THE RIGHT THING
Sarah lay curled on the beige sofa in the predominantly beige living room. Other than brilliant flashes from the silenced television tinting the walls, she was the brightest color source visible, from her metallic emerald sheath dress to the shining silver hair cascading to her waist.
Her attention was divided. The array of manicure equipment before her on the inlaid teak coffeetable was her central focus, as she added long crimson commas to her chromatic statement. She interrupted her meticulous task with frequent quick trips to the glass doors, opened onto the damp spring night, from which she peered expectantly out and down into the darkened city seventeen stories below, stretching beyond her horizon.
Back at her station, she cautiously wrapped delicate, drying fingers around a felt-tipped pen, checked and re-checked the column of lavender figures scrawled in a girlishly feminine hand on mint green stationery. The total was always the same, always evoked a frown from mobile features made yet more expressive by carefully lavish cosmetics.
She owned a delicate, if overblown elven beauty. Her prominently boned, triangular face was dominated by immense green eyes and a startlingly full mouth. Without the artificial height of the tall green pumps kicked under the table, she was barely five and a half feet tall. The swell of her large, full breasts beneath the low cut, tight gown made her extremely slender body distinctly topheavy. Her arms, shoulders and chest were as lightly complected as her hair, adding to her distinctly waiflike aura.
The rattle of a key in the first of the main door's locks dispelled the fragmented orbit of her concentration. She leapt to her feet, barely paused for an automatic, critical self-study in the room's wall-covering mirrors, then dashed impishly down the hall toward the door.
She threw herself into the man's arms before he had the door fully closed behind him. He was as large as she was small, caught her with practiced ease as he flipped the deadbolt. The way their bodies meshed with such flawless grace, their hard, quick kiss, even the way she wiped her lipstick from his mouth, spoke of established ritual, not spontaneity. But love filled his eyes as he held her free of the floor at arm's length, banishing an obvious fatigue. He studied her closely, warmly, as her hose covered legs beat the air.
"Put me down, you beast," she laughed.
"In a minute. I'm not through admiring you, little sister."
She went fey, batted long dark lashes. "You like my new titties that much?"
"I like you that much. You're the one who's in love with your breasts."
She pouted, emphatically wiggled free of his grasp. "You still think they're too big."
He followed her back into the living room, protesting lightly. "More than a handful's a waste, Sarah. Fortunately, I've got big hands." He proferred them. To call them ham-like is only a mild exaggeration.
She was slightly appeased. Flouncing onto the sofa, she lit a sulky cigarette.
He sank tiredly into the chair opposite her, started to say something, bit it back.
She noticed. "What?"
"Never mind."
"It's the cigarette, isn't it?" she demanded peevishly.
He shrugged thick shoulders. "I thought you gave them up for good. You did a week in the hospital and four days here without them."
She avoided his eyes. "I changed my mind."
"Okay by me. I kind of missed the way you smelled."
She sat taller, favored him with a brilliant smile. "Really?"
"Un huh." His eyes found the paper on the table amidst the clutter of tools and bottles of enamel. He pointed. "What's this?"
Her smile inverted. "My bank accounts. I didn't realize how expensive this was going to be. Hospital and doctors bills, all those room charges and drugs, the whole new wardrobe . . ." Her voice trailed off. She shook her head sadly at the bottom line.
"And it's worth every last nickel if it makes you happy." His eyes again brimmed with emotion. "You're absolutely beautiful, Sarah. Perfect in every way. You know how I feel. I couldn't possibly love you any more."
She brightened again. "But you have to admit that my nose and lips and tits make me even sexier."
His fatigue again showed. "To everybody else. Not to me. You can't get any sexier than you've always been."
Her pleased tone belied her denial. "You can't be objective, Johnny. You're my brother." She finally saw his distraction. "Is something wrong?"
"Just a hard day at the office." It had the sound of an old joke.
She gracefully rose, drfited to the back of his chair. "Cruising around all night in that wild new Mercedes is such a bitch of a way to make a buck."
She checked her nails for dryness, then pushed him forward, urging him from the gray wool suit coat. She dug slender fingers deeply into the thick ropes of his shoulders. "Marilyn again?"
"Marilyn still. I don't know what's gotten into that kid. This's the third time in the last two weeks she's tried to hold out on me."
"I warned you about sixteen year old redheaded runaways."
