Tuesday Mooney Wore Black

by Kate Racculia

  The Much Worse was her brother treating her like she would break, or had already broken, like she had to be kept on a high shelf and not be played with, ever, because if she broke any more she’d have to be thrown away. The Much Worse was the ghost of Abby Hobbes never shutting up, talking and talking and talking and not telling her anything she didn’t already know.

  The Much Worse was that Wednesday in Mr. Mulrooney’s homeroom the week before Christmas break. Salem was a small town. It had been two weeks since she’d met with Detective Finch. She’d seen the woman with the glasses who took notes only once, but the rumors were already out. The stories. The information. She’d seen it doodled in Sharpie in the third stall of the second-floor girls’ bathroom:

  Someone else had decided this was too subtle, and clarified:

  She had a test later, sixth period. Physics. She’d barely studied at home, and was trying to catch up before morning announcements when Santa Claus arrived. His pillow-stuffed costume filled Mulrooney’s doorway, he ho-ho-hoed, shook his hips more than his belly, and proclaimed he had holiday cheer to deliver. Candygrams. Tuesday had never gotten one before, but then, she’d never sent one either. She turned back to her physics. Santa made his merry way around the room.

  Then he placed a candy cane, tied with a red ribbon and a card, on the corner of her desk.

  Tuesday’s hands tingled as she pried open the card.

  Someone had drawn a cartoon ghost, like the ghosts in Pac-Man, surrounded by stars. MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM THE GREAT BEYOND! DON’T GIVE UP.

  It was signed xo, Abby.

  It was cruel. It was bizarre. It was perversely everything she wanted to hear.

  In Mr. Mulrooney’s homeroom, on a Wednesday morning when she had never felt more alone, or less like herself, Tuesday cried. She covered her face with her hands and her shoulders shook and she cried, sort of but not really quietly, all through the announcements, and at least no one laughed at her. But no one helped her either. Not even Mulrooney.

  She had disappeared.

  In January, when the skies were gray and Salem was covered with dirty snow, she gave up. She couldn’t do it anymore. She couldn’t listen to Abby, couldn’t pretend she wasn’t crazy, because she didn’t have the power or the energy to do anything about it even if it was all true. Even if Abby was murdered. Even if Finch had a theory. She could not be this girl anymore, this sad, breakable, hysterical girl, this girl she had never really been inside, but if that’s what she looked like, she must be, right?

  And Abby would not. Stop. Talking.

  At thirteen minutes after midnight on a Friday, she slid the planchette over Abby’s Ouija board to spell I’M SORRY. I LOVE YOU. GO AWAY.

  Uh, Tues, said Abby. For real?

  Tuesday spelled PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE.

  Abby took so long to respond that Tuesday wondered if it had really been that easy. Then she said, You know, it doesn’t work that way.

  Tuesday snuffled. Her head felt like it was peeling apart down the middle, halving like an orange.

  “How does it work, Abby?” she said.

  I’m part of you, said Abby. Forever. You’re like a radio – even if you’re not tuned to the right station, I’m, like … here. Always.

  Tuesday didn’t know what to say to that. It made perfect sense and no sense at all.

  “Can I turn myself off?” she mumbled.

  Yes, said Abby. You know you can.

  Tuesday went to sleep. She didn’t dream. When she woke up, Abby’s voice was still there, fainter, more echo than anything, but when she asked how Tuesday was feeling this morning, Tuesday couldn’t answer. She didn’t feel good or bad or hungry or hot or cold or hopeful or worried or afraid or happy. She felt – nothing. She felt blank. She felt empty. She didn’t want anything; nothing mattered, because there wasn’t anywhere to go from here. She knew her name was Tuesday. She knew she had once loved witches and magic with her best friend, her best friend who taught her what it means to disappear, her friend whose body hadn’t been buried but was probably dead, who didn’t know who had killed her. Nobody understood or recognized who Tuesday was now.

  Not even Tuesday.

  She had lost herself.

