It is here that her memory breaks.
It is not a cessation, a threshold crossed where her mind gives way to blackness; here is where the fractures begin, where they spread out and turn moments into facets.
In her weakness, he guides her to the bed. Here, in this stretch of time, Jason arranges her limbs, smoothes down her skirt, props her head on a plump white pillow.
The room is also white, walls like chalk and ivory carpet, blankets the color of antique silk. The light comes from bedside lamps and it fills the space.
Emily is on the bed. She is still. The room is a box of light.
Jason climbs onto the bed. She feels him displace the mattress. She smells him, an odor of warm skin, clean hair, Castile soap, something else. It is unique. It makes her think of smoke and the plant that burned to make the smoke; it is the two scents together, the leaf and its combustion. Thyme, maybe. Sage. Cilantro. Rosemary. Some bastard plant bred of all these things and broken, rubbed into skin; it is burned, the ashes dusted onto sweat: this is what she smells. He moves close to her. He doesn’t touch her.
“Are you comfortable?” His voice changes, departs for territories unknown. There is breakdown at the edges of his words. “Are you cold?”
“No,” she sighs. She looks at the ceiling. It’s smooth.
The weight of his gaze is on her. He leans over. He lets a hand hover over her chest. “You got goosebumps.”
Maybe there is a blanket. She thinks there is, a throw of some kind woven out of soft yarn, and when she thinks of it, it is the color of heather. But there is another thought. This one comes woven out of dimmed light and opened curtains, her bare legs under the covers, sliding in, the cotton cool and crisp against her toes. She sees the dark beyond the window. One of these memories superimposes itself on the other.
Emily is filled with stillness. It rises up in her, slow, and it touches the inside of her skin, fills her like water, suspends her within itself. He brings it to her. He pours it over her.
Jason is there, taking up space. He owns the air. He moves over her to look into her face and she opens her eyes. She sees that he is lost in her. His eyes are the eyes of a man looking out over a great distance. She touches the slant in his mouth, thinks of a compass. At the touch of her fingertip something comes to life in his top lip. It awakens and spreads out across his face, moving like ripples, pushing something new into his eyes. She watches it, fascinated. Kingdoms rise and fall in the lines around his eyes. The space between his lips beckons.
She remembers this part in slow motion: his hand hovering, putting out heat, this evidence of his existence falling onto her skin, warming her cheek milliseconds before the contact. Whorls in his fingers telegraph their secret messages, write them in synaptic code. The electricity, jumping from neuron to neuron, fills her. He is there, in his eyes, filling them.
He kisses her neck. The sensation opens her mouth, releases her breath from her throat. His lips open new channels in her. She breathes into it, the feeling, so restless and soft, unfolding into a pressure in her cunt.
It crowds the other stuff out.
When it happens, he is kissing her. There are other memories here, false ones, the thoughts of how she wishes it had happened: swollen parts coming together, more wetness, urgent moaning.
Jason is kissing her. The shape of his mouth is obscured by hers, there is the tight pleasure of skin touching skin, a warm seal made between them. Their shirts are on the floor and she has a hand in his hair. It is short, bristly, like silk. The roots are warm. She kisses him, floats up into his kiss, his hands. It is a tender thing that shouldn’t be happening at all; he is taking advantage, she is giving it, she wants him. She accepts his tongue into her mouth and thinks of nothing.
Emily doesn’t close her eyes. In the remembering, she will. In the remembering, she wants to keep this one thing to herself.
What happens is this:
In the midst, George is the room. He has gotten in somehow, broken the lock, walked in under the cover of what is happening between them.
He grabs Jason by the neck. He lifts him up off her. He is so limp, so melted into her, that at first he doesn’t move. Emily becomes aware of the emptiness. Her eyes are closed, and for a moment she is confused by absence divorced from process: he does not roll over, he does not crawl away, there is no warning shift. There is only the absence of him, this subtraction of his weight, his smell, his skin.
Hands encircle Jason’s neck from behind. Emily doesn’t feel them.
She opens her eyes to a thud in the floor. It rockets through her, hums in the surface of her skin. She looks up, sees the ceiling, and it spins with the rapid shift in her perspective. A slug of adrenaline pounds into her blood. It wakes her up in time to see them struggle. The thud is the sound of Jason’s escape. He was held from behind, an arm locked around the neck, his face purple.
Now he’s not. George has his knife, it’s out and glittering in his hand. There are quick movements, chaos on a small scale, most of it held within the trembling strain of locked limbs. Emily sees blood. It is so red in the whiteness of the room, so red and crazy, flying about in tiny droplets: there’s a cut somewhere. The metallic scent of it drives them both mad.
All of this happens in panting silence.
From the back of Emily’s mind she feels Jason’s hands smoothing down her skirt. She watches him break out of George’s lock; she thinks about the tenderness living in his hands. He holds a gleaming object, some short heavy thing. It swings down. There are grunts. More blood flies. The object dressed in blood, an obelisk carved of black stone, it is the stone of the island. Jason is astride George.
What started life as an ornament will finish it as a murderer. The obelisk, locked in his hand, comes down again and again. There is a crunch of bone, a sound like ice cracking, like green wood splintering.
Afterward, he is afraid.
Emily sits on the bed. She watches this fear leak into him, moving through his skin a sieve; she sees it tighten the muscles in his body until they tremble. His back is to her, his breath rapid.
The obelisk rolls out of weakened fingers: thud.
Everything happens so fast. A storm rages inside the room. It is locked inside their two bodies. One of them falls, one of them, and it is thunder.
Jason makes a harsh sound. From her place on the bed it sounds like crying, like it wants to be crying but doesn’t know where to begin.
Emily looks at George. His head is turned to one side, away from her. There is little left to the curve of his face. His arms, splayed out. In one of them is the knife. The presence of the blade, its position in George’s slack hand, allows her to see the cut in Jason’s flank. It is long, curved, shallow. It has already started to clot.
It is the feeling she remembers. The richness of it, almost a flavor: the feeling, Jason’s feeling, the weight of emotion smothering her. How she yearned for death. It held her down until he was lifted up, dragged into the corner of the room.
“It’s okay,” she says. “He’s dead.”
Jason turns. There’s blood in his hair. He looks at her, his eyes raw like a child’s, like a warrior’s. He is both of these things at once. Tear tracks streak the fine spray of blood on the right side of his face.
“It’s okay.” The feelings come back to her with a surge of dreadful strength. “It will be okay.”