Lingering

by Melissa Simonson

  They knew the day she was born and the day she died, but they didn’t know anything about her that made her who she was.

  “I don’t care if the DA contests it. I want to contest it. I want him to tell me to my face that he was secretly fucking my fiancée, because I can tell you right now that she wouldn’t have looked twice at him. There’s no way in hell she would have allowed him to touch her.” Steven Klein would have been lucky if she’d ever spared him a glance.

  “I know you loved her—”

  “I still love her,” I cut in, slapping his desk. “I didn’t stop loving her because she died.” It would take a whole lot more than her death to make me stop loving her. I didn’t even think my own death would be enough to make me not love her. “I’m never going to not love her. Even if by some miracle I meet someone else, I’m never going to not love Carissa, because we never broke up. She never set my shit on fire in the front yard or threw her ring at my face and told me it’s over. We never ended. That fucking bastard in there ended it for us.”

  I felt sorry for this hypothetical woman I might one day meet. She’d always be second best in my book, and it wouldn’t be through any fault of her own. There was no way any other woman could knock Carissa out of first place, fill that gaping void in my life. Not that I planned on putting myself out there, setting up a match.com profile, making awkward first-date small talk over coffee. It would feel treasonous, as though I was trying to forget her, replace her.

  Detective Matthews chewed the inside of his lip for a few beats, nostrils flaring, and didn’t look up as he raised his voice and called, “Esposito?”

  Officer Esposito coasted into view on her swivel chair one cubicle over, her makeup yet again an unnerving near match to Carissa’s. I wondered if she’d ever seen any of Carissa’s makeup tutorials, if she’d studied them on YouTube to recreate the effect, maybe as some attempt to butter up Steven Klein, look more his type. “Yeah?”

  “Is Klein still here in holding?”

  She linked her fingers together over her head, her spine arching in a deep stretch, dark hair waterfalling over her back. “I think so.”

  “Call his attorney for me.”

  Her brow furled as she stood and made her way over. “And say what? Hi, Ben.”

  I bobbed my head in greeting, kept my gaze on my knees.

  “Ben wants to talk to Mr. Klein. I’m sure his attorney will want to be there to talk Klein out of agreeing. Either way, she needs to be informed.” He pushed back from his desk, crossing his arms over the paunch in his stomach.

  Officer Esposito’s hand curled around the back of my chair. “Well, odds are he’s definitely dumb enough and narcissistic enough to agree to that, but I doubt his attorney will let him without a fight.”

  “So, let her object. The decision is his.”

  She tapped a pink nail on my chair. “If you say so.”

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” Detective Matthews flicked the face of his watch. “An engraved invitation? You’re burning daylight.”

  Officer Esposito rolled her eyes and headed back for her cubicle.

  I felt Officer Esposito’s eyes flicker all over my profile as I sat at the visitor’s chair by her desk, one knee bobbing restlessly. She rolled her wedding band ceaselessly around her finger, and even in my peripheral vision, I could tell she was planning something she wanted to say. I was willing to bet it would turn out to be some mini speech about having lost someone close to her. Well, she wouldn’t be the first. I’d been inundated with stories of such things from people back when Carissa had just died, almost as if I’d unwittingly entered some competition of grief. It never mattered what had happened to their loved ones; in my mind, I was the winner of the year, of the century, of the universe.

  “My sister—”

  “She died, right?”

  “You been getting a lot of those kinds of stories?”

  “Ever since July.” And before you try to tell me you know how I feel, let me just say now that you don’t. Nothing could cap what happened to Carissa.

  “But none of them held a candle to what happened to Carissa?”

  I shot her a sharp glance.

  She fiddled with a pen, twirling it between her fingers. “Well. Jenna wasn’t raped, but she was murdered. She worked late at a gas station, got robbed one night. Our parents always worried about something like that happening, but she always brushed it off. It happened my senior year in high school. Her death made me change my major from business to criminal justice.”

  “Did they ever catch the guy?”

  “Yeah,” she said, with a half-hearted little shrug. “Some seventeen-year-old idiot who needed cash for meth. I couldn’t believe she’d died because of his drug habit, some guy she didn’t even know. What a fucking waste.”

  “Did you ever want to talk to him?”

  “I just wanted to kill him. The closest I got to him was at the sentencing hearing, when I gave a victim impact statement. He looked like a scared little boy.” She flicked a strand of dark hair off her forehead. “I guess that’s really what he was. Not that it made any difference. He’ll be eligible for parole in…fifteen years, I think. Already served ten. I’ll be at every parole hearing he’s ever granted.” She heaved herself back in her swivel chair, linking her fingers over her stomach. “I understand your desire to talk to him, probably better than anyone in this building, but you need to keep yourself in line, you hear me? No death threats or screaming.”

  I didn’t know if I’d be able to keep that promise, but I promised all the same.

  I should have rehearsed what I’d say before entering that interview room. Snippets of Jason’s speech swirled inside my head like smoke, hard to grab onto, put into my own words.