"Nah," he said, ignoring her levity, but relaxing into her knowing hands, "it's more than that. Something's going on."
"Drugs?"
His eyes, so like hers, glittered with a sudden hardness. "No way. The Snowman'd have me on the phone in two seconds if any of you tried to make a buy."
"Maybe one of her johns? He could score and turn her on."
He shook his head obstinately as a look of sorrow flashed over his face. "She saw what happened when Darlene ran that one on me." His expression became still more grim. "She's way too proud of her body to risk that happening to it."
Sarah sounded oddly curious. "Are you mad at me for doing that to Darlene?"
Johnny blew a long sigh. "What's done is done. We didn't communicate is all."
"But I put your prime piece out of action for good, honey. You didn't say a thing. She made you two-grand a week and -"
"I'm not in this for the money, Sis."
She ruffled his hair, kissed the top of his head. "I know. You're here because I need you." A thoughtful pause. "You don't mind, do you? That I'm a hooker? I mean, most brothers would have gone off their heads if they found out like you did. But not once in four years have you given me shit. If you don't count that first fight."
He bent his head up to look at her. His grin was pure charm. "What's to mind? You're careful about bringing home nasty virus - and I get mine right off the top. Free. Hell, I'm the real whore of the family. You pay me, after all. Just like the other girls do."
She playfully slapped his shoulder. "You're terrible, Johnny!"
She feigned resistance as he pulled her to the side of the chair. His hands encircled her narrow waist. "Un uh, baby. I'm great. In case you've already forgotten, maybe I should remind you."
She squealed gaily as he effortlessly lifted her and swung her onto his lap. His lips silenced her. Their hands deftly drifted over one another's eager bodies. Their voices became no more than sibilant, encouraging murmurs.
The vintage Mustang convertible adeptly backed into a just vacated downtown parking space. Sarah, clad in white from jaunty hat to patent toe, gingerly swung her legs from the car and locked it behind her. She confidently tapped her way around the drunk sleeping it off on the sidewalk and moved toward the entrance of the ancient five story warheouse. Heavy construction thundered and roared on two sides of the building. Distant catcalls and raucous whistles indicated that the workers had spied her. She waved gaily, smiled broadly, and added yet more sway to her stride.
A grizzled black man greeted her inside the squalid office. "Morning, Mz. Waters. Ain't seen you in a spell. I must say you're looking fine."
Her leather glove accepted the key he held out. "Thank you, Henry. I've been away for a while." She turned to leave. He followed. Her heels clacked loudly and their voices echoed throughout the cavernous first floor.
He cleared his throat. "Mam, about that problem we talked about last time . . ."
She hesitated, surprise rounding her thick red lips. "Oh! I completely forgot. Have you heard anything more?"
"Afraid so. New owners say I gotta have everything out by the end of next month. Hell, they's stuff been here fifty years or more I got no records on at all."
"Sell it. Retire, Henry. Any idea where I can move my things?"
He slid open the twin portcullis guarding the huge freight elevator. "No place like this left, Mz. Waters. Have to go to one of them new storage locker places, be my guess. Or maybe that underground place over at Sugar Creek that used to be a mine."
She smiled at his wizened face. "I think I like the sound of that. Be a doll and look up a name and phone number for me while I'm upstairs."
The elevator lurched and groaned upward through the floor. Its occupants fell silent. Sarah lit a cigarette. The platform jolted to a halt at the third level. The woman stalked daintily through the gloom, down an aisle formed by heavily timbered walls, past wide, massive doors, some bearing heavy padlocks but most yawning onto empty darkness. The elevator sank with a squalling shudder.
She halted before one no different from the others. The key in her gloved hand twisted, and the lock smoothly fell open. She leaned every pound of her slight weight into the door, and it slid noisily away.
Sarah walked into total darkness. With a sharp click, a lamp sprang into life. She glanced around with a soft smile, examining a nearly dust free living room.
Threadbare patterned carpet covered the center of the warped floor. Upon the rug squatted a ragged collection of long-spent furniture. The broken-springed sofa across from her depended upon a brick for one leg. The overstuffed chair to her left was ripped, dripped cotton guts from numerous wounds. The shade of the floor lamp beside her was dented all around and sat crookedly on its spindle.
She mashed her cigarette into a half-filled tin ashtray on the chipped blue paint of the coffeetable and tugged off her driving gloves. Dropping them and her white purse casually onto the table, she eased herself into a rocker that protested at even her insubstantial mass. Her meticulously silvered lids closed as she creaked back and forth in a short arc, and her nostalgic smile grew.
