Your Life Is Mine

by Nathan Ripley

  I knew that telling anyone, especially Jaya, about what Crissy had said about another shooting would make my mother real and present again in a way I couldn’t handle. So I didn’t.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  * * *

  CHADWICK WAS STARING at me. If he’d kept asking questions while I went over those last moments Crissy had forced on me, I hadn’t heard them. A few moments had passed while I was switched off in front of him: that much was clear. There was a fresh beer in front of him, in a can this time, and a small pile of napkins in front of me.

  “Are those for me?” I asked Chadwick.

  “I thought you might need them,” he said. “Your lights went off for a second there.”

  “Silence isn’t crying, Chadwick,” I said. I still wasn’t entirely back; Chuck Varner used to tune out like this, too, losing himself in fantasies when Crissy or I were talking to him, expecting us to wait until he was back to resume the conversation. When I would phase out in front of Jaya, she’d think I was doing something ineffable, something creative, in my mind. But mostly I was trying to get away from a memory of Chuck, or Crissy, or both, and couldn’t until I’d relived it.

  I hadn’t cried for Crissy Varner since the last day I’d lived in her home. Even then, I was crying for myself, for how much I’d lost to her and Chuck. Hearing the news of her death from this stranger who also came bearing alcohol and a pile of absorbent paper, my body’s only response was a weird ache in my jaw.

  “I didn’t think you were going to cry,” Chadwick said. “Maybe spit on me or something.”

  I took the last of my Marlboro Lights out of my purse—I bought a case at the beginning of every shoot, and forced myself to make it last. I pointed at the courtyard, holding up the smoke, and the bartender shook his head in sympathetic apology, patting the pack of cigs in his own breast pocket.

  “Out front. Sorry,” he said.

  I pushed my stool back, realizing as my shoes hit the floor that I was drunker than I thought, but not enough to worry about. I left more money than my drink plus tip cost, but not enough to pay for Chadwick’s. Chadwick followed me, of course, but stayed under the canopy when I crossed the street to the citrus tree, poking at one of the fallen fruits with my toe. I couldn’t tell whether it was a small grapefruit, an orange, or some sort of deformed lemon. The skin was pale green, alien, like something hastily painted for an old sci-fi TV show.

  I’d started calling my mother “Crissy” when I was eight, and she had never corrected me. For a second I had another vision of her so vivid it made reality vanish—all I saw was Crissy, putting her makeup on to go to work out at the bar, moving her lips in rehearsal of banter with customers, seeing me behind her in the mirror and turning to laugh, surprising me to the point that I didn’t think to laugh with her until she’d already stopped and turned back to her mascara job.

  I stepped on the thin green skin of the fruit on the pavement and it burst, pink. I lit my cigarette and walked back to Emil Chadwick.

  “Go on.”

  “Your mom was shot with a small-caliber handgun. Home invasion, they said.”

  “Trailer invasion,” I said, seeing if some deadpan would knock away that pain in my jaw.

  “They got the kid who did it. Some opioid crisis statistic.”

  “You have a name?” Chadwick shook his head, but I could tell he was lying, holding back until I gave him something or begged him. Whoever the kid was, he wasn’t just some home-invading stranger. That would be too random, too tidy, too much a part of the Chuck Varner preaching of chaos, and not the actual chaos that Chuck and Crissy made: violence that they themselves fueled, that they carried out. Crissy must have known this kid, the shooter. She would have taught him, tried to make him her instrument. And he’d killed her. She could never just die by accident. Not her.

  “We’ll pay for the ticket when you go down there,” Chadwick said. “Me and my backers—which I already have, I want you to know. This is all paid for as long as you plan on bringing a camera.”

  “No.”

  “Blanche, you are the story I’m doing. You, your dad, your mom. You can either be in control of it, or you can be the Difficult Subject in my movie and my article.”

  “What happened to the napkins and sweet concern, Emil? You have to stick to whichever act you pick, or your subject is guaranteed to be difficult.”

  Chadwick took out his wallet and dug around for a card again. This time, it wasn’t the Varner Six.

