Tea For Two
By
Sergei Shostakovich
“I sure do love you,” Sarah whispered.
The baby cooed in her arms - small and perfect. Sarah held her close and kept herself silent. She studied her daughter’s face carefully, memorizing every detail; dark chocolate eyes, a small upward curl at the edge of her mouth, full pink cheeks, a tiny perfectly shaped nose. Sarah leaned in and slowly inhaled, allowing her nostrils to fill with her daughter’s scent. Wonderful… absolutely wonderful. Everyone gets one miracle in this life. This tiny baby was hers. Alexandra Marie Allison, a miracle born on April 5th at 3:33 AM.
Sarah lay Alexandra down in her crib and covered her with a blanket. She hovered over the child and made silly faces at her. Alexandra grinned wide and giggled back at her mommy. This was their routine - Sarah and her baby in their tiny studio apartment. A new mother, a new baby, and a new start. Sarah was thankful for her daughter. She loved her daughter like any mother loves her kids, but she also knew that her daughter had saved her life. Before Alexandra was born, Sarah’s life had been a mess. Her family had been a mess, her school had been a mess and she, herself, had most definitely been a mess. Alexandra had hit the reset button on her mother’s life.
While her old life was a complete mess, Sarah was not going to let her new life be one. Not at all. Not figuratively, and certainly not literally. That’s why the other part of the daily routine was cleaning. Everyday Sarah cleaned her entire apartment from top to bottom. The dirt that was there today was scrubbed away with a compulsion that scared away any dirt that may show up tomorrow. All of this cleaning and all of this scrubbing was fueled by tea. Cup after cup of sweet delicious tea.
Sarah didn’t have much. She didn’t even have a real tea kettle. What she did have was a large stock pot that the Salvation Army had given her. Sarah took it out of the dish rack and went to fill it, like every day before this one. It was so massive that it wouldn’t fit under her kitchen faucet and she had to tilt it at an angle to get any water into it. Finally, the water neared the lip of the stock pot. Sarah pulled it upright, heaved it from the sink onto the stove and lit the burner.
“Hey beautiful.”
The female voice startled her and she nearly fell as she spun around to find its owner.
“Lucy!” Sarah gasped.
Lucy leaned against the archway leading into the living room. Dark curls flowed back over her shoulders, framing her face and neck. Her skin was pale and perfectly smooth, her eyes emerald green and her lips and nails were painted a deep red. Rings encircled each finger and both thumbs. Lucy was gorgeous and sexy, and she knew it. She had ten, maybe fifteen, maybe more, years on Sarah, but she didn’t show it. Lucy was timeless. Flawless
Sarah couldn’t contain her excitement. She bolted across the room and flung her self into Lucy’s arms, holding on to her like a child holds on to her mother.
“Oh, my God,” Sarah beamed, “it is so good to see you! I thought you’d never come back.”
“Never? Never is a long time. Have I ever stayed away, Baby Doll?” Lucy asked.
Sarah skipped the question. She leaned back slightly and gazed into Lucy’s eyes with a surge of adrenalin coursing through her veins. The other woman’s eyes were wide and her smile was full. Sarah curled the tips of her fingers and dug them into Lucy’s back just a little. Tiny little talons clinging on to her friend, preventing her from leaving again too soon.
“What have you been doing?” Sarah beamed mischievously. “Who have you been doing?”
“It’s a long list,” Lucy replied.
“Slut!”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing. I’m all about the sin, you know that.”
“Yeah, I know… slut! And I say that like I’m envious. I haven’t had any since I got knocked up! That’s almost a year and my fingers are getting carpel tunnel.”
“Hey, at least you’re having sex with someone you love.”
They broke into laughter. It was an easy laughter - the type of laughter that can only be shared by two very good and very old friends. Most people can remember the moment a very special person walks into their life. The mind makes a marker in time to commemorate the occasion. As the years go by the mind accumulates more and more markers, making up our memories and providing reference points that separate the different chapters of our lives.