"Oh, Daddy. If only you could see your little girl now. Remember how scrawny and ugly you used to always tell me I was? No more, Daddy. I'm almost grown up now, and doing real well for myself, too. Johnny says I'm one of the most beautiful women in the whole city."
She giggled. "I'm just a late bloomer is all. Twenty-three and a half and my titties just finished growing. They're real big ones, Daddy. Just like Momma's were."
She frowned. "But maybe you wouldn't like that. Well, the hell with you. You can't have it both ways. Either I'm like her or I'm not. I don't look like her, except for my tits. At least I don't think so. I don't remember much about her."
Her eyes sprang open. "There was a picture, wasn't there? In the album?"
Sarah turned on the lamp flanking the sofa, then danced around it with the eagerness of a child. She groaned as she lifted the the heavy lid of a massive, battered sea chest against the wall. A scarred cardboard suitcase served her as a chair as she rummaged within the trunk.
She held one item after another up to the light. A faded, frilled, patched child's dress evoked a bitter scowl. A brittle, dried letter jacket erased it. She let her fingers caress the rust-reddened tubes of a double- barreled shotgun. Quiet laughter accompanied the discovery of a wheeless toy firetruck. Finally, she located the red-jacketed photo album and beat a retreat to the couch.
She placed the thick, ragged book on the coffetable and stared at it through narrowed eyes as she fumbled through her purse for a cigarette. Her hand trembled as she lit it. Her voice was low, ominous, intense.
"You dirty son of a bitch. You didn't have enough money to feed us, but there was always film in the Brownie and booze in the bottle. I used to cry every time you got the camera out. Remember? I knew what always happened next. Lock Johnny out of the house or send him for more whiskey or . . . so you could . . . then tell me to get dressed up. Baby doll. Daddy's little sugar. You never used my name. Not once."
She touched the cracked plastic cover. "Poor Johnny. He didn't know. When I finally told him how much it hurt, he went crazy. I had to show him it was okay to calm him down."
She turned wistful, more brisk as she finished the cigarette. "From then on, it wasn't so bad."
She opened the album, studied each page. If there was an order to the arrangements and grouping of the grainy, often blurred black and white prints, it wasn't obvious. But, fifteen minutes into and halfway through Sarah's moody examination, some sense could be made of the story they told.
A sagging tarpaper shack set up on stones formed the backround of several shots. In one, a thin, hard-faced woman with light hair, who might have once been pretty, sat on splintery steps, flanked by two blonde toddlers in rags. Their somber faces were alomst identical, though one was plump and healthy while the smaller was wan and frail. A quart whiskey bottle rested between the woman's feet like a third child.
A grim man, tall and wiry, was captured: stacking firewood on a leaning porch while a four or five year old tried to help; bent over the engine of an ancient, battered and rusty pickup. Sarah quickly flipped past all those.
A snapshot apparently taken outside some roadhouse. The man, younger, in a short-sleeved white shirt, string tie, and baggy slacks, leaning against the front fender of a mud-streaked '58 Ford, arm draped possessively around the slinkily dressed blonde woman who was giving the camera a sultry dark-lipped smile. Sarah stared long at that one, was satisfied.
"I'm much prettier, and her tits sagged real bad."
There were no more pictures of the woman. The rest showed no one but the man and the children, and always only two of the three. The larger of the shabbily dressed kids was seldom seen. There were many of the skinnier, paler waif. There were a lot of holes in the black paper pages where photos had been removed.
Sarah seemed unwillingly captivated by the sickly one. She examined them microscopically. All were crookedly composed. The focus was seldom sharp. The exposures were universally bad. In each - sitting on the very furnishings now surrounding her, or before a woodburning kitchen stove, or laying tensely on the edge of a bed - she wore ragged, ill-fitting, amateurishly altered dresses.
Her quiet laughter was drum-head tight. "Jesus. Was that really me?"
There was a definite progression. In the earlier photos, her eyes were wide with what had to be terror. As she grew, so did a fatalistic resignation. Her face became blank, cold, emotionless. Her narrow lips might have smiled, but never her eyes. In some, she clasped a fuming cigarette between tiny fingers. In others, she cradled a brimming shot glass.
