by Anne McClane
Nick had said something about a heart attack. Lacey was certain Fox had suffered a heart attack as a result of a car accident.
When Lacey arrived at the lake, she saw Fox’s car with no sign of damage, an ambulance, a cop car, and a small crowd of people gathered on the levee outside the swimming area. One thought filled her head: How was he thrown from his car?
She saw Nick break away from the small crowd and walk toward her. It seemed like he walked in slow motion.
He stopped her before she could go to Fox, his hands on both her shoulders. He looked her in the eye and told her the half-truth. That Fox had gotten a crazy idea to go swimming. True. The EMTs said he’d had a heart attack. True. A woman who happened to be walking the levee had seen him struggling and tried to save him. False. Nick had been a few minutes behind and hadn’t seen any of it. False. He’d arrived too late to make a difference. True.
Lacey pushed Nick away from her and ran to the small crowd. Fox was lying at the center. He was naked, and he was gray. Lacey’s one thought: that’s not Fox. And that was when she realized he was dead.
Lacey was short of breath. She was remembering it all too vividly. Or she had taken the short bit of steep road that led to the lakefront too quickly. She stopped, bent forward, and grabbed her ankles.
Lacey had wanted to scream on that day in March, one year prior, but was afraid that if she did, she would lose her voice forever.
She knelt before Fox’s supine, lifeless body and tentatively reached out a hand for the one part of him that still seemed like him: his hair. Dark and always a little unruly. She stroked the side of his head. It felt cold, and not like a head at all. More like a moss-covered stone.
One word escaped her throat, at barely the level of a whisper: “Goodbye.” Silent tears poured out of her. Still kneeling, she removed her hand and covered her eyes.
She couldn’t remember how long she had stayed that way. It felt like an eternity.
Lacey walked to a concrete bench, still about a half mile from the swimming area. She sat, and remembered her anger. Not at Fox’s infidelities—that had come later. No, she remembered her anger on the grassy patch on the day Fox had died.
Someone came and covered the body with a sheet. That act snapped Lacey back to life. She rose up suddenly, intensely angry. Why had these strangers been staring at her husband’s naked body? Why had it taken them so long to show some respect for the dead? She scanned the small crowd of faces with narrowed eyes—strangers with various uniforms, a distraught woman with wet hair. She stopped on the one face she recognized.
“Why the fuck did you leave him lying out like this, for everyone to see?” Lacey yelled at Nick. Her voice had returned, and it was utterly altered from the journey.
Lacey never received a response from the stunned Nick. Instead, she felt a firm hand on her shoulder from behind. She turned around, and the hand did not move.
It was a police officer, a short and broad woman, her eyes bright against her brown skin and darker blue of her uniform. Her hand had stayed firm but gentle. Lacey’s sudden rage settled down into something sadder under the woman’s intense gaze.
“Ma’am, is this your husband?” she asked.
No, she wanted to answer. My husband is a vital, magnificent man who charms everyone he encounters. Whatever’s lying there is a shell.
“Yes,” Lacey replied instead.
“There are some things we’re going to have to ask you,” the police officer said as she led her away from Fox.
The blur of activity from that point forward softened the edges of the subsequent memories. Of those days that had led up to the funeral. But those days had been the last ones in which Fox remained the faithful, looming love of her life.
Lacey picked herself up from the bench. She had lost the desire to run. She would run home once she’d passed the swimming area, but decided to walk the remaining way there. She could feel a resolution forming.
Fox was still the love of her life, thus far, but less looming, and the faithful part had been obliterated. The truth had begun to emerge at the funeral: the distraught woman with the wet hair hadn’t just “happened” across Fox at dusk on a warm March day that had turned suddenly blustery. No, she had been with him in the water when he’d died.
Lacey had pieced together the full story in the months after his death. Fox and the woman had left a crawfish boil in Lake Vista together, and Fox had somehow cajoled her into skinny-dipping. Lacey had discovered that had been a favorite gambit of Fox’s—convince a woman to get wet, and any subsequent convincing became much easier.
