Fractured

by Catherine McKenzie

  I walk outside and look left, then right. I catch sight of Brad halfway down the block. His balding head is bobbing up and down as he walks briskly. This is not some casual stroll. He’s making a break for it. I pick up my pace, the need to catch him accelerating in my chest.

  Brad slows down when he gets to the end of the block. He looks around, maybe searching for somewhere to sit. His legs are shaking as he pats himself down.

  “You need a smoke?” I ask, trying to sound friendly. But I’m standing half a foot closer to him than I should be.

  He starts at the sound of my voice. When he turns to face me, he looks frightened, as if I might hurt him.

  “I can’t talk to you,” he says, his voice wheezing. “They said.”

  “It’s okay, Brad. I don’t want to talk.”

  “You should have stayed inside, then.”

  “I’m not up for a while,” I say. “I needed some air.”

  His eyes dart left and right. There are dark circles under them. Beads of sweat on his forehead.

  “It’s okay. There’s no one watching us. It’s just me. John. We were friends, I thought. Aren’t we friends?”

  “You don’t know what it’s been like . . .”

  “I don’t know?”

  “No, I mean, I can’t imagine . . .”

  “It’s fine, Brad. It’s fine.”

  His hands flap at his chest again. His suit is too loose on him, bought at a time when he was twenty pounds heavier. There’s a grease stain on his right pant leg. It doesn’t seem right, somehow, the disparity between us. I should be the one too broken to dress properly. Too distracted to comb my hair.

  “Fine?” Brad says. “It’s fine?”

  “I’m not sure why I said that. This has been . . . it’s all so—what happened?”

  “We can’t talk about it.”

  “I know, you said. Let’s just . . .”

  I reach into my jacket and pull out my flask. I put it there last night, not entirely sure why at the time. I needed to be 100 percent on my game today, not nipping at the clear vodka I chose because it was the safest bet at going undetected.

  “Remember this?” I say, tipping the flask back and forth. Its contents slosh against the sides.

  Brad looks terrified. A shot of pure self-loathing courses through me.

  “Oh, no, I can’t. I don’t drink anymore. I don’t.”

  “But you were drunk that morning.” I can hear the clank of the garbage cans like we’re back there. Brad was stumbling around, talking to himself, trying to line them up like soldiers. “What were you doing there that morning, anyway?”

  “I was just trying to help out my family.”

  “And what about today? What about my family?”

  “I don’t have a choice. They sent a subpoena. You know that.”

  Brad’s eyes scan the area around us again. I’m blocking the way back to the building. Running away is not an option.

  “I can’t fucking do this,” Brad says. “Please.”

  “Sure you can. Come on.”

  I take him by the elbow like he did Susan. There’s a cement structure down the block the smokers use as a bench. I deposit him on it and offer him the flask. This time he doesn’t protest, just takes it from me like it’s inevitable. He screws off the top and swallows down more than I ever could.

  “You do have a choice, Brad. You do.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he says, his voice already slightly blurred. He takes another pull, an even longer one this time, which ends with a shudder. “What do you want from me, John?”

  “Just tell them about the sun,” I say. “And how it made it impossible to see.”

  The Curious Incident of the Dog Poop in the Night-Time

  Julie

  Eight months ago

  John and I didn’t keep up the pretense of running separately when we got back from Mexico. That first frozen morning as I laced up my shoes and made sure my hair was well tucked into my running beanie with the fleece on the inside, I knew he was doing the same thing across the street, checking his watch to make sure he timed his exit so that we’d start this day together.

  I’d had these moments of precognition on and off throughout my life, knowing what other people were going to say before they did, even if it was an unusual word like “cacophony” or “salubrious.” I’d hear the word in my head moments before they said it. Occasionally, it would be instructions. Go to this coffee shop. Turn left. It was usually something innocuous, but it had kept me alive once when the driver in front of me—drunk and two nights’ sleepless, I learned later—applied his brakes for no reason at all, and I stopped mere inches from his bumper because I’d “seen” him apply his brakes ten seconds before he had.

  To the extent I discussed it all, even with myself, I always made fun of it. Not that I believe in this stuff, I was fond of saying at dinner parties if the subject of coincidences came up. But listen to this . . . I’d hold everyone’s attention—I did know how to tell a story—and when I explained how I’d twice in one day guessed where someone was from before they told me, they’d shake their heads and someone, usually a man, would call me a “witch,” and everyone would laugh, and the conversation would move on. If I caught Daniel’s eye, he’d roll his own, knowing, as I had said to him more than once, that I was a bit ashamed of myself when I told these stories. That they were an easy card to play in a social setting, and I was only ever telling half the truth of it.

  Because it wasn’t reliable, and there were so many other things that could explain it, and seriously, what was I saying, anyway? That I was a witch? That magic was real? That I was magic?

  But then there was this: when I met Heather Stanhope for the first time, my mind clanged like a bell. It gave me a warning, but I befriended her anyway.

  Because I didn’t believe in that stuff.

  Because magic wasn’t real.

