by Bower Lewis
She closed her eyes and pressed her palms into her temples. She could stop the momentum; she would control this. She turned away before opening her eyes again, afraid of what she’d find in the woman’s expression.
“I’m very sorry I disturbed you, ma’am. I’m sleep deprived and a little out of my mind at the moment. I’m pretty sure I’m not dangerous, or anything. I’ll leave you to your book now.” She left the park and waited until she was out of sight before pulling the chirping phone back out and hitting the power button.
“I’m done talking for today.”
PATIENCE!
“Bite me, Biz.”
She may be hearing voices, but that didn’t mean she had to listen to them, and she sure as hell didn’t have to do their bidding. Her will might be slightly fucked up at the moment, but it was still hers and it was still free.
PATIENCE!!
“What did I just tell you?” She stalked up Allston Street, shutting down text after text as she fumed at her hallucination’s disregard for her personal space and boundaries.
PATIENCE!!!
HOLE!!!
She looked up just in time to avoid tumbling into a massive ditch in the sidewalk, six feet deep and more than two feet across, with nothing but a string of yellow tape attached to a few skinny sticks to protect the distracted or disabled from plummeting to a broken leg or worse. She stared down at the hole. She stared at the tape. She really wasn’t sure how much more of this she had left in her to take.
She glared up at the sky and shouted. “What about blind people?!”
A man at the mailbox at the corner of Commonwealth Avenue gawked at her as she turned back to the street.
“I’m going to get drunk now,” she warned the cloud. “Do not fucking follow me.”
THER IS WRK 2 DO!
“I mean it.”
CHAPTER THREE
Patience turned her glass in its condensation on the bar, her face propped in her hand. A guy approached from a few seats away, but she wasn’t interested enough to look until he paused beside her and gaped.
“You’re the girl…”
He looked a bit stunned, and she realized that she knew him. His familiarity seemed associated with some vague sense of guilt on her part. She shrugged back, wondering if maybe she’d cut past him on the train some night to grab the last seat—or one of the other crimes of impoliteness she was prone to committing when she was more tired than fair-minded—and had then felt badly enough to look in his direction more often than she might otherwise have. Whatever it was, she was certain about two things: She had been in the wrong, and he had not been nearly this inebriated.
“I’m what girl?”
The phone chirped and she stabbed a finger at the power button. The tequila wasn’t having nearly the amnesic effect she’d been hoping for, and she was about ready to throw in the towel on the evening. She was mildly curious, however, and decided to give him another thirty seconds to illuminate her about how, precisely, she’d done him wrong.
He listed to one side and she grabbed him by the arms.
“Thank you.”
“Look, if we’re going to have a conversation, you’re going to have to drop in something I can work with pretty soon, okay? Because, this really isn’t doing it for me.”
He reached for the back of her stool and smiled down into his glass.
“You’re the girl from the window this morning.”
Patience considered him seriously for the first time. She hooked her foot around a leg of the stool next to hers and slid it back from the bar.
“Right,” she said. “I think I owe you a drink.”
• • •
She shook her head as she signaled to Frank for another round.
“I’m sorry, but you really don’t look like a Zane. Are you sure you’ve got that right?”
“My name?” He drained the last of his vodka and glanced sideways at her as he set the glass on the bar. “I’m pretty sure, yeah.”
“Maybe you’ve misheard. Maybe your parents actually named you Wayne and they’ve been too polite to correct you all these years.”
“My parents have not been too polite. Your phone is ringing again.”
Patience lined up a row of cocktail nuts and flicked them, one by one, at the tip jar. She missed one hundred percent of the shots, but spotted herself two points for the peanut that plinked cleanly into a BU undergraduate’s beer. The guy beside her was still trying to sort out what he’d seen that morning, even as they both avoided the question of what she’d been doing on the window ledge in the first place. She didn’t begrudge him his need to work through it any more than she begrudged the undergrad the dirty look he shot her just before he hurled the dripping nut back and nailed her companion squarely in the forehead, but she really couldn’t help either of them just then.
“But, if you didn’t fall,” he persisted, “and you didn’t jump, and you weren’t pushed, then how on Earth did you—”
“It’s just that Zane sounds like a cowboy name or something.”
He sighed and wiped at his forehead with a napkin. “Zane Grey,” he said. “The author of about a thousand Westerns. My father couldn’t get enough of them when he was younger. Getting tagged with the name Zane Grey Ellison doesn’t follow a kid during his formative years, let me tell you.” He dropped the napkin back onto the bar. “I suppose it could have been worse, though. My older brother’s given name is Steve McQueen.”
“Well, I still think you look more like a Wayne.”
“That’s not polite!”
Indignation sparked life into a face alcohol had rendered nearly incapable of maintaining an expression up until that point. She smiled at him for the first time and lifted her hands in surrender. His ire evaporated as Frank approached with their round.
“This is her, Frank; the one I was telling you about. This is the girl from the window.”
The bar owner set their glasses down and crossed his arms over his chest. Patience shrank on her stool as he looked down at her.