The older she became, the more proficient became the hems and seams of the second hand dresses. In the first shots, she was barefoot. Later, her legs were wrapped in baggy nylons and her feet bore scuffed, ill-fitting patent leather shoes. Most showed her in blotchy, uneven makeup.
Sarah angrily flipped through several identical arrays, then paused to pore over three photos alone on a page, glued in much more neatly, with hand-drawn borders. Two were school pictures. Johnny smiled confidently into the lens, his shoulders already stretching outside the frame. She, though, was shrinking from the camera, trying to be invisible. Her hair was longer than Johnny's, shaggy and limp. Her eyes were moist, her cheeks hollow, her shirt wrinkled and dirty.
The third image was the first in the entire album which depicted happiness. She and Johnny, together, he towering over her, their fingers protectively interlocked. Their overalls were just as ragged, the shack just as dilapidated, but their faces and postures radiated a unique joy.
Sarah leaned back, looked blindly upwards, again smiling. "I remember that one. We'd just buried you, Daddy. Put you down in the red mud where you belonged. It was a week before our fifteenth birthday. Johnny's girlfriend - Marie or Mary somebody - took it just after our picnic. Nothing else on the whole roll came out. Just this one."
With a sigh, she passed through the few remaining leaves of the book, these loosely filled with color snapshots of later days. Johnny as Homecoming King in a mud-fouled football uniform, bearing the number forty- four. The pair of them graduating in Salvation Army clothes, but proud and self-reliant. Johnny in his college football jersey, sans pads. Herself, radiant in a dress so new the price tag still dangled from a blue sleeve.
She chuckled. "Johnny wasn't very happy about that. I'll never forget the look on his face when he got home after class. It was our nineteenth birthday, and I bought it for myself without asking. Just four years ago? I was still shitty with makeup, but . . . I wonder. What would have happened if he'd told me to wash my face and take the dress back?"
She flipped hurriedly back and forth, seeking something specific. "Ah. There it is. What was it, a month or so after my first time out? I made him take this just before my second date.
"Jesus! I thought those were working clothes? That padded bra made it look like I had torpedos for tits. Pretty obvious, I guess - but maybe they liked it that way. Simpering little waitress and part-time slut. Nobody complained. Nobody's ever complained, Daddy, but you. Nobody's ever beaten me again. Nobody's ever made me do anything I didn't want to do. And nobody ever will, either."
A sharp laugh. "But there's not much anymore that I'm not more than happy to try, if the price is right. What do you think, Daddy? Am I worth two or three hundred a pop? That's more money than you ever saw at once, isn't it, you sleazy old lush? I almost wish you were still alive. No more quick blowjobs while Johnny slopped the hogs. No more nothing for you, ever. I'd make you beg and crawl and then laugh at you til you cried."
But she was the one with tears streaming down her face. From a slow trickle, they escalated into racking, silent sobs, as if, all alone in this echoing mausoleum, she was still afraid of being overheard and beaten.
After a final series of broken sighs, she tiredly uncurled from her fetal knot on the sprung horsehair sofa and weakly pushed herself up. Grabbing tissue from her purse, she dabbed at her runneled face. She blotted the final few random tears away, sniffed now and again as she smoked a laconic, dreamy cigarette. As she ground it out, she shook herself from her trance.
Dumping her purse on the table, intent on her compact's mirror, she quickly repainted her pretty mask. With each stroke of color, her strength seemed to return. A hooked nail straightened her lipline, blended her eyeshadow just so. She snicked the compact closed, shovelled everything back into the white clasp bag and rose, as majestic and poised as before.
"Bye, Daddy," she said brightly as she leaned into the massive door. "Don't expect me back for a while. We've got to get you moved to your new home, and I'm going to be real busy. I've got to make a lot of money before I can be all grown up. I promised you I'd do it before we turn twenty-four. That doesn't leave me a whole lot of time."
"Let me have a little talk with her. Please?" There was a slight brittle edge to Sarah's voice as she rummaged through the racks of her walk- in closet.
Johnny scowled into the bathroom mirror as he reknotted his tie. "I'm not sure that's such a good idea, hon."
"Johnny!" she wheedled over her shoulder, "I swear to God I won't hurt her. I may scare the piss out of her, but that's all. We've got to do something, and your nice guy routine isn't working." She settled on a brief black dress, more lace than fabric, and a short matching jacket.