His final gambit had had him suffering a heart attack as soon as he plunged into the still winter-cold water. His panicked companion had called the only person she knew to be connected to Fox: Nick. He had arrived minutes later, and helped the woman pull him from the water.
Lacey felt a profound sense of calm when she stopped at the swimming area. She thought of the immutability of death. And the ultimate mutability of living. Fox was dead and would remain that way. Who he had been with, what he had done while he was living, would stay unchanged. It was Lacey’s perception of it all that was forever altered after his death. But this one immutable truth remained: Fox was gone, and the person most affected by the absence was, and always would be, Lacey.
When you boiled everything else away, it was that one truth that mattered. She closed her eyes and tried to focus on all the changes that had occurred, just in the past week. Whatever was happening to her, her burgeoning ability, she knew it had something to do with Fox. Or more precisely, she knew it had something to do with his family.
She thought of Nathan. Another man, the first one she had felt any sort of attraction toward since Fox, and he had also wound up lying dead. Or almost dead. Yet now very much alive; and, if one was to believe him, alive due to Lacey.
Had Fox needed to be absent from her life for any of this to start happening? She wasn’t ready to think of that, yet. She opened her eyes. The resolve that had been lurking somewhere center-left in her brain crystallized in that moment.
She was done.
She was ready to move on from Fox. All those old feelings were clouding her judgment. Like why she couldn’t seem to get Nathan out of her head. Yes, so maybe she had saved his life, and maybe the attraction was mutual, but he was married. End of story. Moving on from one philandering husband to become the object of philandering was not an option. She resolved to pay attention and figure out what was going on with her. And pay attention for more viable options in the relationship department.
Be done. Move on. Mutability. That was her option, not Fox’s anymore.
Lacey focused on the patch of grass that had held Fox’s body fifteen months ago.
Fox, I will always be the person you influenced the most profoundly. Nothing can change that now. And I loved you, maybe more than you ever realized. And nothing can change that, either. But I have some weird, crazy shit going on right now. And I think there’s more ahead. I need to face it with a clear head and an open heart. That’s it. I’m going to go now.
Lacey left the levee and didn’t look back. And ran home at pace she hadn’t been able to muster since high school.
14
“A definite fugue state,” Angele said over her cuba libre. “Are your pupils dilated? They are, your pupils are dilated!”
Lacey sighed. “Maybe my pupils are dilated because it’s dark in here?”
It was Saturday night and they were back at Patton’s, but inside this time. The air outside was too thick, the unusually dry weather of the past several weeks threatening to end.
Lacey was attempting to get guidance from Angele. She had told her about her new resolution, her freakishly fast run that afternoon, how she was ready for a new start. Ready to make the most of whatever was going on with her. And ready, maybe, for a new relationship (but not with Nathan).
Angele had her own agenda, and it didn’t seem to mesh with Lacey’s. She was fixated on the flaming pape
r towel at Katie’s. She had immediately drawn a comparison to Pyro. After a heated discussion around whether Pyro could still be called an X-Man, or whether Lacey was more like the Human Torch—because he acquired his power and had not been born with it— Lacey called it. She wasn’t sure if she had been born a mutant, but she liked their story the best, so they decided to settle on the X-Men analogy.
“Great,” Lacey said. “Now that we’ve decided how to categorize it, can you tell me what to do with it? Whatever this is, I don’t think it’s supposed to be all about me.”
“Look,” Angele replied, “so far, you’ve had an impact on how many people?”
“Two,” Lacey said.
“We need to focus more on the second—Tom and Jerry,” Angele said. “That’s the only one with a witness, correct?”
“I guess.” Lacey hadn’t thought of it that way. “But a witness to what?”
“Cecil the Chef knows something,” Angele said. “I think these are questions you should be asking him.”
