For the One I Love Read online

  FOR THE ONE I LOVE

  By

  K. H. KOEHLER

  * * *

  Published by KH Koehler Books

  http://khkoehlerbooks.wordpress.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, save those clearly in the public domain, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 K.H. Koehler. All rights reserved.

  No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the Publisher, except for short quotes used for review or promotion. For information address the Publisher.

  Cover design by K.H. Koehler

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  JOURNAL

  About the Author

  Excerpts

  Also Available

  * * *

  “Only Capone kills like that.” –George “Bugs” Moran on The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre

  * * *

  JOURNAL

  February 14th

  Growing up, I’d never had much use for Valentine’s Day.

  It was always so cold and white and blue. A sea of ice separating every living thing from the salvation of spring. The day was spent eating bitter little candy hearts and trading Snoopy and Disney Princess paper valentines with students I didn’t like and who didn’t like me. But we were told by our teachers to be polite and to give everyone a valentine, which didn’t make any sense to me. I’d always thought that valentines were supposed to mean something. What did it mean to give someone you didn’t like a paper cartoon heart?

  I didn’t like the movies they played on TV or the power ballads they played on the radio. None of it was real. It was all fabricated digital flesh and clever wordplay. I had never known anyone to fall in love at first sight. The first time I’d looked upon the Doctor, I’d been scared. I was sure he would kill me. Sometimes—but not often—I still wished he had.

  This one time, I found Valentine’s Day cards in a manila folder in the attic of the old clapboard farmhouse where I grew up. I wasn’t looking for them. I was looking for Daddy’s diploma. A girl at school had said he couldn’t read or write, that he was trash. That I was, too. I’d wanted to prove her wrong, so I crept up the narrow wooden stairs after Daddy had gone to bed to look for his diploma. I knew if I showed it to the girl who had called him trash, she would have to take it back. If she didn’t, I would hit her in the mouth or something.

  But I didn’t find the diploma. I found the cards, instead. They were to Momma from Daddy. They were pretty, sparkly red and white, full of naked winged babies, but all marked up because Daddy had scrawled bad words all over them. I knew then that the girl was wrong. Daddy could read and write. But then Daddy caught me looking at the cards. I guess the bouncy old floorboards had given me away.

  “Give me those and get your skinny ass downstairs!” he barked at me. “You go to bed right now!”

  I fled down the stairs, almost tripping on the last step. I didn’t want to get hit, even though Daddy had stopped doing that long ago. As I dashed through the open attic door, I heard him shout, “You’re as bad as her! You’re both shits!”

  His anger sickened me, like an old, familiar snake tightening up in my stomach. Venom makes you cold, I’d read once. It freezes your blood. So I’d never really liked Valentine’s Day. I’d thought of it as one of the Bad Days, like Christmas, and my birthday. Days when Daddy meant well but got drunk and angry and snapped like a snake.

  Yet the moment I woke up this morning, I knew something was different, something was special about the day. Last year, on this day, the Doctor and I were too busy to celebrate. One of the girls we both knew had fallen on the ice. She was one of the People of the Tunnels, and she had also been pregnant. She had torn her uterus in the fall. Or, rather, it had prolapsed, as the Doctor had patiently explained to me as he worked. It was a fairly complicated surgery, and it had taken us most of the afternoon to tend to her.

  That evening, in the quiet, familiar stuffiness of the study, we took tea and the Doctor said to me, “I ruined your day, Poppet. I wanted to give you something special.”

  “It was her day,” I explained while Rachel served us tea and cucumber sandwiches, a favorite of mine. I did not tell him that I didn’t like this holiday. There were times when we spoke at length about my past, but how could my adventures compare to his? He had seen and written pieces of history. I felt mundane and tiring, so I often kept things to myself. Besides, I kept thinking about the child inside the girl, the child we had saved. We had done a good thing today. The Doctor called it balancing the scales.

