“You’re probably wondering why I asked you over here.” He hadn’t moved from the doorway. He hadn’t told Mandy that Peaches was coming. He hadn’t told Ted. It occurred to him that he didn’t even have to invite her in.
“Kinda,” Peaches admitted. “I’m pretty sure it’s not to announce to your wife that you’re leaving her.”
Stuart stared at her. She was blushing and there was a sort of terror in her eyes. He had all the power in this situation and he didn’t want it.
“No,” he said.
“You just wanted to hang out?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I was just hoping to not ruin a perfectly good friendship. I thought maybe if we all hung out and you were just, you know, Nurse Peaches from school, we wouldn’t like, feel what happened was a threat. Like the kiss could just be a kiss on a stoop on a confusing night and we could leave it at that.”
“Oh.” Peaches’ face fell. She made as if to take the pie away from him and then put her hands in the pockets of her leather jacket instead. She took a deep, shuddering breath and shook her head. Her blue eyes were glassy and faraway-looking. “I think this was a bad idea,” she said in a flat voice. “I’m gonna go.”
* * *
“Who was it?” Mandy asked when Stuart came back upstairs.
Mandy was on the floor doing crunches, her wet-nailed fingers fanned out behind her head.
“Just the neighbors. Their Full Plate box gave them an extra pie.”
“Twenty soldier jumps,” the voice on her ab workout app instructed.
Stuart put the pie down and watched her. He’d never seen Mandy exercise in his life, and now she was doing military-style core curls with jumps he wasn’t even sure he could attempt without spraining something.
“Whew. That felt good.” She took a sip of whatever green juice she was drinking and smiled coyly. “I have a surprise for you.”
“What is it?” Stuart asked.
Mandy jogged in place and took another sip of juice. “I’m thinking about modeling again.”
Stuart removed the quiche from the oven and cut it in sixths. Mandy had been cooking the most awesome food lately. “Seriously? Shouldn’t you check with Dr. Goldberg first?”
Chapter 19
“We want it to look realistic,” Elizabeth had instructed. “Don’t just scatter the body parts clean. We need dirt and leaves on them. Blood. It needs to look authentic. You’re not used to this sort of risk, but authenticity requires risk. Just don’t get arrested.”
What sort of “authenticity” were they going for? Tupper wanted to ask, but didn’t. She might question his ability to collaborate.
Elizabeth was reluctant to leave the house in case the MacArthur people called again. She was certain she’d already missed several of their calls while they were at Tupper’s warehouse in Red Hook, collecting more limbs. Over the years he’d amassed a huge selection of human forms. They were all experimental, all failed designs, but they were perfect for their collaboration, which Elizabeth had decided to call The Hunt.
There were people in the park—a couple of teenagers horsing around on the swings, a man with a toddler on the baby slide, two guys shooting baskets—but Tupper paid no attention to them. Whistling, he rolled a pale white calf with foot attached in the mulchy dirt beneath a hedgerow and left the foot displayed, as if the rest of the body might be hidden somewhere beneath the branches. Next, he knelt down in a pile of dried leaves adjacent to the tennis court and removed the canvas pack from his back. Inside was the torso from one of his oldest fabrications: “Friend.” It was supposed to sit in your house and keep you company in an unthreatening, undemanding way. It wasn’t supposed to be cute like a stuffed animal, or needy like a live pet; it was supposed to be human-ish. The skin was a sort of brownish gray, like the color of a mouse, and had dimpled with age. With its featureless, hairless head and rigid limbs hacked off, Friend looked like a target for shooting practice.
Tupper stood it up in the leaves, and then knocked it down again. He dragged it around and kicked soil and leaves and sticks over it. The torso was almost completely camouflaged, but perhaps that was best. Ironically, Friend was the most artificial-looking body part in his collection.
Was there a connection between Elizabeth’s staging of her death and rebirth and this trail of body parts? Tupper wondered. What was her intention? Maybe that was part of the process—part of the hunt—to wonder, to feel confused.
