One Life to Lose

by Kris Ripper

  Except I never left my keys anywhere. They were on my dresser until I put them in my pocket, and in my pocket until I put them on my dresser.

  And he hadn’t had a key.

  And even if he had, the cops would have taken it as evidence, so that was that. He hadn’t had a key, but if he had, it was locked up in the police station right now.

  Joey Rodriguez was not in my house.

  But it was so fucking hard to open the door. My hand went numb on the knob before I could convince myself to do it. If I’d had more towels, I would have made a nest in the bathtub, an idea that sounded far more reasonable than opening the bathroom door.

  Finally, eventually, I realized that if he had gotten in my home, I would have been far easier to kill in the shower, totally unaware, than I would be out in the apartment, which had already proven to have weapons strewn about. The bathroom door wasn’t locked. He could have just walked in.

  Clearly he wasn’t actually in my apartment. Even though it felt like he was.

  What they never tell you about your instincts, about the powerful primitive part of your brain that tells you when to fight and when to run like hell, is that sometimes it fails you. Sometimes your entire body knows you’re about to die, but you aren’t.

  I crouched on the floor of my bathroom and opened the door very, very slowly. The hallway was empty. I was glad I’d left all the lights on; I could see the kitchen and half of the living room, both of which were empty.

  My heart felt like it was drumming right out of my chest. I eased out into the hall and listened closely. Nothing. No sounds in my apartment.

  I checked every closet, every cabinet, behind every curtain. I looked under my bed. Then I did another round, in case someone was there and had somehow eluded me the first time. My phone had died again. I plugged it in, but left it powered down. I doubted I’d need my alarm to wake up before eight.

  Locking the bedroom door and hiding under my covers didn’t make me feel safe. I fell asleep at one point and woke up, sweating, from a nightmare in which Joey kicked Josh’s body again and again and I couldn’t move to save him. Keith wasn’t there. It was just me, and Joey, and Josh’s body taking blows.

  I ran to the bathroom and dry heaved into the toilet, but then I had to go through the entire apartment again to prove that no one was there. And even though it was stupid, ugly-stupid, unforgivably ludicrous, I grabbed one of Mom’s candlesticks and brought it into the bedroom with me, behind the door I closed and locked and pushed a chair against.

  I was grateful when the sun finally came up.

  Ed was waiting for me outside the theater in the morning.

  I eyed him as I unlocked the front doors. “Shouldn’t you be at work?”

  “My excuse is interviewing the victim of a violent crime, if anyone asks.” He hugged me tightly. “Are you okay? What the hell am I saying, of course you’re not.”

  “I’m fine, Ed, really.” I felt better with my keys in hand, deactivating the alarm, unlocking the booth, booting up the computers. “Josh and Keith took real hits. I’m fine.”

  “Yeah, I’m on my way to the center after this.”

  I stopped everything. “QYP is open? They’re working today? They got out of the hospital like twelve hours ago!”

  Ed rolled his eyes. “You can talk.”

  “I didn’t have a concussion!”

  “Cam, come on. You should be recovering or something.”

  “I am recovering. My job’s not actually that strenuous.”

  “Detective Green said you were a little roughed up, too.”

  That had been one of the worst parts of the statement. Removing my shirt, letting them take pictures of the couple of bruises I’d gotten from the fight. Impossible to ignore them when they were right there on my skin.

  “What else did he say?”

  Ed shot me a baffled look. “Off the record, Joey Rodriguez is fucking nuts. On the record, they’re investigating a suspect who may have a connection to a string of local beatings. Not murders, beatings.”

  He followed me as I turned everything on, got coffee brewing, unlocked the doors for the early staff. When I returned to the booth, Ed took his usual seat and I took mine. The routine was supposed to be making me feel safe and secure, but in truth I felt a bit nauseous instead.

  Ed cleared his throat. “You not talking is beginning to weird me out.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You could tell me what happened, if you want. If it would help.”

  “Don’t you mean you’re dying to know?” His wince told me both that I’d hurt him, and that I was right.

