In the Land of Milk and Honey Read online

  But despite all this, the first thing I noticed were his eyes. Dark and distant, pupils almost wholly dilated but rimmed in brilliant moss green.

  “Beautiful,” he said finally in a distant voice, and I watched his hand reach up. “May I touch it?” he asked desperately. I didn’t answer. His reach advanced, and I felt him touch the silver tiara I’d put on at the party. He pulled his hand away and studied glitter from the tiara on the pads of his fingertips glistening as it caught moonlight. He rubbed his fingers together until the glitter flaked away. Timidly, I reached my own hand to my face and realized I was crying, with slick tears running everywhere. There were blotches on the white fabric of my skirt where I’d hidden my face and I wondered for how long, fearing it was my sob that broke the quiet. He appeared contemplative, but the wonderment died when his eyes went dark. “How cruel to have come now,” he said harshly before lifting to his feet. As I heard his footsteps begin to fade, I grew uncomfortable with the distance; so I followed them.

  His posture was stiff but his stride was long, and I was practically jogging just to maintain our small gap. I don’t know how many blocks we went like that for, but I can say we passed under many street lamps. From shadow to light, shadow to light; before stopping underneath one. Silhouetted in the lamplight, he cupped his hand to his face and I saw a flicker followed by a warm crimson glow before he exhaled a cloud of smoke. I could see the bones in his brow as he pulled from the cigarette, and I stopped just short of him, unsure of how close I wanted to be.

  “Why are you here?” he asked in a hard voice. It looked like he was addressing the cigarette.

  “I…I got lost.” He stared down at me for a moment, brows furrowed and a crease in his forehead.

  Finally, he nodded and said, “I understand,” and he sounded like he did.

  I felt relief but didn’t dare speak as I watched him smoke and look around the dimly lit streets. It looked like he was enjoying the frigid night air.

  “Are you going to stop following me?” he asked, like it didn’t matter either way. I thought about his question for a moment.

  “I…I don’t know,” I answered honestly.

  “Do you always stutter this much?” There was mild irritation in his tone.

  “No,” I said quietly. “Not usually.”

  “But you usually follow strange men,” he countered, as if it were fact.

  “No. I don’t usually do that either.”

  “So be it,” he said. He flicked the cigarette and began to walk again.

  I was beginning to understand the absurdity of my behavior, but I didn’t deny myself the impulse to continue. I was enthralled, and it was like nothing I’d ever felt. Since he was now aware I was behind him, I thought he would slow his pace, as a courtesy. But he kept his smooth swift gait, and I could barely keep up. The streets were slushy and slick, still littered with the discards from the occasion’s revelry and when cars passed occasionally, he’d duck his head. I wondered what he was hiding from or if he was on the run. When he neared a flock of pigeons feasting on a pile of rubbish, they cawed and fled at his footfalls as if sensing coming danger.

  He never quite stayed still, though. Always fidgeting, scratching his forearm or the back of his neck. He’d re-sling the dress shirt periodically, alternating shoulders as if the weight were a burden. He finally stuffed his hands in his pockets and began humming in a deep smooth voice, and for a moment I closed my eyes and smiled. When we got to the heavily wooded edge of Central Park, I hesitated out of instinct. He turned his head over his shoulder with one brow arched and the corner of his mouth lifted deviously.

  “Aren’t you coming?” he dared, feeling confident this was the end of the line.

  For so long, I’d been the responsible one and if this were any of my friends, I would have told them they were mad, but as I watched his figure melt into the fog between the trees, my feet moved of their own volition. I couldn’t see him, but I heard the snow-covered ground crushing under the weight of his soles and branches snapping so I used that as my guide. My silver leather flats were soaked, freezing my toes, and my hair snagged on many branches until finally I arrived at the edge of a very small clearing with a bench and a monument-like boulder.