  A warning sounded within me that morning, too, when I opened my front door and closed it firmly behind me, making sure it was locked. John was standing across the street in his winter running gear, a thin plume of his breath visible above his lips.

  “Shall we?” he said, smiling in welcome.

  I returned his smile and shook the warning away.

  How’s this for irony?

  The first time Heather Stanhope showed up at one of my book events, I was glad to see her.

  I was on a book tour. Nothing grand or fancy, the tour involved me driving to a bookstore a couple of times a week, leaving the twins with Daniel or a sitter, putting on my “adult clothes,” and applying a coat of mascara. That event was in the first month after the book came out. The Book was selling steadily, but it hadn’t yet attained that strange velocity that occurred after it made it onto a couple of “Best of” lists and got downloaded thirty thousand times in one day when my publishers did a flash price drop of the e-book.

  Sometimes no one showed up to these readings; sometimes twenty people did. I’d already found out that it was completely unpredictable, had enough store clerks tell me stories about [insert name of famous author] and how no one showed up for his signing at all.

  It was one of those medium-size events at a Barnes & Noble in Seattle. I’d been snarled in traffic on the way there, feeling late, though I wasn’t quite. When I got set up at my table, I realized I’d forgotten to bring pens again. It still hadn’t sunk in that I was the one signing the books stacked neatly on the table.

  It was a perfect Saturday afternoon for a trip to the bookstore. Not a sunny day—those never worked—and not too rainy, either. Just a gray haze that made you think you were safe leaving the house for a few hours and browsing. The store was crowded. A few women stopped by to chat, and then a line formed behind them. Not a long line, but enough so I was starting to feel good about the day, instead of feeling like the store had gone to a lot of trouble just for me, and all for nothing.

  The line cleared out. The stack of books next to me was shorter, but still high. I’d managed to g
et black Sharpie on my fingers, and the fumes were giving me a headache.

  “Is that really you?”

  A tall woman with brown hair was standing in front of me. She had her hair cut short, almost boyish, and she’d put on a few pounds since law school, but in a way that suited her. She looked capable and strong.

  “Heather?”

  “Julie?”

  I’d smiled and risen up from my seat to hug her across the table. She smelled, surprisingly, of marijuana.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I could ask you the same thing. Wow. Did you write that?”

  “I did!”

  We caught each other up. I told her how Daniel and I had moved from Montreal to Tacoma after I’d quit the prosecutor’s office, how I’d left the law behind, all about the twins. She told me how she’d spent almost ten years in New York, grinding, eating most meals at the firm, and when they’d finally offered her partnership, realizing she didn’t want it. She’d moved to Seattle for a different life six months earlier.

  “Did you make it back to McGill for the tenth reunion?” she asked.

  “I skipped it. I guess you did, too?”

  “Yeah. Too many memories. If they were going to do something for Kathryn, I would’ve gone.”

  She meant Kathryn Simpson, a classmate of ours who’d died during our third year.

  I shivered. Someone walking over my grave.

  “You still in touch with the others?” Heather asked.

  “Booth e-mails me sometimes. I haven’t heard from Kevin in years.”

  Booth was my law-school boyfriend; Kevin was Kathryn’s. We all spent an inordinate amount of time together, and then Kathryn died, and the investigation happened. We started unraveling then. Booth and I broke up, and I met Daniel in the aftermath.

  “I dedicated the book to her,” I said. “I think about her often.”

  Something flickered behind Heather’s eyes. “I didn’t know you wrote.”

  “I didn’t really until recently. I still kind of can’t believe I wrote a whole book.”

  “What’s it about?”

  I tripped over my words. Though I was used to explaining it to strangers, I felt nervous telling her. “Four law students plan the perfect murder. Then, ten years later, one of them has committed it, and one of them has to prosecute them for it. Only it’s not told like that.”

  Some of the color fled her face. She picked up the book and focused on the title. “The Murder Game? But . . . isn’t that what you guys used to play at law school?”

  By then, the warning gong in my head was so loud I was sure others could hear it.

  Daniel and I had a deal. Once a week, he’d come home early from work and do the nightly routine with the kids. We’d had this agreement ever since he found me curled in a ball on the floor near the television when the twins were two and a half and up way past their bedtime. They’d been running laps in the living room, refusing to go to bed. Even the temptation of the iPad and unlimited Netflix had only started working after I repeated it three times and let them have sugar cereal. They were sitting on the couch with a large bowl of it in front of them, eating it like popcorn, when Daniel came home from a late business dinner. He said my name twice before I responded, and we had an awful fight about why I hadn’t called him or someone else to come help.

  It all came pouring out then: how I’d been writing in secret, and how I couldn’t stand being at home all day without any adults to talk to other than the CrossFit moms who always made me feel like I was doing everything wrong. How the pregnancy weight I couldn’t lose made me feel like I was back in high school, with clothes that didn’t fit and the disapproving looks of my peers. How I couldn’t take the weather anymore, and I thought I might be going crazy.