  All I could think was, this stubby, fat hand that looked like it belonged to an overgrown baby is the last thing that touched her. These earthworm lips were the last pair to speak to her. The last words she ever spoke fell on those fleshy ears, that flabby chest was the last thing her fingers had scrabbled insignificantly against.

  Steven Klein’s attorney was built like a fire hydrant and looked like someone’s unmarried great aunt, with bloated pink pads beneath her eyes and deep furrows permanently carved into her forehead.

  She slid her glasses further down her nose, looking at me over the lenses. “Well?”

  When I found my voice, it was hoarser than I’d ever heard it, even after that first time I smoked with Carissa. “I’ve been told you were having an affair with my fiancée.”

  The attorney slammed her glasses back into the canyons dug into either side of her nose. “Don’t answer that.”

  Steven Klein didn’t say anything, not right away, but his expression spoke volumes. As if I was vaguely amusing to him, some mime stuck in an invisible box on a street corner.

  Officer Esposito pulled out a chair opposite them at the table, nudging me forward in the process. “He can answer if he wants. He agreed to this.”

  His teeth were tiny nubs when his lips parted, as though he’d never gotten an adult set. I had the bizarre urge to laugh at how ludicrous they looked, but the impulse dissipated when he turned his shutterless brown eyes on me.

  “What about it?”

  “Well, how did you meet her?”

  “Some bar on the south side.”

  “No, you didn’t,” I said, feeling blood thrum behind my eyes. “She hated the south side.”

  He shrugged, as much as he could with his hands cuffed together. “Maybe that’s what she told you.”

  I slid into the seat beside Officer Esposito, thinking that finger he’s digging in his ear was the last one to ever touch her. Those nails caked with grime were the last things she felt. Those hands had gripped her hard enough to leave all those bruises on her skin.

  I blinked away those images of her open, sightless eyes and battered body. “How’d you communicate with her? She didn’t have you as a contact in her cell phone, never sent you a text. She’d never even sen
t you a smoke signal.”

  “Ever heard of a prepaid?”

  “Have you ever heard of lethal injection?”

  Officer Esposito’s fingers contracted on my kneecap beneath the table. “When did you meet her, Steven?”

  He grinned when he looked over at her, like Jabba the Hut when he got his first look at Princess Leia. “Sometime in June.”

  “Beginning, middle, end?” She tilted her head from side to side with each word, her long hair shifting across her back.

  “He came here to speak to Mr. Hayden,” the attorney interrupted, shuffling her giant files importantly. “That’s all he agreed to. This isn’t an interrogation.”

  Officer Esposito shrugged, elbows planted on the table, her gaze still on Klein. “We can ping her cell phone, find out if she was ever at a bar on the south side sometime in June. If he’s telling the truth, we should be able to find proof. Ben’s got her cell phone.” She looked at me, doe-like eyes wide with faux innocence, and I felt the air freeze in my lungs.

  “I don’t have her phone anymore. I threw it away.”

  “Sounds like a guilty conscience,” the attorney said, a satisfied smile on her lips. I wanted to rip it off her face.

  “Sounds like you’re a fucking moron,” I snapped. “The only guilty one here is the fat slug you’re defending.”

  I could see questions boiling to the surface of Officer Esposito’s eyes, but she rallied almost imperceptibly, pressing two fingers against my wrist. “It doesn’t matter where the physical phone is, we downloaded everything off of it before we released the phone to Ben’s custody, and the cell company will still have the records.”

  “You did it,” I heard myself say at the same time I felt my fists clench, ready to sink into Steven Klein’s porcine face. “You know you did. Invent any bullshit story you want, but you’re not fooling anybody. You did it.”

  “I didn’t.”

  I leaned so far over the table, my torso was almost flat against it. “You’re lucky you’re in jail, not out on bond. I’d fucking kill you the first chance I got.”

  “Now you’re threatening my client?” the attorney barked at the same time Officer Esposito said, “Ben, be quiet.”

  Steven Klein made a show of looking me up and down, the bits of me he could see around the table between us. “I doubt it. You’re pretty scrawny compared to me.” He flexed his bicep, a layer of packed-solid fat jiggling.

  “You’re gonna get the needle,” I barreled on, heedless of the hand Officer Esposito snared around my wrist like a vise. “You’re going to die in a little room just like she did, except there’s gonna be an audience to watch it all happen. You’ll sit on death row for a while, though. Long enough to wish you were dead. I don’t think they like sex offenders too much in prison.”

  “You know what she told me once?” Had he smiled like that when he’d watched Carissa bleed out? “That she liked how strong I am compared to you, that you didn’t fuck her the way I did.”

  White stars sparkled across my vision, and I hadn’t realized I was standing, trying to make my way around the table, until Officer Esposito grabbed my forearm with surprising strength and said, “we’re done here. Ben, don’t make me cuff you.”

  I let her tow me out of that stuffy box of a room, let her poke me hard in the shoulder and ask what the fuck was I thinking, and reached into the pocket of my hoodie for my cell phone to stop the voice recording.

  I followed Nick down the staircase of 311 Emery's bottom floor, but instead of heading straight to get to the interrogation room, he hung a left and entered the room where I'd seen Margot's videos and signed his non-disclosure agreement.

