Lingering

by Melissa Simonson

  Moving on had to be a state of mind as well as an action, and I couldn’t very well do that while still tethered to a machine, when the high of my day happened during a creepy sex dream, and the subsequent lowest came immediately afterward, the second I opened my eyes and she wasn’t with me, didn’t have her hands on me.

  I didn’t plan to rush out there and start dating, but what about a hobby or something? What had I liked to do back when I was normal? I dimly remembered a lot of Xbox and reading, going to the gym. I’d liked chicken wings and live music and always scoured Yelp for restaurants that offered both. I’d wanted to get a dog at one point. It would infuriate Dexter if I brought home a dog, but he’d have to get over it because I was all he had now, King of the House and Keeper of Food.

  I couldn’t help thinking of a Sun Tzu quote Kylie had read from The Art of War the other day—one might KNOW how to conquer without being able to DO it—and with a grim sort of pleasure, I powered my phone off and left the bathroom.

  T he kitchen table had been overrun by shopping bags full of candy and hollow, pastel colored eggs. Putting together an Easter basket seemed somehow beyond the realm of my capabilities. I’d never done it before, not until Carissa, when the first Easter we’d been together rolled around. She’d swung through the door of my then-apartment, what looked like about a hundred bags of bright merchandise hanging in plastic bags on her skinny wrists. Easter stuff for Kylie’s Easter basket, she’d said after my question—what’s all that stuff for? What, you’ve never made a basket for her? It didn’t seem right to not continue the tradition she’d started, but then the tradition had only been me watching her put one together. I’d never gone rogue and done one on my own. I’d be flying blind this time.

  I yanked out a fistful of plastic grass from its package and stuffed it into the bottom of a gigantic pink wicker basket. Ribbons of the stuff still clung to my hand, and I’d been trying to shake it loose when I heard the doorbell chime.

  “Goddamnit,” I muttered, assuming the unannounced visitor had to be Jess. Joe would have called, my mother was working, and I doubted Jason and Jackson would ever set foot in this house again, considering the last time they’d been here, they’d spent a few hours on their hands and knees cleaning up the blood of their dead friend’s crime scene.

  It was worse than Jess.

  “It’s been too long, Ben.” Nick leaned forward, picking a plastic strip of Easter grass off my sleeve.

  “What are you doing here?”

  He flicked the grass off his finger. “I thought we’d do your exit interview here, since you haven’t stopped by the office.”

  “What kind of bullshit excuse is that?”

  “Lots of companies conduct exit interviews.” He blinked in the watery sunlight. “It won’t take long.”

  I didn’t want to let him in, but I didn’t want an argument at my front door to prolong his stay, so reluctantly, I stepped aside.

  “The famous Dexter.” Nick stopped in front of the staircase, at the top of which Dexter sat, wearing a disapproving look.

  “He won’t come down. He doesn’t like company,” I said, with an unspoken and neither do I at the end of the sentence.

  “Cats are elitists,” he said wisely, watching Dexter’s fluffy tail whip around the corner. “Well, where can we sit?”

  I didn’t say anything, just headed for the kitchen. Shoving all the Easter stuff over to the other side of the table, I dropped into a seat.

  He did too, eyeing the pink basket, but thankfully he didn’t supply me with another smug comment. “So, Ben, why have you decided to leave us?”

  “Because I think you’re an asshole.”

  “Yeah. I figured that. Though you thought I was an asshole from the start, but you still came around.”

  “I’m just over it, is all.” I belted my arms across my rib cage. “There’s nothing to tell. I got sick of it, so I’m done, end of story.”

  He looked at me silently for a long time, the beginnings of a slow smirk on his lips. Then he sat back, rested one foot on his kneecap, and scratched the back of his head. “You know,” he said, lifting his eyes to the ceiling, “I thought you were a lock for a while, there. Once you started the secret, after hours visits with her, I figured you’d see this through to the end.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, hoping he couldn’t see the quickened pulse at my temples.

  He held up a hand. “I’m not angry. There’s no need for this farce. You needed alone time. I get it.” When I didn’t say anything, he pulled out his cell phone and dragged his chair closer to mine. “I went back and checked the video feeds when she was alone in the charging room. Remember when I told you about Margot, how she never fidgeted unless she had an audience? That’s what I went back looking for. Fidgeting when she was completely alone. And I didn’t find anything for a while. But then I saw this.” He pulled up a video, turned his phone so the picture went full screen, and pressed the play button. A clear image of Carissa alone, sitting in that charging chair, appeared. But that was all. The video was less than thirty seconds in length, but it looked like nothing more than a still-frame picture.

  “So what? What’s the point? She’s alone, she’s not moving. Just like Margot.”

  Nick scraped aside some of the blond hair falling over his eyes. “Right, like Margot, Carissa never fidgets without an audience. But,” he said, pointing at the frozen video, “look again.”

  He replayed it, and again, I saw absolutely nothing of any kind of importance. He hadn’t looked at the screen the entire time the video played, he simply watched me watching it.

  “You still don’t see it,” he said when it ended. “Let me zoom in.” And he did, but not on Carissa’s unmoving body.

