“What’s her story?” Rabbit asked softly, and Dex had to shrug his shoulders.
“She’s from Salem,” he said.
“What does that have to do with anything?” Rabbit asked. “Unless she’s a witch.”
“She’s pathologically independent. She knows everything. Other than that, she’s a mystery,” Dex said. “I honestly – I wish I did. Know her story. I wish she’d tell me.”
“When was the last time you asked?”
Dex stared straight ahead and blinked. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “This night hasn’t gone exactly as planned.”
Rabbit perked. “There was a plan?” he said. “Beyond drinks?”
“There still is,” Dex said. The thought of salvaging the night, of the surprise still to come, lifted something in his chest. “We’re a little late, though.”
“For what?”
“First, I have something to ask you.”
They didn’t stop walking. Rabbit moved closer, brushing his arm against Dex’s.
“Fire away,” said Rabbit.
Dex had asked men to parties before: holiday gatherings for work, weddings – once, he’d even bought two tickets to one of Tuesday’s benefit galas for the hospital. But this felt different. This all felt different, and he couldn’t say why, other than – all of this was different. All of this, with Rabbit, in his life at this precise moment, was familiar but unlike anything that had come before.
“Will you be my date to the funeral?” he asked. It came out all in a rush. “If the banker can have a date, that is.”
Rabbit slid his arm through Dex’s.
“If you’re okay with meeting the banker at the funeral, then yes, the banker can.”
“I’ve never dated a banker before,” said Dex. “I’ve generally made a point not to.”
“Is that the plan? The whole plan?”
“No, there’s more.” He reached into his coat pocket for his phone. “I got us costumes,” he said.
He felt Rabbit’s arm tense.
“What?” said Dex.
“I already have a costume,” Rabbit said. “Vince – had something in mind.”
Dex sunk a little. But only a little. “You don’t even know what it is yet.” He turned the image on his phone up toward Rabbit’s face. “Ever had a bespoke suit before?”
Rabbit gasped, then laughed, then let it die. He clutched Dex’s arm.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey, stop for a second.”
They were at the corner of Charles and Mount Vernon, in sight of the 7-Eleven, with its fancy wood-and-gold-leaf sign, because the tony denizens of Beacon Hill had decreed that even the 7-Eleven in their midst mustn’t look cheap.
“Look at me,” said Rabbit, and Dex did, and saw that Rabbit looked absolutely awful.
Guilty.
“Stop,” said Dex. “It’s fine that you already have a costume for Friday. We’ll wear these – Saturday. Or next Halloween. Or around town, for, like, kicks.”
Rabbit snorted. He still looked distraught.
Dex continued. “And I didn’t tell you about Tuesday getting fired to make you feel bad. It’s incredible what you did for Vince. Scurrying around in the T. Setting up that theater underground.” Rabbit blushed. “You didn’t get her fired. Sure—” Dex turned his palms up. “Did you create the basic circumstances that eventually led Tuesday to become the architect of her own downfall?”
Rabbit winced.
“You’re just one person. You don’t have the power to get her fired, but you’re acting like a Swiffer for guilt. Does the guilt naturally cling to you? Are you Catholic?”
“No,” said Rabbit, “but I get that a lot.”
Dex beheld him and thought, It’s a good thing you never worked in finance, because that hyperdeveloped conscience of yours would have been the death of you.
“You’d make a terrible real banker,” is what he said.
Tuesday sat on the cold wooden bench at the Charles/MGH station and waited for the train.
The station was elevated, outside and open to the air; the tracks followed the Longfellow Bridge across the Charles, carrying passengers between Boston and Cambridge. If the sky hadn’t been so overcast, and the city lights so ambient, she might have been able to see stars. She was still drunk – she’d consumed enough booze tonight to remain drunk for the next two days – but what she felt more than anything was—
She didn’t know.
