by Leah Raeder
(—Bergen, Vada. Nighthawks in Maine. Ink on paper.)
Max sipped his beer and said, “You stole Ryan’s laptop.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
By the time he got home, it’d be back as if we’d never touched it.
“I won’t press charges. Maybe Ellis can crack the password.” He smiled. “I’m not good with technology. I’m a mechanical guy. I understand moving parts.”
“I really don’t have the slightest idea what—”
“You’ve always been candid, Vada. I admire that.” He sloshed the beer in his bottle. “Don’t put on a show for me.”
Those words. Those words didn’t belong in his mouth.
“Listen,” I said, “I came here to tell you I’m not okay with this shit. I don’t care what you do to me, just leave Ellis alone. She doesn’t remember the accident. If you have questions, you ask me. But my answers aren’t going to change.”
“I don’t want to question you. I want to protect you.”
“Huh?”
“I was in your shoes once. Someone lied to me about something very important. It destroyed my world.”
“What are you talking about?”
Max reclined in his chair, sighing. “Vada, ask yourself why you’re defending a liar.”
I blinked.
“Tell me your girlfriend’s full name.”
“I don’t have a girlfriend,” I said automatically.
“Okay, ‘friend.’ What’s her full name? Humor me, please.”
“Ellis Morgan Carraway. Why are you—”
“ ‘Ellis Morgan Carraway’ didn’t exist until five years ago. There isn’t a single record of her.”
Heat rose in me. “Now you’re digging into her records?”
He crossed his arms. A whiff of cologne drifted toward me, cedars and sawdust. “If you were in my position, you would, too. You’d want to know everything about the last moments of your son’s life.”
“Her personal records have nothing to do with it.”
“They have something to do with you, Vada. And the danger you’re in.”
“What danger? Are you going to sue us?”
“No one said anything about that. But listen to yourself.” He cocked his head. “You instinctively defend her, instead of asking about the name. You’re blind to it.”
“To what?” I spit.
“Who she really is.”
“This is ridiculous. Five years ago she was a minor. Of course there are no records.”
“Not even a birth certificate.”
“That means nothing. Her parents are religious zealots. They could’ve—”
“Who are her parents? Their full names.”
I shifted in my chair. “Why are you asking me? This is all on Google.”
“You don’t know. You’ve never actually searched it, have you? You took her word.” He spread his hands. “I hired an investigator in Chicago. Her father is Klaus Zoeller, her mother is Katherine Brennan. She has no blood relations named Carraway.”
Adrenaline coursed through me, the cold tingle in my hands and feet making me feel invincible. Like I could tear the wooden table apart. “You hired someone to go after Elle. In what reality did you think I’d be okay with this?”
“I saw the signs. I knew you were blind to it, so I entertained a hunch. And I was right.”
“This is betrayal, Max. You betrayed me. I’ll fight tooth and nail before I let you touch her.”
“Listen to yourself.”
“You have nothing.” I gripped the table’s edge, feeling no pain in my right arm, for once. “You can’t pin anything on her. You’ll have to go through me first.”
And I still had cards up my sleeve. Including the ace. My last resort.
“I’m not the threat, Vada,” Max said softly. “Look at the big picture. Really look.”
Again I thought of Elle spinning that sketch around, saying, Look.
“Occam’s razor,” she said once, “isn’t exactly what people think. It doesn’t say that the simplest solution is the correct one. It says that when you’re making a guess about something, make the fewest assumptions possible.”
Her favorite book was The Great Gatsby. For her eighteenth birthday she went to New York, to see where Nick Carraway and his friends had lived. To the libraries and museums, because she was a nerd. The Morgan was her favorite—it looked like something out of Harry Potter. And of course she went to Ellis Island, because obviously.
Obviously.
She’d made her name up.
“What’s her real name?” I said.
“Why don’t you ask her? And while you’re at it, ask why she had a DUI charge under that name.”
