Your Life Is Mine

by Nathan Ripley

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said, handing the picture back and sticking my head out the door. The maid’s cart was two doors away. “I wanna be sure they swap out these sheets before I get back.”

  “Wait, wait. We can talk about any between-us stuff at lunch, but I want to understand. Your mom was stalking you but never made contact? Took these photos but never tried to see you?”

  “She did once. This day,” I said, pointing to the picture in her hands.

  “That day. Holy shit. When you were—when you drove off in Jerome’s truck. That’s what freaked you out.”

  “Yeah. Can we go into it later? I kinda have to get myself geared up for the morgue.”

  “Whenever you want. We have a stop before the morgue, so you’ll have some extra prep time,” Jaya said.

  “What?”

  “You’ve got to check in with Padma and so do I. Every minute she knows that we’re on the ground here and that we’re not in her house is a mark on our permanent records.”

  I told Jaya that I’d drive, and also that we probably didn’t have time for her to blow-dry her hair. Just as we exited the motel room, I pretended that I’d forgotten the car keys, dodged back inside. I pulled the Ruger from under the mattress and strapped it on.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  * * *

  JAYA WAS IN the passenger seat of her car with a wet ponytail, deep into her one of her impossible micronaps, when we pulled onto the driveway of the yellow house on Piccardo. Padma still had a gray VW, like always, but this one was new and smaller, not the tanker that she’d driven Jaya and I around in during high school. She’d downsized the car, but not the sprawling four-bedroom house that was too big for her and her daughter, remained so when I moved in, and was now an absurdly large place for one person to live. They’d bought it the year before Neesh Chauhan died, and Padma would keep it until she died, too. I let Jaya keep sleeping and walked up to the door, knocking quietly as I did in the recurrent dreams I had about this place when I was stressed out.

  Padma opened the door and I immediately made a shushing motion, gesturing toward her daughter in the car. Jaya had a slightly drooling cheek leaned against the half-rolled-down window, and looked as peaceful in sleep as I looked hungover and confused awake. Padma and I folded each other into a deep embrace. She was taller than Jaya, my height, and barely looked older than us, thanks to an annoyingly pure diet and coping skills that were beyond my imagination. Holding her, realizing how much I needed her, I thought for the first time of the danger that I might have drawn here, to her and Jaya, by never leaving their lives after I’d entered them with such insistence, all those years ago. I held on to her and promised myself that if my lies and the parents who had spawned me ended up hurting anyone else, it wouldn’t be this woman.

  “Jaya, you lazy pack of bones,” Padma yelled over my shoulder. She yelled softly; somehow, she could do that. I turned to watch Jaya jerk awake and peel her adhered-on cheek away from the window. She whined “Mom” in the voice she only felt safe using around her mother and slowly began gathering herself and her things.

  “Don’t—how many times do I have to tell you—don’t tie your hair up when it’s wet. It’s like putting an ice cube on your scalp. You’ll get sick. You probably are sick already,” Padma said during Jaya’s turn for an embrace. I pushed the two of them gently inside and shut the door behind us.

  “She wouldn’t let me dry it,” Jaya said, pointing at me. Jaya regressed in small, appealing ways when she was around her mom, becoming a little more shy, a little more playful. I had never been more on my guard than when I was around Crissy or Chuck—I felt safest, most myself, the farther I was from either of them. I envied Jaya this comfort now, just as I’d envied it a decade ago.

  “Sit down,” Padma said, taking over herding duties from me, pushing us through the lush plant-lined hallway with its almost cloying odors of jasmine and gardenia. Padma started keeping the plants because she hated the house smelling like any kind of cooking and thought the flowers might help. The collection of greenery had grown into a jungle when she discovered that her kind of perfectionism was ideally suited to indoor gardening.