  In the spring, this was probably a sunny, lovely little picnic area full of blossoms and butterflies, but with the moonlight casting its eerie blue silver light on the lightly snow-capped boulders, it was much less inviting. The surrounding trees created lurid shadows in the snow of gnarled and mangled dying limbs. And the player was nowhere to be seen. My breathing quickened and I scanned the area, irrationally worried he was gone.

  “You’re quite tempting, you know,” a deep smooth voice whispered into my hair and I jumped in surprise, my heels lifting off the ground, following my heart’s lead. He stalked around me slowly, and I felt the cold air swirl as he came to stand before me. My heartbeat paused when he smiled crookedly, but it wasn’t an entirely pleasant gesture.

  “You should go while you still can,” he warned, taking a small step closer, now inches away, his presence blocking the light of the moon. He was looking down at me, a gaunt face shadowed in darkness, his eyes blazing wildly with some unknown emotion while desperately searching mine for…something. It didn’t go unnoticed that he was the only one expelling the crystallized fog of an exhale, and I felt spared when he finally turned and walked out into the clearing. He went to a bench in the center and sat.

  When my heart and lungs began functioning again, they quickly started making up for lost time. What was I doing? I was alone with a strange man who I had now determined was no eccentric beatnik artist. His clothes were unclean and there were scratches covering his arms long before we passed through the woods. Whatever he was, the player, the lost one, the villain, it was all very real. And he was warning me of whatever it was he was capable of. My sense of flight was warring with something, masochistic curiosity perhaps, and I considered all these things as I watched him sitting on the bench, leaning back, long arms stretched out, thrumming the edges, humming to no one.

  The something won.

  I went to him, where he sat on the bench hunched forward, elbows resting on knees, hands dangling limply between them.

  “You’ve lost your halo,” he said, and nodded towards my head. I was confused so I reached up and patted my hair. The silver glitter “Happy New Year” tiara he’d admired before, was gone—a sacrifice to the branches. I wanted to correct him but it seemed pointless.

  “I—” I stopped so I wouldn’t stutter. “Guess I did.”

  “That’s what happens when you follow a man like me into the dark,” he admonished, still warning me.

  I sighed because what could I do about it now? “It’s fine,” I answered quietly.

  “I had one once,” he said fondly, looking down at his shoes, clasping his hands together.

  “A tiar…halo?” I asked, puzzled. Maybe they called them that in England, which I had now deduced was the source of his accent. The same way they call sneakers “trainers” and feathered hats “fascinators.” He nodded.

  “I lost mine, too,” he said, sounding disappointed. I guessed they didn’t sell them over there because he made it sound valuable. I just hate when you fall in love with something not easily available in your country.

  “I feel that way about chouquettes,” I thought aloud.

  “What?” he asked confusedly as his head snapped up.

  “Y… you know, it’s like a little bon-bon with crème?” I said self-consciously, and I felt myself blush under his intense gaze. I went with Violet to Paris for her atelier apprenticeship the previous summer. Jill came too and they paid my way, but my spending money was tight so at patisseries I ordered only chouquettes. I was sick of them until I came back. Now I craved them all the time.

  “You’re very strange,” he said, tilting his head. I didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or offended. “But I suppose the little things are most missed,” he added wisely, and I nodded in agre
ement, feeling more at ease.

  My teeth had begun to chatter audibly; just looking at him made me shiver. His clothing was minimal but it clung to him with sweat and I thought he was catching hypothermia.

  “You can have my scarf if you like,” I offered timidly, indicating the thick fluffy white that covered my neck like a collapsed turban. My dress was long and I had a thick, camel-colored wool coat that fell past my thigh, so I thought I could spare it.

  “What for?” he asked simply, eyes narrowed in confusion.

  “You’re going to freeze to death,” I explained gingerly.

  An empty sound of realization was all he replied.

  “Don’t you have somewhere to be?” he asked, suspicious, but slightly annoyed.

  “Not really,” I replied pathetically. All of a sudden feeling like my friends had ditched me, instead of the other way around.