  "I have to check on some tests," he said before I could open my mouth. "It'll only take a minute."

  I leaned against the doorjamb, my thumb tracing the rim of my cell phone inside my pocket, wondering what Carissa's reaction might be to Steven Klein's voice recording, when my wandering gaze found a monitor alight with a video of Carissa and Jess, seated across from each other at a table.

  "What's going on?" I asked the back of Nick's head as he pecked away at a keyboard.

  "With Jess and her BFF, you mean?" he asked, not even lifting his inclined head. "Jess wanted to teach her how to play poker." He stabbed a button and beckoned me over as Carissa's voice filled the room.

  "You're not going to win," she said, eyes flitting over the back of the cards in Jess's hand. "Odds are you don't have anything lower than a nine. Which means you'll lose again."

  "Miracles can happen," Jess countered, red lips twitching from side to side as she stared at her cards.

  "This isn't about miracles, this is about mathematics and probability."

  I drew closer to the screen, folding my arms across my chest. "It's weird to hear her talk about math. She hated math. She wouldn't even figure out how much to tip in restaurants, always gave the slip to me so I could do it for her."

  "New and improved," Nick said vaguely, stabbing a final button on his keyboard and pushing away from the desk.

  It bothered me, the math speak. I preferred the Carissa who refused to calculate tips, the one who needed to breathe, the Carissa I’d never seen clench and unclench her fingers as though fantasizing a windpipe was gasping and sputtering beneath them.

  "Stare at them all you like, it's not going to change the numbers," Carissa said, "so let's just get this over with, shall—"

  Her voice cut off as Nick powered down the monitor. I trailed him down the hallway yet again and into the vestibule off the room in which Carissa and Jess sat. As always, Carissa's eyes flicked over to the one-way glass as the door shut behind me.

  Nick flung open the second door and headed for the empty seat next to Jess. "What was your card?"

  "Ten of hearts," she grumbled, shuffling the deck. "I lost three times in a row."

  I loitered by Nick and Jess, hands stuffed in my pockets. The only empty seat was the one beside Carissa. I wished this was the beginning of one of my dreams, where she’d have me on my back on the table in a second.

  Her fake eyeballs followed me as I rounded the corner of the table, the beginnings of a smile on her lips. A near match to the look she'd first worn as I approached her in the Bell in Hand a hundred years ago.

  I slid into the chair beside her. Tried to clear my throat but choked on the saliva welling in my esophagus.

  Her arm was less than an inch away from mine, but it gave off no body heat.

  Silence settled over the four of us, and I looked up from the table to find three pairs of eyes on me.

  "Sorry," I faltered, digging my phone from my pocket as I turned to Carissa. "I brought something for you."

  "Oh?" She looked down at my phone and back up at me.

  "I recorded a conversation I had with Steven Klein at the precinct. They hadn’t shipped him off to lockup yet. I thought you might want to hear it."

  She stared right at me through the duration of the recording, eye contact never straying, her hands in her lap. No expression, her face as unnaturally still as it had been in her coffin, not even a blink at Steven Klein’s allegations. She might have been listening to the weather report.

  “Would you really?” she asked as I fumbled to close the app on my phone.

  “Would I what?”

  “Kill him if you had the chance.”

  “At the first opportunity.”

  Jess and Nick were uncharacteristically silent, her features drawn and subdued, his eyes thoughtful and steady.

  Carissa finally looked away from me, flexing her fingers. “That reminds me of that game we used to play. Would you blank for me. Would you chop off a finger for me? Would you drink horse piss for me? Would you kill someone for me?”

  “I always said yes.”

  “And I always did, too.” She flicked a swift glance my way, her fingers clamping back into her palm. “Thank you for letting me hear this. I’m sure it was difficult to speak to him.”

  In life, Carissa had only been oddly fo
rmal when she was pissed. A stiff thank you as I set a cup of coffee down by her laptop like some kind of lame olive branch. A forced hello as I walked through the side door after an errand, the subtext beneath her icy politeness being eat shit and die, you toad. She’d only ever adopted that tone when she wanted me to go away.

  A roll of irritation thundered through me. I would never expect slavering appreciation from a machine, but she was the one who’d asked for all this, who’d made a point of working herself up into a righteous fury—as though she even had a right to be angry about the death she hadn’t actually gone through—because I hadn’t demanded to see Steven Klein, and all I’d gotten in return for my trouble was a pissy thank you that sounded like a dismissal.

  So I did what I’d always done in response when confronted with that flat voice, and left.

  I watched Dexter standing at attention at the base of the stove, feeling pretty positive he’d managed to corner a mouse, and wondered if I shouldn’t just sell the house and move.

  My mother had suggested it back in July, but I hadn’t given the idea any real thought. This was our house, mine and Carissa’s. This was the last place in which she drew breath; how could I abandon it?

  I thought I’d made my peace with what happened here, but I hadn’t used the downstairs bathroom since July, hadn’t even stood inside it since that day, and it suddenly seemed ridiculous that I’d cordoned it off in my mind, all but placed a DO NOT ENTER sign on the door.