Sarah couldn’t remember when she first met Lucy, or even how. Sometimes Sarah felt this was rather odd, but it never kept them from being the closest of friends. Lucy was always just there. Somehow that seemed to fit. Lucy was a free spirit. She came and went whenever and however she pleased. She’d leave in the blink of an eye without so much as a good bye. Then Sarah would come home one day to find her lounging on the sofa as though she’d never left. This was all OK with Sarah. Lucy had become her best friend, and, mostly, her only friend. Best friends get leeway. Best friends neither need nor demand explanations. Not that Lucy would give her one anyway, but still...
Sarah took Lucy by the hand, led her to the kitchen table and sat her down. Two chairs, straight out of 1977, flanked an even more dated table. Everything Sarah had in her tiny apartment was used. It was a metaphor for her life. Everyone she had known had either used her, abandoned her, or both. Everyone except Lucy. Lucy was always there, in bad times and in worse times. And even now, in good times. Always there with a joke or a hug. Always there with sage advise on just the right thing to do. And now she was sitting so close. So close. Sarah was so excited she could hardly stand it.
“OK, missy,“ Sarah began, “before you begin with your stories of sluttiness, I just wanna know… how come you never came to see me?” Sarah’s voice tapered off and became low and sullen. This was her protest, but it was meek at best.
“While you were giving birth, you mean? No, no,” Lucy retorted. “It’s all blood and screaming. Not my kinda scene.”
“No, I mean-”
“In the nut house?” Lucy interrupted. “Baby, I’m not exactly a good character reference. I thought they’d let you out quicker if your gnarly friends stayed the hell away. I was just doing my part.”
“Well, I just thought that…”
“What? Baby Doll, what’d you think? That I’d abandoned you?”
“No. It’s just that…,” Sarah took a long pause. The words rolled around in her mouth before she let them tumble out. “You know… you kinda told me to do it.”
Lucy leaned back in her chair, pulling away from Sarah, and let out a cackle. It echoed around the small apartment and came crashing down on Sarah.
“Baby Doll, I told you to confront your pedofreak step dad. You know, go preach the gospel? I never said to chase his secretary around the lobby and threaten to cut off her tits with a butcher knife. What the hell were you thinking?”
Sarah was quiet for a long moment. In her mind she arranged and rearranged the events from twelve months earlier. She was at her step dad’s office. There was a woman sitting behind the desk outside his door. Sarah tried to remember the woman’s face but, all she could remember was the color black. It was like a page torn from a book. She knew what happened before, and what came after, but, the middle was missing. Actually, there were several pages missing from her life and Sarah knew it.
Lucy reached across the table and took Sarah’s hand and began to trace the valleys between Sarah’s knuckles with her fingertip. That cackle had deflated Sarah. Her eyes were dull and forlorn. Lucy smiled, locked her gaze with the listless woman, and took a deep breath.
“Baby Doll,” she began “you know I’d never do anything to hurt you.”
Sarah let out a small smile.
“I should’ve gone with you,” she continued slowly. “I just thought that, you know, you should stand up for yourself. He had no right to do those things to you. I just wasn’t thinking. I should’ve gone. I should have been there by your side.”
Sarah turned her hand over and locked fingers with her friend. She smiled again and began to regain that joy she had just lost moments before. They sat in silence for a long time. There was uneasiness in Sarah’s stomach - something curdled and very familiar. Lucy thought about her next question carefully. She wanted to move Sarah carefully out of the conversation and not allow her to dwell on the details of what had happened at her step dad’s office.
“So,” Lucy began quietly, “what’d the shrinks say was your major malfunction?”
Sarah thought about the question and plotted out a careful answer.
“Schizophrenia. But it’s all bullshit,” she added hastily. “The doctor asked me if I knew what was wrong with me. I told him ‘no’ and then he laid that on me.”
“What did you say to that?”