  “And,” I added, “you already give me things.” Just the other day, he had given me a book of paleontology with a fossilized trilobite as a bookmark.

  “Something unique,” he amended his statement. “Something befitting Persephone herself.” He sat very still as he usually did, like he wasn’t a real thing, all unbreathing darkness and fire-lit shadows, and watched me through the bandages. They were dark after so many hours of work. He was bleeding through. I was bleeding with him, not through my face, but my heart.

  I could feel his fatigue. His longing. It was as sharp inside of me as one of his instruments.

  I slipped to the floor at his feet and laid my head in his lap. He touched my hair. His touch was gentle and playful though I knew he could have wrenched my skull to puzzle pieces, if that was his desire. “If you are willing to be patient, my dear, I shall give it to you soon.”

  I didn’t know what he could give me that he hadn’t already, but I nodded all the same. At the time, I’d been almost insatiably curious, but after a while, I thought maybe he had forgotten, or that what he had wanted to give me was too difficult to find. But he could get anything. Cosmetics from Cairo, and dresses from the Dominican Republic. The vintage combs and mourning jewelry he gave me were from auctions in places I had never heard of before. But he knew how to find them all.

  Eventually, things had come to pass with Lizabeth and with Dr. Flamand—and all those lovely, sad things with Jacob—and I forgot even more. I had duties now. I had a child to see after. Charlotte. And a mother’s work is never done.

  Her name hadn’t been that when she came to me, but it was what we called her. Since the Doctor’s treatment, she could remember little of her life before. I was much the same way. I remembered some things, of course, like the Valentines in the attic, but they were archaic occurrences that belonged to distant times. Every year they faded little more around the edges. I knew Charlotte felt the same.

  She is four now, but like all the Timeless, she is as ageless as stone and sky. She is very small and slight and needs to be carried. I don’t mind carrying her. I carry her everywhere she wants to go. She likes when the Doctor carries her. He is very tall and she gets to almost touch the ceiling.

  “Momma up,” she used to say to me, but she’s become wonderfully articulate now. “Momma, I want to go up” is her favorite expression. That and “Doc-doc, take me up.” Soon, we will teach her all kinds of languages, and she will learn about medicine and math. I was very good at math in school.

  “Momma, no more crib,” Charlotte said when I stepped into the nursery this morning. She was standing up in her little white nightshift and bonnet and eyeing me with her clever grey eyes. “I want a bed.”

  “You’ll fall out of bed,” I said, picking her up.

  She squirmed. “Down.” She pointed at the floor. “Not a doll.”

  I put her down, but held her ha
nd as I led her to the changing screen.

  “Want a bed!” she insisted while I dressed her for the day in a dress and pinafore, socks and shoes, which she tied up herself. “You don’t sleep in a crib,” she complained while I wrestled with her curls in the vanity mirror. I put in a ribbon and she pulled it loose and threw it aside. “Doctor doesn’t sleep in a crib.”

  This was the first time she was addressing him properly. “Of course he doesn’t,” I said. “He is the Doctor.”

  “No ribbons. No cribs!”

  “Very well. I’ll speak to the Doctor about it,” I told her as a pleasant, plain-faced Rachel appeared in the doorway of the nursery to take Charlotte into the library for her lessons for the day.

  “Fetch me if she’s difficult,” I told Rachel.

  “She’s never difficult,” Rachel insisted. She was very good at looking after Charlotte. She was leading her own child Matthew by the hand and I knew he and Charlotte would spend many hours reading to each other under the somber lights of the candelabras while some rambling Tchaikovsky played in the background. This was their day. Books and music. Charlotte was learning from the ground up as I had.

  I returned to my bedchamber. The Doctor had long since gone. A mission into the city for supplies, he had said. But this morning, as every morning before, he had left his choice of dress at the foot of the antique sleigh bed we shared. It was sharp-edged taffeta, light as air, and red as an open heart. I lifted the fabric to my face. It smelled of history and newness in equal measure. Modern haute couture and antiquated design.

