Mine Read online

  “Sara,” I whispered.

  The emotion that came over me was unsettling. I’d ordered her to pretend, and she had. I’d told her to say that she loved me, and she had. I’d thought that all of it meant nothing. But now, holding her shaking body underneath mine, I knew that I couldn’t go back. I’d done something worse to her than to any of my victims. Rather than drawing the truth from her with pain, I’d forced her to fake pleasure.

  I felt a deep sense of unease. Was she faking? Did she fake all of it? I didn’t know, and the not knowing is what killed me.

  False love was no love. No, it was worse than that. She was my toy, and I’d ruined her.

  My stomach churned as I withdrew from her body. Such beauty, but it was not mine. I could no longer tell what was real and what was fantasy. Her love was fantasy. Her fear was real. Or was it the other way around?

  I needed to know, but I couldn’t ask her. Letting my hands fall from her body, I stepped back shakily and opened the bookcase.

  “Rien?” She leaned against the back of the couch and her face turned to look at me. She was pale, scared.

  Was that what I had done to her?

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and turned away. I had created a dream, but I couldn’t live in it forever.

  Sara

  Rien looked as though he’d seen a ghost. He fumbled with his pants, pulling them back up around his waist as he walked back into the operating room. The bookcase spun shut behind him.

  I didn’t understand what had just happened. My hands trembled against the couch cushions. I slid down the back of the couch to the floor and huddled there. My arms wrapped around my legs even though I wasn’t cold.

  “Think, Sara,” I whispered to myself. “Think. Don’t feel. Just think.”

  Rien was planning to kill me. I had to take it from there. If he planned to kill me, then this was all a game. He was toying with me before he killed me. He was a cat playing with a mouse. He was using me for fun, for sex, before he strapped me down and had fun with me in other ways.

  I shook my head. Something about that idea didn’t seem right to me. Maybe it was the way he held me in his arms and kissed me so tenderly, but I simply couldn’t believe that he was plotting to murder me

  “Come on, Sara,” I said, frowning. “Of course it doesn’t seem like it. He’s good at lying to you.”

  That’s it. That’s all it was. He was lying to me.

  I swallowed hard. I didn’t want to think about his hands, his tongue, his mouth on my body… as lies. Because as much as he might have been pretending, my body’s responses were all real. My emotions were all true.

  Even the ones I couldn’t admit.

  I pulled the shirt back over my chest. The buttons were mostly ripped off, but a couple still hung on. I buttoned what I could. I found my panties bunched up next to the bookcase. They were wet anyway. I didn’t have any other clothes.

  I rested my head on my knees to try to calm myself down. My heart still pounded from my orgasm. It was a horrible thought, but I wanted Rien back. I wanted him to hold me again. Stupid, a stupid feeling, but I wanted him to care about me. I didn’t want to believe that he was only pretending. I didn’t want to believe that what had just happened was only a scene that we’d both acted in.

  “No, Sara.” I shook my head. “No, no, no.”

  I’d heard all of the stories about method actors. How Daniel Day Lewis had been playing the role of a crazy person and had gone crazy himself after spending days depriving himself of sleep. There were dozens of couples who had started out acting opposite one another in movies. Their characters fell in love, and they followed suit in real life. It was such a cliché, but it was true.

  Delsarte knew that. He was one of the first people in theatre to propose the idea that emotions follow from facial expressions. If you frown, he said, you start to become angry. If you smile, you start to become happy. This was a couple hundred years ago, but even today you could see that concept all over the place.

  There was a psychological study that had a bunch of people watch a comedy show. One group held a pencil above their upper lip so that they were forced to bare their teeth, like a smile. That group always found the comedy show funnier than the group who hadn’t been forced to smile.

  Another study found that people who flexed their muscles and posed like Superman before an interview tended to do much better than people who were forced to do timid poses, like bending over and clutching their knees. Delsarte might not have been a method actor, but he knew something about psychology.

  I looked down at my own posture. My arms were wrapped around my knees, in just about the most timid, un-Superman like pose ever.

  “Okay, Sara,” I said, pushing myself up. I stood up on trembling legs. “Let’s become a survivor. Okay? Okay.”

  I stood with my feet apart, and I flexed my arms like Mr. America. I didn’t feel strong, though. I felt utterly stupid.

  I tried another pose, hands on my hips, chest out. Okay. Better. I was feeling my fright drain away. This could actually work. Thank you, Delsarte. I stretched my arms out and made a monster face, growling.

  “I am the monster,” I said, making myself as big as possible. “I am strong. I am a survivor. I—”

  CRASH!

  The noise came from behind the bookcase. Was it Gary? Or Rien? I froze for a moment, not sure what I should do. Then I took a deep breath and shook the remainder of my fears away. Whatever it was, I could handle it. I stepped to the bookcase and pulled out Man’s Search for Meaning, not sure what I would find behind the door when it opened.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Sara

  I stepped into the operating room, my eyes darting from side to side. Rien was nowhere to be seen. I heard another crash.

  It came from the waiting room.

  I ran to the doorway and stopped there, frozen in the doorway, unable to believe what I was seeing.

