by Noah Hawley
“Frankie knows us. She knows our routines, our finances—or at least a general sense of our finances—she knows which room Rachel sleeps in. Everything. They took Frankie so she could give them Rachel.”
Maggie went over and sat down on the sofa, purse still on her arm.
“Unless she’s working with them,” said David.
Maggie shook her head, shock calming her, making her limbs feel like seaweed floating on the waves.
“She’s not. She’s twenty-two. She goes to night school.”
“Maybe she needs money.”
“David,” said Maggie, looking at him. “She’s not helping them. Not on purpose.”
They thought about this, what it might take to compel a conscientious young woman to give up a sleeping toddler placed in her charge.
Forty-five minutes later, they heard car tires on the driveway. David went outside to meet them. He came back in with six men. They were clearly armed and had what could only be described as a military demeanor. One of the men wore a suit. He was olive-skinned, graying at the temples.
“Mrs. Bateman,” he said. “I’m Mick Daniels. These men are here for your protection and to help me ascertain the facts.”
“I had a dream,” she found herself telling him.
“Honey,” said David.
“About the Montauk Monster. That it was sliding up the side of our house.”
Mick nodded. If he found this odd at all, he didn’t say so.
“You were sleeping,” he told her, “but some part of you heard something. It’s genetic training. An animal memory of spending a few hundred thousand years as prey.”
He had them show him their bedroom and then Rachel’s room, had them retrace their steps. Meanwhile, two of his men examined the perimeter. Another two set up a command center in the living room, bringing in laptops, telephones, and printers.
They met up again with the full group ten minutes later.
“A single set of footprints,” they were told by a black man working a piece of bubble gum, “and two deeper marks directly under the window. We think that’s from the ladder. Tracks lead to a smaller structure on the property, then disappear. We found a ladder inside. Extendable. Tall enough to reach the second floor, I think.”
“So he didn’t bring his own ladder,” said Mick, “he used one that was already here. Which means he knew it was here.”
“We had a rain gutter fall last weekend,” said David. “The landlord came and put it up, used a ladder. Not sure where he got it, but he drove up in a sedan, so he didn’t bring it with him.”
“We’ll look at the landlord,” said Mick.
“No visible tire marks on the road,” said a second man, holding a rifle. “Nothing fresh, at least. No sense of which direction he or they may have taken.”
“I’m sorry,” said Maggie, “but who are you people? Somebody took my baby. We need to call the police.”
“Mrs. Bateman,” said Mick.
“Stop calling me that,” she said back.
“I’m sorry, what would you like me to call you?”
“No. Just—will somebody please tell me what’s happening?”
“Ma’am,” Mick said, “I am a paid security consultant for the biggest private security firm in the world. Your husband’s employer retained my services at no cost to you. I served eight years with the Navy SEALs, and eight more with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I’ve worked three hundred kidnapping cases with a very high rate of success. There is a formula at work here. As soon as we figure it out, I promise you we will call the FBI, but not as helpless bystanders. My job is to control the situation from now until we get your daughter back.”
“And can you do that?” Maggie said, as if from another dimension. “Get her back?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Mick. “I can.”
Chapter 26
Blanco
It’s the white walls that wake him. Not just in the bedroom; the whole apartment is embossed in pure ivory—walls, floors, furniture. Scott lies there, eyes open, heart beating fast. To sleep in white limbo, like a new soul suspended in ether waiting for a door to open, for the bureaucratic check box of body assignment, praying breathlessly for the invention of color, can drive a man mad apparently. Scott tosses and turns under white sheets on white pillows, his bed frame painted the color of eggs. At two fifteen a.m. he throws off the covers and puts his feet on the floor. Traffic sounds creep through the double-pane windows. He is sweating from the exertion of forcing himself to stay in bed, and he can feel his heart beating through the walls of his rib cage.
