Your Life Is Mine

by Nathan Ripley

  * * *

  I GOT PARGITER’S CALL when we were on our way to Padma’s house. Jaya was driving, this time. I thought she might be a little too shaken for it, but she gave me a look that I didn’t want to argue with.

  “Let me be in control of this, at least,” she said. I held my hands up. The Ruger was back at the base of my spine. I’d loosened my belt to accommodate it. Jaya had watched the process with distaste, but didn’t say anything.

  Pargiter told me there was more to say once we were all in the same room, but that he had one thing for me to think about on the drive. I could hear wind and his breathing as he spoke, the sound of someone who usually moved slowly moving very fast.

  “I’ve got Emil Chadwick here, and he says that you’ve seen our shooter before. Says that Crissy just called him ‘The Boy.’ That tell you anything?”

  “Not at all,” I said, after a second of thought. Crissy’s bullshit out in New Orleans had a lot of cryptic phrases in it, but not “The Boy.” It did make me bite my bottom lip in what I was forced to recognize as fear, though. Had the innate ring of a Chuck Varner formulation—part white trash, part ominous and silly heavy metal lyric. The Boy. The Boy prophet. The Boy murderer.

  “Chadwick said he’s your half-brother. The shooter, I mean,” Pargiter said. I couldn’t even answer this, and Pargiter kept talking after a pause.

  “I don’t have any memory—and I don’t think we have any record of this—but were you at Harlow Mall on the day of the shooting?” Pargiter asked. “I do hate to ask you. Must be like when people ask me if I’ve ever had to use my sidearm on someone.”

  I didn’t hesitate this time. “I was there, Detective, yes. Crissy wouldn’t let me tell anyone at the time, and after a while, it seemed like there was no use revisiting it.”

  “Jesus Christ. You poor girl.”

  Before I could find a way past Pargiter’s sincerity and get annoyed at the condescension, at how he’d infantilized me just because I was talking about something that had happened to me then, I closed my eyes and saw The Boy.

  I could picture him there. And I knew it wasn’t pure illusion. There was someone across from me when Dad sat me down at the food court, told me to wait and see. A boy, sitting at another otherwise empty table in the food court, with a perfect view of the concourse below. Like mine. I remembered now because Chuck had smiled at the boy. Nodded, given him a thumbs-up. I was watching the boy and he was watching me when the shooting started, and then that was all I could see.

  That day and what had happened became a rider in me, a parasite that was along every day, shading everything even if I never let it define my life. When I was little, I made myself and the version of Chuck’s bible that I’d internalized into my therapy, my way of—not using that horrible psychiatric word processing—my way of owning what had happened, of making those people dead in the wash of blood that Chuck made with his Beretta into a logical progression of actions. Righteousness. And my memory had helped out by blurring across the parts that couldn’t help me and that I was capable of forgetting. That woman in her oversized Minnie Mouse T-shirt carrying a blue Slurpee, going down after Chuck seemed to hug her when really he was shooting her—it wasn’t an option for me to forget that. But the boy with the lopsided fringe of hair, fascinated and watching my dad becoming something powerful and meaningful in that mall, and later on in the culture: on TV, in the papers, in Jill Gudgeon’s abominable book—I’d forgotten him.

  Chuck’s ultimate hope wasn’t me. And I wasn’t Crissy’s Disciple Zero. The Boy, now the man, was the future of this cult, the killing future that he had started with his former goddess-avatar. My mother.

  “I have seen him,” I said. “He was around my age. So twenty-eight, dark-haired—I don’t know, god, this was twenty years ago, so much about him must have changed—”

  “Hold on to the picture of him in your mind, Blanche,” Pargiter said. “Let your friend get home—we have a uniform posted at the Chauhan house, and one inside—”

  “Padma must be plenty pissed,” I said. Jaya looked at me and I made an it’s-all-okay gesture. Before she could stop herself, Jaya squeezed my knee, then immediately withdrew her hand and stared back into traffic. I could have cried with gratitude, knowing that if even this one part of her body was willing to betray some sign of forgiveness, I could make the rest of her follow eventually, maybe.

