November flows into December, each day passing quicker than the last.
I’m already regretting winning the bid for the sculpture.
York is demanding I build it as quickly as possible, before the next round of elections in the spring.
And just as I expected, I’m fucking hating it.
I have to command an entire crew of construction workers, none of whom know the first fucking thing about working with these kinds of materials.
I’m out on the frigid, whistling flat top of Corona Heights Park, in the goddamned coldest December since 1932, shouting at welders who have already shattered a dozen of the smoked glass plates that make up the walls of the labyrinth.
This might possibly be tolerable if Mara was with me, but she’s not. She’s back at the studio, finishing up her series in time for the show I’m throwing next week.
Whenever I want to snap the neck of one of the incompetent glaziers, I pull out my phone and check the camera in her studio. It gives me a sense of peace watching her dab away at the canvas, her music blasting, her spare paintbrushes twisted up in her hair.
She’s much too engrossed in her work to think about me.
Once, she seemed to sense that I was watching. She turned and faced the camera, grinning and giving me a saucy wave. Then she pulled up her shirt, flashing her tits at me, before turning back to her work.
She could only have been guessing, but my cock still raged against my clothing, demanding that I abandon this idiotic project and speed back to the studio so I could bury myself inside of her.
When Mara’s working, I might as well not exist.
She’s completely absorbed by the project, forgetting to eat or drink or sleep.
It makes me insane with jealousy. I hate when anything pulls her attention away from me.
That’s not how my mind works.
I can think about many things at once, and one of those things is always Mara.
Like a computer that can run several programs simultaneously, I keep tabs on Shaw and Officer Hawks, supervise the construction of the sculpture, and think of every possible way that I can wrap another rope around my sweet little Mara and pull it tight.
When I can abandon the sculpture at the end of the workday, I head over to the studio to pull Mara’s attention back where it belongs: onto me.
I used to hate the holidays. They seemed pathetic and manufactured, designed to give some semblance of structure to the year. So people could pretend to celebrate, when really they’d rather not see their family at all and would only use the excuse to drink as much as possible before passing out in front of the tree.
I’m learning how different the world appears when everything you do is for someone else.
Now, instead of Christmas trees and decorations striking me as tacky, I want to find the most beautiful ones possible, so I can surprise Mara when she walks through the door and finds the house bedecked in soft, silvery lights. I want to see them reflected on her skin and hair, echoing the smoky color of her eyes.
It’s easy to reduce Mara to childlike wonder. To give her what she never had before.
I pile the presents under the tree, dozens of them, all with her name on the tags. She doesn’t care what’s inside—the fact that she has gifts waiting for her reduces her to tears, and she has to go and hide in a distant corner of the house, headphones on, wrapped in a blanket, until she’s ready to come look at them again.
Every stupid thing that people do, that I used to watch them do, now I’m in the center of it.
I take her skating on the holiday ice rink at Embarcadero Center. In this strange wintery weather, San Franciscans are giddy with the joy of actually donning scarves and pom-pom hats, zipping around under the frost-blighted palm trees, drinking their hot cocoa.
The city is loaded with twice as many twinkling lights, as if trying to drive away the freezing fog that blows in off the bay, each day colder than the one before.
The other skaters float in and out of view like ghostly wraiths.
Mara is an angel in the softly glowing light.
I bought her a snow-white parka with fur all around the face. She wears a pair of fluffy mittens and a brand-new pair of skates, freshly sharpened to a razor’s edge. Only the best for Mara, no shitty rentals.
I never knew how good generosity could feel. My ability to make her life comfortable and magical gives me a sense of god-like power. Not a wrathful god anymore, but one overflowing with goodness and light.
I don’t know if I have any real kindness inside of me.
But Mara believes that I do. She believed I wouldn’t hurt her, when I had every intention of killing her. Now she believes that I have the capacity to love.
What is loving someone?
From all outward appearances, I’m very much a man in love. I shower her with gifts, praise, attention.
But I’m all-too-aware that everything I do for Mara benefits me. I feed off her joy like a vampire. The hot cocoa tastes sweeter when I lick it off her lips. The lights are more beautiful reflected in her eyes. The air in my lungs is fresh and sweet when we fly across the ice together, hand in hand.
For now, all our interests align. What’s good for Mara is good for me.
It requires no real sacrifice. I’m only doing what I want.
But perhaps, I am changing in the smallest of ways.
Because for the first time, I wonder if she deserves more than this.
Mara thinks she sees who I am and loves me anyway.
Only I know how cold I truly am at heart.
I told myself I was always honest with her. While letting her believe what she wants to believe: that I always had good reason … that I might be justified.
It’s time to tell her the truth. To show her, the only way I know how.
I take Mara down to the lowest level of the house. To the locked door she’s never seen beyond.
I see her mounting dread as we descend the stairs. Mara is a curious kitten … but she has an instinctive understanding of potential danger. She skirts away without ever acknowledging the boundary.
Now I fit the key in the lock. And I throw open the door.