Her brother savagely ripped the knot out again. "Nice guy? Slapping her around is a nice guy routine?" His voice held a light humor, didn't at all match his anger.
Sarah dropped her robe, wriggled and tucked her way into the clinging gown. Her only undergarment was a sleek elastic panty girdle. "She doesn't believe you mean it, silly boy. She knows you're just an overgrown teddy bear. But after that accident with Darlene, I bet I can get her to open up just by looking at her cockeyed."
The third try with the tie was successful. He blew long, deliberate, calming breaths. "You promise not to get carried away? No marks? No scars?"
Sarah was rolling seamed hose up her silky legs, clipping them to her underwear's dangling elastic straps. Her expression was one of glee. Her tone, though, was sober and sincere. "I swore, didn't I? I probably won't even have to bruise her. Damn, baby, I like Marilyn."
"You liked Darlene, too," he muttered softly.
"Did you say something?"
"Just bitching at this tie. Let me have one more go at her in the morning. If I don't have any luck, I'll give you a call."
Her tongue darted quickly over glistening, pouting red lips. Her green eyes glittered. "Great. I've got a late date at my studio. I'll be finished by three or so. Maybe you should just bring her there."
"Your studio." Johnny looked like he wished he could cry. He pulled himself together with obvious effort, shrugged his heavily muscled torso into the expensive grey jacket. He drew another deep breath. "Like I said, I'll call. She'll probably freak when I tell her that you get the next shot at her and spill her guts on the spot."
Sarah whispered to her smooth knees as she strapped on the six-inch black heels. "I hope not."
Johnny clipped the telephone back onto the rack between the seats. His face was absolutely blank.
The girl - despite her vivid makeup and revealing dress, she didn't look a day over eighteen - cowered against the Mercedes' passenger door. Her hair was a wild auburn cloud around her frightened face. Her ripe breasts heaved against the confining gold bodice. She'd chewed away most of her lipstick. Tears had streaked her from cheek to chin.
"Don't," she whimpered. "Please."
Johnny stared straight ahead down Troost. His face was blank, his voice absolutely neutral. "All you have to do is tell me why. I can turn around and have you home in ten minutes."
"You wouldn't do this if you really loved me. Please don't let her hurt me." Fresh tears glittered under the light of passing streetlamps.
His control snapped. "You think I like this!" he shouted. "You think it doesn't make me want to puke, just thinking about that fucking place!" He shuddered, ran a hand over his face, pulled up at a stoplight gone red on the wet, empty street. His next words, as the light's timer quietly whirred through his open window until the red bulb gave way to the green, were barely audible. "What it boils down to, honey, is that this is really your
decision, not mine. What comes next is totally up to you."
The girl turned away, faced the distant lightning, far to the north of the city. Her shoulders shook as she quietly cried. "I can't explain. That'd only make it worse."
Johnny silenced a ragged sigh. The last few blocks passed wordlessly. The only sounds were the whisper of tires on wet pavement and the girl's muffled sobs. He pulled to the curb opposite a dry cleaning establishment. His gaze across the street, at the darkened second floor windows, was filled with bitterness and hatred. He clambered out, opened Marilyn's door.
"Come on, kid. Let's get this over with."
She clung tightly to him, as if he was a rescuing knight instead of an inquisitor delivering her to the Question. They crossed the street and climbed the narrow, creaking staircase. He wet his dry lips before knocking on the steel security door. At a faint call, he swung it open.
Heavy metal music throbbed in the backround. The twenty foot square room was done in red and black, from tall ceiling to thickly carpeted floor, from bizarre furniture to its sole occupant. Two hooded lamps burned, seeming to cast more shadow than light.
A transformed Sarah rose from a long black sofa with a creak of leather and the quick, jerky grace of a spider. The shiny black bodysuit fit her torso like a carapace, making her breasts seem grossly bloated swellings, squeezed her waist to waspish proportions. High, tall heeled boots and long, fingerless black gloves made stick-like appendages of her limbs.
Only the silver cascade of heavy hair was that of the soft prostitute of the earlier evening. The bony angularity of the face it framed was made skull-like by thick white makeup. The eyes were deep, empty sockets in the dimness. Her thick lips, pulled back in what might have been a smile, caught what light there was and reflected it as would freshly spilled blood. Her upper arms, thighs and chest were made an unhealthy color by the room's yellowish glow.