She felt slack. Tired and grumpy. She should have been satisfied, full up with the scoop that Rabbit was the banker, and yet she didn’t; she felt bad. Dex was pissed at her. He was right to be pissed at her. But she was pissed at him too, and hurt, because he was going to fall in love. Dex was going to fall in love with Rabbit. Move in with him. Maybe even get married; so long as he didn’t move out of Massachusetts, Dex was the marrying kind. She could see it clearly, and she was thrilled for him. She was happy he had found what he’d been looking for, but she was worried too – selfishly worried – that Dex would go away. That she’d just picked her head up and realized what knowing Dex, having Dex as a friend, meant to her, and now – poof! Gone.
She was a monster. She was a cruel monster to be mad at him for being happy, for being worried that things would change. And – think clearly, Tuesday, think: Dex wouldn’t abandon her. And hadn’t she herself been anxious, two weeks ago, that Dex was getting clingy? Jesus, what was her problem? She was a mess. Life was change, constant change and uncertainty, and she couldn’t help it, despite knowing this was just the way things were – she didn’t know how to understand this irrational—
Fear.
She sniffed. She was cold. Her coat was too light for mid-October, but she hadn’t anticipated being out this late, because she hadn’t anticipated being fired this morning, because she hadn’t anticipated being caught, and she hadn’t anticipated Nathaniel Arches or Archie – she hadn’t anticipated Archie, period. She hated him. A lot. She wanted him, or she had, a lot, when she left Pryce’s apartment on Friday, and left them both hanging, wanting more than either of them had already given. She wondered again, for half a second, if something awful had happened. If he hadn’t ghosted her on purpose. If Nathaniel – had done something.
She was too exhausted to go back up the Hill to Vincent Pryce’s apartment, to see for herself. But she should try texting Archie again.
She sat up, reached for her phone, then got dizzy and super-extra-tired and decided to snuggle her Staples box instead. She laid her head in the crook of her arm.
The outbound platform was empty. A train had pulled away as she was stepping on the escalator, and even if she’d cared enough to run, she would have missed it. Now she had to wait. Though not for long – the announcement had just told her that the NEXT TRAIN TO ALEWIFE was NOW APPROACHING, which was nice but unusual. It was past rush hour. The trains weren’t supposed to come this frequently.
“Your lucky day,” she told herself.
She felt a rumble and closed her eyes until the final brake screamed. Then she stood. She had positioned herself perfectly to walk straight into one of the opening doorways.
The Red Line’s cars were huge, each one a long metal breadbox. She was the only passenger on board. She decided to sit in the middle seat with her back to the platform, so she could look at the city skyline as the train crossed the bridge.
It wasn’t until the doors thumped closed that she realized she’d left her Staples box on the bench.
“No,” she murmured, standing, staggering as the car jumped, jerked, and caught. She hooked her arm on the pole closest to the entrance and accidentally swung around it so fast that she smacked hard into the door. “No,” she said again, but yes: there, visible through the scratched window, was her stuff, abandoned on the bench. There were her slippers and her Spam and her pictures and that brand-new box of Rollerball pens that she’d chucked in at the last minute, because she freaking loved those pens and it wasn’t like they could fire her a second time, and the car was moving fa
ster, faster, the train left the station, the train was over the bridge and her box was gone and for one second she thought about pushing the emergency call button or yanking that silver lever that was supposed to do something but she suspected did nothing – but it was just stuff. Things. Objects. They weren’t important. And yet, in their abandonment they suddenly felt like the most important, most symbolic artifacts of her life, as if that box held everything she was or had been or even liked about herself, and she had been careless enough to lose it.
She had been careless.
She wobbled back to her seat. The car braked and she lurched hard to the right, an object in motion trying to obey Newton.
The intercom fuzzed.
“Traffic ahead,” said the conductor. “We’ll be moving shortly.”
“Oh fuck you,” she told the empty car.
The intercom clunked off.
Tuesday folded herself in half, knees up to chest, arms tight around her shins, heels balanced on the edge of her seat. All around her, the car was breathing. Humming, huffing, electric, pneumatic.
