Your Life Is Mine

by Nathan Ripley

  “Chadwick. Right, fucking, now, you need to help me to save some lives, man. You have that power.” Chadwick didn’t move, just kept staring straight ahead. Pargiter got off the bench, kneeled in front of Chadwick like he was proposing, clasped the man’s knees, and looked right into those increasingly absent eyes. A couple of teenage girls behind him laughed at a quiet-but-you’ll-hear-us-and-be-embarrassed volume, which may have had more to do with Chadwick coming back to reality than Pargiter’s grip did.

  “I saw him coming out of Crissy Varner’s trailer once, when I turned up an hour early for an interview. For our last interview. It was when I was finally ready to drop it on her. My big reveal that my mother had been the one who wrote the Chuck Varner book.”

  “No shit.”

  “Yeah,” Chadwick said, looking normal if a little puffy-faced now that he was annoyed. “Turns out she knew already, though. Probably had Maitland check up on me as soon as I contacted her. But I came early that day to see if I could, you know, pick up anything beyond trailer park ambience. Didn’t expect to see him. The Boy. That’s what she called him, when she was telling me that he was the one she’d been talking about, the one Blanche needed to meet.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “Like Chuck Varner. Like he’s trying to look like Chuck, you know? I’m bad at describing features, I’m sorry.”

  Pargiter sat next to Chadwick again. “I thought you were a writer.”

  “We all come with different skills. I can work with you on a sketch but I think I’d need to see him again, you know? It was far away. He had glasses, I remember that. Otherwise I just have a feel for him, how he moved.”

  “How old?”

  “A little older than Blanche. But maybe that’s just me guessing in retrospect. Crissy told me about him, you know? She said that Blanche has seen The Boy, too, but she doesn’t know it.”

  “She’s seen him?”

  “Right here,” Chadwick said, tapping the bench. “He was right here.”

  “I’ll get as many officers as we need going in as many directions from this place as need be if you’ll—”

  “No, he wasn’t just here. He was here on August 17, 1996. He watched Chuck shoot all those people, and so did Blanche, but he was absolutely hooked. ‘A messiah born before his forerunner had even died’ is how Crissy put it. That’s a quote. Chuck’s greatest follower, and Crissy found him. Found him and trained him until he was an even more perfect machine of Chuck Varner’s message of death than Chuck himself.”

  “Why this kid? What the fuck was wrong with him that he went looking for the relatives of the man he’d just seen kill a bunch of people?”

  Emil smiled, the smile of a small man with a large secret.

  “I didn’t believe this at first, but Crissy really did. And you can see it in The Boy’s face.”

  “Go on.”

  “He’s Chuck’s son. The Boy is Blanche Varner’s half-brother. Crissy didn’t keep a harness on Chuck when it came to fucking around, as long as he kept any of the other women away from her and Blanche. She made it seem like that, anyway, that it was mutually decided.

  “The Boy wanted Blanche to come back real bad, and so did Crissy. They had a plan to make it happen by putting me in touch with her, I think. But The Boy must have gotten impatient. Killed Crissy to be sure Blanche would be here. You see how clever these people are? They really should write this book themselves.”

  Pargiter stared at the lights in the Microsoft Store. He thought he might let Chadwick go just then, let him drive himself back to the airport and from the airport back to New York or whatever asshole city he wanted to wash up in. What was being floated here but speculation, believable babbling? There wasn’t anything solid enough to arrest him on, but there was a reason to keep him, Pargiter’s limited empathy aside.

  “Alfred Kindt’s dead, too, Chadwick. Are you going to let me keep you alive, or are you going to try to take a walk on me?”

  Chadwick didn’t answer. He just started looking at his hands again, resting on his knees, and then allowed Detective Pargiter to lead him out of Harlow Mall, over what was once a liquid, red floor.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  * * *

  JAYA WAS TREMBLING, a shake that had started deep inside, not the surface shivers I had from the gales of AC cutting across the conference room.