  “I think she’s fine. As much as can be expected. Get Jaya in there and then just wait outside your vehicle. I have an officer, Clem Broward, tailing you. He’ll bring you right to the station and we can discuss your recollection with a sketch artist in the room. Between you and Chadwick, I think we can put a face on this Boy.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  * * *

  JAYA PULLED UP next to the squad car in her mother’s driveway and grinned hugely when she saw Padma waving from the picture window—the front of the smile was all happiness, but the twitching profile that I saw was just trying to project reassurance.

  “You want to come in?” Jaya asked. It was as though she was asking me to come up after a terrible first date that still left her feeling obligated to be polite. I spared us both.

  “No. I don’t want to—I don’t want to make this any worse for you by making you pretend you’re comfortable with me in front of Padma. Not yet. Get me?”

  “Yes.” Jaya had her hand on the door handle, and I was about to push my way out, too, when she started to speak again.

  “I won’t be telling her this, Blanche. Any of this. I’m not going to ask that of her. She loves you too much, and knowing that—that you were there when her husband died, it would cost her too much. It would cost her you. Her second daughter. That’s why I’m not telling her. Because it would hurt her. Not because I give a single emotional crap about you right now.”

  “That still means a lot, Jaya.”

  “Don’t say my name like that. Just stay safe, and when this is over, we are going to have a serious talk about what happens to our partnership and whatever our—us, what we are—moving forward. Right?”

  Jaya was up and out of the car before I could answer, heading for the house. A uniform let her in and Padma waved at me before Jaya slammed the front door shut. I got up and walked to the end of the driveway, facing the street, waiting for Pargiter’s cop. The street was quiet, sodium streetlights giving off a cool glow. Jaya would remember to bring the camera equipment in from the car, I was sure, but probably it didn’t matter when a squad car was parked next to us.

  I stared into the lights and thought maybe Crissy had talked to me about The Boy, in a remote way. Maybe worth telling Pargiter about. When I’d been about twelve and we hadn’t talked about Chuck all weekend, a rarity, and were eating some mint chip Häagen-Dazs she’d gotten on discount late Sunday, she started talking marriage.

  “I like those cultures where they just let the parents do it for you, you know? I mean, I never would have found Chuck if my own mom had been looking, but some families are different. And that’s the one place you don’t want chaos, like Chuck said.”

  “Mom, come on,” I said, licking ice cream from a papery sugar cone Crissy had unearthed from the back of the cupboard over our fridge. I wished that I had a bowl, and I also wished for a Chuck-free weekend, something I couldn’t have admitted back then.

  “No, hold on. He really did mean that. Family, the core, nuclear family, is one of the few things that America started to do right and then started to do wrong. That idea of adding one or two more points of stability to your life and accepting the chaos that awaited outside every time you opened the door to go out or let someone else in: that was really pure Chuck Varner, his late period. If only he’d had a chance to write this down, you know? I think that especially would have resonated. But some of these turban people, they have that part nailed. They know that family’s where you keep the order established, and that you look to elder judgment to continue that lineage of stability. It should be inherited, right? That’s what you g
et from your parents. A center. The ability to be calm, to provide calm to the only people you should care about: your family, and your followers.” Crissy ate her ice cream out of a certain coffee mug she favored, one branded with a Heathcliff cartoon, now faded from orange catness into a peach-and-gray brocade with an unreadable joke slogan.

  “So you got someone picked for me?” I asked. She’d looked at me with a shifting expression, going from surprise that she’d given away too much to pride in me that I’d figured out where she was going.

  “I think I might have a boy in mind. A fellow. You’d like him if and when I let you meet him.”

  Even when Crissy said it, turning one of the evaluating gazes she’d learned from Dad on me, a high-beam stare beneath lazy eyelids, I had a vague shape of the person she meant in my mind. She got up, with her mug, and waved at me to follow her. It was late, which is something I just remembered—well past midnight. She’d woken me up, as she sometimes did when she was lonely, telling me that I could have some ice cream and skip school if I wanted to stay up and talk a little.