  Beneath it lay a yellow envelope, sealed with red candle wax.

  This, too, I lifted up, then turned to the altar of candles opposite the bed to better read the fine white parchment within. Five words were scrawled on it in the Doctor’s cramped, delicate calligraphy: For the One I Love.

  Accompanying it were a pair of tickets to see Sarah Brightman at a one-night-only, closed performance at the Chelsea Opera. I had heard of it. I had longed for it, as well. Perhaps I had said something at tea. I couldn’t recall. Or he knew. The Doctor always knew. Regardless, it was such a private affair that only a hundred VIP’s were invited.

  Unsurprisingly, the Doctor was among the elite. And noblesse oblige required we attend.

  * * *

  The limousine coasted to a stop in the curb and the driver came around to hold the door for us. The Doctor did something very unusual then. He stepped out onto the walk beneath the sterile glow of a streetlamp before reaching down to guide me from the vehicle. “You look lovely tonight,” he told me, his voice modulated to affect a rich but airy tone that revealed nothing unpleasant.

  I had seen him out in society only twice before. The first time was when he had come for me at Dr. Flamand’s mansion, and the second time was a few weeks ago when we had attended a performance of La Boheme at the Metropolitan Opera. The first time—at the House of Stairs—he had worn his bandages. The second time we had had a seasonal box, though he had not sat with me. I wasn’t sure where he had gone, but I had found the performance dulled by his lack of presence. I had wanted to discuss the story with him, but he had chosen to watch from some other more private vantage point. I had been tempted to argue, but he had good reason not to make public appearances.

  Tonight was different. I could not stop looking at him. A spare black shadow in evening dress and a cravat like a red open wound at his throat.

  His flesh mechanics were immaculate. Spectral. I could find no seam in his face, no stitch in his fine, cream-white skin. He looked as I imagined he had as that young, willful surgeon in the workhouse in 1878, pure and untouched by the world’s atrocities. But then, this had always been in him. He had his work, his body farm. There was no reason to be so surprised.

  I thought of his excuse. Fetching supplies—which he never did. He had agents for the more mundane tasks. He had not wanted me to know. He hadn’t wanted me frightened by his hours of careful labor. The pain that had surely been unendurable. I thought of it now—every searing suture, every troublesome knot which had aggravated and enflamed his bleeding meat. I embraced those imagined agonies and held them inside of me like a little flame on a cold blue Valentine’s night.

  He did not smile, but that was to be expected. His mimetic muscle had been brutally scraped away, and what little remained had long since atrophied. Smiling would only ruin the illusion.

  “Not just I,” I admitted as I joined him on the sidewalk. I could not look away from him. He was the black hole around which the earth rotated. He was my gravity. And when he tucked my hand into the crook of his arm, I felt I belonged more to him in that moment than in all the nights we had spent together. We were a couple. We were a we. Like the dozens of others moving in ordered circles about the city. Invisible, and yet small pieces of it.

  I had never felt the sharp, sterile edges of love until this moment. While we moved inside the gilded, vault-like structure, I kept my eyes on him. The coolness of his arm seeped into my hand, reminding me of what he was. What we were together. We would be this thing in a year, a century, a millennium. Each sluggish tick of my pulse seemed to seek its counterpart in him. My voice was unaccountably shy, as if we were meeting for the first time. “Tear my heart out,” I told him. “It only beats when you hold it, Doctor.”

  “My dear,” he said, and that was all.

  The ushers seated us in a special box overlooking the stage. There were lovely little mother-of-pearl opera glasses presented to me in an engraved leather case, more a memento than a necessity, and shortly before the performance, another of the Doctor’s agents presented me with a traditional bouquet of roses dipped in 24-carat gold.

