by Saul Black
She hurried back to the shed, found the matches, then went over to the storm drain. Matches. Sulfur. There’d once been a brand called “Lucifer,” she thought. She’d read it somewhere, or seen it in an old movie. Murder threw up these charming synchronicities. With the whimsy of the real Lucifer, in fact.
The single sheet of paper burned quickly, though she had to keep shifting her fingers to avoid the flame. When all but a few blank scraps remained, she fed them into the storm drain’s grid and stood for a few moments in the warm afternoon air, forcing herself to go over her actions again. What other oversights or fuckups littered her criminal wake? Maybe she’d left the gun in a ladies’ room? Maybe she’d neglected to flush the bleach or dump the tools in the lake? Maybe she’d neglected to bury him? If you were an idiot—as, manifestly, she was—anything was possible.
Eventually, after perhaps five minutes of wild speculation, she gave up and went back to the house. Either she’d made no other mistakes or she’d lost the ability to identify them. Regardless, the philosophical calm had returned. Quod scripsi, scripsi, as Pontius Pilate had said. There was no undoing it now.
She went to the kitchen freezer and took out a steak for tomorrow night’s dinner.
The right freezer, she told herself, with a mad Shakespearean image of what going to the wrong one would cost her. The right freezer, the right kind of meat.
27
August 30, 2017
It can’t be postponed any longer, Valerie thought. Just get on with it.
Nonetheless, she didn’t move. It was morning on her day off and she was still in bed. Nick had left for a racquetball game with Will, and for the time being it was simply too good to have the bed—the whole apartment—to herself. Not enough time alone these days.
Really? She imagined not living with Nick. She remembered what not living with Nick had been like. What she had been like. The word “feral” offered itself. Not just the booze and wretched one-night stands, the chain-smoking, the more or less perpetual exhaustion and compulsive self-distraction, but the domestic reality of living in a pigsty. When Nick moved in, things came with him: calm, order, pleasure, civilization. Someone coming over for dinner no longer required forty-eight hours’ labor to make the place fit for human occupancy. It was as if after years of flailing in a dark ocean she’d washed up on a sunlit beach. On the island of Happily Married.
And? And?
She got out of bed and stood naked in front of the mirror. A lull in the traffic had brought an unnatural urban silence. The curtains were open a few inches and through the gap a single shaft of sun lit a swirl of motes her movements had disturbed. The quiet and warmth and stillness combined to form a subtle intelligence, an invitation to the truth of herself. She looked at her reflection in the mirror. Conceded with manageable vanity that the new trim suppleness was a gift that refused to stop giving. Imagined Kyle Cornell describing her. Brunette, five eight, nice tits, all the requisite knowledge …
She moved closer to the mirror, examined her face. Her dark eyes were honest. Childhood innocence overwritten by the world’s reliable violence. The childhood was still there, its astonishment a stubborn irrelevance. All her earlier selves were still there, in fact—the curious girl, the stealthy teenager, the burgeoning woman—and the moment her wild energies found their focus and she knew she was Police. Look hard enough, she thought, and you could see a person’s whole life in the eyes. Windows to the soul, obviously. Her own said she’d had love, urgency, horror, self-loathing, and the humor or luck to outgrow it. They said she wanted the real world, no matter how ugly. They said she trusted her judgment. Just.
Further postponement beckoned. She could make breakfast. She could go out for breakfast. She could drive to the mall and buy something indulgent. She could—oh, the crazy, beautiful freedom!—go see a movie.
But the subtle intelligence was shifting its weight. Not an invitation, now: an insistence.
As if to emphasize the point, a truck broke the silence, roared, rattled, and downshifted with a gasp of hydraulics at the junction.
Okay, okay. Fine.
She went to the living room and took the Rite Aid packet from her purse. She’d fudged the dates with Nick. Partly because after years on the pill her period wasn’t a stickler for punctuality, but mainly because she wanted to give herself as much time to think about it by herself before it became something they’d have to think about together.
All well and good, but biology was running this particular show. Even by her own elastic standards she was minimum three days late.
In the bathroom she speed-read the instructions. Redundantly, since she knew exactly what they involved.
