it’s flesh, and what is the old prayer, ‘And the word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us.’ ”
Aaron nodded. “Let me say it once aloud to you,” he said in a low voice, “so I don’t say it over and over forever in my heart and soul. I should have come here with you on Christmas Eve. I should not have let you come up against it alone, come up against it and her.”
“Don’t condemn her.”
“I don’t. I don’t mean that. I mean I should have been here. That’s all I mean. If it matters, I don’t intend to desert you now.”
“It matters,” said Michael, with a shrug. “But you know, I have this curious feeling. It’s going to be easy now that I’ve made up my mind. Kill it.” He snapped his fingers. “That’s my problem. I was afraid to do that from the start.”
It was eight o’clock. Dark, cold. You could feel the cold if you put your hands on the panes.
Aaron had just come back for supper with Yuri. Yuri was returning to the Amelia Street house to talk to Mona. Yuri had blushed when he said he was going. Michael had realized the reason why. Yuri was taken with Mona. Then Yuri had stammered, “She reminds me of myself at her age. She is unusual. She said she would show me all her computer tricks. We will…talk.”
Flustered, stammering, blushing. Ah, the power of Mona, thought Michael. And now she had the legacy to contend with, as well as everything else.
But there was something pure about Yuri, pure and loyal and good.
“He can be trusted,” Aaron had said quietly. “He is a gentleman, and he is honorable. Mona will be quite safe in his company. Never fear.”
“No one has to fear for Mona,” said Michael, a little ashamed, and getting just a wisp again of those sensual moments, when he’d held her and knew it was wrong and that it was going to happen and so what?
There were so few times when Michael had done bad things and said, So what?
Aaron was asleep in the upstairs bedroom.
“Men of my age nap after meals,” he had said apologetically. He had gone to lie down. He was utterly exhausted, and Michael wouldn’t talk anymore about Julien just now, and maybe that was best because Aaron needed the rest.
Just you and me now, Julien, Michael thought.
It was quiet in the house.
Hamilton had gone home to pay some bills. Bea would return later. Only one nurse was on duty because all the money in the world could not procure another, such was the shortage. A nurse’s aide, very capable, was upstairs in Aunt Vivian’s room going into her third quarter hour on the phone.
He could hear the rise and fall of the woman’s voice.
He stood in the living room, looking out into the side yard. Darkness. Cold. Remembering. Drums of Comus. A man smiling in the darkness. Suddenly Michael was a small child again, and would never know what it meant to be strong or to be safe. Fear had kicked in the door of childhood. Fear had laid waste the safety that had been Mother.
Drums and torches on Mardi Gras Night struck terror. We die when we get old. We are no more. No more. He tried to imagine himself dead. A skull in the earth. This thought had come to him often in his life. I will be that way someday, absolutely. It is a certainty, one of the few in my life. I will be dead. I may be a skull in the earth. I may be a skull in a coffin. I don’t know. But I will die.
It seemed the nurse’s aide was crying. Not possible. There was the soft vibration of steps. The front door closed. That was all so far away from him, people coming, going. If she took a turn for the worse, they’d shout his name.
And he’d run upstairs, but why? To be there when the breath left her. To hold her cold hand. To lay his head on her breast and feel the last of the warmth in her. How did he know it would be like that? Had anyone ever told him? Or was it just that her hands were getting colder and colder and suffer and suffer, and when he looked at her nails, her pretty clean nails, they were faintly blue.
“We will not manicure them,” the nurse had said. “You can scrap that part of the plan. We have