  12

  CAUGHT UP

  Dex didn’t check his phone until he left the office at five – early for him on a Tuesday, but he had The Date and he was nervous about it. By the time he saw the text, or rather the series of texts, it was too late. The damage was substantial.

  According to the time stamp, Tuesday had begun texting at twelve forty-three.

  Hey

  I have bad news

  Dex?

  Well I’m just going to tell you

  I’ve been holding it inside for hours and I’m ready now so you’re going to hear

  What I have to say

  The time stamp jumped a half hour, to one-fifteen.

  I got fired

  They fired me

  Nathaniel ducking Arches turned over the binder of research I did on his family

  That I gave to Archie

  I think the fucker sold me out

  And of course that whole binder was like

  A terrible violation of patient privacy

  Hospital policy

  General decency

  Everything

  So Mo fired me

  Tuesday followed this with several rows of crying-face emojis.

  I don’t even blame her

  My ass deserved it

  God why am I so FUCKING

  DUMB

  The time stamp then jumped to three-thirty—

  I need alcohol meet me at McFly’s as soon as you can

  —and by four fifty-two had devolved into:

  DEX DEX DEX DEX

  WHERE ARE YOUUUUU I’m going to make some VERY BAD CHOICES tonight

  I would hate for you to miss it

  Dex didn’t know which was more distressing: the fact that this was the single longest series of texts Tuesday had ever sent him, or the content of the texts themselves.

  This was how Tuesday Mooney asked for help.

  He flew to McFly’s.

  When he arrived fifteen minutes later, Tuesday was sitting at the bar. More like leaning against the bar on a stool, her body rubbery as a noodle, one foot propped on a red and white Staples copy paper box. A lit cigarette between her first and middle fingers sent a column of lazy smoke to the ceiling.

  “You’re not supposed to smoke,” said Dex, because he was too shocked to say anything else. “I mean, inside. In here. Also, you don’t smoke.”

  “I’m just holding it,” she said. She knocked her head back toward the bartender, a tall guy with no hair and a gut that stretched the Sox logo on his T-shirt into a thigh-high. “Nick said it was okay.” She waved the cigarette in the air. “It makes me feel so goddamn cool. I get it. I get it, Joe Camel. I feel like Bette Davis. And Joan Crawford. I feel like Baby Jane and Blanche had a baby, and she is me.” She clenched her teeth in a terrible impression of, perhaps, Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford. “I want to eat a man.”

  “Wow,” said Dex. “I’m torn. You’re super-fun right now but also clearly in a lot of pain.” He looked at Nick. “Nick,” he said, “we’ll talk about your culpability later, but right now can I get some bourbon? Neat.”

  “We are not fucking around today,” mumbled Tuesday. “No we are not.”

  Dex took his drink and Tuesday by the elbow and steered both to a high table in a dark corner. My stuff! she said, waving the cigarette at the Staples box, and Dex, understanding this, this, held all her worldly office possessions, dutifully retrieved it. He had never seen her quite like this. Her head literally lolled. She bobbed and jerked like a bird, weaving the cigarette through the air and exclaiming with glee at the smoke patterns. It had been a minor shock to see her intoxicated two Fridays ago, but this was something else entirely. This was self-medicating drunk, this was it fucking hurts drunk, this was the only way I know how to survive being alive righ
t now is legal poison in my body drunk. Dex wasn’t much of a hugger, or an expresser of earnest personal emotion – he was expressive, sure, his whole life was one extended urge to Madonna-style express himself. But when he really felt something, he was much more likely to keep it to himself, to keep it down deep, to turn it over and over in his soul like the Precious. Which, he had always assumed, was probably why he and Tuesday clicked in the first place. They suspected how deeply the other felt things, and it was almost too deep to talk about. So they didn’t.

  But after he set down her box – it was so light! – he wanted to hug her, hug her hard and not let go, and he thought, for the first time ever, that she might not stiffen into a block of ice if he tried. She might go boneless. She might cry. He almost went for it. He would have, if she hadn’t stubbed the cigarette out on the table at that moment and followed it with a wet raspberry.