  He stretched back out on the bench and began tapping his knee rapidly as if it were piano keys. I was looking down at where my shoes poked out from under my dress and wondered how much longer until my toes got frostbite when he suddenly moved. By the time my eyes flicked up he had removed his shirt revealing a thin, bare, chiseled torso.

  He scaled the snowy boulder until he stood on top. I was stunned. In the moonlight I saw his skin was pale and slick with sweat, it appeared to be the color and texture of Vaseline. His hipbone jutted out from his dark washed ripped jeans; sagging too low. His hair was impossibly wild and he pulled something out of his pocket.

  “A shame about the snow,” he mumbled as he tended to the small bag of powder in his hands. The other thing he’d withdrawn, he dropped and looked down at. Then he stomped it. It looked like a syringe. “It won’t be long now,” he added sullenly, but I didn’t think he was talking to me.

  He extended an arm and shook out the bags contents, and it seemed to hang in the heavy winter air for a moment until a breeze caught the speckles of dust and they swirled around the glistening skin of his bare chest. In the light watching him there, broken and triumphant, surrounded in a cloud of dust, shimmering in the moonlight, his body seemed unwell and his mind seemed even less so. His music was haunting and pained, all hope drained from the melody. And now it was clear, the song and the player were one in the same. He looked frightening and magnificently beautiful in the most tragic way. Just like his music.

  I jolted backwards when he leaped from the rock with unearthly grace and landed in front of me in a crouch with one hand pressed into the snow.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” he growled, as he quickly rose to his full height.

  “L…Like what?” I stammered, unsure of what he was accusing. I took a small step back as he moved towards me.

  “Don’t play dumb with me,” he snapped, stepping forward. His chest was heaving, and he raked his hand though his hair and tugged at the ends.

  I began shaking my head vigorously with my hands extended by sides. I was completely lost by his words and his temper.

  “Don’t look at me like I’m like you,” he accused, eyes narrowed, shoulders rigid with tension. “Because I’m not.”

  “I know that,” I said in a whisper, because it seemed like the response that would anger him least. Was he bragging? Was he telling me he was better than me?

  “I don’t know why you’re here, but it won’t make a difference,” he stated cruelly, tauntingly. “It changes nothing.”

  I didn’t know why I was there either or what difference he was referring to, but his callus observation was a bullseye to the core of my insecure nature and my eyes began to well. I was always there. It never mattered, and I never made a difference.

  Not even with the people who were supposed to love me. I was a coat rack to my friends, a doormat to my peers, and a housekeeper to my father. And I was an absolute nonentity to my mother. I went through life completely invisible to everyone. My entire existence was of no consequence.

  My mother married Mitch at nineteen, after she’d met him at a local country western bar when she was passing through town. He was older, reliable, with a steady job, and she was beautiful, young, and wild. No one knew why she went home with him that night or why she married him the next week, but they all found out a few months after I was born when she disappeared. She inherited her trust fund from her family that held the stipulation she be married and upon the arrival of her first born, and only then, she’d get her money. She picked out the most simple, gullible man she could find to suck in to her manipulative game.

  But she abandoned me. She’d held me and gotten to know me in the months it had taken her to secretly finalize the paperwork and get money transferred, but it wasn’t enough to make her stay. I didn’t make any difference to her plan. She could have taken me with her, but she didn’t. I was just a pawn to begin with. She did all that just to end up getting killed in a car accident, high as a kite with some guy in a band she’d met at a bar. And here I was, with some druggie musician in the middle of the woods. Unaccounted for because no one thought I was significant enough to count.

  My head snapped up when he spoke.

  “Stop that. Now,” he ordered impatiently as he walked to the bench. “Do not cry for me.”

  Yes, he thought he was better than me, and he was vain beyond belief. My blood began to boil at this arrogant lunatic, and I was flooded with too many emotions at once. A man who appeared to live in a cardboard box: Even he didn’t want me around. It shouldn’t have hurt, but it did. I was foolishly letting him rip into the last shred of self-esteem I’d managed to salvage for myself.