  So we were walking through the trailer park and up into the hills when I asked her for the first and last time, and she told me one of her many lies, but perhaps the most important one. We often didn’t wear shoes on summer walks like this, stepping lightly so we could pivot fast if we felt the first gnaw of broken glass on the soles of our feet. That was another skill Chuck had emphasized: “Walk softly. Be invisible. Only let them be aware of you when it’s too late.”

  That night, Crissy looked oddly like my dad—he was good at turning on a glow of pride or approval every time I did something right, which meant, of course, following his orders exactly. For Crissy, pride only emerged when I intuited something with a certainty that she then had to prick into doubt.

  “When you’re older, when you’re ready to start this work as a real leader, Blanche, you’ll know everything I know. I promise.”

  We walked back to the trailer, Crissy placid while I boiled in a silence that I knew couldn’t be broken by me, only by her. That’s what total obedience feels like—being in thrall to someone, not just being a good daughter, but ceding majority ownership of your soul and brain to her, the way I had to Chuck.

  And that’s trauma, too. Crissy and Chuck owned me while the bit I kept for myself throbbed at a lower level, keeping any ideas of existence that were mine and mine alone alive while I figured out how to break free of what my father had forced me to see and what he, and my mother after him, had forced me to live.

  Turns out it took another bullet. Just one, to break that last level of silence between Crissy and me, the one that let me leave her for Jaya, for Padma, for a future.

  Across the street, a blue sedan pulled up, and the window rolled down. A dark-haired man leaned out, calling to me.

  “Clem Broward, Miss. You want to get in?”

  I walked over to the car, Broward nodding at me professionally and badging me before looking straight ahead. He had glasses, a borderline Aryan-Pride haircut, and a young face, one that could have used a mustache to keep him from getting mocked too harshly by other cops.

  I opened the door, saying, “You took awhile. Pargiter said you were following behind us.”

  “Pargiter asked me to do a circuit of this block and the few around us to get a read on any suspicious people or vehicles and just, you know, let anyone who’s in the know understand that the police are here and that the Chauhan household is not to be trifled with. That kind of thing.” Broward mispronounced “Chauhan” but smiled as I got in, immediately getting us moving. I took a look back at Padma’s house as we pulled away. No one was in the window anymore. Probably the cops had told Jaya and Padma to limit their visibility.

  We drove quietly for about a mile, at a steady thirty-five. I wasn’t about to speak first, after the explanation I’d just been through and the memory-spill that was waiting for me at the station. I was about to risk closing my eyes for a few seconds when I felt wetness seeping up through my jeans, and reached down to the seat below me. My fingers came up red. Broward, watching me even while he seemed to be fixated on the empty side street we’d just turned into, spoke up.

  “You ever kill a cop, Blanche? Just did my first, and it was a true thrill, like I thought it would be.”

  The Boy’s fist caught my temple just as my hand closed around the Ruger at my back, and I would have felt the pain in my neck if the bounce of brain on inner skull hadn’t immediately shut down anything my body had to tell me.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  * * *

  CHADWICK PERKED UP a little after the mall, the security of Pargiter’s car and calm conversation having something to do with it, probably, Pargiter thought.

  Bennet, the uniform kid who’d driven Pargiter and Blanche up to the abandoned scope above the Denny’s, met Pargiter and Chadwick inside the station. He was about to open the door of the interrogation room as Chadwick took a long, bracing stare inside, but Pargiter stopped him with an upraised hand.

  “You good?” Pargiter asked Chadwick.

  “Of course. I just saw him a few hours ago. I’m not scared of him,” Chadwick said. “It’s the other one out there who scares the shit out of me. And Maitland should never have kept helping that freak after he killed Crissy.”

  “Like she’s a victim. You still want to write a book about this?” Bennet asked. The rough outline of what had been happening and the potential massacre ahead had been passed around the station. “You need people to get killed so you can get a fucking advance?”

