Part 7
"Well, sweet Daisy girl
Now your coattails have come undone,
Your whisper's a scream now
Since you don't speak to anyone
Little girl in your white ice skates,
We've seen your face walkin' around the old school gates,
With a hand on your hip and the other one on your head,
You realized it wasn't gone, but lost instead…"
-The Wallflowers
The swirling, inexplicable stream of vapid, coarse city lights spilled into the Lennox hotel suite, shedding new and profound light on the ornate, elegant pieces of furniture that lay in a cluttered mass by the window, and cast the edges of the room into deep, boundless shadows.
A young woman sat on the love sofa, her slim, small legs were crossed restlessly at the knee and her graceful, courtly face was drawn up into tense, rigid lines that did little to mar the inherent beauty of her appearance, but strangely enhanced it, giving her an air of annoyed sweetness. She wore a conservative, black dress whose hem-line just brushed mid-thigh and the shiny, silvery-white buttons that ripped down the front gleamed in the light pouring through the window like drops of moonlight that had accidentally fallen from the heavens and onto her dress.
Her hair was the color of glittering opals, sliding in shimmering waves down her back, unclasped by any such hair clip and left to its own deliciously sensual devices. Two slanted, violet eyes slashed across her face like long, purple dashes of paint and revealed the exotic, Asiatic qualities that dominated her petite, angular face. Her hands were fragile and demurely smooth, unadorned save the glow of a wedding band on her left ring finger, and in her right hand she grasped a crystalline wine glass filled to the brim with a chilled, blood-colored liquid. The other hand was tautly folded on her knee with a degree of excited fear that not even she was aware of.
She made a lovely, ghostly picture, sitting on the cheerfully worn love sofa bathing in a backwash of exuberant, kaleidoscopic light that arose and descended upon her lovesick form in bilious waves, silent and still as any devoted artistic subject. No one watching her, watching that pale and melodic figure, would ever guess that underneath the serene and thoughtful façade lay a robotic subservience, a hollow slip of a person that eternally served and never took, a person whose own pain was minimal to the suffering of others.
Daisy Lennox was a selfless person, a woman whose clear, concise intelligence was blinded by her heart and the emotions in which they oft partook, leaving her vulnerably defenseless against the inhumanity of others and the knives they wielded like shields. This vulnerability, this weakness she carried around like a badge under fire, was probably one of the defining reasons she had ever agreed to marry the attractive, captivating Riley Lennox. He was her immortal protector, her slender lifeline to the world she knew little of, and a constant companion to whom she had pledged her unending love and devotion.
It was, in fact, this ceaseless devotion on Daisy's part which kept them together, for without it, Riley would have surely broken and drifted away like a tumbleweed in the desert wind, forgetting to remember anything they might have shared. Indeed, Riley hadn't always been like that, carelessly negligent to the needs of others, but Daisy, poor Daisy, could never possibly understand that the melancholy of Riley was not something she could cure, she did not yet know that there were things unspoken, wild, secret delusions as of yet unshaped. Daisy could not possibly know that she couldn't ever be anything more to Riley than a distant star, beautiful and illustrious, but distant, no closer to him than the far away moons and planets circling the sky in their removed orbits.
Daisy Lennox was often this way, for she was a hollow woman, a woman who could never see that this was the way thing should be and to change them would be to die, lost in a million separate and distinct deaths. Perhaps this was another reason why Daisy had married Riley at all, out of the sheer incapacity to see things as they were and to twist them in her mind as to make it somehow possible to change the impossible.
At least, this was what Riley Lennox was thinking as he stood in the hollow of the doorway watching the rise and fall of that exquisite girl, feeling everything between horror and antipathy and back. He had never known quite what to make of this self-less child he had somehow ended up marrying, had somehow ended up falling to and living with, giving nothing and getting everything in return. Daisy was paradox to him, a thing that went beyond the bounds of normalcy and into the realm of the unknown, an unreachable capacity for which he was never quite worthy of achieving.