“I know he knows something,” Lacey said. “He might know everything. But one, I don’t know how to contact him and two, just what do I ask him if I could?”
“You’ll figure it out,” Angele said. “You know, out of this limited cast of characters you’ve introduced me to, Cecil the Chef seems the most interesting to me. He could be the cook for the commune!”
Lacey gave up on trying to get any advice from Angele. “What the hell are you talking about, Lee?”
“Remember, Campo, the Lakeway buildings? We were going to start a commune, base it there, and we’d have total control over who to allow in? Any of this ring a bell?”
“Shit,” Lacey replied. “Way to bring up sixth grade. I doubt we were the only eleven-year-olds to ever come up with that type of plan.”
“But I bet we were the only ones to plan it for the Lakeway buildings.” The two skyscrapers were fixtures on the western horizon of their childhood. “And actually, this is a perfect time to bring up sixth grade,” Angele said. “Jesus, I’m so brilliant.”
“Please, enlighten me with your brilliance, because you’ve completely lost me.”
“The impetus for starting the commune,” Angele said. She folded her arms and nodded, self-satisfied.
“Still not making any sense.”
Angele huffed. She suddenly looked like her eleven-year-old self. “We were going to start the commune after the world as we knew it had ended.”
“I’m not remembering that part.”
“Oh, it was key,” Angele replied. “Why the fuck else would we start a commune unless we had no other choice in preserving humanity?”
“I guess I wasn’t as focused on that,” Lacey said. “I think I was more focused on the vengeful act of keeping all the people we didn’t like out of there.”
“That was a nice fantasy, wasn’t it?” Angele said. “But back to the world ending. Seems kind of applicable now, doesn’t it?” She arched an eyebrow.
“You’re saying my world is over?” Lacey asked. She couldn’t explain why this line of conversation irked her so. She had spent the evening asserting her resolve to start anew, or so she had thought. And Angele had brought up ancient, adolescent daydreams. Had she not been listening to anything she’d said?
“Jesus, you are so dense,” Angele said. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. One world, the life you relegated yourself to when you married Fox, is over.”
Lacey felt a contrarian urge spring up. She was inspired to invoke Angele’s ire. “I know how you felt about Fox,” she said, “but at least my life with him was normal. Even finding out about everything he did, that’s still normal stuff. It sucked, but there’s nothing supernatural about dicking around on your wife.”
“That’s just it!” Angele said, standing up. “Who wants a normal life? You infuriate me, you know that?”
“You’re no picnic yourself,” Lacey said. “And what’s wrong with wanting a normal life? I was happy with Ambrose on Florida Boulevard. I didn’t ask for this naked mutant power thing.”
Angele sat down again. Something was burning inside her, Lacey could tell. She tried to hide her satisfaction.
“Why do you lie like that?” Angele said, her tone ominous. “We both know you’ve been about the farthest thing from happy.”
“I wasn’t lying about not asking for this,” Lacey said. “What the hell do I do with this? I can’t even see how I can get to a new normal with this.”
“You’re obsessed with normal. Get over it,” Angele said. The fire began to die down. “You know something had to happen. You couldn’t stay in this self-imposed prison forever.”
“Are you going to get another drink?” Lacey asked, still seated and even-toned.
“Yes, but not yet,” Angele sat down again. “What I’m trying to say is, maybe this whole fugue business with Dinner Jacket is a big plus. Look past all the bizarro-ness of it; at least it’s booted you to a new place.”
“Yeah, one hundred and eighty degrees from normal.”
“Whatever. Do you want another drink?” Angele asked.
“I might, but hold up. Look, I’m not trying to be cagey,” Lacey said.
“Yes, you are,” Angele interrupted.
“Okay, maybe just a little,” Lacey said. She smiled, and Angele smirked, and they were back to the timeworn cadence of their friendship.
“But, look, in much more normal terms, work and stuff, I really do think I’m close. I’ve got to figure out what I would do for a job—but I think I’m close. Do you really think I could get work as a production accountant?”