  She turned to him.

  “Well fuck,” she said. “I’m already drunk and trivia doesn’t start for hours.”

  “Obligatory question,” Dex said. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Tuesday wiggled her nose. “Maybe? Ask me.”

  “I just did.”

  “Ask me a different, more specific question.”

  Dex slid a gulp of bourbon down his own throat.

  “Okay,” he said. “How do you feel?”

  “Oh! That’s easy!” She finger-flicked the crumpled cigarette off the table with an audible fap. “I feel awful. I did something bad. Am I a bad person?” He shook his head. “But I did something really bad. I snooped in Nathaniel Arches’s medical records to satisfy my own curiosity, which is one hundred percent illegal, and also just kind of … gross. All because I got caught up—” She flapped her hands in the air. “Caught up in this bullshit, in the Archeses – es – Pryce, this game. I forgot I’m a real person with a real life who has real bills, and now I’m really mega fucking screwed.”

  Dex nodded. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s surprising – uh, a surprisingly clear, mostly sane grasp of your situation.”

  “I need another drink,” said Tuesday.

  “Maybe later. Next question: what are you going to do now?”

  “Obvies,” said Tuesday. “Go to Disneyland.”

  “Seriously,” said Dex.

  “Seriously. By Disneyland I mean Pryce’s funeral.” She slammed her fist on the table so hard the bourbon jumped in his glass. “That – that Archie.” She grabbed his sleeve, twisted her fingers deep in the fabric. “We were supposed to – tonight. But Archie ghosted me, Dex. I left him the binder of research and somehow his brother got it and used it to get me fired and now Archie’s not answering my texts. He’s—”

  Dex had never, ever seen her like this.

  “He disappeared,” she said in a very small, very un-Tuesday voice. “Will you go with me? To the funeral?” She whispered, as though there was anyone else in the bar who might care they had a secret. “What should we do with our combined twenty-six thousand dollars?”

  “Tuesday,” Dex said, and cleared his throat. “Uh, you should know I—”

  He didn’t know, exactly, how to tell her.

  He’d had a terrible day at work on Friday, and not just bored-to-death terrible, actively soul-blackening terrible. During a monthly meeting with the investment managers, meant to update the staff about trends – what they were buying, what they were selling or excited about – everyone had been jazzed about investing in a new pharmaceutical company with a promising treatment for type 2 diabetes. Because instead of looking at diabetes as something to cure, to manage, or as a symptom of something greater – instead of investigating genetic factors, or the industrial food supply, or, hell, big pharma’s vested interest and influence in increasing diagnoses, or at the most basic level remembering that diabetes is a real thing that affects the lives of real individual humans – instead of doing any of that, Dex and his colleagues used the fact of diabetes as a trend to make money. And the more people who got diabetes, the more people who needed this drug, the more money Dex and his colleagues would make for their already wealthy investors, and they were so fucking pleased with themselves for being clever when what they really were was disgusting.

  Dex felt disgusting.

  So he took a very, very long lunch. He left the financial district, passed through Downtown Crossing to the Common, filling with students and escaping office drones like himself. Enjoying what could be the last warm Friday lunch break of the year, tossing Frisbees to each other on the rolling hills, sitting up on their elbows on blankets, leaning back with crossed legs on benches. The Thought that was always there, waiting in the wings, muscled its way to center stage in his brain: how had he become this person? This person who worked in an office selling promises, abstract ideas about money that he barely cared about – who made a living exploiting opportunities, which might as well have been investment code for screwing people who weren’t paying attention? And he wasn’t bad at it. Which wasn’t a prerequisite for not doing it, but was its own bleak truth.

  He did not want to make a living like this.

  But he didn’t know how else to live.

  The other Dex, the showboater, the singer, the dancer, the idiot dreamer, wouldn’t have a nice place in the South End. Wouldn’t have this beautiful shirt. Or these shoes. Or his retirement savings, his daily freedom from want. Ha, he thought. Free from want. He was entirely made of existential want, and guilt, and this horrible flickering feeling of fading out, his self snuffing like a candle. He wanted to be himself again. He wanted all these other parts of him to be seen, to live beyond this narrow life.