  Pargiter looked at Bennet in shock, seeing an expression he’d never seen on the timid cop’s face before—something like sass. “Officer, shut up,” Pargiter said, inwardly slightly proud of Bennet. Bennet was oversensitive but a solid cop, and Pargiter had always been a bit mean to him, though he didn’t quite know why other than that it was mildly fun. He’d have to revise his approach.

  “I don’t want there to be a shooting, do you understand?” Chadwick said. “I’m the one who’s trying to put a stop to this, is that clear?”

  “Fine,” Pargiter said. “Let’s not waste any more time, then.” Bennet swung the door open.

  Maitland was wearing a different kind of city-issued clothing than his usual uniform, but otherwise looked the same as usual. Too calm. He looked Chadwick in the eye for twenty seconds, neither saying anything. Pargiter didn’t want to disturb the balance in the room and knock out whatever information would be willingly offered without any questions being asked. Bennet was following his lead. And Chadwick looked not embarrassed, but—Pargiter had to search for the word, finding it finally in the extracurricular Christian reading his father had forced on him as weekend homework: like the Devil, Chadwick was abashed.

  “We’re both so weak, Emil. Doesn’t it just make you sick?” Maitland said, finally.

  Bennet hustled Chadwick into a chair across from Maitland, and Pargiter stayed standing at some distance from the table. Bennet shot Pargiter a questioning glance and he nodded, letting him stay. Bennet posted up in the corner of the room.

  “I mean it,” Maitland said, still ignoring everyone but Chadwick. “We’re absolute molds for failed men, as Chuck saw them. Prototypes, if there hadn’t been ones exactly like us earlier on.”

  “Chuck was wrong about the shooting,” Chadwick said. “Even Crissy said that. It was his job to stay and teach, not to shoot. And don’t listen to him,” he added, turning to Pargiter. “I only pretended to Crissy that I was into the cult shit so she’d open up to me. It was an interview technique.” Chadwick had reverted to his mall persona, abstract and scared. Pargiter stayed quiet, and Maitland laughed.

  “Oh, that’s your take now, Emil? Pargiter, you should have seen how enraptured this New York fraud was when Crissy would talk Chuck Varner to him. He is a True Believer, and never think otherwise. And Emil, Chuck was only wrong because he killed himself at the end. Because he put himself in a position where it was suicide or jail. The shooting wasn’
t wrong, not a bit, we know that. You do, I do. Because I should have done one by now. You should be back East right now, counting down time until the ideal moment to do one there. Times Square, maybe. We fucked those both up, though, didn’t we? Fooled ourselves. I don’t have it in me to really do chaos. And you definitely don’t. Coward.”

  “Shut up,” Chadwick said, getting up. Pargiter didn’t quite slap him back down, but that was only because he’d mastered this particular hand-placed-on-shoulder shove so many times that the only impact was between ass and chair, not palm and skull. Chadwick let out a small squeak when he landed back in his chair and Maitland laughed like a frat boy watching a pledge endure initiation.

  Pargiter turned to Maitland. “You talk a lot about a shooting on the horizon, Officer Maitland. I want you to, for a moment here, remember the years of duty you put in with this department, the people you helped, the lives you saved. No matter whether you were doing that as a pantomime act, those things happened, in life, in fact. You were a cop. That’s why you didn’t go through with this spree-killing shit. You don’t kill civilians. You’re not the kind. That’s not weak. It’s not strong either, it’s just sane. Decent. That’s who you are. So tell me what you know, and tell me right now, so I can save some lives, and you can save yourself from being an accessory. And then we can talk about your beliefs.”

  “You’re right, Detective. I didn’t go through with the killing because I wasn’t the kind. Everything else you say is off, your reasons, but you can’t help that. You’re a drone. A castrated drone who listens to his mother and his God and his captain and does the best darn job he can.” Maitland laughed, stopping when Pargiter took a step forward and put his full weight on the right foot of Maitland’s prison-issued canvas shoe. Then he screamed.

  “Sorry,” Pargiter said. “This shithead over here seems to think some clown named ‘The Boy’ is going to shoot people in my city, soon. Maybe today. Is that right?”