Your Life Is Mine

by Nathan Ripley

  “Because we know that life can’t last, and we don’t give a shit. Because we’re into the real message of the universe, the heartbeat that we feel in our brains and in our bodies and in rooms like that when we’re tuned in to a truth that some hot chick laughing at you or your dad telling you to focus on the S-A-fucking-T so you can get out of his house can never know. It’s all about coming and chaos. You know that and I know that. And we know that the rest of the world is too dumb to get it, except the ones who hear the alarm.

  “Know what the alarm sounds like? BANG. Bang. Bang. Bang. That’s all that gets their attention. The call to arms in this world, this world we’re forced to live in, isn’t just a call: it’s an armed call. And you know who sounds it? Anyone?”

  The boys are rapt, and so was I. They must have remembered this moment in their lives after the Harlow Mall massacre, remembered this parking lot prophet channeling hates that may never have occurred to them and loneliness they may never have been preoccupied with into a pure, solution-oriented message that made them feel so very, very important.

  The tape ends with Chuck laughing and leaning back against the car that the camera is balanced on top of, shutting it off with a backward fumble of his hand. And maybe that’s when the spell breaks for the boys, too: perhaps they’re too smart for him, once the charisma wears off, once they actually think about what he’s saying. I don’t know. But even if Chuck couldn’t convince them, he could certainly convince others. He already had.

  Crissy and I stayed silent. When I looked over to my right, there she was, crying quietly. Neither of us broke the silence.

  From the next room, Stella, her voice gummy and adorable with sleep, said “Daddy.” She said it again, then she woke up and screamed it. Crissy climbed out of the bed and walked into the next room, and held her daughter in an embrace so tight I thought Stella might stop breathing, or that Crissy would absorb her entirely, and they’d turn back toward me as one, new person, a creature equally Stella, Crissy, and Chuck. No longer broken into discrete, partially human artifacts.

  Just one breathing, looming, monster.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  * * *

  THE BOY WAS waiting for Kindt in his office. From his covered position on the hill, he’d watched Blanche begin to follow the old man out to the river, as planned. Her shot had come alarmingly close to his head, and if she hadn’t panicked, had squeezed off two more bullets, he would have caught one, he was sure. The range was certainly close enough: he’d nailed her precisely with the little BB rifle. She was still a beautiful shot, still had the reflexes that Chuck Varner had baked into her when she was a child. But she lacked his instinct, his strength. Of course she would—that’s why The Boy was necessary.

  He’d been sitting on Kindt’s desk since he got tired of pacing the office to take the tension out of his thighs, which were tight from squatting in the grass. Kindt was one of those men in minor power who was incredibly easy to manipulate with the promise of slightly greater power: after prying into Crissy Varner’s business a couple of times, once almost revealing The Boy to Blanche when she was young and not ready for the knowledge, he had become incredibly pliant after Crissy had first thought of enlisting him to carry out small missions.

  “Feeling needed,” Crissy had said, “is part of what we warn our followers against. It’s exactly how they use you, how they bend you. And no one has needed Kindt for a long time. So let’s use him.”

  Crissy had only directly called on the old man once, for a cover story when she and The Boy did a weapons run at an illegal gun store owned by a survivalist two hundred miles north. They’d taken the place down when the man was away and his weak son was watching the home-based store. The Boy had broken his wrist before even asking him for anything, and Crissy had taken it easy on him by only stealing ten handguns. Seeds of Chaos, Crissy had said, leaving them scattered around Stilford when they drove back, dropping a Colt under a dumpster in the alley behind Walmart, a lane frequented by users and dealers. Kindt was prepared to tell the police that Crissy had been with him in his office, that he was helping her with her taxes. But illegal gun dealers tend to leave these incidents unreported.

