One per 20,408.
“… well, not much different. Could be coincidence. Could be another list. What evidence do you have? Because a theory isn’t evidence.” He sounded like me that first time with Liang. Belief is not data. Something must have shown on my face. “Ma’am, as I’ve explained before, it’s outside our jurisdiction.”
“I called the FBI.”
“Well, they’re probably the right people.”
“I told them everything. I told them they’re coming this way.” Even to me it sounded crazy. But it wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t.
“Coming for you?”
Anger swelled in my gullet like a fist. “How tall are you, six-two? About one ninety? And you carry a gun at all times. And a badge. When was the last time you woke up in bed afraid? When was the last time you saw a TV news report about a six-foot-two man with a gun being raped and sodomized in a park by a gang of six teenage girls while he was out jogging, and then thought, ‘That could have been me’? Lately? No. Because you don’t see images online, in books, on TV of people like you being got at, over and over. Look at me. Look at me! I used to be able to run ten miles and benchpress you. Now it’s hard to open my own front door.”
He was sipping at his coffee, tired, not really listening. I leaned forward.
“How many men have you arrested that would like to see you dead?”
“I don’t—”
“How many!”
“A few.” He shrugged. “A lot.”
“Then imagine this: you’ve been shot in the neck. Modern medical science breathes for you, but you’re completely paralyzed. Someone parks you in your wheelchair in the middle of the prison yard in Fulton. All the guards walk away. Imagine the eyes on you, the crippled cop. They know you’re helpless. They know that they can do anything to you and get away with it. They smile. They discuss it among themselves loud enough for you to hear. One takes out a shank. Another grabs his crotch suggestively. They start walking toward you. Coming for you. Imagine the sweat on your upper lip. The fear. They know they can get you.”
He was watching me now. He had no idea. That fear, that waiting for something to happen was like being buried alive. As the weight of the earth on your chest piles up you can’t move, you can’t breathe, and then the dirt starts hitting your face.
“I got through the fear the first time. Made myself, forced myself to see I could fight back, that I wasn’t helpless, even though everyone, everything, told me I was. But now I’m going through it all again, because now I am helpless. Now I can’t even run away.” I was wound up tight, motionless. Now all I could do was wait for them to come.
He looked at me with enormous compassion. But compassion was not evidence.
* * *
THE LAST TIME I had been this angry, this afraid, I trained my body to a blade. But now I had MS. I went to a gun show to avoid the waiting period and got a Ruger .38 SP101. A short-barreled revolver with a black rubber grip. I got two boxes of shells, a clip-on belt holster, and another holster to attach the gun to the side of my bed at night. Then I went to the range.
Women and men were created equal, one of my mom’s vintage posters read, and Smith & Wesson makes damn sure it stays that way. But Don’t rely on a weapon, my self-defense instructor had said. Easy for her. She was six feet tall and could punch through cinder block. Crips have fewer choices.
I slid the chubby, slick shells one by one into the cylinder and clicked it shut. Maybe this is how the oldest woman in the world with MS survived. Or maybe she was just crazy. Then I started shooting.
* * *
I WAS PUTTING DOWN RIP’S FOOD when my phone chimed. A text from Anton.
I blocked his number. The next time I was at the range, every target was his head.
* * *
SEPTEMBER. Johnston disappeared off the net in Louisville. Two days later it was Carmella in Nashville. Kentucky State Police said they’d get to my inquiry in due course. Tennessee did not bother to hide their impatience. I phoned the FBI again and left another message: They’re coming.
* * *
THEY’RE COMING. They’re coming. It was the drumbeat of my days. I went to the range every afternoon. Every evening I slipped the Ruger into its leather holster and clipped it onto the end of the long flat board that went between the mattress and box spring. Every night I fell asleep with my hand touching the butt. The old woman cackled in my dreams.
* * *
THEY’RE COMING. My eyes flick open. The bedroom is hot and thick and silent. My heart lumps under my sternum, like a huge crank turning. It shouldn’t be hot. Someone has turned off the air-conditioning.