  “You killed him,” she whispered. “You killed my dad.”

  “No, Jaya. I could never. Crissy did.”

  “You’re both fucking murderers. You could have told people back then—she would have been in jail for it. My mother and I could have slept.”

  “I didn’t shoot him, Jaya.” I resisted doing what I wanted to most, which was to touch her, take her in my arms and stop her from shaking. She would have spat on me if I tried.

  “I was supposed to shoot him. A decade-plus of poison from my mother and father made random murder my entire project in life. But I didn’t go through with it. I couldn’t. He was killed with a handgun, right? You know that. I had a rifle, I was lying under a tarp, waiting. Mom, Crissy, she was on the street, doing rounds, ready to buzz me on my cell if there were cops anywhere close. That was the first phone I had of my own—a little Motorola. I was supposed to shoot whoever turned up in my sights first, and then she was going to get into the truck cab and drive us away. The bullet is the lesson, and the teacher leaves when the lesson is delivered, Crissy said. Not that Chuck followed that rule.” I caught my hands moving independently of my thoughts, and realized they were Crissy’s gestures, the rolling chop in the air she’d do to punctuate sentences.

  “Can you please,” Jaya said, her breaths audible and spaced out, like she was taking drags of oxygen that was running out whenever she couldn’t help it. “Can you please skip the fucking details and tell me what you did. Tell me about my dad.”

  She was right. Thinking about Chuck and Crissy for longer than I had in years put me right back into their patterns of speech, the way Chuck would circle a point with suggestions, let you find it first before repeating it to you as a slogan. Crissy had absorbed his cadence, his charisma, his bullshit. Each of them is praying the bullet comes for them, so they don’t have to be around afterward to think. Not just about death, but about anything. That sort of blather. I felt so full of secrets and love when Dad would talk to me in these ouroboros loops of violent nothingness—his big hand wrapped around mine, telling me things that no one else was allowed to hear, that no one would understand until the bullets hit them.

  “Crissy shot your dad, Jaya. I was across the street from his optical place, lying in the flatbed of our Datsun under a tarp, the barrel sticking out an inch from the circular port Chuck had made—just large enough for ‘the gun and your eyeline,’ he’d say. I was supposed to shoot whoever turned up on that stretch of sidewalk, alone, with no one in sight around them, just once in the side of the head.”

  Mr. Chauhan, whom I’d seen for the first time twenty seconds before he died, had an unshaven patch below his lower lip and a small wart to the right of his nose. Ugly, squash-goggle-looking glasses, I remembered thinking, surprised afterward that an optometrist had a pair that looked like it was off a drugstore spinner rack. Crissy was visible in the mouth of the alley when I first spotted him, walking from a car parked in the next block and directly into my sights. Crissy was staring at the invisibility that was me in the truck’s bed. I was only thirty or forty feet from both of them, and I started to tremble in a way that made me feel afraid of Chuck and Crissy, but not so much that I could stop shaking. The shake came from realizing what I actually was, or, at least, what I wasn’t. I wasn’t a person who could shoot that man. Eventually the stock of the rifle clanged down, the whole thing slipping out of my soaked hands.

  “I remember when I made the noise, your dad looked up. There was an echo, it was that kind of wood-on-metal clang that seems to come from everywhere on an empty enough street.”

  Jaya had stopped breathing entirely. The roll
ing office chair she was in was rotating imperceptibly from the controlled force in her body, and it made a tiny screeching sound.

  Crissy came out of the alley with her handgun and shot Mr. Chauhan in the center of his face, while he looked into the dark sky above the shop he’d built for his family for the source of a sound he’d never identify. I watched the bullet and part of his skull leave the back of his head in a tiny, significant launch, a spray that ended in a fall.

  “Crissy shot him. I just watched.”

  Jaya was barely breathing now, moving herself and her chair with frame-shaking, quiet sobs. When she made a sound, I knew it would be a loud one. I waited a second before trying for an arm across her shoulders, taking her in a hug when it was clear that she was going to let me, that she needed contact from someone, even if it was me.