My mouth dropped.
We’d told each other everything. Every stupid little story, every pixel that made up the whole portrait. I felt it in my bones. I knew her, heart and soul.
Except the name she was born with, and this.
I fumbled a bill out of my wallet, slapped it on the table. “I have to go.”
Max caught my elbow as I stood. Firm, but not painful.
“Think about what I said, Vada. I care about you. I don’t want you to fall prey to a danger you refuse to see.”
I dug my nails into his forearm. “Think about what I said. No one touches her. Not while I’m still breathing.”
I left him there and stormed onto the street.
* * *
The house on the promenade was dark, all the windows onyx mirrors, like laptop screens. Weeds knotted the lawn and the roses hedging the porch had grown feral and fangy, vaguely carnivorous. I got out of the cab and stared up at the second floor, hit hard with vertigo.
This used to be ours. Mine and hers.
meeting’s over, I texted Ellis, and turned off my ringer.
The mailbox was stuffed with assorted spam and, for a Mr. Brandt Zoeller: a bill from a hospital in Naperville, Illinois; a letter from a Chicago law firm; a hunting magazine; gun and fishing catalogs.
Who the hell was Brandt Zoeller? Same last name as Elle’s dad.
Was Brandt her brother? Cousin?
Why hadn’t she told me about him?
My phone vibrated. I ignored it and padded down the porch steps and into the gangway.
“Occam’s razor,” I echoed. “That reminds me of Picasso’s bulls. This series of sketches he drew. The first ones are very detailed, heavily shaded. You can see the strain of muscle in the bull’s flanks, the hairs in its hide, the folds of fat. So much weight, so much palpability. Then the sketches become more abstract. Shadows dissolve. Three dimensions flatten to two. It becomes a cartoon bull, comical. And he keeps abstracting it further, to one dimension. To a wire skeleton. Just a few curves, a broad back and horns. And the crazy thing is, it still looks like a bull. It actually looks even more like a bull than the original because it’s the essence of bullness. It’s not a particular bull anymore but all of them. A symbol. A word in a brand-new language.”
Simplify what you see until it’s only bones, essence, soul. That’s the only way to understand what something really is.
I climbed up the back porch, stepping rabbit-soft, and peeked in a window.
Hanging industrial lights, Expressionist lithographs, wire-frame chairs. My touches. All still here. But now there was an army of beer bottles besieging the trash, a battered pair of men’s running shoes. Crumbs dusting the table.
And in the hall, cutting against the periwinkle ocean haze, the silhouette of a man leaning out, gazing straight at me.
I froze dead.
“Emily?” he called in a deep voice.
Then he moved toward the door.
I stood there, mind racing. Meet him. Ask him: Who are you? Who is she? Go behind her back on this, shatter the fragile chrysalis of trust we’d begun to rebuild.
Or let her tell me, on her own terms.
My phone buzzed. I jerked around and vaulted over the railing.
I ran madly throug
h the yard, hopped the neighbor’s fence, and scrambled through their garden to the alley. No backward glance to see if the man gave chase. On the brick paving I broke into a sprint and didn’t stop till I was five blocks away.
Phone still buzzing.
“Hey.”
“Finally.” Elle sounded irked. “I’ve been calling forever. I’m at the ferry. Where are you?”
“Almost there. Sorry.”
“Why are you out of breath?”
“Went for a run.”
“Okay. Weird, but okay.” Puzzlement, that lilting tone she took when she was trying to figure something out. “I’ll wait for you.”
I walked the last few blocks to cool down. Found her sitting on the pier, her hair ruffling in the hot breeze. I came up from behind and stood there a moment, watching her.
Who are you? I thought. Who is this stranger with my best friend’s face?
I sat down, dizzy.
“There you are,” Ellis said. “I was worried. Are you all right?”
“Fine. How’d your mission go?”