He goes to the kitchen, and considers making coffee, but it feels wrong somehow. Night is night and morning is morning and to confuse the two can lead to lingering displacement. A man out of time, phase-shifted, drinking bourbon for breakfast. There is an itch behind Scott’s eyes. He goes into the living room, finds a credenza, opens all the drawers. In the bathroom he finds six tubes of lipstick. In the kitchen he finds a black Sharpie and two Hi-Liters (pink and yellow). There are beets in the fridge, frazzled and fat, and he takes them out and puts a pot of water on the stove to boil.
They are talking about him on the television. He doesn’t need to turn it on to know that. He is part of the cycle now, the endless worrying. Whitewashed floorboards creak underfoot as he pads into the living room (white). The fireplace is still charred from recent use, and Scott crouches on the cool brick lip and searches the ashes. He finds a lump of charcoal by feel, pulling it forth like a diamond from a mine. There is a floor-length mirror on the far wall, and as he straightens he catches sight of himself. By coincidence his boxers are white and he wears a white T-shirt—as if he too is slowly being consumed by some endless nothing. Seeing himself in the mirror in this all-white world—a pale, white man draped in white cloth—he considers the possibility that he is a ghost. What is more likely, he wonders, that I swam for miles with a dislocated shoulder and a toddler on my back, or that I drowned in the churning salt, like my sister all those years back, her panicked eyes and mouth drawn under the greedy black water of Lake Michigan?
Charcoal in hand, he goes around the apartment turning on lights. There is an instinct to it, a feeling not exactly rational. Outside he can hear the grinding brakes of the day’s first trash truck, its geared jaws pulverizing the things we no longer need. The apartment now fully illuminated, he turns a slow circle to take it all in, white walls, white furniture, white floors, and this single turn becomes a kind of spin, as if once started it cannot be stopped. A white cocoon punctuated by black mirrors, window covers raised.
Everything capable of producing color has been piled on the low white coffee table. Scott stands with ashen charcoal in hand. He switches the lump from left to right, his eyes drawn to the feral black stain there on his left palm. Then, with gusto, he claps his dirty palm to his chest and draws it down across his belly, smearing black ash onto the cotton.
Alive, he thinks.
Then he starts on the walls.
* * *
An hour later he hears a knock on the door, and then the sound of the key in the lock. Layla enters, still dressed for evening in a short gown and high heels. She finds Scott in the living room, throwing beets at the wall. His T-shirt and shorts are ruined in the common parlance, or much improved in the eyes of this particular painter—stained black and red. The air smells vaguely of charcoal and root vegetables. Without acknowledging her arrival, Scott pads over to the wall and crouches, lifting the smashed tuber. Behind him, he hears footsteps in the hall, hears the sound of a breath drawn in. A startled rush.
He hears it and doesn’t hear it, because, at the same time, there is nothing but the sound of his own thoughts. Visions and memory, and something more abstract. Urgent—not in the sense of earth shattering, but as it feels to urinate finally after a long drive home, stuck in stop-and-go traffic, the long run to the front door, fumbling for keys, fly unbuttoned shakily on the hurried move. And then the artless stream. A biological necessity
fulfilled. A light, once off, now turned on.
The painting is revealing itself to him with every stroke.
Behind him, Layla watches, lips parted, taken by a feeling she doesn’t really understand. She is an intruder on an act of creation, an unexpected voyeur. This apartment, which she owns and decorated herself, has become something else. Something unexpected and wild. She reaches down and unstraps her high heels, carrying them to the speckled white sofa.
“I was at a thing uptown,” she says. “One of those endless who cares—and I saw your light on from the street. All the lights.”
She sits, one leg folded under the other. Scott runs his hand through his hair, his scalp now the color of cooked lobster. Then he goes to the coffee table, chooses a lipstick.
“A fifty-year-old man said he wanted to smell my panties,” she says. “Or wait, that’s not it—he wanted me to take off my panties and slip them into his pocket and then later, when his wife was sleeping, he said he would hold them to his nose and jerk off into the sink.”
