Seeing Red Read online

  All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Seraphina back together again.

  He didn’t want me to talk about it. He was embarrassed. He just gave me pills that made me numb and able to move forward.

  My childhood memories are disconnected and broken. Mostly, I can remember my parents fighting, voices loud as thunder, like smoke through a chimney, rising up into my bedroom at night, suffocating me in my bed.

  My mother was never satisfied. She always wanted more—more money, more beauty, more love, even though her superficial beauty was nothing more than a lucky accident. Too often, I was left alone with my own darkness when I was hurt. So now, in order to survive, I stay away from the relationships I need most.

  I live a life of detachment, and I only feel free when I’m painting. The colors on canvas give me life and fill in the broken pieces of me that are dull and gray. With the passing of my childhood, a new door opened, and with it, I got stronger.

  I left my family behind, at least the darkness of it, and moved into a better place, one of hope and promise.

  Sky coos sweetly, and the monitor brings me back to the present. The rain has stopped, and the water is smooth like glass. The boat is gone, and I wonder if it was nothing more than an illusion or a side effect of the growing madness within me.

  I walk out into the crisp night air. I feel like I’m breaking from all the stress. The second drink. Always liquid courage.

  The chill feels good as I walk across the grounds of Seablades and out onto the dock.

  I will put together the broken pieces, and those places will heal stronger than before.

  I make my way across the grass barefoot and enter the art studio. I can feel my fear cutting through the darkness. I take out a blank canvas, determined to start over. I start with red. Deep and crimson, flames thick, rising up from the bottom, death fire and combustion.

  Next blue, her beautiful naked body rising up out of the flames. The lines of it, soft and sensual.

  Gray. Breasts, full and swollen. Black, an arm raised, a declaration of war. Green, a tempest, storm clouds growing in the space where a child should be.

  Finally, at the top of the canvas, drenched in liquid gold, I paint the head of a phoenix surrounded by sunlight.

  I feel the heat of the sun as it rises, carved out of fire.

  The colors exploding and vibrant, this painting is beautiful and masterful, even if dark and fragmented.

  With it, something of recognition, of memory, seems to awaken within me.

  I step back to admire my work, and in the distance I see a silhouette out on the dock. For a moment, my levity dies, and the irrational fears take over.

  I am frozen. A stranger is watching me, a shadow, swaying in the darkness of the night. I reach for my cell and start to dial 911. When he turns, I can see the glowing embers of Harper’s cigarette.

  Through the darkness, our eyes meet.

  I make my way outside, heart still racing from the adrenaline and alcohol.

  “What are you doing up so late?” he asks.

  “Painting. You’re smoking again?”

  He laughs as if this is the least of our problems—and he is right.

  He studies my face, my eyes, my body as if I’m someone he’s just met in a smoky bar or had a one-night stand with and wants to leave but doesn’t quite know how to say it.

  I move in closer, angling in toward his neck.

  He smells like perfume, and not mine. Some expensive brand that I don’t even recognize.

  He is caught off guard. I take a deeper breath in.

  I try to endure my rage so I don’t get consumed by it, swallowed up into the abyss of this black hole.

  But it gets the best of me, and I lean into it, biting down hard into his neck and drawing blood.

  “What the fuck?” he says, retreating in pain.

  What have you done, Harper? I think as I walk away. And what have we done to each other?

  Seven

  SERAPHINA AND CARTER

  I have no idea where my husband slept last night. I only know it wasn’t with me. I never sleep anymore. I’m an insomniac. My mind isn’t at peace, my eyes burning as if they are full of dust and ash.

  Sleep is always a battle, a war I can’t win. I feel myself ripping at the seams, just a little at a time.

  Stars can live several billion years, the core expanding, cooling, and changing. They are born, they live, and then die, sometimes exploding into a supernova.

  When I first met Harper, it was as if the fates had aligned, our love born out of tragedy and maelstrom. The stars were bringing us together; all heat, light, and electricity. Now I know nothing lasts forever.

  I’m on the 8:40 train into Penn Station this morning. It’s a fast train, and it feels like I’m really going somewhere, even though it’s only to see Dr. Gordon Ellis.

  I’m going because I have no filter for my words and emotions anymore. They pour out of me, polluting the fresh air around me.

  I’m sitting in an aisle seat, because I’m the last one onto the train. I’m late for everything. I like the aisle seat because I always have to go to the bathroom, and I hate having to squeeze by. Now, I already have to go. The air is stale, a mixture of morning breath and coffee.

  I walk down the tight aisle, the tracks shift, and I knock into a man’s elbow on the way. He shoots me a look of daggers as if it were on purpose.

  I shut the door behind me and click the lock into place. Train bathrooms make me think of the mother who gave birth on a moving train in India. A newborn baby fell right out and into the toilet. The infant was dubbed a “miracle baby” after she survived falling through the lavatory system and clattering onto the tracks.

  It’s hard to imagine, right out of the womb, such an unspeakable horror. Another little girl who will learn the language of pain before she even takes her first breath. I can almost hear the sound of my heart breaking.