  “Here,” he said, handing me a Stilford Police Department business card for a Dan Maitland, with an additional number written on the back and cell in brackets. “This is the only person who’s been able to give me any information at all about your mother’s death. The department there is an organizational nightmare and they’re at the crest of a ten-year steady rise in crime. So now you have a contact. Helpful enough for you?”

  I took the card, turned and blew smoke away from Chadwick, and started to follow it, walking through the cloud and picking up speed.

  “Blanche,” Chadwick called. I stopped, didn’t turn. “Happy birthday, Blanche.”

  “It’s not my birthday.”

  He had nothing to say to that.

  “It’s the anniversary of the Harlow shootings, Emil. The important part of research is getting it right when it matters.”

  “Your mother told me it was your birthday,” Chadwick said. I could tell he was shaken for a second, as though he were surprised Crissy would venture to lie to him.

  “She told everyone that my birthday was the day of the shootings. But only her. So you talked to Crissy?”

  “Months ago, once. Yes. You want to hear more, come back in and sit. You need to, Blanche. I don’t think your mom is the end of this, not for a second. Lives are at stake.” Chadwick wasn’t walking toward me, but he reached with his right hand, then let it fall, not knowing what gesture he could make that would summon me back. “People could die.”

  “And I’m sure you hope they do,” I said, walking away. I wasn’t going to let Emil Chadwick see me cry, for obvious reasons, and for a less obvious one. He’d think I was mourning Crissy Varner, which just wasn’t true.

  I was crying because I felt safe.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  * * *

  THE DAY CRISSY Varner got back from New Orleans was also the day she died. When she was looking at the gun, in the few minutes she talked to The Boy, wondering if she was supposed to beg to stay alive, wondering if she had planned this far at this level of detail, she decided that he hadn’t waited for her to see Blanche one last time before killing her. The Boy wasn’t the tactical type, more of a grand-design fellow. Which was one of the things that made him both a flawed and perfect successor to Chuck: they were just alike. While this moment wasn’t a surprise to Crissy, it hadn’t come when it was supposed to. But it would still work.

  She’d set down her one suitcase and taken her sneakers off, and was walking toward her bed when she noticed The Boy’s Timberlands on the mat by the door. He wore these boots year-round, like a lumberjack or a drug dealer. The Boy had vain habits, a desire for a precisely constructed look, but Chuck had suffered from these as well.

  “Hi, Crissy,” The Boy had said. He was in her bed, lying down, and from the sound of his voice, just woken from a nap. “I found a way in.”

  “Do you need something from me? I was going to update you on Blanche tomorrow, but I suppose I could now. But I’ll be keeping it short. I need sleep. I need to prepare, and so do you,” Crissy said. The air felt impossibly dry after her brief time in Louisiana; every breath felt like it was going to start a nosebleed, not much different from the arid, oxygen-light mix of air on her discount flight back.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me to get up?” he said. He was still in the darkness, but she could see his socks. White, clean, new.

  “I shouldn’t have to.”

  “I know. ‘Get out of my bed unless I’m in it with you.’ ”

  “I’ve been helpin
g you. Helping you get rid of something that bothered you.”

  “Yes, my disease of virginity. My thanks, good lady. But that was just the first time, wasn’t it? What about the rest? My transference lessons, right? Physical education.”

  Crissy forgot about her weariness and, for the first time since leaving Blanche, remembered her authority. Now wasn’t the moment to let go of it; The Boy would need to remember her this way. And she needed the dignity of it, the command, in order to really make her way through these moments with the strength others had always thought she had, and that she eventually accepted she did have. Crissy walked the few steps toward the bedroom’s faux-wood sliding divider and wrenched it open.

  “Why are you talking to me like this? I suggest you think, very carefully, about your response, and about all of your behavior. If you are drunk or high, I will forgive it this once. We are on the edge of a major step forward, and—”

  “Yeah, the Your Life Is Mine Olympics, around the corner,” The Boy said, sitting up. Crissy was momentarily ashamed of the state she’d left the bedroom in. Clothes on the floor, a slightly overflowing trash can. Either she’d left the fan on or he had turned it on when he’d come in—it had blown some of the contents of the ashtray onto the floor by her desk, right onto the up-facing cups of her second-favorite bra. The shame snapped back into anger that The Boy had violated this space.