She rubbed her eyes. Peeked over the top of her knees out the window opposite, across the other track and the Charles River beyond. There, visible through the low glare, was the Boston skyline, all six inches of it, from the Pru to the Hancock and back again. It was little but she loved it. She did. Oh, she did she did.
With a sudden sigh, the electricity, the fans, the wan fluorescent lights in the car, all died and Tuesday was alone in the dark on the train on the bridge.
The buildings in the city beyond got brighter.
Who needed real stars? Those lights would be her constellations.
She crossed and knelt on the opposite seats, propped her head in her hands, and looked out the window. Tuesday loved being alone. She always had. As a kid, it had never scared her, even after Ollie accidentally locked himself in the closet in the spare bedroom and was crying so hard when they found him that her dad had to help him breathe into a paper bag. In fact, because that incident guaranteed her brother would never come looking for her there, Tuesday started hiding in the closet on purpose. Snug in the back, between a box of Christmas decorations and a shoe rack that had been repurposed for keeping winter gloves accounted for and matched, she read books and drew cartoons and wrote poems that she didn’t care if anyone else ever read. That time alone in the dark, time alone with her self, traveling near and far through books, living in her mind, was what gave her the strength to go out and live in the real world.
And there was no place on earth like a city for being alone. That was why she moved to Boston in the first place: no one there knew, when she first arrived, that she was Tuesday Mooney and that for a while she had talked to ghosts. The city had remade her into a glorious unknown, and she had enjoyed, for years, the perfect company of strangers.
She pressed her hand flat against the window and felt cool, solid glass.
She loved, and felt loved by, this city.
The train popped, flickered – once, twice – then burst back to life beneath her. In the sudden fluorescent glare the skyline disappeared and all she saw was a face reflected in the window.
A pale face with deep-set eyes that she didn’t recognize.
It was the first time since Mo fired her that she’d had to look at herself.
“Kendall MIT,” said the intercom. “Next stop, Kendall MIT.”
The car began to move, but Tuesday stared, hard, at the face.
It was the face of someone who had broken the rules and been fired. It was the face of someone who had no job, no income, no way to continue to pay to be a part of this city she loved. It was the face of someone who didn’t know what she’d do or who she’d be tomorrow if she wasn’t a researcher or a commuter or a nine-to-fiver. And now, looking at this other woman, she realized she’d liked being those things. Had loved them maybe. Her boredom, her curiosity, and her restlessness, her desire to play that stupid game wasn’t worth this – this feeling of being so completely outside, unwanted, unknown – this wasn’t what she’d wanted. What had seemed boring once had become infinitely interesting, essential even, now that it was gone.
It was the face of someone who had been cruel to her friend.
It was the face of a woman alone.
It looked haunted.
It looked dead.
The train followed the tracks as they dove back underground, and took Tuesday down with it.
13
DEATH AND THE NEIGHBOR
Dorry pulled her cheek flat. Her hand, the hand holding the eye pencil, was shaking. She had never purposely put anything this sharp near her eye before, and she had three days to get this right. Three days until the funeral, to practice her makeup. Three days to make her costume perfect. Ned had a theory that the costumes were part of the game, that what they wore to their audience with the widow was important. “We gotta dress the part,” Ned said. “The part of what?” Dorry asked, and Ned said, “The part we want.” Then he wiggled his fingers in the air like a magician.
“Okay,” she told her reflection. “You can do this.”
She pulled down the right side of her face. Pressed the sticky tip of the eye pencil against her lower lid, starting at her tear duct, and pushed, gently. The point was surprisingly soft. She traced the bottom of her eye and stopped, blinked, and then drew a small spiral on the flat of her face above her cheek, curling off the outside corner of her eye.
It looked kind of … amazing.
Bolder now, she closed her eye and traced the edge of her top lid – it was a lot harder, because she didn’t want to press down into her eyeball, and her lid kept twitching – and then did the same to her left eye, without the spiral off the bottom. She stood back. She couldn’t believe how grown-up a dark smudge around her eyes made her feel. Looking into the mirror was like looking into the future, her own future, and it was exciting and terrifying and she wished her mom could see it. She wished her mom could see a lot of things, but this especially.