  Just this one passive mission was enough to make Kindt their dog. He had visions of notoriety, of heroism, probably ideas of being a leader himself when Your Life Is Mine entered its next phase: a phase that Crissy was always extremely vague about when she spoke to hopefuls and outsiders like Kindt. He’d wept when Crissy died, and when The Boy told him he was needed so Crissy could be avenged, Kindt had risen to his full, miniature height, pressed the clinging Plasticine snakes of hair he had left back over his scalp, and said, “Anything.” The Boy had fed him the first part of the Vernon Reilly story: the part that landed Reilly in jail, that gave The Boy enough time to make sure that every hour of Blanche Varner’s return to Stilford was choreographed.

  Planning like this, alone, he felt closer to Crissy than he had when she was alive. Closer to Chuck, too. Blanche was correct about this—the family functioned best when the individual absorbed all of their needs and insights, doing away with their weaknesses. Chuck’s impatience, Crissy’s neediness. The Boy had neither. The best of them lived in him, and the worst had leaked out with their lives.

  When Kindt got back to the office The Boy would give him another piece of the plan, wait for it to play out, then give him something else.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  * * *

  I PULLED INTO THE motel lot two hours after Alfred Kindt left me staring into Crissy’s treasure box. After looking through the Polaroids, I’d peeled a bill off the roll of cash and walked to a roadside bar where they used to let Jaya and me drink when we were in senior year, as long as we stayed in the restaurant section, and stuck to drinks that could pass as virgin if the liquor inspector came in. For the sake of those particular old times, I had a Long Island Iced Tea and paid for it with money my mother had probably stolen. Then I stared at the tablecloth and drank water refills until it started to get too busy in that place to think, and I could tell the creature in the Men’s Wearhouse suit and increasingly reddening skin on the next stool was about to start talking to me. He did, just as I got up.

  “You frown a lot. Bad for your skin,” he said, pointing at the slight wrinkles next to his right eye. I could have put his own pointing finger deep into his eye and be walking to the door before the screaming started.

  “Sorry, yes, I do think the sex offender registry is permanent in this state, sir. Good luck,” I said, instead of the eye stab. I made sure to be loud enough that the bartender, both servers, and any table nearby turned to stare at him. I left.

  The slot right in front of my motel door was occupied by a pristine truck. One of the few pleasures of staying in a roadside motel is parking your ride four feet away from where you’ll be passing out, and I felt every extra step I had to take back toward Room 14 after parking near the office. Dan Maitland climbed out of the driver’s seat when I was a few doors away, and I had enough time to put my face on, what Chuck used to call “the street mask.” Closed-lip smile, blank and bored eyes. It was easy to slip back into it, and I realized how often I’d used this face without thinking of him and his lessons over the course of my little career, and how useful it had been. Before Maitland could speak I held up a finger.

  “My phone,” I said, walking back to my car. The phone was already in my purse, but I unlocked the passenger door of the rental and took the holstered Ruger out from under the seat, clipping it back to my belt, then putting on my jacket. I could feel Maitland’s eyes on me and made sure that he couldn’t see any of these interesting movements.

  “Are you all right with me being here? Know you must be tired, but I decided against waiting until tomorrow,” Maitland asked, tapping his knuckles against the wallet in his front right pocket. Maitland in his plain clothes looked like an off-duty something, but it was hard to tell what—mailman, radio jock, bartender maybe. Not a cop. Nicely fitted chinos and a dark pla
id shirt, tucked in.

  “How did you know where I was staying?” I asked, reaching into my bag for my room key but stopping before I got it out, waiting for him to answer.

  “It was maybe the third or fourth thing you told me when you came to the station. Arcadian Inn. Just wanted a quick conversation. Out here’s fine,” he said.

  “We’ve talked a lot today, Officer Maitland. And I got the impression that both chats were pretty reluctant on your part, so this is half a surprise and half annoying. Do you have any new information for me?”