There was no question he was completely unworthy of her as he was, broken and shattered beyond any distinguishable recognition, and that she should, if she had any common sense about her, leave him and start the innumerable search for the one who could pragmatically heal the many wounds Riley had no doubt inflicted upon her during the course of their seven year marriage. And therefore, in light of Daisy's pure unselfishness and sweetness that would never find an equal in this world or the next, it was a shame she had to have fallen for someone as completely unmerited to her profound and phenomenal ways as Riley, someone who would crush her loving and unselfish spirit without even realizing.
And yet, this was the way Daisy was, at once vacant and penetrating, superficially shallow and so very, very deep. She loved unwisely and when she gave that unwise love to someone, she gave it everything, she gave it all she was and had and would ever, could ever hope to be. It was in this respect that Daisy transcended the simple expectation that people often boxed her into, and became a sphinx of secrets, never certain but always sure. It was what had initially attracted Riley to her, that summer on the docks of Lake Odessa, when she had walked past him in that tiny, navy excuse for a bikini and that covert, Mona Lisa smile promising she had done splendid, clandestine things and even more magnificent, dangerous things were hovering about in the next hour. It was in that space of delicate time, that framework of glorious inattention, that Riley had forgotten Monique and the things that lay like slashed crepe de chine between them and focused on Daisy and the buoyancy that would help him forget, if only in for a little while.
He had seen that exact quality in the girl Jolie tonight, that unrestrained levity that could never be pushed back or renounced even by the most ghastly of tragedies. And he had sensed something of a tragedy in Jolie, a sort of grisly dismemberment that disfigured the essence and the core of a person until there was nothing left but the facsimile of a shadow and the levity that was but a mere eclipse of what had once been there. He recognized Jolie as a kindred soul.
The telephone rang beside the bed, lifting Daisy and Riley out of the moment and into themselves, ruining the bare agitation of the instant, spurring it on to roll and dive away from them, away from them into the city and beyond. A flash of regret resounded in Riley's mind, pulling with it the lost regret he had somehow tumbled from and into, ignoring as swiftly and neatly as he did Daisy. It was with this great lamentation that he disjointed himself from the concave door hollow and into the actual room, tugging himself to mechanically stand beside the bed and lift the phone and bring it to his ear.
"Hello?" Out of the corner of his eye he could see Daisy whirl and look upon him, startled and amazed to have the trivial concentration she had placed so much stock in, dishonored by an unusual voice coming at her from an unknown distance.
"Yes, Hello? May I please speak to a…Riley Lennox?" It was the voice of Jolie coming through the receiver, swimming across the range that separated him from her, like blessings and disallowances attacking his meager defenses without pause.
"This is he."
"Oh, this is…this is Jolie. We met at the poetry house last night? You asked for my help?" Her voice was so doubtful it made him want to rush over to wherever she was and protect her, cover her from the sure and painful distress she must be feeling.
"Yes, I remember. Does this mean you've changed…"
"Yes." She cut him sharply and the nerves in her voice were jangling like live wires.
"You'll help me?"
"If you'll have me. I know I seem young, and to you I must appear somewhat inexperienced, but I can assure you I am not as naïve as I can look like to others." She paused, and he could hear her warm breath on the telephone, wondering if she should continue or not. "I can see things."
"That's why I chose you, because you 'see things'. You can view what others cannot, what I cannot. You can glimpse the death of ones who deserved not to die."
"I can help you."
"I know." Everything was silent for a second, and neither Jolie nor Riley said a single thing, each one wondering what the other was thinking.
"Riley?" Jolie broke the silence first, saying his name like an epiphany she had just now discovered, wonderful and new.
"Yes?"
"We have to go somewhere don't we? We have to go to…Hollenbrooke?"
"Yes." Bewilderment shot through him that she could pick that up, could pick up from him where and when they were going to have to travel to find the disorienting aberration that hexed Riley day and night. "We have to go to Hollenbrooke."
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