Page 64 of Spiders in the Grove

“Victor doesn’t want to see anybody,” Mozart says, and my heart falls. “Technically, the doctor’s orders came from Victor Faust.”

I can’t speak for a moment; not only because I have no idea what to say to that, but my chest feels heavy, and there’s an ache in my heart, twisting and squeezing the life out of it.

I shove him to the side and push my way past anyway.

When I make it into the room, I expect to see Victor laid-up in a bed with tubes hanging from him, but that’s not what I see at all. Victor is standing near the bed, and he’s putting on his dress shirt, with difficulty. I go over to help him, glad that he doesn’t push me away like I halfway expected him to do. His midsection is bandaged all the way around; over the gunshot wound, blood had seeped through the gauze and dried.

“What are you doing, Victor?” I try to lead him back to the bed, and this time he pushes me away.

“I have somewhere I need to be,” he says, not looking at me.

“Where? Where could you possibly need to be other than this bed after being shot?” There’s no hiding the anger and disapproval in my voice.

“I tried to tell her,” Mozart says from the doorway, “but she…insisted.”

“It is fine,” Victor tells him, and buttons up his shirt. “I need a moment alone with Izabel.”

Mozart nods and leaves the room, closing the door behind him.

I turn to Victor immediately.

“If this is about me going to—”

“Everything is about you, Izabel,” he cuts me off, and I flinch. “It just took getting shot to realize it.”

I step back, pause, searching for words. “You…got shot because of me?” I’m not sure that’s what he’s saying, but it feels like it.

Victor sighs; he closes the last button.

“Can you not see what having you in my life is doing to me?”—(I flinch again at his words, dreading the rest of them)—“It ends today,” he says, and my heart sinks.

“What ends today?” Please don’t say it…

He limps over to the chair beside the window where he sits, grimacing with the effort, and attempts to put on his shoes.

I can’t move; I want to help him with that, too, but forcing my body into motion seems like an impossible task right now.

“What ends today?” I repeat.

Raising his eyes from his shoes, Victor looks across the room at me.

“Tell me about Javier Ruiz,” he says.

“What do you want to know? You want me to tell you that I never killed him that night in Texas? That I was going to betray you?” (I just assume he knows all this stuff; and even if not, I had planned to tell him anyway.) “Well it’s true, all of it: I didn’t kill him that night, and yes, I agreed to help him, and I was going to betray you. But you know what”—I move across the room toward him, anger, and guilt, in every swift step—“I didn’t betray you. I didn’t help him. And I was only going to go through with it because of my daughter—you would’ve done the same. And you know what else? I did kill him this time.” I stop in front of him, glaring down into his eyes. “You want me to tell you about Cesara? You want me to admit to sleeping with her. Well I did. I did it only because I had to. I did it for my job, for my life—again, you would’ve done the same. What else do you want to know?”

Victor stands, and I take a step back.

“Where the hell are you going?”

He casually walks past me toward the door, taking his suit jacket from the coat rack on his way.

“Victor!”

He stops; his back is to me.

I feel like I’m about to fall apart, that my whole body is held together by a single thread, and that Victor is about to pull it and unravel me when he walks out that door.

I’m not going to let him.

---