  We sat on a couch I hadn’t seen before, part of a three-piece set that looked infinitely more expensive than my apartment’s IKEA kindling. Through and after a recession, Padma’s accounting services firm had barely suffered, eventually even growing, thanks to her reputation for total competence and a knack for justifying write-offs.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t come earlier,” I said to Padma, who was moving into the kitchen, pulling down a small crystal platter that was reserved for guests. I felt a small pang of offense that she was using it for me, but talked myself out of feeling hurt, as Jaya would be eating off it, too. Even family could become guests under certain circumstances, and I understood what those circumstances were when Padma answered.

  “I’m so sorry about your mother. Not for your mother, no, I know you don’t talk about her that way, but for what you’re going through, for what you have to do. We love you so much, and don’t apologize to me in this home again. You’ve been my daughter for years and I want you to know that that won’t change and I won’t stop saying it to you ever, Blanche.”

  She’d always said my name with a bit of a French-Caribbean lilt, which made no sense for someone from the subcontinent with a UK education, but it was the way I most loved hearing it. I’d already cried enough that morning, and the memory of my motel sobs was enough for me to keep dry this time. I was good at stopping emotion when I had enough time to see it coming. Chuck had taught me that, too. But I did need to get up and hold Padma again, tightly. The crystal dish dangled precariously over the sink from Padma’s left hand before Jaya noticed it and leapt up, grabbing it away and placing it safely on the counter.

  The three of us talked about career matters first, the parts of our lives that we’d made for ourselves, that hadn’t been shaped by the violence of other people. Padma waited for the first significant pause before getting right in there and talking about her husband.

  “When Neesh died, at the store, you know, the first thing I thought was that it was on purpose. He couldn’t have just been robbed by some idiot who got too scared to take his money when he saw what he’d done. It couldn’t be that ugly and simple. It must have been mistaken identity, some sort of plan gone wrong, or maybe someone from back home with a grudge. I invented all sorts of stories to explain that bullet.”

  The shot was point-blank, right outside his optometry shop on Langley, near Ninth and Schwab, a storefront I used to walk past a few times a month when I took myself out for a Slurpee while Crissy worked a late shift at the pub and I was able to wrangle Mr. Paxton’s scooter keys in exchange for a promise that I’d clean it and put in a couple of bucks of gas. Jaya’s dad took the bullet but kept his wallet—the cops found it in his right hand. The shooter had also put a bullet in the security camera after the shooting, which would have been useful if the camera was hooked into anything other than the building’s stucco wall.

  I looked over at Jaya, and Padma caught it.

  “It’s fine,” Padma said. “I can talk about this now. I went to—I’ve been seeing a therapist for years. And I understand now that this is just a thing that happens here. Not just in America, but here, this town. Someone gets in the way of the wrong someone else. No pattern, no thought, just a want for money or drugs. It happened to my husband, to Jaya’s dad, and now it’s happened to your mother. To that Crissy woman.”

  She was absolutely back to being Padma with the slightly envenomed delivery of this last line. Some of our first intimate conversations, the ones where I verged on that sisterly-maternal relationship that Jaya had with her mom, were about Crissy’s ravings and control of me, with any mention of the cult of Chuck carefully elided. When I moved in, after Jaya’s great campaign in the face of Padma’s grieving numbness, we were part of each other’s resurrections. Padma took care of herself by taking care of us. But Jaya and I becam
e symbiotic, exchanging pain for pain, support for support, until it was no longer a trade, but simply love. We talked about my crazy mother, and we talked, very selectively, about Neesh Chauhan, who briefly made the papers for being shot point-blank by a mugger for no reason other than that he was on the wrong square of sidewalk. Her father’s death was then forgotten by the rest of the world in a way that Chuck Varner’s never would be, in a way that none of Chuck’s victims would be, and the unfairness of that hurt in a way I hadn’t figured out how to talk about yet, with Jaya or anyone else.

  But I could still be direct with Padma in a way that I could with no one else, even Jaya, because she had the way of asking the right question.

  “What are you worried about, Blanche?”