“You’re what’s at the bottom of this, Patience? Christ, I mighta known.”
She shoved a shock of pink back from her eyes and pulled her drink closer for protection.
“What have I done now? Damn, Frank, this is a hard room tonight.”
“You’ve had this man so far off his mark today, I nearly had to bounce him twice, just to get some peace. No offense, Zane, but you’ve been a bit longwinded.”
“None taken,” he said. “You’ve been a pal, Frank. Really.”
“I really haven’t. And if you’re hoping that being my goddaughter will save you from getting bounced yourself, Patience Abigail, think again. Well, my dear, seeing as you’ve been the cause of Zane’s mysterious angst, I’m making him your responsibility. Quit with the theatrics and practical jokes and see to it that he gets safely back to wherever it is he goes at night. I’ve little faith he’ll make it in one piece on his own.”
Patience’s phone lit up then and her godfather narrowed his eyes.
“And whatever it is you’ve got cooking, you keep it out of my pub.”
She lifted the phone from the bar and dropped it into her drink. A halting chime garbled to the surface, turned whiny, and then died.
“I’m trying, Frank. So help me, I am.”
He closed his eyes for a moment and pointed to his cheek. She rose dutifully up onto the rungs of her stool and gave him a kiss.
“Call your mother tomorrow. You’re way overdue.”
Zane just blinked as she settled again and stared down at yet another hundred and twelve dollars she didn’t have, resting at the bottom of her seven-dollar margarita.
“Frank is your godfather.” It was more a statement than a question.
She sighed. “And he never forgets it for a second.” She looked up again with a slight shrug. “My father was killed by a poorly secured truckload of kegs behind the pub when my mother was pregnant with me, so Frank takes this business of watching out f
or me pretty seriously.”
“Jesus Christ.”
She smiled at that. “He’s a little overzealous, if you ask me. Especially when you consider the fact that my father shouldn’t have been in that alley in the first place. Frank was constantly threatening to brain him with an andiron if he didn’t stop picking up ‘sweet deals’ in Southie and supplementing the pub’s inventory with them. But my family’s always been a bit cracked when it comes to loyalty, and my father was extremely loyal to Frank. It had been that way since they were kids in Belfast. So he just ignored the threats and kept on helping him out, against Frank’s wishes.”
Zane sat quietly with for a moment, with his fingers curled around his glass. “I’m sorry about your father,” he said. “My mother died when I was twelve. That’s a hard thing.”
Patience shook her head. “That’s real loss. To me, my father’s always just been someone who was missing from the lives of the people I loved. My mom did just fine with me, and I’m really not sure how much more of a father figure I could have taken beyond what I’ve had in Frank.”
He laughed, and then a message alert chimed and her eyes flew to her drink. She exhaled as Zane pulled a sleek-looking phone from his coat and she reached over to steal his vodka.
He was quiet too long, so she set his half-empty glass down and looked up. He met her glance and then turned on his stool, as if checking the room for something or someone. Patience watched with a growing sense of apprehension as he turned back with a puzzled expression.
“I think it’s for you.”
She took the phone and dropped it into his drink, and then she stood up and reached for her cash. Zane stopped her and tossed a couple of bills onto the bar. He rose clumsily beside her with a sidelong glance at the submerged phones.
“Bad breakup?”
She just grabbed him by the elbow and turned him toward the door without a word of goodbye to her godfather.
CHAPTER FOUR
Patience sat on her living room floor and considered the heap of mismatched linens on the couch. Somewhere in that pile of cotton and fleece was a Wayne—or a Zane as the case may be—and he seemed to be the only other person on Earth with the ability to witness her great hallucination, the Lord her God. Whether this development was evidence in support of her sanity or against his, however, remained to be seen.
“Zane.”
She pressed her fingers to her temples. The room was silent, apart from the haranguing of her inner self for having chased copious amounts of tequila with vodka. She repeated his name a little louder and resigned herself to standing up.
As she approached the couch, she discovered that it wasn’t so much that Zane was a quiet sleeper as it was that he was an absent one. She stared down at the blankets, and then her eyes darted to the still-bolted door. She turned next to the window above her fire escape, but nothing aside from the blankets seemed out of place. Could she have gone so far as to pull out linens for a man who didn’t exist? She pushed them aside and dropped to the couch, searching her mind for some proof that she hadn’t hallucinated their stumble back from O’Malley’s. She could still feel the pressure of his arm around her shoulder and smell the booze and soap in his skin, but the memory of him wasn’t enough. It wasn’t reliable. She fought against surrendering to her mounting panic as she lowered her face to her hand.
On the floor beside the couch lay a pair of men’s sneakers. In the distance beyond the kitchen, she heard the toilet flush.
She closed her eyes and exhaled. Three weeks before, she’d at least have considered the obvious before assuming the fantastic, but those three weeks seemed like a lifetime ago now. The unreliability of her reality was crushing her.