“Complete success. I jammed the cameras and put the laptop back. We’ve got a cloned drive, and he can’t prove we stole it.” She frowned. “You’re quiet. Did something happen with Max?”
“No.”
“Get any new info?”
You lied about your name. There’s a strange man in your house.
“Nothing.”
She tugged at a shoelace. Then she said, “Vada, were you on the promenade?”
“I ran by our old place.”
She said nothing.
“Still renting it?”
“I sublet to someone.” Her brow clouded. “You went to look, instead of asking me. You don’t trust me.”
My fists balled on the concrete. I couldn’t hold it in. “You want to talk about trust? Okay. Why didn’t you tell me about your DUI as a minor?”
Her eyes widened. “How do you know about that?”
“That is probably something you should’ve told me, Ellis.”
Or should I say Emily? Emily Zoeller. Emily Brennan.
Whoever you are.
“It’s not what you think. It was so stupid. God.” She seemed about to cry. “I was like, sixteen. I drank one of those mini bottles of schnapps at a party. Then I drove someone home. Our taillight was out. I got pulled over and my friend made a scene, so the cop tested us both. I blew 0.01. But Illinois has a zero-tolerance policy for minors, so it counted as a DUI.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.” She eyed me sidelong. “How did you know?”
“Max told me. He’s obsessed with us. He wants to know every little detail of our lives.”
“Those records were sealed. How did he find out?”
“Online, probably. All it takes is one idiot blabbing on social media.” And knowing your real name.
Ellis clutched her fists in her lap. “Maybe it’s better that he knows. That all the truth comes out.”
“What truth?”
“About that night.”
“Don’t get crazy ideas about confessing. You don’t even remember it.”
“But you do. You could tell him, Vada. I know I got behind the wheel.”
I looked out at the water. “Why are you so eager to come clean? It’s like there’s something else on your conscience.”
“Why are you so eager to protect me? It’s like you’re hiding something from both of us.”
Clever little bird.
“Ellis.” I turned my head. “We have to be honest with each other. About everything.”
Sunlight flashed on the water like a blade slicing the tops off waves, bleeding liquid silver. Her pupils shrank and left only clear moss green. Her freckles were sun-dark, fetching. I knew her face so well. I’d never seen anything in it but sweetness, wonder, purity.
Now there was something else. When I looked at her through an artist’s eyes, impartially, I saw it.
Fear.
“Remember saying you could trust me with anything? That you knew I’d never turn my back on you, no matter what?”
She nodded.
“Do you still trust me like that, Elle?”
She nodded again, slower.
“I trust you like that, too. There’s nothing I’d keep from you.” I breathed in, salt sharp in my throat. “There are some things I’m still trying to process. Things I haven’t accepted myself. I can’t talk about them yet. But there’s no one I’d tell before you.”
Her eyes skittered away from mine. “I have stuff like that, too.”
“Promise me again. Promise we’ll never turn our backs on each other.”
“I promise, Vada.”
“Ditto, Ellis.”
No matter how many times I said her name, she didn’t break.
I wondered what would happen if I said Emily.
The ferry coasted up to the dock and we joined the people streaming on. We went to the top deck and stood against the rail, against the infinite blueness of sea and sky. The wind tore at our faces like fingers trying to pull away masks.
I put my hand on hers on the rail. Then she leaned into me, and I wrapped an arm around her, and we faced the salt spray and ruthless wind all the way home.
* * *
Ellis said it’d take a while to crack into the cloned drive. Time to kill.
I’d flaked out of work so much this week that one of my regulars sent a “breakup” email. The camworld is fickle, intense, and brutal. One day they love you; the next you’re a “cum-guzzling gutterslut” who doesn’t know the first thing about customer service and is “probably a dyke irl.”
Do you ever wonder if porn creates a sense of entitlement in a certain type of person?
I don’t wonder.
I had a tie in either hand, debating which color I should strangle myself with tonight—aubergine or pomegranate?—when my email pinged.
A thousand bucks.