One-Step hCG Urine Pregnancy Tests are used for qualitative (visual) determination of hCG (human chorionic gonadotropin) in urine specimens for early detection of pregnancy.
Immerse the strip into the urine with the arrow end pointing toward the urine. Do not immerse past the “max” line. Take the strip out after 3 seconds and lay the strip flat on a clean, dry, non-absorbent surface (e.g., mouth of the urine container).
Wait for colored bands to appear. Depending on the concentration of hCG in the test specimen, positive results may be observed in as short as 40 seconds. However, to confirm negative results, the complete reaction time (5 minutes) is required. Do not read results after 10 minutes.
She sat on the floor with her back against the side of the bathtub and set the stopwatch on her phone. Decided not to actually stare at either the phone or the test strip. Instead she looked out the open bathroom door, through the living room, and out the window. On a balcony of the building opposite, a guy with a short gray beard and no shirt was reading something on a sheet of paper and scratching his belly. On the next balcony someone had tied helium party balloons to the rail: red, pink, white. The day was so still they barely moved. Above the building the sky was deep blue. Two jet contrails crossed each other, miles apart, one curved, the other straight, the leftovers of vague, giant geometry. Her eyes came back to her own apartment. Her leather jacket on the back of a chair. A white bowl of clementines. Last night’s empty green bottle. Her shoes still where she’d kicked them off next to the couch. All the details were suddenly vivid. The way they must be, she thought, in your last moments just before a firing squad.
The problem was she’d outgrown the cop clichés. She’d had the cases that had damaged her. She’d done the monstrosity. She’d done the booze. She’d done the sex addiction. She’d done the rejection of love. She’d done the obsession, the monomania, the Work. Time had passed and she’d found herself awkwardly larger than all of it. Merely not killing herself had allowed her to forgive herself her trespasses. Astonishingly, even to forgive some of the trespasses against her. Love had come back, with a calm admission of its finiteness, its wonderful inadequacy. Now she was a creature of durable approximations. It had left her wondering what else she might become. It had left her a curious, large, quiet space, into which, with a sort of thrilling lunatic sacrilege, the word “motherhood” had insinuated itself.
When her phone rang it startled her so badly that she dropped it. And the test strip.
Carrie Wheeler Calling, the screen said. For a moment she had no idea who Carrie Wheeler was. Then remembered: Victim Support. The woman who had brought Elspeth to the hospital.
She let the call go to voice mail. The screen reverted to the stopwatch. One minute thirty-eight seconds.
She turned the strip over.
Then stayed where she was, naked on the floor, with her eyes closed.
* * *
She didn’t pick up the voice mail until after she’d showered and dressed, as if for work, despite the official day off. The Adam Grant file she’d been looking at last night was still open on the desk. Among other things it contained a results sheet from Forensics based on analysis of the wristwatch. Obviously, Kyle’s recognizing it as his half brother’s heirloom was enough for her, but for the record, prints and skin cell touch DNA had confirm
ed it. Also for the record, the droplet stain was blood, though whose blood was still unknown. Aside from that, they’d had zero movement on the case for going on two weeks. Still no sign of either Jenner or Sophia.
Carrie Wheeler’s message was a request to call her ASAP.
“What’s up?” Valerie asked her.
“Hi,” Carrie said. “I’m sorry, they told me you’re off today, but I thought you’d want to know right away.”
“Yes?” No matter the circumstances, Valerie thought, important news inflated the bearer. The short pause was the counselor’s reflex concession to dramatic effect.
“I’m back at California Pacific,” Carrie Wheeler said. “Elspeth Grant tried to kill herself last night.”
28
“Class two hemorrhage,” Dr. Jacob Loomis told Valerie. “Maybe twenty percent blood loss. No biggie. She’s young and healthy. She’ll be fine.” He was a tall guy with designer glasses and a haircut intended to look as if he’d just tumbled out of a hot girl’s bed. Carried himself very much in the manner of a man who had his mind brightly elsewhere. On the lifestyle his profession afforded him rather than on the profession itself, Valerie decided. She didn’t like him.
“Fine?” she said, not quite without judgment.
Loomis smiled. “Physically, yes,” he said. “You’ll have to talk to the shrink as far as the rest of her well-being goes. She a smart kid?”