The lips emitted a sharp chuckle. Long, stiff strides brought her to the couple in the doorway. Despite her stilt-like heels, she was much shorter than either of her guests. Marilyn might have outweighed her by thirty pounds, her brother by well over a hundred, but she pushed them toward the huge leather sofa like they were small children.
"Relax," Sarah urged, with something between sincerity and mockery. "Can I get you something to drink, hon? I won't even offer Johnny anything. Liquor's never crossed those sexy lips. Can you believe it?"
Horror was scribed on Marilyn's sensitive, pretty features. Her eyes unwillingly followed her hostess' every gesture. She shook her head, declining libation. Johnny was stiff, his expression that of a grim Greek marble.
His sister turned her back, jolted her way to a laquered cabinet and decanted brandy into a pair of delicate crystal snifters. Her continous banter was casual, chatty. "Wasn't that a marvelous thunderstorm? I opened the drapes so my friend could watch. I played some Wagner so loud the speakers almost blew. We had so much fun that he tipped me an extra hundred. How was your night, Marilyn? Anything interesting happen?"
Her young co-worker automatically accepted the brandy, her refusal forgotten, and shook her head harder than necessary. Her eyes raised to meet Sarah's as if against her will, and pled mutely.
The platinum blonde smiled sweetly, an eerie expression. "A toast," she proclaimed lightly, ringingly touching rims with the frozen redhead. "To our wonderful Johnny. Consummate lover and father protector. The best pimp a girl could ask for."
She stained the lip of the crystal deep red. Her eyes were narrow slits. Marilyn gulped the thick liquor with no sign of tasting it.
Sarah's ghastly smile fell into a compassionate pout. "Poor baby. You're terrified. It makes you even more beautiful, you know." Her long scarlet talons tenderly stroked the girl's pale cheek. Marilyn jerked from the caress, slapped the transgressing hand away. She paled even further.
Sarah stiffened. Her voice grated from her throat, a raw, unpleasant tenor murmur. "Well. Enough chit-chat. I think it's time we get on with the business at hand." She grabbed Marilyn's forearm, her nails digging deeply into the soft flesh. "Come, darling. Don't fight it. That'll only make it worse."
Marilyn whimpered, refused to move. For the first time since their arrival, her eyes darted to Johnny.
There was no support there. His stony expression was unchanged. Like a magically animated statue of a cold demi-god, he rose, pulled the girl to her feet. His voice was mechanical, without inflection. "Do as she says, Marilyn."
He watched blindly as his sister gently led the girl toward a modified examination table in a rear corner of the room. He turned toward the door as Sarah crooned tender instructions. As he woodenly walked away, he heard the whisper of leather restraints passing through metal buckles. His shoulders slumped as he closed the door behind him and he trudged wearily down the staircase.
A grey, thickly overcast dawn made only a slow, slight difference in the quality of light beyond the glass wall of the apartment. Within the unlit living room, the change was even less apparent. Johnny sat in a chair pulled near the sliding glass doors. He sat limply, his tie loosened, his shirt wrinkled. A coffeecup was cradled between his hands, its contents gone cold.
The phone's first purr jerked him away from his thoughts. He reached the device in the silence before its second ring.
Sarah sounded strangely brittle. "It's done."
"What's wrong? Is she . . . you didn't -"
The interruption was angry. "I promised, didn't I? Your precious little cunt is just fine. She wants to tell you herself what's going on." A bitter laugh. "You'll love it." She abruptly hung up before he could utter a word.
He made the quarter hour trip in well under ten minutes, abandoned more than parked the long silver car, raced upstairs and slammed through the unlocked door. The thick drapes were drawn back, admitting what light was available. Every lamp burned, dispelling all shadows.
At Johnny's abrupt entrance, Marilyn struggled from her squat between Sarah's spread thighs. She wore an expression of embarrassed passion, a miniscule see-through teddy, spike heels, and Sarah-style, bizarrely exaggerated makeup - all equally foreign to the child-whore's normally tasteful look.
The sister's smile was crooked as she covered her groin by pulling her tiny red skirt down. Crossing her mesh-stockinged legs, she set fire to a cigarette. Her deep inhalation squeezed her swollen breasts against her translucent red blouse.
Marilyn's impassioned confusion was plain. She hovered, still on her knees, not knowing which one to turn to.
"Well. Good morning, honey." Sarah's thick, unnerved attempt at a casual drawl failed to hide her discomfort. "I didn't expect you quite soon soon."