“Yes.”
“Just like that?”
“No,” Angele said. “I’d have to get you on as an assistant somewhere first, and it wouldn’t pay squat, but once you’ve got one or two under your belt, you’d be picking up work everywhere.”
Lacey pushed back in her chair. “How can you be so sure?”
“The work would be ridiculously easy for you, and you’re attractive and even-tempered, and you’re accustomed to dealing with outsized personalities. That’s a very marketable package. I’m going to the bar.” Angele pointed at Lacey’s drink.
“Not yet,” Lacey said.
Angele never made it back from the bar. After several minutes alone at their table feeling conspicuous, Lacey’s phone pinged. A text from Angele: Something came up. I’ll be outside.
Lacey asked if she should join her. No. Stay there. Have fun.
Lacey looked up from her phone. She saw a room full of near strangers. Eli walked past the far end of the bar and nodded at her. She stared back. After several stricken moments, she glanced down at her clothes. A green linen blouse and khaki pants. She wondered if Eli had sussed out some hidden meaning to her selection.
Yeah, have fun, she thought. Everyone here’s either too self-involved or too creepy.
She went to the bar, thinking she could pretend to get a drink while she slowly backed up toward the door. If she ran into Angele outside, she’d tell her she had an early morning tomorrow and that she had to go. And why did she need to make excuses anyway? It was Angele who had abandoned her, not the other way around.
Lacey picked the most crowded spot at the bar and looked at her phone, feigning deep concentration. At the same time, her free hand hunted around in her purse for her car key. She couldn’t find it.
An instant of panic turned into a frantic pantomime as she patted down her legs. The key was in the pocket of her loose pants. “I’m such an idiot,” Lacey said.
“Says who?” said an unfamiliar voice behind her.
Lacey whipped her head around. There stood the Dakota Kid, Kevin Horner. The skin on his neck had cleared up.
“Oh. Sorry. Says no one. Do you need a drink?” she asked.
“That’s typically why one walks up to a bar,” he answered.
Lacey turned around fully, and saw that Eli was standing behind him. Her defenses shot up.
“Hello again, Eli,” she said, her
diction crystal-clear and cool.
“Hello,” he said. He sounded like a child might, greeting an ancient great aunt seen twice a year. “Kevin, this is Lacey. I have to be somewhere else now.”
Eli walked off, robot-like, to the other end of the bar. Lacey made a face.
The Dakota Kid laughed and slid onto an open barstool. The most crowded spot at the bar had miraculously cleared. “Special effects guy. He likes to keep people guessing,” the Kid said. He patted the bar stool next to him, addressing Lacey as if they’d been friends since childhood. “I’ve told him he needs to add a puff of smoke when he decides to do tricks like that. Your name is Lacey?” he asked, his hand out.
“Yes,” she said, accepting his hand. “Kevin, right?”
He nodded, a little twinkle in his eye. He knew that she already knew his name, full well.
“Lacey. I love that name. Both gossamer and complex,” he said.
Lacey blushed.
“So why are you an idiot?” he asked. He did not seem in a hurry to catch the bartender.
Lacey didn’t understand at first. At the moment, she was thinking she was an idiot for letting herself be so easily charmed.
She remembered her car key. “Maybe I’m an idiot for thinking out loud,” she said.
“That can be a very dangerous habit. Worse than drinking,” the Kid said.
He gestured at the half-empty glass Lacey clutched. “Can I get you another?” he asked.
She was so close to leaving. But she was sure she’d never forgive herself if she let the opportunity for a good story pass through her fingers.
“Sure,” she replied. She gave him a sideways glance and smiled.
The bartender was over in an instant, once he saw Kevin Horner beckoning him. He ordered a scotch and soda, and looked at Lacey’s glass.
“Vodka tonic?” he asked.
Lacey nodded, impressed. He ordered her a Ketel One and tonic.