years.”

“Wow.”

I stared at the snake. She looked very clean. I wondered if pythons required baths of some kind. I stopped just short of picturing Nathan showering with Peaches and Cream. Such an image might very well set me to weeping—Marge style.

“Did you . . . um, always want to be a snake owner?” I asked.

Nathan glanced at Peaches and Cream and then back at me. Then he let out a long, wheezy smoker’s laugh that so startled me that I began to laugh, too.

“No. She’s . . .” he began, then dissolved in laughter again. He sat down on the couch, wiping a tear from his eye.

“What’s so funny?”

“Just the question. The way you asked it. You’re trying so hard to be nice about it.”

“Not
so
hard. I don’t
hate
snakes. At least not like some people do.”

“Truth be told, Theresa, she’s a stray. That’s all. Think of it that way. She was abandoned, and no one else would take her.”

“Abandoned?” I said.

“A buddy of mine took her in when his friend—the original owner—went to Iraq. When the friend got back, he had a lot of problems. To make a long story short, he couldn’t take the snake back. My friend kept him as long as he could, but then his girlfriend got pregnant and they wanted to move in together. She didn’t want a snake in the house with a baby.”

“Makes sense,” I said.

“Yeah. It does. Anyway. No one else was volunteering. So I did. Peaches is mild-mannered. It’s some work, but it’s not
that
big a deal.” Nathan brushed my arm with his hand. “You have pets?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Does she eat live mice?”

“Frozen and thawed. Not all pythons will. But she’s fine with it.”

I opened my mouth to ask for the details but decided that wasn’t a conversational direction I wished to pursue. I made a mental note to refuse anything that came out of Nathan’s microwave, whatever else happened this evening.

“Do you mind if I use your bathroom?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “Second door on the left. Just to let you know, though—that’s where I keep my two canaries. It’s a big bathroom, and the light in there is really nice early in the day.”

One of the two yellow canaries
chip-chip-chipped
at me while I brushed my fingers through my hair. The other hopped around in the cage but said nothing. On my way back to the living room, I peeked into the two rooms along the hall. One was a bedroom, the other an office with two computers, a DVD player, and a bunch of other electrical equipment I couldn’t identify. There was a video camera on the office swivel chair and stacks of DVDs popping up randomly around the carpet like mushrooms.

“You did something with your hair,” Nathan said as I returned.

“Just combed it.”

Nathan brushed the hair from the side of my face. “It looks good.”

I leaned close to him. “Thanks.”

He kissed me. Strong, determined, but soft on the finish. A pinot noir of a kiss. And his shadow beard didn’t bother me as much as I thought it might.

I nudged him onto the sofa, and we kissed again. I felt giddy until I looked up at the glass cage and saw that Peaches and Cream had lifted her head and begun to unfurl herself. Her eyes were bloodred. I nearly screamed, but then I turned back to Nathan, reminding myself
—albino.
She’s an albino. Of course her eyes are red. She can’t help it.

“Can I ask you a question?” I touched his silly earring.

“Sure, beautiful.”

I felt my buzz fade a bit. Flattery makes a tiny part of my brain disconnect. For me it’s like hearing nails on a chalkboard. And who calls a woman “beautiful” like that these days? What did he think this was? An episode of
CHiPs
?

“Do you remember the George Michael album
Faith
? The video where he’s dancing by the jukebox?”

“Nope.”

“Oh, come on. His most famous album.”

Nathan shrugged. “I don’t know it.”

“Are you kidding? ’Cuz I was going to say you have the same style as him. I mean, your hair’s not frosted, but the facial hair and the jeans and the earring . . .”

“I have to admit that I have some pretty big holes in my . . . uh . . pop-culture knowledge.”

“I’ll say. How old are you?”

“Thirty-four.”

“Oh. Same as me.” I was a year older, but close enough. “How could you not know who . . . ?”

“I grew up in a Hare Krishna commune. We didn’t leave till I was ten. When did this George Michael thing come out?”

“Hare Krishna? Like the orange robes at the airport?”

“Like that. But I didn’t spend any time at any airports. We grew up on a farm.”

“Wow.” I considered this while he raked his fingers into my hair. “Were you bald? With one of those little ponytails?”

“Listen. I probably shouldn’t have said anything. But I find it easier sometimes.” His hand got tangled in my hair, slid down my neck, and came to rest on my back. “You wouldn’t believe how many conversations you get lost in. When you didn’t have TV or Santa Claus or the mall. It’s easier to just explain than to try to fake it.”

