He took a deep breath. “I have some — unpleasant things to tell you.
And I know that when I’m finished, I’ll lose you.”
“Gabriel, please. I — ”
“Please, just let me say it.” He tugged at his hair wildly. “Before I lose my courage.”
He closed his eyes and inhaled once again. And when he opened them, he peered over at her like a wounded dragon. “You are looking at a murderer.”
Sounds hit her ears but didn’t sink into her consciousness. She thought she’d heard wrong.
“Not only am I a murderer, I took innocent life.
“If you can stand to remain in the same room with me for a few minutes, I’ll explain how this came to be.” He waited for her to react, but she sat quietly, so he continued. “I went to Magdalen College, Oxford, for my master’s degree. You know this already. What you don’t know is that while I was there I met an American girl called Paulina.”
Julia inhaled sharply, and Gabriel paused. Every time she’d asked him about Paulina he’d always put her off. He’d tried to make her think that she was not a threat, but Julia hadn’t believed him. Of course Paulina was a threat to their creeping closeness. Paulina had pulled him away in the middle of dinner back in October. And before he’d run away Gabriel had stood, haggard, quoting Lady Macbeth. Julia trembled slightly in anticipation.
“Paulina was an undergraduate. She was attractive, tall and regal with blond hair. She liked to tell people that she was related to the Russian ar-istocracy, an Anastasia of sorts. We became friends and would spend time together on occasion, but it wasn’t physical. I was seeing other girls, and she was pining away for someone…”
He cleared his throat nervously.
“I graduated and moved to Harvard. We kept in touch via e-mail for a year or so, very casually, and she told me she’d been accepted to Harvard for her master’s degree. She was studying to become a Dostoyevsky specialist.
She needed help finding a place to live, so I told her about a vacancy in my building. She moved in that August.”
He gazed at Julia searchingly. She nodded, trying to keep her trepida-tion from showing on her face.
“The year she arrived was my most difficult. I was working on my dissertation along with being a teaching assistant to a very demanding professor.
I was staying up all hours writing and getting very little sleep. That was when I started doing cocaine.” His gaze dropped, and he fidgeted with his hands, drumming atop the table.
“I used to go drinking with the guys from my program on the weekends. We’d get into fights, on occasion.” He laughed. “I wasn’t always on my best behavior, and sometimes we’d go out looking for trouble. It paid off, though, with Simon.”
He leaned forward in his chair, resting his forearms on top of his knees.
Julia watched his legs bounce nervously. With every sentence he grew more restless, indicating that he was approaching closer and closer to the edge of the abyss in which he had hidden his secret.
“One night someone passed around some coke. I wondered if it would help me stay up so I could work. That’s how it started. I used it as a stimulant, and I alternated its use with alcohol. I thought because I went to Harvard, I was a respectable recreational drug user. I thought I could control it.” He sighed deeply and the tone of his voice dropped. “I was wrong.”
“Paulina was constantly around. She’d knock on my door at all hours because I was always awake. I’d write, and she’d sit on my couch and read or make Russian tea. She started cooking for me. Eventually, I gave her a key since she was over all the time. When I was doing coke, I didn’t eat much.
She was the only reason I ate anything nutritious at all.”
Now Gabriel’s voice took on a darker tone, as if the guilt inside him was clawing to get out. He read the question in her eyes and his jaw set.
“She knew about the cocaine. At first I tried to hide it, but she was always there. Finally, I gave up and started doing it in front of her. She didn’t care.”
Now he avoided Julia’s gaze. He looked ashamed. “She’d lived a shel-tered life. She was completely innocent about drugs and a lot of other things.
I was a corrupting influence. One night, she stripped out of her clothes and suggested we snort lines off one another. I wasn’t thinking straight, obviously, and she was naked…”
He exhaled slowly and shook his head, keeping his eyes on his fidgeting hands. “I won’t make excuses. It was my fault. She was a nice girl who was used to getting what she wanted. And she wanted me — the drug addict downstairs.” He rubbed at his chin with the back of his hand, and Julia suddenly realized he hadn’t shaved that morning.
