Of Love and Evil - By Anne Rice Page 0,7
I’d been so often in the past. We were sitting among the potted fruit trees and the lavender geraniums and she was the fairest flower of the lot.
“Nobody blamed you for going off,” she said. “Everybody knew what had happened.”
“They did? How?”
“When you didn’t show up for graduation, they figured you’d been out playing for tips. And it was easy enough to find out that you’d played all night. So you’d come home in the morning and you’d found them there. And after that, well, you’d just left.”
“Just left,” I said. “I didn’t even see to their burial.”
“Your uncle Patrick took care of the whole thing. I think the fire department might have paid for it, or no, your father was a policeman. I mean I think that they paid. I’m not sure. I went to the funeral. All your cousins were out in force. People thought maybe you’d show up, but everybody understood when you didn’t.”
“I got on a plane for New York,” I said. “I took my lute and the money I had and the few books I loved, and I got on a plane and I just never looked back.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“But what about you, Liona? I never even called to find out how you were. I never even called to tell you where I’d gone or what I’d done.”
“Toby, you know when a woman loses her mind like that, the way your mother did, when she kills her children—I mean when a woman does that, she can kill a boy your age too. There was a gun in the apartment. They found it. She could have shot you, Toby. She was just out of her mind. I didn’t think about me, Toby. I just thought about you.”
I didn’t say anything for a long time. Then finally,
“I don’t care anymore about it, Liona. What I care about is you forgive me that I never called you. I’ll get some money to my uncle Patrick. I’ll pay for the funeral. That’s no problem. But what I care about is you. I care about you and Toby and I care about, well, the men in your life and what all that might mean.”
“There are no men in my life, Toby,” she said. “At least there weren’t until you showed up. And don’t think I expect you to marry Toby’s mother. I brought Toby here for you and for him.”
Marry Toby’s mother. If I thought I could do that I would get down on my knees right here on this veranda and propose.
But I didn’t do that. I was looking off and thinking of the ten years of my life I’d wasted, working for The Right Man. I was thinking of the lives I’d taken working for “the agency” or “The Good Guys” or whoever the hell it was to whom I’d so cheerfully and exuberantly sold my eighteen-year-old soul.
“Toby, you don’t have to tell me what you’ve been doing,” she said suddenly. “You don’t have to explain to me what your life has been like. I haven’t had a man in my life because I don’t want my son to have a stepfather, and I was darned determined he was never going to have a stepfather of the month.”
I nodded. I was more grateful for that than I could put into words.
“There haven’t been any women for me, Liona,” I said. “Oh, now and then, just to prove I was a man, I suppose, there was some contact. But that’s all you’d call it: contact. Money was exchanged. It was never … intimate. It was never anything even approximating that.”
“You’ve always been such a gentleman, Toby. You were that way when you were a boy. You use all the proper words for things.”
“Well, it wasn’t very often, Liona. And improper words would give it an exuberant color it never had.”
She laughed. “Nobody talks like you do, Toby,” she said. “I’ve never met anyone like you. Never anyone who even remotely made me think of you. I’ve missed you.”
I know I blushed. I was painfully aware of Malchiah and my guardian angel, whether they were visible or not.
And what about Liona’s angel? Good Lord. For a split second I imagined a magisterial winged being behind her. Fortunately no such creature materialized.
“You still look innocent,” she said. “You still have that same look in your eye—like everything you see is a miracle.”
Me? Lucky the Fox, the contract killer? “You will never know,” I murmured under my breath. I remembered that