  “I really want it to be him. I want this to be over. Alisha keeps telling me that if I let things take over my life like this, it won’t matter when they end because there will always be something else, but I want to prove her wrong.”

  I thought that sounded pretty accurate, but I didn’t say anything.

  He shook his head slightly. “I’d met him before. Joey Rodriguez. That’s why he looked familiar the night we saw him leaving here. It’s probably why he left so fast. I work with his dad at the paper.”

  “Really?” What a strange, small world.

  “Yeah, uh, he was kind of my mentor. Or maybe he still is, though after this— I don’t know if you ever get over finding out your kid’s a murderer. Especially if you’ve been reporting on his murders for like ten months. And the kid, Joey, was friends with Philpott, or at least they knew each other.”

  I shuddered. “He had no friends. I don’t think he even had the capacity for friends.”

  “So you think it’s him, Cam? No doubt?”

  “He told us he was fixing the community. He was weeding out everyone who didn’t belong.”

  “Huh.” Ed nodded. “The drag king, the trans woman. Stephanie Hawkins was bisexual, that might have pissed him off. Felipe Farraway was flamboyant, I guess. But what about you and Steven Costello?”

  “I read books and think I’m better than everyone else,” I said. “I’m not sure about Steven Costello, except that he was scared, which Joey found offensive. Joey seemed to have a very narrow, limited idea of what being a gay man looked like. ‘A proud gay man,’ he said.”

  He looked a little green. “You’re kidding.”

  “No. He was culling the herd. He was a . . . separatist, I guess. A gay male separatist. And everyone who didn’t fit in with his idea of what was ‘natural’ needed to be destroyed.”

  “That’s creepy as hell. You know, the only time I ever spoke to him, he said something weird, about simplicity. About how he was old-fashioned, that all he wanted was a beer and a hot guy.”

  My chest tightened and I forced myself to breathe. “Apparently my failure to want either of those things offended him. I’m not sure why he went after Philpott except that by then it was about something else, almost like he got hooked on it. Instead of needing more drugs for the high, he needed a harder target.”

  “Cam—I am so sorry this happened. Like, I can’t even imagine how scary it must have been.”

  Still is. How scary it still is.

  “I’m fine, and Keith and Josh are fine, and for a while there I thought none of us were going to survive, so it’s good. It’s all good.” I couldn’t pull off the phrase, but Ed let it slide.

  “I think we’re going to postpone our trip. So you know, you should come over Saturday. Have dinner with us.”

  “Why?”

  “Cam. Saturday is Christmas Eve.”

  “Oh.” Christmas Eve. Right, of course, right where it always was. And Christmas the following day. The full picture came into focus. “What? No, you and Alisha are going out of town for the holiday. You told me that.”

  “We were going to, but we don’t have to. We could go just as easily some other weekend.”

  “Absolutely not, Ed. I’ll be fine. I’m already fine. There’s no reason to delay your trip and I flat-out refuse to come over, so if you do, you’ll have wasted it.” />
  “Cam—”

  “I’m fine. We’re showing It’s a Wonderful Life like we do every year, and I’ll eat snack foods, and make myself sick. It’s a good tradition, and I’m not interrupting it so you can feel better about me being alone.”

  He sat back in the chair. “Alisha said that’s what you’d say. More or less.”

  “Well, it’s true. I’m fine.”

  “Come on, Cam. You can’t be ‘fine’ like nothing happened.”

  “Maybe I’m lucky that way. Now go back to work. If you get fired over this, I’ll be irritated.”

  “Yeah, okay. But first I have to fix something, so hold still.”

  I held still, and when he started unbuttoning my waistcoat I went even more still. My heart began to race and I could feel heat under my skin, as if Ed’s proximity burned. I stared at the blue wall behind him and held the shade in my mind so it couldn’t slip away.

  “Your buttons are skewed and it’s been bugging me the whole time. There. Better.”

  He backed off. Which meant I could breathe.