“I told him that if schizophrenia is what you get after sucking your step dad’s cock for two years, then I guess that what I’ve got.”
Sarah looked Lucy dead in the eyes and then burst into laughter. Lucy followed immediately.
“No wonder they kept you in that joint for six weeks,” Lucy said.
“Yeah, I wasn’t exactly a model patient.”
“I’m proud of ya, Baby Doll. Damn proud of ya!”
“Yeah, they gave me these pills to take,” Sarah glanced at three prescription bottles with tidy white labels and collected herself, “but I don’t take them no more. They make my head all swimmy and I can’t focus on my baby"
Lucy looked over at the child sleeping in the crib.
“She’s beautiful. She’s just like you.”
Sarah enjoyed the moment. This is what love felt like she thought to herself. Small words. Being told you are beautiful. Laughing. Sharing. It felt good to have Lucy back. She wanted Lucy to stay, and, for a brief instant, she began to allow herself to believe that she would. This time.
“Hey,” Lucy glanced toward the stove, “sounds like your water’s boiling.”
“Ooh, tea, yummy! What flavor would you like?” Sarah asked.
Lucy leaned over, tenderly stroked Sarah’s cheek and kissed her softly on her forehead. Sarah looked up and gazed into Lucy’s eyes. The piercing emerald green flashed pitch black and then back again. The two women enjoyed a long silence. Finally, Sarah giggled like a school girl who’d just been passed a note in class.
“Tea for two coming right up,” Sarah whispered and went to prepare the cups.
Lucy just smiled.
++++++++++++++++++++++
The patrolman grabbed the lieutenant by the arm. “It’s not good,” the patrolman stammered, “it’s not good in there at all.”
The lieutenant nodded, fixed his eyes straight ahead and pushed the door open. The small apartment was a mess. Blood was pooled on the floor, spattered and smeared on the walls, on the kitchen cabinets, on the windows… Sickening patterns in deep crimson - manic and violent. Off in the corner was a small oasis. The kitchen table was barren, except for two tea cups, two spoons, and a sugar bowl. The lieutenant took a silent inventory of the room. It was an odd combination: Death and gore spattered all around, and as a contrast, the notable tranquility of a tea service.
“OK, what do we have?”
Detective Gormley never looked up from his notebook. His pen pointed toward the body slumped over in the corner.
“That would be Sarah Allison.” Then he took a long pause, drew a breath, and, without looking, shifted the pen between his fingers and angled the tip toward the stove. “And that would be Ms Allison’s baby.”
The lieutenant stared at Sarah’s body, trying to sort out the events that put her into the corner bathed in her own blood; a butcher knife through her throat and stuck into the wall behind. He then looked at the stove. Nothing. His eyes scanned the counter. Still no baby.
“So…” he paused, trying to assemble all the pieces, “where’s the baby?”
Gormley once again fixed the point of his pen toward the stove without looking in its direction. The lieutenant scanned the stove top and counter a second time looking for possibilities. There was only one.
“In the stock pot?”
Gormley’s silence confirmed what the lieutenant did not want to know. He then blindly shifted his fingers once again and pointed the tip of his pen toward the table.
“And in the cups.” Gormley’s voice was sullen.
The words rattled around in the lieutenant’s head. In the cups? What the hell does that mean? Babies don’t fit into cups. It’s a metaphor. It’s got to be a metaphor. He took a step toward the stove and peered into the pot. His neck snapped back instinctively.
“Jesus! What the hell…?” The lieutenant’s voice quavered.
The patrolman was right; this was not good. A dark thick film of blood and fat had congealed close to the top of the pot. Tiny bones - fingers and toes - floating randomly. A larger bone protruded the dark film, nearly missing the lip of the pot. A tiny skull was half submerged with one empty eye socket staring blankly to the side.