  “The ‘officer’ bit is what’s getting in the way of us having a proper conversation. I’m a cop for about three more months, if I have my way.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve done—I’m finished with my part of this, especially after what’s happened with your mom. This is going to be complicated to explain.” Maitland had been staring into my bag this whole time, relaxing only after he’d seen my hand loosen to reveal the motel passkey, instead of the recorder I figured he was worried about. He kept talking.

  “I haven’t been absolutely honest with you, Blanche. The department has little intention of handling this case right. They’ll tell you that it’s because it’s a lock, that there’s no time to solve the why when they already have the who, but that’s not it. And we both know that the scope you found today is not Chuck Varner’s.”

  “How do we know that?” I tried to keep the combating emotions of vindication and suspicion off my face; I’d known there was something withheld about Dan Maitland, something both vague and familiar. Those predatory eyes that I recognized from my dad’s face. Maitland in public was a person who was half made-up, with the important part kept inside. Just the kind of masking my mother taught me, and that Chuck had to use, because there was only emptiness under the mask.

  “We know the scope’s not his because twelve years ago, you and Crissy Varner broke that rifle down into pieces and you spread the components all over town in places they’d never be found. And I know, even if you don’t, that you wouldn’t flub a job like that.”

  This landed the way Maitland had hoped it would. I shut up and stared at him.

  “What I found most interesting,” he said, “is that you really wanted to believe that it was Chuck Varner’s scope. That on some level, you wanted to see evidence that he was still alive in the world.”

  “I don’t prefer the idea of someone precisely simulating a Chuck Varner artifact. I find that scarier. Because it means that someone is working to keep him around. Do you get that?” I felt the truth of it as I said it: Chuck, Crissy, the past, these were known quantities. Whoever was doing this out there wasn’t. This was Chuck’s chaos at work, through someone new, someone better at it than he ever was.

  “So do you want to talk out here, or sit down somewhere?” he asked.

  “Emil Chadwick,” I said. “Fucking Emil Chadwick, that little worm.”

  “Yeah?” Maitland said, smiling.

  “He gave me your card and got me directly in touch with you so I wouldn’t talk to anyone else on the department. So I’d come straight to you without stirring anything up.”

  “It was just timing, Blanche. We wanted to make sure that you talked to the right people first. He wants a story, and knows this is the best way to get it. Crissy told him he could trust me. And she told me that you would want to talk to as few cops as possible, whether you knew it or not—that you were taught, repeatedly, never to trust us.”

  So Maitland had given me Detective Pargiter’s number knowing I wouldn’t call it, whether it was actually the right number or not.

  “Is my mother even—”

  “God, Blanche, I wouldn’t lie about that. That would land me in prison and also make me a total piece of garbage. I’m sorry to say that your mother is dead, yes. But we have a lot more to discuss.”

  “I could go to your superiors right now, instead.”

  “You’d be going to them with questions, Blanche, and we know how that would go. Agitated young woman with a deeply fucked-up past claims that there is a police conspiracy against her? Come on.”

  Maitland didn’t even offer to drive me, but I knew it wasn’t out of rudeness—just an avoidance of the awkwardness of my inevitable “no.” I hadn’t quite trusted him when he seemed like just another ineffective cop. Knowing enough about my mother that we had to arrange a little drinks party to get it all out made him worse than bumbling: it made him dangerous, more specifically dangerous than strange men already are.

  I took hold of the situation my own way, taking my cell phone out and taking a picture of Maitland in front of his truck. I took a picture of his license plate, too, and texted both to Jaya, showing Maitland the screen just after I did so. I left Jaya a voicemail telling her exactly when and where I was, and that I was headed for a drink with Maitland, “the soon-to-be-ex cop who wants to tell me something about his concealed relationship to my mother.” I didn’t tell her that I had a gun resting against my spine, both because she would have disapproved profoundly and because I didn’t want to fill Maitland in. The phone started buzzing with calls from Jaya as soon as I finished with the message, but I didn’t pick up. I didn’t have the time to listen to sensible advice.