The noise, when it comes, is tiny, like a mouse nosing at a piece of paper. From the dining room. My throat is as dry as a corpse’s eyes.
They’re coming.
My mind is slippery with panic and my muscles are blocks of wood. Think. Think.
Another noise. This time from the small hallway outside the bedroom door. Without taking my eyes off the door, I feel down the side of the bed for the Ruger.
The handle begins to turn. A soft laugh. The door opens. Light glints on something, a ring, a knife, as a hand emerges from the shadow, and I lift the gun, realize from the weight that it’s not loaded, it’s not loaded—
—and I woke up hunched against the headboard of the bed with my knees drawn under my chin and Rip staring at me from the comforter. The air conditioner droned steadily. It was not even midnight. Josh had left his light on again. The pillow next to mine was empty.
I pulled the Ruger from the holster and broke it open. Five rounds. But I turned on all the lights and, stick in one hand, gun in the other, went through the house room by room. All the doors were locked, all the windows secure. The light on the security system control pad blinked green. I turned it off, and then on again.
I got to the kitchen last, then had to sit. I was shaking all over. I stared at the picture of the still unformed me with Elton John. The healthy, vital teen who smiled exultantly back was an utter stranger to me.
Why do you think they’re coming for you? Michaels had asked. Because they were always coming. Because they could. And now they were in my dreams, making me do this to myself, saving themselves the work.
* * *
ROSE LOADED MY SUITCASES into the Subaru, while in the house I pushed a reluctant Rip into her carry cage. She mewled unhappily. “It’s just for a few days,” I told her. She scrunched down in one corner and wouldn’t look at me. Please, don’t make this any harder.
“I’m taking the week off work,” Rose said as she drove us north, to the suburbs.
“Thanks. I’m glad Louise doesn’t mind.” Rose was concentrating too hard on the road, checking her rearview mirror too often, all to avoid meeting my gaze. Oh, no. Rose taking a week off work. “Rose, were you and Louise planning a—I mean, I don’t want…” Barging in, upsetting their lives. I stared fiercely out the window. “Shit.”
“I want you with us. Louise is just going to have to do what I want for a change.”
So they had argued. I watched her driving for a while. From this sideways view her irises were thin slips of green gel. I wondered how long it would be before she allowed herself to understand what I already knew: she and Louise were not going to last.
* * *
ROSE CARRIED MY CASES into a bedroom with twin beds in front of big casement windows that overlooked a tidy, suburban garden with a swept lawn and rose bushes that she had not yet had time to subdue.
“Hope you’ll be comfortable,” she said. “Take a few minutes to settle in.”
I closed the door and opened Miz Rip’s cage. She was backed up in the corner. Her fur was matted, as though she had slept in alleys and eaten from garbage cans for a month. I felt like a monster. “Come on, little one.” She wouldn’t come out. I sighed, and filled a bowl with crunchies. “Come on, Rip. Crunchies.
” She meeped pitifully. “I know you don’t want to be here. I don’t much want to be here, either. And I’m sure Louise doesn’t want either of us. But here is where we are, just for a little while.” Until what? Until my life was miraculously restored to me?
I hung my belt with the Ruger over the bedpost, and unpacked.
* * *
IT WAS A LOVELY HOUSE. Cool in the afternoon when the October sun warmed the garden to seventy-five degrees; warm in the evening when the temperature fell to the fifties. It was still humid in the mornings but by mid-afternoon you could feel the air drying itself out for winter. I made sure I got up late enough in the morning that Louise had already left for work. She worked late every night I was there—and I made sure I went to bed before she got home.
By the second day, Rip was out of her cage, but too scared to leave the bedroom. She would mewl mournfully by the door and I’d open it, but when she saw the strange hallways instead of the familiar wooden floors she ran under the bed.
“I’m worried about her,” I said to Rose out in the garden later that day. “She’s not eating enough.”