  “I’m worried more people will die. I’m worried that the bullet for my mother was only the first one. I’m worried that this is part of something that my dad put in motion a long time ago, or that my mother thought he did. And I’m worried that it’s my fault, no matter how much I try to stop it.”

  “What?” said Jaya. Padma shushed her.

  “Don’t shush me, Mom, your house or not. What do you mean, Blanche?”

  “Crissy—in the house, she talked about how Dad had acted too soon. But not that he shouldn’t have done it at all. She thought the shooting was perfect, but it was sort of, sort of a Christmas in July.” I laughed at this, and poked at a tissue box on the table. Padma’s cat, Ranchero, who had replaced Jaya and me as an affection depository when we’d moved out, jumped onto the couch beside me, immediately falling asleep. The house was immaculately clean except for the occasional dead leaf and endless deposits of Ranchero’s tabby-striped fur.

  “So you think that—that Crissy was planning another mass shooting?”

  “Yes,” I said, shuddering, then putting a hand on the cat. I could feel the engine in him move into a purr, the most passive form of vitality imaginable, but still an undeniable sign of life. It reassured me, which in turn made me feel silly.

  “I think that whoever killed her was someone she was trying to make into a murderer. A Chuck descendant. A tool for her lessons.”

  Padma shook her head, then lifted her hands off her lap and looked at them. They were shaking, too. Jaya walked over and held them.

  “Don’t worry,” Padma said, “it’s not some awful disease. It’s the killing talk. This is what happens when I think of Neesh. It’s why I can’t watch almost anything on television. Stupid.” Jaya sat down and hugged her, but Padma looked at me with intention. She had a way of talking about her own emotions with such clarity that it inspired you to talk about your own. And it was definitely calculated.

  “That’s really normal, Ma,” I said. “It’s not stupid.”

  “Like soldiers,” Padma said, still fishing. I could tell by the lack of interjections that Jaya had caught on now—she knew her mother better than I did, of course, and had picked up on the absolute steadiness in her voice. The leading in it.

  “I don’t know what I have and haven’t dealt with,” I said. “Crissy, I think I have. When I left her, left our place, I left with only my fear of her. No love.”

  “That doesn’t just vanish,” Padma said. “Even if it turns into something else, it’s still emotion. Strong. Your mother, Blanche, it turns into something.”

  “Maybe,” I said, and then perhaps because I was so uncomfortable saying even another word about Crissy to the woman who’d done more to become my real mother than I could properly explain, I added something I’d never talked about out loud before, to anyone except Crissy.

  “I was there in the mall that day. With my father. Chuck. He told me to go up to the food court and watch while he, while he did it. Killed those people. All of them.”

  With the words came the pictures. Chuck, strong and tall as he had always been to me, but with a different look on his face, a canted angle to the whole works that started in his eyes and seemed to be a part of the bones themselves as he drove me to the mall. When Dad came back and told us what he’d done to the couple on the highway with his rifle, Crissy thought he would want her to take me out of town. Set up someplace else. I remember her, wearing the tied-off purple blouse that I loved on her and secretly wanted to wear myself, if I thought it wouldn’t disappoint Chuck that I wasn’t trying to dress just like him anymore, being so happy for Dad and so upset at the same time. Trying to tell him so in a way that didn’t look like she was questioning him, and all around us the heat in the trailer becoming stifling because Chuck had shut the doors and all the windows so we could conference.

  “Couldn’t you have waited, Chuck? I mean, why did you make the decision not to? We haven’t finished building what you said we needed to build. We’ve got—you’re supposed to teach, honey, you have to teach these people so they can do what needs to be done. You’re too important. You’re too important for this.”

  “This is my teaching,” Chuck said, pulling the Beretta out. “This is my staff, this is my word, this is how they will know me. Do you understand?”

  His words after that are vague. Instructions to Crissy, I think. It was the adrenalized fury and ecstasy that welded the conversation up until then to my memory. I found myself telling Jaya and Padma, who were watching me with the kind of rapt curiosity you see in children at a zoo confronting an animal they’ve never seen even a picture of before, but with something else added. Love, of a type so strong and woundingly intense that I couldn’t look right at it. I told most of the story to the coffee table in front of me.