  “I left it there one night. An accident, of course, but it’s turned into a happy accident.”

  The crystal-clear video, trained on the face of a watch I recognized as Nick’s, showed the second hand ticking over five paces to the one, and then it suddenly appeared back at the twelve, where it began the process again and again and again until my eyes started to water and I pushed the phone away.

  Nick tucked the phone back into his pocket, bestowing a smile full of wet, white teeth upon me. “So she’d rewritten the feeds, there’s no doubt about that. But why? Nothing was ever out of place when I woke her up every morning. It takes a long time for her to get a full charge, about eight hours, and each morning her batteries were completely full. Not ever less than one hundred percent. She didn’t remove the charging cable, I’m pretty confident in that. She didn’t move, so then why rewrite the code?”

  “Because I went there sometimes.”

  “Yes.” He slapped his kneecap. “Because you went there sometimes. Why?”

  “You think she’s trying to stir up a rebellion or something?” I asked sardonically. “She’s been colluding with the printer and your desktops to whip up an army?”

  He shrugged but gave no response.

  “She didn’t want all our interactions monitored. Maybe it made her feel like a zoo animal. Hell, it made me feel like a zoo animal, and I wasn’t even there 24/7.”

  “So you two just had little chats during these visits, that’s all?”

  “That’s all.”

  He arched an eyebrow. “Nothing sexual ever transpired?”

  I was too tired to work myself up over such an easy barb. “The most I ever did was kiss her.” Unfortunately. I would have given my left nut to do more than kiss her. On second thought, maybe I wasn’t too tired to get angry. “And I don’t really think I need your permission to kiss my own goddamned fiancée.”

  “Carissa is dead and buried, remember, raped and murdered? She was your fiancée. You were kissing my property, but I’m not even angry about that, I don’t blame you. How did she communicate with you to give the all-clear?”

  “She sent me an instant message over Gmail.”

  “Smart of her. I’m guessing you’ll refuse to show
me the chat logs.”

  “I couldn’t show them to you even if I wanted to. I blocked her from messaging me the other day. Once you block someone on Hangouts, all the messages are erased. I told you, I’m done. With all of you.”

  “So, the content of these messages is nothing more than the pair of you arranging these late-night meet-ups?”

  “That’s all,” I lied, staring into his icy gray gaze.

  He bobbed his head slowly, pulling his bottom lip through his teeth, his eyes on mine all the while. “Of course, I could find out exactly what was said without your help.”

  “Of course. But you’d have to dismantle her to do that, and you won’t.”

  “No,” he conceded with a smile. “I won’t. Not yet, anyway. But I don’t think I can let this go completely unpunished.” He stood, locking his arms above his head in a languid stretch, the pop of every vertebrae excruciatingly loud in the silent kitchen. “Well, thank you for all your help these past few months, Ben. It’s been a pleasure. The front door code has been changed, just FYI. If I catch you inside without permission again, I’ll be pressing charges.”

  He let himself out, and I waited a good five minutes to be sure he was gone before getting up and bolting the front door he’d left through.

  D exter had finally stopped pacing in nomadic circles to find precisely the right spot beside me on the couch the next morning when I got the first notification. Instagram had proclaimed that a new direct message awaited me, and I felt my brow crease as I opened the app.

  You don’t know what he does, sent at 8:58 a.m. from Carissa Kloss.

  My blood ran cold at the same time my throat constricted as though invisible hands had clutched my windpipe. I’d barely had time to register the fact that I’d rather receive a message that said there’s a bomb hidden somewhere in the house before my phone pinged in that odd, interrupted fashion when a dozen new notifications stream through at the same time.

  From Twitter user @CarissaKloss at 8:58 a.m., You don’t know what he does.

  From Facebook, sent by the woman I was still ‘engaged to’ on the site, once again at 8:58 a.m., You don’t know what he does.

  But he doesn’t do anything, I wanted to croak, assuming the mysterious and ominous ‘he’ was Nick. What, did he cross-dress? Sing in the shower? Crash weddings? I didn’t know what he did to her?

  I stabbed my temple with my index finger roughly, like I was subconsciously trying to get my sluggish thoughts moving.

  Had he told her he was onto her, that he knew about all those not-so-secret meetings we’d had? He hadn’t seemed overly angry about it the other day, but by now I knew he probably had a good poker face. He couldn’t “let it go completely unpunished”, he’d said, but I didn’t know how on earth he’d begin to go about punishing a machine. She was already a grounded teenager, unable to leave the premises.

  Jess had said he barely touched the Carissa he’d built, and I couldn’t think of a reason in the world that she’d lie. I ignored the part of my brain that said, in a patronizing voice I must have picked up from Carissa, that Nick would hardly attempt any inappropriate touching while Jess was there to witness.

  So I sat there dumbfounded as the notifications continued to chime, plaintive and repetitive, one after the other from a multitude of different portals.

  You don’t know what he does.

  You don’t know what he does.

  You don’t know what he does.

  I clapped a hand against Dexter’s back, needing some of his furry comfort, but my quaking fingers only seemed to annoy him, and he leapt from the couch and streaked off down the hallway, leaving me alone with the cyclical words of his reanimated mistress.