  “Fine, I’ll go. But I don’t believe you’re fine, so you better return my texts when I check in or I’m coming back here.”

  “I will.”

  We hugged. He was the wrong person to hug; doing it only made me feel a little less stable, a little more distant.

  “Take care of yourself, Cameron.”

  “Of course I will,” I lied.

  Ed went away and I went, blessedly, to work.

  I wanted so desperately to find an excuse to go down to the drop-in center on Monday that I forced myself not to. Nothing I wanted this much could be healthy, and I couldn’t escape the notion that I was bad for them, that I’d called this down on them. Keith and I exchanged a flurry of text messages late in the day, and I hoped they might decide to visit me unannounced, which would save me the agony of deciding, until I realized that they were returning to Mr. and Mrs. Walker’s for at least another night.

  I felt gutted. The ritual of checking the house for intruders took longer. I kept thinking I’d missed something, or heard something, and I’d have to start over. It was better, I told myself. Better that they stay away from me, and I them. Better that they not see me this way: skittish, jumping at car doors slammed too hard, or shouts on the street. I drifted in and out of sleep, nightmares, sometimes realizing that the sound of the candlestick hitting flesh was really a bass line in a car driving down Mooney, sometimes jolting out of bed before I knew I was awake.

  The next morning it was harder to fake “okay,” but Ed didn’t stop by, so there were fewer people who needed to believe it. On the whole, I decided I was fine. I was managing.

  I’d dodged a phone call from Hugh Reynolds, but in the afternoon he called again and left a brief message: “Unless you want me to drive to the theater and stand there until you talk to me, call me back.”

  He was a therapist, and probably a good one, but his habit of being both nosy and overbearing was a lot older than his license. After my first boyfriend broke up with me, Hugh had come out to the theater one night, bought a ticket to whatever we were showing, then sat in the booth with me through the whole thing. We hadn’t talked. He just sat there, beside me, watching the movie on the monitor. At the end he’d given me an awkward hug and said good-bye.

  I called, resigned, and suffered through a volley of questions I recognized as testing my psychological well-being. I answered them honestly, but in as few words as possible. Yes, I had experienced nightmares. Yes, I’d had a few flashbacks. No, I wasn’t thinking of harming myself or anyone else. Yes, my body was healing just fine, practically healed.

  “How are your friends? They’re the ones I met, aren’t they? The paper named them, but I couldn’t recall.”

  “They’re the ones you met. Josh had a concussion, and Keith had a cut on his face, but they’re fine.”

  Hugh exhaled on the line. “PTSD is a real thing, and the right therapist can talk you through it.”

  “I know it’s a real thing, but I’m sure I don’t need therapy, Hugh. It was all over so fast.” I wanted this to be true, I willed it to be true, even though every time I was in my apartment it felt like it was happening again, endlessly repeating.

  “I think you’re in denial. Do you feel vulnerable all the time? Like the world is a thousand times more dangerous than it was before?”

  “It— Yes. It feels that way. I know it isn’t.”

  “In a sense, it is. Or rather, before you didn’t know how dangerous it really was, and now you do.” He paused. “Cameron, I know how you’re feeling. Please contact me if you need anything. Day or night. My phone is always on and I’m telling you, I’ve been there. You have to find a way to feel safe again.”

  “I’m fine,” I murmured.

  “You will be fine. But right now I’d be very surprised if you were anything even remotely resembling ‘fine.’”

  “I’ll live, then. I need to go back to work.”

  “Liar.”

  I smiled. “Thank you for calling.”

  “It’s so easy to feel alone, Cameron, for men like you and me. You aren’t alone. Don’t isolate yourself reflexively; it makes it so much harder to ask for help when you need it.”

  “Bye, Hugh.”

  “Good-bye.”

  I’d meant to go down to QYP that day, but I was too exhausted after the call with Hugh, so instead I sat in the theater and watched whatever we were showing (one of the big movies of two summers before). It seemed like a good idea until I realized that once people started filling in the rest of the seats, I was too paralyzed to move and too unsettled to enjoy the movie. He could be any of those people, any of those silhouettes. Joey Rodriguez could, even now, be sitting in my theater, laughing at the funny parts, gasping at the scary parts.