  “You’re mocking the most important gift Chuck Varner gave the world, which you happened to be lucky enough to be given in turn, and you’re violating the sanctity of the home that I shared with him, and that I’ve opened to you. You leave. Right now. Exactly this minute.”

  The Boy got up from the bed, a fluid motion in which he barely used his hands and never used his elbows. A great distance from the wriggling, rolling movements Blanche used to get out of the same bed, after the distortions that time and a career on her feet had manifested in her spine.

  He’d grown up beautifully, had taken every physical measure and discipline that Crissy told him Chuck would want. He’d obeyed and it had resulted in this sharp, dangerous form, a shape that needed to be draped in baggy clothing to ever look harmless. The Boy, standing naked in his socks, was what Chuck had imagined, yet had never been able to forge in himself. But Crissy had. She’d cut this stone out of the soft young flesh that had turned up at her door in 1996.

  “Why aren’t you dressed?” Crissy said.

  “My clothes are in a bag by the door,” said The Boy. “Don’t worry, it’s not sexual. Quite the opposite. It’s to ensure cleanliness.”

  “Oh.” He had thought of details that she wouldn’t have thought of herself, necessarily. “This is why you’re catching me right off the plane.”

  “You’re armed every day of your life, and I don’t want to have a shootout. Just an ending. Getting you right after airport security is my way of making this—”

  “Cozy. For both of us.” This is where the begging should start, Crissy thought, before feeling a pang of pride so severe it could have been arrhythmia. She wasn’t worried about herself, not at all. “You have to promise that you’re not just abandoning all this, the way Blanche did. That’s the only thing I couldn’t take, and you have to remember that it’s the only thing that—”

  “Don’t tell me, Crissy, what Chuck would want. You never even really saw him work. Doesn’t that ever stick in your head? You’re a placid, smug sow. You think you’re his, his John the Baptist. That his project is graven in your soul, that it’s your purpose. But no. This life is just an accident. It’s all that you can do. You stumbled into an important role through no virtue or talent of your own, and here we are.

  “You’re a waitress with a power complex. A flake of scrap paper that blew near a flame. Exactly the kind of empty, idiotic woman that thinks she’s a creator when she’s only a vessel. Your purpose was me. Me and Blanche. And you’ve already half-failed.

  “Chuck would want me to be with her, but it’s me who has to bring her back in, not you. You couldn’t even anchor her to her path when she’d seen Chuck’s greatest hour, when he’d shown her how it could be, and how we could get there. The blood. She’s seen the blood, so she knows. It’s you that disgusted her, you that drove her off the path. You’ve only ever been a petty criminal, Crissy. A dumb accomplice. You’re exactly what we don’t need.”

  Through the insults, the accurate ones and the ones that were baseless, woman-hating garbage, fueled probably by websites that Crissy had ordered The Boy not to visit knowing that he would seek them out as soon as he was alone and that they would help to shape him to a purpose, she cried. What she would keep to herself, what she would never share, is that the tears came from an ecstasy of fulfillment. Of having done everything exactly right, of working this situation for over twenty years just the way that Chuck would have wanted her to. A solution to Chuck’s absence that was so elegant she had always felt his hands behind The Boy, pushing him toward his fate along with her.

  The Boy didn’t ask her anything about her tears, in the end. He didn’t ask her anything at all. He stood in front of her and told her to kneel, to demonstrate her acceptance. Crissy wondered for a second if he was hard, if he was going to ask her to do something to him before he killed her, but shook the thought out of her mind as disrespectful—not to The Boy, but to Chuck. To Chuck and herself. This creature with the gun and the rage was their creation, the perfected child they hadn’t been able to forge genetically. He was so angry, but so controlled, twenty years of anger and teaching and focus coming together. He really was Chuck’s creation, as she had ensured he would be. The Boy took the gun out from beneath the pillow, pointed it, and asked her to look at him.