  He wanted to be of value to someone.

  He thought about the game. About Vincent Pryce. A billionaire, self-made. He pulled Pryce’s obit up on his phone. I have arrived at death’s doormat with a full heart and full pockets. I regret the latter.

  Dex looked up at the high sun. His heart was full, all right.

  He knew how he was going to spend Vincent Pryce’s thirteen thousand dollars.

  “What,” said Tuesday. “Dex. What’s going on in your head? There’s a lot going on.”

  “I’ve already, uh.” He swallowed. “Committed the capital.”

  “What?”

  “I spent it.”

  “You already spent your thirteen thou – you mean the funky irons? That you had in the fire?”

  Dex curled away from her, though he wasn’t ashamed. He didn’t regret what he’d done, which was refreshing. But Tuesday was so hurt, so tender at the moment, he had the feeling the faintest suggestion that he’d made plans that didn’t include her would be an injury. All the years he’d known her, he had never once worried about hurting her. Tuesday was goddamn impervious, assured and contained, too remote to wound. But maybe all that time—

  Maybe all that time she’d been pretending.

  “Yes,” he said.

  She bugged her eyes at him.

  “Are you – going to tell me?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You’re killing me, Poin” – she swayed – “dexter. I know … I know I was a jerk, the way I kept the whole Archie-isn’t-Nathaniel thing a secret. At first.” She swallowed.

  Dex thought, Not unlike everything else that goes on in that deep dark pit of an inner life you’ve got there.

  “Sorry about that,” she said. “It wasn’t that I didn’t trust you.”

  “I know,” said Dex, not because it was true, but because that was what she needed to hear. Of course she didn’t trust him. Of course Dex was lumped in with all the rest of humanity, in the great pool of Things Tuesday Mooney Doesn’t Trust. But maybe, lately – lately it felt like that had been shifting. Just a little. Shockingly. But now, the person she didn’t trust, if he was playing armchair psychologist – which, let’s be honest, when wasn’t he playing armchair psychologist? – was herself. What she didn’t trust was that she meant something to other people. That she had the right to insist on her own worth.
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br />   “I didn’t want to be wrong,” she said. “And I just – wanted to keep it my own secret for a little while.” She looked down at the table. “He brought me pastry.”

  “That asshole,” said Dex. Making jokes was a reflex.

  She covered her face with both hands.

  “Okay!” He clapped his own hands together and she jumped a little. “I’ll tell you! It’s a crazy plan! Are you ready?”

  She peeked over the tops of her fingers.

  “I bought two bespoke suits,” said Dex. “Of armor.”

  Tuesday lowered her hands.

  “What?” she said.

  “I bought two bespoke suits of armor.”

  “I guess I heard you the first time.”

  “Chain mail, breastplate, gauntlets, helmet with a big old plume. The whole ye olde Ren Faire package.”

  She dipped her head to the side. Opened her mouth and held it open. The edges twitched like she wanted to laugh.

  Good.

  “Let me explain,” said Dex.

  She did laugh.

  “You’ll recall I met Bert Hatmaker last week to return Lyle Pryce’s beverage tumblers, at the library,” he said. “He took me up to see the murals on the second floor. They’re all – Holy Graily. Galahaddy. He expressed an interest in knights and quests, and also me.”

  “Called it.” She mimed lifting a glass, an empty toast to her own wisdom.

  “Yes, you’re a genius. I’m going to ask him to go to Pryce’s funeral with me. Tonight. I’m meeting him for drinks in—” He looked at his watch. “Fifteen. What he doesn’t know is that drinks will then segue into a fitting for said bespoke suits of armor, from a costume designer I found online – be proud of me, I learned from the master – who lives in Malden, and paid double to work quickly. Because we need costumes for the funeral this Friday. Oh!” He’d almost forgotten. “He knew about the underground theater. He asked me if I’d found it.”