She was wearing black tights, her black Docs, a black skirt, miniish – it was higher than her knees, but her butt was covered. She didn’t know how much bending or squatting or climbing she would have to do in it, and she wanted to be prepared – a black tank top, and a too-big black denim jacket she and Ned had found yesterday at the Garment District for fifteen bucks. The final touch, other than the makeup, was the necklace: a heavy silver ankh on a piece of black leather. It had been her mom’s. She’d found it a long time ago, stashed in the same box as her mom’s Sandman comics.
Her hair wasn’t quite right. It was still her hair, dark brown and straight and flat unless it was humid. She spread her fingers, rooted them close to her scalp, and pushed up on both sides of her head.
“Death’s got way bigger hair,” she told her mirror-self.
She was going to need hairspray. Or some kind of gunk. Her mother had used makeup, but not much for her hair. Her father’s idea of personal care products started and ended with toothpaste and soap. Mish, back at her old school, had been getting into complicated hair junk when Dorry left, but it had been a long time since Dorry had talked to her, and it would be way awkward to text her about this.
Ned? Ned knew all sorts of things. Because he was a year older, and because he was the kind of person who collected information, and knew stuff that didn’t apply to him, like – he probably did know about junk for long hair even though he didn’t use it himself. They’d taken the 85 after school yesterday, on Monday, to go shopping for costumes for the funeral. Ned spent the whole bus ride talking about all the ideas he had. He needed help choosing. He couldn’t decide how literal to be. “Like,” he said, “do I dress up as Poe, you know, with a white cravat, suit, like a stuffed bird on my shoulder – but I bet a lot of people will go as Poe, it’s obvious, it’s, like, pedestrian. So do I go literal as a black cat? Or do I go comic nerd as, like, the Black Panther, with the – Wakanda!” He made two fists and crossed his arms at the wrists. They were sitting in
the first row of seats at the rear of the bus, where the floor was higher, raised over the back wheels, so it felt like they were sitting in a balcony. It was easier, side by side. Dorry couldn’t look at his face, which was good, because whenever she looked at him, she felt painfully shy and goofy. Whenever she looked at him, she remembered everything they’d done together, the very day they met. Riding the T downtown. Slipping quietly into the chalk-marked building, and down the stairs, and into that room, that beautiful disintegrating room Dorry had seen on Ned’s phone. They were alone, but they could tell other people had been there. The bottom drawer of a big green filing cabinet was half open, half full of envelopes.
And money.
They were going to take it and go when Dorry noticed the ankh painted on the cabinet, and the word painted below it: LIFE. Ned got it before she did. Ned’s brain jumped: the chalk on the outside of the building was a code, and all around them, on the walls – like the giant crumbling mural beneath the stairs – were the solutions. Ned’s face, when he figured it out, was almost too much; he shone like a lightbulb. They found a generator and some lights, but even if they hadn’t, Dorry suspected they could have found every last symbol in that room from the glow emanating from Ned alone.
He was still shining, on the way to costume shopping. Wound up and electric, splashing, spilling over, and Dorry was shrieking laughter on the inside, caught in the spray. “I don’t remember the last time I really dressed up for Halloween, put some thought and effort into it,” Ned said. “So it feels big. I don’t want to blow it. You know?”
“I think you want to keep in mind,” said Dorry, “that the costume should be comfortable. Because who knows what we’ll have to do.” She caught her breath. “To play our hand, I mean.” Then she risked looking at him. He was watching her, nodding his head now, eyes half-masted; he was calling her smart. Way smart, girl, he said, and she had to face forward again because she was going to snort-laugh and that would be the end of that. She looked down. Peeking out of the bottom of his jeans were yellow-and-orange-plaid socks.
Tuesday Mooney Wore Black Page 26