Zane came barefoot through the kitchen and paused in the doorway. She lifted her face to look back at him and frowned. He was taller than she’d thought, and his T-shirt and jeans hung a lot better on him now that he wasn’t slumped against a bar. He reminded her of a less emaciated, less twitchy Ian Curtis—if Ian had grown his hair out a bit and made it to the age of twenty-five alive. The inebriation had cleared from his face and was replaced now by a slight squint and tightening at his brow that suggested a headache on par with her own. He nodded a half-smile and she breathed a curse at the water-stained ceiling tiles. The Wayne of the previous evening had seemed a manageable enough dolt to contend with. The Zane of this morning, however, had an appreciable intelligence to his expression. He also had a runner’s build, well-defined arms, and dark eyes that made her bite down on her lip a little too hard as they met hers from the doorway. This guy was the last thing in the world she needed.
He approached and she pushed the blankets aside. She kept her gaze forward as he sat down beside her and stared at the knees of his jeans. An embarrassed smile slid onto his face.
“I don’t usually drink to make a fool of myself,” he said. “I also don’t make a habit of conning strange women into taking me home with them just to spare me the indignity of waking up behind the Twin Donuts covered in cat piss. That was out of character for me.”
Patience laughed. “You were never going to make it to the Twin Donuts last night. Hell, you couldn’t even tell me your apartment number. The alley behind O’Malley’s was about as far as you were going to make it on your own.” He glanced down again and Patience felt like an ass. His contrition left him toothless in the discussion and they both knew it. “Anyway, it was obvious that you weren’t a habitual offender. You’re pretty bad at it, for one thing.”
“I suppose that’s hard to argue.”
She went to the kitchen for some aspirin, hitting the coffee maker on her way past. She paused before the sink, taking more time than necessary to fill the water glasses. She was feeling a bit toothless, herself, and hoped it didn’t show. She had no intention of letting her guard down around this guy until she figured out who he was and what, precisely, his connection to her delusions was.
She returned to the living room and he took the aspirin from her gratefully.
“Now that I’ve been duly chastised for my behavior, would you please be so kind as to tell me what the hell is going on?”
It seemed a reasonable question, considering what he’d been through on her account over the past twenty-four hours.
“No,” she said. “But I will buy you a new phone.”
His eyes sparked and she backed up half a step. “I couldn’t care less about the phone, Patience. Whatever it is that’s bothering you, it’s got my number now too. I think that entitles me to some information.”
She was thrown by the directness of his appeal. And by his apparent confidence that it would be responded to. The confidence struck her as peculiar, however, rather than arrogant, and there was something unusual about the way he spoke as well. It was sort of as though he had an accent, but it wasn’t exactly that. Zane Grey Ellison seemed less like the man she’d met at the pub with every passing moment, but she couldn’t put her finger on the change.
“I couldn’t help you if I wanted to, Zane. I’m sorry, but this is beyond my control.”
“This isn’t some sort of prank, is it Patience? You’re not just entertaining yourself, or screwing around with me for kicks or the attention?”
She choked back a gasp and a laugh together. He didn’t sound hostile or accusing, nor did he appear to be joking. “What on Earth are you talking about? I’d never laid eyes on you until yesterday morning. What could I possibly have against you?”
“Nothing, I hope. Actually, I was hoping you might help me put some things into perspective, but it’s often been pointed out to me that I’m not as careful as I ought to be. So, if you are having a laugh at my expense, I’d appreciate it if you’d let me in on it now and I’ll be on my way.”
She didn’t know how to respond to that. He shrugged and reached for his shoes.
“What kinds of things?”
He turned back and set the shoes on the table. That look of total confidence from just moments before seemed to have evaporated, but
he didn’t appear to miss it. Patience was starting to feel disoriented.
“Like how I can be absolutely certain that what I saw you do outside your window yesterday morning is impossible. Also, I still can’t put that call to my phone into any context that makes sense to me, and I’m a reasonably intelligent person. I graduated summa cum laude from Harvard with degrees in philosophy and religion, and I am about to feel like a complete ass for telling you that. I was a pretty decent guy until yesterday morning, Patience. What the hell have you done to me?”
She reached for his arm and he stopped talking. He looked so earnest, and she wanted so much to help him. But how could she explain what she couldn’t understand, or help him understand what she couldn’t accept?
“If you can’t work it out after four years at Harvard, Wayne, I don’t think there’s anything more I can do.”
He nodded and removed her hand from his arm.
“Fair enough, Patience. Goodbye. Thank you for the use of your couch.”
She tried not to watch as he got himself back together and started for the door. She was glad that he was leaving and sorry to see him go.
He paused with his hand on the knob and looked back. “Please do me just one favor, though, would you? Watch it around the open windows.”
“You bet.”
A tortured bleat emanated from his coat as he pulled the door open. He froze at the threshold and turned back, reaching into his pocket with equal parts suspicion and trepidation in his expression. A brick of lead formed in Patience’s gut as he withdrew a margarita-sticky cell phone and his lips fell apart. Then he closed them and returned to set it on the table between them.