  “No,” she said. She closed her eyes and imagined Chuck, tall and naked, holding this ugly little gun, wishing that it was his sweet Beretta. He loved that gun.

  The Boy kept talking as Crissy prayed to Chuck for peace.

  “This next one is going to be what Chuck dreamed, Crissy. Not just a few people shot and a couple of days on the news. Blanche and I, we’re going to make enough bodies to convert anyone who’s paying real attention. They’re going to hear Chuck’s name. They’re going to hear his message.”

  Crissy kept praying, in her own way. Every evening since Blanche left, for an hour, she had tuned out and communed with the Chuck she remembered, before he became a prophet. When they were young, before Blanche, before this constricting set of rooms where they would both live the rest of their short lives, before the project became the only thing that Chuck wanted to talk about. To her, at least. He probably had spoken of other things, to other women.

  She spent all her praying time in the before. Crissy ambled through a memory that placed her and Chuck on the bench outside Raleigh’s Books & Records, kissing and daring each other to throw ever-larger rocks at the big display window. Crissy started them moving up incrementally from the nail-clipping-sized pebbles around the feet of the bench to slightly larger rocks, but it was Chuck, storming off into the park as though he was mad at her and returning with a grin and a palm-sized stone that he calmly sailed through the plate glass before grabbing her hand and starting to move as the alarm wailed, who ended the game. He always ended the game.

  In the cramped, hot, ugly, and unchanging trailer, The Boy was still talking. As though he would never stop, the way Chuck could just keep talking and talking when he came to grips with his role, when he truly began to believe in himself.

  “You’re not Chuck,” Crissy said to The Boy. It did stop him talking. “Even Chuck wasn’t Chuck. But he was better at all of this than you are.”

  Crissy didn’t know if she believed what she’d just said, but it was nice, for a last moment, to be unsure of exactly what it was she believed. Chuck, or someone, or no one, granted Crissy silence, after one incredibly loud sound.

  CHAPTER SIX

  * * *

  I DIALED JAYA AS soon as I stopped believing in the safety of a Crissy-free world, which took about two minutes. I didn’t tur
n to see if Chadwick was following me, but in the traffic-free silence that set in one block north of Fela Cafe, I would have heard him coming.

  “He knows,” I said when she picked up. “That Chadwick guy just drilled me about Chuck Varner for an hour. I don’t want this, Jaya.”

  “I know he knows,” Jaya said. It was quiet behind her—either she was in the washroom at the Carver, or she’d ditched the screening. A flush gave me my answer. “I looked him up. It’s his mom.”

  “What? It’s my mom. Crissy’s dead, and I had to hear it from some exploitative fuck who wants me to help him make a movie about it.”

  “Oh, no. No,” Jaya said. “Wait, let me get outside.”

  I heard the rush of voices as she walked through the lobby of the theater, heard her name called out a couple times. I’d walked four blocks, clearing the paved roads and entering a little field between several squatty buildings: small disused factories and an old school converted into offices and apartments. There were loud frogs and old train tracks around me, tall grass and puddles. I sat on a broken parking median.

  “You ready?” I asked.

  “Yes. I’m so sorry, Blanche. I love you. I’m so sorry.”

  “You know exactly how broken up I am about this, Jaya. I wouldn’t have chosen to hear about it this way, and you can be absolutely sure the cops in Stilford are going to know that, but I’ve been free of that woman for years.”

  “It’s still—I mean, she was your parent, you grew up in her home—”

  “Jaya, you were born with parents. I had genetically similar creatures in my home. This is not a mourning thing, it’s a fact thing. Crissy’s dead.”

  “I understand,” Jaya said.

  I didn’t think she did, and I wasn’t ready to do the amount of explaining I would have to for Jaya to truly understand what Crissy was. In over ten years of the closest connection I could imagine having, I’d never been able to speak fully to her about what Crissy was. What I was, even.