“As far as I know, yes. Why?”
Loomis shrugged. He was about to toss out a tidbit from his casually acquired omniscience. “Probably not a serious attempt,” he said—then left it at that.
Valerie counted to five, mentally. “Because?”
Loomis smiled again, delighted to have the door to his condescension opened. “Smart suicides don’t cut their wrists,” he said. “Two minutes on the internet will tell you it’s a lousy method. Slow and painful. Serious contenders go femoral or carotid.”
Valerie had seen this sort of chipper arrogance in surgeons before. To the right kind of assholes, saving lives on a daily basis simply made them bigger, happier assholes.
“Good to know,” she said, turning away. “I’ll bear it in mind when someone’s smugness finally pushes me over the edge.”
There was no answer to her knock, so she opened the door, gently. Elspeth was in bed in a hospital gown, sleeping, hooked up to an IV. Both arms outside the covers, wrists bandaged. Rachel Grant was in the chair next to her, also apparently asleep. She stirred, opened her eyes, saw Valerie.
“Hey,” Valerie whispered. “How’s she doing?”
Rachel Grant just stared at her. Then put her head in her hands. When she raised it again she drew her palms down her face, as if to wipe away something clinging there.
“What happened?” Valerie said.
It took Rachel a moment. Her voice, when it came, sounded as if it hadn’t been used in years.
“I found her,” she said. “Why would she do this? Why would she…” Rachel shook her head. Struggled. Recovered. “She’s been sleeping downstairs with me,” she said. “We’ve been watching movies. It’s all she wants to do. There’s all this time … She can’t stand it.”
To Valerie neither mother nor daughter looked like they’d slept much. Their new shared exhaustion had stripped their features, returned them to the essential animality formerly soft-lensed by an untroubled middle-class life.
“Last night I did sleep,” Rachel said. “But I woke up and she wasn’t there. She … I found her in her room.”
She paused and looked down. Swallowed. “When I think of her, when I think of her lying there, bleeding … All that time. If I hadn’t got up, if I hadn’t woken up and gone upstairs…”
“But you did,” Valerie said. “And the doctor says she’s going to be—”
“That’s all it is,” Rachel interrupted. “It’s just whether you happen to do something. If I hadn’t … She’s just a child. Is that all it is? Whether you happen to wake up?”
“I know,” Valerie said. “But you did wake up. She’s okay. And she’s going to get whatever help she needs. Both of you.”
“It’s my fault. I’ve been useless. If I didn’t have her … If I didn’t have her there’d be nothing. Just … There would be absolutely nothing.”
Valerie tried to imagine Rachel Grant recovering from a second loss, this loss. She couldn’t. There would be absolutely nothing.
“She never…” Valerie hesitated. “She never did anything like this before?”
“Of course not. Why in God’s name would she?”
“No, of course. I understand.”
“I keep seeing her…” Rachel locked her jaws for a moment. Rode out the horror. “It was a box cutter. She went to the utility room. I keep seeing her, going there by herself … How could she do that? How could I not know?”
Valerie kept silent.
“It’s my fault,” Rachel repeated. “I sat there and told you how strong she was. I’m a fucking monster.”
“Don’t blame your—”
“She was strong because she could see how weak I was. God, I’m disgusting. It should be me lying in that bed, not her.”
“Mrs. Grant, I’m not a shrink, but I’ve seen enough to know that a lot of survivors end up feeling guilty about the simple fact that they have survived.”
“She’s not going to go that way. I’m not going to let her go that way.”
Rachel’s voice had risen. Elspeth stirred. Opened her eyes.
“Mom?”
“I’m here, honey.” Rachel took Elspeth’s hand, carefully. The girl focused. Saw Valerie. Looked sick at the sight.
“I’ll leave you two in peace,” Valerie said.
She glanced back from the open doorway. Rachel had moved to the edge of the bed and was embracing her daughter. Elspeth looked at Valerie over her mother’s shoulder. The big puppet eyes were unblinking—but there was plenty going on behind them. A pitch of tension so extreme it manifested itself as perfect calm. For the first time it occurred to Valerie that maybe Elspeth knew about her father’s affair.