She unfolds and walks to the liquor cabinet to pour herself a drink. Seemingly oblivious, Scott tests the lipstick color on the wall, then recaps it, chooses a different shade.
“Imagine his wide eyes when I told him I wasn’t wearing any,” Layla says, watching him select a color called Summer Blush. She sips her drink. “Do you ever wonder what things were like before?”
“Before what?” says Scott, not turning.
She lies back on the sofa.
“I worry sometimes,” she says, “that people only talk to me because I’m rich or they want to fuck me.”
Scott is a laser beam, focused on a spot.
“Sometimes,” he says, “they’re probably just wondering—do you want to order an appetizer or potentially a cocktail.”
“I’m not talking about if it’s their job. I’m saying in a room full of people. I’m saying socially or at a business meeting. I’m talking about somebody looking at me and thinking, There’s a human being with something meaningful to add to the great debate.”
Scott caps the lipstick and steps back to inspect his work.
“When I was seven,” he says, “I ran away from home. I mean, not from home, but from the house. I climbed a tree in the backyard. This’ll show them, I thought, for who remembers what reason. My mom—from the kitchen window—saw me up there, a boy in the bough of a tree with his knapsack and a pillow, glaring, but she just went about making dinner. Later, I watched them eating at the kitchen table—Mom, Dad, my sister. Pass the biscuits. After the dishes were done, they sat on the sofa watching TV. Real People, possibly Full House. I started getting cold.”
He smudges charcoal, perfecting an effect.
“Have you ever tried sleeping in a tree?” he asks. “You have to be a panther. One by one the house lights go out. I’d forgotten to bring food, is the thing, or a sweater. So after a while I climb down and go inside. The back door is open. My mother has left a plate of food on the table for me with a note. Ice cream in the freezer! I sit and eat in the dark, then go upstairs to bed.”
“What are you saying?”
“Nothing. It’s just something I did.”
He smudges charcoal lines on the drywall, adding shadows.
“Or maybe,” he says, “what I mean is, people can say all kinds of things without ever opening their mouths.”
She stretches her arms and legs away from her body, turning her hip to the ceiling.
“They’re saying on the news that the boy stopped talking,” she says. “That he hasn’t spoken a word since the accident. I don’t know how they know, but that’s what they’re saying.”
Scott scratches his face, leaving an inky smudge on his temple.
“When I was drinking,” he says, “I was what they call a motormouth. Just one thing after another, mostly the things I thought people wanted to hear, or—that’s not true—things I thought were provocative. The truth.”
“What was your drink?”
“Whiskey.”
“So male.”
He uncaps the yellow Hi-Liter, rubs the wet felt absently across his left thumb.
“The day I sobered up, I stopped talking,” he says. “What was there to say? You need hope to form a thought. It takes—I don’t know—optimism to speak, to engage in conversation. Because, really, what’s the point of all this communicating? What difference does it really make what we say to each other? Or what we do, for that matter?”
“There’s a name for that,” she says. “It’s called depression.”
He puts the Hi-Liter down, turns slowly, taking in the work. Shape and color, open to interpretation. He feels exhausted all of a sudden, now that the room has depth, dimension. As his eyes reach Layla, he sees she has removed her dress and is lying naked on the sofa.
“You weren’t kidding about the underwear,” he says.
She smiles.
“All night I was so happy,” she says, “knowing I had a secret. Everybody talking about what happened, the mystery—a plane crashed. Was it terrorism? Some kind of kill the rich beginning-of-the-end scenario. Or some North Korean mosquito swat to keep Kipling from narcing. You should have been there. But then things turn, become more—personal. All these moneyed elitists talking about the boy, will he ever talk again.”
She studies him.
“Talking about you.”
Scott goes to the kitchen sink, washes his hands, watching ash and lipstick run down the drain. When he comes back the sofa is empty.