  How many times had I sold him a ticket and missed the hungry way his eyes took me in? How many times had he sat here in the dark, thinking about how he wanted to hurt me?

  I waited until every single human being had left the theater. Then I walked out as quickly as I could and went to my apartment, where I spent another near-sleepless night jumping at random noises and shadows and dreams.

  Keith: You okay?

  Keith: I think you aren’t okay.

  Keith: You keep saying you’ll come down to see us, but it’s Thursday and you haven’t.

  Keith: Cam? You there?

  Cameron: I’m here. I’m okay.

  Cameron: Just keep getting overwhelmed.

  Cameron: But I’m fine.

  Keith: When are you working today?

  Cameron: Closing.

  Keith: Okay, we’ll come over.

  Cameron: You don’t have to do that, I’m okay.

  Keith: We miss you.

  Keith: Don’t you miss us?

  Keith: Cam?

  Keith: Cam, where’d you go?

  Keith: <3 <3 <3

  Keith: Cam?

  Ed and Alisha had stopped by to bring me dinner before they took off on their holiday weekend. I’d gotten a few phone calls from people—Zane, Jaq, Obie—checking in, which was nice, I guess, though every time someone checked in made it harder to forget all of it had happened.

  I shouldn’t have ignored Keith’s texts. But seeing them made me want to cry, and I couldn’t cry in the ticket booth. I left my phone in my pocket on vibrate. Then I turned it to silent so I would stop thinking about Keith, and Josh, and how I’d keep it together if they visited.

  The nine o’clock movie was just letting out when they slipped inside. I was aware of them, but pretended not to be, helping concessions close, telling a few people what movies we’d be showing next week. When I allowed myself to notice them, from across the room, they were standing under the White Christmas poster, as if they’d planned it, as if they were highlighting how much I’d lost. Christmas was a time for grief, and it looked like this year would be no exception.

  I walked over, taking steady breaths, trying to keep my face calm when I
wanted to throw myself at them.

  “You are not okay,” Keith whispered harshly. “Oh my god, Cam.”

  “Hey.” Josh put an arm around him, but kept looking at me.

  “I’m almost done if you want to stay for a few minutes.” I couldn’t meet their eyes.

  “Yeah,” Josh said.

  “Okay.”

  A few of my staff waved hello to them when they went to sit on the sofas while we closed. I couldn’t bring myself to give them keys this time. What if he was upstairs right now? He wasn’t, he wasn’t, I knew he wasn’t, he was in jail (a fact I’d confirmed with Detective Green every day since Sunday), so he couldn’t be upstairs, but what if he was?

  It was exactly like I’d pictured it the first time: the camera rolled backward as we walked toward it, me, then Keith, then Josh, up the narrow staircase, me unlocking the door (testing it to make sure it was still locked first), holding it open for them.

  I bit down hard on my tongue as I shut it quickly and locked it, not breathing until the dead bolt slammed home.

  “Oh my god, why didn’t you come see us?” Keith hugged me fiercely. “Every day you say you will and then you don’t.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry.” He tugged me to the sofa. “Shit, it’s hard being here, Cam. Are you going out of your mind?”

  “I cleaned. A lot. Cleaning helped.” That wasn’t a lie. It had helped—a little. A very little.

  Josh sat on my other side. “Do you guys want to talk about it? It might be cathartic or something.”

  “No,” I said, as Keith was saying, “Maybe someday.”

  “Yeah, all right.” Josh’s hand reached out to rub my back, and now I was biting so hard—on my tongue, my cheek, whatever I could get between my teeth—that I tasted blood. “Cam, you’re all kinds of tense.”

  “I’m okay.” I twisted away from him, afraid that if he kept doing that I’d dive into his arms and fall apart. I had to stay calm so they wouldn’t know. I needed them not to know how scared I was all the time. I needed to not be more of a problem for them than I had been already.