  The metal stool was in Rien’s hand. He’d smashed both of the mirrored walls in the waiting room. He stood in the middle of the room with the broken glass globe at his feet. The shattered mirrors reflected his face a thousand different ways. His face was as white as the tiles in the operating room.

  “Sara?” The question was hoarse and unsteady. He looked around the room in confusion, as though unsure if he had done all of this himself. His reflections splintered in the broken glass.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “It was too much,” he said. The metal stool clanged noisily to the ground. He waved a hand at the broken mirrors. “All of this. Too much.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. He looked up at me like I’d interrupted him.

  “It’s all fake, all of it. The mirrors, they lie. They don’t tell the truth.” He talked like an insane person, running both hands through his hair as he muttered.

  “Rien, I don’t—”

  “You don’t understand! That’s why!” he yelled. Then his voice softened. “It’s me, Sara. I’m sorry. It’s me. Come, let me tell you something.”

  I stepped forward nervously. I didn’t know what to expect when I came through the door, but it wasn’t this. Rien seemed angry, but not at me. He looked angrily at the mirrors and at the broken glass. He took my hands in his and knelt down, pulling me down next to him. I sat on the floor, in the one clean patch of tile that didn’t have shards of glass. He held both of my hands, his palms hot against mine.

  “Have you ever heard of a delusion called Capgras syndrome?”

  “Cap—what?”

  “Capgras. Never mind the name. Names mean nothing. Nothing, right?”

  “Right,” I said dizzily.

  “It’s a disorder I learned about in medical school, during an elective course in neuropsychology. It’s a problem between the thinking part of your brain and the emotional part of your brain.”

  I furrowed my brow and listened closely even though I didn’t understand what exactly he was talking about. He looked so upset, his eyes frantic
.

  “The delusion comes when you look at another person, someone you know. If you have Capgras syndrome, you can recognize someone, but there’s something wrong when you look at them. You feel like they’re an impostor, or a robot. Something that doesn’t have the same emotions as the person you used to know. You recognize their outside, but their inside is gone, disappeared. They’re not themselves.”

  “That’s… that’s a thing? A real disease?” I couldn’t believe it.

  “One woman claimed that her husband had been replaced by an identical copy of his body in the middle of the night. She wouldn’t sleep with him; she locked him out of the house. Because she couldn’t recognize him as the same person he was before. Another man claimed that everybody in the world was a robot but him.”

  “What’s wrong with them?”

  Rien seized my head in his hands with a sudden jerk and I gasped. He leaned close so that his face was only inches from mine.

  My pulse rate jumped up. He looked deep into me, his anger replaced by sadness.

  “What’s wrong with us, Sara? I think I know, but I’m not sure.”

  “You have this thing? This… this syndrome?” Was that why sorrow drew his face tight?

  I could feel his breath on my lips when he answered. His scent was salty, like the ocean, with only a hint of cologne. My heart raced.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. It comes in flashes, not always. Sometimes I can tell when a person is lying. There’s a screen over them, like a mask that only I can see. And sometimes it feels like they don’t even exist, that’s how much they’re pretending. Maybe everybody in the world is really fake.”

  Rien tilted his head, looking at me first at one eye, then the other. He peered into me like he was trying to see something. His fingers gripped my hair.

  “Am I fake?” I gulped. “Do you think I’m fake?”

  “I don’t know, Sara. I don’t know.” His fingers relaxed, and I exhaled slowly. “Sometimes I think you are, and then I look again and I see something so vulnerable that it must be real. Everybody pretends sometimes. It’s the people who think they’re not pretending who are the real liars.”

  I waited for a moment, thinking about all the lies I’d told in the past year. If I had to go to confession, it would take hours. I couldn’t judge Rien.

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “Me?”

  I breathed in, biting my lip.

  “Are you lying to me?”

  He let me go. I rocked back on my knees, trying to catch my breath. His intensity took all of the air out of the room.

  “Maybe. Sometimes, when I look in the mirror, I don’t know what’s looking back. I don’t know who I’m becoming.”

  “You mean, you think you’re the impostor?”

  “I don’t know,” he said sadly. He turned toward the mirrored wall. His face reflected back in myriad broken pieces, flashed through the glass shards on the floor. “Maybe I’m not real. I look at myself but there’s nothing looking back. Sometimes. I’ve learned to live with it, but…”

  He trailed off, his eyes glazing over.

  I thought of something. I cleared my throat and he turned back to me.

  “You asked me before what made me want to be an actress. What made you want to do this?”

  “What made me want to kill? What made me want to murder people?” He looked right at me when he said it.

  “Yes.”

  “It started… it started when I got my first client from the federal witness protection program. Vale came to talk with me before the surgery.”

  Vale? I must have looked at him questioningly, because he explained.

  “My boss. He’s the liaison between the government and the people who do the government’s dirty work. If you think I’m bad… well, he’s been doing this longer than I have. He sent me this client. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was feeling me out for this job. He asked me if I’d be willing to do plastic surgery on a criminal, if I could keep my mouth shut.”