Rose was weeding; I was supposed to be reading but I couldn’t concentrate. The words kept rearranging themselves into lists of names, and the dry leaves that blew this way and that across the lawn rustled like sinister laughter.
“She’ll get over it.” Grit of fork in dirt as she rooted around a particularly stubborn weed. “How’s Aiyana?”
“She doesn’t talk to me anymore. Nobody wants a cripple.”
She winced, just as straight people used to wince when I called myself queer. “Maybe it’s not that.”
“It is.”
“It must be so different for her out there. And you’ve been so angry. I know how that is.” She saw the look on my face. “I’m not excusing her. But are you sure? Maybe you’ve got the wrong—”
“Two different email addresses. Skype. Voicemail and text. I’m sure.”
“I’m sorry.” Rose dug some more, pulled the weed. Took some time shaking the dirt free of the roots. “But it’s not her I’m worried about.”
“I’m fine,” I said automatically. But I wasn’t. I woke in the mornings with my whole body tight with listening. If someone were to tap my skin with a fingertip, it would boom like a drum. “It’s Rip I’m worried about.”
“Maybe you should try bringing her out into the garden with us.”
Cats bond with places, not people. “I should have left her at home where she feels safe.” Where she feels safe. Where would I ever feel safe? Where did those women in the slings feel safe?
An unexpected shower sent us indoors, not summer rain hard enough to beat flowers to death, but gentle, almost benign. Rose made chamomile tea. We sat and watched the water runnel down the windows. My shoulder muscles were as hard as ball bearings.
“You were always thinking ahead,” Rose said as though picking up a conversation. “I thought that was crazy. The moment, that’s what I thought was important: the right-here, the right-now. But I find myself living a life I don’t understand, that I’m not even sure I like, and I don’t really know how I got here. I’ve been thinking: maybe you were right to think ahead, to make all those lists, to plan. But it terrifies me, deciding ahead of time how things should go. And I realized that it must be terrifying for you the other way around. You’re used to planning but now you can’t because you never know what’s going to happen from day to day.” Her eyes were gray green in the rainlight, and candid. The tea steamed when she lifted it. “You said to me the other day you were trying to face your fear. So, have you?”
My knuckles were white around the mug handle, my thigh muscles clenched under the table. I hadn’t been able to eat a full meal since that dream. Was being scared to death of what may or may not be real the same as facing my fear?
“No,” I croaked.
She just nodded. “Nor have I. I don’t know how. I’ve been reading my cards but I’m not sure I believe them anymore. Maybe they really are just bits of pretty colored cardboard.”
“I must have been a pain to live with.”
“Sometimes.” But she smiled. We could have been talking about two other people.
“Don’t give them up,” I said. “If they help, don’t stop.”
She shook her head, not in disagreement, but the way people do when they discover something they thought was worthless was valued for a small fortune and are afraid to believe it. “So now I’m the one who thinks they’re just pretty pictures and you’re the one with premonitions and hunches? Life is very strange.”
“Yes.” Rain spangled the window, turning the afternoon into an abstract painting. “Do you want to hear something really strange?” She nodded—what else could she do?—so I told her about the MS support group. Wendy the terrible counselor, the helplessness in the room, and Junie. Her claim to be the oldest woman in the world with MS, her diagnostic visions, and the pug. “Only no one else could see it. At least that’s what Junie thought.” I did not tell her Wendy’s behavior matched Junie’s belief. “And there was a woman with a broken arm. One at the internist, too. In a sling. And Junie threatened me.”
“She broke a woman’s arm?”
“What? No, not that kind of threat.”
She looked as though she had questions but she did not ask them.
“She told me a grinning monster was coming to kill me. And that I wouldn’t stop it.” I swirled my golden tea and realized that in Rose’s house I was not afraid of seeing anything that should not be there; for two days I had seen no menacing shadows, no reflections of distorted faces, had not felt something ravenous flitting from corner to corner when I was not looking. That made no sense. “I think she meant MS.” Hers was a wheezing little pug and mine a monster. But they weren’t real. But if they weren’t real, how come we had both seen the dog?