The man was strapping the toddler into its stroller now. They were leaving, which was good, because Tupper wanted to dangle a leg from the top of the big winding slide, let go, and see where it landed. The monkey bars would be perfect for an arm.
“Don’t go overboard,” Elizabeth had warned. “Just a light touch. This isn’t a carnival show. Be provocative, not obvious. Best-case scenario, no one even notices them for days and it rains and green stuff starts to grow on them. The more integrated into the environment the better.”
Weedy vines grew up the fence behind the big-kid swings. If only the teenagers would leave. The sun had set. Soon it would be very dark. If he creeped them out enough, they might take off.
He dragged the trash bag full of limbs across the rubber mats of the playground. The teenagers, a boy and a girl, both long-limbed and skinny, were lying beneath the swings, batting at each other like kittens and laughing their heads off.
Tupper sat down on a bench and tried to look threatening. The teenagers took no notice of him. He cleared the mucous from his throat and spat into the dead leaves. Nothing. He reached down, pulled a foot from the bag, and cradled it in his lap.
“We have to wait ’til dark,” he told the foot in a loud, creepy voice. There was ketchup in his bag, for blood. He took it out and squirted some on the foot.
* * *
“Hey, see that guy?”
“The one talking to his food?” Liam pushed himself up on his elbows and peered through the dusk. “He’s not homeless. His clothes are too nice.”
“I know. He’s still weird though. What’s he eating anyway? It looks like a foot.”
“Should we go?”
“Are you okay to go?” Shy asked. Liam’s eyes were slits and he could barely talk.
“I don’t want to go home. Can we go to your house?”
“Yes. My dad might be home though.” Her dad was always home.
“Can we have sex?”
“Maybe.”
“Seriously? Okay, let’s go.”
* * *
Tupper’s scary-man act had worked. The two teenagers got to their feet very suddenly and ran out of the park, holding hands and shrieking. They’d left their schoolbags beneath the swings. All the better. It was a nice effect, the abandoned schoolbags, the scattered limbs, the darkening sky. Just for fun he’d leave a head.
* * *
Roy slammed his laptop closed and sank back in his armchair. The notion that he could pull off a Russian assassin in space detained by oversexed—possibly pregnant—teenagers with a backpack full of gold and urinals that made Evian water out of piss was completely ludicrous. He was once a beloved, prolific author, but the current mess on his laptop was a not very subtle sign: his authoring days were over. Time to get a proper job like Wendy and end the misery.
Roy had always admired Wendy’s attitude toward work. You got it done and then had a glass of wine. Roy could never quite leave a book alone. Once it was in his head, it stayed there like an infection or a tick, niggling at him, filling him with guilt and dread, or inspiration and elation. Writing novels was like walking endlessly up a hill made of shit, stopping to eat the shit along the way and deceiving oneself into thinking it was cake. Each night when Wendy came home from work, poured herself a glass of wine, and switched on the news, Roy would follow her into the kitchen and pour himself a glass of wine too. But no sooner had he finished the glass than he was filled with self-loathing. At most, he’d written yet another stream of shit that day, even runnier and smellier than the last. What on earth d
id he have to celebrate?
“Oh, this part always makes me cry,” he heard Wendy say in the kitchen.
Wendy was preparing dinner and watching her new favorite TV show on her computer, A Royal Week. If she missed anything about living in England it was the royal family. She knew it was dopey of her, but she just ate it up, every last fascinator and footman. Right now, they were doing a recap of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding at Windsor Castle. The show was focused on the changes to the family as a whole since then, including the couple’s escape to America, and the fortitude of the Queen’s husband, HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Meghan herself appeared in a brief interview in what looked like the doorway of a school. Was she or wasn’t she pregnant again? Her red coat was too billowy to see.