He squirmed in his chair. “The next morning I told her I’d made a mistake. I wasn’t interested in being monogamous. The coke made me crave sex, although it eventually impaired my satisfaction. Karma, I suppose. I was used to being with different women every weekend. But when I told her all of this, she said she didn’t care. No matter what I said or did, or how much of an ass**le I was to her, she kept coming around. So that’s how it was. She acted as if she was my girlfriend, and I acted as if she was a convenient lay. I didn’t care about her, I only cared about myself and the drugs and the damned dissertation.”
Julia felt her heart sink. She knew that Gabriel had never wanted for female companionship. He was a handsome man who was sensual in the extreme. Women fell all over themselves in order to attract his attention.
Julia wasn’t pleased about his past, but she’d accepted it and told herself that it didn’t matter.
But Paulina was different. She’d known this intuitively from the first time she heard the name. Even though she believed Gabriel was no longer involved with her, what he was beginning to describe was much more serious than a one-night stand. The green specter of jealousy curled around her heart, squeezing it.
Gabriel stood up and started pacing, back and forth and back and forth. “Everything came to a crashing halt when she told me that she was pregnant. I accused her of trying to entrap me and told her to get rid of it.” His face contorted with emotion, and he looked as if he were in pain.
“She cried. She got on her knees and said that she’d been in love with me since Oxford and that she wanted my baby. I wouldn’t listen. I threw some money at her for an abortion and pushed her out of my apartment as if she were trash.” Gabriel groaned — a twisted cry that seemed to come from the depths of his soul. He rubbed at his eyes with his fingers.
Julia placed a shaking hand to her mouth. She hadn’t expected this.
But as her mind raced ahead, a number of pieces of the puzzle that was Professor Emerson began to come together.
“I didn’t see her again for a long time. I assumed she’d had the abortion. I didn’t even bother to find out, that’s how f**ked up I was. A couple of months later, I stumbled into the kitchen one morning and found an ultrasound snapshot on my refrigerator. With a note.”
He slumped back in his chair and placed his head in his hands. “She wrote, ‘This is your daughter, Maia. Isn’t she beautiful?’” Gabriel’s words were half strangled by the sob that escaped from his chest.
“I could see the outline of her little head and nose, her tiny arms and legs. Little hands and little feet. She was beautiful. This beautiful, fragile little baby. My little girl. Maia.” He swallowed another sob. “I didn’t know. It wasn’t real. She wasn’t real until I saw her picture and…” Gabriel was crying.
Julia saw tears roll down his cheeks, and her heart ached. As her own eyes filled with tears she moved to go to him, but he raised a hand to stop her.
“I told Paulina I’d help with the baby. Of course, I was broke. I’d spent all my money on drugs and had already run up a tab with my dealer.
Paulina knew that and somehow she still wanted me. We got back together, and she’d read on my couch while I wrote my dissertation. She stayed away from the drugs and tried to take care of herself and the baby. I tried to quit, but I couldn’t.”
He pulled his head up to look over at Julia. “Do you want to hear the rest? Or are you ready to leave now?”
She didn’t hesitate. She walked over to him and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. “Of course I want to hear the rest.”
He clung to her tightly, but only for a moment before he pushed her away and wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand. She stood to one side awkwardly while he continued his confession.
“Paulina’s parents lived in Minnesota. They weren’t wealthy, but they would send her money. Grace used to send me money too, whenever I called her. Somehow we were able to stay afloat. Or at least, delay the inevitable.
But I used most of the money for drugs.” He laughed darkly. “What kind of man takes money away from a pregnant woman and wastes it on cocaine?”
He quickly continued. “One night in September, I went on a bender. I was gone for a couple of days, and when I finally came home I collapsed on the sofa. I didn’t even make it to the bedroom. I woke up the next morning completely hungover. I stumbled down the hall and saw blood on the floor.”