  I had never dreamed of receiving such fine gifts. I had only read about such things. I fingered the roses with delicate interest while we waited for the curtain to rise. They were another of the Doctor’s personal creations. The stems had been constructed of delicate little bones sewn all together, and the heads were large and frilly, the plated petals meticulously molded from out of the Doctor’s body farm.

  The little note said in whispering gold gilt: For the One I Love.

  “All of this is quite too much,” I chastised him. I made my voice sweet and shy, the way he liked it. “Your gifts have spoiled me, Doctor.”

  “These are merely a prelude,” he told me, taking my hand in his as the lights went down. “You’ll receive your gift later on, Poppet.”

  Another gift! I felt a quiver of anticipation.

  The performance was sublime, of course. Ms. Brightman seemed to be singing to each of us in particular—but, then, I think everyone in attendance felt that way. The music became a living thing, quavering but painfully breakable, a barrier against the real world lurking outside the doors of the opera house. For a little while we were entombed.

  After the ovation, the Doctor’s hand closed incrementally tighter about my hand and he lifted it to his delicately constructed lips to kiss. “And now.”

  “Really. You mustn’t spoil me.”

  “It is a husband’s prerogative to spoil his wife on such a night,” he answered and lifted me from my seat. “Tonight is your night, my dear. It has been constructed for your pleasure.”

  The cold, crisp night struck us like a slap. Though the limousine waited at the curb, I asked to stand in the night with the Doctor. I wanted to feel a part of the city. I wanted to watch the other Valentine couples rushing to their appointments.

  In my mind, I saw myself taking his hand and coasting across the busy street, disappearing into the fray of lights like a pair of rangy teenage lovers. We might see the art of Battery Park, or go for a ride in a horse-drawn carriage down the cobblestones of Central Park West. In movies, lovers visited the Observation Deck of the Empire State Building and whispered lifelong ambitions in each other’s ears. But I suppose we were not that kind of couple. Though his face remained patiently flawless, I could see the ghost of pain in it. He was hurting for his love of me. The scratch and tick of nerve endings pull
ed too taut and fastened too stiffly in place. Tonight was slowly coming undone, all the masks coming off.

  I lifted his hand to my cheek and closed my eyes and said, “Yes. Now.”

  * * *

  The restaurant he had chosen to close out this evening was located in the East Village. In all honesty, it was not someplace I would have chosen to dine. I recognized it as soon as we turned onto the avenue, and slowly, bit by bit, as we approached, I felt a muscle in my belly twitch and tighten until it seemed my body was being grossly yanked inside out by my old familiar friend the snake.

  I had been here once before, a long time ago. I remembered the fetid alley with its rusting Dumpster and graffiti-darkened walls. The light that never seemed to penetrate the dark places. The sweet smell of decay and blackened grease that hung on the air.

  When I was fifteen, I left that old farmhouse with the haunted Valentines in the attic. I wore a hoodie and carried my gym duffel. My pockets were full of money I’d taken from Daddy’s wallet. The night before, Daddy had made me bleed. That wasn’t unusual in and of itself, but during volleyball in gym class the following day, the blood had started again and one of the girls had laughed and thrown me a tampon. I’d laughed with her and we had shared one of those wordless moments between women besieged by their own traitorous bodies, but she didn’t know the truth. No one did. What was the point of telling? No one ever believed you, or they thought you were looking for attention, or that you were crazy or just bad. Sometimes they put you on medication, and I didn’t want to be doped up one night when I had to get out of the house real fast.

  The bus let me off at Port Authority in the East Village. The vertigo of people rushing back and forth made me so dizzy, I almost couldn’t stand up. I sat down for a while in a chair near the bathrooms and must have fallen asleep. When I woke up, my duffel was gone, and even my hoodie’s pockets had been torn out. I was hungry. I wanted to go home, but I didn’t even have the money for a ticket.

  I wandered around a long time. I kept thinking I would get an idea, but nothing came to me. I was alone. I might as well be an alien in a strange land where no one wanted me.