“In here,” she calls from the bedroom.
Scott thinks about that—what a naked woman in his bed will lead to—then he turns and goes into the study. The walls here are still white. It offends his sense of accomplishment, so he presses his stained torso to the drywall, leaving a body shape like Wile E. Coyote. He goes over to the desk and picks up the phone.
“Did I wake you?” he asks when she answers.
“No,” says Eleanor. “We’re up. He had a nightmare.”
Scott pictures the boy tossing and turning, the inside of his head a raging sea.
“What’s he doing right now?”
“Eating cereal. I tried to get him back to sleep, but he wouldn’t have it. So I found WordWorld on PBS.”
“Can I talk to him?”
He hears her put down the phone, hears the muffled sound of her voice—JJ!—across the room. Surrendering to gravity, Scott lies on the floor, the phone cord stretching along with him. After a second he hears the plastic of the receiver dragged across a hard surface, then breathing.
“Hey, pal,” says Scott. He waits. “It’s Scott. I was—looks like we both woke up, huh? You had a bad dream?”
From the other room, Scott hears Layla turn on the TV, mainlining the twenty-four-hour news cycle. Through the phone he hears the little boy breathing.
“I was thinking about maybe coming up there—to see you,” says Scott. “You could show me your room or—I don’t know. It’s been hot here. In the city. Your aunt says you’re near the river. I could maybe teach you how to skip stones, or—”
He thinks about what he has just said, Let’s you and I visit another large body of water. Part of him wonders if the boy screams every time the toilet flushes, if he shies from the sound of the filling tub.
“What helps me with fear,” he says, “being afraid, is preparation, you know? Knowing how to do things. Like if a bear attacks they say you’re supposed to play dead. Did you know that?”
He feels the weight of exhaustion pulling on him from deep below the floor.
“What about lions?” the boy says.
“Well,” says Scott, “I’m not sure there. But I tell you what. I’ll get the answer and tell you when I see you, okay?”
A long silence.
“Okay,” says the boy.
Scott hears the boy drop the phone, then the sound of its retrieval.
“Wow,” says Eleanor. “I don’t know what to—”
It hangs between them, this miracl
e worker exchange. Scott doesn’t want to talk about it. The fact that the boy will speak to him and no one else is simply a fact, as far as he’s concerned, without what psychologists call meaning.
“I told him I’d visit,” says Scott. “Is that okay?”
“Of course. He’d—we’d like that.”
Scott thinks about the inflection of her voice.
“What about your husband?” he asks.
“There are very few things he likes.”
“You?”
A pause.
“Sometimes.”
They think about that for a while. From the bedroom, Scott hears a sigh, but he can’t tell if it’s a human noise or a sound effect off the screen.
“Okay,” says Scott. “Sun’ll be up soon. Try to get a nap today.”
“Thanks,” she says. “Have a nice day.”
A nice day. The simplicity of it makes him smile.
“You too,” he says.
After they hang up, Scott lies there for a beat, flirting with sleep, then climbs to his feet. He follows the sound of the television, peeling off his T-shirt and dropping it on the floor, then takes off his boxers and walks to the bedroom, turning off lights as he goes. Layla is half under the covers, posing hip-up—she knows what she looks like, the power of it—her eyes arranged coyly on the screen. Chilly now, Scott climbs into bed. Layla turns off the TV. Outside, the sun is just starting to rise. He lays his head on the pillow, feeling first her hands and then her body move toward him. Waves climbing a white sand beach. She arranges herself across his hips and torso. Her lips find his neck. Scott feels the warmth of the comforter pulling him down. The white box has been vanquished. Limbo is now a place. Her hand touches his chest. Her leg floats up along his shin and settles across his thighs. Her body is hot, the arc of her breasts flush against his arm. She nuzzles and whispers into the groove of his neck, taking her time.
“You like talking to me,” she says, “right?”
But he is already asleep.
Chapter 27
Painting #4