“Malevolent old bat.”
I nodded.
She reached across the table and took my hand. “Well, fuck her.”
“She should be so lucky.”
Our smiles were as comfortable as old clothes. But worn thin. Soon to be set aside. I squeezed her hand and let go.
“Keep reading your cards,” I said. “Read them for me. Read them now.” One last thing we could share. “Please.”
They were new, at least to me: big cards, made of thick linen board with an opulent blue-purple design on the back. She laid out six, facedown, in a cross pattern on the table, then another four in a line to the left.
“This is the Crowley deck,” she said. “They’re based on Egyptian designs, because Crowley believed that’s where the cards came from originally. Your first card.” She turned it over. “The Priestess.” A bare-breasted woman with a crown and sun disc. Fine hatching of lines and whorls to represent power. “I think it’s based on the goddess Isis. Anyway, this represents where you are now.”
Isis, protector of the dead.
“This second card is more about your current sphere of influence.”
The words didn’t mean much but the rhythm of her reading was hypnotic and the cards themselves were rich jewel colors. I sipped my tea, rolled the yellow taste over my tongue, watched Rose’s supple fingers turning the cards, tapping them for emphasis, tracing the designs. The first six cards of the cross were all faceup now.
Rose paused, hand on the next card. “This card, the seventh, is the key to the whole reading. This card tells you about your attitude, about what is influencing how you feel and what will happen in the future. I think of it as the perspective card.” She turned it over.
Big Roman numeral. XIII. A bearded man wearing the crown of Upper Egypt, wrapped like a mummy.
“This is interesting. Osiris. King and judge of the dead.”
“Death,” I said.
“Not exactly. It more often signifies sudden change. Unexpected change. It can mean loss, too, but it’s more about transformation. It’s a very strong metaphor. Death as metamorphosis. Which is true, if you think about it.”
Not really. Dead is dead.
“I mean, nothing really ends or is destroyed, it just changes form. Like a snake shedding its skin.”
Having MS did not make me a different person, it did not make me better or special, just a person with impairments. Physically less. Where does the light go when you switch it off? It’s gone.
“See those things in his hands—the crook and flail? They’re symbols of Osiris’s power over death. He’s not just the dying god, he’s the dying and rising god. Death as a leaving behind, a shedding, or rebirth. Painful, and terrifying, like all births, but not fatal, not final. Change, not death.”
I did not believe in rebirth. Death was final. And it was coming. Doug and Barbra had already met it. Yet something inside me shifted and settled, snicked into place. I picked up the card with its bandaged god—cocooned, metamorphosing—and stared at it.
“Do you want me to read the others?”
“Yes,” I said. “Fine.”
The rest of the day was eerie and quiet. I felt enclosed in a bubble of silence. I don’t remember eating that night. I do remember that I slept well and without dreams.
Rose woke me up at eight in the morning. Her face was pink and strained, like a red rubber band stretched to breaking point.
“What’s wrong?”
“You’d better come and watch the feed.”
Jim Parnetta in Chattanooga had been found cut to pieces with his own butcher knives.
* * *
THIS TIME Detective Michaels called me.
I was shown into an interview room. I leaned my sticks against the wall. Michaels introduced me to the woman with him, a detective from Chattanooga. The Minnesota police had finally sent out a BOLO, and Michaels had seen it that morning and connected the dots. He called the Chattanooga Police Department.
I told them everything I knew. Again. They asked me questions. I answered them. Everything was still coated in that eerie crystal of unreality. I was still scared, I would be a fool not to be, but I was no longer paralyzed, unmade by it. Some decision I had made was rising to the surface, though still hidden.
Michaels was pleased I wasn’t at home and suggested I stay at Rose’s, “for the duration.”
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