  I make my way back through the car and find my seat. As I walk, I hear a voice calling my name. “Seraphina?”

  I turn to see Carter James Nikol, the best thing about my Eastern and Western Approach to Medicine lecture at Harvard.

  “I thought that was you. You walked right by me. You haven’t changed a bit,” he says.

  He is handsome and charismatic. Carter’s still-young face is framed by dark hair, and his eyes hold the same intensity. He brightens with a smile as he looks at me.

  “Do you live in the city now?” I ask.

  “Mostly out in Montauk, but I have a place in the city. I still teach a few nights a week. How about you? Are you still painting?”

  “I just started again, actually.”

  The train has pulled into his stop.

  “It’s great to see you, Carter.”

  “Listen, can we get together sometime? Maybe grab a drink?” He hands me his business card and phone number. “Really great to see you, Seraphina.”

  He gazes at me as if he is having trouble tearing himself away. It’s almost as if I had stepped out of the frame of a portrait and he is mesmerized by the details.

  I look out at the trees—pine, birch, and black locust; the gnarled ones look like devil trees. In the winter, the branches crept and tangled like a cobweb.

  I think it was around this time when I first met Carter, my freshman year. I remember, it was the week before finals, and I was in my dorm room studying. The setting sun tinted the ice, and the Charles River stood still and frozen.

  My roommate barged in and said, “Get your coat. We’re going to see Carter James Nikol.”

  “Who? I’m going to the gym,” I said.

  “He’s brilliant and life-altering, trained as a doctor and a chemist, even a mystic. He just got back from India and Nepal. He’s going to lecture on fusing Eastern practice and Western medicine.”

&n
bsp; I remember I turned over in my bed and pulled the covers up.

  “And he’s gorgeous.”

  That was what woke me up and got me out of bed.

  “We’re going over to Countway Library. Just come with us.”

  When I got to the lecture, Carter was hot with an electricity that charged the room. He had a thick mop of unruly copper-colored hair, laced with silver on the sides. His thick brow, aquiline nose, and intense deep-set brown eyes scanned the crowd shrewdly behind his gray-smoke vintage eyeglasses. He was wearing a fancy Italian suit that had a sheen to it as it caught the light and a striped silk tie that added depth to the color of his eyes.

  When he started talking, it was as if I was the only person in the room, instead of a lecture hall filled with hundreds of students.

  I can still remember how the lecture started. Carter said, “Medicine has existed for thousands of years. During that time, most of it was an art and frequently one connected to religious or philosophical beliefs of the environment or local culture.”

  Carter’s words lit the room on fire. “What would you do in a world without Facebook or Twitter and only a few manmade things? Anyone?”

  I raised my hand.

  “You pull from your environment,” I said.

  “That’s right. The environment and your imagination.”

  “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Anybody know who said that? See me after the lecture for extra credit,” Carter said.

  I raised my hand again. “Arthur C. Clarke.”

  “That’s right. What’s your name?”

  “Seraphina,” I answered.

  “Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein are known as the ‘big three’ of science fiction. Can you join me up here in front and bring your purse. I need to borrow some money.”

  Everyone laughed. I was enjoying all of the attention. I felt smart and funny for the first time.

  Carter said, “Can I borrow a quarter, Seraphina?”

  “Shouldn’t I be borrowing from you? Who’s the student here?” I asked innocently.

  “Come on up, Seraphina. You can trust me.”

  I made my way toward him, feeling the heat from his stare. I handed him a quarter from my purse.

  “What happens to metal when you heat it up?”

  “You change the consistency of it,” I said.

  He took the quarter and held it tightly in his hand. “Seraphina, can you count to ten,” Carter said.

  As I counted, he took the quarter and bit it in half.

  The students applauded and laughed.

  Carter said, “That’s right. Now many of you have seen this trick before. We call it magic, but I’m not a magician or a sorcerer. It’s just an illusion or a manipulation of consciousness, one that can easily be explained by the powers of science.”

  Another student raised a hand.

  “Like a drug trial, when the patient is given a placebo and fully recovers.”

  “That’s right,” Carter said, never taking his eyes off of me.

  We were drawn to each other; our chemistry was palpable. Every moment with Carter had aroused in me the same curiosity and desire one feels before the curtain goes up at the theater, a rush of excitement and hope, a new world to fantasize about.

  Our sexual life together had to be kept a secret. He was reactive to my moods and treated me like a moody artist and a complicated woman. He respected my painting, even encouraged it. He worshipped my body. That semester, I read avidly.

  It was as if he put a spell on me and I was eager to please him.

  I didn’t mind his possession of me, body and soul. He shared his past and the depths of his sorrow over the loss of his mother after a long battle with depression.

  Carter was born knowing how to be rich. It’s not something anyone can teach you, and he knew how to use money and power to get anything he wanted.

  After his family fled Nazi Germany and settled in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where his grandfather founded Nikol Oil, his father inherited control of it, and he made the most out of his wealth.

  He struggled with his mother and her strict belief in Christian morality. She committed suicide after a long battle with depression.

  He inherited his father’s wealth and began misbehaving in school. It was rare that a family fortune survived three generations, and in this case, it was true.