Mara flinches, as if expecting a slap.
Instead, her eyes widen with wonder. She steps inside the cavernous space.
“What on earth …” she breathes, her bare feet sinking into a thick carpet of moss.
The air is rich with oxygen, the cave-like space stuffed with greenery. Ferns cling to the dripping rocks. It’s an underground garden, a riot of life and color, locked away in the heart of the earth.
“It was my mother’s,” I tell her. “She was trying to create a true terrarium—self-sustaining, self-perpetuating. It runs with very little maintenance.”
Mara is speechless, stepping into the surprisingly vast space. She had no idea what was hidden away under the house. No one knows but me.
“My god,” she whispers. “It’s so beautiful …”
“She spent all her time down here. Especially at the end.”
Mara turns slowly, a shadow falling over her eyes.
She understands that I brought her down here for a reason. Not just to show her the garden.
“This is where I found her,” I tell Mara. “Hanging from that tree.”
I nod my head toward a holly tree, its gnarled bough tough enough to bear my mother’s weight when she kicked the stool out from under her feet. I ran to her and clung to her cold feet. Not even close to strong enough to lift her down.
Mara’s eyes are already welling with tears, but I need to explain this to her, before she gets the wrong idea again. Before she builds the narrative she wants to believe.
“I was four years old,” I tell her. “She already knew something was wrong with me. She’d been fooled by my father when they met, but since then she had learned to know him. To see the blankness on his face. His casual cruelty. His lack of normal human warmth. And of course, in his brother Ruben, she saw the fullest iteration of what we are. The family curse.”
I give a hollow laugh.
Mara shakes her head, wanting to object, but I speak too quickly, determined to tell her everything before she can interrupt.
“She hoped I wasn’t like them. She hoped I was kind, like her. But I was already cold and arrogant, and too young to know better than to tell the truth. I told her how little worth I saw in the people who scrubbed our toilets, cleaned our house. I told her how our gardener disgusted me because he was stupid and could barely read, while I was already finishing entire novels. I could see that I was smarter than other people, richer, better looking. At four years old, I was already a little monster.”
“You were a child,” Mara says.
“That’s what she thought, too. She bought me a rabbit. A large gray one. She named him Shadow, because I didn’t care to give him a name. I hated that rabbit. I hadn’t learned how to use my hands and my voice yet. I was clumsy with it, and it bit and scratched me. I couldn’t soothe it like my mother did, and I didn’t want to. I hated the time I had to spend feeding it and cleaning out its disgusting hutch.”
Mara opens her mouth to speak again. I bowl over her, my lungs full of all this fresh, green air, but the words coming out dead and twisted, falling flat between us.
“I took care of that rabbit for three months. I loathed every minute of it. I neglected it when I could, and only fed and watered it when she reminded me. The way it loved her and the way it hated me made me furious. I was even more angry when I’d see the disappointment in her eyes. I wanted to please her. But I couldn’t change how I felt.”
Now I have to pause because my face is hot and I can no longer look at Mara. I don’t want to tell her what happened next, but I’m compelled. She needs to understand this.
“One morning, we went down to the hutch and the rabbit’s neck was broken. It was laying there, dead and twisted, flies already settling on its eyes. My mother could see it had been killed. She didn’t chastise me … there was no point anymore. Looking in my eyes, she saw nothing but darkness. She hung herself that afternoon. Years later, I read the last entry in her journal: I can’t change him. He’s just like them.”
Now I do look at Mara, already knowing what I’ll see on her face, because I’ve seen it before, in the only other person I ever loved. It’s the look of a woman gazing upon a monster.
Tears fall silently down Mara’s cheeks, dropping down on the soft green moss.
“You didn’t kill the rabbit,” she says.
“But I wanted to. That’s what you have to understand. I wanted to kill that fucking rabbit every time I held it in my hands. I only didn’t because of her.”
I’m still waiting for the disgust, the repulsion. The understanding that what my mother believed was true: at four years old, I was already a killer. Heartless and cruel. Held back by my affection for her, but who knows for how long.
“But you didn’t do it,” Mara says, her jaw set, eyes locked firmly on mine. “You were a child—you could have been anything. She gave up on you.”
Mara is angry, though not at me.
She’s angry at another mother that failed in her eyes. A mother that looked at her own child and only saw ugliness.
“She was right to give up on me,” I tell Mara. “I didn’t kill the rabbit, but I killed many more.”
“I don’t give a fuck what you’ve done!” Mara cries. “I only care what you do now that someone loves you!”
She flies at me, and I think she’s going to hit me. Instead, she grabs my face between her hands and kisses me, as ferociously, as passionately as ever she’s done.
“I love you!” she cries. “I fucking love you. Your life starts here, today, now that I’ve told you.”
I look at Mara’s furious face.
I touch the tears running down on both sides. I kiss her again, tasting the salt on her lips.
In that moment, I finally realize what Mara knew all along:
She won’t die like that rabbit. I WILL keep her safe.