“You could’ve said you didn’t have MTV.”

“I could’ve. Since that’s true.” Nathan’s hand drifted up and down my back. “But the truth is even easier. In a way.”

“Are you a Hare Krishna now?”

“A Hare Krishna who works as a bartender? No, Theresa.”

“I guess that was a stupid question. Why did you leave the commune?”

“It was complicated. My parents didn’t agree with some of the choices the people in charge were making.”

“Are your parents still Hare Krishnas?”

“No,” Nathan whispered, then kissed my neck.

“Did you go to regular school, growing up?”

“No. Well, not till junior high.”

He kissed me on the mouth again—stronger this time.

“Wasn’t that hard to—”

“Do you really want to talk about this right now?”

“Kinda,” I admitted.

“Kinda? Oh, right. You study religious freaks.”

“No I don’t. I only study one freak.”

“I see,” Nathan said. He let his hand fall from my back. As he moved, I could smell him—a combination of wine, patchouli deodorant, and something unidentifiable that made me think of gray wolves.

“How about we discuss it later?” he asked, gazing at me with his sharp brown eyes.

They weren’t a dark brown. They were almost yellow around the edges of his irises. Why did I think I knew what wolves smelled like anyway? I’d watched a lot of wildlife documentaries, and I was rather fond of the gray wolf. But still—that didn’t quite explain it.

“Promise,” I whispered, leaning into him and taking a deep breath. There it was again.

Nathan pulled me close. I allowed my gaze to meet his. The yellow in his eyes felt warmer, somehow, than anything I’d seen or felt in days. Weeks, even. Jeff, my parents, Peaches, and Zach all drained gently out of my head. I thought about Marge for a moment—about how there was a time in her life when Marge would weep whenever she saw a handsome man, because it would make her think of Jesus. I thought I might weep now, but it had nothing to do with Jesus.
This creature started to hear Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah” pipe up somewhere in the back of her brain, drowning out everything else.

“Promise,” Nathan echoed.

He said it flatly, parroting so immediately that he almost certainly didn’t know what he was saying. But the look in his eyes was so hungry that I didn’t care.

When Nathan was asleep, I slipped out of bed and got half dressed. Wearing just jeans and a cami, I tiptoed into Nathan’s office and sat in front of the computers, taking care so his office chair wouldn’t squeak. Once I was closer, I saw that it was actually only one computer—a Mac laptop—and two large additional screens. When I opened the laptop, the screen was already open to CNN online—a story about government surveillance.

I clicked on the Finder and typed in
“Kim.”

There was a folder on the desktop titled “Kim’s stuff.”

Too easy, I thought. I glanced around me, heart pounding, half expecting Peaches and Cream to pop out from behind the screen or under the lampshade, jaw unhinged. But all was still and silent.

Opening the folder, I found two files. They were titled “Wayne” and “Wallace.” I clicked “Wallace.”

In that folder there were a few videos. The first was called “Wallace draft.” Everything after that was labeled “Wallace stuff 1,” “Wallace stuff 2,” and so on. As the video began, I tapped the volume down low so it wouldn’t be audible in Nathan’s bedroom. Pictures of Donald Wallace flashed on the screen. Some of them were identical to the ones on her phone—him eating a hot dog, an ice cream. Others were less grainy—him at a hearing of some kind, him behind a podium with his fingers clawed in a dramatic gesture. In most of them, his mouth was open. All of them were unflattering.

Then a fortyish woman appeared on the screen, the back of a restaurant booth framing her head. She had a wrinkled little mouth and wore glasses with oversize frames. At the bottom of the screen, it said,
“Pamela Bolduc, Andrew Abbott’s cousin.”

“It was like Kafka,” she said. I could hear the sound of forks on plates and restaurant chatter in the background as she spoke. Her picture dissolved, and these words appeared, white against a black screen:
“Donald Wallace’s Most Famous Conviction.”

The picture lingered on these words for about seven seconds too long, and then the woman appeared again, saying:

“My cousin spent twelve years in jail. The DNA from the scene shows that he probably wasn’t even there. It was someone else. But did they say, ‘We made a mistake’? Did they say, ‘We’re sorry’? No. It disturbs me that we have a system that doesn’t have to do that. That has no room for self-reflection or remorse.

“I hold the Fairchester police department and Donald Wallace responsible for what happened. They decided who’d murdered Jenny Spicer before they’d fully investigated all the possibilities. They pursued my cousin because he was different.”