  After graduation from Harvard School of Medicine, he decided to travel and teach. He wrote all of his letters on an old Underwood portable typewriter that his father had given him.

  A few months later, I ended things; our romance, a frenzy of love and lust, fizzled out as only a college love can do. It ended in a blaze of fireworks and unrequited glory.

  After the night I was attacked, it was Carter who was by my side at the hospital, mending the parts that were broken and healing my wounds.

  Harper had a bitter rivalry with Carter long before I came into the picture. Harper didn’t attend a prestigious prep school like most of his peers. He worked hard to get into Harvard and attended on scholarship. He was born with luck, talent, and charisma, and had earned every penny through sweat and tears. He hated Carter for his family money and how easily life laid itself out for him. For that, the hate between them only grew, like a tree whose roots are drenched in poison.

  A clash of social classes pitted them against each other, only strengthened by my brief and insignificant romance with Carter.

  We arrive in Penn Station minutes later, spilling out onto the platform, up the stairs, and out onto Seventh Avenue. It’s a bright and sunny day in the city.

  The cirrus clouds are wispy, hanging over a tangle of dark branches in a wintery Central Park. I hail a taxi.

  “Central Park West and Sixty-Eighth Street, please.”

  Now I’m waiting in a small room, beige on beige, with a brown door on either side of me. I’m alone. A sound machine hums softly.

  The room is empty, no receptionist or other human to speak of. Just then, the door within a door swings open mysteriously, and a short, stocky man with soft eyes, a large nose, and thin lips materializes.

  “Mrs. Swift, come on in. I’m Dr. Gordon Ellis.”

  I sink into a black leather couch, shifting around uncomfortably. Each time it makes a strange sound, and we both smile awkwardly at each other.

  “I’m not sure why I’m here. My husband keeps telling me I need medication. I don’t know. Maybe he’s right, or maybe I just need a job. I have too much time on my hands. Lately, I’m questioning everything, even my own sanity,” I say.

  “Go on,” he says, and he just smiles and tells me it’s all right and, in this moment, I feel that it will be all right. Dr. Ellis is like a shot of brandy and he soothes my nerves.

  “Freshman year at college, I was attacked walking home from work. It was late. I keep having flashbacks and nightmares. It’s been years, and I can’t get past it. I don’t remember the details and everything is out of sequence in my head. Lately, I feel like I’m in danger all of the time. I keep having panic attacks and I’m out of control. I feel like someone is stalking me. Hunting me and my family. And then, I think I must be going crazy and I’m just stuck in some sort of postpartum panic. I don’t know if my memories are even real anymore? Maybe it’s just the same blank spaces being filled up by my imagination.”

  I ask Dr. Ellis, “I mean, why didn’t I die that night? I keep asking myself that same question.”

  “Seraphina, you need help. I can help you,” he says.

  “Or maybe I’m reaching, trying to preserve the martyr in me. What if deep down, my story is just like everybody else’s? At the end of it, I survived an attack. Nothing fresh or new. My thoughts and feelings are dated, like a novel that’s gone out of print. And maybe I should just get over it.”

  Once I start talking,
it’s impossible stop.

  “I wake up every day. I shower. I get dressed. Every day I pretend to be human.”

  “I pretend I walk in a world that has no flesh or blood. No pain or suffering. In my mind, it’s a world of skeletons. Every time I open my eyes, I see what he has done,” I say, touching the jagged scar on my head.

  “I feel like I’m not making any sense. Am I making sense? Or am I speaking in riddles. I feel like I’m stuck in some sort of trance. I keep seeing blood on my hands. So much blood. I can’t tell whose it is anymore.”

  Soon the words dry up, and I’m screaming. I’m so angry and I can’t stop. I just let it all out. I scream so loud, and in my mind, it feels like the world has stopped turning.

  I feel like the killer is me. And it always will be. All of that anger, hate and rage flows through me now. Everybody has a dirty little secret. Like a scarlet letter, it burns from the inside. Something they’ve buried deep until it starts to fester and grow, swollen and filled with pus like an abscessed tooth.

  It’s not until you cut it open and release all of the bacteria that it actually starts to heal and regenerate.

  “That night in Boston, I was raped. I made the choice to abort a child. I never told anyone about the pregnancy. It didn’t fit the image of who I wanted to be. The lighter, more beautiful, funny version of Seraphina. And now I’m not sure she isn’t gone forever. I can’t remember who I used to be.”

  “Seraphina, it’s over. You survived.”

  “It’s like I see his eyes everywhere. He has the eyes of the devil, and all I want to do is run and hide. What do you do if the devil is inside your head?” I say, the tears falling now, the language of my heart breaking.

  “The birth of your child, Sky, connected you to that emotional loss. It’s hard to love a child born out of rape. You can’t keep running. You can’t carry the weight of your secret alone. The blood on your hands, the guilt you feel over the loss of that child—you have to forgive yourself to be free of it.”

  My heart is beating faster, some tribal rhythm, sounds like a beat of a drum.

  “So this is what you people do? You’re like a preacher or a reverend?” I say, hating him for my vulnerability.