Leave my daughter out of it, Rachel Grant had said.
So far that hadn’t been a problem.
Maybe it was time for it to become one.
29
September 5, 2017
Be careful what you wish for, Valerie thought. Or half wish for. Or dread. I was nothing before I had Elspeth. Perhaps hers was the opposite condition: I’m too much already. There’s no room for anyone else. Except now there was someone else. Literal room for someone else had already been found. Inside her.
She’d done two things. The first was to check the time limits on legal abortion in California. Eight weeks for medicated, twelve weeks for a D&C, and twenty-two weeks in Los Angeles County for an E&C, should she be dumb enough to leave it that long. She’d done this in a state of dreamlike cognitive dissonance. She’d told herself such information was irrelevant, since she wasn’t going to get an abortion. She’d told herself that even to check was a betrayal of Nick. She’d told herself she wasn’t going to check. And here I am, not checking, she’d thought, as she looked up the information.
The second thing she’d done was a deed by omission: She hadn’t told Nick she was pregnant. He was well aware of the calendar, but he hadn’t asked. He’d read her silence at her period due date as negative, and read the particular brand of silence, accompanied by what Valerie thought must surely be a perceptible shift in her aura, as her desire not to be asked. She knew what he was thinking: Ease back. Don’t make it a big deal. Take the pressure off her. Hell, take the pressure off both of you. Perhaps another couple of months would go by before he might quite reasonably float the idea that they should get themselves checked out, to see if they were, well, you know, capable of conceiving.
Every day since the positive test result she’d woken up certain that would be the day she broke the news. She went over the imagined exchange endlessly.
Guess what?
What?
I’m pregnant.
Pause. A moment for the glitter from the quiet explosion to burst, flicker, fall around them, settle.
Then Nick’s face, smiling. Warmth. Happiness. Relief. Love.
And no fear.
Which was, of course, why she hadn’t told him. It wasn’t just that the thought of herself as a mother—the new vast arena in which she could fuck things up—terrified her. It was that her miscarriage of five years ago had reattached itself to her like a sad and silent ghost. It was with her in the morning and with her during the day and with her when she lay down to sleep. She told herself she was being ridiculous. In gentler moods she told herself she was being understandably cautious. Most of the time she didn’t tell herself anything, just carried on existing in an awful condition of heightened tension and draining uncertainty. And now a week had gone by and Nick still didn’t know.
Work wasn’t helping. Her requests to interview Elspeth had been rebuffed three times by Rachel Grant. Not well enough yet. Stay away. Valerie had legal options, but she wasn’t, quite, at the stage of exercising them. Mainly because there was no hard evidence that Elspeth knew anything, but partly because she, Valerie, was loath to risk an interrogation that might push a manifestly unhinged minor into a second (and God forbid) successful suicide attempt.
It would have been easier if she’d had any other leads—but there were none. Jenner was still missing. The pictures of Sophia had been circulated among the Bay Area strip clubs, but as with the escort agencies the list of possible candidates—based on blond hair, a trim body, and an obscured face—was laughably long and wholly inconclusive. There were four Sophias, all of whom claimed never to have heard of Adam Grant, and none of whom had been working in L.A. when he’d been there for his friend’s funeral. The LAPD was (cursorily, Valerie knew) going through the same routine on their turf, but given the time lapse, forty-plus establishments, personnel turnover in the clubs, and the department’s own prior commitments, she wasn’t holding her breath. It was a mild, seductive torment to her, that somewhere out there Sophia was going about her business, putting on her makeup, shopping for groceries, watching TV, dressing and undressing (perhaps for men, perhaps for money) with so much Valerie needed to know locked up in her beautiful blond head. Sophia—The Life of Sophia—was a drama series in Valerie’s head, with no amount of episodes sufficient to explain the central mystery of the plot. Even sleep didn’t protect her: The other night she’d dreamed she was talking to her in a supermarket parking lot. The wind was blowing and Sophia was struggling to keep her bright blond hair out of her face. In the dream, Valerie had asked her all the pertinent questions—and Sophia, laughing with what seemed a genuine ignorance, had told her she had no clue what she was talking about. There had been a strange sisterly goodwill between them.