“During our last conversation, my grandfather-in-law, Prince Philip, and I talked about how much we love Bonfire Night. The bonfires, the fireworks, the good cheer. Guy Fawkes was trying to blow up Parliament, but he did not succeed. What’s been made of that event, Guy Fawkes Day or Bonfire Night, is always so thrilling, with everyone outside celebrating around massive bonfires. This fall, in honor of Prince Philip, Harry and I will be hosting our first Bonfire Night party in our new home. It’s going to be magical. I’m inviting all my American friends and Harry’s inviting his Royal Air Force buddies. We’re going to party all night.” She smiled her perfect smile. “And there will definitely be fireworks.”
Wendy didn’t think Meghan sounded like a pregnant person. She wasn’t staying in and nesting; she was planning to stay up all night partying.
“Roy!” Wendy called. “Roy!”
Roy had just decided to jump ahead in time and make both girls pregnant. Meanwhile, the people on Earth were watching their every move, like they were the stars of a reality show. Like Tupper with his Macaw.
“Roy?” Wendy bustled into the library. “I’m sorry to interrupt your train of thought, but I’ve just had the most wonderful idea.”
“So have I,” Roy said. “Your program inspired me. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that much of my new book takes place on Mars. And what could be more delightful to those of us plebs on Earth than a wedding on Mars? It would be televised, so we could watch it. I’m not sure of the science of it, the time delay and all that. I don’t think it would quite be in real time. Still, can you imagine the excitement here on Earth? The first Mars wedding! And I was thinking it could be a double wedding—well, two wives anyway—because the rules are different on Mars. Up there everyone’s sort of tribal. I haven’t thought it through.” He clutched his head in sudden agony and pounded his fist on the arm of his chair. “Oh, this is madness.”
Wendy wasn’t really listening. Roy always babbled nonsensically when he was writing. The fact that he was writing was what mattered. She should have fessed up about her demotion to Enjoy! by now, but she didn’t want to distract him when he was finally writing again. “Can I tell you my idea?”
“Sorry.” He closed his laptop and looked up at her. “Yes, what is it?”
“Bonfire Night. Guy Fawkes. We’re going to have a Bonfire Night party here in our backyard. We can invite all our new Brooklyn friends. We can even drive to Delaware or somewhere and get fireworks—I think they’re illegal in New York State.”
“Illegal is good,” Roy said. “The police will be thrilled. And what will we burn? There aren’t many trees to cut down in our garden. Shall we pull all the doors off their hinges and burn them?”
“I’ll get the burning things,” Wendy said, annoyed at his mocking tone. “The bonfire has to be massive, as big as we dare. Maybe we can ask your artist friends to make us a Guy. Harry and Meghan are doing one in LA this year, their first one ever. That’s what inspired me.”
“Naturally we must keep up with the Windsors.”
“Ours will be even better,” Wendy said haughtily. “Manfred and Gabby and I will plan the whole thing. Maybe I can somehow spin it into a story for the magazine so they can pay for it,” she added without mentioning exactly which magazine. “All you have to do is invite the locals.”
There was a loud thump upstairs and a distinctly male exclamation of surprise or pain or jubilation.
Wendy froze and stared up at the ceiling.
“Do you think they’re having sex?” she whispered.
“Sounds like they might be trying on a little Posh and Becks,” Roy responded uncomfortably. He liked Liam, but Shy was his daughter. She was meant to eat cheese toasties and go to movies with him for the rest of her life.
“I think it’s good,” Wendy said uncertainly. “I mean, he could be scary and there could be massive clouds of drug smoke coming out of her room and loud music. He could be from some other neighborhood we don’t know. He’s a nice boy from school who’s good at math and wears clean clothes.”
Roy was trying very hard to unwatch The Blue Lagoon. Why on earth was Wendy choosing not to be uptight about this when she was uptight about almost everything else?
“Hope they’re being careful,” he grumbled.
Wendy snorted. “His mum is a school nurse. She probably started giving him responsible-sex talks in kindergarten.”