Him.
* * *
“Hi, Blue.”
I flopped onto a cloud of goose-down pillows. For the first time ever, I was camming from my real bed. Beside me the dormer window looked over the ocean and the spinning pulsar of a lighthouse, the firefly flares of ship signals. I’d slid the window open and a breeze flicked in, cool and ozonic, that smell of sparks that presaged rain.
SoBlue: hi, you.
SoBlue: this is somewhere new.
SoBlue: where are you?
“My room. The part viewers don’t see.” I smiled cryptically. “You’re the first.”
SoBlue: i’m a lucky boy.
SoBlue: so this is where you sleep.
SoBlue: gazing up at the night sky.
“It’s like a planetarium.” I tilted the screen to give him a better view, careful to avoid the photos on the wall. I’d tested lines of sight. I knew the safe zones. “The sky is so clear here, the stars looked etched in. Have you ever seen scratchboard art? It’s cardstock that’s been coated with black India ink and engraved with a stylus, so the drawing is all sharp white lines, like a woodcut. That’s how it looks tonight. Etched.” I stared through my reflection, the gold buds of Christmas lights in the rafters. “Is it nighttime where you are?”
SoBlue: yes.
“So you’re in the Western hemisphere.”
SoBlue: uh oh.
SoBlue: she’s getting warmer.
SoBlue: soon there’ll be a knock at my door.
“I’ll show up prepared. Tie you up and torture you the way you’ve been torturing me.”
SoBlue: by being winningly sincere and unbearably charming?
“And a total cock tease.”
SoBlue: here’s the fault in your plan:
SoBlue: i would greatly enjoy being tortured by you.
“I bet you would.”
SoBlue: morgan.
SoBlue: hey.
SoBlue: you look sad tonight.
SoBlue: something’s upset you.
I stared at the vacant rectangle of his ca
m as if it were human, a shadowed face, an extreme close-up of a pupil. As if at any second it would come alive and the vague thumbnail in my head—a blur of fingers, eyes glazed with cyan light—would become detailed, whole. Picasso’s bull in reverse.
“Something I’ve been running from is beginning to catch up with me. And it might hurt somebody I care about.”
SoBlue: your best friend.
“Yeah.” I leaned back, sighing. “I just started scraping my life back together, and now it’s falling apart again.”
SoBlue: what kind of trouble are you in?
“Legal. Ethical. Moral.”
SoBlue: that’s a lot.
SoBlue: which one bothers you the most?
“Moral.”
SoBlue: that’s the one that really matters.
SoBlue: did you hurt someone, morgan?
The breeze whisked across my shoulders, and I shivered. “Yes.”
SoBlue: intentionally?
“Depends who you’re talking about. I hurt a lot of people. Him. And her. And me.”
SoBlue: him?
“A bystander. Someone in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
SoBlue: and “her” is your friend.
“Yeah. My friend.” I laughed, faintly. “You can call her Red.”
SoBlue: okay.
SoBlue: so you hurt the bystander, and red.
SoBlue: unintentionally.
SoBlue: because you were trying to hurt yourself.
I sat up, my spine ramrod straight. “I didn’t say that.”
SoBlue: morgan.
SoBlue: it’s okay.
“It’s not okay. That’s not what I said. You’re putting words in my mouth.” Go on the offense. “Why are you fishing for info?”
SoBlue: because i can’t stand seeing you sad, or afraid.
SoBlue: it tears at me inside.
SoBlue: i wish i could shoulder some of your burden.
SoBlue: let you rest for a while. breathe.
“I’m not some damsel in distress.”
SoBlue: and i’m no prince come to save you.
“Good,” I snapped back. “Because I’ve already got one of those.”
SoBlue: do you?
SoBlue: strange.
SoBlue: you’ve never mentioned a man in your life.
SoBlue: never mentioned anyone else.
SoBlue: only red.
“There is no one else,” I said impulsively. “It’s her.”