Pieces of Her (Andrea Oliver 1)

Until now, when she heard the same sounds coming from her brother.

Jane carefully buttoned his shirt back up.

There was a blue afghan on the back of a rocking chair. She draped it over her brother. She kissed his forehead. He felt so cold. His hands. His feet. She tucked the afghan around his body. She stroked the side of his pale face.

Jane had been seventeen years old when she’d found the old cigar box in the glove box of Andrew’s car. She’d thought she’d caught him stealing Martin’s cigars, but then she had opened the lid and gasped out loud. A plastic cigarette lighter. A bent silver teaspoon from one of her mother’s precious sets. Stained cotton balls. The bottom of a Coke can. A handful of filthy Q-tips. A tube of skin cream squeezed in the middle. A length of rubber tubing for a tourniquet. Insulin syringes with black dots of blood staining the tips of the sharp needles. Tiny rocks of debris that she recognized from her years backstage as tar heroin.

Andrew had given it up eighteen months ago. After meeting Laura. After Nick had developed a plan.

But it was too late.

“Jinx?” Nick was standing in the doorway. He nodded for her to come into the hall.

Jane walked past Nick and went into the bathroom. She wrapped her arms around her waist, shivering. The room was large and cold. A cast iron tub was underneath the leaky window. The toilet was the old-fashioned type with the tank mounted high above the bowl.

Just like the one in Oslo.

“All right.” Nick closed the door behind him. “What’s got you so worked up, Ms. Queller?”

Jane looked at her reflection in the mirror. She saw her face, but it wasn’t her face. The bridge of her nose was almost black. Dried blood caked the nostrils. What was she feeling? She couldn’t tell anymore.

Uncomfortably numb.

“Jinx?”

She turned away from the mirror. She looked at Nick. His face, but not his face. Their connection, but not really a connection. He had lied about knowing Quarter’s name. He had lied about their future. He had lied every time that he had pretended that her brother was not dying.

And now, he had the audacity to look at his watch. “What is it, Jinx? We haven’t much time.”

“Time?” she had to repeat the word to truly understand the cruelty. “You’re worried about time?”

“Jane—”

“You robbed me.” Her throat felt so tight that she could barely speak. “You stole from me.”

“Love, what are you—”

“I could’ve been here with my brother, but you sent me away. Thousands of miles away.” Jane clenched her hands. She knew what she was feeling now: rage. “You’re a liar. Everything that comes out of your mouth is a lie.”

“Andy was—”

She slapped him hard across the face. “He’s sick!” She screamed the words so loud that her throat ached. “My brother has AIDS, and you sent me to fucking Germany.”

Nick touched his fingers to his cheek. He looked down at his open hand.

He’d been slapped before. Over the years, he’d told Jane about the abuse he’d suffered as a child. The prostitute mother. The absent father. The violent grandmother. The year of homelessness. The disgusting things people had wanted him to do. The self-loathing and hate and the fear that it would happen no matter how hard he tried to run away.

Jane understood the emotions all too well. From the age of eight, she had known what it was like to desperately want to run away. From Martin’s hand clamping over her mouth in the middle of the night. From all the times he grabbed the back of her head and pressed her face into the pillow.

Which Nick had known about.

Which is why his stories were so effective. Jane saw it happen over and over again with every person he met. He mirrored your darkest fear with stories of his own.

That’s how Nick got you: he inserted himself into the common ground.

Now, he simply asked, “What do you want me to say, Jinx? Yes, Andy has AIDS. Yes, I knew about it when you left for Berlin.”

“Is Ellis-Anne...” Jane’s voice trailed off. Andrew’s girlfriend of two years. So sweet and devoted. She had called every day since Oslo. “Is she positive, too?”