Sensing a brainstorm, Roy turned back to his computer. A nurse like Peaches was exactly what he needed. Not human, though, an android nurse. She would be Ceran, Bettina, and Isabel’s confidante and his literary device. Through her, the reader would come to know what was really going on on Mars—how the scientists on Earth were manipulating the teenagers. Maybe the nurse could give Ceran a little sex lesson? The fact that she was not actually human would give Roy more leeway with her. Yes, it might read as android porn, but what teenage boy wouldn’t want sex lessons from an android nurse? It ought to be required.
He reopened his laptop and hit return several times. He’d have to go back to the beginning, or at least to an earlier section, and revise. Was Shy really having sex? Should he go up there and bang on the door? Best not. Best focus on the things he could control and not the things he couldn’t.
“I’ll leave you to it,” Wendy said.
“Mmm,” Roy replied distractedly.
* * *
Elizabeth sent Tupper out to scatter various body parts in the local park knowing she’d already washed her hands of the project and was ready to move on. Allowing Tupper to get involved felt like a door closing rather than a door opening. The frisson was gone. Perhaps it was the lack of funding. She was no idiot. She preferred to get paid for her work. She had no real intention for the project anyway. She just wanted Tupper to feel useful. She had cooked an easy one-pot meal, now he could do the dishes.
It was possible she was going through some sort of midlife creative crisis. But those never lasted long. To distract herself, she spent the afternoon opening her mail. One inquiry piqued her interest, a formal letter from a wealthy art collector in Iceland. She wanted Elizabeth to come and be a part of her world-renowned “living gallery.” Elizabeth had never been to Iceland. It seemed as good a choice as any.
She began to pack, mentally composing a note to Tupper. Changing her mind, she decided not to pack anything all. Instead, she pulled a Post-it from the stack and stuck it to the kitchen counter. With a pencil she wrote, Keep chasing rabbits, my love, and tucked the note into her poncho pocket.
As soon as the moment presented itself, she would leave. She glared at the phone, daring it to ring.
* * *
Upstairs in Shy’s bedroom, Shy and Liam were not as naked as her parents suspected. He had taken off his shirt, because they’d run home and he was sweaty. And she’d unzipped her jumpsuit, because it gave her a wedgie when it was fully zipped and she was lying down.
“My chest is so lopsided,” Shy said, frowning down at herself. “One is round. The other is pointy.”
Liam turned his head and examined her chest in what he hoped was a casual way. “It’s nice.”
“Thanks.” She looked up at him and giggled. “I can still see a faint outline of a target.”
/> Liam crossed his hands over his underdeveloped pecs. There were weird white bumps on his upper arms that he’d been meaning to ask his mom about. Hopefully Shy wouldn’t notice.
“That whole thing was such a waste. I wonder what happened when the real models showed up.”
Shy stared at his mole-speckled neck and dug her toes into the comforter. “I still feel a bit strange.”
Liam shivered. He was cold now but still sweaty. “Um, I have supplies in my backpack.”
“What do you mean, supplies?” He must know she wasn’t serious about having sex. She pulled the comforter up to her chin. She was freezing and starving. She needed her dad to make her a cheese toastie.
“The day I turned sixteen my mom went to Costco and bought a huge box of condoms. I put some in my backpack, just in case.”
Liam looked askance at her bedroom floor and then at the door.
“Shit. Where is my backpack?”
Chapter 20
“Look away. And now back at me. Good. Look away again and now back. Left foot forward a bit. Cock your left hip. Not too much, just a hair. Good. Now look straight at me and pout your lips. Uh-oh. Wow. Okay, now smile like you just won a million-dollar contract with L’Oréal. Because you’re worth it, baby.”
Mandy had expected Kramer Lamb to be slick and fashiony and intimidating, dressed head to toe in black couture. Instead, he was a super-friendly dork wearing a turquoise mohair bow tie, pleated khaki pants, and pink Adidas pool slides with gray rag wool socks. And he obviously loved his job. She would have to send Wendy Clarke flowers or steal her a pie for recommending him.
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