  Daniel put me to bed and dealt with the kids. After a visit to my doctor resulted in an increase of my Wellbutrin and vitamin D doses, Daniel suggested two things: that I take a night off once a week to join a book club or hang with my girlfriends—whatever I wanted—and that we institute our own “date night” (as tacky as we both felt that was) on Saturdays. His mother would be all too happy to be our standing sitter, and we could explore some of the restaurants that had sprung up around Tacoma while we were being held captive by our kids.

  We hadn’t been keeping either of those nights up since the move. We hadn’t found a reliable sitter (we certainly weren’t going to use Ashley), and I didn’t have any friends to hang out with yet. But as February rolled in, with its monochrome skies and its damp cold that was too reminiscent of a Tacoma winter, I broached the subject to Daniel. And even though I kept the note of panic out of my voice, I thought, he agreed immediately, then began Googling bonded babysitting services in the area.

  I’d texted Susan casually that afternoon, wondering if she might want to go for a walk after dinner. I knew from the few brief text exchanges we’d had since that day in the park that Wednesday was Brad’s night for taking the kids out. He took them for a dinner a week and every other weekend, Susan told me, if she was lucky. Father of the Year was his for the taking.

  She’d written back enthusiastically, the number of exclamations marks in her text suggesting that she, too, was in serious need of a break. Who wouldn’t be, in her situation?

  I ate dinner with Daniel and the kids, sipping a nice glass of red while I sat back and watched Daniel cajole first Sam, then Melly, into eating their broccoli. While he did the dishes, I suited up for the cold and put Sandy on her leash. Despite my complaints and the tug of the winter blahs, Ohio cold was better than the old cold, Pacific Northwest cold, which seeped into your bones like the washed-up, sodden logs scattered across the beach.

  Susan lived halfway down the street in a tall, narrow brick house. It was one of the things I was coming to love about Cincinnati: the variety in the real estate. In complete contrast to the housing development we’d lived in before, no two houses on Pine Street looked the same. Each was built to the original owner’s whim, it seemed, with an errant turret here, a dormer window there. The only consistency, I knew, from my house search before we moved, was the panel of windows at the back of any house with a river view.

  Susan was waiting on her front porch. She was dressed like me—long puffy coat, boots over her jeans, hat over her ears. When I thought back to how I’d wandered around with an open coat and no hat in my youth in upstate New York, I marveled. Was I thicker-skinned back then, or simply stupid?

  “He doesn’t bite, does he?” Susan asked, eyeing Sandy, who was sitting obediently on her heels next to me.

  “He’s a she. And no, not unless I tell her to.”

  “I’ve always been afraid of dogs.”

  “Do you want me to take her back? She hasn’t had her second walk today and . . .”

  “No, it’s fine. I’m all about facing my fears these days.”

  “That sounds like a good precept.”

  She shoved her hands in her pockets. “You’d think, right? But, no.”

  We started walking down the street. It had snowed earlier, and it was safer to walk in the middle of the street than on the slippery sidewalks. We were getting an unusual amount of snow that winter, I’d heard on the radio that morning, but to me there couldn’t be too much. It was one of the things I’d insisted on when Daniel and I were looking for a new place to live: there had to at least be the possibility of snow.

  Susan and I hadn’t agreed on any particular path, only that we’d walk for an hour at least. Sandy trotted along companionably next to us, stopping to pee on the small tree in front of Cindy’s house, which always seemed to call the dog in like a homing beacon on my morning runs.

  Susan looked around. “Don’t let Cindy catch her doing that.”

  “I always clean up after.”

  “I’m sure. But you’ve met Cindy, right?”

  “She can’t control everything.”

  “She can try.”

  Though it was only eight o’clock, most of the lights
in Cindy’s house were off. A flickering glow from a television could be seen through the basement windows.

  “I think we’re safe,” I said. “What’s up with her, anyway? She seems to have a strange hold over everyone.”

  Susan laughed. “I can see how it would seem that way, but, well . . . her daughter, Ashley, had leukemia when she was a kid, and she came pretty close to dying. Cindy was so amazing. She quit her job and basically moved into the hospital, and I swear, she willed Ashley to live. When Ashley got better, Cindy never went back to work. I guess all that energy had to go somewhere.”

  “I can’t imagine going through that.”

  “Yeah, it was awful. She can be over the top sometimes, but mostly she’s this really generous person. She’s helped out a lot since Brad left.”

  We wended our way through the neighboring streets. The clouds that had closed in around Mount Adams earlier in the day, making it feel as if we lived in a tree house, had finally dissipated, and Venus was shining bright in the sky next to a crescent moon. The cold air felt like a carbon scrubber in my system, washing out the impurities and taking them away with each frosty breath.

  “Brad’s in AA,” Susan said suddenly when we crested the hill, as if she’d been gearing herself up to do it.

  “Is that a good thing?”

  “I think so. I asked him to. A million times before the end, I asked him to try it.”

  “Better late than never?”

  “Ha. Yes. I guess. Who knows if it will stick.”

  “I almost did that,” I said, surprising myself. I hadn’t even told Daniel about the vodka-in-the-morning period of my life, though I’m sure he suspected something. There had been a few pointed remarks about skipping wine with dinner. Confrontation was never Daniel’s strong suit.