  “I am so sorry, Jaya,” I said, meaning it more than I’d ever meant anything, my first chance to verbalize the apology that I’d been acting out since I’d seen her father die in front of me. Saying it was the first time I fully understood the immense emptiness of ever trying to atone for something like this, with anything short of suicide. But I said it again.

  “I’m sorry.” After that, there were a few minutes of silence—Jaya with her right forearm across her eyes, her core and jaw tense, processing and burying emotions at a speed that would seem impossible if it wasn’t something that I did every day. When she surfaced from that position, it was with her game face on, one that I’d had on my side of the table many times but never had turned on me.

  “You need to be really, really straight with me on this next thing, Blanche.”

  “I’m always straight with you.”

  “I would have agreed with that an hour ago, but we can’t ever say that again. I think it’s more that you’ve based our entire friendship on an enormous, homicidal lie, and then been pretty honest about other stuff that came up after that. Right?” Jaya didn’t react to my full-body flinch, but waited for me to nod until she went on.

  “Did your mother keep doing this after my dad? Did she keep killing people in the street, at random? Because—” Seeing that I was going to interrupt, Jaya held up a finger as straight and commanding as a conductor’s baton, quivering with tension. “Because if you kept your mouth shut and people died, one thing is going to happen, and it’s going to be my favor to you. I’m walking the fuck out of this building, going back to the motel alone, cleaning my shit out and ending any contact with you, personal or otherwise. Dissolving the company will happen through proxies and email. I’m not spending another minute talking to you if you’ve let people be murdered because you weren’t willing to be truthful about yourself and your twisted fuck of a mother.”

  “Jaya, she didn’t,” I said. I was on the street again, where I’d found myself after wriggling out from under the tarp in the back of the truck after the small gunshot, ignoring my mother’s whispered Blanche, the plan, Blanche when I walked past her, Mr. Chauhan’s dead body, and then past a younger Jaya and her mother, who were just starting to get out of their car to check on Neesh, walking fast but not too fast until I sat myself down at a Chick-fil-A, ordering a small fries when they politely harassed me to get something or move on, sitting under the burning cheer of fluorescents while regular families, bachelors, high school kids milled around me and I thought of the man whose life had melted out in front of me.

  “She didn’t keep killing,” I repeated.

  “I’m going to need a little more than that,” Jaya said. She looked the smallest bit relieved, and I saw how deeply she wanted to believe me, was willing to take me back if I could just prove to her that it would be all right, that she could. I caught her up with the past.

  “I didn’t go back to your store until three hours after the Chick-fil-A closed,” I said, when I had the story at the right place. “I’d been walking since then.” Walking with my camera stuck in my purse. Chuck had told us that it was important to get documentation on every act of chaos, so both Crissy and I had cameras that night. Hers was a dispo, I took the real one. A Rebel that some drunk had left at Crissy’s bar by accident. Crissy said I was the better photographer so it was best that I had the camera. I didn’t take a single photo all night.

  I remembered our planning week better than the night itself, maybe because the adrenaline was lower. Carefully assembling the rifle, freeing it from its PVC pipe and dirt grave. The rifle that had taken George Dillon’s face off when Chuck Varner shot him from the overpass, before picking me up for our day at the mall. We’d been practicing with another rifle all these years, but I still remembered the feel of this AR-10, the fit of it. Crissy absolutely insisted on resurrecting the AR for our first new kill. Even if my hands had changed size in the ten years since Chuck had died, the gun still felt like it was growing out of my skin when I had it loaded and in position. It was only when I had a human being in the sights that the AR began to feel like a foreign growth.

  “I was going back to tell the cops that I’d done it—I thought that was a compromise my mother and Chuck could have understood. I was still so fucked up, Jaya, you have to understand that. I thought I could feel better, at least, by going to prison quietly and leaving Crissy free to carry on Chuck’s work. I thought—I thought that you would be gone by the time I got back.”