Johnny's shock seemed disproportionate. "Jesus Christ, Sarah! What the fuck -"
"There's a first time for everything, big brother. This darling child and I have covered a lot of ground in the past few hours. Haven't we, honey?"
A quick, scared nod from the overpainted redhead. Johnny's mouth moved without creating sound.
Sarah's garishly made up eyes, bloodshot from sleeplessness, squinted against her smoke. Her unnaturally thick crimson lips were compressed. She patted the sofa beside her. Marilyn quickly sat, crossed her legs to match Sarah's, leaned into her narrow shoudler.
Johnny composed his face, then folded himself into a solid antique wing-back chair. His voice was still strained. His words rang false. "I see. Well. I guess it's no big deal."
The blonde's laughter was a harsh cackle. "Oh, but it is." She patted Marilyn's bare thigh. "Be a darling and go make us coffee."
They both ignored the girl's quick retreat through the room's second door. The man's chair groaned as he leaned forward. His face showed barely repressed agony. His voice was low, harsh.
"Why, Sarah? All these years. You swore you'd never cheapen yourself like that." He swallowed, lowered his voice yet further, stumbled on in dread. "Last night . . . did you really . . ?"
Her brittle bravado cracked. Her silicone fat lower lip trembled. "Kind of. As much as I could."
Johnny sat back as if slapped. After an agonized silence, he spoke dully. "Do you know what this means? Do you know what this makes us? Me?"
"Nothing we haven't always been!" she snapped shrilly, then had to fight sudden tears. She couldn't meet his tortured eyes. "I'm sorry. I had to, Johnny. I can't explain."
"Try, damn it. Please. At least try. You owe me that much."
Her eyes were wet and huge as she brought them up from the floor. "Johnny, I owe you everything! Without your love, I'd have died the very first time he did it! I kept remembering what you told me. It'd be okay. Someday, it'd all work out.
"I thought that day came when we were eight. Remember? The first time we made love? It was so warm and tender and felt so good, so right. I thought it'd make the way he hurt me go away. I was wrong. I thought the same thing after he . . . after his friends . . . when you blew the bastard in half with the shotgun. I thought we buried it all in the barn lot, but we couldn't."
"Sarah -"
"No. You wanted me to explain."
"The past is dead! Don't -"
Her whisper was more savage than a scream. "It's not dead! It never will be! We carry it with us inside us every day of our lives! Not just me - you, too! We keep him alive in everything we do. We carry him around wherever we go! Don't you see?"
Johnny emphatically shook his head. "Bruises go away. Broken bones heal. Scars fade."
Her energy was depleted. She sank back into herself, became a small, traumatized waif on the vast couch. "Maybe yours did. Maybe there's something missing inside me so that can't happen. All I know is that last night, with Marilyn, was the first time in my life I ever felt like I was doing something that didn't make the fucker grin in his grave and say, 'See? I told you so.'"
It was quiet enough to hear the cars on the street hissing their paths through puddles. Marilyn returned with a tray and a trio of steaming mugs. Neither of her lovers looked up. The bright smile through her freshened, bloody lipstick was wasted, fell away, again became uncertainty.
"Tell him," Sarah muttered flatly.
"Now? Can't we -"
"Tell him."
Marilyn shifted her weight. Her speech had the brittleness of careful rehearsal, the awkwardness of fear. "I, uh . . . the reason I've been keeping the money is because I'm pregnant, Johnny. I'm going to have your baby. I know it's yours because it's the only time the rubber broke and I didn't use the spermicide. You know how careful I always am - but I wanted to get pregnant with you!"
She waited, expecting an angry protest. None came. That confused her still more. "So, I, uh - the money. I figured I'd need it in case my folks wouldn't help -"
"I've got the picture." His voice was empty. He stared at his twin, not the mother-to-be.
"I'm not going to have an abortion!" the redhead blurted.
He ignored her. "Sarah? Is that why?"
The long fall of platinum hair swung away from her face as she looked up. Her gaudy lips and eyes were determined, both uncharacteristically shy and filled with pride as she kindled another cigarette, held it defiantly between her immensely long nails.
"That's right. Perfect, don't you think? I'll never be able to give you a baby, even after the surgery's all done. I had to share in it. I had to use it before I lost it, Johnny. She had to be with both the Waters brothers. It was the right thing to do, don't you think?"