“Whoa.” Kat stepped back, startled by his sudden aggression. “Don’t turn this around, Aqua. This is about you. You attacked him.”
“Of course, I attacked him. You think I’m going to let someone hurt him again?”
“Hurt who?” she asked, while a small voice in her head—because this is how crazy life could be—heard Stacy correcting her grammar with a gentle hurt whom.
Aqua said nothing.
“Who is Brandon trying to hurt?”
“You know,” he said.
“No, I don’t.” But now she thought that maybe she did.
“I was hiding right there. You were sitting on Elizabeth’s bench. I heard every word. I told you to leave him alone. Why didn’t you listen?”
“Aqua?”
He closed his eyes.
“Look at me, Aqua.”
He didn’t.
She had to make him say it. She couldn’t put the idea in his head first. “Who do you want us to leave alone? Who are you trying to protect?”
With his eyes still closed, Aqua said, “He protected me. He protected you.”
“Who, Aqua?”
“Jeff.”
There. Aqua had finally said it. Kat had expected that answer—had braced for it—but the blow still landed with enough force to knock her back a step.
“Kat?” Aqua pushed his face against the glass, his eyes shifting left and right to make sure no one could hear him. “We have to stop him. He’s looking for Jeff.”
“And that’s why you attacked him?”
“I didn’t want to hurt him. I just need him to stop. Don’t you see?”
“I don’t,” Kat said. “What are you so afraid he’ll find?”
“He never stopped loving you, Kat.”
She let that one go. “Did you know that Jeff changed his name?”
Aqua turned away.
“He’s Ron Kochman now. Did you know that?”
“So much death,” Aqua said. “It should have been me.”
“What should have been you?”
“I should have died.” Tears ran down his face in free fall. “Then it would all be okay. You’d be with Jeff.”
“What are you talking about, Aqua?”
“I’m talking about what I did.”
“What did you do, Aqua?”
He kept crying. “It’s all my fault.”
“You had nothing to do with Jeff breaking up with me.”
More tears.
“Aqua? What did you do?”
He started to sing. “The gypsy wind it says to me, things are not what they seem to be. Beware.”
“What?”
He smiled through the tears. “It’s like that old song. You remember. The one about the demon lover. The boyfriend dies and so she marries someone else, but she still loves him, only him, and then one day, his ghost comes back to her and they drive away and burst into flames.”
“Aqua, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
But there was something about the song that was familiar. She just couldn’t place it. . . .
“The last lines,” Aqua said. “You have to listen to the last lines. After they burst into flames. You have to listen to that warning.”
“I don’t remember it,” Kat said.
Aqua cleared his throat. Then he sang the last lines in his beautiful, rich voice:
“Watch out for people who belong in your past. Don’t let ’em back in your life.”
Chapter 23
Aqua shut down after that. He just kept singing the same thing over and over: “Watch out for people who belong in your past. Don’t let ’em back in your life.”
When she Googled the lyrics on her phone, it all came flooding back to her. The song was “Demon Lover” by Michael Smith. They had all seen him live in some dingy venue down in the Village twenty years ago. Jeff had scored the tickets, having seen him perform in Chicago two years earlier. Aqua had come with a fellow cross-dresser named Yellow. The two ended up working a drag-queen act out of a club in Jersey City. When they broke up, Aqua naturally claimed: “Aqua clashes with Yellow.”
The lyrics didn’t trigger any more information. She found the song online and listened to it. It was eerie and wonderful, more poetry than song, the story of a woman named Agnes Hines who loved a boy named Jimmy Harris, who died young in a car crash and then came back to her years later, after she was married, in that same car. The song’s message was clear: Keep past lovers in the past.
So was Aqua’s ranting just influenced by a favorite song? Had he simply listened to it and felt that if she kept searching for her demon lover Jeff, they’d both end up bursting into flames like Agnes and Jimmy? Or was there something more?
She thought about Aqua now, how Jeff’s dumping her and returning to Cincinnati had affected him. He had already gotten worse, but Jeff’s departure really set him off the rail. Was he already institutionalized when Jeff left? She tried to think back. No, she thought, it was after.
It didn’t matter. None of it mattered, really. Whatever mess Jeff had gotten himself into—she assumed there was a mess because you don’t change names for no reason—it was his concern, not hers. Despite his insanity, Aqua was the brightest man she had ever known. It was one of the reasons why she loved his yoga so much—the small truths he spoke during mediation, the little vignettes that rang deep, the offbeat way he had to teach a lesson.
For example, singing an obscure song she had last heard nearly two decades ago.
Aqua’s warning, coming from a diseased mind or not, made a lot of sense.
Brandon was awake when she got back from the precinct. He had two black eyes from his broken nose. “Where were you?” he asked.
“How are you feeling?”
“Sore.”
“Take some more painkillers or something. Here, I brought you a couple of cupcakes.” She had stopped at Magnolia Bakery on the way from the Central Park Precinct. She handed him the bag. “I have a favor to ask.”
“Shoot,” Brandon said.
“They caught the man who assaulted you. That’s where I was. At the precinct.”
“Who is he?”
“That’s the favor part. He’s a friend of mine. He thought he was protecting me. I need you to drop the charges.”
She explained, trying to be as vague as humanly possible.
“I’m still not sure I understand,” Brandon said.
“Then do it for me, okay? As a favor.”