Gin Palace 01 - The Poisoned Rose

outside my windows. My apartment was dim, a single, dull light burning in my bedroom. I sat up. My clothes clung to my back and legs. I saw Tina tiptoe past the open bedroom door. On the bed just inside the bedroom door was an oversized canvas shoulder bag. As Tina passed the bed she tossed a folded shirt into the bag, then disappeared from my sight again. When she reappeared she tossed something else into the bag, then disappeared from my sight once more.
    My skin was radiating heat, my forearms hot to the touch. I had napped too deeply and for too long. Coming to was more like sobering up than waking.
    Over the humming of my fans I could hear voices coming up from Elm street below. I checked my watch. It was just after eight. People were coming to the Hansom House early. I realized then that it was Friday, that there would be a reggae band. I thought about Tina being gone, of being free to come and go again as I pleased. It was a nice thought. When I felt that I was awake enough to deal with her, I got up off the couch and walked to the bedroom door and stood in it.
    Tina looked up from her packing and clutched at her heart suddenly with one hand. Her mouth dropped open. I had come up on her by surprise without meaning to.
    “Shit, Mac. Don’t do that. You scared me.”
    I tried not to laugh. “Sorry.”
    The small reading lamp beside my bed was the only light on in the entire apartment. Last week Tina had covered the lampshade with a handkerchief to hold back the heat it gave off. It held back a great deal of the light, too.
    Behind me the fans sounded like airplane engines when heard from a distance. Air moved around me like a commotion.
    “You were asleep when I came in,” she said. She had gone back to her packing. She didn’t look at me, was giving much more attention than necessary to the task. I knew by this that Augie had talked her.
    “What time did you get back?” I asked.
    “A little while ago.”
    “You haven’t been over to Lizzie’s in months. It’ll be fun.”
    She managed then to look at me. “Augie signed himself out of the hospital this afternoon,” she said.
    “What?”
    “He signed himself out today. I rode home with him. Your friend Eddie drove us in his cab.”
    “They released him?”
    “No. He insisted on leaving and made a stink about it. They didn’t put up much of a fight, to be honest. I think they were just glad to get him out of there.”
    “Where is he now?”
    “He’s home.”
    “He’s alone?”
    “He insisted I come back here and get all my stuff. Eddie will be back in a little bit to pick me up.”
    I wasn’t pleased by this. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. “He can’t just check out like that.”
    Tina shrugged. “He did. He says he wants to be home, that he’s been away from his life for too long now.”
    “Shit.”
    “We’re going to have a welcome home cookout tomorrow afternoon. Augie wants you to come over. We don’t have much in the house, though. I was thinking maybe you and I could go shopping tomorrow morning. You could pick me up and we could get some things.”
    I didn’t say anything to that at first. I thought about people seeing she and I together in the market. Finally, though, I nodded and said, “Yeah, okay.”
    Tina was standing beside the unmade bed. She was dressed in cut-off shorts and a pink T-shirt that kept few secrets. Her arms and legs were long branches extending from a short trunk. She was awkward, not yet a woman but no longer a child. And though she wasn’t by most standards a beautiful girl—her face was raw, her features unfinished—she was by no means ugly.
    I never once felt a moment of attraction for her, never once said or did anything that would give her the impression that we were anything more than, well, family. But she wanted me, that was clear, and had for the past two months. It wasn’t long after she had moved in that she began spending as much time as she could with me, talking to me, sometimes at me. She hadn’t spoken Spanish since leaving Colombia, and when she found out it was one of the languages I was fluent in, she used “brushing up on it” as an excuse to repeat everything she’d already told me about herself. Frankly, I preferred the chatter, because when we weren’t talking, when she’d finally run out of things to say and we were just sitting silently at night, she would stare at me in a way that was more than a little alarming.
    She was staring at me in that way now.