  I closed my eyes, but You don’t know what he does was still stamped across my retinas in incandescent blue lettering.

  What does he do? I wanted to ask. Fondle you? Make you go into sleep mode before you’re ready or watch endless episodes of Friends on repeat? Force you to speak in Mandarin, recite Shakespearian sonnets, clean his office?

  But this is just like Margot, you know, I told myself firmly. She’s trying to manipulate you, she wants you to come back. She doesn’t like Nick, she’s sick of Jess’s doglike devotion to him, and you’re the only other person in the world that she knows. It doesn’t matter what he does to her because she isn’t real, she’s not a person, she isn’t your fiancée no matter how much she resembles her, and just FYI, none of it is any of your concern anyway, remember? You said you’re done, right? If you go back there, you’re an idiot. I swear to God. Don’t be a fucking idiot.

  There’s nothing I can do about the things he does, I sent in response to her Twitter direct message. I’m sorry, but I don’t know what else to tell you.

  I powered my phone down and tossed it to the cushion furthest from me, sagging back into the couch and staring up at the cobwebs on the ceiling fan, crisscrossed and gilded by the pale morning light slanting through the blinds.

  W hy do you look so bad?” Kylie asked, trudging alongside me through impacted black snow later that afternoon.

  I inserted the key in the lock on the side door and pushed it open with my shoulder. “I’m just tired. I look that terrible?”

  She shrugged off her backpack and dropped it on a kitchen chair, her gaze wide and scrutinizing behind the rainbows shattering off the lenses of her glasses. “You have dark circles under your eyes and wrinkles like Daddy’s.” Her nose crinkled up. “Are you trying to grow a beard?” she asked, and it was plain from her tone that she considered this a very poor idea indeed.

  “No, I just forgot to shave for a while. You got any homework?”

  “We don’t have homework on half-days.”

  I dug in my back pocket for my phone, jerking my head at the cabinets. “Go ahead and dig for a snack. We can hit McDonalds later, if you want.”

  I turned my back on her, resting my elbows on the counter as I entered my passcode. The awful shriek of the stepstool Kylie dragged over the tile somewhat masked the landslide of notifications sliding through my phone, and I blew out a heavy sigh as I clicked on the first one from Facebook.

  The video file autoplayed the moment I’d selected the message icon. A close-up of a T-shirt. Every few seconds the file went black, but whenever it reappeared, the T-shirt swam back into focus.

  “What are you doing?” Carissa’s uncertain voice asked.

  “Are we really going through this song and dance?” Nick, the likely owner of the T-shirt, griped. “Arms up.”

  Something slithered over the camera that I’d become rapidly convinced were the ones in her eyes. She blinked again, looking down at her naked chest that my dreams had never once let me see. As soon as I’d registered the sight, it spun blurrily, finally settling on a blank stretch of wall.

  “Relax,” Nick ordered from behind her. “You’re tensing up.”

  “What are you watching?” Kylie asked, and I pivoted around to see her standing atop the stepstool, a bag of Cheetos pressed against her chest. “Who is that?”

  I didn’t know how to answer her. A replica of her would-be aunt possibly being sexually assaulted?

  I couldn’t let her get raped again.

  “Nothing.” I exited out of Facebook. “It’s nothing. I need to make a phone call.” I headed for the office. “I’ll be back in a minute. Eat your snack.”

  I closed the office door behind myself and sank into my swivel chair, breathing raggedly as I pulled up Jess’s phone number and pressed send.

  “Hello?” she said, with all the snotty, dripping disdain of a fifteen-year-old girl.

  “What the fuck is going on there?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What is he doing to her?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Where’s Nick right now?”

  “He’s in the maintenance lab.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Uh…” she said slowly, as if I were mentally impaired, “maintaining, I assume.�
�

  “Bullshit.”

  “What’s your problem? Whatever he’s doing isn’t your concern anymore, remember? That’s what you wanted, right?”

  “Go in there. Right now. Go see what he’s doing. He isn’t maintaining jack shit.”

  She scoffed. “Are you hammered again?”

  “Just go in there.”

  “Fine.” She gave one of her pissy little snorts. “Yeah, I’ll head over there. Calm down.”

  There were a few seconds of silence until something clicked in the background. “Nick?” she called, and I knew that slow creaking was her pushing the door open. “What are you—” she gasped.

  The line went dead.

  XI

  I tried calling back.

  The phone rang six times before her voicemail picked up. The second call went straight to voicemail. Someone had turned off the phone.

  I pushed back from my desk and lurched toward the door. I almost slammed straight into Kylie when I flung it open.

  She took a few wobbly steps backward. “What’s the matter?”

  “I need to go somewhere.” I sidestepped her and headed down the hallway toward the kitchen. “An errand.”

  “Where are we going?” she asked, hot on my heels.

  “You can’t go, princess. You have to stay here.”

  “Alone?”

  Alanna and Frank were with both boys at a travel soccer game in a town forty-five minutes away. My mom was working until nine p.m. I briefly wondered if I’d have to take her with me until a light bulb blinked on over my head. “I’ll call Joe and get him to stay with you.”