Vomit made its way up the lieutenant’s throat. He managed to swallow it back down with some trouble. His eyes once again scanned the entire apartment looking for the linchpin - that single detail that would explain why a blood soaked body was heaped in the corner, and why a dead baby was in a stock pot on the stove. His eyes caught a glimpse of the cups on the table. It was the same dark mess from the stock pot. The vomit came back up. He clenched his eyes and swallowed hard.
“OK… from the top… what the fuck do we have here?” the Lieutenant demanded.
Gormley clicked his pen closed and looked up from his notebook. His eyes locked with the lieutenant’s and it became apparent that he was having as much trouble putting all the pieces together in his mind as the lieutenant did.
“There was a 911 call about an hour and a half ago. Some neighbor reported hearing someone screaming. Dispatch sent out a patrol car, but by the time they got here it was all quiet. They knocked. No response. They had to kick in the door.”
“OK. Do we know who was screaming? Was it…” the lieutenant paused, “… was it the baby?”
“Well, I don’t think so,” Gormely started, “but I - I’m not sure.”
“No? Was it her?” The lieutenant gestured toward Sarah’s limp body.
“That’s who my money’s on. Word I got is that whoever was screaming was calling out someone’s name.” He flipped back a page in his notes. ”Ms Allison, probably, was screaming out for someone named, uh, Lucy.”
“Lucy? So, someone else was here.” The lieutenant suddenly had a reason for the second tea service.
“Yeah, well, there’s a bit of a problem with that. The windows, the doors, everything, was locked from the inside. When the officers responded, they had to kick the door in. The security chain was still on.”
The lieutenant looked at the door jam. The chain was indeed still attached to the door and the metal plate which had secured it to the jam dangled from the end. The door jam was broken and splintered. None of this made any sense. The Lieutenant closed in on Gormley and gently took him by the arm.
“Bill, level with me… what the hell happened in here?” the Lieutenant asked.
Gormely looked down. The Lieutenant could hear a rasp coming from his lungs. Twenty years of smoking and police work - ten years on a beat, five years in vice and five years in homicide - had left their mark. The Lieutenant knew that the police man had seen some bad shit in his time and was taken aback by his troubled look.
“Look, Lieutenant, fact is I think this is just a suicide. That’s what my report is gonna say. But after looking at the scene, and talking with the neighbors, I think someone else was-” Gormley paused and regrouped his words. “I think she may have thought someone else was in here.”
“Some woman named Lucy?” the Lieutenant asked.
Gormley stared at the Lieutenant. It was as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words. Or the courage. All the Lieutenant could do was wait. Finally, Gormley motioned toward Sarah’s body.
“Take a look at this,” he said.
Gormley squatted in front of Sarah’s body. He pulled out a fresh pair of latex gloves and slipped them over his fingers and let them snap around his wrists. He leaned in over Sarah’s body and carefully pulled aside part of her blood soaked blouse.
“I think Ms Allison thought that someone named ‘Lucy’ was in the room.” Gormley looked back over his shoulder at the Lieutenant. “I’m not sure whether ‘Lucy’ is this person’s full name, and I don’t think we’re spelling it right. I don’t think there’s a ‘y’ anywhere near the name of this ‘Lucy’. You can see it better after the morgue gets her cleaned up…”
He clicked his pen and traced over eighteen jagged cuts across Sarah’s mutilated chest.
The Lieutenant looked at Gormley and then back at Sarah’s body.
“Fuck me. Suicide, huh?” he asked.
“I don’t think there’s another plausible explanation, Lieutenant. This is a lot of damage for a suicide, but I can’t explain the doors and windows being locked from the inside if someone else did it. Can you?”
The Lieutenant shook his head.
“Alright. Good work, Bill. Get a report on my desk“
The Lieutenant turned to leave. Before he made it through the door, Gormley stopped him.
“Lieutenant, you got kids?”
The Lieutenant looked back and nodded.
“Give‘em a hug tonight, huh?”
“Yeah.” The Lieutenant took one last look at the stock pot. “I will.”
© By the motherfucker who wrote this. He lives in Seattle.
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