  “No,” Jaya whispered. Two a.m. or so, and Jaya had never left—Padma was near catatonic, taken away by two cousins in a car, part of the extended family that had become my own in the next few years. Jaya had been impervious to appeals from anyone when it came to leaving the scene—she’d told me this herself when we first talked about the murder, a conversation that luckily took place in the dark, in a sleepover in her bed, where I listened close and clenched my right hand around my left wrist to keep from shaking or crying, digging so deep that I woke up with crescents of blood on the sheet and bits of skin under my fingernails. More evidence.

  “I found Crissy in our truck, after circling the block, then widening my orbit, finally finding it parked in front of a Walgreens. She’d covered over the little hole that the rifle barrel stuck out of with the bit of metal and putty she’d had me put together out of scraps from the metal shop at school.”

  “Enough with the details,” Jaya said. “Just, enough.” She got up and started walking for the door of the conference room, and was about to leave when the office crew started coming back to their desks. Our time was up, and then some. Jaya packed up the camera and lights and left, while I tried to make some small talk with the forgettable men in their forgettable office. I was glad Jaya was gone by then; it would upset her more to see me sliding so easily into business-casual talk after the depths we’d just opened up, the canyon that had always been the foundation of our relationship.

  She was in the lobby, holding the bags of gear right by the elevator banks. She started walking as soon as she saw me, making me jog to catch up, but that she had waited at all was an enormous positive. I’d worried that once we left the vacuum of that temporary confessional upstairs, Jaya would realize how it made absolutely no sense to continue having anything to do with me.

  “I’m sorry about the details,” I said. “I’m sorry for filling in what must seem meaningless to you, but it’s real to me and I need you to know that. That evening is the marking night of my life, Jaya. It lit up everything I’d been denying about my father and it brought us together and put us on this—on this whatever-we’re-doing together, which I think is a life’s work.”

  “Heartwarming,” Jaya said, stopping and shoving me once, hard. I staggered back a pace, looking around to see if anyone had noticed. “Oh, there’s nobody fucking here, Blanche, don’t be embarrassed. If you think that making appeals to what we’ve made out of you murdering my dad and lying about it—”

  “I didn’t kill him!” I screamed, losing it for the first time that day. It seemed to calm Jaya down.

  “My father wasn’t a fucking insect like yours. He built lives for all of us in this city that wanted no part of me,
my mom, or him, before you and Crissy snuffed that out and made my mom do the whole thing over again. Not just for herself and me, but for you. Do you realize how fucked up that is? You ditched your own broken shithole of a family life so you could, so you could—”

  “So I could be a parasite in yours.”

  “Yeah, that’s it. So why should I listen to any more of this? Why do you get a single second more of my time?”

  “Because there’s more to say. Because—because Crissy had decided to stop the shooting that night, but she was still scared.” I focused for the next part, looking down because I knew I couldn’t look Jaya in the eye while I said it. But she knew what I was trying—Jaya put a finger under my chin and pushed it up, until we were eye-to-eye, until I had to look at her and say it.

  “She wanted to kill you and Padma, too. You and your mom. I came—I had to be with you to stop her. To keep an eye on you and her both. It was a sort of bargain, do you get it? I stayed with you to keep you safe, for my mother to know that killing you both and the risk of it being connected to your dad was too much, that I’d never say anything as long as she left us all alone.”

  “I can’t take in another grain of this. I just can’t,” she said, stumbling outside. “So stop.”

  “Forever?” I said, following her.

  “For now.”

  The heat, even if it was dry, had caught us again, and my antiperspirant was absolutely defeated after this many hours, and Jaya was staring at my armpits. I looked at her.

  “I should have worn primer,” she said. “Fucking melting.”

  Nothing was over except for this part of the fight, but we stopped talking there. I wanted to touch her arm, her hand even, but I settled for trailing along behind her when she nodded to the car.

  CHAPTER THIRTY