  “I’m not crying for you, you stupid, selfish boy!” I blurted out through a sob and he spun around to face me. His eyes were filled with rage, but it only fueled my own.

  “You can stay here and destroy yourself if you want because that’s what you’re doing with your drugs and your…bullshit, but I’m leaving,” I spat out.

  Because that’s what this was. The destruction of another person. As soon as the words left my lips, I knew they were true. He had a death wish and my morbid curiosity was now costing me, which is what I deserved, but I’d had enough. I turned on my heels and didn’t start running until I was in the cover of woods.

  I couldn’t believe what a fool I was for becoming entranced by some strange sad boy. I’d put my safety on the line to entertain a warped whim. Branches whipped me as I passed, and I grabbed onto the bark of trunks to steady myself. A thick fog had settled, and I couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead or above. I listened for the sound of cars and civilization to use as my compass, but I heard nothing. I began to see my own zigzagged footprints in the snow, so I’d turn and try another route. I looked up, trying to find a skyscraper as a beacon but a fog had rolled in and I was so deep in the thick of it, there were none to be seen.

  Defeated and exhausted, I fell to the ground underneath a large tree trunk. The snow was melting underneath, soaking the fabric of my dress, and to my own humiliation, I began to cry again. I was thinking of how ironic it was that just hours before I was worried Violet and Jill would be the ones found frozen in a ditch, but now I was winning that contest. I was already contemplating who would give my eulogy when I caught a glimpse of something white. He pursed his lips and furrowed his brow while taking in my condition.

  It looked like there were two of him.

  “Did you come to finish me off?” I asked in a weepy voice. I didn’t think I’d like the answer. I was just lucid enough to understand I was suffering from sleep deprivation and the cold.

  “No,” he said quietly, not making eye contact.

  “Then what are you doing here?” I asked, as I wiped away a tear and he continued to frown.

  “You’re not supposed to cry.” He stated it like my behavior was the oddity of the night.

  I let out a humorless laugh that sounded a little unstable even to my own ears.

  “Get up,” he said brusquely, like I was wasting his time.

  “I wouldn’t want to put you out. Aren’t you runn
ing late to be the keynote speaker at some junkie convention under the bridge?” I asked flatly as he strode past, my brain filter completely shut down. I was sure I’d crossed the line, but as he turned to face me, his features fought between amusement and annoyance.

  “Aren’t you afraid to be left behind?” he inquired, peering.

  I pressed my lips together. “All the time,” I admitted pathetically. I was expecting a snappy retort, but after a moment he nodded appreciatively, unfolding his arms.

  “Come on,” he said, extending me a hand. I glared at it.

  “No,” I refused, dignified in my cloudy state.

  “You’re going to freeze to death,” he said, using my words against me.

  “So be it,” I retorted angrily, playing his game.

  He returned a glare as he walked past. I debated my choices as his footsteps grew faint and, in a moment of clarity, I scrambled to my feet. I wouldn’t say I’d rather freeze than follow him; it was a coin toss. Luck prevailed. I breathed a huge sigh of relief as the fog thinned and I saw city lights ahead. When I exited the woods, he was waiting at the edge.

  “Thank you,” I said curtly as I dusted off my soggy attire and pulled a few twigs from my tangled hair.

  “You’re welcome,” he said formally, but for the first time he looked amused. “But you shouldn’t thank me.”

  “Why?” I asked. I was getting a little tired of being told what to do.

  “I’ve ruined you,” he said, taking in my disheveled appearance again.

  “It happens more that you’d think,” I said, thinking of all the outfits I’d borrowed from my sister that came back imperfect. He seemed less belligerent than before, so I took a chance. “Why did you help me?” I quizzed. He was no boy scout, but he’d walked slowly on our trek out, which I assumed was for my benefit.