  “Everything between that and Chuck taking me by the hand to the truck is gone. Then once we’re in the mall, I remember every second. Every picture and noise. I just know that he wanted me there and that I was proud, but that watching his face in the truck was the first time that I was scared of him, in a way that wasn’t just, you know, awe. I don’t think that we’d actually said out loud that he was going to kill himself when he was done in the mall, but he and Crissy must have known it. They must have, it couldn’t have been improvisation. My mother wouldn’t have forgiven him that.”

  The more I spoke, the more our dead, both the hated and the loved, filled the room. Neesh Chauhan, Chuck Varner, Crissy Varner. When I chanced looking up again, Jaya and Padma were holding each other’s hands, sitting so close they were almost on top of each other, and they had stopped looking at me.

  “This is what I was afraid of,” I said, talking fast so I didn’t choke. “You’re—this makes me further apart from you, I know that. You can’t believe that I could see something like that and just carry on with my life. You can’t. And you shouldn’t.”

  “No!” Padma said, Jaya overlapping her with the same word.

  “Let me talk,” Jaya said, to her mother and me both. “You’re not further from us. We just can’t—I can’t believe—that you didn’t tell me this twelve years ago. You’re supposed to need me, you jerk.”

  “The hours we spent talking about Neesh in this room,” Padma added, standing up so quickly that she banged her knee, hard, on the coffee table before she crossed over to me and pulled me into a hug that I couldn’t participate in, not yet. “We told you every single bit of what we knew and loved about him, and how hard it was to see that—to see what happened to him. And we didn’t ask you once about what you’d seen. Not once. I’m so sorry.”

  “No,” I said. “I always loved that about you. About both of you. You didn’t have that thirst to know that everyone else did before I switched schools, before people started to forget about Chuck. You let it be. You let me come to you.”

  “I didn’t think you were hiding anything like this,” Jaya said. “These years you sat with this. Witnessing a massacre. Did the police know?”

  I shook my head. “When he was done, when he was holding the gun up to his head down there with the people he killed, Dad nodded at me and I left. Walked out of the food court, the mall, all the way home. No one was paying attention. It was the kind of day where a kid out walking alone could pass by
without anyone properly seeing her. Everyone was just too scared for themselves and their own.”

  Padma let go of me and stood up, backing away. She picked up a portable phone from the mantel, where it had been hidden in an elaborate snaking of leaves and stems, and shook it at me.

  “You have to talk to someone, now. Not the police, nothing like that. You can’t go through life just keeping that sight inside of you. Those people. Your father. It’s—it’s a miracle you can do anything, Blanche.”

  “It’s not a miracle, it’s you. It’s you, it’s Jaya, it’s me. It’s my work. Trauma isn’t one-size-fits, Ma. I saw it, I was there, and that’s that. No conversation can take it out of my head.”

  “That’s bull,” Jaya said. “That’s too easy.”

  “Dealing with it has meant turning away, Jaya. Padma. Looking it dead-on isn’t going to give me superpowers, it’s going to shake me apart. I want to get this over with, I don’t want to start it again. I don’t want to spend any time at all in that past. I want to look at my dead mother, then I want to make sure that there’s an end to all of Chuck’s poison, and I just want to go home.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  * * *

  IT WAS HER.

  The bullet had gone in through Crissy’s forehead. Her hair was tidily arranged to flow out from the sides of her head, probably to camouflage how flat the back of her skull was from being blown out at close range.

  “She only dyed her hair for work,” I said to Jaya, who was watching me and emphatically not looking at the body. “Said no one tips an old lady, especially the happy hour business-suit trash she dealt with when they stuck her with just weekdays. Even when she was barely thirty-five, she was saying this. It is so fucking weird to remember that we had normal conversations sometimes, you know?”