  “The client, he was a mob guy. He needed multiple plastic surgeries before leaving for Canada. I met him the first time, and he was a horrible person. Just horrible. He talked about all of the crimes he’d committed. He talked to me about killing a rival’s family, the wife, the children. One of them a baby. He laughed when he said he would get away with them all.

  “I guess Vale told him that he could talk freely around me. Looking back on it, Vale probably goaded him to brag about his crimes in order to make me sick about it. Then, before his last appointment, Vale came to me and told me that he wanted me to kill the mob guy. To make him disappear, was how he put it. He said that if I didn’t want to do it, he could get someone else to do it. Then he told me what he’d pay.”

  “He offered you a lot of money, I bet.”

  Rien laughed a cold laugh.

  “Sure. You see where I live, don’t you? You see the view from out there. The U.S. government pays its people well. But that wasn’t why I did it.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “I did it because after talking with him, I hated him. I hated that he was going to be able to run away and start over. I hated that this man, this killer, would be out there free and living well, while good people starved on the streets. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. I wanted to do it, you see? I wanted to kill him. And not just kill. I wanted to torture him, to make him pay.”

  His eyes were bright and animated as he spoke. The irises shone like tiger’s eye.

  “And once I’d killed him, I didn’t want to stop. I asked Vale, I remember…” he trailed off, staring blankly into the air. “I asked him in a roundabout kind of way. I remember being nervous that he would say no. But of course he wanted me to work for him. He set me up with all of his clients from then on. And it was beautiful. I felt like it was what I was meant to do. Man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life. And that was my meaning.”

  He closed his eyes, breathing deeply. I didn’t know what to say to him. I didn’t know what he wanted me to say. Here, sitting next to him in a room full of broken glass and mirrors, I was lost in his confusion. So instead, I wrapped my arms around him. I hugged him, this monster, this killer. I hugged him tightly, knowing that he might kill me next. I hugged him because there was nothing else I could do to help and I needed to help him, God only knows why. Because there was something in him that kindled a strange desire, and I had spent my life suppressing my desires. Here, though, there was no reason to hold back.

  Rien was better than me, because he knew what he wanted. His life was real, full of real actions and real consequences. I had spent all of my life pretending. I envied him, in a strange, dark way. I wanted to know what it was like to have that kind of power. To have that kind of meaning.

  A moment passed, and he sat back, trembling.

  “What happened, then?” I said.

  He looked at me, tilting his head. Not understanding.

  “You said you had found your meaning.” I looked around the room, at the broken mirrors, the shards of glass. “What happened? What happened here?”

  “Oh, Sara,” he said. His hands moved to my face, caressing my cheeks. “My dear, my dear.”

  In a thousand different reflections, tears fell from his eyes, twinkling in the low light. He cupped my cheeks and leaned in to me, pressing his forehead against mine in such an intimate pose that I forgot where we were for a moment. His voice was so low that it was almost inaudible.

  “You happened.”

  Rien

  “Me?”

  The girl was beautiful, beautiful and lost at the same time. I could see it in her face, in the slight tremble of her hands. How did she get here? I looked around my waiting room. The walls were spiderwebs of cracks. The mirrors reflecting our sad faces. Scattered at our feet were all the plastic pieces, the reminders of my other victims.

  “You’re not real,” I said. “You’re beautiful and perfect and not real.
I don’t know what to do now that I’ve had a taste of you.”

  “I’m real,” she said. Her lip quivered.

  “You are an actress. It’s what you do. You pretend, and you pretend beautifully. But nothing you’ve done here is real.”

  “No,” she said. Her voice was firmer. “No, that’s not true.”

  “No? Would you have done all this, if I hadn’t asked you to? If a killer hadn’t ordered you to kiss him, would you have done it?”

  “I flirted with you before I knew you were a killer,” she said. She was unsteady.

  “And after you knew? Did you want me? Not just because I told you to?”

  She tilted her face up to me. Her eyelashes fluttered.

  “Yes,” she said quietly.

  “I wish I could believe you,” I said.

  “Why don’t you?” She frowned. “I’m telling you now. There’s no reason for me to lie.”

  “There are always reasons to lie,” I said, waving my hand in irritation. “But it wouldn’t have to be a lie. I have too much first-hand experience with Stockholm Syndrome.”

  “Is that what you think this is?”

  “Isn’t it?” My voice grew louder as anger swept through me. I wanted her. I’d confided to her. And it made me irrationally mad to think that she wasn’t real. It made me even angrier to hear her deny it. “Don’t tell me you’re not acting.”

  “How can I prove that? How can I do anything but tell you I’m not lying?” She sounded as frustrated as I felt.

  I blinked. Proof. Vale needed proof. So did I. I had an idea. Crazy, maybe. But it would help narrow my options. Jake still hadn’t called me back about Susan Steadhill, and time was running out. I was uncertain about Sara, but maybe I didn’t need to be.

  “Come here,” I said. I offered a hand to her, pulling her up from the ground. She stood, and I realized that she wasn’t wearing any panties. She needed something to change into.

  Yes. That would be fine. That would be just fine.

  “Come with me,” I said, pulling her hand. I might be crazy. It might not work. But maybe it would.