  “I wish you hadn’t said that last part,” Maitland said. “ ‘Concealed relationship.’ Makes it sound illicit.”

  “Concealing that you had a connection to the victim of a murder you were investigating isn’t illicit, Maitland?”

  “It is,” he said. “But you of all people must understand the value—the necessity—of concealing ties, sometimes. But fair enough.”

  Our conversation was already different from any of the others we’d had. Here, in this parking lot, he seemed ready to concede any point.

  “That’s why I wouldn’t be a cop, Officer Maitland. But you are. You’re not supposed to be concealing anything. Not that I’m naive enough to think it actually works that way in any department in this country.”

  “This country or any other one,” Maitland said, grinning. “But really, I wasn’t being devious. It’s just been, you know, sort of undercover work.”

  “No. I don’t know. I have no fucking clue what you mean.”

  “Then let’s go and have a talk so you can find out. Someplace extremely public. This is the best way we can keep anyone—and I don’t mean you, of course—from getting hurt.”

  Maitland promised to drive slowly, and I tailed him closely. A mile from the motel, I realized how tired I was and annoyed by a pain in my ribs, either from my dive in the trailer or the fall I’d taken outside of it. The BB injury had stopped throbbing, and was clean and bandaged after a stop at a Rexall and some brief triage in the bathroom before I’d had my Long Island. I pressed into the injured rib to check if it was broken, then pressed harder to wake myself up.

  I overuse the mirrors when I drive tired, which also means I get more glimpses of myself than I’d like. After this many waking hours, my face had indeed collapsed into a nightmare of exhausted meat. I didn’t have the time or inclination to fix it, but felt a bit bad about walking into any place, even a dive, with Maitland looking casual-polished the way he did and me looking the way I did.

  We ended up in front of a huge multiplex that had been under construction when I’d left Stilford. The lot was full; blockbuster season, superheroes pulling in the crowds, a couple of screens left over for a romantic comedy and a period drama. As far from Marigny Five’s little opening in the Carver as possible. Maitland was waiting by his truck, and we walked to the entrance together.

  “You don’t have to buy a ticket until you’re up the escalator,” Maitland said. He did have a cop haircut, but the teenagers who were streaming toward us, exiting and going on into the night to drink and smoke weed and make out and generally squeeze out a bit more summer, didn’t make Maitland as a cop. They saw a man and his tired girlfriend going to the movies.

  “Wasn’t open from when I lived here,” I said. He grunted, the kind of res
ponse a non sequitur like that merited. It felt like an oddly normal conversational beat, which made me distrust Maitland even further. Chuck taught me to watch adults small-talking, to look for the real thoughts they were having while they exchanged automated pleasantries. They were what was used when people were sizing each other up, Chuck said, or deciding what their next move would be. I couldn’t remember if he was talking to me about approaching women or recruiting boys.

  I sat down in the glowing neon brightness of the concourse while Maitland went to get us expensive sodas. Behind me was a crane game, unplugged and dark, the claw grabber inside detached and lying among the elephants and SpongeBobs it was supposed to gather up. Maitland had been half-right; it was extremely public here, but that didn’t make me feel safe. Just like at the Carver in New Orleans, I would start to see bodies around me dropping if I lost focus on the present, even for a second. And there were still moments, sometimes long ones, where I walked into a space like this and saw it as Chuck had taught me to: a space to perform, to make chaos happen. The parents and toddlers who walked in front of me became momentarily blank. That’s how Chuck would have seen the people in Harlow Mall before he shot. Nine faceless obstacles between himself and immortality.

  Maitland came back with two waxed paper cups adorned with wraparound masked vigilantes. His face was vivid to me in this crowd, almost seeming to glow from the reflected light and the intensity he was staring at me with, consuming me as though I wasn’t staring right back. He sat next to me on the plastic bench I’d chosen and passed me my cup.